Chapter 4. The Inspection (2)

What every guardian prepares for.""To die," Lynn said.Sister Agnes flinched. Just a flinch. Small. Old."To serve," she corrected, softly. "There's a difference.""Is there?"The nun looked at her for a long time. Then she reached across the table and took Lynn's hand, and her palm was cold, and she held it like it was something that might break."Your sister said the same thing to me, once," she said, very quietly. "Two weeks before they came for her. I told her the same thing I'm telling you now: be careful what you ask questions with."She stood, adjusted her cardigan, and was the nun again, the warm one, the one who brought baskets."Think about the Rite," she said at the door. "They'll send the summons. And Lynn?""Yeah?""Whatever's in the kitchen shadow," Sister Agnes said, without turning around, "tell it I saw it. Tell it I've seen a great many things. It needn't perform."And she left.The apartment was very quiet.Then Kael stepped out of the shadow, and his face was the face of a man who had just been seen by a nun through a wall, and did not know how he felt about it."She knew I was here," he said."She knew you were there for ten minutes and said nothing about it to my face." Lynn sat down hard. "That woman has lied to me my entire life with perfect composure. She didn't flinch when she saw a vampire in her peripheral vision. Do you understand how not-normal that is?""I understand," Kael said, "that the Covenant's inspection team just walked past the lobby."He tilted his head toward the window, and Lynn looked out, and there they were: three people in charcoal coats coming up the front steps, led by a man with a clipboard and the patient expression of a meter inspector who had already decided the building was guilty."Inspection," Lynn said. "Of my building. On the same morning the nun drops by to tell me the Primate wants my life.""They're not here about your building," Kael said. "They're here about the five hounds that turned to ash on my sidewalk three nights ago. There are scorch marks shaped, I'm told, like small very annoyed dogs. They want to know what combusted.""What do we tell them?""We tell them," Kael said, already moving to the door, already straightening his coat and adopting the face of a gracious landlord, "that the building had a small but heroic electrical fire. And you, tenant girl, are going to smile, and you are going to sign absolutely nothing.""I wasn't planning to sign anything.""See? We communicate."The inspection was, by Lynn's standards, a masterpiece of surreal comedy.The lead inspector, a man named Mr. Pell, had the clipboard and the voice of a man who had spent forty years finding violations and feeling powerful about it. He walked the apartment unit by unit, which meant he walked Lynn's unit twice, because he kept coming back to her door with a new question and a new clipboard page."

Ma'am," he said, at the third pass, "we found, on the east balcony, residual heat damage consistent with combustion of organic material.""Electrical fire," Kael said, at her shoulder, gracious as Thanksgiving."The organic material, sir, was of a shape consistent with a human silhouette. Twice.""New security lights," Kael said. "Very powerful. People stand in them. People burn. Science, Mr. Pell.""Mr. Voss, I have here a report that the windows on the third floor were shattered from the inside by force.""Teenagers," Kael said."There was no teenager.""The teenager is everywhere and nowhere, Mr. Pell. That is the nature of a teenager."Lynn bit the inside of her cheek so hard she almost drew blood.It went on like that for an hour. Pell squinted at scorch marks. Kael produced invoices. Pell wrote things down. Kael produced more invoices. By the time they reached the lobby again, the inspection had produced nine pages of bureaucratic nonsense and exactly zero answers, and Pell was rubbing his temples.And then the delivery arrived.It came through the front door on a cart, a parcel the size of a suitcase, wrapped in brown paper, addressed to the Voss Building in formal script. The driver handed it to Pell, because Pell was the closest thing to an authority figure in the room, and Pell turned it over.On the side, in wax seal, was a blood-red bat crest.Lynn felt Kael go still beside her. Not tense. Still. The stillness of a predator who has just heard a twig snap in a forest he owns."Formal greeting," he said, very softly. "From the Conclave."Pell hefted the package. "It's heavy. What is it?""A gift basket," Kael said, with the bright, terrible smile of a man who is about to commit violence with customer service. "The Conclave sends gift baskets. They're very traditional. Blueberry jam. I'll take that. Thank you. Have a lovely day."He took the parcel from Pell's hands as though it weighed nothing at all, which it clearly did, and set it behind the front desk with the care a man would give an unexploded bomb. Pell, who had clearly not been paid enough for any of this, rubbed his eyes and declared the building a puzzling but technically code-compliant disaster, and left.The second the door closed, Lynn turned on Kael."It's a bomb.""It's a message.""Same thing. Open it outside.""It's fine." He was already turning the parcel over, feeling the weight through the paper, his brow slightly furrowed. "They wouldn't send a bomb to my own lobby. That's rude. That's not how the Conclave does diplomacy. They'd send a bomb to a neutral street. This is…" He broke the wax seal. "This is a courtesy."Inside the wrapping, on velvet, was a single silver mask. The kind the bloodhounds wore. Clean. Unmarked. Laid out like a crown jewels exhibit.Taped to the inside lid, a card: A formal greeting to the Anchor. The Conclave does not wish the girl harm. The Conclave wishes the girl home. Come to the Dark Domain, child. We will not bite. Unless asked.

Lynn read it twice."They want me to come live with the vampires," she said."They want you to come be drained slowly over the course of a very long dinner," Kael corrected. "But they phrased it like a dinner invitation. I'll give them points for tone.""What do I tell them?""Nothing." He picked up the mask and looked at it with distaste, then dropped it into the building's incinerator chute with the crisp motion of a man discarding junk mail. "You tell them nothing. You sign nothing. You accept no summons from me, from the nun, from the vampires, from the universe. Not until we know why they're all so very interested at exactly the same time.""You're being very calm about a coup.""I've survived several. They're tedious." He looked at her. "You're doing the thing.""What thing?""Where you stand very still and process three world-ending invitations in one morning and then try to out-calm me, because you think if you panic I'll start wrapping you in pancakes.""…I don't.""Lynn.""Fine." She sat down on the lobby bench. "I'm a little panicked. Is that allowed? Because yesterday I was a girl with a midterm. Today the nun wants me to die, the vampires want me to dinner, and you want me to sort my socks."Kael sat down beside her. Not too close. Close enough."You are allowed to be a little panicked," he said. "You are not allowed to decide anything before you've slept. So tonight, you sleep. Tomorrow, we investigate the Rite. And the invitation, and the Primate, and your sister. We investigate all of it. One terrifying thing at a time.""One terrifying thing at a time," Lynn repeated."That's the plan."It sounded, for about an hour, like a plan.She slept badly. She kept waking up and reaching for Aurora's page, to feel the soft fold of it under her pillow, and every time she closed her eyes she saw Sister Agnes's face saying your sister said the same thing.At 3:07 in the morning, someone knocked on her door.Not Kael's knock. Kael did not knock. Kael let himself in or appeared in shadows or simply materialized with an invoice. This knock was polite. Measured. Two raps, a pause, one rap. The knock of a person who had been taught to knock properly by an institution that trained people in proper knocking.Lynn sat up in the dark, her heart in her throat.And then she saw him.Kael was already at her bedroom window, standing between the curtains and the glass, perfectly still, looking out at the door she could not see. He had come through the wall or the shadow or whatever he did, and he was already there, and he was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on him.Not boredom. Not dry wit. Not softness.Alarm.Very, very quiet alarm.He put a finger to his lips.The knock came again.Two raps. A pause. One rap.And a voice, muffled through the wood, gentle and old and impossibly kind, said: "Lynn Moore. Are you awake, child?

It's time we talked."