Chương 115: Chapter 114 – No One There

She turned over. Dark hair slid back off her face as she rolled toward him, unhurried. Like she belonged there. Her eyes opened first. Then the smile — soft, worn-in at the corners, the kind that belonged to years he didn't have with anyone. He didn't know her face. He was sure of that. He was, in the same breath, just as sure he'd known it his whole life, and neither certainty put up any argument against the other.

"You're—" he started. The smile began to go before he finished the word. Not fading. Going, the way a candle goes when someone pinches the wick between two fingers. Dark spread over her eyes first, then swallowed the rest of her, ink dropped into water with nowhere to stop — Ant sat up so fast his skull nearly split in half with the effort of it. Grey light. Curtains. The same gap in them from before, the sun climbing a little higher through it now, high enough to be an accusation.

His heart was going too hard, too fast, slamming against a ribcage that hadn't caught up yet to the fact that nothing was actually chasing it. He pressed the heel of one hand against his eye socket and held it there until the worst of the throbbing behind it agreed to back off a fraction. The headache was real. Whatever the rest of it had been, that part had followed him out. A scrabble of claws against wood, near the door.

Mahkir was up on all four feet before Ant had even lowered his hand from his eye, ears flat, every muscle bunched like the room itself had turned dangerous around him. What. What is it. The words came fast, no space between them, none of his usual morning slowness anywhere in it.

"Nothing." Ant's own voice didn't sound like it believed that either.

"I don't — nothing's here." Your heart's going like you're mid-fight. Mahkir crossed the room in two strides and pushed his head against Ant's knee, solid and warm and entirely real, which helped more than Ant wanted to admit out loud. Ant.

"Bad dream. That's all." That woke me from across the room. That's not a bad dream, that's— Mahkir stopped himself, ears flicking once, working through the thought before he said it out loud. Was someone here. The question landed harder than a question that simple had any right to.

"Was there," Ant said.

"Last night. However I got up here — did anyone come in after. Anyone at all." No. No hesitation in it, none of the careful softening Mahkir sometimes used when he didn't like the answer he was giving. Nobody came near that door. I'd have been up the second the latch moved, drunk as you were or not. You know that.

"I know." Then why are you asking me like you already don't believe me. He didn't have a clean way to answer that, so he didn't try. He was still turning the question over when the voice came — low, even, from somewhere behind his own thoughts that had never once belonged to Mahkir. There was someone. Ant didn't move. Across from him, Mahkir locked up entirely — ears pinned back flat, every line of him gone rigid the same way it always went when the voice reached far enough to touch him too.

I sensed her, it went on, unhurried, the same plain honesty it always used when it didn't have anything better to give him. Watching you. Before she went.

"Went where." His mouth had gone dry.

"What does that mean, went—" I don't know. A pause, longer than its usual ones. I don't know what I sensed any better than you do. Only that I felt it too. You're telling him someone was in this room. Mahkir's voice cut in sharp, aimed at the presence itself now rather than at Ant — not anger. His own certainty cracking under him, and he clearly hated the feel of it going. I was three feet away. I would have known. I don't have an answer for that either.

If the voice's uncertainty had a texture, this was it — flat, unadorned, nothing performed about it. I'm not lying to either of you. I also don't know how both things can be true at once. I felt her the same as he did. You didn't. I can't explain the gap between those two facts. I wish I could. Nobody said anything for a moment. Mahkir's weight stayed pressed against Ant's knee, and Ant realized his own hand had wound itself into the fur at his shoulder without his deciding to put it there.

Proof, maybe, that at least one solid thing in the room hadn't gone anywhere. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Ask it something else," Mahkir said, finally, to Ant rather than to the voice directly, like he'd rather go through him than address it himself a second time. Ant tried. Got back the same quiet hum the voice always left in its wake once it had said everything it planned to say, patient and closed over like water settling after a stone had gone through it. He gave up after the third attempt, and the silence that followed sat wrong in the room in a way the headache alone couldn't account for.

I don't like this, Mahkir said at last, quieter, tail gone flat against the floorboards. I don't like that you can't tell when it's lying, and neither can I.

"Neither do I." He sat with that a moment, turning it over, and couldn't make it fit anywhere he could put a name to, so he set it aside the way you set down a stone too oddly cut for any pocket — not thrown away, just something he'd have to look at again later, once his skull didn't feel like it was trying to leave his body. He checked, once, stupidly, that the other side of the bed was actually empty. It was.

Cool sheets, no dent left in the mattress, nothing to say anyone had ever been there at all except the memory sitting behind his eyes, and now two more voices arguing over whether that memory had any business existing. Getting dressed took longer than it should have.

His hands weren't steady enough for the buckles on the first try, and the room smelled wrong in a way he couldn't place until he worked out it was just stale — old sweat, old ale sweated back out through his skin overnight, the ghost of the tavern's woodsmoke still clinging to yesterday's shirt balled up on the floor. He left it there and found a clean one. The stairs down from his room felt longer than they usually did, each one landing somewhere behind his eyes instead of under his feet.

Voices reached him before he saw anyone — low, unhurried, pitched just quiet enough that whoever it was hadn't meant a third person to walk in on the middle of it. He came around the last turn and found Hazel and Kalsar at the long table near the hearth, two mugs between them, the fire down to embers and giving off more smell than heat this late in the morning — woodsmoke, and under it the sharper, bitter smell of coffee gone half cold in the pot. Neither of them was smiling.

Kalsar's arms were folded, mug untouched in front of him same as always, and there was a set to his shoulders — squared, braced, more like a man expecting a blow than one enjoying his coffee — that Ant had learned, over a year, to read as trouble.

Hazel had both hands wrapped around her own mug like she was warming them, though the fire was hardly worth warming anything by, and she was watching the door before Ant had even finished coming through it — like she'd been listening for his feet on the stairs the whole time.

"Morning," Ant said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

"There he is." Hazel's mouth twitched, some of the seriousness sliding off her face into warmth instead, teasing, the change so fast Ant almost missed it happening.

"Sit before you fall down. You look like something Mahkir dragged in." He didn't sit yet.

"What happened last night?"

"You don't remember." It wasn't really a question the way she said it.

"Bits. Pieces." He rubbed at his temple.

"Last clear thing I've got is Ray telling a story about a goat that I'm fairly sure got more elaborate every time he told it."

"Well." Hazel set her mug down, folded her hands on the table like she was settling in properly for this.

"You made it about two hours past the goat. Somewhere between one and two you decided the bench you were sitting on was a perfectly acceptable place to stop existing, and you weren't for talking anyone out of that opinion once you'd landed on it."

"I don't remember that at all."

"No reason you would. You were gone before you hit the wood." She was fully smiling now, the kind of smile that meant she was enjoying this more than the situation strictly deserved.

"Kalsar and Andy weren't in any state to carry a full-grown man up three flights of stairs without dropping him twice, so that left me. Got you up here, got you into bed, and got you out of everything you were still wearing, because I wasn't about to let you sleep in boots and a belt buckle digging into your spine all night. You're welcome, by the way." Heat crawled up the back of Ant's neck and kept climbing until it reached his ears.

"You—""Undressed you. Yes." She said it plainly, nothing dressed up about it, clearly enjoying watching him try to find somewhere to put his eyes that wasn't her face.

"Don't flatter yourself, I've seen worse, and you were about as much use to me as a sack of grain the whole time. Barely stirred."

"Right." Ant cleared his throat, and found himself asking the question before he'd fully decided he wanted to hear the answer twice in one morning.

"And I went to bed alone. After that." The way he said it must have carried further than he meant, because Hazel's smile didn't move, but her eyes sharpened on him for a second, reading more into it than he wanted her to.

"You did," she said.

"Just you. I checked the door was latched behind me on my way out, if that's what you're actually asking."

"It's not — I just—" He gave up on finishing the sentence.

"You all right?" Kalsar hadn't said a word until now, and the question came out flat, without decoration, the tone he used when he genuinely wanted an answer rather than a polite one.

"I'm fine." Ant pulled the bench out across from them and dropped into it, more collapse than sit.

"Just a dream. A stupidly vivid one, still sitting behind my eyes like it actually happened. It'll pass." Kalsar held his gaze a second longer than the answer strictly earned, the way he did when he wasn't entirely satisfied but had decided not to push it yet, then let it go and pushed the pot an inch closer across the table instead. Ant poured himself a mug without being asked twice, black, no sugar this early, and let the first swallow burn some of the fog back out of his skull.

It was bitter enough to make his eyes water, which felt, this morning, like exactly what he deserved. He drank half of it before he actually looked at the two of them properly — really looked, the way the headache hadn't let him do a minute ago — and the seriousness he'd walked in on was still sitting there underneath Hazel's teasing, plain as anything once he knew to check for it. Kalsar's jaw wasn't moving.

Hazel's thumb was working a slow circle against the side of her mug that had nothing to do with warming her hands.

"You looked serious a minute ago," Ant said, setting his own mug down.

"Before I came in. Has something happened?" Hazel glanced at Kalsar. Kalsar looked back at her, some old wordless agreement passing between them that Ant wasn't fast enough this morning to catch, and then he let out a breath through his nose, slow, the kind of breath a man takes before he says something he's been sitting on for longer than he wanted to.

"We need to talk," he said.

"It's about Sam."