Chapter 17: If You Want to Stay

The kitchen smelled like coffee and the particular silence that comes after rain. I had not heard the rain itself—I had been asleep when it came—but the courtyard outside the kitchen windows was dark with wet concrete and dripping gutters, and the light had that grey, softened quality that made it impossible to tell what time it was. Nine in the morning, probably. Maybe later.

Kael was at the kitchen table, a cup beside him, untouched. He was wearing his midnight suit, though it was Saturday, though we were alone. The formality of it should have seemed overdone. Instead, it just seemed like him.

"You made coffee," I said.

"I did." He did not look at me. He was looking at something beyond the courtyard, something I could not see. "You take it dark."

It was not a question. I poured a cup and sat across from him, and for a while we drank in the kind of silence that is not empty because it is full of the other person being present. The rain had stopped. A bird was trying to land on a wet fence post, slipping, trying again.

I had written twelve questions in my notebook. Twelve specific, careful questions about the clause. I had not written the questions I actually wanted to ask. Those were different.

I asked one anyway.

"Where were you," I said, "before Chicago?"

He set down his cup. His amber eyes tracked back to me, and I realized that was what I had been waiting for—that attention, that precise focus. It was like being lit from inside.

"London," he said. "Prague. Several centuries in the Carpathians. A long time in Morocco. Constantinople, when it was still called that. Before you lived, and for a very long time before I came to America."

"What do you do?" I said. "In the—" I gestured vaguely upward, or downward, I was not sure which direction Infernal hierarchy operated in. "In whatever the structure is. What is your role?"

"I negotiate," he said. "I have negotiated for a very long time. Terms that others have deemed too complex, or too costly, or too unusual. I am called when mortals want something that requires precision."

"And when they get it?"

"They pay what was agreed," he said simply. "Or they do not, and I take payment in another form."

I thought of him across the table from Catalina one hundred and fifty years ago, and then across the table from me now. Negotiating. I said: "Have you done this before? Made a bargain that lasted as long as yours did with her?"

"No," he said.

"Any other long ones? Other people?"

He was quiet for a moment. "A few. None that endured as she did. None that—" He stopped. He did not finish.

I let him stop. That felt important. I drank my coffee and asked a different question.

"What was she like?"

"Catalina?"

"Yes."

He turned his cup slowly between his hands, and I understood that I had asked the right question, the one he had been waiting for, perhaps without knowing it. "She was direct," he said. "She had survived the Fire and she was not frightened by anything that came after it. She knew what she wanted and she asked for it clearly, without shame and without unnecessary words. I respected that."

I looked at him over the rim of my coffee cup. "Sounds like someone I know."

"Yes," he said. His eyes did not leave mine. "It occurred to me when we met."

The words landed in my chest like a stone in still water. Not a heavy stone. A stone that sinks slowly and deliberately, and sends out rings. "Is that why?" I said. "You have been patient with me because I remind you of her?"

"No." He set down his cup with great care. "I have been patient with you because you are worth patience. Those are different reasons."

The kitchen went very still. Even the bird on the fence post had given up and flown away. I drank my coffee to give myself something to do with my hands, and looked out at the courtyard. The rain had left everything clean and emptied. "What was the exact moment?" I said. "When you understood what the debt was for. The real debt. Not the transaction—the understanding."

He did not answer immediately. When he did, he was not looking at me anymore. He was looking at something I could not see, something that had happened a long time ago in a different city, under a different light.

"It was eighteen seventy-two," he said. "After the Fire. She was standing in the doorway of her building—what had been her building. They had rebuilt the frame already, very quickly. Chicago was very quick about rebuilding. She looked—" He paused, searching for the word. "She looked like she was waiting for something. Not for me, particularly. Just waiting."

I did not move. I did not interrupt.

"I said something conventional. Something about the loss, the recovery, the usual formulae. She did not respond to it. She asked me instead: 'What would help?' Not 'What will you take?' Not 'What do you want in exchange?' She asked what would help me."

His voice had become very quiet, and very precise, which meant it was very true.

"I did not have an answer ready. No one had asked me that question before, not in any language, not in any century. I was silent for a long time. She waited. And then she said: 'I am asking because I intend to give it if I can.'"

I felt my throat close up. "What did you ask for?"

"I told her I did not know yet," he said. "That I would know, when I had time to consider. And she said: 'Then take all the time you need. I meant it.'"

The rain had started again without my noticing. Light rain, the kind that seems to come from the air itself rather than the sky. I set down my coffee cup. I stood up and went to my desk drawer and took out the draft—not my formal copy, the one with the edge-aligned margins and the font I used for client work. The draft. The one with my handwriting in the margins, and my corrections, and my underlined passages where I was still thinking through the exact wording.

I came back to the kitchen table and set it down between us.

"Read it," I said.

I went back to my chair and picked up my coffee, though it was cold now. He looked at the draft. He looked up at me. He looked at the draft again, and his hand moved toward it but did not quite touch it, as if the paper itself might break if he was not careful.

I did not look away.