Heart's Blood(47)

He chuckled and murmured something that sounded vaguely like "bulldog," and turned to sit in the chair, the large comfortable one in her "study," with Pearl on his lap. Tea appeared as if by magic, and Elinor poured something from one of her omnipresent flasks into it. Grey held it to her lips and Pearl brought her hand from his neck to steady it as she sipped. She was not relinquishing her hold on his back.

The tea was hot and a bit startling with its mixed flavors of sugar, alcohol, milk, mint, tea, and magic. It warmed her on the inside. Her feet still felt like dangling boulders, though.

"Get her boots off," Grey ordered. "Her feet are frozen through. We need to get them warm before she loses a toe."

"Been colder," she mumbled. "Never lost toes yet."

"And you'll not do it tonight."

Pearl was vaguely aware of Meade's stricken expression as he hovered in the background while Elinor knelt and unbuttoned Pearl's boots. After that, she was only aware of the burning sensation in her feet as they thawed and the tea Grey forced down her. She kept reminding herself that the magic burned worse when she held it too long.

When she finally got warm again, Pearl couldn't keep her eyes open, and after a few head bobbles, she tucked her nose into Grey's neck and gave up trying.                       
       
           



       

She woke to find herself still in Grey's arms, being carried through, yes, the corridors of the council hall. "What time is it?"

"Far too late."

"Yes, but what time?" She yawned.

"Nearing ten o'clock."

"Oh." Pearl struggled feebly in his grasp. "You have been up all night and all day and must be utterly exhausted. Put me down. I can walk."

"I am. Beyond exhaustion. Therefore you should stop struggling uselessly and tiring me further, because I will not put you down until-"

The door magically opened to the street, by means of a footman, and Grey bundled her into a carriage, also with its door open. He set her on the seat and climbed in to sit beside her. "Until now," he finished. "You have no shoes."

"I don't?" Pearl mashed her mounded skirts flat to look down at her feet, which were clad only in stockings. She tucked them beneath the layers of skirts. "Why not?"

"It seemed useless to wrestle shoes back on you when you are only going home to slippers, supper, and sleep." Grey's smile warmed her more than any number of cups of tea.

"I am too tired to eat." She yawned until she thought her jaw would pop.

Grey put his arm around her and urged her to lean her head in the hollow he made for it on his shoulder. She reached up to adjust her bonnet before she realized it wasn't there, either. "Where is my bonnet? And my shoes?"

He pointed at a basket on the other seat. "It is when you are too tired for eating that it is most important to eat. Magic takes energy. Food and rest put it back. Rest will only give part of what is needed, and you have rested. Time for food."

Pearl sighed, stifling the next yawn. She was also too tired for arguing. "Tell me what happened. Did you find the demon?"

"We did not." He scowled. "Nor can we tell whether it has been returned to hell or simply gone elsewhere. There are no reports of it in England, but that doesn't mean it has not simply taken itself off to-to Hindustan or the Amazon or-"

"Where do you think it went?"

Grey yawned. Oh dear, the man even had attractive tonsils. "We know it went back to the dead zones again. Harry had Colonel Simmons with him when he went around, and the old codger managed to pick up the spoor. No more torn-apart machines, but the edges of both zones were odd, Harry says. As if little nibbles were taken out of them. Pushing it back, like, but in pieces." For the last bit, Grey put on Harry's accent. It made her smile.

Pearl thought about that. She might have dozed a moment or two as well. A hole in the paving jarred her awake again when the carriage wheel hit it. "Do you think it was the demon? That nibbled on the dead zones?"

The carriage pulled to a halt and Pearl wondered if she'd dozed longer than she realized. They'd reached the mews where she shared rooms with Elinor.

"I don't know what to think." Grey climbed out the carriage door and reached back in for Pearl. "Frankly, I'm not sure I am currently capable of thought."

She scooted away from him. "I can walk."

"Cannot." He pointed. "No shoes."

"Oh. Right." Pearl let him take her hand and draw her to the door, then scoop her into his arms. She liked being there so very much, and at this moment, she couldn't quite recall why that was so very bad.

The driver followed them up the steps inside the street door to the door at the top where he set the basket down and went away again, dismissed for the evening. Grey carried her inside and deposited her at the cozy table laid with a cold supper for two.

"Elinor?" Pearl put a hand on Grey's arm to keep him from going away again, too.

"She may have said something about going to her stillroom to replenish her potions."

"Oh. Isn't she tired, too?"

Grey smiled. Pearl wished he wouldn't do that. It made him entirely too beautiful and much more human. "Elinor got far more sleep than either of us last night. She decided upon a nap early, to wake when ‘things' started happening-and slept all night, because nothing did. Until this morning."

"Then stay." Pearl knew better than to invite him, but the words tumbled out of her mouth all on their own. "Have supper with me. I want to know everything you learned today."

"Damned little." But he was holding the chair for her, taking the other for himself. He would stay, and the satisfaction it gave her roused only a little worry. "Though we picked up only slight demon-sign in your tracking of Rose, we're fairly certain it was the demon that carried her with it as it skipped across London and back. Particularly since your . . . scent of her came and went so erratically. As if she faded from this plane and was returned."

He took some of the cold roast and Stilton cheese and placed it on his plate, then switched plates with her after a glance in her direction. "Eat." He pointed at the food now in front of her. "If you want me to tell you more."

It was obvious blackmail. And it worked. Pearl ate.

Grey filled his own plate. "It's apparent that the murderer has moved his torture chamber from the docks, but we do not know where. Perhaps across the river."

"Will that make it harder to find?" she asked around a mouthful of bread. Hunger struck the minute she began to eat.

"Not any harder than moving it out to Greenwich or Richmond." He talked about his own search, about Meade's map of their day's travel and Rollins's theories, about Simmons and his apparent thaw toward I-Branch. She listened carefully, or tried.

Now that she had beef and cheese and bread in her stomach, atop an ocean of tea and Elinor's magic potions, the waves of weariness lapped higher with every surge, weakening the dike she'd built against her emotions. So when Grey turned from his rambling discourse to scolding Pearl again for not taking better care and coming in out of the wet cold ages sooner than she had, the dike washed out to sea and she wept.

She cried. Great, huge choking sobs of guilt and sorrow and fear that shook her body and burned her eyes and frightened Grey half to death.

But he didn't run. He braced himself and waded in, wrapping his arms around her, lifting her onto his lap-how had they gotten to the sofa?-and he rocked her in his embrace, murmuring soft words in her ear. Words in English, French, and Latin, and other languages that sounded soft and liquid and harsh and gentle by turns and all at once.

Pearl only understood the English words, the ones that told her it wasn't her fault, that everything would be all right, that she wasn't alone. But it was, and it might not, and she had been alone for so long. Even before Papa died.

And if she wasn't alone now, she would be again. Sooner rather than later. That was the human condition, wasn't it?

She cried for that, too, for everything that had gone wrong in her life, everything she hadn't had time to cry for in all the years of struggle.

"Hush now, Pearl." Grey's voice softened. "Hush, my Pearlie girlie. You'll make yourself sick with all your weeping. Can you stop? For me, love, can you? You're breaking my heart."

She couldn't have that, wouldn't hurt him for anything, her beautiful fallen angel. She hiccuped, trying to catch the sobs before they got out. She sat up and swiped at her face with both hands. Her face had to be blotchy and hideous. It always was when she cried. "I-I'm sorry," she said through a hiccup. "I'm just-I never cry. I hate to cry. It's-I-I'm so tired."                       
       
           



       

"I'm told it's good to cry now and again. But I never believed it." Grey smiled at her, tender and so sweet her heart broke on it. That made two of them. Apparently hearts broke easily when weary beyond bearing.