Chapter 5

Ember's POV

The rain came down the second the car door opened. My mother got out first with the canvas bag hugged against her chest, and I dragged the suitcase after her, the wheels catching on the shoulder of the road so hard the whole thing nearly went over on its side.

The sheet of metal under the bus sign was narrow enough to cover one person's shoulders and nothing else. I lifted my coat over the suitcase, and the water ran in at my collar, cold enough that the back of my neck flinched.

We stood out in it a long time, long enough for water to come up through my soles, my toes swelling and going numb inside my socks. Every little while my mother looked down the end of the road, eyes narrowed, rain sliding off her lashes.

I knew that look. It was happiness held down under a lid, as though if she let herself take one easy breath, somebody would come along and take something back from her.

That was when the car came. Black, very long, gliding up almost without a sound, its tires cutting through the standing water and throwing it up across the curb.

The driver came around to the rear door under an umbrella, opened it, and said that leaving us to wait in the rain had been Mr. Hawthorne's oversight. He said it politely, politely enough that it sounded like something he'd practiced many times over.

I stood where I was and didn't move. The floor mat inside was pale and laid out perfectly flat, and the smell of the leather was dry, a different world entirely from the one outside.

I looked down at my own shoes, at the mud and water and bits of grass, Black Creek dirt still caked on the sides, and I lifted one foot and set it back down again; in the end I held both feet pressed tight together, heels hanging off the edge of the mat, and I never moved them the whole way.

My mother kept the canvas bag on her knees with both hands closed around the strap, knuckles pale. She said, low, to sit still and not fidget, and I nodded.

As the car climbed, the rain didn't ease, it just got shut outside the glass. The trees kept sliding backward, soaked leaves stuck to the asphalt, the tires crackling faintly over them. The road narrowed and narrowed until it turned in at a gate; the posts were stone, and there was no sign on them of any kind.

That was the moment I actually learned the word big. Every window of that house was lit from one end to the other, lit the way things look right after someone has gone over them an inch at a time. It ran longer than any building I'd ever seen, lamps I had no name for hanging under the eaves, and the stone animals flanking the steps washed bright in the rain.

The door opened, and the man who opened it was the one from the photographs. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the forearm, and he looked at my mother first, his eyes resting on her face a beat before they came to me, and he told me to come in. His voice was lighter than I'd expected.

When I stepped inside, the chandelier overhead caught my eyes first, and then I saw the staircase. He was standing on the third step, dark shirt, wire-framed glasses, one hand resting on the banister. I knew those wrists, clean, the bones clear, not one mark on them from any kind of work.

In Black Creek that day, these were the same hands that pulled money out of a wallet and held it out to me. I knew the black strap around his neck, too; that day there'd been a camera on the end of it.

What sounded in my head first was the shutter, click, click, and only after that my own heartbeat.

He was looking at me as well, for about two seconds. Then whatever I couldn't read receded from his face, receded completely, the way water runs off a tilted table. He said nothing, moved his eyes away, and watched the rain behind me.

"Vincent," Mr. Hawthorne said.

My mother nudged my elbow, barely any force in it, but I understood. I took a step forward, lifted my face, set my mouth where it needed to be and set my voice along with it. "Hello," I said.

He nodded, once, short enough that it might have been only his shoulder moving. That single motion landed in my ears heavier than any sentence would have.

The living room was warm, warm enough that a film of sweat came up along my back. The man told me to take off my coat, and I peeled it off and held it against my side, not sure where to put it.

"Elena." He turned to my mother. "Was the drive all right? You must be tired."

"Not at all," she said. "We're fine, really. Thank you — this is already too much trouble for you."

Her voice was soft when she said it and her back was straight, and that was the hardest way she had of standing in another person's house.

Vincent turned and went through the door beside us, and when he came back out he had a cup in each hand.

He went around to my mother's side first and held out the one in his right hand with the handle turned toward her, unhurried, without so much as a wobble in his wrist. "You got rained on too," he said. She took it in both hands, her palms closing all the way around the cup, thanked him twice over, and her shoulders came down a little.

Only then did he turn to me and set the other cup on the edge of the table in front of me, squared up straight, a fist's width between it and me. "Have something hot," he said. "You were out in it that long."

Arthur laughed beside us and said the boy was thoughtful, and my mother, holding her cup, looked at Vincent and said thank you, that he was so considerate, that she'd spent the whole ride worrying Ember would catch a chill.

I picked the cup up in both hands. The side of it was hot, the steam coming up into my face, and I bent my head and took a sip.

The sweetness hit first, very faint, and then the powder. The powder hadn't dissolved. It pasted itself onto the back of my tongue in one big clump, dry, like somebody had shoved a handful of ash into my mouth.

I held it there trying to break it down, and that was when the taste turned over on me, salt, salt and bitter, crawling off my tongue and down into my throat. My nose stung and my throat jerked upward hard.

It almost came back up out of my mouth. I locked my jaw, pressed the rim of the cup against my lips, and made myself swallow it down.

A small lump of powder caught at the top of my throat and my eyes went wet on the spot, and I had to pull in a hard breath and push the cough back down. I knew my face had gone red.

I knew my mother was sitting to my left. I knew I could not cough out loud in this room, not once.

I raised my head and looked at him. He was standing two steps away with one hand in his pocket, watching me, watching my throat work up and down, watching the breath I hadn't managed to push back yet. The line of his mouth was flat.

There was nothing at all on his face.

"Is it good?" he asked.