Shana Abe: The Treasure Keeper

She gazed at him, arrested. Opened her mouth, closed it. "I don't know," she said at last. "It's only worked in close proximity before."

"I wasn't close," he pointed out. "And you found me."

He saw her comprehend it, saw it and felt it too, a sudden profound chill to the air, the unexpected awakening of her potential. She lay there as fetching as any maiden, and above and all around her he felt the soundless, bottomless depths of her power gather, invisible wings that brushed the air and stirred the molecules.

Her eyes went black. All black, pure liquid, just like that time at the dance hall. It was scary as hell and even more beautiful; he could not look away from her.

She didn't seem to notice. Those shining jet eyes seemed focused on a point beyond his comprehension. She was seeing things he could not, he realized. She was knowing things he did not know.

The velvet curtains rustled. The sheet across the broken mirror rippled and shimmied, trying to pull free. He felt the brush of those wings glance his face—

—malevolent dark, stinking water and dripping tunnels and—

Zoe blinked; her eyes went back to normal. She turned to him in the bed where he lay frozen, trying not to smell the decayed scent of earth and rot that had rushed over him with the touch of her Gift, no, not ever again .

"I know where they are now," she said, her voice hushed and low and still luscious with power. "You were right. It was easy. I know where to find the heart of the sanf. "

Kimber,

I'm alive. Hayden James was killed by the Others. All three emissaries are dead. Zoe Lane Langford is with me. I'll explain all when I get back. I hope.

—R.S.V.L.

Paris was one ravenous city built upon the back of another. Above the earth it bedazzled: marble facades, slate roofs, breathtaking palaces and cathedrals and ancient walled cemeteries brimming with statues and bodies. Hospitals and monasteries, faubourgs that housed the deprived and the prosperous and everyone in between. People flocked to its opulence, lamented the state of its water and its roads, were overwhelmed by the abundance of theatre and science and public restaurants. There seemed little to rival it in all the civilized world. And tourist or native-born, most people who traveled its streets gave no thought to that other place. That world that still existed, crouched and hunched, beneath them.

The other city had no official name. It was a running sore below the paving stones and filthy wide river, miles and miles of underground tunnels and rooms carved first by Roman hands, then Frankish, Carolingian, French: the bedrock chipped and sliced and hauled away to the surface to supply all those generations of buildings and bridges.

Les carrieres. The quarries.

They had been abandoned for centuries. Water pooled in milky puddles, made lakes and grottoes of entire portions of the hidden city. Where it didn't pool it merely leaked, or dribbled, seeping and plopping from above to below. Always seeking below.

Some of the tunnels had collapsed beneath the weight of the behemoth above them; great sections of Paris were progressively sinking, and all the timber joists to be found would not prevent it.

Most of the entrances to the quarries had been forgotten over time. There existed still a few more obvious apertures, usually by way of Gothic crypts, especially in Montparnasse, but by and large the populace of the upper city had overlooked its origins, and the warren of tunnels lay dead and dark.

But for those that formed the easternmost edge.

The passageways there spoked from a hub in eerie resemblance to the pattern of the streets above. The hub itself had once been a massive field of tightly grained limestone, but that was before Charlemagne. Its excavation had left a chamber the size of a granary and roughly the shape of a rectangle, with side tunnels leading away, both up and down, all across the city, toward walls of yet-untouched stone.

It was cold in the tunnels, but on this particular night it was colder above the ground. Fat gray clouds had enclosed the city, and the first snow of the season had started to fall.

The flakes drifted nearly directly through the twist of smoke that slithered above the sidewalks of la Vallee. They continued their path downward to catch along the shoulders and hair of the woman who walked just below the smoke. A servant out very late, or a tavern girl, with a woolen coat but no hat or muff, no hint of cosmetics or jewelry, not even a simple ribbon about her neck. She was scurrying along the lanes with her chin tucked to her chest, clearly in a hurry.

It was nearing midnight. The stalls of the poultry market she passed were empty. Feathers of all sizes and colors littered the ground, cupped the snow to create walkways of bumpy white. The flakes helped mute the stench as well; they muffled all the worst aspects of the city, hid the piles of garbage and stained roofs, dropped in quiet, drifting beauty along the wealthy and the poor in equal measure.

The woman slowed, then stopped. She hesitated, looking around her, then retraced her steps back to the poultry stalls, began to forge a new path through the virgin white.

The odd twist of smoke followed her, a smudge of gray above her head.

Zoe moved guardedly through the wooden stalls of the market, switching her gaze from the indigo cloak that writhed in its funnel ahead to the sticky mess at her feet, damp feathers clinging in lumps to her shoes and hem. She shook her skirts every few feet, glanced back behind her, and was pleased to see the snow falling quickly enough to muddle her tracks.

The cloak beckoned her forward. It had chosen a point upon the ground, the tapered end of it skipping and hopping, whipping back and forth in a random small circle without disturbing a single chicken feather.

She walked up to it, crouched, and touched a hand to the earth. The smoke that had been a twist rushed down beside her and took a new shape: a man, a dragon-man, with a curved back and bent legs, and talons that scratched the dirt.

"Here?" he asked, frowning at the scratches.

Zoe nodded. She knew they both heard it, the subdued song of limestone made hollow by the open space behind it, about as big as a trapdoor. Everything else around was solid stone beneath packed mud.

She stood, kicked her heel against the earth. The song wavered, then resumed.

"Allow me," said Rhys.

She stepped back, and he curled his hands into fists and pounded them both against the ground.

The song broke. Rhys hit the earth again, and again, and when the stones crumbled apart they both heard that as well, and then they saw it: a hole opening up, snowflakes and feathers tumbling down into the sudden darkness, disappearing.

"You know what I miss?" sighed Rhys, peering down into the opening. "What?"

"The smell of peaches. Ripe peaches. There's nothing that evokes warm days and starry nights, leisure and happy times more than the aroma of freshly picked summer peaches. And plums. Plums are good too."

She glanced up at him.

"This"—he aimed a talon at the gaping hole—"is about as far from that smell as I can imagine."

"Agreed," she said. She stood to dust the snow off her lap. "Shall we go?"

"In a moment. One last thing." He faced her, flakes gathering on his bare skin, speckling his hair, white fluff across his eyelashes. It was coming down harder now, much harder, and she had to blink a few times to clear her own vision. "I know I've told you how much I don't want you to do this."

"Rhys—"

"And I know you're dead set on it anyway," he continued, speaking over her. "It's one of the things I love about you, Zee. Normally. That you think for yourself. That you don't adhere to any sort of conventional behavior for a female, even a female dragon. So now I'm going to tell you for what may be the last time the one thing I hope you'll remember of me: I would give up all the summers of eternity for you. I love you. Forever and my summer days, I'll love you."