She kissed the other woman on the cheek and walked back across the hall.
“I thank you for your hospitality,” she said to the innkeeper when she reached him.
“Will you not be staying?” he asked.
“No, I must be going,” the woman said. The innkeeper fetched her golden cloak, bone-dry and warm in his hands. He draped it over her shoulders and helped her fasten its clasps and she smiled at him again, a warm, pleasant smile.
She looked as though she might say something to him then, perhaps a warning or a wish, but instead she said nothing and smiled once more as he opened the door and she walked out into the darkness.
The innkeeper watched until he could no longer see her (which was not long) and then he closed and latched the door. The wind began to howl again.
The innkeeper walked over to the fire, to the dark-haired woman sitting by it, only then realizing that he did not know her name.
“I will have to leave in the morning,” she said without looking up at him. “I would like to pay you for the room.”
“You could stay,” the innkeeper said. He rested his hand on the side of her chair. She looked down at his fingers and again placed her hand upon his.
“I wish that were so,” she said quietly.
The innkeeper raised her hand to his lips.
“Stay with me.” He breathed his request across her palm. “Be with me.”
“I will have to leave in the morning,” the woman repeated. A single tear slid down her cheek.
“In this weather who can tell when it is morning?” the innkeeper asked and the woman smiled.
She rose from her chair by the fire and took the innkeeper by the hand into her room and into her bed and the wind howled around the inn, crying for love found and mourning for love lost.
For no mortal can love the moon. Not for long.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is fairly certain someone hit him on the back of the head though he mostly remembers the front of his head hitting the stairs and that’s where the pain is most noticeable as he regains consciousness. He is also fairly certain he heard Mirabel say something about someone breathing though now he’s not sure who she was talking about.
He’s not completely certain about anything other than the fact that his head hurts, a lot.
And he is most definitely tied to a chair.
It’s a nice chair, a high-backed one with arms that Zachary’s own arms are currently fastened to with cords that are themselves quite high-quality: black cord wrapped in several loops from his wrists to his elbows. His legs are bound, too, but he can’t see them under the table.
The table is a long dark-wood dining table, situated in a dimly lit room that he assumes is somewhere in the Collector’s Club given the height of the ceiling and the moldings but this room is darker, only the table is lit. Little pot lights in the ceiling cast uniform puddles of light from one end of the table to the other where there is an empty chair upholstered in navy blue velvet that probably looks like the one he is currently tied to because it feels like the type of room where the chairs would match.
Through his headache he can hear soft classical music playing. Vivaldi, maybe. He can’t tell where the speakers are. Or if there are no speakers and it is wafting in from outside the room. Or maybe the Vivaldi is in his imagination, a hallucinatory musical complication from a mild head injury. He doesn’t remember what happened, or how he ended up at this blue velvet dinner party for one with no dinner.
“I see you’ve joined us again, Mister Rawlins.” The voice comes from all around the room. Speakers. And cameras.
Zachary searches his throbbing head for something to say, trying to keep his face from betraying how nervous he is.
“I was led to believe there would be tea.”
There is no response. Zachary stares at the empty chair. He can hear the Vivaldi but nothing else. Manhattan shouldn’t be this quiet on principle. He wonders where Mirabel is, if she’s in a different room tied to a different chair. He wonders if Dorian is somehow alive, which seems unlikely, and he finds he doesn’t want to consider that. He realizes he is starving, or thirsty, or both, what time is it, anyway? It’s a stupid thing to realize and the newly realized hunger gnaws at him, like an itch, competing with his throbbing head for his attention. A curl of hair falls in his face and he tries to flip it back into place with creative head gestures but it remains, caught on the edge of his replacement glasses. He wonders if Kat has finished his Ravenclaw scarf yet and if he’ll ever see Kat again and how long it will take before anyone on campus thinks to worry about him. A week? Two? More? Kat will think he decided to stay in New York for a while, no one else will notice until classes start back up again. Perils of being a quasi-hermit. There are probably bathtubs full of lye somewhere in this building.
He is having a heated argument with the voice inside his head about whether or not his mother will know if he dies because maternal intuition and also fortune-teller when the door behind him opens.
The girl from the other night, the one who’d pretended to be a mild-mannered knitting co-ed in Kat’s class, enters with a silver tray and places it on the table. She doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t even look at him, and then leaves the same way she came.
Zachary looks at the tray, unable to reach it, his hands bound to the chair.
On the tray is a teapot. A low, squat iron pot sitting atop a warmer with a single lit candle, with two empty handleless ceramic cups sitting next to it.