Chapter Seventeen
JEANNE
The night was quiet. Too quiet.
Jeanne lay in the dark of the cabin with Anatole's arm across her waist and his breath steady against the back of her neck, and she listened to the ship and waited for the pull to do what she knew it would eventually do.
It was there. It was always there now, the permanent resident behind her sternum, thrumming at a frequency that matched the door's hum the way one tuning fork matched another. But tonight it had changed character. Not louder. Not stronger. Closer, as if the distance between the pull in her chest and the door in the corridor had shrunk, as if the two ends of the connection were converging toward a single point.
Anatole stirred behind her. His breathing changed, the deep rhythm of sleep fracturing into something shallower, and his arm tightened around her waist. But he didn't wake. The sound had gone through him the way it went through the ship, a frequency calibrated for something other than his body, and his wolf would process it as the creak of an old ship in the night.
Jeanne's hand was tingling.
She lifted it in the dark and flexed her fingers. The tingling concentrated in her palm, gathering like static before a lightning strike, and she knew with a certainty that bypassed thought and went straight to bone what was happening.
The key was coming to her.
She turned her hand over. Palm up. The tingling intensified, and then something materialized against her skin, cold and heavy, the weight of old iron settling into her grip the way a bird settled onto a branch. She closed her fingers around it, and the shape was exactly what she'd seen in her dream and exactly what she'd seen in Anatole’s pocket. The key had a long shaft, ornate teeth, a bow shaped like a wolf's head with tiny sapphire eyes.
The pull changed again. Not inward now. Downward. The key in her hand was a compass needle, and the door was north, and every cell in her body was being reoriented toward the same heading.
Now,the curse said. Not in words. In certainty. In the absolute, bone-deep conviction that she needed to go downstairs, right now.
This was how it had taken the others. Not with force. With timing. With the key appearing in their hands at the exact moment when resistance was lowest and the path was clearest and the man who might have stopped them was asleep beside them.
Jeanne sat up. The key was warm in her fist, warmer than iron should be, pulsing with the door's rhythm. Anatole slept on, his arm sliding from her waist as she moved, and the loss of his weight against her body was like the loss of an anchor in a current.
She could wake him. That had been the plan. Go to the room together, on their terms, prepared. She could shake his shoulder and show him the key and tell him she could no longer resist the pull, and he would be on his feet in seconds.
Leave him. The answer is inside. All you have to do is look.
Her feet hit the floor. Cold wood. The cabin was dark, the porthole showing nothing but starless sky. Anatole's breathing behind her was peaceful.
She took one step toward the cabin door. Then another.
Then she stopped.
Not because the pull released her. It didn't. The pull was a fist around her lungs, squeezing, and the key burned in her palm, and her feet wanted to keep walking with a desperation that had nothing to do with her own will.
She didn't have to do this alone. She turned back to the bed.
"Anatole."
He was awake before her voice finished forming his name. Instantly present, his body going from sleep to readiness in the space between breaths. She opened her hand. The key lay in her palm, the wolf's-head bow catching a trace of light from somewhere that had no visible source.
"The key came to me. And I almost walked out that door without waking you."
"And you stopped."
"Yes, the pull is the strongest it's ever been. If I go back to sleep, I won't wake up next time. I'll be in that corridor before my conscious mind catches up."
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. The moonless dark didn't diminish him.
"Then we’ll go now.” He held out his hand.
She took it.
ANATOLE
