Black dawn (29 page)
She circled around the bed,
then
stopped. It was pointless; he was going to get her eventually.
She looked into his face one more time, and saw that he was completely serious. She dropped her
arms and relaxed her shoulders, trying to slow her
breathing, meeting his eyes directly.
"
about my friends. It's about all the slaves here, and
all the humans on the Outside. Turning me into a
vampire isn't going to help them."
"I'm sorry," he said again. "But you're all that really matters."
"No, I'm
not
,
"
Maggie said, and this time the hot
tears didn't stop at her eyes, but overflowed and rolled down her cheeks. She shook them off an
grily, and took one last deep breath.
"I won't let you," she said.
"You can't stop me."
"I can fight. I can make you kill me before you
turn me into a vampire. If you want to try it that
way, come and take your best shot."
suddenly shifted and dropped. He stepped back, his
face cold.
"Fine," he said. "If you won't cooperate, I'll put
you in the dungeon until you see what's best for
you.
Maggie felt her mouth drop open again.
"You wouldn't," she said.
"Watch me."
The dungeon, like everything else in the castle,
was heart-
stoppingly
authentic.
It had something that Maggie had read about in books but hadn't seen in the rooms above: rushes
and straw on the floor. It also had a stone bench
carved directly into the stone wall and a narrow,
barred window-slit about fifteen feet above Mag
gie's head. And that was all it had.
Once Maggie had poked into the straw enough
to discover that she didn't really
want
to know what
was down there and shaken the iron bars that made up the door and examined the stone slabs in the wall and stood on the bench to try to climb to the window, there
was
nothing else to do. She sat on the bench and felt the true enormity of the situation trickle in on her.
She was really stuck here.
ous. And the world, the actual, real world out there,
could be affected as a consequence.
It wasn't that she didn't understand his motivation. She had been in his mind; she'd felt the
strength of his protectiveness for her. And she
wanted to protect him, too.
But it wasn't possible to forget about everyone
else.
Her parents, her friends, her teachers, the
paper girl.
If she let
to them?
Even the people in the
Laundress
and Old Mender and Soaker and Chamber-pot
Emptier and all the other slaves.
She
cared
about them. She admired their gritty determination to go
on living, whatever the circumstances-and their
courage in risking their lives to help her.
That's what
thought. He doesn't see them as people, so he can't
care about them. All his life he's only cared about
himself, and now about me. He can't look beyond
that.
If only she could think
of
a way to
make
him
see-but she couldn't. As the hours passed and the
silence began to wear on her, she kept trying.
No inspiration came. And finally the light outside
her cell began to fade and the cold started to settle in.
She was half asleep, huddled on her chilly bench,
when she heard the rattle of a key in a door. She
jumped up and went to peer through the bars, hop
ing to see
The door at the end of the narrow stone corridor
opened and someone came in with a flare. But it
wasn't
another guard, and this one had a prisoner.
"Jeanne!" Maggie said in dismay.
And then her heart plummeted further.
A third guard was half marching, half support
ing
Aradia
.
Maggie looked at them wordlessly.
It wasn't like Jeanne not to fight, she thought, as
the guards opened the cell door and shoved the
other girls in.
The door clanged shut again, and the guards
marched back out without speaking. Almost as an
afterthought, one of them stuck a flare in an iron
ring to give the prisoners some light.
And then they were gone.
Jeanne picked herself up off the floor, and then
helped
Aradia
get up. "They've got P.J. upstairs,"
she said to Maggie, who was still staring. "They
said they wouldn't hurt her if we went quietly."
Maggie opened her mouth, shut it again, and
tried to swallow her heart, which was in her throat.
At last she managed to speak.
"
"
Redfern
and that witch.
They're all very chummy."
Maggie sat down on the cold bench.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Why?
Because you're too stupidly trusting?"
Jeanne said. "You're not responsible for him."
"I think she means because she's his
soulmate
,"
Aradia
said softly.
Jeanne stared at her as if she'd started speaking a foreign language. Maggie stared, too, feeling her
eyes getting wider, trying to study the beautiful fea
tures in the semidarkness.
She felt oddly shy of this girl whom she'd called
Cady and who had turned out to be something she
could never have imagined.
"How did you know that?" she asked, trying not
to sound tongue-tied. "Can you just
tell?"
A
smile curved the perfect lips in the shadows.
"I could tell before,"
Aradia
said gently, backing up
quite accurately to sit on the bench. "When you
came back from seeing him the first time, but I
was too foggy to really focus on anything then. I've
seen a lot of it in the last few years, though. People
finding their
soulmates
, I mean."
"You're better, aren't you?" Maggie said. "You
sound lots more
awake." It wasn't just that.
Ara
dia
had always had a quiet dignity, but now there
was an authority and confidence about her that
was new.
"The healing women helped me. I'm still weak,
though,"
Aradia
said softly, looking around the cell.
"I can't use any of my powers-not that breaking
through walls is among them, anyway."
Maggie let her breath out. "Oh, well. I'm glad
you're awake, anyway." She added, feeling shy
again, "Um, I know your real name, now. Sorry about the misunderstanding before."
Aradia
put a hand-again perfectly
accurately
on
Maggie's. "Listen, my dear friend," she said,
startling Maggie with both the word and the inten
sity of her voice, "nobody has ever helped me more than you did, or with less reason. If you'd been one
of my people, and you'd known who I was, it would
have been amazing enough. But from a human, who didn't know anything about me . . ."
She
stopped and shook her head. "I don't know if we'll
even live through tonight," she said. `But if we do,
and if there's ever anything the witches can do for
you, all you have to do is ask."
Maggie blinked hard. "Thanks," she whispered. "I mean
you know. I couldn't just leave you."
