The room smelled of tallow smoke and old paper.
Ethan opened his eyes to a low stone ceiling, a single lamp burning green-gold in the corner, and the man in the black wool coat sitting across from him as if he'd never left the chair.
Maybe he hadn't.
"How long?" Ethan asked.
His voice came out like gravel.
"Six hours."
The man didn't look up from the small notebook balanced on his knee.
"Which, all things considered, is fast. Most people who do what you did don't wake up at all."
Ethan pushed himself upright. His arms remembered the ropes even though the ropes were gone, a phantom ache circling both wrists.
He looked down at himself.
New clothes. Plain gray wool. Nothing like the ash-shredded rags he'd been wearing at the pyre.
"Before we continue, I want you to answer the following questions truthfully. Don't try to act smart or pull any unnecessary tricks. It's for your own sake."
He said it in a lighthearted manner, but Ethan could hear the threat beneath the words.
The man turned a page.
"Question one. How did you get possessed?"
"I don't know."
The man stared at him for a while, as if he wanted to say something, but quickly decided against it.
"Hmm. All right."
He tapped the end of his pen against the notebook.
"Question two. Tell me—or rather, summarize—your life. Or should I say, who you were before you became a Taken?"
Ethan fell silent.
He searched for an answer, but nothing came.
Not his childhood.
Not his parents.
Not a place he'd lived.
Not even a face.
His memories were simply... gone.
A flicker of confusion crossed his face.
"I don't know," he said finally. "Honestly, I don't think I remember anything about my past. It's all blank."
His voice trembled slightly. He looked down at his hands, visibly confused by the emptiness where his life was supposed to be.
The man regarded him for a long moment, as if weighing whether every word had been truthful.
"Hmm. So that means you have no memories of your past? Not even a little?"
Ethan shook his head.
The man leaned back, his tone becoming lighter.
"Well, that sure complicates things."
"But I do remember one thing."
The man's eyes narrowed with faint curiosity.
"What do you remember?"
"Nothing much. Just my name."
Ethan hesitated.
"Which I believe is Ethan."
The man's expression became serious, then neutral almost immediately.
"Of all things to remember, it's your name. How ironic. You must have quite an attachment to it."
Ethan remained silent.
He catalogued the room before saying anything else.
One door.
One window, too high and too narrow to matter.
One man who hadn't so much as glanced at anything that could be used as a weapon.
That either meant there was nothing to worry about...
Or the man himself was the only thing in the room worth worrying about.
Ethan filed the thought away without deciding which.
"What did I do?"
"You tell me."
The man finally looked up.
His eyes were an ordinary brown, which somehow made them worse. Ethan had expected something inhuman, some mark of whatever this man was.
Instead, he had the face of a schoolteacher.
"You were Taken three days ago. Standard procedure is the pyre. The pyre has a very good success rate."
He paused.
"And yet here you are. Uncharred. With a Cthu's severed presence sitting in your chest like a swallowed coal."
"A Cthu?"
"That's what we call them. Or what the old texts call them. We borrowed the word because nothing else fit."
He set the notebook down.
"Do you understand what almost happened to you?"
Ethan thought of the green light.
The octopoid face.
The too-many teeth.
The voice that had cracked like a coal fire when it screamed.
He thought of the moment when the creature had stopped being an invader and had, very briefly, become afraid.
He didn't say any of that.
Not because he intended to hide it, but because he hadn't decided what this man deserved to know first. More importantly, he hadn't decided what he could learn by holding something back.
"It tried to wear me," Ethan said slowly. "Like a coat."
"Like a house," the man corrected.
"A coat you take off. A house moves in and starts rearranging the furniture until there's no room left for you."
He leaned forward slightly.
"That's what Taking is. The Cthu's presence bleeds through from wherever it is they bleed through from. It finds a mind unstable enough to get a foothold in, and over days—sometimes hours—it doesn't so much possess you as become you."
His expression hardened.
"By the time we usually catch it, there's no one left inside to save. Burning the body is a mercy at that point, not an execution."
He smiled faintly.
"But I woke up."
"You did more than wake up."
The man leaned forward.
For the first time, something moved behind those ordinary brown eyes. Not fear, Ethan thought.
Attention.
The particular attention of a man watching a fire spread somewhere it had no business spreading.
"You didn't just resist it."
A faint smile touched his lips.
"You ate it."
Ethan's hand went to his sternum without his permission.
Under the wool shirt, low against his ribs, something sat that hadn't been there three days ago.
Not pain.
Weight.
Like carrying a stone he'd swallowed and his body had decided, grudgingly, to keep.
"I don't know how," Ethan said.
It was mostly true.
What he didn't say was that some part of him already suspected the truth mattered less right now than what this man planned to do with it.
The smarter move was to keep listening before he handed over anything else.
"Nobody decides to. That's the trouble with you."
The man stood, his coat moving around him like it had its own opinions about the draft.
"Sit with that for a moment, because I'm about to tell you something that will matter more than anything else I say tonight, and I want you sober for it."
He crossed the small stone room to the single high window, where gray light was doing its best against the lamp.
"There are Tempers."
He paused.
"Pathways. Ways of becoming something other than an ordinary man, with rules and prices attached to each one."
He looked out the window.
"Some men and women all over this rotting world spend their whole lives clawing up one rung at a time, trading blood and sanity and years for power measured in fractions."
His voice became quieter.
"It is slow. It's supposed to be slow."
He turned back toward Ethan.
"It is, by design, nearly impossible to rush."
A beat of silence.
"You just ate a Cthu, something comparable to a quenched, severed mind, whole, in your sleep, while tied to a burning pole."
His expression was almost incredulous.
"And you're asking me how, like it's a card trick you'd like explained."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
"So what am I?" Ethan finally asked.
"That..."
The man studied him.
"...is the correct question."
He picked up his notebook.
"And I don't have the correct answer yet."
He tucked it beneath one arm.
"What I have is a name, Ethan. A title the street already gave you before I got there."
He paused.
"Taken."
His eyes met Ethan's.
"And a very strong suspicion that both of those are about to become inadequate."
He moved toward the door.
For the first time, he offered something like a real smile.
It didn't reach his eyes.
It didn't try to.
"My name is Alistair Vane. I work for an organization that doesn't have a comfortable name in your language, so people mostly just call us the Vigil."
His hand settled on the door.
"Our job, broadly, is to find people like you before the street does."
He gave Ethan a faintly amused look.
"Usually, we're faster."
"You weren't faster this time."
"No."
Alistair didn't seem ashamed.
"This time, you were faster than us."
He opened the door.
"Which is, again, the problem."
He stepped out, then paused with one hand still on the frame.
"Get some rest. Real rest, this time. I'll have food sent up."
Ethan watched him.
"Tomorrow I'm going to ask you to do something extremely stupid and extremely necessary."
Alistair's smile returned.
"And you're going to need to not be dizzy when I do."
"What's that?"
Alistair glanced back.
For just a moment, the schoolteacher face slipped.
Underneath it was something older.
And far more tired.
"I'm going to ask you to reach for that coal in your chest," he said, "and tell me what it whispers back."
The door shut.
The lamp burned green-gold and low.
In the quiet that followed, Ethan pressed two fingers to his sternum.
He felt, very faintly, something inside turn its attention toward his hand.
Patient.
Curious.
And not remotely as dead as it should have been.
He noted, too, how carefully he'd chosen every word he'd given Alistair Vane.
And wondered, a little uneasily, when that had started coming naturally instead of costing him effort.