by Mark Teppo
I hesitated for a second, all this secrecy about the hidden Architects giving me a moment of pause. But only a moment. Speak what lies in your heart, wolf. Be true to me, and to yourself.
"Why shouldn't I?"
A spasm of pain wracked his face. "Don't be obtuse, Michael. Answer my question."
"Yes," I said. Committing myself. Making a choice. Be true.
He tried to nod his head, and only managed a slight tremor of his neck muscles. " 'It is more difficult to live with a woman without danger than to raise the dead to life.' Do you know who said that?" His voice was fading in and out, like the fluttering edge of foam on a wave, as his life ebbed. "Bernard of Clairvaux." He managed to tilt his head to the side enough to look up at me. The light glittering in his eyes gave his face some of its old humor back. "So very medieval of him, and yet so . . . " The light faded, taking with it most of his remaining strength. His head fell forward again, and his voice was almost lost in his throat. " . . . daughters, not our sons that will . . . Oh, my little chicken. I am so sorry . . . "
I knelt beside him, so that he could look at me without having to lift his head. "I know who she is." Ex-lover of my old rival. The prize, as far as many of the Watchers were concerned. The woman whose heart I had broken. More than once. Daughter of the Hierarch.
He stared at me as long as he could, blinking through his pain. "I hope so," he murmured. "I truly do." A low moan started in his belly, and it occluded his throat. His grip on my hand loosened, and his shoulders slumped.
"Goodbye, old friend." The voice rising from my throat wasn't mine, and the impulse that moved my hand belonged to the spirit as well. "I'm sorry." My hand lifted his head, and even though the light was almost out in his eyes, he was still there. When the Chorus flared, the shadows fled from his face, and in his final moment, he could see again. He gazed at the light of the rampant Chorus, gazed at a face he no longer knew, and then closed his eyes as the light overwhelmed him.
I took his soul before it could escape.
The two who had gone for food were down, one of them permanently. Delacroix was still standing, his shirt and pants covered with a brown smear of sauce and noodles. Marielle was examining three others, all of whom were pale and sweating and looking like they were fighting losing battles with their stomachs. The Chorus found Vraillet in the front sitting room, all his wards extended, and tagged a couple more soul lights in the rest of the apartment—one in the bathroom just off the kitchen, throwing up as if his life depended on it. Which it probably did.
The room felt hot, and my palms were slick. The energy from Lafoutain's soul coursed through me, burning my veins. I had been poisoned too, though not as bad as some of the others. Given time, the Chorus could probably burn it out.
Lafoutain had been brought down by his appetite. He had eaten more than any of us, the nervous rapaciousness of a gourmand. Whatever the two had dosed the food with was quick-acting.
Delacroix put up his hand in a warding gesture, fingers splayed, when he saw me. "You," he said. "Who are you working for?" His magick changed, growing into a fiery halo around his head.
"Stop it," Marielle said. "He's with me." She gave the other magus a fierce stare.
Delacroix didn't drop his spell, nor the sneer that slid across his lips. "Who is he?" he asked as if I wasn't standing right there. "Being your fucktoy isn't enough of a seal of approval. Not anymore. Not after Briande sold us all out."
She reacted as if he had slapped her. The Chorus flinched at the sudden pulse of the ley beneath us, a heartbeat echoing through all of us, resonating off our bones. She moved during the echo, nothing more than a blur as I blinked, and Delacroix stepped back in surprise. Before my blink, she was kneeling beside one of the sick Watchers; after, she was holding the cheese knife to Delacroix's throat, forcing him back.
He was still blinking, trying to figure out how she had moved so quickly. "Say that again," she said in a quiet voice that cut through the tense atmosphere in the kitchen, "and I will cut your throat."
The cheese knife wasn't that sharp, but Delacroix and I both knew it had enough of an edge for her needs.
He swallowed heavily, pulling his head back from the small knife. There was a lump in his throat, and no matter how many times he swallowed, it wasn't going away.
"Markham is the only man you can be sure isn't trying to kill you," she said. "Unless you piss him off by being a child about things. And I won't stop him if he changes his mind, because you will, undoubtedly, have done something to deserve it." She pressed the knife against his throat. "Are we clear?"
Delacroix thought about it. Marielle was more patient than I would have been. I would have dropped him after about five seconds of this passive-aggressive sort of bullshit, but she waited him out. Never faltering. Never doubting he'd actually do it. Maybe she could read his heartbeat. Maybe she knew his heart better than he did, or maybe it was the shallow depth of his courage that she knew. But she waited, and after what seemed like an hour, Delacroix nodded. Only after he dropped his magick did she lower the knife.
Vraillet cleared his throat, drawing our attention toward the front hallway. "They're coming," was all he said. He had the shotgun in his right hand, and I noticed it was casually pointed in my direction. His eyes flicked toward the barrel of the gun as he felt my focus shift toward him, and he turned his wrist, moving the gun aside.
Marielle stuck the knife in the tiny slab of leftover Appenzeller on the center island. "We can't stay here," she said. "It's not a matter of defensibility anymore. They'll bring the whole building down." She glanced at me, pushing her hair back from her face. "It'd be easier."
"There's no back door," Vraillet said. He pointed the shotgun at the ceiling. "Two floors above us."
"One below," she said. "But that puts us closer to them."
"True," Vraillet said. His Will shrank to a shiny dot in the middle of his forehead, and then exploded outward in a thousand psychic lines. Each line snapped out a few dozen yards and then came back, flush with physical details of the materials it had just touched. Like a three-dimensional sonar that read through everything. The Chorus did something similar when they mapped lights for me, but Vraillet was doing a full scan.
His etheric sonar ping read the dining room too, and his Will wavered as he picked up the empty shell of Lafoutain. He took a half-step in that direction, but stopped himself. "Is he?" he asked.
"He's gone," I said.
His hands whitened around the stock and barrel of the shotgun, and his face tightened into an uncharacteristic display of emotion, an expression that was both monstrous and awkward on his face. When he exhaled, all the rage flowed out of him, and his Will tightened again. He looked at me once more, his eyes bright with violet light, and then he nodded. He touched his fingers to his lips and then pressed them against the barrel of the shotgun, and his Will bubbled around the mouth of the weapon, wrapping it in silence.
All business, that one. None of us would ever know how much the loss of his mentor meant. Lafoutain was gone; we had to get out: he knew what to do next. Armed with an etheric map of our surroundings, he was going to make an escape hatch. Up and out. The shotgun would make nice big holes for us to travel through, and the silence spell wreathing the weapon would keep our enemies from knowing what we were doing.
He was the sort of inhumanly focused magus that made me nervous. The kind whose Will couldn't be broken. I was glad he was on our side.
Marielle looked at the three incapacitated Watchers. "Walk out or die," she said. "We're not carrying any of you."
"What about Moreau?" Delacroix asked, pointing at the remaining Watcher who had brought the food. Moreau, a narrow-faced guy with a stylish haircut that probably looked better when he wasn't sweating profusely, had been sitting very quietly next to the wine cabinet, trying to be invisible through strength of Will.
"He's already chosen sides," she said coldly.
"No, wait," he whined. "It wasn't my choice." The other Watcher who
had gone for food with him lay in a heap nearby, a red and gray stain leaking out from beneath his head. Moreau was trying not to look at him.
"You spineless fuck," Delacroix spat, a knot of hot magick sparking in his fist. "You just carried the food, is that it?"
My gut tightened as a psychic pulse blipped through the room. Vraillet had found a good spot in the ceiling and was making a hole with the shotgun. Moreau felt the psychic boom of the shotgun too, and the sound startled him. "I didn't know," he squeaked, his tongue loosened by the psychic noise. "Tevvys got a phone call. He wanted to make an extra stop."
"Where?" Delacroix asked.
"A Thai place. Over near Place de la Nation. He sent me in to get the food. It was already waiting for us." He held up his hands. "That's all I did. I just got the food. I had no idea it was poisoned." Moreau shook his head, his face crumbling into a shivering hole. "We came right back from there."
"Where was Tevvys when you went into the restaurant?" I asked.
Moreau's eyes widened. "In the car." He sat up a little straighter. "I thought he was in the car."
Delacroix glanced at me, and I shrugged. "It's deniability," I said. "But it doesn't mean anything."
"You're not listening to me," Moreau shouted, seizing the line of reasoning I had given him. "Tevvys was in the car by himself for a good five minutes while I was getting the food. He dosed it then. The Thai place was the last stop."
Marielle exhaled, and the ley pulsed with her. "The Thai food was poisoned too."
"No," Moreau wailed. "I didn't do it. I didn't do anything. Tevvys took a call. It was all Tevvys." His eyes darted toward the dead man.
"Tevvys can't help you," Marielle said. As if punctuating the seriousness of her tone, Vraillet's shotgun ruffled the ether again. A mundane-sounding cascade of plaster and wood rattled against the hallway floor.
"I didn't do anything." Moreau's voice shrank to a whimper.
"And your brothers are dead because you failed to act," Marielle snapped. "Which is worse? That you failed to save them, or that you participated—willingly or unwillingly—in an action that killed them?"
"That's not true." Moreau forced himself to move, scrambling to grab his dead partner. "His phone. Check his phone." He dug through the dead man's coat, rolling him over to do so. The front of Tevvys' head was gone, and it came away from the tile floor with a sucking noise. Moreau found the other man's phone and juggled it badly as we felt Vraillet put one more round into the ceiling in the hallway.
Marielle took the phone from Moreau's outstretched hand, and she went to thumb through the call log. She paused, and her expression went even colder than it already was. "It's locked. He's got it password protected."
Moreau's mouth moved, but nothing came out but a wordless sound like air leaking from a balloon.
Delacroix stepped forward, his magick swarming through his hair. Marielle stopped him and shook her head. "Get the others. Those who are mobile." Delacroix hesitated again and when she spoke again, her voice was like a whip on his naked flesh. "Now. Go follow Vraillet." Delacroix moved with some haste, and one of the Watchers on the floor staggered to his feet, swept up in the suggestion of Marielle's voice. He tottered into the hall.
Marielle knelt beside the other two. Only one of them was coherent. Barely. She kissed them both on the forehead, smoothing the tension and fright in their faces. "I'm sorry," she said. "Make them feel your pain."
Incredibly, the half-dead one came back from the brink of the Abyss with that.
Marielle stood up and walked over to me. She stared at Moreau until Delacroix came back from the rest of the apartment with one more Watcher in tow, and she kept staring until they went into the hallway. "My benevolence is boundless," she said. "But not infinite."
"You have to believe me," Moreau tried one more time, "I didn't know what was happening."
"You are lying," Marielle said, and Moreau's entire body tensed with a shock of realization. She knew, without a doubt; she wasn't calling his bluff, she was ripping it aside and looking right into his heart. She touched my wrist, and her fingertips vibrated with the echo of Moreau's jackhammer heartbeat.
"Tell me what he knows," she said to me, and with that, she was done with him. She removed her fingers, and the sudden void of the man's heartbeat was like he had ceased to exist. She left the kitchen, left me to ask Moreau in my special way.
Moreau's gaze darted after her, and then toward the hallway to the bedrooms. Gauging his chances.
I lit the Chorus up, and his attention snapped back toward me. The other two Watchers looked away as he started screaming.
XIII
The last time I had looked over the rooftops of Paris, the view had been colored by the glitter of soap bubbles and the golden light of morning. Now, as I joined Delacroix and Marielle on the fourth-floor balcony, I looked out on a nighttime view of Paris. The glow of lights from the surrounding Marais, and further on, the Right Bank, was a hint of civilization beyond the stiff line of the apartments across the street, and the sky, dark with clouds, threw back the light from the city. The shadows were deep and rich enough to hold many things.
Delacroix was scribbling glowing script on the rough balcony; it looked like a variant of a Solomonic Key—one of the Pentacles of the Sun. Some sort of flight circle or focus for making a long jump. As much as part of me wanted to peer over his shoulder and take notes, I joined Marielle at the railing. We were on the outer edge of the building, the central courtyard behind us. All we had to do was clear the buildings across the street, and we'd be gone from this place.
The wind played with Marielle's hair, and I could smell her scent, heavy on the light breeze. Her heartbeat was a slow, solid pulse, its gravitational attraction strong but not irresistible. "I don't See anyone," she said.
With some effort, I tore my attention away from the rhythm of her heart. Faint sparks danced at the edge of my vision, and my head was half-empty and yet overly full. The poison, working on me; the Chorus, fighting it. My concentration was off-kilter; it felt like I was both winding up for an all-night rave and coming down off a bad dose of LSD. What had Moreau and Tevvys dosed the food with?
"They may think the poison has incapacitated us," I offered.
"But you'd think they'd have at least one spotter."
"They should," I said. I remembered the guy from the airport and how he had blended into the background. I hadn't had a chance to look for him again after Henri and the others showed up, but I wondered if he was part of a splinter group too. Forward observers or scouts or some such thing.
She pushed her hair back from her face, and the ambient light reflected off her cheeks and throat. Darkness smeared in a half-moon beneath each eye. "Did Moreau tell you who his master was?"
"No, he didn't."
She looked at me, searching my face for some inkling of the subtext of my reply. Had I not done what she had asked, or had Moreau truly not known?
Delacroix clapped his hands, and his magick circle came to life. The wind shifted, tugging us away from the edge, and half of Marielle's face became obscured by her hair. She pushed it back, but I had already turned away, shielding my eyes from her. She'd have to read me a different way.
"It won't last long," Delacroix said. "And it isn't very strong. You'll have to generate your own wind if you want to go far."
"It'll do," Marielle said. "Clearing the next block might be enough."
It might. The Chorus twisted up my neck. Was she voicing a positive opinion to buoy their confidence or did she know something about the men coming to kill us?
The building shivered, and the tremor in the walls made the balcony sway unnervingly. The Chorus, noting the stress fractures in the masonry of the building, observed that the architecture of this block wasn't very earthquake-proof. The leys were being warped, coerced into a volcanic nexus that was coming up through the foundation and lower floors. Inside the fourth-floor apartment, several of the lights guttered out as the next tremor ran throu
gh the structure, and two floors below, the windows in the kitchen where several Watchers lay dying, blew out, raining flowers of glass down on the sidewalk.
Vraillet came out onto the balcony, still carrying the shotgun. "Time to go," he said. "They've breached the apartment below." He thrust the weapon into Delacroix's hand, and stepped into the circle of violet and blue light. He pointed east, toward the white cathedral of Sacré-Cœur, and jumped. Delacroix's magick circle popped beneath him, a magick spring throwing him into the air, and his own magick bloomed like a tiny sun sparking. Then he was gone, a shadow streaking across the roofs of Paris.
One of the two ailing Watchers followed, though his concentration was bad enough that he only managed a long jump, across the street and onto the roof of the building opposite. His landing was rough too. If he was smart, he'd just lie there, below the roof line, and wait for all the dust to settle. Eventually he'd be able to walk out. If the poison didn't kill him first.
The other guy demurred. "I don't care for heights," he stammered. "And . . . and I haven't mastered flight." He was standing inside the apartment, nervously shuffling back and forth. As close as he dared to the open sky.
The building groaned again, shaking more violently, and in the kitchen behind the scared magus, glassware rolled out of a cupboard and shattered on the floor. Somewhere, distantly, someone started screaming, a thin siren of sound like a teakettle boiling in the next apartment over.
Steadying myself against the outer wall, I reached in and caught the reluctant magus' jacket, yanking him onto the balcony. "You're coming with us," I said, wrapping him in long ribbons of the Chorus. Delacroix's circle gave off a huge flash of blue sparks when I hit it with the other man in tow, but it still worked. The ground flexed beneath us, and we were suddenly thrown aloft.
The building growled, and it seemed to lean forward as if it were going to swat us out of the sky. The balcony cracked, part of the railing breaking away and falling. The sliding glass door shattered, glass sliding like water across the angled floor of the balcony. I twisted around, trying to catch sight of Marielle and Delacroix. As if I could carry more weight than I already was.