For an instant, Robin stiffened, as though she would run, or even strike at him-and then the ice cracked. Her arms wrapped around his chest, the tears she'd been battling earlier soaked his doublet.
“You can't tell her!” Robin sobbed. “Please, Renard, you can't!”
“Shh. Hush. I won't say a word, I promise.”
He twisted his neck around until it ached, struggling to meet the gaze of his companions without relinquishing the embrace. When he was certain he had their attention, he deliberately tilted his head toward the chair to which she'd been chained and carefully mouthed the words “It's all too much.”
He was relieved when the Finders nodded and looked away, making themselves look busy while the girl recovered. Let them believe the lie; it was better for everyone.
“Come on, Robin,” he said kindly as her shaking finally began to subside. “Let's get you home.” He took her wet sniffle as agreement, and slowly began to disentangle himself from her grasp.
“Renard?”
“Yes, my dear?”
She hiccupped once. “How did you know?” she whispered. “How did you know how I feel about…?”
He had no reason to answer truthfully. In fact, so far as Renard was concerned, honestly was rarely, if ever, a virtue. Yet somehow, the notion of lying, or even refusing to answer, just felt wrong.
Smiling sadly, he brushed a tear from her face with a single gloved knuckle. “It takes one to know one, kid.”
Robin's eyes widened, and then-thank the gods! — so did her own smile. “Your secret's safe with me,” she assured him.
“I know it is, Robin.”
The thief's hand on the serving girl's shoulder, they led the small, ragged group from the warehouse, toward home.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The shape-for indeed, a shape is what it was, not a person, not even a creature-appeared from the top of the opening doorway, revealed slowly as though extruding from the ceiling itself. The deathly gaunt limbs; the impossible, elongated fingers; the twitching flesh around the mouth; and of course that hat, and that coat, whose flops and folds refused to conform to either the movements beneath them or the pull of gravity itself. Iruoch descended into the church hall, entered the bishop's chambers with a single, careless stride, and nobody moved to stop him.
Nobody but one.
Had she been a bit more calm, a bit less enraged, and indeed a bit less frightened, Widdershins might have noticed that Iruoch was not moving quite as he had in their first meeting. His steps were ever so slightly less certain; his arms and shoulders spasming with a faint and sporadic twitch. His jaw clenched tight, and he squinted as though he peered directly into the noonday sun. Widdershins might have noticed, and might have wondered.
But she didn't. She noticed nothing, nothing at all, save Iruoch himself. She saw the creature appear in the doorway, and swore there were bloodstains remaining on his hands, his lips. She heard the distant laughter of that ghostly chorus, but in her mind reverberated only the terrified cries of murdered children.
All the frustrated rage and simmering guilt she'd felt since that awful discovery on the upper floor of the Lamarr manor-all of Olgun's own fury, caused by the sheer, diseased wrongness of the faerie's presence in this city of mortals-came together, a spark and tinder, erupting into a spiritual conflagration.
No communication, no requests, not even at the instinctive level of the rapport the thief and her god had developed these past few years. Today they acted, and they acted as one.
Iruoch had only just begun his second step into the room when Widdershins appeared above the shoulders of the others. A leap that should have been utterly impossible without a running start carried her over their heads. She tucked into a tight ball as she tumbled, barely enough to keep her from striking either the stone ceiling or the marble table. Broken glass crunched beneath her feet and one knee as she landed in a crouch, yet the shards failed to penetrate even the fabric of her hose, let alone her skin. Although she stared straight ahead, locked on Iruoch, her hands lashed out to each side, snagging the flintlock from the belt of the Church guard, and dragging the rapier from Constable Sorelle's scabbard.
The others gathered in the chamber hadn't even finished their gasps of astonishment when the pistol ignited with a deafening crack, and not even Iruoch was fast enough to avoid the shot.
The ball tumbled through the creature's filth-matted coat, through the flesh and bone of the shoulder beyond, and fell with a dull thump to the carpet in the hallway. A cloud of cinnamon-hued dust puffed from the wound and drifted to the floor in a flurry of flakes-flakes that resembled nothing so much as blood long dried to near powder. The ball, fresh and new when it was fired, was coated in years' worth of corrosion.
Ghostly children wailed in a chorus of pain, and Iruoch's face was a mask of utter astonishment. His jaw and cheeks flickered as those peculiar muscles-or whatever they were-twitched and flexed beneath the skin.
“Ow!” He really and truly looked as though his feelings had been hurt as much as his flesh. “That was-”
Widdershins kicked, and a small shard of broken glass from the carafe arced across the room-again, with impossible, unnatural accuracy-slicing for Iruoch's throat. He raised an arm fast enough to shatter the missile; several strips of shredded coat and skin dangled from wrist to elbow.
“That was-” he started again.
The flintlock-which Widdershins had hurled less than a heartbeat after kicking the glass-careened off his forehead, sending him staggering.
“That was-”
Widdershins lunged forward with a piercing cry and skewered the creature with Paschal's rapier, literally pinning him to the door.
“Quit it!” he shrieked at her. His breath was a waft of waste and blood, like the feces of an incontinent vampire. It punched through the miasma of peppermint that surrounded him, making Widdershins gag.
Gag, but not fall back. Grunting, she twisted the rapier, widening the wound. More dried blood-or whatever the dust in Iruoch's veins might be-sifted out across his boots, and hers.
“Would you just die?!” She heard the murderous hysteria in her voice, and a part of her welcomed it.
“Hmm…” Iruoch cocked his head aside and actually tapped one of those horrific fingers against his chin. And then, “Nah!”
Eight fingers clenched tight, wrapping and rewrapping themselves around Widdershins's wrist until it was encased in two or three layers of flexed digits. She felt his skin searing her own, felt it pierce the fabric and stick fast to her flesh, and she couldn't repress a shudder.
Slowly, methodically, Iruoch straightened his arms, pushing her back. The blade slid obscenely from his body, the once-pristine steel now rusted and pitted.
She'd hurt him-she knew she'd hurt him! She saw the pain in his clenched jaw, the wince as the sword slid free. But even as she watched, that agony faded. The small stream of dust pouring from his chest stuttered and stopped as the wound…
The ragged edge of the wound shaped itself into a mass of tiny fingers that slowly interleaved with and clenched one another, stitching the injury closed. And the gashes on his arm, the hole in his shoulder, already gone.
Yes, she'd hurt him. But not nearly, not nearly enough.
“You're a really good dancer,” Iruoch told her with a manic grin. “But it's my turn to lead, now.”
Iruoch's fingers flexed-not his shoulders, not his arms, but the fingers alone-and Widdershins hurtled back across the room, bowling over Constable Sorelle and Brother Ferrand in her flight. They fetched up against the desk with a painful clatter, a roiling heap of limbs and fabric and badly bruised flesh. Blood smeared the carpet around Widdershins's wrists, where the creature's touch had once again peeled layers of skin from her flesh, but she scarcely noticed the pain. Her ears filled with the sounds of desperate combat as someone fired off a second shot, as swords and bludgeons leapt from scabbards, as those still standing converged on the monster in their midst-but this, too, she was aware of only peripherally, as something happening at a great remove, lacking any immediacy.