"Ah, yes," Lafoutain said after a moment of searching his own memory. "I do recall an earnest student who didn't have the common sense God gave goats. The straddler. Caught between two worlds. What was it? 'Markham.' That's right. Landis Markham, yes?"
"That would be me, sir," I admitted. "Call me Michael." I hadn't been the most adept of adepts; my pre-Watcher education was full of holes. A flush crawled up into my hair, and I resisted the temptation to check the expression on Marielle's face.
"Michael it is." Lafoutain looked past us, his magick fading into the ambient etheric vibrations surrounding the doorway. "No one else with you?"
The courtyard was empty and quiet; there were no souls for the Chorus to mark.
"Damn their eyes," Lafoutain sighed as he stepped back from the door, opening it further. "I told them to just go down to the corner." He shut the door after we entered the apartment, and traced a finger between two lumps of silver stuck to the back of the door. Activation nodes for a magick circle, his touch completed the circuit again and the magick engaged. My ears popped with the sudden change in air pressure. "There's no food left," he explained. "There wasn't much to begin with, and they've had nothing to do but bitch and eat."
"No news, then?" Marielle asked, the tone of her voice suggesting she already knew the answer.
Lafoutain squeezed past me, shaking his head. "Nothing good."
This apartment was much bigger than the one across the courtyard. A central hall ran from the front door back to the long rectangular space of the kitchen. A large living room opened to our right, off the main hall, and from there another hallway led back to bedrooms. On our left was a narrow sitting room, filled with bookcases, and beyond that was a large dining room that had been turned into the war council chamber. The lights were bright in there, and men clustered around the central table, arguing.
Sitting in an overstuffed chair near the inner wall of the sitting room was a man with a face like a long knife. Propped against the wall was a Mossberg shotgun. His clothes were dark and he sat in half-shadow, almost blending into the fabric of the chair. His eyes were dots of violet light, and being subject to his magickal scrutiny was much more intense than Lafoutain's cursory examination. The Chorus played a short game of dodge and redirect with his magick for a moment. Just long enough for us both to know the score.
Robert Vraillet, the Chorus said, licking the taste of the man's magick off their claws. Lafoutain's man. A Viator.
Ignoring the dick-measuring moment between his bodyguard and me, Lafoutain led us back to the kitchen, sparing a single glance and a rueful shake of his head toward the dining room. "Still too much speculation," he said. "They don't know anything, and it makes them afraid."
The kitchen was filled with chrome-plated appliances. Dishes and the detritus from a serious pantry raid were scattered on the counter and center island, along with more than a few empty bottles of wine. Lafoutain picked up a cheese knife and attacked a quarter wheel of an aromatic hard cheese as he nodded toward the cupboards on the right-hand wall. "Get yourself a glass. There should be a few bottles of that Spanish excuse for a table wine still."
He flipped the knife over, sliding a piece of cheese into his mouth. "I sent Moreau and Tevvys out for more food, and they're backtracking to check for Watchers on their trail, or some other nonsense."
Marielle opened the cabinet behind us, and got down two glasses. I had just had tea, and wasn't all that thirsty, and I didn't think she was either, but this looked like a social nicety. After I took the offered glasses, she opened the cabinet below the stemware and revealed a temperature-controlled wine rack. "Nice setup," I observed. "Well, except for the sparse pantry, of course."
"Thank you," Lafoutain said. "But it's not mine." He pointed the knife at Marielle. "Friend of hers."
"Really?"
Marielle glanced back at me, hair falling across her face. She tried to read my expression, but I kept my face neutral.
Lafoutain was watching me, a half-smile sliding across his mouth. "She has a lot of friends," he teased.
I was thinking about the blonde woman's apartment, the one we ran off to on New Year's Day, and about the somewhat vacant apartment on the other side of the courtyard. Where are we? Somewhere safe; a friend's.
Marielle brought a bottle to the table, and Lafoutain fumbled through the mess on the counter for the bottle opener. "God help me, but I'm developing a taste for it," he said as she started to open the wine. "That's a sure sign of the Apocalypse."
"Or desperation," Marielle offered.
"Most assuredly," he said. He tapped the remnants of the cheese wheel. "Rioja and an Appenzeller." He shuddered. "That's the first sign, you know. When our standards start slipping. Next time, though, could you find a place with a decent liquor cabinet?"
"You wanted something defensible," she countered.
"True," he sighed. "See what I mean about standards?" He cut a slice of cheese and offered it to me.
It was softer than I expected, and had a fruity taste, like it had been soaked in apple cider. "This is good," I said.
Lafoutain snorted. "It's not even French," he said. "You are a philistine." His eyes flicked toward Marielle, who appeared to be concentrating on opening the bottle of wine. "In matters of food, of course," he amended.
My tongue was thick in my mouth. "Of course," I muttered. The Chorus chattered in my ear, the laughter of raucous birds. You can take the boy off the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy. The pretty things would always entrance the son of a potato farmer.
Marielle pulled the cork with a single, fluid motion, poured an inch in our glasses, and when Lafoutain nodded at the offered bottle without an ounce of irony in his expression, filled the empty glass next to him as well. She raised her glass, and we followed suit. "To fallen friends," she said quietly, reminding us why we were hiding out in an apartment that didn't belong to any of us. Lafoutain and I, for separate but not entirely unrelated reasons, leaped at the opportunity to change the topic, and we raised our glasses as well.
The wine was a little young, but not that bad. Good enough for the palette of a potato farmer.
Lafoutain set his glass down with a sigh that had nothing to do with the pairing of the wine and cheese. "Who?"
"Father Cristobel," I said.
"You are the Witness?"
I nodded. "At the Chapel of Glass. They cut us off from the ley and sent in a suicide squad."
"Guns and explosives? Against the priest? That seems ill-prepared on their part."
"Guns, yes; but they had locks on their souls with some sort of remote conduit. They blew the cage out from within and the subsequent implosion was. . partly an etheric quake. It brought the place down."
Lafoutain and Marielle exchanged a meaningful glance, and when she nodded, he continued the questions. "And you?" he asked. "How did you escape?"
"There's a tunnel beneath the chapel. Eventually it comes up in a maintenance shack in Pere Lachaise. Cristobel sacrificed himself so that. . " I trailed off with a wince as the Chorus pinned Cristobel's last memory into my mental scaffolding. A crushing sensation of an enormous weight. The cross and the glass. Bones shattering. The air being forced out of my lungs, along with what felt like every other organ in my body.
Lafoutain cut another slice of cheese and chewed it noisily while Marielle finished her first glass of wine and poured another. "That's ten," he said.