'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.'
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 through 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 Sacre-C?ur, 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
