by Morgan Rice
Kaia was still thinking about that when the feeling hit her.
For a moment, she thought that it was the sensation of the shadows, the same way that she’d felt it before. This felt different, though, not quite the same, more like…
More like the things she’d felt around Xander, and around Tabitha Greene’s body. If they were both like her, then maybe, just maybe, what she was sensing was the Shadowseers?
It was almost too much to hope, but what else could that sensation mean? It was close enough to the shadows that it had to be connected to them in some way, yet it wasn’t the same. The feeling didn’t have that fundamental undercurrent of wrongness to it, but it did feel connected to Kaia in a way she couldn’t entirely explain.
She looked round, thinking that she should fetch the inspector, but he was still in the café. If he was right about her not being able to go in there, then she would have to wait outside for him to come out. If she did that, then what if the feeling faded, and Kaia couldn’t find it again?
No, she couldn’t risk that. She couldn’t risk losing her only chance to find the Shadowseers. She could do this and still keep her word to the inspector; she wouldn’t go too far, and she would definitely be back before he got done in the café.
Setting off, Kaia started to follow the sensation. It was more like following a vague scent on the air than a sound or a signpost. Kaia had to stop at every turn, trying to work out if the feeling was stronger one way or another, following it as best she could.
To most of those around her, it must have seemed that Kaia was just out for a stroll, and she made sure that when she stopped to check the direction, she made it look like she was glancing into a store or pausing to read a sign. She didn’t want anyone thinking she was strange and stopping to ask what she was doing, when she didn’t have any means to even understand them.
Kaia kept following the sensation, and it occurred to her that she was getting a little far from the street where she’d started. The streets here weren’t the broad boulevards that were being built around Paris; instead, they were a tangled maze of smaller alleys that looked much older than all the other buildings around her before. These parts were more like the rundown parts of London, right down to the buildings that leaned in towards one another, close enough that two people on the top floors might have been able to reach out and touch.
She should probably turn back, because the inspector might be coming out of the café any minute, and because if Kaia got lost here, she might never find her way back again. She couldn’t even ask for directions. More than that, every step that she took away from the café was one step deeper into doing what she’d promised not to.
Yet if she didn’t keep going, Kaia would never find the source of the feeling, would never find the Shadowseers she hoped were there. Picking an alleyway where the sensation felt stronger again, Kaia kept going.
The buildings there were tall and crumbling, with half-timbered frames and walls that had been painted a long time ago. That paint had faded and peeled, while the windows of several of them were broken. As Kaia made her way along the row of them, she couldn’t escape the feeling that eyes were watching her from some of the windows, even though it was hard to tell if any of the buildings were occupied or not.
It reminded her of the brief time she’d spent in the Devil’s Acre in London, and Kaia found herself looking around sharply for the possibility of cutpurses or other criminals. Only the lingering feeling that drew her onward kept her there at all.
Finally, Kaia stopped, because the feeling grew stronger as she stood in front of one of the buildings compared to the others. It was a tall tenement building, with the abandoned remains of a shopfront down at the bottom. There had been a sign there once, with the remains of a few greying letters still visible, but Kaia couldn’t read it properly now.
In there. The others like her were in there, if they were anywhere in this city, and if Kaia found them, then she would presumably find her sister too. That had been the point of coming to France, after all. She couldn’t hold back now, even if the building in front of her looked as if the others around it were the only things keeping it from falling down.
Was this really where the Shadowseers were holed up? Actually, though, it made a kind of sense to Kaia. The Shadowseers were meant to be a secretive group, so wouldn’t it be easier for them to hide somewhere like this than in some grand location? Especially in Paris, where waves of revolution had swept through it over the last century?
Hope rose in Kaia, and she slipped forward, knowing that she couldn’t leave it at that now. She had to know what was going on in there. She had to find the Shadowseers, and her sister. Walking up to the front the apparently abandoned building, she tried the door.
Almost to her surprise, it opened. On closer inspection, Kaia saw that the lock was broken. She slipped inside, moving quietly through the remains of a storefront, stripped bare either by the storekeepers moving out or passing thieves. There was a door at the back, leading to stairs that headed up into the tenement proper.
There were old pictures on the wall, painted or drawn by what appeared to be a variety of people. There were cobwebs on the ceilings, and dust on all the furniture of the rooms she passed. There were clear paths through the dust, though, where people had been walking. Kaia followed those paths, assuming that it would lead her to people, to the Shadowseers.
She came to a door, and heard the sound of people talking in French beyond it. Kaia hesitated for the space of several breaths, then pushed it open.
A group of people, mostly rough looking men, was sitting around a table on which cards had been set out. All of them, men and women, looked up as Kaia entered.
“Ou est voux?” one of the men demanded.
“I’m sorry,” Kaia said. “I don’t speak French. Does anyone understand me? I’m looking for the Shadowseers.”
“Ah, English,” one of the men said, looking Kaia over and smiling in a way that wasn’t entirely friendly. “What is a pretty English girl doing walking in here, among us?”
“I told you,” Kaia said. “I’m looking for the Shadowseers.”
She said the word more clearly this time, just in case they hadn’t heard it the first time. Were these the people who shared a strange talent with her? Who fought against the shadows without letting the world know that they even existed? Was her sister in this room somewhere?
Even as Kaia asked the question, she knew the answer. The feeling that had brought her to the building was still there, but now that she was in the building’s heart, Kaia could feel the almost stale taste of it. It was the difference between the feeling she’d had around Xander and the feeling she’d had on seeing the mark on Tabitha Greene’s arm for the first time. One had been there, vibrant and alive, while the other had been dead for hours.
This was a place where the Shadowseers had been, but it was not where they were now. Kaia had come here looking for her sister and for those like her, but if they’d ever been here, they were long gone.
Kaia started to back away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, lifting her hands as she started to realize the truth of what had happened. She’d just walked into the middle of a place she shouldn’t be, a place of thieves and vagabonds. “I think I’ve walked into the wrong place.”
“Oh, that’s definitely true,” the one who spoke English said. “Completely the wrong place.”
“So I…” Kaia realized just how dangerous the situation she was in had become. “…I’ll just be going.”
“Oh, don’t go,” the man said, and he snapped something in French to the others so that they started to circle between Kaia and the exit. “I think we’re just getting started.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Kaia tried to look for a way out of the room, but there were men and women between her and the exit now. Too late, she realized her foolishness in coming here alone, and in wandering off after the Shadowseers.
Instead of finding them, she’d walke
d into the kind of place that people didn’t walk out of.
“I don’t have any money,” she tried, because it was simply the truth. The inspector had all the money. If that was all they wanted from her, then maybe they would simply frighten her a little and let her go now that she knew that they weren’t going to get anything for the risk of robbing her.
“Well, that’s a pity, ma petite,” the one who spoke English said. “But I’m sure we can find another way to get some value out of you. Even in the new Paris, there are plenty of people who will pay for a pretty English girl.”
He stepped forward, reaching up as if he might touch Kaia’s face. This close, he stank of unwashed sweat and garlic. She slapped his hand away.
“Stay away from me,” Kaia said.
“Or what?” he asked.
“The last men to try this ended up beaten bloody,” she snapped back. “My travelling companion is an inspector with the London police.”
She didn’t like hiding behind the threat of the inspector like that, but right then, it seemed like her best chance of getting out of there. Criminals might be afraid of the threat of the police when they wouldn’t listen to anything else.
“This is not London,” the one who spoke English said. He grabbed Kaia’s arm then.
She thought about trying to call for help, or break free, or simply hit him. None of them seemed likely to work, not here, with a dozen other people around her. Real fear rose in Kaia then, because she realized just how helpless she was there. There was nothing she could do to save herself then, and the consequences of failing were worse than Kaia could have imagined.
The man who’d grabbed her started to pull Kaia deeper into the room, towards one of the chairs there. Kaia tried to drag her heels and he struck her, almost casually.
That was when Kaia felt the power start to rise up inside her.
“You don’t want to do this,” Kaia said. Another second or two and the power would burst out of her as it had before, sending them all flying.
Only it didn’t. Instead, it seemed to spread out into the people around her, suffusing them, flowing into them, connecting Kaia to them so that she knew them.
“You don’t know what I want, girl,” the man said.
Except that she did. She couldn’t read his mind exactly, but it was almost as good. In that moment, Kaia knew all of the hopes and dreams of the people in the room. She knew what they wanted. She knew what drove them. She knew them. She knew more than that, too.
“I do,” she said, in French, and she was astonished to hear the sounds coming out of her own mouth. “I know what all of you want.”
That knowledge flooded into her, and it felt so strange, knowing so much. For a moment, Kaia felt uncomfortable with it, because it felt like an intrusion, an invasion of privacy deeper than anything else she could have done. It was like reading a hidden diary, but a thousand times more personal.
She pointed to one of the men there. “You want to go back to the countryside, because the city isn’t what you thought it would be.”
She saw him stop dead, his expression shocked, but she was already pointing to one of the women. “You want reassurance that the pain in your side isn’t the same thing that killed your mother.”
The woman gasped in surprise, and Kaia pointed again. “You want a life that isn’t just robbing people, you want an honest job.”
Again, she pointed, and again. It was so easy to see what lay in the hearts of the people around her.
“You want to know where you’re going to find cheap bread. You want to find a husband, but you think you aren’t good enough for one. None of you want to be here, doing this,” Kaia said. She was worried in that moment by how close this was to what she’d felt of the shadows, with their probing for weaknesses, their preying on desires. Yet she wasn’t trying to take these people over, or trying to force them to do anything evil, only to stop them from hurting her.
She stared at the man who’d grabbed her. “Except you, Henri. You’ve wanted to hurt people for as long as you can remember, just because you can. You’re like a cancer growing at the heart of this house, twisting it and the people there.”
“How do you know my name?” the man who’d grabbed her demanded. He let go of her wrist and stepped back. “How do you suddenly speak French? You are a witch, a mesmerist!”
Even as he backed away, Kaia did the same. “You don’t have to listen to Henri,” she said. “You don’t have to do what he says. He makes you all worse.”
They stared at her, and at each other. Kaia thought that she saw tears starting to fall from the eyes of one of the men there.
“Why do we listen to you, Henri?” another man asked. “What have you ever brought us except trouble?”
Kaia stepped through the door as calmly as she could, because the same part of her that knew these people knew that if she showed fear now, the hesitation she’d woven with her knowledge of their hearts’ desires would be gone. Henri would shout for them to get her, and they would fall on Kaia like a pack of hungry dogs.
So she walked calmly out of the door, leaving the others there trying to make sense of what was happening. Only when she was safely out of the room did Kaia start to run, down through the building and out into the alley. She didn’t stop until she was well out of the tangled medieval streets and back on the main boulevards.
Kaia stopped there, leaning against one of the trees that lined them, trying to catch her breath. She also tried to make sense of what had just happened. The most disappointing part of it was that the Shadowseers hadn’t been there, in the spot where she’d been able to sense them. They’d moved on. Perhaps they weren’t even in Paris anymore.
That thought made Kaia feel empty. She’d been so caught up with the idea of finding them, and finding her sister, that it hadn’t even occurred to her that they might not be there. They could be anywhere now. They could be somewhere else in Paris, but they could just as easily be in Australia, and Kaia had no way of knowing.
Only the strange turn that her powers had taken cut through the disappointment at not finding her family. She was used to her powers coming out in explosive, uncontrolled bursts. This had been different, very different. The last vestiges of the power were fading now, but the knowledge that had come with it still seemed to be there. Including…
“Excuse me,” she said to a passing Frenchwoman. “Can you understand me?”
“Of course I can. You are speaking French. Are you mad?”
“No, no,” Kaia said, or rather non, non, because she was speaking French. “It’s just that I wanted to make sure that my accent was all right. I’m English, you see.”
“Yes, it is fine,” the woman said. “Better than fine. I would not have known that you were English…” She sniffed the word “…if you had not said so.”
She walked off, leaving Kaia to wonder at her newfound skills. She started to walk back towards the café. She had to tell the inspector about this.
*
From the moment Pinsley walked into the café, he felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the high kicking Can-Can dancers on a small stage, showing far more ankle than would have been allowed in England; it was the whole grubby air of the place, with fat, greasy looking men drinking even at this hour, and the staff having the grim look of people who would rather be anywhere else. The space itself had small round tables set out at irregular intervals, a wooden floor, and a counter against which an owner with an impressively unkempt moustache lounged as if he would rather be anywhere else.
Pinsley walked up to the counter, and had to wait for more than a minute before the owner even deigned to look at him.
“What do you want?” he asked. “We have coffee, absinthe, anything you want.”
“I’m looking for Camille du Pont,” Pinsley said, not wanting to spend a moment longer in this place than he had to.
“I only answer questions for customers, Englishman,” the owner said, scrubbing the countertop with a cloth so grubby that
it probably made things worse.
“A coffee, then,” Pinsley said, handing over the money. “And Camille du Pont.”
The owner handed over a cup of steaming coffee, and then pointed to where a woman was waiting tables. She was of middling height, with her dark hair kept in check beneath a relatively simple bonnet with a bavolet ribbon at the back. Her features were sharp, more striking than pretty, and she wore a simple dress with an apron over it, in what was probably a deliberate contrast to the dancers.
“What do you want?” she asked as Pinsley moved over to her, carrying his coffee. “I saw Gaston pointing, so you must want something.”
“I want to talk to you,” Pinsley said, taking a seat at one of the tables and gesturing for her to join him. She stood, instead. “It’s about the production of Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre Rue St Germain.”
Her eyes narrowed at the mention of the theatre. “That place? They wouldn’t know talent if it bit them!”
“I had heard that you weren’t happy about it,” Pinsley said. “Is it true that you auditioned to be Juliet?”
“And they didn’t want me,” Camile said. “Fools. Can you believe it?”
Pinsley chose his words carefully. “I’m told that you are a very fine actress.”
He gestured to the chair opposite him, and Camille sat this time, looking pleased that someone had recognized her talents, even if it wasn’t the theatre.
“I am,” she said. “But they said that I was too difficult to work with. Difficult! As if that isn’t another way of saying that I don’t just blindly go along with whatever the director wants.”
