by Morgan Rice
His mind made up, Pinsley stilled the metronome and stowed it away in his room once more. He considered knocking to rouse Kaia, but she would need her strength if they were to go back to the theatre. She’d obviously been shaken by what had happened. Pinsley left her for now, heading downstairs and hailing a carriage.
“Ile Saint Louis,” he told the driver.
The journey took them to the broad expanse of the Seine. The Ile Saint Louis was one of the islands in the middle of it, joining the two sides of the city with bridges and filled with businesses.
Alighting from the carriage, Pinsley looked around for the Rue Boutarel, finding it only as the evening light started to dim. His next problem was finding the right building, but he saw a potential solution in the form of a man walking back along the street, presumably coming home from work.
“Excuse me,” he said. This was one instance where being English might help. “A friend of mine lives on this street, but I’ve forgotten the number. Pierre Duchene?”
“Old drinking buddy, is he?” the man said. “If he’s in, he’ll be at number nine. Other than that, he’ll be at the Bar Marcel, or the Bar Villanelle, or another bar.”
Pinsley got the message. For now, though, it was enough that he had an address to work with. He went to number nine and hammered on the door, but there was no reply.
He told himself that it didn’t have to mean anything. As the man he’d asked directions from had said, Pierre Duchene might simply be in a bar. Then again, he could also be out preparing to commit murder. The only way to be sure was to find him, and find him quickly.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Kaia needed to sleep more than she’d thought she ever might. She wasn’t some fainting flower of the upper classes who needed to lie down after every little thing, yet now exhaustion claimed her.
The situation she’d been in had been dangerous, and she’d been hurt, if only a little. Then there was the question of using her powers. This hadn’t been the massive burst of energy that it usually was, but it still felt as though it had taken a lot out of Kaia to do it.
As a result, the moment she lay her head down on the pillow, Kaia slept.
As she dreamed, Kaia saw shadows gathering over Paris, and figures gathering, trying to chase them back. Only this wasn’t modern Paris, with its gas lights and its guillotines, its Arc de Triomphe and its broad boulevards; this was an older place, where everyone dressed in tunics and hose, and there were men in armor rather than police.
Kaia saw bodies piled up in the streets, collected on barrows. She saw people dying of sickness. In the midst of it all, she saw people gathering around a woman who seemed to glow from within, striding towards a man who seemed so filled with shadow that the sky darkened above him and thunder rumbled…
Kaia woke to the sound of someone knocking on her door. Assuming it was the inspector, she went to answer it, and found Madam Farge, with a plate of food on a tray.
“Rabbit, beans, and carrots,” the landlady declared, passing the tray to Kaia. “You need to keep your strength up. Your friend has gone out. Didn’t even leave a note.”
Kaia bit back her annoyance, knowing that she couldn’t take it out on the landlady. Even so, it was irritating to be left behind again so soon after they’d talked about including her. She understood that he would want to keep going with the business of the case, and with trying to find his daughter, but still, he could have woken her.
There was nothing to do, though, except eat the meal Madam Farge had brought her. It wasn’t as though she knew where Inspector Pinsley had gone, so she couldn’t follow him. All she could really do was wait, and trust that he would be back so that they could both head to the theatre together later, as a team.
“Thank you for this,” Kaia said, indicating the meal.
“You don’t have to stay around him, you know, if he lashes out,” Madam Farge said.
Kaia realized with a start that the landlady still thought Inspector Pinsley was behind the bruise on her cheek.
“I told you that wasn’t down to him,” Kaia said. “I went into a dangerous place, and ended up getting hurt.”
“And your so called chaperone wasn’t there with you,” Madam Farge said, making the same point she had with the inspector.
“I can look after myself,” Kaia pointed out. “I should be able to go anywhere without a chaperone.”
The landlady gave a shrug that seemed like a whole conversation in itself. “There’s what we should be able to do, and what we can do. The revolution of ’89 promised us freedom, brotherhood, and equality, but life is never so simple. You got out of trouble, but would there have been trouble if your guardian had been there?”
Kaia had wondered the same thing herself, so she couldn’t really argue with the point. Even so, she couldn’t just agree with Madam Farge, or with the inspector.
“I will be more careful in future,” Kaia said.
“Well, be careful now, and stay indoors,” Madam Farge said. “Paris by night is dangerous for a girl alone. It is a place for thieves, pimps, kidnappers, corrupt police, and killers, not for you.”
The landlady left, leaving the tray behind. Kaia looked out of the room’s window as she ate, watching dusk gathering over the city. Thanks to Madam Farge’s words, Kaia imagined the denizens of the night time city pouring out of houses a lot like the one she’d been in earlier, taking over the streets.
It was incongruous, therefore, when Kaia saw a pretty young woman walking past, respectably dressed, with her dark hair neatly coiffed beneath a hat. Kaia stared at her for a second or two, taking in her almost pixyish features, and it was only then that the feeling struck her.
She sensed the shadow as clearly as she had in Xander, or in Doctor de Vere before him. She felt it as a sense of utter wrongness that seemed to blight the world just by its presence. It wasn’t just that it was evil; it was that it didn’t belong in the world, had no place there among normal things. The sense of it was like a clashing note in Kaia’s soul, and it could only mean one thing:
The young woman down there was possessed by a shadow.
This wasn’t like the traces had been in the theatre. It wasn’t like the leftover remnants of the Shadowseers’ presence back in the tenement building. This was the real thing, right there: someone possessed by one of the shadows Xander had tried to send her to the city to find.
Kaia knew as soon as she saw the woman that she had to follow her. Yes, she’d heard Madam Farge when she’d talked about the dangers of the Paris night. Yes, she had only recently walked into a dangerous place and come out worse. Yes, she would rather have had the inspector there with her. None of that mattered right now, though. She’d lost the tracks of the Shadowseers; if Kaia didn’t at least try to follow the traces of the shadows, what was the point of being in Paris at all?
Throwing on her coat, Kaia headed downstairs. She was careful not to let Madam Farge see her as she made her way to the door, because the time needed for an argument would put her too far behind her quarry. Opening the door as quietly as she could, Kaia slipped out into the Paris night, past a newspaper seller.
For a moment, she thought that she’d been too slow, even moving as quickly as she had. She couldn’t see the young woman who’d passed beneath the window, but an instant later, she felt the sense of the shadow again, and hurried forward after it.
Paris looked very different by night. The trees that lined the boulevards looked more sinister by lamplight, flickering shadows sent across the walls of the tall townhouses that lined the boulevards. Clouds obscured the stars, and it seemed almost that the buildings loomed over Kaia, looking down on her like she was nothing. While it was still early enough that there were men in top-hats and women in fine dresses strolling together, Kaia couldn’t see many young women out there alone.
It meant that when the woman Kaia was following came back into sight, it was easy for Kaia to pick her out from the others on the street. At the same time, Kaia suspected that she could have
followed the shadow within her blind, the way she’d done with the one that possessed Xander, following it like a bloodhound on the scent if she had to.
For the moment, Kaia didn’t need to do that, though. Instead, she kept her eyes on the woman in front of her, following half a street behind, not wanting to make it too obvious that she was tailing.
She couldn’t lose her quarry, though. Instinct told Kaia that it couldn’t be a coincidence that the murders had happened and now she’d seen this shadow, not after feeling the presence of the shadows at the theatre.
She was following a murderer.
That thought was almost enough to make her pause, but not quite. Kaia had faced down one shadow-possessed murderer before, after all, and that wasn’t even what she intended now. She was simply going to follow this young woman as far as she went, see where she lived, and then fetch the inspector for backup.
It was a good plan, a safe plan, even though Kaia immediately thought of a dozen ways that it could go wrong. What if she found this woman about to commit another murder? Well, then she would just have to find a way to stop that from happening, and it was just one more reason why she couldn’t give up this pursuit.
Briefly, the woman stopped and looked around, as if sensing that someone might be following her, or perhaps just wanting to be careful. Either way, the movement was enough to make Kaia duck into a café, making a show of looking around as if she’d lost someone there. That at least meant that it made sense for her to keep looking out of the window until she saw the woman she was following start to walk again.
“Oh,” Kaia exclaimed, to cover her as she left again. “She’s outside!”
She followed the woman down the street, trying to pick up anything about her that might prove useful. She was sure that if the inspector had been with her, he would already have worked out everything there was to know about this woman. All Kaia could see was that she was slightly built and elegantly dressed, looking around with the caution of someone who was about something suspicious. Even if Kaia hadn’t been able to feel the shadow within this woman, she might have followed just to find out what she was up to.
As it was, she had to know. Even when the woman turned off the main routes, onto the kind of smaller streets where Kaia had run into trouble before, there was no question of not following. Yes, Kaia felt fear at the prospect of going into this kind of bad part of town again, but it wasn’t enough to outweigh the prospect of actually finding out what the shadows were up to.
She tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, but Kaia couldn’t escape the feeling that every eye was on her. It was probably nothing more than her own worry at the prospect of being discovered, or maybe just that people were watching because she was an unfamiliar face in their part of town.
“Excuse me,” she said, as she had to push her way through a small crowd of people. “Pardon me, coming through.”
They seemed as surprised by her voice as by the sight of her there, perhaps because her accent was as incongruous with her appearance as Madam Farge had suggested.
Kaia didn’t have time to worry about that, though. In fact, she didn’t care, so long as the one person who mattered didn’t spot her. When the young woman looked round again, Kaia quickly stepped into the crowd around a game of chess being played in the street, apparently for money.
“How is the game going?” she asked a man, trying to fit in with the crowd.
He shushed her. “Can’t you see that people are concentrating?”
By then, though, her quarry was off again, and Kaia didn’t bother replying, but simply set off in her wake once more. That meant that she saw the moment when the woman ahead of her wrapped shadows around herself, making it hard even for Kaia to follow her properly. Either she’d realized that she was being followed, or she was simply being cautious as she got closer to her destination.
“Can you see her?” Kaia asked a night time flower seller by the side of the road. “Can you see the woman who was walking there?”
“What woman?” the flower seller asked, and made a sound of irritation. “Leave me be, strange girl.”
Kaia almost panicked then, thinking of the things that might happen if she lost the woman. Clearly something important was happening. Maybe these were even the last moments before another attack.
That thought made her stretch out her senses, trying to feel where the shadow-possessed woman had gone. Kaia followed that sense all the way to a stonemason’s yard, the door to which was slightly ajar in spite of there being no light from inside.
This was definitely the place. A part of Kaia wanted to back off now, but she knew that if she did and someone was killed here, she would never be able to forgive herself. Instead, she slipped inside, not caring if half a dozen people saw her enter. If they summoned the SSûreté, that was a good thing. It meant that they would be there to help Kaia stop a murderer.
The interior of the yard was filled with blocks of stone and completed statuary, the only light that of the moon above and the glow coming in over the walls from the surrounding city. Kaia kept low, moving among the statues as she tried to find the woman.
She found her in a space that was largely clear except for what appeared to be an ornamental stone arch, and a large block of uncarved stone. The woman Kaia had been following was there, perched on the edge of that block as if it were the most delicate of chaises.
Another figure stepped out from among the statues, bigger and more burly than the young woman by an order of magnitude. He had flat features and was probably in his twenties. He wore an apron and carried both a hammer and chisel. For a moment, as she crouched behind her protective stone block, Kaia thought that perhaps the stonemason who owned the yard had come out to tell the woman that she shouldn’t be there. Perhaps he was even meant to be her next victim, although that made little sense when all her others had been actresses.
Then she felt the waves of wrongness coming from him, matching those coming from the woman, dwarfing them, even. They’d been obscured only because Kaia had thought all of that sensation had been coming from the woman. She’d thought that she would find one shadow here in the yard.
Instead, she’d found two.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Pinsley walked into the Bar Villanelle, and it seemed clear from the moment he set foot in there that he was in the right place to find an actor. Everything about it, from curtains that were clearly repurposed sections of theatre curtain to the fliers for plays plastered across the walls, said that this was an actors’ haunt.
It wasn’t too far from the theatre, either, which would make it the perfect place for a man like Pierre Duchene to set off from if he wanted to kill there. It gave him the opportunity, at least, and Pinsley already knew that he had a motive as someone who had been thrown out of the role. Wouldn’t it be suitably dramatic for a man who had been fired as Romeo to start killing Juliets, suggesting that if other actors couldn’t perform opposite them, no one could?
Pinsley walked up to the bar, where a balding man wearing a shirt and suspenders was running things.
“What can I do for you, officer?” he asked.
That took Pinsley a little aback. He hadn’t announced himself, and he certainly wasn’t known in Paris, the way he was in London.
“Officer?” a man said. He was a slender man in his thirties, athletically built with short cropped hair and slightly boyish features. “He’s SSûreté?”
“What makes you think I’m police?” Pinsley asked.
The barkeeper snorted. “You think I can keep a bar full of talkative actors running for so long without being able to spot when there are police walking in?”
“We don’t want SSûreté here,” the man who’d spoken before said. He moved to push Pinsley, and the inspector twisted out of the way, putting a foot out without thinking to trip his would be attacker.
“Don’t,” Pinsley said, but the man was already climbing back to his feet in obvious fury.
“You think you can get aw
ay with that?” the man demanded, and brought a foot up, kicking it at Pinsley’s midsection.
Pinsley knew better than to try to dodge back. Instead, he bulled forward, shoving his opponent to the ground. Again, he sprang up, and this time, there was the gleam of a knife in his hand.
“Jean-Charles Ariette, stop that!” the barkeeper shouted. “He’s English, he can’t be Sûreté. But you stab someone in my bar, and I’ll call them here myself!”
For a moment or two, Pinsley thought that his opponent might strike at him anyway, but then, instead, he cursed, turned on his heel and left the bar.
“Forgive Jean-Charles,” the barkeeper said, putting a glass of beer in front of Pinsley. “His lover left him, and it’s made him angry. A few savate lessons, and all the drunk actors think that they’re Jean-Charles Lecour.”
Pinsley shrugged that off. He’d seen plenty of similar situations back in London, when men with a few drinks in them suddenly thought that they could fight.
“I’m looking for a drunk actor,” Pinsley said, instead.
The bartender waved a hand expressively at the room. “You’re spoiled for choice here.”
“A specific one. Pierre Duchene,” Pinsley said.
“And why would you want him?” the bartender said.
“I need to ask him a few questions,” Pinsley said. He knew how ludicrous it must sound, an English policeman wanting to go around asking questions in the middle of Paris. Then again, that had been what he’d been doing since the start of this.
“Generally, people don’t like police asking questions,” the bartender said.
“Shouldn’t Pierre be able to decide that for himself?” Pinsley suggested. “Look, why not tell me where he is? It’s not like I can arrest him, but the matter I’m looking into is an important one.”
He set down a couple of coins to emphasize the point. The bartender stared at them, then scooped them up quickly. He pointed to a man who had to be Pinsley’s age, far too old to be playing Romeo. His dark hair was lank and his complexion was reddened from too much drink for too long. Several wine bottles were on the table before him, mostly empty.
