Chapter 13
élise arrived less than an hour after I sent the telegram. Gabriel was with her, dressed in a smart charcoal suit, but he informed me almost as soon as we’d exchanged hugs that he wouldn’t be staying.
“I’ve a meeting in the Latin Quarter,” he said. “I hope you two have a productive day—if there’s anything you need, let me know.”
“Of course,” I said, noting his total lack of curiosity with regards to our new location, and the glance he exchanged with élise.
My sister had warned him about our mysterious and likely unsavoury landlord, and now, I guessed, she’d instructed him that he was to have as little to do with the shelter as possible in order to safeguard his reputation.
“Away with you,” élise said to him playfully as he paused at the door, looking as if he might change his mind.
Gabriel was a solid, handsome man an inch or two shorter than élise, with brown skin and wavy hair just beginning to grey at the temples.
In his youth, he’d been a professional weightlifter who kept trim running marathons, and while the last decade had added a certain bulk to his midsection, still he gave off an impression of strength and sturdiness that had served him well in his political career, and which he was happy to play up for the papers, ensuring he was photographed helping to build housing for the poor and shovelling sidewalks after especially bad storms. In this he was a practical man, and yet he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for the job nor his skill at translating his principles into progress, even if he first had to compromise them a little—he’d been the reason several of those housing initiatives had passed in the first place.
“I mean it,” he murmured to her. “If there’s anything—”
“There isn’t,” she cut in. “Especially not with the election coming up. Your sister-in-law runs an animal shelter, and I help sometimes, and that’s the extent of your knowledge on the subject. You’re far too busy to worry about a bunch of alley cats.”
“Not if these cats are dangerous,” he said.
“The only person you have to worry about today is Michel Clement. He was your third-largest donor, yet he’s not given you a penny this year.
Go find out why, but first make sure to ask plenty of questions about his daughter’s wedding.
That man would talk all day about his children, and if you give him the chance, he’ll remember why he’s always liked you. ”
Gabriel sighed again and kissed her cheek. He tipped his hat to me and stepped back out into the snowy street.
élise locked the door, then turned to face me. “What’s going on, Agnes? Your telegram read like Banshee wrote it. What is this place? And—” She paused, sniffing. “And what on earth is that smell? That isn’t magic?”
I wrung my hands. I wanted to be steady and unflappable, for élise’s sake, but it was difficult given that I’d spent half the night being nearly killed by impossible enchantments.
I’d spent the last hour alternating between panicked ruminations about Havelock’s intentions and elaborate plans for outfitting our new cat shelter, and was aware I looked more than a little manic.
She listened to my story in silence, and merely narrowed her eyes at Havelock’s name.
“You guessed?” I said, astonished.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t a guess—the possibility occurred to me, in the same way you might wonder if you have some rare illness just from hearing it described.
Apparently the mayor was briefed recently that Renard might be in the city, not New York like everyone thinks.
There’s been an increase in Artefact trafficking, and some of the world’s most notorious magicians—including a few of Renard’s associates—have been spotted in the streets.
But the rumour’s being kept very quiet, for obvious reasons. ”
“We’ll have to work quickly,” I said. “After Havelock moves the shelter back to Rue des Hirondelles, we’ll have to fill this place with cats. We’ll need cages, supplies, another sign—all of it.”
élise blinked. “Is that what you’ve been thinking about?”
“It’s what I have to think about, élise.”
“Havelock Renard is our landlord,” élise said slowly. “And you’re not worried about him killing you?”
“Of course he won’t kill me,” I said. “He wants me alive so I can continue covering for him and his abominable magic shop. Or so the shelter can.”
élise was silent for a moment. “Do we have time to operate two shelters? Do you?”
“We need to make time. The police are already suspicious enough—Laurent swallowed my story, but if the second shelter suddenly shuts down, that story is going to look even more like a cover for something.”
élise didn’t reply, merely regarded me warily. “What?” I said.
“You’re happy about this,” she said.
My mouth fell open. “I’m happy the shelter is being used to hide the Witch King?”
“Maybe not that bit specifically,” she said. “But you’ve always wanted to expand the shelter. I remember you and Robin talking about establishing a network of shelters across the city.”
I flushed, looking away. “That was unrealistic. We both knew it.”
“And now it’s not. But this isn’t the way to do it.”
I couldn’t understand her. “Aren’t you the one who told me that it didn’t matter if the shop was haunted or cursed? That anything was preferable to being out on the street?”
“I thought that was true,” she said, folding her arms around herself.
I realized then how frightened she was. élise didn’t show fear in the usual ways: she became still and quiet, and seemed to focus on something inside herself.
She was like that after our parents died, as we sat in the hospital waiting room alongside the weeping relations of other patients.
I recalled one of the nurses looking at her askance, thinking her cold, but I had known better.
“Agnes,” she said, “you should leave now. Before he comes back.”
I stared at her. “And go where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. You can stay with me and Gabriel until you get yourself sorted.”
“But the cats—”
“Your life is more important than the cats.” She came forward and put her hands on my shoulders, pinning me in place with her grey eyes, so much like mine. “Agnes, he tried to start an apocalypse.”
“Unsuccessfully,” I said, even as another wave of nausea swept over me.
“And why was he unsuccessful?” she asked rhetorically—no one knew what had stopped Havelock’s spell.
The skies had darkened, the streets had filled with otherworldly shadows, and unnatural tremors had shaken the ground.
Most assumed Havelock hadn’t had the power to end the world, not that he’d had some change of heart.
“And will he do it again?” élise added.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s true about him, élise. Not everything, I mean. He claimed he was never trying to bring about the end of the world.”
I said it with more conviction than I felt.
Because that hadn’t been what Havelock had said.
What had he said? That it was complicated?
Hardly a reassuring defense. Yet in my internal struggle between terror and fantasy—my fantasy about expanding the shelter, that is, and taking on more cats—it seemed that fantasy had won the day.
Perhaps it was partly some form of self-defense against all I had seen, an excuse to think about something familiar, earthly. And yet—
I looked at the cats. Some slept in their nests of blankets, others watched me and élise.
I’d let a few out of their cages: those who wished to stretch their legs and were inclined to get along with one another.
Clowder and her kittens were curled up in a heap by one of the radiators, and Thoreau, in one of his rare bursts of energy, was stalking a spider.
I knew in that moment that I wouldn’t abandon them for any reason.
I’d always known this, of course, but I suppose I’d never truly understood how far my resolve would go, that it might even stretch wide enough to accommodate villains like Havelock. The realization was both distressing and comforting.
“Oh, well, if he wasn’t trying to,” élise said with dark amusement. “An honest mistake on his part, was it? He meant to cast the spell for ironing his shirt, but he got it mixed up with the apocalypse one he had lying around?”
“Please,” I said, and something in my voice made her face soften. I knew she wasn’t done arguing with me, but élise had always followed my lead. It was a relic from our childhood, when we’d been each other’s world.
“You know how I always tease you for needing to think the best of people?” she said. “That it’s a compulsion, and one day you would regret it? I knew you’d prove me right, I just didn’t expect it to be on this magnitude.”
“Believe me, I have no desire to think the best of Havelock Renard,” I said.
élise gave me a long-suffering look.
“I don’t,” I insisted.
“I’d like to believe that,” she said. “The alternative is that you’ve grown tired of indulging figurative monsters and now feel the need to humanize the real ones. Well, let’s get to it.” She looked around the shelter, her expression grim. “I assume you made a checklist?”