The blond man exiting the medeian transport at Grand Central Station wore a distinctive pair of sunglasses. Also, several layers of illusion charms. Some were recently applied, but most were years, perhaps even decades old. This, then, was no hasty disguise; more of a permanent cosmetic reconstruction. The sunglasses were aviators with a prismatic effect across the lenses, a gold that faded chromatically into silver on the arms. They reminded Eilif of a pearl encased in iridescence, treasure laid by an unfeeling ocean. Perhaps it was the sunglasses that drew her attention, or possibly it was the eerie sense that the man had unreadably met her eye.
He was not Nico de Varona, which was troubling; potentially disastrous. But Eilif knew enough to take what was very likely her final shot.
“There,” she said urgently to the seal beside her, who was not the lovely barking kind, nor even a helpful selkie. In answer, he made a face like something had hurt his ears. She couldn’t think what. “That one. He’s got blood all over him.” The lingering haze of the wards from the place he’d come from were unmistakably present, effusing from the blond man’s skin in waves. Like an aura of toxic fumes or bad cologne. Though Eilif doubted this man’s cologne was anything but expensive.
“That’s Ferrer de Varona? Is he wearing some kind of illusion spell?” asked the seal—not of Eilif, but the small machine he wore in his ear. He wasn’t even blue, much less navy. Eilif became concerned she’d unintentionally aligned herself with amateurs. “The brief says the target should be shorter, Latino, with dark hair—”
Eilif watched as the crowd parted graciously for the blond man. No. That did not happen in New York City. She tugged the sleeve of the seal beside her, which was one of a team of three but the closest within reach. “Him. Go.”
He yanked his elbow free. “I think the tracker must have malfunctioned.”
Again he was not talking to her, which was a pity. She would have told him that something magical had told him to say that; that this tracker of his would never function properly because he was a very ordinary human being, and such was the price of ordinariness. True, the seal had lots of muscle, presumably some adequate quickness, and therefore in the aggregate amounted to some preponderance of merit, albeit of an unremarkable variety. A very good killing machine, but Eilif had already known many of those. And none so far had impressed her.
She did not wait for the seal’s medeian commander to inform him of the obvious. She took off in the ribbon of space left by the blond man’s ostentatious exit, prompting a lurch of motion from the two other seals who lurked nearby. Good, they would follow her, she would find the blond man, and it would become very obvious very quickly that all was not well, that Nicolás Ferrer de Varona had bamboozled them yet again, and that in his place was this: a blond man who was also not usual, who had clearly come from the same house. The one with the blood in the wards.
There was a hiss from behind her, somewhere over her shoulder. Eilif followed the golden head through the low arches, bursting onto the street in his wake.
“She’s running!”
“He said this might happen, just keep on her tail—”
She ignored them, chasing either her deliverance or her condemnation. “Stop,” Eilif called from the doors of the station, her voice leaving her in fumes. It felt good to use it again, this thing born in her chest that some might call her magic and that Eilif called herself. Survival meant concealing it, her her-ness, her yes-ness—the thing that made her feel there was a tomorrow. Not like the deals. Those made her feel there was a now, a someday, a today.
It curtained the street, the crowd of fortune hunters and bicycles and the simmering constancy of anger. A man in silver ear blockers did not notice, kept walking. Eilif briefly marveled at the efficiency of modern sailor’s wax. Importantly though, the blond man had paused, his shoulders fallen still in their casing, a white linen shirt. At first he appeared unaffected by the morning’s swampy threat of impending summer, but Eilif caught the magic evanescing from him in swarms. When he turned, she noticed the tiny bead of sweat on his brow just before it disappeared behind the pointed blankness of his metal frames.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was caramel. “My condolences.”
“For?” said Eilif, who had called him to a halt, and was not dead. Yet.
“I’m afraid you’ll come to regret meeting me. Nearly everyone does.” The blond man’s magically altered mouth became a not-sorry crescent just as the two seals shook off the lingering effect of Eilif’s command, flanking her in a way she hoped would soon become useful.
“Him,” she said, with a nudge. Their chins snapped to the blond man, their hands simultaneously reaching for a pair of guns that would not miss.
The instructions were apprehend. The command, as per the terms of Eilif’s deal, was subdue, as with an animal out of containment. She understood that in real life, outside the designs of strategists and theoreticians, many words took on different meanings. Meaningfully, so did hers. Her promise had been this: a key to the house with the blood in the wards. Alive or dead, her optimal target or not, the blond man was now her only salvation. Take him and cut him up in little stars, shove his broken body in a latch, it did not matter. Her promise of delivery was not contingent on the state in which her offering was delivered. After this many years, this many deals, she’d learned to be attentive to the nature of the finer print.
Magic was not required for evisceration. Eilif knew this. But on certain occasions it did not hurt, so she did what she could to hold him there. This blond man, she did not know him and could not hate him. She could, however, choose her life over his.
Unfortunately, things went wrong, almost at once. Eilif was attuned to quiet things, subtle motions, like the difference between a need and a wish. The hairline fracture of a gunman’s hesitation. The seal to her left suffered a thought, or something very like one. More like a pulse of longing, or a pang of regret.
Someone, she realized, was curiously fighting back.
Another bead of sweat manifested and disappeared on the blond man’s brow, hidden behind chromatic lenses. The seal to Eilif’s right flickered, the motion of a candle flame. Rage, maybe, or desire. Eilif knew it well, the jolt of inspiration on which so much of her skill depended. The trick of the light that could, under certain circumstances, be read as a change of heart. Behind her, motion had slowed, no other seals remaining to follow. Whatever shift in atmosphere had launched the two beside her into perilous suspension, they were coalescing now, rejoining to some lighter, higher calling. Like cirro-form clouds to a blanketing cumulus, or a minor chord resolving to a major lift.
“The problem is you’re desperate,” said the blond man. Eilif realized only after the gunshots should have already sounded that he was speaking directly to her. Around them was an odd, performative silence that had spread from the seals to the crowd, creating a stillness like the hush before a standing ovation, the expectancy of unanimous applause. “You must understand it isn’t personal,” the blond man added, observing her belated calculation.
An entire city block reduced to silent paralysis. The seals designed to take down Nico de Varona would be no use after all. So maybe this was it, then. The ending.
No. Not today, not now.
“Neither is this,” Eilif gamely replied, and tried to think only one thing: You’re mine.
Dangerously, though, another element slipped through the intensity of her thoughts; not hesitation, but worse. Like the blond man’s bead of sweat: a bit of pain, born from an ill-advised rush of feeling. The thrill of the chase. The high of a win. The flick of her tail. The spindly notches on her calf—the deals she made to remake her life, to reassemble her fate. And then, just at the end, like the crash of a wave. The particular glint of her son Gideon.
Unwise, to let that much of herself bleed through the effort of bending the blond man’s will; cracks that would undoubtedly transfer to him, impurities like patches of corrosion, places from which a stray thought in opposition might inadvisably burst through. Still, she felt the blond man’s mouth fill with an old, familiar yearning, the sour taste of want. Such was enough, usually, to earn her a window of opportunity, should she need it. In this case, enough that she could snatch the rifle from the hand of the nearest seal.
Enough that she could choose to hunt rather than be hunted, if only just this once.
She turned the barrel on the blond man, finger on the trigger, ancient curses ebbing and flowing through her mind. “Come with me,” she said, sweet as siren song, the lilt of a new-old promise in her voice. She could feel enough of him to know he had the usual mortal wishes; expected pains of the unrequited and unfulfilled. All he had to do was what everyone did, and give in.
The blond man dropped his sunglasses lower. Low enough that she could meet his eyes. Blue like azure. Like the beryl waves of an inviting sea. In Eilif’s periphery, one seal was weeping, tears streaming from his eyes with an odd, subjugating bliss of rapture. The other had fallen to his knees. The driver of a taxicab was singing something, possibly a hymn. Several pedestrians had dropped to kiss the ground. The blond man was resisting her and incapacitating them with impossible simultaneity; like holding two halves of the universe together, or stitching a wave onto the sand.
Eilif understood only after such an epiphany became imperative that the blond man’s magic was not effusive out of waste. Many humans were wasteful with their magic out of relative ignorance of their constraints, bound to overuse a resource of which they believed they could never be robbed. The blond man, however, was accustomed to being emptied. He knew exactly how much of himself he could and couldn’t be without.
“What are you doing to them?” asked Eilif, who couldn’t resist the ill-fated moment of curiosity. One craftsman to another, she could not help but be awed.
“Oh, it’s this great thing I recently learned,” said the blond man, seemingly pleased by her attention. “Incapacitation via painlessness. Cool, right? Read it in a book last month. Anyway, no offense but I’ve got to go. I’ve got a vengeful library to reckon with, some retributive justice I’d like to settle. I’m sure you can relate.”
He stepped toward her from the street, a tiny swagger in his gait. His eyes, upon closer inspection, were unexpectedly bloodshot, one of his irises now blown so wide it looked endless, almost black. So, not so effortless after all, his survival. Eilif reached toward him, touching the tips of her fingers to the clammy opacity of his cheek. One siren to another, she knew the call of an oncoming shipwreck. She knew the end would be a crash, a swirl of dark.
“That person you keep trying to protect,” she heard him muse to himself, “why does he seem so familiar?” and Eilif knew, distantly, that the gun was on the ground, that her last chance was spent, that very soon the prayer would end, that the blond man had placed her directly into the hands of her fate, however unwittingly he’d done it. That he knew, somehow, who—but not what—Gideon was.
Beside her, the seals were stirring and the blond man’s gaze cut away, though for half a second’s lag, Eilif managed to drag him back. She understood that he’d be gone before the effects of his magic fully lifted, but there was something in him she had to see, to understand.
“Look at me,” Eilif said. His eyes were blue, prophetic, sorry. Dark with anger, with purpose, with rage, like blood splashed artlessly across a set of ancient wards.
The pulse of a ticking clock; his end like hers materialized, waiting. “How long do you have?” she managed to ask.
He barked a laugh. “Six months, if I believe the story I’ve been told. Which, unluckily, I do.”
The flash of a knife, his teeth in the dark,
“I love doom,” the blond man said, his eyes gone wholly black. “Isn’t it romantic?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
Notch by notch, this life an anchor, freedom bartered for survival,
His eyes,
The dark,
His eyes,
“Eilif,” said a new voice. Familiar and older. Less tired; less honeyed. “Your time is up.”
The same redness blinked out from the endlessness of ocean depths. The same red ledger flashed impossibly from within the crevices of time and dreams.
She’d tried escaping, but no use. The Accountant had found her again.
For the first time, the mermaid had run out of gambles. She had nothing left to offer, no promises left with which to bargain, no beneficial lies with which to croon her siren song. The notches on her calf marking her debts flashed in the darkness like scales, anchoring her to her inevitable outcome. At last, she was meeting her end.
The Prince, the animator, was at large. Her son was missing. The blond man, her final attempt to clear her ledger, had gone horrifically awry. That place with the books, with the blood in the wards, the one she’d promised to the Accountant—it obviously bred monsters. Eilif of all creatures would know.
It didn’t matter. Everything was over now, so she decided to enjoy what little she had left. Ample time for a curse or two, or possibly just a warning.
I love doom, Eilif thought. Isn’t it romantic?
“You can have my debt,” she offered generously to the Accountant, obliging him with a smile. “Enjoy it, it comes with a price. You have your own debt now. Someday your end will make itself known, and you will not have the benefit of ignorance. You will see it coming and be powerless to stop it.”
Perhaps because she’d truly given up on fear, for the first time she detected a glint of something from the usual formless shadow of the Accountant—a flash of gold, some decorative sparkle. A tiny rune or a symbol on what looked like a pair of spectacles, the shape of it like birds coming home.
Ah, no, not a symbol—it was a letter. W.
Eilif felt her lips curl into a smile as the darkness began to maelstrom ever tighter around her shoulders, enveloping her like a wave and filling her lungs like a weight before she plummeted soundlessly into nothing.