“Ronan,” Adam warned as dread welled up in him.
At the tone in Adam’s voice, Ronan turned.
There was a brief moment where he was looking just at Adam, and Adam wished that he could keep him in it for ever. Just wake up, he thought, but he knew Ronan wouldn’t.
Ronan’s gaze dropped.
“Mom?”
Depending on where you began the story, it was about the Gray Man.
The Gray Man liked kings.
He liked official kings, the sorts who had the title and crown and all that, but he also liked unofficial kings, who ruled and led and stewarded without any noble bloodline or proper throne. He liked kings who lived in the past and kings who lived in the future. Kings who had become legends only after their death and kings who had become legends during their lives and kings who had become legends without living at all. His favourites were the kings who used their power in the pursuit of learning and peace rather than status and property, who used violence only to create a country that did not have to live by violence. Alfred, the king the Gray Man most idolized, epitomized this, having conquered the squabbling kinglings of Anglo-Saxon England to create a unified country. How acutely the Gray Man admired such a man, even as he found himself a hit man instead of a king.
It seemed peculiar that he couldn’t quite remember his decision to become a hit man.
He remembered the academic portions of his life as a historian back in Boston: the lectures, the papers, the parties, the archives. Kings and warriors, honour and wergild. He remembered the Greenmantles, of course. But everything else was difficult to piece together. Hard to discern what was true recollection and what was merely dream. Back then he’d strung one gray day into another, and it seemed likely that he had lost weeks or months or years to this foggy dissociation. Somewhere in there someone had breathed the word mercenary, and somewhere in there someone had given up his identity and become the Gray Man.
“What are we expecting to find here?” Maura asked him now.
They were in the car together, headed out towards Singer’s Falls. The presence of only two parts of Laumonier at the grocery store had been gnawing at the Gray Man ever since he had left them, and he’d spent much of the night in a dedicated search for the third and most unpleasant brother. Now, although they’d lost sight of his rental car, they continued on towards the Barns.
“We are hoping to find nothing,” the Gray Man said. “We are expecting, however, to find Laumonier rifling through Niall Lynch’s closets.”
The part of the Gray Man who used to be a hit man was not thrilled by the idea of Maura insisting on coming with him; the part of him that was very in love with her was deeply satisfied.
“Still no answer from Ronan,” Maura said, peering at the Gray Man’s phone. Blue had told them that morning that Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish were working at the Barns.
“Possibly he wouldn’t pick up my number,” the Gray Man demurred. Also, possibly he was dead. Laumonier could be very difficult when cornered.
“Possibly,” Maura echoed with a frown.
They found the Barns looking idyllic as usual, with only two cars in the gravel area – the Lynch BMW and the Parrish tri-colour jalopy. There was no sign of Laumonier’s rental, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t parked nearby and walked in.
“Don’t tell me to stay in the car,” Maura said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, opening the door slowly to avoid jamming it into a plum tree still growing barely hidden fruit. “A parked car is a vulnerable place.”
He retrieved his gun and Maura put his phone in her back pocket and they tried the front door – unlocked. It took them very little time to discover Adam and Ronan in the living room.
They were not dead.
But they were not quite alive, either. Ronan Lynch was unresponsive on the faded leather couch, and Adam Parrish was keeled back beside the fireplace. A young girl sat bolt upright in front of a dog bowl, unblinking. She had hooves. None of the room’s occupants responded to Maura’s voice.
The Gray Man found himself strangely affected by the sight of them in such a state, which seemed contradictory given that he had killed Ronan’s father. But it was precisely because he had killed Niall that he now felt responsibility and guilt howling in the corridors of his heart. He was his own man now, and in his position as someone else’s tool, he had left Ronan and the Barns without a protector.
“Is this magic or poison?” the Gray Man asked Maura. “Laumonier loves his poisons.”
Maura leaned over the scrying bowl before flinching back from it. “I think it’s magic. Not that I’m any good at whatever kind of magic they’ve been playing with.”
“Should we shake them?” he asked.
“Adam. Adam, come back.” She touched his face. “I don’t want to wake Ronan, in case he’s keeping Adam’s soul close by. I guess … I will go in and get Adam. Hold my hand. Don’t let me go for more than, I don’t know, ninety seconds.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s how Persephone died. The body can’t live with the soul too far away. I don’t intend on wandering. If he’s not close, I’ll come back.”
The Gray Man trusted Maura to know her own limits, as he assumed she trusted him. He placed his gun on the floor beside his foot – out of easy reach of the girl, if that’s what she was – and took Maura’s hand.
She leaned into the scrying bowl, and as her eyes went blank, he began to count. One, two, three —