Her fear was transcendent and arrived delayed and so total it was almost anesthetizing.
No thought or feeling could get through. She couldn’t seem to form words.
He waited.
Finally, she opened her mouth, and as if waiting for her to do that, a tiny sound emerged.
It regrettably bore more resemblance to a whimper than a word.
Her back was literally against the wall. She realized it didn’t feel dissimilar to the man’s front.
A wall would not save her if he wanted to breakherin half. She was certain he could.
She was shivering nearly violently now.
An overhang protected her somewhat from the ever-swifter downpour.
He remained where he stood, a dark dripping statue.
“Madam,” he said quietly. Patiently. His lowvoice penetrated the hiss and splat of rain like a cello. “The streets here at night are as full of sharks as the ocean. My bones tell me a storm will be long and brutal. The ones I’ve broken never lie. Do you have a destination? Are you meeting someone?”
He could break her in half if he wanted to, she thought again. Slit her like a fish, she supposed.
He hadn’t yet.
“One hundred feet.” Her wobbly voice shocked her. She sounded like someone else entirely.
“I beg your pardon?”
She cleared her throat. “It’s about one hundred feet from here. I counted it off, you see, when I... The building. I can find it. It’s white... there are little... little... gargoyles on the roofline, and a sign on chains... I saw the rules in the tobacconist’s, and I liked them...”
She stopped, because her ability to speak had run out.
He was quiet. She wondered if he was considering the possibility that she was quite mad.
“Are you certain you want to go there?” He sounded careful.
It wasn’t the question she was expecting.
“Yes.”
Another odd pause. “Are you... looking for employment?”
And now his words seemed strangely, carefully uninflected.
It was a curious question.
Oh God. She wondered whether he was about to make her an uncomfortable offer.
“I hope to find shelter there.”
This was the truth. Employment would have to wait. But it could not wait for long.
“As do I. In exchange for escorting you safely there, I should like the answer to a question.”
“You may ask it,” she said.
She wouldn’t promise to answer it. And she didn’t intend to give him her name. It was bad enough that he’d witnessed perhaps the most ignominious event of her life yet.