The letter is waiting for Alice when she arises one September night. The air bright and cool, crickets singing in the background, their autumn song, though seasons mean less here than most places she has lived. The moon is low in the east, half a white disc gleaming through the evening's rolling fog.
There is a smudge of motor oil on the right-ward corner, and a particular sigil stamped into the smear of red wax that seals the envelope. A familiar sigil.
Inside:
Alice -
Have arrived in SF. Learning the neighborhoods. Do not feel like playing the pretty pretty princess with the high-brows. Would love to get re-acquainted with you first.
Fancy a spot of breaking and entering?
10:30ish, 734 Thornton Street, Rear. Tenderloin.
- Luce
AliceThere is a letter waiting for Alice when she arises one September night. Her mouth curves faintly when she has read it. Her smile is not a cool thing, understand, though her skin is cool. Her smile is a secret thing, girlish, wondering, and it suits the shape of her face: the broad brow, the pointed chin, the large eyes and eyebrows like the outline of bird's wings against a sunset, the mouth that some have thought is just a little too large. She summons her ghoul who is a man with a keen mind and a keener thirst (for strength, for borrowed immortality, for addiction; addictive substances - he is not mad; not yet; no more than any ambitious creature is) and has him take the letter and gives him a direction. Go by Pascal's house. See if he is home, but do not engage. Leave me a voicemail.
10:30ish, 734 Thornton Street, Rear. Tenderloin.
Alice knows San Francisco well. She would. She has spent a number of years in the city ruled by the mad (intolerably [someone will need to do something, and as everybody else is foolish or whipped]) Toreador, and she knows the way the sidewalks buckle from earthquake and erosion, she knows the way the buildings fit together, the way the streets fit against the hills and knot around each other, so it does not take her a long time to find the place.
Alice: she does not wear her own face, but it is a face that Luce may yet recognize. The suggestion of sunburn - the freckles; the Spanish-golden hair, the thick, caterpillar furry eyebrows; the sullen ripe-Pomegranate mouth; the height! The slightly stooped shoulders! The gangling legs! Alice doesn't look like Alice at all, and she certainly doesn't look like a vampire, but she slinks out've the dark behind the -
?
- and carefully avoids the cracks.
The ? is an old building, brick and mortar and stone, with flourishes that tell Alice it was built in the early days of the previous century, when masons still carved columns out of marble and windows were framed in solemn gray stone. Somewhere high an inscription says: CARNEGIE and beneath it a beaten quote about the life of the mind, unreadable in the gloom, except for the odd, angular shapes of the letters stamped into the solid fieldstone.
The majestic old windows have sprouted contemporary appendages. Fans, air conditioning units. Wires snaking outward, inexpertly stapled to the stone. Some are covered over with brown butcher's paper and others are covered over with plywood. The stately stone steps have a make-shift wooden ramp snaking up them for handicapped accessibility. It is dark with age, a temporary solution made permanent.
A small sign in the front names the place CHAVEZ BRANCH SAN FRANCISCO LIBRARY. It has been covered in obscene graffiti no one has bothered to scrub clean.
The alley is even more graffiti-covered, dark and still tonight, with a single long puddle snaking down the center of the broken asphalt.
Alice-who-is-not-Alice finds Luce leaning against the back of the library, dressed all in dark clothes. Black jeans and a black jacket, black boots with no more than the necessary heel, practical things. A gray knot hoodie beneath the black jacket, dark too, the hood pulled up to cover her blond hair. For she has only her own face to wear; no other.
It is scrubbed clean, though. Free of make-up. Pale brows and pale lashes framing gimlet eyes, fixed on Alice the moment the changed-monster enters the alleyway.
Gods love her, but she's smoking. Something fine, tonight, and the smoke tinged with spice and faintly sweet, superior to many of her choices. She throws it away as Alice comes close. The cherry hisses as it hits the long serpentine puddle bisecting the alley.
"Good to see you. Even if I don't get to [i]see[/i] you yet." She lifts her chin toward the back of the building. One of the windows set 8 or 9 feet off the ground is just cracked open. The lights are off.
"Budget cuts. Closes at 5 p.m. in summer. 4 p.m. in winter. Can you believe it? The things a girl has to do to borrow a book."
AliceThe sad nonfiction truth is that libraries aren't all that valuable in a capitalist society that is winding down (tick, tick, tick). There are alarmists who're saying that the end's come. There are alarmists who're saying that the end's already here. These alarmists don't care very much about the libraries, either. There will probably not be alarms. There will probably not be cameras turned on. They won't want to squander power, when they've so little. And inside the library, it'll probably be dark as the devil's asscrack. The window that's just cracked open looks that dark. Alice smiles at Luce and though it isn't her face, it's a mobile face, expressive. Her teeth are no sharper than they should be, and no whiter. The two front teeth overlap, just slightly crooked, like the smile (rebel girl [mafia courtesan]).
But her voice is her own - low, contralto, compelling; the sort of voice that interacts with the subconscious. A hook, an instrument, a lovely turn of phrase.
"Ha. They always begin with the books," Alice says, by way of answer: "They begin with the books -- then they move on to harder spines, and more vital: snap, snap, snap! It's really nice to see you, Luce. Look. Before I ally-oop you, do you have a pen?" Alice sounds pleased when she says she is pleased (or whatever) and Alice sounds somewhat weary and mildly annoyed when she speaks about books and considering when she asks for a pen.
Her eyes gaze -- after briefly settling on the Toreador's face -- has lifted to the window; to all of the windows, shuttered and locked and barred; and she folds her arms over her chest.
"Who wrote the book?"
There is no concealing the voice, and the Toreador is the softest of skins; easily hooked. A beat falls in between them where she simply - closes her eyes - and listens, look. The voice against the traffic, framed by the sudden alert of a siren sharpening through the gloom.
A-ooo-woo. A-ooo-woo.
Someone's dying in the distance, but here there's just quiet. The odd echo bouncing back to them, words muffled to indistinction. The humn of the electrical boxes and, oddly clear, the threaded sounds of the local Spanish-language radio station, advertising Italian Whoopers are your local Burger King.
"Like a Girl Guide," says the blond, "I come prepared." Lifting her right arm as she tugs at the flat, dark canvas band bisecting her torso, she pulls around the flat shape of a gray patterned messenger bag blooming black fractal flowers across its surface. Pulls it around to rest it on the angular plane of a narrow him and finds two things: pen and a cheap gas station notebound, spiral-bound at the top, no more than one inch by three. She tosses both to Alice - they are clipped together, pen nestled into the deformed metal spiral - as she turns to settle the bag from hip to back.
Then glances up at the building, too.
"Is that a thing?" - curious, after, clear gaze sweeping back down to the familiar mask Alice has chosen for the evening. "A thing-you-know? Girl Guides?" But the curiousity passes and Luce shakes her head inside the shroud of her gray hood. Her blond hair is slicked back from her face, leaving her high brow clear. "The book - is supposed to be a faithful transcription of the lost letters of Pierre de Castelnau.
"But maps, - ahh. They have a map room here. And I have wall space."
AliceThey should be wearing leather pants and uncomfortable boots and corset tops. At least: this is the new truth given to humanity by countless vampire-cum-werewolf-cum-fairy-cum-witch books about sassy supernaturals and their sinfully delicious escapades, naturally told with wry self-awareness and too-busy-for-this-shit flair. They aren't because they're not fictional. Luce is in all black. Alice is grunge. A grunge pair of jeans, a grunge shirt, grunge arm-warmers, a pin through one of her ears, the lie that is the gold hair slicked back so it's a razor's edge dream, a hint of buried treasure.
Luce throws the notebook and Alice pulls her gaze away from the library. She catches it and convinces the pen to come out've its metal cage, uncapping it with her molars (careless). The notebook gets tucked under her arm, and Alice squats down, scraping the pen's nib against pavement. It's not really the kind of pen for writing on things that aren't paper, so she sketches a couple of quick lines (careful) to test it until something shows in the dark. Her eyes gleam when she looks back up at Luce, using the pen to put her hair up in a cat burglar approved bun.
This is an alley, and, as with all alleys, there are (no alley cats, but plenty of rats. There's a Chinese restaurant or an Italian deli nearby, something with meat and) boxes slumping against the adjacent building, leaning against a wall. The snake of water comes from them: slithers out've the crevices, like a flood-story dragged out've the mountains into the lonely valley. There's also a three-legged chair; it looks as if it was struck by lightning or stabbed.
"Girl Guides? Doesn't ring a bell," she says, moving (quietly) to stand just beneath the window-that-is-ajar. She lifts her eyebrows (rakish [arch]), and weaves her fingers together in a cradle. She is not as tall as she seems right now. Luce knows that. Still: she is stronger -- strong when the blood makes her so -- than one would think, no matter her mask. Strong enough to launch a little thing like Luce an extra foot or so if she can't actually reach. "Let me guess. They do good and guide the elderly. Perhaps they crochet and bake cookies and treat poison oak and bandage injured paws."
ooc: FF.
Aliceooc: ack, wait, never mind. it got it all. hee.
Luce"I think you have the gist of it. They would also build fires in the wilderness and eat tinned soup. Collect metal for the war effort. Wear sashes and salute the flag in parades when the parades were short of soldiers because they were all dying somewhere else."
This is perhaps too specific to be speculative. It is all offered as Luce scrapes the sole of her boot off on the edge of the library's back door's back stoop, careful, before stepping into the cat's cradle Alice has made of her hands.
Before Alice boosts her all the way up, Luce reaches back and pulls out a thin-hafted flashlight, metallic blue and holds it in her mouth - between her teeth. Right now, they are too dull for mortal fantasies of night-stalkers.
"Merci " - she mouths around the flashlight, with the practiced skill of a cigar smoker, before she is lifted up up and away. And Luce is slight: taller than the [i]actual[/i] Alice by very nearly a foot, but so thin she must have been living on lemon water, and cigarettes and sunlight and blood and no more than that in the months before her death and rebirth. See? paper thin; up over the threshold. The sash sticks a moment before she pushes it yawning open, then grabs, firmly, the metal frame and half-lifts, half-centipedes herself inside.
There is a quiet crash from the interior as she blunders into something solid. And then, the faint glow from the beam of her flashlight darting over the dark surface of the window like some faerie-thing skimming the surface of a solemn forest pond.
"I'll get the door - !"
Her voice is compounded, echoing off utilitarian tile. A bathroom, them. Moment's later, a solid thud is followed by a fusillade of cursing. En Français. But dead tissue cannot bruise, the wounds from her blunder into the dark line of urinals are minimal, and within five minutes, the back door is sweeping open, Luce leaning out, long arm along the metal bar.
Her hood has fallen down; her blond hair gleams in the available light.
Alice
Alice sharpens her hearing until it's like a knife across a whettstone and it'll cut (and some sounds'll cut, too, but she is used to that sort of pain, she is well able to unbraid it from useful sounds - a footstep that shouldn't be accompanied by a lack of breath; the breathing of a human nightstalker; the click of a weapon being readied), so her voice is as soft as a dandelion's ghost-halo: "No problem."
Her voice is flattened to something generic and American which conceals her roots. Maybe she's just lived long enough hearing the sound of the Colonials and speaking their language that it's easy to let their accent become hers, to adapt.
The back door's hinges squeak; Alice turns from her intense and unblinking consideration of the building's sides, and drops her arms down to her sides. There is no need for impatience -- no need for patience; Alice does not linger in the alley, but joins Luce inside the library's backroom. Her pupils dilate, adjusting to the new texture of dark.
There is a smell in libraries. Alice inhales it, then she licks the tip of her index finger and holds it up as though testing the wind.
"Let's see. If I know libraries - if I know this library - the map room will be somewhere out-of-the-way, inconvenient to copiers and careless of archives."
There is a moment's adjustment and then Alice's finger drops to one side, pointing like a compass: directing them out've the little caged area full of books and broken furniture that hasn't quite managed to make it out to the alleyway yet and to the left.
There is a trail of something sticky, some plastic trashcans that some librarian or volunteer will wheel out when they feel like it and don't have too much else to do. A rank smell, sewage. The library opens up as if it has wings: might as well assume it does - and only one way looks dingy enough (smells mouldy enough) to house archives and maps. There's a door, too, and it may well be locked to keep the public out. There are chips on its wooden frame, someone's carved their name into the bottom.
To get to the door that separates the serious people's rooms, a mini-maze of shorter shelves, of desks with thick and already very near to obsolete computers chained to the ground just in case anybody gets ideas.
There is a light in the front foyer: pale, watery - it almost hurts the eyes; bulks up the shadows.
"Hell," she says. "Would you run away from this place if you were a book?"
ooc: ARGH, FORMATTING.
Luce"In a heartbeat."
So returns Luce, in the same space her heartbeat would have occupied, once-upon-a-time, when the muscle was still necessary and functional. "If books had hearts; and legs to run away to go with their solid spines."
The look she flashes is solid, then. It connects, first with the opening wings of the library as they emerge from the rank miasma suffusing the back room into the public collection space proper; then with Alice's profile. Her chosen profile, new and different. Not her own.
By now the Toreador has pulled her hood back up over the gleaming crown of her head, settling dark shadows over the sharp cast of her features. The gray is softer than the crowding darkness that lurks in the stacks, full of aging soft and moldering pages, that dry-paper-smell of old books, old glue, old leather softening together, beginning its slow, storied collapse in upon itself. She walks with her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her well-turned mouth stretched into a line of flat distaste.
"Books require wooden shelves. Rolling ladders attached to frames on the walls, deeply set leather furniture and wide, solid desks. Those brass lamps with green glass hoods, and a pair of wide windows near the front - oh, look! a card catalogue. - " she offers the aside in passing, running her thumb along top of the rusting green metal frame, " - incising the afternoon sun in distinct wedges along the deep pile carpet, down the gleaming wooden floors.
"So that the dust dances in the sun."
The map room is locked and secured; the handle gives a distinctive click-click-click as she reaches out to test it. There is a dusty window they could break, but instead Luce pulls a set of keys with a splintered wooden key fob that says MAP ROOM from her left pocket.
She flashes a brief and brilliant smile; it scribes a certain brilliance across the stark lines of her heart-shaped face. And too: it shows her teeth. Alas, voyeurs, these are still dull and human. Just white enough to gleam.
"I'm looking for the historical ones. Neighborhoods. Detailed as they come. Maybe every fifteen years. Or Twenty-five? Enough to see the city, and see how it changed. There's an All Night Prime Copy Plus that does blueprints three blocks away."
Alice regards the dark and hushed library, her head tilted just so. She is listening, you see. She is listening to the skitter of rat-nails against pipes, she is listening to what the pipes are saying, she is listening to the fzz, fzz of a fraying electrical wire, and she tilts her head back so she can regard the eaves, a sleeping pigeon which has got in somehow or the other, feathers rustling, hushing, and then she turns her head sharply to the other side, staring hard toward the backdoor, attention fixed and unmoving. After a moment: she turns on her heel, rejoins the Toreador in time to be witness to the revelation of the key (a philosophical treatise by Mme -- ).
"Hmm." Noncommittal, this sound. Lovely, of course - but noncommittal. "It's difficult to trust maps; they've been drawn by somebody thinking about something. Especially the older ones. There is a house that isn't on any map because the man -- I forget his name. His wife left him for the man who lived in that house." Alice smiles, and the sun-burned, gold-and-freckled Spaniard's (half-blood's) face echoes it: a pouty sort've smile that isn't hers.
Then she sets to work with a will, walking her fingers across drawers until she finds what she thinks she wants. Alice is finicky, counting carefully before she drags out some maps, arraying them on a desk the maproom is thoughtfully provided with.
"Tell me, why San Francisco - now? Is it in the maps?"
Luce"No," that's easy, turning back, glancing up. Inside the library, she transferred the flashlight from mouth to pocket and they have been followed by a moon - a yellow one - gliding over the dropped ceiling in the ugly little warren of backrooms, gleaming high in the stacks when they reached the main floor. Now she has shifted it back to her mouth, and speaks around it again, teeth closed over the metal.
There is enough light from the foyer - that bleary gleam of yellow light - filtering through the dusty stacks and the dustier window to illuminate the map room, but sometimes one needs precision. [i]This[/i] year and not the next. " - it's not the maps. I'd want these anyplace I planned to stay for more than a couple months. Sometimes I'm looking for the absences, sometimes, as much as the presences?
"Sometimes it's clusters. Clusters of crimes or clusters of names or - well. Or what's been where. How it's changed." She murmurs this as she, too, works. Identifying dates, checking them off against some list in her head. Pulling out precise, dusty streetmaps that have not been touched in years, adding these to the nest slowly forming on the pair of metal desks in the center of the room.
And then stops. Turns, briefly, the arc of her flashlight crawling over the wall above Alice's head, then dropping as she pulls it out of her mouth.
"Why San Francisco? Believe it or not, - and just between us - a dead fleshcrafter and a 1963 estate auction bring me here. Just now." And she laughs, low, not so musical as Alice's dulcet tones.
"What brought you back?"
She was in Paris, once.
The City of Lights, bright enough, sometimes, that you could pretend to forget you had lost the sun.
Alice pauses when the flashlight touches the wall above her head. Tinkerbell, the original, looking as if she needs to be clapped back to life. Or something for young boy's to giggle over in the dark. Hey, hey. What does that look like to you? YOU know. So say it. No, you say it. He he he.
The flashlight touches the wall above her head; Alice pauses. The light is Tinkerbell, the original, but in dire need of some clapping back to life. The light is a mildly titillating shape for boys to giggle over in the dark. What does it look like. He He He. You say it. No, you. Her eyes close, briefly, and she casually reaches back to grasp her ankle, a living gesture, to pull on it, stretch her hamstrings, whatever. The pen is doing its job, holding her hair out of her face, and she has acquired a marker from the top of one of the filing cabinets in the MAP ROOM, taps ita gainst her thigh. Her eyes are bright with interest when Luce gives her reason for San Francisco, San Francisco Now. "Things belonging to the fleshcrafter or one of its minions, once? Or things said creature was interested in?"
Her expression is thoughtful and still. Her true face is still hidden, but Luce might perhaps imagine it so: cameo-still, etched stark against the dark of the map room -- the dingy walls and dented metal cabinets. The heavy age-blackened chairs. "I always grow sick of the Old World; it began to curdle my blood - " Alice says, offhand. There is a needle hidden in her voice -- something carelessly let fall. There is a grin in her voice, too: something that straddles the boundary between simmeringly bright and dark with vibrance. Her questions never sound as if they're rhetorical. " - and where is the world newer than California? This mad nation. God help me, I find it interesting to see. Is this the land Caine walked out've first or the place he visits last?"
"And Pascal likes this city;" she can't quite - or doesn't feel like it's necessary to - quell a frown; a crease of forehead. "Or did. I should tell you the climate has shifted again."
The flashlight touches the wall above her head; Alice pauses. The light is Tinkerbell, the original, but in dire need of some clapping back to life. The light is a mildly titillating shape for boys to giggle over in the dark. What does it look like. He He He. You say it. No, you. Her eyes close, briefly, and she casually reaches back to grasp her ankle, a living gesture, to pull on it, stretch her hamstrings, whatever. The pen is doing its job, holding her hair out of her face, and she has acquired a marker from the top of one of the filing cabinets in the MAP ROOM, taps ita gainst her thigh. Her eyes are bright with interest when Luce gives her reason for San Francisco, San Francisco Now. "Things belonging to the fleshcrafter or one of its minions, once? Or things said creature was interested in?"
Her expression is thoughtful and still. Her true face is still hidden, but Luce might perhaps imagine it so: cameo-still, etched stark against the dark of the map room -- the dingy walls and dented metal cabinets. The heavy age-blackened chairs. "I always grow sick of the Old World; it began to curdle my blood - " Alice says, offhand. There is a needle hidden in her voice -- something carelessly let fall. There is a grin in her voice, too: something that straddles the boundary between simmeringly bright and dark with vibrance. " - and where is the world newer than California? This mad nation. God help me, I find it interesting to see. Is this the land Caine walked out've first or the place he visits last?"
Aliceooc: 0_0
AliceThe flashlight touches the wall above her head; Alice pauses. The light is Tinkerbell, the original, but in dire need of some clapping back to life. The light is a mildly titillating shape for boys to giggle over in the dark. What does it look like. He He He. You say it. No, you. Her eyes close, briefly, and she casually reaches back to grasp her ankle, a living gesture, to pull on it, stretch her hamstrings, whatever. The pen is doing its job, holding her hair out of her face, and she has acquired a marker from the top of one of the filing cabinets in the MAP ROOM, taps ita gainst her thigh. Her eyes are bright with interest when Luce gives her reason for San Francisco, San Francisco Now. "Things belonging to the fleshcrafter or one of its minions, once? Or things said creature was interested in?"
Her expression is thoughtful and still. Her true face is still hidden, but Luce might perhaps imagine it so: cameo-still, etched stark against the dark of the map room -- the dingy walls and dented metal cabinets. The heavy age-blackened chairs. "I always grow sick of the Old World; it began to curdle my blood - " Alice says, offhand. There is a needle hidden in her voice -- something carelessly let fall. There is a grin in her voice, too: something that straddles the boundary between simmeringly bright and dark with vibrance. " - and where is the world newer than California? This mad nation. God help me, I find it interesting to see. Is this the land Caine walked out've first or the place he visits last?"
"And Pascal likes this city;" she can't quite - or doesn't feel like it's necessary to - quell a frown; a crease of forehead. "Or did. I should tell you the climate has shifted again."
"Things it found interesting," returns Luce, pupils huge in the darkness, devouring the clear light of her eyes, where the ambient glow catches across the vitreous humor, makes them shine. "It made laborious notes, counting lot numbers, volumes, sales prices. Combing probate records and newspaper clippings for this: Five lots. Fifty books, missing Out of ten thousand sold in a long-forgotten auction of someone's life's collection. Either he was an heir cheated out of an extra thousand dollars, or - "
but the or is left with an unfinished shrug. Or this. Or: a vampire travels across the vastness of the country, lodges herself in all these make-shift cities with strange names, ringed by the same mad sprawl, populated by the same sad nightcreatures, wormed through with the same sad enemies, drives long down the arterial highways, hides the day sleeping in the truck of her car, the carefully shuttered, locked, barred and battened bathroom of a cheap hotel, all these indignities for this.
" - there's something there. I'll find out which."
Then, then she makes a noise, something like recognition. The [i]Old World[/i] and curdling blood. As a girl she'd dreamed of Paris. London, even during the worst days of the blitz, even with the Nazis marching down the Champs-Elysées. When de Sausanne suggested she return to the land of her birth, though, she was ready to go.
And she would share that, see - lift her voice, twine recognition around Alice's offhand responses, eyes and ears sharp, listening for the groove into which the needle that spikes through her liquid voice falls.
Except - [i]the climate has shited again[/i] - Luce stills, lifts her head, chin first, dilated eyes flashing back to touch Alice's face. Her eyes. "What do you mean?"
See: she is quiet. Expectant. Serious - what strange war has she walked into? - eyes open.
AliceThis will likely not be the last time Alice inquires into the lot numbers, volume, sales prices, the sale of something potentially interesting, something potentially false lead down a dark road where a trap is waiting to close, something potentially illuminating, a curiousity. Alice claims that she finds the New World interesting, and is not the New World a place where the Curiousity Show, the travelling Carnival of Curiousities, found itself a strong, thick root and branched out through the public psyche? Isn't this the birthplace of the X-Files, of a curiousity that thrives of improbability? But for now, the Malkavian does not pursue. She makes a thoughtful sound in the back of her throat and lets it lie.
This is a thing. That people communicate with noises that don't quite shape themselves into words sometimes. This is something the writer's forget, the artists can never quite capture. The language of posture, the language of noise that is not language.
Alice doesn't answer immediately. The girl -- she looks like a girl now; she always looks like a girl, like someone who'd be carded by some bartenders, just because she could pass for a highschooler depending on the makeup, regardless of how old she was when she, regardless of how old she is now that she -- gazes off into the distance. Easily distracted, or just - listening again: listening for the sound of a heartbeat. Listening for the telltale echo of a palm against floor. Listening for a stirring, for a movement, for the skitter of a rat too nearby, beady eyes spying, chewed-up ears listening, listening. Alice's sire is paranoid. Alice is not paranoid. Alice is cautious: but how often does it look like the same thing?
She inhales, because she has let that become habitual. Easy to pretend to bad habits when those habits are actually yours. And then she says, "Well." A pause. Alice can be brutally frank. "To be brutally frank," and her mouth smirks, but her eyes do not bother to echo the pretty curve:
"I mean that things are not well here. You have heard, I think, of the starry lady's obsession with the lupines; a war, some years back, which drove them up and out? That constellation set; others rose. But now that first: it is rising again -- you see?"
Less prettily -- and lowly: "There was an emergency meeting called in Elysium; blood was spilled. Don't count that building safe when you visit; the foundation is a rotten; step lightly."
"Rumors." She admits to: of the starry lady's obsession with the changing-wolves. "Threads of rumors. They seemed like tall tales, something out of the Old West. The Magnificent Ambersons. True Grit, see? How the West was Won." Unwise to discount them, says her mouth, silently, pulling thinly across her teeth, distorting the perfect little curve of it, the supple twist at the corners.
"I am disappointed to find that too little was made of them, rather than too much." Luce breathes too; this habit of being in the same space of their prey. The wolf sliding among the sheep, see, wearing every inch of their skin. Dropping its muzzle to the grass now and then. And this is why she smokes: to remember the rhythm of it, breathing. "Though perhaps not surprised. Thank you." And that last, see, listen: it is heartfelt. It lingers in her throat.
"I wrote before I arrived. Sent one of the letters de Sausanne gave me. The Madame letter rather than the Monsieur, you see. She told me that the train would be safe as houses, if I needed transportation. So perhaps it should be considered safe as Elysium. An institution with the same foundation."
And then: a lilt of her pale head, a sweep of her pale hands. The maps piled in the center of the metal desks. "But I think we have a start, here. If you come with me to the copy place, I can drop you someplace, after. The car I have now - " here she pauses, inhales a cloud of dust, " - it's a convertible. No roof; open to the night. Fucking brilliant ride."
A beat; a minute movement of her narrow shoulders.
"Except when it rains," and a noise like swallowed laughter in the back of her throat. " - the roof-thing that folds away does not fold back up."