Nolan.
Nathan stood in the middle of the crowded tavern and stared at the man who had killed his mother.
He understood it now, standing here. This wasn’t a place he’d travelled to. It was the Mark. Nolan had killed him first, back in that bedroom, and so Nolan’s soul had been branded into him, and now it hung in his mind like a lodestone pulled always north. He didn’t have to search for the man. He simply knew where he was, and the knowing had reached out across the whole city and set Nathan down in the room like a candle flame leaning toward a draft.
’A beacon,’ Nathan thought. ’I can find him. Anywhere. Whenever I want.’
The assassin sat exactly as a killer sits when he thinks he’s off the clock. Back to the wall. A clear line to the door. His cup of ale untouched in front of him, there for show, because a man drinking alone drew less notice than a man drinking nothing.
Nathan drifted closer. No one saw him. A serving girl walked through the space where he stood and he felt nothing, and Nolan did not so much as glance up.
The bartender came around the end of the counter, wiping his hands on his apron, and stopped by Nolan’s table with the easy familiarity of a man greeting a regular.
"You in again next week, then?" the bartender said. "Same as always?"
Nolan tipped his head back, and for the first time Nathan saw him almost smile.
"Course I am." He turned the untouched cup a slow quarter-turn on the wood. "Where else am I going to spend it?"
The bartender laughed, big and warm, and clapped him on the shoulder, and moved off to shout at the fiddler.
Nathan stood very still.
’Spend it.’
The coin. The pay. Somewhere in that man’s purse was the money the crown had put in his hand for a night’s work, and the night’s work had been a boy’s throat and his mother’s, and here he was, spending it. On ale he didn’t even drink. On a warm room and a bad fiddle and a bartender who knew his order.
His mother had died on a hallway floor reaching for her son, and the man who did it had a table he liked.
The anger came up out of Nathan the way the cold did in the storeroom, from somewhere far beneath the boy he’d been, vast and rising and without any bottom to it. The warm yellow light of the tavern seemed to dim at the edges of him. The air around the place he stood went heavy and dead.
Across the room, Nolan went rigid.
The near-smile dropped off his face. His hand slid off the cup and down toward his belt, slow, and his flat eyes came up off the door and swept the room, once, sharp, hunting.
’What is that,’ Nolan thought. He could feel it. A pressure. A wrongness, cold and close, the specific weight of being watched by something that wanted him dead. He had felt it before killings. He had never once felt it aimed at himself.
His gaze passed straight over the place Nathan stood, and found nothing, and came back, and still found nothing.
Nathan held there, furious, reaching, wanting to close the last few feet and put a hand on that man’s throat and let the grey take him.
Then his skull split open.
The pain came without warning, a white spike driven straight through the front of his head, and the tavern lurched and smeared. The warm light stretched into long streaks. The sound of the fiddle warped down into a groan. Nathan’s vision doubled, tripled, and a line of green flared across it, jagged and urgent.
[Warning.]
[Soul Mark tracking draws heavily on the host’s mental reserves.]
[Prolonged observation risks strain to the mind. Withdraw.]
The tavern tore away.
Nolan, the fire, the bartender, all of it ripped sideways and dropped into black, and the black held for one merciful cold instant, and then that tore too.
Nathan came back into his body all at once, like breaking the surface of deep water.
He was on his back.
He hadn’t been on his back. He’d been sitting against the wall, upright, cross-legged, and now he was flat on the floor of the abandoned house with his heart slamming and cold sweat sheeting down his face and the mother of all headaches driving a nail through the centre of his forehead.
And there was a face above his.
Kira.
She was crouched over him, both small hands hovering just short of touching him, her eyes huge and wet and fixed on his face. She’d watched him die once already, in a storeroom, and gone hours believing the boy who gave her his bread was gone for good. Now she’d watched him fall backward stone-stiff off a wall and lie there not breathing right, and every bit of that terror was standing in her eyes.
She was afraid. For him.
Nathan looked up at her through the fading white haze of the headache, and something in his chest, cold and hard since the hallway, eased by a fraction he didn’t expect.
He let out a breath, and he smiled.
"I’m alright," he said, and pushed himself up onto his elbows, slow, the pounding in his skull protesting every inch. He got upright and sat there a moment with his back to the wall until the room stopped tilting. "I’m fine. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you."
Kira scrambled back the second she saw him move under his own power, retreating to arm’s length, her hands pulling into her lap.
Nathan reached out and set a hand lightly on her head, on the ragged, badly cut hair, the way you’d gentle a spooked animal.
"You don’t need to worry about me," he said. "I’m harder to get rid of than I look."
She went still under his hand, watching him.
He tilted his head, studying her. "You don’t say much, do you?"
Kira didn’t answer. She dropped her eyes to the floor, and after a moment she shifted back another few inches, putting the space between them again, the way she always did.
But she kept glancing up at him.
Nathan let the quiet sit, and rubbed at his aching temple, and turned the headache over in his mind instead. The warning had been clear. The Mark would show him Nolan whenever he wanted, but it took something from him to look, and looking too long took too much.
’Fine,’ he thought. ’I don’t need to look again.’
He already had everything he’d gone in for. A face. A place. A pattern. A man who came to the same bar, on the same night of the week, and thought the world couldn’t touch him.
’Next week. Same table.’
’I know exactly where you’ll be.’