Page 110 of Shadowfox

I stared.

She blinked.

Thomas froze behind me.

It was a standoff.

The kind where the guns hadn’t been drawn, but the questions had already started firing.

I lifted a hand and pressed my forefinger to my lips.

One thought raged through my mind:Please don’t scream. Please don’t scream. Please don’t scream.

She didn’t.

Her eyes narrowed.

She set the sandwich down, carefully, as if it might explode, then she said something sharp and fast in Hungarian that I couldn’t hope to catch. The tone, however, made her meaning clear enough:Who the hell are you, and why are you in my kitchen?

Thomas stepped forward, his whisper smooth and steady. “Néni, kérem. . .” he began, in the slow, formal tone of someone trying not to be shot by a housekeeper.

She didn’t scream, didn’t run, just squared herself like a cannon loading a second shell.

He’d called her “auntie,” and I couldn’t tell if she’d been flattered or was preparing to fight to the death.

Thomas switched tactics.

“Áram. Ellenorzés,” he said—power, inspection—and gestured with a vague motion toward the walls. “Éjszakai munka.”

Night work.

The woman’s brow furrowed.

Thomas gestured to the wall again, then mimed an exaggerated shrug and looked back at me as if to say, “Please, for the love of God, follow along.”

I nodded solemnly, pulling a folded piece of blank paper from my coat pocket, and holding it up like it was an official dispatch from some ministry no one dared question. I added a slight bow, for good measure.

The woman sniffed.

Her eyes flicked from me, to Thomas, to the door, then to the hallway beyond.

Then back to her sandwich.

She made a disgusted noise in her throat—the universal sound for “men are idiots,” apparently—and picked up the sandwich again.

“Ne koszoljanak,” she said, waving one hand at us, and then turned and walked off through a side door, bare feet slapping against the tile.

I let out a slow, shaky breath, then turned to Thomas. “What did she say?”

“Don’t make a mess,” Thomas replied, disbelief filling his eyes, and a half smirk teasing his lips.

We waited a moment until the sounds of the woman’s creaking ascent to her bedroom quieted. Thomas turned to me and pointed upward, his guess at which direction we should look first in search of Eszter. I shrugged, then nodded once.

The first step of the broad staircase held its tongue.

The second wailed like a woman who’d just dilated to ten with a baby eager to greet the world.

We froze.

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