Page 81 of Angel's Flight

Meg was deep in her thoughts when she exited the Opéra and turned up theRue Scribe.It was late and it wasn’t necessarily safe for a young woman to be walking home alone, but she had little choice in the matter.Their flat was thankfully not far.Maybe her mother would still be awake and if Meg was careful about what she said she could avoid an ‘I told you so.’Maybe she could—

Meg yelped as she tripped over the heap of rubbish on the sidewalk.Springing back from the pile, Meg tried to make out what had been left blocking the way, for it had felt heavy and hard when she’d kicked it.The black mass was hard to make out in the flickering gaslight, but it looked very much like a pile of clothes.

In hindsight, she was too cavalier about it.She should have been cautious and should have seen how the pile was stirring.It would have at least minimized her shock when she pulled back the fabric to reveal the bruised, bloody face of Étienne d’Amboise before Meg’s scream echoed against the walls of the Opéra House.

10.Burned

London

“We have to make a decision.”Christine didn’t like how disappointed and dour she sounded, but she couldn’t be bothered to pretend to be anything else.The shock of discovery and the loss of the potential of a life were a deep, throbbing ache, but she had no time or patience to attend to either.Erik was more broken than she was and it was up to her, again, to put them both back together.

Erik looked up at her from where he had secreted himself in Letitia’s parlor, looking out over the dark street.It was past three in the morning; no one would be about now, but he seemed more interested in the dark than in the voice of his wife behind him.

“Did you hear me?”Christine asked, sighing in weariness that went beyond her body to her soul.

“I did,” Erik replied quietly.He looked small in the corner next to the curtain.The mask he had borrowed (of course Letitia had a good store of them for salacious reasons) was black and awkward and he didn’t need it with Christine, but she understood how it made him feel safer.“What must we decide?”

“Where we’re going.We can’t stay in London, not as long as Bidaut is looking for us here,” Christine said, repeating herself from the long conversations in her head over the past few hours.“Letitia says maybe someplace like Oxford or Cardiff might suit us.”

Erik shook his head.“Another city we don’t know that you’ll hate.”He sounded utterly miserable.

“Or we can get ahead of them.”Now that made Erik turn to her at last.Christine straightened up.“When I had Pauline tied up in Lucca, she made it clear where she might hunt us if we slipped her grasp.She knew the name of your mother’s village.In Ireland.”

“We can’t go to Coolaney,” Erik said, firm and sour.“No more backwaters or ignorant villagers.”

“You just said no more cities!”Christine argued, aghast and confused.

“No more foreign cities we don’t know,” Erik corrected, eyes shining with resolve.“We can go back to France.We should go back...and face this.”

“Absolutely not,” Christine snapped.

Erik straightened in shock.“What?”

“We’re not going back to a country where so many people want to see you dead,” Christine explained, her ire rising.“It shouldn’t be hard to understand.”

“I said, we’ll—”

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