Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,89
in mid-sentence, but she managed to force it out anyway. “If you stay, if I have to worry about you, you're going to get me killed.”
A second howl shook the night, closer. Even knowing it was Lisette, now, Shins could barely hear her voice in the horrid sound, a roar of murderous fury soaked through with a burgeoning pain.
“Faustine, get her out of here!”
Robin still protested, growing ever more frantic, but Faustine clearly heard the urgency in Widdershins's tone. She nodded once, began gathering the younger woman to her, leading her away, when Shins called after her.
“Faustine! As soon as Robin's safe, I need you to get to the bishop as fast as you can. Tell him I said yes, but it has to be now or it'll be too late! He'll understand.”
Olgun was screaming again, this time at her. It buffeted her, harsher than the storm. Had the earth vanished beneath her feet or she found herself slammed into one of the nearby walls, it wouldn't have come as the faintest surprise.
She ignored it. It wrenched at her, like dismissing the pleas of a drowning loved one, but she remained steadfast, refusing to take back her demand.
Maybe she had been willing to risk Olgun's life along with her own, but she wouldn't throw it hopelessly away.
Widdershins held herself rigid, a statue in the rain, unwilling to take the chance that Olgun might yet manage, mystically or emotionally, to influence her actions or her words. Only when her friends were off—Faustine helping Robin to shuffle along as fast as her bad leg would permit, Robin staring back with wide eyes glinting in the glow of the streetlamps—did Shins force her shoulders to relax. She stepped into the road, drawing the rapier she'd thus far “neglected” to return to Paschal.
“Stop yelling at me!” she snapped as she reached the center of the road. Then, as she looked up at the roofs, blinking against the rain that seemed like it would never stop, “So much was awful, but I wouldn't have missed it. I love you, Olgun.”
She actually smiled, then, trying to remember the last time she'd felt him so utterly stunned. Lips tight to filter out the water, she took a single deep breath.
Her shout, when unleashed, seemed to stomp along the street, knocking on doors and windows as it passed. “You just going to stand around all night screeching, Lisette? And what's with that, anyway? Got to be murder on your throat, and even you can't have a singing voice that bad. Is it a mating call? Is this deranged homicidal lunatic season already?”
A vaguely human-like blot, dark even against the gloom, shot from the roof down the street. It sailed in a sharp arc, an impossible leap, landing atop the building directly in front of Shins. A juddering thump announced her landing, but for the moment she remained too far from the edge for Shins to see.
“You'll have to excuse the screaming.” It sounded more like Lisette's voice, now, calling over the rain, though there remained something raspy, bestial within. “I'm still getting accustomed to controlling foreign emotions. And they are so very angry with you, little scab! Not as much as I am, but close!”
Foreign emotions? Shins could come up with three or four ways to interpret that, and not a one of them were pleasant.
“It's almost funny, in a way,” the madwoman continued from above, her tone suggesting absolutely nothing at all in the way of amusement. “Such an intricate, interlocking plan, and all you had to do to bring it down was open your fucking mouth!”
“Well, it wasn't that easy. They took some convincing.”
“The godsdamned Houses haven't worked smoothly together in decades! It should never have happened. But that's what Widdershins does, isn't it? Find new and unexpected ways to bugger everything up! I should have killed you years ago, when I had the chance!”
“Uh, you never actually had—”
Something moved at the roof's edge. Shins tensed, waiting for whatever came next.
“Those friends you just oh so gallantly sent away?” Lisette purred from above. “I'm not chasing them down because you might use the opportunity to hide for a few more days, and I really want you to die tonight. But I want you to know that, once you're dead, I'm going to hunt them down. We're going to make them suffer, body and soul, until they beg with their last sane thoughts for me to kill them, and then they're going to suffer more.
“And only because