It's a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to kill you. Or so Clarisse thought, anyway, as she sat in the park in the dark early morning of an Arbonne winter waiting for exactly that occurrence.
The murders of the cocottes were the talk of the city, and certainly of the Left Bank, where several of them had left behind friends, lovers, and cats to mourn them. The men of the Left Bank had become protective of their companions since the summer; a woman could accept a man's escort from a cafe now with a much greater guarantee of safety than she could have in the years that Clarisse had been living in the city.
Unless, of course, it happened that the man was the murderer.
It was an open secret that the killer was going after tall, dark-haired girls. Paulette had been blonde at the time of her death, but Clarisse had seen her dark roots, unbleached by the harsh chemicals that ensured the more desirable hue. A bit of nerves on Clarisse's part would have been understandable.
But it was more than that. Clarisse didn't practice the skills of sorcery and Dreaming very often any more, but the deaths of a half-dozen girls over the course of the last seven months had merited more than cursory investigation. Clarisse had purchased and prepared the incense, burned it in her flat, and set out to find the answers in the heart of the night.
And when Clarisse had awakened the next morning, she knew that the killer was looking for her.
It was only her moral duty to her sisters on the Left Bank to confront him and terminate his menace, one way or another. So Clarisse summoned her courage and strapped on her knife and took to a nocturnal schedule, waiting in the cafes until they closed in the wee hours and walking the parks until the rosy fingers of dawn caressed the sky.
The old skills had come back to Clarisse as part of this exercise, rusty though they were. Whispered secrets on the wind and mysteries in the smoke had once been her stock in trade, though she'd set them aside in the city, lest she be thought a country witch. Or, more likely, her mother find her. But if the decade wasn't enough to see her safe from cher maman, nothing would be enough. And whatever bondage her mother meant her for could hardly be worse than death, or so Clarisse thought, anyway.
Thus it was that she came be sitting on a park bench in the pre-dawn frost, waiting for a murderer, and probably a madman, with only the chill steel of her knife and the silver of her locket standing between her and--something.
The state of distracted thought almost cost Clarisse her life. A hand grabbed her by the throat from behind and jerked her back against the bench. The thumb was just within reach of Clarisse's mouth--a long hand, suggesting a large man, and she sank her teeth into the digit, hard enough to draw blood.
Clarisse's assailant cursed, or at least she assumed his exclamation was a curse from the sharp and guttural sound of it, and yanked his hand away. She leapt to her feet and whirled to confront him, knife in hand.
He was tall, a giant of a man, close to seven feet in height and broad of shoulder, dressed in a black jacket and dark trousers. Clarisse had seen his bearded face in her nightmares. He had no apparent weapon. Some of his victims had been strangled, or had their necks broken, but at least one had died of stab wounds. Clarisse was unwilling to account him unarmed.
This impulse was wise, for he drew a long, wicked-looking knife from one of his pockets and brandished it at Clarisse. Her skills at knife-fighting, like her skills at Dreaming, had suffered from disuse, but years of drilling had set them deep enough into her muscle that they hadn't completely failed her. She fell into a crouch as he pushed aside the bench and came for her.
The first pass was inconclusive, as was the second. They circled, looking for openings. Clarisse was wary of his reach and strength, but the crimson on the knife handle was encouraging. She managed to inflict a deep slash on his left arm, and began to feel more confident.
Then the second man showed up.
He was closer to Clarisse's size than his companion's, but dressed in the same dark clothes. He produced a knife of his own, and made to enter the melee.
Clarisse swallowed once, and backed up towards a tree in the hopes of keeping the second man off her back. Her luck had run out, however, for they were upon her. The smaller man tackled her, heedless of her knife, which she sank into his left shoulder, where it scraped against bone and stuck.
He dropped his knife with a grunt, and moved to keep Clarisse from wriggling out from under him. The first attacker was waiting for his fellow to subdue her, while making sure she had no chance to escape. The one on top of Clarisse pushed up and reached out for her, and she was convinced for a moment that it was all over.
Until the arrow sprouted from his throat, at least.
His eyes went glassy at once, but he was still moving, as if his body hadn't registered that he was dead yet. Clarisse's first attacker let out another guttural exclamation and glanced in the direction from which the arrow had come. So did Clarisse, but she could see nothing.
Her assailant must have seen something, for he took to his heels and departed, neither towards nor away from the source of the arrow, but in a third direction, almost perpendicular to the other two. Clarisse thought it was odd for him to expose himself so, but no more shafts sped forth, and then he was gone. Clarisse was alone with the dying man.
She pushed the cooling soon-to-be corpse off her, ignoring the sticky blood on her own clothes, and surveyed the situation. Other than the body at her feet, the park was silent, as if nothing had happened.
The stillness was broken by the whistles of the gendarmes. Clarisse stooped to pick up the knife her late foe had no more use for, and fled.