Chapter 2: The discord which befell, […] and the deep fall of […] those who rebelled with Satan. – VI, 897-900
Turns out, Paris had been on everyone’s agenda, and not only Tally’s – her father had booked her a trip here as some half-assed apology for missing her graduation.
Logan can admit that it was a rather clever and kind gesture from Laube to let them use his family home as a safe house. Well, safe-house-slash-X-mansion.
Will can insist she probably saw a movie or two with Carter all he wants – Logan had not gone through her X-Men phase in the sixth grade to have her knowledge mocked and ridiculed now. The wise-ass forgets she can still deafen him with one itty bitty scream.
It’s been about a month now. Every weekend so far, Damien has dropped by with another supernatural or two, or three. Last weekend, he’d come by with an entire displaced pack from Egypt. That’d been a joy to sort out.
Thankfully, from his time here since right after Marie Laube’s (Laube’s daughter and Logan’s ex-best friend) death, Ezra Berry appears to be used to copious amounts of grunt work.
Well, he and his equally impressive-looking companion, one Delaynie Laube, who prefers to be called Lane, speaks a frankly scary number of languages, rejects gender as a concept completely, and is quite lethal, from what Logan has seen of their training sessions with the willing supernaturals twice daily.
As it stands, Ezra and Lane had carried cots down into the basement, which had been cleaned out completely to make room for as many people as possible.
Logan herself, however, having been one of the first ‘supernatural refugees’ here, had snagged herself a pretty impressive room of her own. She’s meant to be sharing it with Will, but the pack had all agreed that the best place for him is back in FBI training as their ear to the ground.
She had also ended up making it to MIT, sort of. They’re letting her study remotely and apprentice under a French physicist. Logan is pretty sure she’s smarter than him, but he doesn’t seem to be too threatened by that.
Naturally, her mother thinks she’s in Boston, and that’s how it’ll stay if Logan has anything to say about it. She’ll admit it to no one, but she’s falling in love with Paris and isn’t quite ready to be dragged back home yet.
A scream jars her out of her head. It’s Nihira, after hitting the wall with a sickening crunch. Why she insists on sparring with Lane is beyond Logan. She’s a great fighter. Why does she need to be better than the person who is the literal personification of Hunting? What exactly is she hoping to learn from Lane by getting her ass handed to her?
“Again!” Nihira announces, clicking her shoulder back into place.
“It’s going to end the same!” Lane protests, redoing the sloppy bun they’d bundled their hair into. “Nihira, listen to me: you don’t have to be better than me. None of Gabriel’s people even come close to what I can do. Torturing yourself isn’t going to win this war.”
Despite those hands being deadlier than any weapon, Logan loves looking at Lane’s long, graceful fingers and their interestingly tattooed knuckles that read ‘CERCA TROVA’.
Seek and find.
Mimicking the inscription on the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari’s fresco depicting the battle of Marciano. In fact, there’s a copy of the painting in the library above the mantel.
Logan being Logan, though, is almost certain the one in the Laubes’ possession is the original, leaving her to wonder what exactly is hanging in the Palazzo Vecchio.
Potential historical forgery aside, she can appreciate the symmetry between the painting and Lane as the Hunter – the Laubes’, and by extension humanity’s, answer to the supernatural.
Naturally, Nihira opens her mouth to make some kind of half-baked argument, but, honestly, Logan has had enough rough-housing for one day.
“Guys, I’m pretty sure Ezra is done with dinner. Can we pick this up again tomorrow?”
When I don’t have to be here to smell the self-punishment rolling off our fearless leader, Logan decides not to add.
Truthfully, the only complaint she has about Paris is all the dead. As a Banshee, she’d expected this, of course, but that didn’t make the onslaught on her powers any easier to manage.
See, Paris is built atop about 200 square miles of tunnels – catacombs, to be exact. For the first few days here, she’d been jumping out of her skin every few minutes. The entire city is crawling with ghosts. It completely overwhelmed her powers.
She now engrosses herself in her work almost obsessively. Anything to stay sane. She’s only just beginning to get used to her premonitions. She really cannot handle the plight of every dead person in the city on top of that.
Which is why Logan so covets nights. The house is quiet. Everyone is asleep. The only other people she needs to worry about are the ghosts who occasionally come to hang out in the library, and the other scientists she Skypes with.
Except, it would appear, tonight.
She’s on her way from the kitchen with a cup of coffee, going over her nightly presentation in her head, when she spots a very solid-looking shadow flitting towards one of the windows.
Without stopping to ascertain the source of her drive, she bolts after it. By the time she reaches the window, however, it’s been flung wide and the sill left bare.
Peering out reveals the familiar dark head of Lane disappearing around the corner. With a frown, she again does not stop to question any of this. Simply sets her things down on the sill before breaking into a jog in the direction of the first-floor study.
Slipping out is ridiculously easy, which is probably a safety hazard. Logan rates the others’ chances, what with them being a bunch of magical, physically enhanced creatures and all.
She just knows that, right now, Lane is off by themself in the dead of night, which is extremely unlike them, and being secretive has never yielded anything except problems for everyone involved.
Outside, the air is brisk, and Lane is walking fast, bundled up against the cold in a jacket that looks at least two sizes too big for them.
Logan keeps her distance, trying to keep half her face buried inside her scarf.
Not for the first time, she curses her bright red hair. It doesn’t exactly make blending in easy. Thankfully, there are enough shadows for her to duck into, should the need arise.
It never does. Soon, Lane meets up with someone – a friend, if she has to guess from how they embrace – and the two of them traipse off together.
Logan has a right mind to turn back to the house and just get an early night for once, but she still has this odd itch in the back of her brain.
She can’t leave yet.
So, she follows them as they close in on a club with a line so long, she can’t see the end where it curves around a corner. Lane and their friend get let in immediately, with Lane fist-bumping the bouncer.
From her angle, Logan can see a service entrance. She just hadn’t really seen self-defense on tonight’s itinerary for herself.
Granted, when are these things ever truly predictable?
Quiet as a shadow, she slips down the alley. Only when she reaches for her phone’s flashlight does she realize she’d left it back at the house. The barest hint of a smirk twists her lips when it crosses her mind that she could always scream.
That’ll make Nihira and the others come running.
Through the door, into a dark corridor, dance music makes the walls and floor vibrate – standard for all the partying Logan never wanted to do in high school.
Her one birthday party a year was always more than enough for her.
She only encounters two other people back here, but neither of them pay her any mind. Knowing she has to move quickly or risk losing Lane and their friend to the dancing masses, she scans desperately for a door leading to the music.
Of course, it’s too late. By the time she enters the club proper, it’s impossible to see either of them. She’d have better luck developing late-onset epilepsy from the headache-inducing lights.
A water from the bar and then she decides to do a circuit of the room.
The music is mediocre at best and also very, very French. Tacky techno disguised as EDM.
At some point, she imagines catching sight of Lane, but it’s so quickly that she can’t be sure. After another five minutes, she’s ready to chalk this all up to paranoia and heads back to the service entrance.
“Fancy running into you here.”
Logan almost jumps out of her skin.
A little way farther down the alley is Lane, their friend in a half-nelson to their chest while they have their hand in the person’s mouth, the ‘trova’ on their left-hand knuckles barely visible.
So transfixed is she by what she’s seeing that she barely flinches when Lane yanks two teeth free from the person’s mouth and slips them into their pocket unceremoniously.
But when they produce a large and rather lethal-looking knife from somewhere on their person and use it to sever cleanly their ‘friend’s’ head from their shoulders, Logan finally understands why she’d been compelled to come here tonight.
She screams.