It's melting away, scampering for tight corners and the sturdy weight of heavy stone bridges, panicking, nestling in bits of uneven masonry, scratching its last lines into every door. Everything's a stopgap- the dawn is encroaching at sharp angles and will give less quarter every hour.
The sun's up, again, and Garrett wants to go home.
Someone is watching him.
He is an empty doorway, and someone is watching him.
He is a cramped alley, and someone is watching him.
He is a black crack, and someone is, very persistently, still watching him.
Garrett has noticed, from time to time, that there's a particular bit of his spine that starts to itch at the mere thought of Keepers. It's on fire.
He takes the long way home and gets there twice as fast. Shadows only move this way in the early morning.
When he seeps into the shady side of his street, he finds his lamp lit. His eyes narrow at the lone window, flickering smugly at him.
He hates that lamp, he hates to light it. He doesn't think he's ever replaced the oil.
It is approximately eleven seconds later when he ducks into his tenement through the very same window. Hey, the thing might be a traitor, but he's not picky about loyalties.
He descends the table's top and lone chair in impossibly quiet steps and stares at the still unalerted trespasser for about a minute straight before saying, "If you did enough research to find this place-"
He is almost impressed when her posture holds perfectly firm in her high-backed chair.
..His high-backed chair.
"-you really should've picked up somewhere along the way that I don't even do the kind of thing you're looking for. And even if I did.. there's just something about extramarital crime. Call it old fashioned, but I just hate to come between two people who obviously feel so deeply for each other..." Sarcasm is beneath him, this is something more like satire. He offers, because he is not without sympathy, "If your heart's still absolutely set on it, violent crime hangs out down by the Docks." He waggles a thumb, and almost expects her to wordlessly leave and wander off that a-way.
Or maybe... glide off that a-way. He develops a strange suspicion that she doesn't have legs under there.
She's very odd, he realizes suddenly, a minute of observation coming together like an expanding telescope collapsing and leaving him feeling slightly ill from the change of focus. He almost thinks, for a moment, that she isn't here in hopes of getting her husband out of the picture. He considers going right back out the window he came in.
"The pleasure's all mine, Mr. Garrett," she says, surprising him with a voice, like shiftless, viscous honey. She is staring, apparently fascinated, into the eye of a burnt-out flashbomb perched on three of her fingers. Her five fingers. He counts, just to make sure. "You can keep your generous recommendations. I'm not interested in a common thug."
His sword sings softly from its sheath, sliding up and down the note. The flashbomb doesn't even wobble on its tenuous perch.
He purses his lips and hangs the sword up with a finger.
"The closest you could get," Garrett responds half-heartedly, "is humiliating him in front of his peers." He waffles, baiting her, "But, really... once it was an assignment, it would take all the fun out of it... How bout you just get out?" There is the smallest bit of threat behind his words, nothing tangible.
She is angling her head into the dark gaze of the riveted metal ball, as though it has suddenly surprised her.
"Garrett?" she turns and waits for his eyes. "May I call you Garrett?"
She gets them, after a long moment. They are narrowed, but he is almost certain she can't see them in the dark. Almost.
Hers are black, or close enough; her brows fine and imperious, one of them arching like she has to hold it down, most of the time. "I'm not interested in a petty thug, either." He takes silent offense for no reason he can name, and forgets all about the door his hand is lightly touching. "What I am interested in are.. oddities. Of all shapes and sizes." There is lamplight on her raised and tilted chin, and the wall. "You happened to be high on my list, so here I am."
His head tilts back on it's hinges, eyes glinting just a little, in the dark space where his face persistently fails to exist, "...Ahh. So, you're the Viktoria I've been hearing so much about." Really it's the opposite, and that worries him. No one seems to have any information on her. New money is always a wild card. New money without any apparent source is five, hidden up a convenient sleeve.
Her face doesn't give, perfectly still and serene under the searching flicker.
She is much younger than he would've expected, but seems older. He imagines it's the drab, out-of-date fashions in just-boiled green that drape her in decidedly unappealing ways. Despite this, he catches himself, after a moment, still searching for the points at which the drape ends. He doubles back, decides she is not even particularly pretty, and stops looking at her.
"So.. you've got a.. list of odd things. Interesting." He did not say this like it was. "Have you delegated a cozy spot on there for yourself? Because, I have to say, somebody who makes compulsive inventories of all things strange..."
"I'm not on the list," her eyelashes whisper together, as though plotting something. "I'm perfectly explicable."
"Well that's interesting, because I know about a half dozen members of the city's rich and powerful who'd put you right up there."
He passes her chair, without a single note of apprehension --In some ways, her reputation, or lack thereof, is reassuring. Anyone that the wardens, not just on one, but on all sides, are wary of is certainly not ambitious enough to be in it for the politics. He is pretty curious to know, on the other hand, just what she is in it for. A lack of politics always seems to make folks more.. interesting.
"You seem to have a lot of insight into the workings of the polity, for someone so apparently concerned with his status as an independent," she says, amused.
She's done her research, too.
"Sure, as long as it keeps my torso arrow-free.. Though it does depend on how lately I've run the Auldale Gauntlet for the latest stack of death threats, and.. also gossip."
"...You've named it," she observes. "Naming is such an interesting phenomenon, don't you think? To have such familiarity to have to shorten an idea to words... It must.. bore you, robbing the same simpleminded people, over and over, reworking old routes, reselling the same heirlooms..."
He shakes his head, turning away with a sniff, "Well your persistence is of a less violent brand than the rest of your kind, but I can't say I'm any more impressed. Look, lady, I'm pretty sure you already knew my rule, and just came here looking to bend it. I don't work for people, or with people, or even in the same general area as people, where situation allows..."
"Viktoria," she corrects him, and points out politely, "We've met formally now."
He doesn't like the tone, like she's threatening having seen him before.
"I don't rob greenhouses." He reads his mail, and the words barely slip under his eyes.
Her lips climb half of her face. She is pure curiousity, "And why is that?"
He looks away from his mail to an empty spot on his wall, and says, with surprising honesty, "Plants bother me."
She laughs aloud, setting a hand to her chin. Her laugh sounds even more like honey. That is to say, sticky; it stretches too long in places, and leaves an unpleasant residue in others.
Garrett doesn't bristle, as a rule. "They don't bother you? I take it you're not from around here.."
Information is still king in this business.
"No," she replies lightly, "But I vacation as often as possible. You can't even see the stars anymore inside the city limits."
"Never liked them anyway," he dismisses. "Always winking, like they know something."
She looks at him now; shrewdly, he might even call it, were he capable of feeling generous.
"Mm. You're a creature of dark.." She seems to arrive at this conclusion by staring into his soul, or something similarly metaphysical.
He stops sifting and glances up. "Has anyone ever told you that you sound like a bad theater production when you talk?"
Her lip curls further, "You'd like to blow out this lamp very much right now, wouldn't you?" she nods to it, surreptitiously, as though she and the lamp are in league. "I can tell. You keep giving it suspicious looks."
Garrett's not quite sure what do to with this, because it is entirely accurate. He states, didactically, "..Lamp oil is expensive."
"And a creature of thrift. How do you keep the ladies away?"
"Well, I'm very sneaky."
"Yes. I've heard. I believe my favorite version of the local folk tale about you involved snatching the purse off an unsuspecting shadow."
Garrett is flattered, in spite of himself, scratching his chin at the ceiling, "Doesn't sound familiar. Was the shadow drunk? That would explain a lot. Someone must've been drunk, in that scenario, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me."
"Real stealth is a shockingly rare skill in your field. A very interesting one, even a valuable one, to some people."
He gives a slight snort, "...Are you still here?" he tosses the mail down on the table and looks her right in the eye for probably the first time. "Because you seem like a woman on the go. Half this city is populated by criminals, I'm sure you can find one that isn't immune to your impossibly subtle plying.."
She scans his face briefly, meeting him blink for blink, aloof to the point of a strange deadness somewhere inside her pupils. She is still playing with her pet flashbomb, now settled between two horizontal splayed fingers, "You'd do an interesting job with or without my request. And if you'd heard anything about the manor in question or its owner you would've been on it faster than starved locusts in July." She waxed poetic. "So... are you really going to let the mere act of my suggesting it to you --and, of course, offering you a significantly larger return on the delivery of a single item-- deny you the right of that choice? If you're really so practical as you profess to be, you shouldn't have any problems with it."
He holds the dead look in her eyes for a long moment, as if waiting for it to crack and reveal... something he's pretty sure is in there somewhere.
"..Apparently you can catch more flies with honey," he is surprised, and plunks into a chair, throwing his feet up on the table. "Alright, give me details. Then I'll decide."
Her back straightens further than is humanly possible, and does not even crackle.
"They say the most intelligent creatures are those capable of easily adapting to new surroundings," she comments, airily, stretching, then lays out a map for him on the table. Its edges are green and it has close to nothing on it. "Lord Constantine just finished building his dream house."