Author's Note: Never thought I'd get the inspiration for a chapter title from the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. They probably wouldn't be Penance's kind of group. Noirbarret, on the other hand? Maybe. He seems more like a Charlie Daniels type of guy, though...
...eh, they could probably both settle on the Allman Brothers.
.
.
"Call from out the Timber"
Philadelphia – 1984
His nostrils twitched and his chest heaved.
He smelled it, even with the barrier of two car doors between them.
It was an overripe thing, like fruit left too long on the counter, but more subtle than that, still.
And at the same time more vulgar.
An intoxicant, at least to someone like him.
Usually he was very choosy about where he got his fix. Usually he had one source.
Only one.
Usually.
Noirbarret opened his eyes and looked to his left, out the driver side window of his black Mustang. Not ten feet away, tucked inside the back seat of the state trooper's car, the source of that heavenly scent stared forward, blankly looking at the seatback in front of her with tired, puffy eyes.
No 'terror' left in them; they were too tired for that. Too tired from the tears, and the screaming, and the pleadings she must've belted out. Everything had fallen on deaf ears, of course, and now she was all 'terror-ed' out. But the terror would be back, once she had the strength for it. He knew.
He knew because of the smell.
He opened his door and lazily swung himself out of the car, locking eyes with the black girl very briefly, before she quickly returned them to the seat in front of her.
The two state troopers signing her into Noirbarret's custody were a touch on the surly side. Noirbarret figured it had something to do with the fresh shiner one of them sported around his left orbit.
The unfortunate trooper pointed at his puffy eye.
"Yeah, that right there, agent, is a God-damned state felony charge, for one thing—"
"And for another," the other trooper said, "your little witness is either off her gourd on PCP or just stark raving nuts."
"How so?" Noirbarret asked.
The puffy-eyed trooper scowled.
"She's been rantin' and ravin', screaming a nonsense fairytale about you being some kinda monster vampire."
"That's a little redundant, isn't it?"
"Whatever," the other trooper waved a hand. "She seems to think you're gonna murder her and carve her up."
Noirbarret chuckled, shaking his head.
"Oh, well that just macabre," he sighed, again looking into the trooper's car at the girl inside. She met his gaze, her lower lip quivering; he only smiled at her with genteel politeness. "What kind of a person carves another up?"
The troopers didn't find his joke funny in the slightest, and they were loath to let the girl out of their control without charging her for the sucker punch. He had to pull jurisdictional rank on the pair, including a naked threat to put federal pressure on the governor's office for derailing Noirbarret's case. It was pressure that— he assured the men— would certainly be redistributed down the line to the troopers responsible for the incident.
They didn't take the threat well, but in truth they were just as ready to wash their hands of the 'crazy' girl as they were to see her punished, so after a few more minutes of posturing and preening he managed to make the custody exchange. The two troopers dragged the girl out of the car. She was cuffed around the wrists and ankles; they wouldn't be making another mistake with her.
For her part the girl merely pleaded with them, begging with a small series of 'no's' as they hoisted her into Noirbarret's car, one carrying her under the arms, and the other the legs. At first she looked at the men with pathetic, piteous eyes, but once they dumped her in the backseat and slammed the door her eyes glassed over and she stopped mumbling, eyes going dead.
The terror would be back.
He knew it.
Noirbarret smiled as he looked at the forlorn girl through the window. Again he drew a deep breath.
And he savored that smell.
The troopers moseyed back to their car, the purple-eyed one waving a dismissive hand.
"Life's too short to mess around with crazy kids, anyway."
Noirbarret released his breath with a hearty, satisfied grin.
"It's not craziness at all, officers. It's just fear."
He drove in silence. Jackie Blue played on the radio, and he absently beat his thumb against the steering wheel in time with the music. Occasionally he rolled his black eyes up to the rear-view mirror, looking back at his passenger. The girl sat in her cuffs, body still trembling and frozen sweat flooding her pores as she noted each of his predatory glances.
Twice she tried to speak— fumbling for words, halting on insulting, lame excuses that they were both far, far beyond. What's more: she knew it. Each time she tried warbling out her song he was able to cut her off with only the cold glare of his eyes.
They were there in 15 minutes. He brought the mustang up the drive of a nondescript little house in a nondescript neighborhood, pulling it into a tiny garage. The girl watched him lower the garage door by hand, her desperate eyes looking at the light outside like a shipwrecked sailor eyeing distant land. When it disappeared and she was left in darkness most of her remaining spirit disappeared with it.
Most. Not all.
This next part wouldn't be quite the same, otherwise.
Noirbarret removed the cuffs on the girl's ankles and then dragged her out of the car and into the house, using a key he produced from an empty pot on a high shelf in the garage. He prodded her through the empty, musty place— decked out in the most Spartan and cheap furnishings possible to still be considered a 'house'— and then shoved her toward the basement stairs.
"Watch yourself on these," he whispered into her ear. "Wouldn't do for the baby birdie to go and break her neck, would it?"
She looked back at him, the dark terror in her eyes briefly replaced by puzzlement.
Once she reached the bottom, coming to the cold concrete floor of the unfinished basement, Noirbarret removed the cuffs on her wrists, expertly finding the lock even in the darkness. Then he gave her a sudden push, hard enough to send her sprawling to the floor, tumbling towards the room's center and falling over a bag of unopened concrete mix.
He found the pull-down light cord as she righted herself, getting to her rear with her hands planted behind her, ready to pull back or push off at a moment's notice. Not that it would save her, of course. Noirbarret knew that.
And from the look in the girl's cinnamon eyes she did, too.
The light bulb swayed to and fro on its ratty chain as he observed her, that bleak black look on his face never wavering. He wanted to wait for her to try speaking again; he wanted to once again cow her into silence. Unfortunately it appeared that the girl wouldn't be making the first move.
He found that 'silent treatment' somewhat familiar. It started his blood boiling, in fact, which was unfortunate; he wanted to be calm, at least at the start.
"Say my name, please."
He whispered these words as if unspooling delicate silk, with a voice as practiced and polite as a servant might use to speak to their king.
The girl looked up at him, jaw quivering. She said nothing.
"My name," Noirbarret repeated. "Please say it."
She bunched her lips tight, looking away from him.
"Y— your name's… your name is Special Agent Connall Noirbarret—"
Instantly he was at her side, kicking her hard in the ribs with a merciless foot. She cawed, falling to one side, cradling her injury.
"My name, please," he repeated.
She coughed, her whole body trembling. She only dared look up at the man looming above her once, very briefly, before balling herself up.
"You're a fed. You saw me, before. You told me your name—"
The next kick was to her back, making the girl scream as he connected with her spine. She rolled away from him, crawling backward across the floor.
Noirbarret stalked after her, his face completely cold and empty.
"What... is... my... name?"
She reached the basement wall, bumping her head hard against the cinderblocks. She didn't seem to notice.
"I don't... You— it's what you said: C— Connall—"
He lunged for her, gripping her head with one steady hand and forcing it down on the floor. With two steady fingers of the same hand he gripped her left eyelid and wrenched it open, top and bottom. With his other hand he produced a small, silvery pocketknife. He flipped out the tiny blade and held it over her face.
Over that exposed eye.
She grabbed his wrist with both hands, struggling to stop him.
Nothing, however, could stop that hand from slowly, gently, inexorably lowering. Nothing could stop the tip of that knife from coming down on its target. Nothing could prevent it from finding the soft, wet flesh of her living eyeball.
Nothing could stop it from tearing through the juices and tissue there, carving nerve and flesh and vitreous jelly on its way down into the retina, itself.
They say that the retina is actually the furthest outward extension of the brain, don't they? He remembered hearing that, somewhere. That meant he was technically a 'brain surgeon', today, didn't it? The thought almost made him laugh.
Guess it really wasn't rocket science, after all.
She screamed, of course. But her screaming couldn't save her.
One thing could, however.
"Say... my..."
She managed it just as the very tip of his blade skirted the watery surface of her cornea.
"Black Hat! Black Hat! Black Hat! Black Hat!"
He released her from his grip the instant the first word left her lips, but she could only continue screaming it in wild abandon, bawling his name with tears in her barely-undamaged eyes and a growing urine-stain marring her crotch. It took her quite a bit of time to stop shuddering and crying, snot dribbling from her nose, but he was patient. He even tossed a white handkerchief against her heaving chest, absently motioning to his own eyes and nose.
Eventually he stood up with graceful poise; he closed the pocketknife and then smirked. Noirbarret retrieved his black umbrella from the floor and then paced the room with it, clacking the tip on the concrete, moseying around the depressing basement as he spoke.
"Y'know this place is an FBI safe-house. By that I mean a location we use to conduct operations. Last time we used it was about three years ago, give or take. You'll forgive me on that score. Time's a thing that I can let get away from me, every now and then. We all do, you know..."
He stopped walking near a corner of the basement, absently grinding his umbrella tip against the ground as he chuckled. He wondered if the girl would try to bolt, or even try attacking his defenseless back. She did neither, merely watching him move across the room with that awful shuddering terror in her eyes.
"It was a kidnapping case. Details don't matter much, mind you, but I thought I might mention the result. See, the case ended with me walking out the perp's door, carrying a little 5-year-old kid in a blanket in my arms, saving his scrawny little ass from whatever terrible horrors awaited him in the bad guy's clutches."
Noirbarret continued circling the room. She didn't reorient herself to face him, merely staring across the room at the base of the stairs, her breaths coming in sharp, shallow puffs.
"There were cameras. Oh, how there were cameras. And reporters from up and down the coast. It was a whole throng of humanity that got to see me saving that little guy. You know what they mattered to me? What everyone else mattered, then? Nothing. Not one thing. Did I feel good? Yes, I did. Ecstatic, in fact, and it had nothing to do with anyone else, or anything else, but this..."
Again he stopped walking, this time between the girl and the stairs, back to the girl.
"Saving that child simply felt 'good'. There's no other way to describe it."
He looked over his shoulder at the girl, pointing his umbrella at her.
"You probably see me as a 'monster', don't you? Penance certainly does. But I can forgive him for that." He looked at the ground. "There's an irony, isn't there? Fact is that in my time I've done more good than you, or any other 'normal' person, could ever dream of. Oh, I haven't always been as noble a thing as an FBI agent, mind you. But even when whatever I am is less than noble, well..."
He turned to face the girl.
"...doing good still feels 'good'. And I do it quite a lot of it, in fact. I've planted enough seeds of good in my life to grow a goddamned forest. More than a street-hustling little piece of trash like you could ever know, at least."
He stared down at his cane's tip, watching as he ground it against the cold concrete.
"The bad? The... 'unpleasantness'?"
Noirbarret scratched at the side of his face with one hand, and briefly the confident, dark charm in his eyes faltered, stripped away like armor cast from his body. What lay underneath, however much he hid it, was not at all confident. He scoffed, waving his hand dramatically and re-girding himself in that cold and confident armor.
"Penance Cameron is... something special to me. He's like a drop of water pelting the forehead, or a jagged pebble in a shoe. No matter how much I grow that wonderful, great 'forest' of good deeds, well, he's always there, hiding out in the woods. He calls to me, like a..."
He stopped briefly considering the girl, and then he laughed, motioning to her.
"I was gonna say 'bird', but no: that's not quite right. Let's say a—"
"Fox."
Noirbarret blinked three times in rapid succession. He looked down at the girl again. Her head was lowered so far as to put her chin on her chest. The vulgar light from the bulb overhead only reached her mouth, parted in an unpleasant sneer.
"That'll work," he grumbled. "He's... he's a 'must' for me; everything I do to him, and everything to his dearly beloveds... it's simply a must. Think of it this way: even an Olympic athlete's gotta indulge in a nice, tasty crème brulee every now and then, don't they?"
This, too, made Noirbarret smile. He again fell to pacing around the girl.
"And me... I haven't even taken the pleasure of cracking a spoon into mine, yet. For me it's all about enjoying the 'smell'. From our first meeting he left something of an impression on me. It took me nearly 20 years to find him, again. I thought I had a score to settle, you see, but even I didn't know the half of it, yet..."
He stopped walking, looking up at the bare ceiling.
"I tracked Penance down to a Swiss town called Neuchâtel, and I had my plans for him. Those plans changed when a tiny freckle-faced thing wandered into our 'meeting'; she managed to track me down to the decrepit little chalet I'd dragged Penance to. She inched open the door, calling for him, using the name he'd been using— Penance was staying with her family, you see— and there just wasn't anything for it: she had to go, of course. And when I snapped her neck, like a piece of kindling..."
He looked down from the ceiling, unable to resist the small shudder down his back. He again scratched at the side of his face, looking back at the girl with a grotesque display of puppy-dog eyes.
"It wasn't about her; it wasn't about any feeling of pride or pleasure from what I did to her. But what effect it had on Penance... oh..."
Again he shivered with ecstasy, this time better managing to still himself.
"It broke him in ways I couldn't possibly have managed, not with all my 'plans', combined. And that's really the only way you can break someone like Penance anyway, I think. I bet you know him enough to know that he relishes the idea of punishment, and that's the only way to hurt him: spread the punishment everywhere but his direction. Seems a fair compromise, anyway."
Finally the girl looked up, craning her head into the harsh light of the bulb. Her deep brown eyes seemed to burn in the light.
"'Fair'? What in the ever-loving fuck is 'fair' about anything you do, asshole?"
Noirbarret spread his arms, twirling his umbrella in one practiced hand.
"He's the itch I can't scratch... or won't. Seems only fair that I be the same to him—"
"He thinks you're 'divine judgment'—"
"And who's to say I'm not?" Noirbarret chuckled. "Isn't that the scarier thought? The idea that, just maybe, I actually am—"
"You're a God-damned psychotic whack-job is what you are." She ground her teeth, leering up at him with a hateful scrunch in her freckled face. "A nut job. You belong in a padded cell in a straightjacket!"
The girl unleashed a litany of abuses at him, and he allowed it. In fact it was a pleasant thing to hear. He preferred that she have a little fight in her, at least.
Makes it more interesting, anyway.
"You sissy, umbrella-carryin' bastard! Goddam bullying coward! Pencil-neck, limp-dick—"
At this last one his black eyes suddenly changed, like a snake making the decision to strike. He slapped her with the back of his hand hard enough to send her tumbling to one side, landing on that bag of powdered concrete mix. She looked back up at him in silence, not bothering to wipe the growing river of blood slowly tricking from the corner of her lip.
Noirbarret coughed uncomfortably, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve.
"I, uh... I apologize for that. That's something I usually don't do: make 'em suffer. The 'suffering' is for Penance, not for you—"
"Is that 'doin' good', then?" She whispered, licking at the blood on her face. "'nother seed in your 'forest', fed?"
Noirbarret flashed her a condescending smile.
"Were you 'doing good' when you kicked Penance's cojones into his teeth, while robbing him? Who, exactly, is the 'bullying coward', there?"
Her resolute face faltered a bit at this; it made Noirbarret's smile widen.
"Mmm. Your Fagin— what was his name? Boggs— he told me all about that on our first phone call, when I made him come clean about how in the hell he possibly knew Penance. He told me all about the 'little birdie' that busted the brat's balls."
"That's right," she said. "I did."
"Penance, he wasn't at all 'usual' for you, but what you were doing when you came upon him was, wasn't it? Come the work-a-day week you're out there robbing little kiddies, kicking them in the gonads. That's 'usual' for you, isn't it?"
She licked away a bit of the blood pooling out her mouth.
"Yeah," she whispered. "More or less."
"Penance, he was special somehow, and you helping him... that was an irregularity."
The girl nodded.
Noirbarret got to one knee beside her, taking back his handkerchief and gently wiping the blood from her chin.
"Usually it's hot-blooded triumph, isn't it? The 'robber's rush' that burns in your head, filling you with boiling pleasure as you descend upon a helpless victim. Chemical treasures get loosed from your body and brain— dopamine and epinephrine, we call 'em. They help you focus; they help you push aside the fear. Help you feel exhilarated, don't they?"
She slowly met his gaze, and when she did those brown eyes took a more resolute shape; she nodded again, but this time with dangerous precision.
"Now," Noirbarret whispered gently, "when one considers someone like me— a man who does great deeds more often than not, and even desires doing 'em, most times— and then a gutter trash little punk like you— a girl who does evil all the doo-dah day, and who nearly comes for it, at that— which of these two would you like to consider the 'monster'? We are what we are, and the only way either of us cheats on our 'diet' is with the occasional, irregular 'dessert', after all..."
She kept her gaze fixed on the man, and again she nodded.
"The girl," she whispered. "She'd be the monster..."
Noirbarret chuckled, holding up both his hands in a comical 'I told you so' shrug.
"But the man," she continued, "is worse. Way fucking worse."
"The man," Noirbarret wagged a scolding finger before her face, "is the one doing good, and feeling good about it—"
The girl's resolute eyes became something else. They were softer, but not out of fear. It was almost pity, but with equal parts disgust.
"And that's just what makes him worse," the girl explained. "Girl's like a mangy mutt, frothin' at the mouth; it doesn't know any better. Maybe it can't. But the man?" Again her eyes hardened, and she balled her fists against the concrete floor. "He should know enough to understand how God-damned fucking insane he really is."
He gently bit the inside of one cheek; Noirbarret expected a fight in her, but he also expected to be able to extinguish it, before the end. He figured his little jab would've done that, but no: there was something else.
When the girl looked up at him again, eyes again turning hateful, she confirmed his hypothesis.
"Unless that 'man' ain't a man. Unless they're just a limp-dicked motherf—"
He knocked her down with a firm, reflexive kick, making her land hard on her back. With one steady hand he twisted his umbrella sheath apart, sending the scabbard clattering to the floor, exposing the deadly gleam of his narrow, silver sword.
"You do have a pair, kid, I will give you that," he growled. "But you also interfered in my little 'game' with dear, darling Penance."
He held the sword over his shoulder, both hands gripping the slender hilt.
"And there's a penalty for that."
She never once looked at the sword. That was what really struck him as odd. Not once. She only glared up at him, her face a well of cold anger and something else— something that gave her a certain power over him, even in her pathetic, supine state.
It was something that gnawed at Noirbarret's brainstem; it was something that didn't 'smell' right.
He tried to recover, speaking with silky smoothness.
"Sorry, little birdie," he cooed, "but it looks like this is the end o—"
"Just do it, you Immortal fuck!"
One of Noirbarret's steady legs shivered at her barking command. The involuntary shudder went further up his body than that, however.
"Anything's better than listening to you prattle on. Even hellfire, I bet..."
The girl's eyes were no longer 'cinnamon', no. Noirbarret couldn't say there were like the sweet spice of a benign tree's bark. Now they were something else: the color of crushed castor beans, or the like. There was certainly poison in them, nearly dripping from the sockets. 'Destruction', yes, that's what it was.
And not all if it aimed at him.
He smiled when he recognized it; it certainly took him long enough to see it: the 'damage'. He should've seen it sooner.
Should've recognized it sooner.
What an irony, he thought, that 'damaged' things so often took much more effort to be 'broken'.
"Well, then," he whispered, "on with the 'plan'."
She kept a steely gaze as he tightened his grip on the hilt.
But still she screamed when the blade came down.
Of course she did.
'Steel', after all, only counts for so much.
X
X
X
His shirt still dripped in the sink, bleeding off water at a slow and steady rate from its perch over the filthy bathroom mirror. His shorts were in even worse shape, not so easily wrung out, and they billowed from their place in the ceiling, forced up against the rusty heater vent. As bathrooms went this place was a war-crime. As gas station bathrooms went, it was at least decent.
Penance didn't consider the sanitation of his current surroundings, or lack thereof.
He focused, instead, on the greasy mirror.
In there he saw something he really didn't like.
He thought back to the cemetery, closing his eyes as he remembered the sight of Black Hat on his knees, his reedy throat exposed to the boy. He remembered the pulse of the man' carotids, bare and vulnerable, slick with rain. He felt hot blood pooling in his brain, urging his hand to the waistband of his underwear, gripping the hilt of his little knife as tight as a toddler might grip a teddy bear in the crib.
He bared his teeth, ignoring the froth forming at the edge of his mouth.
The boiling blood in his head traveled down his neck but stopped at his shoulders, countered by a dirty and cold electric fire. Penance remembered the man's touch, his hands gripping the boy's shoulders. It deadened them, turning his hot skin frigid and numb.
He ran two fingers over his bare shoulder, and when he felt nothing he tried his knife, slowly dragging the liquid steel from the tip of his shoulder-blade down across the flesh resting over his beating heart. In his mind he drew it gently, delicately; he ignored the eruption of blood seeping out him like lava from an oozing volcano, the pain of the knife effortlessly parting muscle and sinew, and that awful scrape of steel on bone.
The whole time he only stared back at the boy in the mirror, glaring at his greasy, smudged face.
"You had him," Penance whispered. "You had him. And what would it have cost you to take him?"
Nothing, really. Only the soul of a boy who'd certainly never see heaven, anyway.
And why couldn't he seal the deal in the first place? Why couldn't he goad the bastard into blindly attacking him? Why couldn't he annoy the man enough to ignore the consequences?
Penance was many things, and among those things he was a 12-year-old child.
He should have the ability to annoy almost anyone into doing almost anything.
"Couldn't get his blood hot enough," he snarled.
Instantly he felt the tousling of Black Hat's fingers through his hair, the mocking kiss on his forehead, and still the thought of those hands on his shoulders sent waves of revulsion through his body.
No: he got the blood hot enough, all right, but in all the wrong ways.
When he stared back at the boy in the mirror the revulsion inside Penance only grew.
And not all of it was aimed at Black Hat.
He looked down at Galabeg, resting atop the rusty sink faucet, glaring up at him with empty eyes.
"What're you looking at?" The boy grumbled.
Penance rested his fingers against his forehead, tapping at the spot where Black Hat kissed him. He began to gently rub it, making it come clean.
Then he did so less gently.
When rubbing didn't seem to do the trick he opted for his knife.
He was a little over-dramatic with the whole thing. With the first stroke he sliced all the way down his face, ripping into the soft cartilage of his broken nose and slashing a free flap of skin along the corner of his mouth. The other strokes were equally unconstructive.
But, at least for the moment, it helped to see the boy in the mirror suffer such mutilation. It helped to see that downy hair stained in blood, those rusty blue eyes slashed over, that fair skin ripped apart in grotesque flaps. If only for a minute, at least.
When he was done he dropped his knife in the sink. He panted hard, letting loose exhausted breaths.
'Exhausted' was a good thing to be right now. He didn't think he had the strength to be anything else.
A knock on the door barely registered with him, but when it repeated he thought enough to call out.
"Just a minute," he said.
He looked up at the mirror, glaring with dagger eyes at the boy on the other side. He couldn't help but let a cold smile escape his solidifying lips.
"I'm just putting my face on..."
X
X
X
Noirbarret's blade wobbled, still singing from its impact.
He stood with his hands free, letting the blade rest snug in its target, bare hilt wagging in the air.
He waited in the quiet stillness of the basement, unwilling to break the silence.
Eventually it was broken for him.
Whip let out a rasping gasp, not daring to open her tightly-shut eyes. When she took another sputtering breath she inched one eye open, getting a good look at the sword resting an inch from her right ear. It lay embedded in the sack of concrete mix near her head. She could only stare at her reflection in the thing, dumb, until the concrete dust bleeding into the air made her cough.
"I hope you make it, kid," he whispered.
Whip looked up at the man, who kept his back to her as he spoke. His voice was again as gentle and calm as a pastor comforting mourners at a funeral.
"I hope you get out of the slums and make it for yourself." He slowly turned to face her. "I want you to live a full, long life, and I want it to be filled with all the happiest things you can imagine. I want you, in your final days, to be rocking gently in a cozy chair on a porch somewhere, the grandest view of God's great country before your eyes, and peace ruling your life."
The man took a quiet, delicate step towards her, and she noticed his facewas as soft and gentle as a pastor's, too.
"Because the script's changing. Everything's changing. And I'm not afraid. I've not lost control. What I'm going to do is this: I'm going to go out and collect Penance again, just one last time, and this time I'll be taking him somewhere... more 'permanent'. This time I'm... well, I'll be cracking the spoon into the crème brulee. Where I take him, and what I'm going to do to him..."
Noirbarret drew a slow, halting breath, and when he released it his face was not like a pastor.
Nor was his voice.
"I'm going to consult an actuarial table, kid; I'm going to see how long you can be expected to live, on average. I'll find out when you're expected to die. And at that moment—when you're expected to be breathing your last, hopefully sitting 'peaceful' in that cozy rocking chair— that'll be when I give Penance what he wants— hisdeath— and believe me: he will want it by then. He will beg me for it, by then. He'll kiss my dirty shoes, my bare feet— do anything I demand of him— just for the taste of sweet, empty death.
"And I want you to know, throughout all the milestones of your 'happy', fruitful life, that each and every moment of it he will suffer. Each and every moment he will scream in the dark, and beg..." He took another step towards Whip, a small trickle of saliva forming at the front of his lip. "He will beg for help that will never come..."
Noirbarret licked the saliva from his lip, glaring down at her with cold eyes.
"And only when you breathe your last will he go, and he'll meet you on whatever shore you believe exists beyond the veil." The man's lips twisted in a dark smirk. "You'll both have plenty to talk about, then. If his mind's still even capable of forming rational thought, that is!"
Noirbarret removed his sword from the bag of concrete mix and quickly sheathed it back inside the umbrella scabbard. He rested the tip of the umbrella on Whip's chin and forced her to look up at him, smiling down at her with wet teeth.
"Nothing lasts forever, does it? Nothing can. Not even a 'forest', you know."
He turned and strolled for the basement stairs, whistling an odd and jaunty tune. It was one she'd heard before, barely squeezing out of the stone walls of St. Hubertus one afternoon, belted from the organ pipes.
"H— he'll kill you," Whip stuttered. "Penance will kill you!"
"Wouldn't be the first time," Noirbarret grumbled. He looked back at her, still grinning. "But he's never managed a 'last', either, so I don't think so baby birdie, no."
"I'll kill you," Whip managed the words without the terrified stutter, but only just.
Noirbarret pointed his umbrella at her, menacing at first, but then that silky, contemptuous smile returned and he chuckled.
"Here I thought whippoorwills always kept their heads down, and their camouflage up? They certainly live longer that way, don't they?"
Again he laughed, giving the girl a mock salute.
"Long life to you, little birdie." He laughed as he walked up the stairs, his voice echoing down as he walked.
"Long life, indeed!"
