42. You're going to wear a groove into that windowsill

Chapter 42: You're going to wear a groove into that windowsill

Seven days folded into each other the way bad weeks always did, one indistinguishable from the next, marked only by the slow accumulation of nothing.

Freya ran the search like she ran everything, methodical, relentless, a woman who didn't believe in wasted motion. She organized patrols through every district, split her borrowed men into shifts that covered the city in overlapping sweeps, questioned every informant who'd ever sold her a scrap of useful information in exchange for coin or favor. She walked the slums herself twice, asking questions in doorways that had never seen a knight's uniform up close before, and came away each time with nothing but rumors too thin to follow and fear too thick to push past.

"Nobody's seen him," she said, the third evening, dropping into a chair at their table with the particular exhaustion of someone who'd walked farther than her legs wanted to. "Not Finn, not the creature, not so much as a shadow that matches. It's like the whole thing swallowed itself."

"It found somewhere to hide," Mikaela said. "Somewhere it knows nobody's going to look."

"I know that. Knowing it doesn't make the somewhere any easier to find."

The children, at least, were healing, or as much healing as could happen for kids pulled out of a collapsed building and dropped into an old barracks with cots instead of beds and guards instead of caretakers who actually knew their names. Elara had moved in with them, refusing every offer of a softer bed elsewhere, insisting the children needed a face they already trusted more than they needed her comfort. Lyra and Kael had both come back from whatever the cellar had done to them disoriented, confused, plagued by headaches and gaps in memory neither of them could explain, but they were talking, moving, being themselves again in fits and starts, which was more than anyone had dared hope the first night.

Nora wasn't.

She sat where they put her, ate what they fed her, slept when the light went down and woke when it came back, and none of it meant anything behind her eyes. Mikaela visited twice that week and left both times worse than she'd arrived, the sight of that particular kind of stillness harder to carry than almost anything else the last month had thrown at her.

Eto didn't visit at all. He didn't say why, and Mikaela didn't ask, but she suspected some part of him couldn't sit in front of that girl and do nothing, and doing nothing was the only thing on offer.

He waited instead. Waited the way she'd watched him wait before, patient on the outside, coiled tight everywhere else, and by the fourth night of it she'd started noticing exactly how tight.

He ate less, for one thing, or ate the same amount faster, tearing through meals like the food was an obstacle between him and something else he needed to be doing. He'd stopped meditating on the bed the way he had those first nights, the lotus position abandoned in favor of sitting at the window instead, elbows on his knees, staring out at the rooftops of Torak like the answer was going to walk across one of them if he watched long enough.

"You're going to wear a groove into that windowsill," she told him on the fifth night, half joking, mostly not.

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He didn't look at her. "Waiting."

"I know. I can see that." She came and sat on the edge of the bed behind him, close enough to rest a hand between his shoulder blades. Muscle sat there like stone, no give in it at all. "You're allowed to be angry about it. You don't have to just sit there being patient every single second."

"Not angry." A pause. "Not only angry."

"What else, then."

He didn't answer that one right away, and when he finally did, his voice had gone lower, rougher, something under it she hadn't heard from him before. "Finn. Nora. Kids." His jaw worked. "Are future. Should protect."

"You didn't do this to them."

"Didn't stop it." He said it flat, final, like there was nothing more to argue about, and she didn't push, just sat there with her hand on his back and let the silence hold whatever it needed to hold.

By the sixth day the tension in him had gotten bad enough that even Erik had noticed, muttering something to Mikaela at the bar about how the big fella looked like he was about to put his fist through a wall if somebody didn't give him something to hit soon. She hadn't disagreed. She'd started sleeping lighter herself, half braced most nights for him to simply get up and go looking on his own, hunt or no hunt, permission or no permission.

He didn't. Whatever restraint he was running on, it held, though she could see what it cost him in the shadows under his eyes, in the way his hands stayed curled loose at his sides like he was perpetually a half second from closing them into fists.

It was the seventh evening when Freya finally came through the door of the inn with a different look on her face entirely, something sharper than the exhaustion of the last week, purpose cutting through it clean.

Eto was up off the windowsill before she'd even crossed the room.

"We've got something," Freya said, dropping into the chair across from them without waiting to be asked. "A sighting. Real this time, not another dead end."

"Where," Mikaela said, already leaning forward.

"The old church. Center of the original city, the part that went up over a hundred years back before the walls expanded out past it. There was a fire there decades ago, gutted the whole building, and nobody's touched it since. No reason to. Nobody lives near it, nobody uses it, half the city's forgotten it's even standing."

"And someone saw something there."

"A patrol working the old quarter two nights back. One of the men swore he saw a figure moving through the ruins, said it didn't walk right, said it moved like it was gliding more than stepping. He didn't get close, didn't want to, but he remembered enough to describe it, and it matches. Robed. Tall. Wrong in a way he couldn't put a proper word to."

Mikaela's stomach had gone tight. "You think it's been there the whole time."

"I think it's exactly the kind of place a thing like that would choose. Empty. Forgotten. Nobody around to notice comings and goings, nobody to ask questions if strange sounds carried out of it in the dead of night." Freya's eyes moved to Eto, and whatever she saw in his face made her sit up a little straighter. "I think we've finally got somewhere worth looking."

Eto hadn't said a word since she'd sat down, but something had shifted in him the second she'd said the word church, the coiled stillness of the last week sharpening into something with an edge on it now, something that finally had a direction to point.

"Where," he said.

Freya glanced at Mikaela, who translated the single word without needing to add anything to it.

"Center of the old city," Freya said again, slower this time, watching him take it in. "I can have men there within the hour if you want it done properly. Surround it, corner it, make sure it's got nowhere to run before we go in."

Eto shook his head once.

"No men," he said, and didn't wait for the translation this time, already moving toward the door, already pulling on the vest he'd left hanging by the window.

Mikaela stood fast, catching his arm. "Eto."

"Now we hunt," he said, and this time the words came out steady, sure, every trace of the week's frustration burned clean out of them and replaced with something far more dangerous.

The wait was over.