"The Dream Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abé Shana)
CHAPTER ONE
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1768
In the dream, she was always blind.
That’s what would come first, the utter darkness, settling over her like a soft, soft blanket. But it wasn’t a hopeless or desperate kind of blindness. In fact, it always seemed absolutely normal. Because the dream was never about what she could see, but all about what she could hear.
It was a man speaking to her in the dream. A man’s voice, one she knew as well as she knew the flow of water over the rocks of her favorite streambed, dark and familiar and smooth.
And she would, because in the dream there was nothing she wanted more than to obey that voice. It was her only ambition.
And, oh, how it pleased her, that one single word. How it shimmered through her like warm, sunlit honey, filling her with sweetness.
That part was wrong. Even in the dream Lia knew it was wrong, because Kimber wasn’t the Marquess of Langford yet. Their father was. Kimber was just a boy. But the man never noticed.
She did not know anyone named Havington. She did not know how she knew about the sapphires, or the silk. But she knew that it was all true.
In the dream, she expanded with that sweetness once more.
The man said nothing. His presence broke the darkness around her like a prism of pure, humming joy. Like a song. Like a reverie.
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She wasn’t ready.
Kim could see that she wasn’t ready, even though they had waited the requisite fifteen days and sixteen nights for that one perfect June dusk without sun or moon or even stars. The sky above them was smoke and purple-blue, framed by the black cathedral of oaks and willows that made a rough enclosure around their circle of five.
Her face was still visible, pale, elfin-sharp, very clear to him even through the fading light. Lia didn’t share the famous beauty of their sisters, Audrey’s regal walk or Joan’s silver-bell laugh. Fourteen years old, both earnest and shy, the essence of Lady Amalia Langford was all contradictions: elbows and a bumpy grace, wheat-gold hair and almond dark eyes, and a face that appeared close to ordinary until she smiled. Even then, she wasn’t beautiful. She was, he considered, trying to be fair…arresting.
In fact, despite her powerful bloodlines, Lia didn’t look like anyone else in the tribe. She was all corners and angles, always too tall, too thin, even as a little girl.
He’d been back from Eton only a few days. Kim would have thought that by now his youngest sister would have grown into her heritage, but to him she still seemed like a changeling stuffed into someone else’s shawl and lacy pink gown.
She felt his stare. From her seat on the forest floor her head turned. She met his look-her braids fraying loose from their pins, her cheek smooth with the last glow of twilight, no cap-then glanced quickly away. The corners of her lips pulled back into a faint, unhappy line.
That was how Kim knew she wasn’t going to finish the ritual. She returned to watching the pair of wrens in the scrolled metal cage near her feet. They fluttered from bar to bar, breathing in small, impassioned notes. It was the only noise that broke the forest silence. There were no crickets sawing. There were no mice or badgers or moles rummaging through the fallen leaves.
This was Darkfrith, after all.
One of the wrens slammed too hard against the wires. Kim caught the flicker of emotion that crossed Lia’s face, so fleet he doubted any of the others noticed.
But he was the eldest. He’d had the most experience reading hearts. That flicker had been pain, and sympathy. She’d always longed for a pet.
Hell. She’d be useless tonight after all.
Something dark scored the sky above their heads, something serpentine. None of them bothered to look up. The highest fingers of the oaks shivered in its wake.
“Daughter of the tribe,” Kim intoned, going on with it anyway. By God, the carriage ride alone back home had taken over a week; he wasn’t going to let her off easily. “What dare you offer us?”
But his sister was distracted again. This time her head cocked, her chin lifted, as if she could hear something the others could not.
“Lia,” muttered Rhys, the third oldest, from across the circle. “Pay attention. This is your part.”
“I, daughter of the tribe,” said Lia, her chin lowering obediently, “bring unto you…bring unto…”
The wrens flipped back and forth and back in their prison.
“…this dire offering,” hissed Joan, prompting.
“This dire offering.”
“What is the offering?” Kim asked in his gravest voice, because it was ritual, and because he’d been practicing that voice for some while.
Lia lifted her hand to the cage. The birds pressed back against the far side.
“Heart and feathers,” she said, but turned her head again-and then broke the circle by climbing to her feet.
“
“Doesn’t anyone hear that?”
“No,” answered Rhys. “And neither do you. Sit down, so we can finish this. It took me a bloody fortnight to catch those wrens.”
“Wait,” she said. “Listen. It’s a carriage.”
“It’s not-” Kim began, but then he stopped, because, actually, he heard it too. Not just a carriage, a post chaise, rattling down the graveled drive from the distant manor house. He sent his sister a new, keener glance. “You heard that from here? It’s at least a mile away.”
Audrey had come to her feet as well, brushing out her skirts. “Who’s expected?”
“No one.” Rhys shrugged. “Just Zane, and he’s leaving.”
All three sisters swiveled to face him, and in that instant they looked remarkably alike.
“What?” he said, scowling.
“Zane?” echoed Joan. “Zane’s here?”
“Not any longer. Apparently.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize I was employed as your majordomo.”
Lia dropped her shawl. It slipped to the ground with hardly a whisper, a white curving ghost against the brown leaves and dirt.
“Hold up.” Kim caught her arm before her third step. “You can’t leave. We’ve only just begun.”
She glanced up at him but it was darker now, so he couldn’t quite read her face. But he was irritated to have come so far for naught; he tightened his grip and gave her a shake.
“Oh, let her be,” said Joan. “She’s too young for this anyway. We all knew it.”
“I did it younger than she,” Kim countered.
“Yes, and you had something to prove, didn’t you?” This from Audrey, his twin. “Eldest son, future Alpha of the tribe. You wanted to impress us.” She lifted a shoulder, nonchalant. “Don’t poker up. I would have done the same if I were you. It was clever to think up a ritual.”
Rhys sighed. “Might as well let her go, Kimber. The moment’s gone. They’re right, you know, she’s just too young. She’s
Beneath his hand, Lia twitched. But Audrey had reminded him of who he was, and who he was someday going to be, and so Kim said, “You know what this means, Amalia. You won’t be one of us, truly one of us, until the ritual is complete. Your Gifts won’t come. Or if they do, they won’t be as good.”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I know.”
She shook free of his grip, turned to the birdcage, and snapped open the door. There came a flurry of peeps and rustling; when she straightened again, there was a dark lump in her fist.
“To the
Her fingers opened. The little bird landed beside her shawl, one wing arced in an angel fan across the tassels.
“You have to do both,” managed Rhys, into the sudden hush.
Without a word, Lia stuck her hand into the cage and retrieved the other wren.
Another rush of invisible wind sliced over them, clattering the leaves. She flung the second bird up after it, where it flapped and fluttered and skimmed off in a drunken line, vanishing into the night.
Lia shot a look at Kimber, chin tilted. “I suppose I’ll only ever be half as good as you, after all,” his little sister said, and with her skirts in her hands she pelted down the path that led back to Chasen Manor.
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Once, years ago, Lia had asked her mother if she heard the song.
“The supper chime?” Rue Langford had asked, tucking her daughter into bed.
“No, Mama. The other song. The quiet one.”
“The quiet one. The music box from your father?”
“No. The
And Mama had gazed down at her with her lovely brown eyes, her head tilted, a smile on her lips. She and Papa were hosting a
“I’m afraid I don’t know what song you mean, beloved.”
“That one…”
Audrey was already out of the nursery, but Joan was in the bed against the other wall, sulking because she wasn’t yet old enough to attend the
“She says she hears a song all the time,” said Joan in a very bored, grown-up voice.
Mama’s look sharpened. “What sort of song?”
“A quiet one. You know…like the wind in a meadow. Like the ocean.”
Rue’s expression relaxed. “Oh. Yes, I hear that sometimes too.”
“You do?”
“I do. Nature plays a wonderful symphony for us.”
“No, not
Rue placed the back of her fingers upon her daughter’s forehead. Her skin felt very cool. “Can you hum it?”
“No.”
“Does it bother you? Does it hurt your head?”
“No…”
“It’s not even real,” said Joan loudly in her bored voice. “If it was real, we’d all hear it. We can hear
“It is real to your sister,” answered Mama, firm, and looked back at Lia. “You must tell me if it ever starts to fret you. Come to me, and I’ll fix it.”
Lia sat up in her bed, wide-eyed, interested. Rue was powerful, the most powerful female of the tribe, but Lia had no idea her mother’s Gifts were that strong.
“How, Mama?”
“Why, I’ll love it away, just like this,” said Rue, laughing as she caught Lia by the shoulders and pressed rose-petal kisses all over her cheeks.
That was how Amalia knew that her mother didn’t believe her either.
When the dreams began to surface a few years after that, Lia didn’t bother to tell anyone. The song, for all its persistence, held a certain sadness and distance that made it seem almost innocent. But there was nothing of innocence in the blind dreams. In them she was another person…older. Enigmatic. She woke from them flushed and panting, guilty and excited and miserable at once. She wouldn’t share those feelings with anyone, not even her mother.
At first they were fragments, just voices and sentences that seemed strung together without reason. She could hear herself speaking in them, but what she said made no sense. She could hear the man’s voice, but it was as though he was far away from her, talking through a rainstorm. She caught only snatches of words.
Yet the dreams had grown clearer. And clearer. And with them, a rising sense of danger, a warning that pushed down on her chest and prickled the hair on her arms.
Nothing truly terrible ever happened in the blind dreams. At the same time, she knew that somehow they meant everything terrible. She spoke of stealing and killing and the loss of her parents as if reciting a list for the village market. It was not pretend. But in that humming, welcome dark, Lia felt nothing wrong at all.
A few months past, in the gray morning hours of her fourteenth birthday, the dream had revealed for the first time who the man was.
Zane. Zane the Other, Zane the criminal. Zane, former apprentice of the Smoke Thief herself, now the tribe’s hired hands and eyes and ears in the real world, the world beyond Darkfrith.
And tonight, even though she had run as fast as she could in her hoops and heels, she had missed his carriage. By the time she’d made it past the forest break and onto the front lawn, she couldn’t even see the smudgy glow of its rear lanterns. There was only the faint squeak of metal and wood and the
That-and the song. Thin and eerie and sweet, it beckoned from the farthest thread of the eastern horizon. It always beckoned.
Deliberately, she turned her back to it. It haunted her days and nights; it haunted her soul; and the fact that no one heard it but her was something Amalia never liked to consider.
She found herself gazing at the warm, handsome windows of Chasen Manor, set back against the forest and lawn like a perfect painting of country peace. At the figures moving inside, supper being laid, beds turned down, evening fires stoked, everything as ordinary as could be.
Something new flashed in the sky above her head, twisting, bright as a scythe with the rising moon; it dropped swiftly into the woods.
With her arms hugged to her chest, Lia watched it fall.
She’d be called in soon. She needed a plan.
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The London air hung heavy with soot and a wet, cool fog, clinging to his face like an unpleasant skin, dampening his breath. But he was used to it; in fact, he usually welcomed it, because foggy nights meant fewer shadows. In his business, light and shadow were as important as picklocks and poison and knives.
The only thing Zane truly disliked about the fog was what it did to gunpowder. He’d never found a brand that didn’t lump into muck in humid weather.
From the hours outdoors, his hair had worked loose from its queue, unfashionably long, distinctive. It would be dark against his skin and the dull white of his cravat. He should have worn a wig. A wig, a cheaper hat, a plainer greatcoat: it would have been more anonymous. But what was done was done; he wasn’t a man to linger long in regret. The people he’d cornered these past few days were paid too damned well to remember his face, anyway.
At least tonight was over. Tomorrow he’d start again, but right now he was hungry, he was tired, and he was very much looking forward to a meal and his bed-and what awaited him in that bed.
The candle lantern just past his house burned sulfur-yellow, a very dim sun choked with mist. None of the small, neatly spaced houses he passed were even visible through the gloom. He found his way because he’d always known it, because he’d lived here since he was a child and had mapped the streets and pavements and gutters in his mind so well he knew every alley, every door, every possible route of escape.
He made himself part of the night. He made his footsteps silent, his breathing imperceptible. He listened to the dark so intently it sounded like his own heartbeat, familiar and calm.
This was his realm, for better or worse. This was the place he claimed and defended, a tiny, ragged patch of safety in the midst of chaos.
And so in the back of his mind, past his awareness of the fog and the candle lantern and the muffled thumps and groans of the city, Zane was counting off his steps.
He paused, another reflex. Fifty-one marked his first step onto his property. Too many men relaxed when they reached their own doors. It was one of the easiest places to make a kill.
But Zane was not like other men. He wasn’t like anyone else on this clean, comfortable street, and it was one of the things he appreciated most about Bloomsbury. Despite being a neighborhood of actors and artisans, the truth was that everyone here was rigorously, predictably, church-squeaky
Another advantage to a man who lived in disguise: it made his sort stand out all the more.
He slipped around to the back of his house, evading all the traps he’d set, finding the short rise of stairs through the clouded darkness and then the keyhole to the kitchen door.
Joseph was waiting inside. He was seated at the side table, eating a bowl of something that smelled like very bad eel.
“Late,” he grunted, by way of a greeting.
Zane removed his cocked hat, running a hand through his hair. “Whatever it is you are consuming, I do not want it served at my table tonight. Or any other night.”
The man’s brows arched; past his scars and badly mottled skin, he looked pained. “It’s me mum’s recipe.”
“Then she is welcome to my portion.” He bolted the kitchen door closed once more, had worked the top buttons of his coat free and was heading for the hall, for bed, when he was halted by his front man’s voice.
“Got a visitor.”
“I know.”
“Not Mim.”
Zane slanted a look back at him. Joseph shrugged. “A girl. Put her in the parlor.”
“A girl,” he repeated slowly. “Are you certain?”
“Aye,” answered Joseph, with exaggerated care. “I’m certain.”
Zane turned again and silently left the kitchen.
His house was dark. He’d grown up with it this way and kept it as a useful habit. A house ill-lit on the inside revealed much less of its inhabitants; he nearly always preferred to see and be unseen. But Joe had apparently felt the girl in question required a great deal of illumination. When Zane stopped at the arched doorway to the parlor, he saw that every lamp was burning, plus the pair of candelabras from the dining room. The contrast was almost like daylight: the reds and blue-greens of the Peshawar rug searing bright, the carved corners of the paintings rubbed with gilt, the gleam of the satinwood chairs eye-wateringly sharp.
The child slumped aside in one of them, head back, eyes closed, lips apart. There was a half-filled cup of chocolate tilting precariously on her lap, her fingers still curled around the handle. Her frock was girlish blue sprigged with daisies, her pumps were dirty, her hair was mussed. Limp ringlets of darkened gold fell softly against her cheeks. She looked pale and gaunt and remarkably plain, despite the beauty of that hair. Everything smelled of hot wax and honey.
He stood there and felt, to his distant surprise, none of the anger he had expected but instead a profound sense of relief.
To manage it he took the cup from her fingers and gave the chair a hard kick.
She came awake at once, straightening, her hands fluttering across her skirts.
“Lady Amalia. I wish I could say I was happy to see you, but I’ve already endured the pleasure of the Marquess of Langford’s company thrice in the past two days. What the devil are you about?”
“Father’s here?” she asked, looking around them.
“Not at the present. No doubt it won’t be long before he returns. I don’t believe he’s fully convinced I haven’t hidden you away somewhere in the house. Imagine my joy,” he added silkily, “at walking into my parlor tonight and discovering it to be true.”
“I’m sorry. I…” She trailed off, shaking her head, then covered her eyes with one hand. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Perchance it has something to do with the fact that you’ve been riding in a public coach for-let me see-almost a fortnight, isn’t it? That’s about how long it takes to travel from Darkfrith to my door by stage. Unless, I suppose,” he paused, “you flew here.”
He hadn’t meant it as a barb, but she grimaced, just a little. Then her hand lowered; she gazed at him steadily.
“I didn’t fly. You know I can’t. And that’s not why.”
Zane didn’t like that look, long-lashed, brown-eyed, direct. It reminded him too much of her mother. They stared at each other in the growing silence. Amalia’s lips slowly compressed into a thin, stubborn line.
With a sigh he gave it up, lowering himself into the opposite chair. He glanced down at her cold chocolate and then tried a taste, feeling his stomach rumble. Hell was going to cut loose sooner or later, and he’d already missed supper.
The
Lamplight glinted silver along the scrolled edge of a tray beside him. Saints be praised, Joseph had left her food. Scones, orange cake, a dish of honeyed nuts and dried fruits-he leaned forward and helped himself to half an apricot and a sliver of cake.
“Bad dreams, snapdragon?”
“Yes.” It was a miserable whisper.
“How unfortunate. I’m certain it was worth fleeing your home without a word to anyone-without, I am equally certain, permission from your almighty
But she still didn’t avert her gaze. She didn’t even seem abashed. All her initial, drowsy confusion appeared completely vanished. She looked cool and composed and very much older than her years, even in her wrinkled skirts. Whatever it was that had compelled her halfway across the kingdom was well hidden behind that mask of mulish calm.
Very well. He knew how to wait.
Zane downed the apricot and crumbled the cake into pieces, consuming each mouthful with purposeful leisure. Joseph was thick-witted and slow and strictly as loyal as his next paycheck, but the true reason Zane kept him in his home was this. Cake. Scones. Fresh berry pies. He was the best hand at sugar pastries this side of the Channel, and the starving child Zane had once been fully appreciated his skills. By the force of his nature Zane remained a hammered blade; fat men never made good thieves. He survived on bites and water and potfuls of bitter coffee. But he was on his third slice before Amalia rose, taking back her cup from his hand.
She made a slow circle of the room, not drinking. “This doesn’t seem much like the residence of a notorious criminal.”
“No. That’s rather the point.”
“Is that why Mother gave it to you?”
“Pardon me,” he retorted, brushing the crumbs from his waistcoat, “she did not
“Oh.”
“Yes,
She set the chocolate on the windowsill. She lifted a hand to the iron bolt holding the shutters closed.
“Do not, if you please,” he said curtly, unmoving. “I’d prefer not to invite your kith and kin inside at the moment.”
“It isn’t sealed?”
“The molding around one of the panes has come loose. I discovered that the hard way two days ago.”
Her fingers jerked back as if burned. It was only one loosened pane, nothing very helpful to the ordinary men and thugs who usually haunted him, a mere breath of space between the solder and the glass. Yet it was all Christoff Langford had needed to breach all of Zane’s careful defenses. Because Langford, of course, wasn’t a man at all. He wasn’t even human.
And neither was his daughter.
“You love my family,” Amalia said now, her back to him, rubbing her palm up and down her rumpled blue-and-flowered skirts.
He did not reply.
“Some of them, anyway.” She glanced at him from over her shoulder. “You do love some.”
“If you say so.”
“You know what we are,” she persisted. “You’ve helped us, over the years. You’re…close to my parents. You’ve aided the tribe.”
“That wasn’t for love, I assure you.”
“What was it, then? Only money?”
“Money is a subject very dear to my heart, child. Do not underestimate it.”
“And what of power?” she asked, softer. “Is that dear to you as well?”
“Did you venture all this way for an examination of my character, snapdragon?”
Lia turned and looked him fully in the face. She didn’t like his pet name for her, and never had. It sounded whimsical, childish, when everything inside her felt strong and cold.
But she knew what he thought of her. She’d always known.
He was the only mortal tolerated by the tribe. He was the only one suffered to keep their secrets. While she and all her kind were kept trapped in the green heaven of Darkfrith, Zane was the sole living creature allowed to come and go at will. Even her father, the Alpha, tended to inform the council when he meant to travel.
It was their way. She knew it was how they had survived all these centuries. The Others raised livestock, or crops. The
Lia was the daughter of a lord. She lived in a mansion of glimmer and light; she looked out her bedroom window every day at open skies and wild, wooded hills and sometimes felt so suffocated it was a wonder she didn’t open her mouth and start screaming and never stop.
The council gave lectures to the children in the village:
Rhys and Audrey and Joan-even Kimber, who at least got to leave to attend a proper school-moved through the hours as if there could be nothing finer than what had been placed before them. Their lives were planned out, their hopes and futures would be forever confined by the boundaries of their land. They were born there, they would find mates there, and they would die there. To them, the world beyond the mist and bracken was of little consequence.
Lia understood why her mother had run away, all those years ago. If she thought for an instant she could truly do the same-
But she couldn’t. She wasn’t Gifted like the rest of her family. She couldn’t Turn to smoke, much less to dragon. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t brave, she wasn’t any sort of reflection of the magnificence of her kind. It had taken all her meager resources just to get this far, and Lia knew her time here would be short. They’d find her soon.
There were only two things about her that set her apart from the rest of her tribe-two dark, disturbing things. And one of them was seated before her in this chamber.
Zane had not stirred from his chair. The lamps were bright and the shadows were harsh; he was sketched in charcoal and light, studying her with a half-lidded gaze she recognized from years of watching him pretend to relax at Chasen Manor, every line of his body casually elegant, his coat unbuttoned to drape the cushions, his waistcoat a satin gleam of pewter and taupe.
His eyes were paler than amber. His hair was very long and thick, honeyed brown. He was poise and muscle and as tall as her father; Joan and Audrey used to keep her awake at night for years in the nursery, just giggling his name, until at last she was old enough to realize why.
Because of this. Because of his hands, so strong and tanned. His fingers, gently tapping the wooden arm of the chair in an easy, steady percussion that belied the wolf-watchfulness of his gaze. Because of his jaw, and his brows, and the handsome curve of his mouth. Because when he stretched his legs and crossed his ankles and lifted his dark lashes to fully see her once more, she was as pinned as a deer in a dragon’s clear yellow sights.
The flames from the lamps smoked oily black. Outside the shuttered window, the eastern song softly murmured.
She remembered the blind dream of him. She remembered the stroke of his voice-
“Forgive me if I interrupt your contemplation of my cravat,” he said now, in a very different tone. “No doubt it’s adorned with all manner of fascinating stains, as I’ve been out the past two days and nights straight, searching every inn and tavern and coach yard in the city for one thoughtless, wayward miss. I find I’m a shade impatient with all these heavy silences. Why, pray tell, have you landed in my parlor?”
Lia blinked. “You-you were searching for me?”
“Your father seemed to require it.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,
She took a breath. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to mention it to anyone else?”
“No,” he said bluntly.
“What if it’s important?”
“In that case, absolutely no. Look,” he said, leaning forward to prop his elbows on his knees, “if it’s something so dire you can’t share it with your parents, then I want nothing to do with it. I’m not courting that sort of trouble. Sorry, my heart. That’s the way of things.”
“Do you think,” she asked carefully, “that it is possible to-to tell the future?”
His eyes narrowed. “What, like tinkers and star-casters, that sort of thing?”
She shrugged. “Or like dreams.”
“Certainly.”
“You do?”
“Aye. In fact, I’ve a carnival soothsayer on payroll who’ll read your runes and spin you as fine a future as you could wish-especially if you’re so accommodating as to leave your reticule unguarded.”
“I wasn’t jesting!”
“Neither was I. He’s bloody good at what he does. Only been locked up twice. Much better average than most of my blokes. But then,” he added mildly, “I suppose he’s able to see just when the constables will be turning the corner.”
Lia crossed the rug to stand before him. She felt calm, removed, after all the days of worry and heat and dread, rocked to sleep and awake in that wretched excuse of a carriage, the stench of people and old horsehair clogging up her nose. She felt a thread of her dream-self, smooth and mysterious, flowing through her veins.
With Zane still seated, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
When she drew away again, his eyes had taken on a harder glow.
“Passable,” he said coolly. “Feel free to try it again in about ten years. Until then, don’t waste my time.”
“Oh, dear,” came a light, feminine voice. “Am I interrupting?”
“Not in the least.” Zane rose from the chair; Lia was forced to step back. In the parlor doorway stood a woman, hooded and cloaked, the slit in her mantle revealing skirts of dove silk and a stomacher of white threadwork and moonstones.
With a turn of her wrists, the woman pushed back her hood. Red hair, gray eyes; her every movement carried the fresh scent of night.
Lia felt a flush of exquisite shame begin to creep up her throat.
“Who is this?” asked the woman, sounding amused.
“No one. Merely a little lost lamb.”
“A lamb,” said the woman, still smiling, entering the parlor. She touched a gloved finger to Lia’s chin, lifting her face. “With those eyes? I think not. Rather more a windstorm descending.”
Amalia pulled away. She glanced up at Zane-wolf-eyed, stone-faced, despite his languid tone-then grabbed his hand and held it hard.
“I want you to know,” she said quietly, “that I will do anything to protect my family. Now, or in the future. I’ll do anything at all. Remember that I warned you.”
His mouth flattened into a smile. “How charming. Perhaps you’d care to inform your father as well.” He disengaged their hands. “I believe that’s him at the window.”
And the locked shutters blocking the broken pane began to rattle and shake.
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