Dream Thief by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781644703519
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Chapter

Twenty

Augustus had stopped by to brief Lady Claudette and Captain Digby at their hotel before returning to his. Risky, as everything was, but he should have had that hour, assuming Marie-Rose wasn’t what she seemed on the surface.

To break character and immediately chase after a stranger named Derlyth would open her up to being caught out in her lies later, and if she was that foe that had been stalking him, he didn’t expect her to make petty mistakes now.

Thus, his companions were brought up to speed. And Lady Claudette, in her inestimable guise as Claudette Faulkner, journalist, could bring her charms and intellect to bear on tracking down one Marie-Rose Guérin for him.

That knife, as they liked to say, did cut both ways.

Thus, he sat in his room. Literature had never held any great fascination for him, as he routinely had his own adventures that met or exceeded the bounds of plausibility that might cause one to throw a book across the room in disgust.

Similarly, reading up on his primary field of interest was generally a bad idea, as passing priests might take offense. And if Revolutionary France had removed the control of the clergy on the government, they were still there dominating minds.

That left history. Even then, things were largely disappointing, as too many such books were written by men who had read other books, themselves often wrong or outdated, thus perpetuating mistakes obvious to one such as himself who had been out in the field and actually touched some of those places.

Of course, writing the authors with corrections, or worse, writing his own book, meant acknowledging that he might have been places where even today the authorities would have objections and questions.

That would never do.

Instead, he considered the lines of power and craft he had established around his room on first arrival, and then subsequently enhanced and adjusted as his time extended.

Most fools protected doors and windows, preventing them from being opened without alarms. Augustus always added boundary lines all the way around, so that someone could not conjure an esoteric eye or friend and bypass things by the simple expedient of sending them through a wall. Or floor and ceiling.

Short of destroying the hotel itself, nothing he was aware of could sneak in. Brute force was always an option, but it would leave marks, and none had.

To date, none had even suspected him sufficient to press against the outer markings with adequate force necessary to imprint a signature.

He was, he hoped, unsuspected. Certainly, the gentleman on the hill would be cross, but if he was as good as he’d seemed, as rote perhaps, then he would be chasing ghosts eastward across the Mediterranean, until Mssr. Tawfiq got back to Cairo, or wherever he was headed.

It was enough.

He noted the fading afternoon light out of the window. The rains had finally ceased, by dint of moving on to bother Italy next. Stars would rise with the moon.

He checked his wristwatch and decided that perhaps he had spent long enough hiding in his room, and that it was necessary to emerge and face his foe.

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