All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [304]
“How long have you watched?”
“Not long.” She heard his footstep approaching. “Just enough to see you finally come to your senses.”
“Sense! What do you know of sense?”
She spun, ready to confront him—but stopped . . . and had to laugh.
Henry looked ridiculous. He was dressed as an eighteenth-century French nobleman in a silver-and-black waistcoat with embroidered peacocks chasing peahens up and down the sleeves, with silver buttons, black velvet pants that tied at his calves, silver stockings and buckled shoes. Topping it all off was a ridiculous powdered wig.
Henry the Fool. He would live as a fool—continue as a fool—and one day die playing the fool.
And she loved him for it.
“I’m off to the Governor’s Ball,” he told her, with a luxuriant wave over his outfit. “It’s a costumed affair. Would you care to join me? You’re a bit underdressed, but I doubt anyone will be looking at your clothes. . . .”
“No,” she told him. “I need to think about everything you’ve told me of the twins and the Infernals and the League . . . and your plans.”
He nodded. “Thinking is overrated, darling Dallas. That’s the League’s modus operandi, not mine. I require the Dallas who acts.”
That Dallas.
He was talking about part of her she had long buried. There is no need for that creature in this world. And yet . . . if the world was ending—why not summon the demons of her past?
“Do you know what you’re doing, Henry? Really?”
“The costume ball? Oh . . . no, I see you mean that other thing. No. I don’t ‘know’ anything.” Henry sobered. “But it is my best guess.”
“It all comes down to a guess?”
Henry shrugged.
Dallas sighed, knowing her heart of hearts that she’d trust one of the Old Wolf’s guesses over any of Cornelius’s laser-precise calculations or a Council consensus engineered by Lucia.
She marched over to the wet bar.
Henry followed, helping himself to her sixty-year-old scotch.
Dallas set her hand on a black marble square. It warmed under her touch.
There was a hum and the wall parted, revealing racks of gleaming knives and swords, and the polished wooden and the blue steel of pistols and rifles.
These did not belong to the carefree hippie girl façade she had enjoyed as much as Henry had enjoyed his multitude of masks. These instruments of destruction belonged to her alter ego.
Her finger lit on of her twin gold swords—last wielded at Ultima Thule and still as sharp as the day when Audrey had given them their edges.
There were two matchlock pistols with barrels the size of her fist. Hand cannon, Aaron had called them.
It was a small collection, nothing like Aaron’s armory, but there were all dear to her, and almost every weapon here had a matching mate. Lucia was always telling her that she didn’t know her right from her left most of the time.
True enough. She was perfectly ambidextrous.
As Dallas gazed at these instruments, she grew afraid—not for herself, but for all those that she loved.
She turned back to Henry. “Are you sure? Once I start, I won’t be able to take it back. Aaron and Gilbert—they will be devastated.”
“I know they will be,” Henry whispered. He swirled scotch and peered into its depths. “I also know your aim is unerring. I’m counting on both.”
She stared at her beloved cousin, taking in every silly detail of his face. It would be the last time “Dallas” would look upon him.
She closer her eyes and turned.
When she opened them again she beheld one of the two weapons that had no mate: a bow of fused ram horns with a row of golden arrows next to it. It was deadly . . . but a relic from another Age.
She moved to its modern counterpart, forged in 1915, when she had believed the Great War might’ve been the last war on Earth. It had been centuries ahead of any other weapon constructed on this world, and even today, none was its equal. It was a matte gray bolt-action rifle with a thirty-inch barrel, a stock of fine-grained ebony (tiny snipes on the wing engraved upon it), retractable bipod, a mounted telescopic sight that could see through walls and in the dark and heat sources