Chapter 19 - Montparnasse
We need to talk. It was strange, how four words could be strike terror into someone's heart like a knife of ice.
"Who wrote that?" Lucius asked after a moment of stunned silence. "And how?"
Unable to think of anything to say, Dani shrugged, still staring at the message in mingled horror and amazement.
"I'll call Helena," she said at last. She might not like the vampire much, but in this case at least her help was needed.
"Please don't," a distinctly male, and strangely accented, voice said.
Dani screamed. So did Lucius, who jumped so violently he knocked his chair over with a resounding thud. There was promptly a series of startled exclamations from the room beneath, followed by footsteps pounding up the stairs and Hazel bursting in the door, Dandelion, Helena and Claude behind him.
"What's going on? Why did you scream?" Hazel demanded, helping his now-younger twin up.
"My fault, I'm afraid," the voice replied.
This time, the speaker saw fit to let them see him. Lounging on the windowsill was a tall, thin man wearing a black suit and a black top hat, with green eyes and garishly red hair a shade lighter than Helena's. In less time than it takes to blink, two guns and a scythe that looked like it was made out of bones were aimed at his head. If he was at all fazed, he didn't show it.
"What sort of welcome is that?" he asked.
"Who are you?" Hazel said coldly, keeping his gun pointed at him with one hand while making surreptitious gestures to Lucius and Dani to get out with the other.
They both ignored him.
"That's what you might call a hard question to answer. I've had many names, but at present I'm known as Montparnasse."
Helena muttered something about idiots who named themselves after streets. Dani ignored her, mostly because she hadn't a clue what she meant.
"Why are you here?" Lucius piped up. "And how did you cover a window with frost in August?"
Under other circumstances, Dani would have thought that was a very odd question. After all, there were more important things to worry about - like the fact that the intruder had a gun at his side. But as things were, this whole situation was so strange that she hardly noticed it.
"It's not frost, it's dry ice." That hardly cleared things up for Dani, or Claude either, but the vampires seemed to understand, so she dismissed it as yet another thing that could wait until later. "And I'm here because I want to talk to you. Preferably, without weapons aimed at me."
"We'll put our weapons down if you put yours down," Helena said.
YOU ARE READING
10:30, The Day Before Yesterday
Fiksi Ilmiah~ SEQUEL TO Cross ~ Something strange is going on in New York. First, the robbery of twenty tonnes of fireworks leaves the police baffled. Now, someone is kidnapping and brutally murdering teenage girls. The only clue they have is a sentence one of...
