Cadoville (unfinished)

Chapter XIII

If I had learned anything so far from the people around me, it was that some people carefully select their emotions like books on a shelf, while others have emotional diarrhoea. Unlike my brothers, my kind was expected to wear their emotions on their sleeves and fling them around like rose petals - my mother did precious little to contradict the stereotype.... Emotions to me were like violins or flutes - things I knew and could appreciate when others played them well but had little idea myself. So, I acknowledged them privately, bitter-tasting and often hard to swallow, that is until recently, when they began to lose their flavour....

I must have woken up four times, bad dreams breaking my sleep into un-refreshing chunks. I got up this time, and sat in the chair by my desk, staring into the mirror, the marble-faced stranger inside glaring back at me.... At least it was something a little less condemning than watching, over and over again, what I had done - almost done - just a few hours before. Watching one person kill another is very sobering.... Time sort of stands still and everything becomes so frighteningly fragile and, at the same time, insignificant.

The door clicked open behind me and footsteps ambled almost leisurely to the foot of my bed.... Heel to toe.... Heel to toe.... Deafening in my room's silence.... A clinical whiff climbed up my nose, and I found myself looking at Dr Spice's silhouette behind me in the mirror, partially illuminated by a small, fuzzy amber orb. Hovering quietly over my shoulder, he looked intrigued by what I was still wearing, holding the candle to the metal buttons on my shoulders and squinting - I hadn't got changed since getting back....

"I assume there's a good reason why you're wearing an artillery jacket...." He placed the candle on the table and ran his hands through his hair. "Has Citizeness Lucchesi joined up?"

"Xavier gave it to me...." The words slithered tentatively from my mouth. I was grateful for his hip flask, waved in front of my face. Brandy - I needed that. "They asked me to kill someone tonight...."

Dr Spice sat on the end of my bed, talking to my reflection – his face just a black smudge but his analytical eyes sparkling like cut emeralds in the darkness.

"Who?" He asked. I wasn't ready to answer, not before a bit more brandy anyway, savouring the burn and the trickle down to my belly - somewhat warming. "I'd ask you not to drink all of it..., it's rather expensive these days," he said sweetly but sharply. Then he went quiet, waiting for my answer to his question.

"Nicolas Daumont."

"The journalist?" He asked. I nodded. "Why?"

"They said he was a traitor."

Dr Spice scoffed and grumbled something sour under his breath.

"He's just pragmatic."

"He's not anything now...."

Dr Spice was stiflingly silent unless he wanted something, but I needed him to speak now more than ever to keep me in the room with him.... I felt like I was in two rooms, a bit of me still at the Hotel de Providence, with Lucie and Nicolas.... Dr Spice's eyes lined up with mine but he wasn't 'there,' rather somewhere else in the sometimes untidy labyrinth that makes up our memories. Those eyes of his – beaten and engraved with deep-reaching scars.... I knew such eyes far too well – the girl staring back at me in the mirror had them too, albeit one of the pair static and quite dead. "Gli occhi sono lo specchio dell'anima," as my mother used to say – 'see my eyes, see my soul.' "Have you ever killed anyone, Dr Spice?"

"I was a soldier..." he replied, bluntly. mother would've called that the 'coward's yes.' Armed with charm and a free-flowing bottle of red, my mother could siphon unflattering secrets out of practically anyone – my father used to say she was more efficient than a Spanish inquisitor. "Have you ever killed someone?" Asked Dr Spice, an oblique way of asking if I had ended Nicolas' life....