Cameo the Assassin (22 page)

Cameo took a step away from Kyrian.

He turned, as if he felt her go and gave her a knowing look. “Weren’t there some pressing questions?”

“No. There’s nothing.” She looked over at Jules, who was dangling from his leash.

Before Kyrian could reply, she had moved away. She walked over and stood beside the assassin. He was everything she knew, another killer like herself, and that was at least comfortable. He hung from his rope desperately, in pain, and completely miserable.

“What do you want?”

She pulled out her flask and drank from it. There was still dirt on her gloves from the burial. She brushed her hand on her leg.

“When are we leaving?”

Cameo looked at him. She suspected that he would’ve killed all of them if he had the opportunity. “Wick told you everything about me, didn’t she? I’ll bet she never told you about him. That vampire, I mean.”

He met her eyes defiantly.

“So that’s not something I would really want to get around.”

“
They
know!” He attempted to motion in the direction of the rest of the little group.

“Yeah.” She took another swig and replaced her flask.

“So we could leave now.”

She searched his face for a moment, then turned and walked away from him.

“Cameo! Cameo! Don’t leave me here!”

* * * * *

Opal finished brushing through his hair and pulled it back into a neat ponytail, affixing a large, black bow perfectly. He checked his appearance in a cracked hand mirror and sauntered from a wooded place back out into public view.

Lorelei’s eyes widened as he reappeared. He gave her a bit of a smile as he replaced his rapier in its scabbard.

Kyrian had changed back into that old, stinky set of clothing he started with. He was attempting to smooth the wrinkles when Opal graced his path. The lad almost laughed at him.

The dandy stuck his nose in the air.

Cameo was busy packing up her things when she caught a glimpse of the little group out the corner of her eye. “Here, Lorelei,” she handed her a suitcase. “I thought you wanted to bring this along.”

Opal caught her eyes for a moment; he was wearing Derbec’s clothing.

She walked back over to her things, Opal on her heels.

“Well?”

She turned around, and Opal was right behind her...posing.

“Um, very dapper.”

“Dapper? You wound me. Are you certain you don’t mean
devastating
?”

She smiled, trying not to let him see her studying his body in all that finery. “Dapper is good.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Truly Cameo, I suspect you are trying to hide your enthusiasm.”

“Oh, really?”

He searched her face. “Are you?”

She could feel his breath against her skin; it was quite intoxicating. “You smell good, too.”

“Yes?” He leaned in.

She took a sip from her flask. “I was thinking of that shrine in Lockenwood, unless you have a better idea as to where to take Kyrian and Lorelei.”

“A better idea?” He warmed. “You want my opinion? Why, I never thought I would become a partner in this arrangement.”

“Partner?”

He smiled affectionately at her. “Well, I think that shrine could be a little dicey since you were just there. I suspect they have posted a guard in that little graveyard to prevent further grave robbing.”

“Probably true.”

His eye lingered on her long blonde hair and her profile. She had her gaze completely averted, studying the ground where they had been resting.

“You were so kind to bring me Lord Derbec’s clothes,” he grinned. “Such a good fit too. Those royals have the best tailors.”

“I owed you. I got Bel murdered.”

Opal’s smile slipped. “Yes, well....”

She looked up at him, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”

“I, I think I’d better pack.” He walked away from her suddenly.

She turned and watched as he strolled away. Cameo secretly cursed herself for saying something so stupid.

“Hey, hey Cameo!” Jules called out. “You can’t leave me behind. You need me for information about Wick. You need me!”

Cameo pulled her pistol on him. “Silence.”

Jules closed his mouth obediently, then glanced down at the knot she had tied. He had been standing on the dagger Lorelei had dropped for quite a while.

She turned and found Opal, Kyrian, and Lorelei watching her, wondering if she was going to kill Jules. Cameo lowered her pistol, then motioned to them with it, “We should go.”

Up ahead there were corpses of the dead assassins that Cameo had killed, decaying in the meadow; their bodies dusted with snow.

Cameo brushed past her with Opal and the others trailing behind her.

Chapter Eleven

T
HERE WAS A DARK FIGURE
gazing down at the black waters of the Avon. At that height, it looked like a curving black ribbon, he thought as he took a step back from the tower window. Chadvick surveyed the room that Cameo had lived in at Wick’s tower for...years; he wasn’t certain quite how many exactly. He was a man in his mid-twenties himself, and he remembered his parents telling him to stay away from the tower even when he was a child. So perhaps even twenty years. He had seen her on occasion wandering through Lockenwood.

He opened up her dresser, which had a few items in it, and proceeded to tear it apart, looking for any stashed weapons or information, but there was nothing within. Chad had seen her often enough to question whether she was really human. It wasn’t just her pale eyes that made him wonder; it was the way she moved, almost too fast, too silently. She wasn’t just a powerful assassin; there was something odd going on. And he certainly had the time to ponder who she was, being that his parents had died when he was young and left him nothing but a life on the street, and the ability to watch her from the rooftops. Another gift of being penniless and hungry: great agility, which allowed him to get away with a great deal of theft. He really had the bird’s-eye view of everything going on in Lockenwood.

Chad sat down on her bed for a moment; it had been left in disarray, and he noted that there was gunpowder spilled on one of the blankets. He took it upon himself to rip the mattress apart in a quest to discover what was inside. Any clue to Cameo’s origin and the hope of possibly finding some sort of cash diminished in a rain of feathers.

He did know that Cameo liked to drink, and she had her flask refilled at the tavern at least once every day. She also spent a lot of time taking the coach out of town. Sometimes she returned by coach; sometimes she would just reappear. He assumed she took the ferry back, but now as an adult, he wasn’t so certain.

Taking a lantern with him, Chadvick poked his head into the fireplace, but it was pretty bare as well.

He fingered through the books in her bookcase, but like most everyone else in Lockenwood, he couldn’t read, so he tossed each one onto the ground after he thumbed through it, looking at the bold woodcuts.

He really envied Cameo that tower room; sleeping in a barrack with thirty bloodthirsty rogues made rest quite elusive for him. That was why he had decided to leave that night and embark on the job at hand, which was killing or capturing Cameo and bringing her, or her severed head, back to Wick. Easy enough.

* * * * *

Cameo stood just outside Toppers, a tavern at the end of Haberdasher Street in Lockenwood. From there a person could get quite a nice view of the palace, up on its hill-fort to the right, and straight down the road was the assassin’s tower sitting on the canal. She took a deep breath as she stared at Wick’s tower, now a little over a mile away, and exhaled her steamy breath into the cold air. Now that her flask had been refilled only a few minutes ago, she gulped it down without hesitation, studying the posters plastered all over the front of the inn.

The rickety door swung open.

“Whatever are you doing out here, my dear? Standing in the rain?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was deep; she seemed captivated by the wanted posters.

“Why don’t you come inside, into the ... relative warmth?” Opal said as he assessed the shanty that passed for a tavern. The large, green sign outside with the name of the place on it certainly proclaimed that Topper was at least quite proud of this endeavor into entrepreneurship.

She tilted her head to the side, then looked over at him, “Have you read these?”

“No,” he said, rain dripping from the ends of his hair. “Is there something I haven’t seen before? A fair rendering of my face, perchance?”

“No,” she smiled, “but we have been implicated in the assassination of the king.”

“What?” Opal hastened to get to the posters now. “When did this happen?”

“Something strange did happen when I was in Lockenwood talking to that
other
vampire. Maybe it happened that night.”

“You were actually here?!” he hissed.

There was no reply.

“That’s regicide. Do you know what they do to people who kill kings? We could be drawn and quartered.”

“Well,” she said, never taking her gaze from the tower, “that Francois Mond character seems to have gotten away with murder, murders really, without ever being caught.”

Opal paled.

“And he incited that whole revolution. If anyone deserves to be drawn and quartered, I suppose it’s him, and he’s pretty much gotten away with it all.” She took a sip of whiskey and added, “He’s probably sitting around the table right now with his family having a lovely dinner.”

He looked down at his newly acquired gloves. “He was a boy when that transpired; he has to be an old man by now.”

“Old?” She smiled, “Not that old. I remember when it happened—”

“Oh, you do?”

“Uhh ...,” she glanced over at him getting rained on in all of his dandy finery. “Well, certainly...I mean, I would’ve been a little girl, of course.”

“Very little.”

She grinned at him, “Yes, in the scheme of things.”

“That’s very cryptic of you.”

She caught his eye, “I would think you remembered the revolution yourself. You must’ve been...what? A teenager, right?”

“Uh, yes...yes, nearly. I think you’re aging me a bit, though. I’m going back inside for some brandy. Are you coming?”

She watched the rain running down his hair and into his face. There was a fog rising off the icy ground, capturing them there in some strangely beautiful moment. “I guess.”

Inside was a dimly lit single room. The walls were unpainted and coated in a slick black stain from pipe smoking. Cameo ordered a bottle for the table from Topper, the rather decrepit owner.

“When are we going?” Lorelei said in a hushed voice to Kyrian.

The lad looked around the little room at a few locals. “Won’t be too long.”

Her body was turned in his direction.

Opal sat down beside her with a shot glass. “The lad bothering you?”

“No,” she grumbled at him.

Kyrian looked over at Opal with a smile on his face.

“I’ll see where our dinner is.” Kyrian walked over to the makeshift bar.

Opal checked his appearance in the back of a spoon.

“Did you want some of this, Lorelei?” Cameo offered the bottle of wine, but the girl refused it. “We could leave her here. It’s fairly safe.”

“Here?!” Lorelei whispered harshly.

Cameo poured herself a drink. “We aren’t planning on dropping you off at your house.”

“Fine, leave me here.”

“We could leave Kyrian with you,” Cameo suggested.

“Great,” Lorelei said sullenly.

The assassin pulled a clay pipe from a canister at the center of the crude table. “When I was your age, my sister was murdered too—”

“Save it.”

Opal held his breath for a moment.

Cameo’s face darkened. “Sometimes it’s so hard to be a good person.”

“I don’t care. Kill me. Who cares at this point! My whole life is ruined,” she trembled.

Kyrian took a step toward the girl.

“Say away from me, you buffoon!”

Opal reached for her hand, “Please calm down, my dear—”

“And you,” she jumped back from the table. “You are all the things Bel said! Some sickly libertine—you disgust me more than that zombie!”

“Sickly libertine? Bel said that?”

“Shut up, little one,” Cameo warned.

“I hate you all!”

The crowd took their drinks and moved further from the group.

“Please, no fighting in Topper’s,” Topper pleaded.

“Yes, let’s all leave this place in one piece,” Kyrian said cheerfully to Lorelei, trying to lift her mood a bit.

“One piece?” said Topper. “I should hope so.”

“Ah, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“If you hate us so much, feel free to leave us,” Cameo opened the door for her and as she did so someone hit her in the back of the head.

Opal leapt to his feet, pistol in one hand and a rapier in the other.

There were two Association members standing over Cameo. One had his pistol aimed at Opal, and the other had his pistol resting on the side of her face.

“Come along quietly,” one said.

The dandy looked over his shoulder at Kyrian, then back at the two men. Sighing, he set the weapons on the table.

* * * * *

“Yeah, yeah, the money’s yours if you can catch up with Chadvick.”

“How much did you say was in it for us?”

“Well now, is that really important, Rance? You and Veth just kill him and you’ll be adequately rewarded.”

The back of Cameo’s head felt like it was going to explode for a moment, then she opened her eyes. She was indoors. The room around her was dark, there were animal heads hanging from the walls, and there was a great, thick smoke clinging to the antlers of these poor dead animals.

“Well, would you look at that. She really has white eyes,” one of the assassins commented.

She realized she was lounging on one of the extremely gauche couches in Wick’s office.
She was in Wick’s office?
She felt herself panicking, trying to sit up, then she fell back down again.

“Well, well, well, Cameo,” Wick readjusted her weight on the opposing couch. “I have to admit I never thought I’d find such an imposing person as yourself brought low by a mere blackjack.”