“The pregnancy test?” I needled him.
“Yeah, that.” He slipped a cardboard box into my hand.
“I suppose I should go find out if I’m going to be a mother,” I said, staring at the shadowy box in the dark.
“Karthik says there’s a private bathroom in the corner of the office,” he said, pointing to a door built into the wood paneling at the far end of the room, behind the desk and next to the window. It was almost unnoticeable, just beside what I now knew to be the old Primus’s secret room.
“Thanks,” I said. “I could use a little privacy right now.”
“Sure thing,” Breandan said with a nod. “I’ll leave you be.”
“Why are you still here?” I asked his retreating back.
He paused before turning to me. “I told you, I’m sticking by my guardian angel to the end of this thing.”
“The end of this thing could likely mean your death,” I said, looking into the dark lines around his face. The shadows in the office were concealing him well; I couldn’t really see what he was thinking, his expression. “You can’t tell me a lone wolf like you wants to go down swinging with the whole team.”
“Ah, no,” he agreed, “that’s pretty low on my list of priorities, actually.”
“So why not just … disappear?” I asked. “You seem like the kind of guy that’d be good at that.”
He gave me a nod, like he’d expected this question. “You know, it’s a funny thing. You ever have a best friend?”
“Sure,” I said quietly.
“See, so did I. Great girl, she was a Siren-type, if you know what that is?” He waited for me to react, and when I didn’t, he went on. “Sweetest talker you ever met. When she spoke to a man, she could wrap him around her finger as easy as you could beat the crap out of a person. That was her power. Could sing and lure a man to his destruction—or not,” he said with an easy grin that was visible even in the dark. “We met when we were kids, at the cloister up in Connacht,” he said, and there was a dripping of dread as he said it.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh …”
“She wasn’t there,” Breandan said, shaking his head. “Everyone we knew, everyone we grew up with, they were there, but not her. She was here in London with me. But see, we were on a train together in the tube. I was doing my routine, and she was doing hers. She’d distract the men, and I’d rob ’em. It was a shuffle. Except something went wrong.”
I could almost see the flickering lights of the train as he said it.
“We got separated,” he went on. “Normal enough. The way we’d work, sometimes you had to duck onto a train at the last second, sometimes you’d have to duck off one to avoid suspicion. I got off the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road. Had to, I’d nicked a fat purse and I had a feeling my luck was about to run out because I was giving it everything I had just to get the doors to open a second early. I locked eyes with her as I got off the train. It happened sometimes, just a hazard of the business. We’d always meet up at the end of the day, back at the flat.” His face went dull. “She never came back. Wholly unlike her. I knew something’d happened.”
“When was this?” I asked, the quiet almost oppressive as it hung in the office’s stale, musty air. My office, now.
“About a week before I met you,” he said. “I’d been looking every day, see.” He paused. “I knew … knew there was something wrong. Knew she was … gone … before you ever said anything about an extinction.” He nodded in the dark, his head bobbing up and down slightly, as if he had no control over it. “When those blokes with the guns burst through the door of my flat, I just thought maybe my time had come up, too. Figured it wasn’t coincidence, you know? When you put ’em all out, I knew it wasn’t luck, either.” He lifted his hand and squeezed a tight fist. “Not sure I’d much believe in luck if I couldn’t toss it out as easily as I do.”
I felt like an idiot, totally dumbstruck. “I’m sorry, Breandan.”
“Not your fault,” he said with a light shrug. “So, anyway, that’s why I’m not running. She was bloody grand at escaping, a natural, could talk herself out of any trouble she ever got into. Got herself out of more tight squeezes than anyone I’ve known, myself included. If she couldn’t outrun these bastards …” I couldn’t see his eyes burn in the dark, but I could just about imagine it, “… then I don’t think any running I could manage would get me clear of them. Having met Weissman, I know they’re the sort that are bound to hunt you until they catch you. Until they kill you.”