It was a laborious, wearisome and crowded day at the Crow Club. A lot of tourists from the neighbouring towns had come to explore the fancy ramshackle East Stave on a sultry, congested evening full of the fragrance of expensive alcohol swamped by the stench of post-drink regurgitation, deluged by the aroma of wild spring night-flowers.
The men in the parlour were placing bets, shuffling cards, and clanking their glasses brimming with the sloshing champagne, effervescence rising to the top, however deftly they tried to tip it in their tall slender flutes. The odds of Jesper losing his bets was down to a cold pursuit because the Jesper Fahey we met before double-crossing Jan Van Eck had burned down to bits just like the rooster they cooked in Black Veil. Wylan had assigned Jesper some paperwork that Jesper obliged to because both the smitten boys had a date at the pizzeria down Upper East Stave and Jesper was looking forward to not messing up their first actual date over an almost desperate wanting of the familiar and soothing turn of the Makker’s Wheel. He may or may not have played it once over the past week though.
Kaz had retired from ‘work’ early today. His bad leg was looking a little worse than usual; he could see a green and purple vein entwined together pulsing on his calf, the entire portion throbbing in revulsion. He made his particularly unmade bed for the first time in weeks, thankful that Jesper had taken over tonight’s stocks. Business was booming but with half of the Dregs killed or badly maimed and Inej gone, there wasn’t any crew he could put to the vacancies at the Crow Club. He sat down with a rather unnecessary plop, unable to gauge the mattress’s height now that he’d stowed away the spare sheets and lousy covers from about a year’s accumulation from his bed space. He carefully brought to level his bad leg, gave it a quick rub-down he had learned from a masseuse he’d almost nicked, but decided not to if he showed him a quick way to relieve muscular cramps.
“It’s for a friend,” he’d said.
“That friend must mean a lot to you if you’re willing to let my scrub and I go in exchange for a piece of advice.”
“Easy come, easy go, clever man,” he spat. But in his head, he thought, “Yes, a close friend indeed” then, “we’re the same entity.” The stout, burly silhouette of a man froze as if rendered motionless by Kaz’s stolen line from the ad of an Opera musical near the Church of Barter.
In the frigid, bone-chilling winter that Kerch managed to whip out every few months, neither one could help to shudder a minute or two, longing for the warmth of the fire hearth. Kerch was either six months of extreme sweat-trickling-down-your-pants hot or six months of arctic mayhem. Hard to keep up with the only two seasons the saintsforsaken town seemed to possess.
In the end, the masseuse had given up the fight, and shown him brusquely how to perform the cramp-buster stroke, that he mastered by the finale of the week.
“It was just like a magic card trick,” he thought, “but with more pressure than light-stroked finesse.”
Now, it was just as easy as picking a lock- he could do it in his dreams.
He sat like that for a long time after kneading his veins—his bad leg stretched out on the plush cushioning and the other drawn to close to his chest, his head bent on top of his knee in an attempt to summon all the heat he could from his stone-cold torso. He was scouring the rooftops of buildings for the familiar cloak of his spider, obscured from the rest of the world but him. His crow-headed crane lay beside him, tilted and monstrous in the glow of the lights pouring in from the streets down below, casting shadows over the awake and energetic city of Ketterdam.
“Come to me, Wraith,” he said aloud, as though she would materialize next to his misty contour the moment he breathed out the words.
“She will,” a reassuring voice in his head overpowered him “she will come to you, she will come to her thief and her schemer.”
Just please be safe, every nerve in his body ached with the longing.
May her saints protect her.
With this last plea that he made, to a force he didn’t believe in nor worshipped, the bastard of the barrel drifted off to sleep his head damp and cool against the icy windowpane.
