by Clair de Lune » Sun Mar 05, 2023 4:12 am
Clair has had an evening of it, the sun already sunk below the buildings and the sky beginning to lose the coral stain of light as she pads over rooftops to a small, unromantic shed nestled in the buildings of an industrial estate. Her fingernails are stained underneath with a deep, rusty red, the colour of blood dried hours ago. The latch on the skylight of the shack isn't even a lock - not really, not to people who know how to get in under it. Clair trips it and is inside. The only light is through the skylight itself, shining on furniture, and other oddments, all under variously yellowed tarps. She's aware that the alarm has already been tripped - though there isn't even the tiniest hum or click of a mechanism, not even to her razor-sharp hearing. The window closes behind her, but that's fine; she'll be leaving via the door anyway.
Clair pads across the floor, knowing exactly what to do in the tiny space. She whips a tarp off of a mirror, holding it bunched in a hand as a sharp, hooked point gently touches to her neck, off to the side where one of the sets of jugulars can be found. She tilts her head up, but is unmoved - blinking, purposefully, to allow the owner of the hook to manifest. "Good evening, Marcel," she says in French, by way of greeting, but she doesn't smile - the hooked point could nick her, just slightly, and she would be done forever. Marcel knew who she was, and would not strike, but still that old yearning pulled at her, that impulse to flee the trap. It would kill her, if she didn't wait thirty seconds. "Hi, Chanson," Marcel replies, dark face blank of any emotion. "I take it you have something to tell me?"
"Certainly," replies Clair, "and then I'll fuck off. But take the tool from my throat first. You know how it irks me and mine something fierce to be made to stand to still."
Obligingly, the hook leaves her throat. "Alright, then," Marcel says. "You know how it is with groundskeeping these days. Can't be too careful." He had his ways of knowing she was a real De Lune, just as someone else might have had a way to fake her face and voice.
"I'm coming to the auction. Tomorrow night. And I'm bringing a plus-one."
"You? I didn't think you'd be silly enough after the last time your coven was in Paris. Are you bringing enough to bid?"
"Not the plus-one, if that's what you're thinking. Beyond that, it's my business. That's all I wanted to tell you."
"Alright, girl. See you there, then. You won't be harmed." His face goes even blanker, featureless, his skin turning ashen as he slumps to the floor. By the time Clair turns around the body is gone, and the door is unlocked. She lets herself out, and walks as fast as is politely possible to her date with Robin. A little simple romance to take the edge off of having her life threatened might be best.
On the way, she stops to wash her nails as best she can in a fountain - the obvious scratches on her hands, abrasion like someone who scaled a rock face, bite and scratch makes like someone who toyed too closely with a cat, are harder to mask, but it doesn't matter. Robin can assume what she wants.
She splashes a little water on her face, then sits down by the fountain, head slumping as a crow takes off from the top of the ornate fountain's metal working. By the time the crow is twenty feet from the ground, Clair was never there. It only takes five minutes of flight to land on Robin's shoulder.
The bird is heavy enough to stagger her, and lands silently except for the loud rustle of feathers directly in Robin's ear, but Clair takes a second to let her recover from the shock before leaning in and opening her beak to say "Mwah," directly into Robin's ear, the high-pitched, cartoonish voice of a corvid imitating a kiss - a peck - on the cheek. When Robin looks again, the bird is gone, and Clair's hand is on her shoulder instead, the older woman standing behind her, reaching her arms over to hug her from behind. "You didn't wait long, I hope," she greets her, reaching around her to knock on the door lazily.
After a short while, an elderly woman, tall and elegant, peering down from behind square-rimmed glasses, looms out of the door at them both. "Oh, it's you," she says in French, in a voice that could have been disappointed if she didn't look so emotionless incidentally. "It's me," Clair agreed, brightly. "English, though, please. My guest has only the one language." She switches easily, and so does the woman. "Name?" she asks, looking at them both.
"Moth, both of us," Clair answers, pressing a finger gently to Robin's lips. "Don't say a word until you step through the door, okay, darling?" she asks Robin, pecking her once more on the cheek with this time decidedly more human lips. She steps around Robin, taking her hand and leading her into a closed-in room with absolutely no dust in the air at all and no sign of any air purifiers or electrical ventilation. Red curtains hang by rails about halfway down from the high ceiling on all three sides, and it can be inferred that the space behind them is actually about twice as large in all directions. Clair found this space confusing when first she entered it - now, she simply leads Robin straight ahead, through one of the sets of curtains, to sit on a couch in a tidy and more open carpeted space with a dress form standing politely in the corner. Everything is warm, soft, and scented faintly of myrrh.
"I take it you've payment for both of you?" the woman asks. Clair holds up a silver coin, too large and heavy to be any actual currency - not one that Robin knows, anyway. Embossed clearly on the surface is a too-real portrait of a man with his head between the thighs of a woman, whose own head is tilted back in obvious ecstasy. The woman plucks it from Clair's fingers, and it is gone. "That will do. And what is your name, dear?" she asks Robin, impassively but not unkindly, turning to her. Clair smiles, and squeezes Robin's hand. "It's okay," she assures her.