The first thing to do when you wanted information was to ask. Nicely, if possible. I stood and faced her. “You said you had a bounty on the priest, but that ‘I’d do.’ Father Columban said that all three of us were in danger.” I gestured to include Rick, and asked, “Why?”
She actually answered, in clipped words. I couldn’t place her accent. “He was a traitor. Like him. Like you.”
“A traitor?” I said, indignant. “I’m not a traitor, I haven’t betrayed anyone—”
“A bounty,” Rick said, interrupting. “Placed by whom? Whom do you serve?”
She bared her teeth—straight, white, normal. I expected them to be sharpened, vicious. She gave the impression of laughing at us and said nothing.
“Did Roman send you?” I asked. “Dux Bellorum, Gaius Albinus?” He probably had a dozen other names I didn’t know.
Now she did laugh, a short and mirthless sound. “Idiots.”
“If not him, then who?” I said. Pleading.
“You know so little,” she said, showing her teeth again.
“Then tell me. Educate me. What are we up against here?”
She said, “I was sent by the one who commands Dux Bellorum.”
I tilted my head, as if that would help me hear better, though I’d heard her perfectly well. “And who is that?” I said.
Rick answered me: “Dux Bellorum is the general. The one who leads the army. Not the one who rules the nation. That would be Caesar.”
I stared at Rick. I had never considered such a proposition, and now it rattled in my brain like bells. Church bells, sonorous, tolling doom.
Hardin was getting frustrated. “You still haven’t said if I can arrest her or not.”
“No,” Cormac said. “I don’t think you can.”
“Well, I can’t condone killing her if that’s your other option.”
“You don’t kill something like this,” Cormac said. “You banish it.”
“Then you know what she is?” I said, my ears still ringing. Who was Caesar?
“Demon,” Cormac said, which I’d already known—
I heard the wind before I felt it, a sucking noise, a single, powerful blast of air. The oily vortex reappeared. Narrow this time, it focused on a point—on the woman in leather. She braced against her bindings and tilted her head back.
Dust and debris smacked my face, but I didn’t want to turn away. The tornado shrank, closing the demon in its circle, sucking black smoke into the ground. She opened her mouth, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or screaming. The vortex collapsed, taking her with it, wind, dust, smoke, and demon, all of it falling into the ground, to nothing. The firelit ribbons that had bound her fell to the sidewalk, then turned to ash and scattered.
The air fell still, dust and smoke vanished. She was gone. My nose itched with the smell of soot.
Hardin spoke first. “What happened?” She looked around, not questioning anyone in particular.
I looked at Cormac. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Cormac said.
“Yes you did, something happened—”
“That wasn’t me. Something yanked her back before I could do anything.”
“Yanked her back? What? To where?” I asked.
“To wherever she came from. I don’t know.” Turning away, he rubbed his forehead, like he had a headache. I know I did.