Chương 190: Act 3, Chapter 42: Slow pursuit

Day in the story: 15th January (Thursday), nightime Elle Erikson"Henri? That's a lovely name," I said, managing to draw even more of his attention. Misleading people wasn't something I took any special pleasure in, but given my situation, and Alexa's natural talent for this sort of thing, I decided to rely on her people skills for the moment.

"And what would be yours?" he asked.

"Elle," I replied with a small smile.

"Are you from around here?" I stood up, my body shaking for a moment under the stress before I managed to steady myself. He rushed forward to support me, but I waved him off with a quick gesture of disapproval.

"Born and raised here, in Paris," he said, stopping himself once he noticed the signal. He pronounced the city's name in smooth, effortless French. It sounded nice. We began walking slowly along the riverbank. I noticed the man with the camera again, the same one I had seen earlier. He stood farther ahead, still taking pictures of the city at night.

"Where are you from? England?" Henri asked.

"From York. But the more recent version," I answered, watching a flash go off ahead of us. The photographer stood maybe fifty yards away. Or meters, rather. I should probably switch to metric while I was here. Close enough either way.

"You don't look American."

"Is there a look to us? I'd say we have a pretty diverse ethnic mix," I replied, a bit taken aback. The comment sounded vaguely racist.

"I did not mean to offend," he said quickly.

"And I did not mean the look itself. I meant the way your people usually talk and behave."

"Which is?"

"You tend to be loud, bold, expressive. Which you personally are not."

"Maybe I am, but not during the night, and not after fainting just a few minutes ago. It's hard to live up to expectations under those circumstances."

"You are funny," he said with a forced laugh. He was direct in his approach, yet something about his body language felt off. A little too rehearsed. The sort of thing Jessica might do, though we were far better at it. He stepped a bit closer, trying to create a sense of intimacy.

"What do you do for a living?" I asked, sidestepping slightly and continuing the walk.

"I am a project manager," he said, "but also an art enthusiast." The last part carried a strange emphasis. It might have been his accent, but it still struck me as suspicious.

"I won't lie," I replied.

"I have no interest in projects. The art part, though, that sounds intriguing."

"For such a lovely woman like yourself, it doesn't surprise me at all." So it was flirtation. I wondered how much truth there was behind it while keeping my attention on the photographer, who had drawn much closer to us. He was staring at the screen of his camera, moving his fingers across it.

"What kind of art?" I asked Henri, though my eyes stayed on the other man. His hand shimmered faintly. The light never fully formed, as if restrained or weak. Still, it was unmistakable. Shadowlight.

"Oh, surrealism is the best," he began.

"It's like trying to capture dreams themselves and bring them into reality." He stopped walking and turned toward me, forcing me to do the same simply by the momentum of the moment.

"It's like if I tried to capture your beauty. I would have to make it surreal, because it cannot truly be recreated. It exists only in a the time like this."

"That's nice," I said, dismissing the attempt as I turned slightly away from him.

"Any favorite artists?"

"Salvador Dalí, of course. I've always admired the symbolism in The Persistence of Memory, where the melting clocks represent Einstein's theory of relativity. I often come back to that masterpiece in moments like this, when time slows down and magic happens." What an… I thought, stopping myself before finishing the sentence. Persistent he was. That much was true.

"Would you like to get educated before I tell you to get lost?"

"Whaaat?" he stretched the word, sounding almost childish. He was clearly caught off guard.

"That explanation you gave is a common myth. Dalí himself said the clocks were inspired by melting Camembert cheese and nothing more. Relativity of time would suggest there's some gravity between us, an attraction that works both ways. That's false too. Please don't pretend to know anything about art. If you want to impress people, pick a subject you actually understand." He just stood there, stunned.

"Bitch," he muttered, taking a few steps away before turning back.

"You could have had fun tonight. Your loss." He pointed toward his crotch with both hands, as if presenting the greatest wonder in existence. I waved him off. At that same moment, the small tree beside me grew a few inches. Centimeters, I corrected myself. I would not have noticed it at all if not for the sp-eye-der nested on my neck, peeking out from under the scarf. I sat down on the nearest bench, watching the Seine with my human eyes while the tattooed spiders kept observing the magician to my right.

Alexandra May While Gert was fighting her way through Ideworld and Elle was finding her way around Paris, I worked in the Art Palace in a way that felt completely, utterly crazy. The time-dilating track from the Interstellar soundtrack played on repeat while the card beside me pretended to be a Bluetooth speaker. Each time the full cycle began, I fed it my Authority, turning the area into a bubble of slowed time. Yes, you heard it right—slowed damn time!

Inside the sphere, which stretched about thirty feet across, everything felt perfectly normal as I painted the figure of Alex Weatherlight. Outside, however, Anansi's spider body played with Liora, and the two of them looked as if they were moving at least twice as fast as they should. [From here it looks like you are the one slowed down.] Ani sent the thought. Understanding her speech across the temporal membrane was difficult, nearly impossible. It made sense, though.

And even if I was using the power just for fun right now, it clearly had the potential to become the strongest ace up the sleeve I possessed. I laughed to myself, the way any perfectly sane person does when considering her own godlike abilities. Then I finished applying the base layer of Alex's skin. He would be Caucasian, like me.

Freckled too, dotted across his face and shoulders the same way mine were, because it felt right for him to resemble me as closely as possible, even if the gender difference set us apart. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. His short mohawk I painted a simple brown, just like my own hair, but streaked with deep dark green for a bit of punkish flair. That suited him. There would be scars on his body as well. Many of them. Cuts from various blades.

A clean through-and-through mark from a gunshot he had taken earlier in his life. And a burn starting on his left cheek and running down along the same arm. The burn was there because I was playing with fire with this identity, and I preferred that the damage had already happened. The blade scars were meant to support the story that he was a master of the Domain of Blades whenever he was not pretending to be someone else. The gunshot scar existed for a simpler reason.

I had been shot once near my collarbone, long ago, when I was dressed as a man. When I pretended to be one just like him. It felt good to release him from the confines of my mind and place him into something close to life. Even if the freezes still came from time to time. Even if my thoughts kept drifting toward Gertrude's and Elle's adventures, toward the Rhythm, Eveline, Nick's coming return, and Peter's absence. There was a lot on my plate. At least this time I wasn't the only one invited to the table.

Elle Erikson The man I watched in real time, unlike Alexa with all her tricks, was so absorbed in what he was doing that he didn't notice me observing him. He kept using his magic without a pause, completely unfazed by my presence. The problem was that I had no clear idea what he was actually doing, and I wasn't sure whether I even wanted to find out. Part of me preferred to stick to the plan. Find a hotel or an apartment, call it a night, and deal with everything in the morning.

As I weighed those options, the scales kept tipping toward leaving. Then he tipped them the other way. Why? He teleported across the Seine. He set the camera on a timer to take a selfie, adjusted something on the screen, and a moment later it looked as if the space around him simply snapped. Something pulled him out of the spot where he stood and dropped him on the opposite bank. I quickly pulled one of my paper birds from the bag, fed it a thread of Authority with a flick of my will, and sent it after him.

The man seemed finished with this place and started walking away at a brisk pace. As the little bird crossed the Seine, I used it as an anchor and forced the world to pull me toward its position. The moment I landed, I slipped closer to the wall of a building, hiding in its shadow as much as the city lights allowed. The man moved quickly. My bird followed. And I tracked them both as best as I could. This was a chase with very low stakes.

He wasn't in a hurry, and my flying paper-folded friend had a clear view of him the entire time. The part of the city we moved through wasn't as deserted as the riverbank either. We passed plenty of people along the way—mostly young ones who, despite the fairly chilly weather, had decided that nightlife was worth the occasional shiver. I liked it. It made me feel energized in my pursuit, even though each step remained slow. Soon I abandoned any effort to stay hidden.

Either the man was fully aware he was being followed and was a fantastic actor, or he simply didn't care. The third option was that the opposite was true and he had not even once stopped to consider that someone might be tracking him. I took it as an opportunity to relax and watch the city, which despite its love for art still felt like a blank canvas in many places. The facades of the buildings were beige or white in countless shades.

Streets were either very clean or littered with trash—empty cans and bottles, sometimes even discarded clothing. It all depended on how close you were to bus stops, clubs, or pub entrances. It was one such entrance that swallowed my target whole. Birdy settled on a lamppost outside a pub called Le Coq Rouge. I didn't wait long before going in, weaving between overly drunk men gathered near the front. It was loud inside, but intimate at the same time.

Soft lighting illuminated booths with leather sofas and wooden tables. There was a bar as well, with stools and a group of people glued to the screens replaying some kind of soccer match. They shouted, laughed, and chanted songs. My many eyes scanned the room quickly and found the photographer. He had taken a seat in one of the booths and reached for his phone. I approached, pulling one of the eye-cards from my pocket and feeding it a thread of magic.

As I passed his table, I let it slip from my fingers in such a way that it drifted underneath the booth. It would let me hear him. I moved farther inside and took a solitary seat at a small two-chair table. I perched there, placing a cushion behind my lower back. From that vantage point I could watch him as much as I wanted, while the card carried his voice to me. A perfect setup. I decided to use that time to sketch him in the sketchbook I carried, both to make myself look busy and to train my skills. He had…

interesting features, to put it kindly and generously. I started with what was the crown jewel of his face—the nose. Hooked like the beak of an eagle, it curved forward with unapologetic confidence, just a little too long and a little too prominent for the rest of his features. It dominated the center of his face so thoroughly that the eye naturally gravitated toward it first and only later wandered elsewhere. It was the sort of nose caricature artists would exaggerate without needing to change much.

His hair was a wild cluster of tight black unruly curls that suggested stubborn genetics or a lifelong refusal to negotiate with combs. They contrasted sharply with skin so pale it looked almost paper-white under the warm lights. His eyes were slightly too large and bulged just enough to give him a constant expression of alert curiosity. They were brown, warm in color but restless, flicking between the screen of his phone and the door every few seconds.

Under them were faint purple shadows, as if sleep and he had been avoiding each other lately. A few days' worth of mustache hovered uncertainly above his lip. The hairs were thin and uneven, growing in scattered patches that made it look less like a deliberate style and more like a hesitant experiment. Despite all that, he had a kind smile. It softened everything—the bulging eyes, the dramatic nose, even the awkward mustache.

It gave the impression of someone earnest, someone whose face might be unusual but whose intentions were easy to trust. This could be genuine, but also dangerous. He smiled often too, especially as he scrolled through whatever it was on his phone. Messages perhaps, or photographs. Every now and then the corners of his mouth twitched upward as if he had stumbled upon something amusing.

About ten minutes after claiming his spot, he suddenly stood up with the kind of expressive enthusiasm that suggested his patience had finally been rewarded. He waved energetically toward the entrance as a group of people made their way inside. A young woman led the group. She was a bit overweight, her figure soft and full but in kind of natural rather than neglected way. Thick thighs pressed against the fabric of her jeans as she walked, and her stomach curved gently beneath a loose sweater.

Her chest was generous, the fabric stretching slightly across her breasts as she moved. Her hair was bright ginger and impossible to ignore under the lights. It fell loosely past her shoulders, its copper tones contrasting with her pale, freckled skin. The freckles were scattered generously across her cheeks and nose but more sparsely everywhere else. Her eyes were green, bright and lively, and her cheeks were round and slightly flushed from the cold outside.

Behind her came a man who looked like he had been assembled from dense blocks of muscle. He was short but bulky, his torso thick and compact like a barrel. Despite the mass of his muscled frame, his movements were surprisingly fluid. He walked with the controlled balance of someone used to physical exertion—someone who knew exactly where his weight was at every step. His hair was probably blonde, though it was cut so short it barely qualified as hair at all.

The tight military-style cut left most of his scalp visible. His eyes—either blue or gray from the distance—sat beneath a heavy brow, and his jaw was wide and square enough to look carved from stone. Yet his smile softened that rough structure completely. It was wide, open, almost boyish and a stark contrast to the otherwise rugged architecture of his face. The last pair stood out immediately, their dark skin catching the warm light in rich, deep tones.

Both were tall—at least 185 cm, perhaps taller—and moved with the confidence of people accustomed to their height and presence. The woman was slender, almost wiry, with long limbs and a posture that made her look ready to spring into motion at any moment. There was something graceful and alert about her, like an antelope pausing before a sudden run. Her deep brown hair had been braided into an intricate pattern that wrapped across her scalp in looping paths.

Her face was smooth and slightly elongated, elegant in shape. High cheekbones caught the light, and her brown eyes had a calm, focused intensity that made her gaze seem very serious rather than casual. Beside her walked the last man. He was tall like her but built in entirely different manner. Where she was light and narrow, he was broad and powerful. His shoulders filled the space beneath his coat, and the thickness of his arms was visible even through layers of winter clothing.

The strength in his body showed in subtle ways too—in the weight of his steps and in the relaxed heaviness of his posture. His head was clean-shaven, the smooth curve of his scalp catching the light. The only hair he wore was a thick beard along his jaw, dark brown and carefully braided into short, neat strands. It framed his face and gave him an almost regal look. His deep and steady eyes were brown as well, and when he smiled it carried the quiet warmth of someone comfortable in his own presence.

"Bastien, you ugly bastard!" the last man shouted in perfect British English toward the photographer, grabbing his arm in a friendly gesture and pulling him in for a hug.

"Where in merciful Reality is this dead god you were talking about?" His voice rang with a strong, deep bass.