She looked at the silhouette of the ravaged tree line as she tried to formulate how she should answer. Eva was quick and clever. Even now some part of the other woman had to be whispering, What is she? What? And running through all the possibilities in her mind.
“The problem is that people talk,” she murmured. “One person might swear that they’ll keep a secret, but then they tell their best friend just one thing. ‘I trust you not to tell anyone,’ they say. ‘Oh, I promise, I won’t,’ their best friend says. And everybody is quite sincere at the time. Then the best friend tells someone else. Someone they trust. Someone who says, ‘I promise, I won’t say a word.’” She laughed, the sound abrupt and humorless. “You know I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t done that very thing myself and had it backfire on me. Now I’m mated to one of the most visible figures in the world. The gryphons know what I am, along with several of the Elves. Fuck, don’t even get me started on the Elves. I have no idea how many of them know.”
A hand settled on her back. “You keep getting your fancy knickers in a twist, don’t you?” Eva said. Her voice was gentle, even after everything that had happened.
Pia turned her head. The shock had eased somewhat from the other woman’s face. “He will kill you if you breathe a word of what you saw. He will kill you if you even think of breathing a word.” He probably would have killed Eva already if Pia hadn’t stopped him. All because he had been preoccupied, and she had gotten careless. She said, “And I don’t want your life on my conscience.”
Eva gave her a crooked smile. “I’m not going to say anything, Pia, and not because the Old Man scared me shitless, even though he did. I’m not going to say anything because you’re ours to defend. Besides, I owe you for Johnny’s life.”
She shrugged irritably and grimaced. “Nobody owes me anything.”
The other woman chuckled. It sounded indulgent. Then Eva sobered. “You realize, don’t you, that the others know you did something important, even if they don’t quite know what it is. And I think Johnny’s been too busy to really think about what happened, but sooner or later he’ll remember and get to wondering.”
“He was passed out by the time I did anything,” Pia said.
“He’ll remember being wounded.”
She blew out a heavy sigh and looked at the tragedy outside again. “Yeah, I guess we all remember when that happens.”
“I guess we do.”
Pia thought of the Elves that Dragos had gone to examine. She wondered how bad off they were, and what Dragos would find out. If he could do anything for them. He was not a healer, but he was probably the world’s foremost expert on beguilement.
Her eyebrows rose. Maybe he could beguile Eva into forgetting what she saw. He had tried to beguile Pia more than once, but it hadn’t stuck. What if, for whatever reason, it didn’t stick on Eva either? Then Eva might feel betrayed and resentful, and that was never a good combination in someone when you needed them to keep a secret.
Maybe it was smartest to just trust her, but damn, that was another uncertain road to travel. She tapped the glass a few more times. Maybe she had better think about it some more and talk to Dragos later.
In the meantime, he had given her good advice.
She said, “I’m so hungry I could eat my boots.”
Eva stirred. “We better get some food to that baby before he chews a hole in you.”
“There’s a concept I could have lived without,” Pia muttered.
A vision of the baby monster breaking out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien came to mind. Yeah, she needed that image to stick with her for the rest of this long, weird pregnancy like she needed another hole in her head.
Eva went into the common room. Pia dug through her pack for the handful of soy protein bars she always carried with her, then she joined the other woman. She settled at one end of the couch while Eva brought her a bowl of nuts and fresh fruit from table by the window. After plowing through several protein bars, most of the nuts and half the fruit, she was finally able to make herself stop.
Eva ate a couple of MRE meals she carried in her own pack. Even though they had taken pains to keep their conversation low, somehow the others sensed that it was okay to reappear. They did so quietly, bringing their own supplies of food to eat.
Then the door to the apartment opened, and Hugh walked in.
He said, “Hey, kids.”
“Yes!” Andrea leaped across the room to smack both his upheld hands and throw her arms around him. Johnny leaped on the pair, and all three staggered, laughing.
James grinned, and Eva said, “Good job, bucko.”
The gargoyle shrugged loose of Andrea and Johnny, walked over to Pia and dropped her cell phone into her hands. His plain, bony face crinkled in a smile. “I don’t mind telling you, answering that phone when the Old Man called was one of the braver things I’ve done. He did not like the sound of my voice coming over on your frequency.”
It was just a phone. See, like she said. Biggest psycho of them all.
“Thank you, Hugh,” Pia said.