I’d told Darla just that, more than once, in those three days. We’d managed to have lunch again, once. She’d chided me for failing to shower her with wine and roses. I’d responded with observations that spinster bookkeepers ought to be appreciative of good Pinford ham sandwiches and ice-chilled bottles of Bottits.

She’d laughed and tossed a pickle at me. And then we’d kissed, and kissed again, until the waiter at the Sidewalk Cafe had issued a discreet cough so he could refill our glasses.

We’d held hands, like school kids, and we’d walked in circles around the Velvet, waving at Hooga as we passed. He’d looked the other way when I picked a fireflower for Darla. She kissed me again, and showed me a hidden alcove where the Velvet’s gardeners hid to take naps.

About that, I will say no more.

I grinned at the memory and eased further back into the well-cushioned seats of Evis’s carriage.

At that moment, we rattled past the Velvet. I pushed the window-curtain open wide just to see if Darla was out on the street, or at the Sidewalk Cafe.

She was nowhere in sight. Sharp-eyed Hooga, still on his stoop, dipped his eyes as I passed. I thought of ogre-hash and Martha Hoobin and felt a small pang of guilt.

I let the curtain fall and sighed. Three days, done and gone. Three days of stalking and talking, but if I’d managed to terrify any Hands of the Holy, I’d also failed to see any evidence of such terror. My final four Cleansing priests had shown the same measure of disinterest before they’d heard Hisvin’s name, and similar levels of apprehension afterwards. All had denied ever seeing or Cleansing the combs. All had denied the combs bore the invisible but unmistakable mark of a Cleansing.

That lack of the elusive holy mark was proving worrisome. Evis had seemed so certain about the Cleansing-but what if Evis’s wand waver was simply wrong?

I scowled at passers-by, in fine old rich coot style, and mulled that over. If the combs had no link to the Church, then Martha Hoobin was dead, plain and simple.

I shoved the thought aside. “Can’t be wrong,” I muttered. Evis could afford the best wand-waving money could buy. If he said the combs had received a Church-style Cleansing, then they had done just that.

Priest or acolyte, sorcerer or sweeping man-someone wearing the black robes of the Church had arranged for a box or two of middling good trinkets to be wiped clean of their provenance, just so someone like Mama couldn’t fix their back-street Sight upon a comb and start mumbling things about cassocks and red masks.

Maybe an apprentice did a quick and dirty version of the Cleansing, omitting the much-vaunted holy affluence. Or maybe one of the Hands I’d just spoken to did so, in the unlikely prospect that someone like me came calling.

Evis and I were betting that the combs themselves were a casual acquisition. They’d been seized at an excommunication, bought at an estate sale or picked up for a few gold jerks in the shadows down at the docks. In any case, we were betting that our man knew little, if anything, about the combs and their history.

But he’d be wondering now, if we were right. Wondering and pacing and ruing the day he bought the awful things. Oh, he’d check my story, starting with my association with Encorla Hisvin. That confirmed, if he bothered, he’d learn that Gantish cargo barges sink all the bloody time, and that half of them are named “Embalo”, which is Gantish for “unsinkable”, and that tracing the mere existence of such a vessel might take weeks, if indeed it could be done at all.

I leaned back. Like all the best lies, mine was a careful blend of half-truth and outright misdirection. It would hold, for a short time.

Time enough for panic to take root and bloom. Time enough to let the name Encorla Hisvin rise up and crash down and squeeze them like a vise.

Evis and I were betting fear would be sufficient to scare the truth out of our mark, priest or not. After all, that was the best course, when piloting past a creature like Encorla Hisvin. He didn’t want the combs, specifically. Since all he wanted to know was where they came from, why not tell him?

Tell him where, and when, and by whom. Better to tell him, than to have him find out, because he might then discover other things-things about the warehouse on Gentry, for instance. Things about dead prostitutes, shallow graves and new moons. Things even Hisvin the Corpsemaster might not choose to ignore.

That was my master plan. Because it didn’t matter to us where the combs came from. All that mattered was who had them.

I pulled off my hat, smoothed down my hair and spent a moment hoping my own life never hung by such a thin and twisted thread.

By the time Halbert pulled the carriage to a gentle halt at my curb, Darla was gone. She’d left me a sandwich and a big red Crump Valley apple, and Mama was shoving them both at me before I was halfway to my door.

“Boy,” she said, eyeing Halbert, who doffed his hat to her as if she were a queen before setting the ponies to a trot. “Miss Tomas left you this. Where you been? She waited half the day.”

“Miss Tomas?” I asked, fumbling with my lock.

“Miss Darla, then.” She followed me inside, put the sandwich and the apple down carefully on my desk. “Though you ought to call her Miss Tomas all polite-like. Manners wouldn’t hurt you none.”

I sidled around Mama, pulled off my shoes, hung up my hat and my coat.

“Look, Mama, it’s been a long day. I’m tired. Say what you want to say and get it over with. It’s bad manners to overstay one’s welcome.”

Mama pulled back a chair and sat. I didn’t like the way she was eyeing me. I could tell she was deciding what and how much of a thing to tell me, and what parts to leave out.

I picked up the sandwich. Mama cleared her throat.

“Ethel Hoobin says he’ll have the men you need, when you need them. I got a hex brewin’ next door. You tear it anywhere in town, and I’ll know it.”

I swallowed. “Good. What else?”

She glared. “I still don’t feel right about this, boy. I tell you, something ain’t right.”

“I won’t argue that.”

She sighed. “Miss Darla had news for you.”

“I’m waiting.”

“Said she found a man in the Park that remembered seeing Martha Hoobin.”

I put down Darla’s sandwich. It was good, better than anything Eddie ever made. But the way Mama refused to meet my eyes was putting me off my food.

“And?”

“Said the man remembered seein’ Martha with a man.” She looked up at me. “Tall, thin man. Don’t know no name. But he was there, with Martha. More than once.”

The Park. I’d been there. I’d asked. No one had seen.

But I’m not Darla, don’t have, won’t ever have, those big brown eyes.

“Who-” I began.

“She told me to tell you to talk to a man named Young Varney. Said she told him you’d be around askin’.” Mama shook her head. “Boy, I tell you plain I feel death, just outside your door, right this minute.”

“Mine?”

“Who else’s?” she spat back. “Ain’t there no other way you can do this?”

“No. No other way. Not now. And anyway, Mama, you said yourself your Sight is fuzzy these days. I still think you’re just putting your head too close to the hex-pot you’ve got brewing next door.”

“Maybe.” She sighed. “Anyways, I reckon it won’t do no good to ask you if you’ll take something I’ll give you, when you go out.”

“If I take it, will you go on home?”

“I’ll go,” she replied.

What the hell, I thought. When you’re mixing and mingling with vampires after dark, a clove of garlic discreetly tucked away in one’s breast pocket might not be a bad idea.

“Here,” she said, rising. She put her hand out on my desk, closed but palm-up, and opened it.

She held a tiny silver image of the Angel Malan, wings outspread, hands upraised and clasped to a fine-wrought silver chain.