Her voice trailed off and she backed away as a tall, red-haired woman walked out of the storeroom.
The stranger was oddly familiar, but Rolanda couldn’t immediately place where she knew her from. She seemed to be in her early thirties and stood a few inches taller than Rolanda. She had a striking figure and carried herself with a stately grace. Her solemn grey eyes were the same color of the calf-length gown she wore over a rust underskirt.
“I ... I know you,” Rolanda said, as recognition finally dawned on her. “You’re the reading woman from the other painting.”
The stranger smiled. “Indeed. And from your greeting I take it you’ve already met Cosette.”
“That’s who I thought you were.”
Rolanda couldn’t stop herself from staring at the woman. She’d accepted the existence of numena, been witness to their ability to appear and disappear at will, but she still wasn’t quite used to having a conversation with someone who had just stepped out of a painting. She didn’t think she ever would.
“Where is Cosette?” the woman asked.
Rolanda gave her an apologetic shrug. She had the sudden uncomfortable sensation of having been entrusted with someone’s child and then simply letting her run off, unattended.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “She went off with Alan and Marisa—do you know them?”
“I’ve ... heard a great deal concerning Alan.”
“And I guess Marisa’s his girlfriend.”
The woman smiled. “That must have been a grave disappointment for Cosette. She was quite taken with him.”
“So I noticed.”
“And where did they go?”
“Ah ...” Rolanda cleared her throat, her uneasiness returning. “They went off to deal with Rushkin.
He’s—”
“I know who he is all too well.” The woman sighed. “And she promised me she’d be careful.”
“I tried to stop them,” Rolanda began.
The woman raised a hand to forestall an explanation. “You’re not to blame. Cosette only listens to reason when it suits her.” She shook her head and gave Rolanda a self-deprecating smile. “I suppose I’m far more protective of her than I should be. While she looks like a child, I don’t doubt she’s as old as you and certainly capable of accepting responsibility for her actions.”
“But still,” Rolanda said.
“But still,” the woman agreed. “I can’t help but worry. Especially at a time such as this.”
“If I can help ... ?”
The woman glanced back toward the storeroom. “You seem to have already done what I came to do. John sent word that we should all guard our own gateways because the dark man’s creatures were abroad again, hunting us.”
“The dark man? You mean Rushkin?”
“I refuse to allow him the privilege of a name,” the woman said bitterly. “Monsters such as he forgo that right through their actions.”
A monster, Rolanda thought. And she’d just let the others go off to confront him. Why hadn’t she gone with them and helped? But if she had gone with them, Rushkin’s numena would have gotten away with stealing the paintings and then where would Cosette and the reading woman be?
“And John?” the woman asked. “Do you know his whereabouts?”
Rolanda shook her head. “I never got the chance to meet him. He went ahead of the others—after Rushkin. Hopefully they caught up with him.”
An odd sound came from the storeroom—a soft whufting cough of air being displaced. As the two women turned to look, Rolanda’s grip tightened on the baseball bat she was still holding at her side. But this time it was Cosette who had materialized there in the dark. She stood in front of her painting for a long moment, then slowly turned to face them.
“John’s dead,” she said as she walked out into the light.
She looked different from the last time Rolanda had seen her. Her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red from crying, but the sadness that had brought on the tears had since been replaced with a grimness that stole away all the lightheartedness in her features that had made her so immediately engaging.
“Rushkin killed him,” Cosette went on, “and Isabelle’s the next to die.”
“He’s going to kill Isabelle?” the reading woman asked, shocked.
“No.” Cosette explained how they’d all been trapped in the makeshift studio Rushkin had put together for Isabelle. “She’s going to kill herself. It’s the only way she thinks she can stop Rushkin.”
“We have to stop her,” Rolanda said, but Cosette only shrugged. “It’s her choice, isn’t it?” she said.
“How can you be so callous?” Rolanda demanded of her. “If it weren’t for Isabelle, you wouldn’t even exist.”
“That’s not exactly such a blessing,” Cosette said. “We didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask to be different.”
It felt so odd to Rolanda to hear those familiar complaints in this situation. She was far more used to them coming from the children she saw in her office upstairs. The runaways who felt they owed nothing to anyone for having been brought into a world they hated, who struggled to make do with an existence that offered them only hardship and pain. The immigrant and black children who battled the double grievance of those same joyless homes coupled with the racism directed at them by their peers and the rest of society.
“I’m sure Isabelle never meant to make you unhappy,” she said.
“She never thought of us at all. All she wanted to do was to forget we ever existed. You know what she said to me?” she added, turning to the other numena. “That we’ll never have red crows or dreams, because all we get is the real we have now.”
“Is what we have such a bad thing?” the woman asked.
“Hunted by Rushkin and his creatures?”
“But was that ever Isabelle’s doing?”
Cosette hesitated. Rolanda could see that she didn’t want to deal with the logic of it, but she had no choice—not under the steady gaze of her companion’s solemn-grey eyes.
“No,” she said, her voice pitched low.
Some of the harshness left her features, making her look younger again. Almost fragile. Rolanda knew exactly what the other woman had meant about wanting to protect her. At that moment she wanted to enfold Cosette in a shielding embrace and dare the world to do its worst, because it’d have to go through her first to get at her. But she knew better than to try.
“Will you take me to Isabelle?” she asked instead.
“We’ll be too late.”
“But we could still try.”
Cosette nodded. “Except, they told me to come back to guard the paintings.”
“I will guard the paintings,” the reading woman said.
“His creatures are really scary,” Cosette said, wavering.
“I can call some people to stay with you,” Rolanda told the woman. Then she reached out her hand to Cosette. “Come on. Just show me where Isabelle and the others are. I won’t ask you to go back inside with me.”
Cosette hesitated for a long moment, then allowed herself to be led upstairs. The other numena locked the door to the cellar and pocketed the key before following them up.
“I know some guys in the projects,” Rolanda said. “They’re gang members, but they owe me. All we’ll need is a couple of them to deal with that pair who came by here earlier.”
“Whatever you think is best,” the reading woman said.
It took three calls before Rolanda could get through to the boys she was looking for. They had all found a haven through the Foundation at one point or another in their young lives and were eager to repay the favor.
“They’ll be fifteen minutes,” she said after she’d cradled the receiver. “Go,” the older numena told her. “I can wait on my own until they arrive.”