The fifth.The foot in his pocket. He kisses it like a god. He believes it is the most powerful thing in the magical world.
Rhoda Hadwin straightened. She had four folded pages in her left hand. She had one folded page in her right. She held them up so that the lamp above the door caught their faces, and she looked at the man with his back to the door of her own vault, and she did not say a word.
Lazlo smiled. It was not the warm mild smile he had been smiling for three days. It was the smile under the smile. It was a small private smile of a man who had been waiting a long time to stop pretending.
"Are you surprised?" He said.
Rhoda did not answer.
"My dear, Rhoda. You are not. Look at your face. You knew. Some part of you has known since I stepped onto your porch just a few nights ago."
A faint dark hum began to rise off his shoulders. Not visible at first. A thing the eye almost did not catch. Then it caught. The air around Lazlo had begun to darken at the edges, a slow black smoke that did not move like smoke.
"It's a great pity," Lazlo said. His voice had gone quieter and was not warm anymore. "I should have liked to come down here as your friend. I had hoped you would let it be enough to be your friend and to walk out of this room with my own dignity. But the books would not let me. Your books, Rhoda. You have kept them too well."
The black at his shoulders thickened.
"I will not be stopped, Rhoda. Not now." He moved closer to her. His hands came up. He flicked his wrists once, almost gently, the way a man flicks water off his hands at a sink, and the black at his shoulders unmade itself from his body in two long fast streams and came across the vault at Rhoda Hadwin.
It did not get there.
The wall behind the gold-coin wall opened. Edgar Hadwin stepped through it with his amulet in one fist and his free handalready lifted, and the lavender of him was not the lavender it had been in the dining room three days before. It was the lavender of a man who had been waiting his whole working life to stand between his wife and a thing like this, and it came up his forearms and out through his fingers and across the vault in one enormous gust that took the black streams of Lazlo Varga's magic and folded them inside itself and kept going.
The vault filled with purple glitter. Rhoda did not move. She stood with five folded pages in her hands and the lavender washing past her like weather, and she did not move, because Edgar's magic had never once touched her with anything but care.
The glitter cleared.
Lazlo was on his knees on the floor of the vault, his hands behind his back, his head bent. Around his wrists, the soft slow gold of Spectral Enforcement cuffs had locked. Sean had come down the inside stair behind Edgar's chant and had Lazlo's elbow. Roam had come down behind Sean and had Lazlo's other elbow.
"Sir," Sean said quietly. "You'll be coming with us now."
Lazlo did not answer.
Edgar's amulet went back to his throat. The lavender in his forearms guttered. He swayed once, recovered, and crossed the vault on long unsteady strides to get his arms around his wife. Rhoda turned her face into his chest and held on to him with the pages still in her hands.
"Aw, darlin'," Edgar said into her hair. "You scared me for a minute."
"You came through the wall," she whispered.
"I came through the wall." He chuckled.
"You haven't done that since we were young."
"I know, darlin'. I know."
"Edgar." She buried her face in his chest.
"I'm here, darlin'. I'm here."
She held on a little longer. Then she straightened, wiped her face once with the back of the hand, and looked at Sean and at Roam and at the man on his knees between them.
"Bring him upstairs." She spat.
They came up the inside stair in single file. Edgar at the front with one hand on his wife's back. Rhoda with the pages folded into her cardigan pocket. Sean at Lazlo's elbow, Roam at his other. Lazlo walked between them in the small composed way of a man being walked to a station.
They stepped into the parlor.
Duchess was on the rug. She was thinner under Fat Bastard than she had been before. The silver-cream coat had gone loose on her shoulders. The plume tail did not curl. Her cloudy blue eye had not closed. She had spilled every page she had been carrying, and there was nothing more in her, and the thing that had been keeping her warm was gone. She lifted her head and looked at Lazlo.
