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His callous words failed to hide his emotions. He didn’t relish killing in the slightest, unlike some mercenaries I knew.
“Do you always feel them die?” I asked.
“Every damn time.”
Together, we abandoned the dead and climbed the stairs to the street.
“We should make ourselves look less like murderers,” Wendel said.
He wasn’t wrong. By the light of day, we both looked terrible. Blood crusted his hands and splattered my clothes.
I glanced skyward. “At least it started raining.”
The gargoyles of St. Stephen’s spat water from gutters onto the cobblestones. We held our hands under the mouth of a snarling stone lion. Blood swirled away into a drain. Long afterI finished, he stood beneath the gargoyle, twisting his hands together under the water, his fingernails scraping his skin raw.
“Wendel,” I said.
He shook the water from his hands. “Yes?”
“We shouldn’t stay here.”
He clenched his hands and glanced at the gargoyle again. Like he still wasn’t clean. Like he would never be clean.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said.
We walked through the rain together. Neither one of us spoke. His eyes looked distant, focused somewhere faraway.
Outside our room, I fumbled to unlock the door with my key. “My fingers are numb.”
“Almost there. Then we can shower.”
The lock clicked, at last, and we entered the room. He began stripping off his clothes before the door had even swung shut all the way. He tossed his waterlogged jacket on the floor. His wet shirt clung to his body.
Still on edge from the catacombs, I locked the door. It was impossible to relax.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Another bloodstain.”
He frowned at a spot of red on his sleeve. Maybe the bloodstain reminded him of the men he had killed. Maybe the blood held some lingering memory that he could sense with his necromancy. I shuddered.
Wendel stripped naked and stared out the window. The rain spilled down in sheets over the gray city of Vienna.
He looked lost. Alone.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m sorry.” His voice had more gravel than honey. “I can’t stop thinking of the catacombs.”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“We lured them down there to die.”
“They were hunting you down. We had no choice but to kill them.”
Rattling rain filled the silence between us.
“I need to shower.” His throat worked as he swallowed hard. “Get this blood off me.”
I followed him into the bathroom. He stepped into the shower. When the steaming hot water hit him, he closed his eyes and moaned out a sigh. He tilted back his head and let the water fall over his face.
