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A/N: This is the updated version of this chapter. If you read the original, no worries; not much changed, although I did introduce the concept of the parrains. Some passages changed to better fit the later chapters now that I've done more planning.
(Original A/N): After half an hour in the shower, I emerged with ideas spinning around my head. The past few weeks of school have been intense to say the least, and now I've discovered a medium through which all these miscellaneous things I've been learning become a story. And thus I find myself embarking on a journey I never quite intended to begin...
Don't worry if you don't understand French. I'm trying to write this so that understanding of the language isn't necessary. However, if you find yourself overly confused, please tell me so. And if you're a native speaker, please correct my possibly horrendous grammar.
BEGINNINGS
Mira walked along the crowded streets with her head down against the wind. People bumped her shoulders as she passed, and every once in a while she felt the hand of a pick-pocket reach into her coat. She paid them no mind; she had nothing for them.
Everyone looked like they had somewhere to go, but Mira knew better. Nowadays people walked around and around the same block, trying to relive the glory days when Paris had thrived, and people had hurried down this same street on their way to work. However, Mira had never seen the city in its prime, and unlike the crowd, she had a destination.
Though her feet ached, she pressed on, eyeing the cold gray buildings standing along the sidewalk. At last she found it, a grim edifice with Hôtel de Crillon emblazoned above the door in letters of tarnished gold. Warmth seemed to radiate from inside, but it reached no further than two steps onto the sidewalk, where cold reigned supreme. Drawing herself tall, Mira pushed her way through the doors.
Unlike the dreariness outdoors, the lobby of the hotel shimmered with finery. Above, the ceiling was lined with finely sculpted patterns, and glittering chandeliers shed golden light across the room. Mira stepped quickly across to the front desk, keenly aware that her boots threw echoes around the room each time they hit the spotless tiles.
“Votre nom, mademoiselle?” asked the concierge at the counter.
With a perfect French accent, she replied, “Emmeline Camus.”
“Et votre réservation?” he asked, scanning the computer screen below the shoulder-high counter.
“Seulement pour ce soir, au suite deluxe,” she said. She could only afford to stay one night. The authorities would quickly discover her if she remained too long.
“Bien, mademoiselle. Ca sera…cinq cent quatre-vingt dix euros.”
Nearly six hundred euros? Mira struggled to keep her face calm, but her heartbeat quickened. With a gloved hand, she drew a five-hundred euro note and a few gold coins from her pocket and placed them on the marble counter. “Voilà.”
He swept her money from the counter and counted it. Then he counted it again before placing her money in the register beneath the desk. Hotel managers, like most remaining businessmen, only cared about cash now, even when there was no government to regulate it. They could not help being paranoid with a parrain—the self-chosen nickname of the powerful mob bosses—eyeing their income.
“Merci, mademoiselle,” said the concierge, handing her a key.“Vous êtes à 301, au deuxième étage. L’élévateur est à votre gauche.”
“Merci,” she replied. Again, her footsteps echoed across the empty lobby until she reached the elevator. “Deuxième étage,” she told the operator.
He nodded and pressed the proper button. With a sigh, Mira leaned against the decorated wall of the elevator, watching the numbers light up above the doors. 1…2…3… The elevator stopped with a chime, and she straightened. Waving aside his offers to show her to the room, she gave him a gold coin and left him behind in the elevator.
The hall, like the lobby, had retained the finery of Paris’s better days. The walls had been decorated with a classical but slightly modern style, and the alcoves displayed sculptures and flower arrangements under soft yellow light. The carpet was just the right shade of red to compliment the light, and it smelled freshly vacuumed without a hint of any spills that must have befallen the carpet of the old hotel. Now this… this was the paradigm of perfection and class.
Her room was halfway down the hall, overlooking the street. Mira slipped inside and locked the door. At last, for the first time in weeks, she relaxed. Leaving her coat hanging by the door, she went into the bathroom and studied her reflection in the mirror. A tired but determined face stared back at her, light brown eyes slightly dulled by hardship that was likewise marked in her bony cheeks and the lips she kept pressed in a grim line. Annoyed and frustrated by what she saw, she turned away.
I shouldn’t be surprised, she thought as she kicked off her muddy boots. Three weeks of walking and sleeping on the roadside could only lead to this. What pained her, really, was that she now had the same haunted look she saw on the streets. She had become the image of desperation she once swore she would never become. Face sullen, she stripped off her clothes—black leather gloves, deep green blouse, and black slacks all muddy with the grit of travel.
Hot water—even running water, for that matter—had become such a rarity now, and Mira cherished it. She rarely risked getting herself into such a high class hotel, but sometimes a little luxury was all she wanted. As the steam rose around her and the dried mud and sweat slid off her body under the spray, she closed her eyes and laughed quietly to herself. It would take the hotel at least five days to realize that the money she had handed over was simply a scrap of paper and few pebbles.
Mira was a mage. It meant little in today’s world, when most mages stayed underground and the powerful ones demanded payment for their services. For Mira, magic was livelihood, a way of keeping herself just above destitution. Though by no means an exceptionally skilled mage, Mira could fend for herself. By making pebbles or papers look, feel, and smell like money, she could go anywhere, do anything. In this world where nothing mattered but money—and only cold, hard cash—she could get away with absolutely anything she wanted. In theory, at least. In reality, she didn’t dare to counterfeit more than two hundred dollars a week, although today had been an exception. To get into the inner circles of information, she had to ascend to their level, had to get to the nerve center of the parrain’s network. Besides, she’d gleaned from the mind of the concierge that the mage who worked for the Crillon checked the place for magic on Saturdays, two days ago.
Once the grime of travel washed away, she felt stings of pain as the hot water cleaned the cuts on her arms and back. Grimacing with pain, she turned off the shower. Twisting around, she touched her fingers to the patches of broken skin and murmured a few words under her breath. Though now well-practiced at counterfeiting, she still had to speak the incantation for complex magic like healing. Beneath her touch, the skin closed over, smooth once more.
She turned the shower back on and untied her hair. The messy bun came loose, her hair falling to just below her collarbone in an uneven mess of tangled auburn and gold strands. She yanked her fingers through the knots, and then ducked under the stream. As the hot water flowed down her face and plastered her hair against her neck, Mira blew out a bubbling breath and began contemplating her next move.
Suddenly he tensed, paranoia flooding his mind. Frozen as the statues in the courtyard, he stood, waiting. At last he heard a whisper from the overgrown garden.
“Laroche?”
He relaxed, recognizing Jean-Pierre’s voice. “Ouais?” he whispered in reply.
“Quoi fait-tu?”
Etienne glanced across the courtyard, eyeing the hunched figure among the bushes. “Je cherche quelqu’un.”
“Qui?”
“Une fille, ça va?”
Jean-Pierre fell silent.
Hoping that threats would make him go, Etienne whispered, “Vas-y. Si la police ne vient pas, tu mourras de la froideur. Alors, je retournera bientôt.”
“Mais qui cherches-tu?”
Etienne lapsed into English for fear of a guard catching the conversation. “I told you, a girl. Now go.”
Jean-Pierre’s accent lacked the purity of Etienne’s, but he knew the language. “But why?” he asked.
Damn it, he cursed. Just shut up, idiotic boy. “I have business with her.”
“A girl staying in Le Crillon?”
“Go away, Jean-Pierre.”
“D’accord, d’accord…”
Etienne slipped back among the shadows.
Overall, she knew the plan was risky at best, but she had no other choice. There was only one man in all of Paris—all of France—who could help her, and Captain Dubois had the information that would lead her to the man she needed. After all, who else but Favre’s Captain of Intelligence would know where to find the head of the organization that threatened the life of his boss on a daily basis? This would be the fastest way to find “la chef de la Resistance,” as they called him—the head of the Jade League, Etienne Laroche.
Frowning with uncertainty as she leaned there listening, Mira heard the faint click and swish of an opening and closing door, followed by the muffled footsteps that she sensed belonged to Captain Dubois.
No risk makes a boring life, she thought, straightening from the door. She ran a hand through her hair, now dry and smooth, and straightened her clean clothes. If she played her cards right, she would not only pass as an American agent, but also get herself invited right into the innermost circles of Favre’s networks. Besides, American mob bosses sent agents to France regularly, but American agents were killed often in the line of duty, and the same agent rarely came twice. I can do this, Mira thought. I’ve pulled off riskier heists than this…just never for something so important. Pushing that thought back, she left her room and headed to the elevator.
She had given the captain a head start, so she had to wait for the elevator to return. Slipping a hand in her pocket, she touched a pebble and changed it into a gold coin to tip the operator. With her other hand, she felt the scraps of paper in the other pocket, safe where she could turn them into euro notes if she needed them. If she had to, she could even change the lint or loose buttons on her coat into money, but she liked having paper or pebbles on hand.
The elevator arrived with a chime and the whoosh of the doors sliding open. “Rez-de chaussée, s’il vous plaît,” she said.
The operator nodded and took her down. The doors opened to the crowded lobby, filled with the hotel’s guests. Many had come down for dinner in the Restaurant d’Obelisque, and a few greeted each other in the lounge for business meetings. Mira handed the coin to the operator and thanked him as she stepped into the lobby. To her right, she glimpsed Captain Dubois talking with one of his agents. She was about to scan the rest of the room when suddenly a dark-haired man in a neat business suit collided with her right shoulder and nearly knocked her over.
“Oh! Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle!” he exclaimed.
“C’est rien, monsieur, je vous assure,” she replied, though her heart pounded in her chest.
“Vous êtes sûr?” he asked. “Tout est d’accord?”
“Tout est d’accord,” she repeated with a smile.
He nodded and left. Mira shook her head, a little overwhelmed by the courtesy of the higher class. How many times had someone bumped into her this afternoon on the street? And how many apologized?
But as she slid her hands into her pockets—a gesture of habit—her eyes widened. Only one scrap of paper remained of the dozen she had just checked in the elevator. But why would he take paper? Confused and suspicious, she ducked over to the staircase where she would be less likely to attract attention. She took the paper from her pocket, no longer blank but inked magically in deep green.
A word to the wise, Mlle Rousseau: be careful with whom you speak. There are those nearby who can sense a mage by mere feel. You would do well to return to your room until midnight, when I can meet you by the obelisk of the main square. I understand you have been looking for me.
Mira shivered. “Non,” she whispered, remembering her last words to him. “Tout n’est pas d’accord…” She had met Etienne Laroche without even knowing it.
