I didn’t like her tone. I didn’t like her smile, how her fingers twitched within the folds of her black hair, as toes might among controls concealed in boots. There was an edge of murder in her fidgeting, as when a braggart thug plays with his knife, or Saladin with a bone. “No, never mind,” I said. “I don’t think you’d actually help.”

“You want to fight O.S.?” she asked, leaning forward. “Or help O.S.? Or catch Cardie? Or save Cardie? Or break Cardie? You know what I can do. I’m eager to do it again.” Her eyes narrowed.

I felt mine narrow too. “Yes, I know,” I answered. “Everyone knows how you work now, what you enjoy. That’s why you’re still here.”

“Too many of them, fighting over which gets to have my arts?”

I shook my head.

“Then what?”

“No one’s talking about you. Until I thought you might help with this Sniper business, no one had brought up your name in… I haven’t bothered to keep track.”

She gave a blood-warm smile. “Mycroft, if you’re trying to scare me, and make me desperate, to better your boss’s bargaining position by making me think that no one’s coming for me, it won’t work. The attempt demeans us both.”

“No one’s coming for you,” I said flatly.

“They’ve already gone to the trouble of arranging for Ockham to go to trial alone, so I can stay out of the public eye, and slip into the shadows when it’s time to return to my… vocation. But I won’t do it for just anyone. I’m not going to be a patriotic stickler like Cardie and say I’m only working for Humanists, but I really am the best assassin in the world, so I get to be choosy.”

“The best in the world!” I heard affront in my own voice as I said it, but was not quite sure on whose behalf I took offense. Sniper’s? Prospero’s? Saladin’s? My own? She did not know me at all, did she, this self-important witch? I was the reawakened beast, freed by Jehovah’s discovery that Gods’ universes do not die if They do, freed to prowl and prey again as she had never seen in our decade-long feigned friendship. Can’t she tell? The prison spirits that feeding on my ankles grow fat with lust and malice, yet the witch, who should drink and breathe malice, she can’t even tell that I have changed?

“Well, I’m certainly in the top three.” She thought she was giving real ground there, didn’t she? Vile, hubristic thing! “You must grant me that,” she continued. “But I’ve no patience with those who make it obvious that murder has been done, and I’m very disappointed in Cardie for joining you in that category.”