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He reappears out of the shadows eight months later, when the Angels are on a case involving a duchess’s stolen jewellery box, a shady Marquis, and a tiger skin rug. Dylan looks up from the last of the Marquis’s goons, hearing only her own panting breath and that of Natalie and Alex nearby, to meet ice-blue eyes glittering at her from beneath a nearby overhang.
The Thin Man leans easily up against the doorframe, as though he wasn’t stabbed through the chest and dropped twelve stories off a building not that long ago. Dylan freezes, keeping him in her sights, even as she hand-signals to Alex and Natalie.
They join her a moment later, bookending her on either side, and Dylan is instantly reassured. A very faint smile turns the Thin Man’s lips up at the corners, as though he expected nothing less than the three of them together, side by side.
Dylan opens her mouth, and the rain that’s been threatening all evening chooses this precise moment to come pelting down. Alex starts swearing, Nat holds her hands out in delight that turns rapidly to displeasure at the rain’s icy chill, and the Thin Man casts an irritated glance up at the heavens, as though the rain is foiling him personally.
“Come on,” Dylan says, instead of all the other words that she’d been about to blurt out – what the fuck how are you alive you look amazing – and holds out a hand to him impatiently. The Thin Man just stares, eyes tracking from Angel to Angel warily. Dylan huffs. “They’re not gonna hurt you. You helped us, remember? That means you’re on our side.”
Alex makes a faintly disbelieving noise under her breath; Dylan squashes a foot down on hers. “Well?” Dylan demands, and after another millisecond of silent deliberation, the Thin Man comes out from under his shelter – the rain turns his slicked hair into a mess almost instantaneously – and while he doesn’t take Dylan’s hand, he indicates, somehow, just by the tilt of his head that he will follow.
Dylan’s out of her depth. London in the dark and rain is not the city she visited so many years ago now, but Nat can always be relied upon; she summons a black cab seemingly just by a whistle and the glow of her blonde hair. The cab halts and Dylan watches her friends get in, before turning her head – wow, the Thin Man is right there, looming – and says, “You next.”
The Thin Man’s expression is still dubious, but he climbs into the cab without protesting – which makes sense, really, Dylan, she chides herself. He doesn’t fucking talk. She clambers in and closes the door behind her, gives the cabbie the name of their hotel, and clips her seatbelt on only to look up and find the atmosphere in the back of the cab is practically Arctic.
“On our side?” Alex says incredulously in Finnish. Dylan feels herself shrink a bit under the weight of Alex’s disapproval. “We’re leading him straight to our hotel!”
“I trust him,” Dylan defends, even though she knows she sounds crazy. “He helped us with Seamus and Madison Lee.” Alex blows out a frustrated breath.
“He’s an assassin,” she clips out. “He could kill us all at any time –”
“Shut up,” Nat says in English, and its so rare of her to say that both Dylan and Alex fall silent. Natalie makes a gesture to the Thin Man that Dylan doesn’t understand, before her fingers move quickly and efficiently through a series of signs.
The Thin Man gasps, the sound punching through the silence of the cab, before his own pale elegant hands start to move, much quicker than Nat’s had. “Slow down,” Nat tells him, signing as she does. The Thin Man rolls his eyes, but slows down, Nat’s lips moving silently as she translates what he says. “He says you don’t need to worry about him harming us,” she says at last. “He’s not working for anyone, not anymore. He’s a free agent.”
Alex clips out, “That’s not reassuring –” but goes quiet when Natalie holds up a hand.
“Why are you here?” she says as she signs. The Thin Man pauses, before pointing silently to Dylan, in a gesture simple enough that even she can understand. Then he reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a tattered but recognisable hank of hair. Dylan leans closer to him to get a look at it, but the Thin Man rears back at once, as though protective of the sad little totem he is holding.
“That’s mine,” Dylan says, and the Thin Man nods.
The elevator ride is quiet, but different to before. Dylan keeps sneaking glances at the Thin Man and catching Alex and Nat sneaking glances at her. She pokes her tongue out at them, but there’s a soft sound from the Thin Man, almost like a laugh. Caught out, Dylan feels her cheeks warm up, annoyance humming to life in her veins. Who is he to laugh at her, with his many weird quirks and outright peculiarities –
She stomps out of the elevator. They’re in the penthouse suite – Charlie doesn’t stint when it comes to accommodation when they’re travelling – a luxurious four bedrooms connected by a den, dining area and kitchen. Dylan swipes the key card viciously and storms in, kicks off her boots and flops down on a couch before anyone has time to say a word.
Nat and Alex follow her in, even though she can tell it’s killing Alex to turn her back on the Thin Man. He hesitates, but slinks inside eventually, closing the door neatly behind him and stepping just to the side of it, falling into a sort of parade rest as though it’s been beaten into him to do so.
Dylan huffs. “You don’t have to stand over there,” she snaps. The Thin Man barely restrains a flinch, and with effort Dylan gentles her tone. “Come over here and sit with me.”
He doesn’t walk, she finds herself thinking as he makes his way towards her. He slinks or skulks or prowls, like an animal that’s found itself awkwardly lodged inside a human skin. Still, he approaches, until he’s close enough that Dylan could reach out and touch him, if she felt like it. Then he’s gone again, brushing past her to sit in the lone armchair, eyeing it for long seconds before gingerly settling his long lean frame inside.
Dylan smiles at him. “That’s progress,” she says. The Thin Man just looks at her, clear eyes wide and attentive, as though drinking in all the details he had forgotten about her. Then he clears his throat, puts his hand into his breast pocket again to rummage around. Dylan dreads the thought of him bringing out her hair again, but all he brings out is a small notebook and a stub of a pencil. Dylan frowns. “You want me to…” She gestures to the notebook and receives a withering expression in reply; she retracts her hand like it’s been burned. “Sorry!” she says defensively. “This isn’t exactly a conventional situation, you know.”
She must be getting better at reading him. the Thin Man’s expression clearly reads ‘no shit’ despite the fact that he’s barely moved a muscle of that implacable ivory face. He flips the notebook open and scribbles something in it before handing it carefully to Dylan, so carefully, in fact, that his skin never touches hers.
She looks down at the paper.
I presume you have questions.
It’s written in a neat but flowing cursive, somehow exactly and nothing like what Dylan was expecting his handwriting to look like. Conscious of Alex and Nat pretending to make coffee in the kitchen, she nods. “Yeah, I do! Heaps of them, actually. Uh – okay. How are you even here?” The Thin Man tilts his head.
I took an airplane. Somehow dryness emanates off the words. Dylan shakes her head, rolling her eyes.
“No, I mean, how are you alive? You fell –” Her voice catches, and something softens in the Thin Man’s cool eyes and around his mouth. “And you took a sword through the chest – it had to have punctured your heart –” The Thin Man raises a hand and begins scribbling furiously, before passing the notebook back again. Dylan looks down. His writing is a little messier now.
Falling is not difficult if you have practised it enough. As for my heart – underlined twice, like this means something to him for her to have asked – I was injured some twelve years ago, in a bomb blast. Reconstructive surgery of my chest was required, but due to the location and severity of the injury, the surgeons were forced to relocate my heart two inches to the right. Dylan looks up at him just in time to see him shrug, before he twitches a finger in the direction of the paper, and she looks down again. I am only sorry I was not able to aid you further against your enemies.
Dylan’s eyes are not stinging, damn it. “Why did you come and find me?” she demands, passing him the notebook back when he holds out his hand. “Why me?” Her voice cracks despite herself. Her throat is hot and burning, a ball of bitter shame lodged in the back of it. The Thin Man’s expression is so gentle when she looks up at him, she almost wants to slap it clean off his face.
She takes the notebook from him when he’s finished. I want to work for your employer. I know of him, and he certainly has work that would suit my set of skills. Work that is perhaps too filthy for his Angels to dip their hands into. And I can trust him. I know this, because he trusts you; you, the first person to ever try to speak to me in a way I can reciprocate. Disbelieving, Dylan looks up at him; his face is wry with grim amusement. ASL is like a blunt object, and I can communicate in it when I must. But there is no joy in it, no warmth. Not like with you. Dylan looks up at the Thin Man as he leans forward, exactingly slowly, towards a loose lock of her hair. Dylan braces herself, but all the Thin Man does is tuck it gently behind her ear. She looks down for the last sentence. You are joy. You are warmth.
Hang on. There’s another line. Dylan frowns down at it. Also the jewellery thief you are hunting is none other than the Duke. He has reported his wife’s jewels stolen as part of a scheme to commit insurance fraud. The Marquis is innocent.
“Son of a bitch!” Dylan says loudly, bringing Alex and Nat over. They look over the Thin Man’s writing together, bitching about four days wasted looking for a criminal that didn’t exist. Dylan listens, but she’s also watching the Thin Man, the small, satisfied curl of his lips, the strands of hair falling onto his brow like soft little black feathers. He’s not handsome, not really. He’s otherworldly, fey, like something not meant for the hands of any human. But Dylan imagines the scar that must be on his chest, from where Seamus put the Thin Man’s own sword through him, and the illusion is dispelled. The Thin Man’s hands are folded neatly while he waits for Dylan and her friends to absorb his information, but his knuckles have old scars from fighting, and old healed nicks are on nearly every finger.
The Thin Man follows her gaze downwards. Dylan looks up at his face just in time to see him shrug one birdlike shoulder, lips twisting into an expression that says, clearly: well, what can you do? Dylan’s own hands are not so scarred, but she hasn’t been fighting as long as Anthony.
She sidles over on the couch until she’s close enough to brush her fingertips against his. The Thin Man jerks, but he doesn’t pull away. Dylan rests there for a moment, but something makes her pause. She looks up at him; the Thin Man raises an eyebrow at her.
“Didn’t a giant E fall on you?” she demands. Alex and Nat are talking to Bosley in the kitchen now, loudly, and paying absolutely no attention to anyone else who might be in the room with them. Maybe that’s why the Thin Man closes his fingers around Dylan’s, why he leans down to look her right in her eyes, something like a gleam of mischief in his own.
“Maybe,” he says, in the raspiest, hoarsest voice Dylan has ever heard, thin lips shaping the sounds like a prayer.
And he winks.