Meeting

Meeting


She stood before him, her figure an outline of the Parisian night. The wind blew. Her scarf, like some sort of animal thing, fluttered, reaching out into the night, and passed over her face to reveal clear eyes like a frozen lake, hard, but with depth, just like her sister’s.  

“She’s missing.” Those two words carried it all. Karas, looking at her from the small pool of light underneath the door lamp, was sure she already knew. He came anyway, he wanted, no, he needed, her help.

Turning, she looked out from the balcony into the black sky, seeming to study the formation of lights that was the Eiffel tower. “You know the only good thing about being stuck in Caucasia?” She replied conversationally. Like this was any other night, like there was no desperate search, like the two of them, Karas and Bislane, weren’t, by definition, opposed. “The only good thing was my sister. We were as close as any two people could be back then.” A murmur, “War does that you know,” and then, “when Avalon came to take Ilona out, they hadn’t even thought of me. They were just going to leave me there. Alone.”

Bislane turned back towards Karas, her arms seemed to have wrapped themselves around her slim body of their own accordance, her drowning inner child clutching at the outer adult like a life jacket. For a moment Karas saw a crack in those ice blue eyes.

She looked down, extracting an illegal cigarette from somewhere in the darkness around her. She lit it with a match that shook, ever so slightly. For a moment her hand was illuminated, five long, well manicured, fingers, not a spot out of place, no polish. When she blew smoke, it came out of her mouth in a fine stream which spread out and seemed to wrap, wraith-like, around the glowing panorama of Paris behind her. Bislane looked up again with the composed face from her rap sheet, the one that cops had disappeared trying to find.

“Ilona made them take me. Even though the men who had come for her were so much older than either of us and were offering her a way out. She looked up at them.” A pause. Karas imagined a young, girlish, version of the face he had been combing the streets for, tipped up in defiance, staring right into the eyes of one of Avalon’s security detail. Her deep blues, like Bislane’s, insisting. “Said that we were going together, or not at all.” Bislane quietly sighed, “some nights,” her voice becoming tenuous, “I wish they had said not at all.”

Karas, lulled by her low voice, was broken from his reverie at Bislane’s last comment. He looked up at her, a mere silhouette now; a cloud passing over Paris, inside it, a glowing coal, hunting. “You can’t mean that?”

“Though,” she turned away from him again, “my actions may belay the sentiment, I still love my sister, more than anyone in the world. She’s my sister.” The mysterious shadow of the woman’s exclamation, tinged by the dialect of her home Caucasia, was exotic, surprisingly strange, yet utterly understandable. “But I have never fit in this city.” A slight incline of her head took in the organic, glittering city and when she stepped forward towards Karas, who tensed, Bislane seemed to rise above it all. A female embodiment of night, with her pale, fine-featured, face an intricate moon.

She let out a quiet breath, smoke floating out of the threshold of her darkness and into his light, “I have not seen, nor heard from Ilona in years. She has been locked away, her gifts wasted on Avalon. I, I have been doing things my way, on the streets.” Bislane set a hand on Karas’s shoulder, those thin fingers gently settling on his hard leather exterior like some sort of alien insect coming out of the dark. “But none of that matters now. I will help you find her.”

When her eyes pierced into him, like bright blue blades, Karas returned the stare. They stood there on the balcony in the night, the cop and the underworld queen. Karas couldn’t help but ask himself, to find Ilona, was he selling his soul, or Bislane hers.