Old Blood

Once she had been around for a certain length of time, Hunter started avoiding old people.  She did this instinctively, like she did everything else, and she did not give much thought to it until the day she accompanied Door onto the Earl’s Court train.

She remembered the Earl in the early days before the Court Wars, when he had worn his russet hair long and they called him the warrior who laughed on the field, the early days before she had decided she preferred girls instead.

The man who sat enthroned before them now was a ruin of a man, a deaf old man who stank of dust and age, whose eyes lighted hungrily on Door’s bird-boned waist one moment and clouded with effort another as he chased lost fragments of memory through the fog of his senility.  She could see the Marquis’s cruel, critical smirk in the corner of her eye.  What would he know? Even de Carabas, omniscient, omnipresent de Carabas, wasn’t half as old as she was.

The Earl’s eyes passed over her, resting only for a fleeting moment, and she was half-glad for being spared the identification, half-yearning for something she could not quite let her thoughts conceive.  He had not recognized her, she who looked the same as the first day they had met among the corpse-strewn tracks of Maida Vale.  It was not her unchanging beauty that had changed; it was his facility of mind.

She was glad when they got off the train.  A hunter does not like the smell of rotted meat.  She cleans her knife of the crust of blood and looks to the next kill.