After the War: A Novella of the Golden City by J. Kathleen Cheney Page B

wife. “You two enjoy yourselves.”
    Smiling, Serafina kissed his cheek and went on her way, Mariona in tow.
    “I must say, she’s every bit as pretty as you claimed,” a voice said in English . . . with an English accent.
    He knows me. No . . . he knows Old Alejandro .
    Alejandro shifted to regard the man standing at his table. With blond hair slicked back from a rectangular face, he’d been distinctive enough that Alejandro had noticed him sitting on the far side of the café. The man’s body language didn’t betray any hostility, a good sign. “Why don’t you join me?”
    The Englishman settled on the velvet banquette Serafina had vacated. He crossed his legs, set his hat atop his knee, and regarded Alejandro with pale blue eyes that tilted up at the corners. “You neglected to mention the gills, though, Jandro. She’s a sereia . You told me she trapped you into marrying her,” he said. “Now I know how.”
    Had Serafina trapped him into marriage? Apparently he’d thought so, a strange thing since everyone had been aware he intended to marry her for years. Surely he hadn’t simply volunteered that information to this man, not unless they were friends. Alejandro did his best not to let the man see any reaction. He didn’t want the newcomer to know his needling had hit a soft spot.
    “Personally,” the man went on, “If my wife looked like that, I wouldn’t care. Is the younger one unattached?”
    “Not as far as you’re concerned,” Alejandro snapped automatically. “What do you want?”
    “Of course, you don’t remember me, Jandro,” the other man said with a sad smile. “We knew each other back in the war.”
    You don’t remember me. The certainty in the man’s words said he knew the hex on Alejandro was holding. “You’re the man who hexed me. I expected you to look more . . . Russian.”
    The man laughed dryly. “So Phillips has already gotten to you, has he? That lying prick.”
    And the other unknown man was named Phillips . “I haven’t spoken with Phillips.”
    The blond man snorted. “No, I didn’t expect Phillips to dirty his hands by finding you himself. How does one get a drink in this place? I’m parched.” He waved over a waiter and placed an order in passable Portuguese.
    “Why are you talking to me, then?” Alejandro asked.
    “Phillips has been hunting me, you know,” the man said. “He wants the stones. His henchmen have tried to kill me five times in the last four months. I must say, I’m getting rather tired of it.”
    What henchman would be stupid enough to try killing a witch who could curse him? Most likely a henchman who doesn’t know that fact . “They haven’t been successful so far, I see.”
    “No,” the Englishman said, “but the government is tiring of cleaning up the mess when it happens.”
    The mess? Alejandro cringed. “What have you been doing to them?”
    He opened up a silver case, offered a cigarette to Alejandro, and lit his with a match once Alejandro had duly refused. “The first four, I just stopped their hearts,” he said, and blew out the match. “Not too difficult to pass off as bad men whose fate had caught up with him. The last one, though . . . I panicked and turned him inside out.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “Right outside Whitehall, too, on Queen Mary’s steps. Quite embarrassing, that incident.”
    Alejandro tried to picture what turning an assassin inside out would look like. It did not sound pleasant. “And how can I get you out of this mess?”
    “We find the stones,” he said with an elegant shrug, “and turn them over to the government. That’ll pull Phillips’ teeth.”
    Wouldn’t this Phillips want recompense, then? Alejandro sat back as the waiter brought the man’s coffee. Once the waiter had gone, he said, “You don’t know where they are?”
    “No,” he said. “You hid them. The idea was that I would make you forget where, and after the war we would all meet back in France to