She used to count. Ages ago now. The trouble with counting is this: If you begin counting, soon enough you'll have to decide what does and what doesn't. If you have a conscience at this job, you stop counting quick.

It's moving — a ripple through the air that the distant, detective's part of her mind files away as peculiar — and then it's speaking (a confession?) and she braces herself against the countertop space that it's left behind.

(The barman slides by, lifts his eyebrows in a wry little smile, and she knows he must have noticed none of it).

Despair. Terror. Like Cole's ended. The fixations of a spirit, perhaps even the kind that might wear a corpse. But a revenant alone could not be capable of this. An abomination? Could not know the things it seems to.

Wren forces herself to rise, shoulders set back, expression carefully absenting itself. A familiar look, the hollowness of a hard, shiny helm. Her fists stay tucked tight.

"You knew when they were there." A quiet statement, empty, leading. Real or imagined, she's a duty to do here. There are facts somewhere in this tangle — there must be. "You got around the guards."