Outlander Novella [01] The Space Between by Diana Gabaldon Page A

he’d glimpsed, there in that space between?
    A movement in the shadows banished all such thoughts in an instant. The frog! Rakoczy’s heart clenched like a fist.
    “Monsieur le Comte,” said an amused, gravelly voice. “I see the years have been kind to you.”
    Raymond stepped into the starlight, smiling. The sight of him was disconcerting; Rakoczy had imagined this meeting for so long that the reality seemed oddly anticlimactic. Short, broad-shouldered, with long, loose hair that swept back from a massive forehead. A broad, almost lipless mouth. Raymond the frog.
    “Why are you here?” Rakoczy blurted.
    Maître Raymond’s brows were black—surely they had been white thirty years ago? One of them lifted in puzzlement.
    “I was told that you were looking for me, monsieur.” He spread his hands, the gesturegraceful. “I came!”
    “Thank you,” Rakoczy said dryly, beginning to regain some composure. “I meant—why are you in Paris?”
    “Everyone has to be somewhere, don’t they? They can’t be in the same place.” This should have sounded like badinage but didn’t. It sounded serious, like a statement of scientific principle, and Rakoczy found it unsettling.
    “Did you come looking for me?” he asked boldly. He moved a little, trying to get a better view of the man. He was nearly sure that the frog appeared
younger
than he had when last seen. Surely his flowing hair was darker, his step more elastic? A spurt of excitement bubbled in his chest.
    “For you?” The frog seemed amused for a moment, but then the look faded. “No. I’m searching for a lost daughter.”
    Rakoczy was surprised and disconcerted.
    “Yours?”
    “More or less.” Raymond seemed uninterested in explaining further. He moved a little to one side, eyes narrowing as he sought to make out Rakoczy’s face in the darkness. “You can hear stones, then, can you?”
    “I—what?”
    Raymond nodded at the façade of the cathedral. “They do speak. They move, too, but very slowly.”
    An icy chill shot up Rakoczy’s spine at the thought of the grinning gargoyles perched high above him and the implication that one might at any moment choose to spread its silent wings and hurtle down upon him, teeth still bared in carnivorous hilarity. Despite himself, he looked up, over his shoulder.
    “Not that fast.” The note of amusement was back in the frog’s voice. “You would never see them. It takes them millennia to move the slightest fraction of an inch—unless of course they are propelled or melted. But you don’t want to see them do that, of course. Much too dangerous.”
    This kind of talk struck him as frivolous, and Rakoczy was bothered by it but for some reason not irritated. Troubled, with a sense that there was something under it, something that he simultaneously wanted to know—and wanted very much to avoid knowing. The sensation was novel, and unpleasant.
    He cast caution to the wind and demanded boldly, “Why did you not kill me?”
    Raymond grinned at him; Rakoczy could see the flash of teeth and felt yet another shock: he was sure—almost sure—that the frog had
had
no teeth when last seen.
    “If I had wanted you dead, son, you wouldn’t be here talking to me,” he said. “I wanted you to be out of the way, that’s all; you obliged me by taking the hint.”
    “And just why did you want me ‘out of the way’?” Had he not needed to find out, Rakcozy would have taken offense at the man’s tone.
    The frog lifted one shoulder.
    “You were something of a threat to the lady.”
    Sheer astonishment brought Rakoczy to his full height.
    “The lady? You mean the woman—La Dame Blanche?”
    “They did call her that.” The frog seemed to find the notion amusing.
    It was on the tip of Rakoczy’s tongue to tell Raymond that La Dame Blanche still lived, but he hadn’t lived as long as he had by blurting out everything he knew—and he didn’t want Raymond thinking that he himself might be still a threat to