Heartbreaker Read Online Free

which he had been standing. Behind them there was a couch, steered by a burly men whose skin was as black as the incoming night, so that he almost melded into the background of the coach itself.
    «I would not have run over you», he remarked, turning his head by a fraction of an inch.
    Even though he had never seen the couch or its driver personally before, Shim already knew who the passenger was. There weren't many people who moved in a coach in the early twenty-first century. Actually he knew only of one, and that one was the first name on his list of probable necromancers: Vivienne Blanchard.
    The door of the coach opened slightly and a charming voice came from within.
    «Detective Stonehand, this is an unexpected and pleasurable coincidence.»
    «Miss Blanchard I suppose», he replied.
    «Madame Blanchard, please. Or even just Vivienne, if you deem it appropriated. Only please refrain from using miss or Mrs., gently.»
    «As you wish. Your...» now, what was the word for someone who steered a coach? «... coach man should be more careful about where he's going.»
    «Ashton is a very clever coachman detective, I am afraid I might have involuntarily diverted his attention when I saw you coming down the street, but I can assure you that you have never been in any danger from him.» She paused briefly, then added, «Do you not think that this is not a proper way of carrying on a conversation? Please, come on in.»
    Shim looked at the coach, unsure. He wasn't expecting such an invitation, and wasn't sure about how to react.
    «Do not be afraid, detective, for sure I have no intention to bite you», she urged him, with a vaguely lustful tilt in her voice.
    Shim shrugged. For sure he wasn't about to be scared by a fake old-fashioned aristocrat, not when she was only one civilian and they were three armed police officers. He gestured for his men to follow and together they got into the coach, which seemed wide enough from the outside and proved to stand to the expectation from the inside.
    He sat, one officer on each side, opposite the woman, looking at her a little bewildered. She wore an odd white shirt radiating from a metal ring at waist level and ending into two large sleeves, which narrowed around her wrists. A similar ring, just under the base of the neck, held in place what seemed to be a cloak, even though there was no way to be sure it was as long as she was sitting. Her legs where wrapped into a black skirt made from some glossy and heavy fabric, apparently made of several layers, under which her boots could be seen, these too black and with a heel that should have required a carry permit.
    «It is a pleasure for me to meet you in person, detective», she welcomed him. «I have always heard people speaking of you in, I must admit, mixed terms.»
    Shim didn't stop to wonder which was the meaning of that definition.
    «I too have heard people talking about you mis... Madame Blanchard.»
    «I can well imagine you have. And most likely most of the times it happened after you had explicitly requested those people to, am I right?»
    «I don't know what you're talking about.»
    «Do not be elusive detective, I know well what are the reasons for which you nourish interest in me. I am a necromancer and you are perfectly aware of this fact. In spite of this, I do not contravene to any low simply for being what I am, it is the practice of necromancy to be forbidden, not the simple knowledge of it. Neither I could have had any way to cease being what I am when your code was promulgated.»
    «You don't seem old enough to have already been a necromancer back then», Shim remarked, examining the quite youthful features of that woman who had just asserted to be more than fifty years old.
    «Neither you seem to be a centenarian, detective, which does not mean that you are not. Appearances can be misleading more often than not.»
    «Do you always speak like this?»
    «What are you referring to, pray tell?»
    «I'll consider that a yes.