And I lunged at him—chair and Genghis be damned—before something struck me in the head (a fire poker, as it turned out; wielded by Eska herself) and rendered me unconscious, if only for an instant.
“Really, Mr. Hayes,” he said, circling me where I lay. “These outbursts will be your undoing. Irregardless, there you have it. Everything you need to know in order to help us with our hunt. You’ve even seen the bar we must surpass—the gold standard, as they say; the mount stuffed by Fidelio himself—my taxidermist, God rest his soul—before he showed Genghis an affection at the wrong time and place, and when the animal was in the wrong mood.”
He removed a coin-like medallion from beneath his shirt and studied it, wistfully. “Dear Fidelio, who fashioned this.”
He leaned close to show it to me an
