Unfortunately, Bull didn’t speak medieval High German, which was Kit’s favorite language for cursing. The moment he wound down, Bull said maddeningly, “Good. I’ll see you in ten minutes. Caddrick’s on his way with I.T.C.H. They’re shutting us down, effective today, unless we can figure a way to stall ’em off.”
“Oh, God . . .” Kit propped his eyelids open. “If I’m not there in ten, send an ambulance.”
“Thanks, Kit. I owe you.”
“You sure as hell do. I’ll collect on this one, too, just see if I don’t.”
The line went dead and Kit crawled out of bed, feeling a certain kinship with a recently squashed garden slug. He dragged on the first clothes that came to hand, staggered in search of footgear, and finally stumbled out onto Commons, heading at a drunken pace for the aerie. He was halfway there, repeating to himself, I will not fall asleep on my feet every few seconds, before he woke up enough to realize he wore nothing but a loosely belted kimono that covered entirely too little of him and house slippers that had been new when Queen Elizabeth the First had taken the English throne. He’d stolen them, himself, from an Elizabethan house he’d entered under very unhappy circumstances.
“Ah, hell . . .” He pulled the belt tighter, which at least kept the more private bits of him from showing, and scowled at his hairy shins. No time to go back and change, now . . . He couldn’t even stop somewhere and beg a pair of jeans. Commons remained eerily quiet, shops and restaurants resembling darkened caves behind their steel security-mesh doors. Scattered patrols of security, BATF, and Pest Control officers stood guard over major gates due to open, to be sure no one got into or out of the station. After that dead BATF officer had been found beside the Langskip Cafe, a few days back, not even Commons security forces made the rounds without partners along. A slow, door-to-door search of every hotel room and Residential apartment on station was underway, looking for both Lachley and a handful of Ripper cultists still at large, but the search was taking forever, with no guarantee that the Ripper wasn’t simply changing lodgings to a room already cleared.