Chapter 2: The Silent Arrival
The front door opened again, and this time nobody picked anything.
It simply swung, with the quiet inevitability of a bank vault deciding to be generous, and filled the doorway with six feet of black-clad Batman. He stood there. He did not step in. He looked at the scene with the expression of a man who had read a report this evening, three capital letters included, and had hoped against evidence that the report was a prank.
Harini raised her mug at him. "Hello. You must be Bruce. You have Tim's jaw and everyone's paranoia."
"I," Batman began.
"Father, move."
Batman moved. This was the first remarkable thing. Damian Wayne slipped past his father's knee like water through a fence, landing in the middle of the living room in a crouch that was entirely unnecessary in a domestic setting, and rose to his full height, which brought him roughly level with Marlowe's jaw. Marlowe's jaw, at present, rested on the flattened corpse of the couch. The boy and the hellhound regarded each other.
Damian's eyes went wide. It was a small thing, only a widening, but Harini had the sense of watching a dam develop its first crack.
"Potter," Damian said, without having been introduced and without breaking eye contact with the dog. "Tt. I know your file. It was eight minutes old and already wrong."
"Everyone's file on me is wrong within eight minutes. It's one of my superpowers." She set her tea down. "You can pet him if you like. He bites only, hmm, let me think. Jason's enemies, postmen he doesn't respect, and anyone who wakes me before nine."
Damian's hand hovered. Marlowe's amber eye tracked it, patient as a lighthouse. Then one enormous paw lifted off the cushions and planted itself, delicately, on top of Damian's outstretched fist. All of it. The paw covered the hand entirely, and half the wrist.
"He is asserting dominance," Damian said, in the reverent tones other people used for orchestras.
"He's saying hello. He does everything at the wrong scale. It took him a month to learn to shake gently, and he still gets it wrong when he's excited."
"Where did you get him?" The question came out fast, stripped of all the boy's usual armour. "Breeder? Rescue? Summoning?"
"Rescue, technically. He was guarding a mausoleum in the Cotswolds and eating pilgrims. Well, frightening pilgrims. Well, one pilgrim, once, and the man had it coming, he was a grave robber with an excellent lawyer." Harini scratched Marlowe's shoulder, sinking in to the elbow. "The paperwork to reassign his guardianship took eleven months. Death co-signed. There's a whole form. It's Form 113-B, Undead and Infernal Canine Transfer of Custody, and you have to list your next of kin's opinions, which I thought was very intrusive."
In the doorway, Bruce had still not moved, except for the small steady motions of a man cataloguing everything: the coals, the bag, the dog, the wards he could feel prickling along his own skin like a static warning. Tim had retreated to the kitchen counter with his phone, filming with the discipline of a documentarian. Steph had not moved from the floor by the coal basin, but she had angled herself to watch both Bruce and Damian, which Harini approved of. Good tactical seating.
"Harini Potter," Bruce said at last. His voice, under the growl modulation, was exactly as flat as she'd expected. "Mistress of Death."
"Executive Assistant, actually. Mistress of Death is the, no, wait, I am the Mistress of Death. The other one is Death. It's a title inheritance thing, it's genuinely very dull, there was a war and an evil wizard and paperwork." She waved a hand. "Point is, I don't reap anyone. I file things. Mostly I file things."
"You're an interdimensional magical entity dating my son."
"I'm a person dating your son. The interdimensional magical bits are a job." She picked her tea back up. "Sit down, please, you're making the doorway nervous. Also the doorframe creaks when you stand there, I can hear it, it's doing it now."
"He's not going to sit," Tim offered from the counter. "He does the doorway thing. Sometimes for hours."
"I was briefed," Bruce said, which meant Barbara had sent him a file, which meant Barbara had been busy, which meant somewhere across Gotham a redheaded woman was probably cackling. "I have questions."
"You can have four. The dog takes priority tonight." Harini nodded toward Damian, who had not stopped touching Marlowe and had, she now noticed, produced from somewhere on his person a small notebook. He was writing in it. Standing, one-handed, notebook braced against the hellhound's flank.
Bruce's head turned a degree toward his youngest son, and Harini watched twelve carefully constructed interrogation categories begin to topple like dominoes.
"Damian."
"He weighs approximately nine hundred pounds based on visible mass displacement," Damian said, without looking up. "He has three visible stomachs mentioned in conversation, which suggests a ruminant-adjacent digestive structure despite canine presentation. His diet includes coal, steak, and tea, which is nutritionally absurd and therefore fascinating. Father, I require the Form 113-B."
"You require the what."
"The hellhound custody form. Grayson's copies are outdated, obviously, but Grayson doesn't have a hellhound, Grayson has a dog that is afraid of the vacuum." Damian finally looked up, and his expression had the specific shine of a boy presenting a completed case. "I have wanted a hellhound since I was six. Grandfather denied my request nine times. I kept the rejection letters. I have them annotated."
"You kept the," Bruce pressed two fingers to the bridge of where the cowl wasn't. The cowl was down, retracted; his face was doing something Harini found deeply entertaining. "You were six."
"Thorough," Harini said approvingly. "I like him."
"His feeding schedule is documented," Damian continued, flipping the notebook around to display a page of small, severe, beautiful handwriting. Columns. A heading. Harini leaned over to read it and found, to her genuine delight, that he had reconstructed her approximate feeding routine from an eight-minute-old, already-wrong file. "Underworld coals twice weekly. Red meat daily. Tea as a supplement or treat. I've estimated weight requirements. I'll need the coal source."
"Death ships them. He complains about the postage." Harini sipped. "You can't have Marlowe, though. He's mine. But I can tell you how the process works, since you're clearly going to be insufferable about it either way."
Damian's chin lifted. "I wasn't going to ask for Marlowe."
"You wrote his name at the top of the page."
Damian looked down. He had, in fact, written Marlowe at the top of the page, underlined once. He closed the notebook with a snap. "Tt. Preliminary subject header."
From the couch, a sound like distant thunder with opinions: Marlowe had begun to purr. Harini had never encountered another hellhound to compare notes with, but Marlowe purred when pleased, and the vibration travelled through the couch frame and out into the floorboards, and the tea in her mug shivered in concentric rings. Damian's hand stilled on the great black shoulder.
"He likes you," she said.
"Obviously," said Damian, in a voice that had gone slightly rough.
"Father," Tim called from the counter, helpfully, "you're losing the interrogation."
"I am aware, Drake."
Steph got up off the floor, dusted her knees, and settled onto the arm of the broken couch on Marlowe's other side, which creaked but committed to it. "For the record, Bruce, she made us tea within like ninety seconds of us breaking in. Great tea. Hostage-grade hospitality."
"That is not a grade, Brown."
"It is now."
Bruce came in from the doorway at last, and the room changed temperature around him, or possibly Harini was just watching everyone else react. He stopped at the edge of the coal basin's glow and looked down at it, and she watched him suppress the urge to take a sample. He was going to take a sample. She could see the contingency planning in his shoulders.
"Those came through customs," she said, "technically. Death has an arrangement with the Mother Superior of a convent in Nepal who owes him a favour. Don't ask. The paperwork made me ask and I regret it."
"What are they."
"Dog dinner. Underworld coals, fed to hellhounds. They taste like betrayal and brimstone, which Marlowe adores, because he has no taste and no values." She nudged the basin with her toe. "They're warm but not haunted. I want that on record. Steph asked."
"It's on record," Tim said, tapping his phone.
Bruce looked at her then, properly, the full weight of the cowl's absence somehow making it worse, and asked his first question, and it was not any of the four she'd budgeted for.
"The wards on this apartment. Who cast them?"
"I did. Blood wards, keyed to me, Jason, and anyone I've hosted for tea. It's an old system, hospitality-based. Very traditional. Very paranoid, actually, we'd get on." She tilted her head. "Your cameras are fine, by the way. Nothing's broken. They just fill up with Alley dust and spider evidence. It's a feature. I designed it that way because I figured you'd plant something within a week and I wanted you to have a bad time."
Something happened at the corner of Bruce's mouth. It might, in a healthier man, have been the ancestor of a smile.
"The spiders were noted."
"Good. They worked hard."
"Second question." He folded his arms. "You said there was a war. In your world. You're its, what, survivor?"
"Prime example." Harini's voice stayed light, but she felt Marlowe shift behind her, the great head coming around to rest against her back, a wall of warm fur arriving exactly when it was wanted. She leaned into it. "Dark wizard, prophecy, the usual nonsense. He killed me, sort of. It didn't take, because of the job. Now I can't die properly until I retire, and retirement requires either a successor or Death learning to use a stapler, so." She shrugged. "Indefinite contract. The benefits are excellent. The workload is a war crime."
The room had gone quiet in the way rooms did around her sometimes, when the casualness of it landed a beat late. Even Damian's pen had stopped.
"That's why the title," Diana's voice would have said something wise here, Harini thought, but Diana wasn't here, and instead it was Steph who said, quietly, "You got the job because you died as a kid."
"I got the job because a megalomaniac used an illegal wand on a toddler and everyone involved handled the aftermath badly. Yes." Harini petted Marlowe's nose when it swung around to check on her. "But we're not doing that story tonight. Tonight we're doing the hellhound story, because Damian has a notebook, and the notebook has a deadline, I can feel it."
"There is no deadline," Damian said, reopening the notebook.
"There's always a deadline with you. I respect it enormously." She drained her tea and set the mug down. "Right. Hellhound adoption, the honest version. You can't buy one, they're not property, they're a sort of, oh, what did the form say. Sentient infernal companion, category three, autonomous." She counted off on her fingers. "You find one. Generally guarding something, because that's what they do, it's the whole personality. You convince it that guarding you is a better job. You can't trick it, they can smell lies the way Cass can read a body, it comes out in your feet."
Steph glanced at the door as though Cass might materialise through it on the mention. Harini privately suspected Cass was already on the roof, and had been since Tim's text. She'd introduce herself when the conversation got interesting enough.
"Then you file Form 113-B with, well, with me, or with any of Death's regional offices, there aren't any, it's me. The form asks for three character references from people who have seen you fail at something, because hellhounds won't serve anyone who thinks they're perfect. And a declaration of what you'll feed it, and a declaration of what happens to it when you die. That last one's the binding clause. Most people cry at that part."
"I will not cry at a form," Damian said.
"Everyone cries at the form. Death cries at the form. He invented it."
"What happens to Marlowe if," Damian began, and stopped, and rephrased with visible care, "when your contract concludes. Millennia from now."
"He goes back to the mausoleum trade, fat and happy, with excellent references. Or he goes with whoever I've named. The form has a secondary custody line." She looked at the boy, at the notebook, at the underlined name. "Damian. I'm going to say something once and never again, so listen. If you filled in that form tonight, honestly, in your own handwriting, Death and I would both sign it by Thursday. Not because I'm giving you my dog. Because he'd pick you, and the form's mostly a formality for the ones who choose people back."
Damian's pen had stopped again. He stared at her with the expression of a child who had prepared nine arguments for a hearing and been told, instead, that the hearing was a handshake.
"That is," he said, "sentimentally irresponsible."
"Mm."
"I will draft it anyway. As research." The pen resumed, fast. "Marlowe is research."
"Marlowe is a couch criminal," Harini said, and Marlowe's tail thumped the ruins of the cushions like a judge's gavel coming down on his own case.
Bruce, meanwhile, had spent the whole exchange losing his second question to Damian's notebook and his third to the coal basin, and now tried to reclaim the floor with the flat authority of a man who had once stared down Darkseid.
"Harini. My son."
"Yes. I love him. He's the best thing Gotham's ever produced, and I'm including the bagel place on Ninth. Next question."
The answer, delivered at interrogator's tempo, stopped him mid-breath. Tim made a small choked sound into his fist. Steph said "damn" with real admiration.
Bruce recovered with the dignity of a man refusing to acknowledge he'd been swept. "That was not a question."
"You were winding up to it. I saved you the effort. You're welcome." She stood, brushing hellhound fur off her jeans, and crossed to the kettle. "Fourth question now, make it good, I'm making more tea and the banshee's waking up, and those two events have a historical correlation."
The bag in the corner had, in fact, begun to hum. Low, sweet, a dirge with the melody of a lullaby. Marlowe's ears flattened. Damian wrote ear flattening under a heading.
Bruce asked his fourth question. It came out quieter than anything else he'd said, and it surprised her.
"Does he laugh. With you."
Harini's hand stilled on the kettle switch.
"Constantly," she said. "Yesterday he laughed at Marlowe until he had to sit on the floor. Last week I did an impression of his crime lord voice and he laughed so hard he rebruised a rib he got in Blüdhaven. He laughs like a building coming down, all at once, everywhere." She poured the water. "You know that. You've heard it. You just hadn't heard it in a while before me, and you weren't sure it was coming back. It came back. I checked the records. I keep records."
The steam curled up between them. Bruce looked at her for a long moment, and the twelve categories of threat assessment visibly closed, one by one, like tabs being shut at the end of a long shift.
"Alfred wants you Thursday," he said. "For tea. He's already planned the menu. He texted me the menu. There was a course."
"There was a course," Tim confirmed. "I saw it. There was a sorbet."
"That's for palate cleansing between the story about the war and the story about Jason as a child," Harini said. "Obviously. He understands structure."
Damian snapped his notebook shut and pointed it at her like a writ. "I'm coming Thursday. For research purposes. I'm bringing the draft form."
"Bring two pens," Harini said. "You'll cry by the second page."
"Tt."
The banshee chose that moment to stop humming, draw one enormous breath, and deliver a greeting to Bruce Wayne that rattled every window in the apartment and knocked the last surviving picture off the wall. Marlowe howled harmony. Damian, without hesitation, held his notebook up over his head to shield it, already writing.
On the roof across the street, unseen, Cassandra Cain watched the lit window shake with sound, smiled to herself, and decided the interesting part had started.