As she watched Roman threw off a creature that had climbed up to his shoulder, shouted something that didn't sound like a real word in any language, and slammed the butt of the gun into the ground, producing a purple shockwave—she was not entirely on board with the concept of visible shockwaves, but she didn't know what else to call it—that knocked the advancing creatures back into the water. For a long moment he surveyed his surroundings, but no more of them emerged.
"That won't hold them for long," he muttered, and looked up at the sky. "It seems we are forever buying each other time. But for what?"
"That's very dramatic of you," Jules said. Roman yelped and came running over to her, extending a hand to pull her up onto the roof.
"What are you doing here? It's not safe!"
"It seems much safer for me than for you, overall," she said, and explained what she'd seen. Her description of the creatures' avoidance didn't seem to reassure Roman any, but there were more pressing matters to attend to. "What happened?"
What had happened was that Sauvage had sprinted down the hill to the cafe about an hour after Jules had left this morning and hammered on the back door until Roman, still mostly asleep, answered, at which point he'd said only, "Do you still have your gun?"
"Yes? Somewhere."
"Find it. Something's coming, I don't know what." And then he'd run off before Roman could ask further questions. To all appearances he'd spent most of the rest of the morning convincing people to evacuate. For his part Roman had picked up the same feeling on the air around two hours later—"With enough experience anyone can detect the fluctuations in the fabric of reality that tend to herald a being such as this one, but Sauvage has always been very sensitive to it and I'm rather rusty these days"—by which time, given Sauvage's warning, he was armed and more or less prepared to fight, standing outside the barred doors of the cafe and feeling only slightly ridiculous.
And shortly after that, he'd been approached by a man he'd never seen before, wrapped in what looked like three different cloaks melted together, with a large hood framing a lean, pale, hungry face. The eyes, though—he'd recognized the eyes. They belonged to Timothy Barker, the necromancer, who apparently had dabbled in quite a few other fields since his not-exactly-defeat at the hunters' hands some seventeen years ago.
"Isn't he dead?" Jules interrupted.
"I haven't been keeping up with him," Roman said. "He didn't look at all well, I can tell you, but that seems to be having little effect on his capacity for mayhem. In any case, he informed me he'd come to collect and then he summoned this flood and turned himself into...that." He nodded toward the thing fighting Sauvage. "I suspect he may have been sending the storms we've been getting the past month or so, to build up a reserve of water for his attack."
"This all seems very extreme," she said. "I read a little about your fight with him and it honestly didn't sound like that big of a deal."
"I seem to recall your library's accounts of our work draw heavily on Argent's memory and, I must say, she's always been troublingly blasé about that sort of thing. But you aren't entirely wrong." He sighed. "It was...you read Barker's notes, didn't you? I think you mentioned that. We took him on after one of those horrible experiments produced a horde of ravening undead—which I don't believe he intended, but he was not what I'd call disappointed. Anyway, he was always primarily a necromancer but even back then he knew some other magic, nothing on this scale of course, and between him and his personal army it took all six of us just to reach a stalemate. In order to do even that we had to destroy all his corpses. And that, of course, set his research back by decades. I suppose he would think this fitting punishment."
"That's...that's incredibly petty and ridiculous," Jules said, but she had read Barker's diary and she could certainly believe it of him. "And he's come after you because you're easier to find, because you've stayed in one place and the other hunters don't, is that right?"
"It would be my best guess. Get behind me, please, I think more of his little animals are about to come up and I don't want you caught in the crossfire." He waited for her to move before raising the rifle to his shoulder again. "I don't know what these are. As I said, my impression is that Barker has spent the time since our last meeting improving and diversifying his skills. To be perfectly honest with you I don't think this is a fight we can win. We didn't have enough power to fend him off last time, not in any permanent way, and that was with many more people."