At some point, a lady had appeared behind her in the room, despite its tightly shut doors and windows.
She was a little shorter than Charlotte, with thick black hair falling to her shoulders, bright brown eyes, and striking features. Wearing a light-colored, high-waisted dress without a hoop skirt, she stood less than a meter away, idly twirling a sheathed dagger in her right hand. Her left hand rested on her hip as she watched Charlotte with interest.
That's the weapon I took from Gustav's house after killing Etienne. She actually took it from me... Charlotte froze, then immediately reached for her waist. The dagger she had concealed close to her body had vanished without her noticing, and her heart began to pound.
If the woman had meant her harm, she could easily have killed her without a sound while stealing the dagger. When the maid knocked on the door after heating the bathwater, all she would have found was a cold corpse.
At that thought, Charlotte held her breath and quietly stepped back, pressing her back against the French windows. Ready to leave the room and jump to safety at any moment, she finally asked cautiously:
"Who are you?"
With a snap, the dagger spinning between the black-haired lady's fingers abruptly stopped, settling into her palm.
A moment later, she held it out to Charlotte, hilt first.
"Here. Remember to keep your weapon safe. Don't let anyone take it again," she said with a smile. Her voice was soft and lilting, like a whisper right beside Charlotte's ear. "Still, I preferred the way you looked earlier, when you gripped your dagger and stabbed your enemy with such determination, to how wary you are now."
She followed me into Baron Gustav's house, saw Etienne die, then came back here with me? Charlotte's scalp prickled as she realized that the lady before her had followed her all night, yet she had never noticed anything amiss.
If she's Etienne's accomplice, why didn't she show herself and help him? With her ability to slip into this room without a sound, approaching anyone there couldn't have been difficult... Or is she actually involved in tonight's murder in the old district, and Etienne was just a pawn she could discard at any time?
Charlotte instinctively accepted the dagger with her right hand. Thoughts raced through her mind, and countless questions clamored to be asked, but in the end, she merely repeated her earlier question:
"Who are you?"
The black-haired lady did not change the subject again. Instead, she withdrew her arm, casually smoothed the hair beside her ear, and said:
"I'm Henriette. You can call me Henri."
Henri? That sounds rather like a man's name. But she's different from me. She's female from head to toe, inside and out... As Charlotte pondered this, her gaze wandered over the figure outlined by the woman's dress, her strikingly beautiful face, and her rosy lips.
Henriette seemed entirely unbothered by her scrutiny. She even turned sideways to fully display the curves beneath her dress, tilting her head and narrowing her eyes with a faint smile, like a model on a stage.
Yet this affected display was not irritating. Instead, it had a beauty all its own, leaving Charlotte reluctant to look away.
"As for you, there's no need to introduce yourself." Henri's gentle voice roused Charlotte, who had almost lost herself in the woman's beauty. "I know your name. I know you'll turn eighteen in two months. I know you and your father have only each other..."
"...And I know about the threat to your life you've been facing lately."
A threat to my life? Charlotte paused, immediately recalling everything that had happened that night, especially her jumbled memories and the blood on her body when she woke in the alley. Quickly shaking off her ill-timed daze, she asked:
"What kind of threat?"
Henri raised her eyebrows and dropped her affected pose.
"You should know that yourself, or you wouldn't have written to your cousin in Trier. In fact, I came today at her request, to help you deal with your trouble. Fortunately, I wasn't too late. I managed to find you in time through certain means, while that lawyer was tracking you."
A letter? A cousin? Charlotte, who had yet to find a quiet moment to sort through her thoughts, nearly blurted out more questions.
Fortunately, these memories belonged to the original owner of her body and were relatively old, making them easier to recall than the missing portion from that evening.
With those two key words as prompts, the disjointed fragments of memory rapidly came together, as though they had become part of her own recollections.
It turned out that, starting six months ago, not long after turning seventeen, Charlotte Sauron had noticed that seemingly minor accidents kept happening around her, accidents that could potentially threaten her life. A flowerpot might fall from above, or a horse might become frightened and run out of control. Though she had never actually been hurt, these incidents had plunged the girl into anxiety and fear.
Her mother and elder sister had both died in accidents. And although her elder brother had fallen in the war between Intis and the Loen Kingdom four years ago, his death was reportedly connected to an accident as well. Charlotte was therefore especially sensitive to such incidents. She had wanted to tell her father, but worried that Baron Sauron, who had lost one family member after another, might do something irrational.
Under this pressure, she had thought of her childhood playmate in Trier, her cousin Rosalie Sauron, who was a full nine years older than her.
This ringleader among the younger members of the Sauron family often bullied her other relatives, but had always been especially protective of Charlotte, who had lost her mother and sister at an early age. She had become almost a second elder sister to her.
Unfortunately, after reaching adulthood, Rosalie had left Trier for the Intis Kingdom's overseas Fog Sea Islands to pursue her own career. Since then, she and Charlotte had lost contact.
Tormented by all manner of bad luck, Charlotte had decided it was worth a try and sent a letter to Trier a month ago, asking her cousin for help. To her surprise, Rosalie's reply had arrived soon afterward.
In her letter, Rosalie had reassured her and urged her to pray at a church of the Eternal Blazing Sun as often as possible, saying that this might reduce the frequency of the strange incidents around her. She had also explained that she could not easily come in person from overseas, but would find an "expert" to resolve the matter as soon as possible.
Could Henriette be the expert Rosalie mentioned... On the very day she arrived, the thing the original Charlotte had feared for so long actually happened. It probably even cost her her life, which let me transmigrate into this body. Isn't that too much of a coincidence... As Charlotte considered this, she let go of her last shred of wariness toward the beautiful woman before her and instead asked:
"You said you found me through some sort of method? So when I woke up in the alley, was discovered by Etienne, and fled to Baron Gustav's house, you were watching from the shadows?"
Henri nodded and said:
"It was only a little trick of mysticism. As for the shadows... why would I need to hide in the shadows?"
As she spoke, her figure suddenly turned transparent, disappearing without a trace along with the shadow beneath her feet.
Charlotte instinctively blinked, her mouth falling open. She could scarcely believe that a living person had just vanished before her eyes.
Was that entire conversation a hallucination? Does Henriette not exist at all? She tightened her grip on the recovered dagger, unsure whether to raise it and search the room or simply push open the French windows behind her and flee.
Just then, she heard an extremely soft breath beside her ear. A warm, damp puff of air brushed across her cheek, as gentle as a feather, yet it made every hair on her body stand on end.
Henriette's figure appeared beside Charlotte. She was still leaning forward, her lips slightly parted from blowing that warm breath, as though she had been standing there all along.
Charlotte almost instinctively raised the dagger to stab her, but abandoned the impulse upon recognizing the beautiful face so close to her own. Taking two steps back to distance herself from this woman who appeared and vanished like a ghost, she asked, unable to hide her fear and excitement:
"Is this the 'mysticism' you mentioned?"
This backward world actually possessed powers akin to magic, giving her a glimmer of hope that she might solve the problem of her "transmigration."
"A little trick," Henri emphasized. Dropping her dazzling expressions and gestures, she also took two steps back, restoring the distance between them. "In essence, it's no different from what Etienne Marceau did to you. It simply takes a different form."
Even twenty-first-century technology probably couldn't pull off a little trick like that, unless it was a magic show on a stage prepared in advance... Wait, Etienne?
Charlotte immediately seized on the crucial point and pressed her:
"You mean Etienne could do the same?"
"Heh, of course." Henri chuckled, her gaze sweeping over the dagger clenched in Charlotte's hand. "Etienne, whom you just killed-I mean, whom you killed while defending yourself-was a Beyonder who wielded supernatural powers, just like me."