Fourteen twenty-five. Fourteen twenty-five. The amount of life that had come and gone since then, and Descry hadn't changed. Not physically. Him, and countless other sorcerers, old enough to remember the Italian Renaissance.

And how did he know Paddy had been wondering about that? Anyone else, anywhere else, and Paddy would have assumed he'd made his staring a bit too obvious. Here, he had no idea what to think. Mind-readers? Was there such a thing as a mind-reader, even among sorcerers? Solomon could read souls, but Paddy had been under the impression that no sorcerer was able to do that before him.

Descry, however, was dead, confirming Paddy's earlier theory. From the sounds of it, he and Rover Larrikin were the only ones who were. It made Paddy smile, that even with what they were about to do the Archangels could let this group of men reunite. Two of them were apparently married. Or liked to pretend they were. With Rover's joking personality becoming more and more obvious, Paddy honestly wasn't sure which one was the case.

"I can blame you," Skulduggery disagreed, folding his arms. "It was someone who knew you directly, someone no one else should have known about, lying dead in his own apartment. The last thing you do is touch anything without gloves on. In fact, I've always been curious about this. Why didn't you come and get the rest of us right away?"

Unbeknownst to anyone, he added silently, Was it you that night during the storm?

It was Descry's addition, his answer to an earlier question Paddy hadn't even asked, that clinched it. "You know what I'm thinking?" he asked, ironically, without thinking. And since he couldn't take the question back, he added to it. "Or is that an ability all dead souls have?"