It was a relief.
“Maybe I just drank too much last night,” I told her, taking off my hat to rub at my temples. “I think I just need a nap. Sorry to be so lame.”
“Not lame,” she said, and took the hat from me to prop on her own head. She grinned. “I actually had a lot of fun today.”
I had, too. Almost a normal kind of fun, when I used to go hang out at the pub on long afternoons, having the kinds of conversations where I didn’t feel like I needed an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a scorekeeper. Where my friends liked me and I liked them, and that was the whole of it. When I could go home and bicker with my sister and read a book in bed and not worry that everything I cared about was retreating slowly out of my grip.
The kind of fun where nobody’s shooting at you, I thought, and when I took my hat back from Marie-Helene, I kissed her on the cheek. Before I could pull away, she snaked a finger through my belt loop. “I could see you when I come back,” she said quietly. “I think I might like that.”
“I’ll be in London,” I told her. “But if you ever come out that way—” Don’t call me, I wanted to say, because you’re lovely and deserve better than an imaginary posh asshole who doesn’t like you as much as he should.
“If I do.” She kissed me on the corner of my mouth, a slow kiss, an unexpected one. It wasn’t chaste, and it wasn’t romantic—it was a suggestion, an ellipsis. I closed my eyes against it.
“See you later, Simon,” she said, and I dragged my heels back to Greystone, not sure what I’d say to Holmes when I got there.
I WAS SO LOST IN MY HEAD THAT I DIDN’T NOTICE THE CAR trailing along behind me. At first I thought I was imagining it. But the sky was bleak and whispery with snow, the roads nearly empty, and the black car crept down the street like a moving tumor.
I slowed at a crosswalk. The car slowed, too. When I ducked through an alley and out onto a different road, the car was there moments later. Finally, I stopped at a corner, my hat in my hands, and I waited.
It pulled up to the curb. The back window rolled down.
“Mr. Watson,” the voice said. “Do you need a ride?”
The click of a gun cocking. It wasn’t a suggestion. I got in.
seven
THE BLACK CAR DIDN’T TAKE ME TO A CELL, OR A WAREHOUSE, or a secluded field with a pre-dug grave. I wouldn’t have known to be afraid if it had, because I couldn’t see where we were going. When I climbed into the car, I was immediately grabbed and blindfolded, my hands tied with what felt like a zip tie. All I’d seen before I was bound was a man in a suit with a black bag over his head.
What the hell was going on?
“James,” the voice said, inflectionless. The slip of the bag-mask being pulled off. “Before we begin, I’d like you to know. This is not my voice. I’ve employed this man to speak to you on my behalf. He’s being fed his lines.”
I strained my ears, and I could hear the light tap of fingers on a screen across from me. There must be a seat facing mine. Someone else sitting there, writing his words on a tablet. I kicked my foot out and connected with someone’s knee.
A gasp of pain. A shuffle. The safety being switched off on a gun. Maybe he wasn’t typing on a tablet, after all. But I wasn’t given time to consider it—I was thrown against the door, and after a scuffle, they bound my legs.
“I have no intention of hurting you, idiot child,” the voice said. “Stop flailing about.”
There was a pause while everyone settled back down. The car took a slow turn to the right. If I were Holmes, I would’ve tracked our route by the number of turns we’d made and deduced where we were going. Three? Four? I wished I had a map of the city committed to memory, the way she did.
But I didn’t. I had to get over it. I focused instead on the car’s interior—how many people were in here with me? Two, I knew for certain. When the voice spoke again, I listened for the dead places in the car, where his voice hit resistance. Three, maybe?
“This is not your fight. This was never your fight. You’re putting Charlotte Holmes in danger.”
The voice was English. That was a useless deduction, because I was surrounded by bloody English people, and it wasn’t his real voice, anyway.
“Actually,” I said, hoping to keep them talking, “I’m pretty sure you’re the one putting her in danger, Hadrian.”
I was pretty sure it wasn’t Hadrian in the car with me, but it was worth a shot. Who else would have a fleet of black cars and bother kidnapping me to make their point?
(That said, I’d noticed that the Holmeses had at least one of these black cars, and a driver who took them around town. So did Milo. I wondered if a black car appeared in your garage the morning after you came into some money, like some kid’s movie. Frog chauffeurs instead of coachmen. A bloodthirsty art dealer instead of your fairy godmother.)
The voice paused. “According to my instructions, I’m supposed to laugh at you now.”
“Go ahead?”
The voice managed a kind of embarrassed chuckle.
More soft tapping sounds, but the voice spoke again before they finished.
“I won’t give you my identity. It’s not important. Know that I am an interested party, and I want you to begin booking your travel back home. You have no particular skills. You know this. You’re a fairly standard teenage boy. You have no use but to be used.”
“I know it’s fun to be cryptic, but that last thing made zero sense.” I wanted the voice to keep talking, because as I wiggled my hands, I realized the zip tie wasn’t as tight as it needed to be.
“Think of yourself as a package. It’s Christmas, so picture a nicely wrapped present. Charlotte carries it around. It’s heavy in her arms, but it’s pleasing to look at it. Maybe the package talks. It’s witty. It’s flattering. It makes her feel special, and she likes that feeling. And one day Charlotte leaves it somewhere in public, and poof, it is taken from her. Charlotte is sad. Then furious. Charlotte will do anything to get her present back. Horrible things. Things that will end in her death, or imprisonment. We don’t want Charlotte to do these things.”
“So in this weird children’s story you’re telling me, I’m a talking package.” I’d put my wrists between my knees, and slowly, slowly, I worked one curled hand out of its binding. “That’s a pretty stupid extended metaphor. Did you fail English class? You were more of a math person, weren’t you?”
A pause. “Go home, James. You know that you can’t offer her anything.”
My hand was almost free. With my elbow, I felt as unobtrusively as I could for the location of the door handle. “I do make a pretty mean pasta carbonara.”
The car slowed. Were we coming to a stoplight?
“Go home,” the voice said sadly, “or we’ll call your father.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Please,” I said, “I haven’t talked to him in a few hours, he’ll want an update,” and when I jerked my hand out of the tie, I pulled the door open and tumbled out of the car.
Wheels skidding on concrete. My fingers yanking off my blindfold. Honking, someone shouting, and a mess of cars pulling around me, but I’d learned at least one thing in the last few months. Before I crawled the two feet to the curb, I committed the black car’s plate number to memory.