“Are you listening?”
“Uh-huh.” After considering it for a second, she popped the giant stack of pepperoni into her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, her mouth completely full. “I didn’t think I could pull that off. My calculations were right!”
I’d never seen her act like this before. “What are you on?” I blurted.
Holmes gave me an affronted look, the brunt of which was undercut by her chipmunk cheeks. She chewed for a minute and swallowed. “We found proof. Definitive proof. Haul Nathaniel in, question him, and you’ll have your link to Hadrian Moriarty. I’m sure August has him en route to Greystone right now. We’ll find my uncle before the day is out, I’m sure of it.”
Holmes’s instincts hadn’t been wrong this fall, when she’d refused to consider August Moriarty as a suspect in Lee Dobson’s murder. But this felt different. It wasn’t sentiment, or nostalgia. It wasn’t wishful thinking, either. It felt . . .
“Too easy,” I said to her. “Isn’t this too easy? All the information you need is under the floorboards?”
Holmes rolled her eyes. “Occam’s razor, Watson. I’ve texted August and told him to bring Nathaniel back to Greystone tonight. But he said he won’t be home until late. We have some time to kill.”
She was trying to distract me, I knew she was, but the glee in her voice was contagious. “Well, what do you want to do?”
“A date,” she said.
“A date.” I blinked. “What kind of date? Are we talking, like, dancing? A movie? A soda shop?”
“Better.” Shy, suddenly, she dropped my gaze and looked out the window. “Something . . . well, something I love. Something we can only do here.”
“A German something.”
“Well, when in Rome,” she said, and that was how we ended up at the Christmas market at Charlottenburg Palace, three days before the holiday itself.
At first glance, it looked like a sea of candles bobbing in a dark pool. Tents, white tents, rows and rows of them lit from within like clouds of daylight in a line, all topped with light-up stars and wound with garlands. People were crowded around them in earmuffs and gloves, drinking from mugs and eating giant frosted cookies. It was silly, and charming, and a little bit weird, and honestly, I loved Christmas. I always had. I was missing my family something fierce, tonight, thinking of wrapping presents around the fireplace back at home.
And then there was Holmes, who was acting like she’d had a near-death experience and come back to tell me all about the light. She was relieved, I realized. Bone-crushingly relieved. When, in our last case, she’d realized August wasn’t to blame, she’d acted the same way. Talked nonstop. Ate everything.
Ate . . . everything.
“Have you had stollen?” she asked me, pulling me over to a booth staffed by a jolly old man right out of a Hallmark special. “Was kostet das?” she asked, pointing to the both of us. The man answered, and she pulled a handful of euro coins out of her pocket.
“What am I eating?” I asked her as she handed me a slice of jewel-dotted bread.
“Stollen,” she repeated impatiently. “Sort of like fruitcake, only it isn’t wretched. Milo usually ships it home for the holidays. That, and a fir candle to light up next to the artificial tree.”
Gingerly, I tried it. It wasn’t bad at all.
Cookies next, then mulled wine that smelled like cinnamon and cloves. We wandered through the stalls, eating from brown paper bags, getting our gloves covered in crumbs. We’d stopped on the way so that Holmes could retrieve her jacket from Piquant, the restaurant we’d eaten at with Phillipa, and now she flipped the collar up to keep the snow off the back of her neck. Then, with a self-conscious laugh, she reached over to do the same to mine.
“Otherwise it’ll go down the back of your shirt,” she said, her fingers brushing against my hair. “Don’t want that.”
I shivered.
This side of the market was playing Handel over its speakers, but as we wound over to the giant, light-up Ferris wheel, the music changed to American Top 40. The tail end of a song about sneakers, and then—
“Oh my God,” I said to her. “They’re playing L.A.D.”
“I think I just heard the twelve-year-old girl behind me say the same thing.”
“Shut up,” I said, “or I won’t take you on the Ferris wheel.”
“You’re assuming that I want to go.”
“Of course you do.” I paused. “Do you?”
She smiled crookedly at me, her mug of mulled wine clasped between her hands. A little bit of powdered sugar was on the tip of her nose.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to.”
We stomped our feet next to each other in the line; she was doing this thing where she’d lean against my arm for a second, but if I looked down at her, she’d pull herself away like a housecat caught on its back.
“I want car number three,” she said, when we neared the front.
“Why?” I asked.
“Haven’t you been paying attention? It’s the one that’s the swingiest.”
“Swingiest isn’t a word.”
She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down into everything. I reached out and touched the tip of her nose. My finger came away white with sugar.
“It is now,” she said quietly.
The ride operator was appropriately toothless, and the boys above us kept throwing popcorn down at our heads, and when our car stopped, it didn’t stop at the top to give us a view of the city—instead, we jerked down to the stop before we disembarked, the perfect place to stare up at everyone else’s feet.
“It only goes for two minutes? For five euros each?” She dug through her brown paper bag. “I wish I had something to throw myself.”
“You’ve never been to a carnival before?”
“I rode the London Eye with my Aunt Araminta. She believed in taking my brother and me on ‘excursions.’” Holmes made a face. “She gave us clothes for Christmas, a size too large, ‘to grow into.’ She’s the sort of person air quotes were invented for.”
“Leander said that the Moriartys killed her cats,” I told her, and then blanched. I hadn’t meant to bring that up. Not just when we were on the other side of this case (But are we on the other side of this case? a voice in my head asked), but when we were getting along so well.
But Holmes just nodded. “Totally did her in. She sells honey, now, from her apiary, and doesn’t talk much to anyone. I haven’t seen her in two or three years.” Our spangled metal car tipped forward, then back. “Are they ever going to let us off this thing?”
“I thought you liked the swinginess.”
“It’s making me nauseous.”
“Just close your eyes and enjoy the L.A.D. It’s ‘Girl I See U Dancin.’”
“You knew the name.”
“Girl I see u dancin / something something ransom—oh, come on. You love it.”
“I love it? I think that’s your job.”
I wrinkled my nose at her. “I know your deepest, darkest secrets, Charlotte Holmes. Don’t you give me that.”
The smile on her face went frozen and forced, all at once, like a gust of cold wind from the north, and as I opened my mouth to ask why, the ride lurched forward again.
eight
WE MADE IT BACK TO HOLMES’S ROOM AROUND MIDNIGHT to find August Moriarty waiting at the door, hat literally in hand.
“Where’s Nathaniel?” she asked him, an edge already in her voice.
“I let him go,” he said.
She started, like she was keeping herself from lunging at him. “You ask for my trust, for all of our trust, and then you go and drag away the man I want to question and you announce yourself and everything you know to Hadrian Moriarty and—”