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A quiet chime interrupted Miranda at her desk. She glanced up at her mirror.
Miles Merlin is at the door. The words scrolled in perfect cursive, a precise replica of her own handwriting.
“Miles . . .” she started. Miranda sat back, steepling her fingers, then got up. He’d have an agenda, and he wouldn’t mean it to be helpful, but it was always possible she could glean something useful from whatever rumors he’d come to spread. “I’ll see him in myself.”
She smiled as she opened the door. “Miles! What a surprise!”
“Miranda.” He looked around the entry, taking in the sweeping staircase, the beeswax-polished wood and soft-white candles on tables and in sconces. Mirrors reflected white flowers and Morris-print wallpaper. “I always forget how traditional this House is.”
“I’ve never been as enamored of technology as you are, Miles. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss interior decorating.” She led him down a hall lined with marble sculptures of Greek goddesses in recessed niches and into a sitting room.
“No, I came because I wasn’t sure if you would have heard about Grey’s most recent challenge.” He sat across from her.
Miranda sat on the edge of a chair, back straight, knees together, feet discretely tucked, as poised as a duchess. “Can I offer you something? Coffee, tea, water? The House would be happy to put something together for you.”
“Oh, did you have that automated?” He looked around, interested enough to be distracted from what he had come there to say.
“No, that’s always been done through the House’s magic. I see no reason to change it, not with the spell working as well as it does.” And that was a dig, if a polite one. The stronger Houses, the ones with a close bond to their Heads, could do such magic. House Merlin, notoriously, could not. She suspected it was part of why Miles spent so much time at his club, why he’d installed enough technology to make his House look like the set of a sci-fi movie, that the expensive shine was a distraction that kept people from wondering about the real reason that the oldest House didn’t run on magic.
“Nothing for me. This isn’t a social call. Did you hear about Grey?” Awkward now, and impatient because of it.
“I was just about to get more tea. Are you certain you don’t want any?” Miranda asked, cuttingly polite.
“Really, no.”
“A pot of tea please, Lady Grey.” She didn’t want it, not really, but she did want to keep Miles off-balance.
Of course.
The drink followed on the mirror’s chime and agreement, the scent of lavender and bergamot steaming into the air.
“Thank you for being patient,” Miranda said. “As you may have gathered, since you’ve been through something similar recently, the disinheritance left things strained between us. Grey and I don’t talk; nor are we part of each other’s lives. As you might infer from that, I haven’t paid particular attention to his progress through the Turning.”
“It was a duel with House Morgan.” Merlin’s eyes watched her face like the hawk he shared a name with. “Something went, well, not exactly wrong. Let’s say overenthusiastic. It was a Briar Rose spell. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such thorns. It was almost as if they wanted to hurt him.”
Miranda kept her face carefully blank. Just because she was magically prevented from speaking about the circumstances of Grey’s disinheritance didn’t mean they were gone from her mind.
She knew, too, that Rose Morgan had been murdered a year after, in circumstances that were close enough to those that had triggered that disinheritance to chill her heart.
She had not asked. She would never ask.
“I know you’re very busy, Miles, so while I certainly appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to tell me this in person, I’m not sure why you felt that I needed to know—he did survive, or I would have heard that before now.” That same note of polite curiosity and nothing more.
“Yes, yes, he survived—that challenge was even decided in his favor. But he was, though he tried to hide it, quite hurt. And the casting magician was the older sister of the girl from that House who was killed. Grey dated her around that time, I believe—or am I remembering incorrectly?” He adjusted his cuffs.
And now the reason for the visit was clear. Merlin, with his fingers full of threads, was shaking his spider’s web and hoping to catch her in it. “Again, Miles, Grey is not a part of my life; nor am I a part of his. That’s been the case for years now. I don’t pay attention to whom he has had relationships with. I’m not sure what else you expect me to say.”
Merlin held his silence for a moment. Two. Then he shook his head. “Perhaps I misestimated the power of a mother’s concern. No matter—I’ll see myself out.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll walk with you,” Miranda said, and led him out of her House.
After he had gone, she stood, her hand on the back of the door that would no longer open to her son and very carefully cleared her mind of the reason why.
There are some things that cannot bear looking at.
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Harper had asked some of the other women at work where to find the bar. She knew there would be one, because this was New York and somewhere in this city there was a bar that catered to every possible clientele. She had simpered and giggled and made jokes about wanting to find a guy with a little magic in his wand until she was sure they all thought she was some sort of magician groupie, but they had told her where to go. “Houdini’s Elephant. It’s next door to a magic shop.”
She had poured herself into a push-up bra and minidress, slicked her lips with gloss, and had gotten to the bar early enough to get a seat at the corner, where she could see the other people there without being obvious.
She’d known she was in the sort of place she was looking for when she’d had to prove she could light a candle to get in. She was currently treating the resulting headache with an excellent vodka gimlet, and watching the crowd.
It was, probably, a stupid idea to put herself out there as bait. There were at least five good reasons she could think of not to, not the least of which being she could wind up dead. But she’d heard rumors—women being killed, in a way that made her think of how Rose had been killed. Details that matched the parts of the police file she wasn’t supposed to have seen, full of horrors.