“You can stay,” I say as gently as I can, “if you feel safe.”
Her immediate hand-wave takes in the apartment. “Feel those wards?” I nod. “The agency is renting it. It isn’t regular Crown Estate, but it’ll do for tonight; the security was installed by a minor Saudi prince who was afraid of being strangled in his sleep by the vengeful ghost of his third wife.”
“Was he?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Slipped and drowned in the bathtub between rounds of golf at Gleneagles. Or maybe he fucked the wrong kelpie.”
“Should I be afraid of Saddam-style cheesecake murals on the bedroom ceilings?”
Her shoulders slump and she leans against Moby Dick’s carcass. “Same old Bob.” She sounds somewhere between nostalgic and sad.
“When the going gets tough, the tough desperately evade the issue,” I throw back at her. She is tense. I haven’t seen her outside of meetings for ages—Dr. Armstrong all but ordered me to stay away—and I don’t like what I’m seeing now in close-up. If you see someone every day you maybe don’t notice the minute incremental changes, but take a few weeks out and they become glaringly obvious, and what’s obvious to me right now is that she’s been to a very dark place and I’m not sure she’s out of it. Judging by the way she’s reacting, what happened to me tonight hasn’t helped. “Okay, so not really excessively bad taste, just ten-centimeter shag carpets, a mirrored ceiling over the black silk sheets on the water bed, and an implausible collection of kangaroo-shaped sex toys…?”
She chuckles weakly. “Never stop trying to cheer me up.” She knocks back a good-sized mouthful of Talisker, goes cross-eyed from the effort of trying not to spray it everywhere, and holds her breath before taking a whooping gasp. Then her mood slumps. “I’m a bad woman, Bob. I’m about as supportive as a plank; I really ought to try harder. You deserve better than me.”
“And I’m about as perceptive as a plank so maybe we deserve one another.” I sip at my glass and the liquid evaporates before it reaches the back of my tongue. “We’ve got to start somewhere.” Change the subject before you get maudlin, Bob. “How does it feel not having the violin in tow all the time?”
“Like walking around naked in public.” She shivers again. “It was weird and frightening at first but now it’s almost liberating. I don’t have to worry about keeping Lecter under control anymore. The worst has happened, it’s all history. If it hadn’t nearly broken me I’d be doing just great.”
There doesn’t seem to be much I can say to that so I put my arm around her and we sit in silence for a couple of minutes.
“Why are you here tonight?” I eventually ask. “Aside from the obvious?”
She half-turns into my chest and wraps an arm around me. “You gave me a bad fright. Also, Dr. Armstrong told me to come.” And there you have it, I just about have time to think, before she adds, “Not that he could have stopped me with anything short of a direct order.” Oh.
“Um. Why?”
More hugging ensues. It’s embarrassing—we’re acting like teenagers—but neither of us is inclined to stop. “Something about putting an armed guard on the stable door to stop the horse thief if they make a second attempt, I think. He said Johnny will babysit you until he can organize a personal protection detail. Maybe tomorrow.”
“What?” The words I’m the Eater of Souls, I don’t need no steenking bodyguards die before they reach my lips: the sore patch on the side of my neck aches and I remember a searing moment of near-panic, the realization that I could have lost control.
“Don’t worry, they’re not coming back tonight. But if they try it they’ll have to come through Johnny and me.” The way she says it reminds me Mo is formidable with or without the violin. I remember the incident report on the attack on the New Annex, detailing the damage Judith Carroll inflicted on the ancient vampire sorcerer before he rolled over her. She was an Auditor. Mo is her replacement, and they have capabilities we mere mortals don’t know about. Best not to ask too many questions. “One more piece of work to do, and I’m done for the night: how about you write up your report on the SA’s meeting while I examine whatever it is that your attackers were so keen to get their hands on?”
That’s a no-brainer. “Sure.” I lean over, grab my bag, open it, and pass her the envelope.
Her finger circles cautiously over the seal as she checks it for unseen wards or invisible occult finger-traps. “Who was it…?”
“A fellow from the US Postal Service Inspectorate. He’s taking early retirement and thought we ought to know why.”
“Oh dear.” She frowns as she opens the envelope and removes a fat sheaf of printouts. “This is going to take some time.”
“I’ll be over there.” I stand up and shuffle towards the inhumanly clean desk at the other side of the room, tugging my bag along. I had the foresight to pack a couple of biros and a notepad, but I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s writer’s cramp: I don’t normally handwrite anything longer than my signature these days.
“Oh, and one last thing,” she calls across the room. “I asked HR to book us a slot with a relationship counselor for early next week, one with a security clearance. Are you okay with that? It’s in your calendar, we can change it if you want.”
“I can’t—” I stop and rephrase. “I don’t see any reason why not, as long as work doesn’t get in the way.” I heft the bag. “But first…”
She chuckles sadly. “Work always gets in the way, love, that’s our problem. But we’re not going to fix things by sitting around in a safe house waiting for the end of the world to fall on our heads.”
*
Night in the capital.
There is a row of six Georgian town houses with shared walls on one of the avenues near Sloane Square in London. Taken individually they are astronomically valuable pieces of real estate, any one of them worth tens of millions of pounds. An onlooker might suppose that they’re owned by sovereign wealth funds or minor Middle Eastern royalty, like so many others in the center of the world’s most expensive city.
But of course, the onlooker would be completely wrong. They’re all owned by the resident of the house in the middle of the row. She’s had the attic spaces combined into a single open studio workspace, she rents out the lower three floors of the other five houses for income—and she’s a witch. By which I do not mean the crystal-chakra-healing kind of witch, but the consorts-with-demons, walks-between-the-raindrops, stops-hearts-with-a-single-word kind of witch. She’s Baba Yaga with a laser beam, guaranteed to blow your mind. And right now Persephone Hazard is furiously, incandescently angry.