Smoke & Ashes (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator #4) - Alexis Hall Page 0,1
otherwise everything goes to hell everywhere, always, something like that?”
“Roughly. And it’s worse now than it was.” That was underselling it. Between the drink and the hating myself I was less tied into the country’s uncanny underworld than I used to be, but I’d still been able to tell that the epic wizard battle screwed things up big time, especially since there’d been no clear winner. Tara perched on the end of the bed. She always looked like she was posing for a catalogue shoot, even when she was talking about serious mystical something-or-other. “I know that the witch-queen was your friend, but she rather fucked us on that one.”
She didn’t get to talk about Nim. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“No, she came from a long line of interfering humans who should have left alone what they didn’t understand.” I was pretty sure that was her grandmother talking. “Although”—she gave me a look that was softer than her usual intense, predatory gaze—“I suppose she was better than many of them. Which isn’t saying much.”
There was a polite knock at the door and Tara opened it to receive a silver tray laden with the kind of things you ate for breakfast if you were super rich, super posh, and a werewolf. Which meant a French press full of immaculately brewed fresh-ground coffee, a reasonable selection of continental pastries, and steak so rare a good vet could probably still have saved it.
She laid the tray on the bed between us, mostly out of politeness. It had been months since I’d eaten anything solid before noon and didn’t fancy starting now. Still, I poured myself a coffee and spent about ten seconds pretending that this was going to be the day I actually got up at a reasonable time and did something productive. Huddling back against the headboard with my drink, I watched Tara eat breakfast. I’d mostly given up trying to learn new things lately on account of how everything was going to be awful forever anyway so why bother, but I was learning quite a lot about Tara Vane-Tempest. Being a shapeshifting guardian of reality caught eternally between two worlds meant that she was guaranteed to be a mess of contradictions. In public she was this flawless icon of the British aristocracy, all poise and composure and using the right fork. Behind closed doors she was something completely different.
Ignoring the pastries entirely, she picked up one of the succulent, flawlessly seasoned steaks with her bare hands and tore into it with her teeth. Blood dribbled down her lips and fingers, and if I hadn’t been feeling so—I think the medical term is “shitty”—I’d have jumped her there and then. Sex and food both really brought out Tara’s animal side and, while I was more into her whole droit de seigneur bit than I liked to admit , it was when the wolf joined the party that things got properly interesting. The metaphorical wolf. Don’t get me wrong, I know some people are into fur, but I prefer my women strictly bipedal.
By the time I was about halfway through my coffee, Tara had finished her breakfast and, with the casual disregard of a woman who knows the sheets are being cleaned by somebody else, prowled towards me, leaving bloody fingerprints all over the bedclothes which turned out not to be a major problem since they were soon covered over by the remains of the French press. I had just about enough time to put my cup down before she was on top of me—sexy wolf ladies were all well and good but there was no sense in wasting perfectly drinkable Jamaica Blue Mountain.
“I thought you had duties to attend to.” Not that I was complaining.
She arched her body so that her face was millimetres from mine. I could practically taste the blood on her mouth already. “There’s still time. I get up early for a reason.”
I tried to kiss her, but she brought a hand to my neck and pinned me down. Her eyes flashed yellow and lupine. I struggled hard enough to make it worth her while. Something sharp grazed my throat—a claw tracing the pulse-line of my carotid artery. Okay, maybe I was kind of into the literal wolf thing as well, as long as she stayed closer to claws-and-fangs and well away from wet-nose-and-tail.
She brought her lips next to my ear. Her breath was hotter than it had any right to be, and her skin brushing against mine was the