me. Occasionally I’d see a patient or a member of staff going to or from a different room, seemingly oblivious to all the weirdness happening around them. Was I hallucinating? I didn’t think I’d ever hallucinated before, and this wasn’t a good time to be starting. It was bad enough having people poking about in my dreams, without the dreams they were poking about in spilling through into my actual eyes when I was actually awake.
Nimue’s had to be the last room. That’s how it was with her—the top of the tower, the end of the line, forever and always. If she hadn’t been such a basically decent person she’d have been insufferable. I eased the door open and slipped inside.
I hadn’t been ready to see her. In some ways it was better than I’d expected—nobody did serene quite like Nimue—but the whole left side of her face was ruined where Arty King had struck at her, and I was one thousand percent certain she was down an eye underneath those bandages. For some unfathomable reason, the hospital had left her lying in this awkward, unnatural position with her hands folded behind her back and one leg crooked underneath the other.
Michelle, the Warden of the Watchtower of the South and Nim’s lieutenant in charge of murdering people’s heads off, looked up at me from a wooden hospital chair. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I pulled up another of the room’s relatively generous supply of chairs and sat down. There was a silence whose length was matched only by its awkwardness.
“Why now?”
“Dreams.”
“Figures.”
“Figures how?” Actions were definitely more Michelle’s bag than words, but I needed information.
She cast a wary glance at the door, then at Nimue’s peacefully—not sleeping, the phrase that kept coming to mind was more like suspended—body. “Gabriel’s been reading the signs for months. You know what crisis used to mean?”
“Apart from a really bad thing?”
“Not originally. It was medical. Ancient Greek medical. Crisis was when you got to where you either get better”—she held out one hand as if showing half a set of scales—“or you die.” She held out the other to balance it.
“You think Nim’s in a crisis? The technical sort, I mean?”
She glowered. If we hadn’t been sitting mere feet away from the comatose body of a woman I’d kinda-maybe-sorta-loved in a complicated way, I’d have been far more struck by how sexy her glower was. I do like a woman who looks like she wants to break all your limbs. “No, I think her spirit’s calling to a fallen knight through the oneiric darkness because everything is totally fine.”
Fallen knight didn’t strike me as a totally fair description, but I let it slide. I’d never wanted to be anybody’s knight in the first place. “It’s not her that’s calling me. Not completely.”
“Green Lady?” I wasn’t sure how much Michelle knew about Nimue’s dark reflection, but clearly enough to get the colour right at least.
I nodded.
“Not sure if that’s better or worse.”
“I’m thinking worse? She’s basically like Nim’s evil twin.”
“Sort of.” Michelle gave the most non-committal gesture I’ve ever seen a human make. “But evil’s not a thing.”
“Try taking that line with somebody who hasn’t been to actual Hell.”
“Crappy isn’t the same as evil. Point is the Green Lady isn’t Nimue’s evil side, she’s her other side.”
“Yeah, the side that’s not not evil.”
Another one of those movements too casual to even be shrugs. “She’s like a reversed Tarot card. Not Nimue’s exact opposite, not the bad version. Just another point of view.”
“Oh, not you as well.” I slumped back in my chair hard enough that I was briefly worried I’d break it, but private hospitals had sturdy furniture. “Why is everybody trying to read my cards lately?”
Michelle flexed her fingers, making her knuckles crack. “Because you’re on a mystical vision quest to heal the witch-queen of London and stop the country sliding into waste and ruin?”
“Oh yeah. Right.” I looked at her. “So … know how I might go about doing that?”
“Find the castle, win the grail.”
This shit was getting a bit too real for me. “Can I make it extra specially clear that we’re talking about the same thing here? Because I’m a PI. I find cheating spouses, not the actual Holy Grail.”
“You’ll do it, Kate. Nimue chose you for it.”
Okay, that was beginning to sound very slightly creepy. “What do you mean chose me?”
“This day was always coming, sooner or later.”
“If you say anything that sounds remotely like ‘every step has led you here’ I am going to