me for.” That was probably an overgenerous way of expressing it, but I’ve been doing a bare minimum of tidying so I can feel like less of a fuckup didn’t have the same defiant edge. Plus the whole speech would have gone somewhat better without the yellow rubber gloves.
“And how well has that worked for you?” Nobody and nothing could sneer quite as well as the ephemeral manifestation of the dark side of the living conduit of the soul of a city.
I looked around at my sitting room, which now contained 80% fewer old coffee cups but 600% more bits of screwed up paper towel and hastily discarded bottles of surface cleanser. “It’s a work in progress.”
“You have permitted yourself to become distracted.” She caught me by my hair and pulled me to my feet. For somebody who I was fairly sure only existed in my head I was getting a bit concerned at how manifested-in-the-real-world she was getting. “The living statues do not matter. The wolves do not matter. The oracle does not matter. All of these trivialities are keeping you from your pursuit of the castle and the resurrection.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, one of those trivialities was covering my bills and the other two were the direct result of Sebastian Douglas trying to kill me.”
“The Prince of Wands is not your enemy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have got confused because of that time he chained me to a wall and tried to drain all my blood out.”
“Find the castle of the Sangreal. Nothing else matters.”
And before I could come up with a devastatingly cutting and appropriate reply she was gone. She’d probably never been here in the first place. Either way it had harshed my cleaning buzz. I knew that in the overall scheme of things getting my flat in order wasn’t quite up there with raising Nim, stopping the Prince of Wands yet again, or keeping Yelena from murdering everyone I knew, importance-wise, but I’d really thought it was part of turning a corner.
Fuck it. I was going to bed. Except that would have meant giving a small army of magic ladies free rein to roam around in my subconscious. That was probably something I should be taking a look at one of these days, but I honestly wasn’t sure how I was meant to.
I was about fifty-fifty on whether getting totally passing-out drunk would make it harder or easier for people to come and bother me in my dreams, and in a fit of maturity, I decided it wouldn’t. I’d been going way lighter on the booze recently and while it would be an exaggeration to say I was feeling the benefit, I was starting to enjoy knowing what mornings felt like. I went into my half-cleaned kitchen and made myself a cup of Bovril. It wasn’t a magic prophylactic against psychic invasion, but it did make me feel better. Then I sat in my bed drinking beef tea and staring at the wall.
Blah.
Fuck.
I reached onto the floor where I’d sensibly hung up my jacket and fished out my phone. Probably it would be a bad idea to call Tara at this time of the evening. She had her own shit going on and it was unfair of me to drag her into my flat-related insecurities. Then again, fuck it, she was a big girl and she could always hang up if it was a problem. I called her.
“You didn’t tell me,” she purred down the line the moment she picked up, “that the blue one would be quite such a handful.”
“Did she try to shag you?”
“She very nearly succeeded. I’ve had a lot going on and would have appreciated the diversion.”
A tiny part of me was sad that it wasn’t just me Flick had tried it on with. It was nice to feel special, after all. “I don’t know who’s worse, you or her.”
“Come now, you’re clearly worse than either of us.”
I’d have protested, but having come within a heartbeat of fucking the magically identical quasi-sister of my effectively dead best friend, I had very few legs to stand on. “Point.”
“So why have you called? Did whoever’s bed you were trying to crawl into think better of it?”
“Actually, I thought better of it. Long story. I’m at home right now.”
She gave a laugh that I only found slightly mocking. “Are you telling me that you’ve not only turned down casual sex two nights in a row but are also going to sleep in your