went. His life was hard enough what with the whole deal demons had where they needed to drain other people of their joy and happiness or else suffer unending torment always, forever. Plus immortals didn’t face bereavement that often, for obvious reasons, so they tended not to handle it well.
I pencilled another entry onto my list of reasons I am a shitty person who doesn’t deserve to have good people in her life.
Saying goodbye to Julian was awkward. There was still a tiny part of me that felt I should be kissing her, and another part that wanted to ram a golden spike through her eye and watch the alchemical sunlight liquefy her brain.
In the end I went with, “Later.”
“Don’t get killed.”
She was still the last person who got to give me that advice.
22
Cold & Dark
It was weird being in Julian’s limo again, but I wasn’t going to let a little detail like seething bitterness get in the way of my ride. On top of being a basically lazy and selfish person, I needed to get to Safernoc as quickly as possible because, as a rule, people didn’t ring you up saying “help help, we’re under attack” unless things had got super bad.
My arm was still hurting like hell, which on reflection was probably going to limit my ability to be much practical use in any kind of fight, much less the sort that required you to ring for emergency relief. Still operating my phone wrong-handed I fired off a few messages to Flick but got no response, which I took to mean she was keeping her head down, rather than that she was dead of mysterious entity. I also caught brief sight of a somewhat belated reply from Eve on the Nicola Bright situation to the effect that she was a bit concerned but her government contacts were being cagey. I filed that under “later”.
As the car sped through the late-night traffic, I had this weird dissonance in my head where it felt betrayal-ey to be thinking about anything that wasn’t whatever the hell disaster was going on at Safernoc, but at the same time I was stuck in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven vehicle for at least another hour and I might as well try to be useful. Well, useful-ish.
I texted Patrick.
I wasn’t expecting to get anything back, so I went long-form. Having come of age in the days of strict character limits when skipping punctuation and using maddening abbreviations had actually been useful, I couldn’t quite get used to the fact that you could now send somebody a text the length of a short wikipedia article if you wanted to. But I tried anyway.
Patrick, I typed, I know you won’t believe this, and I don’t have any details, but whoever your new girlfriend is, she might be in more danger than we thought. The Prince of Wands used you to get to me and he used you to get to Sofia. He’s got plans for the new girl, I’m sure of it.
I hit send. Then followed it up with. I’m serious, Patrick.
That had been almost as painful as getting a limb snapped by an angry vampire. It had also exhausted my list of tasks I could productively do via electronic device from the rear of a moving limousine. Which left me alone with my thoughts. And I fucking hated my thoughts.
Everything was still such a tangle right now. Getting the Ed Brown case off my docket meant I was without paying work yet again and had dropped the only relatively straightforward thing from my to-do list. Yelena, the Prince of Wands, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter, and whatever the fuck was happening with Nim and the visions and the hallucinations and the fucking tarot nonsense, were all this gigantic messy blur of supernatural gah that was making less and less sense by the day. I was getting sick of messy blurs of supernatural gah.
The night grew darker as we turned off the motorway and into the A-roads and then the little country lanes that led to the ancestral seat of the Vane-Tempests. A lot darker, now I thought about it. And some of that was probably tree-cover and some of it was probably getting away from the relentless streams of headlights and streetlights that lined the main roads, but there was something else—an almost tangible malevolence, like a haunted wood in a fairytale. I felt briefly bad for the driver, who as far