“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know quite what will happen with the four of them, but they’re alive, and it seems like they’re free from the King-Queen’s control, at least for now. Of course grandmama may be right; they may be a burden on the pack.”
I put an arm around her instinctively, realising slightly too late that I was still soaking wet and probably ruining her dress. “I know you’ve got the whole ancient warrior people thing going on, but this isn’t Sparta. We’re well past leaving folks to die on hillsides for the greater good. They’re blind, not incompetent.”
“I want to believe you.” She leaned into me. “But so much rests on this.”
“Some does, true. But if you ask me where your grandmother’s wrong—apart from how she’s kind of a flat-out terrible person, no offence—is that she thinks you’re in this alone. I might be stepping out of line, and you can tell me if I am, but the way I see it is, if you think you have a duty to protect England from the forces of the supernatural, you’d want to use whatever support you could get. Even if it came from people who couldn’t turn into monsters on demand.”
She turned her head towards me. “That was a little out of line. These matters are more complex than you credit them with being. But you aren’t entirely wrong. There is an… arrogance to our calling that can lead us to make poor decisions. I only hope that I have not made one by trusting you.”
“That I can help with. I’m an expert on poor decisions.”
“I’m not sure that’s comforting.”
“Yeah, I can see that. But I’m quite sensible where other people are concerned. It’s my own life I can’t cope with. And I’ve got your back, Tara.”
She took my hand again. My good hand. “I want to believe that.” With a curt nod to the driver, we pulled out. And I slowly allowed myself to realise that we might have achieved something. True, the something was solving a problem that only existed in the first place because I’d sucked the Vane-Tempests into a conflict with the Prince of Wands, and true, four basically innocent women had been left with lifelong injuries, but this was a win. A small win, but a win.
Nim was still in a coma, of course, and I still had no idea where the grail was or really what it was, and I was still convinced that Sebastian Douglas had another card to play, but I was taking my victories where I could find them.
29
Reflections & Realisations
After the excitement—and I use the term advisedly, it might have been better to say godawful clusterfuck—of the raid on the Cold and Dark, the evening was subdued. Sofia had managed to bring all four of the werewolves back from whatever prison of ice and shadow they’d been trapped in, and they were now recuperating in various parts of the vast expanse of Safernoc Hall. Smudge—it had been Smudge, although her real name was apparently Genevieve Tempest de Vere—was ensconced in the green drawing room where Tara (in a stunning green gown, because you always dressed for the décor, even in tragedy) had just told her the bad news about Tuffy. She’d taken it well. Stiff upper lip and all that. When you mixed the deeply ingrained stoicism of the British upper classes with the instincts of a race of predatory shapeshifters, you wound up with people who were truly phenomenal at repressing their emotions.
“Well then,” she said, her hands only slightly trembling as she sipped her tea. “There’s that.”
“Did you learn anything while you were there?” Tara went on with the gentleness and compassion of, well, of a two hundred pound furry killing machine, I suppose.
Genevieve shook her head, not so much in a negative way, but in a trying-to-sort-out-her-thoughts way. “Perhaps,” she said. “It’s all muddled. All mixed up.”
“Whatever you can tell us will help.” I’d have said Tara was like a dog with a bone, but that would probably have been insensitive.
“It’s difficult. Time isn’t normal there. Nothing’s normal there. The Queen was in my mind and she wanted me to hunt for her, to come here and kill you all so she could claim the hall for herself.”
Tara looked intrigued. “Just the Queen, not the King?”
“It looked like fairly icy magic,” I explained, partly to spare Genevieve the questioning and partly because I was still high on the novelty of occasionally having useful