already.” I wasn’t sure if she was angling for reassurance, but I thought it was best to err on the side of her self-esteem. “You basically saved all our arses when the Prince of Wands attacked.”
Sofia, who I suspected might have been genuinely humble, which I was gradually learning wasn’t quite the same as the crushing self-loathing I used as a substitute, murmured something approximating a don’t mention it, and curled back up.
From there, the trip up to the North-West was fairly uneventful, despite Tara’s utter disregard for road safety, the highway code, or the comfort of her passengers. Travelling by day there wasn’t a huge amount that was likely to ambush us, and bombing along a major roadway at something like ninety miles per hour there wasn’t much that could have. We changed Ms a bunch of times and wound up on the M6 cannoning past Liverpool and into Lancaster.
Taking the motorway through this bit of the country was always weird, because it was this strange mixture of rural idyll and fucking gargantuan chunk, of tarmac. Look ahead and it was all concrete and road bridges and signs saying three miles to services. Look left and it was nothing but fields and open countryside. As we came off the main road, we started hitting the proper national park bit, with all of its rolling hills and grey-red-brown cliff-faces rising up out of the treeline. Perhaps it was my mother’s blood or my father’s northern roots, but there was something about those hills, about the unstoppable vastness of the sky and the stone and the wood that spoke to me in a way that not a lot of things did. It felt kind of right for the grail to be here, if it was anywhere. If the whole Patrick’s-girlfriend-is-an-ancient-metaphor theory was remotely plausible. The whole place had this ancient almost fairytale vibe to it that I didn’t think anywhere else could match. Well, an ancient fairytale vibe, plus a fairly major network of A-roads.
We’d been in the car for a good four hours by the time we got into the Lake District proper, and we went from dual carriageways and concrete barriers to winding lanes with dry stone walls. Despite my general mistrust of Tara’s wheelpersonship this had been suspiciously easy so far. If the Prince of Wands did have plans for Elaine, then there was no way he’d let us get away with waltzing up and snatching her from under his nose.
Unless that was exactly what he wanted us to do.
Unless he wanted us to think that was exactly what he wanted us to do.
Unless he wanted us to think he wanted us to think it was exactly what he wanted us to do and in fact he didn’t want us to think he wanted us to do it because it was what he wanted us to do.
Bleagh. That was the problem with going up against Sebastian Douglas. The guy got in your head like Doctor and the Medics singing Spirit in the Sky. And before you knew it you were second-guessing every thought that crossed your mind.
We followed Patrick’s directions down a few more winding roads and down a little country lane. Yeah, so it turned out that when Elaine said her parents had a “little place in the lake district” she meant a fucking estate in a private woodland overlooking Lake Windermere.
“Oh, how pretty.” Tara seemed less impressed than charmed. Then again, anything short of an actual fucking castle probably looked a bit nouveau-riche to her.
“Yeah, really … millionairey.”
Sofia and Flick stirred in the back seat. “Oh, are we here?” Flick seemed at once pleased to have arrived and peeved to have been woken.
“It looks lovely,” added Sofia, apparently the only person in the car middle class enough to see a second home in a national park and not immediately respond with either condescension or resentment.
We parked the Silver Shadow outside and approached the front door. I knocked, and there was no answer. Of course there fucking wasn’t. We’d left early and even with the nearly five hour trip it was barely afternoon, which meant Patrick was at far less than full vampire power and he’d clearly have instructed Elaine not to open the door during the day when he couldn’t protect her. Despite the fact that all his enemies were nocturnal. Fucking Patrick. Fucking predictable fucking Patrick.
“Elaine,” I tried through the door. “It’s me, Kate. We spoke on the phone?”