Paddock set two frothing glasses of beer on Grimalkin’s tray. “If they don’t, I’ve a mind to sweep up the coals from the fire and sell ’em as witch bones myself. I’d make a fortune.” He laughed before waddling back to the tap to fill another glass. “About time we had a bit of good luck around here.”
“That’s why I love you, Paddy.” Grimalkin picked up her tray. “So what’s it going to be?”
“I’m not looking for trouble. I just need to know why.”
Grimalkin nodded, understanding in a way only someone living with the cursed could. “He showed up about an hour ago and ordered supper. We’re busier than usual tonight, so it’s taking longer to serve people. He kept pulling that watch out, checking the time, and giving me the evil eye. That’s when I recognized it. Tried to stall him best I could after that. Then the strangest thing happened. I was set to give him his check when a woman joined him. Older lady. Real proper. Came in a few minutes before you and ordered two glasses of wine. Can’t imagine what she wants with the likes of him, but they moved to a private booth at the back.”
“Show me,” Elena said, her curiosity straining against the leash.
Madame Grimalkin delivered the beers to a pair of conjurers spinning coins three inches above their palms. She snatched the coins out of the air for payment, then pointed Elena to the booth in the back with the curtains half drawn. A man’s elegant leg peeked out of the curtain—the trouser perfectly creased, the wing-tip shoe polished to a mirror shine. “That’s him,” she said. “Probably explaining his services to her right now. Bah. Sooner he’s gone, the better.”
Elena felt a supportive hand on her back before she was left alone to stare at the half-open curtain. She’d been delivered to this moment on a seven-year tide of yearning. Revenge had been the sweet fruit she’d craved in her sleep, poison the elixir to deliver the dream. But Bastien’s death had turned the taste for vengeance to rot. Murder was no longer the salve she’d once sought for her injury. Yet as she gravitated right to see past the curtain and finally know the face of her assailant, she had to temper a rising impulse to strike.
He was an ordinary-looking middle-aged man in a gray suit. Clean-shaven, balding, soft in the middle, and yet he possessed enough vanity to wear an enchanted tie that shimmered with a silver glow. A trick to make his eyes sparkle now that natural youth had slipped away. She tilted her head and looked again. There was something familiar about those eyes, yet not enough to trigger knowing.
She lowered her gaze to where a chain looped from the button on his vest to the watch in his pocket. He didn’t need to pull the watch out for her to know what the case looked like. The image had never left her mind—a sickly green dragon’s eye with a vertical slit overlaid by an elaborate golden eyelid. Tick tock, tick tock, the lid had snapped shut and her life got sucked away. But his ordinary appearance threw her. What if he wasn’t the right person after all? What if the watch was more common than she’d thought?
And then he raised his voice.
“How dare you accuse me of subterfuge,” he said, pounding his fist against the table so that it rattled the silverware. “You practically begged me to fix your little problem. As I recall you handed over a pretty stack of cash and told me I was free to do whatever it took so you could be rid of the situation. That’s what I did.”
The nasal tone, the air of superiority, the twinge of false aristocracy—his identity came flying into focus. The face without the dramatic pasted-on eyebrows and pointed goatee. The eyes wiped clean of their black kohl. A wizard without his flowing robe and false nails.
“You!” she said, throwing back the curtain.
Rackham startled, then narrowed his eyes. “You?” Once he made the connection, he balked at his tablemate. “What is this?”
“Good heavens, what are you doing here?”
Elena pushed back the other curtain. Sitting opposite of the man who had cursed her and left her for dead was the woman who had raised her from a child.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Was it a chance meeting? Coincidence? The All Knowing’s idea of a cosmic joke? Elena’s mind grasped for any reasonable explanation for