Page 14 of Smoke & Ashes
Then I sent her a wolf emoji. Then,The wolf is not intended to be sexual.
“You broke my fucking door.”
“I’ll replace it.” She swung herself into a standing position with a poise and elegance that should have been impossible in that much flowing red silk. “Where did you go last night? I know it wasn’t home—you’ve not been home in months.”
“I’m not your pet. True I’ve been staying in your house, eating your food, and generally leeching off you for quite a long time now, but that makes me a loser, not property.”
She crossed the office and got well, well inside my personal space. Boundaries, for Tara Vane-Tempest, were very much things that happened to other people. She sniffed me. One of these days I had to think hard about my policy of sleeping with women who could track by scent. It got creepy fast. “My my,” she breathed. “Youdidhave a good time last night. I can still smell it on you, although I doubt you’ve showered.”
“It wasn’t really a showering kind of arrangement.” Not that I’d especially prioritised making the option available.
“I don’t expect fidelity.” She was doing that full-alpha-werewolf thing that I always had a difficult time resisting. “But I do expect courtesy. You said you would wait for me yesterday. You didn’t.”
This was getting at least a little bit unfair. “Youtoldme to get off my arse and start trying to be useful, and I did. Sorry going back to my job and my life inconvenienced you, but if you’d wanted me to lie around naked and attending on your pleasure all day, you did in fact have that option.”
She was still very, very close to me, in a way that was fast moving from sexy into threatening. I tried backing away but she moved forwards. Wolves: don’t run, it only encourages them. “A member of my pack was murdered. More are missing. You solve murders for a living. I had hoped you would finally prove yourself to be of some use.”
Oh. “You wanted tohireme?”
“I wanted you to be on my side when it counted. Something bad is happening, and I think you can be of assistance.” Fuck, it never rains but it pours. I addedwerewolf problemsto my list ofshit people expected me to know how to deal with. She turned away and lowered herself gracefully into the chair that clients were actually meant to sit in. “If you would prefer this to be a professional arrangement, I can pay you. I’d hoped you’d see it as helping a friend.”
It had never occurred to me that Tara Vane-Tempest thought of me as a friend before. I’d thought she mostly saw me as a slightly annoying woman she wanted to fuck so she could score points off Julian Saint-Germain. Then again, she had saved my life a couple of times, and I knew some of her family didn’t like her keeping me around, so she must have—crap did I have to add taking Tara for granted to my long list of things to feel bad about?
“I don’t need your money,” I said. It was a lie. I very much needed her money. And I’d meant it in the niceI’m doing this because I like youway but from how she bristled I don’t think that’s how she took it. I decided to cut my losses. “Tell me what happened.”
7
Death & Flowers
It took Tara a while to get around to explaining what had gone on after I’d left her. She paced the room like a caged animal and refused to meet my eyes for a good five minutes. There was something about seeing her like this—her guard halfway down but still not quite willing to let herself ask for help—that was scarier than when she was just plain threatening to rip my throat out.
“Was it that bad?” I asked, then immediately wished I hadn’t.
She stopped in front of the desk and stared at me for a long moment. It was like she could barely form the words. Eventually she managed exactly one: “Skinned.”
“Alive or dead.” I wished I hadn’t asked that either.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes went yellow, and her fingernails lengthened into claws. Claws that she dug into the back of my chair but hey, furniture was cheap. Well, the furniture I bought was cheap.
“Where?” That question was safer, I hoped.
“On the edge of the Place of Ice and Darkness, the realm of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter.”
That was worrying. I’d never had any particular contact with that particular Faery Lord, but his-her child—the Merchant of Dreams—had been, well, not an ally exactly, but a help at times. Of course they weren’t necessarily involved in everything their mother-father did any more than I was involved in everything that went on in the Deepwild, but they were likely to know something, or be able to sense it at least. “I never thought that the King-Queen was the tearing apart type. That’s more my mother’s style.”
“Which is one of many things that concern me.”
“You think she’s involved?”
Tara shook her head. “No, I think something else is. I know you believe I’m too suspicious of mortal sorcerers, but this stinks of witchcraft. A bargain with a faery creature, hunting a werewolf for her skin. This is human magic of the bloody kind.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come to Safernoc. See what you can find. We will need to take vengeance for this. Terrible vengeance.”
I wasn’t going to argue. Tara had come through for me when I needed her and I had to do the same. Even if that meant taking a case that didn’t pay and was apparently going to start with me looking at a flayed corpse.
Quietly, because subdued didn’t begin to describe the mood, we went outside and Tara called the car around. Since she’d busted my front door it meant I was leaving all my important documentation where anyone could nick it but what were they going to do? Steal my debts? And if somebody went to the office looking for information the joke was on them. IfIcouldn’t sort through my filing system a burglar had no chance. Which, now I thought about, it felt shitty because Elise had left my books in good shape but a couple of years of having to sort this stuff out on my own had addedthe basic administration of my own damned businessto the list of things I’d ruined.
