Page 25 of Smoke & Ashes
I didn’t. Or maybe it would be better to say I had several.Technicallythis was my best opportunity to get another lead on the whole cryptic vision quest/save reality/resurrect Nimue thing, but while that was the big picture it wasn’t likely to come looking for Sofia with murder in its eyes. “Short term,” I tried, “I can stick with you, and if Yelena attacks she’ll at least find somebody she can’t instantly eviscerate. Longer term we need to either get you some protection or work out how to get you in control of your weird my-magic-husband-is-god-of-the-sun powers as soon as possible.”
“Which we do … how?”
“Fucked if I know. I still think getting you high might actually work.”
She gave me a stern look. “You are not getting me high.”
“Not even a little bit?” Okay, I should probably stop with this line of questioning because it was beginning to look a bit sexual-groomingy.
“I mean”—she had that sincere expression she got when she was trying to be helpful while also being firmly convinced that I was a sucking vortex of self-destruction who would drag her down with me. Which to be fair I often was—“I think we’ve got some wine?”
Should I have been worried how up for that I was? What, after all, could go wrong if I spent the evening getting drunk with two undergraduates. Apart from everything. “I’m not sure that has quite the samesacred oraclevibe.”
“Well, no,” Flick was already up and rooting through the fridge. “But it does sound like a pretty good plan for an evening. And we could light some incense, get some candles, make a whole big thing out of it.”
I eyed her suspiciously. “Do youhaveincense and candles?”
“Please, I’m twenty, have blue hair and listen to post-punk bands from the ‘70s, in what world would I not have incense?”
A worryingly short time later I was sitting in a mostly dark kitchen-diner, drinking Sainsbury’s Lambrusco Rosato out of chipped mugs with two girls a shade over half my age. This was not going to look good in court.
It didn’t take very much wine at all for Sofia to noticeably loosen up. “Right.” She set a half-burned-out tea-light in front of herself and fumbled with my lighter. “Let’s do this.”
“What exactly are we expecting to happen?” Flick was cradling a mug that I suspected she’d stolen from the student union, and looking justifiably suspicious.
“Best case scenario,” I said, “she starts giving off sunlight that makes it impossible for vampires to bite her. Second best case scenario we get some useful information.”
“Worst case scenario?” Flick topped up her wine.
“Well, we’re playing with divine power that none of us understand, so I’m not sure there’s really a floor here.”
Sofia finally managed to get the candle lit. She laid her hands flat on the table and stared into it in a way that looked surprisingly like she knew what she was doing, although there was a good chance she was going off movies.
“Feel anything?” I asked.
“Slightly warm, but that might just be the wine.”
Flick raised an eyebrow. “Babe, you’ve had like half a mug.”
“It’s a big mug.”
“It’s a normal sized mug.”
This was getting a bit off-topic. “Okay, even if it’s the genuinely negligible amount of alcohol, warm is still a sun thing, so let’s focus on the warmth. Maybe it’d help if you shut your eyes?”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.” I had to hand it to Flick, at least she appreciated a classic.
Sofia did in fact shut her eyes.
“See anything?”
“Only after-images.”
I felt a sudden closeness as Flick sidled around the table towards me. “If she goes into a trance, let’s draw on her face.”
I was much too classy to respond to that. “Okay, you’ve done this before. All you need to do is get back into the same frame of mind you were in then.” Of course that frame of mind had been in the middle of an arcane blood ritual designed to usurp the throne of the sun with an ancient vampire priestess about to eat her, but maybe she could get close.
She sat in silence for a while. I was almost convinced that I could also feel the room getting warmer, but like with Sofia, it might have been the wine talking.
