She should. And I needed the money, but I’d basically broken this woman’s world and couldn’t quite bring myself to charge her for the privilege. At least not right at that moment. “No rush. You’ve got your own shit to get in order, like I’ve got mine.” Leaving her on the sofa, I stood up, threw my coat on, and fished the invoice out of my pocket. “Look at it when you feel ready, but take whatever time you have to.”
She picked it up but didn’t unfold it. “Have a safe evening.”
“I’ll try, but no promises. Mostly though, I think I’m going home.”
I did.
18
Hearth & Home
The flat was cold, with a weird smell from the bin or the sink or possibly both. Going literally months without sleeping in my own bed hadn’t exactly been a deliberate policy, and so I hadn’t set things up for it. I didn’t want to think about how much mould had grown in the half-cups of coffee and never-quite-finished sandwiches that were probably scattered all over the whole damned place.
Well, most of the place. For the first time since her not-exactly-death, I went into Elise’s room.
It was pristine. Her bed was made—as far as I knew she’d made it the first night she got here and it hadn’t been unmade since because she never actually slept in it. I’d occasionally pointed out to her that she’d have more space if we got rid of it, but she said she thought it tied the room together, and that a bedroom should have a bed in it.
What, precisely, she felt it tied together I could never be sure of. I paid Elise for working for me—not a huge amount admittedly, basically minimum wage, but since she also got to live in my home rent-free and had zero physical needs, I thought it was pretty generous all things considered. Her whole income had been disposable income, and she disposed of it according to a series of whims I’d never properly been able to understand. She’d had a phase of building model aeroplanes, had bought one of those incredibly elaborate dollhouses some people were into and done it up in immaculate detail. She owned a truly remarkable and strangely eclectic wardrobe of clothes that ranged from the demure to the outlandish. A chest of drawers in one corner was completely filled with objects whose texture she found interesting. Different grades of sandpaper, rocks with holes in, silk and soapstone, a koosh ball. I’d never worked out what Elise’s relationship with touch was. As near as I could tell she didn’t feel pain, but she must have feltsomethingbecause she took an almost-childlike joy in subtleties of texture and variations in temperature. She’d been quite unabashedly sensual, I realised. Even if her sensuality hadn’t come across as ordinarily sexy.
I allowed myself a good few minutes of wallow, then went back into the sitting room. Definite mould. Definite weird smell.
Fuck it, Tesco's was open ‘til eleven. I went for cleaning products.
I got back home a bit under an hour later with bags full of all-purpose cleaner, mould and mildew remover, and that odour spray stuff that you use when you have to admit that the situation has got so bad all you can do is cover up the worst of the stench. Not being sure where to start I took everything that looked throw-awayable and threw it away. Then I took my full-to-bursting bin bag down to the big communal bins outside. Then it was a matter of spraying everything to within an inch of its life, scrubbing the shit out of anything that looked like it might actually be growing, and filling the whole place with a nauseating floral scent that was marginally better than the faint smell of decay it was masking.
It was a haphazard, poorly planned affair, and about halfway through I found myself crashed down on the sofa wearing a pair of marigold gloves and crying my eyes out for no fucking reason.
I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder, and looking around I saw a woman in green sitting beside me.
I slapped her arm away. “Can you not give me one fucking moment to have a feel without popping back up like the otherworldly equivalent of undercooked chicken and telling me I’m supposed to be doing something woobly and mystical. And then not telling me how.”
She glared at me. Her too-green eyes looked weird as hell in Nimue’s face. “You’re at your worst when you’re defensive.”
“You’re invading my fucking house. And my fucking dreams. I’ve got the right to be as defensive as I damned well want.”
In a rush of emerald sequins and unsettling magic, she rose and stood in front of me, looking down with that imperious expression that Nim only got when it was super, super important. “The Queen of London will die forever if you do not act. You have a duty and you are abandoning it to bathe in self-pity in this”—she made a sweeping gesture that covered my entire flat—“parody of a home.”
“I’ve not been bathing.” That was kind of true but not what I wanted to be saying. “I’ve been getting my shit in order so I can be of some use in whatever apocalyptic showdown you’re trying to prepare me for.” That was probably an overgenerous way of expressing it, butI’ve been doing a bare minimum of tidying so I can feel like less of a fuckupdidn’t have the same defiant edge. Plus the whole speech would have gone somewhat better without the yellow rubber gloves.
“And how well has that worked for you?” Nobody and nothing could sneer quite as well as the ephemeral manifestation of the dark side of the living conduit of the soul of a city.
I looked around at my sitting room, which now contained 80% fewer old coffee cups but 600% more bits of screwed up paper towel and hastily discarded bottles of surface cleanser. “It’s a work in progress.”
“You have permitted yourself to become distracted.” She caught me by my hair and pulled me to my feet. For somebody who I was fairly sure only existed in my head I was getting a bit concerned at how manifested-in-the-real-world she was getting. “The living statues do not matter. The wolves do not matter. The oracle does not matter. All of these trivialities are keeping you from your pursuit of the castle and the resurrection.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, one of thosetrivialitieswas covering my bills and the other two were the direct result of Sebastian Douglas trying to kill me.”
“The Prince of Wands is not your enemy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have got confused because of that time he chained me to a wall and tried to drain all my blood out.”
“Find the castle of the Sangreal. Nothing else matters.”
And before I could come up with a devastatingly cutting and appropriate reply she was gone. She’d probably never been here in the first place. Either way it had harshed my cleaning buzz. I knew that in the overall scheme of things getting my flat in order wasn’t quite up there with raising Nim, stopping the Prince of Wands yet again, or keeping Yelena from murdering everyone I knew, importance-wise, but I’d really thought it was part of turning a corner.
Fuck it. I was going to bed. Except that would have meant giving a small army of magic ladies free rein to roam around in my subconscious. That was probably something I should be taking a look at one of these days, but I honestly wasn’t sure how I was meant to.
I was about fifty-fifty on whether getting totally passing-out drunk would make it harder or easier for people to come and bother me in my dreams, and in a fit of maturity, I decided it wouldn’t. I’d been going way lighter on the booze recently and while it would be an exaggeration to say I was feeling the benefit, Iwasstarting to enjoy knowing what mornings felt like. I went into my half-cleaned kitchen and made myself a cup of Bovril. It wasn’t a magic prophylactic against psychic invasion, but it did make me feel better. Then I sat in my bed drinking beef tea and staring at the wall.