Page 52 of Smoke & Ashes
It was weird being in Julian’s limo again, but I wasn’t going to let a little detail like seething bitterness get in the way of my ride. On top of being a basically lazy and selfish person, I needed to get to Safernoc as quickly as possible because, as a rule, people didn’t ring you up saying “help help, we’re under attack” unless things had got super bad.
My arm was still hurting like hell, which on reflection was probably going to limit my ability to be much practical use in any kind of fight, much less the sort that required you to ring for emergency relief. Still operating my phone wrong-handed I fired off a few messages to Flick but got no response, which I took to mean she was keeping her head down, rather than that she was dead of mysterious entity. I also caught brief sight of a somewhat belated reply from Eve on the Nicola Bright situation to the effect that she was a bit concerned but her government contacts were being cagey. I filed that under “later”.
As the car sped through the late-night traffic, I had this weird dissonance in my head where it felt betrayal-ey to be thinking about anything that wasn’t whatever the hell disaster was going on at Safernoc, but at the same time I was stuck in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven vehicle for at least another hour and I might as well try to be useful. Well, useful-ish.
I texted Patrick.
I wasn’t expecting to get anything back, so I went long-form. Having come of age in the days of strict character limits when skipping punctuation and using maddening abbreviations had actually been useful, I couldn’t quite get used to the fact that you could now send somebody a text the length of a short wikipedia article if you wanted to. But I tried anyway.
Patrick, I typed,I know you won’t believe this, and I don’t have any details, but whoever your new girlfriend is, she might be in more danger than we thought. The Prince of Wands used you to get to me and he used you to get to Sofia. He’s got plans for the new girl, I’m sure of it.
I hit send. Then followed it up with.I’m serious, Patrick.
That had been almost as painful as getting a limb snapped by an angry vampire. It had also exhausted my list of tasks I could productively do via electronic device from the rear of a moving limousine. Which left me alone with my thoughts. And I fucking hated my thoughts.
Everything was still such a tangle right now. Getting the Ed Brown case off my docket meant I was without paying work yet again and had dropped the only relatively straightforward thing from my to-do list. Yelena, the Prince of Wands, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter, and whatever the fuck was happening with Nim and the visions and the hallucinations and the fucking tarot nonsense, were all this gigantic messy blur of supernatural gah that was making less and less sense by the day. I was getting sick of messy blurs of supernatural gah.
The night grew darker as we turned off the motorway and into the A-roads and then the little country lanes that led to the ancestral seat of the Vane-Tempests. A lot darker, now I thought about it. And some of that was probably tree-cover and some of it was probably getting away from the relentless streams of headlights and streetlights that lined the main roads, but there was something else—an almost tangible malevolence, like a haunted wood in a fairytale. I felt briefly bad for the driver, who as far as I knew was just some schmoe who worked for Julian and had no clue about the nightmare that was, in all likelihood, about two minutes up the road.
I pressed the little intercom button. We were close enough now that I could walk the rest without it being too much of a problem and staying off the main drag would probably be a good idea. “You might want to stop here,” I suggested. “It’s a long way back to London and these roads get tricky late at night. I’ll be fine, you get back home.”
“If you’re sure, Miss Kane.” The driver’s voice seemed at once uncertain and relieved. I was glad I hadn’t been the only one sensing the general creeptastic vibe—I’d been known to get a little paranoid about mystical bullshit. Then again I always thought paranoid was a big upgrade from dead.
The driver very much did not need additional encouragement to leave me in the dust, turn the limo around, and hightail it back to the Velvet. It was probably for the best all in all—another mortal to worry about would only have made things more awkward—but it did mean that I was now on foot by the side of a very poorly lit road, with my arm in a rudimentary sling and a night of supernatural horrors closing in all around me.
I told myself I’d been in worse situations, and I had. Then again, I thought that probably said more about how crappy my life had been up until that point, rather than being any kind of silver lining to my objectively cloudy present situation.
There was nothing for it. With the trees arching up on either side of the road like claws and the stars and moon blotted out behind what I hoped against all probability was a completely ordinary overcast sky, I walked on.
Before long I decided to get off the road proper and a little deeper into the woods. The choice of strategy was partly because the posh berks who lived around these parts tended to think speed limits were strictly optional, and it would have been deeply embarrassing for even this half-arsed rescue attempt to end with my getting run over by some prick in a Beamer. But mostly it was because I suspected the roads would be watched, and while where faeries were concerned trees weren’t exactly mega-trustworthy either, at least I knew I could run and hide in the woods if the situation got out of hand.
Besides, something in the chill of the forest called out to me—not something I was especially comfortable listening to, but right about now something was a metric shit-ton better than nothing.
The woods around Safernoc Hall were a strange, enchanted place that bordered a whole mess of ever-shifting faery realms. The Realm of the Pale Stag—a creature of desolation and withering and autumnal decay, responsible for the white streak in my hair—was one, the Cold and the Dark another. I’d have been amazed if my mother didn’t have access to it somewhere, because it was a howley wolfey hunty place and she was a howley wolfey hunty lady.
I pushed on through the darkness, letting instinct guide me as much as memory. Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe it was residual faery magic impulses, but my arm was beginning to bother me less and my head was starting to feel clearer. Through the trees, I saw a shadow moving in parallel with me. I stopped and it stopped too. I quickened my pace and it quickened.
I walked towards it.
The thing was large, though details were hard to make out in what was fast becoming near-total darkness. At first I thought it might have been one of the wolves, but it seemed bigger, more the size of a large horse. I fumbled on my phone light, and saw something gleaming pale between the trees.
Fuck. Not the unicorn.
It walked slowly towards me, head bowed, which given the giant fucking spike it was pointing at me could either have been a gesture of submission or a threat. Last time we’d met I’d managed to get it, or something like it, more or less on side by pulling faery princess rank. But there’d been a lot of vodka under the bridge since then.
Still, I approached it. Just very, very, very carefully. Horses were bad enough, horses with fucking spears coming out of their faces should have been nightmare fuel to any reasonable person. It knelt down in the undergrowth in front of me, and tucking my phone back into my pocket I gently stroked its neck.
“There we are,” I whispered. “There’s a good half-ton of spite, muscle, and anger.” Cautiously, in case it changed its mind, I swung myself onto its back, and it got to its feet. Well, this officially made me the cavalry. All one of me. Riding a unicorn was more a question of intent than technique, or at least it was if you were me and had to use your status as otherworldly pseudo-royalty to compensate for not knowing what the fuck you were doing. I did my best to guide it towards Safernoc Hall, insofar as I knew where that was.
Snow began to fall. It was so, so not the season for it. Which meant that something intensely spooky was happening. I urged the unicorn on and it carried me through thinning woodlands towards the vast gardens of Safernoc. And while the trees grew sparser the snow grew heavier, so that by the time we’d broken out of the woods and into the grounds of the manor, I could scarcely see for the blizzard and the darkness and the strange shapes that roiled in the clouds overhead.
Shit. I really wasn’t sure how I was supposed to fight the weather.
Except that the snow wasn’t the only thing attacking the hall. Strange, wraithlike images formed in the air—insubstantial but definitely humanoid, forming a chill white army that surged uphill towards the house where in the distance I could make out the shapes of wolves holding the line and a tiny bright point of light that I thought must be Sofia.
I stopped dead. I could have spurred the unicorn on and charged into the back of the blizzard-ghosts. And I might even have been able to push through but then where would I be? Surrounded by evil blizzard faeries with a broken arm and a small iron dagger trying to fend off what looked a lot like the full weight of the Cold and the Dark.
Okay, Kate. Think. Thinking is what makes you different from animals and dead people.This whole place had been a nexus of mystical wibble for centuries, which meant if this was happening now something had changed. And if something had changed it was because someone changed it.
