Page 64 of Smoke & Ashes
“Will you fuck off,” I yelled. “Can’t a woman walk her dogs in peace?”
“These are all yours?” asked one of the teenagers, incredulously.
There was no reason at all that I needed to defend myself to these people. “Yes,” I said. “I’m an eccentric millionaire and I have a large collection of wolfhounds.”
“Some of them look ill.”
“You know it’s illegal for you to be filming this?”
“Is it?” The kid looked genuinely worried.
“Data protection.” It was a lie, but he didn’t need to know that. “Now sod off and let me dry out on my own.”
They sodded. Given that it was, by my best guess because my watch was fucked and my phone was still in the car, early afternoon it made sense for the wolves to stay wolves. I retrieved their clothes—those of them that had clothes—from the side of the pond where they’d been left mercifully unmolested by passing ramblers. Then we walked the half-mile back to where Flick, Sofia, and a medium-sized army of chauffeurs were waiting for us.
We bundled the rescue-wolves into the back of one of the cars, where they shifted back to their human forms to save space. At this point it was kind of down to Sofia, which I hoped wasn’t too much of a headfuck for her, because from what I could remember of being nineteen, I wouldn’t have been confident having complete responsibility for somebody else’s life and free will dropped in my lap.
“How do I do this?” She looked up at me very, very uncertain.
There wasn’t much I could do but shrug. “I don’t know. It’s sort of instinct, at least for me. Whatever you do when the glowy thing happens, do the same, but maybe focus it a bit more.”
“That’s … unhelpful.”
“Don’t blame me, blame Apollo. Maybe it would be better if you thought of it more as a medical procedure? What would you do if somebody came to you with regular glass in their eyes?”
She pulled astill not helpingface. “I’d send them to somebody much better qualified.” Still, she got on with it, kneeling by the car door because there wasn’t room for four wolves and her inside the vehicle. She took the first werewolf’s face in her hands, peering at her ruined eyes with what looked like real medical interest.
“Okay,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice for somebody dealing with such an objectively unnatural problem, “let’s take a look at you.”
I had no idea what she was hoping to see, and probably neither did she. There wasn’t a lot that could be done withmassive chunks of mirror in the facebeyond the obvious, but the ritual of it seemed to help her. And she managed to avoid the more annoying GP questions likedoes it hurt when I do this.I was beginning to think she’d make a pretty ace doctor in a few years.
With a gentleness that I would actually totally have expected because unlike most of the women I knew, Sofia really did come across as nurturing in quite a traditional way as she examined the mirror-shards. And then, somehow, something seemed to take over, and it was like she’d always known exactly what she was doing. A delicate radiance gathered around her fingertips, and she brushed them gently across the mirror-fragments, which began to melt rapidly, like ice rather than glass, becoming a clear water that ran down the werewolf’s cheeks as though she was crying.
I looked away. She had it in hand, and I’d done enough staring at the victims of faery fuckery for one day-slash-lifetime. Letting myself into one of the other cars—or rather getting the driver to let me in because we were in the world of the posh now and doing things yourself was this weird social taboo—I sat down on the back seat and stared at the ceiling.
Tara slid in next to me. She’d redressed, which I was thankful for—not that I didn’t respect her body confidence, but I was never quite sure where to look.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know quite what will happen with the four of them, but they’re alive, and it seems like they’re free from the King-Queen’s control, at least for now. Of course grandmama may be right; they may be a burden on the pack.”
I put an arm around her instinctively, realising slightly too late that I was still soaking wet and probably ruining her dress. “I know you’ve got the whole ancient warrior people thing going on, but this isn’t Sparta. We’re well past leaving folks to die on hillsides for the greater good. They’re blind, not incompetent.”
“I want to believe you.” She leaned into me. “But so much rests on this.”
“Some does, true. But if you ask me where your grandmother’s wrong—apart from how she’s kind of a flat-out terrible person, no offence—is that she thinks you’re in this alone. I might be stepping out of line, and you can tell me if I am, but the way I see it is, if you think you have a duty to protect England from the forces of the supernatural, you’d want to use whatever support you could get. Even if it came from people who couldn’t turn into monsters on demand.”
She turned her head towards me. “Thatwasa little out of line. These matters are more complex than you credit them with being. But you aren’t entirely wrong. There is an… arrogance to our calling that can lead us to make poor decisions. I only hope that I have not made one by trusting you.”
“That I can help with. I’m anexperton poor decisions.”
“I’m not sure that’s comforting.”
“Yeah, I can see that. But I’m quite sensible where other people are concerned. It’s my own life I can’t cope with. And I’ve got your back, Tara.”
She took my hand again. My good hand. “I want to believe that.” With a curt nod to the driver, we pulled out. And I slowly allowed myself to realise that we might have achieved something. True, the something was solving a problem that only existed in the first place because I’d sucked the Vane-Tempests into a conflict with the Prince of Wands, and true, four basically innocent women had been left with lifelong injuries, but this was a win. A small win, but a win.
Nim was still in a coma, of course, and I still had no idea where the grail was or reallywhatit was, and I was still convinced that Sebastian Douglas had another card to play, but I was taking my victories where I could find them.
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