Page 69 of Smoke & Ashes
There was a very, very awkward silence. We were all looking at Sofia.
“I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I still don’t know how it works.”
Flick got out of her comfortable armchair and knelt down by Sofia’s comfortable armchair. Wow, this place had a lot of comfortable armchairs. “You’ve done it before. You need to concentrate. Here.” She held up a finger. “Look at this.”
“That’s your finger.”
“I know. I’m improvising.” Fishing her phone out of her pocked, she flicked on the torch and waved it in front of Sofia’s eyes. “Is that better?”
“No!” It was an emphatic no. “Just give me a moment.” Sofia shut her eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. Then she looked up. “So those three knights loved their sister so sore that they brent in love, and so they lay by her, maugre her head.”
That didn’t sound good at all.
“Umm”—Flick looked concerned—“I’m a mathematician, so all the maugre and the brent and stuff is a bit above my pay grade, but that sounds hella rapey.”
I was inclined to agree. “We should probably get moving.”
Tara didn’t say anything but slipped her dress from her shoulders and transformed at once into the shape of the great wolf. And then she was off after the scent, and it was all the rest of us could do to keep up with her.
31
Knights & Maidens
The woods around Lake Windermere would have been a really pretty place for a walk if we hadn’t been in a rush to stop a completely innocent girl getting maugred. I was hopeful—not confident but hopeful—that Sofia’s outburst hadn’t been literal. Things looked a lot happier for Elaine if she’d been speaking figuratively and fighting actual knights would get too fucking weird by half.
Tara led us down a narrow, winding path along a hillside that I was beginning to suspect wasn’t quite in the real world any more. It didn’t have the same chill water vibe as walking into faerie but there was something unpleasantly and familiarly dreamlike about the landscape we were passing into. The floor was strewn with hyacinths out of season, and we ran down twisted trails into copses and valleys and caught glimpses in the distance of a lake shrouded in mist.
Then we came to an I-shit-you-not castle. To be fair, these aren’t quite as unheard of in England—especially the heritagey, national parkey bits of England—as they are in some places, but it was still fucking weird. There were buttresses and everything.
As luck and the almighty power of sod’s law would have it, by the time we reached the gates of the improbable castle the sun was beginning to set. I say sod’s law, but everything that had happened so far had been so completely driven by whatever malevolent arsehole passed for fate around here that I was beginning to think I should shut my eyes and do the magical slightly pagan equivalent of letting Jesus take the wheel.
Tara shifted back to her human shape a moment and approached the door. “This isn’t period,” she said to nobody in particular. “Neo-Gothic if I’m any judge.”
“Please don’t tell me that you’re so posh that you’re throwing shade on a fuckingcastlefor not being classy enough?”
To her credit, she looked a tiny bit abashed. “I was just providing context. We’re not totally outside the normal world here—all the strange mists and flowers are … they’re extras. This is a real place.”
I wasn’t sure that was totally helpful. “So if we break in we could get arrested?”
“I have very good lawyers, and you’d be surprised how seldom the police are keen to keep me in custody.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to speculate too much about that. “Right then. Door?”
“The girl’s definitely been here. I can’t be so certain about the vampire, but the whole place smells wrong. We should be careful.”
Great. Busting into a wrong-smelling fake castle in a national park. What else would I have wanted to do with my evening? The lock here was trickier than the one on Elaine’s parents’ summer house had been, but that was a long way from surprising. This kind of place was probably noticeable enough that people occasionallywouldtry to break into it, and the owners had secured it accordingly. Still I got us past the door without too much trouble, and we found ourselves in a swanky entryway, the floor decked out in that red swirly stone that wasn’t quite marble but wanted you to think it was. Now I was inside I could see where Tara was coming from on the neo-gothic front. The whole place had that trying slightly too hard vibe you got when the Victorians decided that historical things didn’t look historical enough and tried to dress them up to be more like they thought they were meant to be. All a bit too much, in other words.
It was about then that I heard the scream.
The good news was that unless Elaine sounded significantly more masculine in person than she had over the phone, it wasn’t her screaming. The bad news was that probably meant something awful had happened to Patrick. Okay, not reallybadnews. Inconvenient news.
The noise was coming from below, because if this was a Victorian imitation of what they thought a castle should be, ofcourseit was going to have a dungeon.
We bolted through the sumptuously Gothic interiors and down a flight of steps that led to a mixture of kitchens, servant’s quarters and, yup, looked like a legit dungeon. Seriously, what was it with those? It was decked out in full nineteenth-century grotesque style, complete with one of those cupboards full of spikes that never really existed. At least I assumed it was full of spikes. Right now it was full of Patrick. And looking closely at his chest—yep, also full of spikes. I could see the points poking out through his shirt. Okay that officially wasn’t funny, I hated the guy but I didn’t want him literally impaled.
Yelena was standing next to him, still in a wolfskin and still acting like she was unhealthily into this whole blood and torture routine. She was running her fingers down his body in a way that I had to describe aslasciviouseven though it made me sound like I was writing a sternly worded letter of complaint in 1874. I was glad that we weren’t dealing with a trio of ambiguously incestuous sex knights, but honestly, I wasn’t sure that an evil vampire with no sense of proportion was much better.
“All right,” I tried. “How about you let him go and we all walk away from this without getting torn apart?”
