Page 82 of The Dagger and the Flame
‘Hell or not, I’m going down there.’
They all turned to stare at her.
‘Now,you’redrunk,’ said Theo. ‘How the hell are you planning to get inside Hugo’s Passage?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ admitted Sera, and perhaps she would have felt uneasy – scared even – if the brandy wasn’t warm inher belly, stoking the flames of her courage. If her palm wasn’t tingling with the memory of Ransom’s kiss.
But now she knew the Dagger wanted that Lightfire just as badly as she did. Perhaps that meant he would help her.
Seeing her friends’ matching looks of horror, Sera stood up, plucking her damp clothes from the floor. ‘These monsters were made by my mother.’ She picked up Mama’s note, the weight of her task heavy in her fist. The guilt around what had become of this city just as heavy on her heart. ‘It’s up to me to get rid of them. One way or another.’
Bibi winced. ‘Breaking into Hugo’s Passage means crossing enemy lines, Sera.’
Sera almost laughed. After the way Ransom had looked at her tonight, after the way she had touched him, she was so far over enemy lines, she was nearly in Dufort’s lap. ‘That’s tomorrow’s problem,’ she murmured. ‘I’m going to sleep.’
A short while later, Sera was standing in the back garden, waiting for Pippin to relieve himself, when Theo appeared.
‘Hey,’ he said, slipping his hands in his pockets as he joined her on the back steps.
‘Hey,’ she replied, only now noting the dark circles under his eyes. ‘I thought you’d be in bed.’
‘I wanted to ask you a question.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘You plan to destroy them, don’t you?’ he said. ‘The monsters, I mean.’
Sera hesitated. ‘What else would I do with the Lightfire?’
He frowned, and she knew they were both thinking of thenote, of what Sylvie Marchant truly wanted of her. Not just to kill the monsters, but to first use them to destroy Dufort and his Daggers.
‘Don’t worry about it, Theo,’ she said, rubbing his arm. ‘You should get some sleep.’
But he lingered on the steps, both of them watching Pippin sniff around a hydrangea bush, pretending they weren’t ruminating over the fate of Fantome. He sighed then, turning back into the house. ‘Just remember what happened to Armand Versini. Daggers never lose, Sera.’
Not yet, she thought as she watched him go.
But there was a first time for everything.
Chapter 30Seraphine
The following morning, Pippin went walkabout. Sera looked for him in his usual spots but he wasn’t snoozing by the ovens in the kitchen or growling at squirrels through the windows of the rec room. She asked around until Blanche said she had seen him snoozing in the library after breakfast.
It was there Sera found him curled up under an armchair by the window. Madame Fontaine was sitting in the opposite chair, poring over a spread of tarot cards. Sera was about to turn around and come back later when the old lady looked up.
‘I don’t bite, Seraphine,’ she said, beckoning at her. ‘Your mutt likes me well enough.’
Sera edged inside. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
Fontaine snorted. ‘You were afraid I’d smell my brandy on your breath.’
Sera’s cheeks flamed. She’d thought the three cups of coffee at breakfast had done enough to battle her hangover.
‘I was saving the Laramie for a special occasion,’ Madame Fontaine went on, gathering her cards back into the deck. For an old woman with gnarled hands, she shuffled them with surprising deftness. ‘Not that those two urchins you run around with seemed to care.’
‘It was a stressful night,’ said Sera, vaguely wondering if the rumours were true, and Saint Oriel did in fact sometimes whisper to Fontaine. ‘We had a run-in with a monster in the Scholars’ Quarter.’
A card sprang from the deck and Fontaine caught it in mid-air, laying it face up on the table. It was an image of a woman in a gold mask, holding a silver one in her hand.
