Page 21 of The Magpie Lord
“Now and then.”
“Merrick will arrange everything,” said Crane. “When do we start? What do we do?”
“We?”
“We. This is my house and it’s supposedly my brother back from the grave. I think that makes it my problem.”
“Yes, but keeping you safe is my job. Really, don’t come. It’ll be tedious or unpleasant, and possibly both. I never do hauntings if I can avoid them.”
“Do you want to avoid this one?” asked Crane. “I made an assumption this was your business, but if not, it’s easy enough to keep people away from the Rose Walk—”
Day was waving a hand to stop him. “No, not at all, it is my business. If there’s any chance of a malignant entity, I have a responsibility to stop it before it does any harm.”
“Well, I feel the same. And you didn’t sign up to face Hector. Ah, Mr. Day?” Crane said over Day’s protest. “I’m a Shanghai Joe. I don’tcare how magical you are, you’re not winning an argument with me unless I let you. I’ll tell Merrick to put the word out and he’ll come to you for a list.”
Chapter Eight
The Rose Walk was a long stone pergola through what had once been an ornamental garden. Its roses were bursting into bloom early thanks to the sultry, unseasonable April heat, about which it had been all too easy to forget inside Piper’s clammy walls. It was twilight now. The waning moon was up, the stars were coming out, and Day and Crane strolled through the shadowy grounds towards the long stone walkway, inhaling the night perfumes of flowers and greenery and clean air, laughing.
The evening had been awkward at first. They had eaten in the huge dining room, at the massive oak table, surrounded by portraits of Vaudreys gone, and Day—small, shabby, poor—had looked utterly out of place, and obviously felt it, among the faded ancestral magnificence, as had doubtless been Graham’s intention. Crane, cursing himself for not ordering the meal somewhere less formal, had set himself to put the man at his ease, since God knew this was uncomfortable enough already, and a chance remark about gambling sharps had led to Day’s admission that he had a certain knack with cards. So Crane had produced a pack, and Day had made it sit up and beg. He took a shuffled pack, shuffled twice more, and spread the cards out in suit and number order; shuffled twice more and brought all the face cards together; sent the cards flying from one hand to another in a series of elaborate twisting switchbacks.
Crane had opened another bottle out of respect for the miraculous display, and what had followed was without doubt the most pleasant hour he had ever spent in Piper. Manipulating the cards had visibly relaxed Day, so that he spoke freely about some of his work, and they had ended up exchanging ever more absurd stories, of smuggling and bizarre magical crimes and life in China, killing the second bottle in the process. The wine, Crane noticed, had no effect at all on Day’s small frame.
The evening had become, in fact, ridiculously enjoyable, and Crane found himself increasingly intrigued by the little man who sat opposite him, and decidedly annoyed when they had broken off to search for his brother’s perturbed spirit.
Stephen Day had a keen mind and a puckish sense of humour, with a relish for the absurd. He also had an infectious sideways grin, his top lip catching on a crooked canine tooth, which gave him a foxy look that Crane was rapidly coming to find highly provocative. And the quick flashing light in those tawny-gold eyes had caused Crane to reassess his ideas about inexperience: there was definitely more to Day than he’d thought. It was, Crane reflected, a pity his small, sinewy body was so scrawny, although that in itself was a mystery.
“A pleasant night for a postprandial stroll and a spot of ghost-hunting,” he remarked now. “Some time you really must tell me how anyone who eats as much as you stays so thin.”
“I know, I know,” Day said. “I’m eating like a, a—”
“Starving vulture.”
“Thank you. Yes. It’s the house. I’m used to much more lively environments.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“In terms of power, I mean. I can’t draw on any etheric flow, any power in the house, which means I’m stripping myself every time I do anything. Which is to say, burning energy from within myself. As you do when you take physical exercise, but more so.”
“Is that safe?”
“Oh yes, as long as you have plenty to eat and drink. If you don’t, or you try to do too much, it burns fat and then muscle, and eventually bone and brain and skin.” They reached the side of the Rose Walk and, in unspoken concord, turned to walk alongside it. “I stripped myself to the bone last winter,” Day went on, “and very unpleasant it was too. I’m still recovering from that, actually.”
Convalescent, thought Crane. That explained a lot. He bit back an absurd urge to ask if Day really ought to be working. “What were you doing last winter?”
“Hunting a murderer. On Romney Marshes, which is an etheric sinkhole—nothing to draw on, worse than here. I spent twelve of the nastiest hours of my life playing tag with a killer, around a marsh, in the dark, on my own, trying not to die.”
“Did you catch him? Was he one of you, a practitioner?”
“A warlock. And yes, I found him. I stripped myself well beyond anything I’d have chanced if I hadn’t been fighting for my life. I woke up looking like something out of the Egyptian Room at the British Museum, and weighing about five stone. I couldn’t walk for a month. Lost all my hair. It was vile.”
“So who won?” Crane said. “It doesn’t sound like it was you.” They had reached the end of the Rose Walk. Day peered down it, crossed the end and led the way down the other side, still outside it.
“No, I won,” he said. “I woke up.”
Crane whistled. “I thought I had an adventurous life. Pitched magical battles on Romney Marshes...”
“Have absolutely nothing to recommend them.”
