Page 68 of Box of Frogs
I flipped up the visor on the helmet and scowled at his back. ‘How the hell do you know something’s wrong? You’re not even looking at me.’
‘I know you, Maddy.’
That was hardly much of an explanation. I thumped him between his shoulder blades. ‘Explain yourself,’ I said sternly. ‘Do faeries have special three-sixty vision?’ I experimented with my own eyes, swivelling them first one way then the other.
‘We do. It’s a difficult technique to master, though. Get off the bike and I’ll show you – it might come in handy.’
Cool. I slid off and ambled round till I was facing him.
‘What you have to do is tilt your head back fifty-two degrees,’ he said
‘Fifty-two? How am I supposed to know how far that it is? It’s not like I’m carrying a protractor.’
He laughed. ‘Do your best.’
I did as he bade. It was awkward but not entirely uncomfortable.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘lick your lips three times, spin around and do a star jump.’
To my shame, I started to. I licked my lips at least twice. Then I came to a halt and glared. ‘You’re taking the piss out of me, aren’t you?’
Morgan’s face split into a massive grin. ‘I am indeed.’ He unhooked his leg from the bike and shook out his hair as if he were in a shampoo advert. I wasn’t complaining. ‘We faeries are impressive but we’re not so impressive that we can beat the basic laws of biology.’
I frowned. ‘Then how do you always know what I’m doing?’
‘As I said,’ he told me, ‘I know you. When you’re so close, I’m … attuned to you. I could hear your breathing change. And your body was pressed up against mine. I felt it when you tensed.’
My mouth was suddenly inexplicably dry. He was paying that much attention to me? Slightly discombobulated, I shuffled my feet. ‘Spiders,’ I said, by way of explanation.
Morgan blinked at me. ‘Pardon?’
‘There were lots of cobwebs in the last place we went to. Rubus’s old hide-out. Fortunately I couldn’t see any spiders but the cobwebs were massive.’ I shrugged awkwardly. ‘I guess I have mild arachnophobia.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ His tone was so dismissive that I bristled.
‘It’s a phobia. It’s not supposed to be logical. It justis. I can’t help the way I feel.’
‘The Madrona I knew wasn’t afraid of spiders. She wasn’t afraid of anything.’
I pulled back my shoulders. ‘The Madrona you knew dumped you for your brother and was by all accounts an evil bitch. At leastI’mtrying.’
He stilled and his eyes met mine. For a long moment, we simply looked at each other, surrounded by night and silence and the whisper of old, broken promises that I couldn’t remember.
Eventually I shook myself. ‘We should get going,’ I said. ‘Julie is in that building and I’m going to rescue her. You can do whatever you want with Rubus. I just want to get out of there with my new boss still alive.’ I sniffed. ‘And I want to find out what happens with Stacey and her husband.’
‘Who the hell is Stacey?’
I smiled. ‘I’ll tell you all about her once we’re out of this place.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘Coming?’
He growled in the affirmative.
With my shoulders hunched and my back slumped, as if poor posture could hide me from any prying eyes, I slipped across the street. Morgan followed. The last thing either of us needed was to end up trapped in Rubus’s lair without knowing how to get out, so I went left while Morgan went right. We met up round the back of the derelict warehouse.
‘No other doors round this side,’ I whispered, ‘apart from the one the arsebadgers entered, and the front door itself. There’s a low window that is ajar though. It’s on a latch that can’t be reached from the outside, but it’s an option for an escape route from inside if we need it.’
Morgan nodded. ‘There’s a door back that way,’ he told me, pointing in the direction he’d just come from. ‘It’s padlocked and chained so it doesn’t look like an option.’
‘Then it looks like we enter the same way they did.’ I glanced around. The streets were still quiet but there was a faint glow appearing on the horizon. ‘Dawn isn’t far off. If we’re going to do this, we should do it now.’
