by Emma Newman
He looked up from the menu and half smiled with a shrug. “In some ways. Christ, it’s good to see you, Cathy. I need to talk to someone who understands all this shit.”
She started to reach across the table but caught herself in time. Even though she was gloved, she didn’t want him to break the wish magic, nor that of the wedding band. She’d watched him break the curse on Natasha just by holding her hand. Somehow, all the power he had now only made him more magnetic. She was far from impressed with herself. “Let’s get the food order in first, I’m starving. I’ve usually had elevenses and about a gallon of tea by now.”
The waitress flirted with a totally oblivious Sam as they made their orders. Carter and Sam’s security men sat at opposite sides of the diner, watching the doors and keeping an eye on them. It seemed silly and made Cathy want to go over and introduce them to each other. Perhaps they could become friends and exchange tips. Did security men do that?
“How are you, really?” Sam asked, his hands flat on the table, leaning forwards slightly.
“I’m fine.”
“Really?”
She laughed. “Yes. Well, you know, I’m worried about stuff and I mostly just want to run away and watch Adventure Time and eat pizzas and forget the Nether ever existed, but shakes and a burger with my friend will have to do.”
“Is he treating you well?”
“My husband?” Sam gave a nod that conveyed all the ways he couldn’t stand Will. “He’s not like the others. I know you haven’t got off to a good start with him, but he’s not as bad as you think.”
“He’s a posh thug. He held a sword to my throat!”
“He’s an Iris. They tip over into being arseholes at the drop of a hat. He was scared you were going to take me away from him.”
“He doesn’t know you at all, does he?”
She smiled at that. “He knows me better now. And he knows I’m here with you and he was fine about it.” She didn’t mention the fact she’d had to persuade him for over an hour to reach that point, and he probably only acquiesced because it was the only way for her to get his letter to Eleanor. “That’s enough about Will. How are you?”
“Listen, Cathy, if you ever want to leave that bastard and all that fucked up Fae shit behind, you can. Come to me. I’ll make sure they can’t touch you.”
She sighed and leaned back. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I just know how much you hate it. I know you’re scared of them. I just want to make sure you know you have an alternative. I couldn’t help you before, but I can now. I have flats in London that are built to keep Fae magic out. I have houses and hotels all over England. If you’re in Bath, there’s a hotel you can go to, any time of day or night, and they’ll take care of you until I can get there. If you want to leave him, just call me and I’m there.”
She blinked at him, surprised by his earnestness. There was definitely a new confidence to him, a strength that hadn’t been there before. “God, if you’d said that to me a few weeks ago I would’ve taken you up on it like a shot.”
“You still can.”
“No. I have work to do.” She saw the sadness in his eyes, the frustration. She knew he was thinking of his wife, the one he couldn’t save. “I can’t just swan off into the sunset, knowing what I do.”
“You don’t have to be brave for everyone else.”
“Bollocks. If I’m not, who will be? I looked for someone else to change Society, believe me, and they don’t exist. It has to be me.”
“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”
Something in Sam’s tone made her scowl. “You don’t think I can change anything.”
“What? No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I’m trying to make changes too, and I’m mostly getting nowhere. No, worse than that, I’m making enemies.”
The milkshakes arrived and Cathy listened as he described what his wife had been uncovering before she died, how hard it was for him to change things and how disappointed he was with the Elemental Court. As he spoke, she heard the loneliness beneath his words, saw the weight of his wife’s legacy on his shoulders, as well as what the previous Lord Iron had dumped on him. She wanted to put an arm around him, or even just rest her hand on top of his, knowing what it was like to feel like the only swimmer trying to go to the opposite shore from everyone else.
The burgers arrived and he paused. “Wow. Sorry to just dump all that on you.”
Cathy smiled. “It’s okay. You needed to vent. I know the feeling.” Again, she resisted the urge to take his hand. “I know it’s hard, but you have to remember what an amazing opportunity you have. I mean, shit, all that money, that power. You could really make a difference.”
His frown lifted. “You think so?”
“I think you’d have to be a special kind of fuckwit not to.”
Sam threw his head back and laughed. “No one talks to me like this anymore. They’re all employees or rivals or…I dunno, maybe friends but still dangerous, or ex-Fae-touched and kind of terrified of me. Cathy, I was wondering if you could do something for me.” He reached into his pocket and then put four USB memory sticks on the table. “Can you keep these for me? Hide them somewhere safe in the Nether?”
“Is all the stuff Leanne found out on them?”
“Yeah. I’m worried that they’ll try to destroy it once I make my first move, before I have a chance to work out how to fix it all. They won’t know about you.”
She put them in her pocket when Carter was looking at the entrance. “No problem. I’ll keep them safe.”
“Take this too.” He passed over a folded piece of letter paper. “These are the places I own in London and Bath, and my estate in Cheshire. You can go to them at any time. I’m serious about what I said, Cathy. I know you want to stay and fight, but if you ever change your mind, you’ll always have somewhere safe to go.”
Cathy stared at the paper. She was afraid that if she took it she’d lose her nerve and take the easy way out.
“Just taking it won’t do any harm,” Sam said. “And I’ll feel a hell of a lot better.”
With a shrug, Cathy slipped it into her pocket. “I don’t need rescuing, okay?” She took out the letter that she’d brought with her from Will to the former Dame Iris. “Whilst we’re exchanging things, could you pass this letter on to Eleanor for me?”
“Sure.” Sam tucked it into the inner pocket of his overcoat, not worrying about whether his security guards saw. “She’s a character. I like her.”
“Is she happy?”
Sam shrugged. “I think she’s still working out what to do. She’s content for now, but I wouldn’t exactly say happy. She was a big deal in the Nether, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I think she misses that. So, what’s been going on with you?”
Cathy didn’t know where to start. She settled upon the Court nonsense first. He listened intently, tucking into his burger and nodding and laughing when she told him about taking the piss out of the men who’d got upset.
“They have no idea what it’s like in the real world, then,” Sam said. “Christ, Leanne would have got on so well with you.”
There was an awkward pause. “She must have been amazing, doing what she did.”
“Amazing and annoying. It fucked our marriage up. You know, I’ve read stuff about activists and campaigners, and they couldn’t have been happy. If they were married it must have been to saints.”
Cathy nursed the dregs of the milkshake, feeling that was too close to the bone. It wasn’t a happy path she was on. And Will was hardly a saint.
“So you’re going to drag those men into the twenty-first century, kicking and screaming?”
“That’s the plan. And I need to sort out the Agency, too.” She told him about the slavery, the asylum and what the gargoyle had told her about the people trapped in the basement of the Agency headquarters, forced to magically anchor a building in the Nether without a real property in Mundanus. “It’s totall
y fucked up. That’s why I can’t leave, Sam. I have to do something. I’m going to tell all of the women in Londinium about how evil they are, but before I do that, I have to make sure Ekstrand helps me to keep the Agency off my back. One of them already tried to blackmail me, and now I’ve screwed up their very lucrative asylum they’re bound to try something else.”
“Ekstrand doesn’t give a shit about anyone else,” Sam said bitterly.
“But Max and the gargoyle said he took over the Agency or something like that, so I have to try. I want to see if I can persuade him to free those people at least. I just don’t know how to find him or Max. I could go through my uncle, he knows Ekstrand, but my aunt hates me and I daren’t risk going to him when she might have poisoned him against me. She’s really angry with me at the moment.”
“I know where Ekstrand lives,” Sam said. “I’ll take you there if you like.”
Cathy reached across the table and then snatched her hand back. “Thanks, Sam,” she said, blushing.
He grinned. “No problem.” He looked at her hand. “You’re worried about me breaking the wish magic?” When she nodded, he smiled sadly. “I wish we’d met before all this shit happened.”
Cathy didn’t know what to make of that. “Yeah,” she said, and thought back to when they first met, how different everything was. “Do you remember when Ekstrand made me take you into Exilium, and that faerie recognised you and I walloped it? You were so shocked.”
“Shit, yes! I never thought I’d look back on that and laugh. You took care of me there. You didn’t play any games with me.”
“We were both pieces on the same board.”
“What are we now, then, now I’m Lord Iron and you’re a duchess?”
Fucked, was Cathy’s first thought. “Survivors.” She gave him her best smile. “And fighters. We have to be. Keep going, Sam. We’ll get there in the end.”
• • •
Will tried to coax the smoke-coloured cat over for a scratch behind the ear, but it wouldn’t budge from its spot by the window. It didn’t like him, and after several visits to Tate’s house in Pimlico, Will was starting to feel the same way about the cat. It always hissed when she opened the door to invite him in, as if it thought he was there to hurt them. Far from it—he and Tate had settled into a mutually beneficial business arrangement. He had access to all of the artefacts, potions, and Charms sold at the Emporium of Things in Between and Besides at a fraction of the price and compensated her well for them. There were no difficult questions or any transaction records for the extraordinary number of Shadow Charms and others he’d had to use to keep Margritte hidden. The mark-up that Shopkeeper imposed was exorbitant and Will was glad he no longer had to pay for anything with tears of regret or sighs of unrequited love or whatever took the Shopkeeper’s fancy at the time. Both he and Tate preferred the Queen’s pounds to form the basis of their transactions.
Tate stood at the window, making the most of the brief spell of sunshine, staring through a jeweller’s loupe at the sapphire he’d just given to her. She wore thick gloves with intricate stitching that he assumed offered some sort of protection. He let his eyes run down her back, the slender curve of her hips and the shapeliness of her legs. The cat hissed at him. He looked away.
“It’s a beautiful gem, Mr Iris. First-generation magic, very powerful.”
So Lord Iris himself had given it to the Patroon, as he’d hoped. “And does it do what I described?”
“Yes.” She tilted the gem to capture the light in different facets. “Whoever wears it against their skin will have any magic other than that of the Iris broken. And if it’s worn continually, it would protect against anything else being cast. This is rare, Mr Iris. Your patron obviously wants to protect someone very well.”
Will smiled to himself. In one thing, at least, he and his patron’s feelings were aligned. “Any side effects or other things woven in?”
“Well, the wearer might feel the other magic being broken, depending on what it is. Nothing else that I can see, but the more subtle effects are very difficult to see in first-generation jewels.” She raised her eyebrow to let the loupe fall into the palm of her other hand. “Do you want me to set it into a piece of jewellery?”
“Yes. What would you suggest?”
She considered it against the white of her glove. “Too large for a ring of any taste. It would be wasted on a bracelet and tiaras always look best with lots of small jewels. I’d say a necklace. It would make it easier to maintain contact with the skin.” She looked at him, a wicked glint in her eye. “There is something possessive about this jewel. Perhaps it would suit something tight about the throat. Yes. A choker. Elegant and functional, wouldn’t you agree?”
He didn’t like what she implied, and how, deep down, he agreed with her. “How soon could you have it finished?”
“I could prioritise it and have it for you in three days. That would be reflected in the cost.”
“That’s no concern. Set it with diamonds. Something eye-catching. Not too ostentatious.”
She nodded and dropped it back into the small velvet pouch it had arrived in. “I’ll send word when it’s done. I think you should pick it up in person. It’s too valuable to send via courier.”
“Agreed.” Will stood and retrieved his cane from the umbrella stand by the door. “And the other special order, to remove scarring, how is that progressing?”
“Another month at least, I’m afraid. I cannot make it any faster. But the choker won’t delay it. It’s the…curation of certain base ingredients that takes the time.”
Will said his goodbyes, gave the cat one last glance only to see it looking steadfastly in the opposite direction, and left the house. He got into the taxi waiting outside and asked to be taken to the stables on Bathurst Mews.
Even now, when the gem was on its way to being made into a gift, he still had his doubts. Cathy had moved away from that mundane-made-Lord when he was at the house before, fearful his newfound power would break Poppy’s magic. She wanted that wish’s power, even though she said that all of her actions were her decision. She clearly feared she would be less decisive without it, so he’d have to keep the gem’s true purpose from her.
He pressed his fist against his mouth as he wrestled the guilt into submission. He was trying so hard to be a good husband, to care for her and be all she wanted him to be, but it was simply impossible. There was no way he could accept the gem—a solution he himself had brought about!—and then not use it. The Patroon would check. And fundamentally, he still wanted the outcome. He needed her to slow down, consider her actions and words more carefully, and breaking the wish magic was the only thing he could bear to do to her to make that happen. Trying to reason with her, counsel her, had achieved nothing.
He sank lower in his seat as he admitted the other reason for hiding the gem’s purpose to himself: if she knew the wish magic had been broken, would protecting her wedding band be incentive enough to stay away from Lord Iron? He believed her when she’d said that they weren’t lovers, but surely the temptation to run away to her old life in Mundanus was still within her. Was the love she professed for him enough to keep her in the Nether? Was the desire to help people enough? Without the wish magic to assist her that desire might lose its lustre. He had to make sure he gave her everything else he could, without losing his Dukedom in the process, to keep her at his side.
He tried to push his worries about Cathy away. He had other decisions to make and concerns that made his head ache. The Agency was one of them, thanks to Cathy’s recent actions. He’d learned a great deal about the organisation from Mr Bennet, enough to make him want to gain control over it—and also to understand that he couldn’t. Even though he controlled Tate, who supplied the Agency with everything magical that they required to function, it was ostensibly owned by the Sorcerer of Wessex, Ekstrand. He didn’t even know how to find the man and doubted that he would be interested in a negotiation even if he could locate him. He still had to decid
e what to do with the wretched Mr Bennet to punish him for blackmailing Cathy. He was convinced there was some way to use him, he just hadn’t settled upon it yet.
Then there was Margritte. They needed a long-term solution and neither of them had one to suggest. She was dependent on him and the Charms he supplied to keep herself hidden; Nathaniel would have her assets and property watched closely for any sign of her. She had no allies she could trust to withstand the temptation of selling her out to the Irises and her son had been stripped of all power and influence, exiled from the very city that he might have been able to mobilise to help her. Will felt his responsibility weigh heavily upon him, knowing that he couldn’t keep it up forever due to the cost and risk of discovery, but failing to see a viable alternative.
And then there were the disgruntled men of the Londinium Court. Bertie Viola needed to be kept happy; otherwise he would nurture dreams of seizing the Dukedom for himself. Will wasn’t prepared to offer him much more than he already had. And there was Elizabeth Papaver to match, as he knew that Cathy wouldn’t have a clue about who was both eligible and desirable. He needed to take some time to give that proper consideration and make some arrangements. He wanted peace restored in the household.
And there was the child he and Cathy had to conceive.
“That’ll be twenny quid,” the driver called from the front, and Will paid him. He hadn’t realised that they’d arrived at the stables.
In minutes he was back in the comfort of his own carriage and travelling home on a Nether road. The silence after the roar of mundane London was welcome. He wondered what crisis Elizabeth had engineered in his absence and whether he’d be able to sneak through the house to play with Sophia for half an hour before anything else demanded his attention. When the carriage pulled up outside Lancaster House he was delighted to see that no carriage was parked up outside.
Greetings exchanged with Morgan, mundane coat and gloves deposited, Will listened for Elizabeth and smiled at the silence of the house.
“Miss Rhoeas-Papaver is with the dressmaker, your Grace,” Morgan said, “and the Duchess has not yet returned. Would you like me to bring tea to your study?”
