He knew what they thought of him.

Drunk.

Spoiled.

It didn’t matter. It worked to his advantage when it came to leaving the hotel, as he was able to wave a hand and insist that they send the bill to his father. He may as well add insult to injury while he was being politely evicted onto the street.

Quentin had been quite fortunate in finding enough clothes intact from which to form a single outfit. Any toiletries still in the bathroom had survived well enough, but that was about the size of it. He abandoned them all, as his small suitcase was as ruined as the rest of the room. His phone was a mangled wreck, but he’d pocketed it in case it could be salvaged in some way.

At least the rain had finally stopped.

Quentin descended the steps of the Dorchester and maintained the charade of being a calm, collected individual. God alone knew how long it would take for Father to hear of this.

He thought he heard Frederick’s voice. Just for a second. He sounded angry, and seemed to think Quentin should be angry too, but when Quentin checked over his shoulder there was no-one there.

But he did feel angry.

He couldn’t pin down why. Was it down to ruining his own chances of remaining undetected, or had the nightmare troubled him so much that even though the dream had faded, the emotions remained? Regardless, he felt as though there were something churning at his insides now which hadn’t been there yesterday.

Perhaps, if he ignored it, it would go away.

His more immediate concern was that he was in the middle of Mayfair at two o’clock in the morning with nothing but the clothes on his back. London was not a city famed for the all-night availability of, well, much of anything other than bars and clubs, so if he wished to replace those clothes or his phone at any juncture he would need to wait for morning.

More sleep was out of the question. He could not systematically wreck every hotel across town in his quest for a night’s shut-eye. No.

He needed information. If he was to track Frederick down, stop him, and rescue Laurence, he had to find out more about what Freddy was capable of.

Which meant speaking with the one person alive who might know.

Satisfied with his line of reasoning, he stepped back toward the hotel and waved down a taxi, robbing the doorman of something which could have entertained the poor fellow for all of ten seconds at this time of night. As he slipped into the back seat of the black cab and pulled his seatbelt on, he looked to the driver in the rear-view mirror.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked.

“Will you go as far as Royal Tunbridge Wells?” It was best to ask up front, lest the fellow be due to clock off any time soon.

The driver nodded. “Fare up front.”

Quentin dug out his wallet and slid one of his cards free. “Not a problem,” he murmured. “Dovecote Manor, if you would be so kind.”

He’d arrive far too early for good manners, but ultimately that was not his problem.

* * *

It took a little over ninety minutes to reach the gates of the manor, according to the cabbie’s clock, and when the taxi stopped, Quentin leaned forward.

“This will be perfectly sufficient, thank you.”

The driver lifted his eyebrows. “You want me to just drop you here?”

Quentin nodded. “This is ideal.”

“Your money, mate.”

Quentin said nothing to that, and simply exited the cab and shut the door. There was no point explaining the problem further, that if they attempted to use the intercom to have the staff open the gate for the taxi, they would have no success.

No. Quentin was persona non grata among his peers, and had been since the funeral. There wasn’t a castle, manor, or stately home across the country which would open its gates for him, given the choice.

He straightened his cuffs and meandered toward the intercom, then feigned thumbing the button and made an idle show of awaiting a response as he kept tabs on the taxi out of the corner of his eye. The driver was taking his sweet time pulling away, likely curious about his passenger’s request to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere, so Quentin leaned in and did his best to appear as though he were speaking.

Finally the taxi peeled away. Quentin waited until the car was off in the distance, then stepped back from the gates and eyed them speculatively.

They were well over twenty feet tall, made from wrought iron, and anchored in brick columns themselves easily fifteen feet high. The center of the gates bore the Dovecote family crest, parts of it picked out in gilt on the black ironwork, but it was too dark to see the gold fully. At the top of the curved gates, the iron stuck up in spikes which while hardly sharp could doubtless do some damage if one were to fall on them.

The trick, then, was to avoid doing so.

With one final glance back to ensure the taxi was long gone, he ran at the gates, then leaped up them, utilizing a combination of ironwork and telekinesis to make short work of the climb. He vaulted the spikes with ease, then softened his landing with another quick, subtle application of his gifts, but rolled into a breakfall out of habit.

Gravel grated beneath him as he sprang to his feet, and he launched immediately into a sprint toward the house. This approach was a mile long, curving through landscaped hillside and over a small weir, and if there were any security cameras on him he preferred not to spend the next twenty minutes dawdling along slowly enough for the police to arrive.

* * *

The house came into view as he cleared a small copse of trees on the cusp of a hill, and he shot across the bridge over the weir, the sound of water masking his footsteps only briefly. Gravel had long been used on approaches such as this to make it impossible for intruders to sneak up undetected, so he didn’t even try.

Dovecote Manor was everything that Castle Cavendish was not. Neoclassical, dark-brick, rectangular, and self-contained, it occupied four stories rather than two, which Quentin imagined had caused quite a stir when the house was built three centuries ago.

The primary façade faced north, and Quentin debated skirting around to try and find a staff entrance or perhaps something else less aggressive, but the fact of the matter was that his appearance would be most unwelcome no matter which door he used.

He was the black sheep, after all. The one who had turned Mother’s funeral into a circus.

He sighed and stopped at the front door. It, too, was not ostentatious. Merely a single large door of white-painted wood which weakly reflected the feeble moonlight. It was blank.

There was no need to antagonize the household more than he already would, so he raised a hand and tugged on the doorbell, pulling the knotted ironwork several times. There was no sound from his action, but that was to be anticipated. It would be a poor piece of engineering if it disturbed the residents while alerting the staff.

Quentin glanced to his left as he waited and evaluated the sky. The first hints of pink and orange touched the edges of clouds toward the horizon, and there was no way around the fact that he was here absurdly early, but what choice did he have?

Metal scraped against wood, and he turned back toward the door as one lock after the next turned as though if they took long enough the visitor would go away.

The door swung inward, and light spilled onto the doorstep. Quentin dipped his head in readiness and turned side-on so that he could reach out and place a hand against the door to prevent it slamming in his face.

The doorman which greeted him looked disheveled, his hair slicked back in a hurry and sticking out at the tips. His livery was crisp, but without jacket. The poor fellow had to have rushed out of bed so fast he hadn’t even had time to grab his glasses if the way he peered at Quentin was anything to go by.

Quentin put a foot over the threshold.

The older man blinked quickly, and his features drained of all color. “Lord Banbury,” he stammered. “This is an unexpected pleasure.” Pleasure could not have sounded more like horror if it had tried. “Forgive me. We were not anticipating a visit at this hour.”

“No,” Quentin answered coolly. “I imagine that you were not.” He brought his other foot inside, then breezed around the doorman, blinking to try and help his eyes adjust to the light. “I can only apologize for that.”

The footman didn’t close the door. A sure sign that he didn’t want Quentin to stay.

“Perhaps if you could return at a more reasonable hour, my lord,” he began.

Quentin raised his hand abruptly and cut him off.

“Very well, my lord. How may we be of service?”

Quentin turned to face him at last, and squared his shoulders. Then he spoke with absolute authority, his words unwavering, the anger in his heart clipping his voice. “I am here to speak with my grandfather, and I will not be refused.”