The Burning Page

She had to say something to Kai. ‘We’re staying here tonight, of course.’

‘Would it be safer to take him to our lodgings?’ Kai asked. ‘Or to somewhere else defensible?’

She gave him a few mental points for not actually saying such as Li Ming’s establishment out loud. ‘I can set up defences here,’ she said. ‘Library wards. And we can sit up and watch for spiders together.’ She also needed to discover what had driven Vale back to his drugs. Under the circumstances, information was the best weapon she could have.

Kai eyed the room dubiously, obviously imagining how many places a spider could hide itself. ‘I suppose it might be better,’ he said unenthusiastically. ‘I’ll put him in his bed. It’ll be better than leaving him on the sofa. He might catch a cold.’

Which is of course a profoundly serious issue, when compared to shooting up with morphine. But Irene nodded. ‘Check the bed first. We should be careful.’

‘We can’t go on like this!’ Kai burst out.

‘No.’ Irene fought down the whirl of fury in her stomach. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action . . . ‘No, we can’t. We are not required to act like sitting ducks, just waiting to be shot at. We aren’t being laid-back about this, Kai – we’re putting up defences and finding out what the hell is going on. We also need more information . . .’ She wasn’t sure who or what she was angriest with: the mysterious murderer, Vale for the drugs, or the whole day for being such a roller-coaster of near-failure. ‘And we don’t know that this, here,’ she gestured at the unconscious Vale, ‘is specifically due to us.’

‘It’s very coincidental if it isn’t,’ Kai said. But his temper had cooled a little. He bent down and swung Vale up in his arms, carrying the man easily. Vale didn’t stir, as loose-jointed as a strung doll, his eyes closed in fathoms-deep slumber.

I wish I knew more about the effects of morphine, Irene thought. Oh well, it was probably in one of Vale’s own reference books. She could look it up while she was waiting.

The room was cold, now that she wasn’t being distracted by Vale. Kai had been right. She went down on her knees next to the hearth to build up the fire. In her distraction, she almost missed the balled-up sheet of notepaper. It had been caught in the grate and had fallen a few inches short of the embers.

It was probably a private letter. It would be prying into Vale’s personal life to look at it. He was a friend of hers, and he deserved better than this sort of morbid curiosity.

On the other hand, they’d come in to find him drugged out of his mind on morphine.

She picked it up and unfolded it, smoothing it into legibility.

It was expensive notepaper: she could tell that much, even if she didn’t have Vale’s expert knowledge of paper, manufacturers and watermarks. And it was Vale’s handwriting, carelessly untidy, scribbled with the sublime lack of concern of someone who thinks it’s the other person’s job to understand the message:

Singh,

Stop wasting my time with these pitifully simple cases. I am not interested in these petty problems. I would have no qualms in giving these to even the slowest-witted among your colleagues at the Yard.

I thought that you understood. My mind is a machine that is being stressed to breaking point, without any problems to exercise it. And if you can’t help me, then—

The writing broke off there in a spattered trail of ink.

Irene hesitated for a moment, then crumpled the letter and thrust it into the embers. Her hands went through the motions of building up the fire, but her mind was elsewhere. The murder attempts. Zayanna. Now Vale. There was too much to do, and too much to monitor. And what was she going to do if the Library ordered her off on another mission tomorrow?

She carefully diverted herself away from that thought. Because if that did happen, then one way or another, she was going to end up betraying someone.

CHAPTER SIX

Kai had fallen asleep by now too, curled up on the sofa where Vale had been sleeping earlier. They’d agreed to keep watch in turn. After the day’s events, neither of them had felt safe, even with Irene warding the place. Vale had enough books for her to draw the rooms into a temporary sympathy with the Library, which should keep out any immediate Fae attacks.

Sitting with a book in her lap next to the fire, with the lights turned down so that Kai could doze better, Irene half-wished that they had an immediate attack on their hands. It might give them a bit more information. At the moment they knew very little: they were reacting rather than being proactive, running to catch up.

There was a faint mutter from Vale’s bedroom. She put down the book on narcotics and went to investigate.

Vale lay on his bed, his bedspread half-thrown back, eyes closed but mumbling to himself. It was a step up from the drugged slumber of earlier, but it still wasn’t wakefulness. The light from the open door fell in a slice across his bedroom, throwing his face into painful definition: his eyes were sunken in their sockets, and his cheekbones stood out viciously. Surely, Irene thought, surely he hadn’t looked that worn, that desperate, when they’d last seen him a fortnight ago. Surely she would have noticed . . . wouldn’t she?

She closed the bedroom door quietly behind her, so that the noise wouldn’t wake Kai, turned the light on, then walked across to Vale’s bed. She sat next to him and touched his shoulder, shaking him gently. ‘Vale?’ she murmured.

His eyes came open. He was the sort of man who snapped into consciousness all in one moment, rather than Irene’s own more gradual (and pitiful) slow clamber from sleep to wakefulness. He assessed his surroundings in one quick glance, then focused on her. ‘Winters.’