The Masked City (4 page)

‘Could it be just a burglar?’ Kai suggested.

‘It could be.’ Irene adjusted her veil. ‘But what if it was the person nominated to retrieve the bag, once the werewolves removed it from us?’

‘Oh, that makes sense. It’s a pity we couldn’t question the watcher, then.’

‘They were gone by the time you’d taken the men down,’ Irene said. ‘It looks as if that lady and her agents really wanted to hide their trail.’

‘But they failed,’ Kai said with satisfaction. ‘We have a name.’

They stepped out into Oxford Street, and Irene raised a hand to signal a cab. ‘Everyone’s unlucky sometimes,’ she said. ‘However good the plan may be.’

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps she and Kai had been a little bit
too
lucky themselves tonight.

CHAPTER TWO

The next morning Irene spent a while thanking this civilization for inventing the shower. While in many respects it was similar to the period known as ‘Victorian’ in numerous alternate worlds (featuring smog, horse-drawn carriages as well as ‘ether’-powered carriages, and a lack of instant communication), in other respects it had managed to hit the important points. It had decent sanitation barring the smog, adequate clean water and plenty of tea and coffee. So she had to endure zeppelins, werewolves and vampires, and a lack of telephones (the users kept on getting possessed by demons). It could be worse. The smog killed most of the mosquitoes.

But while she was in the shower, she was thinking. She needed to get the Stoker book to the Library - and the sooner the better, before another theft was attempted. But she and Kai also needed to investigate the woman. Vale would be most helpful there. A sparrow couldn’t get stabbed in the back without the detective hearing about it. And while Irene or Kai could go sniffing round the Liechtenstein Embassy (Liechtenstein being a haven for Fae in this world), they might show their quarry they knew where to find her.

Kai was working at his desk in their shared study, scraping away with a fountain pen on a list of booksellers. He acknowledged her politely, but his attention was clearly elsewhere. A harshly glaring table-lamp threw his face into sharp profile, giving an extra gleam to his black hair.

It had been a sensible idea to get lodgings together, Irene reminded herself. It had meant that she could keep an eye on Kai. After they fell foul of the traitor Alberich and London’s Fae, via Silver, she didn’t want to take any chances. And being a friend of Vale’s could be risky in itself - especially when they helped on each other’s cases. Kai and she were both adults. They could share lodgings without having to get ‘involved’.

But dragons, when taking human form, apparently took implausibly handsome (or possibly beautiful) human forms. Kai had smooth black hair with blue lights to it, skin pale as marble, deep dark eyes and cheekbones that
begged
to be touched. He moved like a dancer with a physique to match. The dramatic sort of dancer who could whirl you around the dance floor before bending you by the waist and pressing himself against you, and then …

He was also, Irene reminded herself firmly, her student and apprentice and her responsibility. The point wasn’t whether he might be willing - though he had strongly suggested that he was, and kept on suggesting it - or whether she might be willing. The point was whether she had the right to take advantage of his offer. For the moment she was content to have him as a friend as well as a colleague, and to be grateful for it.

Being responsible has a lot to answer for
, she thought resentfully. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

‘I was just …’ Kai fiddled with his pen. ‘There was a message,’ he finally said.

‘From whom?’ This was clearly going to take a few minutes to sort out. Irene sat down opposite him, settling her elbows on the table. The healing scars on her hands from months ago stood out against her skin, and made a criss-cross pattern across her palms and fingers.

Kai plucked a scroll from under a pile of other papers. The wax seal on it had been broken, and the ribbon untied. Irene could make out what looked like Chinese characters, in black ink, signed in red. ‘From my uncle,’ he said. ‘My oldest uncle, my father’s next-oldest brother. He requests my presence at a family ceremony in a few months.’

‘Well, of course you must go,’ Irene said promptly. ‘I can manage without you for a few days. Or weeks - how long a celebration is it?’ She knew very little about dragons, in spite of sharing lodgings with one, and possibly they thought that a good family celebration lasted several years.

‘Probably a couple of weeks,’ Kai said without any real enthusiasm.

Irene tried to imagine what the problem was. ‘Are you embarrassed about your current position?’ she asked.

‘No!’ Kai’s answer was gratifyingly fast. ‘No - I wouldn’t have done it without my uncle’s permission, in any case.’

‘So he knows?’

‘No, that’s a different uncle,’ Kai said. ‘My father has three brothers. The youngest was my guardian when I started working for the Library. This is an older brother, the second-eldest in the family. So naturally I owe him my loyalty and should attend.’

Irene made a mental note that if this conversation was going to go on much longer, she was going to have to ask for names and draw up a family tree. ‘I don’t see what the problem is then,’ she said.

Kai shifted slightly in his chair. ‘I just hadn’t expected them to be able to contact me here. Any invitations should have gone to my former guardian, and of course I speak with him every few years. But for it to arrive like this—’

‘How did it arrive?’ Irene broke in, before he could edge around the subject any more.

‘By private messenger,’ Kai said.

Irene considered that. On the one hand, it meant that some dragon out there knew Kai’s postal address and, by implication, hers. On the other hand, was that necessarily a bad thing? ‘I still don’t understand why you’re objecting,’ she said. ‘If you’d waited till you next spoke to them, you’d have missed this family event.’

‘You don’t understand!’ Oh, maybe they were getting to it now. It was the wail of the teenage prince, or at least the college student prince - away from his family and enjoying a previously unknown sense of liberty. Perhaps, for junior dragons, taking a few years to explore alternate worlds was like a student’s weekend away in a foreign country - though possibly involving less drinking. ‘They know where I am. They might visit at any time. They might even disapprove of what I’ve been up to.’

‘Wait. You just said that you’re not embarrassed about your job. Now you’re saying they might disapprove. Is it because of our recent activities?’ Such as going to criminal auctions, infiltrating the Inquisition Cloisters under Winchester, or the time they’d had to run a con game on a visiting Kazakhstan warlord with a Silk Road travelogue …

‘It’s possible my uncles might not understand the full complexities of working with the Library,’ Kai admitted reluctantly. ‘I believe they think it’s just a job of researching and purchasing books.’

Irene wanted to swear at the waste of time. They needed to be on their way to see Vale about the woman, or get to the Library to get rid of the Stoker. Having to persuade Kai to confess his family problems was like pulling teeth while standing in front of an oncoming train. Though admittedly with less screaming. ‘When you were recruited for the Library, weren’t you hanging around with criminals and street thugs? Didn’t your uncle know about that?’

Kai’s back went absolutely rigid and a high flush flared on his cheekbones. ‘Irene, if you were not my superior, you would regret saying that!’

‘But you
were
hanging out with criminals and street thugs,’ Irene said, confused, but admiring his precise grammar under stress. That was the sort of thing you had to learn when you were young and impressionable.

‘That may be true,’ Kai said grudgingly. ‘But it was without my guardian’s knowledge. He is above such things.’

Irene rubbed her forehead in exasperation. ‘But you were staying with him …’

‘He encouraged me to sample local literature and art,’ Kai said, losing a little of his anger. ‘The fact that I became involved with local criminals was entirely beside the point.’

Irene mentally raised the draconic capacity for hypocrisy by several thousand points and took a deep breath. ‘We are wandering from the point. Kai, you
will
be attending that family gathering. It would be rude not to, and they might suspect I was teaching you bad manners and relocate you.’ She saw his face twitch. He hadn’t thought of that.

Kai sighed. ‘You talk like my elder.’

‘I probably am,’ Irene said. She’d lived more than twenty-five years outside the Library, in alternate worlds where she aged normally. But at least a dozen more had been spent inside the Library at various intervals, and people didn’t age within its walls. ‘Even if you’re a dragon.’

‘But how do you suppose they found me here?’ Kai asked, returning to the point in question like a cat with a favourite toy.

‘At a wild guess, my supervisor Coppelia had word passed to your people, so that they wouldn’t worry about you.’ Irene rose to her feet and began looking for her coat. She wasn’t wild about Kai’s family possibly turning up on her doorstep, but she could understand the political necessity of being able to account for where he was. ‘You won’t have any problems getting to your uncle when you visit, will you?’

Kai twitched a shoulder in a deliberately casual way. ‘Irene, I
am
a dragon. I don’t require the Library to travel between worlds. I can do so quite easily myself.’

She had to concede him that bit of smugness. It was quite justified. Librarians needed props and protocols; she couldn’t simply stroll from one world to another, as Kai could. ‘Can all dragons do that?’ she asked, trying not to sound jealous.

‘All royal ones,’ Kai said. ‘Lesser dragons can make smaller journeys - it doesn’t really translate into physical terms,’ he added hastily, when she raised a hand to ask what he meant by ‘smaller journeys’. ‘Or they can follow in a royal dragon’s wake, if he is leading the way.’

‘I see.’ She found her coat and started to button it. ‘Now we should be moving. It’s nearly ten o’clock.’

‘Irene …’ Kai hesitated. ‘You don’t want to get rid of me, do you?’

She simply gaped at him for a second. ‘What?’

‘You’re sending me off to my family. You’re treating me like any other apprentice. You don’t seem to care that they might order me to leave. You don’t …’ He looked at her, his face full of yearning and uncertainty. ‘If you want me to go, then I will go, but …’

It wasn’t some sort of emotional blackmail. It was sincere and it was honest, and it made her heart clench in her chest. She sighed, and walked around the desk - nowhere near as graceful as he was, nothing like as elegant, just a mortal human - to take his hands. They were thin and hot in her grasp, his long fingers curling around hers. ‘Kai, don’t you understand that I am saying all this because I don’t want to lose you? You are my friend. You are the person who I trust to watch my back, to fight werewolves for me. To dangle me out of zeppelins. To stand by with a hammer when I’m staking vampires. I don’t know what might make your family take you away. I don’t want to give them an
excuse
.’

‘Do you mean that?’ He rose to his feet and looked down into her face, his hands tight on hers. ‘Do you promise that you mean that?’

It would be so easy just to say
yes
and let go of common sense, to slide her hands up to his shoulders and hold him against her. She had been spending months now trying to avoid this sort of thought, this sort of situation. ‘I give you my word that I don’t want to lose you,’ she said. ‘You’re my apprentice. You’re my ally. You’re my
friend
. Can’t you believe me?’

Yes. And stop asking for more, before I do something I might regret.

‘I want to.’ His voice was rough. ‘It’s just that - Irene, I’m afraid.’

‘The mugging? If you don’t feel safe—’

‘Not that!’ He very nearly sneered at the idea, and it cooled a little of the heat between them, like a sudden touch of fresh air. ‘Not of danger. Not for myself. It’s … everything.’ His eloquence and his grace of speech had deserted him. ‘You. Vale. The Library. Everything. I’ve never disobeyed my honoured father before, never challenged the authority of my elders. What am I to do if they tell me to leave you?’