Catherine hunched down in her chair, drawing in her narrow shoulders until she seemed even smaller than before. Kai knew that she was in her early twenties, but when she acted like this she seemed no older than a teenager. ‘This is so stupid. Can’t we even go hang out in the local library – the Guille-Allès? I could read something and I wouldn’t be getting on your nerves so much.’

‘Your uncle doesn’t take well to following instructions either.’ Lord Silver, Catherine’s uncle, was London’s biggest libertine and the head of the Liechtenstein spy network. He was generally untrustworthy, devious and well dressed in equal measure.

‘Just because my uncle’s a miserable excuse for a . . .’ Catherine picked through her options, and clearly couldn’t find any that satisfied her. ‘How can I convince you I don’t like him – or trust him – any more than you do?’

Kai felt he should try to be honest. ‘He’s a Fae, like you. And he’s your family, your blood. Of course you’re going to be closer to him than you are to us.’

‘And you think I’d betray you to him,’ Catherine said tonelessly.

Kai had carefully avoided saying just that. To her, at least. He should know what it was like, after all. He lived with his lord father’s expectations, and he’d always been aware of his duty. To his family. To his own kind. And to Irene, always.

‘Have you been paying any attention to me? Any attention at all?’ Catherine demanded, her tone rising. She glanced across at the waitress and lowered her voice to an angry hiss. ‘Have you noticed what I actually want?’

‘Well, to do a good job, obviously.’ Kai backtracked, trying to work out what he’d said wrong. ‘To be a Librarian like Irene, to help keep the truce . . .’

‘What I want,’ Catherine said quietly but emphatically, ‘is access to the Library. I want to get in among those books. If Irene can do that for me, for all I care, my uncle can fornicate until syphilis makes his private parts drop off.’

Kai didn’t like Lord Silver, but his own niece shouldn’t be using that sort of language about family. Family was important. ‘Control your tongue!’ he ordered. ‘That is not acceptable.’

‘You aren’t my boss,’ Catherine flared back. ‘Where do you get off acting like you’re superior – just because you’re in bed with her?’

Kai felt the bones grind in his hands as he curled them into fists, the prick of fingernails that yearned to become claws. Anger sang in him as the ocean had done earlier, pride and fury urging him to treat this child – his junior, his younger sister in apprenticeship, his lesser – with the proper discipline for such an insult.

She flinched.

Moment by moment, counting his heartbeats, he made himself relax. ‘Could you pour me some more tea, please?’ he asked.

Her hand shook a little as she poured. ‘I’m not getting paid enough for this,’ she muttered.

‘I didn’t know you were getting paid at all.’

‘I have an allowance.’ Her mouth twisted unpleasantly. ‘From my uncle – which means nothing, before you judge me on that too. I thought you knew.’

‘I know he and Irene had an argument about it, but I don’t know the details.’ Kai had sadly not been witness to that.

Catherine visibly perked up at the notion that he didn’t know everything, then sighed. ‘I don’t want money, anyhow. I want books.’

‘But money gets you books,’ Kai pointed out.

‘Not the sort of rare “one-per-world” books the Librarians hunt down. That takes connections. The sort you don’t seem to want me to make, as I’m Fae and not a dragon . . . Whereas I suppose you’re letting Irene run mad in your father’s library?’

‘You may infer what you wish from this, but I have invited Irene to visit my lord father’s palace and library,’ Kai said with dignity. ‘But she refused. She said if my lord father hosted her, he’d have to host a Fae representative too – in the spirit of the treaty. That it could cause a diplomatic incident if he wasn’t willing to do so.’

Catherine shook her head in wonder. ‘I’m glad one of you has some sense. Though, as she’s sleeping with the dragons’ treaty representative, maybe I’ll take that back. Unless to keep things fair, in the spirit of the treaty, she’s also sleeping with the Fae representative . . .’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Kai snarled, leaning forward.

‘Excuse me, sir, madam.’ The waitress had approached while they were distracted.

Kai held up an admonitory hand. ‘A moment, please. Catherine, I demand an apology.’

‘Excuse me!’ The waitress had raised her voice. As Kai and Catherine both turned to glare at her, she said, ‘There’s something you should know, sir, madam.’

‘And what is that?’ Kai snapped.

‘You’ve both been poisoned.’ She folded her hands primly in front of her. ‘But please don’t let me interrupt you. I can wait.’

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Irene had not expected to walk through a door in a submarine base somewhere under Guernsey, and emerge somewhere entirely different.

She and Vale had managed a successful sweep through the remainder of the base. The other men they’d found had all been under the influence of cerebral controllers. They’d therefore lacked the intelligence to stage more than very basic ambushes, but they’d still fought savagely. As a result, Vale and Irene had had to deactivate all the controllers – which had proved fatal for their victims.

She’d seen Vale’s face grow more tense with each new confirmed fatality, the leashed anger showing in his shoulders and the quick jerk of his head. He and Irene were being deliberately manipulated into killing these men – however necessary this was. They too were victims, being used as mere tools and then discarded.

You didn’t have to be a Fae to be that amoral a manipulator, but Irene couldn’t deny that it helped – especially if this was somehow Lord Guantes, returned to gleeful life.

In the criss-cross of passages, the route to the submarine dock wasn’t obvious. And yet the longer they’d searched, the more certain Vale seemed that he’d find his letter on the submarine moored there. It was Vale who’d eventually halted and raised a hand for her to wait, then prodded at what looked like a cupboard door with the tip of his cane. The resulting shock knocked him across the room.

The cane lay to one side, smoking. Vale glanced at it regretfully, then back to the door, and his brows drew together in a frown. ‘That door shouldn’t be there.’

‘It’s in the wrong location?’

‘In a way . . . That door is not on the base’s plans. There should be nothing but solid rock at that point. And look – more of the cerebral controllers’ scrapes on the floor, spreading out from this point.’

Irene carefully moved her hand towards the door, halting before touching it. The air around it prickled with chaos. As Irene approached, she could feel the Library brand on her back flare in response, rather like a guard recognizing an enemy. The door itself looked like any of the other cupboards on the base: metal, set into the wall and painted dark grey. There was nothing to mark it as significant – except for Vale’s knowledge that it shouldn’t have been there, his dramatic propulsion across the room and her own recognition of chaotic power.