Chapter Three #2
Merlin, she’d forgotten his voice—low and smooth and dark, somehow. It sounded like the voice of a man she’d like to get up to no good with.
“You can call me Vesper,” she said, giving a tinkling little laugh.
“I don’t like to be very… formal.” She batted her eyelashes at him, trying to look appropriately seductive while still watching him carefully to see if it was working.
His expression was impassive enough that it was impossible to tell if she was setting him at all off-balance.
“Unfortunately, I do,” he said, offering her a thin smile, and Vesper frowned, before immediately wiping the expression from her face. She had a nearly one hundred percent success rate when it came to flirtation, and this was not the reaction she was accustomed to.
“It must’ve been years since you were last here,” she tried again, plastering another seductive smile on her face determinedly. “Perhaps you’ll join me for a drink, and I can show you around? Unless you’re meeting someone here—I suppose you must have been invited?”
The unspoken implication—that this was a private club, to which he decidedly did not hold a membership—was loud and clear.
He obviously heard it, because he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a card, printed on thick, expensive stock embossed with a coat of arms, which he handed to her now.
Glancing down at it, she saw that it belonged to Dashiell St. Clair.
He was the heir to a viscount, and one of Freddie’s oldest friends from his school days.
Flipping it over, Vesper recognized his hasty scrawl—Ashbridge—meet me at my club.
Holloway’s, New Cavendish Street. Tell the doorman the password is “liquidity.”—as well as the signature at the bottom of the card.
She bit back a swear. It wasn’t as though she could deny St. Clair the right to bring a guest; his family had been members at Holloway’s for generations, and he had deep pockets.
Vesper was mercenary enough to not wish to risk offending one of their best customers, even though he had—she cast a suspicious glance at Ashbridge again—invited a traitor into their midst.
She looked back up at Ashbridge and saw that something close to a smile was playing at the corners of his mouth.
“All in order?”
She returned the card with ill grace. “Of course.”
“Good.” He tucked it back into his jacket pocket. “I was unaware you were such a thorough hostess.”
“I do what I can.” She smiled at him again, determined to not allow this man to best her—and determined, too, to work out what he was actually doing here. She hadn’t seen St. Clair this evening, though admittedly that didn’t mean that he wasn’t present.
“Now,” she said, her tone syrupy sweet. “How about that drink?” Anything to loosen his tongue a bit—though not, sadly, in the way that she usually enjoyed loosening men’s tongues.
“You are attentive, aren’t you?” he asked, eyeing her consideringly. “Tell me, is there any particular reason?”
Vesper narrowed her eyes at him.
He raised an inquiring brow in return.
“What is it that you do for work these days?” she asked, lifting a hand so that she might examine her nails idly, as though his response were not terribly interesting to her. “I thought I heard that you were doing something for the government.”
“Yes. I worked at the Passport Office until recently.”
“Lovely.”
“Is it?”
“Of course.” She gave him a sickly-sweet smile. “I do so admire anyone who works for the civil service. Such an honorable line of work.”
“Ah, yes. I know how much the magical families care about obeying the government.” His tone was dry as toast; Vesper was amused against her will.
“I don’t recall you having a sense of humor.”
“Was that a compliment?”
“No. I preferred you without one. Why are you here?”
A flash of a smile crossed his face. “There’s the Vesper Holloway I remember. I vastly prefer you when you come out and ask for information, rather than trying to trick it out of me.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean,” she said airily.
“Don’t you?” he asked.
“If you’re not with the Passport Office anymore, then where is it that you’re working, did you say?”
“I didn’t.”
A lengthy pause.
Vesper frowned at him.
He frowned back, just for a moment, and then his gaze flicked away from her—a relief, that; it was rather piercing—and focused on something in the direction he’d been looking before she approached.
She turned, trying to see what had caught his attention, and saw the same raucous group of boys she’d noted earlier, now sounding decidedly less celebratory and considerably more panicked.
Not that she could blame them, because one of their number was currently levitating somewhere near the ceiling, upside down, spinning like a top and jerking around as if controlled by the invisible strings of a marionette.
Vesper mentally raced through a litany of swears.
“Is that what’s meant to be happening?” Ashbridge asked.
“Obviously not,” Vesper said, the words clipped, and turned on her heel to race across the room to where the cluster of panicked university boys were debating loudly what was to be done.
Vesper attempted to interrupt, but could barely make herself heard above the din; in addition to their arguing, the surrounding clubgoers had noticed what was afoot, and a clamor of excited voices made it difficult for her to hear herself think. Overhead, the spinning boy was moaning in terror.
At last, Vesper took the expedient measure of aiming a kick to the shin of one of the arguing gaggle of boys—the loudest one—who broke off his blustering and gaped at her.
“Did you just kick me?”
Vesper didn’t waste breath apologizing. “What on earth has your friend here gone and done?”
“He’s not ‘gone and done’ anything,” one of his friends said angrily.
“He drank a Flotation Fizz half an hour ago, but he thought it was a bad batch, it wore off so quickly. And it says on the menu that it’s for ‘low-level levitation’ only; it didn’t say anything about him spinning like a top up round the chandelier—”
“What else did he take?” Vesper interrupted, not willing to waste too much of her valuable time listening to a man whinge. “Clearly it wasn’t the Flotation Fizz alone.”
“I didn’t see him drink anything else all night,” the brow-furrowing friend informed her. “He said he’d a rotten hangover after too many bottles last night, and so he was sticking to potions tonight.”
This was, in Vesper’s opinion, highly dubious logic—she got wicked headaches from potions of the sort that her cherished bosom friend (champagne) would never give her—but about what she’d expect for a man of this age and general background. (Posh, overeducated, underintelligent.)
But, if he were correct… could something have gone wrong with the Flotation Fizz?
She tipped her head back and watched as the unfortunate fizz-drinker continued to rotate, gaining and losing elevation with alarmingly unpredictable jerks, as if there were an invisible string wrapped round one of his ankles.
She thought that the movements might be slowing a bit, but it was difficult to tell for sure.
Unfortunately, he was already looking quite green about the gills, and a moment later—
“Watch it,” came Ashbridge’s voice in her ear, sudden and unexpected, the warmth of his breath on her neck. His hand came around her upper arm in a firm grip, pulling her backward.
But not in time.
Because at that precise moment, the bespelled man whirling in midair saw fit to vomit directly onto Vesper’s shoes.