Mr. Grimm!
Nigel flinched. He couldn’t help it. He’d heard that tone of voice from her before, and it never failed to make him react like a puppy with his nose caught in the bin. But it wasn’t as though he was doing anything so very wrong this time, was it?
He glanced over at Luna, his hand still upraised, his eyes still flashing with the darkness of Fell Dimensions, the potent sear of energy-exchange sharp in his veins.
He’d sourced the energy for that spell up from the soil of Garden itself, but the process had been a little too quick and spontaneous following the larger spell he’d just worked on the Heart Tree. The results were painful.
And now Luna gaped at him with open-mouthed shock and fury. All the blood drained out of her face, and her eyes were large and staring beneath that mess of tangled dark hair.
“You gave me permission to protect Garden,” Nigel pointed out.
“Within reason!” she cried. “I said within reason! I’m quite sure I enunciated those words with perfect clarity.
” She shook her head, clapping both hands to her cheeks as her stare shifted from Nigel to the figure lying sprawled in the boiler room doorway.
“I didn’t think I needed to mention that murder is not reasonable.
Even a Dark Sorcerer ought to be able to figure that one out! ”
Nigel felt his face set in sulky lines. “I didn’t murder him.” Even in his own ears, his voice sounded petulant. “He’s merely unconscious.”
“Is he?” With a desperate little inhale, Luna hastened to the side of young Tobias.
The boy lay flat on his back, his feet sticking through the door into Garden’s grounds, the rest of his body in the back passage of The Arcane Bouquet.
Nigel firmly suppressed a pang of jealousy at her concern over the weasely little idiot.
He personally didn’t feel the world would be particularly worse off without one Tobias Goddard in it .
. . though, granted, that was probably the Dark Sorcerer in him talking.
Luna dropped to her knees beside the boy, placed her fingers against his neck, then dropped her head against his chest. Nigel swallowed.
When the spell on the Heart Tree had taken effect and knocked the wind out of him, he’d struggled to draw breath.
The sudden sensation of Luna Talbot’s cheek pressed against his chest had acted like a shock, jolting his lungs back into action.
He’d not been in a position to fully appreciate it in the moment, however.
It was all a bit spoiled now, seeing her show the same concern for Tobias.
“He’s breathing.” Luna sat back onto her heels, her shoulders slumping. Then she glared at Nigel. “No thanks to you!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nigel answered with great dignity, drawing near to the door. “Whatever else you may think of me, I am not a sloppy sorcerer, Miss Talbot. I intended to knock him out. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Never mind,” Debbie concurred, flapping to roost on his shoulder.
“And what were you thinking?” Luna demanded, turning her attention from Nigel to the raven. “Did you really give that key to Tobias Goddard, of all people?”
She ruffled her wings, affronted.
“Don’t you go ruffling your wings at me!” Luna took the key from Tobias’s greasy fingers, peering into the boy’s face as she did so. She bit her lips, her jaw setting hard. Then she turned to Nigel again. “He definitely saw Garden. Didn’t he, Mr. Grimm?”
Nigel rubbed a hand down the back of his neck. “His reaction was not that of a man looking into a boiler room.”
“What are we going to do?”
He met her frightened gaze, taking care that his own face remained neutral. “What will my Sovereign Lady permit me to do?”
Luna shuddered. Getting to her feet, she backed away, her gaze studying the stretched-out form of Tobias, as though he held the answers she sought. She drew a long breath, held it for some heartbeats. Then: “You’ve got to remove his memories.”
Nigel nodded.
“Just the one memory though, right? You don’t need to do anything extreme?”
“I shouldn’t have to, no.”
Luna looked very pale. Sick. Not to mention frazzled and bedraggled and so adorable it made Nigel ache just to look at her.
It hurt to see that line of disgust marring her sweet mouth.
She hated everything about what he did, what he was, and it was enough to make a man wish he could go back in time and change all his life choices so that he never, ever pursued sorcery to begin with.
So that he could somehow start from the ground up, crafting himself into the sort of person a woman like her could look at with . . . well, without disgust.
Nigel breathed out slowly, unable to relieve the heaviness in his heart.
This afternoon they just shared together—this wonderful, terrifying, miraculous gift of an afternoon—was at an end.
Never to be reclaimed. All that ease in her manner dissipated, replaced by the half-forgotten formality.
And all those little half-glimpses of what might have been faded to nothing.
Finally, Luna shot him a sharp glance. “Do it quickly then if you must, Mr. Grimm. I . . . I’ll just . . . step into the shop and check the flowers, shall I?”
Nigel nodded and watched Luna slip away. So eager to get away from him. Not that he could blame her. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.
He turned to the raven on his shoulder, catching her beady eye. “I’ll have to source from you, I’m afraid.”
She clacked her beak. “Never mind!”
“I’d do it myself,” he said, “only, I just used up rather a lot of lifeforce getting Garden back in order. I’m going to need time to replenish.”
“Never mind, never mind, never mind.”
“Thanks, Debbie.”
Nigel knelt beside the unconscious Tobias and began to shape a sigil over his forehead.
He performed the energy-transference and used the Dire force to penetrate into Tobias Goddard’s mind.
It was not a pleasant place to be. Nigel didn’t love delving into other people’s minds to begin with, but Tobias’s mind was such a singularly greasy affair.
Like someone had been cooking in his mental kitchen with far too much fat in the frier, and it had spattered everywhere.
A very little shifting, and Nigel located all the most recent memories, isolated, and drew them out from Tobias’s brain.
As they were so recent, there was no need to fill anything into the cracks—a mind like Tobias’s had so many empty spaces in it already, one more wasn’t going to be noticed.
Instead, Nigel simply drew a blank over the last twenty minutes or so.
The deed done, Nigel took care to seal any gaps in consciousness, just to make certain nothing seeped through. Then he closed up, like a surgeon, and sat back on his heels, looking down at the unconscious Tobias. The boy’s color looked a little better, a little fresher.
Nigel’s eyes narrowed. Mrs. Goddard’s concerns about the company her son was keeping sprang to mind.
If this kid was involved with a bootlegger sorcery gang down by the harbor, that could spell trouble.
One word mentioned in the wrong ear about a secret garden behind a boiler room door, and complications would arise.
Very quickly. Nigel grimaced. He’d simply have to trust that he’d done a thorough job with that memory removal.
Tobias groaned suddenly, and his eyelids twitched.
With a sigh, Nigel got up, gripped the boy under the shoulders, and hauled him the rest of the way into the passage.
Hastily, he locked up Garden’s door again and slipped the key back into its polka-dot pot in the storage room.
Then, returning to the passage, he pulled Tobias into a seated position.
By now the boy was beginning to moan and blink.
“Come on, Tobias,” Nigel said, drawing one limp arm across his shoulders. “Let’s get you home to Mother’s, shall we? You’ve been on a bit of a bender, and your mam isn’t going to be best pleased with you.”
“Awwww,” Tobias moaned, struggling to get his feet under him. He staggered, slouched, and nearly pulled Nigel over on their way into the kitchen. “Don’t tell Mam!”
“No, no. It’ll be our little secret,” Nigel assured him.
They proceeded into the alley behind the shop, and somehow Nigel managed to get the boy across to Mrs. Goddard’s back door.
This he found unlocked, so he pushed it open and carried her son inside.
“Mrs. Goddard?” he called out, even as Tobias hissed a desperate, “Shhhhhhh!”
No answer issued from deeper in the house, so Nigel simply passed through the kitchen and on to the back parlor. There he deposited Tobias on the couch in an ungentle heap. Something told him his landlady often discovered her son in similar straights and wouldn’t think much of it.
“And here’s hoping you won’t give me cause to regret not smiting you to oblivion on sight,” Nigel muttered as he left the room, then paused a moment, frowning. Gods, when was he ever that darkly sorcerous?
With a little shudder, he exited Mrs. Goddard’s house, shutting the door carefully behind him.
He crossed the alley to his own kitchen.
The dinner platter sat in waiting on the counter, he noted.
No doubt the reason for Tobias’s intrusion, running errands for his mother.
Nigel’s gaze fastened on that platter as he pulled the door shut behind him.
He wondered suddenly if he could convince Luna to stay on and share dinner with him?
After all, she probably didn’t have any food back home, and it would be nice not to let their day end on a sour note.
Sharing a meal was a harmless enough interaction, wasn’t it?
Then he remembered.