THIRTY-TWO
“She’s not here.”
Calum’s heartbeat quickened as he stared at the attendant, her muscled arms efficiently tugging the sheets off the bed as she spoke. The bed next to Calum—Aly’s bed—had fresh sheets already, the corners taut and crisp.
“What do you mean, ‘she’s not here’?” Calum demanded.
The attendant stopped pulling the sheets off the bed and folded her arms. “She discharged herself yesterday.” She gave a shrug. “Too early, in my opinion, but she was adamant.”
Calum’s skin went cold. Had Grant found her?
It was the only reason he could think of for why she’d insist on discharging herself early.
The food and bed in the hospital were, after all, free.
But surely if that were the case, she’d have sent word to Calum, or told him in person.
He’d heard nothing from her since he’d visited her two days ago.
A terrible possibility occurred to him. If she knew Grant was after her, and had left the hospital to flee him, that didn’t mean she’d been successful in her escape.
A single strand of copper hair shimmered, caught in a metal nut on Aly’s bedframe. Heart pounding, he snatched it out and tucked it in his pocket, striding across the flagstones, out of the hospital and into the square outside.
It was a bright, sunny day, a rarity in winter in Mossburgh, and the square was teeming, packed with children chasing each other and parents strolling with infants.
Calum stepped into a close, away from the throng.
He pulled the hair out of his pocket and curled his fingers into a fist around it.
For one heart-stopping moment, nothing happened, the rasping of his breath loud in his ears until he felt the familiar tug behind his navel.
His chest loosened as he followed the spell’s pull through well-kept streets lined with bright white houses and parks with spare trees and dormant lawns.
As he walked, the buildings grew closer together and the green spaces became smaller and further apart, but the streets were clean and the market he passed through was vibrant, the smell of warm, buttery pastry and frying onions dominating the air.
Stalls selling everything from second-hand clothing to quill pens and sealing wax were scattered about the square, their wares displayed on wooden tables and benches.
The spell tugged him to the right, past a stall selling fragrant Ujuyul dumplings, and he crossed a canal, a barge piled high with vegetables passing beneath the bridge.
He followed the spell into a narrow close, the tall buildings choking out the sunlight.
The cobbles were covered in muck, and the cramped leaded windows scattered in the walls on either side of him were coated with grime.
He walked past a dosshouse, its tiny windows high in the walls making it look more like a prison than a cheap lodging house. Then he stopped abruptly, the spell tugging him back. He paused in front of the dosshouse door, and there was a sharp tug behind his navel pulling him towards the dosshouse.
Calum frowned. Why would Grant have taken Aly to a dosshouse?
It didn’t make sense. It was hardly private, and certainly not secure.
Unless he owned the entire place, which, for all Calum knew, Grant did.
He pushed open the door, its peeling paint gleaming in the wan sunlight, and crossed to the man seated on a hard wooden chair next to the small window, his newspaper tilted to get the light.
Calum pulled out his warrant card and showed it to the man. “I’m looking for a young woman with red hair who I think might be staying here.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “She’s not caused any trouble, has she?” He closed his newspaper and snapped it to get the creases out, the sound grating in the small room. “We don’t house that sort of folk here.”
Calum shook his head. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I just need to speak with her. She might be able to help me with something.”
The other man looked suspicious, but he led Calum through a warren of dingy corridors. Calum’s shoulders shrank towards his ears as the walls pressed in on him. He ground his teeth together, forcing himself to duck under the low lintel ahead. If Aly was in here, he had to find her.
Confined spaces had always made him uneasy, ever since he was a child.
And, like so many others, those fears were only compounded in Faerie.
Caoimhe had a knack for noticing the things he disliked the most and bringing them back as punishment.
When she’d asked him to hide in a wardrobe when he was fifteen, he’d hesitated.
Three years later, when he refused to attend court to be paraded around like a well-behaved prize, she’d shoved him into the cramped cellar, his head bashing off the low ceiling as she slammed the bolt home.
It was less than a day before she returned from her aunt’s palace, not long enough for dehydration to do much more than make his throat ache, but she could easily have spent the same amount of time at court and yet not returned to Gleannbhròn for a month, such was the way time worked in Faerie.
And as he’d sat hunched in the corner of the dark, dank cellar, he’d been all too aware of that fact.
He followed the landlord to a tiny room—more of a cubicle, really, Calum thought.
It was barely large enough to house the cot pushed up against the wall, the only furniture in the room.
There was little privacy, and no respite from the sounds of the other residents, their voices barely muffled by the thin walls.
Aly was perched on the bed with a small pair of scissors in one hand, ripping the monogrammed initials DS out of the front of a shift.
She was alive, and she was safe.
Aly looked up at the sound of Calum’s boots. Her eyes flared wide, then her expression closed off.
Calum turned a stern look on the man who had led him there—the proprietor, he assumed—who took the hint and crept back along the dim corridor. Calum turned back to Aly, watching as she pinched black thread out of the white linen. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Aly picked up a needle, threaded with fresh black thread. “I need more than one shift, so I picked some up second-hand at the market. I have to fix the initials on them though before I send them to the laundry.”
Calum felt the corners of his mouth turn up. “And what initials are those? AC? AM?”
Aly let out a sigh. “Does it matter? What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I went to the hospital to see you.” Calum leant against the doorframe, crossing his arms. “When they said you’d discharged yourself, I was afraid Grant had found you, so I tracked you with a strand of hair that was caught in the bedstead.” He held the hair up in demonstration.
Aly snatched the hair from his fingers. “I had to leave. It was only a matter of time before he found me.” She stabbed her needle into the linen with enough force to pierce her finger on the other side.
“Shit.” She jerked her finger out of the way and held it aloft so it wouldn’t bleed on the fabric.
“I was stupid enough to use your surname, knowing he knows about you.”
Calum sat on the bed next to her, picked up the shift and needle, and began stitching an A into the front neckline of the shift. Her thimble wouldn’t even fit his pinkie, and he didn’t have one with him; the eye of the needle soon bit into his fingertip as he pushed it through the linen.
He glanced round at the flaking paint and the absence of any actual doors in the room. “And you’re safe here?”
He meant the words with concern, but Aly reacted defensively. “I’ll have to be,” she snapped. “I haven’t got much choice.”
Calum made a few more stitches before saying anything. “You could—” he started, but she cut him off.
“Stay with you?” She shook her head.
Calum turned to her. Her lips were pressed in a thin line, her hands clenched in her lap. “Why not? I can protect you from him.”
Aly gave a snort. “The last time a man kindly offered to upgrade my accommodation, it ended in him trying to strangle me.”
Calum recoiled as though she’d hit him. “I’m not—”
“Not him? Of course you’re not.” Aly exhaled through her nose. “But you’re a copper, and we both know you could put me in prison for a long time if you wanted to. And you can be jealous, too, even Grant saw it, and he didn’t hear the things you said to me at the station house.”
The words speared through Calum’s gut. “I shouldn’t have said any of that, and I’m so sorry about it.”
“I know you are.” Aly looked down at her hands. “But whatever you say or do, you still have power over me. I can’t be indebted to someone like that again. I just can’t.” Her voice broke on the last word.
Calum set his sewing down, reaching out to lay one hand over Aly’s clenched fingers.
The tension in her shoulders loosened at his touch.
“I understand.” He wet his lips, considering his next words.
“I’m not going to tell you that I’m different and you can trust me, or that I would never do something like that.
I’ll just say this: the offer stands, if you ever need it. ”
Aly’s eyes shone as she looked at him and gave a sharp nod, then she picked up her scissors and another shift and said, “So have you made any progress finding your mole?”
“It could be anyone. My boss, one of my constables, even the desk sergeant.” The enormity of the problem sank in as he spoke. “It means I don’t have the power of the police force to protect you from Grant or to make him answer for his crimes, because I can’t trust anyone there.”
“What about your journalist friend? Do you think he could help?”
Calum considered that. He didn’t want to put Lewis in danger, but she had a point.
Lewis was already investigating corruption in the burgh government, including Grant’s role; odds were good Lewis had an idea as to who might be leaking information to Grant.
“He might be able to. We didn’t part on very good terms last time I spoke to him, though.
I’m not sure he’d be willing to help me. ”
Aly shrugged, picking at more broken threads. “Maybe he won’t be willing to help you. But he’ll be willing to help all the people Grant has hurt by exposing his informant in the police, won’t he?”
Calum swallowed. “Aye, I think you’re right.” He gestured to the completed A on the shift. “So what initial am I using here for your second name?”
Aly gave a cheeky grin, the kind that sent heat dancing over Calum’s skin. “E. For Erskine.” She winked as Calum’s cheeks warmed.
“E for Exasperating, perhaps,” he muttered, loudly enough for Aly to hear him.
She let out a peal of laughter. “M is fine. It’s my proper name, anyway.”
And so they sat there until the winter light faded, she ripping out the old initials and Calum embroidering the new, until she had a pile of shifts with AM neatly stitched into the neckline, and Calum’s middle finger stung from the needle.