Chapter Thirty-Five
Ambrose closed and locked the door. He looked very calm, but I got the sense that he had a good amount of potential energy, though for what, I didn’t know.
“I do not like this,” Elias said.
Ambrose grunted. “Stating the fucking obvious.”
Echo looked at Elias. “You should be able to help us find where they are.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You and your computers.”
“Do I need to be here?” Thaeros asked.
It was a good question. They’d done a morning shift then driven us all over town, and while I couldn’t judge what Caecilius would do to someone who randomly got in his way, I had some sense of what he’d been willing to do to me.
He’d gotten me shot, and then there’d been that black-eyed kid…
I shivered. I wanted to get Thaeros out of harm’s way.
“He has a point,” I said.
Echo sighed. “He also has a brother who’s currently very pissed and looking for someone to vent it on.”
Thaeros paled again. “Oh.”
Echo crooked his finger. “Come on, everyone, we should get to work.”
He made a left, seemingly knowing his way around this house.
I finally took a look around the place. It was cavernous and cool past the front door, and the walls were rough, whitewashed, with no other decoration than iron wall sconces and two cabinets framing the door, both made of dark wood and looking antique.
Above our heads, a chandelier hung, shaped like a wagon wheel but made of iron.
The floor was creamy marble, and a marble staircase just off the center led upstairs.
Windows high in the wall above the door let in some natural light to brighten those stairs, though not much of that light made it to where we stood.
“And where do you think you’re going?” Ambrose asked.
Echo stopped, letting his head droop. “To Lord Hawthorne’s office.”
Elias cocked his head. “My office? Well, yes. That makes sense. I suppose it very much does. Ambrose, could you arrange for refreshments for our guests?”
“I’m not your maid.” Ambrose then pulled out his phone and shot off a text. “Done.”
Elias took my hand and leaned in. “He gets grumpy. You know the type.”
Echo raised his head and continued on. We all followed him through the gorgeous house.
The high ceilings were the dominant feature, much like in Soyer’s place, but he’d had to merge two floors to get the effect.
I couldn’t even say whether this house had been something else or whether it had been built to these exact specifications.
I also wasn’t exactly sure what I had expected when Elias had pestered me to come visit him.
I knew that he, Valentin, and Elias were rich, not least because they ran the underground and much else from what I’d gleaned.
Yet, knowing someone had accumulated vast wealth through vampiric longevity and seeing it were two very different things. It made me feel unprepared and…small.
It was when we walked through a plush living room with big couches and mythical-looking tapestries on the white walls that my manners kicked in.
“The garden is lovely, by the way. The house too.”
Elias received the compliment with a polite smile. “It’s really very big, but not as drafty as some manor houses I’ve been forced to spend the night at. Do you truly like it? Oh, we could have sleepovers! Ambrose, wouldn’t that be nice?” Elias fake-whispered to me, “Ambrose thinks I’m lava.”
“Why?”
Elias shrugged his shoulders, making the movement extra big. “I wouldn’t know that. He just says things sometimes and then other people are supposed to understand, even if it makes no sense at all.”
“It’s because it’s not wise to get too close to a pickpocket,” Ambrose grumbled.
“Which I am absolutely not.” Elias put a hand to his chest and did the puppy eyes.
Ahead of us, Echo abruptly stopped, froze, then rubbed his face.
“I’m not sure where this is, but what we’re going to have to do is meet up with the other three at Caecilius’s hideout.
When I say meet up, I mean we have to engineer it just right to have them get there when we need them there. Finesse and timing.”
Elias clicked his tongue. “No one knows where that hideout is, not even Mr. Bennet. How would we arrange for a secret meeting? The first rule of a successful rendezvous is that all parties know where to go to have one.”
Echo gestured in the general direction of the front door and what was beyond. “Well, he’s in the city.”
“I thought having a witch here was bad, but now Caecilius has a hideout here? This is a reason to fucking move,” Thaeros said. “I thought Newstaten would be safe.”
Ambrose frowned at Echo. “Bennet kills witches, and if he can do it, other people might have a shot as well. I can think of a lot of stuff no naga would survive. The only people who need to go are the witch and Caecilius. Assuming all this is real.”
Echo clicked his teeth together. “I actually like how suspicious you are of everything.”
Ambrose lowered his chin. “Not falling for that.”
“My point.”
Elias clapped his hands. “It’s not that I mind dicks, but the measuring of them can get so very old so very fast.” He reached for my hand again.
“Amory, come along. I’ll show you my busy office.
It’s not my studio, but it’s where I get busy doing things for Valentin and Simeon, for Hawthorne in general.
You’ll like it. It smells of all work and no fun at all in there. ”
With me in tow, he breezed past the others, taking the lead.
Elias’s office wasn’t what I’d thought it would be.
It had the high ceilings and the white walls, plus a big modern meeting table and a very large desk with several screens set against one wall.
Above it, clocks hung, a row of them, each telling the time in a different city.
There was Newstaten, of course, then there was London, also Reykjavik.
Elias had told us to sit at the big table, and I’d angled my chair so I could see what he was doing. Echo was standing behind him, and Ambrose was at the end of the desk, arms crossed as he frowned at the both of them while they went over surveillance footage and maps, among other things.
Next to me, Thaeros was fidgeting, playing with the button on his shirt.
“How long have you been up?” I asked them.
“Oh.” They looked out the window. “It’s getting dark again. Huh. Maybe twenty hours or so.”
“Do you want to find a couch?”
They shook their head. “I can’t sleep. Too nervous. Hey, did… My brother. Did he do anything, say anything?”
“Not really. I thought you’d gotten a haircut.”
They snorted. “Yeah. Very different kind of fashion sense.” They let go of the button and fumbled with the sleeve of their uniform shirt.
“It’s not that unusual. For my kind to be different from their twin.
Sometimes it’s talent or the jobs we gravitate toward, but Peiras…
Peiras was just always extreme about the things he wanted. The things he thought he should have.”
That brought up memories of Florence. “Do you miss him?”
“Miss my brother? Fuck no. I want nothing to do with him. I mean, I didn't know he’d gone over to fucking Caecilius. I know some of his people give talks and recruit that way, but…it’s just not right.
It’s not how the world works. Maybe it did in the past, but you can’t just turn all humans into slaves. ”
The door opened, and a woman wearing a nice suit walked in, pushing that fancy kind of food trolley you saw in restaurants like the Doge. She stopped, looking at Ambrose. “Tea and human food?”
Ambrose gestured at us. “Those guys for the human food. Put it on the table.”
“And tea with extra sugar for me, please,” Elias said, sounding needy while typing at extreme speed, his eyes glued to the screens.
I tried to see what they were doing, but it was no use. Echo was describing a building, I understood that. How they were finding it from what he was able to tell Elias, I had no idea. It was all just images and diagrams, and some of it was really grainy.
The woman poured tea and put a large plate with tiny triangular sandwiches in front of us, the crusts cut off. Unless I was mistaken, those were cucumber sandwiches. All very fancy.
Echo ignored the cup he was being offered and began pacing. “The timing. We have to get the timing right.”
He looked at me, but his eyes were seeing past me at the same time.
Timing. Timing reminded me that I had other things to do besides being here and…plotting. “I think I have to call Ben.”
“Why?” Echo asked, his eyes narrowing but still not really seeing me.
I pulled out my phone. “I thought you knew everything. He’s my…bodyguard, I guess. Soyer has him watch me and take me to work.”
“I don’t know everything, but Cecil clearly had you followed if his lawyer came to the diner. Which means he had someone watch your bodyguard in the hopes you’d turn up there.”
“I don’t even know where he lives.”
Echo pulled out his own phone. “Beside the point. Don’t call him yet. I’m—oh.” Echo stopped. “You’re not calling at all. I get it now. The Lord Shuck can track your phone, can’t he?”
I blinked at him. “I guess. He set everything up for me. He mentioned that, I think. I told him to do what he had to and that I didn’t mind because I trust him.”
“Aww!” Elias said.
“Yeah…yes. This can work. Your Ben would call the Shuck right away if he knew anything was wrong. He’d come in hot.”
“Might be easier to just tell everyone what we’re doing here,” Ambrose said, and I nodded.
Echo pinched the bridge of his nose. “Both Lords Hawthorne as well as the Lord Shuck will react in a very particular way if they think their lovers have been harmed. You know that. If they think their lovers are doing something foolish, they will focus on stopping them from doing that, and in this situation, that is the wrong thing for them to focus on entirely.”
Ambrose reached for the teacup the woman had left on the table next to him. It looked ridiculous—Ambrose, with that no-nonsense look on his face, holding a flowery teacup, his pinky slightly raised. “Possibly. I know they’re gonna have my head before they even go for yours.”
Elias turned in his chair. “I am not a tactician, but I have learned from the best. More than that, Echo is right. I know how Simeon and Valentin would come for me, and I saw how Soyer came for Amory.” He waved his hand at Ambrose.
“Even if Echo conveys what he sees of the future and what he knows must be done, you’d be ordered to chain up myself and Amory, and not in the sexy way. ”
“That’s because noncombatants have no business getting involved in combat. That’s how that works.”
I’d been bouncing my heel, but that made me stop. “I’m involved in this. Caecilius really doesn’t like me, and he wants me gone. He had someone…blow my brains out.”
I shouldn’t have said that, because the words alone brought back the memories of that day. I swallowed bile as I remembered the…mess all over me.
Ambrose stared at me for five seconds before he said, “I really am the babysitter around here.”
Elias gasped. “But you refuse to call me baby! Are you going to call Amory baby now? That’s unfair. Amory, tell him that’s unfair.”
If I hadn’t known Elias so well, I might’ve gotten mad, but he was probably as tense as I was, so I was fine ignoring him.
To Ambrose, I said, “I won’t let Soyer get hurt, and…I don’t want him to have to face that witch alone.”
Ambrose’s eyelid ticked slightly. “That witch?”
“Yeah.” I was fidgeting like Thaeros now, wondering what to tell them. I knew it wasn’t my place to explain this. Soyer had told me his story, the story of how his phoenix curse had come to be, in confidence, and I wasn’t going to betray that. “He’s met her before.”
Ambrose kept looking at me, almost like he could sense there was more there that I wasn’t saying.
Echo cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and focused on the screen. “Let’s see if we can find something that has a private or mostly private underground parking structure for vans or big SUVs.”
Elias nodded. “Yes. That big naga tail would stick out.”
They put their heads together once more. Ambrose clearly still wasn’t happy about it, but I was grateful that he seemed to be on board, at least for now.