Chapter Seventeen #3
“Double cream,” she said, a blissful expression on her face. “Milk, sugar, cocoa, cinnamon, a pinch of salt, and double cream to finish.”
He took another sip. “It’s quite nice.”
“You needn’t sound so surprised.”
“You’re the one who admitted your parents’ cook worries that you can’t feed yourself.”
“Well, this isn’t feeding, strictly speaking,” she said, and took a sip from her own mug. “Besides, I don’t think men who show up unexpectedly at my door on foggy nights are in any position to complain about what I serve them.”
“I don’t believe I was complaining,” he retorted, and knew, just from the expression on her face, that she was about to mock him.
“I don’t believe I was complaining,” she mimicked, in what he could not help but sourly note was a considerably worse approximation of his voice than her attempt at Freddie’s had been. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”
He bought himself some time by taking another sip of his cocoa, but she seemed prepared to wait him out, settling into the corner of the sofa more comfortably and tucking her feet beneath her.
He got a brief flash of one smooth, fair knee, and tried very hard to immediately forget what he’d seen, because he could not imagine that anything good could come from him having any sort of familiarity with Vesper Holloway’s knees.
“I’ve been thinking about what our next steps should be,” he said at last, and she arched an eyebrow at him. He was starting to feel it in his cock, every time she arched that brow at him. This could not possibly be normal.
“I thought we agreed on that last night.”
They had, of course. But he couldn’t admit that—could barely admit, even to himself, that the reasons he was here had nothing whatsoever to do with their investigation, and everything to do with the fact that he hadn’t wanted to return to his quiet, empty flat, where he would have spent his evening with her face in his mind.
So, instead he said, “I think we’re missing something obvious.
And if we don’t work it out soon, Raffles is going to bring in Scotland Yard, and the situation will be out of our hands.
” He felt unexpectedly grim at the prospect; when the police raided illegal mundane nightclubs that were selling alcohol out of licensing hours, the clubs tended to spring up in new locations within a matter of days, like particularly determined mushrooms. He had no doubt that the magical clubs would prove similarly crafty, but now that he’d visited a handful of them, the difference between these storied establishments, full of history, and the seedy nightclubs serving champagne at two in the morning for quadruple its worth seemed suddenly stark.
The idea of them vanishing, being forced to start from scratch, was not as appealing as he’d have found it a fortnight earlier.
“There has to be something else that the accidents all have in common,” Vesper said thoughtfully.
“I think if we could work that out, we’d be on the right track.
” She sighed. “It’s a shame there hasn’t been a mysterious buxom and dimpled redhead hovering by the bar in all the instances, something obvious like that. ”
“Ha,” Max said, but then his mind snagged on the word dimpled—and returned to something his sister had said earlier.
Every time she drinks one, no matter who she ends up looking like, she has the most adorable dimples in one cheek.
“Vesper,” he said slowly, “how do the potions at the Grimoire work?”
Vesper blinked at this non sequitur. “Well—they have several on offer. They all change your appearance in some way, obviously. Some will give you a rapid-fire succession of different faces; some let you swap genders; some change your hair color—”
“Do they—do they have any… consistencies?” he asked.
He felt all at once frustrated by his lack of magical knowledge.
This was never something he had considered to be a disadvantage before, and yet now he suddenly became conscious of the reality of a large, intricate component to the world that he didn’t understand—and had never tried to.
“I mean, if you use a potion, is there anything that stays the same?”
“Well—yes, actually.” Vesper sounded a bit surprised.
“It’s one of the quirks of the Grimme-Nox magic—there’s always one new feature that’s consistent, no matter what your face or body does.
I always get the most annoying cowlick that is absolutely impossible to hide, but some people have the same nose…
or the same freckles… or their ears stick out… or—”
“Particularly long eyelashes?” Max suggested. Vesper looked at him, eyes wide. “At Plenus Venter, and Holloway’s, and Grenoble’s, the people handing off the drinks had extremely long eyelashes—long enough that someone noticed, each time. Almost as if—”
“It was the same person, taking an appearance-changing potion,” Vesper finished for him. “Merlin. Do you think—”
“What I think,” Max said, feeling grimly satisfied, “is that we should break into the Grimoire.”
“Is there a reason that we can’t simply visit it one evening, as we have done all the others?”
“I’d rather Augustus Grimme-Nox didn’t know I was there.”
“And why’s that?”
He took a breath, weighing his words—but, really, there was only one way to explain it.
“Because he’s my father.”