I pushed my hand back through my hair. "I'm too young for this," I said.
Blackbird laughed. "She's been through a lot and she's endured. She's earned her independence. Anyway, there's nothing you can do about it. It seems she's been paying a lot more attention to Fionh's lessons than you gave her credit for, and now that's paying off. If she doesn't want to be found, you won't find her."
"She's not supposed to use it against me."
"She's using it for herself. You can't blame her."
"What am I going to tell Katherine?" I asked.
"Tell her the truth. Tell her you've tried to find Alex and failed. What can she say?"
"More than I want to hear."
"She bears some of the responsibility for this Niall. I think she knows that."
"You'd have to pull her teeth out to get her to admit it."
"Look at it this way, it solved one problem. You don't have to tell Katherine why Alex can't go back to living at home with her. She's chosen for herself, and there's nothing Katherine can do about that, any more than you."
"What if she gets hurt? Where will she sleep? What will she do for money?"
"Let her figure it out, Niall. She knows how to find you. All you have to do is make it clear that if she does come back, it's on her terms, and that you'll accept that."
"Her terms? What does that mean?"
"It means not locking her up in your ivory tower until you can find a suitable man to palm her off on."
"I haven't… there's no way…"
"The West Wing, then. Have you allowed her out? Has she been able to buy clothes, meet people?"
"She's hardly been in a state to be allowed to…"
"Allowed. That's an interesting word, Niall. Well, she no longer needs your permission or seeks it. She's taken responsibility for herself, and actually it's time. Now you have to trust her."
"That's harder than you think."
She looked down at our son who had eaten his fill and then flopped asleep in her arms. "Oh, when this little one wants to fledge and fly I expect to be biting my nails at the edge of the nest just like any parent, but it doesn't change what has to happen. They can't stay in the nest forever. That's just nature."
"Yeah, well let's just hope it isn't red in tooth and claw."
Alex sat on the steps outside a red-brick apartment block. The steps were stained with green algae, but she had a blister on her heel and she didn't care. She delved into her bag looking for a plaster or something to cushion her foot, but of course, there was nothing. She had make-up which she wasn't wearing, a hair clip that fell out, but nothing useful like a plaster.
She looked up and down the street. Away from the main streets where the chain stores made easy pickings, there were little corner shops with eagle-eyed shopkeepers who kept everything behind the counter, and long walks between them. She needed to head back to the high street where she could get what she needed. What she really needed, though, was somewhere to stay.
It was all very well being free to go where you wanted but if you had nowhere to go back to it wore thin pretty quick. Her feet were sore, the weather had broken and there was the threat of rain. Her thin cardie was no longer the comfort it had been. She needed shelter, and food, and a warm bed, and central heating, and chocolate.
Momentarily she thought about going home, but there was nothing there for her now. She had no clothes, no stuff, no room even. And her dad would be furious with her after she warded him out this morning. It would take him days to calm down. If she went back now she would be grounded for months. She couldn't even go to Kayleigh's. She had no friends now, there just wasn't anyone she could talk to, except maybe Tate.
Initially him calling her Miss all the time had annoyed her, but now she kinda liked it. He always treated her respectfully and asked her what she wanted to do. He offered advice, but didn't get all antsy if she didn't follow it. And he was huge. She caught herself wondering if he was that big all over, and found herself blushing. No, she didn't think of him like that. He was a friend, that was all.
She pushed her hands through her unruly hair — she couldn't go to Tate anyway. He was a Warder, just like Dad, and he would have to tell Dad where she was, and then there would be hell to pay. That wasn't going to work.
She stood and brushed at the green marks on her skirt, making them worse rather than better. She needed a change of clothes as well. She sniffed at her armpit and wished again that she'd made use of the shower in the hotel before running out like a scared cat. What was the matter with her? She'd had the situation under control, so why run? She shook her head at her own folly.
There were people she knew, though, weren't there? There were the other people like her, the ones from Porton Down. She wasn't the only one who had escaped, and she had an idea where one or two of them might have gone. Maybe she needed to be with her own kind, people who'd understand what she was going though?
Hoisting the bag back onto her shoulder, she headed back towards an area where there were sandwich shops and a high street chemist — somewhere she could get something for her feet. Then she would take a trip and see what she could find.
"Is this what Alex did when I tried to speak to her?" I was sitting on the fence overlooking the fields which rolled away from us.
"No. What she did, I think, was to ward where she was staying against you," said Blackbird. "A warding can apply to a place, or an object, or a person. Warding a place is simple and effective. You exclude anyone's magic but your own. In its finer form it can be used to clean and protect a place, a home perhaps, so that malicious magic cannot intrude, but even then it has limitations. Anything brought into that space which is tainted with another's power will disrupt the warding and release the magic. That's how you know that someone has crossed your warding — you'll feel the release and know it's been broken."
"So she pushed me out."
"There's no point in brooding on it, Niall. You invaded her privacy and she reacted. Instead of expressing your concern and asking if she was safe, you started making demands. It was not, perhaps, the best way to re-establish relations with your daughter."
"You always take her side."
"I take no side but my own, but I know Alex is precious to you and I'm trying to help. You need to stop thinking of her as a little girl."
"That was pretty cool, what she did, though, wasn't it?" I smiled.
"Crude but effective. She excluded you and prevented you from re-entering. Maybe she's more capable than you think, and she's certainly better at learning and not getting distracted by side-issues when someone is trying to teach them something."
"Sorry, where were we?"
"You were extending your awareness outwards and telling me what you feel."
I closed my eyes. Here beneath the trees the shade was welcome, but the rustling of the leaves and the smell of the grass was a constant distraction from what I was supposed to be looking for.
"It's just trees and grass," I told her.
"Is it? Or is that what you're supposed to think?"
I let myself sink deeper into the sense of the place, hearing the buzzing of bumble bees, the far-off coo of a wood pigeon and the faint rumble of distant traffic. "It's peaceful."
"How peaceful?"
Now that she mentioned it, there was something. "There's a kind of dampening, a dullness spread around us. Is that what I'm looking for?"
"What can you tell me about it?"
"It's heavy, like a wool blanket but not warm like that, just heavy. Now that I can see it it's over everything. It's huge."
"Every day the Warders renew these boundaries." Blackbird said quietly. "Every day they reassert their magic over this ground. What you're sensing is the repeated warding of this place, layer upon layer, until it's so thick that it can no longer be broken, simply endured. It's one of the things I don't like about being here. It's smothering."