“Probably.” He squeezed me closer. “But I can make another one. How ’bout you? Are you all right?”
“As right as I ever am.”
“Your skin feels cold.” He kissed my cheek. “You want to get back in bed and warm up?” I could feel him smiling and a pink glow radiated from his body as the room’s normal Grey presence began twinkling back.
“You are an adorable lunatic.”
“I can go for adorable.”
“Not so much the lunatic?”
“I think I prefer techno-geek. I know I prefer the bed over standing on this cold-ass floor.”
The glimmer and gleam of the grid hummed back to normal as we scampered across the chilly floor to huddle under the blankets again.
Quinton kissed my temple. “That was pretty freaky.”
“And I have no idea what it was in service to.”
“That’s the same message your dead boyfriend delivered: It’s not what you think. Isn’t it?”
I called that memory up. “Yeah, it is. But that. mob wasn’t Cary.”
“Someone wants you to get that message pretty desperately.”
“Oh, I get it. But it’s not very helpful. What is not what it seems? Me? Edward? His little business trip? That wasn’t even on the table when Cary got in touch.” The more I thought of it, the madder I got at the whole cipher-wrapped-in-an-enigma thing. “I’m not going to back out of this trip, even if that is what the ghosts are warning me about. I think I stand a better chance of finding answers in England than staying here and chasing my tail, not knowing which questions to ask whom and pissing Edward off in the bargain. I have a plane to catch in five hours and I’m not planning on wasting what’s left of that time puzzling over the energetic missives of cryptic specters,” I snapped.
“Hey, sweetheart. It’s just me here now.”
I closed my eyes, chagrined at my anger. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m being played in some way. It makes me. short-tempered.”
“Played by Edward?”
I shrugged dismissal. “Not really. Manipulation is Edward’s stock-in-trade. There’s something else. Ever since this started there’s been something. lurking. I just have a bad feeling. ”
“I know.”
I sighed. “I don’t mean to take it out on you.”
“I don’t mind being your sounding board. Or your backup or whatever you need.” He hesitated. “That’s—you know. what you do for someone you love.”
Something ridiculous and giddy swelled through me at the word. I could feel the fizz of it bursting out of my skin and igniting sparks in the writhing platinum mist, bouncing off the living, glowing streams of energy that powered magic, and the rippling knife edge of the Grey. After the devastation Cary had wreaked on the remnants of my juvenile romanticism, the gleaming evidence of Quinton’s sincerity was intoxicating.
“Want me to prove it?” he whispered into my ear. His grip tightened just a little as his body temperature kicked up.
“You don’t need to prove—”
He nipped at my neck below the ear. “I want to,” he breathed against my skin. His hands slid up toward my breasts.
I turned in his arms and met his mouth with mine, passion heating the air until it baffled our lungs and fused us together, flesh to flesh. I forgot to say the words, but I did my best to show him that I felt the same way.
CHAPTER 18
Edward’s idea of long-distance air travel for daylighters started at business class. Since he had, in his weird way, damn near begged me to take the job, I got first-class treatment—literally. Not the corporate jet—the opposition would catch on to me soon enough without that sort of red flag—but the cushiest seating British Airways offered to commercial travelers nonstop from Seattle to Heathrow. Nine hours in transit. It was the first time I’d ever slept comfortably on a plane and arrived feeling reasonably alert and uncramped.
Edward had run the reservations through a couple of corporate blinds so only an insider would know I was in London under TPM’s aegis. The financial distance made for sufficient security to arrange for a car to pick me up and take me to my hotel without recourse to the Tube or my paying for a common cab myself. But the luxury of the car service—it was a huge step up from a cab, but you couldn’t quite call it a limo—set me on edge; conspicuous consumption is just that: conspicuous. As I sat in the back of the black sedan cruising away from Heathrow on the freeway—no, motorway—I put my mind into undercover mode and thought about what I was heading into.
A tourist is one among thousands, but a first-class traveler is one of a hundred and, like any other undercover job, I’d had to look the part. Now I had to act it as well until I could shift into the next physical and mental disguise. I suspected that most of my investigations in London would require a less-affluent wardrobe and an attitude that wasn’t as hard as my usual street armor. I already missed the convenience of my old, wrecked Rover with its cache of clothes and tools. The hotel would have to be my base of operations, so, first thing, I’d need to find an unobtrusive way in and out, or risk attracting attention. Vampires are a paranoid lot and if some local faction had moved against Edward as he seemed to suspect, they’d be on the alert for anything that indicated his eye was on them. Eventually, they’d connect me to Edward, but the longer I could keep that from happening, the better.
The car had just passed some kind of light industrial or office complex and the wide, multilane road descended from its protected cement embankments to run at street level as a highway when the preternatural world flooded over me. I hadn’t noticed the Grey much before that; the area west of London along the M4 was a little more rural than the suburban mix between Seattle and our own airport at Sea-Tac and not quite as haunted—which isn’t much to begin with. But leaving the motorway and entering the streetscape of western London was like stepping into a deep and turbulent sea of the Grey, even inside the damping barrier of the car’s steel and chrome. I don’t know why I hadn’t given much thought to the weight and chaos of the unseen that would grow up along with a city over the course of two millennia, but it was as thick and opaque as a one of London’s famous Victorian fogs and I shuddered with cold, although the sunny afternoon was pleasantly warm—hot by native standards.
“Would you like the air turned off?” the driver asked.
“Huh?” I coughed, the centuries choking and slamming through me.
“The air-conditioning. Would you like it turned down? You seem cold.” His speech wasn’t strict BBC bland but it was carefully correct. I suspected he spoke with a broader accent at home but was supposed to present a bit more polish on the job.
“Yes. Please.” If it would help me warm back up after the shock of sudden immersion in the icy sea of the past, I was in favor of it. I would have to gain some control and equilibrium before we reached the hotel or I might be completely useless—or at the least as sick and punch-drunk as I’d been the first few times I’d stepped into the Grey.
“Where are we?” I asked, groping for something to orient myself by.
“Just coming into Hammersmith. Not much farther.”
“How much longer to London, then?”
He laughed. “Sorry, miss. We’ve been in Greater London since we left Heathrow. It’s all London.”
“But you said Hammersmith. ”
“It’s one of the outer boroughs. London’s like. a lot of little cities that grew together. I’ve a cousin in Queens, New York, says it’s the same sort of thing there. One vast city made of a lot of bits. What you probably think of as London, that’s really just a couple of the old cities—the City of London, and the City of Westminster—and the inner boroughs.”
“Like most people think New York is just Manhattan,” I suggested.
“That’s what my cousin said!”
“So. how big is London?” I asked, realizing I’d bitten off a lot more than I’d imagined in agreeing to come with no idea which part to look in for Edward’s answers or my own.