“No, the first time was a sparring match.” I worked my arm; it felt good as new. “Are all life mages this good at healing, or is it just you?”
Anne smiled. “I’ve had a lot of practice. Is there any food in the house?”
I showered and changed my clothes. I felt really good; I must have been carrying a bunch of minor injuries that I hadn’t noticed until Anne fixed them. By the time I stepped out of the shower I could smell something very appetising coming from the kitchen and my stomach growled. “Wow,” I said as I walked in. “Smells good.”
“It’s a stir-fry with tuna.” Anne was over the stove; she’d washed the blood from her hands. “Sorry, there were only so many things in the fridge so it’ll be a bit makeshift.”
“Knowing you, it’ll still be better than anything I could come up with.”
“That’s not saying much.”
I laughed. Anne never used to say things like that out loud, but she’s a lot more relaxed around me these days. “There’s a catch, you know,” Anne said.
“With tuna?”
“What you were asking. About whether I can heal anything.” Anne had turned to look at me and her face was serious again. “I have to be there. If I’m next to someone, I can bring them back, no matter how close they are. But if you bleed out, or if that shard had hit you in the brain or the heart . . .”
“I know.”
“This was why I wanted you to have a gate stone for my flat.”
“You’ve got one for here. It works out about the same.”
“What if I hadn’t answered my phone?”
“I’d have had to think of something else,” I admitted. “But you’re pretty good about that kind of thing.”
“That’s because you never ask for help unless it’s something incredibly serious.” Anne had been opening a can; now she drained off the water and poured the contents into a frying pan with a hiss. “Um, by the way, don’t you have a set of armour?”
I sighed.
Luna and Variam arrived just as Anne was finishing up; she’d called them and given them the news, which come to think of it was something I should have done myself. They took a little time catching up on the story, then once they were sure I was okay, promptly started critiquing my performance.
“So let me get this straight,” Luna said. “You have a set of imbued armour designed specifically to stop attacks like this one, and you left it at home.”
“Yes.”
“Because you forgot to wear it.”
“I didn’t forget, I just didn’t realise I was going to get attacked.”
“Even though you’re a diviner.”
“. . . Yes.”
Variam and Luna shared a look. “You know,” Luna said, “I think that has got to be one of the stupidest possible ways to get killed.”
“Yeah, seriously,” Variam said. “What’s the point of having armour if you’re not going to use it?”
“It’s armour,” I said. “I can’t walk around London every minute of the day looking like I’m going to a SWAT raid. Anyway, I didn’t think it was going to be dangerous.”
Variam stared. “You didn’t think a police investigation could be dangerous?”
“Well, none of the others have been.”
Variam and Luna looked at me.
“All right! It was stupid, I get it. Look, you don’t have to worry about this stuff. You can just throw up a shield whenever you feel like it.”
“Honestly, doesn’t work as well as you’d think,” Variam said. “I can dispel anything that’s magic, but not if they just shoot through.”
“And I can’t shield either,” Luna said. “So none of us can really. Though I guess Anne can do the ‘healer’s shield.’”
“Healer’s shield?”
“You let them shoot you, then you heal yourself.”
“I’d rather not,” Anne said mildly. “It still hurts.”
Anne had made enough for about six normal people, which was just as well since I was starving—one of the side effects of life magic healing. I wasn’t the only one, either. “I wish I could eat that much and stay that thin,” Luna told Anne.
“I don’t really have a choice, you know.”
“Yeah, but you still get to pick how much goes into body fat. That would be so—”
“Okay,” Variam said. “I’m preemptively cutting you both off before you start talking about your diets. What are we going to do about this assassin guy?”
Luna and Anne turned to me. “Right now, not much,” I said. “He’s long gone and we don’t have any way to trace him. I’m going to call Caldera in the morning.”
“What if he traces you?” Luna asked.
“Then we’ll just have to see who finds who first.”
“Do you still have it?” Anne said.
I went to my desk and took out the focus, returning to the dinner table to put it down in the centre. “So that’s the thing you nearly got killed for?” Luna asked, studying the green marble with interest.
“Looks that way. You guys seen one of these before?”
“If I had, it would have been on your shelves,” Luna said.
Anne had picked the focus up and was studying it curiously. She shook her head. “I don’t recognise it.”
“I do,” Variam said.
Luna and I looked at Variam in surprise. “Really?” Luna said.
“You don’t need to sound so bloody shocked.”
“You’ve seen one?” I asked.
“It was a different colour, but yeah, I think so. My master was doing something with it.”
“Doing what?”
“Dunno,” Variam admitted. “Wasn’t paying attention.”
“You and Luna have a lot in common, don’t you?”
“Hey,” Luna said to me, then looked at Variam. “Could you show it to him?”
Variam shrugged. “Got a lesson tomorrow. I can ask him then.”
Anne glanced at me. “Is that okay?”
I thought about it for a second. Variam can look after himself pretty well, and having the focus up in Scotland with his master would probably be safer than keeping it here. It did mean trusting Variam’s master with the information, but it wasn’t like the thing was doing any good sitting in my desk. “All right. Call us when you know anything?”
“No problem.”
We talked a little longer, but it was past midnight and it wasn’t long before everyone was yawning. Anne decided to stay over (she said she wanted to keep an eye on me). Luna wanted to go home but didn’t want to cycle back this late, so Variam gave her a lift. By the time I went to bed, the aftereffects of the healing had sunk in, and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
I woke up to a tickling feeling. Something thin and light was brushing the side of my face; I twisted away and buried my head in the pillow and duvet. There was a moment’s pause, and I had just enough time to vaguely register a presence on the bed before something round and cold was shoved into my ear.
I woke with a yelp and opened my eyes to see a long face with red-brown fur and a pointed muzzle ending in a black nose. The eyes were yellow and less than six inches away, and they were staring right at me.
I glared. “Will you stop doing that?”
The fox pulled its head back and sat on the bed, blinking twice at me. “Alex?” Anne called from the kitchen. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I called back. “Just Hermes.” Apparently satisfied that I wasn’t going back to sleep, the fox jumped off the bed, trotted to the door, then looked back at me expectantly.
Hermes is a blink fox, a magic-bred creature with human-level intelligence and the ability to perform short-range teleports. I met him last year at about the same time that I ran into Richard, and after making it out of the shadow realm he followed me home. Ever since then he’s dropped by at irregular intervals, expecting a meal. I probably shouldn’t have fed him the first time.
Finding out the fox’s name had been less straightforward than you’d think, since while blink foxes can understand human speech, they can’t talk. Luna had wanted to name him Vulpix, but I’d put my foot down and gone to Arachne instead. After a private conversation with the fox, Arachne had told me to call him Hermes, though she’d been evasive about how she’d found out. “Seriously?” I said. “You want me to feed you now?”