Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) (16 page)

She had a point, though, about the effect that I had on clients. Calmness was the commodity that I gave the coven, from my desk at home that served as my little office in Edinburgh, not too far from the castle. Calmness and occasional answers. After all, what else was an enchantress for?

Yes, I was an enchantress, a witch specializing in the manipulation and sensing of emotions. No, I couldn’t read minds, and I couldn’t produce love potions. Indeed, the list of things I couldn’t do was a lot longer than the list of things I could. I was not a diviner or a battle witch, a ritual weaver or an expert in producing focuses. As an enchantress, I couldn’t even cast spells, not really.

What I could do was influence emotions just enough to, for example, stop a werewolf who had been recently hit by a car from tearing me apart in a fit of pain-fueled rage.

In my line of work, I was also adept at persuading someone who was already feeling guilty that they might want to confess something to me. I could even feel their emotions directly if I concentrated hard enough. I really couldn’t read minds, but it had given me a small edge when it came to my day job in insurance investigation. It had been enough, most of the time.

“You should get home,” Rebecca suggested. “You look—”

“
Like something the werewolf dragged in. I know, you told me.” I sighed, because I knew how we must look side by side, right then.

With her being so tall and blonde and professional, and me…well, I looked exactly like someone who had been hiking in the mountains, and tracking down a wounded werewolf, right down to the mud stains covering my jeans and jacket. My hair was currently a tangled, reddish mess and my skin was chapped to within an inch of its life. There were reasons that I normally preferred city life.

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca insisted. “Somehow, you always manage to look beautiful. Even after rolling around in a muddy ditch with a werewolf and showing up with drool on your clothes.”

“
At least no one got eaten.”

That got a smile from her. Good. It was always nice to make people feel better. Especially her. We weren’t exactly friends, but we were friendly. Rebecca moved in different circles in the coven than I did, so any contact we had was generally about jobs that I did for the coven. Their jobs were one of the major reasons I was here in Edinburgh.

Although not the only one, by a long way. Actually, there were plenty of reasons to have my investigation business in Edinburgh. I couldn’t think of a better place for a thirtysomething enchantress about town to live than Scotland’s capital. Edinburgh was less industrial than Glasgow or Aberdeen, less obvious than London. Perfect in so many ways.

My city was filled with all the life you’d expect from one of the world’s great cities, and also, handily, the center of a pretty big insurance trade that let me earn my living in relative comfort. Not to mention my income kept me supplied with DVDs of seasons of Bewitched. A girl has to have at least one vice.

Occasionally, I took some of the money I’d earned and went off on holiday somewhere exotic. Last year, I had gone to Santorini for two weeks. Alone, of course. Perhaps ironically, I didn’t have that many witch friends. Even they sometimes had trouble with the idea that I really wasn’t able to steal secrets out of their heads.

Greece was nice, even if I did have to keep away from the clubs while I was there. But Scotland was my home and I loved it here, too. Between the tourists and the locals, Edinburgh was always so full of movement and emotion…too full, some days.

I yawned again in front of Rebecca. “Sorry, the job was grueling and I think I might have a few fleas from the werewolf crawling up my leg.”

“
Where would Fergie pick up fleas?”

“
He must have rolled in something dead before I got there.”

“
Ugh!” I could feel Rebecca’s disgust at that one from here. She reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. “Go home, Elle. Take a bubble bath. Scrub yourself!”

I laughed. “That sounds so good right now.”

“Go. Your fee will be deposited in your account as usual.”

Aching for a bath and rest, I headed home, walking through the city center. The walking route back from Rebecca’s swanky Edinburgh office took me past a few of the more avant-garde bars and chic comedy club venues. With each one I passed, I could feel the backwash of emotion emanating from the open doors.

I didn’t even try to go inside any of these interesting places, and not just because the bouncers wouldn’t let me in looking like I did, covered in mud and with twigs in my hair and fleas crawling up my legs. I didn’t go in because too much emotion was dangerous, a sensory overload, like sitting in the middle of the mosh pit at a thrash gig, trying to carry on a normal conversation.

Even in my own life, knowing when to back away was a must. Boyfriends tended not to last very long around me. I didn’t even make that many real friends. It was just the price of what I was. All of my teachers had told me that. True enchantresses were rare. I was the genuine article.

Home was an end terrace house that was deeper than it was wide, with a good view out over the city from the upper floors. From outside, it didn’t look like much. Inside, it was home. It had been for years. It was comfortable and welcoming, even if I tried not to keep too much clutter in my life. There were fine art prints on the walls and a couple of mementoes from trips spent looking to recover items for insurers.

Home at last, I was ravenous. My kitchen was small but well stocked. I grabbed a glass of buttermilk and poked a wide straw in it. Some of it I drank and the rest would go on my face, as a natural skin treatment. I rumbled through my herb cabinet and got out a blue-glass bottle of pennyroyal oil. It would thwart any remaining fleas. I peeled off all of my clothes in the utility room and threw them in the stacked washer-dryer combo.

I headed upstairs and showered, running the water as hot as I could stand it, the steamy heat finally making me feel like myself again as I washed the dirt from my hair, several times, until the water ran clear, and conditioned the tangles from my hair. I combed through it while standing there dripping. And then, I took a glorious minty bubble bath with another splash of pennyroyal to ward off or kill any remaining fleas I had caught from poor Fergie.

Even having only known him a few hours, I could see that he was such a mess, as both a man and a werewolf. His mother ruled him, and his werewolf transformations seemed to run his life. From the way he’d talked about Thurso, he hated his job, too. Fergie was really on a downslide. His chagrin at his own life was a reminder of how lucky I was to have the life I had.

The part I didn’t tell Rebecca was that Fergie and I quickly got along like old chums and he had even asked me on a coffee date after he got out of the hospital. I had politely declined, the way I so often did, saying that I wasn’t allowed to date anyone whose case I was investigating, that it would be unethical. The truth was simpler. There was no emotional spark between us. I wanted a mate, a partner who excited me.

But Fergie? After his injury was attended to and the near-debacle with the insurance company faded, I thought he would make a good platonic friend. I’d seen him at his very worst and he was direct in his communication, humble when he needed to be, and down to earth. With Fergie, there was no arrogance or pretense. What you saw was what you got. There was no façade about him, only this effusive need to be liked that was, after all, rather canine.

Of course, dating was always kind of a problem, given that I was meant to keep away from strong emotions. Oh, I’d dated. There had been men in my life from time to time. But either I’d just never connected emotionally, which was a deal breaker for me, or a month or two of me knowing everything they felt was too much. As for sex…well, when I spent my life keeping away from strong emotions, that could be an even bigger problem.

I dried off and wrapped in a towel. I headed up to my bedroom. The bedroom was one of the reasons I loved being home. It was as large as the plan of the house would allow, and my big bed filled most of it. Thanks to the stresses of constantly blocking out the world, I liked to sleep with at least seven pillows. My friends had sometimes made fun of me for that when we had sleepovers in our school days.

At thirty-five, without half those friends, I missed that. We’d grown up, drifted apart. Some of the witches among them might have ended up working directly for the coven. More would just be out there living normal lives, their only reminders of the coven’s existence coming with the magic they hid from the world, or the occasional tithes to the coven’s coffers.

As for the rest of the bedroom, the Georgian wardrobe toward the back was big enough that people could get lost in it if they weren’t careful. It wasn’t that I had that many clothes. It just seemed to be sort of a bottomless hollow—no matter how many clothes I shoved in there, the wardrobe never seemed to fill up. Someone had once joked that if I went inside, there would probably be a lion in there, as the witch and the wardrobe were already accounted for.

I kept important things like my cell phone, my hair straightener, and my collection of aromatherapy candles in a small dressing table. I loved candles. They could change the whole emotional atmosphere of a room. I made them often and gave them for gifts. Oh, and there was the old photograph of my mother, back before the accident, with a couple of other members of the coven’s higher echelons, including Rebecca, who never seemed to age.

There was also a full-length mirror that I stood in front of, trying to work out what to wear. More casual jeans, or did I feel like being the professional me for the rest of the day? I guessed that depended on what I planned on doing. Working, or finally taking some much needed time off? Things had been pretty busy lately. Sleep! Oh, I loved sleep, but the day was so beautiful I hated to waste it. Maybe I would go to the Royal Botanic Garden and look around the glass houses.

Even dressed in a towel, I looked more like myself in the mirror now that I’d showered. My skin was back to its oh-so-pale best that sometimes made people wonder what foundation I was using, my hair had that reddish auburn luster that didn’t seem quite so out of place in Scotland, and the sharpness of my features framed eyes that seemed to shift and change color between green and gray, depending on the light.

On the whole, probably thanks to all that exercise I’d been getting chasing after apologetic werewolves, I thought I was doing pretty well for thirty-five years old. Not in witch years, ha—that joke was quite old.

My phone rang, dragging me from my thoughts. I answered the phone, pulling on some underwear as I did and almost going sprawling as a result.

“
Elle Chambers,” I said a little breathlessly as I got my balance.

“
Ms. Chambers, this is Iain Peach from Gerard and Philips.” The accent was softly Shetlands, as if its owner had tried hard to lose it as he’d gone up in the world. If he was working for G&P, he had gone up in the world. They were one of the firms I occasionally consulted for, and they weren’t the sort of company that most people contacted for home and contents or health coverage. G&P were specialists.

“
Something rare has been stolen,” I said.

“
How did you know that?” he asked.

“
Magic.”

“
This really isn’t—”

I sighed. “You specialize in insuring high-value objects. I can hear how worried you are, and G&P have used me when things have gone missing previously.” So…not magic at all. Face to face, I couldn’t have read his mind. On a phone, I couldn’t even pick up emotions, beyond hearing nice insurance brokers sounding like they were about to have some kind of breakdown. “You sound very upset. What’s happened?”

“About an hour ago, we received a call from one of our customers notifying us of a potential claim relating to an insured item.”

Trust an insurer not to get to the point. “And the item is?”

“A rare M.C. Escher. We believe it to be the only one in existence.”

That made it valuable. One of the side effects of my job was that I had to keep up with prices for these things. An ordinary print of one of Escher’s designs might not make more than a few hundred dollars on the international market. A rare one could be worth a hundred thousand. Not the biggest payout G&P had ever made, but certainly one worth calling me in for.

Why? Because I could save them money. First, I’d check whether the claim was real. Then, if I could, I’d try to recover the item. Even if it meant buying it back, that wouldn’t be at the full insured cost. In the absolute worst-case scenario, where the insurers made a final payout before I found it, at least they’d have the art to defray the cost. This was all assuming I could find it, of course, but my record was as good as anyone’s.

“
So,” I said, “where will I have to fly to? Which museum?”

“
It isn’t a museum,” Iain replied. “The client is a private collector.”

Private collections were a little rarer than they used to be, at least outside of bank vaults. Nowadays, a buyer at an auction was as likely to be someone like Iain’s bosses, buying a valuable investment, as it was someone just wanting to put it up on a wall.

“Even so, I’d better get the tickets booked,” I insisted, trying to remember where in the house I left my laptop.