City of Fae by Pippa DaCosta

Author:Pippa DaCosta [DaCosta, Pippa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-07T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The ride from Andrews’s flat to Chancery Lane could have taken an hour, or five minutes, I barely registered the passage of time as I sat cuffed in Detective Miles’s car. He uttered a few words about pleasing the queen, mentioned Saturday, and constantly checked his phone. When his gaze wasn’t on his phone, or the road, it roamed over me. My hands fisted in my lap, palm itching to close around a weapon.

“Andrews will come after me,” I said.

Miles laughed. “That upstart kid? He has no idea what’s going on. I’ll tell him you attacked him. If he remembers? Well”—he sniffed hard, and dabbed at his bloody nose— “it doesn’t matter; nothing matters. By the end of the week, it’ll all be changed anyway.”

Turning my head I forced myself to look him in the bloodshot eyes. “What’s happening at the end of the week?”

“Nothing, if your boy Reign doesn’t pull his finger out. The queen’s tired of him. About time too. Soon, she won’t need him, or you.”

I tied to swallow the saliva pooling in my mouth but my throat tightened. “Why does she need me?”

Sunlight cut into the many lines on Miles’s face, hollowing his cheeks and pooling shadows under his eyes. Was he mad? Somehow, I doubted it, but I wished he was.

One corner of his mouth tucked into his cheek. “You were the failsafe, but you’re broken. Have you blacked out a few times, maybe entered rooms but had no memory of getting there?” He saw the answer on my face. “Don’t worry that pretty little head over it. She’ll set you right in no time and you’ll go back to doing what you do best.”

“Which is what?”

Miles’s eyebrow twitched. “Nothing you need to worry about right now.”

Perspiration speckled my clammy skin. I shivered, as though feverish. “I think you have the wrong person. I don’t know the queen. I only saw her once and I wasn’t even meant to be there.”

“Weren’t you?”

My hands trembled. I cut my gaze away and searched the sun-blushed street outside. Wisps of clouds hung in an azure October sky. The world continued around me, life marching on, as I sat cuffed beside a corrupt detective spouting crazed nonsense. I denied Miles’s words meant anything and instead let them slip off my hastily constructed armor of denial.

Miles manhandled me from the car at Chancery Lane station, marched me through the foyer, and through the throngs of people. When we were stopped at the ticket gates, he flashed his Met Police badge and we were waved on through. Down he guided me, down the trundling escalators, down the tunnels, down where the dry air cracked my lips, and where the trains thundered. His hand on my arm, he steered me away from the people, through tunnels where nobody walked. Out footfalls echoed off tiled walls. Under the glare of the artificial lighting, Miles appeared to age, and his hand on my arm trembled. There were no smiles now, no sideways leers.

He pulled me up short in the middle of a pedestrian tunnel.

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