Smoke & Ashes by Alexis Hall

Author:Alexis Hall [Hall, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912688968
Published: 2020-11-16T18:30:00+00:00

The sunlight through the curtains woke me at last—oh right, I didn’t have other people’s alarm clocks or actual fucking cockerels getting me up this time. Checking my phone, I found a text from Nicola Bright. Will be at your office circa 1.30 if convenient.

It wasn’t hugely. It was nearly noon already because seriously man, fuck sleep patterns. Still, an hour and a bit was just about enough time to get into the office and if I didn’t catch up with the professor now she might decide I was too unreliable to be worth it. And they said sleeping in your clothes never paid off.

To be honest, I was glad of the distraction. Having made the very mature and positive decision to do something about Nimue if I possibly could, only to wind up chasing a sodding giraffe and playing three moves of chess against my ex, I was feeling a bit symbolismed out for the day.

Vision quests could officially go fuck themselves.

There was a bus direct from my flat to my office—it had been one of the things that appealed when I’d first been looking at it—and so I managed to get in without having to risk the Tube. I’d been down there once without incident but there was no sense in pushing it, especially since this whole vision quest seemed about to go full descent-into-the-underworld. I arrived with a whole eight minutes to spare, pleased to discover that the door-fixing-person had been in my absence, and used the time productively getting the worst of the mess cleaned up, hiding the more obvious stashes of empty bottles, and making sure I definitely had the fucking book that I was supposed to be showing her.

I fired off a brief text to Eve. Professor coming to office, if you’ve found anything out about her, now would be a good time to tell me. She’d been curious about the mysterious Professor Bright ever since I’d mentioned her during my last check in.

It came as precisely zero surprise to me when the professor emeritus arrived bang on half one. People who put the word circa in their texts were far too anal to ever be circa about anything.

She looked younger than I expected given her title, I’d have put her as fifties rather than sixties, and well-preserved fifties at that, her hair barely greying and her eyes carrying a kind of wicked brightness that I’d fallen for way too many times from way too many women. There was something about her that weirdly reminded me of Corin Black, the doe-eyed femme fatale who’d killed Archer and come close to killing me on multiple occasions. Assuming, of couse, she managed to make it to that age which, honestly, I thought she probably would—Corin lived a dangerous life, but it was mostly dangerous for other people.

“Nicola Bright,” she said, extending a hand.

I shook it. “Kate Kane. You’re here about the book?”

“That’s right. Look, I know it’s not exactly the done thing anymore but do you

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.