Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (6 page)

“Perhaps I’d better put you back there,” he suggested, and he pushed Siobhan. Never a good move around a goblin. Particularly not an overprotective, pregnant goblin.

She swiped back at him, and while Siobhan might have been quite good looking by goblin standards, her fingernails were still more like claws. They sliced through the warlock’s T-shirt, leaving bloody wounds on the flesh beneath.

“You little bitch!” The warlock called power up into his hands, and even though warlocks were generally less dangerous than witches, I knew that the last thing I wanted right then was to let him touch Siobhan.

Instead, as he reached out, I put myself between them, knocking his arm aside and shoving him back. He bounced off the nearest bookcase and came up to his feet in a fighting stance, more power going into his hands so that they glowed with black light.

“Don’t do this,” I said. The last thing I wanted here was trouble. Especially since I hadn’t finished reading yet.

“I’ll do what I want. No
vampire
is going to tell me what to do.”

I was lucky that his preferred magic worked at close range. Further off, and I might have had to hit him with something lethal. As it was, I simply waited for him to move forward and take his next swing. When he did, I slipped inside the strike while it flowed harmlessly past me. I caught his wrists, forcing them out to the side, and I did what seemed like the obvious thing. I kissed him.

It was nothing like the kisses Niall and I shared. There was no love in it. There was no passion, even though after the first second or so, I could definitely feel the warlock’s need rising up for me. I didn’t care about any of that. Instead, I just held his wrists and sucked the power out of him, swallowing the energy that he would have used for his next spell, taking enough that I felt him go weak at the knees.

I shoved him back and he stumbled, collapsing against one of the bookcases. He stared up at me.

“Don’t ever threaten one of my friends,” I said, moving to put an arm around Siobhan. I turned, and I found the young witch who served as the librarian/archivist looking at me with that particular brand of fear and mistrust I had come to know so well from witches recently.

“I think,” she managed after a few seconds. “I think that you had better both go, don’t you?”

“What do you do after being thrown out of a semi-magical archive by an uptight librarian after nearly devouring a particularly unpleasant reader? Well, I can’t speak for anybody else, but Siobhan and I decided that the best thing to do was go shopping.

“Are you sure?” Siobhan asked. She pulled the hood of her top firmly up over her head as she did it. “I mean, we’ve got so much to do with this case, and there are the other ones Fergie was telling me about, and—”

“And we’re going shopping,” I insisted, taking Siobhan by the hand. “I said that we were going to, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but people say lots of things.”

I tried not to think about all the people who had probably lied to Siobhan in her life. Growing up as a goblin wouldn’t have been easy. Then there were the lies that Victoria had told her, manipulating Siobhan to make her do what she wanted. Whenever I started to worry about having a goblin around the house, or about Siobhan’s arguing with Fergie, it didn’t take much to remind myself of how much Victoria had hurt us both.

I smiled. “Well, I say that we’re going shopping. Come on, there must be some good places to get baby things around here somewhere.”

There were, because I’d looked up a couple of them specifically for this moment. That was just as well, because Siobhan seemed shocked by the idea of going into the upmarket baby boutique that was our first port of call.

“But I’ll never be able to afford anything in there,” she protested as I more or less dragged her through the door.

“It’s okay, Siobhan.”

She didn’t seem entirely convinced. “So, does that mean that you’re the distraction while I bundle stuff out of here?”

I sighed. “Don’t even joke about it.”

I hoped that she was joking, at least. I didn’t
think
Siobhan had been stealing from people since she moved in with me and I gave her a job, but it was kind of hard to be sure.

“But I really can’t afford stuff here.”

“I’ve got it. It’s not a problem.” I had the money, after all, and if it would help make Siobhan a little happier and take her mind off what had just happened, it was worth it. I was sure I wasn’t paying her enough, or regularly enough. I tried to, but it was kind of hard when she didn’t have a bank account. Simple, straightforward things became far more complicated once goblins were involved. Mostly because, as far as the UK government was concerned, they didn’t exist. Fergie was apparently working on ways of getting around it.

So, we went in and browsed. I’d say this for the shop assistants: they did a good job of making Siobhan feel wanted there. In a lot of places, they would have immediately focused on me rather than the goblin girl, and might even have looked at Siobhan in disgust once they saw the scales that marred patches of her skin. The two middle-aged women running this place, however, quickly had Siobhan talking about everything from her due date to the kind of crib she had in mind for her baby, while I mostly just waited to pay for it all.

Hey, if some kids got a fairy godmother, why not an emotional vampire one?

About halfway through, I got a text message from Rebecca.
We need to talk, urgently. Meet me at your office.
About what I expected, after the way things had gone at the archive, and I probably did need to talk to her. On the other hand, she wasn’t my boss anymore, she had tried to kill me at least once, and Siobhan was enjoying herself far too much to cut things short. Rebecca could just wait a while. Maybe Fergie could explain the finer points of the Chancery division to her or something.

So, I left it until Siobhan had picked out everything she needed for now, and the look on her face was more than worth the resulting credit card bill. I decided that we could probably walk back slowly to my office, maybe taking in a few more shops on the way just to make Rebecca wait that little bit longer. Well, not
just
to do that. The part where it would also make for a good afternoon with one of my few close friends was the main aim of it. Annoying Rebecca was just a bonus.

“Come on,” I said to Siobhan, once we’d arranged for delivery of everything we couldn’t carry. “Let’s take our time about going back.”

So, we did. We walked along, looking in the windows of all those small boutiques Edinburgh had acquired over the years, window-shopping more than anything, even if I did acquire a nice new pair of designer heels along the way. We were maybe halfway back before I got the all too familiar feeling of being watched by someone.

I was starting to wonder why people bothered trying to follow me around in the shadows. Hadn’t they worked out by now that I could feel the weight of their attention on me? Surely, they had to know that an enchantress could pick up their curiosity and a good sense of their intentions, while all they got from the deal was a good look at me.

“Siobhan,” I whispered, “we’re being followed.”

If I’d been with almost anyone but her, I wouldn’t have said that. Fergie, for example, might have been able to scent whoever was following us, but he would have immediately blown things by looking around. Most of our other friends were too frail and human for the kind of trouble that sometimes found us. Siobhan, on the other hand, was good at danger.

“You’re sure it’s a problem?” she asked. “I mean, you do get plenty of people watching you, and I’m not exactly inconspicuous.”

 She had a point. I did get plenty of people staring at me these days. Occasionally, I used it when I needed to feed, honing in on the people who were obviously interested in me anyway, so that I didn’t have to push anyone into anything they didn’t want. That meant, though, that I’d acquired an accurate feel for the kind of interest people were showing in me.

“This is different.”

“Okay, what do we do?” Just like that, Siobhan was ready to act.

“I don’t want anything major out here,” I said. “I just want to get a good look at whoever’s following.”

“So, more window-shopping?” Siobhan suggested.

“Exactly.”

We kept going, moving from shop to shop, looking in windows, occasionally going in and looking at things near the windows. What we were actually doing, of course, was finding spots from which to look for potential pursuers, trying either to catch a glimpse of their reflection or simply spot them directly. All the time, I kept my senses open, getting a good sense of the general direction in which to look from the feeling of attention that flowed toward us. I tried to work out what this might be about. Did it have something to do with what had happened at the archive? Was the guy who had attacked us looking to take another shot?

It was impossible to be certain, because whoever was following us did a good job of keeping out of sight. I knew from my job how hard it was to follow someone effectively, once they were looking for pursuers or if they knew what they were doing. An ordinary person might never so much as look behind them on the street. Someone more aware, or more paranoid, would be keeping track of faces, seeing who showed up too often around them for it to be a coincidence, who moved with them if they did odd things. It was one reason that professionals generally used whole teams of watchers.

I couldn’t sense that, but whoever was out there, they were still good enough at hiding that I couldn’t get a glimpse of them, even with the magical advantages I possessed. That meant that it probably
wasn’t
just some angry amateur from the archive.

“What we need is a trap,” Siobhan said.

“Are you sure?” I shook my head. “I don’t want to put you into the line of fire. Not when you’re pregnant.”

“Goblins are tough,” Siobhan insisted. “Anyway, if someone’s coming after us, I’d rather know about it.”

As much as I disliked doing so, I had to agree with that. It would be better if we knew what was going on.

“I’ll lead them on,” I said. “You come up behind them. Just identify them, though. There’s no need to try to grab them.”

Siobhan nodded and we went to work. I went out of the shop we were in alone, moving on a little through the crowds, willing the unseen individual to follow me as I led the way down into a quieter street. I felt the attention firmly on my back as I did so for the first fifty yards. Then, as abruptly as the attention had fallen on me, it vanished. I turned, looking for whoever it was, but there was no sign of them. They were simply gone.

I went back to collect Siobhan and found her only a little way behind me.

“Did you see anyone?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “No one.”

“I don’t like this. I think we should get back to the office.”

Siobhan agreed, and together, we made our way back to the set of offices that formed the official home of my investigation business. We headed inside, and I was met by the sight of Fergie pouring tea for Rebecca, playing the good host. My former coven handler looked up as we came in, not bothering to hide her impatience. Maybe she just knew that I would feel it anyway.

“Where have you been? Didn’t you get my message?”

I shrugged. “We had other things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Well, being followed, for one.” I decided not to go with the shopping. I wanted to feel how Rebecca would react to this instead. I caught the flicker of surprise at that one. So, it probably wasn’t her, for once.

She quickly recovered from her surprise. “It probably had something to do with what you just did at the Archive. What were you
thinking
, Elle? Attacking someone in the middle of a coven-run institution?
Feeding
on them where everyone could see?”

I moved over to her, and she flinched, a relic of things that had happened when I’d been angry with her in the past. I’d used emotions as a weapon then. Now, I forced myself to stay calm.

“I didn’t attack anyone, Rebecca. A warlock at the Archive tried to throw his weight around with Siobhan, and when it escalated, I stopped him.”

“When it escalated?” Rebecca shook her head. “From what I hear, she tore him open with her claws.”

“Siobhan barely scratched him, and since he was shoving around a pregnant girl, he asked for everything he got.”

“Even you half-draining him?” Rebecca had gone very still. “From what I hear, they had to carry him out of there.”

Fergie cut in. “Is this some kind of formal accusation? Should we be taking this up through the proper legal channels?”

“What legal channels?” Rebecca snapped at him. Since Fergie had spent a lot of the last few months tying up the coven in red tape, I guess she had a right to snap. “The coven is the power that matters when it comes to supernaturals. The tolerance directive…” She stopped herself, as though realizing where she was. I really
had
made her frightened of me. “I need to know what happened, Elle.”