Change. An interior view, up through a ceiling made of clear glass set in intricate shapes within a lead frame, like a huge stained glass window had been bleached of all hue and wedged here on its side. Shoes and shapes of people moved across the glass, busy as the King’s Cross main platform.
Change. A man sprawled across a bed, pale enough that the veins shone bluish through his bare skin, fair hair sticking to a sweat-slick brow and mouth forming unheard words or sounds of pleasure. He slurred one hand across his own face and grabbed vainly at a handful of sheets with the other. His back arched, lifting his chest. His eyes opened and his features cohered.
Edwin Courcey.
Robin jolted back to himself, half out of his chair and breathing like a man at the end of a ten-mile run. His glass of port had fallen to the ground; the rug had saved the glass, but the liquid had created a dark patch. His eyes smarted at the firelight for a few seconds before returning to normal.
He fumbled his cuff link off and his shirt to his elbow. The tattoo was unchanged. He’d half expected it to be moving, or changing colours. He didn’t know anything about any of this.
Edwin Courcey.
Robin shook his head as though he could rid it of the things he’d seen, not to mention the tendril of unexpected arousal that had curled itself around that delirious vision of Courcey: that canvas of sweat and abandon and bare collarbones. Robin rescued his port glass and stumbled over to the decanter to pour himself another. Until the triple-punch of today, he’d managed to get through twenty-five years of life without magic revealing itself to him. Anyone from that world was obviously expert at hiding their real selves when they wanted to, and the real Courcey had made it very clear that he saw Robin as an outsider and an inconvenience; possibly even a danger. Robin didn’t know him at all. He was Robin’s best hope of answers, but he couldn’t be trusted.
Robin drained the glass, hoping it would soothe the kicked-hard feeling of his brain. He would worry about that when he planned to worry about everything else. Tomorrow.
Edwin arrived at the liaison office the next morning and had to blink several times before he accepted that the scene in front of him was truly happening. The hem of Miss Morrissey’s skirt disappeared in a snowbank of paper strewn over the office floor. She was sitting on a wooden box; after a moment Edwin recognised it as one of the three sturdy drawers that had made up the filing cabinet, which was now a hollow frame. Here and there amongst the chaos of paper lay the late contents of the bookshelf. Edwin’s stomach squeezed at the sight of splayed pages and bent-back spines.
Sir Robert Blyth sat cross-legged on the desk. Around him was a battlefield of detritus that was probably the contents of the desk’s drawers, and yet more paper. He had a pile of envelopes in his lap and was reading something.
“What have you done?” Edwin demanded.
Blyth looked up. “Come in, close the door,” he said cheerfully. “Oh, wait, no—it doesn’t do that anymore.”
“What?”
“Close.”
Edwin’s fingers dipped through empty space. There was a scorched, splintered gap in the door where the knob had once been.
“Someone was in a temper,” said Miss Morrissey. “There’s no particular imbuement on the locks. A robust opening-spell would do it.”
Edwin hung his hat and coat on the stand in the outer office and waded into the battlefield. “My apologies,” he said stiffly. “I assumed . . .”
“That I tossed my own office?” said Blyth.
“It was like this when I let myself in, at eight o’clock,” said Miss Morrissey.
Edwin looked around again. Viewed with that eye, it was obvious. “Someone was looking for something.”
“Yes. Your friend Gatling has gotten himself muddled up in some sort of serious trouble,” said Blyth. Belatedly, Edwin realised that the cheer in Blyth’s voice was too high-pitched.
“What do you mean?” Edwin asked sharply. “What do you know about it?”
Blyth waited as Edwin picked his way into a patch of bare rug. Up close, Blyth didn’t look like a man who had slept well. Those mild hazel eyes had pinches of tension at their corners. There was a stubbornness to his mouth.
“I mean,” Blyth said, “that I was attacked last night by—magicians—who seemed to think that because I’d stepped into Gatling’s position that very morning, I’d have known to search his office for secret documents and would be happy to hand them over.”
“Documents?” Edwin found his hand drifting towards the pocket holding the small vial of lethe-mint he’d prepared that morning, and forced it back down by his side before the movement could become obvious.