Cruel Magic (Royals of Villain Academy #1)(76)
I pinned the convict to the ground, braced against his back. The flexible fabric of my violet evening gown pooled against his white catering shirt. Quite a few people were yelling. A security officer hustled through the throng and knelt down to snap a pair of handcuffs around the guy’s wrists. We were in a room stuffed with cops, but this one night they’d all left their equipment behind.
“Oh my God,” the commissioner said, holding out her hand to help me up, the other pressed to her chest. “Thank you so much—you moved so fast. He came out of nowhere.”
I’d give too much away if I looked around to check, but I hoped the London trio had gotten a good view. I stood and squeezed the commissioner’s hand with a small smile. “I saw the gun, and I just reacted. I’m glad you’re okay.”
After toasts and exclamations over my heroics, I welcomed the stillness of my hotel room. The grand establishment hosting the conference boasted worn historic limestone and ornate arched lintels on the outside, but the innards had been tastefully modernized. Ivory walls, thick slate-gray carpeting, a sleek ebony desk against one wall, a king-sized bed with matching ebony frame against the other, a little table in the corner near the window.
The window looked out over the back courtyard, dark now other than a few pools of light from the security lamps. I’d arranged a suite at the end of the hall on the second floor. The broad limestone sill outside would serve Bash just fine when he needed to drop in.
I turned away from the view, and all my satisfaction drained away.
A translucent white figure wavered in the glow of the bedside light. It formed a lumpy but vaguely humanoid shape beneath overlapping strips of ragged white fabric—at least, they looked like fabric. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t swaths of dead skin.
The only part the strips didn’t totally cover was the area that should have been a face. There, amid the folds of cloth, a haze of mist stared back at me, so deep that if I looked at it for long, I’d feel I were staring clear across the continent into a realm where no human had ever ventured.
A chill raced over my skin, but I meandered across the room to the mirror over the desk as if I had no qualms about my visitor. “Hello, Bog,” I said. “What brings you here?”
Bog wasn’t really the thing’s name. The shrouded folk had their own language that human ears couldn’t properly decipher. Bog sounded somewhat right, and it gave me a tiny shred of amusement to call the monster after something repellant, if I had to address it at all.
I could still see it at the side of the mirror while I unpinned my hair. As the red waves spilled down over my narrow shoulders, the folds around Bog’s face quivered.
“You are playing games,” it said in a voice as dry as desert-bleached bone and as distant as the mist it came from. “I thought you might need reminding of our agreement.”
A pinching sensation emanated from the spot on the back of my neck just below my hairline where the magic of our contract had marked me.
“Oh, I’m hardly going to forget that,” I said. “I have a month longer. Why shouldn’t I play during the time I have left?”
“Why play here, bloodling? You are no ‘investigator’.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ve investigated plenty in my time.”
“If that is what pleases you. Perhaps I will find something of interest in it too.”
The shrouded one’s tone stayed perfectly even, like mine had. We were playing a game right now—the game where I pretended I didn’t plan to do everything in my power to escape the deal I’d made, and it pretended not to suspect me of that scheming. But those last words had been a warning.
I shrugged and picked up my brush. “You can spend your time however you want.”
The mist stirred. I could almost have said I caught a glint of a smirk.
“Think more about how you wish to spend yours, bloodling. You received your ten years. In thirty days, your life is mine.”
I smiled back at it through the mirror despite the tremor that ran through my chest. We’ll see about that.