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The girl suddenly looked like a Juvéderm ad. Rashid started to say something, which by the look of things would not have been polite. But then Lily looked down the hall and saw us. “Tell me what real girl can do that?” she said proudly.
“The Kardashians?” I offered.
“They not here!”
“Finally!” Rashid said, striding down the hall toward us. “I need to talk to you—”
“Maybe later,” I said, grabbed Louis-Cesare by the hand, and ducked into an empty room.
“That won’t hold him,” Louis-Cesare pointed out, as I slammed the door.
“It doesn’t have to. You ready?”
“For what?”
“For this,” I said, and pulled him inside—my purse.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dory, Hong Kong
It was dark, until I fumbled around in my pocket and found a light. It was only a cigarette lighter, which is a useful item to carry when you regularly fight vamps, even if you don’t smoke. I clicked it, and the flame lit up our faces with a dim, golden glow, although the rest of the space remained in darkness.
Louis-Cesare’s face was showing a certain amount of surprise, which was valid.
“What is this?” he asked, glancing about.
“Fey tech. I got trapped in one of these once. You remember; you came in to get me.”
“You mean the laboratory.”
I nodded. “That would be the one. Some dark mages folded over a flap of non-space to make themselves an illegal lab that nobody could find, because it didn’t exist in real space. I thought I’d repurpose the idea for something good.”
“Repurpose it how?” Louis-Cesare asked. He could probably see more in almost complete darkness than I could, but this deserved better lighting. I fumbled around on the wall until I found the switch and flicked it.
“What . . . did you do?” he asked, his eyes widening, and amazement in his voice.
“That.”
I gestured around proudly at what looked like a simple, cement walled room with a concrete floor and no windows. But the bare bones didn’t tell the whole story—not by half. Because this room . . . was filled with wonders.
I’d spent half of my convalescence moving things around, getting it just the way I liked. There was a squashy armchair to sit in, for cleaning guns and bandaging wounds and just resting in between bouts. There was a light overhead, just the bare bulb for now, but I was thinking about getting a decorative fixture to spruce things up. There was, of course, a beer fridge, and it was fully stocked, because what am I? An animal?
But the real story was what was scattered around, covering almost every available surface. When I designed this place, I had thought of it as fairly expansive, because I’d assumed that I’d be filling it via the contents of my own, rather thin, bank account. But afterwards, I’d found another solution.
Or, to be more precise, Ray had found it.
“You gotta see this!” he said, taking my hand and all but pulling me down a set of stairs at court.
“See what? And why are we going to the dungeon?”
“It’s not a dungeon. What is this? The middle ages?”
“No, but this house does belong to the consul,” I reminded him. And she’d always kind of struck me as pretty damned medieval.
“Yeah, that’s the point,” Ray said excitedly, as we all but ran down a narrow set of stairs that I’d never seen before. Of course, that probably had something to do with the fact that they were hidden by a painting, a corridor, another painting, and a set of bookshelves, but trust Ray to suss them out, if there was something valuable to be found.
I just didn’t know what yet.
