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Realising what she is going to do, I urgently hiss, But what if there’s an alarm?
“Unlikely,” she says. “The police will have had the alarm company switch it off.”
How do you know that?
“Experience.”
What’s that supposed to mean?
She shrugs, not bothering to answer. She smashes my elbow into the glass pane of the rear door. The glass breaks. It doesn’t even hurt. Then she pulls the end of my jacket sleeve over my hand, and reaches through the hole in the broken glass to the lock.
The key is in it.
“People are so stupid,” she says, turning the key to unlock the door.
She walks into the house, locks the door behind us, and then strolls through the kitchen into a hallway, and up the stairs. Here she opens all the doors one by one.
She does not switch on the lights, seeming to be okay with the minute amount of light coming in through the windows. She finds a bedroom, a bathroom, another bedroom, a study, and then finally the smallest bedroom, clearly a guest bedroom. She goes inside, shuts the door, flings herself onto the bed, and lies back with her hands behind her head.
She lets out a leisurely sigh.
Shouldn’t we be hiding? I hiss at her.
“Maybe later,” she says.
But shouldn’t we be looking for the key? Raif said he had it. We can give it to that poor girl so she can unlock that awful collar and go live her new life. Imagine how scared she is. If the fae haven’t found her already that is.
“Maybe later,” she says again.
We should look for clues to her location. How else are we going to find her?
“Are you going to be quiet, or what? I need to listen.”
I go quiet, trying to enjoy lying back in this bed, trying to relax, wondering what the hell is going to come next. Every time I hear car drive by outside the window, its headlights briefly lighting up the room, I tense up. She does not. She is perfectly at ease. I’m surprised she’s not humming to herself.
What feels like an hour ticks by. Literally ticks. I can hear the second hand of the clock on the wall moving. Its sound winds me slowly like a spring, filling me with tension.
Eventually I can’t stand it any longer. What if she is not coming? I say. What if it was all for nothing?
“She’s coming,” says the little voice. “She is definitely coming.”
Fifteen minutes later she is proved right. A car drives down the street, but instead of passing, it parks up somewhere nearby.
“Told you so,” she says.
Chapter 24
DIANA
We hear the car’s door slam shut. The little voice does not get up to look out of the window like I would have. She lies calmly on the bed, waiting.
In the darkness and the silence, it is easy to hear the key being inserted into the lock of the front door. Beatrice Grictor has a key to this house. Or at least I hope it is Beatrice Grictor.
The front door opens and then quietly shuts. Then someone walks into the house, and climbs up the stairs, and goes into the room opposite the one that I am in, the room which is Raif’s study. The little voice doesn’t even twitch. She lays utterly still on the bed, listening.
We can hear the person moving around in there. Then a scraping noise against the wall that I can’t quite identify, and then small taps and shuffles, like she is searching, moving small objects aside. I hear a voice mumble something, a voice which sounds like Beatrice Grictor’s. And then louder and more frustrated, “Where is it?”
The search continues. The sound of things being shoved aside more angrily and carelessly now. The sound of books being tossed off shelves. The desk squeaking as it is moved, possibly to check behind it. All the while Beatrice mumbles, and finally there is an angry crash, and a hysterical cry of, “Where is it!”
