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‘No. They disappeared with my turning.’
‘But your fire didn’t?’
Alessandro smiled slightly. He raised a hand and suddenly he was holding a fireball. Crackling and round, it danced in his palm. I stared at it, fascinated.
Greg hastily pushed me behind him to protect me should Alessandro be overtaken with the urge to throw the fireball at me. I blinked out of my reverie and Alessandro extinguished the flames.
His smile faded. ‘No, the fire didn’t leave me. Now, that is all the information you will get out of me. Get out, Lucy.’
I opened my mouth to disagree, but Greg grabbed me by my elbow and yanked me out of the room. ‘You have no survival instinct,’ he muttered. ‘Vampyrs can be on us faster than we can shift into wolves. He could have had us for dinner.’
‘Faster thanyoucan shift,’ I corrected. Esme and I can shift almost instantly. We’d been practising lately; after the whole Ace debacle, we wanted to ensure we were as fast and as deadly as we could be.
We’d even tried to shift with our clothes on, just to see what would happen. Let me tell you: your clothes vanish, never to be seen again. I lost a beautiful Gucci watch that way; I thought the clothes would just tangle Esme up, and she’d be the blingiest wolf around, but no. I lost my Gucci watch forever. Life’s a bitch.
‘Rub it in,’ Greg muttered.
‘You’re better in all other ways,’ I assured him.
He smiled. ‘That’s not true, but I’m glad that you think so.’ He winked, which sent butterflies to my tummy.
It would be better if you’d just mate.Esme sounded a bit disgruntled.
It’s not something you leap into.
So exchange a few of those mouth-to-mouth things you do, then leap into it.Herview of the world is simplistic, but the imagery she sent to my mind made me blush.
Greg looked curious as fuchsia stole up my neck. ‘Esme,’ I commented.
‘One of these days I’d love to hear what she says.’
‘She’s got a lot to say about you,’ I admitted before my brain could censor my mouth.
‘Is that so? I’m glad to hear it.’ He was turning on the flirting dial. I wasn’t sure what had changed; I thought we’d agreed, non-verbally of course, that we weren’t going to do the flirting thing. Half an hour ago, he’d been glacial and calling me boss. His signals were definitely mixed.
‘Come on,’ Greg said. ‘Let’s go to the bathroom.’
‘You take me to the finest places.’
‘Only the best for my girl,’ he joked. I stamped on the wistful thought that I’d love to be his girl. In another life, maybe.
We walked down the long, wooden-panelled corridor until we came to the bathroom. The men’s door had a laminated sign that said, ‘Out of order – please use the disabled toilet’.
Greg pushed open the door. I hesitated for a second before following him; it goes against the grain to go into the men’s bathroom. I was prepared for the smell of sweat and stale urine, but the room was fresh and cold – largely due to the huge hole in the wall.
Maxwell had downplayed the extent of the damage; it looked like a car had driven into the wall but from inside the restaurant, which was impossible. Someone had used magic – the Intention and Release – or sheer brute strength to push the wall down. Most of the rubble and debris had been cleared away.
Greg whistled. ‘That’s quite some hole.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Who could do that? A wizard, obviously, using the IR, but who else?’
‘A wizard or a troll.’ He knelt on the floor. ‘Or an ogre with a heavy mace.’
‘What makes you think ogre?’ I asked.
‘The bricks and the dust.’ He swiped his finger across the bathroom floor and his fingers came up covered with a fine coating of red brick dust. ‘The mace spikes impacted on the bricks, hence the dust.’ He stood and picked up one of the stray bricks that had been left at the scene. ‘Here.’ He threw it at me.
Before I was a wolf I would have cringed at the throw, worried I wouldn’t catch it or it would hit me. Now, with Esme’s instincts at the ready, I snatched it from the air. With my werewolf strength, the weight barely registered.
