Fade to Black (42 page)

What does a guy have to do to get your attention? Fancy a coffee at Victor’s?

She straightened and looked at herself in the mirror for the first time in days, brushing a stray hair from her face. Dark circles underscored her eyes and her skin was pasty white. She looked like hell.

So the relationship with Michael would continue after all. The St. Clair history chronicled in The Travels of Maewyn Succat was the blueprint for her future. There was no escaping it. She truly believed that now.

She threw open the shutters and took a deep breath. The sun streamed in through the lime green foliage of the young elm tree outside her window. London waited out there, every crazy, chaotic, architecturally fraudulent, pompously self-interested, over-regulated piece of it. But it was a city she loved in a country peopled by decent, upright people who relied, unknowingly, on the few who made their lives safe for them and their children. She had been called to serve in a way few humans had ever been and she would die in the service either on the streets as part of the Metropolitan Police force or in some nightmarish place battling some unimaginable…
thing
. She turned back to the mirror and inexplicably, a laugh burst from her.

What the hell,
she thought.
What was I going to do, anyway? Marry a banker and have two point three kids and buy a beige-colored dog?
She strode to her desk and sat at the keyboard. Latin was never her strong point, but she knew what 'vinculum infinitas'
truly
meant for her now. She looked again at the message:
Coffee at Victor’s?

She did what a warrior committed for life to The Game Without End would do.

She typed in;
Sure, why not?

Cave diabolus redit