I scowled down at the plate that Audrey placed in front of me. It was some kind of pale fluffy cake with swirls of whipped cream, and sliced strawberries positioned together like flowers. The whole three-layered pastry was also topped with something that looked like melted chocolate drizzle.
With my scowl still in place, I looked back up at Audrey. “What the hell did you order?”
“I don’t know,” she replied as she slid into the seat across the small table while setting down a similarly ridiculous-looking cake in front of herself too. “It was called summer delight.” Raising her eyebrows, she shot me an expectant look and stabbed a hand towards the sunny day outside the windows. “It’s summer.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Just shut up and eat.” She leaned forward and abruptly reached for my plate. “Or I’ll eat yours too.”
My hand shot out. Pinning her wrist to the smooth wooden tabletop, I stopped her hand halfway to my plate and narrowed my eyes at her. “Over my dead body.”
She grinned at me. “That could be arranged.”
But after throwing me a smug look, she pulled her hand back. I let her. Shaking my head at the troublesome poisoner, I huffed out a short laugh and then picked up the small spoon that waited on the white and blue ceramic plate. She did the same.
The whipped cream wobbled as I stabbed the spoon down right in the middle of one of those strawberry flowers, ruining the careful arrangement. From across the table, Audrey watched me with poorly hidden amusement. I ignored her and just put the spoonful of that ridiculous cake in my mouth.
Surprise flitted through me. There was a pleasant vanilla flavor to the whipped cream, and it complemented the strawberries and the chocolate drizzle well. The cake part of it was light and fluffy, and there was some kind of spice in it that made the whole pastry a lot tastier than I had anticipated.
I knew that Audrey had read all of that on my face, and I could feel her getting ready to use that sharp tongue of hers for something taunting.
“I would choose my next words carefully, if I were you,” I said without even looking up at her. “We won’t always be in such a public place.”
Her laughter rippled through the air. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you for picking such a delicious pastry for me, sweetheart’. Or you could go for…”
She trailed off as I at last lifted my gaze to hers. Wicked satisfaction glittered in her eyes as she watched me slowly raise my spoon and eat some more of the cake, all while my gaze stayed locked on her face.
“Well, I have a few ideas,” she finished. Lifting her own spoon, she licked some of the whipped cream off it in a move that almost made me snap my spoon in half. “But I think I’ll wait to share them until we’re… not in such a public place.”
Hell damn it, she really was going to be the death of me.
Swallowing the bite of cake, I cleared my throat and tried to force a very interesting image out of my head so that I could focus on what we really needed to discuss. The job.
“So, there was no easy way in,” I said.
Audrey chewed on a strawberry slice while she discreetly swept her gaze around the bakery. We had picked one of the less busy streets, so only about half of the tables were occupied. Two people stood behind the counter, helping new customers with their orders, while the patrons who were already seated chatted softly at their own tables. All of them were too far away to hear our conversation.
While Audrey had ordered for us, I had secured the table at the far end. It was placed in a small nook, so the pale pink walls provided a bit of extra protection against eavesdroppers.
“No, there wasn’t,” Audrey replied at last. “Can we pretend to be some kind of delivery people to get in?”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “You really think they’d fall for that?”
“I meant blackmail the real delivery people and take their places. Not just show up and hope for the best.”
“I know what you meant. But I still doubt that they would let anyone in that they haven’t seen before. I’d suggest hiding in the delivery cart, but they probably search those too.”
“Yeah. And we also need to get all the way to this Gale guy. Not just through the first ring of buildings.”
“True.”
A faint clinking sounded as I tapped my spoon against the plate while thinking. Audrey ate another bite of cake. Outside the window, a man in a yellow shirt strolled down the otherwise empty street. I tracked him until the pale pink wall hid him from view again.
“And we can’t use the doors or the windows,” Audrey said. “At least not without immediately alerting the guards stationed right next to them.”
“Except they can’t have guards stationed everywhere. There are far too many buildings to cover.”
“So we need to figure out which doors and which windows have people watching them.”
“And how do we do that?”
She spun her empty spoon between her fingers and then looked up to meet my gaze while lifting her shoulders in a shrug. “Grab more stones?”
I knew that she was joking so I didn’t bother arguing.
An idea flashed through my mind.
Blinking, I sat up straighter and then glanced out at the deserted cobblestone street.
“What?” Audrey prompted.
“Do you remember that part of the building, on the north side, where there was a long stretch of buildings with no windows or doors?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I have an idea.”
Her eyebrows rose as I explained what I wanted to do. Once I was done, she set her spoon down and leaned back in her chair to study me. Surprise, and something else, swirled in those perceptive green eyes of hers.
“You know people like that?” she asked.
“Yeah, I, uhm… We have history. They’ll follow my orders.”
For a moment, it looked like she was going to ask something. But then she just nodded and said, “Good.”
Utensils clinked as the other people in the bakery continued eating. I watched as a young man held out a spoon full of pink mousse to the woman sitting opposite him. She giggled and then leaned forward to eat the mousse from the spoon. Joy glittered in her blue eyes. It was such an absolutely absurd thing to do. If I ever did something like that to Audrey, she would probably slap the spoon away and poison me. And then the whole bakery.
When I returned my attention to the poison mage, I started slightly as I found her studying me. A hint of alarm shot through me. Had she figured out what I had been thinking about?
“What happened between you and Levi?”
The sudden change of topic made me stare at her in silence for a few seconds while my brain finished shoving aside the absurd image of Audrey eating pink mousse from my spoon and then poisoning the whole bakery.
Guarded hesitation blew across her features. “It’s just… It might be important. For the mission, I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, pulling myself together.
Sharing information wasn’t exactly a common activity for me. And especially not when that information included my own personal history. History that I normally didn’t want anyone to know. But Audrey and I were… I wasn’t even sure what we were, exactly, but we were supposed to be in this together. So I smothered the instincts that were screaming that it was incredibly dangerous to share something like this with another dark mage, and instead drew in a deep breath.
“After I left the academy in Eldar, I went to Malgrave,” I began, holding her gaze. “I was about fourteen at the time. I survived here on my own for a while, but then I attracted the attention of this guy who was five years older than me and who ran a gang. Or a house, as it’s often referred to here. And that was of course Levi Arden. I was infringing on his territory…” I waved a hand in front of my face. “Long story short, he realized that I was a force mage and offered me a job.”
Audrey only watched me in silence as I paused for a few seconds. Condensing my history with Levi into a manageable story was pretty hard.
“While I worked for him,” I continued at last, “he also helped me hone my magic. Helped me learn how to think like a dark mage. Helped me learn how to not only survive, but how to become the most dangerous guy in the room. It went on for about two years. This was also when I met Henry.”
“He worked for Levi too?”
“Yes. Anyway, after two years, I had become both very skilled and very knowledgeable about the dark mage world. Levi had taught me a lot but…” I heaved a deep sigh and shrugged. “When I left Eldar, I did it because I swore that I was done doing other people’s bidding. And I had no plans to spend the rest of my life bowing to Levi’s authority. So… I stole some money from Levi, faked mine and Henry’s deaths, and pinned it on a rival house.”
Surprise, and approval, flickered in her eyes as she raised her eyebrows.
I chuckled. “Yeah. My little stunt led to a pretty bloody war, and it took Levi two years to figure out that I wasn’t actually dead.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t take that very well.”
“No, he did not.” Shaking my head, I blew out another breath while remembering the very exhausting period of my life that had followed. “He started sending people to take me out. I made it three years of dealing with both the dark mages in Eldar and Levi’s assassins before I realized that I couldn’t keep splitting my focus like that. So I went back to Malgrave. I paid off the financial debt, with interest, and then Henry and I spent a few months working for Levi to pay off the blood debt. After that, he pulled his kill-on-sight order on me. But yeah, our relationship is still a bit… strained.”
“No wonder.” She laughed, and then blinked as if she had just realized something. “Wait… When you went back to pay off the debts… When was that?”
I leveled a pointed stare at her. “About five and a half years ago.”
“So that’s where you were!” She laughed again. “That’s what you were doing while I built my mansion. You were here. Working for Levi.”
“Yes. So you can imagine how I felt back then. I had just spent months calling Levi sir and practically licking his damn boots to buy my life back, and then after enduring all of that, I come home to find that a fucking poison mage has had the bloody nerve to build a house on my lands. By all hell, I was ready to torture you to death when I found out.”
Her lips curled into an evil grin. “So that’s why you overreacted so much.”
“I didn’t overreact.”
Crossing her arms, she gave me a flat look. “You didn’t even say hello. You just shot a force wall straight at my chest, which sent me flying into an actual wall, and then you put your boot on the back of my neck and told me to grovel for your forgiveness.
“Alright, fine. Maybe I was a bit… irritable when I went up to confront you.”
“A bit?”
“But if I remember correctly, you almost severed my ankle tendons too.”
“Well, I had to get your boot off my neck.”
“And you killed five of my men.”
“You killed two of mine.”
For a few seconds, we just held each other’s gaze. Amusement fought against the mock scowls we had on our faces. At last, a laugh spilled from her mouth.
“So, the one who’s really responsible for starting the war between the two of us is actually Levi,” she said, mirth dancing in her eyes.
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m sure we would’ve found something else to fight about eventually.”
“True. I don’t think I would have been able to stand such an arrogant and domineering neighbor for long even if you hadn’t thrown that first temper tantrum.”
Raising my eyebrows, I shook my head at her in mock disbelief. “Oh, do be careful with that sharp tongue of yours.”
Her smile was villainous, and full of challenge. “Or what?”
“You know exactly what, sweetheart.”
My chair scraped lightly against the floor as I pushed to my feet and jerked my chin towards the door.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to find out if those people I mentioned are still where I left them.”
She popped the final strawberry slice into her mouth and then rose as well. “I’ll interpret your change of topic as an unconditional surrender.”
I snorted. “As if.”
Placing a hand on her lower back, I steered her towards the door. The other patrons were thoroughly engrossed in their own conversations and pastries, so none of them looked up when we weaved through the pale wooden tables. The two people behind the counter, however, lifted a hand in farewell. I gave them a nod back as I followed Audrey out the door.
A breeze swirled between the buildings and hit me in the face as I stepped across the threshold. Behind me, the small bell tinkled as the door fell shut again.
I was just about to open my mouth when I noticed that Audrey’s back had gone ramrod straight.
One second too late, I realized why.
Two guys had been hiding by the wall right next to the door. One of them had leveled a sword across Audrey’s throat from the side.
My gaze darted between the young man beside him and the group of people who had materialized on the other side.
A lightning bolt was aimed straight at the side of my neck.
