Even The Vampires Get The Blues

talk?

No. Ignore him. He's a fool and he doesn't know what he's talking about.

You answered me, I thought at him, oddly pleased by the touch of his mind against mine. It felt… right.

Paen frowned at me, but said nothing else.

Chicken. 'All right,' I said aloud. 'Finn, if you want to volunteer to be Clare's bodyguard, that would do a lot to relieve my mind. As for what steps we're going to take next to find your statue…'

I closed my eyes for a moment to think. I was never at my brightest in deep night, and after the drain of speaking with ghosts—and sharing my vision with Paen—I was left limp and exhausted, sapped of the energy needed to make a decision.

'You will go home and get some rest,' Paen said authoritatively.

'I beg your pardon?' I asked, looking at him in surprise.

His eyes glittered like shadowed mercury. 'You're exhausted, and at the end of your strength. You will go home and rest.'

'You seem to misunderstand the basic client-investigator relationship,' I told him, straightening my shoulders in an attempt to look chock-full of vigor. 'I'm the one who makes the game plans. That's what you're paying me for.'

'I am your employer. I have paid you to work for me,' Paen said. 'That entitles me to give orders.'

'In your dreams!' I said, too tired to come up with a snappier comeback.

'Sam doesn't look tired to me,' Finn said, eyeing me, standing next to Clare's car a few feet away. 'She looks pretty good, as a matter of fact. How do you know she's tired, Paen? Do you have some special insight into Sam's feelings? Something you would instinctively know about, oh, say, a Beloved?'

We all looked at Paen. He glared back at us. 'I will take Sam home. Finn, you do the same with Clare. In the morning, we will plan out a new strategy for locating both the statue and the man who attacked Clare.'

'Wait a minute,' I protested, dropping the intriguing idea of a Beloved. 'You are not the boss here—I am. And I already have a plan for locating your statue.'

'Really?' Paen asked, crossing his arms over his chest. 'What would that be?'

'To start with, we will do the same thing we have been doing for another client—I'll check with the antique network and see if anyone has an interest in black monkey statues. Since you can't tell us much about it, Clare is going to do a little research into just what the statue looks like, and its provenance. Once we have a little more information on the statue itself, I can pull out the big guns.'

Clare gasped in horror, and instinctively reached for a wildflower growing at the side of the overlook.

'And what would your big guns consist of?' Paen asked, his eyes so dark they looked like a stormy sky.

I took a deep breath. 'I'm going to scry.'

'No.' The almost inaudible whimper slipped between Clare's lips as she stuffed petal after petal into her mouth.

Paen frowned. 'What's wrong with Samantha saying?' he asked Clare.

Her eyes got huge as she looked at me with wordless pleading.

'It won't be like that,' I told her. 'Stop frightening the clients!'

'I'm not frightened,' Paen said. 'I am, however, a bit confused. I thought scrying was a standard divination technique?'

'It is.'

'Then what's the big deal with you doing it?' Finn asked.

'I'm not actually a Diviner,' I explained to him. 'I studied as one for a while, but I… er… left the Order.'

Paen's eyes narrowed. 'You left them because you realized you were not meant to be a Diviner?'

'Something like that,' I said, giving Clare a look that was meant to keep her quiet. It didn't work, of course. No one can shut a faery up when she's determined to blab.

'Sam was kicked out of the Diviners' Order after she scryed,' Clare said, swallowing the last of the petals. 'She was part of a scrying circle, and she lost control.'

'It's not as bad as she's making it sound,' I told Paen, more than a little mortified to have my dirty laundry aired in such a manner.

'How can you lose control scrying?' Finn asked at the same time Paen asked Clare, 'What happened?'

'She opened a temporal rift that sucked in two Diviners,' she answered, meeting my potent glare with a haughty look. 'They should know, Sam! You're dangerous when you scry!'

'A temporal rift?' Paen looked at me as if I was wearing my underwear on my head.

'It's not that uncommon,' I said abruptly, tossing my things onto the backseat of Paen's car. 'Happens all the time.'

'Hardly that,' Clare said. She turned to the men with an eloquent gesture that stated how distressed she was by the very thought of me giving in to my Elvish birthright. 'It took the head of the Diviner Order three weeks to get the Diviners back from where Sam had sent them.'

'Inadvertently sent them,' I corrected. 'It was just a minor little glitch.'

'And you're planning on scrying the location of the statue?' Paen asked, clearly stuck on that point.

'Yes.' I gave them all a level look over the top of Paen's car. 'I admit that I had a little control issue before, but I know what I did wrong. I was scrying by the moon. I'm part sun elf—unlike most Diviners, the moon does not give me power, it dilutes it. This time, I will scry by sunlight. Everything will be fine, just you wait and see.'

Famous last words, eh?

Chapter 6

The next two days passed like… well, like two days. Busy, mostly. Frustrating, definitely, both on a personal and a professional level.

'Are you coming back tonight?' Clare's voice was rather breathless against my ear as I cradled the phone to hear her over the noise and confusion of the Glasgow train station.

'Yes. I should be home around dinnertime. What's been going on there today?'

A smothered giggle followed by a deep rumble of a masculine voice answered that question. 'Um… we don't have much to report, actually. Finn and I have been working through the list of antique buyers, but with no new information. Oh, Mr. Race called to see if we'd had any progress. I told him you were in Glasgow working on a tip for another case, and he was a bit put out. He said he wasn't paying us good money to work for other people, and he demanded that we put all our attention on his case. He also said he was in London for a day or two, and he'd really like you to meet him there.'

'London? I thought he was in Barcelona?' Something rustled in a nearby trash bin. I hoped it wasn't rodents.

'He left. He said he could put you up for a couple of days if you wanted to contact some of the English collectors in case some of them have heard anything about the manuscript.'

'I hope you told him we already have, with no luck.'

'I tried to, but he doesn't seem to want to listen to me. He just kept saying that people are more forthcoming if you approach them in person, and what a good idea it would be for both of us to go to London and search.'

'He can just go soak his head,' I grumbled, eyeing an itinerant man to make sure he didn't decide to relieve himself near the phone cubicle I occupied. I spent a few minutes damning whoever it was who stole my cell phone a few days earlier, then pulled my mind back to the present. 'Did you tell him we were devoting all possible energies to finding the book for him?'

'Yes, but he didn't like the fact that you were away working on another case. So, the private auction lead was a total failure?'

'Not just the lead, the last two days have been a bust.' The homeless man curled up on a bench and quietly