Page 106 of Shield of Fire

And I doubted he had any choice in the matter. Given the circumstances, he was lucky he hadn’t been planted under a tree somewhere. “Did he give you any useful information about Gilda?”

“Only that he was indeed paid a handsome amount to favorably enhance her background. The ‘who by’ was unsurprising.”

“Was she related to them? A cousin or something?”

I didn’t think she was, given what I’d just seen, but fucking or even marrying first cousins wasn’t actually illegal here in the UK. Frowned upon, perhaps, but not illegal.

“No. But he gave me the full report he did before he was given a hefty bribe to alter the information.” I could hear the annoyance in his tone. “As suspected, she and her partners had a long history of milking information from her carefully selected ‘lovers.’”

“Who was her lover before you? Afran?”

“Yes.”

I wondered if he was where she’d gotten the information about the shield and the rubies from. The timeline made it seem likely, especially given he’d accused her of stealing from him.

It also made me wonder if Afran had been behind Gilda’s bloody death. Mkalkee’s comments to the contractor we’d interviewed would seem to confirm it, as did what I’d glimpsed in that memory sideshow. The three of them had been working together for a very long time.

“I was given a list of her past residences,” he continued, “and we’re in the process of investigating them now.”

“We?”

“Well, the IIT. I’m just tagging along.”

I smiled. “How would you like to untag yourself and meet me at the tavern?”

“Is untag an actual word?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

He laughed. “I can be there in twenty. I take it we have a lead?”

“We do. Tell you about it when you arrive.”

I hung up, called an Uber, and then rang Sgott. It also rang out, so I left another message, telling him what I’d discovered and what I needed, and then went down the street to meet my Uber.

The tavern hadn’t opened to the public yet, but I could hear the chef and kitchen hands preparing for the day. I dropped into the office to check if Ingrid needed me to do or sign anything, then ran lightly up the stairs to my living area.

I chucked my bag onto the sofa and strode across to the spare bedroom. Lugh had moved out years before I’d met Halak and Mkalkee, and I’d taken to hiding my teenage “treasures”—dumb things like notes from boys I’d fancied, or jewelry and other tokens they’d given me—underneath a loose floorboard. Mom and Gran undoubtedly knew of its existence—however little my treasures might weigh, they still altered the timbre of the song in that area—but had let me keep the pretense of it being my “secret” place.

I’d eventually moved on from such silliness and forgotten about the stash. Its memory hadn’t been part of the smudged section, but the memory session had nevertheless forced it back into conscious thought.

I knelt beside the bed, pushed it sideways a couple of inches—the bedroom was tiny, so there actually wasn’t much room to maneuver with all the other furniture in here—then felt for the indentation in the board. My fingers were bigger now than they had been then, and it took a few minutes to find it.

As the cover popped open, the gentle whisper of music told me Mathi had arrived upstairs.

“Hey,” I said, as I dropped onto my stomach and peered into the small box I’d carefully melded onto the joists.

He leant, arms crossed, against one side of the doorframe—an image that came through the gentle song rather than me physically seeing it. He might never have stayed here overnight during the course of our relationship, but he’d certainly been here often enough that the fabric of the building had built up a “musical” impression of him.

“Can I ask why you haven’t just moved the bed totally out of the way?”

“Because that would involve moving the bedside table, and I can’t be bothered.”

I carefully pushed the bits of yellowed paper and oddments of jewelry, stones, and chains aside until I found what I was looking for—a small clay token with a heart etched into its front and a multitude of symbols on the back.

This was the key. Mkalkee had given it to me just after we’d met when I was eighteen so I could slip through the multiple barriers of magic that protected their safe place. It existed in the heart of old Deva, close to the Northgate, underneath what was now a tapas bar—one that I’d unknowingly gone to multiple times over the years since.

I wondered why Halak hadn’t taken it off me before they’d taken me home, but maybe he’d simply forgotten about it.

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