Page 22 of Secrets of the Forgotten Heir

Maddie poured us each a glass of wine and we settled on the sofa. I took a sip, liquid heaven. ‘So,’ I said, ‘tell me about your plans for a tattoo shop.’

She lit up as she gushed excitedly about finally having enough clients to justify opening her own office premises. She talked about equipment, overheads and her bottom line; she sounded so unlike the ditzy girl I’d once known who hadn’t understood the difference between gross and net income.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ I said, the thought slipping from me before I could stop it. ‘You’re going to crush it.’

Her bright smile faded. ‘Without the Witchlight…’ She trailed off, shaking her head. ‘Without the Eternal Flame, my dreams are dead in the water.’

‘We’ll get it back,’ I promised fiercely. ‘Of course we will.’

‘I’ve missed that Stonehaven bullishness,’ she laughed.

‘We will,’ I repeated. We had to.

Maddie’s passion about her business had burned through our entire bottle of wine and the time was waaaay later than I’d intended to go to bed. I gave a yawn so wide that my jaw clicked. Maddie chucked a cushion at my head. ‘Go to bed! We need you in Nana’s office so you can dig up dirt on Fraser,’ she ordered. ‘We can’t afford you being late onyour first day. You know Nana hates it when people are tardy. Go. Sleep. Now.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ I sassed, as I stood up.

I let Eva out for a wee, then we went up to my old bedroom. I set my phone alarm for the obscenely early hour of 7.00am and settled into my old bed.

Thankfully Eva was by my side and she chased my memories – and nightmares – away.

When the alarm went off at the crack of dawn, I hit snooze. I did so repeatedly until I clawed my eyes open enough to see it was 7.30am. Fuck!

I had no time for a shower so I hastily brushed my teeth and hair, chucked on some clean clothes. Eva had done her favourite trick of hiding my keys, so it took a fraught five minutes to find them, then Eva and I jogged to the police station. We arrived, panting, at 7.55am. Perfect timing, and I wasn’t even sweatingthatmuch.

I sat in the waiting room for all of two seconds before Yanni barrelled out of her office. ‘You’re here!’ she said, her tone reflecting pleasant surprise.

‘Of course I am,’ I replied, as if affronted. I tried to make sure my breathing didn’t give away my last-minute sprint. Eva, meanwhile, flopped onto the floor like she’d climbed Everest.

‘Oh well,’ Yanni sounded slightly apologetic. ‘I expected you to be late. You were never an early bird.’ She smiled. ‘More of a permanently grumpy pigeon.’ Her words were warm and teasing. ‘Come on in.’

She led me through a door to the right of the reception area into the bowels of the police station. We went into a room with a few desks in it. Filing cabinets lined the walls but didn’t appear to be in use because there was paperworkeverywhere.Yeesh: they didn’t need someone to answer the phones, they needed someone to sort out this shit.

‘The phone is here.’ Yanni gestured to a desk piled with paperwork but with no visible phone. She frowned. ‘No, wait. Itwashere but I moved it last week. Hold on. I need to move a couple more of these. I promise I’ve been meaning to tidy this lot up.’

She shuffled a stack of papers from one side of the desk to the other before picking it all up and dumping it on the floor next to a massive heap of folders – and more paperwork. That was some filing system. Organised chaos? More like chaotic chaos.

I sat and waited as Yanni tried to find the phone I was supposed to be manning. After a solid ten minutes had passed, I broke into her mutterings. ‘Yanni, don’t take this the wrong way but it seriously looks like you need help.’

She grinned suddenly. ‘What gave it away? The mountains of paperwork or the missing phone?’ She sobered. ‘I know – I know we need help,’ she said. ‘But it’s so tricky to find someone to do the job. You’ve got to be impartial if you’re working for the magical police, and it’s difficult to find someone like that around here. We’ve got covens, clans, shifter groups –people feel like they’re being disloyal to their own sect if they take a job with me.’

‘Rather than thinking their loyalty should extend to all types of magic folk and helping the whole community?’ I said incredulously.

‘I know. It’s ridiculous, but that’s the way it is. I’ve got a couple of years till I retire and I’m sure I can find somebody to get this place shipshape before then. Dove is coming along wonderfully – you’ll like her. She’s on leave for the next day or two, but she’ll need some help when I go.’ She eyeballed me pointedly.

‘Yanni, I’m here to earn some money and help you out, but this won’t be my forever job. I’m laying that out for you now. I’m a PI – that’s what I do. I set my own hours,I take the cases that I want. I’m not made for nine-to-five work.’

She sighed. ‘Well, I appreciate you stepping into the breach for now. And I appreciate your honesty, though I can definitely say there is nothing nine to five about this job. I’m on call the whole time.’

‘That must be hard.’

She beamed. ‘I love it. Retirement’s the thing that will be hard for me. A few years more yet,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not ready to slow down.’

Yanni may have liked her job, but she clearly didn’t like the paperwork. I’m an untidy soul, but the state of this room was making me itch to start filing. How could she findanythingin this mess?

‘Oh, there it is!’ she said triumphantly, pulling out a heavy, outdated piece of technology that I half expected to be steam-powered. It was a large plastic phone with several lights labelledLine 1,Line 2,Line 3, andLine 4. Considering there was only one other office in the station, I couldn’t imagine where those lines went unless they had telephones in the interview room and cells, though that didn’t seem likely.

Yanni found a clear space to put it down. ‘All you need to do is answer it and find out the issue. Most of the time it will be people wanting reassurance, like old MrMargate who lives on his own by Wheatsheaf Grove. He’s convinced that banshees keep announcing his death. He’ll probably ring up, tell you it happened last night and we should get ready to make arrangements.’

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