Page 104 of A Touch of Poison
“I got that information about the necklace, didn’t I? I can be useful, and I can do something none of your kind can.”
“Lie.” His gaze flicked down to my mouth as though he could see every lie I’d told as a stain upon my skin.
“Even if you don’t need me as a spy, there must be something I can do. Plus, it sounds like you could use the help.”
His lips pressed together and he sat back. It felt frustratingly like a dismissal.
“Put me to work, Bastian. I don’t like being useless. And right now, with my inability to control this magic, I feel pretty damn useless.” Granted, I’d used Kaliban’s fire trick to help me keep it calmer, but it still didn’t feel like it was mine to control.
Bastian’s gaze skimmed over the rug. Thinking about it, perhaps.
“Please.”
Growling, he gave me a sidelong glare, which was fair.
Using that word was a low blow. But didn’t he advocate so-called dirty tactics?
His jaw feathered as he folded his arms.
Perhaps he wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate in this matter.
Fine. Logic, then.
“We made a good team in Lunden.”
He raised an eyebrow in question.
“We stopped the changeling, didn’t we?”
“We weren’t exactly working together on that.”
“No. But we werebothworking on it, albeit separately. And we stopped him just in time.” Lifting my chin, I met his gaze squarely. “Imagine what we could do if wedidwork together.”
Several things flickered over his face, each too quick for me to dissect. But they amounted to one, important outcome: he was thinking about my proposal.
Eventually, he drew a deep breath. “Fine.”
I shot upright, grinning. It had worked.
He raised his hands, frown deepening in response. “But you’re not a spy. I won’t be sending you out as one of my operatives. It’ll be desk work. Research. Very boring. No sneaking around or trying to get information from anyone.”
I didn’t care. It was something. A purpose. Maybe even a tiny chip of stone taken off the weight he was carrying.
“Whatever you need, Bastian.”
The way his eyes widened told me something that dimmed my smile.
No one had ever said that to him before.
* * *
I spentthe next week reading old books and calming myself by focusing on the fire each day. Forcing the stains back had become increasingly exhausting, and they bubbled back once my attention waned, but focusing on sensory details as I did with the fire seemed to help.
As for my reading, it turned out the language that was similar to Latium was High Valens—one of the old fae tongues.
Bastian claimed they’d shared it with humans and that was how Latium had been born. If he hadn’t been fae, I’d have called him a liar—Latium had originated around the Central Sea, not Albion.
Then again, he’d told me fae had once inhabited the whole world, only pushed back into Albion because of human expansion and their own dwindling numbers. The inhabitants of Elfhame certainly looked more diverse than the humans of Albion.
