A Marvellous Light (The Last Binding #1)(2)

A scrap of hope rose in Reggie at the idea. When he tried to move his hands, they burned with a flash of reproving heat, then went as stubbornly unresponsive as his legs. No. It wasn’t going to be that easy for any of them.

George’s eyes were narrowed. “Very well. Where is it now?”

Reggie shrugged in complete honesty.

“Where did you last see it?”

The pain of the bind gave a wary pulse, and Reggie didn’t dare test his voice. But this time his hands lifted when he told them to, and he waved them frantically.

“Ey,” said the other man. “Now we’re getting someplace.”

“Indeed.” George looked out over the park again. He shifted his gaze north, then kept turning, a slow circle like a man lost and seeking landmarks. When he had rotated fully on the spot, he began to build a spell of his own, with the elegant mastery of a jeweller laying minuscule cogs.

George flung his magic-brimming hands wide and a map appeared in the air in front of Reggie, as though a small tablecloth had been shaken out and hung over a line. Blue lines glowed in the air against a background of nothingness. The thickest line formed the familiar snake of the Thames, and the city spilled out around it.

Reggie jabbed at the approximate location of his office. Nothing palpable met his fingers, but the map changed at once, showing a much smaller portion of London. The river formed the eastern and southern borders, and it stretched out to Kensington in the west and followed the northern border of Hyde Park. It was a lovely spell. Reggie wondered what level of detail he would discover, if he kept jabbing and jabbing.

“Not where we are now, you imbecile.”

This time, Reggie managed to indicate the building itself: ironically, yes, a bare stone’s throw to the east from where they were, though Reggie’s finger fell closer to Whitehall than the St. James’s end.

“Your office?” For the first time George sounded surprised.

Reggie managed to nod before the dormant bind seared up in punishment. He barely noticed when the map flickered into nothing. He kept his tongue thrust out as though he could somehow shove the pain away, and tears ran down his face. The two men were looking across the park in the direction of the building.

“Do we—” the other man began.

“No,” said George. “And that’s all we’ll get past the bind, I expect. It’s enough. Finish up.” George didn’t look at Reggie. “We’re done here.”

Again, the man in the cap moved fast. The second-last thing that Reggie saw was the tide of white, cobwebbing up to cover his entire body. The last thing he saw, as he took his last breath, was the sun glinting off the top of George’s walking stick as George strolled through the curtain of his own spell and down the hill, unhurried, a man with nowhere in particular to be.





Robin was definitely going to punch someone before the day was out.

Currently topping his list of ideal candidates were his family’s estate steward and the chap who’d managed to stab Robin’s foot with his umbrella on the front steps of the Home Office this morning. And although Robin would never hit a woman, the frayed edge of his mood was unravelling further with the incessant tapping of his typist’s ring against her desk.

Robin gritted his teeth. He was not going to set himself up as a tyrant and snap at the girl over trifles, not on his very first day in this job. He would hold out for the prospect of going to his boxing club and venting his feelings with a willing opponent.

The ring-tapping halted as footsteps heralded someone entering the outer office. Robin sat up straighter behind his desk and moved one ragged pile of paperwork a few inches to the left in a doomed attempt to make the whole thing look less like a hurricane had blown through a library. This would be his nine o’clock meeting, then.

Hopefully the other person would have a bloody clue what they were meant to be meeting about.

“Mr. Courcey!” came Miss Morrissey’s voice. “Good mor—”

“Is he in?”

“Yes, but—”

The footsteps didn’t halt, and the speaker strode right into the room.

“What have you been doing, I was—” Silence snatched the man’s words away as his eyes landed on Robin. He stopped dead a few steps inside the door, which was also a few steps from Robin’s desk; it was a very small office.

Robin swallowed. For less than a second, there had been relief in the newcomer’s voice and rather a charming smile on his face. They had vanished with such abrupt, chilling totality that Robin could almost convince himself he’d imagined them.

The man shifted a leather folder from one hand to the other. He was slim and pale, with fair, colourless hair and a face currently folded into an unpleasant expression that suggested he’d stepped in something on the street and its odours had only just reached his nose.

It was, Robin reflected wistfully, an eminently punchable face.

“What the bloody hell is this? Where’s Reggie?”

“Who’s Reggie?” It had already been a difficult morning. Robin was not above returning fire with rudeness where rudeness had been offered. “Who are you, come to that?”

A pair of blue eyes narrowed. They were the only mark of colour in the man’s countenance—indeed, in his entire appearance. His clothes were neat, expensively tailored, but all in shades as unremarkable and drab as his dishwater hair.