Of Wicked Blood: A Slow Burn Romantic Urban Fantasy (The Quatrefoil Chronicles Book 1)

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Thierry’s the Master Horloger whose specialty is medieval, mechanical objects. He’s the only one the university trusts to put a finger on the gears of this relic.

  As Adrien taps out a message on his phone, hinges groan and then the massive wooden door bangs shut, injecting icy wind into the library.

  I swivel my neck, certain it must be Alma this time, but the person coming down the aisle is tall and wears black leather gloves currently cupped around his mouth.

  The boy I dreamed about is here.

  The cocky thief who told me to make my own luck.

  His eyes seem to grow round, which is a feat for eyes shaped like his. “Almost didn’t recognize you without your witch hat,” he says once he’s reached us. His tone is so falsely cheery my teeth grind a little harder. “Hi.” He holds out his gloved hand to Adrien. “Slate Ardoin. Brume’s newest student recruit.”

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Slate. I’m Adrien Mercier. I teach history.”

  Slate’s bowed black eyes take in Adrien as though he were a dial lock on a safe. “I don’t hate history.”

  “Then I hope you’ll join my class.”

  Slate disengages his hand from Adrien’s. “Are you in Professor Mercier’s class, Bellatrix?”

  Bellatrix? Does he think my name is Bellatrix?

  “Her name is Cadence.” Adrien’s tone is sharp enough to crack ice. “And yes she’s in my class. Speaking of . . . I need to be in Cambridge tomorrow, so I was wondering if you could fill in for me.”

  “Me?”

  He nods. “You could teach a class about Brumian lore. After all, no one knows our town’s mystical history better than you.”

  “I suppose I could do that.” His compliment makes my ego shine as brightly as the brooch that fell out of Slate’s pocket last night.

  Slate’s eyebrows writhe minutely. “I didn’t know you were a history buff, Cadence.”

  I cross my arms. “Why would you know anything about me, Slate?”

  Adrien clears his throat. “I’m going to head downstairs to check on the clock’s gears, see if I can pinpoint what’s changed.” He smiles as he backs away, but it flickers like a faulty bulb as he takes in Slate again.

  Slate who’s taller and broader. Then again, thugs need to keep in shape to run from the law.

  I’m not being fair. Maybe Slate had the brooch in his pocket because it’s some good-luck charm or something. But what about all the other glittery baubles that tumbled out? No, he’s most definitely a crook.

  Slate watches Adrien wrench open the trapdoor before locking his gaze on the clock again, probably scheming how to steal it. Good thing it’s huge and embedded into the ground. Still, I wouldn’t put it past him to try and wrench one of the hands off or pry out a coin-sized topaz.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I hiss.

  His gaze settles unhurriedly back on mine. “For someone so lovely, your stare is fearsome. Ever thought of joining the police force?”

  I roll my fearsome eyes. “What is it you want?”

  Almost a full minute goes by before he says, “I’ve been seeing this four-leaf clover motif all over Brume, and I was wondering if a librarian could help me find some Brumian history books on the subject.”

  I frown, not because I’m surprised—the Quatrefoil is a big tourist attraction—but because he didn’t strike me as someone who’d venture into a library to look up my town’s history.

  His fingers curl at his sides. “Can you direct me toward a librarian?”

  “You’re looking at an honorary one.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh.”

  “What is huh supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t strike me as a librarian.”

  “You don’t strike me as a student.”

  His lips quirk. “What do I strike you as?”

  “A criminal.”

  “And criminals aren’t allowed to be educated?”

  Did he just admit to being a criminal? “You’re not contesting my assessment?”

  He shrugs.

  I take a small step back.

  “Relax. It’s not like I’m an axe murderer. Criminals come in all forms.” He simpers at my expression. “So? The shamrock aisle?”

  Once I get over the shock of his confession, I cross my arms. “This library is for students and faculty only. I’ll need proof that you’re attending the university before I can direct you toward any book.”

  His knuckles tighten, his large ring or wart . . . or maybe it’s some sort of egg-shaped swelling from punching someone . . . straining the leather.

  “Such a stickler for the rules, Cadence.” He sighs, then digs something out of the inside breast pocket of his tailored coat. “Will this do?” He unfolds a piece of paper and dangles it in front of me.

  I make out the logo of the school—a gothic U speared through a B, then quickly scan the sheet. It’s a letter of acceptance signed by the dean, aka Papa. Sure enough, it’s addressed to Slate Ardoin.

  He folds it back up and slides it into his pocket. “Is my proof satisfactory?”

  I nod, making a mental note to ask Papa about this boy later, about why he arrived mid school year. “By shamrock, you mean the Quatrefoil?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “We don’t have an aisle for it, but we do have some books. However, they’re kept in the archives, which is a cold room—”

  “Good thing I’m wearing a coat and gloves.”

  “—with extremely restricted access.”

  “I’m imagining you have access to it.”

  “I do.”

  “I have a pair of sapphire earrings that would complement your eyes.”

  “Are you trying to bribe me with stolen goods?”

  “Who said anything about them being stolen?”

  “Do you usually carry around women’s jewelry in your coat?”

  He drags his hand through his tousled black curls. “What you saw last night . . . I was getting pieces repaired. That’s what I do. I’m a middleman. I pick up jewelry from customers, bring them to professionals, then drop the fixed pieces back with their rightful owners.”

  I squeeze one of my eyes shut a little.

  The nerve at his temple pulses. He’s definitely lying.

  He clears his throat. “You really should be a cop. Not a librarian. Then again, if you were a cop, I suspect the crime rate would escalate in these parts.”

  My arms loosen, and my hands land on my hipbones. “That’s not nice.”

  “Not nice?”

  I puff my chest a little. “I’d make a terrific cop.”

  “I’m sure you would.” He smiles with his eyes and with his mouth. “I was implying crime would escalate, because men would be begging for you to cuff them.”

  Oh. Heat fills my face so suddenly that I want to peel off my wool turtleneck. But then I remember that he’s slick, and so his compliment—if that’s what that was—is simply a veiled attempt at getting what he wants. Plus, I’m not wearing anything underneath the chunky knit.

  I level a glacial stare. “Give me a real reason to let you look through the archives, and maybe I’ll consider your request.”

  The charming mask slips off his face, and I see the hardened boy who told me to make my own luck.

  “Fine.” He digs through his pocket again, pulls out another folded paper, then drops it in my hands.

  It’s a birth certificate. Which is weird. Who the heck carries around their birth certificate?

  He points to the line bearing the name. Rémy Roland.

  I frown. “I thought your name was Slate?”

  “It is. I only just found out about the unfortunate other one.”

  I wrench my neck back. “But I thought . . . I thought the Roland bloodline died out.”

  “Is everything okay?” Adrien’s making his way back toward us, his strides slow but long, as though he’s trying to reach me quickly but without spooking Slate.

>   “It lives on.” Slate’s harsh tone reveals a nest of anger.

  “What lives on?” Adrien asks.

  “Slate . . . he’s . . . Rémy.” I lower my gaze back to the birth certificate. I’m not sure whether I could tell a fake from a real, but for some reason, I don’t think Slate’s lying about his lineage or the fact that he’s just found out.

  I hand the paper over to Adrien, whose forehead grooves, then smooths. “Rainier mentioned he’d found you.” Something flickers in his expression as he returns the paper to Slate, who slots it back into the breast pocket of his coat. “And so he has.”

  Slate’s mouth moves and then Adrien’s, but I’ve checked out, hurt Papa confided in Adrien but not in me.

  Adrien touches the back of my hand, jerking me out of my bubble. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Peachy.”

  He frowns.

  Before he can comment on my mood, I spin around and all but bark at Slate, “Follow me.”

  The guy has the nerve to answer, “To the ends of the earth.”

  As our footsteps echo on the tiles, I toss him a blistering look. “Quit the charm. It won’t work on me, Rémy.”

  “Slate. And is that a challenge?”

  “No.”

  “I like challenges.”

  “It’s not a challenge,” I mutter as I lead him toward the glass trapdoor and the subterranean floor beneath.

  The gears of the clock take up almost all the space, but around it, Papa’s built a glassed-in archival room to preserve Brume’s oldest and most fragile books. Not all are about the town. There are some first editions Baudelaire, Hugo, and Rousseau. National treasures.

  As I unlock the door with a swipe of my thumb on a digital keypad, I look behind me. Slate’s eyes are wide with wonder.

  He goes to touch one of the enormous cogs when I stop him with a sharp, “Don’t.”

  Surprisingly, he doesn’t.

  7

  Slate

  I follow Cadence’s gently swinging ass into a modern archival room decked out in glass. The view is stunning, and I’m not talking about the clock gears or rough stone walls; I’m talking about the view of blue denim that hugs this girl in all the right places.

  It almost makes me forget I want out of this goddamn village in which I’m stuck.

  And when I say “stuck,” I mean, stuck.

  After the de Morel party, I bought a ticket for the earliest train out of here. In blizzard-like conditions, I trudged back to the station. The thirty-minute walk almost froze my balls off. If hell existed, this would be it, this life-sized, snow-globe of a town with its swirling flakes and icy winds.

  Never had I been so ecstatic to see a train.

  That’s when the next-level crazy shit went down.

  I crossed the platform and raised my foot to climb into the orange bullet when I hit a wall.

  Literally.

  Only it was an invisible wall. And I seemed to be the only one who couldn’t get past it. I watched a couple of other people get onto the train with no problem. I thought maybe there’d been some toxic chemical in one of those salmon things from the party. Something that would cause me to hallucinate. So I took a deep breath and tried again.

  And again, I hit a fucking wall.

  I moved farther down the platform, tried another entrance. Same damn deal. I looked like one of those sad mimes pretending he was in a box, my palms out, pushing but going nowhere. All I needed was to paint my face white and stencil a black teardrop on my cheek. Hell, at some point—that point being my breaking point—someone tossed a two-euro coin my way.

  I swore and shouted, which made a ticket inspector step off the train and inch toward me as though I were some rabies-infected dog. When I said I wanted to get on the train, he sniffed the air, trying to breathalyze me with his nose, then gave a little shake of his head.

  Yeah, I smelled like wine, but I was stone-cold sober.

  I took a step forward.

  Bam!

  “Fait chier,” I growled. Then, “Push me!”

  “Look, Monsieur, I really can’t—”

  “Putain de bordel de merde! PUSH ME ONTO THIS TRAIN!”

  A handful of people eyed me like I was missing my straitjacket. The ticket inspector wouldn’t touch me, but a freckle-faced kid shoved me toward the door, only to have me bounce off the invisible wall. Everyone scattered like I was contagious.

  The train whirred to indicate the doors were closing. In a last desperate attempt to break through, I banged my fist against the invisible force that trapped me in this quaint shithole. The doors shut, and then the train shot away like a missile.

  I wasn’t on it.

  I got a cheap bottle of Beaujolais to numb my brain, then went back to my gnome headquarters, aka my dorm. Found the Toilettes Hommes, which looked like they’d come straight out of a retro horror movie—mildewed white tiles, yellowed plastic curtains, hair-speckled soap on a stick. There was one toilet stall and two urinals set so close to the row of white porcelain sinks I could have probably taken a leak and brushed my teeth at the same time. At least the showers were semi-private. I stood under the hot water, lubed up my fingers, gagging as I picked out the wet hair that came off the soap, and went to work on the goddamn ring.

  I yanked and pulled, twisted and rubbed. The last time I’d worked up so much friction in the shower I’d gotten myself off. This? Well, this was a fucking nightmare. The ring didn’t even budge.

  After dressing and going back to my room, I tried again.

  And again.

  And again.

  No dice.

  “You had a good night last night?” Cadence asks, pulling me out of my head.

  I bet she senses it was craptastic—which is saying a lot—and is needling me to test my mood.

  “Just awesome.” The ring bumps the wall, shooting pain into my swollen finger. I gnash my molars and curse under my breath.

  “. . . no longer use gloves for paper, only photographs,” Cadence is saying as we walk through the archival room arcing around the mechanism of the astronomical antiquity.

  The glass walls are thick, and yet the slow, steady ticks of the turning crown wheel penetrate them.

  I cock an eyebrow, having no idea what she just said. “What?”

  “You can shed the gloves.”

  I shrug, playing off the glove-thing like it’s a personality quirk.

  The glass room is cold but warmer than outside. They must have had it specially outfitted not too long ago. Everything that isn’t glass is white metal, from the floor to the ceiling to the three long curved tables to the shelves.

  Cadence tucks her hands into the sleeves of her turtleneck. “So, what is it you’d like to see?”

  For starters, what’s underneath that bulky sweater. I clear my throat. “Two things, actually. The history of the Clover Council—”

  “Quatrefoil Council.” Her mouth pinches as though she’s pissed I muddled the name.

  “—and whatever you’ve got on a magical ring with a red stone.”

  A faint frown touches her brow. “That’s very specific.”

  “I’m a very unambiguous man.”

  “You’re the exact opposite of unambiguous.”

  “Not when it comes to what I want.” I take a step toward her, going for my well-oiled intimidation technique.

  From the quickening pulse in her neck, I suspect it’s working. Her gorgeous red mouth pops open but nothing comes out. Instead, she backs away and takes a special pair of gloves from a drawer, then turns to a row of shelves near the middle of the crescent-shaped room. And, yeah, I cop a look at her ass again. Especially when she stretches to reach a high shelf and her turtleneck rides up.

  She eases out a tome of leather and vellum, which she deposits carefully on the nearest table. A gold-leaf quatrefoil brightens the pebbled green hide.

  “This is Istor Breou. The History of Magic, specifically the one in Brume.” She looks pointedly at my hands. “If you want t
o page through it, no leather gloves. Leather sticks to paper, which could ruin it.”

  I fuse the tip of my middle finger between my teeth, then slowly ease the glove off my left hand.

  When I make no move to take off the other, she sighs and opens the book. “The language is a mix of old French and Breton.”

  The words scrawled over the page are tiny and jittery, as though written by a broken hand.

  “Do you speak Breton?” I ask.

  “A little.”

  I don’t ask her to translate anything, too busy taking in the accompanying illustration—an illumination of the clover resting behind a tangle of trees, ferns, and fog. Various moon phases dot the top of the page, from full to crescent to new. I scan the text, catching some French words: Berceau. Magie. Pouvoir.

  Cradle. Magic. Power.

  I try to decipher the Breton beneath the image but can’t. “What does the caption say?”

  Cadence tucks back a brown strand that’s escaped her ponytail and reads, “The source of all magic can be traced to a golden Quatrefoil found in the forest of Brocéliande. For millennia, people flocked to Brocéliande to live near the source of magic.” She glances at me. “Local lore says that over time, more and more people settled in the forest, thus turning it into a town: Brume. Named, of course, for the ever-present cloud of mist that covers it.”

  How depressing. “No wonder Brumians worship something golden and shiny.”

  Cadence rolls her eyes but smiles, and that tiny crack in her serious countenance reassures me that she’s not some magic-crazed zealot, even though I might be turning into one after last night.

  She carefully flips the page to one with illustrations of fantastical beasts wreaking havoc, half-submerged people cupping flames, and what looks like a rave in a windy field.