Vengeance Read Online Free PDF Page B

tidy the towel that formed a bridge between the hot-air scrubber and the litter tray she shared with the beast. It could wait. Rigidly disciplined at work, Jocasta lived in chaos, leaving the housework to the spellhound, which left her feeling guilty. It had been designed to be more than her unofficial housemaid. She closed the door. The spellhound had left hours before, on the trail of another lead that would probably go nowhere. She walked down echoing corridors, the hum of voices unheard after years of screening out extraneous noise. Her room was in a hive-like building modelled on an antique brownstone on the outside, according to the building manager. She wondered if brownstone was really meant to be that particular shade of dung.
    Her plummet down the levitation tube was so familiar she barely noticed her stomach lurch. The spell caught her gently on the ground floor. She emerged into sunlight blinking, her corneas dimming to compensate.
    She walked coolly through the congested streets, smiling at the memory of planning her change of career, so ending years of tedium, proud that she'd taken nothing from her old employers except knowing what not to do. She allowed her shoulders to droop slightly, exaggerating the old-maid qualities her clients found reassuring. She'd learnt early that it helped if people underestimated her, but knew too that she sometimes carried it to extremes.
    A nudge and an accompanying cry interrupted her reverie. A passerby had collided with her, incurring the shock of her privacy spell.
    Her office faced a row of stalls, and she purchased a drink and sweetmeat for her breakfast, as she did every morning. She closed the door on the street. As the smell of food and herbs and spices from the street vendors and the nearby dining inn accompanied her, she activated the air scrubber. Nothing on the message wall came from anyone she wished to talk to, and she left the two messages from Duff unread. She deposited her faux-silk wrap in the inner office and sat cross-legged on the floor, breakfasting while she consulted her oracles.
    She heard the crackle of a sending in the outer room. Peering through a crack in the doorway at Duff's image circling the room, looking for her, she shrank back, overcome by blind terror. Damn him! She was grateful she'd always gone to him or he'd have known about the inner office. She fought down a sneeze caused by the peppery smell of the sending.
    She wondered now what she'd taken on. It was one thing to land a big job that would make her fortune, something else to take on a case that might lead to her death.
    Giving up, the image pressed its hand to the message wall. “Jocasta, this is Duff. Please report to me on your progress,” it intoned and vanished, leaving its message with its two unanswered predecessors.
    She breathed a sigh of relief and considered her next move. “Well,” she mused, “we have to give Duff something very, very soon."
* * * *
    That evening Sinhalese adjusted her dress one last time before dinner. Was it her imagination or the light from the mirror? No, she'd definitely lost weight over the last few weeks. Her eyes were bruised with lack of sleep and her mouth, always slightly downturned, had acquired a noticeable droop. When she slept, her dreams often turned into nightmares. Whatever she wore, it seemed to hang badly now. She shrugged. It will have to do.
    Meals in the Duff house were now eaten in silence. They breakfasted in their rooms, and Sinhalese lunched out. She found it difficult being around her father when he was in one of his moods, as he often was nowadays.
    This lunchtime she had decided she would eat in and keep an illusion of normality, despite the way her father shredded his napkin and periodically scored the tabletop with a sharp knife. She had prattled about the new powder-blue dress she'd bought to match her eyes and didn't see him glower as she mentioned their friends she'd seen in town. She more than anyone should have