He chuckled. “You are always full of surprises, aren’t you, Miss Reale?”
“You live in London, right?” Yumi jumped in, putting on her best attempt at innocence. “Where should we go first today?”
He lifted his hand to his chin in a stereotypical gesture of thought. “The Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. I say start there.”
“Perfect,” Yumi said, going along with his suggestion. She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “Let’s see if I can get tickets.”
“Don’t do that,” Mo said, waving his hand at her phone. “Go talk to the concierge. He’ll arrange it. You’ll never get in on your own last minute.” He indicated a young man at a nearby desk.
“Be right back,” Yumi said, abandoning Aida to arrange for the tickets.
“Your friend is rather perky,” he said to Aida once Yumi was out of earshot. “A bit too perky. How can you stand being around someone so annoying?”
“The same way I stand your criticism of my friends,” she retorted.
“I suppose I deserved that.” He seemed oddly contrite. “So, handsome? Of course, I am. How could you think anything otherwise?”
“There’s no conceit in your family, is there?” Aida said, knowing she was being cheeky. “You’ve got it all.”
He only gave her that damnable grin. Then he grew serious. “Are you really just sightseeing?”
Aida silently thanked Sophie for her aegis... Without it, she didn’t think she would have been able to keep her cool at such a question.
“You don’t think I came here to see you, do you?” she asked.
He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Fine. Tower of London, British Library, Tate Modern, London Bridge, the Churchill War Rooms, and the Museum of London. Those are my suggestions.”
Yumi reappeared at Aida’s side. “The concierge pulled some strings so we could enter early. We’ll be the first ones to see the Jewels today! Thank you for the suggestion, Mo.”
“My pleasure, Miss Tanaka. Now then, I must be going. Ta-ta, little sightseers!” He headed away from them toward the elevator, his absence bringing her anxiety about the encounter back to the forefront.
Aida ushered Yumi out of the hotel and down the street. When they were a few blocks away, she pulled out her phone and did as Vulcan said, tapping it three times and saying, “Hephaestus.” Her phone glowed brightly, then dimmed to normal. Yumi did the same.
“God, I hope that works,” Aida said, pocketing her phone again. She gave Yumi the lowdown on the conversation she had with Mo. “Out of all the people I didn’t want to see on this trip, he was at the top of the list.” She swatted Yumi on the shoulder. “And what were you thinking, telling him I thought he was handsome?”
“I’m so sorry! It was the first thing I thought of to say. I was so flustered. I’m not used to this god thing. And he is beautiful. Although rather condescending and a bit of a misogynist.My little sightseers? Really?”
Aida didn’t relate Mo’s other condescending words to her friend. “So those places he mentioned—Tower of London, British Library, Tate Modern, the Churchill War Rooms, the Museum of London, and London Bridge—we’ll have to go to them now. Were they on your list?”
Yumi sighed. “Of course not. All those places were ones I specifically crossed off because they’re heavily documented online and it was easy enough to check the photos and satellite views. Nothing about them suggests there will be any meanders. Maybe we can try the location spell Vulcan gave us. Let him think we’re at one of those locations when we’re not?”
“I worry Mo will randomly show up to one of them—he has a penchant for doing that, trying to catch me off guard.”
Yumi lifted her hand to hail a passing black cab. “Why would this adventure of ours be easy? Gah. Then we’ll see a lot of London this week.”
The Tower of London, while jam-packed with history and millions of dollars’ worth of Crown Jewels, did not, as Yumi had predicted, yield a single meander. But they didn’t dare hurry too much. Mo knew they were headed there, so Aida didn’t use Vulcan’s spell to mask their location and only used the audio block sparingly. She needed MODA to think they truly were on vacation. But she had to give Mo some silent thanks—they were the only ones viewing the Crown Jewels early. When they emerged from the castle into the light of the courtyard, a line of several hundred people snaked in front of them, waiting for their turn.
Yumi was keen to see the Tower’s ravens, so they wandered in that direction. While Yumi took photos of the caged birds, Aida’s phone buzzed.Luciano.
Leaving Yumi to her photos, she stepped away from the path and out of the way of passersby. After activating Hephaestus’s privacy spell, she slid in her earbuds and answered the call, looking around to make sure she wasn’t being watched. Her heart skipped a beat when his face appeared on her screen.
“It’s good to see you. Were you able to find anything out from the beekeeper?” she asked in a low voice.
“A little,” he said. “While Dolores was her main contact, she said all the contracts she signed were from a firm in London, which she found odd.”
“If the firm is in London, that’s another sign that our database is too.” She didn’t want to say Pandora’s name aloud.
“The beekeeper also told me MODA paid an extravagant fee to close off the garden so I was free to conduct my research—a fee that the garden couldn’t turn down.”
