17
I didn’t bother texting Val this time. I called her. If that meant dragging her out of the library and whichever book she was absorbed in, so be it.
‘Yes?’ she said, after three rings. The word had a dangerous edge to it.
‘Valentine Argentein,’ I said.
‘Ves! You found him?’
‘Val, you are not going to believe this.’
While Jay nipped back into the academy to return the painting — my having reluctantly let it go — I rushed through an only slightly garbled account of everything we had just experienced.
‘Slow down,’ said Val more than once, and I tried, but my heart was galloping and my fingers were zapping with magick and I was fit to burst with excitement.
‘She’s a painting,’ Val said at one point. ‘A painting? She, Cicily Werewode, is a painting? Ves, have you gone off your rocker
