Chapter Thirty-four

ARCHER

The next morning, I checked Ollie's burn and found blisters were already forming. After giving him some more painkillers, I lent him another of my shirts that was big enough on him not to pull the dressing. Not that he was an invalid, precisely, but he was a couple of orders of magnitude less bouncy than usual, which put him on the same sort of bounce rating as a rubber ball. He was evidently feeling his injury more than he wanted to let me see.

Having established him on the sofa in the sitting room, I brought him breakfast on a tray, putting it across his knees.

"I feel like a king," he said imperiously, before making a quick dive for the egg that had fallen off the egg cup on the tilting tray.

"What are we going to do first?" he asked me after he'd cut his buttered bread into soldiers and was contentedly dipping them, one recruit at a time, into the yolk of his egg.

"I want to find out what Lillian knows about the bible, but I'm going to need you to stay here."

Ollie's face fell in disappointment.

"I don't want Mia coming downstairs to an empty house after last night," I explained.

"Oh, of course I'll be here for her," he said instantly.

I wasn't sure he'd have been quite so biddable if I'd told him my other reason, which was that I wanted him to rest and heal.

"I won't be long," I promised. It was all I could do to leave him and Mia for any time at all, even though I was confident that Chris wouldn't come back.

"Are you going to expel June, too?" he asked.

"They're both out. She was his first attempt to get the bible. She came here when she knew she wasn't allowed." June had also shamelessly taken advantage of Ollie's good nature, and my anger over that burned bright.

I could see Ollie's reluctance for me to impose such a severe punishment, even after what they'd done. He was too kind-hearted. He didn't understand what it meant to be the head of a family.

Before leaving, I fetched him some more tea and took the tray to the kitchen when he'd finished with it. I finally tore myself away, leaving him furtively scrubbing egg yolk out of the sofa cushions.

OLLIE

Archer was only gone for an hour. Time enough for me to pick up my phone to message Jack about five times and put it down again each time. I wanted to talk to him, though I wasn't sure what I could say. Even though Archer would hate his family business to be the subject of gossip, I wanted to tell Jack I was sitting here wearing Archer's clothes. I had to turn up the sleeves, but still. He'd given me his shirt to wear, and along with the terror and strangeness of last night, I wanted to share that with someone.

Before I could give into temptation, Mia came downstairs. She brought her breakfast into the sitting room, and as she ate, she questioned me further about the previous night. It gave me the chance to ask what she was doing back at the Court, when we'd thought she was safely at Lacey's.

"Lacey had really bad period pain, and she got snappy with it. She does that sometimes, and she knows it, so it made sense for me to leave and come home. Her mum dropped me off, but you and Archer were out, and I guess I was asleep by the time you came back because I didn't hear you."

Just as well, because there'd been some heavy groping and kissing on our way up the stairs, thinking we were alone in the house.

"I don't understand why Uncle Chris—"

The sitting room door opened, and I'd never been so thankful to be interrupted. I had no idea what had been wrong with Chris that led him to try to kill her brother and still less idea how to answer her questions.

"No luck with Lillian," Archer reported, dropping into his usual chair. "All she knows about the bible is that it's German and from the sixteenth century. She spent most of my visit complaining that I hadn't brought Ollie with me."

"Where did Chris get the idea he wanted the bible if not from Lillian?" I asked. "And when? You said they've not been here for years, yet suddenly they can't stay away."

"Short of interrogating Chris and June, I doubt we'll ever find out," Archer said. "I thought I'd try talking to Evelyn Berstow. Unlikely she'll know anything specific about the bible, but she might. "

He left us to make his call from the dining room. I was disappointed, but I supposed it was hardly etiquette for a discussion between the heads of two families to be listened to by junior members, whose only motive for being part of the conversation was nosiness.

He'd only just left us when Mia's phone sounded. She looked at me with a mixture of longing and guilt on her face. "Lacey wants me to go over," she said. "Will you be okay if I leave?"

"I don't think my arm's going to drop off because you're not here," I assured her. "Go have fun."

She flashed me a grin before shooting out of the room and racing out of the house. My hand twitched towards my phone, and I firmly brought it back onto my lap. I'd be the model of patience and wait for Archer to report back.

ARCHER

"Well? What did she have to say?" Ollie was bouncing with impatience.

"That was a very interesting call," I told him. "A lot of things are falling into place. D'you want a coffee?"

"I want to know what you talked about!"

"Come into the kitchen and I'll tell you while I make the coffee."

I didn't tell Ollie anything until the coffee was made and we were sitting opposite each other at the table. I didn't want to miss his reaction.

"I did the usual small talk first, telling her how good it had been to meet her at the moot before explaining I hoped she could help me with a specific question. In return, she asked me what we'd discussed at the moot."

Ollie's brows drew together. "What? Why?"

"So of course I told her that we'd agreed to speak at some point after the moot, when she was less pressured by other families. And then she sighed and said that she rather thought she owed me an apology."

Ollie's eyes were wide. "Why?"

"Because she'd taken a call from someone she thought was me a week ago."

"Chris," he breathed.

"Has to have been. She had no reason to suspect he wasn't who he said, and she answered his questions about the line of succession in the Talbot family."

Ollie was leaning breathlessly across the table. I moved his coffee mug before he could knock it over. "What does she know about it? Does she have proof who it is? What did—"

"She has no proof. What she has is an extremely personal letter sent by the mother of the twins to her sister, in which she was bemoaning the behaviour of the younger twin and wondering if she'd caused it by not loving him as much as his brother."

Ollie flinched, and I realised that cut close to home.

"The younger twin, Thomas, sounds like a psychopath. He killed baby animals as a child—as a human child, not in dragon form—and his mother said he had no compass when it came to right and wrong. So while that doesn't necessarily mean his claim was false—"

"It makes it more probable," Ollie concluded.

"The letter was written years before Thomas made his claim, so it's not as if she was providing an alibi."

Ollie sat back in his seat. "How did Chris get Evelyn's number?"

"I haven't given her number to anyone, so my guess is that June made up a tale to get it from her mother. Perhaps she said she'd mislaid it after I gave it to them or something like that."

Ollie's brow furrowed.

"June's mother is the head of the Smythes," I explained. Meaning she'd be likely to have come away from the moot with Evelyn's contact details.

"So Chris's headship claim has been disproved, more or less, but why was he so interested in the bible all of a sudden?"

"Now that's where it gets even more interesting."

Ollie's mouth opened as he stared at me. "You mean there's more?" he demanded indignantly.

"Yup. Sooooooo….." I dragged it out until I thought Ollie was going to reach across the table and thump me. "There's an often-repeated rumour in the papers Evelyn has that the Talbot family bible holds secrets. Valuable secrets about dragonkind. Evelyn, sadly, had no idea what they might be, but I'm guessing that didn't matter to Chris. Once she'd told him they were there, he wanted to get his hands on them regardless. Oh, and by the way, I think we might be having Evelyn Berstow to stay before much longer. She wants to see the bible for herself."

"But if there are any secrets, we can't read them. They're either in Latin or invisible ink."

"Which is where Evelyn earned my undying gratitude by giving me the number of the Mortimer red dragon. I mumbled something about going through Abimelech, and she informed me tartly that Rufus was his own dragon, not his grandfather's pawn." I frowned as I considered. "He was at the moot, apparently, but I don't recall seeing him."

"Oh no, Helen was definitely there," Ollie said.

"Not Helen. It's a grand son."

"Yeah, Helen of Troy."

I stared at him, unable to prevent a smile from dawning. It was impossible to be with Ollie for long and not smile. "I have no idea what you're talking about, yet somehow I'm at peace with that. Anyway, before I came to find you, I made another call."

He sat up straight in his chair. "To Helen?"

"To Rufus Mortimer. I offered to take the bible to him, but when he heard about the library, he said he'd come here, tomorrow. He's bringing his boyfriend with him. A human." I still hadn't wrapped my mind around that, but I guessed if you were a Mortimer and also a rare red dragon, normal rules didn't apply.

Ollie gaped at me, as stunned as I'd been. He eventually managed to close his mouth, only to say, "Well, bugger me sideways."

"Think I already have," I mused, and was treated to a full-wattage Ollie laugh.