Chapter 10

Chapter

Ten

‘ A thair deliberately sent her here when you were meeting him. He could have easily given you the message himself, but he ordered that brownie to come here so she could snoop around.’ Hugo looked furious, as if her incursion were his own fault. His spine was rigid as he paced the length of the Bone Zone. ‘I should have expected something like this – I should have been prepared.’

‘You weren’t here, dear,’ Miriam murmured. ‘If anyone should have been better prepared, it’s the people who stayed behind in the castle.’

Several of the Primes looked put out at her words. ‘She’s the size of my fucking thumb,’ Mark growled. ‘She’s hardly easy to detect.’

‘Exactly,’ Miriam said, realising her mistake when she saw Mark’s expression. ‘That’s why Athair sent her, and why she managed to stay hidden when we searched for hours last night.’

They were blaming each other, but there was only one reason Athair had forced Eloise to break into Pemberville Castle and that reason was me. Hunger for a soothing dose of spider’s silk scratched at my insides but I pushed it away as best as I could. ‘This is my fault,’ I said. ‘None of this would be happening if it weren’t for me. I’ll get my things and head over to the Assigney mansion. Athair will stop bothering you if I stay away.’

Hugo stopped pacing and swung towards me. ‘No.’ The force behind the single syllable was enough to make me shiver.

I tried to ignore my churning nausea. ‘The lives of everyone in this room are at risk because of your association with me.’

He glared at me. ‘In that case we both leave here,’ he said. ‘We are in this together.’

‘This is your home, Hugo.’

‘My home is wherever you are,’ he returned instantly. ‘We belong together.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘Nobody – not even your birth father – will change that. I don’t care what he does.’

‘You’re not going anywhere without me,’ Otis said, the anger in his expression almost matching Hugo’s.

‘I was going to say that!’ Hester snapped.

‘Well, I said it first. So there.’

She opened her mouth to yell at him but Miriam cleared her throat and interrupted. ‘You’re forgetting the most important point.’ She sounded genuinely irritated.

I turned to her in surprise. She wasn’t the only Prime who was looking pissed off.

Slim moved next to her. ‘Do you really think that this is the first time our lives have been in danger?’ he asked.

Becky nodded vigorously. ‘We risk our lives every time we go out on a treasure hunt.’

‘We choose to take that risk,’ Rizwan said.

Miriam smiled. ‘We enjoy taking that risk.’

‘And we are family,’ Mark added, giving me a hard look. ‘We are all family.’ Suddenly there was a very large and very painful lump in my throat.

‘Besides,’ Rizwan said, ‘don’t you think that Athair wants you to leave? He wants to separate you from us so you’ll be more vulnerable. He’s manipulating everything.’

I realised that he might have a point. I reached for Hugo’s hand, needing his warm, reassuring touch. ‘If any of you get hurt…’

‘We know what we’re doing,’ Becky said. ‘And we don’t need you to make our choices for us.’

I pressed my lips together until I’d composed myself. ‘I love you guys,’ I whispered.

There was an array of warm smiles in response. ‘We love you too, Daisy,’ Becky responded.

The more logical part of my brain started to take over. Fight, not flight, I told myself. That was what I needed to do. Then I corrected myself: that was what we needed to do.

‘I doubt Athair sent Eloise here to snoop,’ I said shakily. ‘He didn’t need to do that. He sent her here to do what you said, to separate me from you and to sow dissent between us.’

I extended my hand towards the group, acknowledging what had just happened between us, then nodded at the brownies who had resolutely turned their backs on each other. ‘He also wanted to prove that he could get to us whenever he wants. Perhaps he was hedging his bets in case I cut dinner short last night. Everything Athair does is about power and control.’

There were several nods of agreement.

‘Whether she’s under his control unwillingly or not, that brownie will describe everything she saw here to him,’ Rizwan pointed out.

Becky twisted a length of her hair in her fingertips. ‘There was nothing lying around that Eloise had access to. She won’t have learned any state secrets.’ She pointed to the enlarged photographs on display around the room. ‘She won’t have seen any of these. The ward surrounding this room was in place long before Rizwan printed those out.’

‘But she can tell Athair that this room is warded,’ Hugo muttered. ‘He’ll assume we have something to hide.’

‘And that means he’ll try to get inside the castle again,’ Mark said. ‘Either with that damned brownie or with some other poor creature he’s enslaved.’

I cleared my throat. ‘So we let him.’

Everyone turned to me. Hugo raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Let him?’

‘We don’t secure the castle – after all, the vampires will immediately report anything we do. Wasting time by creating a ward to cover the entire castle will only confirm Athair’s suspicion that we have something to hide.’ I was warming to my subject. ‘We get rid of the ward around this room as well. Once we’ve removed all evidence of Hugo’s visit to Culcreuch, of course.’

Hugo’s anger was diminishing. He winked and gave a self-congratulatory bow.

My smile widened. ‘If Athair wants to come here, we let him. We don’t allow him to feed off our fear, not even for a second. And we wrongfoot him whenever we can while working on ways to undermine his power.’

‘That’s easier said than done, my dear,’ Miriam said mildly.

I nodded, but I wasn’t finished. ‘The message,’ I said to Hugo. ‘You understood it, or at least part of it?’

‘I think so,’ he admitted. ‘Eloise said“ They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure, gold under gravel, gone to earth, as useless to men now as it ever was”. It’s from Beowulf .’

‘The old poem?’ I asked.

‘A modern-day translation of it,’ he said. ‘It was written over a thousand years ago.’

‘Okay. Does anyone know what treasure it refers to? That’s obviously what Athair wants us to focus on.’

Every single Prime nodded; clearly it was only Hester, Otis and me who didn’t know.

‘The Staffordshire Hoard,’ Hugo explained. ‘It was dug up around fifteen years ago. It’s the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metal work ever discovered. The items were mostly military with very little magic attached, but even so it was an incredibly significant find.’

There was a faint fizz in my veins. ‘Staffordshire?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

I glanced at the photo of the enlarged map. ‘Parts of Birmingham are in Staffordshire. Where exactly was this hoard found?’

‘In a small village near Lichfield,’ Slim said. His eyes also travelled to the map.

I pointed at the marker that had been labelled number one. ‘There?’

‘There.’ He inhaled. ‘Right there. I should have made the connection earlier.’

‘Eloise said not all the gold was found.’ Hugo scratched his jaw. ‘She said it twice.’

Miriam frowned. ‘Once the hoard was uncovered, the area was scoured for signs of more. There’s no chance anything was missed.’

‘She also said,’ Hugo added, ‘that some of it had already been found and moved elsewhere.’

‘There’s never been any suggestion that was the case,’ Mark said. Hugo only shrugged.

‘What about the biblical quote she mentioned?’ I tried to remember it. ‘ Surge Domine …’ My voice trailed off. ‘Something about the Lord rising up and enemies scattering?’

Hester filled it in. ‘ Surge Domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua.’

I blinked at her in surprise. ‘I know my Latin. So what?’ she said sourly.

Mark flipped open the nearest laptop, tapped the keys then sucked in a breath. ‘One of the items found at the Staffordshire hoard was inscribed with that very quotation.’

The fizz in my blood intensified. Everyone else simply looked confused.

‘Athair wants you to go and look more closely at the Staffordshire Hoard because there are some items that haven’t been located yet,’ Becky said.

‘Seems that way,’ I answered.

Hugo eyed me. ‘He knows you like hunting for treasure so he’s providing you with a hunt.’ He glanced at the map. ‘Thirty-two treasure hunts, in fact.’

I smiled broadly. ‘Yep.’

Miriam nodded. ‘He wants to please you, to deepen your relationship and prove that you’ll benefit from a continued association with him. Complete the first treasure hunt and he’ll provide details for the second, and so on. He’s mapped it all out.’

‘Literally,’ Hugo murmured.

‘We should ignore him, right?’ Slim asked. ‘His end game is to make Daisy a fiend. We don’t want to do anything that might play into that.’

‘Definitely,’ Otis agreed. ‘And Daisy doesn’t want to make him think he’s controlling her, not even for a second. There’s plenty more treasure to be found. We don’t have to go searching for the stuff that Athair shows us.’

‘That’s where you’re all wrong,’ I said.

Rizwan wrinkled his nose. ‘You want to go looking for Athair’s treasure? Really?’

I felt Hugo’s eyes on me, watchful and intense. ‘What is it, Daisy?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘Take a step back and look at the map again,’ I said. ‘There are thirty-two spots all over Britain. Presumably each one will lead us to treasure of some sort. Athair’s been around long enough – he’s bound to know where a lot of stuff is buried. Maybe he even buried some of it himself.’

‘So?’

‘Every corner of the British Isles is covered by Athair’s marks apart from one.’ It had taken me a long time to work out what was peculiar about the map but it seemed glaringly obvious once I’d seen it. We weren’t looking for what was on the map, we were looking for what wasn’t on it.

The others squinted at the map until, one by one, they saw the same as me. ‘There’s nothing marked in either Lincolnshire or North Norfolk,’ Rizwan said. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘And yet,’ Mark murmured, ‘those areas are amongst the most popular for metal detectorists because they often contain the most treasure.’

‘There’s a reason why lots of treasure is found there,’ Hugo said. ‘The Vikings, the Romans, the Normans, the English Civil War – those places are steeped in history.’ He glanced at the Primes. ‘How many times have we been to Lincolnshire?’

‘Half a dozen at least,’ Slim said.

Hester flitted up to the map. ‘It might be a coincidence.’

I nodded. ‘That’s always possible. But if this map is what we think it is, then Athair wants to send me – to send us – all over the country. It’s not that long since we found that bejewelled dagger and you set up that hunt because you wanted to keep me busy.’ I pointed at the map. ‘I reckon this is the same. Athair is providing us with work that he thinks will endear me to him, but he also wants to control what that work is and where we go. And he doesn’t want us to go to Lincolnshire.’

Otis frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Could there be treasure there that he doesn’t want us to find?’ Becky mused.

‘I don’t know that either.’ I paused. ‘But it’s worth investigating.’

Otis still looked doubtful.

‘I’d say so.’ Hugo flashed his dimple. ‘We can be in Lincolnshire by nightfall.’

Mark folded his arms. ‘I hate to be the ghost at this party, but we don’t know where to go or what to look for. That’s a vast area to cover – it’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack when we don’t know what a needle looks like.’

I grinned. ‘That’s why we don’t go there. We do what Athair wants. Hugo, the brownies and I will investigate the Staffordshire Hoard and he’ll believe he has us under his thumb. We’ll go on our own because then we’re deliberately separating ourselves from the rest of you to keep you safe. You lot stay here under the watchful eye of those bastard vampires outside. In the meantime, you find what we should really be looking for.’ I stepped up to the map and waved my hand. ‘It will be in the one place where Athair doesn’t want us to go.’