Chapter 30 #2
Rush had already vanished back inside the building, and I tried to school my expression into disinterest as we made our way down the path and through the doors.
As soon as I entered the Great Hall, where light meals were served during school holidays, my stomach knotted at the buzz of tension in the air.
A group had gathered around Rush, who sat at a round table near the middle of the room.
Luther was already back from break, and he had one arm draped around a red-haired third year from Diamond, the other pointing at something on the table.
A newspaper.
Vanya tensed beside me, her brow furrowing. “What is it?” she asked, drawing us both into the circle around Rush.
“Someone broke into the duke’s summer home,” announced a pretty blond, also from House Diamond. “Ransacked the place and set fire to it.”
My mouth hung open as I stared at Rush’s profile, still bent over the newspaper.
His gaze lifted, taking in the crowd, finding me, briefly.
His lips curled and his head tilted just slightly, the better to tip his hair out of his eyes.
With both arms, he reached back and grabbed the chairs on either side of him, his shirt splaying open at his collar.
“House was empty. Nothing to worry about,” he said, playing the role well. Avoiding my gaze well, too.
The blond sat down at his table, propped her chin on her hands, and stared at him. “Is it true your father is going to station men here to protect you?”
I stiffened visibly, then pretended to have an itch behind my neck.
Rush relaxed into a slouch. “No one is after me.”
A few minutes later, Headmaster Vaughan arrived and the crowd dispersed, leaving Vanya and me shuffling to find a table.
Vanya chose a table where the only seat left put Rush in my direct line of sight.
It was a physical struggle not to glance at him throughout the meal.
But when I did, his eyes easily found mine.
He was chatting with Luther, who was cramming potatoes in his mouth and didn’t notice that Rush’s attention had drifted.
For a moment, boldly, I held his gaze.
Then I was laughing again as Vanya described to Mabel the experience of sliding down a mountain on skis.
After dinner, Headmaster Vaughan stood to make an announcement.
The hall quieted.
“I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. In a few days, classes will resume, and I wish to inform you of a change you will notice on school grounds.” His voice sounded clipped, less jovial than usual.
“Due to an increase in violence in the city, some of the parents have expressed a desire to see more security on campus.”
My eyes shot to Vanya, who was staring up at Vaughan with raised brows.
“Starting tomorrow, there will be guards placed at all entry points into the school, including the front courtyard and the lair.”
He dismissed us, and as I pushed my chair in, I spotted Rush storming from the Great Hall.
After dinner, I wandered back to the lair. Vanya was still sitting in the Great Hall, engrossed in a game of spades with some students from Diamond and Ruby. I wasn’t in the mood for cards, which felt so pointless when there were things like magic and death plaguing my mind.
Myth, sensing my distress, let out a low moan as I slid his den door open.
For a moment, I peered in at him, trying to remember what it had felt like only a matter of months ago when I’d slide the doors open in the duke’s lair, staring in at the dragons that I believed lived in a world apart, a world I could never truly enter.
Then I stepped into the den with my dragon.
“Thought I might find you here,” came a familiar voice behind me.
I whirled around, one hand braced on the door, the other on the wall, as Rush moseyed down the aisle of the lair, hands in his pockets. My heart flipped upside down.
He stepped right to the door, to me, gave the smallest breath of a laugh, and said, “Miss me?”
“Like a sore tooth.” Scowling at him to keep from smiling, I stepped backward as he marched into the dimly lit space. I hadn’t brought a lamp, and the only light spilled in from the hall outside and the open skylight above, where stars and a winter moon shone.
“You set your house on fire?” I asked, hopeful that my voice sounded calm and unaffected by his sudden appearance.
“It was the only way to cover up the evidence.” He nodded at Myth.
I stopped beside Myth, his warm scales pressing gently against me as he breathed in and out. I’d underestimated Rush, what he would do to keep this a secret. My chin dropped in a quick nod.
“Don’t worry, the whole house didn’t burn.
I set it in the drawing room, where my father’s safe is and, conveniently, adjacent to the wall where Myth’s fire caught.
The firemen watch those neighborhoods closely in the winter, and they arrived in time to put it out, saving the rest of the house.
” He shrugged. “Not that it matters to me. What?” he asked at my scoff.
“You have so much that you can burn an entire house and say it doesn’t matter.”
His face fell, the hint of a smile hardening into a flat line. “Now the authorities can say it was a thief who knew where the safe was, couldn’t get into it, and so set fire to the place instead. It covers our tracks and buys us some time.”
His words tugged at a question I’d been mulling over.
“But whoever sent that man knows your arson trick was a cover-up. There are people out there who know what happened.” I stroked Myth’s long neck.
He was growing by the week, and I had to reach higher now to touch his face when he was propped on his front legs like this.
Rush nodded. “And the only thing we have going for us is that those people, the Corzos, are likely the ones after my father. At least that’s the only thing that makes sense. They won’t be the ones telling my father what happened.”
A beat of silence passed.
I glanced at his hands, still in his pockets. “So, did you get some more stones?”
His lips tilted up in a sly grin. Withdrawing a fist from one pocket, he uncurled his fingers. In his palm lay a small pile of tiny glittering jewels.
A gasp hissed through my lips. “All of those were in the spines of books?”
“Nope.” His fingers curled around them once more. “Some of them I took from my mother’s jewel collection in our family vault at the estate.”
“Robbing your own dead mother?”
He cringed. “You have such a way with words, Mireaux.” One eye peeked at me over his scrunched mouth.
“You’re forgetting she’s the one who led us to the gems in the first place.
I just want to see if all gemstones have magic, or only some.
” He stepped forward, almost skipping with excitement.
“Because if it’s only some, then that means people put it there, and if people put magic in gemstones—”
“We can too.”
His grin was contagious. “I was going to say magic can be transmuted into objects, but you went and jumped ahead.” When he stepped closer, it made my skin hot, but I was already almost leaning against Myth. “Ambitious. I like that,” he muttered.
I had to remind myself that he knew the truths about me that could ruin me. And yet he was giving me a dangerous smile that said he didn’t care what my darkest secrets were.
Suddenly, my shoulders fell. “With guards here, how will we test Myth’s flame?”
He picked up a single ruby and held it up to his face. “I guess we’ll have to get creative.”
I squinted at the ruby as it caught the orange light streaming in from the hall and the pale blue light falling in from above. It took me a moment to realize Rush wasn’t staring at the stone in his fingers anymore—his gaze had shifted to me.
I plucked the ruby from his hands, turning to face Myth to hide my blush.
“It’s not wise to let you have this,” I said to Myth, who was sniffing at the stone in my fingers.
“Considering we don’t know what it does.
” Myth shifted, rising to a standing position, his nostrils flaring as he peered, transfixed, at the ruby.
“I wish you could tell me what it does.”
Rush’s shoulder brushed mine as he stepped beside me. “Yeah, now is when that guidebook would be nice.”
My arm drooped down to my side, my skin so close to his I could feel a small buzzing warmth between us. “What does your mother’s journal say?”
He withdrew the journal from the inside pocket of his blazer.
Tapping the cover with his fingers, he said, “Her notes are incomplete. She knew my father was winning races by cheating, but she couldn’t figure out how.
She thought it was because of something they were giving the dragons, but they always passed every blood test.” He ran his thumb down the pages almost like a caress.
“She hated the races. Said they were what had ruined my father. I think she was always afraid he’d hurt one of us, the way he did—” He swallowed.
“To her, finding out the truth about the races became a passion—at least that’s how the notes read.
This is part diary, part research project.
Most of it, at least at the start, is her daily entries, starting the year she…
the year she passed. As the year goes on, the entries turn more to frantically scribbled notes, passing ideas, and, at the end, statements written directly to me. ”
His fingers had grown still, both hands clutching the journal like it was a sacred item.
The small sliver of space burned between us, but I felt no more able to cross it than a canoe attempting to cross an ocean without a paddle.
He swallowed. “For a time, she helped my father run one of his businesses, importing Avencian glass. It’s mostly a hobby, really, not a money maker.
But that’s what tipped her off that it was likely more than just glass.
My father doesn't do anything without a reason. She found out that one crate of glass always went missing. From there, she tracked down one of the missing crates, and in it, the magical ointment I showed you.”
My eyes widened.
“At that point, she realized he was dealing in magic. That was only a month before she died, and she was already ill. The magical ointment didn’t work for her.” His face fell. “The last thing she discovered was the gems, I think. But she never pieced it all together.”
“When…” I cleared my throat. “When did she…?”
“Ten years ago.”
“Oh.” I remembered reading about the duke’s wife’s death, but that was only a year or two ago.
Reading my pinched brow, he added, “That was his second wife. She died, too. But hers was a freak accident on a fox hunt.”
Two wives, both dead? My brows lifted in surprise.
But then I quickly turned away, avoiding eye contact with Rush.
He had lost his mother, his first dragon, and a brother he’d never known.
The headlines I’d read about him, all the wild nights and embarrassing mishaps with the law, suddenly struck me as sad.
For years, I’d thought of him as spoiled and ridiculous, but now I knew better.
Spoiled in the material sense, maybe, but he’d lost so much too.
And he lived with a man he knew could kill his own flesh and blood.
I wasn’t sure what that would do to someone.
Part of me wondered if Rush Covington had become the wayward son because he figured it was better to leave his father in constant disapproval than to ever try to gain his love in the first place.
Biting my lip, I looked back at Rush. Now his dreams of becoming a pirate and sailing far, far away didn’t sound so strange.
He looked down at the journal again. “My mother left me this, but she also left explicit instructions with the bank not to alert me to its existence until I turned eighteen, probably because she knew how dangerous this was and how careless I was as a child. Always leaving my things all over the house.” His voice softened to a raspy whisper.
“It was like she’d reached out from the grave when I got this. ”
After the silence stretched a little too long, I said, “So, we don’t have a guidebook. But what about the books you destroyed to get those gems? What did you find in them?”
“You think I’ve read that many books in a week?” He elbowed me, the heaviness of the moment fading. “You have too much faith in me.”
I exhaled. “Then we’ll start there.”