Chapter 4
Four
The pantry turned out to hold bread and cold chicken, as well as butter and plum preserves, though the previous difficulties with shadowy invaders meant that there was no more tea.
“You have to have another teapot somewhere,” said Mina.
“Have I?”
“For company, at least.” Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have suggested that she was “company” for a peer—even now, she could feel her mother’s hand on the back of her head—but this night had been anything but ordinary.
“It may surprise you to learn, Miss Seymour, that I don’t often entertain here.”
“Ah,” she said, thinking of the dark rooms and the things that had chased her through them. No, she wasn’t very surprised.
Mina drank water instead, tried not to let her hands shake while she held the glass, and eyed the food.
Half-remembered fairy tales and a few of the myths she’d heard while working with Professor Carter made her hesitate, thinking of fairy food and drinks that made you sleep for years, but this was London, MacAlasdair employed a cook, and she’d never heard of anyone, in any story, enchanting cold chicken or plum preserves.
Any decent spirit would probably snicker into its airy sleeves at the idea.
She took a slice of bread and buttered it, keeping her eyes on MacAlasdair as much as she could manage without buttering her cuffs by mistake.
“Well,” she said, when the silence grew so that she could no longer bear it, “I can’t tell you very much, I’m sure.”
“No, I’d imagine not,” said MacAlasdair, and the uncertainty in his voice made him seem slightly less remote and sinister. “I was going to wait until you’d had a chance to eat.”
“Suspense doesn’t make me very hungry,” said Mina, but she took a bite of her bread anyhow. Eating was only sensible, considering the circumstances.
Chewing was an effort, swallowing a worse one, but after the first few bites, her body remembered itself and demanded more. The food did help. It was solid and normal and made her feel grounded again, not tossed about on uncanny events like a leaf in the wind.
“You’ll have to stay here,” said MacAlasdair. “For the time being, that is.”
Atrocious timing. Atrocious man. Mina almost inhaled a morsel of bread, succumbed to a brief but undignified coughing fit, and got herself under control in time to wave MacAlasdair away.
As a result, the first word she got out bore no resemblance, in either form or tone, to the icily proper “I beg your pardon?” that a lady would have used under similar circumstances.
“What?” Her voice practically shattered glass.
“I don’t mean anything…” MacAlasdair coughed indicatively. “I’ve a cook and a housekeeper, Miss Seymour, and a number of maids.”
“I’m happy for you,” said Mina. “Are you in the habit of keeping women prisoner, then? Or just anyone who wanders in here?”
MacAlasdair sighed. “Hardly. But the circumstances make it necessary.”
“What circumstances.”
“The things you’ve seen tonight.”
“And do you really think I’d tell anyone?
” Mina rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes. I hear the weather’s real pleasant at Colney ’atch this time of year, thank you so much.
” She heard her accent slip, stopped, and took a long breath, her hands tight fists at her sides.
More carefully, she went on. “Even if I did tell, which I’m not going to, who on Earth would believe me? ”
“Enough people,” MacAlasdair said, “to cause me considerable trouble.”
“One in specific?” she asked, picturing the shadow demons.
“That,” MacAlasdair said, leaning forward with narrowed eyes, “is none of your concern.”
Even human, he was a good bit larger than her. Mina suddenly couldn’t take her mind from that fact, nor from the tightness of his square jaw and the way his hands had clenched on the table. There was no poker here. The table itself might be an obstacle, but not for long.
Catching the look on her face, MacAlasdair sat back and dropped his hands to his sides. He closed his eyes. “You have my apologies,” he said roughly. “I didna’ mean to frighten you.”
“I’m fine,” Mina lied.
Opening his eyes, MacAlasdair looked at her dubiously, but said nothing.
Instead, he took a bite of his sandwich.
He’d devoured half of it while she blinked, it seemed, which made him far less intimidating as a gentleman and far more when she thought of his other form.
He chewed slowly and finally spread his hands.
“One hundred pounds,” he said. “I’ll draw up the check for you myself, once this is over. ”
Almost from the moment of his ultimatum, Mina had expected a bribe of some sort.
You couldn’t lock a girl in a dungeon these days, after all, and she’d hoped MacAlasdair wasn’t the blackmailing kind.
All the same, the sum was a jolt. One hundred pounds was four times what she made in a year, and MacAlasdair tossed it off as casually as if he were buying a pint of beer.
She could almost be angry about that—how much it meant to her and how little to him—but, she reminded herself, it would serve no purpose. The world was as it was.
Still, her voice was a little sharper than she’d meant when she answered. “How long will that be, pray? And what will I be doing in the meantime? You’d have to give people some reason I was here, and I don’t think you could pass me off as your ward, not to anyone with eyes or ears.”
“I—” He frowned for a second, dark eyebrows slanting together, before hitting on an idea. “You’d be my secretary, I suppose. I’m sure I can find something for you to type.”
“Or a threshold to guard?” Mina asked. “And what about Professor Carter? He needs my services—come to think of it, what about Professor Carter? Is he in any danger?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here if I thought he was,” MacAlasdair said stiffly. “I’ve given him what protections I can, and I assure you that they’re effective. As for your services, Carter will understand. He and I are acquainted.”
“Old friends, you said.”
“So I did.”
“How long is ‘the time being’?”
“Until I settle a certain matter. I shouldn’t think it’ll be more than a few months,” MacAlasdair said, and then his thin mouth twisted in dark amusement. “One way or another.”
The room around her was huge. The man across from her was large and wealthy and, well, a dragon. Scary didn’t half begin to cover it.
But a hundred pounds would set her up well; the dragon seemed to be at least something of a gentleman; and Mina Seymour had never let being scared stop her from doing anything before.
“All right,” Mina said. “I’ll take your offer. With three conditions.”
“I should have known,” said MacAlasdair. “What do you have in mind?”
“First of all, it’s a hundred a year. And I get the first hundred however long your business ends up taking.”
One corner of MacAlasdair’s mouth twitched. “Agreed.”
Briefly, Mina wondered if she should have asked for more.
Oh well. “Second, I want to talk with Professor Carter. I want to be sure he’ll have me back after this, and I want a good character from you.
If I get a bad reputation from living with you, I’ll have the devil’s own time finding another place, and that might happen no matter how many maids and cooks you’ve got. ”
“Strictly speaking, Miss Seymour, that’d be two conditions. But I’ll agree.”
“Third, I want you to tell me exactly what’s going on here.
” That banished MacAlasdair’s incipient smile.
Before he could say anything, Mina folded her arms across her chest and went on.
“I’ve a right to know why I’m risking my good name and my career, and maybe my life.
And with whom. I don’t need to know Crown secrets, but I want to know who you are, and what you are, and why someone’s sending shadow monsters after you. ”
“For my safety and your own,” MacAlasdair said, “the less you know—”
“The less I know, the more I might accidentally let slip. Or walk into. You’re paying to keep an eye on me so I don’t tell what I do know. There’s not much more you can do by keeping mum about the rest of it, I’d think. And I’m not staying here half-blind.”
Mina lifted her chin and did her best to look calm and immovable. MacAlasdair couldn’t know how fast her heart was going—unless dragons had spectacular hearing, which they might. She tried not to think about that.
Finally, MacAlasdair sighed again. “Very well,” he said, and Mina heard Cerberus as an unspoken echo to his words. “I should have guessed that you’d not make this easy.”