17. Artemis
ARTEMIS
The flight to Scotland was nothing like the flight to Iceland.
Arthur had adjusted everything.
The wind broke around us instead of against me. The pace remained smooth, never sharp, never jarring. He had shifted his flight path to avoid colder currents, and at some point, I realized I was genuinely warm and not just tolerating the cold.
Scotland unfolded like a secret meant to be kept.
Green layered over green, hills rolling into one another.
Dark water cut through the land in long, shining ribbons.
Stone ruins clung to cliffs like they had grown there rather than been built.
Mist hung low, softening everything, turning distance into something intimate.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I leaned forward slightly, bracing myself against Arthur’s back, not because I needed to but because it grounded me. The air was clean, almost medicinal, undoing damage I hadn’t realized I was carrying.
I told myself, firmly, to pay attention.
This was the point. The research. The reason I was here. Not the dragon. Not the man. The mission.
I needed to stay clear-headed. I had spent too much of my life being the person who adjusted, who accommodated, who became easy to manage so others did not have to worry. I was not going to do that here. I was here to contribute.
And yet.
My mind drifted anyway.
I’d woken up in Arthur’s arms. With him next to me, my body had gone quiet without effort. His presence had felt inevitable rather than intrusive. When I’d brushed my finger over the mark on his wrist, his entire body had reacted like that contact mattered.
We’d come so close to kissing.
That was the dangerous thought.
He had said, plainly, that he did not have time for romance. I believed him. I respected it. And yet my body seemed to be operating on a different set of data entirely.
Even Caliban had thought we were about to kiss.
That was what bothered me most.
Caliban didn’t seem the sort to misread situations, which meant either something had been there, or I was projecting so aggressively I had summoned a supernatural being about it.
Neither option was ideal.
I focused on the view again.
A dark, glassy loch appeared below us, framed by ancient hills. This land had watched people come and go, and it held stories layered upon stories.
I took a slow breath and let the air fill my lungs.
This was real.
This was happening.
Whatever I felt for Arthur, whatever confusion or yearning or inconvenient attachment was trying to form…
it didn’t get to overshadow this. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I had written more in two days than I had in years.
I had pages of notes and observations that I would not have made if I had stayed home.
A story was forming in my mind that I knew I would share with the world and I could not wait. And I had Arthur to thank for that.
I was alive in a way that felt like a gift.
This adventure was enough.
I anchored my attention to the land rising beneath us and committed to the thing I had come here to do.
Whatever else might be unfolding could wait.
For now, it was enough to fly.
The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh looked like a place that had never quite decided what century it belonged to.
Stone walls darkened by age rose up from a narrow street, ivy clinging to the edges like it had been there long enough to claim squatter’s rights.
The windows were tall and narrow, the glass warped just enough to make the outside world feel theoretical.
The light that filtered inside had the dust motes dancing in the air.
I stopped just inside the door without meaning to. The air was warm and dry, layered with the faint bite of old bindings and something metallic that reminded me of typewriter keys. The smell soothed me, and told me I was exactly where I belonged.
“Oh,” I said softly.
Arthur glanced at me. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Something is very right.”
Nothing was rushed here. Nothing was loud. Even the floorboards seemed to cooperate.
This was a place built to protect thought.
I moved farther inside, slower now, almost careful.
Original desks sat behind low barriers, scarred and uneven, their surfaces worn smooth where hands had rested for years.
Ink stains bloomed dark across blotters.
Pressed flowers lay tucked into notebooks like secrets that should have been long forgotten.
This was my holy ground.
“I would have been very productive here,” I said.
Arthur’s mouth curved slightly. “You sound disappointed you weren’t.”
“I’m devastated,” I said. “This place understands me.”
That earned me a smile.
The museum was a maze of small rooms stitched together with narrow hallways.
I drifted from display to display, only aware of Arthur because my body tracked him automatically. He read plaques with serious focus. I read handwriting. We moved in a quiet orbit, occasionally bumping shoulders, exchanging dry commentary under our breath.
I registered him the way I registered exits. Just a constant background awareness, my nervous system quietly noting where he was in relation to me at all times and deciding, without asking, that this was acceptable.
“That man wrote seventeen drafts of the same poem,” I murmured, reading a placard.
Arthur leaned closer. “Was it good?”
“No,” I said, “he could have written a hundred drafts, and it would still be like a stake to the brain.”
We were deep in a back corner when Arthur slowed, a thoughtful expression on his face. “This way,” he murmured.
I followed him into what looked like an afterthought of a room. No desk. No spotlight. Just a large, old map mounted on the wall, its edges curled, its surface faded with age. It detailed the known world, coastlines rendered lovingly, names written in precise script.
Frowning, Arthur tilted his head. “The air moves differently here.”
“You can… feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you can.”
He stepped closer to the wall, fingers hovering near the stone beside the map. I watched his focus narrow, the way it did when he was solving something internally.
“There’s a hidden passage here,” he said.
Arthur pressed against the stone, and the wall gave way with a low, grinding sound that made my heart kick. A narrow opening revealed itself, descending into darkness.
“Well,” I said. “That’s equally disturbing and fascinating.”
We went down anyway.
Arthur closed the passage enough so anyone walking past wouldn’t notice, but left a wedge so we could open it from the inside.
The stairs were worn smooth, their stone edges rounded by centuries of use. They spiraled downward in a tight coil, the walls opening up into an unexpectedly large cavern.
I misjudged the last step.
My foot slid, my balance tipped, and for one humiliating second, I was acutely aware of gravity’s personal vendetta against me. Arthur caught me quickly, as if he had anticipated this exact betrayal.
Fartie motherfucking Artie. At it again.
Arthur didn’t comment or tease, and as soon as I’d regained my balance, he let go of me.
Clearing my throat, I continued down.
The space at the bottom seemed much older than the building above it. The room was enormous, yet at the same time, it made me claustrophobic. There was no furniture to speak of, no attempts at making the place comfortable.
Maps covered the walls, layered so densely that coastlines overlapped and bled into one another.
Some were parchment. Some vellum. Some so paper-thin that they had gone nearly translucent with time.
Notes were pinned directly into stone, corners curling, ink faded but legible.
Symbols appeared wherever there was space: scratched, etched, painted on.
It was an ancient conspiracy board, meticulously curated by people who had expected to be interrupted by history and had prepared anyway.
I stepped forward slowly, careful where I placed my feet, afraid of disturbing something important even though everything here had already survived centuries.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
Arthur had stopped near the center of the room, his attention fixed on a symbol carved directly into the stone wall.
“My ancestor was here,” he said with complete certainty.
I moved to the opposite wall, drawn not to the symbols but to the writing. The margins were crowded with notes. References pointed to other pages. Corrections layered carefully instead of erased.
“This was written by an academic. Percy’s ancestor, probably,” I muttered.
Arthur nodded once. “My and Percy’s ancestors worked together at some point, and there are gaps in both our histories. It’s not happenstance.”
We stood there, the shape of it settling in. Two different kinds of minds occupying the same space for a reason that had demanded secrecy and patience.
I found a journal opened to a marked page.
“Latin,” I said.
Arthur lifted another nearly identical book from a nearby shelf. “Draconic.”
We read at the same time.
“Ab profundis ad astra,” I said.
“Through the depths to the stars,” Arthur said.
The floor clicked.
We froze.
A section beneath the central map slid open, revealing a recessed compartment. Inside sat a puzzle box. Dark wood reinforced with metal, its surface etched with a dragon motif that wrapped around the sides.
“Oh,” I said on an awed breath. “I like this.”
The top of the box was divided into six shifting panels. The upper three showed a dragon flying over an ocean beneath different skies—bright daylight, twilight, and night. The lower three were all ocean, but the waves didn’t align.
Arthur frowned. “It doesn’t match.”
“It’s not supposed to.”
The phrase he’d translated echoed in my mind. Through the depths to the stars.
“They’re wrong,” I said. “The dragons aren’t meant to be above the water.”
Arthur’s eyes snapped to mine. “They go under.”
We adjusted the panels together, aligning the dragons beneath the waves instead of the sky. The box emitted a low hum, then opened with a clean click.
Inside lay an old compass. Its needle trembled slightly, refusing to point north.
Arthur exhaled. “That’s not normal.”
I took my phone out and started snapping pictures. With my hands trembling from the excitement, I had to take a bunch to get some that weren’t blurry, then I sent them to Percy. I closed the box and slipped it into my bag.
My heart was racing.
“This,” I said quietly, “is why we’re here.”
Arthur looked at me, something warm and unmistakably proud in his gaze.
“Yes,” he said.
I turned back toward the journals, already mentally reorganizing the room into categories I could manage, and cross-referencing by ink color and margin density.
I was mid-reach, fingers hovering over a page that referenced something I desperately wanted to understand, when the pressure in the room changed.
Arthur went still, and my attention snapped to him. Every line of his body tightened, his focus dragging away from the walls and locking on the stairs.
“Artemis.” My name had barely left his lips when two massive shapes came barreling down the stairwell.
Dragons.
Their bodies expanded, bones snapping into new shapes, skin hardening into dark scaled armor that swallowed the light instead of reflecting it. Wings slammed outward, shredding what remained of the doorway. Their forms were lean, built for speed.
Everything about them screamed intent. No hesitation. No warning display. This was not about presence. It was about efficiency.
“Assassins.” Arthur’s voice echoed through my mind.
He moved before my brain caught up, putting himself between me and the assassins.
He shifted, power rolling off him in heavy waves that made the symbols on the walls vibrate.
In a flash, he was on the first attacker, claws tearing flesh as he hurled the other dragon.
Heat surged outward as he struck, claws tearing into the first attacker and hurling him back hard enough to crater the stone behind him.
The impact shook through my feet, my ribs. My brain lagged behind my body, still trying to catch up to the fact that this was real and happening to me.
The second dragon didn’t pause.
A metal-tipped chain whipped through the room and wrapped around Arthur’s side, glowing faintly as it tightened. Something slammed into him with brutal force, driving him sideways.
The room became chaos.
Maps ripped free from the walls. Pages scattered in wild arcs. A blade clipped a journal and sliced it clean in half.
I screamed at that, which was wildly unhelpful but deeply sincere.
The sound tore out of me before I could stop it. Pure outrage. Something feral and offended at the idea of history being destroyed in front of me.
I dropped to the floor as Arthur swung again, fire ripping past me close enough to lift my hair. Stone fractured. The ceiling groaned in protest. One assassin crashed down hard, but the other was already moving again, too fast.
Arthur staggered a step.
My stomach dropped. My brain rejected it outright. Arthur adjusted. Arthur adapted. The idea that he could falter didn’t fit inside my head.
“No,” I said, words tumbling too fast. “No, no, no.”
He kept fighting, though.
He took another strike meant for me without turning, fury flashing across his face as he drove the attacker back again. But the assassins were coordinated. They boxed him in, cutting off space, forcing him to defend instead of attack.
This was another execution attempt.
Someone had decided this should end with Arthur’s body on the floor and everything he knew buried with him.
The room shuddered as one of the dragons slammed into a wall. Dust rained down as a shelf collapsed. I scrambled backward, heart pounding, hands shaking, mind racing through options that all ended the same way.
Arthur was bleeding.
Endure, and keep yourselves for days of happiness.
I held on to the line from Homer like a rule and a prayer.
“Keep moving,” Arthur said inside my head, not looking at me. “Stay behind me.”
I did, because I trusted him, and the alternative made my chest seize so hard I thought it might split.
The assassin lunged again.
Arthur met him head-on.
The impact rocked the chamber, sending cracks racing along the walls. The ancient den of secrets began to tear itself apart around us, history burning and breaking under the strain.
But Arthur was still standing.
And then the second assassin rose behind him.
I saw it before he did. The attacker moved like this was already over and Arthur just hadn’t accepted it yet.
I opened my mouth to shout.
The world narrowed to that moment.