Page 37 of The Last De Loughrey Dynasty

The tiny dress I was wearing did nothing to help the cold, and my teeth were chattering as I hugged myself.

“Did the necklace help?” Archer’s voice was neutral again.

I closed my fingers around the pendant, almost ashamed to admit it, and said, “yes. Except for tonight.”

Archer nodded, his wet hair flicking as he did. “What I wrote in that letter was true.” He raised his left hand, showing me a black ring on his finger. “I wear the same one, to protect myself,” he added.

I had never noticed the ring before, but I hadn’t been looking at his hands.

He’d made sure I had some kind of protection, even though he hadn’t told me about his ability.

“So, if I say I’m taking you somewhere safe, I mean it.” His eyes lingered on me for a moment before he began walking up the hill back to school. He was confident I’d follow him. And, for once, he was right.

“Are you saying I can trust you?” I asked, catching up to him, ignoring the burning exhaustion in my limbs.

“No, I didn’t say that,” Archer said without looking back.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DOROTHEE

Back at Aquila,Archer headed straight for the library, and judging by the sounds emanating from the hall, the ball was still rather lively.

“Shouldn’t we change into some dry clothes? I have no intention of contracting pneumonia,” I muttered, walking rather awkward in my soaked clothes.

“For once in my life, I’m thankful that Mai is such a mother hen. She stored some spare clothes for hypothetical situations like this.”

“Maisie?”

Archer was the only one who called her Mai, so I was sure he wasn’t talking about anyone else. She had told me that her grandmother was a family friend and that they’d grown up together like cousins, which was why he called her by the same name her sisters used for her.

“Indeed,” Archer said, heading past the study tables and toward the shelves at the back of the library. No one ventured there because they only contained family history records of the founders and citizens of Owley. All the students came from faraway and shared no familial ties, which was why no one took an interest in studying them.

When I’d first returned here, I hadn’t had the time to look into any of the titles. Magdalena, the librarian, had shushed me away with the explanation that only professors were allowed past the clearly marked sign. That same sign stated the rule explicitly.

Most students didn’t bother following the library’s rules, so I hadn’t thought it would be a problem. But I suspected Magdalena didn’t like me because I stayed until the very end of her shifts, preventing her from leaving early.

When I’d asked Chadwick about it during one of our sessions—why students couldn’t read those titles—he couldn’t give me an explanation. He’d only been working here for a year and had never been interested in history because it wasn’t his subject.

“If anyone sees us here, we could get into serious trouble. I was already scowled at by one of the librarians last week, and quite rudely at that,” I informed Archer, though I was certain he already knew these shelves weren’t meant for students’ eyes.

He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder at me. The fake blood had been washed off his skin by the water, leaving it only to stain his white shirt, which had turned almost completely translucent in its soaked state.

It took a significant amount of self-control not to let my gaze linger on the way the wet fabric outlined his muscles. I wasn’t blind. I could see how attractive he was, even though I didn’t appreciate his detached demeanour.

“Is that really your biggest fear tonight, after everything you’ve just witnessed?”

“No, but I don’t like getting into trouble.”

I hated the attention it caused.

Attention seekers got punished. That was what my mother had taught me at the age of six, after I’d screamed in a grocerystore because an old man with a head wound had been standing near the strawberry marmalade, his brains half spilling out.

She’d dragged me out of the shore, furious that I’d made everyone look at me, and smacked me across the cheek. I don’t think anything had hurt me as much at that age as realising that, instead of protecting me, my mother was just as monstrous as the ghosts haunting me.

“If you ask me, you are trouble itself,” Archer remarked, trailing his index finger along the spines of the books as he searched for something.

I cleared my throat. “Good thing I didn’t ask you.”

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