“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 intime 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 wantto 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 peopleputit 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…?”
