The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(77)

“When will Milo get here?” I asked.

“He’s on his way now,” she said. “He has information about Lucien that he needs to tell me in person.”

August stared down at his hands. “Can you take the two of them somewhere else?” he asked quietly, and the soldiers hauled his brother and sister to the back of the plane and out of view.

We’d left Tom and Lena at the Prague airport. They were about to catch a flight back to Chicago to spend Christmas with Tom’s family. A compromise, Tom told me, for having spent so much of his break bumming around Europe with Lena.

“And your parents agreed to let you be away all this time?” I asked. We were at the curbside drop-off. Holmes and Lena were inside, arranging for the faux-Langenberg paintings to be delivered back to Germany. It was Christmas Day; everything but the airport was closed.

He nodded at me, hands in his pockets. “Her family’s paying for it all, you know? My parents figured it might be my best chance to do some traveling. They can’t afford any of this stuff. Even after I got suspended, they thought . . . well, why pass up an opportunity?”

So they weren’t the parents of the year. I was beginning to understand Tom a bit more. “Was it worth it? I mean, did you and Lena have fun?”

To my surprise, Tom shook his head. “I kind of miss them. My family. After all the crap that happened this semester, I thought I wanted to escape them . . . but like, Lena and I went to all these fancy restaurants and crazy stores where they make you tea while she tried on dresses and yeah, it was all interesting, but I kind of miss my couch. And my TV. And then this stuff with you and Charlotte?”

“Yeah?” I pulled my hat down further around my ears. Without that plastic mask, I felt self-conscious in public, especially now that my bruises were beginning to turn green around the edges. I looked like a piece of rotting meat. August had a bandage around his neck. Holmes wasn’t speaking to anyone except Lena, and then only in dark whispers. I didn’t need Tom to tell me that the last few days had been hard.

“Dude, just . . . you need to get yourself out, now. Like, guns? Soldiers for hire? A whole family of weirdos trying to kill your girlfriend? You’re not married to her, and I really like Charlotte, I think she’s interesting and, honestly, really scary, but I kind of think that if you keep following her around, you’re going to wind up dead.”

“August’s taken care of it,” I said.

Tom shrugged. “Maybe. If so, it’s a hell of an anticlimax, isn’t it?”

Before I could respond, Holmes and Lena came through the sliding doors in their dark jackets and hats. Lena slipped her gloved hand into Tom’s back pocket. “Ready?” she asked.

“Let me know if the Germans don’t reimburse you for the cost of those paintings,” Holmes said to her. “The Moriartys had some nerve, auctioning every last one of them off. I think you have a complete set. I don’t think my surveillance videos would be permissible in court, but we do have enough evidence to at least lean on the government to write you a check.”

“It’ll be fine,” Lena said. “I kind of like the paintings, anyway. I might put one in our room this spring.”

Holmes nodded tightly. “If they give you trouble,” she said, “tell them to shine a flashlight onto the canvases to look for cat hair.”

“Cat hair?”

“Hadrian’s trouser cuffs were coated in it. White,” she said, “so I assume it’s one of those wretched longhaired Persians. Hans Langenberg famously died alone. It was weeks before they found him. Since I haven’t read anything about his face being eaten—”

I wondered how long she’d been sitting on that information.

“No cats. Got it. I’ll tell them, if they ask.” Lena leaned in to kiss her roommate on the cheek, leaving a smudge of red where her lips had been. “Bye, guys. Merry Christmas. See you back at school!”

Holmes smiled briefly. “Go on, you’ll miss your flight.”

We met August at the airstrip. The Greystone plane was there waiting for us, and he was too, standing at the foot of the stairs with windswept hair and exhausted eyes. He looked like a photograph of himself rather than the real thing.

We all nodded to each other, too tired to say much. When we boarded and took our seats, Holmes huddled up against me. She tugged my arm down around her shoulders. Through the layers of sweaters and scarves and coats, I could still feel her shivering, and so I held on to her more tightly.

She’d almost died. We both had. I still wasn’t sure why we were alive, where her brother was, why we were headed back to Sussex at all. Her mother was still in a coma. Leander was still lost. We’d pulled off a feat back in Prague, to be sure, but had things veered off one inch to the left or the right, the three of us would all be in refrigerated drawers. I was still processing it there in the museum lobby, my mask in my hands, when Holmes looked down at a handcuffed Hadrian Moriarty and said grimly, “I suppose there’s no delaying it further. We need to go home.”

“Go, then,” August had said.

“No,” she’d told him. “You’re coming with.”

She’d refused to answer further questions. I was done trying to ask them.

The Moriartys were brought in, and then brought to the back. The plane took off. We looked at each other.