The Book Eaters(86)

She wet her lips. “What happens if I turn you down?”

“Then your story ends tonight, princess.”

And for all that she was the one covered in other people’s blood, tongue still tainted by her double murder, she could not help but shrink from her brother.

Sometimes, decisions really were a straightforward life-or-death question.

“I…” Devon squeezed her son tight. “What do you want me to do, exactly?”





25

CAMELOT, INC.





TWO YEARS AGO


Courage—and shuffle the cards.

—George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

The night passed in a blur.

Three knights peeled off Devon’s ruined clothes and stuffed them into a trash bag. Someone gave her a man’s suit to wear, complete with boxers. The suit fit well, her height and build an advantage for once. She dressed in an embarrassed rush, only to find herself hustled back to the gore-strewn room from before.

Matley’s safe had been broken open, presumably by one of the knights. The door hung from its hinges, rendered useless in its prime function.

She gawked at the stacked bills inside.

“Fit what cash you can into this.” Ramsey handed her a messenger bag. “Should net you about twenty-odd grand, if you’re efficient.”

Understanding dawned. “You’re making this look like I attacked him and robbed him, and then fled with the money.”

“I’m not ‘making this look like’ anything of the kind. That is precisely what you will be doing.”

She gripped the bag with bloody hands. “What did you do to Matley?”

“He bled out internally,” Ramsey said flippantly, and she could not tell whether that was true, or whether it implied the knights had finished him off. “We moved the remains to his bedroom.”

Every action she took was writing another word of her own death sentence. The Families would think it was her fault. She would take full blame for her husband’s death; the full blame, too, for stealing his money and for killing his men. And it kind of was her fault, which made things even more complicated. Just not to the extent that Ramsey was implying.

But four knights were in the room and they were all armed, so Devon set down her son on the cleanest bit of carpet she could find and crammed bills into the messenger bag until it could barely zip shut. By the time she’d finished, her fingerprints were everywhere: mixed with blood and dirt and fuck-knew-what from the men she’d killed. More rope to hang herself.

“Perfect,” Ramsey said with a winning smile, and took the bag off her.

Someone crammed a poorly fitting dragon-painted helmet on her head, and now she grasped finally why she’d been given a suit. The knights were removing her from the scene of the crime without drawing attention.

They walked through Easterbrook Manor. The household buzzed with activity, men and the few women talking in corridors or arguing in corners. No one recognized Devon in her suit and helmet; dragons had a kind of special invisibility in that way.

“What have you told them?” The helmet muffled her voice.

Ramsey glanced back. “As I promised earlier, they think you murdered Matley and fled with Cai. Under normal circumstances they might have enlisted the aid of knights to hunt you down, but apparently we’re disbanding. I’ve told them we can’t help.” The last was said with savage venom.

Devon, inside the safety of her dragon apparel, hunched her shoulders and said nothing further as they wound through the house and out into the gentle darkness of the witching hour. The air smelled crisp, and the breeze brought welcome coolness.

“We have a long drive ahead,” Ramsey said, settling on his bike. “You’ll ride with me, your son will ride with someone else.” He gestured for her to sit behind him, and reluctantly she did. Cai was being bundled up in a passenger’s seat the next bike over, still unconscious.

“Where are we going?” Devon clasped on the seat belt.

“Oxford.” He revved his bike into motion.

Devon left Winterfield Manor in the dead of night wearing a dragon’s suit, bundled discreetly onto the back of Ramsey’s motorcycle. The luggage he kept on it surrounded her tightly, and she fell into exhausted sleep.

Dawn was breaking when she woke, some four hours later. The knights had skirted the city center, keeping to side roads and winding through smaller villages before eventually rolling up to a lonely concrete building in the commercial district, surrounded by concrete walls and a barbed-wire fence. A large-lettered sign bore the words CAMELOT INCORPORATED.

“I can feel you laughing,” Ramsey said. “Something funny?”

“Of course you’d live in Camelot,” Devon said, almost wheezing. “I should have known. Not much of a castle, is it? Do you have a round table, at least?”

“Modern times don’t accommodate such symbolism,” he said, coasting to a stop in front of an enormous pair of electronic gates. “Much as we’d enjoy a drawbridge and moat, this is rather more secure than the Arthurian variety.”

A pair of young, suited knights leaned out of a security booth, offering a greeting in Latin; she caught the word Camelot in there.

“How do you afford this?” she said as the knights approached their motorbike. “None of you take jobs.”