Honorbound

by Chelsea M. Campbell

  “Amelrik—”

  “He put her in a dragon ring for months!”

  “I know, but… we need to get out of here.” And he needs to not shout stuff like that where anyone could hear him.

  He wraps his arms around himself, his jaw clenched, and now I’m certain he’s trying not to transform.

  “Don’t,” I tell him.

  “I could kill him.”

  “Don’t do that, either.”

  “He deserves it.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not you. And even if you did…” I swallow. “You know what would happen.”

  “He’s a monster.” He hugs himself more tightly, taking a few deep breaths.

  “Come on.” I put a hand on his arm and motion for us to get going, absolutely terrified that Warwick will step out of the house any second, his interview with Henrietta already over with. And if he does…

  I swallow and tighten my grip on Amelrik, my eyes pleading with him. The muscles in his arm are tense—his whole body is—and there’s a moment where I really think he’s going to transform right here on the street.

  His eyes meet mine. Then he winces. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Then don’t do anything to get yourself killed.”

  The door to the house opening startles us both. My back prickles with dread as we turn to look.

  But it’s just Jeanie, bundled up in a winter coat, a shopping basket under one arm as she heads off in the direction of the marketplace.

  Amelrik exhales, some of the tension leaving him, and I think he’s just as relieved as I am that it wasn’t Warwick. “Come on,” he says, turning away from the house. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  17

  EVERYDAY SERIAL KILLER

  “You know,” I tell Cedric, “you don’t have to do this.” The two of us are walking from his house to the inn, which isn’t really very far, and I’m sure I could have carried our food back by myself. Or Amelrik could have come with me instead. Not that I mind Cedric’s company, but he looks like he’s having a hard time. He keeps scratching at his arm where the makeshift dragon ring is, and the color in his face looks off, and his eyes don’t look as bright as usual.

  We decided to get lunch from the inn, because there’s nothing to eat at Cedric’s place. Leif’s out sick, and it would have been weird for him to go—though they definitely would have bought that he wasn’t feeling well—and Amelrik was going to come with me, but then Cedric volunteered instead, even though he looks like he should have stayed home.

  “I wanted to get out for a while,” Cedric says. “I don’t want…” He twitches suddenly, looking like he’s in pain. Then he relaxes. “I don’t want this to change anything.”

  He doesn’t have to say he means the dragon ring.

  “Right,” I tell him, because it’s obvious that it already has changed things. “But you know it’s only temporary.”

  “If they catch the murderer and if we get out of here in time.”

  “There’s talk that it’s someone human.” Just your average, run-of-the-mill, everyday serial killer. No big deal. “If it’s true, they’ll take the barrier down. They’ll stop looking for dragons.”

  He shakes his head, a bitter expression twisting his mouth. “They won’t. And just because someone stabbed her with a sword doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dragon.”

  Amelrik said pretty much the same thing when we discussed it on the way home. Well, on the way back to Cedric’s house. I tell Cedric what I told him. “True, but that doesn’t account for the claw she saw.”

  “She imagined it. She saw what she wanted to see.”

  Maybe. That occurred to me, too. But if she did imagine it, it’s an awfully strange coincidence that she got the color right.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I didn’t come with you to talk about the murders. I wanted to ask you about paladins.”

  “Now?” I raise my eyebrows at him. “I think it can wait. No offense, but you look like crap.”

  His jaw clenches a little at the reminder. “None taken, and I feel like crap. But I might not have another chance.”

  I want to argue with him that he could have asked me back at the house, or later, after we eat lunch, but I know that’s not what he’s getting at. “Cedric… You guys aren’t going to die.”

  He ignores that, his forehead wrinkling in the same way that Amelrik’s does when he disagrees but doesn’t want to say anything. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be myself, so…”

  I study his face, wishing I could reassure him that he won’t go crazy. But I have no idea how long that takes. Obviously Amelrik’s mother was an extreme case, but I’m sure she was crazy well before she got free. But was it a few days, or weeks, or what? “Okay,” I tell Cedric. “Ask away.”

  He opens his mouth to speak, and I’m sure he’s got several questions already lined up, but then he hesitates. He looks me over and says, “Why are you with my cousin?”

  “Wow. That’s not a question about paladins.” It’s a lot more personal than I was expecting, and it also makes me think that maybe he disapproves of us or thinks I’m not good enough.

  “I just meant… what made you choose his—our—world over your own? He told me how you met, but I still have questions.”

  “My world was small and empty. I didn’t belong there. It’s not what I would have pictured myself doing, but it wasn’t a hard choice to make.” I decide if he’s going to ask personal questions, that means I can, too. “Why don’t you want to be king?”

  He grimaces and hunches his shoulders, like he wishes he could disappear. “I like my life here.”

  “So, before that you were okay with it?”

  “No. It’s what everyone assumed for me, but it always felt like a weight around my neck. How do you see things ending? Between you and Amelrik?”

  That one makes my stomach twist up. That and the way he asks it so bluntly, as if it’s a fact. “I don’t. And I could ask you the same thing about you and Leif.”

  “And I’d give the same answer. But there’s a reason we live here and not at Hawthorne clan. The king’s never going to let him marry you,” he adds, his voice soft.

  I kick at the snow on the ground and almost lose my balance. “So now you care what the king wants?”

  “No. I just…” He takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly. “I don’t know what I’m getting at. I just know that Amelrik’s going to be heartbroken, and I don’t want that for him.”

  Tears sting my eyes, though I tell myself it’s just because the wind is particularly cold and blowing right in my face. Hopefully that’s what Cedric will think, too, if he looks over and sees that they’re wet. “He’s the most important person to me in the world, and if you’re trying to say we shouldn’t be together—”

  “I’m not!” He holds up his hands. “I mean, I have to admit I was shocked when he said you were a St. George, but that’s it. And I kind of admire him for having the nerve to actually bring you to Hawthorne clan and declare you in front of the king. But he’s as crazy as his mother if he thinks Uncle Ulrich’s ever going to approve. Sorry,” he says, when I don’t say anything to that. “It’s a tough situation, that’s all.”

  Yeah, tell me about it.

  We arrive at the inn, and I’m glad for a change of scenery, and hopefully a change of conversation. But as soon as we step inside, I can tell something’s wrong. The inn’s busy, full of the lunchtime crowd, but there’s a subdued feeling throughout the room. Customers stare into their drinks, their voices hushed.

  A waitress forces a smile when we come in, but when she sees that it’s just Cedric, she lets her mouth turn down again.

  Cedric stops her. “Maria, what happened? Is… is everyone okay?”

  She sighs, and her eyes start to fill with tears. “She used to come in all the time when I first started working here. I was so nervous back then, I remember I spilled a whole pitcher of iced tea on her. I was mortified, but she just laughed it off. She ins
isted that they didn’t fire me, and now…”

  “Who?” Cedric asks. “What are you talking about?”

  Maria sniffs and dabs at her eyes with a rag. “Henrietta Thorpe.”

  “You mean, the woman who got attacked?” I look from her to Cedric, as if he’ll somehow have the answers, even though I know he doesn’t.

  “Uh-huh. We just got the news that she… she didn’t make it.” Her lower lip starts to tremble as her eyes well up with tears she can’t hold back.

  Cedric puts an arm around her—the one without the dragon ring—and lets her cry into his shoulder.

  “Henrietta Thorpe can’t be dead,” I tell them. “I just saw her, like, an hour and a half ago. She was fine.”

  Maria steps back from Cedric, trying to get a hold of herself. “That’s what everyone’s been saying, that she seemed fine. But her wound must have been worse than she let on, because her daughter stepped out to do some shopping, and when she came back a little while later, Henrietta was just lying there on the couch and wouldn’t wake up. She was just… gone.”

  “It was him,” Amelrik says after I tell him the news. “It was Warwick St. George.” He makes a face, like the words taste bad, like he wishes he hadn’t spoken his name out loud.

  We’re in Cedric’s bedroom. Cedric and Leif are in the kitchen, eating lunch. Leif seemed to take the news kind of hard, though not nearly as bad as Maria.

  “We don’t know that,” I tell Amelrik. “Not for sure. Maybe her wound really was worse than everyone thought.”

  “No.” He shakes his head, then paces back and forth in front of the bed. He presses his palms to his forehead and rakes his hands through his hair. “We should have gone back! If I’d just—”

  “What?” I snap. “Killed him?”

  “Yes.” His voice is quiet. He stares at the floor. “Then he couldn’t have hurt her, and Henrietta would still be alive.”

  “But you’d be dead.” Or captured at least, which amounts to the same thing. “I need to go back to Rosewood Manor.”

  He looks up at me. “Both of us need to stay as far away from him as possible.”

  “There was something in his room, last time I was there that I—”

  “You were in his room?!” Amelrik’s eyes go wide as he studies my face.

  “I didn’t know who he was then.”

  “But you do now. Virginia, you can’t go back there.”

  The terror in his voice makes my stomach clench, and I really, really want to abandon the whole idea in favor of just staying home and hoping I’m wrong. “There was a chest in his room. A really big one. Like, big enough to store a body.”

  “A body?” He considers that. “None of the bodies were missing, though.”

  “I know. I just have a bad feeling about it.” A really bad one.

  Amelrik stares at me for a second. “It might not be him,” he says, changing tactics. “There’s no reason for a paladin to be killing humans.” But even as he says it, I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

  “So when I look inside that chest, there won’t be anything incriminating, and we can move on to figuring out who the real murderer is.” Because it could be anyone. Maybe Henrietta really did die of complications from her wound. Or maybe someone else killed her, someone who came in after Warwick.

  Except, deep down, I know I don’t believe that, either. He’s given me a really bad feeling every time I’ve seen him, not to mention the effect he had on Amelrik. And the things he did to Amelrik’s mother… I don’t know why he would have killed Henrietta—or anyone else, if he really is the murderer—but the amount of cruelty a person would have to have in them to put a dragon ring on someone and watch her slowly go crazy for months while also torturing her, and knowing she was pregnant, that they weren’t just hurting her, but her unborn child… A child that should have been hatched instead of born.

  I shudder at the thought, because who knows what someone capable of causing that much pain might do? My sister and the other paladins I know might hurt and kill dragons, which is bad enough, but I can’t see any of them having the stomach for that level of cruelty.

  And now I want to break into that man’s room again and go through his stuff?

  “It’s too dangerous,” Amelrik says.

  “I did it once before. And I’m a paladin. If somebody catches me, I’ll just say I was looking for Celeste’s room and got lost.”

  He puts his hands on my wrists and looks me in the eyes. “But if he catches you—”

  “He won’t.”

  “—he’ll kill you. And then he’ll have taken everything from me.”

  I swallow, because while part of me thinks I’d still be able to talk my way out of it, another part of me worries that he’s right. “Something weird is going on here. It’s been long enough that any dragons should have transformed by now.”

  “Which they did yesterday, when they killed Patricia Brown. We found that scale.”

  “And no one saw them somehow?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Something about this doesn’t add up. And until I go check Warwick’s room, I’m never going to be able to let go of it.”

  He hesitates, looking like he’s going to argue some more, then says, “I’m going with you.”

  “No. There’s no way you’re going anywhere near that house.”

  “He doesn’t know me. He has no idea who I am.”

  “But Celeste does, and if she sees you there, she’ll throw a fit.” She might even have him arrested. And either way, I’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to her what we were doing or that we think her boss, who she looks up to for some reason, is the murderer.

  Amelrik slides his arms around me, pulling me close to him. “I can’t just stay here while you go risk your life to search his room. Maybe you don’t know what he’s capable of, but I—”

  “Okay,” I tell him, hugging him tightly, as if we might never see each other again. Because the truth is, I don’t really want to go alone. “You can come with me, but on one condition.”

  I expect him to argue, but he stays silent, so that the only sound in the room is our breathing.

  “You stay outside, out of view. After all, it won’t do any good if we both get caught.”

  “Alright,” he says, though he sounds reluctant about it. “But if you don’t come back right away, I’m coming in after you.”

  18

  ONE MEASLY HUMAN

  I get lost trying to find my way to the paladins’ rooms again, and each second that goes by makes me more and more anxious. Amelrik might have stayed outside like he promised, but not without another reminder that if I’m not back out soon, he’s coming in to make sure I’m okay. Which scares the hell out of me, the idea of him putting himself in that kind of danger, but it’s not like I wouldn’t feel the same way if our roles were reversed. And truth be told, the idea of coming in here without any kind of backup kind of terrifies me, too.

  Because the more I find out about Warwick St. George, the more I’m not so sure that my paladin status—which is shaky at best—will save me from him. Especially if he really is the one killing people.

  Not that that makes any sense, but collaring a dragon and watching her go insane doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time, either, so I’m not going to pretend to understand him.

  Finally, I get to a staircase I recognize. I have no idea how much time has passed, only that it felt like an eternity, which I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. My heart’s already pounding as I head upstairs. My throat feels dry as I imagine knocking on Warwick’s door again, just to double check that he’s not in there, and what I might say to him if he is. I can’t pretend to be a maid because Celeste already told him I was her sister, and he definitely recognized me when we were at Henrietta’s.

  Thinking of Henrietta makes me feel a sudden pang of grief. I didn’t even know her, but I know she didn’t deserve what happened to her. And she’d seemed so alive earlier, despite her injury.
And poor Jeanie. I wonder if she blames herself for leaving her mother unattended or if, like us, she suspects some kind of foul play.

  I see the door to his room at the end of the hall. It seems impossibly far away, and I feel like each footstep I take is awkward and unnatural, like I can’t remember how to be a normal person.

  Then a door to my left opens and Celeste and another paladin step out. The other paladin’s insignia marks him as one of the Strongshields. The two of them are laughing about something, and there’s a strange vibe between them, like maybe…

  Ugh, did they just sleep together?

  The laughter dies as soon as they spot me, and then Celeste’s face turns kind of pink, so that I think maybe they did. Or at least that there’s something going on between them.

  “Celeste?”

  “Vee!” My name comes out a squeak. She glances nervously between me and her companion. “Char, this is my, um, my sister, Vee.”

  “Char?” What kind of a name is that?

  “Richard,” he says, holding out his hand to me. “It’s a family nickname that kind of stuck.” He sounds kind of embarrassed about it, and like he’s had to explain it to basically everyone he’s ever met.

  I shake hands with him, then glance over at Warwick’s room, aware of every second that’s ticking by.

  “Why don’t you go on ahead?” Celeste tells him. “I’ll just… I’ve just got to talk to my sister for a minute.”

  “Yeah, sure. It was a pleasure meeting you.” He tips an imaginary hat to me, then heads downstairs.

  Celeste looks like she’s going to die. “It’s not what you think.”

  Well, if I wasn’t sure before, I am now. “You like him.”

  She smooths her hair behind her ear. “We’re just… Tensions are high for everyone with the lockdown.”

  “So that’s what you were doing? Relieving tension?” I really didn’t need to hear that.

  Her face turns red. “No. I mean…” She clears her throat. “Some paladin you are, saying you wanted to help and then not showing up until mid-afternoon.”