The Wyvern's Defender Dire Wolf

by Alice Summerfield

  Surprised, Dolf’s growl died in his throat.

  Looking down at her, Dolf was surprised to see that Helena was already looking up at him, a question in her eyes.

  It soothed that primal part of him. Sure, that other were-animal was flirting with her and right in front of him too, but he was the one that she was paying attention to. His was the arm on which her hand was resting.

  Dolf blinked, still surprised but now mollified, and Helena smiled up at him. The sweet curve of her lips was the final thing necessary to sooth his more savage nature back into complacency.

  Under Helena’s hand, Dolf relaxed.

  “You may have been Lazarus’ friend, but what are you doing here?” demanded Declan, taking up the conversational slack for him and Helena.

  “I’m J.P. Fields,” said the stranger. “I work as a driver for the Rothschild family, and I’ve been sent to make you an offer: five hundred dollars for any papers of Mr. Pommard’s that you may or may not have found.”

  Helena laughed.

  “These shoes cost more than that,” she said scornfully, and almost as one, all three men looked down at her ankle boots.

  Now that she mentioned it, they looked very expensive. Or maybe they just looked expensive, because he now had an idea of what they had cost her.

  Looking back up at Helena, Dolf arched an eyebrow at her.

  “A pair of well made shoes stands you in good stead,” said Helena with a little shrug.

  “So you’re not going to take the deal?” prompted Fields. “Can you at least give me an idea of how much money it would take to part you from those papers?”

  “How about a counteroffer?” said Helena, her gaze sliding past Dolf to land on Fields. “I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for each member of the Rothschild family that you can tell me about; useful things only.”

  Dolf was scandalized. How much money did she have rolled up in that little purse of hers, anyway?

  Resentment flashed across Field’s face. Declan just looked wryly amused. Apparently, he was already used to his cousin’s antics.

  “Because you have that rolled up inside your teeny tiny purse,” scoffed Fields.

  Helena shrugged. Almost defensively, she said “We don’t have time to mess around! Someone nearly killed you yesterday, Declan!”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, but only because your friend is an unnaturally gifted healer,” said Helena tartly. “I just want to get this over with, so I can get back to the task of sorting out my own family problems.” To J.P. she said “Which Rothschild sent you?”

  He barely hesitated before he said “Patrick Rothschild.”

  “And how did he know to send you?”

  “Miss Caroline told him,” said J.P. He grimaced. “Her attorney apparently made some sort of emergency filing about it with the court. That stopped the probate proceedings, at least temporarily, which angered Mr. Spencer and Mr. Patrick. They went to confront Miss Pamela about it. She apparently lost her head and shouted back at them about you.”

  “And you just happen to know all of this,” said Declan, his voice heavy with irony. Dolf agreed with him. This seemed too good to be true.

  J.P. visibly bristled.

  “Mr. Spencer and Mr. Patrick were complaining to each other about it, as I drove them home from Miss Pamela’s school. They were really loud about it too. I could hardly not know about it.”

  “And are Spencer and Patrick Rothschild the only Rothschilds who know that I might or might not have the last wills and testaments of Mr. Lazarus and his wife?” inquired Helena coolly.

  That, at least, would narrow the field a bit. Dolf wasn’t entirely convinced that that horrible family of hers wasn’t willing to kill her, but he couldn’t deny the timing issue. If that pack of hellhounds tried to kidnap her again, then they’d know for sure that the hellhounds and her family weren’t the ones that had decided to kill Helena and call it a day.

  Not that he was going to let anyone harm Helena, much less kill her. And it was more than a matter of professional pride.

  “No, all three of them probably know it,” said J.P. “Miss Phyllis wasn’t in the car, because she attends school with Miss Pamela.”

  Helena nodded. Moving on, she asked “What can you tell me about the lay of the Rothschild family? Are they were-animals? Or dragons?”

  “No, they aren’t were-animals or dragons,” said J.P. Fields heavily. “But old Jonathan Rothschild squeezed every penny like he was one. It was one of his two great loves: money and information. That was how Conchetta kept his interest: she gave him information on all the people around him, including their coming and goings, known associations, even the contents of their rooms, I’d wager. There were no secrets in that house, except the ones that Jonathan Rothschild kept in his safe. He practically got off on having other people’s secrets.”

  “Knowledge is power,” agreed Helena. “Especially if it’s information about something that someone would rather keep secret. My grandparents were the same way.”

  “My former employer kept envelopes on people’s dirty little secrets in his safe,” said J.P. bitterly. “I assumed that one of those people must have killed him.”

  “To protect their secrets,” agreed Helena with a nod. It made sense. “Did the killer raid the safe then?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Fields. “Conchetta was the one that found the body, but I was the one who called the police. I came when she screamed, so I got a glimpse of the crime scene before the police shut it all up. Jonathan Rothschild died in his study. He was mauled to death by someone – or something. But the killing definitely wasn’t for the public good, because the old man’s safe was open. Its door had been ripped of off its hinges, and all the blackmail material had been emptied out. Whoever killed the old man took all his secrets with them.”

  “Huh,” said Helena. She sounded perplexed. “Can were-animals even do that?”

  “No,” said Dolf.

  “Not even a were-bear?”

  “No,” said Declan with a little shake of his head. “Not even a were-bear.”

  Opening a safe that way would have taken a lot of strength. A dragon probably could have done it, but Dolf was hard pressed to think of anything else that could have ripped the door off of a safe, easily or otherwise. Certainly, no human could have done it.

  “What do the police think happened to the safe’s contents?” asked Declan.

  “They seem to think that Conchetta took it,” said Fields. “For a rainy day, I suppose.”

  It made a certain amount of sense.

  On the other side of the coin, there was no way that Conchetta Fernandez could have been the one who tried to mow Helena and Declan down in the parking lot yesterday. Aside from anything else, she had been locked up in jail then.

  Although I suppose that she could have had a partner, thought Dolf. Except there were those wills…

  According the Helena and Declan, aside from a few relatively small gifts, Mrs. Caroline Pommard had left all of her worldly possessions to her husband. And, aside from a few gifts, Mr. Mitchell Pommard – Helena’s Mr. Greg Lazarus – had left all of his worldly assets to his younger sister in the event that his wife had already predeceased him, which she most certainly had.

  Those wills were most valuable to Pamela Pommard. They were most damaging to the other Rothschilds. Only the Pommards and the Rothschilds would have had any reason to try to kill Helena for them.

  And that was assuming that the attempt on her life had come from that quarter, rather than another one.

  “And you’re certain that none of the Rothschilds can transform?” asked Helena, because if they couldn’t, there went her theory.

  “I didn’t say that,” said J.P. “There’s a darkness that runs through that family; a selfish, greedy, callousness that makes it difficult for them to see other people as, well, people. Old Jonathan Rothschild had it, and so does his son, Mr. Spencer. Mr. Patrick seems to be going that way, and Miss Pamela h
as more than a touch of it. That always used to kill Mr. Mitchell – your Mr. Lazarus – that his sister was just as ready to eat her own as any of his in-laws at the first sign of weakness.”

  “But some of the family don’t have it – that darkness?” asked Helena.

  “Only Miss Phyllis, I think,” said J.P. “They say that Miss Caroline used to be as bad as all the rest of them, but she changed once she met Mr. Mitchell. He was the best thing that ever happened to her – even she used to say that. The rest of them, though…”

  “But you never saw any of them transform on the full moon?” pressed Helena, and Fields shook his head.

  “No, and I definitely would have noticed that.” Fields frowned. “But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t something. Sometimes, there are claw marks; usually in the furniture, although Spencer Rothschild left some in one of his drinking buddies, a couple months ago. Hard to say whether it was the swipe or being tossed down a dozen flights of stairs that crippled the poor bastard, though.”

  Some friend, thought Dolf, disgusted. Aloud, he said “And he’s not in prison?”

  “For the time being, at least,” said Fields with a laconic shrug. “Although who knows what might happen now that Jonathan Rothschild isn’t around to smooth things over for Mr. Spencer anymore.”

  “In cases like this, they say that it’s usually people that the victim knew well, who killed them,” said Helena. “Tell us about the Pommards and the Rothschilds.”

  “With Jonathan Rothschild dead, there are only three real Rothschilds left: Phyllis, Patrick, and Spencer,” said Fields. “Of the three of them, Phyllis is the best. She’s the least likely to stomp on you for fun, at any rate. As far as I know, Mr. Jonathan didn’t have anything on her, but he definitely had something on her brother Patrick, and he used it as ruthlessly against her as he did against Patrick.

  “Phyllis’ brother Patrick, of course, was entirely under their Great Uncle Jonathan’s thumb. Patrick Rothschild didn’t sneeze without Jonathan Rothschild’s approval.”

  Could Patrick Rothschild have killed Jonathan Rothschild to get free of him? Dolf wondered. Or maybe it was Patrick and Phyllis Rothschild working together?

  “Ironically, Spencer Rothschild is possibly the only person that old Jonathon Rothschild couldn’t blackmail good behavior out of,” continued Fields. “He’s wild and cruel, and he has a temper to boot. The whole world knows his sins; literally, they’re down in the public court records. He’s the worst of them all by a long shot, but ironically, that probably also makes him the least likely to have murdered his father. He needed the old man to keep paying off his victims and his court fees; and to keep him out of jail.”

  “What about Pamela Pommard?” Dolf asked. Since he hadn’t actually gotten to meet her, he was curious about her.

  “Oh her,” said Fields scornfully. “She was the apple of her big brother’s eye and his wife’s too. She was loved. They weren’t born rich, you know, Mr. Mitchell and Miss Pamela. He married into money, specifically Miss Caroline’s. But she’s as spoiled as any of the rest of them. She’s almost as wild and willful and selfish as Mr. Spencer. Pamela Pommard is a party girl, through and through. Her brother, though…”

  There, Fields hesitated.

  Almost defiantly, he said “I liked Mr. Mitchell, and I could see why Miss Caroline married him. He was kind, and he wasn’t too good to be kind to his driver, either. Money didn’t ruin him, like it did all the rest of them. We used to talk about our sisters sometimes, when it was just him and me in the car. We had that in common. Both of were us older brothers doing our best to raise our little sisters after our parents died. He used to worry something fierce about Miss Pamela and how she was turning out.

  “And he was generous. Last Christmas, he gave me a bottle of scotch and a violin for Christmas. It was a cracking good one too. Not that the violin was for me. It was for my little sister. I could never have got her something like that. She made the state’s youth orchestra with it.” He glared at Helena. “And I want you to know, that I know how it is in families like this one, and what you must think of me, but I wouldn’t have taken your offer, if she didn’t need me to cover her uniform and travel fees. I’m not a snitch.”

  Nothing about his scent proclaimed Fields to be a liar. Dolf wasn’t certain if that relieved or annoyed him. But one thing was for certain: he disliked the way that Fields was glaring at his girl. His client; she was definitely his client.

  “I understand,” said Helena.

  “Were any of the Rothschilds or Pommards in the house the night that Jonathan Rothschild was murdered?” interjected Dolf before Helena could continue, trying to draw the other were-animal’s attention away her.

  It worked. Shifting his gaze from Helena to Dolf, Fields said “There was a family get together that night, so all of them were there, except Miss Pamela and Mr. Mitchell. Although Miss Pamela and Miss Phyllis probably see quite a bit of each other at school; they go to the same boarding school, you know.”

  “Do you know why her brother started going by Mr. Lazarus?” asked Helena.

  “Probably to avoid the rest of them,” said Fields. “They eat the weak, and after the accident, he was nothing but weaknesses. Miss Pamela certainly thought that people were trying to kill him. She said it often and loudly enough.”

  “Do you think that anyone was trying to kill him?” demanded Declan.

  “Yes,” said Fields. There wasn’t even a moment’s hesitation in his answer.

  Helena arched her eyebrows at Fields hopefully, while Declan favored him with an expectant look. Dolf contented himself with a glower.

  “Let me just put it this way,” said Fields. “Knowing that family the way that I do, it didn’t seem impossible. In fact, it seemed… highly likely, to me.”

  Dolf wondered if someone had asked – or maybe even tried to blackmail – J.P. Fields into murdering Lazarus for them; and maybe her and Declan.

  A car would be an excellent murder weapon for a chauffeur.

  Although maybe that’s too obvious? Dolf wondered.

  “One last question,” said Dolf. “Do any of the Rothschilds or Pommards own a cobalt blue Ferrari?”

  “Sure,” said Fields. “Miss Pamela and Miss Phyllis both do. Now, am I going to get my money or what?”

  “Of course,” said Helena. “Will a money order from the bank do?”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “Not without me and Delcan,” interjected Dolf. “She doesn’t go anywhere without us.”

  To Fields, Helena said “We’re a package deal,” by way of explanation.

  Fields drove them to the nearest branch of Helena’s bank, where she had a money order made out for eight thousand dollars.

  “Eight thousand dollars?” murmured Dolf to her in an undertone, as they were leaving the bank. Declan and Fields were waiting for them outside.

  It was a stunning amount of money to drop without even batting an eyelid.

  “One thousand each for Spencer, Phyllis, and Patrick Rothschild, another thousand for Pamela Pommard, and four thousand for his little sister the musician,” said Helena. “She obviously has talent. She ought to be encouraged.”

  At her words, Dolf’s heart clenched in his chest. She was just so good. So kind.

  So kissable, thought Dolf, and then immediately buried that thought.

  So what if he wanted to kiss her because she was trying to be kind to some unknown, nameless, faceless girl. He always wanted to kiss her. He just especially wanted to kiss her when she was being kind.

  Fields had better not try to kiss her when she gives him that money order, thought Dolf darkly.

  When Helena handed the money order to Fields, he looked stunned.

  “But the deal was for four thousand,” he said weakly.

  “The other four are for your sister’s musical education,” said Helena. “It’s a gift. I have a weakness for talented musicians. It’s genetic.”

  Dolf wondered if it was too late t
o take up the guitar.

  “This is – I can’t –” Fields swallowed thickly. “Thank you. We won’t ever be able to repay you for this.”

  “You’re welcome.” Helena considered Fields for a moment. “If you take us home again, I’ll consider us even.”

  Jerkily, Fields nodded. “Of course.”

  Dolf couldn’t wait to find out what a four thousand dollar car ride was like.

  Chapter 21 – Helena

  In the end, they settled on three pizzas, one for each of them, because Dolf and Declan had absolutely appalling tastes in pizza toppings. There was just no two ways about it.

  While Declan called in their order, Dolf asked, his voice low, “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” said Helena. “Three pizzas were definitely the way to go!”

  Declan and Dolf had refused to see reason about the anchovies, and Helena definitely wasn’t going to have pineapple on her pizza. Three pizzas was the only way to make sure that everyone was happy.

  “I meant about the chauffeur.”

  “Oh, yes, there too. Although it didn’t exactly make anything clearer,” said Helena, now frowning. “At least we have three names to go with the suspicion that someone is now trying to kill me.”

  “Three names?”

  “Patrick Rothschild, Spencer Rothschild, and Pamela Pommard.”

  “What about Phyllis Rothschild?”

  “J.P. didn’t seem to think she was particularly murderous.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t say that she was a saint either, just that she was less obviously troublesome than any of the other three. And you know what they say about the quiet ones.”

  “All right, four names then,” said Helena.

  Thump! Thump! Thump!

  Frowning, Helena looked towards the apartment’s front door, where it was shaking on its hinges. So did Dolf and Declan.

  “You don’t think that’s the pizza do you?” she asked.

  “No,” said Declan. “They’re fast, but they’re not that fast.”

  THUMP! Crack!