Page 31 of Shield of Fire

“You probably haven’t been looking hard enough then.”

He glanced at me, amusement twitching his lovely lips. “Well, between work and a certain luscious pixie, there hasn’t been a whole lot of time left for exploration.”

I laughed. “If you’ve time to sleep, there’s time to explore. Or so Lugh would say.”

“Yes, but he’s a workaholic who apparently considers a couple of hours of sleep a night one hour too much.”

That was a truth even he wouldn’t deny.

I sipped my whiskey, then said, “I had to go see Kaitlyn, the broker who works out of Falkner Street, this morning. She mentioned you were in the shop the other day and left your card.”

He frowned. “I did indeed, though I don’t understand the suspicion I see in your eyes. It was an innocent enough task.”

“That task being?”

His gaze flicked my length, then rose to meet mine. The deeper flecks of buttery brown in those golden depths gleamed in the pub’s half-light, and they weren’t happy. “I was going through a backlog of Nialle’s old notes and found a mention of two relics with her name on them. He’d circled them in red, which made me think they were of importance. That is all.”

“Why not ask Lugh about them?”

“Lugh wasn’t around, and I needed to stretch my legs.”

“Truly?”

He studied me for a second then held out a hand. “While I’m disappointed you trust my word so little, I’m quite willing to let you use your truth-telling magic on me.”

I glanced at his hand then pressed my palm against his and twined our fingers. I didn’t magic him, however. “I’m sorry, but after Rogan and everything else that is going on, I’m tending to be overly suspicious.”

He squeezed my fingers. “If a brief bout of suspicion is the only problem you and I ever have, then I would consider us lucky.”

So would I. “Tell me about the note.”

He sighed but didn’t remove his fingers from mine, and that was a relief. While he and I had a long way to go before we knew for sure something more permanent was on the cards, I didn’t want a quick bout of suspicion jettisoning it all before it had really started.

“Nialle obviously wasn’t a big cataloguer when it came to these sorts of things.”

I raised my eyebrows. “He actually was—at least at home. I never saw his office there, but his basement was filled with neatly stacked and catalogued items.”

“Well, let me assure you, that neatness did not carry over to his desk.” He slated a somewhat wry glance my way. “You are perfectly welcome to come check if you want. I’m only halfway through the note piles at the moment.”

“If I was so inclined to distrust, I could ask Lugh easily enough.”

He nodded and seemed to relax a fraction. “Most of the notes related to his investigations of the Claws, which, after the business with Rogan, I presume is now a closed case?”

If you could call the Claws being taken into Annwfyn and therefore made inaccessible to anyone here, that was certainly true. But I wasn’t sure how much Lugh had told Eljin, and it was doubtful the council would want the broader population to know what had happened, so I simply nodded and took another sip of whiskey.

“However, there were perhaps half a dozen scraps that mentioned various artifacts,” he continued. “Most of them were unknown to me, but the two I recognized were the Shield of Hephaestus and Ninkil’s Harpe.”

“Ninkil being the rat god?”

I made it a question, although I was well aware who Ninkil was. Beira—who was not only the goddess of winter and storms, but a hag bound to Earth for past misdemeanors—had recently told me those who followed Ninkil—a minor god who reveled in destruction—had become a lot more active of late. She also believed they were behind the theft of the hoard, and the little I’d seen via my visions seemed to concur.

He nodded. “I had what could be a minor clash with his followers when I worked for the Louvre’s fae artifacts department. We’d found a small cache of Ninkil artifacts on a dig, and they attempted a retrieval.”

“Successful?”

“No.” He grimaced. “They were captured but were subsequently killed in prison before they could be fully questioned.”

Which was a rather grim echo of what had happened to Mathi’s kidnappers. Were the same people behind both? It was a long bow to pull, given there didn’t appear to be any real connection between either the shield, the harpe, or indeed their gods, but the fates did have a way of twisting these things.

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