I glanced to where Graham looked at me, adoration clear on his face, and swallowed.
“What did he say?” Graham asked.
“Um, just that he remembers you from the other day in the stacks.”
“Hey, mate.” Graham stepped forward and put out a hand and then looked down on it, before dropping it backto his side. “Frankly, I’m not sure how to greet a dragon. He’s a proper wee beastie, isn’t he then?”
“And he’s a proper beast, isn’t he?”Quilliam asked. The two surveyed each other. My eyes darted between them, and I couldn’t quite figure out the staring contest they had going on.
“Right.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to cook and you’re going to sit there and listen while I tell you everything.”
“Wrong,” Graham said, turning and pushing me forward until I sat down in a chair at the kitchen. “Iam going to cook. And I will listen without interrupting until you get everything out of that beautiful brain of yours.”
“But—”
“Just let me, Agnes.” Graham leveled a look at me. “I listen better when I’m busy doing something. It’s the nature of my job, all right?”
“I suppose that makes sense.” I tapped a finger on the table in front of me and Quilliam scampered over, clambering onto my palm. “Hey, buddy.”
“It’s time to tell him everything, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I murmured, leaning back to watch as Graham bent and dug through the contents of my fridge.
“I think he’ll handle it well.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Agnes?”
“Aye?” I looked up.
“I’m waiting.”
“Och, right. So. Here it is. All of it. That I know, at least. From the beginning.”
I started with Gran.
“When she was dying,” I said, “she made me promise something. She grabbed my hand and told me I had to let you go. I could never let myself loveanyone. That if I did, the loch would take him.”
Graham turned to me, an unreadable look in his eyes. “Takes them how?”
“Drowns them, basically. Every man a Wright woman of the Bookkeeper line truly loves? Well, the loch claims him. My grandfather drowned in Loch Mirren when my mother was a girl. My father as well. My great-uncle too. And generations before that. It’s not coincidence or even really bad luck. It’s a curse.”
“A curse,” Graham repeated carefully. “Naturally.”
“Placed on my family several hundred years ago.” I took a breath. “By a creature called the Beithir.”
“The same one we saw in the loch?”
Graham had been there the day that the Beithir had risen from the loch, shocking us all, as the Order of Caledonia had held off the Kelpies to save Zara and Liora.
I told him everything then. How my ancestor Isobel had killed the Beithir in 1746, and the creature had cursed the Wright line with its dying breath. How the Bookkeeper position had been vacant ever since, my family cast out of the Order in disgrace. How I’d only recently learned any of this, discovered it in the archives, confirmed by Quilliam.
“Wait,” Graham said. “He was there? Three hundred years ago?”
“Aye,”Quilliam said, and I translated.“I was bonded to the Bookkeeper line long before Isobel. I watched her grow up. She was a good Bookkeeper, dedicated and meticulous. Andthen I watched her walk into the loch one winter night and kill the guardian she was sworn to protect.”
“But why?” Graham asked. “Why would she do that?”
