Of course he would ask before touching. Of course he would stop himself. I’d have to deal with the fact that my standards had just been violently recalibrated.
“You saved my life,” he said.
“I used office safety equipment.”
“That doesn’t diminish the achievement.”
Percy cleared his throat loudly from a few steps away. “I would like it noted that this was not what I expected to happen tonight.”
“That seems to be the theme,” I said.
The thrill settled just enough for logic to start pushing in. Questions stacked on top of each other in my mind. Dragons. Lineage. Missing history. Someone trying to erase people who knew too much.
I crossed my arms, the movement grounding me. “Okay, start with the part where dragons are real and I don’t lose my mind about it.”
Arthur inclined his head slightly. “They aren’t simply stories ormythology. We exist.”
“Hidden,” I said. “On purpose?”
“Yes.”
I waited, but he didn’t rush to fill the silence.
“Because humans freaked out?” I asked finally.
“Because we started losing our power, and humans learned how to fear magic, then how to weaponize that fear,” he replied. “It became safer to keep ourselves hidden.”
That tracked depressingly well.
I nodded once. “Okay, and the genealogies?”
His jaw tightened. “Bloodlines carry more than names. They carry continuity, stability. Magic itself.”
“And when the records disappear,” I said, “so does the stability.” My stomach sank. “So, this isn’t just for curiosity’s sake?”
“No.”
“But you don’t actually know what happened,” I said carefully. “Not yet.”
“No,” he agreed. “Something disrupted the balance centuries ago. I don’t know how, or why, or what.”
“But you’re fairly sure the gap in your genealogy matters?”
“Yes.”
“Enough that someone is trying to kill you for looking into it?”
His gaze held mine. “That appears to be the case. Although this is the furthest I’ve ever gotten in my search, so I wasn’t aware of the danger prior to coming to your library.”
I let that sit between us. The not knowing. The weight of it.
“So,” I said slowly, “someone erased part of your history, something in that history is linked to the decline of your people in slow motion, and now anyone who notices becomes a problem.”
“That’s my working theory.”
I exhaled. “Cool. I mean, horrifying. Extremely not cool.”
He didn’t contradict that.
