Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifteen: Oxford Rules

There was blackness for a while, but it couldn't have been long, because he awoke to the sound of tense, bickering voices, and one of them was Ellini's. He would have known it anywhere.

"I told you not to kill him!"

"I didn't."

"Head wounds can be very unpredictable."

"Yes, I know. I'm an expert. That's the point."

There was a swishing of skirts beside Jack, and the sound of someone dragging timber across the floor. Ellini – it had to be her, because Robin wouldn't have been so gentle – knelt beside him and helped him to sit up against a fallen beam. It was like trying to surface through layers of hot, foamy water, but the world eventually swam into focus. The dark patch beside him resolved itself into a dark woman, and she was like calamine lotion for the eyes.

"You've got a lot of potential," he said, as if there had been no break in the conversation.

"You've got a concussion," said Ellini.

"Does that make me more or less credible, do you think?"

"Well, nothing could make you less credible."

She was holding the side of his face, but not tenderly. It felt as though she was trying to keep his head from drooping. And she was peering into his eyes, presumably searching for more signs of concussion. It struck him as odd that she had been torturing him for seven months and was suddenly concerned about his welfare now.

"Follow my finger with your eyes," she instructed, holding up one ribbon-wrapped finger and moving it slowly to the left. Jack focused on the face behind the finger.

"When can we do this again, mouse? I had so much fun."

"Yes, so did I," she said, without smiling. "And never."

Jack was not perturbed. They had fallen back into the rhythm of their Oxford conversations, where it was against the rules to say anything emotional or relevant. It was a bit of a challenge, talking to her like that, through the fog of concussion, but he loved being challenged. He felt as though he'd been forgetting that for seven months. As though he'd been in hiding from himself.

"Seems like a mixed message," he pointed out.

"No, the message is 'never'. In fact, if I could choose one word to sum up our future relations, it would be 'never'. My enjoyment is immaterial."

"Oh, I realize that," he said, with a sardonic smile. "But it's not immaterial to me."

This was probably breaking the Oxford rules, because Ellini ignored him, and continued with her medical examination. She tilted his head from side to side, then brought it forwards and got up on her knees to examine the spot where his skull had smashed into the floor. She touched it with her fingertips, and Jack saw stars burst in front of his eyes, but there was no pain – possibly because she had brought his head forward to the point where he was now staring down her cleavage.

"You mustn't go to sleep tonight," she said at last. "Make a pot of coffee and find someone to talk to."

"How about you?"

"We have nothing to say to one another. Nothing polite, anyway."

"Well, politeness is overrated," said Jack. He was drunk on the – the alrightness of this moment. That was the thing he always forgot about Ellini when he was away from her – how she made him feel that everything was going to be all right. Probably it was a reaction against her own pessimism. Maybe it was because she had held him like a mother when he was eight years old, because mothers said that sort of thing, didn't they? That everything was going to be all right? And the extent to which you grew up was the extent to which you learned to ignore them.