I cleared my throat. ‘We’re not going to find King John’s crown jewels.’ The only person who looked unhappy was Amy. Her face was still twisted into a frown and her hands were on her hips.
‘What’s the alternative?’ Rizwan asked. ‘We have to keep searching, there’s no other choice.’
Miriam’s clever eyes flashed. ‘There’s always another choice, dear.’
‘The other choice is that Daisy hands herself over to Athair and agrees to become a fiend just like him,’ Becky said.
‘And then,’ Slim continued for her, ‘we’ll end up having to fight Daisy to the death as well as Athair.’
Hugo growled, ‘That won’t happen.’
‘No,’ I assured him, ‘it won’t.’
‘We’ve got a maximum of thirty-six hours before we have to leave for Edinburgh. There are three more low tides between now and then, so almost eighteen hours of search time left.’ Mark sounded earnest. But we all knew that eighteen hours wasn’t enough; eighteen years might not be enough.
‘We are talking about a vast tract of land,’ I said. ‘Land that’s constantly shifting. King John couldn’t retrieve his treasure after a single tide. There have been hundreds of thousands of tides in the intervening years.’
‘Almost six hundred thousand,’ Hugo muttered. ‘I did the arithmetic.’
William Hausman flitted into my mind. ‘First of all, we have to assume that the treasure hasn’t been found by anyone else. It might have already been dug up and taken elsewhere or melted down. We can’t ever know for sure.’
Amy scowled. ‘We would know. Somebody would have blabbed if they’d found it.’
I glanced at her. ‘Okay. Even if we imagine that nobodyhasmanaged to find it, we have to believe that we’re not only thebest treasure hunters in the country today but that we are the best treasure hunters in the last eight hundred years.’
‘Works for me,’ Hugo said.
I grinned but I knew that even his ego wasn’t that large. ‘And that we don’t have days or weeks or months or years to find this long-lost treasure.’ I swept my gaze across the group. ‘We’ve only got hours.’
Slim sighed. ‘We know all that, but there’s no alternative.’
They all looked at me and I straightened my shoulders. ‘Some new information has come to light.’ I felt imbued with a strange new confidence; we were no longer on the back foot or playing catch-up. Not any longer. ‘We need to get back to Scotland.’
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Ihad only ever been in the vicinity of Culcreuch Castle once, when I’d time-travelled back to 1994, lurked in the nearby woods and spied on the old building from a distance. Thirty years later, those woods looked much the same. There was a bit more litter caught in the undergrowth but the trees remained in place and were only slightly taller and leafier than I remembered.
We hadn’t travelled all the way by helicopter; after all, stealth from this point on would be vitally important. We’d managed to fly to the nearby city of Perth from Sutton Bridge, however, and Slim had driven us the rest of the way so we could approach Culcreuch without being noticed. We waited until daylight in order to avoid Athair’s vampires and then he’d dropped us a mile from the castle. We’d walked the final section but, before we arrived in the castle grounds, I made a silent promise. If I made it to Saturday morning, still alive and still free, then I was definitely taking flying lessons. I was a high elf now – hell, I was practically royalty. At the very least I ought to live up to my newfound status and zip around the countryside in my own helicopter.
‘Hours,’ Otis said, checking the time and causing my brief daydream to evaporate. ‘We’ve got mere hours until we need to meet Athair in front of the Royal Elvish Institute.’
‘Plenty of time,’ Hugo said.
‘Screeds,’ I agreed.
‘We’ll be in and out by lunch time.’
I nodded. ‘By noon, we’ll be in a warm, welcoming country pub and eating a hearty lunch. There will be hours left to prepare for tonight’s showdown.’
‘It’ll be great.’
‘We’ll be heroes.’
Hester and Otis gazed at us. ‘Will you say it?’ Hester asked her brother. ‘Or will I?’
‘It’ll sound better coming from me,’ he replied without missing a beat. ‘You’re both fucking crazy.’
