Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3)

Reader Notices

This book is number 3 of a closely linked trilogy starting with Slippery Creatures. As such, it contains spoilers for the first two books.

Please be aware, this book contains references to self-harm and emotional abuse within the family. A full list of content warnings is available at my website.

Chapter One

Will Darling was selling books.

That was his job these days, and it brought him into contact with a pretty peculiar lot of people. Right now he was selling them to a specialist antiquarian book dealer off the Charing Cross Road, which was an experience all its own.

He’d only been running Darling’s Used & Antiquarian since last October. As a novice in the misanthropic and surprisingly brutal world of old books, he’d found his colleagues in the trade very ready to share their opinions of his incompetence, so he was enjoying his current meeting a lot more than he probably should. It was quite entertaining to be underestimated when you had a secret weapon.

Mr. Deansbrook, whose tiny paper-dump of a shop specialised in music, leafed through the list Will had handed him a second time, and pursed his mouth. “This is the Aveston collection.”

“It is, yes.”

“They’re selling off the Aveston music collection.”

“That’s right.”

“The Aveston collection,” Deansbrook repeated, in case they had misunderstood one another. “And you’re handling it? How the devil did you get that? Why didn’t they give it to me? Or Hughes, even? Good heavens, I could throw a brick from my doorway and hit half a dozen better men for the job! No offence,” he added rather too late.

“None taken,” Will said cheerily. “Interested in anything, at all?”

The list, as he well knew, comprised most of Deansbrook’s hopes, dreams, and sexual fantasies, since he shared the deceased Lord Aveston’s love of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. Will couldn’t tell a madrigal from a macaroon, but he hadn’t got the job for his bibliographic skills. In fact, he’d spent much of his time with the Avestons simply chatting to the new viscount, a pleasantly dim young man who was far more interested in swapping war stories and rattling on about cricket than in anything that might be classed as intellectual pursuits.

That had been fun in itself. Will had enjoyed fossicking about the impressive library too, not to mention staying in a stately home where nobody was trying to kill him. That made a change. Mostly, though, he now had the opportunity to repay Deansbrook for a lot of jibes, and he planned to do that in full.