Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) by Rosemary A Johns

Author:Rosemary A Johns [Johns, Rosemary A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fantasy Rebel Limited
Published: 2016-08-13T18:00:00+00:00

MAY 1866 LONDON

I checked the numbers again. There was no doubt: Overend, Gurney and Company, London’s wholesale discount bank - the banker’s bank - was about to collapse.

Junior clerk as I was, I could see the ripples from the rumbling earthquake in its wake spreading out with photographic clarity: the panic and run on banks spreading to Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, Derby and Bristol, and then all the other companies failing, like dominoes in a row.

I’d written warnings to the directors, especially Mr John Wesley Erwood, ever since they’d employed me on the written recommendation and good word of my uncle. That, however, had nearly got me bloody fired.

Junior clerks weren’t meant to get above themselves; it was bleeding presumptuous and should’ve been already beaten out of me. I should’ve simply got on with my job, bowed and scraped - yes sir, no sir – and kept my peepers to the ground, rather than lifted to the lofty heights of high finance. But I’ve always been a curious bastard. Not one to stay in my place.

The one talent I had was for numbers.

Numbers had danced in my mind, in glimmering cascades, before I even had the words to describe them. And these ones at the bank? They’d never added up. Not when the bank had millions of pounds more liabilities than liquid assets, yet still couldn’t see the danger. Not when the stock and bond prices collapsed. Not when the Bank of England failed to play ball.

I slammed the hefty, leather accounts book shut, tapping my fingers thoughtfully on top. I’d requested to work late in a dusty backroom, which was lined with the bank’s ledgers; their secrets for the last decade were hidden in the numbers. Gradually I’d unearthed the truth in their patterns. The fading light streamed through the single high window.

The answer I’d discovered in that room of numbers, was that the world was about to come tumbling down on all our heads. Yet no one realised it because the reality was masked by the directors’ fraud – and that was the buried truth.

Every night I came here, I was working myself up to something, which took more courage than I reckoned I possessed.

The directors were conning the world and I was the only one, who could do anything about it. If I didn’t, honest men and their families would suffer; I understood too well what poverty and misery could follow, when livelihoods were lost.

I knew I’d have to reveal the lies.

Real hero, right?

Prat more like.

I was innocent as a babe in my First Life. But I was fired by the flames of the righteous for all the little people, who’d be caught in the whirlwind, when the banks turned bad.

Clueless I was but still, that’s when I started my plan to worm close to Mr Erwood, (the stuffed walrus). I made sure I was in the position to overhear snatches of muttered meetings, which I could then match up with the dodgy numbers that paraded - day and night - in my brain.

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