10. Cleaning House #3
“Focus on the task at hand, Beauchamp,” she snarled, her voice tight and high. “Which is my hand. You can theorize with Nikka all you like later about creatures long gone. The house just tried to maim me two minutes ago.”
“It was reckless of you to go off on your own,” Miles said, his tone clipped. “We agreed to proceed as a group. The attic has already demonstrated hostility.”
Hah. Gabriel had to admire the proficiency of Genna’s distraction, even as he made a note to poke at this later.
He and Genna had met shortly before Madaze’s death, an ally from the Order Miles had recruited to their cause.
The intensity of that bad old time and their natural affinity for a cutting phrase and a cynical viewpoint had quickly made him feel close to her .
He trusted Genna with his life. He trusted her with Miles. But as he watched her wiggle from a slip-up she clearly regretted, Gabriel realized he was mistaking shared trauma for depth of history.
But he filed it away. Genna’s hidden syllabus on vampire biology would have to wait. He had other, more pressing problems.
“I didn’t touch the attic,” Genna shot back at Miles, wincing. “I touched the mechanism to access it. There’s a difference.”
“A slim one, at best. Hold still.” Miles smeared the green, pungent paste over her bruising knuckles.
He was right to scold her, Gabriel thought.
The house hadn’t tried to hurt them when they hauled out the corpses. But when Genna tried to access the attic, it struck.
He’d first thought it was a trap, but now it seemed to him to be more a warning. A selective one? Genna was now the only person the house had injured, and he and Miles made it all the way up to the attic, if briefly.
It was protecting something up there. Or protecting them from it. Or maybe—and this was the thought that made his throat tight—it was protecting itself. The attic was its wound. The place it wasn’t ready to let them see. The manor had lashed out like a cornered animal protecting its den.
He understood that.
“It seems,” Gabriel said dryly, “that our host has very specific boundaries about the attic.”
“Boundaries?” Genna snapped, wincing as Miles’s magic cooled the bruising. “It tried to break my hand, Gabriel.”
“Leave it,” Gabriel said. “Whatever is rotting in the attic can rot for another day. We stick to the main floors.”
Nikka didn’t need telling twice. She scurried past them, eager to return to her task.
Miles frowned but nodded. “There’s plenty to do here for now.”
As the rest of them made their way back to the ballroom past the staircase that led down, Gabriel’s mind drifted down those stairs.
The basement. The “Gilded Cage.” If the attic was the house’s hidden brain, the basement was its gut, the place where the bile settled.
They would need to inventory it as well.
But the thought of descending those stairs today, with his nerves already frayed from the morning’s argument and the looming threat of Vellast, made his throat tight. No. He couldn’t do the basement today. And he didn’t have to. There was more than enough to do today on the main and upper floors.
“Lord Fairfield! Master Beauchamp!” Nikka’s voice boomed from the far end of the ballroom, obliterating the tension. She was standing next to a massive mahogany sideboard that looked like it weighed as much as a carriage. “There’s a lot of goop behind here. I need help to move it.”
Miles sighed, a man beset by trials, and reached into his coat. “I have just the thing.” He pulled out the Kinetite disc, and Gabriel recalled the effort it had taken yesterday for Miles to use it repeatedly. If he levitated this cabinet, he’d likely keep magically moving furniture all day.
“No,” Gabriel said, stepping forward and placing a hand on Miles’s forearm. He felt the tension in Miles’s muscles, the readiness to cast. “Save it. We don’t know what else this place is going to throw at us today. Don’t waste your power on furniture.”
“It’s not that hard, Gabriel,” Miles argued, though he tucked away his disc.
“Humor me,” Gabriel said. “We can shove it. We have hands.”
He moved to the left side of the sideboard, gesturing for Miles to take the right. It was better this way. Physical exertion was grounding. It kept the panic in the chest from rising to the throat.
“On three,” Gabriel said, bending his knees, gripping the carved wood. “One, two—”
He didn’t get to three.
Before he could exert a single ounce of force, the sideboard moved.
It didn’t scrape or shudder. It slid, smooth as oil on glass, gliding three feet away from the wall and settling with a polite, nearly silent thud .
Gabriel snatched his hands back as if the wood had burned him.
“Fascinating,” Miles said, his mind instantly absorbed with academic hunger. He leaned down to inspect the floor. “Did you feel the hum? That wasn’t just standard levitation. That was a localized friction negation and something else I don’t understand.”
“It’s helpful,” Nikka chirped, oblivious to the creepiness of it all. She immediately attacked the revealed pile of gray sludge with a brush that seemed to make it hiss and dissolve. “I’ll take it.”
Genna scoffed .
“Helpful?” Genna cradled her healing hand against her chest, eyeing the obedient furniture with open hostility. “Funny how it plays the eager servant for the pretty lord but tries to amputate my fingers for touching a latch. It seems your house has favorites, Gabriel.”
“It’s a classic sympathetic resonance,” Miles said, crouching to inspect the floorboards where the sideboard had glided, his fascination momentarily eclipsing his concern for Genna’s fingers.
“Oh, please. That wasn’t a subroutine; that was a mood swing,” Genna countered.
“If this were standard magic, the ambient Aether would be rigid. Instead, it tastes like ozone and resentment. It’s acting less like a spell and more like a territorial predator recognizing its alpha.
It’s mimicking loyalty to secure a food source. ”
Gabriel watched them bat theories back and forth like a shuttlecock. Miles rattled off something about “kinetic bypass loops,” and Genna interrupted with a sharp retort about “feral mana bleed.”
“Enough,” Genna finally snapped, cutting Miles off mid-syllable.
She glared at the ceiling as if daring it to drop a chandelier on her.
“There is no point in us guessing at the pathology of this asshole of a house. It is beyond my hedge-craft and your Guild manuals.” She stretched her fingers, testing their healing and looking ready to hex the first doorframe that looked at her sideways.
“Velma brings her cards the day after tomorrow. Let the fortune teller figure out why the furniture has abandonment issues.”
Gabriel stepped back, wiping his hands on his trousers. They saw a puzzle. They saw a phenomenon.
He saw a kicked dog.
He looked around the cavernous room. A curtain had pulled itself back earlier. Now the furniture was moving before they could strain themselves. It wasn’t a trap. It felt... flustered. Like a servant terrified of being punished for an outburst, now scrambling to be useful, to be good .
I know you, Gabriel thought. I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to appease people, so they don’t hurt you.
It was a mirror he hadn’t expected to look into today. Fawning. Anticipating needs before they were voiced. It was the survival strategy of the powerless. And it worked, because looking at the now eager-to-please mansion, Gabriel didn’t feel fear anymore. He felt a nauseating, profound pity .
“Don’t get used to it,” Gabriel murmured to the room. “We’re not keeping you.”
The heavy velvet drapes shivered, just once, as if he’d struck them.
***
The common room of the Mourning Lark was nearly at capacity, full of both those staying at the inn and the people of Averdon who flocked to the Bent for entertainment, booze, and socializing.
The air was a solid wall of humidity, layered with the sour tang of spilled ale, the sweet cloying smoke of pipe weed, and the collective body heat of half the Bent’s drunkest patrons.
A fiddler in the corner was murdering a shanty that deserved a quick death, and the roar of conversation battered against Gabriel’s temples.
He winced, pressing a hand to his forehead. They had spent twelve hours cleaning and inventorying a building that anticipated their movements like a desperate valet, and Gabriel’s nerves were frayed to the point of snapping.
“Food,” Gabriel said, the word more a plea than a statement. “And wine. A bucket of it. Then bed.”
Miles, whose stamina remained infuriatingly robust even after a day of heavy lifting and scribbling in ledgers, steered Gabriel toward the bar with a hand on the small of his back.
The touch was a tether keeping Gabriel from floating away into the dissociation that had been threatening to snatch him since the sideboard moved on its own.
“Trata!” Miles leaned over the polished brass rail of the bar.
The bartender looked up from wiping down a tankard. She was a slim woman with strong forearms and a wry air. “Kitchen’s closed, Master Beauchamp. Chef Olba’s been gone for an hour.”
Gabriel let out a small, tragic noise. The idea of scavenging for a late supper in the Bent—dodging pickpockets and stepping over puddles of questionable origin just to find a meat pie that might give him food poisoning—was physically painful.
Miles gave Trata that smile, the one that was equal parts charming boy-next-door and confident mage who knew how the universe worked. “I don’t need Olba. I just need his stove. I’ll pay for the privilege and the ingredients.”
Trata eyed Gabriel, who attempted to look pathetic and starving rather than high-maintenance and bitchy. It was a difficult performance, but he gave it a go, widening his eyes.
“Double the cost of our dinners here,” Miles added softly.
Trata snorted. “Don’t burn the place down.”