Chapter 31
Nin stared down at a symbol written in blood on the floorboards where Lavina had just been.
“The witch used magic to escape undetected,” he mumbled.
I didn’t care. I was just relieved she was gone. And relieved he was here. “You’re hurt!”
He touched his neck and came away with blood on his fingers. “It’s minor.”
Was it? I pulled at his clothes to check. There was a lot of blood, and it was still coming. But if he’d been cut in the wrong place, there would have been a lot more than there was. Realizing this eased my mind a fraction, and I nodded and released him.
We both glanced around the room. Along with Lavina, Mr. Hoffmann was gone, leaving nothing but broken glass and the liquid that had pickled his blackened finger. Said finger was missing. I wondered if he’d gone with her, even after he’d been so passionate about abandoning her.
It was hard to know if I could trust him.
“What did you do to her husband’s soul?” I asked, flicking a glance toward the wall with the open cabinet and its goat skulls leering back at us. “Hoffmann’s master.”
“A banishment. Either he’ll be guided to the Nightlands by one of my siblings or he’ll walk Earth as a ghost. He’s not our concern anymore. I need to find Lavina. I cannot return to my world until I have my starlight pendant.”
His words broke through the chaos inside my head, and now I recalled what he’d said when he’d been telling me the story of his origins. “Your father gave it to you. Does it look like an opal? White and iridescent?”
“You’ve seen it?” An intense hope underscored his words.
“Around the master’s neck.”
A string of curses fell from Nin’s lips. “She’s gone. Not on the immediate property. Or she’s hiding.”
“If she’s anywhere, my guess would be in the master’s rooms upstairs.”
He held out his hand, and I clasped it with mine. “Try to hold on,” he said.
“Um…?”
I had no chance to prepare for what followed. One second I was standing in the wreckage of Agnes Voss’s bedroom, and the next, everything went black. No light. No sound. No anything. Then the world returned, and we were standing in Voss’s rooms.
I was so dizzy that my knees buckled, after which, I promptly vomited.
“I’m so sorry,” Nin murmured, helping me up after I wiped my mouth.
“What… was that?”
“It’s how I move when I need to. I thought you might be able… Never mind. We won’t do that again. Are you all right?”
I nodded, accepting his help to get me to my feet again. “Is Lavina here? Can you tell?”
“I cannot sense her anywhere.” He let go of me and began exploring the rooms while I recovered.
He opened jewelry boxes and looked behind several books that lined the wall near the master’s desk, tossing old grimoires to the floor.
I thought of all the times I’d been inside these rooms doing my nursing duties.
I’d been checking the vitals of a dead man with the soul of a woman who’d been born over two hundred years ago—at the very least.
How could I not have at least been suspicious?
As Nin searched the master’s rooms, I told him what I’d found in the cabinet concerning these Buckriders. The letter from Scotland Yard. The property deeds going back to the 1600s. “Did you suspect any of this?” I asked. “Do you know these people?”
“They are known to us as profaners—people who break the natural laws of your world and mine to defy death. They and others like them have been a thorn in my father’s side since the time of King James.
They’re skilled at hiding themselves with stolen magic, and my family lost track of them.
I had no idea they’d crossed the Atlantic. ”
“Please tell me that the goat-riding part is just a story.”
He hesitated. “I’ve seen humans do stranger things, but I don’t know anything for certain.” He shook his head and threw up his hands in frustration. “She has several hiding spots in these rooms, all hidden with weak magic. But my pendant is not here. She was wearing it?”
I nodded. “Around her neck. I saw it once, when I was helping with a coughing attack.”
“I cannot go home without that pendant,” he said, checking the bleeding at his neck. “And she is no longer on this property.”
I could feel the exasperation coming off him.
“Then we’ll have to track her down. Look, it’s already snowing,” I said, pointing to the balcony.
“Maybe we can follow her tracks? Well, I guess they’re Charles Voss’s tracks, since she’s still wearing his body like a suit of meat,” I mumbled.
“Do you have any special god-level tracking skills?”
He glanced out the balcony doors, squinting to see through heavily falling snow. “Are the goats still in the pasture?”
“Hoffmann moved them into the red barn earlier.”
“Then that’s where we start.”
“I need to bandage you first!”
“I’m all right, truly. And we don’t have the luxury of time. Let’s go, Molly.”
We rushed out of the rooms through the golden doors.
I needed my coat to travel—it was well below freezing—so we raced down the hall to my room, where I grabbed both it and the nursing lantern.
When I did so, I had the sudden realization that we intended to leave Riverbend.
I began pulling out my medical bag from its hiding spot beneath the bed, but Nin stopped me.
“You might need stitches,” I argued.
“We cannot take everything,” Nin told me, lightly touching his neck to test the wound. “If we mean to track Lavina, we will need a horse.”
Right. I left the medical bag, but I wasn’t going to leave the lantern. Nin grabbed my hand again, but this time we just ran. Down the back stairs, through the servants’ wing, and into the kitchen—
Where we both stopped short of leaving. I gasped in horror at the sight before us.
The side door stood wide open. Sheets of snow blew into the kitchen from the doorway, already making a pile on the floor.
Near the dead body of Mrs. Culpepper.
She lay in a pool of her own blood, her chest stabbed several times.
Though I had no affection for the housekeeper, I didn’t want to see her dead.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam, I murmured.
Nin murmured something too. I caught the word “Kesh” at the end of it.
“Your brother’s here?” I whispered, heart racing.
Of course! Lavina had murdered the housekeeper. Kesh was the Prince of Murder.
Nin put his hands on my shoulders to move me around the body. “I cannot perform my duties while I’m in this world, and neither can Kesh.”
“Does that mean he was back in the Nightlands when this happened?”
“Yes. Where he is now, though, I don’t know. But I’m having trouble trusting him at the moment—not until I know his motivations for wanting to rescue me. We need to go before he shows up.”
Nin didn’t have to tell me twice.
We rushed out of the room together and were pummeled with heavily falling snow.
I don’t know what I’d been thinking; there was no way we could track anyone in all of this.
Any tracks would be filled immediately with more snow.
An inch or more already covered the ground, and the winds were fierce, whipping swirls of snowflakes around us as we ran toward the carriage house and the big red barn.
The doors of the carriage house were already open. I wanted to be cautious, but Nin forced me inside, where the howling winds were muffled and we could shake snow out of our hair and clothing.
“Schwester Molly!”
Hoffmann stood near Filomena, who was busy saddling a horse. A second horse had already been saddled. When she spotted Nin, her eyes widened with shock.
“It’s all right, my dear,” Hoffmann told the girl. “I told you before that the boy in the basement won’t hurt us. You’re looking at a member of royalty.” The valet bowed deeply and addressed Nin. “Prince of Mourning, it is my honor.”
“Imp of Saxony,” Nin replied, nodding in acknowledgment. “Where is Lavina? We must find her immediately. She possesses something of mine.”
“I just came from the barn,” he said. “Abbo is missing.”
“That’s the master’s favorite goat,” I told Nin. “Can they truly fly?”
“Fly?” Filomena muttered, eyes still wary of my companion.
Nin stared at the valet. “Can they, imp?”
Mr. Hoffmann blinked furiously, clearly afraid of Nin, and finally nodded.
“Not far. A mile or two at most. It’s the master’s magic, a spell, that makes them fly—a very taxing spell.
If Lavina tries to push herself, she will need to sleep almost immediately to recharge her strength.
We brought the goats from Europe on a boat.
They respond to a special bell that the master rings. ”
I felt a little sick, thinking about the goats. Filomena must have felt the same way, judging by the look on her face. I had the feeling she’d seen far more in Riverbend than she’d let on.
“We may already be too late,” Nin said. “Lavina could be a couple miles away.”
And the storm was raging. That would make our travel difficult and hinder tracking.
“What about the hounds?” Filomena said in a small voice.
I looked at her. “What about them?”
“They always return to the master’s side,” Filomena said.
Hoffmann stroked his mustache. “She might be onto something with that. The hounds are gone—I saw them running across the lawn when we were coming in here.”
“The master once bragged that they were left at the farmers’ cottages, many miles from here,” Filomena added. “It took them two days to make their way back to Riverbend.”
Nin considered this. “Which direction did you see the hounds going?”
“At the edge of the bluffs, following the river north.” Hoffmann pointed.
“Thank you,” Nin said. “We need a horse. My brother may show up here, so you both should leave as soon as possible.”
This lit a fire under the valet, who looked positively spooked at the mention of Nin’s brother. “Wait,” I told Hoffmann, suddenly remembering. “A while back, I saw you walking to the aegis border to talk to Nin’s brother. Why?”
Hoffmann cowered visibly, turtling into the neck of his jacket.
“Answer her, imp,” Nin demanded. “There’s little time.”
“The Prince of Murder wanted a key to get inside the aegis,” the valet said.
“The metal hourglass?” I said. “He asked me, too.”
Hoffmann shook his head. “He wanted a day pass—the smaller hourglass that I carried with me to be able to fetch you from the city. He didn’t want to take down the aegis. He wanted to get inside it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nin said roughly. “Kesh is now in this world. I can feel his presence. We must leave.”
“Come with us,” Filomena said. “We’re going into town. There’s a hotel—”
“No.” Nin shook his head. “I will not let her leave my sight, not while Lavina is loose.”
Oh, thank goodness. I couldn’t dare leave him, not after we’d just been freed. This might not have been how I’d dreamed of our freedom, but this was what we had. I told Filomena, “Thank you, but I’m going to stay with Nin.”
Nin’s shoulders relaxed. He nodded at me once, and I nodded back. It felt as if we were offering each other a silent vow. I will not abandon you.
He turned to the servants and said, “We must follow Lavina. Our path is dangerous. We’re better off splitting up.”
“Take the mare, then,” Hoffmann said, gesturing toward the horse that had just been saddled. “She doesn’t scare easily. We’ll take the stallion.”
I looked at Filomena and hesitated. She hadn’t seen Hoffmann’s pickled finger. He wasn’t human. Nin had always doubted him, or at least been unsure about his motivations.
“Will you take care of Filomena?” I asked the valet.
“Of course.”
“More like I’ll be taking care of him,” Filomena joked.
Nin grabbed the front of Hoffmann’s jacket and bent over him, putting his face in front of the valet’s. “What are your intentions? Give me your word that you will not put this girl in harm’s way.”
“You have my promise, my lord,” Hoffmann said, raising his hands in surrender. “I swear to you on my life, I only wish to see her safely into town. Then I will make my way back overseas. Unless you require a servant, my lord…?”
“No,” Nin said simply, releasing the valet.
Hoffmann nodded. “Then we will head east into town.”
“And we will head north.”
Nin was already mounting. He was eager to leave, so I hurried to the mare and hooked my lantern to the saddle before accepting Nin’s arm to help me mount. After struggling with my skirts, I settled into the saddle behind him.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Filomena asked from the back of the stallion.
I nodded. “If we all make it out of this, you can always call on me at Bellevue Hospital in the city. Thank you for everything.”
Filomena nodded. “May we meet under better circumstances.”
“Goodbye, my lord. And goodbye, Schwester Molly,” Hoffmann said before bowing his head. “Thank you for freeing me. I’m sorry for everything that happened, for your imprisonment, and for even bringing you out here into this chaos.”
“We all have our duty,” I told him.
And my duty, the entire reason I’d been brought out here, was getting away in the snowstorm.