Chapter One #2
“Mr. Wright is a fool,” Hel said, her voice rough as she turned her face from Sam, leading the way down the hall to the investigation room. “But I’m used to it.”
“You shouldn’t have to be!” Sam argued, forcing the mess of her feelings down.
This was not the time for it, not when Hel might be arrested or worse.
But then, it was never the time for it, was it?
“Just because your father is Professor Moriarty, they act as if you can’t be trusted, calling you Lady M, as if even saying your name is enough to bring down a curse—”
“My father is a curse.”
“If you’re referring to his fondness for murdering your partners,” Sam said, “that curse is broken.” Sam had not been murdered yet. Whether that was due to Professor Moriarty’s greater designs for Sam or because of Sam and Hel’s ingenuity in escaping said designs was beside the point.
“So far,” Hel said, pushing through a set of heavy carved doors. Marble floors, patterned like a checkerboard, underlay dozens of mahogany desks. A handful of eyes fell on them and slid away, as if looking at Hel too long risked contagion.
Hel ignored them, making her way to Heathcliff’s cage on her desk.
It was, of course, empty. In the month since they’d brought Heathcliff back from Paris with them, he’d become quite the escape artist. Fortunately, he never went far—perhaps on account of all the exotic cheeses they kept bringing him—and was presently curled in the puddle of Sam’s scarf.
Hel held her hand out to the black-and-white rat, and he yawned, stretching, before scampering up her arm to perch on her shoulder.
“They think he died,” Sam whispered. “That you’re behind everything.”
Hel’s shoulders sagged. They had spared Arsène Courbet to get a lead on Hel’s father, and instead, as a last act of revenge, he’d told them the man they were hunting had perished alongside Sherlock Holmes, claiming it had been Hel all along.
It was, Sam was loath to admit, a good story.
After all, what was more likely? That a man whom no one had seen or heard from since Sherlock Holmes died was secretly pulling the strings behind a shadow empire, or that he’d died alongside Sherlock Holmes, and his daughter, a woman under active investigation, was continuing her father’s legacy?
Never had Sam so regretted an act of mercy.
“There’s still time for you to go back to your books, Miss Harker,” Hel said softly, as if reading the tenor of her thoughts.
“I never left my books. It turns out they’re portable,” Sam said tartly.
But Hel only grimaced. “Wait, you’re serious.
” She expected this sort of thing from Mr. Wright—who’d refused to give her a desk of her own on account that she might yet run back to the library—but not from Hel. It hurt more than she’d anticipated.
“Sam—” There was an unfamiliar ache in Hel’s voice, and Sam got the impression she’d misread the situation entirely.
But she would never find out what Hel might have said, for a new voice cut in: “There you are.”
Jakob Van Helsing strode toward them. Perhaps the most efficient hunter the Society had to offer, the only son of Professor Van Helsing looked much like the statue of Perseus and was nearly as likely to be carrying about a monster’s head.
Though he was, blessedly, wearing clothing.
He was tall and muscular, like many men who thought themselves heroes, with a straight nose and brown hair grown unruly in the field.
“Mr. Van Helsing,” Sam said. “Shouldn’t you be out on assignment somewhere? Or have you run the world out of monsters already?”
“Nothing would please me more,” Van Helsing said, watching her narrowly as if, even now, he expected her to turn monstrous. Honestly, sometimes Sam wished she could. “But Mr. Wright requires you in his office. Immediately.”
Hel raised an eyebrow. “Running errands for Mr. Wright now, are you?”
Van Helsing shifted his gaze to encompass Hel, his lip curling with distaste at the sight of Heathcliff on her shoulder. “Both of you.”
Hel shrugged, and they turned to go, only for that familiar jingle to chase their steps.
“Why don’t you go on ahead?” Sam said, having heard quite enough of his spurs in Paris. “I’m sure you must be terribly busy.”
For the first time since she’d rescued him, Van Helsing smiled. “Orders, Miss Harker.”
Fear shifted beneath Sam’s skin. They must have discovered evidence of Sam’s channeling—this would be the asylum come again. But it was reflexive, and Sam shook the notion free almost as soon as she’d had it. There was no reason to suspect that.
It was the affair with Dr. Gastrell and the rumors that Hel was pulling the strings of her “fallen” father’s shadow empire, which was more than enough.
Hel was going to be arrested because Sam had just had to argue with Mr. Wright, instead of simply telling him whatever he needed to hear to let them off.
Oh, why couldn’t Sam simply keep her thoughts to herself?
It was as if she’d lost the trick of it.
Once, Sam had known exactly what to say to Mr. Wright to avoid exciting his suspicions.
It was as if she could see his expectations written in the shifting of his eyes and the twitching of his lips—her part in his story. She needed only give it voice.
Sam could still see it, but she’d gotten too used to saying whatever came to mind the moment it did. Now it seemed she could not shut it off.
Hel was a terrible influence.
The walls of Mr. Wright’s office were papered in black florals and hung with the bleached skulls of trolls, basilisks, and even a vampire, still with a bit of brick between its teeth.
It made Sam uneasy. There was something unwholesome about having a skull so like a person’s on display—a reminder that humans were not so very different from monsters.
That if you weren’t careful, you might become one.
Ancient books and maps were piled haphazardly on narrow bookshelves.
Fat candles burned on a heavy scrollwork desk, red wax splattered over a scattering of case files, as if the whole bunch had been hastily shoved aside.
A radiotelegraph was tap-tap-tapping on the desk, so like the ones her grandfather used to have that her heart ached.
The eerie light of a will-o’-the-wisp lapped at the walls, drawn to the radio waves like a moth to a flame.
Unthinking, Sam pulled meaning from the Morse code: M-o-r-i-a-r-t-y.
“Mr. Wright,” Sam said in a rush, “it wasn’t Dr. Moriarty’s fault, she—”
“Moriarty. Harker. Good, good,” Mr. Wright said, as if he hadn’t heard her. Sam frowned. He was nervous, repeating himself, the lines under his eyes somehow deeper than they had been minutes ago. There was no sign of police, nor the strange men from before. “We have a situation.”
“What kind of situation?” Hel asked.
“Men have been disappearing in Ireland.”
Hel sharpened, every angle of her a knife. “How many?”
“Four,” Mr. Wright said, but then he grimaced. “Though perhaps more than we know. The reports out of Ireland mark a significant increase in abnormal phenomena of a more . . . violent persuasion. More even than is expected this time of year.”
Beyond its cities, Ireland possessed a rugged coastline and a cutting wind that swept in off the sea, over rolling hills and forests pocketed with ancient peat bogs and ruins older than memory.
You could get lost in the mists of its untamed wilds, even without walking over a fairy rath that might spirit you to the Otherworld or catching the attention of the Folk, who might steal you away to dance your shoes through on an endless night that would turn out to be a hundred years.
It was particularly dangerous this time of year, so close to Samhain, when the veil between the Otherworld and our own would be at its thinnest. Sunset on Samhain would bring a night of prophecy and hungry ghosts—when bonfires were lit for protection and monsters roamed freely.
There were rituals the Irish did to turn the worst of it aside, such as leaving iron tongs over a baby’s bassinet to prevent their being stolen and replaced with a changeling, or keeping a bit of bread tied with red string in your pocket to escape enchantment.
If you didn’t, well. Disappearances were the least of it. Still . . .
“Aren’t disappearances the province of the civic guard?” Sam asked. “Why send for us?”
“They’ll explain when you arrive,” Mr. Wright said tightly.
He doesn’t know, Sam realized, a thought that was as surprising as it was unsettling.
“A carriage will be here within the hour to take you to the train station at Holyhead. You will be on that train, and tomorrow morning’s express ferry to Dublin.
I’ve allotted you each a generous stipend to purchase what you don’t have time to pack. ”
“But we don’t even know what to research!” Sam exclaimed. Ireland had a far greater concentration of abnormal phenomena than the rest of Europe. There were theories that it was on account of the lack of industrialization—something the English were keen to address—but no one truly knew why.
There remained, also, the question as to why the Irish themselves weren’t handling this.
They had resisted the formation of any sort of formal Society, but they had the fairy doctors—those who knew the ways of the Folk and helped others with problems of an Otherworldly nature—who served much the same purpose.
But she knew better than to ask Mr. Wright that much.
“I’m certain you’ll manage,” Mr. Wright said. “Trinity Library has one of the greatest collections of books in the United Kingdom. I’m assured you’ll have full access for the duration of the assignment. You do remember how to request research materials from the field?”
“Why are we just hearing about this now?” Hel cut Sam off before she could respond. Which was probably for the best.
“We’re not,” Mr. Wright said. “The last field agents we sent out after them disappeared, too.”
“So you’re sending us,” Hel surmised. “Glad to know we’re such valuable members of the team.”
“You’re Irish, and Miss Harker’s American. Even better, you’re both Irish Catholic,” Mr. Wright said. “I’m afraid you’re the least objectionable field agents we have at the moment.”
The Irish were famously unkeen on talking to the English—and the Society had never had an excess of the un-English—so it very nearly made sense.
Except for the fact that Wright had just interrogated Sam on the matter of Hel’s loyalty.
Not to mention his ongoing suspicions as to Sam’s willful channeling.
So why was he sending them on a mission into the heart of the Moriarty empire?
Sam ought to let it be. One didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, that was because it was often filled with metaphorical Greeks. But in the end, she couldn’t help herself.
“I thought you didn’t trust us?”
“I don’t,” Mr. Wright answered. “That’s why Van Helsing is going with you.”