Chapter Two
The Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena, London Field Office, the Closet
Six Days Before Samhain
“This is intolerable,” Sam said the moment they made it through the War Room and into the Closet.
It wasn’t really a closet, of course. It was a chamber adjoining the War Room, with moss and golden fern wallpaper, mahogany privacy screens carved like lace, and a large brass mirror rumored to be haunted.
The walls were hived with dark wood shelves on which crowded a vast assortment of travel chests, and it was on this account that it was affectionately known as the Closet.
As field agents, Sam and Hel were each permitted to maintain a travel chest within the Closet for the ostensibly rare occasions on which they wouldn’t have time to go back home before shipping out again.
Sam clambered up the ladder, attempting to balance as she yanked on the iron handles of her travel chest. It didn’t budge. She tried again, her biceps protesting. Sam didn’t remember it being quite so heavy. Then again, the last time she’d moved it, it had been empty.
“I can’t believe he’s sending Van Helsing with us!” Sam managed, struggling with the trunk.
“The only thing that’s hard to believe is that it’s taken him this long.” Hel had already shrugged out of her coat and suit jacket and slid the pin out of the collar of her shirt.
Sam gave a little cry as she nearly overbalanced. A hand on the small of her back steadied her.
“Thank you,” Sam gasped as she climbed down, shaking a little. She would grab what she needed and borrow a carpetbag; the travel chest could just stay up there until it rotted.
“Let me,” Hel said, rolling up her sleeves.
“Oh, I—um.”
Hel brushed Sam aside, pulling her trunk down with ease, the only sign of strain written in the flex of her forearms, the tug of cloth between her shoulder blades. Sam’s cheeks flushed.
“Here you go.” Hel handed the chest to Sam, who nearly dropped it but managed to make it appear as if she were simply setting it down. Right in the middle of the floor. As one did.
“Mmmm,” she managed, caught between pique and something else entirely.
Not daring to look at Hel, Sam gathered up an armful of clothing and fled behind a privacy screen.
Get a hold of yourself, Sam! She resisted the urge to slap her own cheeks.
Hel was just being helpful, which was what partners did for one another.
They were helpful. The way Sam helped Hel when it came to people.
But ever since the Beast, there had been this .
. . terrible fury inside her mind. It rose within her at the most inopportune times, choking her if she attempted to swallow it down.
She tried to tell herself it wasn’t hers, that it was some remnant of the perfume that had turned her into a Beast, but she knew that for the lie it was.
Something had awakened within her. Where there had been fear, there was wrath. It was becoming a problem. Perhaps this was what happened to channels when the corruption took root—when they began to break.
Nerves simmered beneath her skin as she tugged off her riding habit and began the process of wriggling into her white wool-and-velvet traveling dress. She’d just sewn in a new petticoat after the whole “setting the old one on fire” business. It still smelled vaguely of smoke.
Being a field agent was a terror on one’s wardrobe.
Sam knew she ought to exchange her fine fashions for more sensible attire.
She’d nearly twisted an ankle on more than one occasion and ruined more dresses than she dared recall.
But every time she forced herself to consider it, a part of her shriveled up and died.
Fashion was the only language in which Sam had always felt free to express herself.
It was a kind of armor against the world, as much a part of her as her rabbit-brown eyes.
Besides which, there was value in being underestimated.
“What am I supposed to do, Hel? I can’t—I’m not . . .” Sam stumbled; she couldn’t make herself say that she was a channel, not within Society walls. Not when someone might hear. “I’m useless with Van Helsing watching.”
Hel snorted. “You’re not useless. I never would have solved the riddle of the Beast if it weren’t for you.”
If it weren’t for Sam’s channeling, she meant.
“Would you have let me come along if I hadn’t”—she still couldn’t say it—“if I hadn’t smelled the salt?”
Hel went quiet. Sam’s heart ached. It was confirmation enough. She sat down heavily and began finger combing her hair in front of the allegedly possessed mirror. Her face looked haunted in its shadowed glass, her eyes hollow, her teeth a little too sharp.
Sam shouldn’t have been surprised at Hel’s reaction.
What value did Sam have in the field, outside of channeling?
Oh, she was observant enough, but not more so than Hel.
Her legs went limp instead of, say, running when pursued by monsters, let alone any of the more offensive maneuvers Hel employed.
She was, as Van Helsing had so eloquently pointed out, a hazard with a firearm and a liability without.
“Would you have ever left your library,” Hel said at last, “if it weren’t for your grandfather’s numbers?”
It was Sam’s turn to fall quiet. The truth was, Sam might have spent all her days in the library—delving the endless-seeming stacks and gorging herself on rare books in the flickering gaslight—if it weren’t for the slim, improbable hope of finding her grandfather.
But that wasn’t what this was about: Hel was trying to distract her. Sam could feel it in the distance between them, in the suggestion that Sam go back to her books. In the name the radiotelegraph had dropped before them like a stone.
Moriarty.
“What did he tell you?” Sam demanded.
Hel stilled, so briefly that if Sam hadn’t been watching for it, she would have missed it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“There on your arm,” Sam said evenly. “That’s a bee sting, isn’t it.”
Hel didn’t so much as glance at it. “The wasps are ornery in October. They know they’re going to die.”
“You already knew we were going to Ireland, didn’t you?” Sam pressed. The sharpening of Hel’s body, it hadn’t been for Ireland but because it confirmed something she’d already known, something that had implications. “You think your father’s behind the disappearances.”
“I don’t know what you—” Hel began to pull away.
Sam reached after her. “Hel—” The moment her fingers brushed Hel’s, she gasped, a feeling ghosting through her like smoke.
Hel snatched her hand back, but it was too late.
Blood bloomed on Hel’s discarded coat, right over her heart.
Hands shaking, Sam knelt and pulled a curl of paper from its pocket, no bigger than a wood shaving, a yellow bristle still caught in the glue.
She’d been right. Heart in her throat, she read the message: Luke 15:11–32.
“The parable of the prodigal son?”
“Sam,” Hel warned, but Sam shook her head—she wasn’t letting this go.
Hel was the prodigal son, that much was obvious.
She’d left home with all the gifts she’d inherited from her father—her training in the clandestine arts, her skill with weaponry, and her mind, sharp as a splinter.
Arsène Courbet had warned Hel she’d never appreciated the gift she’d been given in her father.
One might even say she’d wasted it, whereas her brother, Ruari, continued to work for their father, like the brothers in the parable.
Sam recalled what Ruari had said of his father’s plans for Hel: She will be alone, without allies or lovers or friends, until the day she comes home.
Father will make sure of it. Like the prodigal son, he meant for Hel to exhaust her welcome in the wider world, forcing her to return home.
At which point, the father slaughtered a fatted calf to celebrate.
But who was the fatted calf? Sam wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to find out.
Hel snatched the curl of paper back.
“What does it mean?” Sam asked.
“It means it’s not safe,” Hel said flatly. “Not for you.” Sam was the fatted calf, wasn’t she. She’d been a queen before. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the downgrade.
“And it is for you?” Sam pressed, but Hel didn’t answer. “If this is about your father, I made you a promise.” That they’d be sharks, that they would scent out Hel’s family, that they would stop them together.
Hel grimaced. “I release you from that promise. I shouldn’t have let you make it in the first place.”
“That’s not your decision!” Sam made a frustrated sound in her throat. “Hel, we’re supposed to be partners. You said you’d try.”
Hel looked away. “You don’t want this. Trust me.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I want,” Sam said stubbornly. She reached for Hel, but the other woman pulled away. Her fingers curled into her palms. “What are you so afraid of?”
“Him!” Hel said with a quiet intensity, tension running through her body like a current.
“And you’re a fool if you’re not. You thought he had eyes in Paris, that he still has a mole in the Society—there is nothing he does not see in Ireland, no whisper he does not hear.
His library is brimming with forbidden magic, and that’s not counting the monsters.
He is going to have me arrested for his crimes, and if you are associated with me, you will go down with me—if he doesn’t kill you first.”
Hel had accepted her own death and disgrace when she’d taken up against her father.
But when it came to Sam, death and disgrace were suddenly unacceptable.
It was a weakness—Sam was a weakness—and so Hel wanted to do what she’d done every other time she’d found a weakness in herself.
She wanted to cut it out. Unfortunately for Hel, Sam wasn’t that easy to be rid of.
“He’s still just a man,” Sam said, plucking up a broad-brimmed hat festooned with a cloud of white feathers and pinning it viciously to her head. “And men can be beaten.”