Chapter Two #2
“Sam, I left, and I still play my part in his game,” Hel said. “Every victory is at his sufferance, ever counter furthers his design. Even the Beast murders—”
“We saved Josephine Heroux,” Sam protested. “We stopped Arsène Courbet.”
“After he had achieved my father’s aims,” Hel said. “Even there, we did my father’s work.”
Sam remembered what Hel had said before: Men like that don’t leave pieces on the board.
Arsène Courbet had died shortly after his initial confession implicating Hel, before he could be cross-examined, his clothes found crawling with a rare variety of ant said to come all the way from Australia.
But Professor Moriarty had only killed Arsène Courbet because he had been caught.
He couldn’t possibly have intended on Sam and Hel killing him the whole time . . . could he?
“My father is my problem to solve, not yours,” Hel said grimly, and at last, Sam recognized the look in Hel’s eye. Like a gunslinger when the law closed in around them, preparing for their last stand. “I can’t let him take you, too.”
“He won’t,” Sam said firmly. “Hel, I need you to trust me.”
“It’s not you I don’t trust,” Hel said. But when Sam followed her from the room, dragging her trunk inelegantly behind her, Hel didn’t move to stop her.
Dublin Port (Irish: Calafort átha Cliath), Ireland
Five Days Before Samhain
Sam looked out over the rail of the passenger ferry, sea spray stinging her cheeks.
A cutting wind rose off the water, whipping the fog like it was carding wool, but through it Sam could just make out glimpses of Ireland: white froth crashing on the rocks and the red flash of a lighthouse, like Avalon emerging from the mists.
Or Dracula, Sam thought, her nerves rising with the skirling of the lighthouse siren, recalling her father’s stories of the ghost ship that had carried the vampire to England, of the dead captain tied to the wheel.
There had been fog then, too, and a terrible storm to rival the Night of the Big Wind, despite the fact that a strong wind ought to have torn through fog like salt through a ghost.
And then there was the strange singing in her blood, which no one else seemed to hear.
It had started when they’d entered the harbor—a humming in her flesh, a fluting in her bones.
She heard it every time she closed her eyes, and sometimes when they were open, and it was getting stronger.
It was unearthly, lilting and sweet, with a yearning that filled her with a terrible grief.
She couldn’t quite make out what it wanted, but she felt certain that if she listened long enough, she would.
Sam wondered if this was how her mother had felt when Dracula had called to her.
It wasn’t vampires, Sam told herself sternly.
Mr. Wright would have told her. Although he didn’t seem to have a full grasp of the details.
Whoever Sam, Hel, and Van Helsing were working for, they were powerful enough to order the Society’s field agents out from under Mr. Wright and seemed under no obligation to share why.
Sam itched to pick over it with Hel, but the other woman had made herself scarce.
Having searched the steam-packet from bow to stern, Sam was just about to check the rigging—which, as it was the last place Sam expected to find Hel, was probably where she ought to have started—when she heard the jingle of cowboy boots.
“I hardly require an escort, Van Helsing,” Sam said without turning.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Van Helsing replied, drawing next to her and leaning back on the rail. “It’s a small ship. I came for the air.”
“And if I should choose to go inside?”
“Then I must concede: The spray is a bit much.” He sounded amused, her irritation but one more perk of the assignment.
Sam rounded on him. “What exactly do you think is going to happen should I make it out of your sight for more than the time it takes me to powder my nose? Are you afraid I might steal a moment’s peace? That I might enjoy myself?”
“People have been disappearing, Miss Harker,” Van Helsing said, as if he hadn’t been haunting her the entire trip. Even Sam’s shadow gave her more consideration—at least at noon it went away. “I had assumed you wouldn’t want to be one of them.”
“And I require your assistance for that, do I?” Sam said.
“You seem to have misplaced your usual escort,” Van Helsing said.
So he’d noticed. Sam lifted her chin. “Perhaps Dr. Moriarty simply trusts that I can handle myself.”
Van Helsing stepped close, the wet-leather scent of him washing over her.
Instinctively, she tried to step backward, but found herself against the rail of the ship.
Fear flickered in the hollow of her throat, as if to prove that no, she couldn’t handle herself, that in fact she very much needed her escort, wherever she had gotten to.
“Miss Moriarty is not like us,” Van Helsing growled. “You and I, we understand that there are certain lines you do not cross, and that the rules are there for a reason. There is no line she will not cross, no rule she will not break. Whatever she has done to earn your trust—”
But Sam was stuck on that first part, lodged in her throat like a fishbone. “I am nothing like you.”
Something like surprise crossed over his face, as if he’d truly thought them similar. Then his expression darkened. “No. Perhaps not.”
“Dr. Moriarty!” Sam called, relief coursing through her as she caught sight of Hel striding toward them, Heathcliff perched on her shoulder like a parrot, her long tan coat whipping in the wind. Sam was gratified to see Van Helsing lurch away from her.
Hel’s gaze flicked toward Sam. Are you all right?
Where were you? Sam’s look returned.
Van Helsing interposed himself between them, cutting their game of glances short. “Miss Moriarty,” he said, as if he hadn’t just been trying to turn Sam against her, “you’re from Ireland, right?”
“How spectacularly observant,” Hel said dryly. “Did you figure that out yourself?”
“What are we looking at?” Van Helsing continued. “I’m afraid I’m a little rusty on Irish monsters. Do you think it’s fairies? They’re the ones that abduct people, aren’t they?”
“Don’t call them that,” Sam said sharply. Hadn’t he read any books on the Good People at all? Sam was afraid to think the word, let alone give it breath.
Van Helsing snorted. “What, fairies? Whyever not? They seem easy enough to deal with. Vulnerable to iron, right? Or a net, I imagine.”
“If you don’t stop,” Hel said, “you’re going to find out.”
“Fine then, what do you call them?”
“The Good People,” Hel said. “Or the Folk. Anything so long as it’s not their name.”
“What are they, really?” Sam asked. The books Sam had read were unclear on the subject, full of contradictions and what she was fairly certain were metaphors. But the Folk couldn’t truly be “the scream before a death” or “the laughter when you lost your way,” could they?
Hel shrugged. “They are Themselves. Some call them the old gods, and others the dead. Some call them nature spirits, and others fallen angels.”
Sam remembered her grandfather’s stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann: Manannán mac Lir, the son of the sea and guardian of the Otherworld; Brigid, goddess of poets and wisdom, healing and smiths; and the Mórrígan, also known as the phantom queen.
But also, the humble brownie, the shapeshifting pooka, and the mischievous leprechaun.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Van Helsing scoffed. “They’re monsters, like all the rest. Not gods or fallen angels. Besides, nothing can be all those things at once.”
“That is exactly what they are, and only fools call them by name,” Hel said, with a hard look at Van Helsing, who had the decency to flush. “But we can count ourselves fortunate: They’re not the ones behind the disappearances.”
Van Helsing frowned. “How do you figure?”
Sam understood at once. “The Folk tend to take people they like.”
The very fact that the English were upset meant the people who had disappeared were unlikely to be the sort the Folk might take a liking to, let alone love well enough to abduct.
Even if they were, these people had likely lived in cities, to which the Folk had a particular aversion on account of all the industry and iron.
Sam couldn’t help but feel a vague sense of disappointment. She knew the Folk were nothing like the winged nymphs of English imagination, but she couldn’t help but find them fascinating. Inconstant, glorious, and undefinable, they were a dangerous puzzle.
Sam glanced at Hel, but the other woman’s face was a mask.
“Well, there are plenty of other monsters in Ireland,” Van Helsing said.
He was right, of course. Sam had cut her teeth on stories of kelpies, the vicious water horses who drowned and devoured their prey, leaving only their livers to catch in some fisherman’s net, and there were plenty more besides that.
“If the monster is even from Ireland,” Sam murmured, half to herself.
Van Helsing’s brow furrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” Hel said, “that between the Chimera in the southern heath and the strigoi in the salt flats of France, the creatures can’t be counted on to stay in their usual ranges. My father’s business trafficking monsters on the underworld’s shadow market has seen to that.”
Van Helsing frowned. “Why haven’t I heard of this? Does Mr. Wright know?”
“Yes,” Sam and Hel said simultaneously. Though why Professor Moriarty’s monstrous affairs had been kept from Van Helsing, Sam could only guess. Perhaps it had something to do with his lack of subtlety. Or his inability to blend in. Or the sheer decibels of him.
Van Helsing gave them an odd look, and seemed as if he might say something more, but then the captain was calling him over as sailors threw lines over to the dockhands and readied the gangplank.