Chapter Nine
The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin (Baile átha Cliath)
Four Days Before Samhain
Ash drifted over Sam’s bare feet. A red sun simmered in the sky, silhouetting a sea of swords stuck out of the ground like tombstones. This, she understood, as the song shivered through her, was not Dublin. At least, not the Dublin she knew.
She was dreaming. Though it was unnaturally vivid—and she uncomfortably aware.
She tried to shift the dream, to conjure a library filled with every book she might imagine and also cheese, but nothing happened.
She tried to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, it was to stare into the red sun again.
Not knowing what else to do, Sam began to walk, following the red blood that ran in rivulets, veining through the ash and dust to a crimson river. There, a bent-backed old woman scrubbed the stains from a man’s rusting armor with gnarled hands, singing.
The song. It was coming from her.
A bean-nighe. Even in her dreams, Sam knew to be afraid. For to see the washer at the ford cleansing your clothing was to know your own death.
The old woman’s head jerked up, her eyes burning like stars. The singing stopped, and her mouth stretched wide in a scream, but all that came out were birds, hundreds and hundreds of birds, night black, like fragments of the shattered sky.
Sam tried to scream, but the sound stuck in her throat. She coughed, opened her mouth, and gagged, pain spiking through her as something bulged in her esophagus, scrabbling and squirming, clawing its way up, clawing its way out—
Sam shot upright in her darkened room at the Shelbourne Hotel, coughing and retching, her face reddening as she curled over, clutching her throat.
There was something in there, something digging into her gums and all the way down.
She clawed at her mouth, panic making her actions wild.
Out. She wanted it out out out. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase.
There was a snap and she pulled. Something slid, scraping, up the length of her throat and out through her lips.
Pinching it between her fingertips, Sam looked at it uncomprehendingly in the darkness. She fumbled for the lamp beside her bed, squinting against the sudden flare of gaslight.
In her hand was a long black feather, slick with spit and phlegm and streaks of blood.
She dropped it with a shriek.
Horror poured through Sam as she stared at it lying on her covers like a dead thing. She broke out in gooseflesh, her arms wrapping around her, fingernails digging into the flesh of her ribs. What in God’s name—
Despite her best efforts to dismiss it, to wake up and prove this all a night terror and nothing more, it didn’t disappear.
It was real. The calamus had broken when she’d torn it from her gums. The musky scent she identified with birds still clung to it.
She could probably identify the species it had come from, had she the proper book.
But how had it even gotten down her throat in the first place, and without waking her?
Sam shivered, remembering the feather in the scone, imagining Ruari crouched over her bed like some nightmare spider. She’d read about a man who had used a strange smoke to put his victims to sleep before having his way with them. Was this what he’d done? It might explain the dreams.
Except Van Helsing had been standing guard outside her door all night—he would have heard something, or at least smelled something. But then there was the incontrovertible fact of the feather.
There was a strange scratching sound and a tugging at the edge of her blankets. Sam gasped, yanking the covers up to her chest—only to find a familiar white-and-black rat entangled in them. Heathcliff clung to the covers with all four paws, blinking up at her.
The door burst open. Sam quickly threw a decorative pillow over Heathcliff as Van Helsing strode through the doorway, revolver in hand. “Samantha!”
“I’m all right,” she said, horribly embarrassed. “It was just a nightmare.”
Van Helsing scowled. “Do you always scream when you have nightmares?”
“Are you saying you don’t?” Sam asked.
“I haven’t screamed since I was a child,” Van Helsing huffed.
“That’s—um, all right,” Sam said. She had a lot of questions, but this was not the time for them. “Good night, Van Helsing. Sorry to bother you.”
He grunted, his eyes scraping the shadows one last time, as if certain she was hiding a ghost in there somewhere—though whyever she would do so was beyond her—before he finally closed the door.
“Sorry about that, Heathcliff.” Sam sighed, moving the decorative pillow. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
The rat scampered up to perch on her knee, and she realized he had something in his mouth.
“Is that for me?” Sam asked, tugging it gently from between his teeth.
He really was an uncommonly intelligent creature.
Something to do with whatever rituals the Golden Dawn had used to attune him to their needs, no doubt.
Unrolling the damp paper between her fingers, she saw a series of numbers in a familiar orientation.
A book code, she realized with a thrill. Sets of three numbers, page, paragraph, word. The note was from Hel, then. Because who else would it be from? But such a code required a book in common, and as far as Sam knew, they didn’t—
Oh. Sam blushed. Back in London, Hel had caught sight of one of Sam’s saucier detective stories and abducted it, forcing Sam to buy another. To her horror, she’d caught the other woman actually reading it. She hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask her what she thought of it.
The page opened to a particularly . . . well fingered .
. . section, a scene between the protagonist and the antagonist. It was a coincidence, she told herself, even as her cheeks heated.
Hel was logical, efficient. She’d likely just searched for the first instance of the word she wanted.
Probably didn’t even notice what was on the page—and what wasn’t.
Like the characters’ clothes. Or inhibitions.
This was getting out of hand. Hurriedly, Sam counted paragraphs, then words: window.
It likely didn’t mean anything, but just in case it did, Sam threw on her best nightgown, a frothy, diaphanous number that made her feel like a goddess rising from the sea-foam.
Then she rushed over to the window, arranging her blonde curls so they tumbled down around her neck.
She tried several different approaches, then decided to sit on the sill, and looked out over her shoulder.
Hel stood in the puddle of light beneath a Nubian statue, hands shoved in her suit jacket pockets, looking up at Sam. She quirked an eyebrow.
Sam’s heart fluttered, entirely taken by the daring of it, the romance—like something out of one of her storybooks!—until she realized Hel expected her to climb out the window.
Oh, for goodness’ sake! Couldn’t this wait until Hel’s watch? There was a curfew, in case she’d forgotten, and a large Dutchman standing watch outside her door. Not to mention, Sam was likely to break her neck sneaking out. She crossed her arms. Absolutely not.
Hel shrugged and turned to go.
Sam cursed silently and held up her hands in surrender. She was messing everything up. Hel had finally made what was most probably a romantic gesture, and Sam was ruining it. Sneaking out had been her idea, after all. Sam eased open the window. It groaned horribly.
“What was that?” Van Helsing’s voice came muffled from the other side of the door.
“Just wanted a little air,” Sam said, keeping her voice light, hoping he wasn’t about to hear the telltale thump of her body hitting the cobblestones. “You know, nightmares . . .”
“You are . . . odd.” She could hear the frown in his voice.
“Says the man who wears those boots.” Sam yawned.
“What’s wrong with my boots!?”
Silence, Sam decided, was the better part of valor. She was trying to sneak out, not explain the errors in Van Helsing’s sartorial judgment—which would take far more than one night regardless.
At least her new room was directly over the iron-and-glass canopy.
All she had to do was jump, which was what you called falling when you meant to do it.
Even if you changed your mind halfway. Sam swallowed.
The wind swept through the window, reanimating the feather she’d pulled from her throat so it fluttered across her sheets.
Suddenly, Sam couldn’t bear to be alone.
She shrugged on a coat and shoes, climbed out onto the balcony, and feeling as if she were about to regret all her life decisions, jumped.
It was only by some miracle she didn’t scream, her nightgown catching on the stone of the railing, showing an indecent amount of leg, before she landed on the canopy in an inelegant heap.
Heathcliff’s tiny face peered down at her with concern.
Which, Sam could relate. She felt reckless and wild, her toes curled over the glass canopy and her curls whipping in the wind.
Then it was just a matter of doing it all again, only this time, Hel caught her, her arms wrapping around her, strong and warm.
“You couldn’t have waited until it was your turn on watch?” Sam asked a little breathlessly, looking up at Hel’s face limned in the moonlight. Though the idea that Hel couldn’t wait had its own not entirely insignificant appeal.
“I did it for you,” Hel said, her voice low. “This way, you can go back inside when it’s my turn on watch.”
That long! Sam wasn’t even entirely certain how they might keep themselves occupied for the hours that entailed. Though, she supposed one might . . . revisit the same subject.
“Aren’t you worried about him seeing?” Sam pressed. Not certain if she meant Van Helsing or Ruari or both.
Hel gave Sam a crooked smile. “I’ll tell you a secret. Ravens can’t see in the dark.” But still, she let Sam go, leaving Sam cold and wishing she hadn’t said anything at all.