Chapter Eleven #2
That was to say, an ink that was invisible until it had been activated.
The only question was by what. It didn’t feel waxy, or smell particularly chemical .
. . Praying she wasn’t about to regret it, Sam licked the paper.
It tasted of dried citrus. A lemon extraction, as she recalled. Activated by iodine . . . or heat.
Sam was fresh out of iodine, but fortunately, where there were cigars, there would be matches.
She found them and lit the stub of the cigar, coughing as she drew the flame to life.
Holding it behind the paper, she watched as words ghosted onto the top of the page, in the color of burnt almonds—The Vespertine—and beneath it, that same selenic eye. So it was letterhead after all.
Vespertine. She knew the word—like flowers that bloomed at twilight, or prayers said at dusk, it simply meant something that happened in the evening—but she had never heard of an organization by that name.
It struck Sam then, the way the words had seemed burned into the paper she had pulled from Mr. Enfield’s hearth.
They’d been fixed with that same strange eye.
Mr. Enfield must have been Vespertine. But what was so important that Mr. Enfield had gone to such lengths to tell Lord Lusk, and so dangerous that someone had gone to such extents to stop him?
Painstakingly, Sam moved the cigar lower, uncovering not words but cramped formulas and a complex array of sigils and geometric figures arranged in a circle. Then, at the bottom, in a tight, angular script: See figure 2.A for detail on sigils. Alchemy, and a ritual of some sort.
Sam set the cigar down, then bent to pick up another page, when her eye caught sight of something tucked away behind the spill of paper, in the shadows of that secret compartment: a lone chess piece.
A black queen. She picked it up. It had an odd weight to it, suggesting that it was meant for more than just gameplay.
She turned it over in her hands, twisting it, searching for a seam, but it refused to give up its secrets.
Frustrated, she gave it a shake, only to nearly fumble it at the sound of a thump down the hall. Sam’s pulse leapt as she glanced back at the door. Whoever it was, they weren’t here, not yet. But they would be soon. Her eye snagged on the chessboard, the pieces arrayed as if in the midst of a game.
There was no time for subtlety; no place to hide.
Hurrying to the board, Sam hesitated, her hand drifting over the pieces, searching desperately for some sign of where the queen belonged.
But there was already a black queen, and the fine layer of dust over the chessboard was undisturbed, as if the last move in the half-played game had been centuries ago.
Then she saw it—a pawn, waiting to be crowned, its pate oddly free of dust. Quickly, Sam changed it for the spare queen. There was a click, and the painting of the broken-backed stag split from the wall, revealing a secret passage.
Heathcliff squeaked in alarm and hid beneath the desk.
“Heathcliff!” she hissed. But it was too late. Footsteps sounded down the hall outside the room.
Without stopping to think, Sam ducked into the secret passage. A series of electric lights hummed to life, illuminating yellow wallpaper with clusters of roses peeling off the walls. Beneath were charcoal streaks of what looked—and smelled—like mold. In so opulent an estate, it was disquieting.
Sam tried to pull the painting closed, but no matter how she tugged, it wouldn’t stay shut. And so she held it along with her breath, as footsteps sounded in the other room.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” murmured a man. Sam nearly bit clean through her tongue. No, it shouldn’t be possible, Sam thought wildly. He should still be in Paris. There was no way, no reason for him to be here.
The door wrenched open, revealing a man in an exquisitely cut black suit with a gold brocade waistcoat. She couldn’t see his face, hidden behind a mask shaped like a deer’s skull etched with arcane designs, its antlers twisting above his head, but she knew who he was.
M. Voland. The Golden Dawn initiate who had slashed open her palm to steal her blood.
He seized her wrist, his eyes lighting up with that familiar avarice. “You. You are that channel from Paris.”
“You are mistaken,” Sam said in a ghastly Irish accent, praying Hel would forgive her if she ever found out. She tried to pull her arm free, but his grip tightened. Sam thought about screaming, but the only people who might hear her were unlikely to help her. “I’m afraid we’ve never met.”
“Oh, but I am not. I would recognize you anywhere,” M. Voland said, his voice like velvet. “Do you know how much I made of what little you left me?”
What little she’d left him?
Anger sparked in her breast, and despite herself, Sam snapped. “You mean when you severed the tendons in my hand?” The cut had gone down to the bone. She had nearly lost the use of her hand—would have, if it weren’t for Hel.
Sam felt, rather than saw, the man’s smile behind his deer-skull mask.
“Ah, but that is only because you resisted,” M.
Voland said. In one sharp motion he twisted, pinning her arm painfully behind her back.
“You are fortunate you ran into me, you know, and not one of the others.” He began to force her down the stairs, haltingly, one at a time, as Sam tried to resist. “They don’t know how special you are, how unique.
They might not have been so understanding. ”
At the bottom of the stairs, Sam barely made out a hallway of more peeling wallpaper before M.
Voland shoved her stumbling into a room.
It was a relatively plain space, the walls painted an unforgiving white that showed every smudge and fleck of dirt.
In the center of the room was a heavy wooden chair.
It was bolted to the ground, the arms and legs and seat back fitted with well-worn leather restraints.
Sam had seen one like it, for patients receiving electric-stimulation therapy, and lobotomies.
Beside it on a small steel table was a stained bowl and an ancient-looking four-bladed fleam, the kind as might have been used to bleed a horse.
Sam did scream then, no matter who heard, thrashing violently.
The song whispered, louder now than before.
Let us
in
help
hurt—
“Do not resist,” M. Voland said, words a thousand women had heard a thousand times.
And yet, he didn’t know how tempting his words were, if not in the way he suspected.
But the last time Sam hadn’t resisted the song, it had taken over her body, and she wasn’t ready to give in quite so easily. Not yet. “It will be over soon.”
No one was coming for her. Sam was going to have to solve this herself.
Jerking violently, she slammed the back of her head into his mask. She heard a vicious crack. M. Voland swore. In his distraction, Sam wrenched away, racing for the door.
“You bitch!” he cursed, his voice gone nasal as he chased her into the hall. Blood sheeted down his vest. Sam thought she might have broken his nose. “You’ll regret that.”
“You know, I don’t think I will,” Sam said, feeling greatly daring, even as she was certain things were about to go from bad to worse. She’d embarrassed him. He wouldn’t be satisfied with just hurting her now. She had to get to the stairs. Get to somewhere there were more people.
He tore off his mask. It cracked as it hit the ground. Sam took the stairs as quickly as her feet would carry her, not daring to look back at the sounds of M. Voland chasing behind her, his long strides eating up the distance between them.
Sam burst into Mr. Ashdown’s office and spun, putting all her body weight behind closing the painting, only for M.
Voland to shove it open as if it were nothing, sending her stumbling back.
He was on her before she could so much as draw breath to scream, forcing her against the wall, the picture frame digging into her back.
“This didn’t have to be so difficult,” he said. His hand closed on her wrists, so tight she gasped, and he yanked her arms high above her head and held them there, veins out.
But before he could do anything, an old woman’s voice sounded behind him. “M. Voland. You had better not be doing what it looks like you’re doing.”
It took Sam a moment to realize what it looked like.
The painting had closed, leaving them looking not like a channel and a blood thief, but a man and a young woman.
Alone. Unchaperoned. With him pressing her against the wall in Mr. Ashdown’s office.
She flushed, for while none of this was her fault—and no one could mistake their situation for consensual—Sam’s was the reputation that might be ruined.
M. Voland jerked away from her. Sam gasped, tears springing into her eyes. Behind him stood an old woman in black brocade, her hands folded in front of her. Grey eyes gleamed in her sun-wizened face, her silver hair pulled back into a plait that wound around the back of her head like a crown.
“Or what?” M. Voland said, his voice nasal with blood. “I caught her spying in Mr. Ashdown’s office. I was going to let her go after. I was doing the ungrateful thing a favor.”
The old woman laughed. “Spying?” she said. Her accent, like most at Ashdown Manor, was English. “You don’t truly think she could have gotten into Mr. Ashdown’s office on her own, do you? Did you forget the locks? The secret passages?”
Sam was beginning to get concerned. What exactly had she done while given over to the song? More importantly, how?
“Well, I—” For the first time, M. Voland looked doubtful.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman scoffed. “She’s one of Mr. Ashdown’s. I dare say she belongs in his chambers more than you.”
“Merde,” M. Voland cursed, turning on Sam. “Why didn’t you say anything?”