Chapter Eleven #3
She should have, she realized, her cheeks hot with embarrassment. It would have been the perfect excuse. In her fury, she’d forgotten the first rule of getting away from men: belong to another man. Sam used to know that. It was as if with Hel, she’d forgotten how to be afraid.
“Indeed. Merde,” the old woman cut in before Sam could answer, and she smiled, sharp as the crescent moon. “Now I might be able to convince her not to tell anyone . . .”
A few minutes later, after the old woman and M. Voland had worked out an arrangement involving the loan of some spectacularly rare books—during which Sam surreptitiously searched for an absent Heathcliff—M. Voland left, leaving Sam alone with the old woman.
“Sorry about that, dear,” the old woman said with a grandmotherly smile. “I know you don’t belong to Mr. Ashdown, whatever reason you had to be in his office, Miss . . . ?”
“Harker. Samantha Harker,” Sam said.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Samantha. My name is Alice Grey,” the old woman said. She began leading the way out of Mr. Ashdown’s office and through the manor. With one last glance back, Sam followed. “Please, call me Alice. I’m too old to stand on ceremony.”
“What you saw, I wasn’t, I was just—”
“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Alice said. “I used to run away too, back when I was pursued by young men. They’re always after the same thing, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so,” Sam said uncertainly, wondering how different her life would be if she had to worry more about the quality of men’s affections than their lust for her—
“Blood,” Alice finished for them both.
Sam’s head snapped up, and she stopped walking. So this woman, too, was after her blood. She ought to have expected as much! How had she thought anyone would be safe in this cursed manor? “I’m not—”
“It’s all right,” Alice assured her, holding her hands out as if Sam were a wild animal. She felt like an animal.
“Stay back,” Sam said, her voice panicked.
She would be the one to determine if things were all right, thank you very much!
The song nipped at her thoughts, offering a way out out out—out of the mansion, out of her body—and, oh, she was tempted.
This woman looked frail, but she had scared M.
Voland, which meant Sam couldn’t underestimate her.
She tried to dart past Alice, but the old woman blocked her path.
Sam swallowed a scream—the last thing she needed was to draw the attention of more bloodthirsty Vespertine!
—and braced herself, but Alice didn’t touch her.
She only pushed up her sleeves, revealing flesh crisscrossed with silvery scars, some knotted with age, some still red.
She had a bandage on her left wrist, blood seeping through in the four lines of a fleam.
Alice smiled at her. “I’m a channel too.”
Oh. Sam had never met another channel before. This, then, was why she was so deep in the mansion—even at Mr. Enfield’s remembrance, she’d been called upon to tithe blood.
“There, see?” Alice said, pushing her sleeves back down. “Friends?”
“How did you know?” Sam asked, for she had no scars, nor had M. Voland been wielding a fleam when she’d caught them. “That I’m a . . . a . . .”
“A channel?” Alice chuckled. “You mean aside from the hungry look in M. Voland’s eyes? Women aren’t members, dear. Which meant you were either a nosy wife or a channel, and I don’t see a ring.”
“Why is he here at all?” Sam said. She hesitated, uncertain as to whether she should voice her suspicions that this was a secret society akin to the Golden Dawn called the Vespertine, formed to indulge in the forbidden arts of alchemy, ritual magic, and prognostication.
It seemed the height of folly. Who knew what such an organization might resort to in order to keep their secrets, if they suspected she didn’t belong?
But Sam had to know: “I thought he was Golden Dawn, not . . . Vespertine.”
“Oh, you poor dear.” A look came over Alice’s face, as if she were a lost child. “Did your patron not say anything?”
Sam shook her head. Alice, it seemed, thought she was a member of the Vespertine—or rather, that she was attached to a member, as a channel. Her patron.
“Honestly, you’d think they were raised in a sty,” Alice said as she unlocked another door and ushered Sam through.
“The Vespertine is an offshoot of the English branch of the Golden Dawn. More lunar than solar focused. Men only, as opposed to the Golden Dawn’s more egalitarian outlook.
Sailed to Ireland on dreams of piercing the veil to the Otherworld.
It will be good to have another channel around. It’s been far too long.”
The hope in the woman’s eyes was crushing; Sam didn’t have the heart to tell her she wouldn’t be staying. “Do you know anything about Mr. Enfield’s death?”
“Ah, now that was a terrible tragedy,” Alice said.
“But not unheard of. I’m not normally one to talk, but he and Lord Lusk were close as brothers, did everything together—fought together in the war, went into business together .
. . fell in love together, with the same woman.
Mr. Enfield told Lord Lusk to choose: his friendship or her hand.
He chose her. It’s enough to shatter the stoutest of hearts, and he was never strong.
I shouldn’t be surprised the Wild Hunt took him—it’s said they like the brokenhearted best of all. ”
It was the same story Lord Lusk had told, and it might very well be true.
If Mr. Enfield had been having an affair with Lord Lusk’s fiancée, he’d hardly be the first man to murder another to protect the honor of his soon-to-be wife.
Though traditionally, it was done in a duel, which, while also illegal, had the vestiges of honor about it, and there was something about the confirmed bachelor rumor that still made Sam suspect it wasn’t Lord Lusk’s fiancée he was in love with.
Either way, it didn’t explain the urgency with which Mr. Enfield had sought Lord Lusk.
Then she realized what Alice had said.
“The Wild Hunt?” Sam asked suspiciously.
Alice looked away. “They took my husband, too. About a month ago.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Sam said, feeling terrible.
“He was seeing ghosts near the end, you know,” Alice said.
“It looked as if he’d just fallen out of a window, and so everyone called it an accident.
But I’ve been looking into it. The wind, the wings like smoke.
I’ve been seeing murders of crows, too, flying at night.
Unnatural, that. But not if they’re actually the Wild Hunt.
” She looked sidelong at Sam. “The Vespertine has an excellent library if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Not every channel is, I know, but—”
“No, no, that’s all right,” Sam said. Though she was sorely tempted, if only the cost weren’t her blood. She was willing to bet this library didn’t have a forbidden section. “Is there—anything else you can tell me about his death?”
“Is there nothing else we might talk about?” Alice said, looking uncomfortable. She didn’t, it seemed, want to talk about the death of her husband. Fortunately, there was another topic on Sam’s mind.
“Do you know anything about ghosts?” Sam asked, and immediately regretted it.
“Seeing things, are you?” Alice said. Sam stiffened, but the older woman just chuckled, and led them through a small door Sam would have sworn was part of the wainscoting.
Their voices echoed oddly in the windowless passage.
“Just a little channel humor there. These old eyes have seen a thing or two. What do you want to know about them?”
“I think I’m being haunted. I know I should be frightened.” Least of all because it signaled she was marked for death. “But it feels almost like the ghost is trying to tell me something, I just can’t understand what she’s saying.”
Alice made an empathetic sound. “The Irish say that if you ask the ghost of a friend or family for help, a door to the answer will open within three months,” Alice said. “Were you and this ghost friendly, in life, anyway? Or acquainted at least?”
“No,” Sam said. “At least, I don’t think so.” The ghost looked like a vampire, which made her far from a family friend. Though that wasn’t the sort of thing she felt comfortable explaining. Not even if this other woman was a channel.
“Most likely this ghost needs your help, then,” Alice said. “There are ways to strengthen ghosts, if you’ve the stomach for it. I wouldn’t let your patron know about it, though.”
“Whyever not?” Sam asked, leaving aside the matter of her not having a patron.
“They don’t like it when we use our gifts,” Alice said. “They consider our power their own, and if we use it ourselves? Well then. But what they don’t know can’t hurt them, can it? If you want answers, it’s the only way I know, short of finding a medium, and they are far rarer than we are.”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t know.” There was a reason alchemy was outlawed, a reason channels were restrained. Wasn’t there?
“Have you ever noticed that the people who make the rules about what channels can and cannot do are never channels themselves?” Alice said.
She pushed open a door at the end of the passage, and they emerged into a hallway that blessedly had windows again.
“Do you really think they know how it works? They’re afraid.
Jealous. You already know more about channeling than they ever will.
But if it makes you feel better, it’s nothing they don’t do themselves, excepting they have to use our power to do it. ”
“Tell me,” Sam said, then paused. She recognized the hallway ahead, could hear the murmur of conversation. They were nearly back to the others.
Alice smiled, as if Sam had passed a test. “Well, you’ve read of Odysseus, I’m sure, of how he offered a plate of blood to Tiresias, the blind prophet, to attract the ghost and strengthen him, so that Odysseus might glean his future?”
“It’s that simple?” Sam said.
“Who said it had to be hard?” Alice laughed. “You’re a channel. This is what you’re made for.”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. The way she said it, it made her sound like a hammer or a chisel, defined by what and not who she was. And it struck Sam that while she’d always thought of being a channel as an affliction, as something done to her but not of her, she didn’t know who she was without it.
“I should go,” Sam said as they came upon the foyer. Sam didn’t even want to guess what Hel would do to M. Voland this time if she caught wind of what he’d done. Or rather, what he’d tried to do. “My friends . . . They’ll be looking for me.”
“It was a pleasure meeting you,” Alice said warmly, and she handed Sam her calling card. “You should come by sometime. It’s been so long since I’ve had the opportunity to chat with another channel.”
Sam yearned to take her up on that. There was so much she didn’t know about being a channel.
But she would have to be careful. The Society would never allow it if they knew, would claim it was too dangerous for her to know the truth about herself.
Van Helsing would say it was the pride before the fall.
Hel would say she didn’t need anyone to tell her who she was. What she was.
But Sam found she was tired of other people deciding what she was allowed to know about herself.
“I will,” Sam said.