Chapter Fifteen #2
“I had reason to suspect that Mr. Enfield might have kept some compromising correspondence,” Miss Shinagh said. “You understand, I expect, why I might not want it discovered. And yes, before you ask, I burned what I found. So, if that’s all?”
“Just one more thing,” Van Helsing said. “It rained the night the Viscount and the Duke were taken, but the camera you found is made of glorified cardboard. Which means you didn’t happen to come across it the next morning, hours after the fact—you were there, weren’t you?”
He was right. Sam’s fingernail slid beneath the splitting cardboard of the box camera, swollen just from the spray while crossing the Liffey. A whole night in heavy rain and it would have disintegrated utterly. Certainly the film wouldn’t have been useable.
It occurred to Sam that she’d been dangerously underestimating Van Helsing. He didn’t always confess what he’d uncovered; he waited to see what you would do first.
“It seems you have it all figured out,” Miss Shinagh said, as if this were all a bit of a game. She tilted her head back to look at the twilit sky, the fierce wind tugging her hair free of its bun. “I should warn you. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
“And how exactly would you know that?” Van Helsing said, his voice velvet with violence.
Not at the sky—at the stars. “It’s almost Samhain,” Sam breathed.
Miss Shinagh smiled. “You’re wasted with the Society, Miss Harker. Do let me know if you’d ever consider a change of occupation.”
“What do you mean?” Van Helsing demanded of Sam.
“It’s the eve when the veil between the worlds is thinnest and the gates of the Otherworld are blown wide,” Sam explained. “Every rath and mountain ash.”
If the veil was thinner in Ireland, on Samhain, it would be lifted, the Otherworld melding with the mortal realm.
Reach your hand out in the dark, and it might not be your neighbor who took it.
Venture out at night, and you might never come home.
There was a limit to how many people the Wild Hunt could run down in one night.
But at sunset on Samhain, any limitations would blow away like ash on the wind.
“It means,” Sam said, “that we have two days to solve this, before—” A harrowing scream shredded Sam’s thoughts.
“Are those . . . foxes?” Van Helsing asked, sounding confused.
Sam turned to catch a flicker of movement in the brush—a fox, just as Van Helsing had said. But it wasn’t alone. The dark was alive with movement, amber eyes kindling behind half-tumbled rock walls and thorny bushes, creeping closer.
There was another hair-raising shriek. Hel swore. “We’ve wasted too much time. The Wild Hunt has chosen their quarry.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Van Helsing asked.
“There are stories told about the Lusk family,” Hel said. “That their founder rescued a vixen from a hunt, and ever since, when the head of the Lusk household is about to die, foxes come from all of Ireland to pay their respects.”
“But he’s a separatist!” Sam exclaimed. A separatist, she realized, but a member of the Vespertine.
Van Helsing rounded on Miss Shinagh. “What have you done?”
Miss Shinagh didn’t hear Van Helsing—didn’t seem to notice him at all. The color had drained from her face, her notes falling from her nerveless fingers. She rounded on Sam, her eyes bright with desperation. “Miss Harker, you owe me a favor.”
They all heard the echo of the Otherworld in her words.
Van Helsing looked at Sam sharply. “You what?”
“Come with me,” Miss Shinagh pleaded. “Help me save my fiancé, and your debt will be paid.”
“Sam, you can’t,” Hel said, but she knew Sam had no choice. There were consequences for breaking a promise to the Folk, and while Miss Shinagh wasn’t Folk, she was close enough. “It’s a trap, it’s obviously a trap.”
“You can’t still believe she’s behind it!” Sam said. They’d been right there, with her, the whole time.
“I absolutely can,” Hel snapped.
“I know I was a fool to promise a favor,” Sam said. “But how much more a fool would she be to spend it this way if she were the one calling them down? Besides, what’s the alternative? Let the Wild Hunt take Lord Lusk? This is what we came here to do.”
“Not like this,” Hel urged. But Sam was already turning back to Miss Shinagh.
“I’ll do it,” she said, her heart in her throat, and felt the thrum of the promise she’d made tighten around her. She would not see another man die, not when they might do something about it. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Miss Shinagh said helplessly. “He was never supposed to be in danger.”
“I think I know,” Hel said grimly, nodding at the starry sky, at the dark specks of a murmuration against the gibbous moon.
“He’s not far from the train station,” Van Helsing said. “If we can hold off the Wild Hunt until the train arrives, he might live.”
“Thank you—” Sam started.
But Van Helsing cut her off. “We,” he said, “are not done with this conversation.” But he took off at a punishing pace.
There wasn’t time to argue; the rest of them followed.
Night drained the color from the fields through which they ran, the cries of foxes echoing around them.
The ground was soft and uneven, and the wind tangled Sam’s skirt around her legs.
She stumbled over one of the crumbling stone walls, and suddenly, Hel was at her side.
“You have to find his ghost,” Sam murmured as Hel checked her ankle with cool fingers. “The one haunting him. If we can take it out—”
“We?” Hel raised an eyebrow. “What were you intending to do if I didn’t come?”
“You said to trust you.”
“Trust me, not force my hand,” Hel said sharply. “Do you know how many ghosts there will be? The unforgiven dead are legion. Besides which, we don’t know for certain that the ghost is what marks him. It could be the selenic tattoo itself, at which point there will be nothing we can do.”
“I know,” Sam whispered. But it was possible. It had to be. Otherwise, what hope was there for Sam?
“Stay by me.” Hel’s lips pressed together as if she wanted to say a great deal more.
But they were falling behind, the glow of Miss Shinagh’s lantern bouncing into the night like a will-o’-the-wisp.
Hel pulled Sam to her feet, and they ran, the barley giving way to wheat, undulating in the wind like the ocean at night.
To Sam’s horror, when the winds rose, the song rose with them—not from outside, but from somewhere inside her.
As if the song weren’t something trying to get in, but trying to get out.
You could save him. If only you—
Sam shut the song out. No. Not again. She didn’t need it. She could do this herself.
Hel and Sam burst into an expanse of flattened wheat.
There, in the ravenous heart of the storm, stood Lord Lusk, his lantern guttering.
The air soured with the stench of the Wild Hunt, rancid as rotting flesh, with a sulfurous musk about it that stung tears from Sam’s eyes.
She could feel the thrumming of their wings like a vibration in her bones.
This close, it was impossible to mistake them for birds.
You could say they were like angels, if all their glory had gone to ash—their wings of fire snuffed out, leaving only smoke, trailing up into the midnight sky.
Their skin was shrunken and withered, their stringy flesh clinging to the bone, their fingers blackened and curled into birdlike talons.
But it was their faces that would haunt Sam’s nightmares, more like a plague doctor’s mask than anything human.
Their eyes were overlarge and glassy, their beaks wet with gore, as if they’d been feasting on carrion, and yet, there remained small details of the people they had once been.
A trilby hat. A pocket handkerchief embroidered with a heart. A pair of wire-framed glasses.
“Jack!” Miss Shinagh shouted, the storm swallowing her words as she ran to her fiancé.
“Róisín, you can’t be here.” Lord Lusk’s teeth were gritted. Twisting the top of his fox-headed cane, he drew an iron rapier, wincing as his left leg gave out.
“I’m not leaving without you,” Miss Shinagh cried.
But Lord Lusk only turned to Van Helsing. “Get her away from here, I beg you. I would not have her see this.”
Help us help you help him, the song crooned. For a terrifying moment, she saw Lord Lusk’s face riddled with worms, his flesh shriveling down to bone, the song pulling her reason out from under her, like the tide.
“Hel!” Sam cried as the vision faded, praying it wasn’t an omen, that it was only her fears preying on her fragile mind. Wishing she weren’t so useless.
“Working on it.” Hel’s teeth were bared, the lantern light making hellfire circles of her spectacles. Her revolver was held loosely in her hand as she searched the swarm for the one that marked him.
Lord Lusk lashed out with his iron rapier, driving the Wild Hunt back, only for one of the creatures to close in behind him, tearing at his back with blackened claws.
He spun, slashing, but too late; another latched onto his shoulders, smoke wings flapping furiously.
With a cry, Lord Lusk collapsed to one knee, his rapier tumbling from his grasp.
And then Van Helsing was there, the links of an iron chain flashing as he flicked it like a whip. With a mind-rending skreee, two of the Wild Hunt burst into ash, leaving Lord Lusk panting as more took their place, swarming the man like ants on sweet cream.
“Do something!” Miss Shinagh cried.
Let us in, the song urged as Lord Lusk began rising into the night sky, like Mr. Enfield before him. Like Sam would when her time came. He doesn’t have to diiie—
The crack of gunfire split the night. Sam looked back to see smoke twining up from the barrel of Hel’s revolver. The wind tunnel of the Wild Hunt collapsed, and Lord Lusk crumpled to the ground like a husk.
“Got you,” Hel said with satisfaction.
Hel had done it. She’d actually done it. The song had been wrong: There had never been any need for Sam to give in. They could do this on their own.
Wincing, Lord Lusk got to his feet, worse for wear, but very much alive. Miss Shinagh threw herself into his arms, and he kissed her deeply before turning to them, leaning on her for balance.
“Thank you, I—” Abruptly, Lord Lusk’s voice slurred, his face blurring, pulling, as if he were rendered in wet paint, as if someone had placed their thumb on it and smeared. Above him, the Wild Hunt reeled in their prey.
“No no no no no. Jack! Don’t you go.” Miss Shinagh set her hands to his cheeks, as if she could press him back into himself, but the motes of color that were Lord Lusk leaked between her fingers, drifting up toward a handful of dark shapes cut out against the stars.
“Don’t you dare let them do this to you. ”
“It’s not the haunting,” Sam whispered.
“It’s the mark,” Hel said grimly, unmoving even as Van Helsing cursed, looking for someone to hurt for this. In the distance, the foxes cried. But there was nothing anyone could do now.
“Please, spare me—” Lord Lusk begged, subharmonics making a chorus of his voice. “Take him, not me.”
At first, Sam, like the rest of them, didn’t even try to make sense of the words that spilled from his mouth, the litany of those who knew they were lost, choosing, instead, to bear witness. Until she remembered: The only way to avoid being taken was to offer another in your place.
“Take Van Helsing in my—”
Surprising even herself, Sam lunged, her fist slamming into Lord Lusk’s mouth.
Her knuckles split, bloodying his bared teeth.
Pain needled through her wrist, and she cried out, cradling her hand.
But the damage was done. Lord Lusk looked at her as if seeing her for the first time.
Then he jerked upward, his head lolling back, the breath emptying from his body not with a scream, but with a horrible, unending gasp, pluming in the night air, leaving Miss Shinagh clutching the empty shell of his body, the wheat withering and dying in a halo around her.
Then the Wild Hunt blew away, like wishes blown from a dandelion clock.
Sam stared at her hands. What had she done?
A howl tore itself from Miss Shinagh’s throat as she rounded on them. Hel stepped in front of Sam, a warning in every line of her body.
“You owed me a favor!” Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, her hands curled into claws at her side.
“So long as it didn’t cause harm,” Sam said. Lord Lusk had tried to sacrifice Van Helsing. She couldn’t let that happen, so she’d killed him. She had killed Lord Lusk. She’d come here to save him, and she’d killed him, like Cyprien before him. She trembled bodily, sick with it. “I—I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Hel said, her eyes hard. “This was your intention all along, wasn’t it, Miss Shinagh? If Van Helsing and I hadn’t come, it would have been Miss Harker he offered to the Wild Hunt.”
Hel was right: Miss Shinagh couldn’t have known about the selenic tattoos or the ghosts or any of it.
Not unless she was behind it, which, while still technically possible, seemed increasingly unlikely.
Nor could she have known that Hel could see ghosts.
Which meant Miss Shinagh couldn’t have known there was a way out where no one had to die.
“It was . . . a trap?” Sam said, looking up at Miss Shinagh.
“Not for you. I knew you would not be alone,” Miss Shinagh said. “You are never alone; they do not trust you well enough for that, not where they think you can do any harm. I know what you are. You think I have not seen the way that man looks at you? He is not your compatriot; he is your captor.”
“That man just gave everything he had to try to save your fiancé!” Sam said.
“Not everything,” Miss Shinagh said, her voice like ice.
Van Helsing laid an arm on Sam’s shoulder.
“Come on,” Van Helsing said as Miss Shinagh dropped back down beside Lord Lusk, her scream joining that of the foxes in the hills as she cradled him to her chest. “We’re done here.”