Chapter Seventeen #2
It took everything in Sam to stay still, her coherence fraying as Hel’s fingers drew reverently down her chest, skimming the softness of her belly to trace the hollows of her hips, shuddering with the need to pull Hel to her, to touch her as she was being touched.
It was terrifying, how badly Sam wanted her, this brilliant, fierce, infuriatingly secretive woman, who was so good at everything Sam was not.
Who could somehow pierce to the heart of her with a look.
Who didn’t care about the rules or expectations or anyone’s opinions but her own . . . and somehow Sam’s.
It left her dizzy with desire, a tremor moving through her body like a whimper. Until at last Hel stopped, her hands tightening into fists, and she stepped back, turning her face away, as if afraid of what Sam would read there.
“What is it?” Sam said, panic bleeding into her voice as she was pulled back to the reason for this whole endeavor. The marks. The ghosts. The Wild Hunt. “Did you find something?”
“There’s no tattoo,” Hel managed, her voice thick. She held out Sam’s coat to her, without looking. “Here, you’re cold.”
But Sam wasn’t cold. Not when she looked at Hel.
“I think,” Sam said, feeling greatly daring as she pushed the coat aside, “perhaps I should check you.”
Hel’s sharp intake of breath was all it took: Sam was lost. The way she gazed at Sam, raw with desire.
Sam wanted to devour her, to tangle her hands in her hair and hook her fingernails in her flesh, to take her, wounds and teeth and all.
And if that made her monstrous, she no longer cared—they could be monsters together.
“This is a bad idea,” Hel managed, her voice a ragged ghost of itself.
The rawness of it set Sam’s every nerve on fire.
She wondered what it would take to unravel Hel’s iron self-control, what she would sound like when that brilliant mind of hers lost the ability for coherent thought. And suddenly, Sam needed to find out.
“The worst.” Sam traced her fingertips down Hel’s cheek to the hollow of her throat, felt Hel’s pulse leap at her touch, her eyes fever bright.
“I’m a monster,” Hel rasped, but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from Sam’s. The want in her eyes clear and sharp as broken glass.
But Sam needed to hear her say it. “Is that a no?” She withdrew her hand.
“No, it’s—” Hel grasped Sam’s hand, pulled it back to her. “Please.” It was the first time she could ever recall Hel saying the word. It electrified her, becoming just one more thing she wanted to hear Hel say again and again and again.
“I have to warn you,” Sam said, her voice scraped to a whisper as she knotted Hel’s crimson tie around her fist, pulling a whimper from Hel that threatened to ruin her before she’d even gotten started. “I’m not feeling quite so gentle.”
The helpless look in Hel’s eyes then, as if Sam were a siren, as if Hel yearned to wreck herself on her shores. It was everything. “I’d be disappointed if you were.”
After, they lay tangled together in the moonlight, damp and trembling with exhaustion.
But even spent, Sam was unable to stop marveling at the woman bared before her—at the unexpected softness of her.
Reaching out to touch her, to reassure herself this was real.
A spray of freckles covered the other woman’s bare back, her skin knotted with scars—the starburst of a bullet here, the jagged troughs of claws there.
Sam traced them with her fingertips, pressing a kiss to the most brutal scars.
Hel’s answering shiver coursed through her, intoxicating and addictive.
Could it be like this forever? The two of them working together on cases, sharing a bed at night .
. . It was customary for women to take on female roommates.
No one had to know. Not Mr. Wright, not Hel’s brother.
Aunt Lucy would know—that much was inescapable—but Sam felt certain they might come to some sort of arrangement.
“Do you think we might be like this, always?” Sam murmured, heady on the scent of Hel, like gunpowder and rosin. A scent that had come to smell like home.
“What, in bed?” Hel said, curling around to look at her.
The curve of her shoulder was bleeding from the glass.
They might have moved, but neither one of them had possessed the patience for that.
Sam resisted the impulse to lick the blood, feeling unsettled at the strange urge but so unspooled by recent events that she couldn’t bring herself to care overly much.
Not even when she caught sight of her shadow’s finger.
It was just a shadow, she told herself. What could it do?
Sam laughed. “A bed would be an improvement. I meant . . .”
“I know what you meant,” Hel said, turning to kiss the tip of Sam’s nose.
Sam bit her lip. “Stay with me tonight?”
“You know I can’t,” Hel said, shifting in the moonlight. “Van Helsing—”
That, Sam thought, was very nearly as bad as mentioning her brother. But before she could say as much, her breath caught in her throat. No. It couldn’t be. Her imagination, that was all. Or a vision. She looked out the window, at the dark cloud passing over the moon.
“What is it?” Hel said, all drowsiness fled.
“Hold still,” Sam demanded, pushing Hel back into the position she’d held moments before, not daring to breathe. The wind sighed, the moon slowly unveiling herself until her pale light shone through the window once more—and there it was.
“Hel, you have it,” Sam said, her voice shaking. “You have the mark.”
“What?” Hel’s voice was sharp. “No. It’s not possible. I would have seen it.”
The ghost, she meant. “You might not be haunted. We don’t know that the ghosts are related to the marks,” Sam said.
Not for certain, not until they developed the next set of photographs.
But if she did, if it had stayed out of Hel’s line of sight .
. . that betrayed an upsetting degree of intentionality.
“My grandfather might not even be involved. He probably isn’t.
After all, I’m haunted and I don’t have a mark, and you might not be haunted and you have one. ”
“You think there’s only one way to haunt someone?” Hel said.
It sounded ridiculous when she put it like that. “I’m only saying we don’t have enough information.”
“What is it?” Hel demanded, pushing herself up, and if Sam weren’t who she was, she wouldn’t have heard the desperation tearing at her voice. “I’m not Vespertine, I shouldn’t have one of their eyes.”
“You don’t,” Sam hedged. “It looks more like something from an illuminated manuscript.”
“Just tell me!” Hel said, a wild look in her eyes.
“A letter M.” Like a brand on cattle. Pressed between her shoulder blades where she’d never be able to reach it. “He must have had it done when you were passed out, being stitched up for one of your wounds, so you wouldn’t notice.”
Hel drew a knife and held it out to Sam. “Cut it out.”
“Me?” Sam squeaked. “I can’t—I don’t—that’s not something I can do.”
“You’ll have to go at least an eighth of an inch to be safe,” Hel said.
“How—”
“About two of your quarters stacked atop one another. Best add a dime, to be safe,” Hel said, as if that were the only objection Sam had.
“Hel, I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam said. It was one thing for Hel to cut a mark off Sam, but for Sam to do it herself?
“I’m asking you to,” Hel said, pressing the knife into Sam’s hands.
The medical bag. Sam needed the medical bag, at least. Sterilization, wound dressing, and all that. She couldn’t just cut a chunk of Hel’s flesh out and let her bleed.
“This mark must have been put on me when I was still my father’s creature,” Hel said.
In her panic, Sam hadn’t put it together.
Now that she knew Hel possessed one, it seemed all but certain that Hel’s father was behind the marks.
If the pictures they developed revealed Hel to be haunted, then Sam’s theory was most likely correct: Her grandfather was tattooing ghosts into people’s skin.
But even if Professor Moriarty and Sam’s grandfather were behind the attacks by the Wild Hunt, they couldn’t have intended that when Hel had been tattooed. Professor Moriarty might have an upsetting degree of foresight, but that was too far, even for him. Which meant they had another use.
“All this time, I wondered how he seemed to know my every move before I did,” Hel said. “How I could never seem to get ahead of him. I thought I just wasn’t clever enough, that he was outsmarting me. But what if this is how?”
“You think your father is using ghosts to spy on the Vespertine . . . on you,” Sam said.
And why not? For what better spy than one you could neither hear nor see.
One that might witness your most intimate moments.
It painted a terribly convincing picture.
Aunt Lucy had said her grandfather could draw her to him by ringing a silver bell.
In Sam’s vision, silver bells had covered a whole wall. “And my grandfather is his spymaster.”
Hel and Sam looked at each other then, and realized there was no hiding how they felt about each other. Not now. Bile rose in her throat at the idea of sharing what had happened between them with him.
“You have to cut it out of me,” Hel said. “If we burn and salt it, if we return the ghost to its final rest . . .”
He might not know. At least, not the most recent part.
“Right.” Sam swallowed her fear and ran to fetch the black medical bag.
She lined up the iodine and the clean bandages before reaching into a hidden compartment for the clay vessel that held amaranthium, an alchemical healing paste.
It wasn’t for open wounds, but Sam didn’t see another option.
She popped the cork. The paste inside was thick and yellow, filling the air with the scent of amaranth and something sharper, something that went to her head.
“You’ll need to make an incision first,” Hel said, her voice soft as Sam wet her back with iodine. “Then, pull up the skin and peel, using the knife to cut away the flesh. It’s not that different from skinning a rabbit.”
“Do I look like I’ve skinned a rabbit!” Sam said. Her hands shook as she reached for the knife, cleaning it with the same care she’d taken with Hel’s back. Perhaps more. She was delaying again. She knew it. But . . .
“Sam.”
Sam bit her lip. “I know, I just—” Didn’t want to do it, wasn’t ready to do it, couldn’t do it. She drew in a deep breath. Hel didn’t need her panic right then. She needed her to be brave. “Do you need anything to bite on, or . . . ?”
“I’ll be fine,” Hel said, gritting her teeth, and Sam got the distinct impression she’d done this sort of thing before.
Sam pressed the edge of the knife gently to Hel’s back, her hand trembling as she remembered the force and the speed it had taken to open that shallow cut on her finger.
“Not like that,” Hel said. “Like you mean it.”
Resisting the urge to squeeze her eyes shut, Sam carved her knife into Hel’s back. The other woman grunted, shuddering under Sam’s touch. It took a moment for blood to well in the cut, as if the flesh were surprised. Then, it welled, sheeting down her back.
“Good,” Hel managed, her voice uneven. “Now pull it up, and scrape.”