Chapter Nineteen #2
It didn’t matter. Even if it was only a slim chance, Sam had come too far to let a lead on her grandfather slip through her fingers.
Not after years of being haunted by the numbers he’d left her.
Not when there was a chance she might see him again, even if she didn’t know whether she wanted to hug him or punch him in the mouth.
Slap him in the mouth, she corrected herself, and wondered if Van Helsing would be proud.
“Hello.” Sam near leapt out of her skin.
Hel’s revolver was out and aimed at the wind-racked linden tree behind them, its barren branches clawing at the sky.
But there was no one there. Only the wind shaking the gorse.
Hel fired, the shot ringing out over the empty hills, and a raven flew out of the tree, cackling with an all-too-human laugh.
“My brother,” Hel said tersely to Van Helsing’s questioning look. Ruari.
“Your brother’s a raven,” Van Helsing said flatly.
“Yes, yes, that’s exactly it,” Hel said, holstering her revolver. “No, he trains them. He’ll know we’ve been here.”
Her Aunt Lucy had been right. There was something here. She could feel it.
Putting a hand on the stone, cool even through her gloves, Sam ducked into the Hell-Fire Club, after Hel and Van Helsing.
The floor had gone to dirt, muffling their footsteps.
The ceiling was rounded and blackened with soot, the scent of char lingering in the air, giving the unnerving sense of being inside a kiln.
A flight of stairs rose up to nowhere, the remnants of a wooden frame hanging above like a skeleton from where there had been another floor.
And all around them, the air vibrated with the sound of bees.
Sam toed through the ash, unearthing flattened, blackened coins, melted into slag. She traced the walls for hidden switches and secret passages, stumbling back when a bee wriggled out of a hole in the stone. But found nothing.
Checking to ensure Hel and Van Helsing were nowhere to be seen, Sam tugged off one of her gloves with her teeth and knelt, brushing her fingers through the ash.
A frustrated noise broke free of her throat.
Why could she never have a vision when she needed one?
She snatched off her other glove, thrusting both hands into the ash.
This time, she felt the faintest stirring on her skin, like the echo of a flame, before it faded, leaving only the whisper of char.
At last she had to admit the truth: There was no one there. The Hell-Fire Club had been abandoned, a long time ago by the looks of it.
Panic slid through her, cold and slippery. She’d gotten so close. But if her grandfather wasn’t there, then where was he? If her Aunt Lucy couldn’t help, she had no way of finding him. It was over. Sam had done everything she could; she had to let him go.
Except . . .
Not everything, whispered that song.
Alice had said that channels might do more, that they might control their power, rather than let it control them. And she remembered how her mother, Mina, had wormed her way into Dracula’s mind, seeing visions of the vampire’s passage across the ocean.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done it before, Sam reasoned. Given in to the song and come out the other side. Without the song, she never would have found Mr. Ashdown’s office. Without the song, the Wild Hunt would have taken her the previous night.
In the end, it wasn’t a decision at all. She curled her fingers into the ash, feeling again for the flicker of flames, and this time when it came, she didn’t flinch. Instead, she just . . . let go, let the song fill her with music and fire until it smoked from her eyes.
Show me, she demanded.
It was easier than she’d expected. Like all this time, she’d thought she had to learn to fly, when all she had to do was fall.
The visions came—so fast Sam could scarcely follow.
They coursed through her, horrifically sensual and saturated with power.
The copper tang of blood filled her mouth as she walked through the flames and did not burn.
For perhaps the first time in her life, Sam wasn’t afraid.
Not of getting caught, not of what other people thought, and not of the monster inside her.
In fact, she didn’t feel anything at all.
She could see why her Aunt Lucy had found it seductive—how it might lead to temptation.
I can feel things and still deal with them, Sam had said.
But that was painful, exhausting. The world was so broken, the sharp edges cutting you open every time you tried to touch it.
It was so much easier when nothing mattered.
Only, why was she here again? It had been important, had felt all-consuming.
Grandfather, a small voice murmured. Right.
Her grandfather had been here once. What had happened to him?
She dredged his face up through the murky waters of her memory, saw the flicker of his reflection through a glass, darkly, his brows knit in concentration as he bent over some contraption or another. Yes—that was it . . .
“Sam,” Hel interrupted; the black mirror shattered at the sound of her voice.
“Not . . . now,” Sam said, her own voice sounding dim, as if coming from far away, as she reached for the pieces of the black mirror in her vision, slipping them together.
She hissed as they cut her palms, blood slicking the edges.
It was so hard to concentrate when you were in pain.
So much easier when you let it all go. “I almost have it—”
Strong hands closed on Sam’s shoulders. “Sam, you have to come back.” The pieces of the black mirror scattered.
“No!” Sam lashed out blindly.
Hel gave a strangled cry, and something warm splashed across Sam’s face. Sam opened her eyes—startled; when had she closed them?—to see Hel falling.
“What—” Sam said, disoriented, her hand going to her face.
Her fingers came back red, but not from the cuts she’d thought she’d had on her hands, for those had evaporated with her vision.
But then where . . . ? Hel crumpled against the wall, the back of her tan coat rent bloody.
Fear shot through her veins like a poison, her voice rising. “What’s happening?”
And then she saw it. You might say it was a cat in the same way a tiger was a cat, with a coat the shineless black of soot, its claws wet with Hel’s blood. Flames dripping from its too-sharp teeth. No. No no no no no.
What had she done? Had she summoned that—that monster? Horror fought with revulsion as she remembered the feeling of Hel’s flesh tearing beneath her claws. Not just summoned it—Sam had been it, somehow—she had done this.
This was what happened to channels.
“Hel!” Sam cried as the nightmare prowled toward Hel with leonine grace.
Glass shattered against the cat’s scarred hide, smoking up into the cloud-ridden sky. She felt more than heard its growl then, rattling through the softness of her belly, her nerves running through her fingers like water. Van Helsing.
Van Helsing stood outside, fumbling for more vials of holy water.
“Jakob!” Sam cried. The cat turned; it was always more fun to play with a live mouse.
“Stop the bleeding,” Van Helsing said as he fumbled with a strange-looking firearm. “I’ll deal with the cat.”
It leapt through the window at Van Helsing, who threw himself aside, his strange firearm shooting out a weighted net encrusted with exorcism salt.
The cat yowled in rage, smoke rising off its pelt where the net bit into it, cutting its jump short.
Van Helsing snapped the enormous book off his belt, his voice rising in an exorcism.
The cat tore free of the net and leapt at him, but Van Helsing jammed its jaws with the oversized crucifix, and continued to read.
Sam rushed to Hel’s side. Hel looked pale, her face covered in sweat.
Sam’s eyes filled with tears. “Hel, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“The case,” Hel panted.
“Right.” Sam could hardly breathe, her throat hurt so much.
It wasn’t right to make Hel tell her what to do when all Hel should be focused on was not dying.
The case had cracked against the wall when the cat—when Sam—had swatted Hel, spilling its contents on the stone.
Sam fell to her knees, scrounging through the ash for the metal case carrying the needle and thread and bottle of iodine.
There was no alchemical healing paste. They’d used it all the night before, when she’d cut the tattoo from Hel’s back.
She was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Gingerly, she peeled off Hel’s coat and suit jacket, then started down the buttons on Hel’s shirt, her fingers trembling. Hel caught her hand and looked up at her dizzily. “I’m afraid it might be too late for the shirt, love,” Hel whispered.
She was right; Sam ripped Hel’s shirt open.
There, splitting her back, were four claw marks, blood welling in them.
Sam felt as if her stomach were turning itself inside out.
There were no organs there, she told herself.
Of all the places to get mauled, it was better than most. If only she could stop the bleeding.
Outside, she heard the sickening crashing of wood and Van Helsing’s chanting rising louder. Sam flinched.
“Don’t . . . worry about him,” Hel managed, hissing as Sam upended the bottle of iodine on her wounds, her face growing paler. Her voice was strained. “The man hasn’t gotten to kill anything since we arrived in Ireland. He was probably going through withdrawal.”
“I wasn’t worried about him,” Sam said, blotting away what blood she could with the wound dressing. It saturated immediately. “I’m worried about you.”
Hel had been teaching her to stitch wounds, as promised, but it was harder when it wasn’t a fish they were cooking up for dinner, when it lived and breathed and cried out in pain. Harder still when her hands were shaking and slick with Hel’s blood.