Chapter Twenty-One
Dublin Port (Calafort átha Cliath), Ireland
Samhain
The afternoon sun gilded the cracks in the dark grey clouds, the seagulls crying as they circled toward the port. A sailor mumbled something about seagulls being the spirits of the Irish lost far from home. Her grandfather used to say they meant a storm was coming.
If it were, Sam wouldn’t be there to see it.
She leaned on the thin iron railing of the passenger ferry back to Wales.
Her fingernail picked at peeling rust as she listened to the hypnotic slap of waves against the side of the boat.
A boreal wind numbed her cheeks. She wished it might numb more than that.
There was no telling what Sam was going back to, other than London. Mr. Wright would be furious. Certainly, he would never allow her to return to the field. Not after her insubordination. She’d be reassigned back to the research department, if she had a place left at the Society at all.
In other circumstances, Sam might have approached Miss Shinagh about her offer and studied to become an unnaturalist. Except Miss Shinagh wouldn’t have her, not after Sam had gotten her fiancé killed.
Which meant she would have to go home to Chicago, where she would have to confess to her parents that she’d gotten her grandfather arrested—imprisoned, according to Jakob, in an iron cell.
She would never make things right with Hel. There would be no more adventures. Not for Sam. Perhaps she might find a job at a local library. At least then there would be reading.
She felt as if her mooring had come undone. As if she were out to sea on a starless night, without sight of shore.
Three ravens perched on the grassy and chain-wrapped remnants of a pier in the frothy waves, the wind ruffling through their midnight feathers as they stared at Sam. Hel’s brother bidding her farewell.
This was what Ruari had wanted all along. The aim of his note with the question Sam hadn’t been able to keep herself from asking. Of the feathers she couldn’t bring herself to confess. She will be alone, without allies or lovers or friends, until the day she comes home.
Hel had known something like this would happen—knew what her family was like. She’d warned Sam that they needed to trust one another. Hel, who trusted no one, but somehow trusted Sam.
Or had.
That terrible knowing rose in her again—of what she’d done, of what she’d lost—until Sam was drowning with it, and she understood perhaps a fraction of why her grandfather might choose not to think.
Hel was right: Sam never should have come to Ireland. Jakob and Hel didn’t need her. They never had. They were the best field agents the Society had to offer, and even with her channeling, Sam was useless. Worse than useless—she was, as Mr. Wright had pointed out, a liability.
Except that wasn’t precisely true, was it?
Certainly, she was useless in a fight. She’d have been dead many times over without Jakob’s and Hel’s interventions, and if her Aunt Lucy had truly meant her harm, well .
. . But it had been Sam who had puzzled out the connection to the Wild Hunt at the library at Trinity, Sam who had uncovered the secrets of the Vespertine and the selenic M on Hel’s back, and Sam who had tracked down her grandfather.
She had solved the case—not Hel, not Jakob, but Sam. Moreover, they never could have done it without her.
No, this feeling of being useless, it was a refrain of sorts, a song that twined through her thoughts.
A fear that she wasn’t good enough, that she would never be good enough, even if she worked as hard as she could and sacrificed everything she had.
But that she must, for if she didn’t, those close to her would cast her out.
She’d repeated it to herself so often, it seemed one of the immutable facts about the world, changeless and true.
But if Sam were being honest, her utility was never in question. Even Mr. Wright had admitted she was not without value in the field, and yet Sam had been so bent on earning her place, so focused on being useful, she hadn’t been able to see that she was wanted. Until she wasn’t.
The cawing of ravens became a cacophony.
Sam glanced over her shoulder, the wind stringing her hair into her eyes, to see not just the three from earlier, but hundreds of ravens, all their black eyes trained on Sam.
For a moment, Sam was back on that ashen plain again, the swords like tombstones, the crone washing armor, her mouth opening in a scream—
A spike of pain lanced through her wrist, and the vision broke.
Sam gasped, her hand flying to her sleeve.
There was something under there, something that pinched her skin and dragged at the fabric of her dress.
It felt wrong in a way that set a panic knifing through her.
She clawed at the fabric, buttons popping free as she tore it open to find a black feather stuck into her skin.
Ruari.
All the fear she’d been gathering turned to fury.
Sam had already lost in every way that mattered; that he would toy with her now, when she was of no use to him, was a cat’s cruelty.
She tried to pull the feather out, but it was stuck, as if Ruari had made a hole in the soft flesh of her wrist and glued it in—or as if it had grown out of her.
But that was impossible. Gritting her teeth, she yanked hard, hissing with a jolt of unexpected pain as the feather popped free, blood oozing down to wet her fingers.
How had he even done it? Even if he had some device, some alchemy to ensure she would not wake when he worked his torments, the night prior had not involved a lot of sleeping.
Besides which, she liked to think she would have noticed a black feather sticking out of her wrist when she’d gotten dressed that morning.
“Anchors up, lads,” the captain called. The ravens rose like a black wind, blotting out the sky as they circled the ferry, and Sam became aware of a crowd gathering, exclaiming and pointing at something she could not see. Dread pooled in the pit of her stomach.
“What are all those people looking at?” Sam asked an old man.
“You didn’t hear?” the older man said, smacking his lips around his pipe.
His skin was spattered with freckles and flecks of red from a lifetime in the sun, his hair long since drained of color.
But his eyes were still sharp, a stormy hue that reminded Sam of the sea.
“A man died last night. The baker’s boy found him this morning, still warm. ”
“But what are they looking at?” Sam demanded.
“Oh, his hat,” the older man said offhandedly. “The brim was embedded in a tree. Don’t see that every day, do you?”
The hair rose on the back of Sam’s neck. The Wild Hunt. It had to be. But her grandfather had been taken into custody, had been secured in an iron cell! He couldn’t possibly be behind the attacks, even if whoever was behind them was using his hauntings to target their victims.
And that night was Samhain. When the sun set, the Otherworld would spill out, the Wild Hunt’s power swollen like overripe fruit. Instead of cutting down one or two men that night, they would harvest the field, and everyone with a haunting would perish. Including Sam.
Sam ought to stay on the ship. She’d had a death omen, after all. She ought to put all the salt of the sea between her and the sluagh. But time was slipping away—by the time word got to Hel and Jakob, it might be too late.
She had to get back to warn them. Ravens screamed overhead as Sam leaned over the railing.
The distance between the ferry and the dock yawned.
Hel or Jakob might make the leap, but Sam couldn’t.
Nor could she imagine swimming in the cold, stormy waters, not with her heavy skirts pulling her down. Which left only one solution.
It didn’t take her long to locate the captain, a grizzled man with long features and a distant stare. The mellow scent of tobacco hung around him in a cloud, a pipe clenched between his teeth.
“Sir,” Sam said, “I need to get to shore at once, it’s an emergency—”
“Can’t be done, miss,” the captain said, without taking his eyes off the sea, as he steered the ferry away from the dock through the chop. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait till Wales.”
Except it couldn’t. She thought about explaining, but it sounded absurd even to her own ears. Besides which, who would believe she was an agent of the Society? If, indeed, that’s even what she was anymore.
But Sam had skills of her own, didn’t she? She scanned the shore, her gaze landing on a young boy with a flop of sandy hair squatting on the docks, examining what must have been some sort of oceanic arthropod.
“That’s my son!” Sam cried, pointing at the boy. “You have to go back. He’s still on the shore. He must have wandered off at some point, oh, please—”
“Your son?” the captain frowned. “You don’t look old enough to have a son.”
“He’s all I have left of my sister,” Sam begged. “If anything happened to him—”
An older woman scowled at the captain. “Oh, have a heart! What are you waiting for, her whole life story? You’d leave a little boy defenseless and alone?” At her word, the other passengers began muttering amongst themselves, agitating in her defense.
“Help the poor woman.”
“Heartless bastard.”
“That poor boy . . .”
Unexpectedly, tears pricked in Sam’s eyes, and she turned them on the captain, remembering, at last, their power. The way men could never stand to see a woman cry, despite generally being the cause of it. “Please, sir.”
“Fine. Have it your way,” the captain snapped. “But if the Dobhar-chú takes us—”
“Thank you,” Sam said with feeling.