Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“What!” Sam exclaimed, rounding on Jakob. “And you didn’t say anything?”
“Me? A spy?” Mr. Bishop laughed. “That’s absurd. A spy is supposed to be unremarkable. Do I look unremarkable to you?”
“I expect that’s exactly why you make a good spy. No one would believe it,” Jakob said. “And I imagine you fit in with the Vespertine just fine.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Mr. Bishop said, bitterness lacing his words like a poison. “The Vespertine wants nothing to do with me.”
“They only wanted you for your rituals, did they?” Jakob said, all false sympathy.
“Don’t try to be funny,” Mr. Bishop said irritably. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Hel gave Mr. Bishop a knowing look. “They were never going to accept you. You had to know that.”
Mr. Bishop sighed. “But I had to try, didn’t I? I thought perhaps, if I did something so spectacular, so brilliant, that they could not look away . . . But alas, you have the right of it; they were never going to let me in, and now I’m going to die for it. Satisfied?”
“Rarely,” Hel said.
“Grand,” Mr. Bishop said. “Now, I’ll repeat my question—which I don’t think is an unfair one, considering the three of you invited yourselves into my house apparently to interrogate me—who are you?”
“We’re with the Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena,” Jakob said before Sam and Hel could stop him. He seemed to truly believe Mr. Bishop was on their side. “We’ve been called in to put a stop to the murders perpetuated by the Wild Hunt.”
“Fine, fine, supposing I am—who you say I am,” Mr. Bishop said, giving Jakob a narrow look. “Though I’m still not clear on how you came to that wild assumption.”
“I told you, it was Detective Lynch,” Jakob said.
“And I told you, I don’t know who that is, but we move on,” Mr. Bishop said, lifting his glass of absinthe. “Supposing you’re right, as I told you before, if you do not already know who she is—”
“You mean the Mórr—”
“Shhh,” Mr. Bishop hissed, his eyes going wide with alarm, darting to the rents in the walls. “What, are you trying to call her down on us?”
“You just said—” Jakob said through gritted teeth.
“I know what I said. But you have no idea—”
“What she’s capable of?” Sam finished for him.
“Yes! Yes. See, she gets it,” Mr. Bishop said, looking relieved.
“I don’t actually,” Sam said. “With the wards you have on this place, you ought to be safe.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Mr. Bishop said, eyeing them sidelong. “But I can hear her in the walls. Scratching, always scratching with her thousand tiny claws.”
“Crows,” Hel murmured for Jakob’s benefit, who looked as if he were about to spout steam from his joints.
“She can’t come in, not directly, but she can watch through the cracks, she can listen, and when I sleep . . .” Mr. Bishop shuddered, and Sam had some idea where the bruises under his eyes had come from. “It’s better not to sleep.”
That was why he’d gone at the walls with an axe, she realized. Why he’d torn all the feathers from his sofa.
Mr. Bishop saw the look in their eyes and laughed, a horrible, desperate sound, pulled from a man who had nothing left—except an exceptional property in the most desirable district in Dublin, immunity to consequences, and wealth.
“You think I’ve gone mad, don’t you?” Mr. Bishop said. “You see the rents in the wall and imagine there’s nothing behind them. Just like all the others.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Jakob asked. “Sail back to England?”
“You imagine I haven’t tried that?” Mr. Bishop groaned. “It was the first thing I tried. Fighting is overrated, an activity indulged in by those with more muscles than sense. But she’s not leaving me much of a— Wait, you believe me, and you’re with the Society. You can fix this.”
“What do you mean, ‘fix this’?” Jakob said suspiciously.
“Kill her, what else?” Mr. Bishop said, his eyes fever bright. “It’s what you do, what you came here for, you hunt monsters—and this is the only way the nightmare ends.”
“She’s a goddess,” Hel snapped. “Not a monster.”
“Is there a difference?” Mr. Bishop said. This, Sam thought, explained a good deal about mankind.
“Can she even be killed?” Jakob asked.
“Oh, yes, yes, she can,” Mr. Bishop said, and disturbingly, he pulled a knife out of his sumptuous robes—from where, Sam didn’t even want to know.
It was of an esoteric design, made of scorched wood, of all things, and encrusted with what looked like green eyes.
Sam felt an almost piercing pain at the sight of it, as if should she look too long, she’d catch fire and burn down to ash. She forced herself to look away.
“This knife has been ritually prepared from the oak stained with the blood of Balor’s poison eye,” Mr. Bishop was saying, an eye that was by some accounts the Fomorian’s only eye and, by other accounts, his third eye—ironic, if true, given the placement of the Vespertine’s tattoos.
“The same poison eye that slayed Nuada, first king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It should work, but those fools at the Vespertine won’t let me near enough to use it. ”
So the Mórrígan was a prisoner of Ashdown Manor. Sam thought of the crows that had circled the manor, of Mr. Bishop begging to see a her.
This, then, was why the Otherworld had risen up against the English—not on account of the Irish, but on account of her.
And this was why all the wealthy Englishmen of the Vespertine had come to Ireland, despite condemning it as “charmingly uncivilized.” To indulge in the very thing England was working to eradicate: Ireland’s closeness to the Otherworld.
“You caged her,” Hel said, her voice dangerous.
“Yes, I did.” Mr. Bishop laughed horribly. “I caught her. I caught her like a wild hare, in a snare I set like a child intent on impressing my peers. I caught her with arcane rituals designed by minds far wiser than my own and alchemy of my own devising and artifacts that ought to be in a museum.”
His selfishness was responsible for all of this.
“But why?” Sam said. “What did you have to gain?”
“By caging a creature with power over death and destiny?” Mr. Bishop said, leaning forward. “Can you imagine if you had the power to change your fate, to avert your end? To cast down those who stood against you? Would that not be worth almost any price?”
“No,” Hel said flatly.
Mr. Bishop leaned back. “Yes, well, you’re right of course. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret it.” And for a moment, Sam almost felt sympathy for the man, until he kept talking. “For now, the Vespertine can never let her go, or she will end us all. Unless you can end her first.”
Rage lit in her veins. Even now, the man couldn’t seem to fathom that his actions might be wrong for any other reason than they possessed consequences for him, his only concern not making things right but escaping those consequences, even if it did more harm to the woman he’d wronged.
Just like Dr. Gastrell and the vengeful spirits of the women he’d murdered, calling for the Society’s aid with every expectation he’d be saved.
He, after all, was human, and they only monsters.
“How am I supposed to kill her, if she’s caged?” Jakob said.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Mr. Bishop said, turning the knife so the green eyes winked in the candlelight.
“The knife will cut through the cage. It will cut through damn near anything. Where it gets tricky will be finding her. She’s secured somewhere in that blasted manor of theirs.
I was blindfolded on the way down to perform the ritual—my ordeal, which was to admit me, if it hadn’t all gone horribly awry, if I hadn’t needed to try to kill her to set myself free.
You’ll have to use force, I’m afraid, and you’ll have to go tonight. ”
“Samhain,” Sam breathed.
“Her night,” Mr. Bishop said. “The Vespertine will be doing a ritual, siphoning some of her power for their own. If you can’t manage to stop them tonight, well.”
“Right,” Jakob said. Mr. Bishop held the knife out to Jakob hilt first. Jakob’s hand closed on it, only for Mr. Bishop to keep hold of the sheath, searching Jakob’s eyes.
“Don’t forget,” Mr. Bishop warned him, “just because people used to call her a god doesn’t mean she didn’t massacre men until the rivers ran red with it. You don’t want that sort of blood on your hands.”
Sam could see it all too well. The rivers of blood that led to the Mórrígan. She had been wronged, it was true. But how many lives was her freedom worth? Sam’s heart squeezed. If it were only the guilty, it would be different. But this . . . it was a harder choice.
Jakob’s hand closed around the knife. He looked down at it with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Take my carriage,” Mr. Bishop said, and then, at their looks, added, “What? You’ll never get there in time without it, and despite my grave reputation, I’m not particularly keen on dying. Besides, I want the Vespertine to know I sent you.”