Chapter Twenty-Three
Merrion Square, Dublin (Cearnóg Mhuirfean, Baile átha Cliath)
Samhain
The sleek black carriage with its gilding of screaming-soul flames and enormous black horses clattered down the cobblestone road, stopping before Mr. Bishop’s house. The carriage driver, a tousled, blond man with soulful eyes, hopped down and held open the door.
“Wait,” Sam said as Jakob mounted the step into the carriage. “Something about this isn’t right. The Otherworld has reason to be upset, I understand that. But if the Mórrígan can extend her power beyond her cage, why hasn’t she simply attacked her captors directly? Why call upon the Wild Hunt?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Hel drawled. “She can’t. She has help on the outside.”
“But who?” Sam said. “And how would such a thing even be possible?”
“Many things are possible where channels are involved,” Jakob said grimly.
The implications of his words sank into her like stones. “You think it’s Alice Grey.”
Jakob shrugged. “She’s associated with the Vespertine. The Mórrígan will have had every opportunity to corrupt her. Not to mention, she’s killed with ghosts before.”
“That was poison,” Sam said.
“You can’t believe everything people tell you,” Hel said. She had taken against Alice from the first. Sam didn’t know what Hel had against the woman. But before she could snap back, Jakob speared her with a dark look.
“You know better than most how a monster might work through a channel, regardless of the distance, once a conduit between them has been forged,” Jakob said.
Sam had to admit Jakob’s theory was plausible—that a month ago, Alice might have used the Mórrígan to kill her husband. They didn’t actually know how long the Mórrígan had been imprisoned, only when the Wild Hunt had begun to ride on her behalf.
Sam recalled the bitterness in Alice’s voice when she’d talked about the rules that bound channels, when they were born to do so much more, warning Sam not to trust the others with her experiments.
When she’d confessed the Vespertine had never admitted her to their ranks, but saw fit only to use her, no matter how she bled for them.
Yes, Sam could understand why Alice might want the Vespertine dead. Only . . .
“But what about the Dearg-Due at the barracks?” Sam protested.
There was no way anyone might think that was anything less than targeted, not with the bloodless bodies of soldiers being left on the doorstep of Dublin Castle.
“I know Detective Lynch said the other attacks are unrelated, that they’re only attacking industry, but the barracks are not industry, which means it’s targeted.
Alice is English, what reason would she have to attack them? ”
“There might not be much of Alice left,” Hel said. “If the feathers and dreams are any indication, the Mórrígan already has her hooks in you, which means she has a conduit.”
Hel was right. And Sam found herself thinking of Alice, hollowed out the way Mr. Pearse had been—the way she herself had felt, before the song had filled her.
“It’s pride that does it,” Jakob said, his face shadowed. “The channel thinks she is in control, that she can use the monsters to widow herself. But inch by inch, the monster takes her over, until her body is but a shell for something else. Something wrong.”
It made a terrible sort of sense. Alice made a devil’s bargain—let the Mórrígan in to free her from the horrors of her husband.
Only for the Mórrígan to plant a seed inside her that grew with every passing day, until Alice’s will was no longer her own.
Presumably, when her influence grew strong enough, the Mórrígan would use Alice to free herself—if that wasn’t what she was doing already with the Wild Hunt.
The effects of rituals, from what Sam had read, had a tendency to collapse when the last of those who had performed them perished.
It still didn’t feel right—Alice being the culprit—and not only on account of the fact that she liked the older woman. Sam was forgetting something, something important. She could feel it, itching at the back of her mind like a moth’s wings, or—
“The feather,” Sam breathed. Then, louder, looking up at the others: “The feather I pulled from my throat, my dreams of the Mórrígan, they started before I even met Alice.”
Hel looked at her sharply. “When?”
“That second night,” Sam answered. The night before they went to Ashdown Manor and Sam encountered Alice.
But there was someone she’d met before the dreams had started.
Someone who wielded her inability to lie the way Jakob did the jingling of his boots.
Who hadn’t actually denied she was behind the attacks, only implied otherwise.
Someone who had broken into Mr. Enfield’s apartments on account of “compromising correspondence,” trusting in the Edwardian love of euphemism to conceal what Mr. Enfield had truly uncovered: evidence against her that he’d needed to bring to the man he loved.
Hel cursed.
“Róisín Shinagh,” Jakob growled. “Damn it, I knew it.”
“Every time a man disappears, there she is,” Hel said darkly.
A woman who walked with crows, with intimate knowledge of the Otherworld and a reflexive dislike of the English—but still a woman, and the Vespertine admitted only men to their ranks.
“She must have needed Lord Lusk in order to gain access to the Mórrígan,” Sam said. “That’s why she was so furious when he died.” Her dreams of freeing the Mórrígan had died with him.
“Do you think she’s hollow?” Sam asked. “That it was the Mórrígan the whole time?”
“No,” Hel said shortly, at the same time as Jakob said, “Yes.”
“She may have gone a little Other, but her actions are logical,” Hel said, “human. She’s no puppet.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jakob said, seeming almost angry. “It doesn’t change what I have to do.”
That I again. Sam hated the sound of it.
“You can’t mean to murder the Mórrígan!” Sam said, but the look on his face said he meant to do exactly that. “She didn’t ask to be captured; she’s the victim. There must be another way. If we can find Miss Shinagh, if we can convince her to stop—”
Hel looked thoughtful, but Jakob wasn’t having it.
“Then what, Miss Harker?” Jakob said harshly. “We’ll keep the Mórrígan imprisoned forever? Perform the rites every year to keep her caged? And you would think that a kindness?”
He was right: That was no solution.
“If Miss Shinagh has a relationship with the Mórrígan,” Hel mused, “we might be able to come to an arrangement—the Mórrígan’s freedom in exchange for everyone’s lives.”
“You can’t seriously intend on reasoning with that monster,” Jakob said scornfully. “She means to kill Miss Harker.”
Hel shook her head. “The Folk are dangerous, slippery and subtle, but say this for them: They do not break their bargains. The penalty is too steep, even for them.” And Miss Shinagh was close enough to the Folk at this point that Sam suspected the same went for her.
“Even if you’re right, even if Miss Harker can somehow slip death’s grasp, you said it yourself, the Mórrígan already has her hooks in her,” Jakob said grimly, his hand clenching around the knife. “There is only one escape from that.”
Sam suddenly understood. Jakob thought the same thing was happening to Sam as had happened to her mother—that the events his father had always warned him about had finally come to pass.
Only instead of putting Sam down as he’d always sworn he would, he meant to save her the same way his father had with Sam’s mother by killing the monster responsible. This was, after all, what he did.
I like protecting people, he’d said. I’m good at killing things.
“Jakob—” Sam began.
“She’s killing people, Samantha,” Jakob said harshly. “And she’ll kill more if she’s released. Including you, in case you’ve forgotten. I know she looks like a woman, but she’s a monster, and when a monster gets a taste for human flesh, it doesn’t matter if it’s not their fault, you put them down.”
He was preparing himself for the kill. It was awful to watch, like he was drowning a piece of himself with it. Sam wondered if he was thinking of baby manticores. Of their chubby baby cheeks and kitten bodies.
Tears stung Sam’s eyes. “I won’t be a part of this.”
“That,” Jakob said, “is probably for the best.”
“I won’t either,” Hel said grimly.
At this, Jakob looked pained. “Very well.” And when he stepped up into the carriage, his spurs jingling, he didn’t look back. Hel took off in the opposite direction, her long tan coat snapping behind her, the crows crying above as if in mourning.
“Hel!” Sam said, raising her voice as she hurried after the other woman, who showed no sign of slowing.
“Either get on a ferry before sundown, or hole up in a train,” Hel said. “I don’t particularly care which.”
“I’m sorry?” Sam said breathlessly. “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“It means your assistance is no longer required,” Hel said.
“Assistance—” Sam shook her head. “This is my case too!”
“Was your case.” Hel gave Sam a sidelong look, the kind Sam had seen her level at others, but never at Sam. “What would you even do in a fight? Because make no mistake, that’s what’s coming.”
It was nothing Sam hadn’t thought herself, but still it hurt. Hel had been the first person to believe in Sam; that she didn’t believe in her anymore . . .
“It’s my life at stake!” Sam burst out. “It should be my decision!”
“Damn it, Sam, not when your decisions keep putting your life at risk!” Hel slammed her fist into the stone wall, her head bent, shrouding her face in shadow. Sam forgot even to breathe as she watched the trickle of blood trace down Hel’s knuckles.
“You put your life at risk all the time!” Sam argued.
And Hel looked back at Sam, agonized. “I can’t lose you.”
Sam blinked away sudden tears, furious at herself for crying when she wasn’t done being angry. “Then why did you push me away?”
“It was the only way I could think of to keep you safe,” Hel said. “And with all the secrets you were keeping . . . I’d lost you already.”