Chapter Twenty-Four #2
In the heart of all those swooping lines was a shimmering dome, like a Fata Morgana.
Within sat a barefoot woman, clutching her knees to her chest. She was pale as bleached bone, her face shadowed, her long dark hair hanging, shroud-like, around her.
Even as Sam watched, she realized she was wrong; her hair wasn’t black at all, but the visceral red of blood.
She was younger than Sam had thought, too—no, older, her grey hair scraggly, her fingers gnarled as the roots of trees.
Miss Shinagh let out a cry at the sight of her, and the figure looked up, her face a symphony of angles, at once sharp and soft, her brows fierce, her black eyes burning like stars. The same eyes that had somehow seen Sam in her dreams. A frisson of electricity lanced through her as their eyes met.
The Mórrígan. The phantom queen.
It was unspeakably wrong to see her this way.
“Ceol mo chroí.” Miss Shinagh’s whole face changed.
“Song of my heart.” The words left her lips without her even seeming to notice.
She rushed over to the barrier, pressing her hands to the shimmer only to hiss and recoil, tendrils of smoke wafting up with the scent of cooking meat.
The Mórrígan’s lips moved, but Sam could not make out what she said.
The Mórrígan was the great queen, and yet for all her terrible power, she was unable to breach the barrier that contained her.
Sam knew that feeling all too well. What it felt like for your fury, which seemed as if it ought to have summoned storms and leveled empires, to come to nothing. To feel as if there was no way out.
Miss Shinagh spun to them, her features written over with desperation. “We have to get her out of there. Can’t you see how it hurts her, to be reduced to this?”
“We can’t,” Hel said. “Not until Van Helsing comes with that knife.”
Miss Shinagh made a noise of frustration in her throat, looking up at the darkening sky, their time bleeding out with the last of the light. “I was wrong to listen to you. I need to go back, to finish what I started.”
“I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere.
” The three of them turned to see a man standing in the doorway behind them.
His face was hidden behind a mask like a wolf’s skull etched in esoteric sigils, scraps of fur still clinging where the ears ought to be, but his voice was recognizable.
It was Simon Ashdown, holding a golden puzzle of wheels and triangles in the palm of his hand.
Behind him fanned out men: M. Voland in his cracked deer’s skull, holding his many-bladed fleam; Mr. Keene with a mask like a rabbit’s skull and a cane in one hand; and two more she didn’t recognize, masked with the skulls of a raven and a ram, armed with a revolver and a shotgun respectively.
As if the three of them were little more than deer to be hunted, skulls to be worn.
For all Mr. Keene’s pretty words to the contrary, at the end of the day, it seemed he still bowed to whoever wore the crown. Sam wouldn’t have thought it possible, but somehow, the rabbit skull managed to look guilty.
Sam raised her camera and snapped a photograph. The men stiffened, despite their masks. This was what they feared, these men who flourished in the shadows. While she feared them, they feared the light.
Miss Shinagh blistered the air with a string of curses in Irish. “Go ndéana an diabhal cipín dod’ dhá chois. Go ndéana an diabhal dréimire de chnámh do dhroma. Go n-ithe an cat tú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat! D’anam don diabhal!”
“Oh, come now, Miss Shinagh. Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Mr. Ashdown said.
Sam could just glimpse the helpless look on his face through the ragged orbital sockets of the wolf skull.
As if all of this were inevitable, as if the three of them were only making things harder for themselves with their struggle.
“You thought, what, that we wouldn’t be prepared for this?
That you’d come in and free the Mórrígan without any resistance?
” Mr. Ashdown shook his head. “To think we almost welcomed you with open arms. You know, there were rumors Lord Lusk was bewitched, but I never believed them. The man needed no encouragement to be a fool. But now—”
“He was a better man than you’ll ever be,” Miss Shinagh said, to Sam’s surprise, given that she suspected the man was little more than a key to a particularly recalcitrant lock for the unnaturalist.
“If you liked him so well, perhaps you ought to have considered not murdering him?” Mr. Ashdown said, before turning to Sam and Hel.
“You’ve done us a great service. Do you know, we hadn’t the slightest idea who was behind the attacks of the Wild Hunt?
I only half believed she existed. She never would have come out on her own.
Might have killed us all, if it weren’t for you. ”
“I’m beginning to think we ought to have let her,” Hel said, her voice gilded with violence.
“Now, now,” Mr. Ashdown tsked. “None of that. I know the board of the Society well, old friends from university, you understand. If you can bring yourselves to be cooperative, I could put in a good word for you. Perhaps get Miss Moriarty out of their proverbial crosshairs?”
He knew, Sam realized with growing dread. Must have known everything about them, ever since Sam’s encounter with M. Voland. Maybe even before.
Hel was unmoved. “A generous offer for a man who holds us at gunpoint.”
Mr. Ashdown shrugged. “You may not be the most valuable players the Society has to offer, but you still belong to them. I don’t think they’d appreciate my taking you off the board, and I could stand to have them owe me a favor.”
“Mr. Ashdown, as much as we appreciate your offer, you need to release the Mórrígan,” Sam urged. “She’s not just a goddess of death and destiny, she’s—”
Mr. Ashdown’s laugh cut her off. “Goddess? My dear, she’s a monster, like any other, if one more pleasing to the eye than most, and like any other, she has her uses.
We caged her, kept her from being a danger to the public, which is better than you in the Society do, what with your killing everything the Otherworld coughs up.
If we enhance our lives at the same time, can you truly blame us? ”
“Yes,” all three women said at once.
Mr. Ashdown sighed and looked at his watch. “This would go so much easier for you if you’d just be reasonable—”
He cut off as Hel shot the raven-masked man in the hand.
He dropped his revolver with a shout, and Miss Shinagh launched herself at Mr. Keene, an inhuman snarl on her lips and the moonlight knife in her hand.
His eyes went wide behind his rabbit mask as he stumbled back, drawing a sword from his cane.
“We’ll have none of that, now,” M. Voland said, his eyes agleam behind his stag mask as he wrenched the camera from Sam’s grasp, dashing it upon the floor. The song swelled, pulling at her thoughts. Let us in, let us end him end this—
No. She wouldn’t lose herself. Not again. Her heart was in her throat, her thoughts scattered like leaves, unable to think of anything but how it had felt to have the sheer weight of him pressing her against the wall, the painting cutting into her back.
The song rose to a scream as M. Voland grabbed for her.
A shotgun blast seared the air beside him, shattering on the wall of the cage in a spray of steam and liquid metal.
M. Voland cursed, flinching back just in time, turning to see Hel with the shotgun across the ram’s throat.
She kicked out his legs and dragged him across the floor, his face purple, his hands scrabbling at the cold, unforgiving metal.
M. Voland cursed, turning to Hel as she tossed the ram aside and swung his shotgun like a bat into Mr. Ashdown’s mask, shattering the hollow of his left eye.
“Fuck!” Mr. Ashdown screamed, blood sheeting down the side of his face where his mask had broken, but he held the arcane device before him like a ward.
Something was different about it—it hummed with energy, a sound that scraped against Sam’s skull like a hive.
It almost seemed to float in his hand. “Stop this nonsense at once or the Mórrígan dies.”
Hel held the stolen shotgun steady, aimed at the eye revealed behind his mask. “You’re bluffing.”
The Vespertine needed the Mórrígan, had spent all those resources capturing her. But then, resources were hardly a problem for the Vespertine, were they?
Mr. Ashdown laughed a little wildly. “Did you truly think the ritual wouldn’t have a failsafe? We are playing with forces greater than you could possibly comprehend—”
“Have you ever seen a shotgun blast at this range?” Hel asked. “You won’t have a face left. You’ll be lucky if you still have a head.”
Mr. Ashdown blanched but held his ground.
“Oh, you misunderstand. I’ve already primed it.
My finger is the only thing keeping it from going off.
It’s always a pain to disarm afterward, but it earns its weight in gold at times like this.
Wouldn’t you say?” He went on with the calm certainty of a man who knew he’d won.
“Now, that being said, I don’t wish to kill her.
Or you, for that matter. I am not a murderer, no matter what you—”
Hel cocked the shotgun. The words shriveled in his throat.
“Moriarty,” Miss Shinagh said, her voice a warning.
For a moment, Sam thought Hel would fire anyway, and damn the consequences; that she would burn the world before she would give in to a man like this.
For a moment, so did Mr. Ashdown, sweat beading behind his shattered mask, beneath those helpless brows.
But then Hel cursed and raised her arms in surrender, letting the shotgun swing from her thumb.