Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“There’s a good girl,” Mr. Ashdown said, nodding at M.
Voland, who wrenched the shotgun from her hand.
His men climbed dizzily to their feet, eyeing them balefully from behind the fragments of the skull masks still clinging to their faces, bloodied where they had cut into their flesh.
“Now. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to let my men tie you up.
If you struggle, if you even think of struggling, the Mórrígan dies. ”
Mr. Ashdown nodded to his men, and three of them stepped forward with heavy rope.
“I’m going to enjoy this,” M. Voland’s voice slithered in her ear, and an old fear woke in Sam’s bones, primal and inescapable, the song racing in her mind.
He pulled the rope tight around her forearms; Sam could feel the sensation begin to leave them, as if even they didn’t want to be present for whatever happened next, could feel the blood pooling in her wrists.
When he was done, he dragged her over to where the others knelt, facing the Mórrígan, who watched them like a wolf in a cage.
It would be all right, Sam told herself. M. Voland wouldn’t do anything while the others were watching. Even if they knew, he wouldn’t go that far where they could see him. There was a sense of propriety to their violence, a sense of decorum.
“We have wasted enough time,” Mr. Ashdown said with disgust as he looked at his watch, spatters of his own blood marring the face.
He twisted the arcane device in his hand in a series of increasingly complex motions as sweat beaded on his brow, until at last, the hum faded, and the device lay quiescent in his palm.
“Watch them. If they try anything, activate the device.”
“It would be my pleasure,” M. Voland said smoothly, his voice deferential. Mr. Ashdown transferred the device to M. Voland.
“No,” Sam blurted. “Not him.”
“I’m afraid you’re not in a position to be making demands, young lady. Perhaps now you’ll come to understand the virtues of obedience,” Mr. Ashdown said mildly. He turned to his men. “Come. We have work to do.” Their footsteps retreated behind them.
M. Voland’s smile spread into a wolfish grin.
Jakob, Sam thought desperately. He was still coming, was probably already there, and he had that knife.
He could free the Mórrígan and end all of this—if they could convince him not to kill her.
Except he had no idea how to find them, and even if he somehow managed to track them down, M.
Voland would see him coming, and the Mórrígan would die. Unless . . .
Her eyes hooked on the spider’s web of glass and iron that made up the ceiling, and the crows crying out against the red sky.
Sam had used her connection to the Mórrígan to reach the crows before, to lead her to Miss Shinagh.
She closed her eyes. She could feel them still—the crows, hundreds of them, brushing against her mind with the tips of their wings.
“What are you doing?” M. Voland’s eyes narrowed.
Come, she thought. Show him the way. Her eyes flew open as something hit the glass, claws scrabbling, wings beating. Crows spiraling above the glass ceiling like a beacon.
It had worked.
M. Voland backhanded her. Sam fell sideways, her ears ringing, unable to brace herself with her arms.
“I hope that was worth it,” he said, his voice dangerous. “If the crows could break the glass, they would have done it already.”
“Touch her again,” Hel said, her voice serrated.
“And you.” M. Voland gripped Hel’s hair and slammed her head against the stone floor. “You’re the reason I was expelled from the Golden Dawn.”
“Hel!” Sam cried, not having to hide the horror in her voice. Hel slumped over.
“This never had to be painful,” M. Voland said, having the temerity to sound exasperated as he loomed over Sam. “If you’d only stop resisting.”
A shadow passed overhead. Jakob, Sam thought, her heart thrilling.
She had never been so glad to catch him on her trail.
But she couldn’t let herself look, couldn’t so much as glance in his direction.
Couldn’t do anything that might give away what he was doing—what she was doing—or M.
Voland would end the Mórrígan, and everything they were doing would be for nothing.
She had to keep M. Voland’s attention. Play her part. It wouldn’t be hard; it was embarrassingly close to reality.
“Don’t touch me,” Sam pleaded as she scrambled backward with her legs. M. Voland’s eyes lit up as he strolled after her, watching her struggle. Sam knew how men like this worked. Knew how to make herself satisfying prey, buying Jakob time.
“Are you still trying to be strong?” M. Voland taunted. He lowered his head to her ear and whispered, “I know girls like you. You used up your strength on the way here. You were made to be prey to men like me.”
The noise Hel made then. Sam flicked her eyes in Hel’s direction, to Heathcliff hiding behind Hel’s hip, looking exceptionally self-satisfied, cleaning bits of rope from his teeth.
Hel’d baited him, gotten herself to where Heathcliff could free her, and now she was going to launch herself at M.
Voland, going to pull his veins out of his throat and strangle him with them.
But not before he ended the Mórrígan.
Sam locked eyes with Hel, and she shook her head minutely. Trust me.
The pain on Hel’s face.
“Please,” Sam begged Hel, while looking at M. Voland. It might have looked like he was in control, but Sam knew exactly what she was doing. For once, she was the one pulling the strings.
“Don’t worry,” M. Voland said, an amused hum in his voice. He raised the fleam. She wondered how he meant to collect her blood, or if he simply meant to lick it from her arm. “I’ll be gentle.”
A cacophony of cawing raged in the room, suddenly louder than it ought to be. Jakob must be through. But how? She hadn’t heard the glass shatter—
The knife. It could cut through damn near anything. He must have realized how delicate the situation was and cut through the glass, lifting it out rather than shattering it so as not to attract attention.
Still, M. Voland frowned at the sound of the crows.
Sam’s heart nearly flipped inside out as she urged the crows to quiet.
He was going to turn, he was going to look up, and he was going to see Jakob.
His weight was already shifting. She had to recover his attention, or everything she’d done would be for nothing.
And so, she did the only thing she knew worked one hundred percent of the time.
She laughed.
The laugh was small at first, bubbling up, almost a hiccupping of fear and dread and excitement, but soon it was great silvery peals of laughter that rang off the stone walls.
M. Voland advanced on Sam just as Jakob dropped to the floor, a fury in his eyes terrible enough to make her soul quail in her flesh. But still, Sam made herself speak. She would give him what he wanted—what he’d wanted since the moment he met her in that back alley in Paris.
“You want to know what I see when I look at you?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice hungry.
“Spiders,” she said. “You’re a skin of a man filled with spiders. Venomous and many legged and easily squished.”
His face twisted behind his mask. “You’re lying.”
“You’ve always underestimated me,” Sam said. “But I’ve known what you are from the moment we met. A weak man who worships at the altar of his appetites, who hates that which he craves simply because it is not his. A man who—” Sam hesitated as M. Voland pressed his fleam to her throat.
“Oh, don’t stop now,” M. Voland said, his voice quiet and measured. And Sam knew that he would kill her in the next moment, no matter what Mr. Ashdown said about their not being murderers. Not if Jakob didn’t see who the real monster was and stop him. “A man who what?”
Sam held Jakob’s gaze as he gripped the blood-soaked wooden knife with its poison-green eyes, its power blistering even from so far.
Everything relied on him now. She had to trust the change she’d seen in him.
Trust that beneath all that armor, he was still the boy she’d known.
Trust that he didn’t actually want to kill the Mórrígan—that he thought it the only way to protect Sam.
“Don’t be shy, not now.” M. Voland pressed the fleam deeper. Four trickles of blood ran down her throat from four blades. “A man who what?”
“A man who has already lost,” Sam said with a smile as Jakob raised the knife.
M. Voland whirled. “What are you doing, you fool!” His hand twitched on the device, but lockpicks flew from Hel’s fingers like throwing knives, burying themselves deep in M. Voland’s wrist.
“You didn’t really think we were unprepared for resistance, did you?” Hel drawled.
M. Voland cursed, his fingers convulsing on the arcane device, but he was too late.
The knife sheered through the cage. The Mórrígan was on her feet so fast Sam didn’t see her move.
Another blink, and she was before M. Voland, tilting her head, her eyes black and round as a crow’s, his face gripped in her blacked fingers.
Gazing into his eyes, she wrenched her hand into his guts and pulled out his intestines, lacing them around her fingers. Blood streaked her pale body.
“I do not give you permission to die.” The Mórrígan was speaking Irish—Sam knew she was speaking Irish—but by some enchantment, Sam could understand her. Her voice was harsh and strangely harmonic. Crows filled the chamber, making a storm of their wings.
Róisín gasped, crumpling over, as if it were her guts the Mórrígan threaded. Jakob stood with that knife clutched in his hand, looking between them, uncertainty warring on his face.
“Cut us loose, quick!” Sam said. “Before the rest of them realize something’s gone wrong and come back.”
As if her voice broke the spell, Jakob rushed to her side, slicing through the bonds. “You fool. What were you thinking, baiting him like that?” Jakob said as Sam worked the feeling back into her hands.
“I was buying you time,” Sam said.
“By what, getting yourself killed?” Jakob demanded. That was just it: The fleeting diversion of her death was the distraction. It had been Sam’s first field lesson.
“We don’t have time for this. Listen, we made a deal,” Sam said, looking over at Miss Shinagh, curled in on herself, her breath a quick pant. “Miss Shinagh will argue for their lives.”
“Wasn’t she the one murdering everyone?” Jakob said doubtfully. “And you’re . . . what, on her side? Trusting her?”
Miss Shinagh wrenched her head up, and Sam was horrified to see something unfurling in the socket where her left eye had been—a black flower, thorns hooking it into the socket.
The punishment she paid for the partial breaking of her bond.
Sam wondered what would happen to her if the Mórrígan killed the other members of the Vespertine—if Miss Shinagh’s whole body would change, leaving only an oddly shaped topiary behind.
“Jakob, please.”
“This had better work,” Jakob grumbled, as he sawed through Miss Shinagh’s bonds. She pushed herself off the ground, and into a bow.
“An Mór-Ríoghan,” Róisín said, grimacing around the pain. Then, switching to English, for the benefit of her witnesses: “Great queen, I made a deal: their lives for your freedom.”
The Mórrígan’s black eyes snapped to her, to the black flower blooming in place of her eye. “Those were not your lives to give.”
“I gave them until the sun sets tomorrow,” Róisín begged. “If they are still here then, they are yours. I swear it to you. Tá a fhios agat féin go n-íocaim m’fhiacha.”
“Tch.” But the Mórrígan let M. Voland’s intestines slip from her fingers.
Sam half expected the Mórrígan to claw out his throat, to drink from it like a cup.
For a moment, Sam was fairly certain the Mórrígan did too.
But then, the Mórrígan tilted her head back, at the open sky, her skin seeming to shiver. “I’ve spent too long here already.”
Feathers sprouted out of her arms and back, her mouth sharpening, pulling into a beak, her body seeming to fold in on itself until she dwindled into the shape of a crow.
The Mórrígan screamed, and the crows in the room screamed with her, and all of them blew out through the broken glass like a black wind.
The only sound in the room was M. Voland’s groans as he lay crumpled on the ground, struggling to hold himself together.
Sam couldn’t help but wonder at the relationship between Miss Shinagh and the Mórrígan, that she would let her captors walk free simply to spare this one woman’s life. Or perhaps Sam was letting her imagination get the better of her again. She didn’t think she’d earned the right to ask.
M. Voland gasped on the floor. “Help me. We would never have killed you. You can’t—”
“No,” Hel said flatly. It was some measure of justice, at least.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said to Miss Shinagh. “About your eye.”
Miss Shinagh shook her head, her remaining eye gleaming as she watched M. Voland squirm. “It was worth it.”
Sam turned to Hel, but the other woman was already tearing into her.
“Never do that again,” Hel said, furious. “What were you thinking? You—”
Sam flung her arms around her, startling Hel out of her tirade before she could get started.
“Thank you,” she murmured into Hel’s shoulder, tears pricking her eyes.
“For what?” Hel said stiffly, but she didn’t push Sam away. “Nearly letting you get murdered? I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s generally the sort of thing you thank someone for.”
“For trusting me,” Sam said.
Hel’s breath caught, and she looked away. Sam might have been wrong, but she thought she saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes, too. Sam wandered over to Jakob, who was looking down at the knife in his hands, confused, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.
“How did you know I wouldn’t kill her?” Jakob asked.
“I didn’t.” Really, she ought to have expected the opposite.
The notches in his revolver for every monster he’d killed.
The man who’d stalked her through the streets of Paris, and half of Ireland, warning her at every turn that he’d put her down if she showed the first sign of corruption, that it would be a mercy.
As if she ought to be grateful. But then when it had finally happened . . . he hadn’t.
“But?” Jakob pressed.
Sam shrugged. “But it’s like you said. You like protecting people.”