CHAPTER 32 #2
Emma reeled back. The first memory had shown her the ritual and the boys; this girl had given the story of her draining.
Left alive, but empty. Her soul, her self, taken.
She must have been on her way home when it happened.
Emma tried to stay, to see if she was safe, but the next memory was upon her.
And they began to flick faster now. Over and over, she saw the Turnbull Clubhouse, the bowl and the runes, the boys in tailcoats.
She felt one memory-body after another wrack with screams, with sobs, as thought and soul and self spilled out like warm blood.
She wore a miniskirt, an A-line dress, finger-waved hair, a corset.
Often now, there was a servant’s apron over her dress.
And still the memories roared through her.
Men bent over her: in breeches, in powdered wigs, in lace cuffs.
Then ruffs, cloaks, doublets. The Turnbull Clubhouse she knew gave way to smoke-blackened beams and a floor strewn with rushes.
There were so many girls. Too many. Dimly, Emma felt tears track down the face of her living body, far away in the water hag’s hut.
But she was down in the screaming. Now the Turnbulls had her by the river, and the damp was soaking through her shift.
Only her shift; they had taken her clothes.
They put a bowl before her on the ground, forced her over it, hands and knees, like a beast. They pulled her hair back.
A man crouched next to the bowl. He had a knife.
She was trembling now, and her bowels went, but he did not flinch.
He patted her forehead, as you might a cow.
His eyes were cold as snow, she thought. Then his knife moved. And she was gone.
Emma came to gasping, clutching her throat. She felt the sear of the knife’s slit, hot on her skin. That memory had been different. They had not just drained the girl of her soul. They had killed her.
“Well? That was the last, and oldest, memory.” The water hag emerged from the dark.
But Emma’s voice was locked within her. There had been so many.
She had held a thousand women’s breaths in her mouth, felt their fear, lived their pain.
The sacrifices had been happening for centuries.
And the Turnbulls would do it again. They would keep doing it unless someone stopped them. Unless she stopped them.
“It is time for your payment.” The shadows within the hut thickened.
“Yes, my studying memories,” Emma said brightly, edging her foot from the dark tendrils. “You can take them now.”
“You thought to trick me?” hissed the water hag, lunging from the dark. Her hands were shards of ice on Emma’s shoulders. “With memories so weak and thin, you discard them without care? No, what I take must be warm and alive, as close to you as the beating of your heart.”
Cold dripped through Emma, like fingers probing at her mind.
“And what will be worth a thousand years of memories, I wonder? Your name? Or the ones you love, perhaps? I see a mother. And friends. The boy, all jokes and aliveness. And the girl. Their memories glow within you, so rich…”
The very reeds of the hut were wailing, the air a whirling shriek of smoke and shadow. She had to have something of value to trade, if she could only think of it. She could not lose Nat, or her mother, or Julia. She could not lose her name.
And an idea flashed before her. “I know how to pay you.”
The air in the hut calmed.
“I need to keep the first of these memories,” Emma said. “I must. I have to remember that there were others like me, ones that had this mark, and what happened to them. The mortals who did this—I can’t stop them unless I’m armed with something.”
The water hag’s eyes narrowed.
“But you may have the rest,” Emma hurried on. “All the rest—nearly a thousand years of memory, which must mean something. And to make up the difference, take something of mine. Something of true value, this time.”
She held out her hand to the water hag and brought a memory to the surface.
She was five or six, and it was the first time she had seen a horse.
She had been gripping her mother’s hand, and seen the great tapered head turn, and the horse’s eye come to rest on her.
And in the moment she saw the intelligence in those velvety depths, she knew that she wished to understand animals more than anything.
The water hag drew in a satisfied breath. “Ahhhh. That will do.”
Fighting the impulse to claw her memory back, Emma let the water hag take her hand. The hag fanned the fire, and Emma coughed till her sinuses ached. Smoke curled through the caverns of her skull.
A pleasant numbness swept through her. She knew that she had seen centuries of memories clinging to the mark set within her. She had just seen them, after all. But their contents were a watery blur. Only Lucy’s memory remained.
“I have known powerful men,” the water hag said, watching Emma cough out the last of the smoke. “That is what cast me into the Night City. Mine did not have such clever, sorcerous tools as yours, only the ordinary brutality of fist and muscle. But their effect was the same.”
She gripped Emma’s hand, and her touch was no longer ice.
“Take this one back.”
It was the girl kneeling by the river. The first sacrifice, her fear as fresh as if her blood had spilled yesterday, not a thousand years before.
“It is wise to know the beginnings of things. Therein can you find their end.”
“I don’t understand.”
The ancient eyes kindled. “I wish you victory. We do not all get our revenge. May you bring your enemies to their knees.”
Emma felt the kinship blaze between them. “I can take them lower than that, I think.”
The water hag cackled, high and eerie. “Oh, I like you. May we meet again.”
Crawling from the hut, Emma thought she might forgo that pleasure.
She would rather be in the mortal world.
And she was going to make it happen, if she had to force the whole Night City to bend before her to do it.
The encounter had given her new fire. Yes, the memories had shown her no magical secret to destroy the Turnbulls.
But they had given her a thousand more reasons for revenge.
Her skin still sang with the feel of Lucy’s heart beating, and the edge of her nerves. The Turnbulls had to pay.
Emma pushed through the bracken, breathing in the scent of the river.
And it came to her that memories were not all her time in the hut had given her.
There was something the water hag said. It stuck in her mind, a barb.
The hag had described Emma’s sacrifice mark as a key to those memories.
A chance phrase. But Emma’s mind threw up a thought to follow: What if other marks could be thought of as keys?
There was a magical lock she had been beating her brains out to open.
Which, logically, would require a magical key.
The secret room at the Turnbull Clubhouse had borne the Turnbull mark.
What if the mark itself was also the key?
Emma ran, shoving through the rest of the thicket to get to the river path.
It made perfect sense. Only those who bore a Turnbull mark would be able to pass through that door.
Which posed a problem. Her first rash impulse was to seize one of the boys straight from the street.
But she’d not even been able to scratch Piers before the pain blinded her.
She could not imagine trying to manhandle one of them to the upper floor of the clubhouse.
At the sound of voices, Emma stepped off the path into a tree’s shadow.
The University track team thundered past. Emma let them go.
She had more than hunting to think of now.
She would need help to open that door. And Robin had promised to give it.
Well then, she would have to see what he could do for her.