CHAPTER 35
Of all the balls that lit up the University on summer nights, St. Dunstan’s was the grandest. It was always on Midsummer Eve.
Just as the Night City gave itself over to Midsummer revels at the Court, the mortals threw aside exams and work for a dreamscape of champagne and strawberries and dancing.
Competition for invites was intense. The favored few milled inside the college grounds, ushered in by burly security teams. Outside, shut-out students attempted ever more outlandish schemes to gain entry.
The inexpert disguised themselves as booked performers, only to be checked against a list and thrown out by security.
Others scaled the walls of surrounding buildings, in full formal dress, timing their drop into the ball grounds to avoid the guards patrolling the perimeter.
On this occasion, the most extreme—suspected in later years to have been the water polo team—stripped down to trunks and swam the river, with tailcoats stashed in waterproof bags strapped to their backs.
Emerging dripping on the unguarded riverfront at the rear of the ball, they wriggled into immaculate white tie attire and strolled into the thick of the party.
Taken as a whole, it was perhaps not surprising that so many of the University’s graduates were recruited into the nation’s secret services.
But a fox maiden needed no such subterfuge. Emma simply gathered the shadows around herself and walked past the guards. Inside the ball, she let the shadows fall. Her gown of mist wreathed her shoulders and floated from her waist in shimmering swathes. A velvet bag hung from one wrist.
She was beautiful. She was magnificent.
She was alone.
Through the ancient courts of St. Dunstan’s College, the only one alone.
Students streamed by in groups, a whirl of giddy laughter and corks popping.
Perhaps she had once been that young. A lifetime ago, when her worries had been of essays and friends, and what to say at parties.
Now she had no age, and never would again.
She felt ancient to her bones next to these children.
Emma lifted her eyes. Above the chocolate fountains and Ferris wheel, above the hectic flush of fireworks over St. Dunstan’s Cathedral. Up at the moon, hanging like a clean, cold eye in the sky.
It was time to hunt.
In the end, it was easy to find them. Their table was the largest on the lawn. The marks on their backs glowed through their tailcoats. Every face the same color, every laugh a needle in Emma’s ear.
Beside each crisp white shirt and bow tie sat an elegant girl. None of them were Julia. Emma’s breath came easier. Her friend ought to be far away from what she was about to do. She needed no emotional ties. No distractions.
The velvet bag weighed almost nothing on her wrist. And all she had to do was reach inside.
She had been careful not to disturb the order of the bottles in the sickroom. While the House of Foxes slept around her, she had robbed its store of deathsleep. A few grains kept Sara unconscious, so Emma had taken a palm’s worth. More than enough for nine strong young men.
The tenth, she had hoped not to see. Hugo was a warm presence in her memory.
So kind, so helplessly adoring of Julia.
She did not want to believe he was complicit.
Of all the Turnbulls, he alone had not been party to hunting her through the streets.
He had been back at the clubhouse, passed out on a pile of coats.
And she had not seen him join the Turnbulls in a single photograph or newspaper quote since.
As though he had split from the club entirely.
Rejected them, and all that they stood for.
She hoped he had. Then she might have a reason to spare him.
The others were different, though. They would pay for what they’d done.
The Turnbull mark protected their bodies from a nightdweller’s blow or bite.
But there was no such mark on the objects around them.
Nothing to stop her from sprinkling powder in an unattended glass.
And once it touched their lips, no mark could keep them from sleeping long enough for her to drag them down to the Court and in front of the Judge. And then—
Then what? The Judge was clever enough to ensure they would be trapped in the Night City. Just as she was. Their glowing mortal lives, their families and futures, would all be gone too. And wasn’t that fair?
Wasn’t it?
Was it?
A golden head ducked from the champagne tent. Emma knew that the crowd could not actually have parted. That the music could not have stopped. But there he was, moving toward her. The face from her dreams. At last.
Jasper dropped into an empty seat on the edge of the group.
Tawny, disheveled. Knocking back champagne from a glass in each hand.
It was rage that made her heart pound so, she reminded herself.
And if her limbs were trembling, that was eagerness born from daydreams of ripping out his throat.
Emma’s lungs burned with the effort to breathe.
Her cloak of shadows flickered and dissolved.
There was a blur of movement, and horror pounded through her.
She was standing there, visible to any mortals who cared to look.
But it was only Richard and Piers, rising to take their dates to the champagne tent.
The rest of the Turnbull group followed in a braying cluster, except Jasper.
He stood, wobbling on his feet, and stumbled away from the lights and laughter, fumbling a lighter and a crumpled cigarette from his pocket.
His tailcoat fluttered around a yew hedge shaped like a dragon, disappearing into the sunken garden.
Emma’s gaze flicked a moment between the bright champagne tent, where Turnbull glasses gaped welcomingly for the touch of deathsleep powder, and the shadow-wreathed garden. She barely noticed the velvet bag dropping from her wrist. Her gauzy skirts flitted across the lawns into the darkness.
And behind her, an impossibly tall, thin figure choked on his drink.
In the darkness of the sunken garden, the wind was rising. Shivers ran through the moon-silvered rosebushes. Emma prowled through the beds, snapping off blowsy heads as she went. Petals dripped in her wake, like a trail of blood. This year’s growth still bore the rot-sweet smell of the flood.
Jasper struggled to light a cigarette. She watched him through the thorns.
She’d had no idea who he was. Not when she yearned after him.
Not when their skin finally met, that day on the roof.
Not even in the dark and echoing Senate House, when she’d watched his eyes turn cold.
She’d thought he was golden. But he was as rotted through as the rose garden itself.
He was as beautiful as ever. In a way, now they were a perfect match. If he had been vicious and dangerous all along, this new Emma could finally equal him. One hunter to another.
The Turnbull mark glowed eerily from his back. She stepped from the roses, prepared to strike.
“I still dream about you.”
Emma wished she could scoop her words out of the air and back into her throat. That was not the speech she thought she was about to make.
Jasper dropped the lighter, blank white horror on every feature.
“Emma? No. Please, it can’t be…”
“I know you didn’t feel the same way. Now I see it.” She cut across him. “But was any of it real? The things you said we’d do together, the traveling, the sailing? The way you kissed me. Was it all a trick to get me where you needed me?”
Her cheeks were wet. She was supposed to want to tear out his throat, not curl up on the ground and sob. Anger would have felt strong. Clean. Not like this squirming agony in her chest.
“Did you know from the start that you were going to sacrifice me? For your precious Turnbull Club, so your father would think you were a good little president? Go on, Jasper, what was worth my life—”
She stopped, partly because he was running his fingers over her face as though she were a precious vase, and partly because he definitely wasn’t listening to her.
“You’re alive,” he whispered. Then, to her immense surprise, he burst into tears.
It is a slightly cruel observation, but—perhaps because men of Jasper’s cast so rarely allow themselves to cry—when the dam does finally burst, their listeners are often treated to the most bizarre sounds known to humanity outside of walrus mating season.
Emma listened to the hnnurgghs and guuuaahhs with a patience born from extreme guilt at finding them so embarrassing. By some strange balancing alchemy, her own tears seemed to have cleared up. She felt almost cheerful.
“Jasper…” she tried.
“Bleeeghhhsnuff.”
“Jasper, what’s wrong?”
“Hargleweggh… uffgh… I thought you were dead,” he managed, and hacked up some phlegm.
Her heart softened. How had it never occurred to her that her sacrifice might have been an accident? A spell gone wrong. Jasper, wracked with guilt and despair. That perhaps he truly had cared for her, after all.
She pushed the thought from her. He was her enemy, and he had drawn her in deliberately. She’d thought he was a simple, impulsive boy who had made her feel special because he liked her. That had been her mistake. If his tears now were a ruse, she wouldn’t be fooled.
“I’m not dead.”
An expression of purest joy lit Jasper’s face, as though he were looking at Christmas and a divine manifestation and a gleaming IMOCA 60 racing yacht all in one. He was so beautiful when he smiled. Her heart sped horribly, and she reminded herself she hated him, hated him, hated him—
“You’re not dead.” He beamed. “So I didn’t kill you. I didn’t kill you, and you’re here, so I can’t go to jail for it.”
“You—er—thought you had killed me?” prompted Emma, feeling that the conversation was not running quite as expected.
Jasper strode around, pounding one hand into the other.
“Well, I wasn’t sure. I drank so much that night, and I had this total blackout after I saw you—at the Senate House, right?
And then you were gone. The others said they’d cover, tell the police I wasn’t with you, and they had this look.
Like they really thought I’d done something.
I was so scared. I couldn’t remember, and I thought, what if I had…
My dad wouldn’t let me say anything. Not to the police.
Not even to him. Like I really was a—a murderer, and he didn’t want me to confess. ”
His face darkened. “Why didn’t you come forward? You have to go to the police. Tell them I didn’t do it…”
“Jasper—”
“… Now I can have my life back. Leave this charade, get on my yacht. Forget the University and my father. I won’t need his money and his lawyers anymore.”
“Jasper,” she tried again, less patiently.
“There’ll be no more press to pay off, just me and the waves—”
“Jasper. Let me get something straight. Did you or did you not think I was dead because you sacrificed me in an ancient ritual, performed by the Turnbulls since the founding of the University, to bring them—I don’t know, riches or happiness or three wishes—from the elemental power that rules this place? ”
He could not have looked more bewildered if she had started juggling owls in front of him while singing the “Marseillaise.” The world twisted. “Jasper. Secret society. Ritual sacrifice. Ancient magical power. Are you following me? Your dad might have mentioned something?”
She had been so sure, for so long. That he had brought about her fall into the Night City, step by engineered step. It had made sense. He was the president of the Turnbulls. The Turnbulls had made the deal with the Night City. She had been sacrificed to the Night City.
And yet. The more she looked at him, the harder it was to see him as the mastermind.
If the degree of confusion on his face was fake, he was a better actor than she could have imagined.
And when had Jasper ever been calculated?
He had never made a plan more than a day in advance in his life.
She had once found that charming and spontaneous.
The suspicion in her mind was now fully formed. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
And he didn’t. She could see it now in his blank, handsome face.
He was just a nice, lucky, selfish boy. He had never questioned what it meant being part of a club because of how important his parents were.
He had never had to consider how to fit himself to the world, because the world fit around him.
But he was not a murderer. Perhaps he’d even cared about her, in his own way.
The relief was meaningless. Beneath the screaming urge for revenge, she realized, she’d just wanted to know who had sacrificed her.
Why they’d chosen her. Now she had no answers.
Nowhere to go, except back to a life of draining and debt.
She snapped one last rose from its stem.
“Look, Jasper. I’m saying this as a favor. Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me. They won’t believe it, and it won’t go well for you.” She turned for the steps. “I’m not back. I never will be.”
He really was beautiful, even when he was staring with the expressive confusion of a goldfish trained in mime.
Perhaps his eyes were a little fishlike.
She’d never noticed that before. If his gaze was vague, she’d thought it was soulful.
When he’d left yet another decision to someone else to bother with, she’d called him a free spirit.
She’d pinned her dreams to a boy who coasted through life with more charm than brain.
She’d painted in depths where there were none.
Perhaps she was more like her mother than she’d thought.
She trudged up the steps from the sunken garden back into the ball.
Nine steps later, an arm swung out from the dragon-carved hedge and clamped around her throat.