CHAPTER 40
The military history room was cluttered with glass cases holding muskets and ceremonial daggers.
Rifles and sabers hung from the walls. Richard slumped on the floor against a display case.
Hugo stood guard in front of him. In the other corner, Nat and Julia were binding a scratch on Jasper’s arm.
With the unerring instincts of a cat, Venetia had perched herself on the windowsill.
There, she was dividing equal attention between looking down on them, and grooming the gore out of her moonlight hair.
They all looked up when Emma came in.
“It’s over. We’re safe. The Boars are gone.”
Nat and Julia clutched each other. Jasper buried his head in his hands. And across the room, Hugo gave a sudden intake of breath.
They turned. Hugo was standing very still, his chin raised. A gold-hilted knife rested at his throat.
“And to think, I hadn’t been sure about putting this on display.
” Richard smiled and tilted the dagger. His air of defeat had fallen away, as if it were a disguise he had shed.
He had been waiting, Emma realized. For the group to be distracted.
“Officer-class ceremonial knife. My great-grandfather’s, actually. From the time of the Raj.”
Behind him, Emma could see the display case hanging open.
“Family heirloom.”
Julia stumbled toward Hugo. Richard tutted, and a line of red welled along Hugo’s throat. Julia stopped abruptly, her hand reaching for nothing.
“No closer, Jules, babe. Hugo’s a friend. I don’t want to hurt him. It’s her I want.” He jerked the blade at Emma.
“You’re going to come with me, Emma. And you are going to get on your knees and let me finish the sacrifice. Otherwise—” Hugo gave a muffled grunt of pain. Richard had pressed the flat of the blade to the open wound. “I will be forced to kill him. And I will.”
Emma took a single step before Jasper and Nat seized her arms. Nat hauled her back. “Don’t listen to him, Emma. He won’t do it.”
“Let go. I have to—”
“He’s bluffing,” offered Jasper, from her other side. “We’ve known Hugo since nursery.”
The knife lowered. A pleasant smile curved Richard’s cheeks. “Oh, since nursery, is it?” he said. He plunged the knife backward into Hugo’s gut, his face curiously detached. “I’d forgotten that.”
Richard grunted as he dragged the blade up through Hugo’s middle.
The knife moved slowly, jerk by jerk, as what was inside Hugo made one last struggle to stay in.
The sliced edges of his dress shirt gaped white, then red.
A rounded edge of liver slipped out, then the darker gleam of intestine.
Blood spattered. Richard twisted the knife up.
Hugo gave a strange, wet gasp and fell, blank-eyed.
“I don’t do these things because I want to,” Richard said, panting. “I do them because you’re making me.”
Blood flecked his lips. The knife in his hand was red and syrupy. Emma’s legs weren’t working properly. She couldn’t feel them, at least.
Julia threw herself on him with a scream. Richard recovered his footing, and held Julia’s face between tender hands. As much as they could be, with one holding a knife.
“Pretty Jules,” he murmured. “We would have lasted. Even after you ran to the gutter press. I would have forgiven you.” Runnels of blood trickled down the blade and over his hand, onto Julia’s face. Richard smeared one away with his thumb.
His voice changed. “So. Emma?”
“Don’t—” she croaked, but Richard had taken the knife and passed it across Julia’s throat. Her beautiful, delicate throat. Surprise painted Julia’s features. She sagged slowly, her ball gown crumpling beneath her.
“Too slow. When I say come to me, I mean now.” He gazed down at Julia, lying at his feet. Her bubbling gasps filled the room. “So much blood. And no use for it at all.” He looked sad. “There, she’s quiet now.”
A keening filled Emma’s mind. She had time to notice Venetia, up on her windowsill, a hand clamped to her mouth. Jasper and Nat, unmoving as statues. Julia’s awful gape.
In fact, Emma had the feeling that the rest of the world had slowed down. Only she and Richard looked across at each other in true time. For once, she knew exactly what she was going to do.
She felt the warm, grateful pull of her muscles, the thriving pulse that sung its willful song: alive, alive, alive. And, as each step carried her closer to Richard, she felt for what lay beneath it all.
The fox.
From far away, she heard Nat’s gasp; felt the currents of air as Jasper stumbled back from her; saw the shock in Richard’s florid face.
She was a fox now, and running. The hunter chased her. Once he had her scent, he would not stop. She would flee, he would follow, and she would lead him far from her mortals.
run run run
this is the hunt
Her breath rasped, and the reading rooms blurred into one. His footsteps were close behind. She forced a faster pace. A solid door was just ahead. She spat herself back into girl shape and wrenched the handle with human hands.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Please.”
It opened under her desperate fingers. She sped through into the shadows beyond, slamming the door shut behind her.
Panting, Emma looked around at a reading room dotted with four doors, one at each compass point.
A staircase spiraled to an upper gallery.
Beneath, a tapestry hung in an alcove: a tree laden with fruit, a river winding round.
She recognized it. She had spent hours searching through the books here, all magical texts about mortals.
She’d spent almost as much time trying to find the room itself.
The Library had often sent her spinning in circles around it, through the same few useless galleries, before it finally relented and let her in.
It had felt like the Library’s little joke.
She had always suspected it had a sense of humor.
Perhaps it had a sense of friendship too.
Emma waded through the darkness and placed her hands on the nearest bookcase.
Feeling utterly ridiculous, she whispered to the Library.
She asked for help. She pushed its attention toward the bloodstained man with her death in his eyes, whose footsteps drummed closer and closer to the door.
She spoke of hiding this room from him. Of sending him through an endless loop of darkened rooms, a closed circle that would not let him in or out.
She promised hours of faithful service, reshelving the most jumbled collections and dusting precious books.
Richard’s footsteps were at the door. And then she heard him pass by.
His rage-filled grunts circled the room, but did not find a way in.
Emma’s spine began to uncurl from its hunch.
She heard his first cry of frustration. Richard’s footsteps turned, pounded the other way, his breaths rasping thick with fear.
This time, his cry was of horror. The Library had trapped him.
Outside Emma’s hiding place, he ran in his own dark and doorless corridors, looping eternally around the room.
“Let me out—someone—”
Emma smiled with satisfaction. She stroked the bookcase in silent thanks.
But it struck her that she could not stay there waiting, like a fox trapped in her den, listening to the footsteps outside.
She, with the weight of a thousand ghosts at her back.
With her friends’ blood freckling her skin. She was meant to make him pay.
The plan came to her then. Simple, clean. Obvious.
She called to him.
“Richard.” It was a song, a taunt.
Outside, she heard his footsteps falter. She flitted closer, to the very wall that divided them. She called again.
“Richard.”
She heard him curse. She danced along the edges of the room, calling as he ran, always just ahead of him.
“Can you really not get me?”
Heavy feet stumbled on the other side of the wall. “What are you doing, witch?”
Emma let her laugh echo, high and eerie.
She heard a ragged intake of breath. He was afraid now. Good.
“Do you like the dark, Richard? The running? I hope you do. Because you’ll never leave it.” She had become good at lying, she realized, with all her time in the Night City. “You will die here. Imagine that, Richard.”
A sound from the nearest wall suggested he had slumped against it, and slid to the floor.
“I will get you. I will kill you.” She heard his fists thump the wall. But he was panting as he said it.
Emma slid to the floor on her side of the wall. She could hear the wet rattle of his breath, only inches away. It was almost intimate.
“You know, this is the second time you’ve run after me and not caught me,” she mused, as if at random. “How frustrated you must have been, the night of your ritual. Chasing me through the streets. So close, until I…”
She held her breath. He might not pick up the lure she had left dangling.
“… until you made a bargain.”
Emma closed her eyes in silent gratitude. He had taken the bait.
“I did.” And she let her voice puff with pride, smug and unbearable.
She was quite pleased with her next crow of laughter.
“And to think of you, all learned and expert, with your bowls and your runes, failing and failing. Always a failure. When I did it the first time, all by myself, running from you, and all I needed was desperation and a plea, and a bit of blood to open the way—” She let her voice squeak, as though she’d stopped herself.
“So that’s it.” There was glee in Richard’s voice. “Of course. Our bargain was complex. So many elements to fail. But yours was simple. One request, one person: your promise sent straight from you to the Power—”
“The Night City,” Emma corrected, as officiously as Richard might have, then let her voice spill over with horror. “No—I shouldn’t have said—the proper name, we use it only—”
She hoped Nat would be proud of her acting.