Chapter 59
Fifty-Nine
Neal
No pigeon came that morning. And immediately I set to work. I was a pessimist by nature. That’s what made me good at my job. I gave them two hours in case of delay, in case of some unexpected but benign contingency, and then called the communication missed and started executing rescue plans.
Ansel had spun some story about Sorcha being pregnant out of wedlock with a drunkard’s baby. And it made for an easy cover to go in and rescue.
I sent three sentries out to patrol near the house, explaining that if Sorcha was in danger she’d inevitably send animals out for help.
Little ones. So I told them to watch for rats or songbirds—any tiny creatures behaving out of order, that seemed to be pointing to a specific location.
I ordered them back at nightfall. And prayed that they would see some kind of pattern to guide me later.
In the meantime I rounded up my four youngest, roughest-looking guards.
“Assume everyone in that house is complicit,” I instructed.
“One way or another they’re holding your sovereign against her will.
We can’t have police called—though I doubt they’d risk it regardless—but no edged weapons, no firearms. Fight dirty.
They’re expecting you to. Your singular job is to buy me time until I can get her out.
Even if it means punching an old woman. Understood? ”
No one breathed a word of disagreement.
“And O’Faelen?” one of the guards asked.
“Is smart and stubborn and ancient,” I replied. “Keep an eye for him. But Lady Sorcha is your number one priority.”
Nightfall came and there was no word from Sorcha and Ansel.
I sat up on the roof until almost nine o’clock waiting, watching the horizon, feeling hope bloom in my chest every time I saw a pigeon and then collapse again as they all carried on without a message for me.
My scouts returned at nine o’clock, all reporting that rats seemed to be trying to get attention for the back, right-hand corner of the mansion’s basement.
It wasn’t much. But it was enough to go on.
So I doused myself and my guards in whiskey and gin, roughed up our shirts with ash from the fire and my hunting knife, put belladonna in our eyes to dilate pupils for good measure, and then stalked down the darkened Edinburgh streets toward the eerie white marble house.
I banged on the whitewashed mahogany front door with the bottom of an empty whiskey bottle. I was here to make a scene, might as well begin as obnoxiously as possible. An older woman answered the door—taupe calico dress, severe low bun, no apron.
“May I help you? Are you here because you’ve fallen on hard times, sir?” she asked, eyebrows knitting together in an uncomfortably practiced gesture of concern.
“My piece of shit father-in-law brought my wife here,” I slurred, begging the woman would buy the charade. “I’m here to take her back.”
The woman’s brow furrowed farther, but I pushed past her and into the house.
“Now where are you, Albert, you leech?” I shouted up the steps. “Sally and I were happy, you bastard!”
“What’s all this?” A middle-aged man with a black mustache emerged from one of the aggressively whitewashed doors lining the front hallway. “Is something the matter? Do you need assistance, good sir . . .”
He trailed off as the four guards I had brought with me filed in behind, all reeking of alcohol, clothes stained and torn.
“Oh many things are the matter,” I said, getting right up to the mustached man’s face. “So many things. Can’t make a pittance in the mines any longer. But we’ve got mill owners blowing all kinds of their money on occult retreats instead of doctors.”
“I’m sure this is a simple misunderstanding,” the man soothed.
“And I’m sure that a man named Albert Mansard came here a few days back with a pregnant girl named Sally,” I said, raising my voice until it was nearly a yell, “and I bloody well want my wife back!”
And with that I punched the man square in the jaw.
Blood sprayed across the whitewashed stairs.
The old woman at the door gasped. And suddenly the hall was awash with activity.
A half dozen other cultists emerged from rooms upstairs and along the hallway, and my guards followed instructions perfectly—fighting with blows designed to distract but not maim and creating every bit of ruckus possible so I could slip back through the hall and try to find a stairway down to the cellar to rescue my wife, my sovereign, and my unborn baby that she carried.
I found the narrow cellar stairway behind yet another identical whitewashed door.
The steps led down to the left, back corner of the house, near the coal shoot for the fires.
So if my intelligence was any good, once I got downstairs I would likely have to argue or fight my way through more of the cultists before I found Sorcha somewhere across the house.
But as I rushed down the steps and down the hall it was suspiciously vacant.
I passed a locked iron door—stark black standing out against the whitewashed surfaces that extended even down into the cellar.
And then I glimpsed the kitchen with pots of stock that smelled like rotting flesh, still simmering but unattended, and six full-sized meat hooks dangling from the ceiling—the kind butchers used to gut whole animals. I suppressed a shudder.
I yelped as something darted over my foot. Then looked down to see a brown rat sitting up on my boot, nose twitching, paws raised, clearly here with a purpose. So I stepped back, gestured ahead, and hoped the animal would understand.
The rat skittered away, down the hallway, then turned off to one side passage, then another. I took note of the laundry as I passed—vats of linen that smelled like piss and sulfur. A laundry had to have ventilation, and ventilation meant windows, which meant means of escape.
I looked back down to be sure I hadn’t lost sight of the rat. The tiny animal had paused, nose twitching, outside a bolted wooden door—whitewashed like everything else.
“Sorcha?” I called, pounding on the door. “Love?”
“Neal!” Sorcha’s voice was muffled through the door.
“Stand back, okay?” I instructed.
Then I jammed my hunting knife under each of the hinge pins until the door swung open, revealing a cramped closet full of mundane laundry supplies.
And there on the floor? Sorcha, blood streaked, terrified, clad in a flimsy, bile-soaked, black chemise that concealed nothing and clung to her belly like a burial shroud.
“You came!” Sorcha cried, throwing herself into my arms.
“Of course I came,” I soothed, hugging her tight, hand going up to tangle in her unbound curls, now stained with blood and puke.
She didn’t embrace me back, and suddenly I realized her hands were bound behind her back.
I fought back the rage, the urge to go up there and strangle whoever had tied her up like this, and instead cut the bindings with my knife, rubbing blood and life back into her hands and kissing her palms over and over.
“Where’s Ansel?” Sorcha asked.
“He’ll find his way,” I assured her. “Now you come with me. Right now.”
“How did you get in?” Sorcha asked as I led her by the hand back through the hallways to the laundry.
“I may have played the drunk, indigent father card,” I replied. “And I may have four guards upstairs creating a distraction. And they all definitely deserve a raise.”
Sorcha actually cracked a smile through the blood caked on her face.
I broke the lock off the largest of the laundry-room windows and helped Sorcha clamber out into the night. And there in the fresh air the fight went right out of her. She fell to her knees, gagging up blood. Then slumped onto the grass.
“Sorcha!” I exclaimed, crouching beside her.
“Too much magic,” Sorcha mumbled into the turf. “Too much magic for too long. Just get me home. Please just get me home.”
And so I shrugged out of my coat, wrapped it around her shoulders, and gathered her into my arms.
“Neal,” Sorcha murmured into my chest as I walked toward the back gate, “Neal, I think these are a resurrection of the old Elvish death cults.”
Sorcha was asleep, dead weight in my arms, well before I got back to the outpost. I waved off help from the staff except to ask one of the chambermaids to draw a hot bath for her upstairs.
That’s where Ansel found us—Sorcha bleary but mostly awake in the bath, trying to rinse blood out of her hair, and me slouched on a chair beside the tub, pupils still blown from belladonna, scrubbing grime off my own face.
“I did it!” Ansel exclaimed as he burst in. He was bloody, coal streaked, shirtless, covered in bruises, and dragging an old man in tattered clothes behind him by the ear.
“What the hell did you do?” Sorcha snapped, fully awake now. I shoved a towel in her direction, watching the old man’s eyes widen and his cheeks flush when he glimpsed Sorcha’s naked body.
“Got out,” Ansel said, nodding toward me. “No thanks to you.”
“And you kidnapped someone,” Sorcha added, deadpan. “Again.”
“We needed more detail,” Ansel said. “You fainted. They shut you in that cupboard before I could do anything. And as for me? They tied me to a chair and roughed me up. First they just asked about why they hadn’t received payment yet.
Then they started accusing me of espionage, insisting I was here for the police, the church.
And then Neal and his men burst in. Pulled everyone into the hall and away from asking me stupid, useless questions I wasn’t going to answer anyways. ”
“You’re welcome,” I muttered.
“I took the chance to whip this out.” Ansel produced a blade from his waistband. “Cut the bindings and sneak away.”
“And your new friend?” Sorcha asked.
“Was lingering near the back door,” Ansel said. “Clearly trying to avoid the fray out front. So I figured we’d bring him home and learn a little more about our local demon-worshipping blood cult.”
“So you’re going to torture him?” Sorcha drawled.
The old man swallowed hard and immediately started fighting. Ansel just tightened his grip, twisting his fingers on the man’s ear, eliciting a yelp and a mumbled apology with a promise to “be real cooperative, mister.”
“And you are not helping,” Ansel said in reply. “You are going to sleep. And I’ll bring news at breakfast.”
I didn’t sleep that night. Seeing Sorcha bound and bloody in that closet had disturbed me too much for rest. So I just cuddled her against my chest, rubbed her back when she stirred, and kept an eye on the window in our darkened room, alert to every real and imagined threat.
I saw the light in the shed out where Ansel and two of our guards were interrogating the cultist flicker off around three o’clock.
Ansel and one of the guards emerged a few minutes later, talking quietly.
Another hour passed and there was a quiet knock at the door. Ansel let himself in.
“You’re not gonna sleep without someone watching out for her are you, lad?” Ansel asked softly.
“I don’t know if I’m going to sleep ever again after that,” I replied.
Ansel closed the door behind him, sat down and leaned back against it.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Try. I’ll keep watch.”