A Breath of Frost

by Alyxandra Harvey

  The first spider scurried back toward them. Its glowing counterpart drifted free and raced up Penelope’s ankle. She paled, eyes snapping open when she saw whatever the spider had seen.

  “Hurry.”

  Chapter 58

  There was nowhere to run.

  Emma tried the door again but it held fast.

  The Sisters drifted out of the portal hovering in midair, just under the chandelier. The purple light was as malignant as she remembered it. The stink of sulfur mingled with lemon balm. Ice clung to the banisters, creeping like ivy.

  Sophie beamed at the Sisters in such a way that they might have been saints instead of warlocks. Lark looked as distracted and desolate as ever, but the blood dripping from her dress coalesced when it hit the cracked marble floor. The magic and life force of the murdered girls had fed them what they needed to stay anchored in this reality.

  And now that they were in their own ancestral house, with not just one descendant but two, they were more powerful still. The Order might never get rid of them.

  The lightning might not have stopped Sophie but it had at least broken the window open. The damp night breeze fluttered what was left of the curtains. Emma lunged for it. She was a whisper away, her fingertips brushing the wooden sill, when Sophie tackled her. She grabbed her ankles and Emma toppled, slamming into the floor hard enough to crack her teeth together. Her antlers scraped the wall. Dust lifted, choking her.

  She kicked back and Sophie yelped when her finger got crushed, but she didn’t let go. Emma struggled to turn over onto her back to get better traction. Her hand slipped when the cut on her palm opened up, bleeding more profusely than such a shallow cut warranted.

  “The Sisters taught me how to work my magic fully,” Sophie said. “I can work it backward and make every pain you’ve ever suffered come back worse than it was, right down to your very first aching tooth. That’s how I trapped the girls so they couldn’t fight back, so the Sisters could get stronger. And the footman who tried to protect poor Lilybeth. The Sisters can teach you too. And then one day we can join them.”

  Blood dripped down Emma’s arm. Her palm pulsed with pain. She went limp, letting Sophie drag her backward, letting her get close enough for Emma to punch her in the eye. Sophie howled, shocked, her head snapping.

  Ladies did not punch.

  Ladies didn’t have antlers either.

  Emma swung her head, prepared to run the other girl through if she was forced to. She felt foolish but oddly vindicated. She was beginning to rather like her horns. Sophie slipped on Emma’s blood as she scrambled to get out of the way. “We’re family!” Sophie cried out.

  “It’s a trap,” Emma yelled, hoping the others could hear her warning.

  Suddenly, her scalp tightened, pain shooting into her skull. Every scraped knee and pinprick she’d ever suffered came rushing to the surface of her skin. Every bramble scratch, every bee sting, and bruise.

  Her left wrist cracked loudly, snapping the way it had when she was nine years old and had fallen from a tree. It throbbed, full of hot needles. She and Sophie circled each other like two feral cats, all but hissing. Sophie had the audacity to look wounded, as though Emma had hurt her feelings.

  The Sisters grew tired of waiting.

  “Enough,” Magdalena snapped. Death’s-head moths fluttered out of her tangled hair. “We need you both for this.”

  Power snaked out in tendrils as the Sisters approached, slapping at Emma hard enough to make her stumble. Ice crept over the marble, glittered on the shards of glass, and froze the air hard enough to make her teeth hurt. Tendrils of deadly nightshade curled out from Rosmerta’s belt, circling Emma’s ankles and her sprained wrist, tightening agonizingly. Pain strangled her voice momentarily.

  Magdalena lifted her hands. Her long hair fell down her back, hung with spiders and beetles. “Come,” she called, her voice reverberating through the house. Wisps of violet light floated away on death’s-head moth wings to lure the innocent to the house. “Come,” she repeated as they drifted outside. The soft glow made them look like perfect jeweled butterflies.

  “Don’t struggle so,” Lark said in a sweet, high voice when Emma pulled at her restraints. “We need to make you one of us. Then we’ll be strong enough to find my beloved.”

  “He’s dead,” Emma spat, tearing frantically at the ghostly plants and the ropes of violet energy pinning her to the wall. Sophie smiled and the pain in her wrist flared, the cut on her palm went red and violent. “Go back to the Underworld if you miss him so much!”

  “He’s not there!” Lark screeched. Her voice scraped inside Emma’s head, making her vision waver. Her ears were being stabbed with the awful sound. Her heart raced. “I looked everywhere, didn’t I?” Maggots spilled out of her hands, squirming and wriggling until they turned to ice and shattered on the marble. “Didn’t I?” Blood poured off her hem.

  The lilac ropes dragged Emma up the wall. She hung there, struggling. Despite knowing it would do no good, lightning crackled and rain dripped from the ceiling. Wind whipped through the hall. Rosmerta smiled greedily, her poisonous vines flaring virulently green.

  The portal burned brighter and brighter.

  Emma felt their whispers. It was more than the sound of the Sisters, it was the way they prowled inside her head, in her bones and her belly. They pushed and poked at her magic, prodded her memories, pinned her inside herself. She fought them as long as she could. But how does one fight the water while drowning?

  She was as substantial as mist and rain. It was a struggle to stay conscious. Only the fear of being even more helpless in front of the Sisters kept her lucid, but only barely. Her eyelids fluttered frantically.

  The Sisters were more powerful than she was.

  It took all of her effort just to turn her head. Her witch knot flared, going from the color of spilled tea to blood and rust. As they claimed her for their own, the points started to unfurl slowly, like a poisonous plant, like the mark of the Greymalkin.

  Chapter 59

  “Stay back!” Penelope called to the girl racing into the garden. There was a leather strap tied crosswise between her breasts. It bristled with iron daggers, nails, and various magical weapons.

  “Where’s Cormac?” she demanded instead of listening to Penelope’s frantic order.

  “Inside,” Penelope replied. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Cormac’s sister, Colette. I saw the flares he sent up earlier.”

  “Is the Order with you?”

  She shook her head and made a rude sound that perfectly explained how she felt about that. As she turned toward the house, giant moths flew out of the front door and the broken window. They were the size of robins, and gleaming and glittering the intense shade of mauve associated with the Underworld.

  “What are those?” Gretchen asked.

  “Will-o’-the-wisps,” Colette replied. “They lure people into bogs and swamps and drown them.”

  “I don’t feel the urge to follow them,” Gretchen pointed out. “Do you?”

  “They’re not meant for you.”

  “Then who for?”

  “Them.”

  She pointed to the small crowd of strangers wandering up the sidewalk, out of houses and carriages. They wore fine evening gowns, starched collar points, diamonds, and ostrich feathers; also nightcaps, aprons, and footman’s livery. They came from sculleries and master’s chambers and stables. They trailed after the violet moths as if nothing else mattered. Not even the fact that one of the ladies was still in her chemise and corset and nothing else.

  Their pupils and irises were bleached out by magic, white eyes staring blankly. They were blind to everything except the path into the house. Penelope didn’t know what was waiting for them inside, but she was sure it wasn’t conducive to a long healthy life. She hopped down to the ground, trying to keep the gates closed but they kept coming. “I think the cloaking spell is definitely broken,” she said, shoving back at insistent hands passing between the bars
. She slapped at them. “Go home, you lunatics!”

  “You figure that out,” Colette said, dodging around them. “And I’ll find Cormac.”

  “They’re bewitched,” Moira shouted, scrambling down the rainspout to help. “They’re following the will-o’-the-wisps.”

  “How do we stop them?”

  “I’m not sure we can.”

  A housemaid scaled the fence, her smile both besotted and drunk. She didn’t notice the bleeding gashes on her palms from the wrought iron spikes. Several alley cats slipped between the bars. A large man who looked like he spent his time wrestling bears rattled the gates. Penelope was shoved across the flag-stones by the press of people, still clinging uselessly to the bars.

  When the housemaid dropped to the ground next to Penelope, Penelope reared back and punched her. The girl slumped in the grass, dazed. Gretchen tossed her an approving, slightly vicious smile. They were reduced to tripping and shoving the people who tried to push past them. Moira dashed around to the back gardens, where three half-drunk gentlemen were attempting to scale the wall. She broke a branch of a tree and brandished it at them.

  Despite the taint of dark magic, the gardens were coming back to life all around them. Green grass pushed up through the mire. Daffodils bloomed along the edge of the broken path. The foxgloves turned pink, and the ash’s withered leaves unfurled thickly.

  It wasn’t just the garden. The house was also repairing itself. The shutters opened like flowers, and the cracks in the mortar faded away. The peeling paint smoothed out. The crumbled chimney mended itself, brick by brick.

  The last of the wards and invisible spells fell away.

  Chapter 60

  The gates pulsed with dark magic, bleeding wider and wider like a wine stain on a white tablecloth. Dark residue oozed, leaving black scorch marks and deep fissures in the marble. It was the last unguarded gate left in London.

  And it still wasn’t the worst thing in the Greymalkin House.

  Emma.

  Her eyelids fluttered madly. The vines and magical ropes binding her were already leaving red scrapes and bruises. She was so pale she was nearly translucent. The room was utterly still. Cormac couldn’t understand why she wasn’t calling the wind, or blasting through her chains with lightning.

  Unless she was no longer able to.

  Ice traveled over her body, encasing her in frost. Icicles dripped from the ends of her antlers, like glittering needles. Her lips were turning blue.

  “Emma!”

  She tried to speak, her lips parting weakly. No sound emerged. The Sisters barely glanced at him, still congregating around her with greedy intense smiles. He wasn’t a threat, even after having nearly banished them in the park. He had no magic. Sour fury scalded his throat.

  He tossed a red bundle of banishing powder to the ground. The house shivered once, the tremor building under the cellar and traveling up the walls and through the floors. The chandelier rattled, dropping crystals. The portal widened farther.

  The white horse who reared out of the powder was huge. The mare had flashing blue eyes and a mane that shot out showers of sparks. Sweet honey covered the stench of the house. She neighed and landed hard, her hooves cracking the charred marble into pieces.

  But the Sisters still didn’t abandon Emma. They didn’t care that the horse had the power to drag them back to the Underworld. When the mare galloped at them, her hooves about to slash through them, she was stopped in mid-leap. He could hear the crack of the sudden cold, the snap of the hooves as they froze.

  And then the ghostly mare shattered into pieces.

  The very house had struck the blow, like a rock through a windowpane. The remaining threads of magic animating the horse were sucked into the portal, bloating it to dangerous proportions. It didn’t widen low enough to be reachable; instead, it deepened like a tunnel. Cormac could hear the sounds of footsteps, hoofbeats, and wailing from the other side.

  “You’re too late,” Sophie said, stepping out from behind one of the curved stairwells.

  He stared at her. She looked like all the other debutantes in her white dress and carefully coiled hair. He half expected her to curtsy. “Sophie?”

  She smiled demurely. “Hello, Cormac.”

  She clearly wasn’t a prisoner. “What are you doing here?” He angled himself to keep an eye on the Sisters, his mind racing through possible plans.

  “What I must.” She flicked her fingers in his direction. “I’m sorry.”

  Old wounds long healed and long forgotten opened. Blood seeped through his shirt and down his leg. His trousers ripped at the knee under the force of an inner blow. He fell to his other knee, steeling himself against the unexpected pain. Emma needed him to survive this.

  And fast.

  Mottled bruises ran down to his ankle and spread up along his jaw. His little finger snapped like a dry twig. Multiple cuts opened like mouths on his arms and legs. The burns from the charms on the silver chain around his neck throbbed.

  Sophie stood over him, sad but determined. She didn’t see Colette arrive until it was too late. His sister flung one of her daggers, not bothering with spells or spirits. It slammed into Sophie’s shoulder and she cried out, clutching at it in shock. Cormac kicked out at her feet and knocked her down. Her temple struck the floor. She blinked dizzily, diverting the magic she’d been pushing through him to heal herself. Blood seeped between her fingers.

  “Get out of here,” he groaned at Colette when she crouched next to him.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Oh, look.” Rosmerta glanced over her shoulder. “Another little lamb,” she said. “Come for the slaughter.”

  “Leave her alone!” He coughed, spitting out the blood from a split lip he didn’t even remember getting. He assumed he’d been fighting over a girl. Colette helped him up. His knee was a rusty hinge and there was a goose egg swelling on the back of his head. “We need to close the gate,” he whispered, handing her a pouch prepared with rowan berries and nails.

  “First things first.” She stepped over the magic barrier and smiled darkly down at Sophie. “I don’t think your kind of help is required,” she said, grabbing her by the hair and cracking her head against the stones again. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she lost consciousness.

  Sophie’s magic fell away from Cormac. Still, his magical charms were no use in the house.

  Finally, an advantage.

  Not having magical abilities of his own meant he’d never been able to completely rely on them.

  Emma whimpered. Her left hand was bent back at an awkward angle, the witch knot flaring. Light gathered into the lines, like lava. He saw the tips unfurling, the knot being forced into a mark of the Greymalkin family.

  Over his dead body.

  Quite literally, if it came to that.

  He remembered Talia’s cryptic dream from the night he’d first encountered the Sisters. Bottles break and knots undo but the only real binding is love that is true.

  He couldn’t assume Emma loved him.

  He only knew that he loved her.

  It would have to be enough.

  He had to get to Emma. Now. But he was going to need help, they all were. Before the gate was closed. He lifted his dagger. Her blood was still on the tip. He had to hope it would be enough to call her father out of the Underworld again, as it had before.

  He turned and threw his knife, watching it spin blade over hilt until it whistled through the portal and something screamed on the other side.

  Weaponless, he turned back to the Sisters.

  Chapter 61

  Cormac leaped into the cold coven of the Sisters.

  The air was frigid and hard, stabbing into his lungs. His knee still throbbed, making him awkward. He knew he’d never make it past them. He remembered exactly how it felt to be drained by them, the cold seeping ache that made your bones hollow, that turned your heart into a lump of ice. It was just as awful as it was the first time.

  Still, it was preci
sely what he’d wanted.

  He’d aimed for Rosmerta. Her temper frayed the quickest and he wanted to be within her reach. Lark was so unbalanced she might kiss him or kill him, neither of which would help Emma.

  Rosmerta grabbed him by the throat and flung him at the wall. The edge of the broken window dug into his shoulder. Vines of nightshade and belladonna draped all over her, crawled up to encircle his arms, thick as chains. They tightened until he felt prickles down his arms. “Wait your turn, boy,” she scolded.

  Beside him, Emma’s eyes opened suddenly, the irises virulently, unnaturally violet.

  Bottles break and knots undo but the only real binding is love that is true.

  “Hold on,” he murmured. “Don’t give into them.” Inch by slow, excruciating inch, he reached for her.

  The Sisters were chanting, their hands raised, Greymalkin knots facing Emma. Their hair lifted in a breeze no one else felt, the ends tipped with lavender fire. The floor was completely frozen beneath them. They were still pale, but it was the pallor of skin kept from the sun, not the pearly gray translucence of spirits. They were nearly corporeal.

  Alley cats slunk through the front door, batting at purple moths. Their breaths puffed into white clouds as they wound around the Sisters’ ankles. They fell over almost instantly, frozen and drained.

  A man followed, stumbling drunkenly after a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Colette could stop him, he’d grabbed the violet moth and collapsed. Cursing, she went back to building the small banishing salt-fire under the gate, using his body to block her from the Sisters’ attention.

  Cormac gritted his teeth against the same seductive weakness that stole over him. He was so cold. Fatigue dragged him down. He had to hold Emma’s hand. He couldn’t remember why, only knew that it was important. His joints creaked like rusty armor. His shoulder might as well have been a giant’s war club for all he could lift it. He stretched his fingers out.