I expected an outburst, an order to keep his thoughts to himself, but instead Emeline sighed and re-folded her hands in her lap. "You're right, Seamus. Forgive me, Mags, it's not your fault, but without you in the field we are all but helpless. Roisin was run ragged last night, going back out after we brought you home, and the newer blood is faring no better. Even with you, I fear we were only putting off the inevitable. New crèches pop up every night."
"There will be more," I whispered, remembering the chains that had bound Lucien to the wall. Remembering his soft, sad words: You should not have freed me.
"What do you mean?" Emeline asked. Seamus just looked at me with wide, pained eyes.
"Lucien had been bound to the wall in the Hensford House with magics I don't understand. Maeve should have a look at them if they haven't been trashed. I don't know who trapped him there, or why. I can only imagine it was to make him create ghouls of Raina's rich friends. But now that he is loose in the world... I do not think his personal loyalty to humanity will be enough to restrain him. He is Luna's avatar, and while she rides his blood he will make ghouls, willingly or not, at a rate we have not seen in hundreds of years."
Emeline closed her eyes and crossed herself. "In that case, matters are all but settled. We need DeShawn's help, desperately, if we are to hold the line against the night. The days... shorten."
I licked my lips. "Not a natural shortening?"
She shook her head. "I do not believe so. The effects are subtle, but we have a record of it happening in the past. As the balance of the world shifts, so to do the length of the day and night."
"Then we must take all the help we can get."
"Which is precisely why we should not keep you locked up here like an animal."
"Seamus," I said, registering the exhaustion weighing down Emeline's shoulders. "I am not the only weapon we have. A few days cooped up while we are sure of my oath is no trouble. And I, quite plainly, need to heal."
"Of course." Seamus's freckled cheeks flushed red. "You must be well."
But Emeline, her wide eyes narrowing, caught on to my tone and asked, "What other weapon are you thinking of?"
I glanced sideways at Seamus, watching his expression to see if he suspected what he was. "I do not yet know what it is, but there is something unique about Seamus's blood."
Judging by how pale he became, the man had no idea. Guilt nagged at me. He had not asked for this—for any of this—but something had drawn him to Somerset House, and nerves made of steel had found him following me into the bloody dark at St. James. Hard as it was, hard as it would continue to be, Seamus was ready for this. But being ready didn't mean he deserved it.
Twelve: A Blackened Rose
After a muffled shouting match in the hallway outside my door, Roisin had gotten me released long enough to spend the day lying out in the permanent sunshine of the rose garden. I laid sprawled on a thick granite bench, the stone having soaked up the warm morning light so that it radiated into the overworked muscles of my back.
Roisin cradled my head in her lap, working small braids into my hair as the sunlight poured over us. I'd worn a sleeveless top, my shoulder wound exposed to the light, and every moment fresh sun caressed my skin I felt myself gain in strength.
Beside us, pacing ward circles in the gravel, Maeve explained in a wavering pitch the fundamentals of magic. I did my best not to watch, as every time I caught Seamus's panicked gaze trying to take in Maeve's weaving, rambling, instruction, it was hard not to laugh. I wasn't convinced Seamus was a mage in the practical sense, but Maeve was determined to squeeze any potential out of the poor guy.
Roisin, ever tactful, avoided the topic of the mote in my eye and told me in a slow, measured voice of her night busting up crèches with the other sunstriders while I battled Lucien in the church. Her tone of voice changed, and she trailed off in silence for a moment.
Then, softly, "I have been looking for Sebastian."
Hope hooked in my chest. As her sire, she would have fed from him at least once. "Can you sense him?"
A frown tugged at the corner of her lips. "Yes and no. He lives, but the sensation is blocked somehow. Too far away, or by magic. I've been digging through paperwork."
"Have you found anything?"
She shook her head. "No. Not yet. With everything that has been happening, my search has been academic—piecing together the time surrounding when his body may have been moved. Can you think of anything I may have overlooked?"
"What do you know?"
She pursed her lips, fingers stilling in my hair as she regarded Seamus and Maeve bickering over something or another, but her thoughts were not with the pair themselves. They were with Maeve—and the concept of descendants.
Roisin was rare amongst sunstriders and nightwalkers alike, as she had kept in touch with her sister's line after she had been turned. It occurred to me that I had not asked her what Maeve meant to her. Wild-haired and stubborn as anything, Maeve simply was. Kind, yes, and determined to do the right thing, I still had a hard time seeing her as anything more than a sharp-tongued witch. To equate her with a concept that felt so soft to me as, say, great grandniece, was nearly impossible.
And yet, despite the centuries separating them, Maeve was a sprout off of Roisin's family tree. Young enough to have children, and unattached so far as I knew, Maeve had been living the life of a hermit when I met her. Did Roisin worry her line was ending? Was that something creatures like us were even capable of? I tried to consider that my parents' line had ended with my sister, but the notion was so abstract as to be meaningless.
"I scouted the sewer system you woke up in," Roisin said, drawing me back to thoughts of Sebastian. "There was no evidence to suggest Sebastian was ever down there. Your dumping ground was, I'm sorry to say, rather unremarkable."
I chuckled. "Deservedly so. Did you..." I cleared my throat. "Was there any sign of Lucien?"
She shook her head. "No. He must have moved you long before the Venefica began weaving her spells on the coteries, and as such any such traces would be long gone. He trusted in the oubliette sleep to keep you out of the fight."
"Wrongly, it seems."
She shrugged. "The balance was too far tipped. I understand his motivation was to keep you safe, but I doubted he thought so far ahead as to wanting you awake to undo what the Venefica had begun. Even then, his mind was Ragnar's, as it is with all nightwalkers and their sires."
This was her way of dancing around talking about her desire to see Sebastian again. Though he had been my friend, and my family as a part of my coterie, he had been her sire. Although sunstriders did not indulge in the same mind-control techniques the nightwalkers used, there could be no stronger bond.
"Did Maeve discover anything about the van that kidnapped you?" I asked.
"No. Unmarked and white, the drivers escaped, and she did not have the nose to tell what shade their blood ran to—night or sun, or ghoul perhaps. She knew only that I was being moved when I should not have been, and that was all. I'm told she used my impromptu casket to rest her tea set on."
"I did!" Maeve shouted over her shoulder at us. "Bloody beveled edges were a pain to dust, but she wouldn't fit anywhere else." She huffed. "Thought we Quinns all ran short, but oh no, not the old matriarch."
Roisin smiled warmly. "If Lucien moved you, and Ragnar attempted to have me moved, then it stands to reason Ragnar moved Sebastian."
"But Sebastian's body was not in Ragnar's hive, nor was he in the van that Maeve tracked down, and Ragnar's people had not been particular about taking us one at a time," I said.
"I suspect when Ragnar realized Maeve had rescued me, he moved Sebastian somewhere else to keep me from following my nose straight to his hive."
"He would have kept some record of that," I said slowly. "And yet we found no such information in his hive, and of the coteries we did find none of them where whole. Every sunstrider woken by Maeve was part of at least a threesome, but no more than two from a coterie were fou
nd there. So where are the others?"
"Precisely my concern." Roisin flicked her gaze up the side of the house, and I did not follow her glance. I knew what she was watching—the slow rotation of our guard. DeShawn's people—who called themselves the Freak Squad—kept an eye on us, on me, as we lingered outside of my cage. Too bad for them, DeShawn had agreed to let me rest and recover in the rose garden so long as the sun shone, and the estate's old magics made it so that, as long as it was daytime, the sun always shone on this garden.
"You think DeShawn's people know something?" I dropped my voice so that only supernatural ears could hear. Maeve shot me a curious look, but said nothing. Seamus kept on playing her attentive student, all unawares.
"I cannot be sure," Roisin said in the same low tones I used. I had tested such things with Seamus. When we spoke this way even the most delicate of recording equipment had trouble understanding us. A situation which frustrated him to no end, as he insisted it was impossible. I'd only smiled at him, fangs out, and he'd gone back to muttering to himself over his keyboard.
"Before you and Maeve entered Ragnar's hive, Inspector Culver—" she did not like him, and wouldn't use his first name "—arranged a parlay with Ragnar, wherein he deceived Ragnar into believing that he would cast his lot in with the nightwalkers.
"When you entered, he was forced to commit to the bit lest Ragnar discover the deceit—hence the conditions you discovered when you reached the ritual chamber. Though I was a prisoner, I was aware of the inspector's scent, and although I couldn't hear him I know he was in that hive longer than he told us."
I licked my lips. "Ragnar told him where the others were?"
"I don't know what they discussed, only that they discussed more than the inspector has shared with us, and that we have no good answer for where the missing sunstriders are."
"If he knew, would he not tell us? We are overrun with ghouls as it is. He wants peace in the streets as badly as we do. If we retrieved the others, then our numbers might be enough to overwhelm Ragnar's plans, not just to hold the line."
"And here is where politics—" she said the word as if tasting rotten ghoul blood "—become an inconvenience. Things are just as petty in this modern world as they were when you were awake, only they are done with a touch more subtly. We know the inspector wishes to take the order from Emeline and take command of the Sun Guard and, by extension, ourselves. What then, if he already had his own army of loyal sunstriders? Ones he had rescued and introduced to the modern world without Emeline's oversight?"
"How could he?" I blinked lazily, trying to rouse myself though the sunlight made me content as a fat cat in the cream. "Maeve hasn't been able to wake the rest up, and she's the strongest witch we know. We only have the ones that were roused when Maeve poured sunlight into the Venefica's spell."
"It may be he doesn't have them yet, that he hopes to gain Maeve's trust and cooperation. Or, perhaps, the assistance of another witch."
She glanced sideways at Seamus, and this time I followed her gaze. Maeve had cleared a spot in the gravel and set up a squat, unlit beeswax candle, then circled it all around with pale pieces of glittering quartz. Her charms and trinkets tinkled as she moved, catching the brilliant sunlight in such a way as to make her appear a living star, bright and glittering. Some of the live-wire tension she'd been under ever since she had proven unable to awaken the other sunstriders washed out of her features as she explained the spell to Seamus. Her fingers danced through the air as she shaped runes for every word. Such shapings weren't necessary for spell casting, but if Maeve ever stopped moving, she might die from the shock.
Despite our attention, both witch and apprentice ignored us. Seamus's every thought was bent to the task presented him, his hands balled at his sides and his body canted forward, but not quite breaking the invisible wall that the quartz stones represented. His lips moved silently at first, mouthing everything Maeve said, her own mute parrot.
"Go on then," she said. Roisin's fingers tensed in my hair.
Seamus spoke the words, his fists going pale and bloodless as he clenched them so hard I feared he'd break the fragile bones beneath. A tingle rippled through the air, power burgeoning. Roisin shifted, uncomfortable, and Maeve's eyes narrowed as something tinkled against all our skin.
Seamus said the final words and opened his fists.
The candle inverted inward, white beeswax turning black, and smeared against the ground leaving nothing but a greasy patch of withered soot. A puff of white smoke curled into the air.
"Hmm," Maeve said. "I have no idea what that was."
Seamus's forehead wrinkled but, guided by a gentle nudge from Roisin, I glanced upward. DeShawn had been standing on the balcony overlooking the garden. His back was turned to us now, one hand already gripping the handle of the door. Frustration made his shoulders taut, his steps heavy.
How long, I wondered, had he been in Ragnar's hive after all?
Thirteen: Confidences
With the fall of night, DeShawn's people saw me tucked away in my gilded cage. Though I was supposed to be resting, I paced the small room, hands clasped behind my back, bare feet shuffling against the rough pile of the rug just to feel some sensory input.
The estate, though bustling with mortal life, felt empty to me. One sunstrider stayed behind every night, should the worst happen and an attack be made upon our home, but all the others had gone out, spilled into the streets under the malicious light of the moon to hunt ghouls and, if they were lucky, pinpoint the location of nightwalkers. The Hensford House would not be attempted again for quite a while, Emeline had told me. Raina's guests were so frightened by the commotion that she would not have another party any time soon.
Even though my power waned under the moonlight—never mind the mote, I would not use that strength again—I chafed to be set free, to take to the streets of London and cut down those which my oath demanded be excised.
But DeShawn had spoken, and Emeline had listened, and until my conversation with Roisin I had felt the whole arrangement reasonable. Trust wore thin in the house, now.
All over I heard the patter of feet, dozens more than there had been the night before. DeShawn's people. Working, coordinating, rotating shifts out in the city as they wore down much faster than my kin. Ostensibly, we were all on the same side. Working together to push back the night. Yet...
That extra time in the hive, unexplained. The missing sunstriders DeShawn never mentioned. The set to DeShawn's shoulders as he walked away from watching Seamus attempt magic.
Speculation, all of it. Wild spinning out of ideas, and Roisin was prone to intensity when it came to the safety of her sire—not to mention the slow building of paranoia that came with immortal age. Though I was eldest, Roisin had spent the most time awake.
I trusted her. Trusted her with everything I was, and her hunches had never led me astray before.
Someone knocked on my door. I tensed, freezing in place the way only the immortal can, every cell in my body deadening all processes—even the slow healing of my shoulder. Though the worst of the poison from Lucien's bite had passed, it threaded through me still, slowing me down, and something about that knock screamed danger into the primal part of my mind. Or maybe it was just the way my thoughts had been spinning out before the visitor. Maybe I was the paranoid one.
"Mags?" Talia's voice, gentle and wary.
"You may come in," I said, then thought again. "If you have a key, I suppose."
"I didn't mean to wake you."
I looked to my bed, perfectly made up ever since I'd peeled myself out of it to go to the garden, and almost laughed. "There is no way I can sleep through the night. Not anymore."
"Oh."
"Hurry up," a woman's voice I didn't recognize whispered. My eyes narrowed. I cast around the room for a weapon—of course there were none. My blade and firearm had both been taken from me, even the small daggers in my boots secreted away until I could prove that my oath as a sunstrider held, and that I would no
t go rampaging around killing mortals because of the mote in my eye. It occurred to me, belatedly, that I had not asked how I was supposed to prove my allegiance.
A key clicked over in the lock and the door slid open, revealing a dark hallway beyond. Talia had not turned on the lights. I craned my neck, curious, as she scuttled into the room as quick as she could and stepped aside so that another woman could enter. Long, ash-blonde hair streaked with dusty blue tied up into a knot, perfect blush-pink shoes without a scuff on them, and a dress whose cut screamed designer. I hadn't been introduced to the woman, but I knew her.
"Raina Hensford."
She strode into the room, fearless, and met my golden gaze. "You must be Miss Magdalene Shelley. It's a pleasure to meet you at last."
Talia shut the door as softly as she could and rushed over to me, wringing her hands. "Raina wants to talk about Mr. Dubois, but she doesn't trust the Sun Guard, so I thought, uh..."
"That you'd bring her to the guard's headquarters?" I asked, amused.
"Talia is a little overwhelmed," Raina said, letting a slow and easy smile light up her face. "She's not used to breaking the rules. Never was comfortable with it, even when we were kids at boarding school."
Although Raina exuded confidence and that cool, slick feeling I got from all mortals who were self-assured of their own power, something about the way her smile softened at the corners as she talked about Talia warmed me up to her. She liked Talia. Anyone who liked Talia couldn't be all that bad.
"Why don't you trust the Sun Guard?" I asked.
She glanced up, as if she could see through the ceiling to those walking above us. "Because you appear to have gotten into bed with the local metropolitan police. An odd, and unwise, decision."
"What makes you say that?"
She sighed and twitched a stray curl of dusty blue hair behind her ear. "Because they are, unfortunately, paid very little. And those paid very little are very likely to take bribes, as I'm sure was true in your day. They mean well, many of them, but the organization is inherently corruptible. And you battle those who specialize in corruption, do you not?"
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