The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil

by Heidi Cullinan

  The smoke roared, but it drew back, and they shot through. But as soon as they were flat against the door of the abbey, Madeline stopped them both and turned around again.

  “I need you both to stand very still,” she shouted over the wind, which had risen up from nowhere and was now whipping around them. “I will draw on both of you. It will feel sharp, and there may be pain.” She tightened her grip on Jonathan. “I will fall unconscious when I’m through. Take me to the tower and let me rest, and I will be fine. I am going to seal us inside. I will seal the entire abbey.”

  Timothy said nothing, only nodded wide-eyed as he watched the fog coming closer.

  Jonathan bent and kissed her cheek, trying not to let his own terror show. “When you are ready,” he said into her ear.

  The pain came like a knife, cutting him from his head to his toes. He pushed past it, holding still as she had told him, shutting his eyes. He saw a strange dark field open inside his mind, and he saw Madeline standing upon it, arms raised as a great dragon rose before her, dripping tar and flame. It reared back to strike her, and Jonathan went rigid, forcing himself motionless to keep from reaching for her. But as the beast drew in its great breath, Madeline shouted a stream of ancient words, and a wall of blue fire erupted from her hands. When the beast exhaled, its black fire danced along the surface of the great blue dome that arced up and encompassed them as she tumbled, unconscious, to the ground.

  Jonathan opened his eyes and caught her before she hit, carrying her inside the abbey as the black fog pushed impotently against the invisible wall. But once inside, he passed her to Timothy.

  “Take her upstairs,” he said hoarsely. “I will be up in a moment.”

  Timothy, pale and shaking, did so with a curt nod. Jonathan watched them go, then turned and shut the door. He watched the fog through the windows as he fumbled down the hallway to the kitchen privy. He watched it choke out the windows one by one, rising higher against the walls of the abbey, clawing angrily at Madeline’s spell. He heard the roars and felt the shudders as the daemon-turned-demon in the fog slammed against the spell, and he worried it would fail to hold.

  He kept the door open behind him as he pissed through the wooden hole and into the pit below. He thought of how much it had taken from Madeline to box them in like this. He knew without being told that they would not be getting out.

  He thought of the witches’ Council, still moving toward them, determined to destroy her.

  When Jonathan was finished, he tucked himself back into his trousers. Then he let out a shuddering sigh and leaned his body against the door, pressing his hand flat against the rough wood as he let his forehead fall forward in defeat.

  Chapter Twelve

  androghenie

  heart-child

  The androghenie are the third gender created by the Goddess.

  They are the children of the union of the Lord and Lady.

  Charles sat in a lumpy chair in the study, his hands in his lap as he listened to Madeline speaking to their motley crew gathered around the hearth. He was thinking right now would be a good time for a few drams and a stiff drink.

  He kept one eye on the others and one on the fog as it retreated slowly back to the edge of the woods and the forest, and he was listening, but now that the heat of battle had died down and Timothy had wiped the hardest edges of his pain away, now he felt…unsettled. As if he could sense something dark coming, something terrible, something much, much darker even than the demon outside—something he didn’t understand and could not stop.

  One dram, even, and a shot.

  He tried again to focus on Madeline. His sister. She was very pale and her hands shook as she took a cup of tea from Emily, but she was conscious now at least. Jonathan sat beside her on the sofa; occasionally Charles saw him rest a hand on the center of her back, but he was discreet. Stephen was seated on a stool near the hearth, looking nearly catatonic with his fear, and Timothy paced like a tiger in the shadows near the door. He had a knife drawn, and he twirled it agitatedly between his fingers. Occasionally he looked over at Charles, but Charles could not read his expression.

  Emily appeared before him with a small porcelain cup and saucer. “Tea,” she said, almost whispering. Timothy had tried to make her sit several times, but she seemed stronger and calmer when she was moving around, feeding them. Charles nodded thanks and took the cup, but he was glancing around for the bottle of brandy, which also made him think of baetlbeth.

  His eyes met Timothy’s accidentally, and he looked quickly away, ashamed that the Catalian might have read his longing for the drug. Charles’s body still hummed from all they had done during the night. He could still smell the oils on his skin, and he could still taste Timothy inside his mouth. He had dreamed such sweet, soft dreams. But when he had awoken, it had been to Timothy’s haggard, frightened face as the black fog closed over the top of the tower.

  I wish I could help. I wish I could help him, Charles thought, but sorrowfully, because he knew he could not.

  Oh, Goddess save him, just one dram.

  Madeline shifted forward on the sofa. “I will need to investigate more deeply before I can say for sure,” she said, “but I grasped enough of the demon’s intent as I battled with it to speak with some certainty. It laid a trap for us; it would have done to us what it did to Whitby’s men—or rather, it would have done that to some of us. It was angry that it had to give itself away, but it read their intent, and it knew it had no choice but to destroy them, lest they kill one of its prizes.”

  “Who are the prizes?” Timothy asked, his eyes sliding to Charles.

  “Charles, of course,” she said. “But also Jonathan. At this point, Jonathan is almost more important.” She took a sip of her tea, shutting her eyes as she swallowed. “He would be more important if Whitby were already dead. And should Augustus Perry come through its ring of power, he will meet the same end as his men…unless the demon decides to use him as bait. But in any event, he will not survive long. Jonathan is vital to the game, but not until he is the last Whitby and Perry.”

  “But I thought the Whitby and Carlton Houses were dead,” Timothy said. He sounded almost pleading, as if he hoped he could undo all this with logic. “Jonathan always told me the Whitby title was like an honorific.”

  “It is, but it is also something of a cloak,” she said. “My father was not Lord Elliott, not every day. He had no social title of any kind, and Henry Carlton was a sir, not a lord. But the title of lord of an elemental House is not a political position: it is a state of being.” She nodded to Charles. “I have said he is Lord Elliott and Lord Carlton; this is because there are no other male Elliotts or Carltons left. The Whitby title is in flux. The daemon should have died with the last of its blood, but the Elliott daemon seems convinced it did not.”

  Beside her, Jonathan shifted. “It did not.”

  Everyone turned to him; he withdrew his arm from Madeline and linked his hands together in his lap.

  “I didn’t know until I carried the demon, but yes, the Whitby daemon is still here. It is subjugated by the Perry demon, but it is hidden.”

  Madeline’s eyes were wide as she looked at him. “Within the other daemon?”

  He nodded, looking grim and vaguely ashamed. “The Perry daemon is dual. It has been for some time. My family marked the merger by soldering the Whitby talisman to its own. They bragged of it too, because no one ever seemed to notice.”

  “You keep interchanging these terms,” Timothy said. “Is it a demon, or is it a daemon?”

  “It depends,” Madeline said. “When it is behaving properly, the House guardian is a daemon: a sort of guide. It is meant to be a shepherd of its element’s energy. If the daemon turns, however, it is demonic. Then it has its own will and agenda beyond the element. Like a human, but without the limitations of a body to keep it in check. In the old tongue, the loss of the a within the word was almost alchemical.” She flattened her lips into a grim line and shook her head. “Though with a
ll I have seen, I am beginning to think they have always been too sentient, too willful to be anything but demons through and through.”

  “What’s this about a talisman?” Charles asked.

  Madeline turned to face him as she answered his question. “Each House was given an item of power associated with its element. The Elliott—ours—is a cup. It was rumored to be lost, but it never was. At this moment, the Perry daemon is imprisoned within it, and apparently the Whitby one is too.”

  Emily nearly dropped her kettle. “Your old rune cup!”

  Madeline smiled, wearily but mischievously. “The Morgan advised me it would retain its power better if it was regularly used. Also, she said it would be better hidden in plain sight. I disguised it to appear very plain and ugly. But now—” She looked out the window, worried.

  “It is safe,” Timothy said quietly. “It is hidden here.”

  She relaxed, nodded her thanks, and went on. “The Perry talisman is a sword, and the Whitby a coin. I do not know the whereabouts of either of them, but I know the Carlton talisman, a wooden staff, is long lost. Which is a shame, as that daemon is so diminished it can’t be recalled without it.”

  “The Carlton talisman isn’t lost,” Jonathan said. “The sword and coin talismans were destroyed by my hand. But the staff is over there, resting beside the fire.”

  They all looked, Charles included. But he saw nothing but Jonathan’s walking stick. And then he understood.

  So did Madeline. “You had it with you all that time,” Madeline said, surprised.

  “I didn’t know what it was until I carried the demon. Grandfather acquired it after Henry Carlton’s death and had it converted into a sword stick. He used it as his own, but one day, in a fit of rage, I stole it. It unnerved me that he never searched for it, and it made me even warier when I flaunted it in front of him and he only seemed pleased.” His face darkened. “Once I knew what it was, I would not let him have it back, but for different reasons than he hoped.”

  Charles watched Jonathan’s stormy face, and he knew a moment of shame. He remembered some of those arguments. They had seemed so stupid to him at the time, and he’d hated Jonathan for being the grandson Whitby liked. It dawned on him that it had perhaps been easier to be the family bastard than to be the heir. And as he watched the man he had always considered his brother sink deeper into the couch, looking more and more weary, Charles found there were still levels of his own worthlessness and idiocy he had not yet explored.

  He shifted in his chair, determined to rise, ready to wander the room until he found something to fucking take off this edge, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was heavy, it was familiar, and in the wake of the touch, he smelled the familiar scent of Timothy, spice and oil and leather. He sagged, then fell back into the cushions. He shut his eyes as Timothy’s hand gave him a gentle squeeze, then trailed across his cheek in a loving touch, but he ached when it went away.

  “The lake demon craves the heir of Whitby and Perry and the talismans,” Madeline continued. “For reasons I do not yet know, it wants Jonathan alive, at least temporarily, since it didn’t kill him at the lake. Either that or it simply couldn’t.” She glanced at Charles but didn’t truly look at him. “It wants Charles, however, because it believes he was created for it. I, however, am not convinced that is true.”

  The comment got Charles’s attention. “I’m not made for the demon?”

  “I do not know why what was done to you was done. But I am suspicious of what the demon believes. It truly thinks this is truth, that you were made for it, but I am doubtful. My father and Henry Carlton were friends, but if they had darkness enough in them to do this—” She paused, then shook her head. “They worked too closely together.”

  Timothy was nodding with her now. “Yes. There is a gap in the logic. Why would one House aid the other for supremacy?”

  “But the Carlton House was all but dead,” Jonathan insisted.

  “Not with Henry still alive,” Madeline argued back. “It is not in the nature of one House, reduced to the grim blackness they were working from, to willfully stand back and cede to the other. When the Whitby House went down to the Perrys, it was a terrible thing. It is visible on the magical Plane, a dark scar across the landscape. And look at what rages against us outside. My father’s actions made clear that there is nothing but darkness at the heart of each House.”

  “And then there is the question of exactly who or what this demon is,” Timothy said, pacing again. “Is it one of the Houses? Is it something else entirely?”

  “I think it must be of the Houses,” Madeline replied, frowning. “I am beginning to think it is the Elliott demon.”

  “But that one was lost long ago!” Jonathan said. “It was so weak!”

  “Was it?” Madeline asked grimly. “This is what we were told, but did any of us see this or feel this?” She shook her head. “It is clever, whatever it is. And water is very, very difficult to contain.”

  Charles turned away from them, still listening with one ear, but his mind was racing now. He looked out the window at the place where the sky should be but was full only of swirling fog.

  It believes I was created for it.

  But I might not have been.

  “What I don’t understand,” she went on, “is how the daemon became freed from its prison. I knew there was a beast in the lake, but I did not know until it took me under that it might be the daemon of my House turned demon. The witches put the beast there, according to my former mentor. They didn’t tell me it was a House daemon, though, which makes me think they didn’t know. And that it might be my House daemon changes everything.” She shook her head, looking grim. “We all have been fools, full of conceit in what we thought was knowledge. Clearly it was simply dressed-up ignorance.”

  “This is a good question,” Jonathan said. “How did the demon get out? Has it been free this whole time?”

  “If it was, it was very cagey,” Madeline said. “That was my task and the Morgan’s before me: contain the lake demon. In all these years, it has never made so much as a ripple in that pool until that night when you all appeared.”

  “It seems unlikely that the beast we saw in the hall,” Timothy said, “with that much disdain for humanity, would simply wait peacefully for any amount of time, let alone the thousands of years you seem to imply it has been trapped.”

  Charles was staring into his tea, listening, but he was starting to feel pointedly unwell. “Until that night when you all appeared.”

  Until the night I went onto the moor and stumbled into the lake.

  Charles put the cup aside and clutched at his stomach. Goddess help me. Then the irony of that plea struck him sideways, and he started to laugh. And then, abruptly, to cry.

  He rose, shaking, his insides so queasy that he felt the echo of it in his arms and legs. This time it was Madeline who reached for him. But Charles rose and walked away from her, walked away from all of them toward the window, thinking very seriously that he should throw himself out of it.

  Timothy cut him off, and that was when Charles lost it.

  He shouted and shoved Timothy aside—or tried to. Timothy blocked his first attempt and his second and his third, and Charles shouted again, the well of despair in his gut free at last, and he turned to them all, arms outstretched, and he let all the poison out that was swirling inside of him.

  “I did it,” he snapped, biting back his sorrow. “I freed it. I crossed the moor to find Madeline, to send her to Jonathan and ask her to help me get away from Smith. I tried not to go to the lake! But it moved to follow me, tricking me with the fog, and I stepped into it.” He curled his lip in a disdainful sneer. “I suppose that would be enough, wouldn’t it? If I’m its perfect host, then that would make sense, that it would wake up when I was around. And it would wait too, until I came back, to strike—which was what it did, taking Madeline and Jonathan as bait for me.”

  “But you beat it,” Timothy said. He was maddeningly calm, w
hich only infuriated Charles all the more.

  “Oh yes,” he shot back, “with my clever wit, that’s right.” He waved his hand at the fog. “I was a bumbling fool! You were there—you saw me! I am a farce!”

  “You prevailed where no one else could,” Timothy said, still unruffled. “You saved every one of us when Smith was here, and you brought Madeline and Jonathan back.”

  “And almost killed Madeline,” Charles reminded him.

  “You won against the daemon before,” Timothy said. “You can do it again.”

  “You did,” Emily said, encouraging him. “You may have been nervous, but from where I stood, you were amazing.”

  Charles aimed a finger at Jonathan. “Ask him—ask him what I truly am! Ask him if he would put the fate of the world in my hands!”

  All eyes fell on Jonathan, who looked first startled, then uneasy, and then finally he simply looked at Charles. Charles stared back, feeling more naked than he ever had in his life, far more afraid than he had been when he faced the daemon. He could see Whitby in his brother’s eyes. His half brother—his cousin? What were they now? He was the closest thing to a father I ever had, Charles admitted and opened his arms again, exposing his heart.

  “What good am I, Johnny?” he asked, whispering, though he did not mean to. “Why shouldn’t you all just lock me away or kill me, or cut me into pieces and burn them so the demon can’t have me? You know me. You know me better than anyone here. You know how worthless I am. I brought all this on everyone. I am the prize. Why don’t you just take me out of play?” He swallowed the terror in his throat. “I wouldn’t stop you.”