"Then what in the hell do you suggest we do?" Julian demanded, wringing his hands together.
I looked at Emeline. "The other orders of the world have not answered our call for aid?"
She shook her head. "We have had no answer from anyone. I fear we may be the last of the Guard."
"Then we hold the line against the night alone." I closed my eyes, thinking even as the stares of those gathered lingered on me.
I'd crushed all their ideas and, if I were being honest with myself, I had none of my own to offer. The young ones worked well enough against the ghouls, but with a full-blooded nightwalker on the loose we risked losing them every time we sent them out. Unless we kept that nightwalker on her back foot, reacting to us instead of the other way around. It wasn't a plan so much as a thought, but it'd have to do. And anyway, logistics was Talia and Emeline's concern.
"Roisin and I must put the nightwalker into retreat so that our younger members can mop up the ghoul problem without fear of running into her."
"And how are you going to do that?" Julian jabbed a finger at me. "We don't even know her name, let alone where she's holed up. You and Roisin can't be everywhere at once."
"What was she like?" Talia asked, quietly, and flinched as everyone in the room turned to regard her. She swallowed, fingers going white around the edge of her tablet. She licked lips painted a muted rose and pressed on. "I've spent a lot of time reading in the old archives, since Emeline couldn't get away to do that research anymore."
"You were supposed to be resting," Emeline cut in, grasping the golden chain that hung around her neck. I squinted, but couldn't make out the charm. I didn't recall her having worn jewelry before.
"I know," Talia said, "but I needed something for my mind to do, and the archives seemed to do the trick. I didn't start out looking for anything, just browsing, but then I got the idea to scan it all in so I could run searches."
Seamus clapped and whooped, his face splitting into a massive smile. "You're a saint, Talia. That was on my get-to-it-someday list but Adelia—sorry, Emeline—always put me off doing it. I never thought about not asking permission."
Talia turned crimson and pressed the tablet tighter against her chest, like a shield. "I didn't think. I just needed the busywork I suppose. I'm sorry if that was against the rules, Emeline."
Emeline blew a breath out of her nostrils and shook her head. "Mother never wanted things digitized because she was worried about security."
"It's on the local network and backed up on a portable hard drive. I didn't put it online or anything, but I guess—"
Seamus cut her off before Emeline could get good and worried. "No, no, that's good, Talia. Perfect, really. I mean I'll get my team to help me lock it down, but what you did is a great start."
Tension melted out of Talia. "Oh. Oh, good. I figured as long as it wasn't online it was okay."
"If Seamus can secure it, then that's fine," Emeline said.
"Can you search through it now?" I asked.
Talia peeled her tablet away from her chest, then jabbed at it a few times and looked up at me. "It's not perfect, but it's a start. If she's old enough, she's probably in the archives somewhere. What was her most distinguishing feature?"
Eyes like the moon on a baleful night, but that was every nightwalker. I cast my mind back, grabbing at my senses. She'd been petite and strong, with black hair in long, loose waves. Nothing unusual about that. Nightwalkers liked their turns to have dark hair. I almost reached for my own burnt-oak hair, but stilled my hand.
She'd worn layers of dusky purple, and though the fashion had a modern bent, I had the feeling she didn't update her look often. And her scent... violets. Yes. Between the color and the aroma, that was her key.
"Violet," I said.
Talia blinked at me, and I touched the side of my nose. "Her scent. Her clothing. The woman likes violets—the flower and the color."
"Oh. Okay." She tapped a moment, and we all waited in tense silence as her tablet ground away through its store of data to find that word.
"Here," she said, perking up. All timidity disappeared from her as she straightened and turned the tablet around for me to see.
A picture of a yellowed page filled the screen, the text handwritten ink long since faded to a watery brown. A sketch of a Parma violet filled the left-hand side of the page, but on the right in clear English the software had highlighted the word it was looking for: violet. I read the paragraph that enclosed the word.
Whenever the heiress of the stone is present, the distinct scent of violets precedes her. The scent is mixed with the usual nightwalker stink of grave dirt and rot, but the floral note is dominant. We believe she mixes a tincture of the flower into her hair to enhance the scent.
Perfect. I scanned up the page, seeking the name.
"Her name is Lenora Faviola," I announced to the room, and handed the tablet back to Talia. "This is the same woman. Dig up everything you can on her, we will need the data if we intend to get ahead of her."
"Will do!" Talia beamed at me, and through the pinched-cheek realness of that smile, she seemed less gaunt than before.
"I want that dossier too," DeShawn cut in.
"I don't see why," Emeline said, "our elder sunstriders will handle Miss Faviola."
"Emeline," I said sharply. "DeShawn is trying to help." She stared at me, frowning, but I pressed on. "Give him the dossier. His people have access to information we do not, or at least other ways to go about gathering it. We saw, just now, how helpful a modern take can be."
Emeline cleared her throat. "Very well. Talia will send you all we compile, but I must request you keep the data secure."
"I'm on it," Seamus said. "I'll encrypt that shit to hold until doomsday. Uh. I mean, I'll take care of it, ma'am."
DeShawn tilted his head at me, curious, but turned to Emeline. "Thank you. Scrape together enough data and we'll start looking hard at civic records. She's gotta live somewhere. We'll find her hive for you."
"Speaking of your people," I said, "you captured a ghoul in the park, did you not?"
DeShawn nodded. "Snagged him when your people flushed them out down the center line, before Faviola made an appearance. Got him in the wagon out on the drive. Can't make any damn sense of what he's saying."
"Typical," I said, and made eye contact with Roisin. She nodded. "We'll take him to Dr. Padhi now. If we're to restore the balance to London, our effort must be twofold. We cannot..." I cleared my throat. "We cannot keep destroying ghouls just because we're overwhelmed. If a cure can be found, it is our duty to find it."
"Follow me then," DeShawn said, waving at Roisin and me as he exited the library.
I was last out. As I passed by Emeline, she took my forearm in her hand and held, gently, leaning forward to whisper low enough that only I could hear.
"You and I, we're going to have to talk about your duty someday, Magdalene."
I moved on without a response, and she let me go.
Oath be damned, I had work to do.
Eighteen: Lab Rats
After handing over the ghoul, DeShawn and his squad left to see to their other duties. It was sometimes difficult to remember that, as an inspector, he had bosses to answer to who weren't involved with the Sun Guard. I wondered how he'd write his report about tonight—then pushed the thought aside. If I asked, I'd no doubt get more information than I'd bargained for.
The ghoul was tight-lipped and hunched as we led him through the servant's entrance into the small room that had been set aside for Dr. Padhi to do his work. No doubt starving, though a take-away wouldn't do him any good. His body needed the blood of his maker, or he would wither away.
Or, perhaps, eventually break the hold that addiction held over him. There was no way to be sure. Even those sunstriders and guard members who worked on detoxing ghouls had admitted, time and time again, that knowing the outcome for any given ghoul was impossible.
If Padhi was successful, that might change. For this man's sak
e I prayed that he'd be successful sooner rather than later.
I knocked once on the heavy door that lead into the makeshift lab. Padhi looked like he hadn't slept since he'd moved his equipment in. His white lab coat was twisted askew, his pockets stuffed full of instruments that pushed the seams dangerously taut, his hair sticking up like he'd run his hands through it more often than he had a comb. His dark chin already displayed the beginning of a respectable beard.
"Miss Shelley, Miss Quinn. Who is this you've brought me?" He reached for the ghoul's neck, instinctively going to take his pulse. The man let loose a low snarl, baring his still very-human teeth. Padhi stepped back, eyes wide.
"I see," he said.
"We could only capture one from tonight's efforts," I said, skimming over the fact that we'd lost some of our own.
"What's his name?"
Roisin and I shared a glance. "You'll have to ask him. He hasn't been talking to us."
"Bring him in, then." Padhi glanced over both of our shoulders, down the hallway that led back into the estate. He shook his head and hurried away from the door, rubbing his hands together as he paced in a tight circle.
Someone in guard facilities had brought in a mismatched collection of stainless steel rolling tables, the doctor's equipment covering almost every available surface. As far as I knew, DeShawn had gone with him back to the hospital to 'requisition' any new supplies he might need on the premise of the police needing them to deal with the current emergency on the streets of London.
The room was split in two. One side contained the tables and equipment, the other a temporary quarantine station, complete with a neat row of five heavy-duty hospital beds, each fitted with thick leather restraints. He'd expected us to bring more than one back from the park. I wished we could have.
For all the brilliant light in the room, Padhi kept glancing over his shoulders, staring hard into shadows.
"Is everything all right?" I asked, stopping just inside the door once I'd closed it. Roisin and I held the ghoul between us, limp as a puppet now that Padhi had backed off trying to touch him.
"Fine, fine," he said.
I sniffed the air intentionally. Fear-sweat, coffee, anxiety. "Has someone been bothering you down here?"
"No. Not, I mean..." He grimaced and dragged his hands through his hair, then plopped down on a cushioned stool."You'll think I've gone mad."
"Try us," Roisin said.
"It's just.... I can't shake the feeling that someone's watching me when I'm down here. I think the hospital might have put surveillance devices in the equipment we gathered. My colleagues, you understand, are just as eager to figure out the ghoul problem as I am, and they're very suspicious of what they view as my sudden rise in station."
"Did Seamus look the equipment over?"
I glanced warily at the beds. To bring Padhi into things was one matter, he had already encountered me and had his suspicions about my origins. But another mortal doctor eavesdropping on us was worrying. The Accord was already shredding at the seams, Victoria's Veil all but forgotten. We didn't need medical doctors—people with social cachet—going on the evening news to talk about vampires overrunning London.
"He did, he did. He assures me that there's nothing at all amiss."
"And yet you feel watched."
He grimaced, looking away. "I know it must sound mad. I assure you I haven't cracked under the stress of your revelation about the source of the city's outbreak. My research has progressed well, in fact. Here, here, let's get this gentleman situated."
Padhi unlocked the chain fence surrounding the plastic walls of the quarantine area and motioned us toward a bed. To my surprise, the ghoul allowed us to manhandle him onto the bed without so much as a snarl. He kept his eyes open, wide with fear and hunger, but didn't so much as twitch a finger toward us, even as we pulled leather restraints across his body and tightened them down.
With the man secured, I hesitated. It felt wrong to leave him here knowing nothing about him. He'd abandoned whatever life he'd had before Lenora had turned him into her puppet to gather with his fellow ghouls in that park. But he'd had a life. A life we very much wanted to return him to.
"We want to help," I said. He didn't so much as blink.
"He won't have anything to say to us," Roisin said. "We're not his kin, not anywhere close. Not human, ghoul, nor nightwalker."
My fingers had curled around the rail on the bed, squeezing. She put her hand over mine and tilted her head towards the door. "Let the doctor do his work."
"It's very promising," Padhi said. If he'd seen that moment of tension in me he didn't register it. He fussed with some instruments on a table outside of the quarantine room, his back to the patient we'd just secured. For some reason I couldn't quite put my finger on, that bothered me. "I've only managed tests in tubes, but the samples I had of ghoul blood were plentiful and varied, and I've seen a lot of improvement."
"But we lost the woman," I said, standing over his shoulder as Roisin clicked the lock on the quarantine fence closed.
He froze, hands trembling as he set down the modern phlebotomist kit he'd been picking up. "Yes. Right. Of course. I need to run more trials before I attempt to cure the subject."
"He'll get worse," Roisin said. She glided over and sat on the empty edge of a table. "No telling how long he's been without his master's blood. Not too long, otherwise he'd be raving by now, but that's coming. The madness. No way around it. Can you handle that, doctor?"
Padhi clasped his hands together on the table to stop their shaking. "Yes. I've seen it before, you know, more than once. Ghouls—as you call them—being brought into the hospital already at the blood-mad stage. You say that consuming blood from the thing—the—"
"Nightwalker," I supplied.
"The nightwalker that did this to them would stop that raving?"
"For a time," I said. Roisin toyed with an empty vial, rolling it over her knuckles. "But the more they drink, the more enslaved they become. Eventually, they are turned into nightwalkers, their makers kill them, or they're cast out to starve."
"This man is dead, then," Padhi said slowly, as if reassuring himself.
"Yes," I agreed. "If we did not need him for you to test your theories on, then we would have killed him there in the forest. It is no life, being a ghoul. Better to end the torment."
"Right," he said, "right."
I touched my fingertips to his shoulder. "Padhi. You should rest. The ghoul will still be the ghoul when you wake."
He grimaced. "I've stayed awake longer during my residency. This is nothing. If we are to see success, we must intervene now, before the ghoul disease has taken a deeper hold."
He picked up the kit again, sure this time, his hands solid and stable.
"I'll leave you to it," I said.
I had no desire to see what this ghoul was about to go through. Petty of me, probably. Maybe even selfish. But I wanted to get back to my journal, the one I'd secreted away with my things at DeShawn's flat. There might be answers in those pages, though I wasn't sure I wanted them. I still needed to know.
"I'll stay," Roisin said, surprising me. "Just in case he needs help with our friend on the table."
"Thank you," Padhi said, turning back to the patient.
I met Roisin's eye and she turned her head, deliberately, to the corner of the room, where a particularly dark shadow lingered, like an ink spill on the stone floor. Maybe Padhi was being watched after all, just not by his colleagues at the hospital.
I nodded, acknowledging my sense of the presence, but I left anyway. There was nothing I could do to battle that being, not yet, and if it wanted to watch—well—let it.
Nineteen: Wild Flowers
I smelled the violets before the door to the lift opened. The scent raised the small hairs on the back of my neck, sent power thrumming through my veins. DeShawn had been here, his scent was fresh enough, but had gone. I hoped he had left before the nightwalker arrived. My key clicked over in the lock. I didn'
t bother to extend my claws as I swung the door open.
Lenora Faviola sat cross-legged in the center of DeShawn's small living room, one of his novels split open to the middle and held up straight to her nose. Mr. Pips sat like a sphinx on the kitchen counter, tailed curled around his legs and back poofed up, his golden glare watching the intruder's every move. He shot me an indignant look as I walked in. I shrugged. Not much I could do. Locks were poor protection against nightwalkers. DeShawn might have to move into the estate now. My fault. She had followed my scent here.
"This," she said, "is fascinating." She held up the book so I could see it: Jurassic Park filled the cover in gold-foil letters. "Could this happen, do you think? The dino-saurs," she drew the word out as if it were alien, "could be brought back to life? I wonder if they could be turned to nightwalkers? Now there's a thought." She tapped the page thoughtfully.
"Animals cannot be turned, Lenora. Even your order should know that."
"Ah, I see you've done a bit of research." She closed the book and tucked it into her pocket. "Well, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance properly. I am Lenora Faviola, as you have no doubt discerned, and you are Magdalene Shelley. But I wonder, do you know who you were before the turn? Because I've always been Lenora, as is the nightwalker way, but you haven't always been Magdalene, have you?"
Selene, I thought, the name pushing against the back of my lips as if demanding to be let out. My name is Selene and as a descendant of the Venefica's line it would be so, so easy to discover my last name. To find out if the Sun Guard had killed my mortal sister.
I swallowed it all back. Not here. Not with this woman.
"You may call me Magdalene," I said, and put my keys into my pocket. "Though you won't for long. I am obliged to kill you, Lenora."
She tsked. "You are obliged to do no such thing. I've been around plenty of sunstriders in my time, my dear, and I know the... the look of the oath. The hunger and the posturing, holding back only so long as strategically necessary. But not you. You're standing there easy as if you're chatting with your mortal landlord. I wouldn't have risked coming to you, otherwise. Though I confess it is difficult for me not to lunge for you.
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