She caught a flash of movement just in time to block the sidekick aimed at her face. Her forearm took the blow, the weight of it jarring through her bones. She ducked as Carlston spun into another kick, missing her temple by a hair’s breadth. Her blood surged, full Reclaimer speed riding in upon it. She leaped over Stokes’s corpse and whirled around to face Carlston, knife raised.
His dark eyes showed no recognition. They were narrowed and cunning and fixed upon her with vicious intent, his lips drawn back over his teeth like a snarling animal. A long wound at his hairline seeped with blood, streaking one side of his face like war paint. A knife had ripped through his shoulder, slicing open jacket, shirt and muscle into a sodden mess of red cloth and raw flesh. In one hand he held the journal and in the other, a long paling of wood with three iron nails protruding from it.
‘William!’ She put every ounce of urgency and need into the call. His name had brought him back from strangling the Duke; perhaps it would draw him back again. ‘William! It is I, Helen.’
He ran at her, stepping on Stokes’s body, the corpse convulsing under his foot as if it still had life. The man she knew would never have desecrated another Reclaimer in such a way. Lord Carlston was truly gone.
He lunged, the paling aimed in a low sweep at her ankles. She jumped back, slashing at his hand, but he was too fast, pulling back into an overhead hammer swing at her head. She had no time to deflect, just managing to turn so that her shoulder took the blow. Pain burst through her back and arm, her hand spasming open. Her knife clattered to the wooden floor.
Clenching her teeth, she tried to grab the paling, but he pulled it too fast. She retreated, trying to stay on her toes, flexing movement back into her hand. He was standing over the knife.
Behind him, Darby launched herself from the doorway at human speed.
‘Darby, stay back!’ she yelled as Carlston attacked again.
The warning cost her a precious second. She dodged, but not fast enough. The paling slammed into her ribs, the iron nails biting through her woollen jacket into her flesh. She gasped as he followed it with a snap-kick to her chest. She staggered back from the momentum, the nails ripping out of her flesh. Clutching the raw, wet agony, she tried to stay on her toes, Quinn’s mantra loud in her mind: A still body is an easy target.
She retreated another step, stumbling over the foot of the tambour frame. Its mahogany stand was at least as long as her leg: a weapon with reach. She grabbed the bottom of it, her hands wet with her own blood, and swung it up at Carlston’s head. The blow connected so hard with his jaw it smashed the embroidery frame off the end, the circle of wood flying through the air.
He dropped to one knee, momentarily dazed. Seeing the chance, she kicked at the journal in his hand. It spun from his loosened grip, landing with a slap on the floor near Stokes. She swung the tambour stand again, but he rolled clear, coming within hand’s reach of her glass knife. He scooped it up, surging to his feet.
Behind him, Helen saw Darby slowly reaching for the journal, caught in human momentum. If Carlston saw her, she would be dead in a second.
Helen retreated, tambour stand held like a bat, trying to draw him away from Darby’s excruciatingly slow progress. He followed, the glass knife raised. Helen felt a choking rise of anguish. Carlston would have known the knife had her protection alchemy forged into it. This man in front of her was just a savage animal, and she was barely holding her own against him.
Darby ponderously scooped up the book and clutched it to her chest, rising sluggishly to run to the safety of the opposite wall. Helen readied herself for Carlston’s next attack just as a figure stepped into the doorway. The Duke, his arm outstretched, pistol in hand.
‘No!’ Helen screamed. She could see its course — a flash of the future in her mind — but he had already pulled the trigger.
The iron ball exploded out of the smoky ignition, its aim set for Carlston, but its course blocked by Darby as she ran — so slowly — for the wall. Helen tried to launch herself past Carlston, but he was in her pathway, charging towards the Duke.
The bullet hit Darby under her collarbone — an awful wet thudding crack of metal chewing through flesh and smashing bone.
Helen arrived at her side in time to catch her as she staggered another step still clutching the journal, blood welling up through the blue pleats of her bodice. Her startled eyes found Helen’s, her breathing shortening into panting shock. Helen took her weight against her chest and lowered her to the floor, pressing her hand against the wound. So much blood.
A low guttural snarl wrenched her attention back to the doorway. Carlston picked up the Duke by his throat and slammed him against the wall.
Helen half rose, caught between Darby and the Duke. Both in dire peril.
She ducked back to Darby, grabbed the journal from her maid’s weak grip and jammed the soft leather cover against the gaping wound. Darby screamed.
Helen gritted her teeth and pulled Darby’s hands over the book. ‘Press hard,’ she ordered.
She hurled herself at the grim battle by the door. Selburn smashed the butt of the spent pistol against Carlston’s head, opening up another gash across his temple in a spray of blood, but Carlston did not let go. He pounded Selburn back against the wall, the Duke’s head slamming against the plaster, and raised the glass knife.
With a yell, Helen launched herself onto Carlston’s back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his head. He released the Duke and staggered into the wall under her momentum. The Duke slid to the floor, dazed.
Hammond peered through the doorway.
Helen tightened her headlock, desperately trying to steer Carlston away from the other two men.
‘Hammond, get him out!’ she yelled.
Damn the Duke and his gun. The blaze of anger galvanised her as Carlston whirled around, trying to dislodge her from his back, the knife still in his hand. He stabbed at her blindly, but the blade sheered past her thighs, his strikes sliding wild. They whirled in a lurching circle. Helen caught a dizzy glimpse of Hammond dragging Selburn out of the attic, and then Darby with the journal still stoically pressed into her wound, the binding covered in her blood.
Carlston rammed Helen against the wall, the impact crushing the air from her lungs. Gasping, she punched him in the head, managing to get a foot on the wall to lever herself some space to breathe. Somehow she had to get the journal and subdue him long enough for them both to touch it. There would be no problem with the supply of blood, she thought grimly. For either of them.
He still had her knife. And he still wanted the journal. A desperate plan formed.
‘Darby, can you move?’
It came out more as a gasp than a yell, but she saw Darby nod and gather herself. So brave.
Carlston shifted, giving himself space for another brutal ram into the wall. With a formless prayer, Helen swung both feet back and planted them against the wall, her arms still wrapped in the headlock. With all her strength, she propelled herself forward, pushing all her weight up against his shoulders, praying that the leverage would be enough to topple him.
He staggered a step, then dropped to his knees, her forward momentum too much for his balance. As he crashed to the floor, Helen launched herself into a tumble over his head, the room spinning, her breath gone in a moment of panic. She slammed onto her back, her spine jarring against the floor.
‘Darby!’ she yelled.
She spun on her back to face Carlston. He hauled himself onto his knees. At the corner of her eye, she saw Darby crawling towards her, the journal in her hand, smearing a trail of blood on the wooden boards. Faster, she urged her maid. Go faster.
She clenched her teeth as Carlston gathered himself, knife in hand. She had to trust the alchemy forged into the blade and her Reclaimer speed.
He scrabbled forward and lifted the knife above his head, face savage and intent. Helen watched him drive the blade down towards her heart, the reflex to roll away rising like a scream through her bo
dy. The point plunged closer and closer, a foot, an inch, from her chest. Suddenly the blade veered to the right and slammed into the wooden floor.
For one precious second, Carlston kneeled beside her, locked in uncomprehending stillness. Darby flung herself forward, hand outstretched with the journal. Helen snatched it from her grasp and curled herself upright, slamming the blood-soaked binding against Carlston’s torn shoulder, praying that her own bloodied hands were enough to forge the bond.
The journal heaved under her grip, searing power boiling up from its foul blood-ink and streaming into their bodies like a torrent of scorching oil. Carlston screamed with pain, and Helen’s own terror scoured her throat. The shrieking howls of the slain rose through the pages, their death throes caught within their blood, their fear written into the journal’s alchemy. Helen felt their anguished loss pulling her towards the darkness.
She braced against their burning force, turning her body against the attack, raising her arm as if to block a savage blow. But there was no outside enemy to deflect; all the searing power was within.
Another scream drained her of air as a golden light — her soul — erupted above her body. Gasping, she saw Carlston arch in agony under a swollen black mass of vestige energy and alchemy. Was that his soul? She could see no light at all within the snarl of power that twisted and writhed above him.
Her own soul-light swirled around the black pulsing mass, battering against its squirming walls like waves against a rock face. There was no way into the dense darkness. She fought to focus through the agony building in her head, her body shaking with fiery pain and a terrible realisation: they had not bonded. He was locked too deep within his madness.
She had to free him to bond, but how?
The answer came in a horrifying rush. She must stop resisting the voices and their fear-filled madness. She had to open herself to the journal’s blood power and Carlston’s vestige darkness, and pull him out. The same force that had all but destroyed her mother.
No! She was not strong enough! What if she did not find her way back? What if she went mad too?
Yet if she failed now, there would be no Grand Reclaimer. No hope. Carlston would be lost forever, caught in eternal torment.
The darkness had destroyed her family. It would not destroy Carlston too.
She slammed herself against the journal’s blood-soaked binding and Carlston’s arched body, and with a formless prayer opened herself to the howls of the slaughtered inscribed upon its pages. Deceivers, Reclaimers, innocents — their anguish and fear searing through her veins, their lives embedding themselves within her mind and heart like thousands of burning brands stamping their mark forever. So many lives. So much knowledge. She felt the pain of every word written in their blood — Benchley’s words about her parents, Carlston, his wife Lady Elise — then they were swept past in the agonising deluge of blood-ink and murdered voices that fused with her flesh and bone. She absorbed them all.
The power from the journal rose louder and louder, roaring through her into a bright, molten force. It boiled through Carlston, raging towards his black, squirming prison. It swept up Darby, forging a bond through the blood-soaked binding, her screams joining the song of pain. No! Darby was not a Reclaimer. She would not survive this power. But there was no stopping the roaring voices.
The black mass of vestige above Carlston flared with light, heaving with the journal’s bright fury. The blood power boiled across it like fire across a forest, consuming the foul darkness in a blistering inferno, obliterating the screeching, oily madness. Piercing light sprang around Carlston: his soul, scorched clean of all vestige. He slumped onto his hands and knees, gasping for air like a man who had not breathed for days.
She felt his heartbeat and her own meld into one frantic pulse beneath the molten force — the bond, finally forged, locking them together in an agony of union, the chaotic voices of the journal screaming through them. She had to stop them or they would drag her and Carlston — and Darby too — into the storm of their gibbering pain forever. But how?
She forced herself past her own terror and focused on the voices. So much fear. So much loneliness. She caught an image of a tavern girl, eyes bulging, clawing at hands around her throat. A boy shielding his head from a hammering fist. A baby alone in a crib, screaming. Dear God, a baby. All those voices bound together into one howling wounded creature, striking out with teeth and claws made of burning power. She could not save them from their brutal ends, but she could soothe them. Comfort them. She could sing their lament alongside them with a heart that had felt fear and loss too.
‘I understand,’ she cried. ‘You are not alone. You are remembered.’
There was no change in the roaring, chittering pain. Perhaps an open heart was not enough. Yet did not all hurt creatures seek easement?
She kept on calling, her voice lilting into a chant. ‘I understand. You are not alone. You are remembered.’
The silence came so suddenly that it pitched her backward, the room spinning into a grey haze from the sudden absence of shrieking pain. She felt hands catch her and gather her against the warmth of another body. For now, the journal voices were blessedly at rest, the pain they had brought, gone, but she could feel their presence in her mind like a distant hive of bees, ever shifting and softly buzzing.
Above her, the grey slowly resolved into Carlston’s face, blood-streaked, the pain still etched on his face.
‘Helen!’
She gave a sobbing laugh of relief, touching his jaw, his cheek, the curve of his lips, no longer set into savagery. He was truly back. She could feel the pulse between them; no longer a clawing, desperate need, but a strong steady beat of union.
‘What have you done?’ he said in wonderment. ‘We are connected. I feel it in every part of my body.’
‘The Comte’s cure was a blood bond.’
‘So Louis kept his promise.’ He pressed his lips hard into her hair, the fierce tenderness drawing her closer against his chest. ‘I have never felt anything like it. So much power.’
Part of her knew she should pull away — she could hear a persistent whisper rising from the distant buzz of the journal, its devastating information demanding attention — but she did not move from the circle of his arms. Surely they could have this victory, this sublime sense of completeness, for just a few moments more.
Darby pushed herself onto her knees, dazed, brushing her fingers across her torn and bloodied bodice. ‘My lady, I am healed!’
Helen peered down and touched her side where the nails had ripped through her flesh. Smooth again, just as the cut in her palm had healed when she had struck down Lowry.
‘Are you healed?’ she asked Carlston.
‘Was I injured?’
She hesitated, then with light fingers smoothed back his hair. ‘You had a gash here, on your head, but it is healed now.’ She felt the power that linked them tingling in her fingertips and leaving a trail upon his skin. ‘Your shoulder too; it was laid open.’
She dropped her hand, the break of their touch bringing a tiny loss. He regarded her for a moment, clearly feeling it too, then drew a breath and turned his attention to the ripped and bloody mess of his jacket and shirt. He pulled back the ripped cloth to expose smooth skin and muscle.
‘Everything seems to be healed.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘Not least my mind, thank God.’
‘My lady, do you know what happened?’ Darby’s voice held an edge of panic. ‘After I was shot, all I can remember are voices screaming in my head, and pain, like I was on fire!’
‘The power forged our Terrene bond too,’ Helen said. ‘You did so well, Darby. You were so brave.’
She took her maid’s hand. It was trembling.
‘We are bonded?’ Darby tightened her grip. ‘I am glad, my lady. But will it be a normal Terrene bond? Does it matter that we did not say the right words?’
A good question.
‘I do not know.’ She squeezed Darby’s hand. ‘Normal or not, I am gl
ad we have it.’
‘Helen.’ Carlston’s arms around her tensed. ‘Is that Stokes over there? Is he dead?’
She could not help but look at the prone body in the doorway. Merciful heaven, Carlston did not know what he had done. Darby met her eyes — should they tell him? — but Helen gave a slight shake of her head. Not yet. There was more anguish to come, but not yet.
‘He died as a true Reclaimer,’ she said.
She felt the sorrow bow Carlston’s body. ‘He was a good man. He will be sorely missed.’ He pressed his hand to his forehead. ‘I cannot remember much, but I do remember Benchley’s journal was a Ligatus. Is it destroyed now?’
Helen lifted the blood-soaked book. ‘It is how we bonded.’
He flinched. ‘We bonded through that thing?’
Helen opened it and fanned the pages. Every one of them was blank.
Carlston tentatively touched the smooth paper. ‘But it was full of writing. Full of alchemy.’
‘Not any more,’ Helen said.
It was all locked within her mind and heart. She had absorbed all the voices, all the words, all the power. And very soon — when she could bear to retreat from Carlston’s arms — she would have to tell them the terrifying truth. She was not only one half of the Grand Reclaimer. She was also the Ligatus.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Almost a full hour later, the bodies of the Comte and Comtesse d’Antraigues and their assassin, Lawrence, were carried to the cool rooms of the White Hart to await the coroner. Mr Pike orchestrated the removal, ordering into service a number of local men who had gathered outside the house to watch the spectacle. As ever he was promptly obeyed, his air of authority creating some order within the murmuring shock of the day.
He and Helen stood watching from the doorway of the Comte’s house as the three bodies made their journey across the road, an interested group of shabbily clad children circling the procession.
‘What about Stokes?’ Helen asked.
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