Once again, I stood in that cursed room while someone else decided what would become of me.
The Grandmaster shifted, exhaling through his nose.
“Shall we begin?”
Vexley nodded. “Miss Draymoore, you will leave St. Dismas and my care.”
My pulse stuttered. This was some test, surely—some trap.
“Nothing is free here,” the tarot reader had warned me. Yet I couldn’t help my curiosity.
He continued. “We have a task for you—a matter of utmost importance. One that, should you succeed, might ensure your return to the world beyond these walls.”
A task. So now it was time to learn what I had to pay.
I forced my face to remain impassive.
The nurses’ macabre comments about a murdering monster were still ringing in my head.
And I remembered all too well the disemboweled body in that foggy back alley—and the flying demon who did it.
“And if I don’t?” I asked, my eyes darting between both men.
“Then you return here if you’re lucky enough,” Vexley said, pouring some of the amber liquid into a faceted glass.
The blond stranger pushed off the mantle with a graceful shift.
His steps were unnaturally quiet.
Some deep chill emanated from his body as he slowly circled me.
“You’ll succeed, Daphne. You’re the perfect choice despite Doctor Vexley’s prejudice. What we try to achieve proved impossible with brutal force, so now we’ll try a more... subtle approach. And the ravens were curious about you.”
The ravens in the garden? How was that relevant? I turned my head like an owl, trying to follow him.
Letting him out of my sight gave me chills.
“And what’s expected of me? What is this task?” My throat was dry, but I sounded confident.
Fortune favors the brave, as Grandfather said.
Rotting and playing their game, as the tarot reader suggested, would destroy me.
The silence stretched, interrupted only by my ragged breathing and the crackling of the flames.
Vexley took a long sip of his drink and cleared his throat.
“There is a manor. A grand, ancient place. Duskmere Manor. Within it lives a man—a dangerous man, one who holds knowledge that is... valuable.”
Duskmere Manor?
Everyone knew of this place. It was a myth. An urban legend.
The Penny Dreadfuls were full of stories about it: once a sanctuary for scholars and mystics, built on the edge of a blackwater mere said to swallow the light of the stars. Its master had quite the reputation of a ruthless man and a womanizer before he had vanished along with his entire household after digging too deep into forbidden knowledge, leaving the estate abandoned and whispered about in dread. Now they were telling me it was all real?
“A dangerous man?” I squeaked.
Sweet Jesus, what horrors had they unleashed into that house?
