He pressed the blade to her throat. An uncanny chill radiated from her skin.
“What happened? You don’t seem—human anymore.”
“I’m not,” Emma agreed, one eye on the knife. “I made a bargain. It changed me.”
Richard’s tongue flicked around his lips.
“A bargain?”
“I pledged my service to—a power.”
Strange how he almost believed her. It was impossible, of course. Centuries of Turnbulls had tried to unlock the secret and failed. Only John de Turnbull’s first bargain had held: Each year a sacrifice was made, and the Power granted the Turnbulls their list of demands. A list carefully drawn up by the alumni, each jockeying to have their interests represented. Generations of wealth, political power, and fame stemmed from that bargain. But no Turnbull had ever succeeded in making a new bargain with the Power. To force it to answer their will whenever they pleased, and not just once a year.
Richard found his hands were taut, knuckles showing white through the skin. He had always known that he would be the one to do it, the one destined to forge a new path for the Society. Midnight hours spent in study of the rituals. The cuts on his hands he had explained away with clumsiness, the shapes drawn in blood and then wiped away, night after night. The gray dawns rising on endless failure.
And then there had been one night, the September the University was buzzing over Jasper’s return. The hunter’s moon high over St. Dunstan’s College, silvering the sill of Richard’s bedroom. He had been so close. Each time he tweaked the words of the bargain, changed the shape of a rune, the force that coursed from the Turnbull bowl grew more electric. Ritual by ritual, he had felt his work shaking the veil between the human and the magical. Andthat night, he felt the magic catch. Felt the bargain start to take hold. The bowl glowing in his hands, the roiling of the great Power bucking beneath his grip. He had been so close to mastering it. And then the force had surged, become a flood. The current singed his skin from the inside. He could not keep his hold. The capillaries in his nose had burst, warm blood streaming over his mouth. He fell backward.
And the bowl was cold. The Power was gone.
He had staggered to the window. Below, dark eddies of water were lapping at the foundations of St. Dunstan’s. They reeked of magic. The Power had called them up, he knew it. He had come too close to breaking through its barriers, to forcing it to his will. He had threatened it. And like a wild beast, it had lashed out. He had watched well into the dawn, as the Power drowned the whole city. Oh, they had wailed about the flood, those petty people with no sense of what had been at stake. The bursars yammering to the press about historic carvings. The shops moaning about a bit of water damage. As though that compared to the loss of the power that had so nearly been his.
Even after the flood receded, it left the city drenched in a film of magic. Like a shield. Every bargain he attempted after that fizzled and died before the first rune was complete. And so he had been denied even one bargain of his own. Yet this creature sat there, claiming to have made one by herself. He could have laughed at the lie.
The funny thing was, the sacrifice wasn’t meant to have been her. He had chosen carefully, all that time ago: one of the hired help taking coats at the Turnbull annual dinner. Just as the old boys instructed, he tried not to use University students. He tried to befair. Students worked hard. They earned their place. Well, apart from the diversity schemes flooding the University now. Anyone who could scrape together a few Cs and a woke-enough sob story. He wouldn’t have minded using them. But there was far too much scrutiny there. It would bring too much trouble.
Caution was the key. The ritual was discreet. Not a whisper of scandal, in all the generations of the University. They never disappeared, the ones marked for sacrifice. Nothing so flashy. The serving girl he’d chosen should have gone home to her bed that night, woken up. It would have taken a day or so for the magic to fully drain her. After that, it would have just looked like a breakdown. There but not really there. Sometimes you got ones that walked into traffic or fell down stairs, too drained to care. It was very neat.
Or it should have been. He sometimes thought of that coat attendant, living life with no notion of the part she could have played in securing the future of the nation. But Emma had squeezed her way into the Turnbull annual dinner. Before then, he’d been mildly amused by her. Liked her, even. She wasn’t bad, for one of Jasper’s attempts at rebellion. But then she, a grasping nobody, had broken their ritual bowl. Handed down, ceremony to ceremony, since the founding of the University. It had survived the Reformation of the monasteries and German bombs. But not Emma Curran.
It was funny to remember. He had actually thought it was fated. Because in breaking the bowl, she had left her blood all over it. All of those lovely little slashes on her fingers, the pulsing slit on her palm. She made it so easy. Marking a sacrifice—oh, it took ingenuity. You needed something of them for the ritual, you see. Hair was the easiest to get. Mixed into animal blood, it could do the trick. But pure human blood was the best, the strongest. The oldest way.
Richard let the knife probe the soft skin of her neck. He watched her face, imagining the pain.
She was smiling in a way he didn’t like.
“Thank you,” she said.
He found himself peering closer, trying to see behind the mask. The tears she must be holding back. The fear and sweat of the cornered beast.
But she was still smiling.
“You’ve made me see it clearly. I thought it was my fault. Who I trusted, or what I drank or what I’d said. That I’d brought it on myself, somehow. But none of that mattered. Because it was always about you, and what you chose to do. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been wise, or perfect, or hadn’t been there at all. You would have found someone else and done it to them.”
At last, the tear gleaming down her cheek. Somehow, it didn’t give him the satisfaction he had hoped. No matter. He caressed her cheek with the flat of the blade.
“Oh, I agree. Really. You don’t matter.”
And then the punt nosed against the bank. It was the moment Emma had been waiting for. Richard sawed through the rope that tied her, and heaved her onto the riverbank. Her fox instincts coaxed her to stay cunning and limp until the sweet, solid ground met her limbs.
run run run
this way and only this
She spun to her feet. But Richard stepped into her path, and she ran into him at full tilt. Pain ripped through her as the mark on hisback flared. Worse than her brief brush with Piers, worse than she could have imagined. No creature of the Night City could attack a Turnbull. She fell, and darkness rushed the edges of her vision. But there at its center, she watched Richard’s face change, from confusion to understanding to a vile, hardening glee.
He bent over her, and the ghostly glow of the Turnbull mark on his back cast a halo around his face. He pinned her body to the ground with one hand. But he left her arms free.
“Go on,” he said softly. “Hit me.”
