The saber, the boarding school trunk, the blazer. It was a perfect fit.
“Welcome to our humble abode,” said Richard. “Jasper, get the lady a drink. Where are your manners, boy?” He gave Jasper a fond cuff to the back of the head.
“Boy?” Jasper darted in with a sucker punch.
Richard doubled up but waved off Emma’s horror. “Plenty of padding here.” He chuckled, rubbing his stomach. “You clearly don’t have brothers.”
He saw Emma peer at the framed photo on the mantelpiece. “Yes, that’s me and Jasper.” Richard smiled over her shoulder. “And his father. The day he taught us to fish.”
“You both look so young.”
“Lived with them since I was ten. Best people in the world.”
Emma’s gaze drifted to Jasper, striding back to the fireplace with three brimming glasses. He was a lightning bolt streaking through the darkened room. Laughing with some groups, whipping a joke at others. Wherever he was, faces lit up. She’d been wrong to thinkit was just about the money. People followed Jasper like sunflowers leaned toward the sun.
He fetched up against the fireplace. “Sorry about that. It’s like—there’s a person I have to be at these things. I just slip back into it. Still, seems silly now to have been hiding in the garden, doesn’t it?”
He offered her a glass. Richard and Jasper emptied theirs in one, so Emma tried to do the same. At some point, a pack of boys in tailcoats gathered around. The Society, she was sure now.
Even as the heat in the party rose and other shirt points wilted, theirs stayed sharp. Their tailcoats were cut from fabric so rich, the black of it seemed to drain the light around them. Firelight dripped from the brocade on their waistcoats, spinning from brass buttons and signet rings in dizzying rays. It was almost hypnotic.
Condensation dripped from the ceiling. Little Tabitha Mountbatten was pressed against a wall. Francis Carr’s tongue explored her throat with the energy of a man rummaging through a coat stand to find his umbrella. Julia lay asleep on a sofa, her head in Hugo’s lap. Emma was nearly knocked over by two boys ushering a staggering Imogen to one of the bedrooms. And over the heads of the writhing crowd, Emma met Jasper’s gaze. Her heart was doing the strangest things in her chest.
Then Jasper smiled, and Emma knew she was lost.
Emma knew they must have said goodbye, but she couldn’t remember it. As she slipped out of St. Dunstan’s College, all she couldthink of was the electric brush of his lips on her cheek. He had seen her to the door.
“Would you like to—”
“Maybe we could—Oh, you first.”
Jasper laughed and leaned against the doorframe. It brought his face inches from hers. “So, you’re interested in photography, right?”
“I don’t know much about it, but I wish I could take photos like yours. Ones that tell a story.”
Jasper rubbed a hand over his golden curls, looking pleased. “I could show you a few things. Come out with me, next time I do a session? Go on—put your number in my phone, I’ll message you.”
Her heartbeat had not yet recovered. She hugged her arms to her chest, reliving the match strike of his lips on her skin. Her steps echoed from the empty city streets. From the cobbled lanes, where fairy fogs muffled the lampposts. From the facades of the colleges, turned to mother-of-pearl in the moonlight. And from the statues, staring everywhere from plinths and rooftops. Stone eyes, blank and pupilless, followed her path.
She passed Beaufort College, whose outer wall was shrouded with the skeletal remains of a wisteria vine. It had been dead for decades, withered fingers clawed too deep into the mortar to remove.
Now, impossibly, it was blooming. Lush flowers glowed through the dark like alien fruit, fleshy and corpse pale. Emma coughed, dizzied. The scent of the flood leaked from them, an echo of the rot in the rose garden. Emma backed away, repulsed and drawn atonce. The scent ran ghostly fingers through her hair, chased her all the way up Beaufort Crescent. Emma reminded herself that she was only interested, as a scientist would be. There was no reason to feel troubled. Or to walk faster.
If only she could shake the feeling of eyes on her back.
Emma’s heart made a determined effort to leap out of her chest. Those were drums, faint on the night air. The sinuous rhythm slid into her pulse. And wisps of human voices, like the chatter of a distant bazaar. She spun to face them. But the street was empty.
With a laugh that sounded like a gasp, Emma recovered herself. She was surrounded by student rooms. Students gave parties. Muffled beats from speakers, the sounds of laughter. What could be more expected?
Then, at the top of the High Street, something brushed her foot.
Emma jerked back. But it was just a little frog. Another strange remnant of the flood, trying to find its way back to the river. The shape split. Not one, but two frogs. Squirming against each other.
Breeding. In September. It was impossible. It could only happen in spring. It—
It couldn’t just be the flood. No single flood could change the patterns of millennia, surely. But what about climate change? There had been journal papers on climate-related behavior shifts before. She could do some research. None of this would feel so eerie once she found a reason. A peer-reviewed, data-backed reason, preferably. Her steps quickened toward Gabriel Tower. Purring croaks bounced from the shopfronts, following even as she hurried away.
Gabriel Passage was gloriously, gratefully in sight when Emmareeled back. There, stripped by the streetlight. A writhing mass of amphibious bodies, climbing and scratching at one another. One moist body slipped from the pile to the gutter, and another mounted in his place. They were croaking in a frenzy.
