That recalled Emma to reality. The information she’d found might have swayed a mortal’s opinion. It had certainly made her burn with fury. But the Night City would not care about any of it. The only Turnbull dealings it cared for would be magical. She looked again at the door in the corner, and the Turnbull mark glowing from it. The only magical thing in the room. Whatever was behind that door, it was treated as more in need of protection than the secrets here. It was where she needed to be.
But try as she might, the door would not open. Emma tried force, then cunning. Nothing shifted it. She searched every inch of wall, but there were no keys hidden behind paintings here. Jamming her claws into the lock only resulted in a nasty jolt and a strong smell of singed fox.
Defeated, Emma slumped against a filing cabinet and waited until the Turnbulls stumbled out of the house. She heard a dimbloom of voices and a muffled door slam. Then she slunk through the darkened house with every muscle tensed. The Turnbulls’ mortal crimes weighed on her as though she were part of them. Because now she knew. And it was her responsibility to make sure the world did too.
But she forced herself to leave the records room without taking anything. Not tonight. Missing papers could put the Turnbulls on alert. Given warning, they might destroy the evidence in the records room and the secret space beyond. Emma had to get through that locked door first, before giving them any reason to suspect that they were under attack. Her reward from the City depended on it.
So she padded through the warren of disused passages at the base of the clubhouse, until she found a disused storage room at the back of the building. A perfect entry point for someone who wanted to remain inconspicuous. She broke the lock on the window and climbed through. From the alley beyond, she turned to glare at the Turnbull Clubhouse. She was not done with that secret door. And now she had a way back inside.
CHAPTER 32
The locked door withstood all her efforts to open it. Emma had returned, more than once. Each time, with a new idea. Each time, disappointed. The opening charms she bought at the night market had no effect. Trying to pry off the hinges only stung her claw-tipped fingers numb.
As the moon waned and fattened once more, Emma felt numbing despair creep in. For the first time, she truly considered that she might fail. That she might never escape the Night City. Even as the spring bloomed lovely around her, Emma felt only the cold of the rainy nights. Her sisters could not tempt her to their jaunts in the Night City. Not the fairy horse auction at the night market; not the brandy raid in the Master’s Sitting Room at Granville College; not even the ballet of the bats in the starry groves of the University Arboretum. Hunting was the only thing that settled her. At least she was earning something toward her escape. Even if it was a droplet against the sea of her thousand-year debt. And so Emma stalked her prey.
One evening, Emma perched in an alder tree by the river,waiting. The University track team ran the path below, and they would be rich pickings. But the runners were late. Emma peered down, looking for them.
Something else caught her eye instead. In the thicket that stretched beneath the alder to the river, she saw thatching. Emma slid down the tree and waded forward. There was a hut hidden in the bracken, low to the ground and roofed with dripping reeds. It would be invisible from the path and the water. The air was quiet there. Almost too quiet. There was no birdsong, no friendly rustle of squirrels. The opening of the hut gaped at her like a dark mouth.
A voice hissed from its depths.“What do you wish?”
Emma backed away.
“Do not leave, little one. Enter.”
“No, thank you,” Emma said, as politely as she could. “I must go.”
“And leave behind the thing you want most?”the voice caressed.
“How would you know what that is?” Emma crossed her arms, skeptical to the core.
“No corner of the heart is secret to the water hag.”
“The water hag?” With a jolt in her pulse, Emma remembered the fox maidens’ tale. “You take memories.”
“I show memories,”the hag said.“We all have things we wish for. Things lost in the past. A lover, left in the mortal realms? A babe, perhaps, or a long-gone home? Do you not have something you wish for?”
Her mother’s hands, warm on her shoulders. The rosemary smell of her. Something yawned inside Emma: a hole that screamed like a tiny lost child. If she could just feel her mother holding her one more time.
Emma hushed the voice warning of danger. She was a fox maiden now, armed with claws and teeth. The hag should be wary ofher.She ducked into the hut’s entrance.
“And if I do have something? A memory?”
“Then I can help. I need only an item—and coin.”
Emma crawled in. The inside of the hut smelled as damp as the outside. A fire glowed at the center of the gloom. Beyond, a dark figure waited.
The water hag. She did not wear a wig of weeds, as Nancy had predicted. Her hair was a pale cascade, knotted with talismans of bird bone. Within the tangled mass, her face was unlined. But her eyes were ancient pits, and the fingers that reached for Emma were glassy, as though the fingerprints had worn smooth from use.
“Come.”The water hag’s voice was sand over river stones, the grit in it ground fine over centuries.“Closer.”
Her young-ancient face stilled, as though she listened to a sound Emma could not hear.“There is a strangeness to you. You carry memories that are not your own. I hear them, whispering. I see a shape of cruel lines, fixed upon you.”
“There’s somethingonme?” Emma twisted to look at her back. Her skin crawled, as if with wriggling insects.
“Not on, but inside. It glows from your soul, this rune. A key that locks within the memories of many others…”
“A rune fixed to me. To my soul,” Emma said, with a sick realization. The Judge’s ruby eyes loomed before her.Marked by the bargain with the Turnbulls,he had called her. Branded as a sacrifice by a thingaffixed to your soul.But then Saskia had told her that whatever marked her, it wasn’t visible. So Emma had stopped wondering whether the thing on her was a literal mark, like therune the Turnbulls wore on their backs. Or whether there might be someone who could see it for her. If she knew what this sacrifice mark was, and what it held, could she find a way to destroy it? To free herself?
