Robin was looking at her oddly. “And you’re sure that’s what you want? You could stay, you know.”
“Stay?”
“With that reward, you could be free of your collar. Attain a minor position at Court, even. Think on it. I should hate to pine for you. We might do great things together, lady fox.” He flashed her a mischievous smile. “And it could be fun.”
“Fun,” Emma echoed. She pictured running through the gilded corridors of the Court, gown flying behind her like wings. Silver halls lit with fireflies; trees of jeweled fruit; adventures with Robin. Regretfully, she released them all. “I can’t. Not with what I’ve seen in that records room. In the mortal world, the Turnbulls are untouchable. I’m the only one who knows what they’ve done. With those secrets, I might be able to bring them down. I have to go back. I have to try.”
Robin sighed. “I feared as much. Your streak of the heroic is most inconvenient, my lady. I hope you know that. Well, I shall take these to the Court for our reward.”
He lifted the box that held the silver cup, the blood jar, and the knife and swung the sack over his shoulder. He had found time to repack Sir Walter in his earth-stained travel compartment, it seemed. The door to the secret room closed behind them. Robin strode out to the corridor; Emma stopped in the records room.
“Leave me here,” she said firmly.
“Lady mine, there is enough paper for twelve to carry. And you cannot take any of it without alerting them to your theft. It’s a hopeless case.”
“I’ll decide that.” She gave him a vixen-like grin. “You get Sir Walter back to bed.”
His eyes met hers, full of suppressed laughter. “I bow to your wish, my lady.”
Emma paced the corridor, hoping her brain would hunt up a clever solution. But Robin had been right. She could not take any of the files, not without the Turnbulls suspecting their secrets had been compromised. But with what remained of the night, she might be able to copy out a few documents. It was not perfect, but it was something.
The glint of a frame caught her eye. The wall here had been given over to photographs. They ranged from modern color to the blurred grays of the earliest age of photography. Young men in tailcoats and waistcoats stared from every picture. There they were. Jasper, Piers, Richard. All of the Turnbulls she knew, posed in proud rows. She strolled back through the years of photographs. There was Francis Carr’s lantern jaw on a 1967 Turnbull.Eustace Carr.And in the gray tones of 1920, a man so sharply lovely, he might have been Atticus Tremaine’s twin.Lord Archibald Tremaine.Speeding forward to the eighties, the cold eyes of Jasper’s fatherpeered haughtily from a frame.Lionel Balfour.But it was not there that Emma stopped. It was not there that the blood fled her cheeks, or her lips peeled back in a snarl. She stood rigid, with fingers clawed, staring at a face in another photograph. She tore it from the wall and let it smash on the floor.
An idea ripped through her like a wildfire blown by a gale. She might not be able to take the records from the clubhouse. Not without the Turnbulls noticing what was gone. Unless all of it was gone. Every paper. Every wall. Every trace of the Turnbull Society.
She worked quickly. There were a few hours before morning. Enough time for a fox to slip through the streets to the House of Foxes. And soon after, for a blur of copper forms to lope back across town. When they got to the clubhouse, the fox maidens asked no questions. They set to work ferrying the boxes and files from the house. Emma waited until they had all gone. Every file, every letter, whisked away. She padded from the empty records room, listening as her sisters’ song fluted from the alleys and chimneys outside. The last task would be hers alone. It was hers by right.
The photograph crunched under her boot as she passed. She did not look at the face beneath the cracks. A blond young man, with a nose that might seem challenging on a twenty-year-old girl, but fit perfectly on that square-jawed countenance. Taller than the others around him. Just as she was.Hugh Pelham,read the caption. Had he kissed her mother by the time that photograph was taken? Had he already known he would leave her? That he would grow up to be a man with a house in the loftiest enclaves of London, with expensive cars and tailored suits and a family that shone in the reflected glow of his wealth? A man who wore a Turnbull mark on his back.A man whose fortune had come from somewhere. From a bargain. A ritual. From somebody else’s sacrifice.
Emma stalked downstairs and flung open the doors to the dining room. She had one more memory to make here. It only took one shining claw, trailed along the fire grate. Sparks leapt in its wake, spilling onto the hearth rug. Puffs of flame that caught and spread. Emma stooped to light a candelabra from them. She held it aloft and spun for one last look at their room. Their cozy chairs for drinking. Their crystal, their silver. They had so many things, these boys.
Emma touched the candelabra to the base of every heavy velvet curtain. She heard the animal growl of fabric catching light. Flames, red as foxes, licked the ancient timbers of the Turnbull Clubhouse.
But that, of course, was not the last of it. Burning a building was one thing. Burning a society to the ground required more. Emma slipped out into the dark. There was one last domino to fall.
Olivia Farquhar tore her fingers through her hair. She’d run out of coffee sometime between midnight and dawn, and Chaucer was still refusing to cooperate. Her nonexistent essay was expected on Professor Lindman’s desk in two hours.
A knock rang out across her room. Startled, she darted to the door. There was no one there.
Then her gaze dropped.
Someone had lined the corridor outside her room with filing boxes. The closest was open, with a sheet of paper on top. She bentand scanned it. A second later, she was dialing the number of Mus Khan, her coeditor at the University student newspaper.
“Mus, you have to get over here. Now.”
Mus was still grumbling when he reached her room, tugging a hockey hoodie overDoctor Whopajamas. He found Olivia cross-legged on the floor amid a sea of paper.
“Come in,” she said, without looking up. “You’ve got to see this.”
He studied the sheaf she handed him and swore softly. “These are real?”
“Real as they come. Someone dropped these off this morning and ran. Look at this one—we wondered why none of the bigger press picked up the Turnbull angle of the Emma Curran case. We argued over it, you and I.”
“A total media blackout?” Mus sank to the floor next to her. “We didn’t know who we were reckoning with.”
“And now we do.” Olivia dug through a box, face intent. He knew that look. Once she had a story between her teeth, she never let it go. “Someone’s dropped us the scoop of all scoops.”
“Should we… give it to someone? Like, a proper journalist? We’ve barely scratched the surface, and it’s practically enough to take down an entire Cabinet Office.”
