Through the ancient courts of St. Dunstan’s College, the only one alone. Students streamed by in groups, a whirl of giddy laughter and corks popping. Perhaps she had once been that young. A lifetime ago, when her worries had been of essays and friends, and what to say at parties. Now she had no age, and never would again. She felt ancient to her bones next to these children.
Emma lifted her eyes. Above the chocolate fountains and Ferris wheel, above the hectic flush of fireworks over St. Dunstan’s Cathedral. Up at the moon, hanging like a clean, cold eye in the sky.
It was time to hunt.
In the end, it was easy to find them. Their table was the largest on the lawn. The marks on their backs glowed through their tailcoats. Every face the same color, every laugh a needle in Emma’s ear.
Beside each crisp white shirt and bow tie sat an elegant girl. None of them were Julia. Emma’s breath came easier. Her friend ought to be far away from what she was about to do. She needed no emotional ties. No distractions.
The velvet bag weighed almost nothing on her wrist. And all she had to do was reach inside.
She had been careful not to disturb the order of the bottles in the sickroom. While the House of Foxes slept around her, she had robbed its store of deathsleep. A few grains kept Sara unconscious, so Emma had taken a palm’s worth. More than enough for nine strong young men.
The tenth, she had hoped not to see. Hugo was a warm presence in her memory. So kind, so helplessly adoring of Julia. She did not want to believe he was complicit. Of all the Turnbulls, he alone had not been party to hunting her through the streets. He had been back at the clubhouse, passed out on a pile of coats. And she had not seen him join the Turnbulls in a single photograph or newspaper quote since. As though he had split from the club entirely. Rejected them, and all that they stood for. She hoped he had. Then she might have a reason to spare him.
The others were different, though. They would pay for what they’d done. The Turnbull mark protected their bodies from a nightdweller’s blow or bite. But there was no such mark on the objects around them. Nothing to stop her from sprinkling powder in an unattended glass. And once it touched their lips, no mark could keep them from sleeping long enough for her to drag them down to the Court and in front of the Judge. And then—
Then what? The Judge was clever enough to ensure they would be trapped in the Night City. Just as she was. Their glowing mortal lives, their families and futures, would all be gone too. And wasn’t that fair?
Wasn’t it?
Was it?
A golden head ducked from the champagne tent. Emma knew that the crowd could not actually have parted. That the music couldnot have stopped. But there he was, moving toward her. The face from her dreams. At last.
Jasper dropped into an empty seat on the edge of the group. Tawny, disheveled. Knocking back champagne from a glass in each hand. It was rage that made her heart pound so, she reminded herself. And if her limbs were trembling, that was eagerness born from daydreams of ripping out his throat. Emma’s lungs burned with the effort to breathe. Her cloak of shadows flickered and dissolved.
There was a blur of movement, and horror pounded through her. She was standing there, visible to any mortals who cared to look. But it was only Richard and Piers, rising to take their dates to the champagne tent. The rest of the Turnbull group followed in a braying cluster, except Jasper. He stood, wobbling on his feet, and stumbled away from the lights and laughter, fumbling a lighter and a crumpled cigarette from his pocket. His tailcoat fluttered around a yew hedge shaped like a dragon, disappearing into the sunken garden.
Emma’s gaze flicked a moment between the bright champagne tent, where Turnbull glasses gaped welcomingly for the touch of deathsleep powder, and the shadow-wreathed garden. She barely noticed the velvet bag dropping from her wrist. Her gauzy skirts flitted across the lawns into the darkness.
And behind her, an impossibly tall, thin figure choked on his drink.
In the darkness of the sunken garden, the wind was rising. Shivers ran through the moon-silvered rosebushes. Emma prowledthrough the beds, snapping off blowsy heads as she went. Petals dripped in her wake, like a trail of blood. This year’s growth still bore the rot-sweet smell of the flood.
Jasper struggled to light a cigarette. She watched him through the thorns. She’d had no idea who he was. Not when she yearned after him. Not when their skin finally met, that day on the roof. Not even in the dark and echoing Senate House, when she’d watched his eyes turn cold. She’d thought he was golden. But he was as rotted through as the rose garden itself.
He was as beautiful as ever. In a way, now they were a perfect match. If he had been vicious and dangerous all along, this new Emma could finally equal him. One hunter to another.
The Turnbull mark glowed eerily from his back. She stepped from the roses, prepared to strike.
“I still dream about you.”
Emma wished she could scoop her words out of the air and back into her throat. That was not the speech she thought she was about to make.
Jasper dropped the lighter, blank white horror on every feature.
“Emma? No. Please, it can’t be…”
“I know you didn’t feel the same way. Now I see it.” She cut across him. “But was any of it real? The things you said we’d do together, the traveling, the sailing? The way you kissed me. Was it all a trick to get me where you needed me?”
Her cheeks were wet. She was supposed to want to tear out his throat, not curl up on the ground and sob. Anger would have felt strong. Clean. Not like this squirming agony in her chest.
“Did you know from the start that you were going to sacrifice me? For your precious Turnbull Club, so your father would thinkyou were a good little president? Go on, Jasper, what was worth my life—”
She stopped, partly because he was running his fingers over her face as though she were a precious vase, and partly because he definitely wasn’t listening to her.
“You’re alive,” he whispered. Then, to her immense surprise, he burst into tears.
