“No one has sent a ransom, for one thing,” Detective Lynch said, scraping at the peeling varnish with his thumbnail. “For another, there’s the uncanny manner in which the men disappeared.”
Detective Lynch leaned over the photographs from the file, indicating a picture of a broken window: the moonlight singing on the broken glass, shards scattered over the windowsill. Splintered scores as if from fingernails raked along the painted wood?—not running deep as they approached the edge, but shallow, as if he were somehow fallingup. Sam thought about the desperation it would have taken to leave such marks on the windowsill, and shuddered.
“Mr. Pearse was pulled out of an architectural folly?—some gardener’s attempt at a round tower?—one hundred feet above the ground. He’d been taking a look at the stars and thought to get his telescope closer to Heaven.
“Mr. Hayes told his brother he was going out for a smoke after dinner and never returned. The only evidence he’d been there at all was his rather distinctive pipe, found embedded in the back door?—two inches deep.”
This time, the picture was of a bog-oak pipe inscribed with strange, almost alchemical, sigils around the bowl. The stem of the pipe was, as Detective Lynch said, embedded in a door, alongside a scattering of straw, as if it’d been shot from miniature bows.
Such phenomena had been recorded?—if the winds were strong enough, they might drive soft straw through solid wood, and solid wood through a brick wall. But someone would have mentioned it if a tornado had touched down in the middle of Dublin. Besides which, Sam imagined there would be a good deal more to show for it than a door having a smoke.
“Your Viscount and Duke were abducted in Saint Stephen’s Green, sometime between midnight and dawn,” Detective Lynch said, setting his whiskey glass down on the edge of the last photo, distorting the image of what looked to be a heavy iron chain tangled in the twisted branches of a sycamore tree. “Passersby heard a fox’s scream, the rattling of chains, and the discharge of firearms. But no bullets were recovered at the scene.”
Every attack had been at night. It seemed unlikely that was by chance.
Van Helsing frowned. “Ghosts, perhaps?”
“The Viscount and the Duke certainly seemed to believe so,” Hel said. Iron was useful against any number of monsters, but an ironchainwas a standard precaution against insubstantial threats, and a part of every seasoned field agent’s kit. There was only one problem.
“Why didn’t it save them?” Sam shivered. There was something about ghosts that never failed to slip beneath her skin. Perhaps it was simply because they were so often birthed from human atrocity?—not a thing they did but that was donetothem. Or perhaps it was only that she couldn’t see them coming, only feel them, her tears crystalizing on her lashes, her bones icing over in her flesh.
There was also the matter of the unearthly wind, strong enough to drive a man’s pipe through a door and toss an iron chain into a tree’s branches. Certain varieties of ghosts could cause great winds, but there were monsters that hunted with it as well, and Sam had even heard tell of witches who sold fishermen gales in knotted hanks of rope.
All of which was to say that it might be anything at all, and that the only thing they knew for certain was that it was the Society’s case.
“There is another option,” Detective Lynch said, and he cocked his head. It took Sam a moment to understand he meant for them to listen. Outside the snug, the poem was continuing, new verses being added for every Irish monster who woke from their slumber to strike out against the English, in increasingly lurid detail.
Hel made a sound of disbelief in her throat. “Don’t tell me you’re suggesting the Gaelic revivalists are unleashing monsters on their enemies.”
“You tell me,Moriarty,” Detective Lynch said pointedly. “I’ve had a look at your record. It’s fascinating, don’t you think, how nearly every major case you’ve chosen has turned up some connection to your father’s old enterprises, however tenuous?”
“I’m sorry, but do you really think we’d have suffered through a fraction of what we’ve experienced if Dr. Moriarty were truly running her father’s criminal empire?” The words slipped out before Sam could yoke them.
“If she was smart about it, yes,” Detective Lynch said.
“Why even put Dr. Moriarty on the case if you suspect her?” Sam said hotly.
“Who says I suspect her? You’re the one who suggested that,” Detective Lynch said mildly. “I simply find it convenient that the loudest voices against the separatist movement have begun disappearing in mysterious circumstances, just when the Gaelic revivalism has reached a fevered pitch. I hadn’t realized you had so much insight to offer on the subject, Miss Harker.” Detective Lynch turned his piercing gaze on Sam.
“I?—I didn’t,” Sam stumbled. What was she doing? She was supposed to be arguing with Hel, not defending her! She hadn’t taken the problem of her anger into account. This deception was going to be harder than she’d thought.
But Hel only rolled her eyes. “The world order works quite well for my ‘father’s old enterprises.’ Whoever you suspect of running them, they have little incentive to change it.”
“The worldischanging, whether the people here will it or not,” Detective Lynch said. “Someday, they will thank us for it.”
“And you’re sure about that, are you?” Hel said.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Detective Lynch said. “We’re doing Ireland a favor. Who would want to live amongst monsters?”
“Who indeed,” Hel drawled, with a sideways glance at Van Helsing. Which struck Sam as strange, given that Van Helsing had never met a monster he didn’t want to murder. Then again, Sam didn’t even want to think of what he’d do if he ran out.
“Dr. Moriarty,” Detective Lynch said, “you’ve always claimed you want a chance to go after your father, a chance to prove yourself.”
A chance to prove her innocence, he meant. To prove that her father yet lived and that Hel hadn’t taken over his legacy. All while Detective Lynch and Van Helsing were trying to catch evidence that Hel was guilty. It was a dangerous game?—but one that they had no choice but to play.
“I have,” Hel admitted.
“Well then. Here’s your chance,” Detective Lynch said. “Don’t muck it up.”
