Van Helsing broke his gaze at last, turning it on Sam. “Some things are worth breaking the rules for, Miss Harker. I already know he’s a villain. I only need to uncover whether he’s the villain in this case.”
“He’s right,” Hel said.
“Of course you’d agree,” Sam began heatedly. Hel hadn’t met a rule she didn’t want to break. Even if it meant she got herself disappeared. “But we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet?—nor how to safeguard against it. If Mr. Bishop is truly to blame, stalking him might ensure we are the next to disappear.”
“It’s safe enough,” Hel said dismissively. “Assuming someone is selecting the targets, and that the Duke and the Viscount were taken on account of getting too close?—which seems highly probable?—it’s unlikely the perpetrator would be able to target us on our first night in Ireland. Such things require preparation. But it’s beside the point: Miss Harker should stay behind.”
Van Helsing raised an eyebrow, suspicion written between his brows. “Oh?”
“She’s dressed in white, for one thing. For another, she’s wearing heels, in which she can neither run nor move silently, and she’s a hazard with a firearm besides,” Hel said, and despite knowing it was part of their plan, a part ofSam’splan, it was hard not to take Hel’s criticism to heart. It was only that it sounded so unflinchinglylogical. “If he doesn’t see her coming, he’ll certainly hear her, and then she’ll be useless once he does. She’s a competent enough researcher. Give her the file, see what she can make of it.”
“I’m sorry?” Sam’s voice climbed.Samwas noisy when she walked? Van Helsing jingled with every step, and Hel’s tan coat was hardly better than white.
But even as she thought to shape the words, Hel was shrugging off her coat and Van Helsing was picking the bells off his spurs, leaving Sam to wonder what it meant that he’d left them on while stalking Sam... or whether those were only the times she’d known he was watching and this, too, was a tactic.
“Fine.” Van Helsing drew the file Detective Lynch had given them out of his jacket and pressed it into Sam’s hands. “Miss Harker, see what you can make of this. Miss Moriarty, with me.”
Van Helsing and Hel stalked into the night, Heathcliff staring back at Sam from Hel’s shoulder as Sam watched them leave, her arms full of Hel’s coat, feeling about as useful as a cracked teacup. Well, she would see what she could do about that last part, at least.
The rooms Mr. Wright had secured for them were every bit as fine as the foyer, with gilt green wallpaper, a crystal chandelier, and a large golden mirror above the fireplace. A painting of Nimueh trapping Merlin in a hawthorn tree hung on the wall. Sam’s travel trunk had been placed at the foot of a large feather bed situated next to the oversized window overlooking the green.
Mr. Wright had given Sam and Hel each their own room, presumably so they would be unable to plot against the Crown in secret. There would be no Morse code knocked on the walls between rooms, either, for he’d placed Van Helsing between them.
They would have the darkroom, Sam promised herself. There, at least, they could be themselves.
In the absence of a proper table, Sam tossed Hel’s coat and the file on the bed, only to hear aclink.
The chain.Of course. Hel must have slipped it into the coat. Sam might not have been willing to have a vision in Saint Stephen’s Green, but in her hotel room, there was no one to see her writhe in the grips of whatever monsters answered her call.
No one to stop her if she went too far.
Sam would just have to risk it. Pulling her gloves off with her teeth, she braced herself and brushed her fingers against the cold metal, and... nothing. She wrapped her hand around the links, pulled them through her palms. But still, she feltnothing.
Frustration climbed her throat. Why wasn’t it working now, when she would invite a vision? Perhaps the chain didn’t belong to the Viscount and the Duke after all. Or perhaps it was because it wasiron. Iron was proof against enchantment; that was why it was so useful against the Folk. But then, the Wolfssegner’s enchanted bread had been baked in an iron oven.
The whims of her visions were strange; Sam couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around their workings. Every corpse Sam had laced fingers with?—the fact that this was a nonzero number was in itself horrifying?—had given her one of herfeelings. Only rarely did she get a vision when she touched another living person. She wouldn’t necessarily get a vision touching a blood-soaked settee, but she might when her fingers closed on the hat pin lost between the cushions.
There had to be a better way to summon one of her feelings, something easier than touching everything and bracing herself. Some method, some means to reach out to the source of her visions, to tap into them, instead of waiting to have them thrust upon her. A way to invite the monstersin.
As if summoned, the song tugged at her again, rooting in the fertile soil of her mind.Not just a song,she understood as it blossomed inside her,but a path.
No sooner had the thought formed than the horror crept in. What was she doing? This was exactly what led channels down the dark and winding road that turned them monstrous, like her mother’s dearest friend, Lucy. This was exactly what Van Helsing was afraid of?—what everyone was afraid of. Not that a channel might fall victim to visions, but that she mightchooseto.
That she might embrace a power that does not come from them,the song murmured, so softly it might have been her own thoughts.
Sam found herself tempted, despite Hel’s warning. It wasn’t the ceol Sídhe, she didn’t think?—after all, wasn’t that supposed to tempt her to dance herself into an early grave, or wander into a bog? Sam didn’t feel like doing either of those things. The song wasn’t seductive because of what it told her to do, but what it told hershe coulddo... if only she trusted herself enough tolisten.
She knew it wasn’t worth the risk, even if it was safe. Because in the improbable circumstance that it worked, the Viscount and the Duke would turn on her for what she’d done.
If they knew,the song whispered.
With a little cry, Sam shoved the offending chain off the bed and threw herself into her research. She didn’t need the song; she had value outside of her visions. All she had to do was prove it.
Sam startled awake, sprawled amidst her notes, trembling violently. It was pitch dark. The glass rattled in the windows; dogs howled outside loud enough to wake the moon. Her fingers caught the key on her gas lamp, the metal sticky with cold.
The flame flared, illuminating a woman standing in the dark, staring at Sam with half-lidded eyes that were somehow mournful and sensual at once. Her golden hair haloed around her as if drifting in water, and her ephemeral white nightgown pulled in unseen currents. But it was her lips that caught Sam’s attention: wicked red and plump and pricked with the points of two white teeth.
No, not teeth. Fangs.
