“Sam?—” There was an unfamiliar ache in Hel’s voice, and Sam got the impression she’d misread the situation entirely.
But she would never find out what Hel might have said, for a new voice cut in: “There you are.”
Jakob Van Helsing strode toward them. Perhaps the most efficient hunter the Society had to offer, the only son of Professor Van Helsing looked much like the statue of Perseus and was nearly as likely to be carrying about a monster’s head. Though he was, blessedly, wearing clothing. He was tall and muscular, like many men who thought themselves heroes, with a straight nose and brown hair grown unruly in the field.
“Mr. Van Helsing,” Sam said. “Shouldn’t you be out on assignment somewhere? Or have you run the world out of monsters already?”
“Nothing would please me more,” Van Helsing said, watching her narrowly as if, even now, he expected her to turn monstrous. Honestly, sometimes Sam wished shecould. “But Mr. Wright requires you in his office. Immediately.”
Hel raised an eyebrow. “Running errands for Mr. Wright now, are you?”
Van Helsing shifted his gaze to encompass Hel, his lip curling with distaste at the sight of Heathcliff on her shoulder. “Bothof you.”
Hel shrugged, and they turned to go, only for that familiar jingle to chase their steps.
“Why don’t you go on ahead?” Sam said, having heard quite enough of his spurs in Paris. “I’m sure you must be terribly busy.”
For the first time since she’d rescued him, Van Helsing smiled. “Orders, Miss Harker.”
Fear shifted beneath Sam’s skin. They must have discovered evidence of Sam’s channeling?—this would be the asylum come again. But it was reflexive, and Sam shook the notion free almost as soon as she’d had it. There was no reason to suspect that.
It was the affair with Dr. Gastrell and the rumors that Hel was pulling the strings of her “fallen” father’s shadow empire, which was more than enough. Hel was going to be arrested because Sam had justhadto argue with Mr. Wright, instead of simply telling him whatever he needed to hear to let them off. Oh, why couldn’t Sam simply keep her thoughts to herself? It was as if she’d lost the trick of it. Once, Sam had known exactly what to say to Mr. Wright to avoid exciting his suspicions. It was as if she could see his expectations written in the shifting of his eyes and the twitching of his lips?—her part in his story. She needed only give it voice.
Sam could still see it, but she’d gotten too used to saying whatever came to mind the moment it did. Now it seemed she could not shut it off.
Hel was a terrible influence.
The walls of Mr. Wright’s office were papered in black florals and hung with the bleached skulls of trolls, basilisks, and even a vampire, still with a bit of brick between its teeth. It made Sam uneasy. There was something unwholesome about having a skull so like a person’s on display?—a reminder that humans were not so very different from monsters. That if you weren’t careful, you might become one.
Ancient books and maps were piled haphazardly on narrow bookshelves. Fat candles burned on a heavy scrollwork desk, red wax splattered over a scattering of case files, as if the whole bunch had been hastily shoved aside. A radiotelegraph wastap-tap-tappingon the desk, so like the ones her grandfather used to have that her heart ached. The eerie light of a will-o’-the-wisp lapped at the walls, drawn to the radio waves like a moth to a flame.
Unthinking, Sam pulled meaning from the Morse code:M-o-r-i-a-r-t-y.
“Mr. Wright,” Sam said in a rush, “it wasn’t Dr. Moriarty’s fault, she?—”
“Moriarty. Harker. Good, good,” Mr. Wright said, as if he hadn’t heard her. Sam frowned. He was nervous, repeating himself, the lines under his eyes somehow deeper than they had been minutes ago. There was no sign of police, nor the strange men from before. “We have a situation.”
“What kind of situation?” Hel asked.
“Men have been disappearing in Ireland.”
Hel sharpened, every angle of her a knife. “How many?”
“Four,” Mr. Wright said, but then he grimaced. “Though perhaps more than we know. The reports out of Ireland mark a significant increase in abnormal phenomena of a more... violent persuasion. More even than is expected this time of year.”
Beyond its cities, Ireland possessed a rugged coastline and a cutting wind that swept in off the sea, over rolling hills and forests pocketed with ancient peat bogs and ruins older than memory. You could get lost in the mists of its untamed wilds, even without walking over a fairy rath that might spirit you to the Otherworld or catching the attention of the Folk, who might steal you away to dance your shoes through on an endless night that would turn out to be a hundred years.
It was particularly dangerous this time of year, so close to Samhain, when the veil between the Otherworld and our own would be at its thinnest. Sunset on Samhain would bring a night of prophecy and hungry ghosts?—when bonfires were lit for protection and monsters roamed freely.
There were rituals the Irish did to turn the worst of it aside, such as leaving iron tongs over a baby’s bassinet to prevent their being stolen and replaced with a changeling, or keeping a bit of bread tied with red string in your pocket to escape enchantment. If you didn’t, well. Disappearances were the least of it. Still...
“Aren’t disappearances the province of the civic guard?” Sam asked. “Why send for us?”
“They’ll explain when you arrive,” Mr. Wright said tightly.He doesn’t know,Sam realized, a thought that was as surprising as it was unsettling. “A carriage will be here within the hour to take you to the train station at Holyhead. You will be on that train, and tomorrow morning’s express ferry to Dublin. I’ve allotted you each a generous stipend to purchase what you don’t have time to pack.”
“But we don’t even know what to research!” Sam exclaimed. Ireland had a far greater concentration of abnormal phenomena than the rest of Europe. There were theories that it was on account of the lack of industrialization?—something the English were keen to address?—but no one truly knew why.
There remained, also, the question as to why the Irish themselves weren’t handling this. They had resisted the formation of any sort of formal Society, but they had the fairy doctors?—those who knew the ways of the Folk and helped others with problems of an Otherworldly nature?—who served much the same purpose. But she knew better than to ask Mr. Wright that much.
