Despite having Van Helsing breathing over her shoulder, Sam felt at ease. Oh, how she’d missed this! The thrill of discovery, chasing down references, weaving together a story from often contradictory scraps. Knowing her efforts weren’t wasted, because this, at least, Sam was good at.
“You know we could have the researchers back at the Society do this,” Van Helsing grumbled.
“Could we?” Sam asked. Her impression was that they weren’t supposed to tell the Society anything at all.
Van Helsing frowned, as if he hadn’t truly understood the researchers were people, that they might tell other people the things they heard. It was, unfortunately, an epidemic amongst field agents. Sam had to be careful now, or she’d give away all her secrets.
By late afternoon, Sam had a feast of books laid out before her. Van Helsing had given up and was scowling at a sketch he’d made of Mr. Enfield’s ring.
“I think I found something!” Sam said, just as Hel returned with the photographs in hand. Immediately, Van Helsing and Hel crowded over her shoulder. She pointed at an illustration: thick swirling lines illuminating a storm-racked sky, hounds baying before a host of horses with their Otherworldly riders.
“‘The Wild Hunt,’” Van Helsing read doubtfully.
Certainly that was the most common name for them, on account of the German unnaturalists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Though little was agreed upon about them?—least of all their name. They were known as Herod’s Hunt in England, the Devil’s Dandy Dogs in Cornwall, and the far more sinister Dead Hunt in Italy. It was as if they changed their form and tenor depending on the ground over which they rode, like a piece of music played on different instruments.
“They’re lost souls that hunt at night,” Sam explained, pulling references from the books laid out before her. “It’s said you can hear their hoofbeats and the baying of their hounds in the howling of the storms, as they ride in search of men’s souls to join their endless hunt.”
“Then it can’t be them,” Van Helsing said dismissively. “There were no horses last night. Flying or otherwise. Let alonehounds.”
“In Ireland, they’re a bit different,” Sam said. “They’re called?—”
“The sluagh,” Hel breathed. “It means ‘the host.’” Which was to say they were Folk, who might be fallen angels, nature spirits, the old gods, or the dead, depending on who you asked. And unbaptized children, but then everything awful in Ireland was associated with that.
“Instead of hooves, you hear wingbeats in storms that smell of rotting meat.” Sam skimmed the book, summarizing as she went. “They can take the dark crescent form of birds, and a more demonic form with black talons and wings of smoke. It says here they creep in west windows to steal the souls of the dying, but they’ll take the souls of the living too?—the brokenhearted, the desperate, and anyone who says their name nine times. The only way to avoid being taken is to offer another in your place, but that only buys you time, and when that time is up, your soul will ride with the Wild Hunt until the end of all things.”
“Birds...” Hel said. “Just like the photograph.”
“What photograph?” Van Helsing demanded.
Hel tossed the photographs on the books spread out before Sam. The murmuration of birds silhouetted against the setting sun sky, blurred with motion. The Duke, looking up at them in black, his sword a sliver of light by his side.
They’d known,Sam thought with a chill. They must have, to have taken such a picture. They’d known it was the Wild Hunt, and still that hadn’t saved them.
Van Helsing looked at it for a long moment. “That could be any flock of birds.”
“On the Viscount’s camera?” Sam pressed. “Why else would he photograph them, if they weren’t important?”
“How should I know?” Van Helsing said. “Perhaps he was testing his camera.”
“It shouldn’t be the sluagh,” Hel agreed. “The Wild Hunt isn’t supposed to be able to venture into the light of day any more than they can wither moss. But we already know something’s affecting their behavior.”
“Do you think the poets of Keogh’s pub might be right?” Sam said, thinking of Miss Shinagh, of the way the English had bound Ireland in iron, with its railroads like chains around the gates of the Otherworld. Even the marking of victims?—if the Wild Hunt were essentially ghosts, who was to say they weren’t marking their quarry themselves? “That it’s Ireland itself rising up against the English?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Van Helsing snorted. “They’re poets. They’re being poetical. Leveraging tragedies as a metaphor for their politics, as a self-fulfilling prophecy for war.”
“But if they aren’t, if there’s some kernel of truth to it,” Sam persisted, “then perhaps we ought to stop looking at who is behind the attacks and instead find out how to appease them.”
“The Wild Hunt cannot be appeased?—they are hunters, their hunt eternal. Nor should we stoop to appeasing monsters,” Van Helsing said sharply. “Do not forget what they are, nor that one of them almost killed you last night.”
Sam’s saint medal felt like ice against her breast. “I know, but?—”
“Don’t tell me you feel sympathy for the things,” Van Helsing said.
“Last I checked, we are the Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena,” Sam said tartly, “not the Society for theMurderingof Abnormal Phenomena.”
“The only thing you needstudyis how they might be killed,” Van Helsing said dismissively. “Anything more is a distraction.”
Even after all they’d been through together, Sam found it hard to believe that this was the same man who had once hung rapt on her grandfather’s stories, who had been obsessed with memorizing the endless variations of dragons and their Latin names, sketching them in his journals and in the margins of books. He’d been able to tell you their ranges and diets, how to distinguish a northern Welsh dragon from a southern by the shape of its wings, and their age from the mottling of their scales. Now, he cared for nothing but how they might be killed.
