“It appears we’re not the only ones to think Lord Lusk has something to do with the disappearances,” Hel mused.
Mr. Enfield, the Viscount, and the Duke?—that was three out the five known victims that Lord Lusk had reason to want gone. Mr. Enfield might have threatened to expose their relationship; the Viscount and the Duke might have seen something compromising.
“But what could he possibly have against me?” Sam asked.
“It might not be about you,” Hel said grimly. It might simply be that she worked for the Society; there was a reason they were undercover after all. Or rather, they were supposed to be. Secrecy, it seemed, was scarce when you were accompanied by a loud Dutchman.
“Right.” Sam winced. Though she didn’t understand why she should be singled out and not Hel or Van Helsing.
“There’s still the matter of how he would have controlled the Wild Hunt,” Hel said. “To say nothing of haunting people.”
“That’s what I aim to find out,” Van Helsing said grimly. “Fortunately, I know exactly where he’ll be.”
“Mr. Enfield’s funeral,” Sam said.
“It won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest,” Hel pointed out. “They still have to prepare the body.”
“Good,” Van Helsing said. “That gives us time to get ready.”
Sam glanced out the window. The darkening sky meant curfew would be upon them soon. October days were terribly short in Ireland. At least, Sam thought, they wouldn’t be missing any sleep.
Chapter Nine
The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath)
Four Days Before Samhain
Ash drifted over Sam’s bare feet. A red sun simmered in the sky, silhouetting a sea of swords stuck out of the ground like tombstones. This, she understood, as the song shivered through her, was not Dublin. At least, not the Dublin she knew.
She was dreaming. Though it was unnaturally vivid?—and she uncomfortably aware. She tried to shift the dream, to conjure a library filled with every book she might imagine and also cheese, but nothing happened. She tried to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, it was to stare into the red sun again.
Not knowing what else to do, Sam began to walk, following the red blood that ran in rivulets, veining through the ash and dust to a crimson river. There, a bent-backed old woman scrubbed the stains from a man’s rusting armor with gnarled hands, singing.
The song. It was coming fromher.
A bean-nighe. Even in her dreams, Sam knew to be afraid. For to see the washer at the ford cleansing your clothing was to know your own death.
The old woman’s head jerked up, her eyes burning like stars. The singing stopped, and her mouth stretched wide in a scream, but all that came out were birds, hundreds and hundreds of birds, night black, like fragments of the shattered sky.
Sam tried to scream, but the sound stuck in her throat. She coughed, opened her mouth, and gagged, pain spiking through her as something bulged in her esophagus, scrabbling and squirming, clawing its way up, clawing its way out?—
Sam shot upright in her darkened room at the Shelbourne Hotel, coughing and retching, her face reddening as she curled over, clutching her throat. There was somethinginthere, something digging into her gums and all the way down. She clawed at her mouth, panic making her actions wild. Out. She wanted itout out out. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase. There was asnapand she pulled. Something slid, scraping, up the length of her throat and out through her lips.
Pinching it between her fingertips, Sam looked at it uncomprehendingly in the darkness. She fumbled for the lamp beside her bed, squinting against the sudden flare of gaslight.
In her hand was a long black feather, slick with spit and phlegm and streaks of blood.
She dropped it with a shriek.
Horror poured through Sam as she stared at it lying on her covers like a dead thing. She broke out in gooseflesh, her arms wrapping around her, fingernails digging into the flesh of her ribs. What in God’s name?—
Despite her best efforts to dismiss it, to wake up and prove this all a night terror and nothing more, it didn’t disappear. It was real. The calamus had broken when she’d torn it from her gums. The musky scent she identified with birds still clung to it. She could probably identify the species it had come from, had she the proper book.
But how had it even gotten down her throat in the first place, and without waking her?
Sam shivered, remembering the feather in the scone, imagining Ruari crouched over her bed like some nightmare spider. She’d read about a man who had used a strange smoke to put his victims to sleep before having his way with them. Was this what he’d done? It might explain the dreams.
Except Van Helsing had been standing guard outside her door all night?—he would have heard something, or at least smelled something. But then there was the incontrovertible fact of the feather.
