If it weren’t for Sam’schanneling, she meant.
“Would you have let me come along if I hadn’t”?—she still couldn’t say it?—“if I hadn’t smelled the salt?”
Hel went quiet. Sam’s heart ached. It was confirmation enough. She sat down heavily and began finger combing her hair in front of the allegedly possessed mirror. Her face looked haunted in its shadowed glass, her eyes hollow, her teeth a little too sharp.
Sam shouldn’t have been surprised at Hel’s reaction. What value did Sam have in the field, outside of channeling? Oh, she was observant enough, but not more so than Hel. Her legs went limp instead of, say,runningwhen pursued by monsters, let alone any of the more offensive maneuvers Hel employed. She was, as Van Helsing had so eloquently pointed out, a hazard with a firearm and a liability without.
“Would you have ever left your library,” Hel said at last, “if it weren’t for your grandfather’s numbers?”
It was Sam’s turn to fall quiet. The truth was, Sam might have spent all her days in the library?—delving the endless-seeming stacks and gorging herself on rare books in the flickering gaslight?—if it weren’t for the slim, improbable hope of finding her grandfather.
But that wasn’t what this was about: Hel was trying to distract her. Sam could feel it in the distance between them, in the suggestion that Sam go back to her books. In the name the radiotelegraph had dropped before them like a stone.
Moriarty.
“What did he tell you?” Sam demanded.
Hel stilled, so briefly that if Sam hadn’t been watching for it, she would have missed it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
“There on your arm,” Sam said evenly. “That’s a bee sting, isn’t it.”
Hel didn’t so much as glance at it. “The wasps are ornery in October. They know they’re going to die.”
“You already knew we were going to Ireland, didn’t you?” Sam pressed. The sharpening of Hel’s body, it hadn’t been for Ireland but because it confirmed something she’d already known, something that hadimplications. “You think your father’s behind the disappearances.”
“I don’t know what you?—” Hel began to pull away.
Sam reached after her. “Hel?—” The moment her fingers brushed Hel’s, she gasped, afeelingghosting through her like smoke. Hel snatched her hand back, but it was too late. Blood bloomed on Hel’s discarded coat, right over her heart. Hands shaking, Sam knelt and pulled a curl of paper from its pocket, no bigger than a wood shaving, a yellow bristle still caught in the glue.
She’d been right. Heart in her throat, she read the message:Luke 15:11–32.
“The parable of the prodigal son?”
“Sam,” Hel warned, but Sam shook her head?—she wasn’t letting this go.
Hel was the prodigal son, that much was obvious. She’d left home with all the gifts she’d inherited from her father?—her training in the clandestine arts, her skill with weaponry, and her mind, sharp as a splinter. Arsène Courbet had warned Hel she’d never appreciated the gift she’d been given in her father. One might even say she’dwastedit, whereas her brother, Ruari, continued to work for their father, like the brothers in the parable.
Sam recalled what Ruari had said of his father’s plans for Hel:She will be alone, without allies or lovers or friends, until the day she comes home. Father will make sure of it.Like the prodigal son, he meant for Hel to exhaust her welcome in the wider world, forcing her to return home. At which point, the father slaughtered a fatted calf to celebrate.
But who was the fatted calf? Sam wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to find out.
Hel snatched the curl of paper back.
“What does it mean?” Sam asked.
“It means it’s not safe,” Hel said flatly. “Not for you.” Sam was the fatted calf, wasn’t she. She’d been a queen before. She wasn’t sure she appreciated the downgrade.
“And it is for you?” Sam pressed, but Hel didn’t answer. “If this is about your father, I made you a promise.” That they’d be sharks, that they would scent out Hel’s family, that they would stop themtogether.
Hel grimaced. “I release you from that promise. I shouldn’t have let you make it in the first place.”
“That’s not your decision!” Sam made a frustrated sound in her throat. “Hel, we’re supposed to be partners. You said you’d try.”
Hel looked away. “You don’t want this. Trust me.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I want,” Sam said stubbornly. She reached for Hel, but the other woman pulled away. Her fingers curled into her palms. “What are you so afraid of?”
“Him!” Hel said with a quiet intensity, tension running through her body like a current. “And you’re a fool if you’re not. You thought he had eyes in Paris, that he still has a mole in the Society?—there is nothing he does not see in Ireland, no whisper he does not hear. His library is brimming with forbidden magic, and that’s not counting the monsters. He is going to have me arrested for his crimes, and if you are associated with me, you will go down with me?—if he doesn’t kill you first.”
