Which meant the victims of the Wild Hunt weren’t disappearing. They were being murdered.
The nearest train that might take them to Lusk to see the bodies was across the River Liffey. This required Sam, Hel, and Van Helsing to crowd into a rowboat with nearly a dozen dockworkers, all of whom spent the journey sneaking looks at Hel. But that, at least, was entirely the woman’s own fault.
Hel had emerged from the Shelbourne wearing a pair of wire-framed spectacles with dark circular lenses. Together with the rat perched on the shoulder of her long tan coat, one might have been forgiven for mistaking her for some sort of crossroads devil. If a far more tempting one than might be found in scripture.
Van Helsing had raised an eyebrow when she’d emerged. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not,” Hel had admitted.
Sam’s stomach was hollow as she clutched the Viscount’s box camera, her mind churning over the same few details. The crinkling of the Viscount’s eyes when he told a joke, and his boisterous laugh after he’d told the punch line. The Duke’s quiet chuckle, even when he pretended to be reading. They would never argue over their shared love of romantic detective stories again, or worry about whether a duckling had accidentally imprinted on the lobster the Duke’s cook intended for dinner. She hadn’t known them well, but they had been good men. They hadn’t deserved to die.
Sam tilted her head back, the wind stinging the tears from her eyes as the boat surged through spindrift to the far bank. The sky was overcast, the clouds so low, Sam imagined she might reach up and comb her fingers through them.
The road in front of Amiens Street Station was covered in mud and crisscrossed with the marks of passing carriages. Rising from the muck, the train station looked as if it had been plucked from the Italian Renaissance, with slender columns and delicate balconies just waiting for Juliet to emerge to sigh over her Romeo.
In stark contrast with its exquisite exterior, the interior of the train station was dingy. The red-brick-and-Portland-stone walls were slicked with grime, the railway nearly as muddy as the road outside. A raven perched in the skeletal structure above, watching them with uncanny, almost human, attention.
The song surged in Sam’s mind, beckoning, and she shivered, rubbing the chilblains on her arms. Ruari was watching.
Unfortunately, they had to wait, as only one of the trains seemed to be in service, due to an unnatural profusion of blackthorn growing between the tracks. Not just blackthorn, Sam noted, as she studied it from the platform. There was somethingmovinginside it, swarming up the tangled branches.
“Lunatisídhe,” Sam breathed. A lunar variety of Folk, as she recalled. Mostly human in appearance, the creatures were small and wizened as year-end apples, with long and spindly limbs and a decidedly spikey look about them.
They were fascinatingly botanical. Wherever a human might possess hair, it seemed the creatures hadthorns. Sam leaned closer to the lunatisídhe, intent on a better look, when one of them lunged at her, hissing and baring needle-sharp teeth.
Sam gasped and stumbled back, remembering also that they were said to curse people.
“This is absurd,” Van Helsing said. “We’ve been here for hours. A carriage would have been faster, at this point. Why don’t they simply cut the bushes back?”
“You can’t cut blackthorn before November 11,” Hel said. “You’ll anger the lunatisídhe.”
“They already look angry,” Sam said, and she couldn’t help but hear the whispers of the poets claiming the Otherworld was rising up against the English.
It was nearly sunset before they at last heard the screeching of metal as their train pulled into the station, grinding to a halt in front of the platforms teeming with would-be passengers in their tweed and wool. Oddly, no one else had lined up near the last train car.
Van Helsing reached for the door handle and pulled, then grunted. “Hold on just a moment.” He put his back into it, his face going red with exertion.
“Excuse me!” Sam called out as Van Helsing wrestled with the door. She flagged one of the other passengers before he could board?—a weatherworn older man in madder red, his eyes bright in his wind-roughed face and a hand-carved pipe clenched between his teeth. His were the rough, scarred hands of a fisherman, the sweet scent of tobacco and salt clinging to his clothes. With a pang, Sam was reminded of her grandfather, and then the conversation with Hel she’d had the night before. “Why isn’t this door opening?”
“Oh, that? It’s been stuck like that for ages now,” the man said around his pipe.
“And they haven’t fixed it?” Sam exclaimed. It was no small matter to jump between cars?—not with the ground racing beneath them and the wind whipping past, when one wrong step could send you tumbling out of the train altogether.
“Fixed it? Oh, no, there’s nothing wrong with it. They’d have dropped it behind somewhere if there were,” the man said, maneuvering his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. “More likely some rich arse bought it out, unwilling to rub elbows with his lessers.”
“Is that even allowed?” Sam said.
The old man shrugged. “The sun doesn’t shine if the rich don’t want it to. Can’t see why a door would be any different. Though why anyone rich enough to buy out a train car wouldn’t just wheel around in one of those automobiles is beyond me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He was right, Sam thought.
The train whistle blew, and Sam startled.
“Are you with us, Miss Harker?” Hel called, leaning out of another train door, her ginger hair whipping around those dark glasses in the wind. Heathcliff peeked out of her pocket.
“Coming!” Sam hurried toward the train car, wishing she hadn’t worn heels. Hel pulled her in just as the train began to shudder to life.
“You know,” Hel mused to Van Helsing once they’d settled in, “if we can’t cure Miss Harker of her ghost problem, we can always leave her on a train.”
