Hel had accepted her own death and disgrace when she’d taken up against her father. But when it came to Sam, death and disgrace were suddenly unacceptable. It was a weakness?—Samwas a weakness?—and so Hel wanted to do what she’d done every other time she’d found a weakness in herself. She wanted to cut it out. Unfortunately for Hel, Sam wasn’t that easy to be rid of.
“He’s still just a man,” Sam said, plucking up a broad-brimmed hat festooned with a cloud of white feathers and pinning it viciously to her head. “And men can be beaten.”
“Sam, Ileft, and I still play my part in his game,” Hel said. “Every victory is at his sufferance, ever counter furthers his design. Even the Beast murders?—”
“We saved Josephine Heroux,” Sam protested. “We stopped Arsène Courbet.”
“After he had achieved my father’s aims,” Hel said. “Even there, we did my father’s work.”
Sam remembered what Hel had said before:Men like that don’t leave pieces on the board.Arsène Courbet had died shortly after his initial confession implicating Hel, before he could be cross-examined, his clothes found crawling with a rare variety of ant said to come all the way from Australia. But Professor Moriarty had only killed Arsène Courbet because he had been caught. He couldn’t possibly have intended on Sam and Hel killing him the whole time... could he?
“My father is my problem to solve, not yours,” Hel said grimly, and at last, Sam recognized the look in Hel’s eye. Like a gunslinger when the law closed in around them, preparing for their last stand. “I can’t let him take you, too.”
“He won’t,” Sam said firmly. “Hel, I need you to trust me.”
“It’s not you I don’t trust,” Hel said. But when Sam followed her from the room, dragging her trunk inelegantly behind her, Hel didn’t move to stop her.
Dublin Port (Irish: Calafort Átha Cliath), Ireland
Five Days Before Samhain
Sam looked out over the rail of the passenger ferry, sea spray stinging her cheeks. A cutting wind rose off the water, whipping the fog like it was carding wool, but through it Sam could just make out glimpses of Ireland: white froth crashing on the rocks and the red flash of a lighthouse, like Avalon emerging from the mists.
Or Dracula, Sam thought, her nerves rising with the skirling of the lighthouse siren, recalling her father’s stories of the ghost ship that had carried the vampire to England, of the dead captain tied to the wheel. There had been fog then, too, and a terrible storm to rival the Night of the Big Wind, despite the fact that a strong wind ought to have torn through fog like salt through a ghost.
And then there was the strange singing in her blood, which no one else seemed to hear. It had started when they’d entered the harbor?—a humming in her flesh, a fluting in her bones. She heard it every time she closed her eyes, and sometimes when they were open, and it was getting stronger. It was unearthly, lilting and sweet, with a yearning that filled her with a terrible grief. She couldn’t quite make out what it wanted, but she felt certain that if she listened long enough, she would.
Sam wondered if this was how her mother had felt when Dracula had called to her.
It wasn’t vampires, Sam told herself sternly. Mr. Wright would have told her. Although he didn’t seem to have a full grasp of the details. Whoever Sam, Hel, and Van Helsing were working for, they were powerful enough to order the Society’s field agents out from under Mr. Wright and seemed under no obligation to share why.
Sam itched to pick over it with Hel, but the other woman had made herself scarce. Having searched the steam-packet from bow to stern, Sam was just about to check the rigging?—which, as it was the last place Sam expected to find Hel, was probably where she ought to have started?—when she heard the jingle of cowboy boots.
“I hardly require an escort, Van Helsing,” Sam said without turning.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Van Helsing replied, drawing next to her and leaning back on the rail. “It’s a small ship. I came for the air.”
“And if I should choose to go inside?”
“Then I must concede: The spray is a bit much.” He sounded amused, her irritation but one more perk of the assignment.
Sam rounded on him. “What exactly do you think is going to happen should I make it out of your sight for more than the time it takes me to powder my nose? Are you afraid I might steal a moment’s peace? That I might enjoy myself?”
“People have been disappearing, Miss Harker,” Van Helsing said, as if he hadn’t been haunting her the entire trip. Even Sam’s shadow gave her more consideration?—at least at noon it went away. “I had assumed you wouldn’t want to be one of them.”
“And I require your assistance for that, do I?” Sam said.
“You seem to have misplaced your usual escort,” Van Helsing said.
So he’d noticed. Sam lifted her chin. “Perhaps Dr. Moriarty simply trusts that I can handle myself.”
Van Helsing stepped close, the wet-leather scent of him washing over her. Instinctively, she tried to step backward, but found herself against the rail of the ship. Fear flickered in the hollow of her throat, as if to prove that no, she couldn’t handle herself, that in fact she very much needed her escort, wherever she had gotten to.
“Miss Moriarty is not like us,” Van Helsing growled. “You and I, we understand that there are certain lines you do not cross, and that the rules are there for a reason. There is no line she will not cross, no rule she will not break. Whatever she has done to earn your trust?—”
But Sam was stuck on that first part, lodged in her throat like a fishbone. “I amnothinglike you.”
Something like surprise crossed over his face, as if he’d truly thought them similar. Then his expression darkened. “No. Perhaps not.”
