“Got you,” Hel said with satisfaction.
Hel had done it. She’d actually done it. The song had been wrong: There had never been any need for Sam to give in. They could do this on their own.
Wincing, Lord Lusk got to his feet, worse for wear, but very much alive. Miss Shinagh threw herself into his arms, and he kissed her deeply before turning to them, leaning on her for balance.
“Thank you, I?—” Abruptly, Lord Lusk’s voice slurred, his face blurring, pulling, as if he were rendered in wet paint, as if someone had placed their thumb on it andsmeared. Above him, the Wild Hunt reeled in their prey.
“No no no no no. Jack! Don’t you go.” Miss Shinagh set her hands to his cheeks, as if she could press him back into himself, but the motes of color that were Lord Lusk leaked between her fingers, drifting up toward a handful of dark shapes cut out against the stars. “Don’t you dare let them do this to you.”
“It’s not the haunting,” Sam whispered.
“It’s the mark,” Hel said grimly, unmoving even as Van Helsing cursed, looking for someone to hurt for this. In the distance, the foxes cried. But there was nothing anyone could do now.
“Please, spare me?—” Lord Lusk begged, subharmonics making a chorus of his voice. “Take him, not me.”
At first, Sam, like the rest of them, didn’t even try to make sense of the words that spilled from his mouth, the litany of those who knew they were lost, choosing, instead, to bear witness. Until she remembered: The only way to avoid being taken was to offer another in your place.
“Take Van Helsing in my?—”
Surprising even herself, Sam lunged, her fist slamming into Lord Lusk’s mouth. Her knuckles split, bloodying his bared teeth. Pain needled through her wrist, and she cried out, cradling her hand. But the damage was done. Lord Lusk looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Then he jerked upward, his head lolling back, the breath emptying from his body not with a scream, but with a horrible, unending gasp, pluming in the night air, leaving Miss Shinagh clutching the empty shell of his body, the wheat withering and dying in a halo around her.
Then the Wild Hunt blew away, like wishes blown from a dandelion clock.
Sam stared at her hands. What had she done?
A howl tore itself from Miss Shinagh’s throat as she rounded on them. Hel stepped in front of Sam, a warning in every line of her body.
“You owed me a favor!” Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, her hands curled into claws at her side.
“So long as it didn’t cause harm,” Sam said. Lord Lusk had tried to sacrifice Van Helsing. She couldn’t let that happen, so she’d killed him. She had killed Lord Lusk. She’d come here to save him, and she’d killed him, like Cyprien before him. She trembled bodily, sick with it. “I?—I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Hel said, her eyes hard. “This was your intention all along, wasn’t it, Miss Shinagh? If Van Helsing and I hadn’t come, it would have been Miss Harker he offered to the Wild Hunt.”
Hel was right: Miss Shinagh couldn’t have known about the selenic tattoos or the ghosts or any of it. Not unless she was behind it, which, while still technically possible, seemed increasingly unlikely. Nor could she have known that Hel could see ghosts. Which meant Miss Shinagh couldn’t have known there was a way out where no one had to die.
“It was... a trap?” Sam said, looking up at Miss Shinagh.
“Not for you. I knew you would not be alone,” Miss Shinagh said. “You are never alone; they do not trust you well enough for that, not where they think you can do any harm. I know what you are. You think I have not seen the way that man looks at you? He is not your compatriot; he is your captor.”
“That manjust gave everything he had to try to save your fiancé!” Sam said.
“Not everything,” Miss Shinagh said, her voice like ice.
Van Helsing laid an arm on Sam’s shoulder.
“Come on,” Van Helsing said as Miss Shinagh dropped back down beside Lord Lusk, her scream joining that of the foxes in the hills as she cradled him to her chest. “We’re done here.”
Chapter Sixteen
The Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath)
Two Days Before Samhain
Sam lay in the dark in the Shelbourne Hotel, her grandfather’s numbers whispering to her in the rain. Another feather in the drawer. Another feather forgotten. Growing up, her grandfather had always seemed like a good man. His patience had seemed endless as he taught Sam the workings of the radiotelegraph. He’d had the soul of a storyteller, dropping his voice to a quavering whisper and raising it to a belligerent roar as he told tales of wyverns and witches, Hydras and heroes. He was the reason Sam had fallen in love with books, and for the longest time, he’d been the only person who hadn’t treated Sam’s channeling as something to be pitied or feared, but simply as a part of who she was?—like her rabbit-brown eyes and her love for salty cheese.
But then, when Sam was ten years old, her grandfather had abandoned her, and even if what Hel had said wasn’t true, even if he hadn’t left because he wanted to but because Professor Moriarty had forced his hand, Sam wasn’t entirely certain she could bring herself to forgive him.
Lord Lusk had seemed like an honorable man, too. Sam wanted to remember him the way he was when he’d run out to defend Mr. Enfield, his fox-headed cane in his hand, as if he’d beat back the Wild Hunt himself. But still, when the end had come, he had been unable to accept it. Willing to spill Van Helsing’s blood on the altar of the Wild Hunt to save his own.
