“Sam?—Sam!”
Sam came back to herself to see Hel’s face tight, her arms gripping her shoulders so hard Sam feared she might bruise. Or perhaps that was only because she felt so raw, fresh born, like a calf on trembling limbs. There was a tenderness behind her sternum, a feeling that something waited within her, biding its time before it emerged.
It had worked, Sam thought uneasily. The song had done what it had promised, leaving her to wonder at the price she’d paid. She resisted the urge to glance at her shadow.
“What did you do?” Hel demanded.
“I?—I don’t know.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. Sam had barely clung to consciousness, had no idea what the song had done in her stead. She turned to Hel, desperation unraveling the edges of her words. “I don’t... Those marks, what if I have one?”
“You don’t,” Hel said dismissively. “Listen, whatever you did?—”
“You can’t know that,” Sam protested, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Do you know how long it takes to get a tattoo?” Hel said with what Sam now knew was more patience than she would have had for anyone else. “Or how much it stings? It’s not the sort of thing that happens without your noticing.”
“And you’re saying there isn’t an alchemical solution for that?” Sam said. She knew it was foolish, that it was likely nothing, her fears playing on her overactive imagination, but she needed Hel to listen to her, to at least acknowledge it was possible.
“No,” Hel admitted. “But you’re not Vespertine. How precisely would you have gotten?—”
But Sam cut her off. “Hel, my grandfather’s amedium.”
“He’swhat?” Hel’s whole body sharpened like a knife, her eyes narrowing. “How long have you known?”
“I don’t think he’d tattoo a ten-year-old girl, and I know the tattoos might just be a mark of the Vespertine and have nothing to do with anything,” Sam babbled. “But if you’re right about him, if he did, that would be the proof of it, wouldn’t it? And then we can stop all this from happening, all we’d have to do is cut them out.”
“Cutwhatout?” Hel said, alarmed.
“The tattoos, what else?” Sam said, gesturing wildly, realizing even as she said it that few of the Vespertine would consent to having a chunk of their foreheads removed. Certainly, they wouldn’t be terribly secret anymore, but Sam didn’t care, it would serve them right. And Sam couldn’t go through that again, couldn’t face down the Wild Hunt and the question of how monstrous she was willing to be. “You have to check me.”
“Sam,” Hel said, her voice aching.
“For God’s sake, I don’t want to hear about your brother right now!” Sam snapped. “Please. I can’t do it myself, and there’s no one else I can ask.”
“All right,” Hel said, clasping Sam’s flailing hands between her own to still them. “All right. I’ll do it.” But the look in Hel’s eyes was as if she were girding herself for war.
“Thank you,” Sam said, and meant it.
“Just... wait a moment,” Hel said. Gently, she shut the door. Then she slipped off her suit jacket and laid it out like a gentleman casting his coat over a puddle, only the puddle was broken glass and moonlight. “There.”
Sam knelt on the jacket, the scent of gunpowder and rosin ghosting around her. The wind sighed through the shattered window, making froth of her diaphanous nightgown. Fingers trembling, she tried to undo the mother-of-pearl buttons at her neck, but she kept fumbling them, until at last Hel brushed her honeyed curls aside and undid them for her.
The nightgown slid from her shoulders. Sam clasped it over her chest.
“Ready?” Hel said, her voice unsteady. Anyone would think Hel was more worried about what they’d find than Sam.
Sam nodded, then, when Hel seemed to need her to say it: “Yes.”
Hel’s fingers were cool and delicate as they traced down the bumpy arc of Sam’s spine from nape to base, gooseflesh rising in their wake. She turned Sam in the silvery light to catch the shadows on her ribs.
“Anything?” Sam whispered, her heart beating loud enough to drown out the wind.
“Not yet,” Hel managed, her voice rough, her eyes as focused as Sam had ever seen them, as she held Sam’s arms to the pale moonlight, her fingertips whispering down their length. Until at last, she let her arms drop and stepped so close, Sam could feel the heat of her body, not touching except for the fingers that pulled through her curls.
Sam bit back a gasp at the sensation, so unexpectedly good in a way that tore at the core of her. Leaving her with the horrible, desperate knowledge that she wanted to feel it again, and that shecouldn’twant that, that wasn’t what this was, wasn’t what Hel had agreed to.
Hel released her, and Sam let out a shaky breath. Only for Hel to kneel before her. “Stand?”
“Yes,” Sam managed. She stood, clutching her nightgown to her chest as Hel met her eyes, before pushing up the froth of her skirts, exposing her legs. She trembled, trying not to feel more than she should, to want more than she should, as Hel’s fingers ghosted down her thighs and the long bones of her calves, turning her feet to catch her soles.
