Sam’s cheeks heated. “I?—that’s...” But before she could voice her objections, there was the sound of heavy footfalls behind them.
Reluctantly, Hel let Sam’s hand drop, and they turned to face Van Helsing as he ducked through one of the sunken windows. His skin was slick with sweat and grime. Claw marks tore the leather of his coat.
It took Sam a moment to recognize the thing in his arms?—a puddle of darkness with enormous green eyes. Then the darkness meowed, its pink mouth a revelation.
Acat. Soaking wet with holy water, but still. He hadn’t killed it; he’dexorcisedit.
“Here,” Jakob said, thrusting the cat at Sam like an unwanted dishrag, as if it were her fault, which she supposed it was. But said dishrag yowled and clung to Jakob. He cursed, pulling her back in to cradle wetly against his body. She purred, a rumble that sounded as if it belonged more to her demonic form than her tiny frame. Sam couldn’t help it; she laughed.
“Congratulations on your cat,” Hel said, and Sam was grateful they’d left Heathcliff behind.
Jakob flushed and turned his back to them, realizing all of a sudden that Hel’s shirt hung open.
“She’s a fury,” Jakob muttered as Hel shrugged on her jacket and did up the buttons. He winced as the cat kneaded his arm, her claws needling out, and petted her awkwardly, as if he feared he’d break her. It reminded Sam of when he’d found what he thought was a stray kitten when visiting them in Boston. He’d spent an hour picking the burs out of its fur before its mother had shrieked at him with its terrible grin of needled teeth and he’d realized it was, in fact, an opossum. They didn’t have creatures like that in Europe, he’d complained, when Sam had nearly died laughing.
“It’s not her fault,” Hel told him, but she was looking at Sam. “She was possessed.”
“Unless she invited it in,” Sam countered. “Looking for... a mouse or something.”
“Are we still talking about the cat?” Jakob said. Had he just saidwe? No, she must be mistaken. He continued to stroke the cat’s head until drool dripped from her snaggle tooth. “Did you find anything?”
“No,” Sam said, at the same time as Hel said, “Yes.”
Jakob raised an eyebrow. Sam looked at Hel, whose gaze followed a bee that flew past her before wriggling into that hole Sam had seen earlier.
“Bees?” Jakob said.
“A hive lock,” Hel corrected. “My father’s fond of them. If this is like his other installations, there will be a narrow, twisting channel in the wall that leads to a beehive. To unlock it, you use the queen bee’s pheromone to pull enough bees down the passage that the weight triggers the mechanism that opens the door.”
“That sounds overly complicated,” Jakob said.
“That’s my father,” Hel said dryly. “Fortunately, complicated things are easy to break.” Wincing as she bent over the spilled contents of the black case, Hel rummaged up a vial of mercury. Unscrewing the top, she tipped the silvery liquid down the passage. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Sam heard aclickand the groaning of the earth as a stone panel slid out of the floor. Candlelight flickered up from the darkness.
Gooseflesh rose on Sam’s arms, her heart hammering in her chest. “A secret door,” she breathed. She might have guessed. The Hell-Fire Club had been built on a rath?—one of the hills in which the Folk danced and drank with the ancestral dead. A gate to the Otherworld. It oughtn’t to have been accessible to mortals, not by anything so mundane as a secret door. At least, not to the living.
But Sam’s grandfather had spun her tales of men who sailed off the west coast of Ireland and uncovered islands hidden in the mist where time moved differently. In her grandfather’s stories, a man could claim them with the ash from his pipe?—and the Folk would promise him anything to stay his hand. It struck Sam then, how few of his stories were actually nice.
The sound of humming drifted up out of the dark. It was raw and whimsical at the same time, with a folksy edge to it that belied his academic inclinations.
“It’shim,” Sam whispered. It had been ten years, but she still remembered the sound of her grandfather’s voice.
“Who?” Jakob demanded. “Professor Moriarty?”
“Her grandfather,” Hel said grimly.
Chapter Twenty
Montpelier Hill, County Dublin (Cnoc Montpelier, Contae Bhaile Átha Cliath)
The Day Before Samhain
“Are you ready?” Hel asked softly, her eyes searching Sam’s.
Sam nodded, unable to speak. She had no idea what to expect. Whether she’d see the grandfather who had read her Greek myths by her bedside, who had taught her how to catch frogs and bake his famous brown bread... or the man who had left his daughter to mourn him twice over, who had given Hel the worst of the jobs she’d done for her father, and who had set a ghost to haunt his own granddaughter.
It seemed impossible that they could be the same man.
Hel went down the iron ladder first, dropping silent as a shadow. “You can’t come with me,” Jakob murmured, trying to dislodge the cat from his chest. Her claws dug in, making her displeasure known. But at last, she released, with a disgruntledmrrr, and stalked over to curl up amidst the ruins, watching with baleful eyes.
