That churning sea rose in Sam again, and she felt like she was drowning, like she couldn’t get enough air. Like everything she tried to grab on to slipped through her fingers.
“You are getting on the first ferry back to London,” Jakob said as he returned, pressing a train ticket into her hands.
“But the case?—” Sam began.
“Is solved,” Jakob said. “Or near enough. Besides, without Mr. Murray, it’s unlikely Professor Moriarty will be able to murder anyone else in the same fashion.”
“But I thought you said that it couldn’t be Professor Moriarty,” Sam protested, “that there are easier ways to kill a man.”
“Overly complicated is kind of Professor Moriarty’s thing, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Jakob said. “The walls of the War Room in the Society are iron. You’ll be safe there until Samhain has passed and we can find a way to exorcise your haunting. Tomorrow, you’ll collect your things and head straight to the ferry. I’ll phone ahead to let Mr. Wright know about the delay, and that you’re on your way. Don’t make me a liar.”
Sam turned to Hel, hoping for a reprieve but finding none.
“You have your orders, Miss Harker,” Hel said coldly.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dublin Port (Calafort Átha Cliath), Ireland
Samhain
The afternoon sun gilded the cracks in the dark grey clouds, the seagulls crying as they circled toward the port. A sailor mumbled something about seagulls being the spirits of the Irish lost far from home. Her grandfather used to say they meant a storm was coming.
If it were, Sam wouldn’t be there to see it. She leaned on the thin iron railing of the passenger ferry back to Wales. Her fingernail picked at peeling rust as she listened to the hypnotic slap of waves against the side of the boat. A boreal wind numbed her cheeks. She wished it might numb more than that.
There was no telling what Sam was going back to, other than London. Mr. Wright would be furious. Certainly, he would never allow her to return to the field. Not after her insubordination. She’d be reassigned back to the research department, if she had a place left at the Society at all.
In other circumstances, Sam might have approached Miss Shinagh about her offer and studied to become an unnaturalist. Except Miss Shinagh wouldn’t have her, not after Sam had gotten her fiancé killed. Which meant she would have to go home to Chicago, where she would have to confess to her parents that she’d gotten her grandfather arrested?—imprisoned, according to Jakob, in an iron cell.
She would never make things right with Hel. There would be no more adventures. Not for Sam. Perhaps she might find a job at a local library. At least then there would be reading.
She felt as if her mooring had come undone. As if she were out to sea on a starless night, without sight of shore.
Three ravens perched on the grassy and chain-wrapped remnants of a pier in the frothy waves, the wind ruffling through their midnight feathers as they stared at Sam. Hel’s brother bidding her farewell.
This was what Ruari had wanted all along. The aim of his note with the question Sam hadn’t been able to keep herself from asking. Of the feathers she couldn’t bring herself to confess.She will be alone, without allies or lovers or friends, until the day she comes home.
Hel had known something like this would happen?—knew what her family was like. She’d warned Sam that they needed to trust one another. Hel, who trusted no one, but somehow trusted Sam.
Or had.
That terrible knowing rose in her again?—of what she’d done, of what she’d lost?—until Sam was drowning with it, and she understood perhaps a fraction of why her grandfather might choose not to think.
Hel was right: Sam never should have come to Ireland. Jakob and Hel didn’t need her. They never had. They were the best field agents the Society had to offer, and even with her channeling, Sam was useless. Worse than useless?—she was, as Mr. Wright had pointed out, a liability.
Except that wasn’t precisely true, was it?
Certainly, she was useless in a fight. She’d have been dead many times over without Jakob’s and Hel’s interventions, and if her Aunt Lucy had truly meant her harm, well... But it had been Sam who had puzzled out the connection to the Wild Hunt at the library at Trinity, Sam who had uncovered the secrets of the Vespertine and the selenicMon Hel’s back, and Sam who had tracked down her grandfather.
She had solved the case?—not Hel, not Jakob, but Sam. Moreover, they never could have done it without her.
No, this feeling of being useless, it was a refrain of sorts, a song that twined through her thoughts. A fear that she wasn’t good enough, that she would never be good enough, even if she worked as hard as she could and sacrificed everything she had. But that shemust, for if she didn’t, those close to her would cast her out. She’d repeated it to herself so often, it seemed one of the immutable facts about the world, changeless and true.
But if Sam were being honest, her utility was never in question. Even Mr. Wright had admitted she was not without value in the field, and yet Sam had been so bent on earning her place, so focused on being useful, she hadn’t been able to see that she waswanted. Until she wasn’t.
The cawing of ravens became a cacophony. Sam glanced over her shoulder, the wind stringing her hair into her eyes, to see not just the three from earlier, but hundreds of ravens, all their black eyes trained on Sam. For a moment, Sam was back on that ashen plain again, the swords like tombstones, the crone washing armor, her mouth opening in a scream?—
A spike of pain lanced through her wrist, and the vision broke. Sam gasped, her hand flying to her sleeve. There was somethingunderthere, something that pinched her skin and dragged at the fabric of her dress. It feltwrongin a way that set a panic knifing through her. She clawed at the fabric, buttons popping free as she tore it open to find a black feather stuck into her skin.
