“What she’s capable of?” Sam finished for him.
“Yes! Yes. See, she gets it,” Mr. Bishop said, looking relieved.
“I don’t actually,” Sam said. “With the wards you have on this place, you ought to be safe.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Mr. Bishop said, eyeing them sidelong. “But I can hear her in the walls. Scratching, always scratching with her thousand tiny claws.”
“Crows,” Hel murmured for Jakob’s benefit, who looked as if he were about to spout steam from his joints.
“She can’t come in, not directly, but she can watch through the cracks, she can listen, and when I sleep...” Mr. Bishop shuddered, and Sam had some idea where the bruises under his eyes had come from. “It’s better not to sleep.”
That was why he’d gone at the walls with an axe, she realized. Why he’d torn all the feathers from his sofa.
Mr. Bishop saw the look in their eyes and laughed, a horrible, desperate sound, pulled from a man who had nothing left?—except an exceptional property in the most desirable district in Dublin, immunity to consequences, and wealth.
“You think I’ve gone mad, don’t you?” Mr. Bishop said. “You see the rents in the wall and imagine there’s nothing behind them. Just like all the others.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Jakob asked. “Sail back to England?”
“You imagine I haven’t tried that?” Mr. Bishop groaned. “It was the first thing I tried. Fighting is overrated, an activity indulged in by those with more muscles than sense. But she’s not leaving me much of a?— Wait, you believe me, and you’re with the Society. You canfixthis.”
“What do you mean, ‘fix this’?” Jakob said suspiciously.
“Kill her, what else?” Mr. Bishop said, his eyes fever bright. “It’s what you do, what you came here for, you hunt monsters?—and this is the only way the nightmare ends.”
“She’s a goddess,” Hel snapped. “Not a monster.”
“Is there a difference?” Mr. Bishop said. This, Sam thought, explained a good deal about mankind.
“Can she even be killed?” Jakob asked.
“Oh, yes, yes, she can,” Mr. Bishop said, and disturbingly, he pulled a knife out of his sumptuous robes?—from where, Sam didn’t even want to know. It was of an esoteric design, made of scorched wood, of all things, and encrusted with what looked like green eyes. Sam felt an almost piercing pain at the sight of it, as if should she look too long, she’d catch fire and burn down to ash. She forced herself to look away.
“This knife has been ritually prepared from the oak stained with the blood of Balor’s poison eye,” Mr. Bishop was saying, an eye that was by some accounts the Fomorian’s only eye and, by other accounts, his third eye?—ironic, if true, given the placement of the Vespertine’s tattoos. “The same poison eye that slayed Nuada, first king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It should work, but those fools at the Vespertine won’t let me near enough to use it.”
So the Mórrígan was a prisoner of Ashdown Manor. Sam thought of the crows that had circled the manor, of Mr. Bishop begging to see aher.
This, then, was why the Otherworld had risen up against the English?—not on account of the Irish, but on account ofher. And this was why all the wealthy Englishmen of the Vespertine had come to Ireland, despite condemning it as “charmingly uncivilized.” To indulge in the very thing England was working to eradicate: Ireland’s closeness to the Otherworld.
“Youcagedher,” Hel said, her voice dangerous.
“Yes, I did.” Mr. Bishop laughed horribly. “I caught her. I caught her like a wild hare, in a snare I set like a child intent on impressing my peers. I caught her with arcane rituals designed by minds far wiser than my own and alchemy of my own devising and artifacts that ought to be in a museum.”
His selfishness was responsible for all of this.
“But why?” Sam said. “What did you have to gain?”
“By caging a creature with power over death and destiny?” Mr. Bishop said, leaning forward. “Can you imagine if you had the power to change your fate, to avert your end? To cast down those who stood against you? Would that not be worth almost any price?”
“No,” Hel said flatly.
Mr. Bishop leaned back. “Yes, well, you’re right of course. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret it.” And for a moment, Sam almost felt sympathy for the man, until he kept talking. “For now, the Vespertine can never let her go, or she will end us all. Unless you can end her first.”
Rage lit in her veins. Even now, the man couldn’t seem to fathom that his actions might be wrong for any other reason than they possessed consequences forhim, his only concern not making things right but escaping those consequences, even if it did more harm to the woman he’d wronged. Just like Dr. Gastrell and the vengeful spirits of the women he’d murdered, calling for the Society’s aid with every expectation he’d be saved. He, after all, was human, and they only monsters.
“How am I supposed to kill her, if she’s caged?” Jakob said.
“That’s the beauty of it,” Mr. Bishop said, turning the knife so the green eyes winked in the candlelight. “The knife will cut through the cage. It will cut through damn near anything. Where it gets tricky will be finding her. She’s secured somewhere in that blasted manor of theirs. I was blindfolded on the way down to perform the ritual?—my ordeal, which was to admit me, if it hadn’t all gone horribly awry, if I hadn’t needed to try to kill her to set myself free. You’ll have to use force, I’m afraid, and you’ll have to go tonight.”
