“Samhain,” Sam breathed.
“Hernight,” Mr. Bishop said. “The Vespertine will be doing a ritual, siphoning some of her power for their own. If you can’t manage to stop them tonight, well.”
“Right,” Jakob said. Mr. Bishop held the knife out to Jakob hilt first. Jakob’s hand closed on it, only for Mr. Bishop to keep hold of the sheath, searching Jakob’s eyes.
“Don’t forget,” Mr. Bishop warned him, “just because people used to call her a god doesn’t mean she didn’t massacre men until the rivers ran red with it. You don’t want that sort of blood on your hands.”
Sam could see it all too well. The rivers of blood that led to the Mórrígan. She had been wronged, it was true. But how many lives was her freedom worth? Sam’s heart squeezed. If it were only the guilty, it would be different. But this... it was a harder choice.
Jakob’s hand closed around the knife. He looked down at it with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Take my carriage,” Mr. Bishop said, and then, at their looks, added, “What? You’ll never get there in time without it, and despite my grave reputation, I’m not particularly keen on dying. Besides, I want the Vespertine to know I sent you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Merrion Square, Dublin (Cearnóg Mhuirfean, Baile Átha Cliath)
Samhain
The sleek black carriage with its gilding of screaming-soul flames and enormous black horses clattered down the cobblestone road, stopping before Mr. Bishop’s house. The carriage driver, a tousled, blond man with soulful eyes, hopped down and held open the door.
“Wait,” Sam said as Jakob mounted the step into the carriage. “Something about this isn’t right. The Otherworld has reason to be upset, I understand that. But if the Mórrígan can extend her power beyond her cage, why hasn’t she simply attacked her captors directly? Why call upon the Wild Hunt?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Hel drawled. “She can’t. She has help on the outside.”
“But who?” Sam said. “And how would such a thing even be possible?”
“Many things are possible where channels are involved,” Jakob said grimly.
The implications of his words sank into her like stones. “You think it’s Alice Grey.”
Jakob shrugged. “She’s associated with the Vespertine. The Mórrígan will have had every opportunity to corrupt her. Not to mention, she’s killed with ghosts before.”
“That waspoison,” Sam said.
“You can’t believe everything people tell you,” Hel said. She had taken against Alice from the first. Sam didn’t know what Hel had against the woman. But before she could snap back, Jakob speared her with a dark look.
“You know better than most how a monster might work through a channel, regardless of the distance, once a conduit between them has been forged,” Jakob said.
Sam had to admit Jakob’s theory was plausible?—that a month ago, Alice might have used the Mórrígan to kill her husband. They didn’t actually know how long the Mórrígan had been imprisoned, only when the Wild Hunt had begun to ride on her behalf.
Sam recalled the bitterness in Alice’s voice when she’d talked about the rules that bound channels, when they were born to do so much more, warning Sam not to trust the others with her experiments. When she’d confessed the Vespertine had never admitted her to their ranks, but saw fit only to use her, no matter how she bled for them.
Yes, Sam could understand why Alice might want the Vespertine dead. Only...
“But what about the Dearg-Due at the barracks?” Sam protested. There was no way anyone might think that was anything less than targeted, not with the bloodless bodies of soldiers being left on the doorstep of Dublin Castle. “I know Detective Lynch said the other attacks are unrelated, that they’re only attacking industry, but the barracks are not industry, which means it’s targeted. Alice is English, what reason would she have to attack them?”
“There might not be much of Alice left,” Hel said. “If the feathers and dreams are any indication, the Mórrígan already has her hooks in you, which means she has a conduit.”
Hel was right. And Sam found herself thinking of Alice, hollowed out the way Mr. Pearse had been?—the way she herself had felt, before the song had filled her.
“It’s pride that does it,” Jakob said, his face shadowed. “The channel thinks she is in control, that she can use the monsters to widow herself. But inch by inch, the monster takes her over, until her body is but a shell for something else. Somethingwrong.”
It made a terrible sort of sense. Alice made a devil’s bargain?—let the Mórrígan in to free her from the horrors of her husband. Only for the Mórrígan to plant a seed inside her that grew with every passing day, until Alice’s will was no longer her own. Presumably, when her influence grew strong enough, the Mórrígan would use Alice to free herself?—if that wasn’t what she was doing already with the Wild Hunt. The effects of rituals, from what Sam had read, had a tendency to collapse when the last of those who had performed them perished.
It still didn’t feel right?—Alice being the culprit?—and not only on account of the fact that she liked the older woman. Sam was forgetting something, something important. She could feel it, itching at the back of her mind like a moth’s wings, or?—
“The feather,” Sam breathed. Then, louder, looking up at the others: “The feather I pulled from my throat, my dreams of the Mórrígan, they started before I even met Alice.”
