Hel looked at her sharply. “When?”
“That second night,” Sam answered. The night before they went to Ashdown Manor and Sam encountered Alice.
But there was someone she’d met before the dreams had started. Someone who wielded her inability to lie the way Jakob did the jingling of his boots. Who hadn’t actually denied she was behind the attacks, onlyimpliedotherwise. Someone who had broken into Mr. Enfield’s apartments on account of “compromising correspondence,” trusting in the Edwardian love of euphemism to conceal what Mr. Enfield had truly uncovered: evidence againstherthat he’d needed to bring to the man he loved.
Hel cursed.
“Róisín Shinagh,”Jakob growled. “Damn it, Iknewit.”
“Every time a man disappears, there she is,” Hel said darkly.
A woman who walked with crows, with intimate knowledge of the Otherworld and a reflexive dislike of the English?—but still a woman, and the Vespertine admitted only men to their ranks.
“She must have needed Lord Lusk in order to gain access to the Mórrígan,” Sam said. “That’s why she was so furious when he died.” Her dreams of freeing the Mórrígan had died with him.
“Do you think she’s hollow?” Sam asked. “That it was the Mórrígan the whole time?”
“No,” Hel said shortly, at the same time as Jakob said, “Yes.”
“She may have gone a little Other, but her actions are logical,” Hel said, “human. She’s no puppet.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jakob said, seeming almost angry. “It doesn’t change what I have to do.”
ThatIagain. Sam hated the sound of it.
“You can’t mean to murder the Mórrígan!” Sam said, but the look on his face said he meant to do exactly that. “She didn’t ask to be captured; she’s the victim. There must be another way. If we can find Miss Shinagh, if we can convince her to stop?—”
Hel looked thoughtful, but Jakob wasn’t having it.
“Then what, Miss Harker?” Jakob said harshly. “We’ll keep the Mórrígan imprisoned forever? Perform the rites every year to keep her caged? And you would think that a kindness?”
He was right: That was no solution.
“If Miss Shinagh has a relationship with the Mórrígan,” Hel mused, “we might be able to come to an arrangement?—the Mórrígan’s freedom in exchange for everyone’s lives.”
“You can’t seriously intend on reasoning with that monster,” Jakob said scornfully. “She means to kill Miss Harker.”
Hel shook her head. “The Folk are dangerous, slippery and subtle, but say this for them: They do not break their bargains. The penalty is too steep, even for them.” And Miss Shinagh was close enough to the Folk at this point that Sam suspected the same went for her.
“Even if you’re right, even if Miss Harker can somehow slip death’s grasp, you said it yourself, the Mórrígan already has her hooks in her,” Jakob said grimly, his hand clenching around the knife. “There is only one escape from that.”
Sam suddenly understood. Jakob thought the same thing was happening to Sam as had happened to her mother?—that the events his father had always warned him about had finally come to pass. Only instead of putting Sam down as he’d always sworn he would, he meant to save her the same way his father had with Sam’s mother by killing the monster responsible. This was, after all, what he did.
I like protecting people,he’d said.I’m good at killing things.
“Jakob?—” Sam began.
“She’s killing people, Samantha,” Jakob said harshly. “And she’ll kill more if she’s released. Includingyou, in case you’ve forgotten. I know she looks like a woman, but she’s a monster, and when a monster gets a taste for human flesh, it doesn’t matter if it’s not their fault, you put them down.”
He was preparing himself for the kill. It was awful to watch, like he was drowning a piece of himself with it. Sam wondered if he was thinking of baby manticores. Of their chubby baby cheeks and kitten bodies.
Tears stung Sam’s eyes. “I won’t be a part of this.”
“That,” Jakob said, “is probably for the best.”
“I won’t either,” Hel said grimly.
At this, Jakob looked pained. “Very well.” And when he stepped up into the carriage, his spurs jingling, he didn’t look back. Hel took off in the opposite direction, her long tan coat snapping behind her, the crows crying above as if in mourning.
