Hel stalked up to the ivy-choked door and sawed through the vines with a knife. It seemed strangely visceral, as if she were cutting into the flesh of some great beast. At last the scarred wood of the door was revealed, the vines curling back like skin from a wound.
None of them were under the illusion there would be knocking. Hel withdrew a set of lockpicks from her suit pocket. After an agonizing moment, the lock gave with a satisfyingclick.
Disappearing her picks, Hel drew her revolver. Miss Shinagh drew a long knife from a sheath at her hip, a strange blade that shone like moonlight on water. Sam clutched her camera in both hands, trembling.
The doors swung wide with a creak more befitting a haunted house than a prized mansion. Sam dizzied as she stepped inside, feeling off balance. The air within was stale, the crystal chandeliers unlit, the mourning crepe half falling from the windows. Chanting came from somewhere deeper in, slippery and rhythmic.
Miss Shinagh hissed as she stepped over the threshold, her hand going to her head as if it had been pierced with a sudden pain. “There’s a dampening worked into the wainscoting,” she managed. “A ward against the Otherworld. I can’tfeelher.”
Sam knew what she meant: She felt vaguely sick, just as she had in Mr. Bishop’s flat, as if the song were screaming in her ears and she simply could not hear it. It was strange; she hadn’t felt that way the last time she’d been here.
“Did one of your feelings happen to let on where they might be keeping the Mórrígan?” Hel asked Sam.
“I suspect it’s behind the hidden door in Mr. Ashdown’s office,” Sam managed. The song, it had led her there for a reason. “There are stairs that go down into a kind of secret dungeon. I can’t imagine they’d have two of those.”
“You’d be surprised,” Hel said dryly.
“Can you take us there?” Miss Shinagh demanded, sounding as if she couldn’t get the wind back in her. As if the dampening were drinking all her strength down and leaving none for her.
“I think so,” Sam said, praying she had the right of it?—that she’d paid sufficient attention when Alice had taken her back, still dazed from her encounter with M. Voland.
“You think so?” Miss Shinagh said sharply.
“Yes,” Sam said firmly.
Quick as she could, Sam led them down the wending path through the manor, ducking through secret doors concealed behind oil paintings spotted with mold that Sam swore wasn’t there before. Occasionally they had to stop while Hel picked a lock or, failing that, dissolved it with acid. They slunk past chanting that spilled beneath doors carved with apotropaic glyphs, the air hazy with incense as the halls thickened and thinned around them, snaking like the intestines of some great beast, leaving Sam with the uncomfortable sense of being swallowed.
Until at last, the three of them stood before a familiar door. It looked larger than it had before, the grain of the honeyed wood illuminated in a creeping black mold, like swirls of ink. For a moment, Sam glimpsed faces imprisoned in the wood, twisting, screaming, begging for release.
It wasn’t real, Sam told herself, even as she shivered. Just a vision.
The door to Mr. Ashdown’s office swung open on that awful red room, with its oil paintings of deer bristling with arrows and stuck boars, eyes rolling with fear. The scent of incense was fainter, overtaken with the sweet, pungent aroma of cigar smoke. It was a good sign: If the ritual wasn’t being performed here, there ought to be less resistance.
Still, fear rose like acid in her throat as she recalled M. Voland’s assault. She could still feel the carved frame of the painting pressing in against her back, the glassy eyes of all those taxidermized heads watching as he turned her wrist veins out.
Sam had met people like M. Voland before. Men who were so intoxicated on their own importance, who believed they were entitled to whatever caught their fancy simply on account of theirwantfor it. Men for whom the wordnowasn’t so much a barrier as a price to be paid.
And it occurred to Sam that it wasn’t just M. Voland?—that this was what the Vespertine did. They took. Took from those they held beneath them. Took because no one could deny them. The land, the blood of channels, the Mórrígan...
It was as if they were monsters in plain sight, only no one saw them, because they dressed in suits and smiled with all their flat white teeth. Because you were a woman and they were men, and those in power feared that if these men were judged and found wanting, they would be too.
Trust in the rules. They will keep you safe,her mother had said, and they did, to an extent. But you were still a rabbit. Just a rabbit in a cage.
Sam hated the fear that flooded her then, the utter helplessness. It felt as if there was nothing she could do, as if this was simply the way the world worked: There were predators, and there was prey. And she was no predator.
You could be,the song whispered in Sam’s thoughts, and heaven help her, but if M. Voland had been there, Sam would have let the song come flooding in, let it scrape her from her body and fill her until there was nothing left of her to experience what came next for good or ill. Done anything at all, if it meant she might be the wolf instead of the rabbit.
No,Sam told herself firmly. She could do this on her own terms. Besides, this time, she wasn’t alone.
She snapped photographs of the more damning titles on the bookshelves, of his documents, of the alchemical diagrams.
“I can feel her.” Miss Shinagh’s eyes were half lidded, her head tilted back, as if listening. “She’s close.”
“Sam?” Hel said.
“This way.” Sam retrieved the queen from its hidden compartment in Mr. Ashdown’s desk and moved to the chessboard, changing out the pawn. The painting swung wide, the air awash with the iron tang of old blood and mildew, revealing the peeling yellow wallpaper with its cloying clusters of roses. Electric lights hummed above, drowning out the shadows with their cold, relentless light.
Hel glanced at Sam; Sam shook her head. This was as far as she’d gotten. Revolver in hand, Hel eased down the stairs. Róisín went next, her knife held so the blade skated back along her forearm. Sam followed, her eyes darting to every shadow, as if M. Voland might be hiding within it. Foolish, she told herself. He would be at the ritual. He wouldn’t be here. But she could still feel his bruising grip on her wrists, the lance of pain in her shoulders as he lifted her effortlessly, so high her toes had to scrabble for purchase.
