Page 83 of The Scarlet Ball

“I’ve earned my right to this as much as any of you have. And I think if you stop me, that will be a compact broken. If I have come this far, if I have come to this place and left the rest behind me, I must be given the chance.”

They might still have tried, but Mielle spoke up, her voice cool and measured as expensive champagne.

“You want her to call her lord. Right now, she’s the only thing he might want more than he wants the end of your city.”

A babble of voices went up, and it was Martha, clever and quick-thinking Martha, who saved the day. She spat on the marble floor, and when it became a still pool of water, we could see in its depths the familiar skyline of the city we lived in. We saw the power lines go down, sagging against their great nests of wire. We saw the river churned up to deposit five feet of mud on the streets. We saw the fires start.

Mrs. de Lange made a rictus of her mouth.

“Very well,” she said, her voice as loud as mine. “You will call, but as first among us, I am bound to give you warning. This place holds the past even as it births the future.”

She closed her fist, revoking some protection I had not previously been aware of, and now I could hear it, or more precisely, now I could hear them. There were voices, dozens of them, girls as young as sixteen, and they shouted and cursed and cried for their mothers. One or two cried out in Dutch or German, the rest in English. I heard them call their own names, desperate to be remembered or to remind themselves. I heard Eliza Gelder, newest among them.

They had died here between the columns of bone, died for power, died for their families, died for beauty, but they had all died and not a single one of them rested easy.

Mrs. de Lange opened her fist, and the music resumed, drowning out the dead girls. When the living left, arm in arm with their lords, those girls would be all that you could hear.

“All right, darling,” she said. “Call him.”

I turned to Mielle, squeezing her hand with my good one, and with a look, I sent her to the sidelines. I didn’t know what would become of her if I failed, but as my friends and I used to say, you don’t have to be faster than the gendarmes, you only need to be faster than your slowest friend. For this, I would be slower than she was.

I stood at the center of that place, which was a palace and was also the rib cage of some vast and terrible thing that had never loved us and never would. Someday these giants would come back, and the book would close upon us, but right now, they slept, and I closed my eyes.

“Sebastian Rowe, come to me,” I whispered.

The wind lifted as if it had been waiting for my command, rose until it howled through the ballroom, something too large turning over and over again in a space too small. The lights flickered and dimmed, nearly went out before they flared again. Even then they were unable to hold back the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean at night, the menace of ships wrecked for nothing more than the pleasure of it.

The temperature dropped, winter and then below, and I let it come into me. It took away the aches of my body, because nothing hurt when it got cold enough.

My bare skin prickled with electricity, and far, far above me, eyes opened and teeth were bared in something older than a smile.

“Come on,” I said, and then, “Stop fucking around.”

The pressure dropped hard, popping my ears, and suddenly I was lifted straight off the ground, the wind powerful enough that the people below screamed. I caught a glimpse of Mr. de Lange and the lord next to him whose name I did not know, some little ruler of the lowland flood staring up in shock, because they did not recognize this power or this fear.

The storm drank the air from my lungs and gave me back cold. I imagined ice crystals crawling up my throat, freezing me from the inside out, I would never be warm, never be warm again, because this was a storm, and it did not serve.

There was something feral about him now. I had never realized before how much he had tamed himself from the beginning, even when he came to me that first night at Howard House, even when he killed the man whose body he wore. He had learned the rules to please me, he followed them so he might stay with me, but that was before he had devoured another demon lord.

He was something else now, and I realized with a thrill deep in the pit of my belly that he still wasn’t satisfied.

“Come on,” I whispered again, and in the grip of the storm, I let my head fall back, my throat stretched out for him.

The pain was terrible, the sound was worse. There was a grinding, ugly scrape, deafening. Someone was screaming, probably me, and someone was bleeding, definitely me. The blood flowed down my chest, would have further ruined my gown if the storm hadn’t drunk down every single drop, some enormous mouth closing over the wound.

Purple-gray flowers exploded behind my eyes, and I had to fight for every breath. My heart beat like it was trying to escape my body, and my hands closed over and over again on nothing. In my ears, I heard the chorus of dead girls, Hello, sister, come and join us, and no.

“Stop.”

I shaped the word in my mouth, forced it past my lips, and as it hung in the air between us, I knew that this wasn’t going to work. He loved me, and for him, this was what that meant. Love was consumption, love was a devouring, and when I was gone—

Gone?

Yes, gone. Gone as in over, gone as in done. I don’t go on forever, and I’ll get a lot less than forever if you keep at this.

Forever.

What a stupid time to be honest, but all right. No, not forever, but more. More than this. More of me. More of us.