No. The past was the past. She couldn’t afford to live in it, anymore. Death and its sleep awaited: rest, at long last; and oblivion, free from the grasp of fear. She pulled herself up, shaking; forced herself to breathe until the room came back into sharp focus.
“I don’t understand,” Isabelle said.
In her hand was a sphere of gold, topped by a crown. “It was the last thing I had of him,” Madeleine said. “The last thing anyone had of him, perhaps — I don’t know who kept what in this House. But I had to—” She shook her head, dazed. “Morningstar. It was Morningstar’s magic.”
But now it was gone in a burst of power, all spent like the gift of Elphon’s breath; and how would they defend themselves, if the shadow came back?
She looked at the door, at the walls; heard and saw nothing but the usual sounds of Silverspires at night. It was gone, whatever it was. But it hadn’t been a hallucination. And—
“You said it was what killed Oris.”
“Philippe saw it, I think,” Isabelle said. Her voice was still shaking.
Madeleine took in a deep, shaking breath; thinking of bodies shriveling and burning under the assault of magic; of Oris, crushed under the weight of gravity on the floor of Notre-Dame. “It’s killed six people, whatever it is. Come on. We have to tell Selene.”
* * *
PHILIPPE ran. It was undignified, and possibly useless, but he was past caring. Doors flashed by him, indistinguishable — at one point a door opened, and he almost toppled over someone in Harrier’s uniform. “Sorry,” he said, but didn’t stop. There was a noise at his back, a hiss like ten thousand open gas taps; a shadow, slithering across flat surfaces whenever he turned his head, just enough to make a fist of ice tighten around his belly — except that the shadows were growing larger and larger, and the lights in the corridors ahead of him were dimming, throwing his own large, distorted shadow across the wall like that of some monster.
Shadows. A creature of wings and fangs and of darkness — he’d wondered, back then, what he had summoned when he touched the mirror; but he didn’t need to wonder anymore. He knew.
As he ran, he tried to gather khi currents to him. But, without the calm of his trance, it was too hard to see the few threads that would be in the House; and all he could manage was a feeble ring of fire around his hand — which did nothing much to either reassure him or light his way.
He turned one last corner, and found himself in utter darkness. The hiss had gone away, and so had the shadows. So early, so easily? Slowly, carefully, he gathered more khi currents to him, widening the ring of fire in his hand until it lit the way ahead.
It was just a stretch of corridor, going to two rooms at the end: Asmodeus and Samariel, of course, the two lovers being accommodated close to each other. There was no noise coming from either bedroom. Philippe crept closer.
It was a bad idea. He should go back to his room, forget the whole incident; and come back later. This was… not a good time to be there. Not…
There was a sound, as he approached the end of the corridor: a slight hiss like an intake of breath, already slithering away. The shadows danced, around his ring of fire — out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of something folding huge wings, and sinking back upon itself, but it might have been nothing more than illusion.
The door to Samariel’s room opened easily, swinging with the tortured sound of ungreased hinges — surely it must have been heard all the way to Indochina. But no one moved, or spoke.
“Samariel?”
A slight sound, coming from the bed; a slithering of wet things from the wallpaper; a fist of shadows slowly closing around the lone light in the room. He took one step, then another and another, and approached the huge canopied bed in the center of the room.
The furniture was from another age: two bedside tables with thin, elegant curved legs, their drawer handles in the shape of butterflies; a mahogany commode with a marble top; a vase in that chinoiserie blue and white that looked even worse than the cut-rate porcelain the Chinese had foisted on the Annamite Imperial Court. His feet barely made any noise on the thick Persian rugs; and the khi currents in the room seemed to have shriveled and died around him, as if they’d been burned at the root.
His light, unsustained by any fire, shivered and died, leaving him in shadows. Another, stronger light took its place, the golden radiance of Morningstar’s hair and skin.
No. Not now. With all his strength he willed the vision to pass — it did not, but neither did it fully materialize. Instead, Morningstar remained where he was, standing by the farthest column of the canopy. He had his sword in his hand, and watched Philippe with burning eyes.
“I warned you,” he said, and his voice was like thunder, strong enough to make Philippe’s knees buckle. “I told you to seize power, or be destroyed. Do you see now?”
Philippe made no answer. There was none he could give — nothing, to this ghost of the past, this bitter, angry memory of whoever had cast the curse on Silverspires. He simply moved closer.
Samariel lay in bed, splayed like a puppet with cut strings; his legs and arms at impossible angles, curved like the corpses of eels, as if all the bones had been sucked out of his limbs. The sound Philippe had heard was the wet struggle to breathe through crushed lungs. Nausea, sharp and bitter, rose in his throat; he held it at bay, kneeling by the stricken Fallen. “Samariel?”
The skin — all that was left whole — was covered in bite marks; as if a snake had struck him, repeatedly; the same marks, by all reports, that had been on Oris’s corpse. The eyes — the eyes were still there, with that same, familiar, sarcastic intelligence. The mangled mouth opened, shaped around something — his name? “I’ll get help—” he said, but Samariel shook his head.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked; but Samariel said nothing, merely stared at him with those bright eyes; and magic rose in the room, a burning heat that picked at the strands of the spell around him, snapping them like burned matchsticks.
“You can’t—” he whispered. More and more strands were vanishing, though the strain of it should have been too much for a dying Fallen. “You can’t—”
“Seize power,” Morningstar whispered, his image wavering and bending as if in a great wind. “Seize power.”
He didn’t move as the magic wrapped itself around him, the spell unraveling moment after moment; staring into those bright, bright eyes and knowing exactly why Samariel was doing it. He had told him, all those days ago.
“I imagine it would be quite a setback for Selene to lose you….”
Behind him, the door opened again; and closed, with hardly a sound. “What do you think you’re doing here, boy?”
The face of Asmodeus, head of House Hawthorn, was twisted out of shape by grief and rage. I can explain, Philippe wanted to say. Ask Samariel. I can—
But Samariel would not speak, not anymore.
TEN. OLD FRIENDS
THE night had not ended well; and the morning had not started well, either. Selene sat in her office¸ staring at the papers strewn on them; at the memoirs of journeys in Indochina she’d been reading, back when her only worry had been how to best use Philippe for the good of the House — in hindsight, how much simpler those times had been, such easier moments compared to the tangle that awaited her now.