A Breath of Frost (45 page)

There was no gate.

She was risking everyone’s lives for nothing.

It was a
trick
.

Wind pushed at the windows and howled through the slats. Lightning struck the locked shutters, exploding them into sparks and splinters. It flashed again, hurling a spear of light at Sophie.

The house swallowed the lightning before it could touch her. It sucked it into the violet sparks, bloating them into embers and strange licks of lavender flames. Emma remembered that purple fire, remembered the open gate releasing hellhounds and Greymalkin warlocks.

Sophie had tricked her to get her blood to open the gate. In the Greymalkin House, the Sisters could force it open indefinitely.

Emma reached for the storm again.

Thunder shook the dust off the rafters. A crystal drop came off the chandelier, shattering on the ground. Snow blew through the broken window.

“You can’t hurt me, not in here. The Sisters told me which charms to make to use the house as a shield.” She took a step toward Emma. “You’ve been as lonely as I have. I know it. Don’t you want to be part of a real family?”

The rain stopped. The thunder retreated and even the mist blew apart, leaving the street clearer than any London street had ever been in recent memory. Too late.

The Sisters had found them.

“Where the hell did she go?”
Cormac demanded as Gretchen and Penelope closed in behind him. They stared at the dismal house.

“What just happened?” Penelope asked, stricken.

“Emma was right,” Cormac replied grimly as she went through his arsenal of amulets. “Her blood was the key. Only it wasn’t this gate she opened, but a hidden portal.”

Emma’s shout echoed clearly from the Greymalkin House. A storm gathered above their heads, raging with light and fire. Cormac launched himself at the gates.

The magical wards pulsed an angry acid green, flinging him off the way a dog flings water off its fur. He flew off his feet, landing hard on the edge of the pavement and tumbling into the road. He leaped into a crouch, barely avoiding a passing carriage. The horses nickered at him reproachfully. He pushed to his feet without a backward glance, even when they passed so
close one of them took a swipe at his shoulder. His sleeve was torn and there was a bloody scratch on his cheek.

He didn’t notice any of it.

He saw nothing but the gate and the house standing between him and Emma.

Gretchen and Penelope parted, scurrying out of his way. Pale glowing spiders crawled out from under Penelope’s hem, clustering at the base of the gates. They flared that same virulent green and she winced, sweat beading on her brow. Real spiders began to congregate, coming out of the bushes, the nearby mews and walking in a line across the street from the shadowy edge of the park.

Cormac used his iron dagger to try to pry the gates open. He gritted his teeth against the pain shooting up his arm. The blade slipped, coming away red.

“Emma’s blood,” Gretchen said as it hissed and boiled. It had already eroded the metal, pockmarking the edge of the iron magpie’s wings.

“That’s my girl,” he said softly.

“Let me try,” Moira called down. She pointed to the immense gargoyle on the Greymalkin roof. She couldn’t quite reach it, but the wards wouldn’t have let her touch it anyway. “Where do you want him? Right on the gates?”

“Combined with Emma’s blood, it might be enough to break them open,” Cormac agreed.

Moira leaned over, trying to whisper in the gargoyle’s ear. “I can’t reach him. I need to lure him closer with another gargoyle.” She looked around wildly, running over the roof until she found one attached to a rainspout.

“You’d better hurry,” Gretchen encouraged from the mouth of the laneway. “Because cloaking glamour or not, we’re starting to look suspicious.”

Moira whispered in the gargoyle’s ear. His wings were narrow and fluted. When they moved, they hardly made a sound at all. The rainspout creaked and then he was airborne. “Come on, little pip,” she crooned, darting back to the other side. She took a small bundle of bat wings from her belt and poured whiskey over it from a flask in her pocket. The little gargoyle dipped down in front of her. She nodded to the Greymalkin House. “Go on.”

The gargoyle flew too close to the wards and showered green sparks on the others waiting on the ground. The second time he circled around, the massive Greymalkin gargoyle growled. His eyes opened slowly, reptilian in their cold indifference.

Finally, after what felt like an excruciatingly slow eternity during which Cormac imagined hundreds of horrible deeds that could have made Emma scream, the Greymalkin gargoyle shifted.

His talons unclenched, dislodging dirt and debris. His stone wings turned a leathery gray and he pushed off the ornate parapet, snagged the wrought iron widow’s walk below, snapping off the points. He flew slowly, erratically, and against all laws of physics. The Greymalkin magic anchored him to the protection of the house, but the pull of Madcap spells eroded the magical chains.

But only a little.

The gargoyle swung toward Moira, snarling. She swung out, dangerously close to falling, and tossed the whiskey-soaked
bat wings and bird bones into his gaping mouth. He bit down reflexively, crunching through magic and marrow.

“To the gate!” she commanded.

The gargoyle descended with its own kind of grace, claws clutching the top of the gates and bending them. The sound of crushed metal made the hairs on the back of Cormac’s neck stand straight up.

“Ha!” Moira shouted smugly. “Bloody Keepers couldn’t do that!”

“That’s because they didn’t have Emma on their side,” Cormac said with a grim smile, as her blood ate through the spells locking the gates together.

“Or a Madcap.” She smirked.

“Or a Madcap,” he agreed.

The gargoyle continued to tear at the gate, green fire searing his stony talons. At the very first crack, a large black spider slipped through. The gate peeled apart slowly, like the rind of an orange. Spiders scurried up the path.

Cormac used his dagger again, slipping it between the doors. Gretchen broke a branch off a nearby tree and joined him, using her entire body as leverage. The iron creaked and groaned. The gargoyle descended, forcing them to cover their heads.

Emma screamed again.

Cormac and Gretchen exchanged grim glances and doubled their efforts, pushing until the veins pulsed in their temples and their knuckles popped uncomfortably. The gap widened, just enough to let Marmalade slip through, leading a parade of
glowing spiders. Wider and wider it opened, like the jaw of a beast with acid-green teeth. The gargoyle roared again and flew back to its perch.

The first spider scurried back toward them. Its glowing counterpart drifted free and raced up Penelope’s ankle. She paled, eyes snapping open when she saw whatever the spider had seen.

“Hurry.”

There was nowhere to run
.

Emma tried the door again but it held fast.

The Sisters drifted out of the portal hovering in midair, just under the chandelier. The purple light was as malignant as she remembered it. The stink of sulfur mingled with lemon balm. Ice clung to the banisters, creeping like ivy.

Sophie beamed at the Sisters in such a way that they might have been saints instead of warlocks. Lark looked as distracted and desolate as ever, but the blood dripping from her dress coalesced when it hit the cracked marble floor. The magic and life force of the murdered girls had fed them what they needed to stay anchored in this reality.

And now that they were in their own ancestral house, with not just one descendant but two, they were more powerful still. The Order might never get rid of them.

The lightning might not have stopped Sophie but it had at least broken the window open. The damp night breeze fluttered what was left of the curtains. Emma lunged for it. She was a whisper away, her fingertips brushing the wooden sill, when Sophie tackled her. She grabbed her ankles and Emma toppled, slamming into the floor hard enough to crack her teeth together. Her antlers scraped the wall. Dust lifted, choking her.

She kicked back and Sophie yelped when her finger got crushed, but she didn’t let go. Emma struggled to turn over onto her back to get better traction. Her hand slipped when the cut on her palm opened up, bleeding more profusely than such a shallow cut warranted.

“The Sisters taught me how to work my magic fully,” Sophie said. “I can work it backward and make every pain you’ve ever suffered come back worse than it was, right down to your very first aching tooth. That’s how I trapped the girls so they couldn’t fight back, so the Sisters could get stronger. And the footman who tried to protect poor Lilybeth. The Sisters can teach you too. And then one day we can join them.”

Blood dripped down Emma’s arm. Her palm pulsed with pain. She went limp, letting Sophie drag her backward, letting her get close enough for Emma to punch her in the eye. Sophie howled, shocked, her head snapping.

Ladies did not punch.

Ladies didn’t have antlers either.

Emma swung her head, prepared to run the other girl through if she was forced to. She felt foolish but oddly vindicated. She was beginning to rather like her horns. Sophie
slipped on Emma’s blood as she scrambled to get out of the way. “We’re family!” Sophie cried out.

“It’s a trap,” Emma yelled, hoping the others could hear her warning.

Suddenly, her scalp tightened, pain shooting into her skull. Every scraped knee and pinprick she’d ever suffered came rushing to the surface of her skin. Every bramble scratch, every bee sting, and bruise.

Her left wrist cracked loudly, snapping the way it had when she was nine years old and had fallen from a tree. It throbbed, full of hot needles. She and Sophie circled each other like two feral cats, all but hissing. Sophie had the audacity to look wounded, as though Emma had hurt her feelings.

The Sisters grew tired of waiting.

“Enough,” Magdalena snapped. Death’s-head moths fluttered out of her tangled hair. “We need you both for this.”

Power snaked out in tendrils as the Sisters approached, slapping at Emma hard enough to make her stumble. Ice crept over the marble, glittered on the shards of glass, and froze the air hard enough to make her teeth hurt. Tendrils of deadly nightshade curled out from Rosmerta’s belt, circling Emma’s ankles and her sprained wrist, tightening agonizingly. Pain strangled her voice momentarily.

Magdalena lifted her hands. Her long hair fell down her back, hung with spiders and beetles. “Come,” she called, her voice reverberating through the house. Wisps of violet light floated away on death’s-head moth wings to lure the innocent to the house. “Come,” she repeated as they drifted
outside. The soft glow made them look like perfect jeweled butterflies.

“Don’t struggle so,” Lark said in a sweet, high voice when Emma pulled at her restraints. “We need to make you one of us. Then we’ll be strong enough to find my beloved.”

“He’s dead,” Emma spat, tearing frantically at the ghostly plants and the ropes of violet energy pinning her to the wall. Sophie smiled and the pain in her wrist flared, the cut on her palm went red and violent. “Go back to the Underworld if you miss him so much!”

“He’s not there!” Lark screeched. Her voice scraped inside Emma’s head, making her vision waver. Her ears were being stabbed with the awful sound. Her heart raced. “I looked everywhere, didn’t I?” Maggots spilled out of her hands, squirming and wriggling until they turned to ice and shattered on the marble. “Didn’t I?” Blood poured off her hem.

The lilac ropes dragged Emma up the wall. She hung there, struggling. Despite knowing it would do no good, lightning crackled and rain dripped from the ceiling. Wind whipped through the hall. Rosmerta smiled greedily, her poisonous vines flaring virulently green.

The portal burned brighter and brighter.

Emma felt their whispers. It was more than the sound of the Sisters, it was the way they prowled inside her head, in her bones and her belly. They pushed and poked at her magic, prodded her memories, pinned her inside herself. She fought them as long as she could. But how does one fight the water while drowning?