Whisper the Dead (The Lovegrove Legacy) (37 page)

Magdalena vanished and reappeared beside them, trailing icy light. The horse’s sides heaved and ice crackled in his mane.
He ignored Cormac’s pull on the reins, turning right to get away from Magdalena.

“She’s herding us,” Cormac shouted above the whirling storm. He struggled to control the frightened horse.

“Where?” Emma asked, though she thought she knew the answer.

“Greymalkin House.”

“Tobias, what are you doing?” Gretchen struggled in his arms, making the same noises a wounded badger would make. Tobias held on tighter. “You have to stop!”

“Gretchen,” Moira’s voice was strangled. “There are Rovers closing in.”

“I don’t care if they rob the place,” Gretchen said.

“That’s not what they’re here for,” Moira replied grimly. “Someone’s sent them here while the Greybeards are useless. And we can’t hold them off, not the two of us.”

“We just need to hold them off long enough for me to break the spell.” Gretchen struggled harder against Tobias’s grip.

“I’ll have to break that one’s arms to make him let go of you,” Moira said.

“I have a better idea,” Gretchen said. Or possibly the worst she’d ever had. Or the best. It was hard to tell.

Tobias was a shape-shifter. They needed him to fight the Rovers and rouse the others. He’d once told her that shifting into wolf shape burned any malevolent magic out of a shape-shifter. She could free him. She just had to force him to wear the
wolf. The pull of his own magic had to be inexorable, had to fill him up so there was no room left for any other magic.

She reached into the front of her corset, where she’d hidden the vial of wolfwater. She’d half-expected the potion to taste like snow or fire or wild herbs. Instead, it tasted like what it was: muddy rainwater. For a frozen moment, nothing happened.

He continued to hold her pinned against his body. The Rovers kept on advancing. The guests danced on and on.

It was a tickle at first, then a cold burning down to her belly, as if she’d eaten too many ices too quickly. A shiver raced under her skin, pricking painfully.

The change was fluid and excruciating. She was ice melting and reforming. Her bones dissolved. She slid like rain down a drainpipe and Tobias released her. There was nothing left of her to hold on to.

She landed on four legs, disoriented. She was still Gretchen, but everything looked and felt different. Her vantage point was so much lower, all hips and legs and frock coats billowing. Her joints worked differently, her center of balance shifted. And when her tail moved, she nearly fell over. She smelled everything—beeswax, lemon balm, sweat, hair oil, floor polish.

The wolf trapped inside Tobias.

He backed away from her, blue eyes wild. She prowled toward him, hunting him.

A Rover crawled in through one of the windows. Pip attacked him, smashing into the back of his head until he slumped over the sill, unconscious. Two more thundered into the ballroom. Gretchen snapped at one, her teeth closing over his leg, tearing
through linen and flesh. The taste of his blood should have sickened her, but it didn’t. He howled, stumbling. Moira broke a chair over his head.

“Bloody hell,” she added, giving the giant wolf that was Gretchen a wide berth.

Gretchen lunged at Tobias, knocking him back. He landed on his back, and she slapped her paws on his chest, growling.

Finally, finally, his wolf answered.

While Gretchen was clumsy and disoriented
in her new body, instinct gave Tobias a undeniable feral grace. He slunk around a couple still whirling in their own frozen moment, barely brushing the woman’s skirts. He leaped over the broken chair and landed on the third Rover, who had a fistful of Moira’s hair. Pip dove for the Rover’s face, breaking his nose so it bled down his chin, but he still wouldn’t let go. Tobias swiped at his thigh with his claws, tearing through pant leg and muscle. He fell, clutching at the claw marks. The ragged wound was so deep it showed glimpses of the bone beneath. Moira yanked herself free.

“I saw at least six more of them in the garden,” Moira warned. “Gretchen, you need to be Gretchen again.”

It felt better to be a wolf. She didn’t feel the loss of Godric so keenly; it didn’t burn into her marrow because even her marrow
had shifted. She was finally as wild on the outside as she felt on the inside. She could stay like this forever.

Tobias changed back; she could smell the human in him overpowering the wolf. He crouched beside her, naked and calm. “Gretchen,” he said gently. “You saved me. Now we have to save the others.”

She whined, longing for long nights spent running through the forest with nothing but the stars for company. Her ball gown was in tatters on the floor, where it belonged.

“You’re stronger than this,” he insisted. “And you’re the only one who can break the spell. Change back.”

She didn’t want to.

“Please, Gretchen. We need you.”

The combination of his plea and the feel of ice crystals forming under the pads of her paws convinced her, but only because she imagined Godric was the one freezing her toes with his dis-pleasure.

Fur turned to skin, bones reshaped, fingers formed. She let the wolf in her retreat, let the human girl take over with her grief over her brother, her fear for her cousins, her frustration that she would never find her place in a world where the girl always won out over the wolf.

She nearly howled at the loss of it.

Tobias tugged the tablecloth off the refreshment table and wrapped it around her before ducking into the privacy of the shadows. Teeth chattering, she felt the heaviness of her legs, the fragile confines of her body. Dully, she took one of the bottles from Moira. Chips of green crystal and salt swirled around the
angelica and wormwood leaves. “We need to put it on their third eye,” she murmured. Her voice felt strange in her throat.

Tobias returned wearing a linen shirt and buff trousers he’d stolen from their hosts’s bedroom. He carried another set of clothes for Gretchen. “I thought you’d prefer these,” he said quietly, handing her trousers. “They belong to the young son of the house. They should fit you.”

“Thank you,” she said, touched.

Moira rolled her eyes. “Could you flirt later? We’re about to be overrun here.”

Telling herself she wasn’t blushing because there was simply no time for that kind of foolishness, she stepped behind the curtains to get dressed.

A lit torch crashed through a window.

Moira stomped it out as Gretchen rushed to anoint the First Legate, rubbing the potion between his brow. He jerked like a marionette whose strings had tightened abruptly. While Tobias explained what he could of the situation, Gretchen woke Daphne. She jolted into consciousness, looking furious.

More smoke from the hallway and the smell of scorched carpeting.

“They’re going to burn the place down around us, with everyone frozen inside,” Tobias said harshly. “We’re the sacrifice.”

Fire continued to consume the house, closing in on the ballroom. The curtains went up in flames, snapping and crackling as they belched black smoke. Moira coughed, pulling her cravat up over her mouth and nose. “It’s spreading,” she said, peering down the hall.

They only managed to release a few more Keepers before the next wave of Rovers closed in. They stood in the gardens, blocking escape and throwing more torches into the house. Moira and Gretchen continued to dispense the potion as quickly as they could.

The first few Keepers went out the broken windows to fight off the Rovers. Disoriented witches woke to a house filled with fire. Smoke hung from the ceiling and the yellow-and-orange light flickered violently. Shouts and the clash of swords and daggers drifted in from outside. The First Legate dispatched more people to fight or find water. “And a way out,” he snapped. “For God’s sake, clear a path.”

“We need to find the linking spell,” Tobias said as the chaos of guests trying to escape the fire reached a crescendo. “We have to break the connection so Sophie can’t feed on the sacrifice.”

“Get everyone out first,” he ordered. “Start with her.” He gestured at his daughter.

Daphne shook her head, even as a cough racked through her. “I can help you find the spell.”

“Don’t argue with me, girl,” her father shouted. “Get outside!” A Keeper picked her up around the waist and tossed her over his shoulder.

Gretchen had used up the last of her potion, and there were only a few more people in the ballroom and the various servants of the house to release with the remains of the second bottle. The real danger now was the panicked jostling and the inexorable smoke, impossible to fight. The windows in the conservatory were being broken as an escape route. She saw a
grandmother hoisting a candlestick like a club to use against the Rovers. She looked keen to bash someone’s head in.

“The Keepers are getting the last people out.” Tobias handed Gretchen a wet strip of tablecloth to tie over her nose. “Run!”

The dark of the smoke pressing in on them and the brutal flashes of fire made it feel like they would never get out. The screaming gave way to choking and coughing and stifled sobs as people tried to feel their way out. Gretchen brushed against a metal door handle, branding a vicious welt into her arm. Burning debris rained from the ceiling, and Tobias bent over her, using his body as a shield.

They crawled through the jagged window, the door secured shut from the outside by a Rover. The air was sweet and clean and Gretchen gulped it down like a dessert ice.

Daphne shoved through the frantic crowd toward them. “I’m better with a pendulum than anyone else here,” she insisted. She unclasped the opal pendant from around her neck. “No matter what my father thinks, I can help.”

She dangled her necklace like a pendulum with her right hand, letting it swing over her witch knot. “Is the connection spell anchored in Grace House?”

The pendulum circled clockwise.

“Is it in the ballroom?” Daphne asked.

The pendulum circled in the opposite direction.

“Grace House must have twenty bedrooms alone,” Gretchen said. “This could take hours.”

“Then don’t interrupt,” Daphne snapped. “You’ll only make
it worse.” She went back to staring intently at the pendulum. “Is the connection spell in the library? The kitchens? The attic?”

The pendulum circled both ways, then swung side to side, confused.

“Try the roof,” Moira interjected, soot on her face. “Where else would it be safe long enough to be used while everyone and everything burns?”

Daphne opened her mouth to object to being ordered about by a Madcap, then shut it with a snap. “It does make sense,” she said grudgingly. “Is the pendulum on the rooftop?”

The pendulum made wide clockwise circles.

Moira nodded. “Right. I’ll go.”

“Let me,” Tobias said. “It could be dangerous.”

Moira snorted disdainfully. “A Greybeard balancing on a ridge pole? You’d fall on your pretty head. No, this is what Madcaps do, remember?”

“Help Greybeards?” Gretchen said with a commiserating smile.

“Don’t tell the others,” Moira retorted before tightening her cravat securely over her nose again.

Fire shot through the house windows like dragon tongues licking the sky. The light pulsed hungrily. The neighbors evacuated their own houses for fear the fire would jump from building to building. Most of the guests were running out into the road to find their carriages. The Rovers, outnumbered, had run off.

Gretchen should have felt relief.

She felt only a deeper, colder fear.

“Has anyone seen Emma?”

“She wasn’t here,” Tobias replied, soot marks in his hair. His shirt was pockmarked with burns.

“And Penelope?”

Daphne looked at Gretchen. “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Lucius Beauregard did this to us,” she replied. “He mesmerized us all somehow. And when he told us to, we became music-box dolls, stuck in a pattern.”

“Son of a bitch,” Tobias ground out, his blue eyes turning arctic. “I didn’t see him activate the spell. And he was just made an honorary Keeper. Who else has he hypnotized?”

“He took Penelope,” Daphne said.

Gretchen turned to go without a word, the broken glass from the conservatory windows crunching under her shoes.

“Gretchen, wait,” Daphne called out. She pulled the poppet they’d made of Sophie from her reticule. “I took this from my father’s pocket,” she said, tossing it to her. “You’ll need it.”

Penelope fell into Lucius’s memories. As always, they were out of order, and she spun through them like a kaleidoscope, all colors and patterns that made sense only for a brief moment.

He hurried down an underground tunnel. He had to hunch over in order not to hit his head on the damp stone. The old mines of Paris had been converted into catacombs for the dead during the French Revolution. The cemeteries were emptied to make space for buildings and houses. A river of bones had decanted down into the mine tunnels.
Knights, cheesemakers, wine sellers, dancing masters, merchants, and old kings all gathered here, heedless of titles and wealth
.

More importantly, so did the bones of those who’d died in the riots at la Place de Grève, and those who’d laid down for “Madame la Guillotine.”

Seraphine, one of the Seven Sisters, had died in Paris during the Revolution
.

It took Lucius a full year to find the right gatekeepers and street urchins to mesmerize into helping him, and then another to explore the catacombs
.

The burble of water from the aqueducts and springs was his ever-constant companion. Fossils gleamed in the wet limestone before it opened up into the catacombs. He passed walls made of leg bones, skulls lined along the top. Finger bones and cracked jaws made patterns delicate as lacework. He barely noticed. Finally, finally, he had what he needed
.

Seraphine’s finger bone was tucked safely inside his coat pocket. He wasn’t able to find anyone to read the bones, but three bone-singers assured him that her ghost lingered, hungry and desolate. “You’ll be with your sisters soon enough,” he murmured, his voice echoing in the tunnel as he climbed back up to the city streets. “And I’ll be with my love.”