THE ONCOMING STORM
MADELEINE woke up, and wished she hadn’t.
She was lying in an infirmary bed. She would have known that peeled, faded painted ceiling and its flower-shaped moldings anywhere. When she tried to move, every joint in her body seemed to protest at the same time, with a particular mention to a crick in her neck that seemed to have become permanently stuck. What— There had been the strangeness of the dragon kingdom—the flight to the cathedral—
“Oh, you’re awake. Good.” Emmanuelle’s face hovered into view. She looked better, but distinctly worried.
“What did I miss?” Madeleine said, or tried to. Her tongue was as unresponsive as a lump of wood—her mouth felt full of grit and ashes, and her words came out garbled. She tried again, felt something shift and tear. “What—?”
“Aragon said you needed to rest,” Emmanuelle said.
“You’re—you’re fine,” Madeleine said. “You’re healed.”
Emmanuelle nodded.
“I’m glad,” Madeleine breathed. At least they had succeeded in that. At least . . . “Philippe—”
“He left. Isabelle went after him,” Emmanuelle said. “She has some foolish notion that she can change his mind.” Her eyes—her eyes had changed somehow. They were . . . older, as if something had made her age in the space of a few hours. What had happened? Had Philippe healed her? She was standing, and didn’t seem to be in any pain other than extreme weariness. Surely that meant they had succeeded; but then, why did she seem so distant? Something . . .
The House, she realized, and felt as though something was squeezing her heart. Something was wrong with the House. She could feel it, even through the tenuous link she had with it.
The House’s magic was coming apart.
A commotion: Aragon’s raised voice, and then steps, getting closer to her. “I know she’s awake,” Selene said. “You should have notified me before.”
If Emmanuelle looked ill at ease, Selene looked unchanged. She was dressed in her usual men’s swallowtail and trousers, regal, apparently unaffected by whatever seemed to have oppressed the atmosphere. “Madeleine.” Her voice was cold, cutting. “Will you leave us?” she asked Emmanuelle.
Emmanuelle winced. She cast a hesitant glance at Madeleine, but withdrew; her mouth shaped around words she never did get to pronounce. An apology? But what for?
“You’re going to chastise me for lacking to do my duty,” Madeleine said. “We were trying to help Emmanuelle.”
Selene said nothing.
“Isabelle thought that, if we could find Philippe, we could convince him to help—” It sounded small and pitiful, when she said it; with none of the hard-edged certainty she’d felt when she went with Isabelle; as if whatever magic had flowed out of her had utterly, finally gone, leaving only the taste of ashes in her mouth.
Selene’s face had not moved. She let Madeleine’s awkward, spluttering speech fade into silence. Only then did she speak, and her voice was entirely emotionless. “I would reproach you for that in ordinary circumstances, yes. I expect the alchemist of House Silverspires to be available when I have need; and not gone into God knows what senseless adventure with her apprentice, whom you’re supposed to keep an eye on, not indulge, may I remind you?”
“In ordinary circumstances.” Madeleine struggled to think through the layers of cotton wool that seemed to fill her mind. “I don’t—”
Selene raised a hand, and power crackled in the room like the prelude to a thunderstorm. “You will remain silent. How could you be such a fool, Madeleine?”
“I don’t understand—”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. You knew. You knew the rules, and you flaunted them. How long has it been going on?”
“I—” She knew. The only thing that came to Madeleine’s befuddled mind was the truth. “Five years. Nights are hard, when you remember the past. It’s—” She took in a deep, burning breath. “The dead and the dying and the bloodbath at Hawthorn—”
“Be silent. I don’t want your excuses, Madeleine.”
“Then what do you want?” She knew, even before the words were out of her mouth, that they were a mistake; knew it when Selene’s face hardened like cooling glass, impossibly brittle and smooth at the same time.
“You know exactly what I want. I’m not throwing you out of the House in your current state, which Aragon tells me is probably so poor because of your use of angel essence. But I want you gone, Madeleine.”
Gone. Cast out from Silverspires; stripped out of her refuge, her last rampart against Asmodeus and the nightmares of the night Uphir had been deposed. Her worst nightmare coming to meet her, and she couldn’t even seem to muster any energy for fear; for anything but the sick feeling in her belly. “But—I have nowhere else to go.”
“You should have thought of that before you got addicted to essence,” Selene said. She snapped her fingers, almost absentmindedly; and something was gone from Madeleine’s mind, a noise she hadn’t been aware of, but whose lack was overwhelming, a glimpse into the abyss. “I withdraw from you the protection of the House. Go your own way.” And with that, she turned and left—that . . . that bitch. Emmanuelle had been an essence addict, once; and she’d been allowed to clean up her act, to go on as if nothing were wrong; but Emmanuelle was Selene’s lover, and of course she’d be favored over everyone else. Of course.
She couldn’t seem to think straight—as in the dragon kingdom, except that it wasn’t serenity that plagued her this time. Her thoughts kept running around in circles, around the gaping wound left by the loss of the House; couldn’t seem to coalesce into anything useful. But still . . .
Still, she was damned if she’d let Selene have her way. “Selene?” She forced the words through a mouth that felt plugged with cotton.
Selene didn’t turn, but she did pause for a moment.
“You’re not Morningstar,” Madeleine said. “You’re not even a fraction of what he was.”
“Perhaps not,” Selene said. “But I am the head of this House, Madeleine. And nothing will change that.”
* * *
PHILIPPE came out of the House under the same gray, overcast skies of Paris. He barely could remember a time when they hadn’t been thus, when he had come in from Marseilles under a sun reminiscent of the shores of Indochina, a long time ago, in another lifetime.
He carried a basket of figs, dry-cured sausage, and bread that had been forced upon him by Laure when he went to the kitchens to say good-bye—Laure hadn’t said anything or accused him of anything, merely shaken her head sadly, like a mother whose chicks had had to flee the nest far too early. He’d tried, then; to warn her; to tell her she should leave the House before it collapsed around her, and realized that she’d lived for so long in it that nothing existed outside its boundaries. It had been . . . sobering—and made him think, again, of Isabelle and what she had become.
He stood, for a while, on the boundary between the House and the city, by the raised parapet of Pont d’Arcole, watching the oily waves of the Seine. He had feared the river once, like everyone in Paris; but now his eyes were opened to its true nature, and there was nothing to fear. Dragons ran sleek and superb beneath the water, elegant shapes racing one another; if he frowned hard enough, he could forget the broken-off antlers, the patches of dry scales on their bodies, the dark film that made their eyes seem dull, like gutted fish at a monger’s stall. For a moment; an impossible, suspended moment, he was back on the banks of the Perfumed River; with the smell of jasmine rice and crushed garlic, and the sweet one of banana flowers, all the things he should have set aside when ascending.
Past, all of this, gone by. There was no point in grieving for faded things.
Aragon had said he should forget it all; that the way to Annam was closed forever; that he should accept that his new home was in Paris, and act accordingly. But Aragon, who liked to call himself independent and unbound by loyalty to any House, still lived through his services to them; still drew a salary from Silverspires, and the lesser Houses he helped. Aragon could no more envision a world without Houses than he could stop breathing.
And Isabelle . . .
No, he couldn’t think of Isabelle now; or of what she might have meant to him. He couldn’t afford to.
What he was sure of was this: he would rather die, or forsake any hope of ascending ever again, than be forced into service once more.
Isabelle might have given in, but he wouldn’t. He threw a piece of broken stone into the river, and watched the ripples of its passage until they faded away. Then he shook himself, and went to look for the nearest omnibus stop.
* * *
MADELEINE tried not to brood, but it was all but impossible. Her mind was an empty place; a yawning abyss opening onto the night of the coup; and now she had neither angel essence nor the House’s protection to dull the knife’s edge of memory. In her dreams she smelled blood, the thick, sluggish, sickening odor of a slaughterhouse; and remembered Morningstar’s measured steps: the fear, shooting through her, that he would pass her by, that he would leave her to die in the darkness. In her dreams she never made it to Silverspires; or she stood on the Pont-au-Change and watched the ruins of the House, with the acrid smell of magic in her nostrils. In her dreams Asmodeus laughed, and whispered that he had won.
She lay alone in her room. She supposed Selene had given orders that no one could visit her; it would be just like her, drive home the sheer soul-destroying misery of her situation. Or perhaps no one wanted to see the pariah; to think on how their own existence within the House depended on its master’s whims.
Aragon, when he did come, was brusque. She gathered she wasn’t the only one he needed to take care of, or perhaps it was the atmosphere of the House, finally getting through to him even though he wasn’t bonded to it.
“I can’t do anything for you,” he said. His lips were two thin lines in the severity of his face. “Your lungs are all but gone.”
Madeleine suppressed a bitter smile. “How long do I have?”
“You know as well as I do. A few years maybe? Unless we’re talking some kind of miracle.”
“Miracles never happen here,” Madeleine said, with terrible bleakness. “Not in this city, not in this House.” She had felt it; the change to the fabric of Silverspires; the worm, gnawing away at the layers of protections Morningstar had painstakingly laid out during the founding of the House. Perhaps it was better if she left; soon there wouldn’t be any refuge here anyway. But where else would she go? There was nowhere, nothing; and the thought of taking Claire’s charity in Lazarus was a draft too bitter to be swallowed.
“You should have told me,” Aragon said, finally, as he was about to leave: the professional reserve peeled away, to reveal—what? Anger? Hurt? She couldn’t read him, never had been able to. “You didn’t have to—”
Madeleine thought of Elphon; of blood, warm and sticky on her hands; and the ghost of pain in her hip, the acrid memory of fear as she crawled out of Hawthorn. “There are some things I can’t live with, Aragon.”
“There are some things that will kill you, and you should have known that.” Aragon stared at her for a while. “See me before you leave. I can give you a few addresses and names. You don’t have to head into the unknown.”
“Thank you,” Madeleine said, but she was too drained, too hollow to care. Silverspires had been her life, her refuge; and now, soon—all too soon—it would be gone, leaving only a bitter memory in her thoughts. She needed . . . a plan, something she could cling to; but nothing seemed to penetrate the gloom around her.
* * *
THE omnibus was crowded, but the crowd lessened as they drew away from the major attractions. They passed the empty space where Les Halles had once been, the charred trees on rue de Rivoli, under the watchful gaze of the dome at La Samaritaine: the shop, like Les Grands Magasins, had been nuked in the war, and an upstart House whose name Philippe couldn’t remember had settled in the wreckage, making grand claims of restoring the art deco building to its former glory. Like most grandiloquent claims, this one had never materialized.
Then, in the distance, the dome of Galeries Lafayette, and the roofs of House Lazarus and its counterpart, Gare Saint-Lazare—where trains had once departed for Normandy, but which hid nothing more than beggars and essence junkies. The crowd was no longer House dependents, or middle-class shopkeepers, surviving as they could; but younger, more haunted faces: children with nimble hands doubling as pickpockets, mothers carrying their entire belongings on their backs; old women smoking pipes, tobacco the only luxury they had left.
Philippe left his ornate cloak and Laure’s basket of food to one such woman, bowing very low to her; and ignoring the puzzled, suspicious glance she threw him. Suspicious or not, she would sell the cloak: he hoped for a good price, though it was all out of his hands. Then, at the next station, he got down.
La Goutte d’Or had been a workers’ neighborhood before the war, the hands and arms toiling away in factories, making the luxuries the Houses gorged themselves on. Now the factories functioned at part capacity only, and the workers sat on the pavement, drinking absinthe when they could afford it, or other alcohols that were much less kind on the eyesight when they could not. They watched Philippe, warily; not because he was Annamite—there were plenty of Annamites there, the descendants of those sucked in by the maw of war—but because, with his quiet, confident walk and his clean cotton clothes, he stuck out like a sore thumb.
Philippe ignored them, except to answer when a mocking voice would greet him. He was unfailingly polite and courteous; but, nevertheless, he called fire from the wasteland around him, and held the khi element in his clenched fist, ready to finish an argument with more than good manners.
The building hadn’t changed. It was still where he remembered it: at one of the edges of a triangle-shaped square, its limestone walls overgrown with ivy, its wooden shutters discolored and cracked. The bottom floor had once been a vendor of sewing materials, but had since long fallen into disrepair; the little drawers with cloth samples and ribbons now held pilfered artifacts and containers, anything that could be sold for a price.
It hadn’t changed. But then, why had he expected it to?
He waited outside until the usual crowd had all but gone, as the evening deepened around him, and the wind picked up. Then, shrugging his scarf around his neck, he walked into the shop.
And stopped, for it was Ninon behind the counter—who watched him, openmouthed. “Hello,” he said, into the growing silence. “I’ve come back.”
* * *
SELENE had hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. Asmodeus was shut in his rooms, claiming to be grieving and refusing all her polite requests for a meeting. Emmanuelle was back with her, but given to odd bouts of melancholy; back to her old self, before she’d completely given up essence, grieving for something neither she nor Selene could name. Despite their intense searches, Philippe could not be found anywhere, though there had been the occasional glimpse of him on the margins of the House, like a ghost she could not exorcise.
And Selene knew the name of her enemy now, though it did not help her.
Nightingale.
She had been young then, in the days of Nightingale’s apprenticeship; young and naive and self-centered, paying little attention to the things that didn’t concern her. Nightingale had given way to Oris, and Selene had barely noticed; nor had anyone within the House ever talked about the transition.
Given away, Emmanuelle had said. Betrayed.
How could he—? He was cold, and cruel, and ruthless, but she’d always thought he would do right by his students; that he discarded them for weaknesses, but not that he would turn them out of the House; bargain them away on shadowy things, use them as pawns in his war of influence.
Not her. He never would have. He didn’t love her, or even feel more for her than the casual affection of a man for his pet, but he . . . He never would have—
But, if she closed her eyes, she would see, again and again, that amused glint in his gaze, would feel again that terrible sense of oppression; that primal fear that tightened all her leg muscles at the same time, primed for fighting or fleeing—fleeing, for what else could she have done, she who had never even been close to equaling him?
He never would have—
And her mind paused then, hanging over the precipice, because she knew, deep down, that he was perfectly capable of it. That he had always been.
“You can’t appease a ghost,” Emmanuelle had said, with a tired sigh. “She’s dead, Selene, and she’s been working on her revenge for decades. The dead don’t easily change their minds.”
She knew, but still she had to try.
While Emmanuelle was sleeping, she stole away, wrapped only in a thin cotton shawl, the cold wind on her skin like the beginning of a penance. She had put two guards outside Emmanuelle’s room, but though she wouldn’t be such a fool as to requisition them, neither would she be fool enough to go off on her own. She dropped by the mess hall, and asked which bodyguards were available. Two of the idle ones—Imadan and Luc—leaped up at the chance to follow her, abandoning a spirited discussion on the proper way to sketch the human body.
The crypt where Morningstar had lain was all but deserted. The stone bed was still empty in its circle of power—do not think of the bed now, not of the grave or whom it belonged to—but the place had changed. Along every column holding up the ceiling, something crept downward: great buttresses like snakes, moving so fast she’d have sworn she could see them shifting; encircling the pillars so hard and tight that the stone had cracked. Selene walked closer, touched them. They were as hard as rock, but the material wasn’t rock. It was wood.
She thought of the plants in the East Wing; of the leaves she couldn’t touch or pull out. Green things. And, like all green things, they had roots; roots which were now choking the foundation of Silverspires. If it couldn’t be stopped . . .
Of course it could. It was silly to think that any ghost could affect the oldest and most powerful of Houses . . . But this ghost had summoned the Furies—killed Oris and Samariel and others; used Philippe as a catalyst to enter the House; and perhaps Asmodeus and Claire to wreak its havoc. This ghost had led Morningstar to sacrifice himself in order to exorcise her; in vain, for he had only kept the danger at bay, not eradicated it.
A worthy student, Morningstar would have said; except that, of course, it was his House being torn apart, and he who had been killed.
Selene knelt in the circle, touched her fingertips to it: nothing but cold, inert stone. Dead, all dead, and yet . . .
She brushed her fingers against the stone bed, and, calling to her the magic of the House, pulling in every strand like a weaver at her loom, spoke the slow, measured litany of a spell.
Something stirred, in the dark; large and unfathomable and not feeling human anymore. “I would speak with you,” she said, slowly.
Darkness; and the wind, howling between the pillars with their weight of tree roots. “I know Morningstar harmed you, but he is gone. I—I am mistress of his House, and would offer amends in his name.”
Amends, the darkness whispered to her, in her own voice. A cold, unpleasant feeling, slithering across her hands. Amends. There are none.
“Whatever you desire—”
All that you built—destroyed. All that you hold dear vanished. All that you long for—borne away by the storm.
“What storm?”
It is coming. Can you not hear it?
Selene could hear nothing but it; the sound of the wind racing between pillars; the distant noise of branches bending against its onslaught; the tightness in the air, a cloth stretched taut, almost to snapping point. “Your storm?”
There was no answer from the darkness. “What do you want, damn it!”
She had already had her answer; had already seen what was happening. Not a House, but something else; the foundations of a new building, a new garden, its roots in the wreckage of Silverspires.
Never.
It wasn’t Morningstar’s voice in her mind, but it could have been: it was that same cold, dry feeling of steel against the nape of a neck, that same feeling of unbreakable promises. The House was hers, now that Morningstar was dead; wholly hers, with none of the whispers that Asmodeus and Claire had started, none of the doubts about her ability to rule. It was hers; and, because no one else could protect it, that duty fell to her.
“I will crush you,” she said to the darkness, her voice taking on the singsong of chants and litanies, and powerful spells. “Hack off your roots and suck the sap from your leaves, and burn your seeds before they can ever land.” The air was taut again, as if listening to her promise; but what could it know of fear? It wasn’t even human, not anymore.
“Selene?” It was Javier, pale and untidy. His creased face had the same expression as when he had waved Asmodeus into her office.
Her heart sank. “What’s happened?”
“Asmodeus is leaving,” Javier said. By now, she knew, all too well, his expressions and what they meant; and could read what he didn’t say in the tightness of his clenched hands, in the thinness of his stretched lips.
“Asmodeus. That’s not what I ought to be worried about, is it?”
Javier winced. “You—you have to come and see. There really is no good way to explain it.”
* * *
MADELEINE wrapped her things carefully; not that there were many of them, of course. Isabelle watched her in silence, leaning against the doorjamb of the laboratory: she’d come in the middle of Madeleine’s packing, and had settled in her current position without a word. At last she said, “You don’t have to—”
Madeleine winced. She’d scoured her drawers before Isabelle had arrived, and had found only one small locket with a little angel essence; nothing like what she’d have needed to take. A vague edge of hunger seemed to overlay everything she did. It wasn’t a craving, not something irresistible that would have left her in tears; merely a faint sense of discomfort that seemed to be slowly increasing. She refused to think about what it would mean for her, out there. “Selene gives me no choice.”
Isabelle’s hands clenched. “Selene can’t drive everyone away.”
“Philippe, you mean?” Madeleine asked. She’d never liked him, so she couldn’t say she was sorry for him. But anything that would rile up Selene had her approval at the moment. How dare she—how–
Her throat was closing up. She took a last look at her laboratory: at the old, battered chair she’d sat in during her wild nightmare nights; the secretary desk, with the first drawer that always jammed—if she closed her eyes, she could still see Oris, sitting at the table with a frown on his face, trying to understand what she wanted from him.
Oh, Oris.
She blinked back tears. She’d never been one for sentimentality: she and Selene had that in common, at least; and she wasn’t about to collapse in tears in the middle of her laboratory.
“Madeleine?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. She had her bag. All the containers within belonged to the House, but she didn’t think Selene would begrudge her a battered leather bag, so old it could have seen the days of Morningstar. “You should—” She closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel the House; couldn’t even reassure herself that she would be safe. And she’d had so little time to know Isabelle; but she and Emmanuelle were the one shining spot left in the desolation. “Take care of yourself, will you?”
Isabelle smiled sadly. “That’s what Philippe said. Do you all think me such a child?”
“No,” Madeleine said. She laid one of Isabelle’s containers on the now-empty table. “But you’ll be House alchemist. That’s a big responsibility, trust me.” One that she’d never been quite up to, she suspected; but she’d done better than her predecessor, at the least. And she’d trained a successor, in all too short a time. If only she could have stayed longer . . .
“I know.” Isabelle shook her head. “I didn’t . . . There was no time, Madeleine.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Madeleine sought words; never something she’d been good at. “You’ll do fine. Believe me.”
Isabelle laughed bitterly. “Perhaps. You will write, won’t you? Send news—”
Madeleine shook her head, unsure of what to say. Tears blinked at the corners of her eyes; she didn’t move. No sentimentality. “Of course.” It was a lie; why bother Isabelle with the remnants of a sad, washed-out alchemist, a teacher who couldn’t even provide enough knowledge? “Of course I’ll write. If it makes you happy.”
Isabelle’s smile seemed to illuminate the entire laboratory; no, it wasn’t merely an illusion; it was a radiance from her skin, so strong it cast dancing shadows upon the walls. “Not as well as your staying, but I’ll take it,” she said.
Madeleine’s heart clenched in her chest. She couldn’t do anything more for Isabelle; couldn’t protect her, or even give her more than a modicum of the knowledge she’d gained. It would have to do; because Selene had left her no choice; but oh, how it hurt, as if she were betraying Oris all over again.
She hadn’t had much, and hadn’t hoped to bequeath much; save for the hope her apprentices would do better than her.
She left Isabelle in the laboratory, moodily staring at the container, and took the shortest way out, toward the ruined cathedral and its parvis.
There was something—something in the corridors that wasn’t quite usual. On her way, she bypassed the school. She could hear Choérine’s voice, explaining the finer points of Latin, and the giggles of some of the girls, but the noise was overlaid by something else, some other sound she couldn’t quite identify. A breath, a tune she couldn’t quite catch; voices whispering words on the cusp of hearing—but, no, it wasn’t voices. It was . . . a sound that was the creak of a mast on the sea, a rustle like cloth; a breath like the wind in outstretched sails.
None of her business, not anymore.
People stood on the parvis. At first, Madeleine thought only to push past them on her way to the Petit-Pont; but then she saw the uniforms of silver and gray, and the sickeningly familiar insignia, the crown encircling the hawthorn tree. No. Not them, not now. She would have turned in blind panic, to find her way back into the House; but there was no safety there, not anymore, only the cool welcome they would reserve for strangers.
Breathe. Breathe. Do not think about blood, or the hollow pain of ill-healed ribs, the old wounds that never stopped twinging. She was going to walk past them, cross the river, get on board the omnibus that stopped before the Saint-Michel Fountain; and at last be rid of Hawthorn’s ghosts in her life.
Her breath seemed to come out in short, noisy gasps as she crossed, on the other side of the vast plaza where the market was held, now all but deserted, with only a few House dependents hurrying about their tasks, their gazes studiously avoiding her. Halfway through, she threw a glance at them: so far away, they seemed like dolls, their faces all blurring into one another. They were talking animatedly, paying no attention to their surroundings. A leave-taking, that was what it had to be—she remembered something about the Hawthorn delegation staying on—a funeral, had it been? Or something close to it.
Ahead, the bridge beckoned, and the omnibus was waiting at the stop, its horses pawing at the ground, fresh and nervous, at the beginning of their hour-long run through Paris. She was going to make it—she was—
“Ah, Madeleine.”
She never even heard him. One moment there was nothing; the next he stood between her and the bridge—with Elphon and another Fallen one step behind him. His glasses glinted in the sunlight; the expression in his eyes light, mocking. “Leaving so soon?”
The wind blew the smell of bergamot and orange blossom into her face, so strong that her entire stomach heaved in protest. “Asmodeus.” She got the word out; barely. “It’s none of your business.”
His smile was bright and dazzling. “Oh, but it is. When a House rids itself of a most talented alchemist, I cannot help being interested.”
There was no one else; or rather, everyone was giving them a wide berth, heedless of Madeleine’s feeble attempts to signal for help. She was on her own, and she had never felt so alone. “Go away.”
“I think not. I have a vested interest in you, after all.”
Because she had once belonged to Hawthorn, because the House never let go of what it had once possessed, because she’d woken up at night, shaking and fearing that they would come to take her back, and now it was happening, and she was powerless to stop it. “Please—” she whispered, and Asmodeus smiled even more brightly.
“My lord.” It was Elphon; for a wild, impossible moment Madeleine thought he had remembered, that he was going to speak up in her favor. He would— “We need to return to the parvis.”
Asmodeus did not turn around. “For the formal leave-taking? Selene is half an hour late, and I see no sign of her coming.”
The world had shrunk to Asmodeus’s face; to his eyes behind their panes of glass, sparkling as if they shared some secret joke. She couldn’t—she had to . . .
Her bag. The box with the remnants of angel essence. If she could find it. Slowly, carefully, she moved her hand, creeping toward the pocket where she had put it.
Asmodeus was talking to Elphon, and his full attention wasn’t on her yet. “I expect the House to be . . . somewhat in disarray right now. I’ll send someone with our excuses, to apologize for the impoliteness of leaving without the formal ceremony.”
Madeleine’s hand closed around the box; undid the clasp, plunged into the essence—warmth on her fingers, a promise of power. If she could raise her hand, and swallow it. If she—
“I’m sure Selene won’t begrudge us our departure,” Asmodeus was saying. He reached out, almost absentmindedly, and caught Madeleine’s hand in a vise. His index finger pressed down, unerringly, on one of her nerves, and her fingers opened in a shock, sending the box clattering to the pavement; and the essence wafting onto the breeze, the wind picking at her palm and fingers with the greed of a hungry child.
Asmodeus’s hand went upward, toward her shoulder; and effortlessly slid down the strap, divesting Madeleine of her black leather bag. “I think not. Where you’re going, you’ll have no need of this.”
* * *
HE sat on a bed in Selene’s room—Javier had spluttered and hemmed on the way, saying something about privacy and the need to keep this a secret, but Selene had been barely listening.
Javier closed the door behind her as she entered, leaving them in relative privacy. Emmanuelle was there, too, her eyes two pools of bottomless dark in the oval of her face. “He was wandering the corridors,” she said, slowly, softly; as though everything might break, if she spoke too loud. “Stark naked.” There was not an ounce of humor in the way she spoke: in spite of the incongruity, the hour was not one for laughter or light-spirited comments.
For a good, long while, Selene did nothing but stare.
He had the radiance of newborn Fallen: a light so strong it was almost blinding, so oppressive she fought a desire to sink to her knees; and the eyes he trained on her were guileless, holding nothing but the blue of clear skies. “Selene?” he asked, quietly. “I was told you were Head of the House now.”
Selene swallowed, trying to dispel the knot in her throat—she wasn’t sure if it was relief, or anger, or grief, or a bittersweet mixture of all three. “Glad to see you, Morningstar.”