“Miss Blaine,” the one nearest me started. “Pleased you’ve come round. We all hoped as you’d be here sooner. I’m Henry Glick.” He emphasized “hope” as if I’d disappointed him. His accent was working-class, with the Hs softened almost to silence.
I took Glick’s proffered hand with reluctance. I was under no illusion that this was a social visit, but I needed to be polite if I was petitioning his aid. I hated the touch of vampires, though his was much cooler and less nauseating than most. I still took my hand back as quickly as good manners allowed and stepped away a little.
I glanced at the cowering creature behind him. “Have I interrupted something?”
“Not so much. Don’t pay that any mind.” But as he said it, his gaze slipped to the side and his mouth was stiff, like someone telling an uncomfortable lie.
“Mr. Glick,” I started. “I came here on behalf of a. former Brother of St. James. I know there’s no great love between St. John and St. James’s, but I think we may be of use to each other.”
“How’s that?” Glick asked, licking his lips. A nervous gesture.
“I’m a stranger here, so I’m not entirely sure of the situation, but I suspect there’s been a change of management up the street at St. James. Is that true?”
“Ah. Yeah. Clever way o’ putting it.”
So we’d guessed right about a power grab at St. James’s. That didn’t cheer me, since it was probably Alice who’d snatched the reins. I felt eyes on me and a chill that pushed through my body, sharp as a knife. A frown creased my face and I tried to clear it away, not wanting to offend the man I was going to ask for help. The resulting expression must have been stiff.
“I believe your rival up the street,” I continued, slower, trying to feel my way through the shoals of the situation, “has taken a friend of my employer and a friend of mine prisoner. I’d like to get them back and I think the only way to do it will be to take the current Primate of St. James down.”
“Why would you think I’d help you?”
I felt as if I were dragging every syllable from him.
I used the information Marsden had provided. “Because I believe the Primate of St. James has brought the asetem-ankh-astet to your doorstep. She’s violated the covenant set long ago among the three clans of London. Asetem are supposed to stay south of the Thames, aren’t they? Yet I saw them only a couple of nights ago not a hundred feet from the doors of St. James’s church.”
“True it is, Miss Blaine. That was the covenant. And the asetem do roam in Clerkenwell, but we—”
“Then why haven’t you done anything about it?” I asked, losing a bit of my patience.
The apparently trapped vampire behind Glick writhed and looked down at the floor and then back up at me as if he were trying to direct my eyes to something, but I couldn’t risk pulling my attention away from Glick long enough to study the slick-looking patch of stone he stared at.
Glick sighed, his shoulders sagging. “Because I’m no longer the Primate of St. John.” He shot a glance over his shoulder, and something stirred in the shadows of the nearest arch. “She is.”
“Harper, dear. You were just a day too late,” said a female voice, and then it giggled with a greater measure of madness than Chastity’s unbalanced laughter had contained.
Most of the arches filled with the pale white presence of the asetem-ankh-astet as they stepped into the verges of the light, their orange-glowing eyes dimming in the room’s illumination. The coil of yellow power around the edge of the room shivered and crept higher up the walls, closing the room in a protective circle. I looked toward the empty arch behind the platform where the voice came from.
A slender female strolled out of the darkness, dragging it with her like a train. Alice. She wore some kind of skintight black stuff that looked more like bandages or a winding sheet than clothing, leaving only her head, forearms, and feet uncovered. A bright red choker circled her throat, dangling ruby beads on glowing white skin. Her eyes burned from shadowed sockets above lips stained the deep wine color of a fresh bruise. Wine: that had been the color of her hair when last I’d seen her in Seattle—staked through the chest on the floor of the burning house. Now her hair had gone the dark auburn of dried blood.
“Imagine, trying to suborn my underlings like that,” she said. “Naughty, naughty,” she added, her voice resonant with pressure against the old geas between us. The geas was a magical compulsion between us; one I’d forced her into so she’d let me live if I let her get to Edward. It bound us both equally. I should have wondered harder about the lingering effect of the geas that kept me from speaking of certain things, or doing them, after I’d presumed her dead. But I hadn’t, and now I was going to pay for that.
A dark-haired, bearded man stepped out of the arch behind her and stopped a few paces back, watching the show. A phantom black strand of magic unreeled between him and Alice while another reached out to touch the spooky-eyed creature beside me. A third strand, white and heavier than the others, stretched between the creature and Alice, closing the unnatural triangle. The new man seemed familiar. He carried his own cloud of ugliness that boiled with glimpses of tormented, crying faces. Then I remembered where I’d seen him before. “Ezra?” I asked.
He gave a small, crooked smile and tilted his head. “Ah, no. But how would you know? I am Simeon. My apprentice left this world long ago. But he was useful in making me as you see me now. Before he died, we discovered a great deal about the making of clay men and the binding of souls, which has been invaluable in my work here. I’m wroth with you for destroying my golem. It was a masterpiece.”
He’d made the golem of Will. I cringed, thinking of what must have been done to make it so big, strong, and real. Real enough to fool Michael; strong enough to walk around for a week or more.
My stomach curdled and I tasted bile in the back of my mouth as more pieces fell into place. Blood and bandages, a sorcerer below St. John’s, and Alice up and walking where she shouldn’t have been. Alice must have been the creature in the jars filled with blood. I wondered how he’d done it, how he’d stitched her back together, and how—
The word slipped out. “How?”
Alice had strolled to Glick’s side and then half a step past him, eclipsing him. She raised one hand toward the silver-eyed creature beside me. “Kreanou,” she murmured. “Very good.”
Kreanou—was that a name or a title? — made a sound a lot like a growl and pinned his spooky gaze on her as if he would devour her in a single bite if he had the chance. But he didn’t move.
Alice smirked. She was on the dais, several steps above me, so she could look down at me. It was barely enough extra height: We were almost eye to eye.
“How did I survive the fire? The Pharaohn, of course. Wygan followed me to the house. But not for me, Harper. For you.” A minute sharpness in her voice gave her fury and bitterness away. “He wanted to be sure you’d survive whatever happened. You have no idea how often he’s looked over your shoulder, or for how long. Like a guardian angel.” She gave her mad giggle once again, her eyes glittering. “Or maybe I should say, ‘like a guardian beast’?”
I narrowed my eyes and kept my mouth shut over the urge to spit. Or vomit. Her aura had never been pleasant but it was a vile thing now. Twice dead, twice resurrected, blood-soaked, mad, and burning with her own fury, she was Hate walking.
“He took me from the fire. You and the others almost destroyed me, but he saved me. He bathed me in blood, soaked me in it, drowned me in it.”
I could see it as she spoke, like a film blazoned in fire on the glimmering, cold air. He dragged her from the house as Cameron had dragged Carlos and hid her in a place of cold stone and salt water. He did murder and let blood run like a brook. Her body, cracked and blackened like a cinder, drank the blood, swelling with it and healing itself, the pores of her skin like a million tiny mouths. For months he nurtured her on blood and the poison of his mind. Then, beneath the surface of a swelling pool of gore, he cut her into pieces.