October 5: First Blood

Breakfast was scrambled eggs that Vex had overcooked into small pale pebbles, and toast that was a shade darker than it should have been.

"Don't say anything," she warned, setting the plate in front of him. "Your dad cooked. I never had to. I know how to make exactly three things, and one of them is cereal."

"The grilled cheese was really good," Eli said, honestly. "And the soup."

"Those are the other two." She dropped into the chair across from him with her own plate and a look of mild defiance. "So you can stop looking at me like I've committed a crime."

He ate the eggs. They were not good, and he did not mind. Over the second cup of coffee, he told her about the night. He told her about the seven hundred steps, and the priests in the Cavern of Flame, and the sound of the great fire breathing. He told her about the wood full of eyes, and the green valley, and the little town of cats. He tried to describe how Mordecai had looked in the square, tall and starred and lit from within like a small night sky, and found he could not do it, and that she was nodding anyway, her chin on her fist, as though she had once seen something of the same kind.

"He did that for you?" she said quietly. "The sovereign thing? He never did it for your dad. Not that I saw."

"He said it was a courtesy to the court."

"Uh huh." On the windowsill, Mordecai pretended to be asleep. "And the woman on the bridge?"

"Zara Qadir. She was nice." He turned the mug in his hands. "She's twenty-seven, she has a silver stag, she reads the Necronomicon, and she wants to wake up properly. She offered a truce. Maybe more."

Vex's eyebrows rose slowly. "Qadir. I know the name. A dream-walker from one of the old foreign covens. I've heard she's very good and very careful. I've never met her." She set her fork down. "Eli. Listen to me. I'm glad she was kind. I hope she meant it. But you need to keep this in your head. There are thirteen clans in this contest, some of them from places most people couldn't find on a map, and the champions come from every one. Zara was peaceful last night. That does not mean that the next witch you meet will be. To a lot of them, you're an easy mark. A new witch, an inexperienced witch, filling the hole your father left. They won't see a boy. They'll see a gap in the field that they can close with one good hit."

The eggs sat in his stomach like stones. "I know."

"Do you? Really?" She was not angry. She was very serious, and a little pale beneath the eyeliner. "You need to train harder. Not so you can win, necessarily. So you can still be breathing on the thirty-first."

"Then I'll train harder," Eli said. It was becoming something of a habit, saying it, and each time it seemed to cost him a little less to mean it.

They began in the living room, with the furniture pushed back, and it was not like the lessons of the last few days. There were no candles. They spent the morning on defense. Vex taught him how to raise a shield across his palm, a flat wall of will that hung in the air like a pane of glass. She taught him how to bring a ward up on his own skin, in two seconds, with a single drop of blood and a breath. She threw things at him. First tennis balls, which he stopped without effort, and then a ceramic mug, which he did not stop, and which broke on the wall behind him. "Again," she said, and handed him a second mug.

"You're enjoying this."

"A little." She grinned. "Not a lot. Okay, a lot. Again."

By noon he could stop the mug. By one he could stop a heavy book, thrown hard and without warning. He had a bruise on his hip from a dictionary he had not seen coming, and a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, and a loose, hot, humming sensation in his palms that he was beginning to recognize as the feeling of magic when it was working.

"We still don't know who left that handprint on the sill," Vex said, as they dragged the sofa back into place. She said it lightly, but her eyes went to the front window. "Whoever it was, they were scouting. And they weren't friendly. It was almost certainly an enemy, one of the champions or one of their familiars. Until we know which, you should assume that someone out there is learning your habits."

"Great," Eli said.

"Sorry."

"No. I'd rather know."

He watched her tuck her hair behind one ear and frown at the window. It struck him quite suddenly, in the plain gray light of a Monday afternoon, why she was doing this. She had not simply taken on a student. She was working him as hard as she dared, with the stubborn, almost fierce care of someone who had lost a person already and did not mean to lose another. He thought of the man in the study, writing I hope I have in a book that had been meant for a boy he could not protect. Vex was trying to give him what his father had not had time to. He did not say anything. His throat had gone tight, and he looked at the floor, and he felt grateful to her in a way that had no easy words, a quiet and unspoken thing.

They had the last of the soup for lunch.

"I'm going to visit Dad's grave," he said, rinsing his bowl. It had been on his mind all morning. "This afternoon. I haven't been back since the funeral. Do you want to come?"

She went very still at the sink.

"No," she said, after a moment. "I can't. Not yet." She gave him a small, lopsided smile that did not hold. "It's still too raw. I'm sorry. I know it's stupid."

"It isn't stupid."

It wasn't. Eli understood it, watching her face. Vex was strong, and clever, and talented, and fun to be around, and a good many other things. She was also a young woman who had lost her boyfriend of three years a handful of days ago. He had been a man she lived with, and shared a bed with every night, and who had been, in some quiet way she probably did not like to name, a sort of parent to her as well. Older, steadier. Someone who cooked for her, and gave her an allowance for her hobbies, and listened to her talk about bands he did not understand. It was no wonder she could not stand in front of a patch of fresh earth and say goodbye to him so soon.

"Be careful," she said, when he reached the door. She had followed him to the hall, and was twisting the hem of her sleeve. "Stay on the main paths. Keep the charm on. If anything feels wrong, even a little, you come straight home."

"I will."

"Eli." She hesitated. "Stay safe."

Mordecai slipped out ahead of him through the door, a small black shadow, and fell into step at his heels.

Graymoor Cemetery lay on the hill above the harbor, a thirty-minute walk through the old streets, past the cannery and the empty rail yard and a row of shuttered shops with their windows soaped over. It was a gray afternoon with a cold, damp wind, and the sky hung low over the water, the color of an old bruise. Eli had a small bag of black salt in one pocket and an iron nail in the other, and Vex's charm warm against his chest. He walked fast, with his hands in his jacket, and did not talk, and Mordecai did not try to make him.

The gate stood open. The grave was near the top of the hill, beneath a bare-limbed oak, and it was still very new. The earth had not settled. A temporary marker stood at its head, a plain white board with a name and two dates in black paint, and a few flowers lay drying in the grass where mourners had left them. Someone, perhaps Vex, had placed a small cheap plastic skull among them, grinning, with a candle stub tucked under its jaw.

Eli stood in front of it for a long time with the wind in his hair.

"Hey, Dad," he said at last. His voice sounded strange in the open air. "It's me."

Nobody answered. He had not expected anyone to.

"I'm trying," he said. "I want you to know that. I don't really know what I'm doing yet. But I'm learning. Vex is teaching me. She's really good, Dad. She's much better than the book. I would have burned the house down by now if it weren't for her." He laughed, a small, broken sound, and wiped his face with his sleeve. "She misses you. I think she misses you a lot. I'm taking care of her, or she's taking care of me, I can't tell which."

The wind moved in the oak. Somewhere far off, a gull cried.

"I wish we'd had more time," he said. "I wish I'd called you back. I'm sorry I was so angry. I'm sorry I thought you'd stopped caring. I think I understand now, a little, why you did it. Why you kept me away." He drew a ragged breath. "I read your book. I read what you wrote on the first page. I know you tried. I just wish it had worked."

He stood there. He was not sure for how long.

At his feet, Mordecai made a sound.

It was very small, a low, flat vibration at the back of the throat, and it was not a purr. Eli looked down. The cat had gone absolutely rigid. Every hair on his body stood on end, and his ears lay flat against his skull, and his eyes were fixed on a point past the oak, on the far side of the graves, where the stones met at the corner of the old iron fence.

"Eli," Mordecai said, without moving. "Do not turn around. Take out the salt."

"What is it?"

"I know the signs." The voice was perfectly calm, and more frightening for it. "I know the name of what is coming. It is not alone, and it is not a stray." The cat's head turned, slowly, toward the sky, where the light had begun to go thin and strange. "Salt. Now."

Eli's hands were already moving. His fingers found the bag in his pocket and tore it open, and he turned in a quick circle with the black salt falling in a gritty line behind him, around the grave, around the cat, around his own feet. It was a clumsy circle. It was not a perfect ring. It would have to do. He crouched and drove the iron nail into the soft earth at the edge of the circle, and pricked his thumb on the point, and pressed the bead of blood to the head of the nail.

I am protected here, he thought, as hard as he could, the way Vex had taught him. This ground is mine. Nothing crosses.

The air gave a deep, soft hum. A pale dome of faint light rose around them, thin as a soap bubble and barely there, and Eli felt something in his chest take the weight.

The light began to go wrong.

It happened slowly, and then very fast. The shadows beneath the headstones stretched and bent, and where two lines of stone came together at the corner of the old iron fence, the air seemed to fold in on itself, like a page being creased. Eli's eyes slid over the spot and refused to hold it. There was a wrongness to the angle. It was too sharp, and too deep, and as he watched, something stepped out of it.

It was a dog, if a dog could be built by someone who had heard dogs described and never seen one. It was black, and long-legged, and lean as a greyhound, with a coat that seemed to drink the light. Its head was wolfish and narrow. But the jaws parted, too wide, and kept parting, and the mouth within was lined with teeth. Too many teeth, in rows, in ranks, set into the gums at angles that hurt to look at. Its legs had one t too many. It made no sound at all. A thin, cold smell came off it, like old paper and spilled copper, and the grass wilted beneath its paws.

"Garm," Mordecai said. His voice was very low. "Cassius Wolfe's hound."

"Who is Cassius..."

"A champion. One of the twelve." The cat did not take his eyes from the creature. "The Wolfe clan has always been ambitious. They have wanted this city for a century, and the only thing standing in their way has been the Calloways and the Hales. He has sent a dog to kill a boy at his father's grave. It is a cheap and shameless thing to do, and exactly what I expected of him." The ruff along his spine stood higher. "Garm comes out of the angles. It is something older than any hound, that Cassius found and bound. Its master serves the Pallid Mask."

Eli had a dim memory, from the Dreamlands, of a plateau and a monastery and a priest in a yellow silk mask. "The thing on Leng."

"A relative. The King in Yellow, the Pallid Mask, a hundred names for the same patient face. It has been giving Cassius gifts for a long time." Mordecai crouched low. "The ward will not hold against that for long. Stay inside it. Keep it standing. I will do the rest."

"You can't fight that!"

"Can I not?"

The hound lunged.

It struck the dome like a battering ram. The light screamed. A web of white cracks raced across the surface of the ward, and Eli felt it in his bones, a deep, clenching ache, as if someone had driven a fist into his ribs. He staggered. He kept his hand on the nail. The hound drew back and struck again, harder, and this time one of the cracks tore open, and a long black snout came through, and the teeth snapped shut a hand's breadth from his face.

Mordecai was already in the air.

He went through the broken seam of the ward as if it were water and landed on the creature's back, claws first, and the two of them went down together in a tangle of black fur and gleaming teeth. Eli had thought of cats as quick. He had never seen anything move like that. Mordecai was everywhere at once, raking, tearing, springing clear and striking again, all of it silent but for the awful wet sounds of claw and bone. The hound screamed, a thin, high sound that did not come from its throat, and flung him bodily across the grave. He rolled, came up, and went in again. There was no wasted motion, and no mercy in it. These two had known each other a long time. The hatred between them was older than the boy who was watching.

But Garm was bigger, and it was fed by a man with decades of practice, and by something behind that man that wore a pale mask and did not tire. Every wound that Mordecai opened closed again almost as fast as it formed. Every time the cat struck, the creature struck harder. Eli saw the jaws close on Mordecai's flank and shake, once, and heard a sound that he would , and saw the small black body flung against the oak so hard that the bark split.

Mordecai did not get up at once.

"No," Eli said.

He let the ward drop. He knew, even as he did it, that it was reckless, that Vex would have shouted at him, that it was the sort of thing that got a person killed. He stepped out of the ring of salt and into the open, with the damp wind in his face and the black thing turning toward him. His palm was burning. The pain was bright and steady and impossible to ignore, as if someone had pressed a hot coin into the skin.

Don't push, he thought. Ask.

He looked at the hound's eyes. They were yellow, and enormous, and utterly without thought. He did not think about his father, or the grave, or the book. He thought only about a single small flame, and asked.

It appeared in the left eye, a bead of fire no bigger than a candle's. It flared. The hound shrieked, shook its head, and clawed at its own face, and in the half-second before it recovered, Eli threw the last handful of black salt straight into its teeth.

The thing recoiled. Steam rose from its jaws, and the smell of burned paper filled the air, and it staggered back, snarling, with one eye weeping smoke. It turned to him, slowly, and the rows of teeth parted.

"Left!"

The cry came from across the cemetery. Eli did not understand it, and then the hound's head snapped around toward the voice, and a tall, pale figure in a long black coat came vaulting over the low fence and landed, crouching, in the grass.

"Left, Mina! It's coming out of the corner by the oak! The angle's still open!"

A second figure followed, small and fast, her bobbed hair blown flat across her cheek. She did not look at Eli. She looked at the hound, and her silver rings flashed as she lifted both her hands, and she began to speak in a clear, low voice, a language Eli had not heard before.

Chains of pale light snapped out of the air.

They wrapped the hound in a single motion, once, twice, three times, wound round its ribs and its legs and its terrible jaws, and drew tight. The creature thrashed. It screamed in its wordless voice, and the chains of light bit into its coat, and where they touched, the black hide smoked. Jonah was already moving, calling out the angles with a flat, practiced calm, his eyes snapping from corner to corner, from fence to headstone to oak. "Behind you. Higher. It is going for the gap. Now, Mina, now." He hurled a fistful of something gray across the grass, iron filings, glittering, and they struck the open crease in the air at the fence corner and flared white.

Garm tore free of the last chain with a terrible wrench. It threw a single burning look at Eli, one good eye and one ruined, and in that look he felt, plainly and clearly, a thing that was not the hound's at all. Something behind it, patient and amused, had seen him. It had marked his face.

Then the creature bounded sideways into the angle at the corner of the fence, folded in on itself, and was gone. The air snapped shut like a book.

Silence came down on the hill.

Eli stood in the middle of the grass with his chest heaving. His left hand was clenched into a fist, and when he opened it, the skin of his palm was alight.

Lines of white-gold fire were drawing themselves into the flesh, thin as hairs, fine as wire. They formed a ring, and around the ring they set thirteen small points, evenly spaced, like the numerals on a clock, and the thirteenth, at the very top, burned brighter than all the rest. It did not hurt. It sat in his skin like something he had always had, and the light of it pulsed, once, twice, and sank slowly beneath the surface until only a faint warm outline remained.

"Number Thirteen," Mordecai said weakly, from the base of the oak. He was on his feet. He was limping, and one flank was matted dark, and his left ear was torn worse than before, but his eyes were bright and his voice was steady. "It has marked you. Now they will all know where you are."

"Mordecai." Eli dropped to his knees beside him. "You're hurt."

"I am annoyed. It is not the same." The cat sat down with great dignity and began to lick his side. "A cheap, ill-bred, coward's trick, attacking a boy at his father's grave. I will it."

Mina had lowered her hands. Her face was gray, and a thin line of blood ran from her nose to her lip, and she wiped it away with the back of one wrist as though it were of no importance. Jonah stood a few paces off with his hands hanging empty at his sides. He looked at Eli, and at the cat, and down at the grass.

"How did you know?" Eli asked. His voice shook. "How did you know I was here?"

"We were told to keep an eye on you," Mina said. She did not seem to be lying. "Your grandmother's orders. We are to follow you whenever you leave the house, Master Eli, and keep you safe. We were behind the gate. We did not want you to notice."

"I'm good at watching," Jonah said quietly. He still had not looked up. "That's all I'm really good at. Mina did the rest."

"He saw it first," Mina said. "He saw where it would come from. I could not have done it without him."

Jonah glanced up at her, and Eli saw a flicker of something in his face, pleasure and an odd, bruised gratitude, and then it was gone.

Eli drew a long breath. The Calloway grave lay behind him, a mound of new dirt with a skull and a candle. He thought of everything that could have happened if they had been a minute slower. "Thank you," he said. He meant it. "Both of you. I mean that. You saved my life."

"It is what we are for," Mina said, with the same quiet obedience she had shown in the study. But something in her eyes softened, only a little, as if the words had struck her in a place she did not expect.

He walked home slowly, with Mordecai in his arms, and Mina and Jonah following some distance behind, as quiet as shadows.

The kitchen smelled of garlic, and of something very faintly burnt.

Vex was standing at the stove with her sleeves pushed up and a streak of flour across one cheek. A pot of spaghetti boiled over onto the burner, and she was scowling at it, and an old yellowed index card lay propped against the sugar jar, covered in his father's cramped, upright handwriting. Sunday sauce, it said at the top, and below that a list of measurements underlined twice. She had clearly been following it line by line. Half the dishes in the house seemed to be in the sink.

"I made dinner," she said, without turning around. She sounded tired, and proud, and a little defensive. "It's your dad's recipe. I didn't want to just heat something up. I figured you'd be hungry. I figured..." She stopped, and turned. Her eyes went to his face, and then to the cat in his arms, matted dark along one flank, and the color drained out of her. "Eli. What happened?"

He told her. He sat at the table with Mordecai on his lap, while Vex dabbed the cat's wounds with salt water and a clean cloth, and he told her everything in a flat, careful voice: the cemetery, the angle at the fence, the hound with the teeth. Cassius Wolfe. The Pallid Mask. The chains of light, and Mina's bloody nose, and Jonah calling out corners. When he got to the end, he held out his left hand and opened it.

The faint outline of the ring was still there, a pale tracing in the skin, and the thirteen small points at its edge, and the one at the top glowing a very little, like an ember.

Vex stared at it. Slowly she reached out and took his wrist in both her hands, turning his palm to the light, and her thumb moved across the brand. It was warm. She drew a long, shaky breath.

"It's the first week," she whispered. "It's only the first week, and they've already come for you."

"They meant to kill me," Eli said. "That was the point. They waited until I was at his grave, and alone, and they sent that thing to take my head off." He looked down at her hands. "If I hadn't known how to raise a ward, I would be dead. I wouldn't have lasted a minute. I wouldn't have known where to start. I put the salt down, and the nail, and I thought what you told me to think. It held. That's all it did. It held long enough."

"Eli..."

"Thank you," he said. It came out rough. "For teaching me. For all of it. I'd be lying out there on the hill right now if it weren't for you."

For a moment she did not say anything at all. The pot boiled over again behind her and neither of them moved. Her fingers tightened around his wrist, and her eyes, ringed in smudged black, filled with tears that she did not wipe away.

"I'm glad you're alive," she said, very softly. "I'm so glad. You didn't die like him. You came home." Her voice cracked on the last word. "I couldn't have..." She shook her head. "I'm just so glad."

He turned his hand in hers, and held on. They stayed like that for a long moment in the warm and steaming kitchen, with the spaghetti boiling over and the cat looking between them with one yellow eye, and neither of them said anything more. It was not a romantic thing. It was something older and simpler. It was two people holding on to the fact that the other one was still there.

Then she laughed, wetly, and let go, and snatched the pot off the burner. "Oh, hell. The noodles. They're going to be disgusting."

They were slightly overcooked. The sauce was very good. Eli ate two helpings, and told her so, and she pretended not to be pleased. Afterward he dried the dishes while she washed, and they spoke of small things, of nothing, of whether the cat would let her put a bandage on him. At the foot of the stairs she said "Night," and he said "Night," and the door of the master bedroom closed softly at the end of the hall.

He lay in the dark with Mordecai curled against his side, listening to the house, and his palm glowed faintly in the dark like a coal.

Marguerite Beaumont had been a beautiful woman, and she knew that she still was.

She was fifty-two years old, slender and straight-backed, with silver-blond hair twisted into a chignon and a string of pearls at her throat that had belonged to her grandmother and which she had never once considered selling. She wore her last good silk robe, the color of old champagne. In the great dim ballroom of the Beaumont house on Alder Street, where chandeliers had once hung by the dozen and now only one remained, she knelt at the center of a circle of gold dust and smiled the practiced smile she had perfected over thirty years of luncheons and charity balls. It was a lovely smile. It had never once reached her eyes.

The Beaumonts had been a great family once. They had held half the harbor, three generations ago, and sat on the board of every important thing in Port Verity, and kept a coven that could rival the Hales. Now there was Marguerite, and an elderly maid who slept in the east wing, and a mortgage she did not let herself think about. Every year a little more of the house went dark. Every winter another room was shut and its furniture sold. She had melted down her wedding ring for the dust that gleamed around her knees tonight, and had not felt a thing as she watched it run.

She would have it all back. She had promised herself that. Every stone of this house, every acre of the old estate, every seat at every table. The Beaumont name would be spoken in this city again as if it were a prayer. All she had to do was win.

"Argus," she said softly. "The wine."

Her familiar crossed the floor on slow, silent feet. He was a white peacock, enormous and perfect, with a long, shimmering train that trailed behind him across the boards like a bridal veil, and every feather of it ended in a great dark eye. He bowed his head and carried a small silver cup to the edge of the circle, and Marguerite took it in both hands.

She poured it out onto the gold dust, wine and honey, as she had been taught. "Agathodaimon," she said. "Good spirit. Serpent of the hearth and the granary. You who were poured out to in Alexandria, on the tables of merchants, in the days when the world was young and every house had you for its guardian. You are the Gilded Serpent. You are the one who keeps a family's fortune whole. Hear me. I am the last of mine. I am asking for what is owed."

The candles flared. The gold dust stirred, and began, slowly, to move. It rose around her in a long gleaming coil, shimmering, nine feet of living gold light with a flat, wise, ancient head, and the eyes in it were as bright and old as coins. It wound about her shoulders. It was warm. It was always warm. For a moment she felt it as she had at fourteen, kneeling beside her mother in this same room, in a house full of light, and she wanted to weep.

Give me an edge, she asked, without words. Give me what I need to win.

The left palm of her hand began to burn.

It was not the Serpent's warmth. It was a hot, sudden, precise pain, like a nail pressed into the flesh, and she turned her hand over and saw the Sigil there, a ring of thirteen points, and the second point blazing white. It had never done that before. It meant that another champion was near. Very near.

Argus made a sound.

It was a sound she had never heard from him. It was a thin, high shriek of pure terror, and the great fan of his train snapped open behind him, every eye flaring, and he backed away from the doors with his beak open and his small head jerking from side to side.

The candles went out. All seven, together, as if a hand had ed over them.

In the dark, Marguerite heard the wards go.

She had set eleven of them, on the doors and the windows and the roof, with iron and salt and wax, at ruinous cost. She heard them go one after another. They did not shatter. They did not scream. Each one simply stopped, with a small, soft sound like a sigh, like a tired mother laying a child down, and then the next, and the next. Her eyes had been on the doors. She understood, with a cold, slow, certain dread, that whatever was coming was not forcing its way in. It was being let in. The house itself was giving way.

From somewhere beyond the ballroom doors, down the long, dark corridor, came a sound.

Someone was humming.

It was a very soft and gentle sound. It was a lullaby. It was an old, simple, nursery tune, tuneless and sweet, and it drifted along the corridor with the unhurried patience of a man strolling home from church. There were no footsteps. There was no sound at all but the humming.

"Who is there?" Marguerite said. Her voice cracked in the dark. "I am a champion of the Beaumont clan. I invoke the rules of the contest. I am under my own roof!"

The humming stopped.

The doors of the ballroom opened, slowly, with no one touching them.

She could not see what stood in the doorway. That was the first thing, and the worst. The dark there was not ordinary dark. It was a dark with a shape, tall and narrow and stooped, and the pale light from the tall windows bent away from it as if it were repelled, as water bends from oil. She could see no face. She could see no hands. She could only see, on the lintel above the doorframe, perched with its head tilted, a bird.

It was a rook. It was nothing but bones. Each small curved rib stood out clean and white, with no feather or flesh to cover it, and the empty sockets of its skull glowed with a faint cold light. It clicked its beak once, softly, like a clock.

Marguerite did not scream. She had been taught not to, and she was a Beaumont.

She struck first.

"Argus!" she cried. "The eyes!"

The peacock flung back his head, and his enormous train lit up from edge to edge, a hundred painted eyes opening at once, each one blazing with a pure, merciless white light, the light of a watchful god who sees everything as it is. It struck the thing in the doorway full in the face.

It showed her nothing.

She saw the silhouette. She saw the outline of a man, tall and thin and gray, with his head bowed. And she saw, in that white and truthful light, that there was nothing inside the outline at all. There was no skin. There were no bones. There was only a long, shapeless, bottomless hunger the size of a man, shaped like a man because it had learned how, and it was smiling.

She threw everything she had.

The Gilded Serpent struck, nine feet of molten, shining gold, and its jaws closed on the dark. Marguerite flung out both hands and drove the whole force of her will into the boards, and the floor of the ballroom turned to gold beneath the thing's feet, solid and glittering, rippling up in a hundred razor spikes of living metal. It was Midas's own gift. It had killed three men, once. It was the finest piece of magic she had ever worked.

The dark stepped through the spikes. They crumbled to gray dust at its touch, without a sound, like ash from a cold fire.

The Serpent screamed. It was a thin, awful sound, a sound of utter bewilderment, and the golden coils around Marguerite's shoulders went slack and gray and brittle as old paper. Its eyes dimmed. It fell from her in flakes. And Argus, poor Argus, was shrieking, his train shedding feathers in a white storm, his hundred eyes closing one by one.

"No," Marguerite said. "No. No. Not like this. I have a wish..."

The lullaby began again, close by her ear.

She felt the cold. It came up her legs and into her stomach like a tide. It did not hurt. That was the horror of it. It felt as if everything warm in her were being gently drawn out, her strength, her breath, her memory of the house on Alder Street full of light. Her knees buckled. The pearls snapped at her throat and scattered across the golden floor. Somewhere very near, the rook clicked its beak, and she knew, with perfect clarity, that she was looking at the last thing she would see.

She thought of her mother, kneeling beside her in the old ballroom. She thought of every empty room in the house, and the maid sleeping in the east wing who would wake to nothing. She thought: I did not need to do this. I could have sold the house. I could have gone to live by the sea. I could have let it end.

She thought: I wish I had never come.

Then the dark closed over her, and the humming went on, soft and patient and sweet, and when it was over the ballroom was silent. The last chandelier swayed once on its chain. Argus lay in a heap of ruined feathers, one eye still faintly open. On the golden boards, among the pearls, a single skeletal rook hopped delicately from bead to bead, and tilted its head, and began to feed.

A little after five in the morning, before the light had properly come, a man walking his dog along the seawall of Port Verity found a woman sitting very upright on one of the old iron benches that faced the harbor.

She was elegantly dressed, in a silk robe the color of champagne, and her hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her silver-blond hair was still pinned up. She might have been a lady waiting for the dawn. It was only when he came closer, and saw her eyes, that the man began to shout.

She was dead, and her face still held the last thing she had seen. It stared up at the lightening sky with its mouth open and its pupils wide, a thing of such perfect, naked terror that the police officers who arrived within the hour could not look at it for long. Not one of them could say what had killed her. There was not a mark upon the body, and nothing at all inside it that seemed to be warm.

On the bench beside her, in a small neat row, someone had left her pearls.