A Breath of Frost (48 page)

“Come here, little Whisperer,” Rosmerta said, vines snapping out to grab her. Penelope tried to stomp on the tendrils as they rushed toward Gretchen’s feet. Emma’s lightning came from the ceiling this time, slashing through the vines. Rosmerta howled, a gash opening just under her rib cage.

Sophie dragged herself slowly toward the Lacrimarium who slumped over the witch bottle. Blood dripped unseen from her nose. The gate continued to leak the slightest traces of violet light.

“It will have to be closed from the inside as well,” Ewan said, confirming Gretchen’s opinion that the spell was incomplete.
“They’ll try to stop me,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “That’s when you get the hell out of this house. If I can’t take them with me, they’ll follow you, and you let the bloody Greybeards finish this, do you hear me?” His eyes were hard on Lord Mabon. “Don’t risk yourself for the Order, Emma,” he added.

“You can’t either!”

He laughed but there was no humor in it. “Not for them,” he said. “Never for them. For
you
. For Theodora.”

“But I just found you,” she said. He was leaving her, just as her mother had left her.

“I know,” he said gently. “But I’m so proud to call you my daughter, for however brief a moment.”

“Then stay! There must be a spell to undo whatever the Order did to you.”

“You know I can’t. There’s no time.”

“But you’ll be stuck there again.”

He smiled sadly. “Tell Theodora I am waiting for her. However long it takes, we will be together again.”

His ax was the first to return to mist. He leaped onto the banister, used to climbing trees as a boy, and to the agility of a spirit as a man. The temporary magical mending tore like paper.

And then he was on the other side, a silhouette of himself outlined against the crackling energy. He slashed down once with an antler-handled dagger and the portal began to properly seal itself. It was an ocean whirlpool sucking everything in its path to its dark mouth. The stairs shook, the chandelier beads lifted, and Emma was dragged across the slippery floor.

She didn’t even have time to mourn her father’s second death by magic.

The Sisters were dragged behind him, fighting the magic of the gate too desperately to be able to keep her or the others trapped inside the house. They howled, acid-green and violent purple energy flinging off them like elf darts. The floorboards began to peel away, popping nails.

She wouldn’t let all of this be a waste, wouldn’t let her father, or Strawberry and Lilybeth and the other girls die for nothing.

She wouldn’t let the Sisters win. Not now. Not ever.

“We have to finish this,” she said wearily.

“We can’t,” Cormac said savagely, staring at the slumped body of the veiled woman next to Sophie.

The Lacrimarium was dead.

Emma dove out of the house
and rolled down the steps, curled protectively around the Lacrimarium’s bottle. Gretchen and Penelope dashed after, the silencing spell falling away from Gretchen once she was outside. Cormac and Colette dragged Sophie between them. Cormac was slipping a jet-inlaid iron-wheel pendant around her head, but too late. Emma knew Sophie had killed the Lacrimarium. She’d recognized the collection of odd small injuries on the woman’s body, a result of Sophie’s talent turned backward.

The garden was eerily quiet as the house shook with light. The drained and dead bodies of the innocent people the Sisters had lured to the house were scattered over the grass. Emma held the bottle in her hands carefully, standing between the gates, one of which hung crookedly off its hinges. This was a Threshold place. It was the best she could do. There wouldn’t
be a proper Threshold day until May Day and they couldn’t afford to leave the Sisters loose until then. This was their last and only chance.

It had to be now.

And it had to be Emma.

She’d read everything she could find in the school library. She was as prepared as she could be. Never mind that the Lacrimarium had rare gifts and trained for years before attempting the kind of spell she was about to try. The Lacrimarium had prepared the bottle before she died. It was infused with the right magic, created on a Threshold day, under the three nights of the full moon and buried in salt and graveyard dirt for a year and a day.

And though Emma wasn’t a Lacrimarium, she had an advantage they didn’t have. Her connection to the Greymalkin gave her power over them. She could work the spell without the necessary training or talent.

In theory.

“I need hair from all three,” she murmured to Cormac. “Or blood. Just in case my … in case Ewan doesn’t succeed.”

“I can help with that,” Colette said, just as a hawk erupted from her chest, feathers bright as moonlight on water.

“Gather the horses,” Lord Mabon ordered the Keepers who hadn’t remained inside the house. “Circle the grounds so no one can escape.” Within seconds, white horses appeared all around them, thick as fog. Their hooves shot sparks like falling stars. “Keep the Sisters contained if they fight the gate. We’ll have to bind them until another Lacrimarium can be located.” He snapped his finger at Emma. “Get back, little girl.”

“I don’t think so,” she replied coldly. “You need me.”

“You are still wanted by the Order.”

“Even though she’s the only reason you’ve gotten as close to the Sisters as you have tonight?” Gretchen pointed out acidly. “Closer than you have in decades, if I recall correctly.” She smiled blandly. “And I know I do.”

“Ewan Greenwood sacrificed himself to save us,” Emma added, her voice shaking. “I won’t let it be in vain. Now you can help me, or you can get the hell out of my way.”

Several Keepers swung their heads to goggle at her. No one spoke to the Order that way. Especially not a young witch with a spotty family lineage. Lord Mabon looked taken aback. Cormac hid a grin.

“Here they come,” Emma warned.

The Sisters floated out of the house, having already lost the weight of their bones to the battle and the magical wards. Sinister glee and fury rolled off them like steam from a kettle. Paint peeled off the doorframe.

Her father was gone. He’d managed to close the gate, but he’d lost the Sisters.

“Steady on,” Cormac said softly as they approached.

The newly regrown garden began to wilt under a coating of ice and frost. A mouse darted out of the bushes and froze solid, burning with the Greymalkin mark.

Lord Mabon elbowed Emma back imperiously. “I can do this,” she snapped at him when he showed every intention to ignore her plan. She shoved him back for good measure.

“Just like your mother,” he muttered.

“You’d best hope so,” she muttered back.

Colette’s hawk had possessed a real hawk in the nearby park and it now swooped down with a vicious jab, flying away again with two strands of hair in its beak. When Rosmerta and Magdalena turned to fling a curse on it, Moira’s gargoyle dove down between them. The dark magic cracked the stone. The hawk returned, sneaking in from behind and pulled one of Lark’s tangled hairs out. She barely noticed.

Emma rubbed the cut on her palm until it opened up again, adding the drops to the bottle. The neck was long enough that she couldn’t see what the Lacrimarium had placed inside it. By the smell of it, she probably didn’t want to know.

Next, she added one of the hairs.

Fine tremors racked Rosmerta’s body and her eyes rolled back in her head. Her familiar was a garden snake and it slithered out from under her hem. The magic of the bottle pulled it faster and faster, until it was sucked into the bottle. Rosmerta glowed brightly then fell apart into dozens of phosphorescent snakes, slinking into the shadows of the garden.

The white horses pressed closer and closer.

The next hair went in, long and auburn and tipped with blood. Lark faded away, her osprey-familiar sliding into the bottle without a struggle.

Magdalena smiled when the last hair joined the others.

Seeing the smile, Emma felt a premonition of cold dread, but it was too late.

Unsurprisingly, Magdalena’s familiar was a moth. It landed on the lip of the bottle, folding up its wings and then dropping
down the long clay neck. Magdalena turned to mist and drifted away. Sophie screamed. “No! Don’t leave me! No, you promised!”

Emma hurried to cork the bottle but now that the spell had been activated, the clay jug froze, burning her hands. She struggled to hold onto it, skin sticking painfully. She felt a strange pull inside her, an uncomfortable severing that had her teeth chattering. The darkness paled to a pearly gray. It took her a splintered excruciating moment to realize she was looking at the witch bottle through her familiar. The luminous deer shape was being sucked into the bottle trap, along with the Sisters’ familiars.

She made a strangled sound, unable to form actual words. Her hands blistered with cold, but a worse numbing chill had seized her insides. She knew she would never be warm again. She was being pulled apart and no one would be able to put her back together again. Cormac shouted something but it sounded as though he was speaking through water. She was shivering so violently she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t let go of the bottle. Her fingers were cramped around it. Her deer-familiar kicked its hooves, fighting the pull.

Cormac’s hands closed around hers. His warmth sent needles of pain through her but it was anchoring. It reminded her of her body, dragged the deer back ever so slightly toward her.

“Let go,” Cormac said while the Keepers watched, horrified. He peeled her fingers away. Her knuckles cracked, sounding like dry twigs. Her teeth were still chattering and she bit through the side of her tongue. The bottle shook in her grasp.

Cormac gave a hard yank, wrenching it from her.

Pain exploded through her. It scraped inside her skull and closed a jagged fist around her heart. She was scoured clean with it, like sand rubbing rust off an old kettle. She whimpered once before she could stop herself. Her familiar slammed back into her body so violently she was knocked off her feet. She landed on her tailbone in the grass. Gretchen and Penelope were at her side before she could finish catching her first breath.

“How did you do that?” Penelope asked Cormac.

“I have no magic,” he replied. “Remember? So I was able to break the connection.” He handed the jug to Lord Mabon. “Shall I restrain her, sir?”

“Which one?” He sighed, knocking the candle out of his iron lantern and slipping the bottle safely inside. A jet-inlaid wheel necklace was wrapped around it.

“Sophie was the culprit,” Cormac replied without inflection. “But I can secure Lady Emma as well, should you wish it.”

“I’d like to see you try.” Gretchen bared her teeth. “Ungrateful, useless lot of you.”

Before Lord Mabon could answer, the house flared once, shooting arrows of light between the shutters and under the mended door. The power behind it slapped into the garden, pushing everyone out so violently they left grooves in the dirt.

The Keepers flung up a line of shields and the others dropped to the ground, covering their heads.

The house’s gates slammed together.

The magpie burned with such intense heat it fused, before fading to black scrollwork again.

The Greymalkin House was closed once more.

Emma stepped out of the carriage
in front of the Rowanstone Academy for Young Ladies. She’d spent the last week at Penelope’s house recuperating, answering questions from various Keepers and magisters, and eating as much cake as she could. Apparently, defeating warlocks made one hungry. Lord Mabon was commended for setting up the protocol to immediately bring a Lacrimarium to the Greymalkin House if flares were ever sent up in the vicinity. Cormac snuck up the servant staircase one night, disguised by a One-Eyed Joe cameo.

And none of it seemed nearly as daunting as returning to school.

Especially a school filled with several dozen witch debutantes. She could swear her evil-eye ring was warming up even now.

She’d been exonerated of the murders.

But she’d also been tricked into opening the Greymalkin House for the Sisters and their dark secrets.