A Breath of Frost (6 page)

Gretchen once tried to pry the hinges of the locked compartment apart with a knife but with no success. Emma was relegated to shaking the box gently. It rattled enticingly but refused to give up its secrets, even now. There could be love letters in faded ribbons inside, dried roses from her first ball.

Or decapitated doll heads.

Emma had no idea how long her mother had been crazy, after all.

And it was no use asking her father about it. He never spoke of her mother. And when she asked questions, he merely left the room. Or the house. He’d once left the country entirely. So she was left with an old box that wouldn’t open and the broken top of a mysterious glass bottle full of a questionable substance.

That wasn’t quite right though, was it? Cormac had apparently deciphered the mystery of the bottle with ease. After
which he proceeded to lose his composure and his good manners entirely. Curious, that. If she still knew anything about him it was his reputation for gallantry, top marks at Oxford when he wasn’t down from school for the Season, and a secret duel at dawn that wasn’t so secret. Such things never were. But even after he’d snubbed her, she’d only ever seen him being charming and handsome, ever dancing with wallflowers, which his friend Tobias disdained.

And smoldering.

There was no denying the man could smolder.

Still, he clearly knew more about her own family than she did, and whatever he knew disturbed him. Evidently, she brought out the very best in his character. He’d sent her home without answers, only more questions.

Despite herself, she missed him. She missed his crooked smile and the way he’d held her hand. She’d have thrown herself into the Thames in the middle of winter before admitting it to him. Naked. In broad daylight.

He’d been autocratic and cryptic, assuming he could intimidate her into silence or obedience, just like her father.

Worse, she’d let him.

She sat up.

Well, they’d just see about that, wouldn’t they?

The Greymalkin Sisters
were notorious.

Of all the warlocks in London, they had been the worst. They served only themselves. They weren’t witches after all, but warlocks. They admitted to no authority from the witching society and therefore would not be regulated by the Order.

And even though they hadn’t been seen since the French Revolution, everyone knew their names. Magdalena, Rosmerta, and Lark were spirits of past Greymalkin warlocks clinging to a twilight life, long after their deaths. They weren’t actual sisters, merely female descendants from the same family lineage. There had once been seven of them, before the Order managed to banish them.

Magdalena hovered off the pavement, so pale Cormac could see right through her to the wet cobblestones of the street. She was the eldest, wearing a medieval gown. It was long and blue,
ending in misty tatters that caused steam to rise off the puddles under her bare feet. Her hair was loose, since knots and braids bound power and caused spellwork to go awry. Through the long thick tresses scurried all manner of insects: wasps, beetles, and black spiders. Death’s-head moths fluttered over her head. When she smiled, a nearby gas lamp flickered frantically.

Behind her the other two Sisters waited, sinister in their still, expectant patience.

Under his shirt, Cormac’s charms and the silver chain they hung on prickled painfully with warning. It stung hard enough to scar the already satiny-worn skin it had branded with previous warnings. And he’d only been part of the Order since just after Christmas. Tobias turned slowly, as if he could delay the inevitable. He was still clammy and weaving on his feet from the poisoning of tracking a blood curse.

The Sisters descended.

They moved so fast they blurred into nothing. There was a heartbeat of unnatural silence, not quite long enough for Cormac to reach for his weapon, but just long enough for ice to form on his fingertips. Tobias swore and his blistering words turned to frost.

Rosmerta wore a Tudor-style dress over a whalebone corset, and a choker encrusted with rubies and a pearl the size of a quail’s egg. A silver sickle knife hung from her waist, catching the hazy yellow-tinged light. She was wreathed in poisonous flowers: deadly nightshade vines for a crown, belladonna at her wrists, red bryony berries in long loops around her neck and white hemlock stalks woven into a belt. She stank of valerian and bruised lilies.

Magdalena and Rosmerta reached out, touching fingertips around Tobias, as if circling him in a child’s game. Every time a Greymalkin drained witches of their power, the Sisters were strengthened. They were currently gray-lavender shades, having been deprived of a witch’s full power for decades. The Greymalkin family had been hiding too successfully to properly feed their dead ancestresses. But with enough power they could rematerialize.

Their hunger was sharp as badgers’ teeth. Cormac could see the power gathering under Tobias’s skin as he tried to shield himself. He managed to fight back, searing Rosmerta with a blast of sun-bright magic. She screeched, her hair singeing.

It wasn’t enough.

Tobias made a choked sound of pain and slumped to the ground. The Sisters peered down at his fallen body. He twitched, teeth chattering. The color leached from his face, his hands, his eyes, even his clothes. Everything about him looked bleached and faded. Cormac lunged toward him, only to be stopped so abruptly by the third Sister, he felt he’d been thrown from a horse.

Lark wore the brown woolen dress of a peasant girl with a misty plaid shawl around her shoulders. She reached for Cormac, tears glistening in her eyes. She was said to have been quiet and kind, the rose among Greymalkin thorns, until her beloved died on the Culloden moors. The battle against the British had raged so desperately that nearly two thousand Scots were lost. She’d walked the fields of dead and butchered men until the hem of her gown was stained in blood, as it was still. She was silent, sad, and sweet.

She was the worst of them.

When she reached for Cormac, the air shattered. It froze in his nostrils, making it difficult to breathe. Frost clung to his eyelashes. He fumbled for the dagger in his boot with numb fingers even as the charms around his neck shot light through the buttonholes of his shirt. It was brief, like sunlight glinting on water or a sword’s blade.

She stumbled back, holding a hand up to her eyes. “A trick,” she sighed. Blood began to drip from the hem of her dress. Ice cracked under Cormac’s boots. She dragged her hand across his chest, leaving fresh singes in his shirt. The material crackled as it burned under a sheen of ice. Ghosts pulled so much energy from the atmosphere around them that their touch scorched, even as everything else around them froze.

“You deceived me,” Lark said so mournfully that he nearly apologized. He felt odd, as if he were under a frozen river. He was too cold to move, too cold to care. “You have no real power, only borrowed trinkets.” Those trinkets would have made a meal for her, if there wasn’t a witch to drain not three feet away.

She drifted away to join her sisters. They hunched over Tobias, scattering beetles, poisonous berries, and icicles. His patrician features were gray. The gas lamps went out, pulled by an invisible wind. The Sisters floated there, their edges growing sharper and more distinct. A bird fell dead from the sky, landing in the middle of the street.

Tobias didn’t have much time.

But none of them wanted Cormac and so would not be distracted.

Cormac tossed another pinch of summoning powder, to warn the Order they were needed. The sparks cast a pale blue light over them, flickering and fading away. Magdalena was the first to look up, more satiated than her sisters. Her eyes glowed with an unnatural brightness. “The Order of the Iron Nail,” she sneered. “Go away, little Greybeard, before I eat your spleen for your impertinence.”

He’d once had a governess threaten the very same thing. He’d tossed a plum pudding at her head, if he recalled correctly. This time he chose salt and iron shavings, ground down from the horseshoe of a white horse with one blue eye.

He carried the banishing powder in a red pouch, sewn with magical runes by his youngest sister. It was a standard weapon of the Order, as useful as swords and pistols. More useful, truthfully. There were too many creatures that didn’t fear bullets. But demons dreaded salt, curses broke under the gaze of a blue eye, and spirits feared horses and boats, both used to carry them off to the Underworld.

Cormac leaped into their circle, standing over his friend and tossing another handful of the banishing powder. Ice burned his exposed forearms, leaving angry white welts. Rosmerta shrieked as the powder formed into a white horse and galloped at her. She jumped out of the way, scurrying to hide behind her plaid-draped sister. Blood and ice hit the pavement. A large beetle was crushed to ash under a bright hoof. The horse tossed his mane, sending death’s-head moths tumbling into one another, wings shredded.

Rosmerta’s poisonous vines lifted in the air, as did her hair
and the full bell of her skirt, all being towed toward the white horse. She grabbed a handful of her sister’s bloody hem, fighting the inexorable pull, still shrieking. The other two stopped draining Tobias, turning to glower at Cormac, then at the horse.

“No!” Magdalena snapped viciously. “We’ve been too long denied.”

“I can’t hold on,” Rosmerta shouted above the roar of the wind and the pounding of hooves like cannon shot as the white horse circled and circled. A strange honey-scented wind flattened Cormac’s hair and tugged at his clothing. Tobias slid a few dangerous inches along the pavement. Cormac crouched to hold onto the back of his collar, securing him. Tobias was exhausted to the point that the white horse might accidentally take him as well.

Cormac had to lure the Sisters away. Where they went, the white horse would follow. He touched the amulets around his neck. They’d been a temptation for other creatures before, from revenants to necromancers to warlocks. He just had to make them more appealing than the last dregs of Tobias’s magic. He slipped the chain off, unclasping it. Amulets clattered together.

Rosmerta turned to glance at him once. He dropped a charm for agility and stepped on it, shattering the glass bead. She licked her lips, but didn’t leave her post.

“Don’t you want it?” he asked. “Why fight over what little he has left in him?” He held up the chain, the amulets spinning together. “When I have all of these?”

He broke three wolves’ teeth meant to guard him from a werewolf’s bite.

Rosmerta abandoned Tobias first.

He took a few steps, cracking a memory charm like a hazelnut.

The horse nipped at Magdalena. She hollered a curse and his mane singed briefly. Ghostly smoke smelled like cold water and metal.

In unison, the Sisters turned to Cormac.

When he was certain they were following him, he crossed the street and headed to the seclusion of the park, dropping charms as he went. Curse-breakers, dream-shields, lock-singers. He kept the charm for True Sight, slipping it into his pocket. If he was going to distract the Sisters long enough for the Order to arrive, he had to be able to see them.

He broke his strongest shield-charm last, leaving him vulnerable. He knew it would be irresistible to the Sisters. It was the most powerful magic he carried on his person; it had taken three witches three long nights to forge it.

And he just had to distract them a little longer.

Long enough to survive.

And hopefully not get his own sisters killed.

“Gretchen, your gown!
It’s positively ruined!”

Gretchen smiled brightly as she dropped onto a gold velvet chair. She was covered in soot and mud, and the ribbons on her dress had dye running all over the skirts. It blended to a virulent shade of purple where it met the pink smears left behind by Lady Pickford’s ridiculous dog. She was rather proud of the effect. It looked a little like a sunset over the moors. “Best. Ball. Ever.”

“Up, you savage!” Her mother very nearly shrieked, despite her daily assertions that ladies only spoke in pleasant whispers. A talent, it need not be said, that Gretchen did not possess. “You’ll stain the fabric and I’ve just had that chair delivered.”