“I do not like this,” Stevens said, slowly but very loudly.
“S-s-s-s-s—” The stutter matched her frantic pulse. Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just know I—
“CAMI!” Nico broke what was left of the door, skidding on the carpet, bare-chested and in his ragged pajama pants, his hair standing up and the red pinpricks in his pupils guttering like candleflames in a draft. He stopped dead, thinning smoke shredding and cringing away from him.
“Biel’y.” Stevens turned on his heel. Even at this hour he wore mirror-polished wingtips, and his suit wasn’t creased or wrinkled. The only thing missing was his tie, his collar unbuttoned instead of cutting into the papery skin of his throat, and it made him look, for the first time, oddly fragile. “The maggots are here. In New Haven, yes, and they dare to break the sanctity of this house.”
Nico’s nostrils flared. He wasn’t listening.
He inhaled, deeply, and Trig went very still.
“Oh, fu—” Trig shoved Cami through the bathroom door. He didn’t even get to finish the word before Nico was on him, a thundering growl throbbing in the new Vultusino’s chest and his fangs out.
Cami fell, barking both bleeding knees on white tile. Nico tossed Trig aside like the older man was made of paper, Trig’s head hit the doorframe with a sickening crack. A blink and the Vultusino was there, his fingers sinking into her arms like iron claws, and Cami kept screaming breathlessly, scrabbling to get away as his teeth champed just short of her throat.
It was Stevens, one thin knee in Nico’s back, who wrestled the Vultusino away from her. He had paused to grab the gauze from the floor and twisted it into a noose, pulling back on Nico’s throat as if dragging the reins of a maddened titon, his face set and still as it always was. He heaved Enrico Vultusino’s son back, and the scream of a blood-maddened bloodline Family member turned the air so cold Cami’s breath turned to a white cloud.
Trigger Vane lay very still, across a shattered door, his eyes closed. And the copper-smelling crimson tide, maddening Nico with its perfume, was everywhere.
TWENTY-EIGHT
BOTH KNEES BANDAGED, HER RIGHT HAND BANDAGED too—Marya hadn’t even scolded her, just observed a stony, worried silence—Cami clutched at her schoolbag and wiped at her cheeks. Behind her, the limousine purred.
Nico was locked up in the Holding Room, probably with Stevens standing guard at the door. It was a good thing the walls of the house on Haven Hill were thick, otherwise they could have heard the new Vultusino’s screams in the next province.
The cries had ceased, as if cut by a knife, the instant she closed the front door behind her.
Chauncey slept in a small apartment over the cavernous garages; Cami’s tentative knocks hadn’t even woken his wife Evelyn.
I need to go to Ruby’s, she’d told him. It’s an emergency.
Chauncey hadn’t asked any questions, just rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and yawned, grabbing the limousine’s keys off the pegs. He was used to being awakened to drive someone somewhere.
Now her stomach growled, and she lifted the brass knocker again. The garden lay under snow, the ruthlessly trimmed holly along the east boundary glowing green under a scrim of ice. The fountain, its snout lifted and its concrete jaws wide, was festooned with artistic icicles.
The gate was wooden and the fence was low, but you got the idea it was because she liked it that way, and furthermore, that Mrs. Edalie de Varre, Ruby’s formidable grandmother, needed no wall or gate to bar and no security guards to eviscerate any Twist or jack who stepped onto her property.
There were powers in New Haven even Family respected, and one of them rested here in Woodsdowne.
The locks clicked, the door opened, and a pair of bleached-gray eyes under a fall of bone-white hair, braided and banded across the top of her head, peered out. Gran was in her high-collared dragon-patterned silk housedress and embroidered slippers, and she examined Cami for a few moments before stepping back.
“Camille.” A faint smile, her parchment skin barely wrinkling. “Come in.”
She really does have very sharp teeth, Cami thought, and stepped over the threshold. The limousine dropped into gear out on the street, and Chauncey pulled away.
Inside, it smelled of hot griddle and blackcurrant jam, frying eggs and bacon. “I’m making breakfast,” Gran said briskly, taking Cami’s coat and stowing it in the cedar-scented closet, just like usual. She never seemed surprised or ruffled, which was probably a blessing since she had to deal with Ruby all the time. “You like them scrambled, I recall. Ruby will be down as soon as I make coffee.”
“Th-th-thank y-y-y—”
“Oh, don’t,” the Wolfmother of Woodsdowne said, her faint steely smile widening a trifle. “Nobody has good news this morning, my dear. I can smell as much on the wind. Come and eat.”
It took some time. Gran didn’t make coffee until near the end of Cami’s stuttering recitation—unlike Ruby, she couldn’t lie to Gran, and she didn’t want to. There was just something about those pale eyes and the way the old woman moved, with such precise economy, that warned against any such impropriety. Spending the night at Ruby’s meant walking on eggshells, though Mrs. De Varre had never even raised her voice in Cami’s presence.
You got the feeling you didn’t want her to. At the same time, there was a curious comfort. Gran hadn’t batted an eyelash when Ruby brought Cami home one day after school. Yes, the Vultusino girl, she’d said. You are welcome in my house, young one. Sit down, have a scone.
Cami left out some things, certainly—the flush that went through her every time she said Tor’s name, just how bloodcrazy Nico had gone, the wooden huntsman’s blue, blue eyes, the dreams . . . and Trig’s awful stillness, lying in the shattered doorway.
But she told about Tor and the pin and the shimmersilk, the mirror, and the smoke. Gran listened, her eyebrows coming together fractionally as she refilled Cami’s glass—milk for a growing girl, she always remarked—and snapped a charm to flip the pancakes on the griddle.
“And so,” she finally said, switching the coffeemaker on, “you came here.”
I couldn’t think of where else to go. I just need to sit for a little while. Just get myself together.
And even if Nico wanted to, he couldn’t step inside Gran’s door without her blessing. Not even Papa would have. Here was the safest place Cami could think of, even if she wondered just what might follow her out to Woodsdowne.
If some bad charming, bad magic, could reach through a mirror in the house on Haven Hill, it might be able to come here too. Cami’s midsection clenched at the thought. “I n-need h-help.” Her tongue had eased. At least Gran was invariably patient. She let you get everything out.
“Help. Well. Hm. You did well, coming to me. Shows you have some intelligence.” Gran poked at the fresh strips of bacon sizzling in their pan. Dawn, creeping through the wide window full of terracotta pots holding green herbs, was iron-gray. More snow before long. “But . . . them. The Pale Ones. Theirs is an . . . old magic.”
Here, in the cozy sun-yellow kitchen, warm and chewing on pancakes with blackcurrant jam, it almost seemed like she could handle all this. Maybe. “O-older than th-the R-r-reeve.” She nodded. Her scalp itched, her hair felt greasy. But her stomach had quit growling. It wasn’t like Marya’s oatcakes, but then, nothing was.