The tenuous sense of connection faded as Eliza shifted forward, releasing her grip on the wall. Nadrett redirected his snarl to her. “That goes for you, too, bitch.”
In the end, Eliza was sure of one thing: that it would be better to kill every faerie in this place, even Dead Rick, and herself with them, than to let Nadrett tear people’s souls out and feed them into his terrible machine.
“Devil take you,” she said, and threw herself at Nadrett.
The sound of gunfire was deafening in the small space. Eliza never made it near her target; Dead Rick caught her, in a desperate, failed attempt to prevent disaster. But as her ears rang with the aftermath of the shot, as smoke wisped through the cool, dry air, the expected earthquake did not begin.
And Lune sat, untouched, in her chair.
Nadrett stared, disbelieving, at the Queen. So did Dead Rick; so did Eliza. The pistol was an inch from her head; he could not possibly have missed. The wall showed a fresh pockmark where the round had struck, and the line between the two went straight through her skull.
Trembling, Nadrett reached out with his free hand to touch Lune’s hair.
His fingers went right through.
“What in Mab’s name…?” he whispered.
Clinging to Dead Rick, Eliza felt the growl in the skriker’s chest, before it ever became audible. Then understanding caught up, and she released him, freeing his arm to throw.
A tiny arc of water leapt from the vial, cloudy and stinking of the Thames from which it had been drawn. In a fierce, triumphant growl, Dead Rick snarled, “Seithenyn, I name you, and mark you for death. Let the waters of Faerie carry out their curse!”
Only a few droplets of water caught Nadrett. Nowhere near enough to hurt anyone. The entire vial couldn’t have hurt a man, even if poured into his lungs. Nadrett raised his gun again, and Eliza thought they were dead; Lune might survive that, but she and Dead Rick never would. Before Nadrett’s arm made it all the way up, though, the water began to move.
Move, and grow. It twisted up from the floor, from his sleeve and collar where the droplets had landed, twining into ropes and waves. Nadrett screamed, trying to claw it away, but the water only clung to his hands, like animate tar; then, understanding, he tried to run.
He didn’t get more than three steps. The waters raged higher around him, a whirlpool binding his body tight, and in their surface Eliza thought she saw faces: beautiful nymphs, twisted hags, and through them all, the solemn, bearded face of an old man. A voice spoke, resonant but clotted with mud and filth, the voice of the Thames itself. “For the destruction you wrought, and the death of Mererid our daughter, we bring this justice upon you.”
Nadrett’s scream died in a choking cough. Then there was only rushing water; then silence, as it drained away, leaving only a damp slick on the floor.
Dead Rick spat at it. “Wanted to tear your throat out, you bastard. But they ’ad first claim.”
Sick to her stomach, Eliza turned away. To the broken edge of the wall that had closed Lune into this chamber—Lune, who was some kind of ghost. Beyond its edge she found Hodge, limp on the floor, having dragged himself almost to the Queen before his strength gave out. Eliza knelt and rolled him onto his back, fearing the worst, but Hodge opened his eyes. “Is she…”
Eliza didn’t know how to answer. Instead she slipped her arm around his chest and helped him upright, and together they staggered back into the chamber of the London Stone.
Dead Rick gestured helplessly toward the Queen. “Lune—”
Hodge stretched one hand out to the wall. Not for support; his fingers touched the stone, and he closed his eyes. After a moment, Eliza did the same.
She felt that presence again, tenuous and weak, but undeniably there. A sense of gratitude breathed over her, so painfully weary that it brought a gasp of tears into Eliza’s own throat. I began to suspect some time ago. I have poured so much of myself into the Hall, I am no longer in my body; the Hall is my body. The scholars would say my spirit has released its grip upon the aether that made it solid. I could not hold both that and the palace at once.
It was more than just words. The Queen’s whisper carried with it overtones of sensation and memory that gave Eliza vertigo: in that moment, she came untethered from human notions of time and existence, growing into something vaster and more elemental than her poor mortal mind could conceive. But then, as from a distance, she felt Hodge’s arm tighten around her shoulders, and she knew she wasn’t alone; he was mortal, too, if not entirely so, and he helped anchor her to the reality she understood, against the tide of the Queen’s ancient soul.
Whether she heard Dead Rick’s voice with her ears or her mind, Eliza didn’t know. “Your Grace. I should ’ave stopped ’im sooner—”
No need for apology. Another wash of weariness, so intense Eliza wondered how anyone, human or faerie, could bear it. I know of your purpose in West Ham. Did he have an answer? Can his… machines be used?
It must have been mental communication, for Eliza felt the surge of Dead Rick’s repugnance alongside her own. “No,” she said, and then words failed her; they did not suffice to describe the horror of what Nadrett had built.
But it seemed the Queen took the sense of it from her mind, for she felt Lune’s grim resignation. Then we do not have long. At most, until the first train passes by the London Stone above. Perhaps not even that long. Hodge… the time has come. The Onyx Court must flit; the Hall can shelter us no more.
“No!” That was out loud, and it came from Dead Rick. Hand still on the wall, Eliza opened her eyes, and saw the skriker fall to his knees at the feet of his phantom Queen. “We can’t just bloody well give up. There ’as to be a way to save the palace.”
Hodge slipped from Eliza’s arm to lean against the stone, exhausted. His answer was flat and unyielding. “There ain’t. We’ve tried. I wish it weren’t true—but your time ’ere is done.”
The naked despair on Dead Rick’s face echoed through the stone, into Eliza’s own heart. “But this is our home.”
His words tore her in half. One piece growled that it would be good riddance; after all the evil the fae had done, London would be better off without them. No more Nadretts, stealing people and memories and souls, profiting from the misery and suffering of others. These were not godly creatures; they were alien, and unwanted. The occasional exception—Dead Rick, the Goodemeades—did not redeem the rest of their kind.
The other piece of Eliza had heard such words before—coming from men like Louisa Kittering’s father.
Maggie Darragh, starving in Whitechapel, until her anger could only express itself in dynamite. James O’Malley, who’d stolen more than a few things in his time, and other crimes besides. All the drunkards and thieves and murderers, the unwashed pestilential masses of Irish hidden away in their rookeries, where the respectable folk of London didn’t have to see them; some were bad at heart, and others were led into sin by those around them, and still others had it forced upon them by circumstance. And then there were the men like Patrick Quinn, that those respectable folk liked to forget: decent, hardworking Irish, not living in poverty, not committing crimes, but they couldn’t redeem their race in the eyes of those who judged.
Eliza had told Quinn that London was her home. It was Dead Rick’s home, too—and Lune’s, and the Goodemeades’, and all the other fae who sheltered in the dying ruins of the Onyx Hall, criminal and citizen alike. How could she look him in the eye and say he had to leave, that his kind were not wanted here?