Kell was pulling away when Hastra’s voice drew him back, soft, but insistent. “There is a saying in the Sanctuary. Is aven stran.”
“The blessed thread,” translated Kell.
Hastra nodded eagerly. “Do you know what it means?” His eyes brightened as he spoke. “It’s from one of the myths, the Origin of the Magician. Magic and Man were brothers, you see, only they had nothing in common, for each’s strength was the other’s weakness. And so one day, Magic made a blessed thread, and tied itself to Man, so tightly that the thread cut into their skin….” Here he turned his hands up, flexing his wrists to show the veins, “and from that day, they shared their best and worst, their strength and weakness.”
Something fluttered in Kell’s chest. “How does the story end?” he asked.
“It doesn’t,” Hastra said.
“Not even if they part?”
Hastra shook his head. “There’s no ‘they’ anymore, Master Kell. Magic gave so much to Man, and Man so much to Magic, that their edges blurred, and their threads all tangled, and now they can’t be pulled apart. They’re bound together, you see, life to life. Halves of a whole. If anyone tried to part them, they’d both unravel.”
VI
Alucard knew the Maresh palace better than he should have.
Rhy had shown him a dozen ways in and out; hidden doors and secret halls, a curtain pulled aside to reveal a stairwell, a door set flush with the wall. All the ways a friend could sneak into a room, or a lover into a bed.
The first time Alucard had snuck into the palace, he’d been so turned around he’d nearly walked in on Kell instead. He would have, if the Antari had actually been in his rooms, but the chamber was empty, the candlelight dancing over a bed still made, and Alucard had shuddered and slipped back the way he’d come, and fallen into Rhy’s arms several minutes later, laughing with relief until the prince pressed a palm over his mouth.
Now he raked his mind, trying to remember the nearest escape. If the doors had been made by—or cloaked with—magic, he’d have seen the threads, but the palace portals were simple, wood and stone and tapestry, forcing him to find his way by touch and memory instead of sight.
A hidden door led from the first floor down into the undercarriage of the palace. Six pillars held the massive structure up, solid bases from which the ethereal arch of the Maresh residence vaulted up against the sky. Six pillars of hollowed rock with a network of tunnels where they met the palace floor.
It was simply a matter of remembering which one to take.
He descended into what he thought was the old sanctuary, and found it converted into a kind of training chamber. The concentric circles of a meditation ring were still set into the floor, but the surfaces bore the scorches and stains befitting a sparring hall.
A lone torch with its enchanted white fire cast the space in shades of grey, and in the colorless haze, Alucard saw weapons scattered on one table and elements on another, bowls of water and sand, shards of stone. Amid them all, a small white flower was growing in a bowl of earth, its leaves spilling over the sides of the pot, a tame thing gone wild.
Alucard took the stairwell on the opposite side of the room, pausing only when he reached the door at the top. Such a thin line, he thought, between inside and out, safe and exposed. But his family, his crew, waited on the other side. He touched the wood, summoning his strength, and the door opened with a groan onto darkness.
Darkness, and before it, a web of light.
Alucard hesitated, face to face with the fabric of the priests’ protection spell. It looked like spider silk, but when he passed through, the veil didn’t tear; it simply shuddered, and settled back into shape.
Alucard stepped forward into the fog, half expecting it to fold around him. And yet, the shadows wicked off his coat, washed up against his boots and sleeves and collar only to fall away, rebuffed. Retreating with every step, but not far, never far.
His forehead itched, and he remembered Lila’s touch, the streak of blood, now dry, across his brow.
It was a thin protection, the shadows trying again and again to find their way in.
How long would it last?
He pulled his jacket close and quickened his pace.
Osaron’s magic was everywhere, but instead of the threads of spellwork, Alucard saw only heavy shadow, charcoal streaked across the city, the stark absence of light like spots across his vision. The darkness moved around him, every shadow swaying, dipping, and rolling the way a room did after too many drinks, and woven through it all, the colliding scents of wood fire and spring blossom, snowmelt and poppy, pipe smoke and summer wine. At turns sickly sweet and bitter, and all of it dizzying.
The city was something out of a dream.
London had always been made of sound as much as magic, the music drifting on the air, the singing glass and laughing crowds, the carriages and the bustle of the market.
The sounds he heard now were all wrong.
The wind was up, and on it he heard the hooves of guards on horseback, the clank of metal and the multitude of ghostly voices, an echo of words that all broke down before they reached him, forming a terrible music. Voices, or maybe one voice repeating, looping over and under itself until it seemed like a chorus, the words just out of reach. It was a world of whispers, and part of Alucard wanted to lean in, to listen, to strain until he could make out what it was saying.
Instead, he said the names.
Names of everyone who needed him and everyone he needed and everyone he couldn’t—wouldn’t—lose.