“Some of them may fear you, but all of them respect you. And don’t let on,” he added, nudging her shoulder with his, “but a few may even like you.”
Lila groaned, and Alucard chuckled.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Delilah Bard,” she said calmly. “The best thief aboard the Night Spire.”
Normally Alucard left it at that, but not tonight. “But who was Delilah Bard before she came aboard my ship?”
Lila kept her eyes on the water. “Someone else,” she said. “And she’ll be someone else again when she leaves.”
Alucard blew out a puff of air, and the two stood there, side by side on deck, staring out into the fog. It sat above the water, blurring the line between sea and sky, but it wasn’t entirely still. It shifted and twisted and curled, the motions as faint and fluid as the rocking of the water.
The sailors called it scrying fog—supposedly, if you stared at it long enough, you began to see things. Whether they were visions or just a trick of the eye depended on who you asked.
Lila squinted at the coiling mist, expecting nothing—she’d never had a particularly vivid imagination—but after a moment she thought she saw the fog began to shift, begin to change. The effect was strangely entrancing, and Lila found she couldn’t look away as tendrils of ghostly mist became fingers, and then a hand, reaching toward her through the dark.
“So.” Alucard’s voice was like a rock crashing through the vision. “London.”
She exhaled, the cloud of breath devouring the view. “What about it?”
“I thought you’d be happy. Or sad. Or angry. In truth, I thought you’d be something.”
Lila cocked her head. “And why would you think that?”
“It’s been four months. I figured you left for a reason.”
She gave him a hard look. “Why did you leave?”
A pause, the briefest shadow, and then he shrugged. “To see the world.”
Lila shrugged. “Me, too.”
They were both lies, or at best, partial truths, but for once, neither challenged the other, and they turned away from the water and crossed the deck in silence, guarding their secrets against the cold.
V
WHITE LONDON
Even the stars burned in color now.
What he’d always taken for white had become an icy blue, and the night sky, once black, now registered as a velvet purple, the deepest edge of a bruise.
Holland sat on the throne, gazing up past the vaulting walls at the wide expanse of sky, straining to pick out the colors of his world. Had they always been there, buried beneath the film of failing magic, or were they new? Forest-green vines crept, dark and luscious, around the pale stone pillars that circled the throne room, their emerald leaves reaching toward silver moonlight as their roots trailed across the floor and into the still, black surface of the scrying pool.
How many times had Holland dreamed of sitting on this throne? Of slitting Athos’s throat, driving a blade into Astrid’s heart, and taking back his life. How many times … and yet it hadn’t been his hand at all, in the end.
It had been Kell’s.
The same hand that had driven a metal bar through Holland’s chest, and pushed his dying body into the abyss.
Holland rose to his feet, the rich folds of his cape settling around him as he descended the steps of the dais, coming to a stop before the black reflective pool. The throne room stood empty around him. He’d dismissed them all, the servants and the guards, craving solitude. But there was no such thing, not anymore. His reflection stared up from the glassy surface of the water, like a window in the dark, his green eye a gem floating on the water, his black eye vanishing into the depths. He looked younger, but of course even in youth, Holland had never looked like this. The blush of health, the softness of a life without pain.
Holland stood perfectly still, but his reflection moved.
A tip of the head, the edge of a smile, the green eye devoured in black.
We make a fine king, said the reflection, words echoing in Holland’s head.
“Yes,” said Holland, his voice even. “We do.”
BLACK LONDON
THREE MONTHS AGO
Darkness.
Everywhere.
The kind that stretched.
For seconds and hours and days.
And then.
Slowly.
The darkness lightened into dusk.
The nothing gave way to something, pulled itself together until there was ground, and air, and a world between.
A world that was impossibly, unnaturally still.
Holland lay on the cold earth, blood matted to his front and back where the metal bar had passed through. Around his body, the dusk had a strange permanence to it, no lingering tendrils of daylight, no edge of approaching night. There was a heavy quiet to this place, like shelves beneath long-settled dust. An abandoned house. A body without breath.
Until Holland gasped.
The dusty world shuddered around him in response, as if by breathing, he breathed life into it, set the time stuttering forward into motion. Flecks of dirt—or ash, or something else—that had been hanging in the air above him, the way motes seemed to do when caught in threads of sunlight, now drifted down, settling like snow on his hair, his cheeks, his clothes.
Pain. Everything was pain.
But he was alive.
Somehow—impossibly—he was alive.
His whole body hurt—not just the wound in his chest, but his muscles and bones—as if he’d been lying on the ground for days, weeks, and every shallow breath sent spikes through his lungs. He should be dead. Instead he braced himself, and sat up.