Page 181 of The Mask Falling

Except Jaxon had killed him for me, as a gift. And I did not want anyone to die like this in my name. Not even him.

I prepared to do it with my spirit. It would be clean and dignified. Then a broad hand came down on my shoulder, and I raised my head to see Ankou, who held out his sickle.

“An Ànkou, in Breton myth, is the reaper of souls,” Le Vieux Orphelin said. “This soul should be yours, Underqueen. Let him begin his own Empire of Death.”

The blade was a dark grin of steel. Ankou gave me a grim nod, his mouth a line. Slowly, I took the sickle.

Alfred no longer seemed able to speak. Blood seeped between his knuckles where he held his guts in. His gaze darted to the sickle, then my face.

He had harvested us for the season of bones. Even he knew this was justice.

If I’d had the silver pill, I might have given it to him—but I would not use my gift to take his life. That was one mercy I was not prepared to offer this time. Paige Mahoney had shown mercy too often for her own good. Black Moth was someone else. Someone to fear.

I placed her mask back over my face.

“Alfred Hayhurst Rackham,” I said softly, “be gone into the æther. All is settled. All debts are paid.” I rested the blade of the sickle on his throat. “You need not dwell among the living now.”

****

The smell of blood clung to my clothes as I climbed the ladder back to the surface. Once everyone was through, Le Vieux Orphelin closed the manhole behind us, leaving the Rag and Bone Man to rot in his reeking tomb.

In a hundred years, someone might find his skeleton and the rusted sickle and wonder what had befallen him, this nameless corpse at the bottom of the citadel, this man with an iron mask beside him. Until then, he would be forgotten.

I could think of no more fitting end.

25

The Winged Victory

I lay on an unfamiliar bed, iron-cold and silent. Outside, the sun had dipped below the rooftops. I slept in the day now, and rose at night, as I had in the colony. Darkness made everything softer.

Rue Vernet was quiet this evening. I stared at the wall, my arm half-numb under my head.

Tomorrow night, I would join the perdues on the Île des Cygnes—one of the natural islands of the Seine—to await the arrival of Le Latronpuche and La Reine des Thunes. Léandre had forged them a summons from the Rag and Bone Man, sealed with a wax stamp we had taken from the corpse, which showed the skeletal hand. Mélusine had ensured it was delivered.

Unbeknownst to them, Le Vieux Orphelin would be waiting, with the patrones gathered as witnesses, to accuse them of all their crimes. If the syndicate accepted the evidence and ousted Le Latronpuche and La Reine des Thunes, I would step from the shadows and announce the alliance between the syndicates of London and Paris. I would show the world I was alive.

Except that I didn’t feel alive. Not fully. Part of me had been swallowed into that hall of stained-glass windows, entombed there like a queen of old.

The part of me that could never have drawn a blade across a human throat. The part of me that would have flinched.

Now I felt nothing. Just as I had felt nothing when I washed the blood off my hands and face and neck. It had been a mercy kill, yet there had been no mercy in my hand. Only resolve.

Distantly, I knew I needed to get up. Wash, eat, pull myself together. The most I had moved since noon was to turn from my side to my back to my other side.

When I slept, it was in jolts. Often I stirred, thinking there was an arm around my waist, somebody there. Then I would remember, and the sharpness of it would pierce me again. For the first time in weeks, I craved the drug they had forced into me in the Archon, the one I had sweated out in the safe house. Anything to eclipse the harsh light of reality.

It was almost dark by the time I got up and faltered down the corridor, to the kitchen. I needed to turn on the heat. I could do that. Once I had found the right switch, I took a jug of lemon barley from the fridge, poured a little into a glass, and drank until I coughed.

Just before the fridge thumped shut, I glimpsed a coffee press on the counter. And suddenly I was on the other side of the Seine, and there was Arcturus, in the amber sunlight, handing me a steaming mug. Though my lips clamped together, they trembled. I wanted to shatter the coffee press. I wanted to buckle. That memory was a lie. All of it had been part of his act.

I had wondered what the æther had been trying to tell me when Liss read my cards. If Arcturus Mesarthim was meant to be my lover or my downfall. Now I knew. He was the Devil.

My breath shook. Heat suddenly leaked down my cheeks; I brushed them roughly with my sleeve. Every time I thought I had turned myself to ice, something opened the cracks again.

Since I had run from him, the golden cord had been so still that I could no longer feel it. A small mercy. If I couldn’t feel him, perhaps he could no longer feel me. Or find me. I would still have to abandon this place soon, just in case. I could never stay in one hideout for long. I would have to be rootless for the rest of my life.

I looked hard at the ceiling. When I could draw a steady breath, I returned to the room and the rumpled bed. I had to sleep, had to think clearly for tomorrow. As I turned onto my back, I remembered another bed. The warmth of him beside me, around me.

---