But Kell knew he couldn’t break Holland.
Holland was already broken. It showed, not in the scars, but in the way he spoke, the way he held himself in the face of pain, too well acquainted with its shape and scale. He was a man hollowed out long before Osaron, a man with no fear and no hope and nothing to lose.
For an instant, Kell tightened his grip anyway—in anger, in spite—and felt Holland’s bones groan under the strain.
And then he forced himself to let go.
I
Alucard had been dreaming of the sea when he heard the door open. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it was so out of place, at odds with the ocean spray and the summer gulls.
He rolled over, lost for a moment in the haze of sleep, his body aching from the abuse of the tournament and his head full of silk. And then, a step, wooden boards groaning underfoot. The sudden, very real presence of another person in the room. Rhy’s room. And the prince, still unconscious, unarmed, beside him.
Alucard rose in a single, fluid movement, the water from the glass beside the bed rising up and freezing into a dagger against his palm.
“Show yourself.”
He held the shard in a fighting stance, ready to strike as the intruder continued his slow march forward. The room around them was dim, a lamp burning just behind the intruder’s back, casting him in shadow.
“Down, dog,” said an unmistakable voice.
Alucard let out a low curse and slumped back against the side of the bed, heart pounding. “Kell.”
The Antari stepped forward, light illuminating his grim mouth and narrowed eyes, one blue, the other black. But what caught Alucard’s attention, what held it in a vice, was the sigil scrawled over his bare chest. A pattern of concentric circles. An exact replica of the mark over Rhy’s heart, the one woven through with iridescent threads.
Kell flicked his fingers, and Alucard’s frozen blade flew from his hand, melting back into a ribbon of water as it returned to its glass. Kell’s gaze shifted to the bed, sheets rumpled where Alucard had been lying moments before. “Taking your task seriously, I see.”
“Quite.”
“I told you to keep him safe, not cuddle.”
Alucard spread his hands behind him on the sheets. “I’m more than capable of multitasking.” He was about to continue when he registered the pallor of Kell’s skin, the blood staining his hands. “What happened?”
Kell looked down at himself, as if he’d forgotten. “The city is under attack,” he said hollowly.
Alucard suddenly remembered the pillar of dark magic beyond the window, fracturing across the sky. He spun back toward the balcony, and stiffened at the sight. There was no familiar red light against the clouds. No glow from the river below. When he reached for the door, Kell caught his wrist. Fingers ground against bone.
“Don’t,” he ordered in his imperious way. “They’re warding the palace, to keep it out.”
Alucard pulled free, rubbing at the smudge left by Kell’s grip. “It?”
The Antari looked past him. “The infection, or poison, spell, I don’t know …” He lifted a hand, as if to rub his eyes, then realized it was stained and let it fall. “Whatever it is. Whatever he’s done … doing. Just stay away from the doors and windows.”
Alucard looked at him, incredulous. “The city is being attacked, and we’re just going to hole up in the palace and let it happen? There are people out there—”
Kell’s jaw clenched. “We cannot save them all,” he said stiffly. “Not without a plan, and until we have one—”
“My crew’s out there. My family, too. And you expect me to just sit and watch—”
“No,” snapped Kell. “I expect you to make yourself useful.” He pointed at the door. “Preferably somewhere else.”
Alucard’s eyes went to the bed. “I can’t leave Rhy.”
“You’ve done it before,” said Kell.
It was a cheap shot, but Alucard still flinched. “I told the queen I’d—”
“Emery,” cut in Kell, closing his eyes, and it was only then that he realized how close the magician was to falling over. His face was grey, and it looked like sheer will was keeping him on his feet, but he was beginning to sway. “You’re one of the best magicians in this city,” said Kell, wincing as if the admission hurt. “Prove it. Go and help the priests. Help the king. Help someone who needs it. You cannot help my brother any more tonight.”
Alucard swallowed, and nodded. “All right.”
He forced himself to cross the chamber, glancing back only once, to see Kell half sinking, half falling into the chair beside the prince’s bed.
*
The hall beyond Rhy’s room was strangely empty. Alucard made it to the stairs before he saw the first servants hurrying past, their arms full of cloth and sand and water basins. Not the tools for binding wounds, but the ones needed for making wards.
A guard rounded the corner, his helmet under his arm. There was a line of blood across his forehead, but he didn’t appear wounded, and the mark was too deliberate to be the weary wiping of a brow.
Through a set of wooden doors, Alucard saw the king surrounded by members of his guard, all of them bent over a large map of the city. Runners carried word of new attacks, and with every one, King Maxim placed a black coin atop the parchment.
As Alucard moved through halls, down flights of stairs, he felt like he’d woken from a dream into a nightmare.
Hours before, the palace had brimmed with life. Now the only motions were nervous, halting. The faces masked by shock.
In a trance, his feet found the Grand, the palace’s largest ballroom, and stopped cold. Alucard Emery rarely felt helpless, but now he stood in stunned silence. Two nights before, men and women had danced here in pools of light as music played from the gold dais. Two nights before, Rhy had stood here, dressed in red and gold, the shining centerpiece of the ball. Two nights before, this had been a place of laughter and song, crystal glasses and whispered conversation. Now ostra and vestra huddled together in shock, and white-robed priests stood at every window, hands pressed flat against glass as they wove spells around the palace, shielding it against the poisonous night. He could see their magic, pale and shimmering, as it cast its net over the windows and the walls. It looked fragile compared with the heavy shadows that pushed against the glass, wanting in.
Standing there, at the mouth of the ballroom, Alucard’s ears caught slices of information, too thin, and all confused, tangling with one another until he couldn’t pick the news apart, sort the real from the fabulous, the truth from the fear.
The city was under attack.
A monster had come to London.
A fog was poisoning the people.
Invading their minds.
Driving them mad.
It was like the Black Night all over again, they said, but worse. That plague had taken twenty, thirty, and passed by touch. This, it seemed, moved on the air itself. It had taken hundreds, maybe even thousands.
And it was spreading.
The tournament magicians stood in clusters, some speaking in low, urgent tones while others simply stared out through the gallery’s vaulting windows as tendrils of dark fog wrapped around the palace, blotting out the city in streaks of black.
The Faroans gathered around Lord Sol-in-Ar in tight formation as their general spoke in his serpentine tongue, while the Veskans stood in sullen silence, their prince staring into the night, their princess surveying the room.
The queen caught sight of Alucard and frowned, pulling away from the knot of vestra around her.
“Is my son awake?” she said under her breath.
“Not yet, Your Majesty,” he answered. “But Kell is with him now.”
A long silence, and then the queen nodded, once, attention already shifting away.
“Is it true?” he asked. “That Rhy …” He didn’t want to shape the words, didn’t want to give them life and weight. He’d picked up fragments in the chaos of Rhy’s collapse, seen the matching spellwork on Kell’s chest.