It was enough.
And it was not enough.
He wanted more.
I
GREY LONDON
Ned Tuttle woke to a very bad feeling.
He’d recently moved out of his family’s house in Mayfair and into the room above the tavern—his tavern—that magical place once called the Stone’s Throw, and rechristened the Five Points.
Ned sat up, listening intently to the silence. He could have sworn someone was speaking, but he couldn’t hear the voice anymore, and, as the moments ticked past, he couldn’t be sure if it had ever been real, or simply the dregs of sleep clinging to him, the urge to listen to an echo of some peculiar dream.
Ned had always had vivid dreams.
So vivid he couldn’t always tell when something had truly happened or when he’d simply dreamed it. Ned’s dreams had always been strange, and sometimes they were wonderful, but lately, they’d grown … disturbing, skewing darker, more menacing.
Growing up, his parents had written off his dreams as simply an effect of his reading too many novels, disappearing for hours—sometimes days—into fictional and fantastical worlds. In his youth, he’d seen the dreams as a sign of his sensitivity to the other, that aspect of the world most people couldn’t see—the one even Ned couldn’t see—but that he believed in, fervently, determinedly, doggedly, right up until the day he met Kell and learned for certain that the other was real.
But tonight, Ned had been dreaming of a forest made of stone. Kell was in the dream, too, had been at one point but wasn’t anymore, and now Ned was lost, and every time he called out for help, the whole forest echoed like an empty church, but the voices that came back weren’t his. Some of them were high and others low, some young and sweet, and others old, and there at the center, a voice he couldn’t quite make out, one that bent around his ears the way light sometimes bent around a corner.
Now, sitting up in the stiff little bed, he had the strangest urge to call out, the way he had in the forest, but some small—well, not as small as he’d like—part of him feared that just like in the forest, someone else would call back.
Perhaps the sound had come from the tavern downstairs. He swung his long legs over the side of the bed, slid his feet into his slippers, and stood, the old wooden floor groaning beneath his toes.
He moved in silence, only that creak-creak-creak following him across the room, and then the oomph as he ran into the dresser, the eek of the metal lantern rocking, almost tipping, then humphing back into place, followed by the shhhh of tapers rolling of the table.
“Bugger,” muttered Ned.
It would have been dreadfully handy, he thought, if he could simply snap his fingers and summon a bit of fire, but in four straight months of trying, he’d barely managed to shift the pieces in Kell’s kit of elements, so he fumbled on his robe in the dark and stepped out onto the stairs.
And shivered.
Something was most certainly strange.
Ordinarily Ned loved strange things, lived in the hope of spying them, but this was a type of strange bordering on wrong. The air smelled of roses and woodsmoke and dying leaves, and when he moved it felt like he was wading through a warm spot in a cold pool, or a cold spot in a warm one. Like a draft in a room when all the doors were shut, the windows latched.
He knew this feeling, had sensed it once before in the street outside the Five Points, back when it was the Stone’s Throw and he was still waiting for Kell to return with his promised dirt. Ned had seen a cart crash, heard the driver rant about a man he’d crushed. Only there was no body left behind, no man, only smoke and ash and the faint frisson of magic.
Bad magic.
Black magic.
Ned returned to his room and fetched his ceremonial dagger—he’d bought it from a patron the week before, the handle etched with runes around a pentagram of inlaid onyx.
My name is Edward Archibald Tuttle, he thought, gripping the dagger, I am the third of that name, and I am not afraid.
The creak-creak-creak followed him down the warping stairs, and when he reached the bottom, standing in the darkened tavern with only the thud-thud of his heart, Ned realized where that feeling of strangeness was coming from.
The Five Points was too quiet.
A heavy, muffled, unnatural quiet, as if the room were filled with wool instead of air. The last embers in the hearth smoldered behind their grate, the wind blew through the boards, but none of it made any sound.
Ned went to the front door and threw back the bolt. Outside, the street was empty—it was the darkest hour, that time before the first streaks of dawn—but London was never truly still, not this close to the river, and so he was instantly greeted by the clop-clop of carriages, the distant trills of laughter and song. Somewhere near the Thames, the scrape of a fiddle, and much closer, the sound of a stray cat, yowling for milk or company or whatever stray cats wanted. A dozen sounds that made up the fabric of his city, and when Ned closed the door again, the noises followed him, sneaking in through the crack beneath the door, around the sill. The pressure ebbed, the air in the tavern thinning, the spell broken.
Ned yawned, the sense of strangeness already slipping away as he climbed the stairs. Back in his room, he cracked the window despite the cold, and let the sounds of London drift in. But as he crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up, and the world settled into silence, the whispers came again. And as he sank back into that place between waking and sleep, those elusive words finally took shape.
Let me in, they said.
Let me in.
II
Voices rang out past Holland’s cell just after midnight.
“You’re early,” said the guard nearest the bars.
“Where’s your second?” asked the one on the wall.
“The king needs men on the steps,” answered the interloper, “what with the scarred fellows coming in.” His voice was muffled by his helm.
“We’ve got orders.”
“So do I,” said the new guard. “And we’re running thin.”
A pause, and in that pause, Holland felt a strange thing happen. It was like someone took the air—the energy in the air—and pulled on it. Shallowly. A tug of will. A shifting of scales. A subtle exertion of control.
“Besides,” the new guard was saying absently, “what would you rather be doing? Staring at this piece of filth, or saving your friends?”
The balance tipped. The men roused from their places. Holland wondered if the new guard knew what he’d done. It was the kind of magic forbidden in this world, and worshipped in his own.
The new guard watched the others climb the stairs, and swayed ever so slightly on his feet. When they were gone, he leaned back against the wall facing Holland’s cell, the metal of his armor scraping stone, and drew a knife. He toyed with it absently, fingertips on the tip, tossing and catching and tossing it again. Holland felt himself being studied, and so he studied in return. Studied the way the new guard tipped his head, the speed of his fingers on the knife, the scent of another London wafting in his blood.
Her blood.
He should have recognized that voice, even through the stolen helm. Maybe if he’d slept—how long had it been?—maybe if he wasn’t bloody and broken and behind bars. He still should have known.
“Delilah,” he said evenly.
“Holland,” she answered.
Delilah Bard, the Antari of Grey London, set her helmet on the table beneath a hook holding the jailer’s keys. Her fingers danced absently across their teeth. “Your last night …”
“Did you come to say farewell?”
She made a humming sound. “Something like that.”
“You’re a long way from home.”