The redheaded boy began to walk a spiraling route through the shadow-draped town, avoiding the alleys where stray cats called and dogs barked. Wood smoke filled the summer air. Whiffs of heather from the surrounding valleys tricked one into the mindset of a bright, hot day. Alec must have walked for twenty minutes with me close on his heel, taking me to the edge of Waterford and to the cove proper. The harbor air was thick with the scent of fish, making my nose twitch from the power of it. Here the winds blew harder, and I breathed deep, filling my lungs with the air fresh off the river currents.
We cut along the top of the cove, the drop down to the water stomach-churningly steep. One false step would plunge a man to his death among the jagged rocks waiting below. Alec moved swiftly, and in my mind, unnaturally, a fact that made me more certain of our destination. We moved inland for a half mile or so, to a place where the grass grew thin and the stones rose in a kind of uneven circle. This was the spring; I could hear the water bubbling nearby, and a curiously neat ring of mushrooms grew around the rocks.
“The spring is yon, but you must pay the price. For you, strange one, an answered riddle and a trinket will suffice.”
I nodded and told him to continue.
Alec’s smile glittered under the stars. The mushrooms sprinkled around the spring were bright red, the spots on their caps shining like a dusting of crushed diamonds. “An open-ended barrel, I am shaped like a hive. I am filled with the flesh, and the flesh is alive.” He cackled, throwing his head back. “What am I?”
It was a simple riddle, one I puzzled out quickly enough. “A thimble.”
Pouting, Alec seemed disappointed in my quick response. But then he smiled again and clapped his hands and pointed to the pocket on the right side of my coat. “The price is inside; now toss it in the spring. Who knows what manner of blessing the thimble will bring . . .”
I reached into my pocket, and sure enough, my hand closed around a small, cool thimble. The spring bubbled more fervently as I moved into position, and I gazed down into the roiling waters, wondering just what might come of doing as the odd boy said. But I did, closing my eyes, casting the trinket into the spring.
Alec had disappeared when I opened my eyes.
This was how I came to find the Spring of the Ainsprid Choimhdeachta, so-called Guardian Devils. The words were chiseled in half-legible script on a stone to the side of the spring. I had heard whispers of these beings before, guardian spirits of a female persuasion that could be summoned to perform all manner of spells, shielding of the spirit and the flesh principle among those skills. Curiouser still, they were said to be summoned by dark thoughts or prayers, which led many demonologists to suppose they are not guardian angels but more of a curse, a weight ’round the neck of their summoner. I’ve yet to find evidence of such a curse, and I participated in Alec’s game with the hope of creating just such a Choimhdeachta of my own.
Alas, no amount of wishing, praying, or cursing produced a spirit. Either the legend is wrong or a soul in greater need managed to pray her out from under my nose. Regardless, I did feel a great deal of Fae energy surrounding the spring; it filled me with dread and wonder, and I sat beside the waters and the fairy ring for a long time, fancying I could feel invisible spirits dancing merrily around me in the darkness.
Rare Myths and Legends: The Collected Findings of H. I. Morningside, page 210
I had only ever seen one dead body in my life.
When my mother and I still lived in Dublin, we watched them pull a man from the river Liffey on market day. He was gray and bloated, draped in a shroud of plants and muck, nothing like the body I was looking at now. Nothing like the still-beautiful Mrs. Eames, who, with her head down on her dressing table, might have been sleeping. She was still clutching her rosary, but the emerald on her hand did not glisten, shadowed as it was by her dead body.
A single trickle of blood ran out of her ear and down her cheek, underlining the eyes that stared out at me in mute surprise.
I stood in the door staring—at her, at the many open traveling trunks heaped with luxurious gowns, at the shoes lined up neatly by her dressing table, at the lacy frill of her robe, at all the trappings of a once-living person—and bile rose in my throat. It smelled like dried roses in the room, sweet enough to remind me of rot.
Nobody had yet found her even though it was midmorning the next day. I had come inside to scrounge up a bit of breakfast, and then found myself drifting up the stairs, wondering if it all was really true—if Mrs. Eames would be dead, killed by a child and abetted by gentle Mary. Perhaps I had also meant to see if there were any unlocked rooms and trinkets in them to steal, but that was all forgotten now. Here I was, the taste of toast souring on my dry tongue. It was all true. Her door had been open just a crack, and when I’d peered inside, I’d felt at once that this tableau had been left for me to find.
But maybe that was selfish. Maybe the answer was far simpler: this was not an occurrence of any urgency or rarity. If this were the first guest to be killed on the property then there ought to be some kind of commotion, but in this peace, in this silence, it felt as if this was business as usual at Coldthistle House.
Yet it was not usual for me. I took a careful step into the room, aware that my mere presence would look suspicious to outside eyes, but I had spotted something under her head on the table. A pot of ink lay open next to her, and a quill pen had tangled in her skirts as it fell. The parchment under her cheek was smudged. I dared not touch it, but I held my breath, leaning over her, scanning the letter with a growing sense of disgust . . .
My dear Enzo: The men here are so delightfully gullible—morbido come pane caldo—one or both will empty their pockets for us soon. I linger here only until their hearts are fully ensnared. Wait for me in San Gimignano, you know the spot, I will
It ended there, abruptly, with a giant ink splotch.
Good God, it was true. Everything Mr. Morningside had said about her and everything he’d threatened to do. It was all true.
My disgust deepened to nausea. Something must be done, but what? I turned straight around and marched out of the room, smashing headlong into George Bremerton.
He had taken everything in already, I could see from the bloodless shock on his face.
“Help,” I murmured, blinking up at him, feeling just as bloodless but not nearly as shocked. “Something terrible has happened.”
Moments later I sat staring at the wall in the Red Room as a man I didn’t know took my pulse.
I was well and truly caught now, caught between these two groups—that of the rich male guests left staying in the house, and that of the odd creatures determined to annihilate them—and I belonged in neither. The venerable old clock on the far wall tick-tocked, tick-tocked, marking the excruciating seconds. Listening to it was better than the alternative: Colonel Mayweather paced the carpet, speechifying endlessly, hands akimbo as he enumerated the horrors of not only the widow’s death but my apparent part in it.