Helen half rose, caught between Darby and the Duke. Both in dire peril.
She ducked back to Darby, grabbed the journal from her maid’s weak grip and jammed the soft leather cover against the gaping wound. Darby screamed.
Helen gritted her teeth and pulled Darby’s hands over the book. ‘Press hard,’ she ordered.
She hurled herself at the grim battle by the door. Selburn smashed the butt of the spent pistol against Carlston’s head, opening up another gash across his temple in a spray of blood, but Carlston did not let go. He pounded Selburn back against the wall, the Duke’s head slamming against the plaster, and raised the glass knife.
With a yell, Helen launched herself onto Carlston’s back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his head. He released the Duke and staggered into the wall under her momentum. The Duke slid to the floor, dazed.
Hammond peered through the doorway.
Helen tightened her headlock, desperately trying to steer Carlston away from the other two men.
‘Hammond, get him out!’ she yelled.
Damn the Duke and his gun. The blaze of anger galvanised her as Carlston whirled around, trying to dislodge her from his back, the knife still in his hand. He stabbed at her blindly, but the blade sheered past her thighs, his strikes sliding wild. They whirled in a lurching circle. Helen caught a dizzy glimpse of Hammond dragging Selburn out of the attic, and then Darby with the journal still stoically pressed into her wound, the binding covered in her blood.
Carlston rammed Helen against the wall, the impact crushing the air from her lungs. Gasping, she punched him in the head, managing to get a foot on the wall to lever herself some space to breathe. Somehow she had to get the journal and subdue him long enough for them both to touch it. There would be no problem with the supply of blood, she thought grimly. For either of them.
He still had her knife. And he still wanted the journal. A desperate plan formed.
‘Darby, can you move?’
It came out more as a gasp than a yell, but she saw Darby nod and gather herself. So brave.
Carlston shifted, giving himself space for another brutal ram into the wall. With a formless prayer, Helen swung both feet back and planted them against the wall, her arms still wrapped in the headlock. With all her strength, she propelled herself forward, pushing all her weight up against his shoulders, praying that the leverage would be enough to topple him.
He staggered a step, then dropped to his knees, her forward momentum too much for his balance. As he crashed to the floor, Helen launched herself into a tumble over his head, the room spinning, her breath gone in a moment of panic. She slammed onto her back, her spine jarring against the floor.
‘Darby!’ she yelled.
She spun on her back to face Carlston. He hauled himself onto his knees. At the corner of her eye, she saw Darby crawling towards her, the journal in her hand, smearing a trail of blood on the wooden boards. Faster, she urged her maid. Go faster.
She clenched her teeth as Carlston gathered himself, knife in hand. She had to trust the alchemy forged into the blade and her Reclaimer speed.
He scrabbled forward and lifted the knife above his head, face savage and intent. Helen watched him drive the blade down towards her heart, the reflex to roll away rising like a scream through her body. The point plunged closer and closer, a foot, an inch, from her chest. Suddenly the blade veered to the right and slammed into the wooden floor.
For one precious second, Carlston kneeled beside her, locked in uncomprehending stillness. Darby flung herself forward, hand outstretched with the journal. Helen snatched it from her grasp and curled herself upright, slamming the blood-soaked binding against Carlston’s torn shoulder, praying that her own bloodied hands were enough to forge the bond.
The journal heaved under her grip, searing power boiling up from its foul blood-ink and streaming into their bodies like a torrent of scorching oil. Carlston screamed with pain, and Helen’s own terror scoured her throat. The shrieking howls of the slain rose through the pages, their death throes caught within their blood, their fear written into the journal’s alchemy. Helen felt their anguished loss pulling her towards the darkness.
She braced against their burning force, turning her body against the attack, raising her arm as if to block a savage blow. But there was no outside enemy to deflect; all the searing power was within.
Another scream drained her of air as a golden light — her soul — erupted above her body. Gasping, she saw Carlston arch in agony under a swollen black mass of vestige energy and alchemy. Was that his soul? She could see no light at all within the snarl of power that twisted and writhed above him.
Her own soul-light swirled around the black pulsing mass, battering against its squirming walls like waves against a rock face. There was no way into the dense darkness. She fought to focus through the agony building in her head, her body shaking with fiery pain and a terrible realisation: they had not bonded. He was locked too deep within his madness.
She had to free him to bond, but how?
The answer came in a horrifying rush. She must stop resisting the voices and their fear-filled madness. She had to open herself to the journal’s blood power and Carlston’s vestige darkness, and pull him out. The same force that had all but destroyed her mother.
No! She was not strong enough! What if she did not find her way back? What if she went mad too?
Yet if she failed now, there would be no Grand Reclaimer. No hope. Carlston would be lost forever, caught in eternal torment.
The darkness had destroyed her family. It would not destroy Carlston too.
She slammed herself against the journal’s blood-soaked binding and Carlston’s arched body, and with a formless prayer opened herself to the howls of the slaughtered inscribed upon its pages. Deceivers, Reclaimers, innocents — their anguish and fear searing through her veins, their lives embedding themselves within her mind and heart like thousands of burning brands stamping their mark forever. So many lives. So much knowledge. She felt the pain of every word written in their blood — Benchley’s words about her parents, Carlston, his wife Lady Elise — then they were swept past in the agonising deluge of blood-ink and murdered voices that fused with her flesh and bone. She absorbed them all.