The House of Shattered Wings

*

SELENE felt it long before she saw it, of course. The shadows had been one thing—scurrying at the back of her mind, a blot on the power of the House that slowly sank to an annoying whisper. This . . . this was something else: a feeling that something was not quite right, that something was gnawing away at the foundations of the House’s power.

Javier had come back with one of the search parties: they all clustered in her office, looking glum—but at least they were alive and unharmed. One of the previous parties hadn’t been so lucky: their brush with the shadows had sent a man to the hospital with a flesh wound eerily similar to Emmanuelle’s. Aragon didn’t expect him to survive the night. One more confirmation, then, that Philippe had been the catalyst; but that the shadows had a life beyond him and were, in fact, spreading faster now that he was dead, as if he had been the only thing holding them in check—his mortality the only curb to their frenzy.

She’d have been in a better position to appreciate the irony if her House hadn’t been coming apart around her.

“Tell me again,” she said to Javier, fighting back the urge to snap at him.

“It’s not what you think,” Javier said.

“I have a very good imagination.” The House, its power and reputation diminished after the Samariel “incident,” could hardly afford another emergency. And she—she needed to be the rock they all stood on, not a Fallen shattered by the sickness of her lover. It would be fine, if she focused; if she forgot the awful pallor of Emmanuelle’s face, the dark circles under her eyes like bruises, everything Aragon wasn’t saying in his silences. We’re all mortal, Morningstar would have said, and he would have smiled. Secretly, he wouldn’t have believed anything like this would ever apply to his Fallen. What a fool he had been, sometimes. “Now tell me again why I can’t go to Asmodeus’s rooms and ask him what is going on?”

Javier’s face was pale. “Because you need to see this first.”

Selene dismissed the rest of the search party with her apologies—and summoned two of her bodyguards, Solenne and Mythris; as well as the butler, Astyanax. Then she followed Javier.

It had once been a bedroom on the first floor of the East Wing. Now its floor was shot through with . . . “Plants?” Selene asked. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t that.

They were slender green shoots with long, elegant leaves: she could imagine using one of them as a boutonnière, its vibrant green in stark contrast to the dark gray of the suit, a welcome note of freshness. They didn’t sound harmful, exactly, but they were plants. Growing on dusty parquet floors.

“That’s . . . not natural,” she said.

“No. They’re only in this room, though,” Javier said.

So far. “I assume you’ve tried pulling them out.”

Javier gestured toward the nearest shoot, which grew inches from the curved legs of a low marble table. “Be my guest.”

Selene reached out, felt the tingle of magic on her hands. Apart from that, it looked like a usual plant; though not something that would ever be found in French gardens. It was a jungle thing, blown in from Guyane or Indochina or Dahomey; longing for warm, humid weather in which to grow. That it could take root here, under the perpetual pall of pollution from the war . . .

She tried to pull it out; and her fingers slid through it, as though it hadn’t been there. And yet . . . and yet she could feel the silky touch of its leaves on her hands; could feel the sap pulsing through the stem, the slow ponderous heartbeat of the plant . . . She reached again, this time drawing to her the power of the House, whispering the words of a spell to start a fire. Again, her hand did not connect with the plant; and the fire died without fuel to consume. It was . . . it was as though the thing didn’t exist; or more accurately, wasn’t properly part of the House.

But it was part of the darkness. It was what she had sensed, lurking around the wards; circling, like vultures waiting for a dying man to breathe his last—for any weakness in the structure of the House.

And now it was in—taking root in the structure of the House itself.

That was more frightening than anything else. The wards, laid by Morningstar when he’d founded the House, should have held. It was the wards, in fact, that made the House; their slow, painstaking accretion transforming unremarkable buildings into a shelter and a source of magic, a fortress that protected them all against attacks. Morningstar’s absence would not have changed anything—they would have been flimsy things indeed, if they could not survive their creator’s leave-taking. Morningstar was no fool: he had known that most Houses survived far longer than their founders.

But if the wards were still there, what, then, was this?