The House of Shattered Wings

She had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t like any of it. “Fine,” she said to Javier. “You’re right. We’re not going to Asmodeus’s room.”


Javier nodded. “The foundations,” he said.

There was no locus of the House, no single point of vulnerability an attacker could have used to disable the wards. Other Houses were rumored to have one: House Draken had, if the testimony of survivors could be believed; House Hawthorn, though Madeleine had been tight-lipped about it. Selene wasn’t sure if it was ignorance, or a reluctance to sell a past she would not talk about.

Madeleine. She remembered angel essence on her fingers; Emmanuelle’s pale, skeletal face; then, as now, the nights sitting by her bedside, praying that she would recover, that the preternatural thinness wouldn’t turn out to be the beginning of a long, slow slide toward death. . . .

No. That was a weakness she couldn’t afford. She needed to be as tough and as uncaring as Morningstar, focused only on the good of the House.

Morningstar had been old, and clever: the wards he had made could not be easily dispelled—Selene would not even have known where to start, if it had been her stated mission. The wards were carved into the foundations; baked in the bricks of its chimneys; ground to dust, and made into the mortar of the walls. There were places, though, where the fabric that hid them was thin and translucent; where, stretching out a hand, one could almost feel the energy surging under one’s fingers.

Selene headed for one of these: a patch of wall at the back of one of the wine cellars. She grabbed another three guards on her way with a wave of her fingers; just to make sure there was an escort in case something turned sour.

The cellar was at the end of a long corridor, beyond more disused rooms: all empty, the dust blown under their feet as they walked, with that sense of entering the mausoleum of a king. Empty and dead; lost since the heady days of the House’s glory, though . . .

Something was off. Something . . . not as it should have been, a feeling she couldn’t quite name. Slowly, carefully, she moved to one of the doors in the long corridor—it was ajar, and she only had to push to open it.

“Selene?”

Nothing but a reception room: an upholstered sofa, its flower motif tarnished by layers of dust, a handful of elegant chairs with curved legs, a Persian carpet stretching away toward a grand piano.

“Selene?”

“It’s nothing.” She looked again at the room, trying to see what had bothered her. Just dust, and the smell of beeswax; and a faint, familiar smell of flowers.

Flowers. Bergamot. “Asmodeus was here.”

Javier said nothing, though his face made it all too clear he thought she was imagining things.

He didn’t know Asmodeus. “You do have people keeping an eye on him, don’t you?”

Javier looked affronted. “I do,” he said. “He hasn’t left his room.”

Or had already left it; and returned, with no one the wiser.

Selene suppressed a sigh. One thing at a time. She had to worry about Asmodeus; she couldn’t afford not to; but, first, she had to know what was going on. “Let’s go.”

The butler, Astyanax, opened the door of the cellar for her, the creak of the key in the lock resonating like the groan of tortured souls. “Here you go, my lady.”

The cellar was bone-dry, and relatively clean—the wine for the conclave’s banquet had come from here, after all—but still, it exuded the same pall of neglect as the rest of the House. Why was she so sensitive to it, all of a sudden? It wasn’t as though anything had changed; but, perhaps the setback they had suffered had finally exposed the truth—as if, with Silverspires’s reputation in shambles, she had suddenly discovered that she couldn’t lie to herself anymore: the House was in decline, and it would never, ever claw its way back to its former glory; not even if Morningstar himself were to come back from whatever obscurity he had vanished into.

If he wasn’t already dead, or worse, imprisoned somewhere. But no, if he had been imprisoned somewhere, whoever had him would have used it against the House by now. No, it was either dead or gone to some other project of his own. She’d have liked to think he wasn’t capable of such casual betrayals, but she knew him all too well.

“There.”

Between two of the wine bottle racks, there was a slightly clearer patch of wall: a place where the plaster had peeled off, revealing the stone of the cellar walls; nothing much, either at first or second sight, or even with magic to boost one’s darkness-encrusted eyes.