The House of Shattered Wings

There was no escaping that fact; or the memory of that car ride with Asmodeus, so close the stink of his perfume still clung to her clothes. Back, and powerless; and entirely at his mercy, a fact that no doubt amused him. Probably the only reason she was still alive.

A fit of coughing bent her double, left her gasping for breath; her lungs wrung out, emptied of everything except bitterness. She needed essence, needed its familiar warmth to keep away the memories, to smooth over the bare, inescapable fact that she was back in the last place in Paris she wanted to be; to keep her from imagining her future, which would be short and nasty and brutal.

Does it really matter? Your future was always short. You’ve always known that.

But there was the long, slow slide into an oblivion fueled by drugs—and—this. One of her choosing, the other one emphatically not.

Selene, no doubt, would have lectured her about the need to be strong, to keep her head. Madeleine wasn’t Selene, and saw little point in any of this. This was Asmodeus’s House; and there wasn’t a corner of it he didn’t master. He had hundreds of dependents, a hundred rooms like this one; and a vast reservoir of artifacts from his predecessors in addition to his own power.

She lay on the bed, and tried to sleep, to banish the smell of orange blossom and bergamot from her clothes; although she already knew both attempts were doomed to fail.

*

MAGIC didn’t harm the roots. Fire did, but they immediately grew again, more numerous, as if they’d cut off the hydra’s head. Emmanuelle suggested axes infused with angel breath: that worked better than fire, but with the same drawbacks.

And the tree fought back. Roots uncurled, far faster than anything vegetal had a right to—and strangled the unwary, or knocked them against the wall so hard their bones broke.

Selene lost two bodyguards, Solenne and Imadan; and Isabelle, reckless and heedless of the danger she put herself in, almost got herself killed.

In the end, nothing really seemed to make a dent in the inexorable engulfment of the House.

Selene stood in what had once been the entrance to the East Wing: the corridor was now a dense mass of roots and branches—not exactly inaccessible, but certainly not a part of the House anyone would run through.

She kept a wary eye on the labyrinth of roots blocking the corridor; but the tree appeared to be quiescent for once. Emmanuelle had theorized that it was most active at transition times: at twilight, or at dawn, or when the moon moved away from a quadrant of the sky into another. Which, as insights went, wasn’t very helpful.

“Please tell me you’ve found something useful,” she said to Emmanuelle, who only grimaced.

Morningstar hovered by—hesitant, ill at ease—even more useless than Isabelle, who didn’t master her powers but didn’t hesitate to use them. It broke her heart: he looked like him, and sometimes the odd mannerism would surface, but there was nothing left, not one useful memory, not one bit of deeper comprehension of magic, or of the predicament they found themselves in. “I can’t exorcise her,” Emmanuelle said. “I would need access to her grave for that.”

Said grave was either in Hawthorn—where the chances of Asmodeus giving them access were so slim they might as well not exist—or in an unknown place in the city, wherever Hawthorn dumped its bodies—again, Asmodeus might know; and again, he would not tell them a thing.

“Morningstar?” She hoped—she prayed against all evidence—that there would be a miracle, that he would recall something of use. But there was nothing.

“I don’t—”

“It’s fine,” Selene lied, swallowing the words like so many shards of glass. “We’ll find another way.”

“There is another way,” Isabelle said, detaching herself from one of the walls. Disheveled and wild, she looked for a moment like one of the feral women from legend; and the radiance she cast flickered fast and out of control, from soft to almost blinding.

“I’m not sure I see one,” Selene said. Something had changed in Isabelle; something that made her ill at ease, though she couldn’t have told what.

Isabelle looked at Morningstar, who gazed steadily back at her. “You don’t remember anything.”

“No,” Morningstar said, his voice holding nothing but mild, polite interest.

“I could fix that.”

“You could—that’s not possible!” Selene said. Spells that tinkered with the mind weren’t impossible, per se. They were just very complex, and had a higher chance of frying a brain than actually working.

Isabelle smiled, as slow and as enigmatic as an Asian idol. “Why not?”

“Because—because it won’t work,” Selene said. “Because you’ll damage his mind—” She stopped, before she could say “even further than it already is,” but the words hung in the air, regardless.

Morningstar was looking curiously at Isabelle. “What makes you believe you can do that?”

Isabelle came closer to him; and bent, briefly, to whisper something in his ear. Morningstar didn’t move; his face remained emotionless; but his hands clenched. “I see,” he said.