The House of Shattered Wings

A slight sound, coming from the bed; a slithering of wet things from the wallpaper; a fist of shadows slowly closing around the lone light in the room. He took one step, then another and another, and approached the huge canopied bed in the center of the room.

The furniture was from another age: two bedside tables with thin, elegant curved legs, their drawer handles in the shape of butterflies; a mahogany commode with a marble top; a vase in that chinoiserie blue and white that looked even worse than the cut-rate porcelain the Chinese had foisted on the Annamite Imperial Court. His feet barely made any noise on the thick Persian rugs; and the khi currents in the room seemed to have shriveled and died around him, as if they’d been burned at the root.

His light, unsustained by any fire, shivered and died, leaving him in shadows. Another, stronger light took its place, the golden radiance of Morningstar’s hair and skin.

No. Not now. With all his strength he willed the vision to pass—it did not, but neither did it fully materialize. Instead, Morningstar remained where he was, standing by the farthest column of the canopy. He had his sword in his hand, and watched Philippe with burning eyes.

“I warned you,” he said, and his voice was like thunder, strong enough to make Philippe’s knees buckle. “I told you to seize power, or be destroyed. Do you see now?”

Philippe made no answer. There was none he could give—nothing, to this ghost of the past, this bitter, angry memory of whoever had cast the curse on Silverspires. He simply moved closer.

Samariel lay in bed, splayed like a puppet with cut strings; his legs and arms at impossible angles, curved like the corpses of eels, as if all the bones had been sucked out of his limbs. The sound Philippe had heard was the wet struggle to breathe through crushed lungs. Nausea, sharp and bitter, rose in his throat; he held it at bay, kneeling by the stricken Fallen. “Samariel?”

The skin—all that was left whole—was covered in bite marks; as if a snake had struck him, repeatedly; the same marks, by all reports, that had been on Oris’s corpse. The eyes—the eyes were still there, with that same, familiar, sarcastic intelligence. The mangled mouth opened, shaped around something—his name? “I’ll get help—” he said, but Samariel shook his head.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked; but Samariel said nothing, merely stared at him with those bright eyes; and magic rose in the room, a burning heat that picked at the strands of the spell around him, snapping them like burned matchsticks.

“You can’t—” he whispered. More and more strands were vanishing, though the strain of it should have been too much for a dying Fallen. “You can’t—”

“Seize power,” Morningstar whispered, his image wavering and bending as if in a great wind. “Seize power.”

He didn’t move as the magic wrapped itself around him, the spell unraveling moment after moment; staring into those bright, bright eyes and knowing exactly why Samariel was doing it. He had told him, all those days ago.

“I imagine it would be quite a setback for Selene to lose you. . . .”

Behind him, the door opened again; and closed, with hardly a sound. “What do you think you’re doing here, boy?”

The face of Asmodeus, head of House Hawthorn, was twisted out of shape by grief and rage. I can explain, Philippe wanted to say. Ask Samariel. I can—

But Samariel would not speak, not anymore.





TEN


OLD FRIENDS

THE night had not ended well; and the morning had not started well, either. Selene sat in her office? staring at the papers strewn on them; at the memoirs of journeys in Indochina she’d been reading, back when her only worry had been how to best use Philippe for the good of the House—in hindsight, how much simpler those times had been, such easier moments compared to the tangle that awaited her now.

A tinkle of beads announced Emmanuelle’s arrival from her private quarters. She was holding two coat hangers. One was a long black dress with straps; the other was a swallow-tailed suit with straight trousers. “Which one do you want?” she asked.

Outside the room—in the ballroom, where Father Javier was making them wait—stood the heads of every House, all with the same intent: to hear an explanation for the evening’s events, and to see what concessions they could wring out of her for failing to protect her guests. Damn this stupidity of a conclave, for putting her in that impossible situation. “Did you hear anything from Aragon?”

Emmanuelle grimaced. “Samariel’s alive, but just barely, Selene. Aragon said there was nothing much to be done. Just make him comfortable—”

No miracle, then, but then, why had she thought there would be one? God seldom visited those on Fallen; the thought was so old by now that there was little bitterness left in it. She hadn’t prayed in years, not since she was Isabelle’s age, in fact. “And Philippe?”