A Breath of Frost Read online

  Tobias wiped his mouth with a pristine white handkerchief. “The bloodcurse trail goes that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction, much to Cormac’s relief. They followed it around the corner, past several mansions and over to the next street bordering the park. Tobias retched one more time.

  “Blood curses are vile,” he said wearily. “They taste like rotted leeks.” He wiped his face with a grimace. “Nasty business.”

  “That’s not all,” Cormac said steadily, reaching for the dagger in his boot. “If I recall, Greymalkin magic of this kind always unleashes the Sisters.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  Chapter 5

  Two hours later and the strange, peculiar night was no closer to making any sense at all.

  Emma had leaped into the carriage and proceeded to stare so wide-eyed that Gretchen asked her if she’d had too much champagne. She desperately wanted to tell them what had happened but Aunt Mildred was dreadful at keeping secrets. So she could only sit against the cushions as the carriage rattled over the cobbles, the image of the mole clambering out of the dead girl’s chest repeating in her mind.

  It made no sense.

  Not the first time she replayed it, and not the hundredth.

  “Well, that was fun.” Gretchen grinned, slouching back against the seats. The swinging lantern cast long fingers of light over her face. They’d been safely in the carriage and driving away before Margaret’s body was found. Emma wasn’t sure why it was so imperative that she or her cousins be out of the vicinity, but Cormac’s fear was contagious.

  “What have we learned from this, girls?” Mildred asked primly, as if she hadn’t just been scrambling onto benches to watch the ballroom burn.

  “Never attend a ball?” Gretchen guessed.

  Mildred’s nostrils flared. “Do I have to remind you, yet again, that you have a duty, Gretchen Thorn?”

  Penelope groaned and kicked her cousin’s ankle. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  “I don’t see how marrying some balding old earl who smells like liniment paste is my duty to king and country,” Gretchen replied mutinously. “Napoleon is out there and I’d rather be a spy against the French than a wife.” She rubbed her hands together. “I think I’d make a dashing spy. Or I could dress as a boy and be a soldier.”

  Emma was barely listening. She’d just seen a girl die in front of her. She widened her eyes at Penelope. Misunderstanding, Penelope rolled hers in response. Mildred’s speeches about duty and manners were only outnumbered by Gretchen’s speeches about becoming a spy.

  “Do you still think this is a game?” Mildred snapped, the mask of prudish and slightly befuddled maiden aunt slipping. “Even now, after your come-out? You have one duty and one duty only, to repay your parents’ kindness by securing yourself an eligible bachelor to marry. Before they choose one for you, and they shall, if you don’t smarten up.”

  Gretchen blinked, sitting up slowly. “Aunt Mildred,” she said, even though Mildred was only technically Emma’s aunt through her father’s side. “Why are you so upset? Did the fire frighten you? Do you need your smelling salts?”

  When she reached for Mildred’s reticule, Mildred rapped her across the knuckles with her fan. The delicate ivory sticks snapped. “You will all three of you listen to me most carefully,” she said severely. “You have two options: find a gentleman with manners who will marry you, or wait for your father to find one for you. The first is preferable, though by no means guaranteed. The second is most likely, and most unpredictable. You may scoff at my methods, but I think you would prefer to choose your own husbands. Girls always do. And I suspect boys do as well, despite what earls and viscounts convince themselves once they have children of their own.”

  “Or we could not marry at all,” Gretchen felt the need to point out, rubbing her pink knuckles. “Like you.”

  “And be a burden on your family instead? What happens when your father dies, Gretchen? Or your brother? Who will take care of you then?”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  Mildred snorted. It was the most indelicate thing they’d ever seen her do, which only underscored her seriousness. “Do you not think I thought the same, when I was your age? I was going to be a novelist. I turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage, and by the time I realized my foolishness, there were no more to be had. Instead, I’ve had to live off my brother’s largesse and endure the pity of my friends and the impertinence of my ungrateful nieces.” Her eyes flashed. “Make no mistake. Marry, or become a governess or a mistress. There is only one clear and acceptable choice.” She turned to stare out of the window and did not speak again. Her cheeks were red with temper.

  “Damn,” Gretchen muttered to Emma under the cover of the creaking carriage wheels. Mildred was seriously put out to have mentioned the indecorous and invisible subject of mistresses. “What’s got her skirt in a knot?”

  Emma just shook her head, equally bewildered. Mildred was usually a faded, kindly woman who fussed over the right color gown and the proper way to pour tea. None of it seemed terribly important to Emma at the moment.

  She could only take herself up the dry path to the front door after her cousins were dropped off and her aunt left for her own small house. The rain must have missed this part of London, even though the Pickfords only lived a few streets away. The house echoed around her as she let herself in. The butler, Jenkins; the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill; and all the other servants were asleep. Not that it would have mattered. Her father had strict rules that the family was never to encounter the maidservants in any of the rooms or even on the stairs. They had to scurry into empty corners whenever Emma passed by. It hardly encouraged a sociable household. Especially when Emma tried to befriend one of the housemaids when she was thirteen and the girl, just thirteen herself, was turned out. Her father was an unsympathetic man, made of rules and protocol and the august pride of the Hightower earldom.

  He was dull as dishwater, really.

  She went down the hall to the library, her wrap dripping unpleasantly when the tassels dragged against her leg. Draping it over the grate to dry, she lit one of the candelabrums and lifted it high, casting a warm glow over gilded letters and leather spines. She rifled through them at random, hoping for a mention of moles, marks, or Orders. She wasn’t surprised when her search proved futile; she hardly expected her father to have books of such a nature. He preferred political tracts, historical treatises, and plays in their original Latin. Even novels were too frivolous for Lord Hightower.

  Too anxious to sleep, Emma did as she always did when she returned to an empty town house large enough to comfortably house a family of ten. She snuck down into the kitchens, skirting the maid asleep on a pallet by the empty grate, and helped herself to a handful of almond biscuits and a jar of blackberry jam. Then it was back up to her bedroom, the smallest in the house, awkwardly shaped and drafty in winter. But it had the benefit of a wide balcony that she’d converted into her very own observatory. She’d hung gilded stars strung from the ceiling on silk thread. They shimmered when the lantern light caught them. Emma had also dragged a chaise to the railing (scratching the floor in the process), and covered it with cushions and a blanket. Angled just right, she could see most of the sky.

  She’d found comfort in looking up at the stars since she was a little girl. It was a shame the infamous London fog often covered them in a yellow veil, but on those rare nights when the lanterns were put out and the wind was brisk, the sky became a field of fireflies. Rain clouds hung in tatters over the river, but on her secret balcony, she was alone with a thousand stars and stolen sweets. It was as warm as the frigidly opulent house ever felt.

  Before curling up on the balcony, Emma dragged her mother’s box from under the bed. She’d found it in the attic when she was eleven years old and had been hiding from Penelope, Gretchen, and Gretchen’s twin brother Godric, in a game of hide-and-seek. It was an old-fashioned patch box with one dusty heart-s
haped patch left in one of the compartments. Ladies would have worn them to cover smallpox scars. Curiously, the compartment for the brush was filled instead with salt and wrinkled rowan berries. The third section had held the small green glass perfume, which was now mostly lying in shards on the Pickford ballroom floor. The last section was locked.

  Gretchen once tried to pry the hinges of the locked compartment apart with a knife but with no success. Emma was relegated to shaking the box gently. It rattled enticingly but refused to give up its secrets, even now. There could be love letters in faded ribbons inside, dried roses from her first ball.

  Or decapitated doll heads.

  Emma had no idea how long her mother had been crazy, after all.

  And it was no use asking her father about it. He never spoke of her mother. And when she asked questions, he merely left the room. Or the house. He’d once left the country entirely. So she was left with an old box that wouldn’t open and the broken top of a mysterious glass bottle full of a questionable substance.

  That wasn’t quite right though, was it? Cormac had apparently deciphered the mystery of the bottle with ease. After which he proceeded to lose his composure and his good manners entirely. Curious, that. If she still knew anything about him it was his reputation for gallantry, top marks at Oxford when he wasn’t down from school for the Season, and a secret duel at dawn that wasn’t so secret. Such things never were. But even after he’d snubbed her, she’d only ever seen him being charming and handsome, ever dancing with wallflowers, which his friend Tobias disdained.

  And smoldering.

  There was no denying the man could smolder.

  Still, he clearly knew more about her own family than she did, and whatever he knew disturbed him. Evidently, she brought out the very best in his character. He’d sent her home without answers, only more questions.

  Despite herself, she missed him. She missed his crooked smile and the way he’d held her hand. She’d have thrown herself into the Thames in the middle of winter before admitting it to him. Naked. In broad daylight.

  He’d been autocratic and cryptic, assuming he could intimidate her into silence or obedience, just like her father.

  Worse, she’d let him.

  She sat up.

  Well, they’d just see about that, wouldn’t they?

  Chapter 6

  The Greymalkin Sisters were notorious.

  Of all the warlocks in London, they had been the worst. They served only themselves. They weren’t witches after all, but warlocks. They admitted to no authority from the witching society and therefore would not be regulated by the Order.

  And even though they hadn’t been seen since the French Revolution, everyone knew their names. Magdalena, Rosmerta, and Lark were spirits of past Greymalkin warlocks clinging to a twilight life, long after their deaths. They weren’t actual sisters, merely female descendants from the same family lineage. There had once been seven of them, before the Order managed to banish them.

  Magdalena hovered off the pavement, so pale Cormac could see right through her to the wet cobblestones of the street. She was the eldest, wearing a medieval gown. It was long and blue, ending in misty tatters that caused steam to rise off the puddles under her bare feet. Her hair was loose, since knots and braids bound power and caused spellwork to go awry. Through the long thick tresses scurried all manner of insects: wasps, beetles, and black spiders. Death’s-head moths fluttered over her head. When she smiled, a nearby gas lamp flickered frantically.

  Behind her the other two Sisters waited, sinister in their still, expectant patience.

  Under his shirt, Cormac’s charms and the silver chain they hung on prickled painfully with warning. It stung hard enough to scar the already satiny-worn skin it had branded with previous warnings. And he’d only been part of the Order since just after Christmas. Tobias turned slowly, as if he could delay the inevitable. He was still clammy and weaving on his feet from the poisoning of tracking a blood curse.

  The Sisters descended.

  They moved so fast they blurred into nothing. There was a heartbeat of unnatural silence, not quite long enough for Cormac to reach for his weapon, but just long enough for ice to form on his fingertips. Tobias swore and his blistering words turned to frost.

  Rosmerta wore a Tudor-style dress over a whalebone corset, and a choker encrusted with rubies and a pearl the size of a quail’s egg. A silver sickle knife hung from her waist, catching the hazy yellow-tinged light. She was wreathed in poisonous flowers: deadly nightshade vines for a crown, belladonna at her wrists, red bryony berries in long loops around her neck and white hemlock stalks woven into a belt. She stank of valerian and bruised lilies.

  Magdalena and Rosmerta reached out, touching fingertips around Tobias, as if circling him in a child’s game. Every time a Greymalkin drained witches of their power, the Sisters were strengthened. They were currently gray-lavender shades, having been deprived of a witch’s full power for decades. The Greymalkin family had been hiding too successfully to properly feed their dead ancestresses. But with enough power they could rematerialize.

  Their hunger was sharp as badgers’ teeth. Cormac could see the power gathering under Tobias’s skin as he tried to shield himself. He managed to fight back, searing Rosmerta with a blast of sun-bright magic. She screeched, her hair singeing.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Tobias made a choked sound of pain and slumped to the ground. The Sisters peered down at his fallen body. He twitched, teeth chattering. The color leached from his face, his hands, his eyes, even his clothes. Everything about him looked bleached and faded. Cormac lunged toward him, only to be stopped so abruptly by the third Sister, he felt he’d been thrown from a horse.

  Lark wore the brown woolen dress of a peasant girl with a misty plaid shawl around her shoulders. She reached for Cormac, tears glistening in her eyes. She was said to have been quiet and kind, the rose among Greymalkin thorns, until her beloved died on the Culloden moors. The battle against the British had raged so desperately that nearly two thousand Scots were lost. She’d walked the fields of dead and butchered men until the hem of her gown was stained in blood, as it was still. She was silent, sad, and sweet.

  She was the worst of them.

  When she reached for Cormac, the air shattered. It froze in his nostrils, making it difficult to breathe. Frost clung to his eyelashes. He fumbled for the dagger in his boot with numb fingers even as the charms around his neck shot light through the buttonholes of his shirt. It was brief, like sunlight glinting on water or a sword’s blade.

  She stumbled back, holding a hand up to her eyes. “A trick,” she sighed. Blood began to drip from the hem of her dress. Ice cracked under Cormac’s boots. She dragged her hand across his chest, leaving fresh singes in his shirt. The material crackled as it burned under a sheen of ice. Ghosts pulled so much energy from the atmosphere around them that their touch scorched, even as everything else around them froze.

  “You deceived me,” Lark said so mournfully that he nearly apologized. He felt odd, as if he were under a frozen river. He was too cold to move, too cold to care. “You have no real power, only borrowed trinkets.” Those trinkets would have made a meal for her, if there wasn’t a witch to drain not three feet away.

  She drifted away to join her sisters. They hunched over Tobias, scattering beetles, poisonous berries, and icicles. His patrician features were gray. The gas lamps went out, pulled by an invisible wind. The Sisters floated there, their edges growing sharper and more distinct. A bird fell dead from the sky, landing in the middle of the street.

  Tobias didn’t have much time.

  But none of them wanted Cormac and so would not be distracted.

  Cormac tossed another pinch of summoning powder, to warn the Order they were needed. The sparks cast a pale blue light over them, flickering and fading away. Magdalena was the first to look up, more satiated than her sisters. Her eyes glowed with an unnatural brightness. “The Order of the Iron Nail,” she sneered. “Go away, l
ittle Greybeard, before I eat your spleen for your impertinence.”

  He’d once had a governess threaten the very same thing. He’d tossed a plum pudding at her head, if he recalled correctly. This time he chose salt and iron shavings, ground down from the horseshoe of a white horse with one blue eye.

  He carried the banishing powder in a red pouch, sewn with magical runes by his youngest sister. It was a standard weapon of the Order, as useful as swords and pistols. More useful, truthfully. There were too many creatures that didn’t fear bullets. But demons dreaded salt, curses broke under the gaze of a blue eye, and spirits feared horses and boats, both used to carry them off to the Underworld.

  Cormac leaped into their circle, standing over his friend and tossing another handful of the banishing powder. Ice burned his exposed forearms, leaving angry white welts. Rosmerta shrieked as the powder formed into a white horse and galloped at her. She jumped out of the way, scurrying to hide behind her plaid-draped sister. Blood and ice hit the pavement. A large beetle was crushed to ash under a bright hoof. The horse tossed his mane, sending death’s-head moths tumbling into one another, wings shredded.

  Rosmerta’s poisonous vines lifted in the air, as did her hair and the full bell of her skirt, all being towed toward the white horse. She grabbed a handful of her sister’s bloody hem, fighting the inexorable pull, still shrieking. The other two stopped draining Tobias, turning to glower at Cormac, then at the horse.

  “No!” Magdalena snapped viciously. “We’ve been too long denied.”

  “I can’t hold on,” Rosmerta shouted above the roar of the wind and the pounding of hooves like cannon shot as the white horse circled and circled. A strange honey-scented wind flattened Cormac’s hair and tugged at his clothing. Tobias slid a few dangerous inches along the pavement. Cormac crouched to hold onto the back of his collar, securing him. Tobias was exhausted to the point that the white horse might accidentally take him as well.