The Sweetest Dark

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Reginald?”

Armand poked his head past the doorway of the study, glancing about.

Empty. Lights left burning. Curtains left open to show the night. A crushed cigarette and a china cup in its saucer on the desk.

He walked to the desk, lifted the cup to his nose. Coffee. Coffee. Black, unadulterated, a few good inches of it still sloshing around the bottom, gone cold.

Mandy dropped into his father’s chair behind the desk and thought about that. He hadn’t seen Reginald sober in days. Actually, he hadn’t seen Reginald sober or drunk in days. His Grace had been distinctly absent from manor life, and damned inconvenient it’d been, too, leaving his remaining son to deal with all the endless details of managing an estate he’d never been trained to inherit.

But nothing dislodged Reginald from his mourning. Armand had asked the chatelaine to keep an eye on him as discreetly as she could; he couldn’t forget those Vickers, despite what he’d said to Eleanore. The chatelaine’s reports to him had all been of the same flavor: Reg was locked in his room or locked in his study. He ate very little; he drank a great deal. He shifted from one chamber to the other, back and forth, but tonight he was in neither.

Mandy had already picked the lock on the duke’s bedroom door to be sure.

Something had changed. Something felt not right, and if he was going to be completely honest with himself, that same not right had been hounding him all day.

His fingers drummed a tattoo atop the leather blotter.

He glanced down. There was a crack in the line of the desk’s edge that meant the drawer hadn’t been properly closed.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

That voice that lived within, that sly dragonish-thing, warned, Don’t do it. You won’t like it; you can’t change it. Don’t look.

The bracket clock counted out, seven, eight, nine …

No one would ever know how close Armand came to obeying that foreboding command, to just getting up and walking away and letting the world sort itself out as it would. He was seventeen years old and weary to the bone. If it were up to him, he’d abandon his entire family’s legacy, his mother’s lost magic, his father’s insanity. What good had ever come of any of it?

But he had to look, didn’t he? Drunk or sober, crazy or sane, Reg was all he had left. So he had to.

With a drowning sense of déjà vu, Armand Louis opened the drawer. He reached inside until his hand discovered papers.

He unfolded the top sheet, a letter. Official-looking, government letterhead.

You’ll be pleased to know your concerns regarding the marquess have been noted and all matters I assume sorted to your satisfaction… .

It took no time at all to understand the grisly enormity of what Reggie had done.

...

In the darkness of his bedroom, amid the mess of his sheets and all the golden songs he’d made and shaped just for her, Jesse Holms opened his eyes.

awaken! awake! the stars were crying, piercing with urgency. your time is now!

“Lora,” Jesse said, into the sightless dark.

...

I opened my eyes, startled. Was someone in the room with me?

I sat up, rose to my knees in the bed. No one else was here, no Jesse, no Sophia. Nothing but me moved, yet something wasn’t right.

The tower was gripped in shadows, a flat tintype of a small round room frozen in time, forever on edge. If armoires and bureaus could respire, these were holding their breath. Even the sky beyond the window hung ominously still.

And purple. Amethyst. That rare, uncanny dark.

My nightgown had twisted into a tourniquet around my waist and thighs. I must have been tossing in my sleep. I plucked at it, walking on my knees to the end of the bed. My feet hit the floor and absorbed its unyielding cold.

Beloved, rose Jesse’s song, strong and clear at once, shattering the calm. Armand is in danger. He needs you.

I didn’t think. I just reacted. I opened the window and Turned to smoke and raced over the green and the water. Toward Tranquility.

The road to the plowed fields, farmhouses to the woods. Purple land, purple sky. I was a hazy streak sandwiched between them, more than halfway there before a new, heavy sensation settled over me, dragging me down to a crawl.

Armand wasn’t inside Tranquility any longer.

I wasn’t certain how I knew that, but it was so. None of his energy—his trail? his scent?—waited ahead of me. I felt the pull of him behind me. Back toward the coast.

Damn it.

I drew myself up into the stillness, condensing into a sphere above a rye field. A cloud of magpies exploded into flight from a thicket nearby, rushing frenzied wings carrying them away from me, inland.

The beast in me registered that. Hungered for pursuit. I quelled it.

Armand. Armand. The only other living being in the world with blood linked to mine.

I floated in place and tried to let my senses drift free, feeling for him, reaching. It would have been helpful to have Jesse sing me the way, but Jesse was silent.

The castle. Armand had gone there. He was in trouble and he had gone there, maybe even to find me.

I curled about, briefly assuming the shape of a fishhook—don’t think about the shark!—and tore back the way I had come.

Iverson beckoned me home. Tiers of stone, arches and windows and towers and a hundred radiant eyes, all of them lit windows. Burning gold against amethyst, a target of such easy and immense proportions that it probably cast its glow all the way to France.

An automobile had been parked askew beneath a beech just past the island bridge, the grass behind it torn to shreds by the tyres. He must have driven here in a hurry but slammed to a stop there, far enough away that the engine wouldn’t wake anyone. If that had worked, he’d have been able to creep inside the castle unnoticed. After all, Lord Armand knew his way around his former home, and the doors were never locked.

My mind put the pieces together. He didn’t want to be seen or heard. He didn’t want anyone else to know where he was. Was he hurt? Bleeding? Had the duke’s sanity completely deserted him? Had he done something dire to his son?

Was he in pursuit?

Armand would expect to find me in my room. It would be the first place he’d look. I funneled back up to my window and poured inside, but the room was empty. No echoes of him. Nothing.

Jesse, I thought, slightly panicked. Jesse, where is he?

But, of course, Jesse couldn’t hear me. I could only hear him.

I Turned, scrambled back into my nightgown, opened my door and paused, listening with dragon ears, tasting the air with a dragon tongue—or as close as I could get to either in my human shape. I detected limestone and cologne and furniture polish. The usual nighttime noises of a mass of sleeping girls; shifts and sighs, some snoring. The same from even farther away, perhaps the teachers’ floors. The servants in their dungeon cells.

Then, from the far end of the castle, something very different: panting. A heartbeat so fast it sounded like nothing but an unbroken convulsion of muscle and blood, pumping louder and louder.

A teeny tiny metallic series of clinks echoed above that, but so dim compared to that heartbeat that I wasn’t sure what it was or where it had come from.

Armand was in the eastern portion. I was in the west.

And Jesse, I realized, as his music lifted back to me in a full, imperative refrain. He was near Armand, as well.

There was no time to agonize over going to smoke or staying in this shape. If I met up with any firmly sealed windows or doors, I’d waste time Turning to open them. My feet flew down the stairs, the gown a white whip behind me. I might have made noise. Possibly not. I don’t know that the soles of my feet had much contact with the floor.

In any case, I was in too much of a hurry to worry about it. If anyone did wake up, all they’d discover was an empty hallway.

Impressions flitted by me, the long corridors, sharp turns, unlit corners. I didn’t recognize most of where I ran; I was just going. Going and going until suddenly I was in familiar surroundings again. I was at the base of the corkscrew stairwell that led to the roof of the castle.

Jesse and Armand were beyond them.

I grabbed the folds of the nightgown and sprinted up the stairs. The door at the top was closed but not bolted. I wrenched it open—now I was the panting one—stumbling out into a night that had shifted abruptly from stillness to chaos.

Everything after that happened rather quickly.

Wind howled, pushing me aside a step.

Jesse called, “Lora, no!”

Armand shouted, “No!”

And the duke fired his gun at me, the bullet tearing a path along the outside of my left arm.

I was tackled around the legs and slammed down hard against the limestone, pain a bright light cleaving through me. Jesse and I rolled together as another bullet ricocheted close by, close enough that chips of rock stung my hands and face. Then he and Armand were hauling me around the curve of the tower behind us. Another bullet exploded past our heads.

“You’re hit.” Jesse was kneeling before me, protecting me from the shots. “Let me see.”

“Where?” Armand was beside him, grabbing at my arm.

“What …” My tongue felt too fat. I tasted copper and salt; I’d bitten it in the fall. The words I wanted were jumbled around inside my head, all mixed up. I spat out a mouthful of blood and tried again. “What’s happening?”

“My father,” Armand said, clenched desolation and fury.

“He’s got an arsenal over there.” Jesse was much cooler; he had his fingers at my face, tilting my head to the purple light. “We can’t get near.”

“Right.” I knew what to do. I would just Turn to smoke. He couldn’t shoot that. The world would stop slurring around me, and I would Turn.

“No, Lora, we—” Jesse began, but too late.

It seemed like a good idea. It really did.

I surged past both of them. Armand actually thrust out his hands, trying to grab me to hold me back, but I sieved through his fingers and left him clutching air. Even as smoke, I still felt woozy—strange, because I had no body any longer, so all the physical pain was gone—but I knew I didn’t have much time. If either of them tried to follow me, they’d easily take a bullet. I wouldn’t.

The duke never saw what was speeding toward him. He was crouched at the edge of the battlement with the merlons behind him, blockaded behind an improvised fort of crates. I could see his hair puffed with the wind. His eyes gleaming. He had his arms braced atop one of the boxes so his hands would be steady for the next shot.

He was so close to the end of the roof that I couldn’t Turn behind him. So I did the only other thing that occurred to me.

I Turned back into a girl right above him.

We both went down hard this time, me on top and him too stunned to make more than a high, gargled sound in his throat. As soon as we hit the stone, I wrapped my arms around his head and held on tight, ready to fight him if he tried to roll, but His Grace wasn’t moving. His body had gone completely slack.

Armand towed me up and Jesse hustled me away. I staggered against him, looking past his shoulder just in time to see my nightgown dance over the rim of the roof, a twirling, empty ballerina blowing away to the stars.

“That was stupid,” I said loudly.

“Too right it was.” None of Armand’s fury had left him.

“No, I mean you. Both of you. Following me like that. You could have been killed!”

“We were doing well enough until you—did that! Went to smoke like that.”

“He couldn’t shoot smoke!”

“He could have shot the half-wit on top of him!”

“But he didn’t!” I swallowed, a lump of something sick rising in my throat. “I didn’t kill him, did I?”

Armand seemed to shrink a little. He looked back at the duke and shook his head. “No. I think you knocked him out. He’s breathing.”

“Has anyone a coat?” I asked, and found myself crumpling down to the roof, a leisurely sort of collapse. Armand grabbed me by the arm again and I managed to remain seated instead of prone.

“Dragon-girl.” Jesse was stripping off his shirt. “Bravest girl. I keep telling you to eat more.”

“Jesse!”

He was bleeding. The entire lower half of his left leg was covered in blood, wet and glistening.

“Clean shot,” he said, his weight on his other leg as he bent to hand me the shirt. “Went all the way through. Might not even leave a scar.”

Why hadn’t I noticed it before? Why hadn’t I smelled the blood? It was everywhere. All over him. All over me. I clambered to my feet.

He stopped my desperate groping of his thigh by cupping my face in his hands. “Truly, Lora. It’s fine. My fault. I should have spoken to him through the door before opening it.”

“I don’t understand.” I clutched his shirt to my chest, dazed. “What happened to him? Why was he shooting at us at all?” I noticed then that many of the crates were opened, shredded paper frothing over the edges of the wood, tumbling about. “What is all this?”

“The Vickers,” said Armand. He lifted his hand and pointed at a pair of large, evil-looking guns set out past the crates. They’d been attached to legs of some sort, narrow muzzles, round drums, lots and lots of bullets. Just like he’d described before. “If he’d aimed those at us, we wouldn’t be around to chat about it now.”

“But why?”

His voice began to climb. “Oh, well, it turns out he’s to blame for Aubrey’s death. He wasn’t able to leave well enough alone, to leave Aubrey to his goddamned glory in the goddamned war. He had gotten him reassigned back to England, even though Aubrey’d never have wanted that. Never would have agreed to that, so they must have forced him. But he was coming home. When his plane was shot down in that dogfight, he was on his way home. Because of Reginald.”

He threaded both hands through his hair, staring at his father; I could see the fury draining away. When he spoke again, he sounded just … confounded. Disbelieving.

“So he’s lured them here. The Germans. He managed—oh, God, he managed to somehow start a rumor that Iverson’s been turned into a secret munitions factory. That we’re building explosives or something out here. I found cables and cables about it, and everyone knows how—how easy they are to intercept. He wanted the Germans to come to blow it up, don’t you see? And he meant … I think he meant to shoot them first. With the Vickers.”

“I thought that ground fire couldn’t reach the zeppelins,” I said. “I thought that guns on the ground didn’t have the range.”

“Eleanore. Do you imagine for one particle of one second that he was thinking clearly enough to fathom that?”

“He was thinking clearly enough to fathom all of this,” I retorted, my hand flung out to encompass the roof. Blood stained my palm. “Clearly enough to have men haul all these crates into the castle in broad daylight all week long, so that everyone could see them and wonder what was actually inside!”

“I know!” Armand’s voice broke. He walked back to his father, going to his knees beside him. He placed his hands upon the unconscious man’s chest. “I know,” he repeated, beneath the screech of the wind.

Jesse left me to limp to them. The backs of his fingers grazed the top of Armand’s head, not quite a caress. “Grief can break a mind. He loved and loved, your father, because that’s his way. He couldn’t turn it off.”

“He shot at Armand,” I felt compelled to point out. I wasn’t in a forgiving mood; the duke certainly hadn’t minded risking me and everyone inside the castle getting blasted into oblivion to gain his revenge. And the smell of Jesse’s blood was becoming overwhelming. “He might have killed you.”

“Yet he didn’t. He had the opportunity to kill both of us when we first made it up the stairs, but once he saw he’d wounded me, he simply shot around us. I suspect the bullet that got you, Lora, was more of an accident than not. All he wanted was for us to go, so that he could finish his plan. Burn away his grief.”

Armand was shaking his head. “I don’t know what to do now. He’s the duke of all this. The duke of everything. If people find out … I don’t know what to do.” He rubbed at his eyes. “God, Dad.”

I had managed to get myself into the shirt, even past the throbbing ache of my arm.

“Right,” I said once more, because it sounded firm, and because Armand’s brittle desolation was beginning to eat at me. None of this, after all, was his fault. “We get him downstairs. We sneak him out of the castle, back to your motorcar. You take Jesse to a doctor and your father home. Lock him in a room, pour some wine down his throat. Laudanum. Whatever you have to do to keep him out while I get rid of the guns. None of this ever happened.” I looked at Jesse. “Are there hidden tunnels to use? So no one sees?”

“I’m sorry,” said Jesse. “It’s too late for that.”

“No, we can at least get him to—”

“Too late, Lora. Listen.”

I did, cocking my head to the wind. But I didn’t hear any voices. I didn’t hear people on the stairs. It was mostly schoolrooms over here; we were far from the populated part of the castle.

I held back my hair and shrugged at him.

Jesse glanced upward. Toward the eastern stars.

Thup-thup-thup-thup. It was hardly a sound at all, it came so faint.

“What is that?” I asked sharply, but I knew. Oh, I knew.

The Germans had believed the mad duke’s cables. The airships were coming.