Frost & Filigree: A Shadow Council Archives Urban Fantasy Novella (Beasts of Tarrytown Book 1)

by Natania Barron

  Vivienne never had a mother that she can remember. The entire concept of a mother, or indeed of having children, is a foreign one to her. She has seen innumerable births in her tenure upon this earth, and she has always had respect for mothers and motherhood, but never felt drawn to it.

  Yet, as she scales the steps of Rockwood, she finds herself thinking about children. Specifically, if she or Nerissa could ever have them. Do lamias hatch from eggs? It would make some amount of sense. Perhaps they are born half-formed, squirming from their waists down like baby snakes.

  Worth had brought up childrearing once, but Vivienne had laughed at him and then tackled him again, playing with his tongues the way she knew would shut him up without argument. Had he truly wanted children with her? Was that why he left? Could two beings of such natures even procreate? Is that what Nerissa wanted?

  Even the appearance of Mrs. Dunnett, leaning over so far her breasts are one whisper away from abandoning her corset altogether, does nothing to brighten her spirits. Usually it would send her into such fits of joy that she would spend at least a half hour recounting the absurdity.

  She hasn’t made up her mind about tonight. If she stumbles upon a cure, some way to rid herself of her abilities, her essence, she would very much like to see what happens. Barqan and Worth have warned her of the danger: such a combination of conjuration and alchemy could kill her outright. Though not a mortal by standard definition, all creatures and monsters can die given the right circumstances.

  “Why, Lady du Lac,” Mrs. Dunnett says, coming up sharply, her gelatinous orbs settling back into place. “I’m glad to see you here. I wanted to thank you for the suggestion of Master Pinkering; he’s done such lovely work on my dress, and I had no luck until you made mention of him, and…”

  Mrs. Dunnett drones on as they walk together into Rockwood, and Vivienne doesn’t notice the myriad decorations or the lovely draperies at all. Instead, she is wondering why in the world she ever looked for the approval of a woman like this. How beneath her it is to do so. And why she should even bother saving such a person.

  The soiree commences. Worth and Nerissa and Vivienne blend into the gathering crowd with ease, over a thousand years of talent between the three of them, and spend the first hour enjoying hors d’oeuvres and wine, making small talk, and in the case of the lamia, enumerating a mental list of who she will eat first if this all goes badly. One must have an exit plan, after all.

  Vivienne finds it most difficult to enjoy herself, the impending doom notwithstanding, and she is at a crossroads of conscience. Vivienne is not without depth; it must be stressed that her life as it is has been so much longer than the span of the average lifetime. Once her adherence to the old art of alchemy was as fickle as her love of fashion and culture now. One must reinvent oneself many times over, after all, to make the passing of the years more tolerable.

  She watches the soirée as if from a distance, no longer focusing on which dandy to entice or win over. She takes no notice of the high-ranking politicians and military officials. Vivienne is thinking of two things and two things alone: her alchemical journal and the impending arrival of the beast.

  “I call it the Beast of Tarrytown,” comes a voice behind her, as if knowing her thoughts.

  Vivienne startles to see Christabel Crane beside her, bedecked in a dress white as snow, casting the young woman’s skin in a kind of pearlescent contrast. Her piles of pale hair have been arranged most fetchingly, and Vivienne cannot help but feel both pale in comparison and envious of the woman’s style.

  “You do, do you?” Vivienne asks, collecting herself as much as possible. “And what do you think it is?”

  “A hunter. No, a hunger. I’ve been studying this a long time, though I may seem young to you. I believe it is a kind of collective Aberrant.”

  “Have you told Worth your theory?”

  “I have. But he is doubtful of my thinking on the matter because he believes the work he did with Ms. Waldemar to be complete.”

  Vivienne glances across the room at Worth, who is dancing with a young woman dressed in a green gown two winters out of fashion. Must be one of the poor Monterose girls.

  “And thereby negating all the work we did,” Vivienne finishes. “It would be very difficult for someone like Worth to accept. He takes the burden of the world upon himself; he always has.”

  “A martyr, yes. In many things,” Christabel says with a sigh. “I only hope that when all of this is over, he can forgive me for dragging him into this business. Though the arrangement was mutual, he has much more to lose.”

  “We have our plan,” Vivienne says. “I am confident in it.”

  “I will signal you as soon as it’s time.”

  “Providing this Beast of yours shows up.”

  “Oh, it always does.” There is a note of sadness to Christabel’s voice. More to investigate at a later date, providing they make it out intact.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Ms. Crane, but I have a dance card to keep up with,” Vivienne says, and makes her departure.

  She scans the room, going over the plan again. She knows that the Circle has a room within the walls here. She’ll just need a good excuse to get out into the fray.

  Vivienne takes a few steps into one of the darker alcoves and immediately feels the pressure beneath her feet change. Her mouth goes dry, her hands tremble. Again, that sense below her. Christabel had called it a hunger, and now it is stronger than she sensed it at the Villiers’ house. It is growing, wanting.

  Vivienne closes her eyes and prepares to make a short journey.

  “Vivienne has nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Nerissa tells Worth a little later, as the two meet up by the shrimp twists. They are pitiable-tasting things, seasoned with far too much cilantro. Why any human being would want their mouths flooded with the taste of soap is quite beyond Nerissa. Were it not for the lack of propriety, she would lick the hem of her dress until the taste is gone, or else drown her mouth in fresh blood.

  “I wouldn’t be so fast to discount her,” Worth says. He looks surprisingly calm considering the situation and what is at stake, and it bothers Nerissa to no end. She does not get nervous; it’s not in her nature or her nerve endings. But Worth has always functioned as a gauge for her to know how to feel. She has missed him on that account, at least.

  “I never discount her,” Nerissa hisses.

  A portly man with a terrible toupee approaches Nerissa, extending a hand with papery yellow skin. He is the kind of man inevitably drawn to her: old, married, and thinking that her bespeckled visage is in need of rescuing.

  “Might you humor me with a dance, mademoiselle?” asks the would-be suitor.

  “I’m afraid that my friend Ms. Waldemar is morally opposed to dancing,” says Worth, stifling a giggle. This is not the first time such a situation has presented itself.

  And perhaps that is the reason that Nerissa grabs the old man’s hand and takes him to the floor, because she is tired of being predictable.

  Dancing with the old man is not any stretch of fun. He says his name is Count something—Fescue? Farthing? She decides that it’s Count Fundus—and he has a great deal of money, a dying wife, and a young heir who seems to have no interest in finding a wife. Would she be interested, he wonders?

  And for a brief moment, Nerissa contemplates vanishing into the life of a young heiress to Count Fundus’s line. Unattractive, perhaps, but full of talents her spouse could only dream of. Granted none would end up with childbirth, but there were always unwanted babies around waiting for the taking.

  Her thoughts are cut short by someone tapping her on the shoulder. It’s one of the Iapetus cultists, as she’s taken to calling them, the man with the mustache—Rockefeller himself. He looks drunk already, judging by the blossoms on his cheeks, though that could be purely hereditary.

  “I regrettably must demand Ms. Waldemar’s attention,” says Rockefeller.

  Count Fundus looks genuinely crestfallen, likely having
taken her silence for consideration of the matter.

  “I hope you will find me once your duties to our host are satisfied. I do think that young James will find you delightful,” Count Fundus says as Rockefeller leads her away.

  To his credit, the host does not try and touch the lamia. Most men, she has found, are naturally repulsed by her, save the old and infirm and desperate. At least, when she casts her negative glamor. It’s another story when she wants to be desired, but those tales are for another telling.

  “Christabel sent me a note,” Rockefeller says, eyes shifting side to side as if in suspicion of everyone within a ten-foot radius. “There is a disturbance in the wine cellar.”

  He says it as if he is delivering the news of a dead relative.

  “That should be easy enough to contain,” says Nerissa, reaching out to try and sense Worth and Vivienne as she is wont to do. Oddly, they are not progressing in the same direction, but rather in an opposite manner.

  “It is a very large wine cellar,” says Rockefeller.

  “I will need our footman,” Nerissa says, trying to think through her concern. “Mister Barqan.”

  “Of course, of course. He will be brought to you post haste.”

  “And Worth and Lady du Lac,” she says evenly, no more concern in her voice than if she were reading the grocery order.

  “I have given them instruction to enter from the servants’ quarters. We have two entrances to the cellar, you see. The disturbance appears to be in the middle, and that is of great concern.”

  “Why? Is the house structurally vulnerable there?”

  “Why, no. It’s where we store our best vintages.”

  La Petite Mort

  When Worth arrives at the servants’ entrance to the wine cellar, he spots Christabel right away. She looks ghostly, pale against the shadowy stone walls, wisps of her delicate hair moving just so in the breeze. She has ever been a beauty to behold, a kind of exception to her kind. While many women have tried to get his attention over the centuries, she has been the only one to hold it, even if for a brief amount of time.

  “It’s through there,” she says, pointing ahead. The doors shudder, heavy and reinforced with iron. Christabel carries a delicate key around her wrist.

  “I’m ready,” Worth says.

  “Where is Lady du Lac?” Christabel asks, without turning around to see.

  “She had to attend to a… quick matter… she should be joining us presently,” Worth says, not very eloquently. For reasons he cannot fathom, the woman has a habit of making him feel entirely unprepared for human speech, let alone the complex and brilliant thoughts of his own kind.

  “If she’s looking for her journal, I have it right here. I really hope that isn’t the case because I don’t think we’ll be able to take care of this creature without her,” Christabel says, her voice distant, echoing slightly in the cool damp of the cellar.

  “I am a terrible liar,” Worth admits freely, knowing full well that any attempt at the alternative will land him in even more trouble. “I am incapable of weaving untruths before you.”

  She sighs. Her disappointment is bitter enough to tinge the air with sharpness.

  “I thought I could trust you,” she says at long length, brushing an errant hair from her brow, her small fingers dancing above her eyebrows in perfect elegance. “I thought you understood.”

  There were many things about Christabel that Worth does not understand. He wants to explain that to her, but again, his words fall to ash in his mouth.

  “Vivienne and Nerissa are like me. They are fickle like me. I’ve spent decades trying to protect people from the likes of this creature before us, and I promised you that I would do just that. I have not changed my stance on the matter, I assure you.”

  “Yet you allowed Vivienne to leave your sight, knowing full well that she, unchaperoned, will be up to no good in this place. You say that you are like them, Worth, but you have been lied to. You are not like them. They are hunters. They are blood drinkers. You have never been such a thing… you beast, you chimera.”

  Worth shivers. He has never told her in exact terms of his naming or kind. He had hoped to avoid it, simply cast himself off as one of the lesser Fey. With their remarkable tendency to procreate with anything willing, such a claim is not out of the realm of possibility.

  But he is rarer than that. In all the measure of the world, there had ever only been two Glatisants; his mother and himself. What parentage he had besides is forever a mystery, but he is no chimera. He is more.

  “I am the Glatisant. I am the Beast, and I am the Quest,” he says, and for one brief moment saying it out loud to a mortal is remarkably satisfying.

  It does not, however, have the intended effect. Christabel just looks terribly sad, her eyes pinching at the side, making her look for a moment a hundred years older than her tender age.

  “Beasts, every last one,” whispers Christabel.

  As if in answer to her, the creature in the cellar moves behind the door. It is a noise that demands attention, and yet its form is difficult to discern. The sound is both shuffling and slithering, yet like a thousand pounds of sand sifting through a giant sieve, stacking up high enough to hit the skies.

  They both move to open the door without speaking to another, and Worth is momentarily quite proud of himself for reacting in such a way. It reminds him of his days with Nerissa, when no danger was too great together. But why should he feel such a way with Christabel? There isn’t time to contemplate, alas.

  The heavy doors swing open.

  The beast, at last, emerges.

  For Vivienne, when glancing a kind of psychic preview to the creature, she had felt a void of power, a darkness as she described it. But we must remember that Vivienne is no average creature. Light and dark are measures quite different to her. She called it a shadow.

  Worth is shocked to see the beast is not a deformed creature or horror. While he can sense that its intent is vicious, its form does not match. For all its beauty, its presence is like a rain of acid all around him.

  But the beast can only be described as beautiful. It is filamented, a dizzying swirl of strands of light high and wide as the cellar itself, which is no small space. Yet Worth has the distinct suspicion that were they to find themselves in Westminster Abbey, the creature would have no trouble expanding to accommodate such a size.

  Upon each long stalk rests an eye, or else a whorled pincer. Thousands of them, looking and grasping. But no mouth to feed.

  It is a glittering mass of beauty, emitting the most terrible of noises—like scratching and sand shifting, but on a scale greater than he had ever heard—and while he can sift through all the creatures he’d captured and done in during his lifetime, there is no clear point of entry to categorize this being.

  He turns to Christabel to say something, or else gauge her thoughts on the situation, but she is moving away from him as if being pulled by an invisible hand.

  Like Barqan, her feet do not move as they should have across the ground. She is slipping forward like a chess piece directed by an invisible hand, and as Worth watches, he notes that the great creature of light twists and reaches toward her, new little tendrils reaching out in filigree and curlicues, a sight both beautiful and horrific.

  They wanted her all along.

  It made perfect sense to Worth in that moment, and he chides himself for missing it. They all know there is something unique about the young woman, something clever and pure and bright. All the strange occurrences happened after she arrived, which happened to be at the same time of Yvan’s death. It had been convenient enough to distract him.

  He pulls out Mercy and takes a deep breath, trying not to concern himself too deeply with the fact that Christabel is being pulled inexorably toward a very likely doom.

  Then Nerissa appears, and the world becomes even more interesting.

  Vivienne walks slowly, in shadows, through the expansive Rockefeller house, taking note of the details around her.
It’s much too garish for her tastes, a strange amalgam of aesthetics, acquired for the sole reason of displaying wealth, and not with the care and precision one should when undertaking the adornment of such a home. It’s a shame, really, that people of such wealth hire people to decorate for them—she has been approached many a time for her services, and most times turns down the business—because one’s home ought to be a further extension of one’s soul.

  She has never had a home. As far as she knows, she is incapable. In the same way that vampires cannot bear too much light, she cannot claim any building, land, or waterway as her own.

  This is why Nerissa is so mistaken. It is not that she wants to be human, exactly. It's that, by extension, she will have a place of her own. Deep inside her, all these long centuries, she has felt a deep longing, a need to belong, physically, to the world around her. It is why she has spent so much time on the frivolous pursuit of fashion. She adorns her own temple, her body.

  The Circle keeps an enclave within the house, and Barqan, in his clever way, has discovered the location while they caroused. With his ability to move quietly and almost transparently, he can shift easily between planes and between rooms.

  She stops in one of the chapel-like outcroppings along the hallway, checking for voices, sensing as deeply as she can. Reaching out her frost, she concentrates, penetrating the large building around her, digging deep to sink tendrils into every nook and cranny, to find her friends.

  But she cannot.

  The shadow below them is too large.

  Vivienne frowns, pulling back, just as she hears a voice, familiar, from down the hall.

  It is Mr. Rockefeller and the old woman.

  “...so damned cold up here,” says the woman, her voice sharp as knives. “How you could build such a large house with no hope of actually maintaining a consistent temperature, I have no idea, son. You’ve brought the look and the feel of old drafty English castles.”

  Rockefeller clears his throat. “There must be some kind of draft somewhere. I will be certain to alert the architect. We paid him far too much money to deal with such…”