I had no time to react before the Ripper obeyed. It seared across the gallery, lifted me right off my feet—like a noose—and smashed me with unearthly force into one of the mirrors.
Glass shattered around me. My head struck metal. An instant later, the pendant awoke. The shock had barely registered when I fell back to the floor and crumpled, leaving a spiderweb of cracks on the mirror. The æther shrieked around the fractured numen. Before I could gather my wits, let alone rise, the Ripper flew up, loosened one of the chandeliers, and brought it crashing down between me and Arcturus, snowing the floor with glass.
I shielded my eyes. My ears were full of a muffled roar, my skin clammy. Somewhere, Jaxon was shouting. I half crawled toward the doors, smearing blood in my wake. The poltergeist bore down on me, and I could feel an incorporeal hand on my throat, cold as winter, the fingernails of Jack the Ripper . . .
A huge, intricate spool hurtled over me, driving the poltergeist right out of the gallery. Then Arcturus was there, and I was up, and we were careering away from the Hall of Mirrors.
“Find me again, darling,” Jaxon called. “Choose voyants, not Ranthen. I’ll be waiting for you, somewhere in this world. Do try to take care of my dollymop, now, Arcturus!”
His laughter chased us out of the gallery. With a livid spike of strength, I lashed out my spirit and dealt him a blow hard enough to silence his crowing and bowl him to the ground.
Arcturus just about managed to hold onto me and one of the swords. The other glinted in our wake. I had thought that cutting down Jaxon might stop the Ripper, but it was still following his last command. My back was wet, my head ringing. I had failed, and Ducos would soon know.
That meant I had nothing left to lose.
Drops of sweat froze to diamonds in my hair. Somehow, by dint of propping each other up, we reached the broken doors to the south wing. Instinct made me pull them shut behind us. Halfway to the staircase, Arcturus collapsed, and I went right down with him.
“No, no.” My breath gusted, thick and white. “Arcturus, get up. We have to keep moving—”
“Free the prisoners. Leave me, Paige.”
Behind us, the doors flew off their hinges. As the poltergeist screamed toward us again, I gave in to the rush of anger and fear. Throwing away the last of my self-preservation, I ran to meet the spirit, my left hand outstretched so the three letters carved into my palm were on display.
KIN
“Go,” I commanded, as I had when I faced the spirit in Senshield. “Be gone into the outer darkness—”
Pressure detonated from the scars. It was like the force that thrummed from me when I dislocated, but far stronger. The poltergeist slowed. Though I was just about holding it back, the waves of defense only served to incense it. I harnessed the power that seemed to come from nowhere.
“Fine,” I shouted at it. The pressure intensified. The Ripper forged onward, a shrieking mouth in the æther. “Come on, then, Jack. Come and get your dreamwalker at last.”
I thought it would do just that, that it would smash me between the walls until I was nothing but gore and shards of bone. Instead, the poltergeist was suddenly reeled away, as if caught on a line. The pressure ceased at once, and I buckled against the wall, light-headed.
Outside, the flare had guttered out. With gritted teeth, I took a flaming torch from the wall and thrust it into the nearest curtain. Fire raced up the fabric, to the wood-paneled ceiling. I set every curtain in the corridor alight, then the portraits: Georges Benoît Ménard, Frank Weaver, Abel Mayfield, Irène Tourneur, the whole ghastly theatre of marionettes who had made all of this possible. As their faces melted, I took the flashlight and hurled it into a tapestry.
Burn that place to the fucking ground.
Flame painted the corridor with fitful light and shadow. I ran back to Arcturus and towed his arm around my neck, but his frame was so large, and mine was so fragile. With a sound of frustration, I folded back to my knees beside him.
“Arcturus.” I grasped him by the shoulders. His body was rigid. “Come on, I can’t lift you—”
“I know.” Tendons strained against his glove. “Run, Paige. Save yourself.”
“No.”
And then—even though the ceiling was on fire, even though I knew I was a moonstruck fool for doing it—I framed his face between my hands and forced him to look at me.
“Do you still want me?”
The light in his eyes had almost gone, but now it returned.
“Tell me you do.” I kept hold of him, breathed the words against his lips. “Tell me you’ll fight.”
Fire burned at my back. Nowhere had ever been less safe. Yet in that single moment, there was only us, together in the cradle of another revolution, just as we had been when all this had begun. Arcturus cupped my cheek and pressed his brow against mine, his body softening, a wordless surrender. He didn’t tell me, but I knew. Because I knew him.
“Get up,” I whispered, “and come with me to Paris.”
This time, when I rose, he rose with me.
He led me down the stairs, away from the blaze. It was so hot. Smoke hung in the air. “Stay here and keep a lookout.” I coughed into my sleeve. “I’ll get the prisoners.”
Leaving him by the stairs, I dug the keys from my pocket and ran down the corridor, past room after deserted room, weaving around four unconscious Vigiles. When I reached the gathering of dreamscapes, I slewed to a stop and opened the nearest door. A paraffin lamp guttered on a guéridon beyond.
“Who is that?”
I switched on my headlamp, illuminating a wall of bars. A thin brown arm reached through, belonging to a man in a white tunic. It took a moment to recognize him with a beard—to find the scar on his forehead, the amber eyes, the freckle under the left one.
“Paige,” he breathed.
“Zeke.” With a sigh of relief, I grabbed the bars. “You’re alive.”
“You came for us.” He clamped his fingers over mine with a weak grin. “Nadine said you would.”
“Of course I did.” I held up the keys. “Do you know which is the right one?” When he nodded, I passed the whole set through the bars to him. The cell beyond reeked of sweat and piss. “Where is Nadine?”
“Thuban took her a few hours ago.” Zeke was starting to stammer. “I have to find her.”
“We will.”
He found the right key, and I unlocked the cell. Twelve hollow-eyed voyants in white tunics began to shove past. “Michael,” I croaked, searching their grimy faces. “Zeke, was Michael in here?”
Zeke was ushering the voyants out, helping those who were too weak to rise alone. “Who?”
“Michael Wren. He’s unreadable, about your age, doesn’t talk much—”
“He was here,” an augur said, “but they took him away yesterday.” His hair was lank, and he leaned hard on Zeke. “I don’t know where.”
We had missed Michael by a matter of hours. I beckoned the voyants into the corridor. “Stay close to me, all of you. We’re leaving.”
“They’ll shoot us,” a voice said.
“Well, the roof’s on fire, so we’ve no choice.” The acrid smell of smoke was stronger. “We’re not going past the snipers. There’s another way out, through the tunnels under the palace.”
“Like you said, Paul,” Zeke murmured.
The augur nodded, looking satisfied. “The old hydraulics.”
Arcturus waited for us at the end of the corridor. Now he was away from the poltergeist, he was visibly stronger.
“Warden.” Zeke stared at him. “You came, too?”
Arcturus nodded. “It’s all right,” I said to a medium, who had shrunk away from him with a whimper. “He’s a friend, I promise.”
We moved as fast as we could, given the state of them all. I shepherded them under a flight of stairs to avoid two squadrons of Vigiles. At last, we reached the Lower Gallery, where we had entered the palace. It was already hot and dry as an oven.
A constellation of dreamsc
apes shone ahead. Ankou and Léandre were at the other end of the Lower Gallery, guarding the doors to the north wing, the latter newly armed with a Scion-made assault rifle. The carpet was swampy under my boots, and it reeked of something familiar, so strong my eyes watered. Léandre saw me at once.
“Paige.” He beckoned my group. “Through here, all of you, now.” As they hurried into the north wing, he said, “Renelde has gone ahead. She has Le Vieux Orphelin and your friend Nadine.”
“Nadine?” Zeke said, catching her name. “What did he say about Nadine?”
“She’s okay. She’s out,” I said in English, and pushed him through the doors. “Come on.”
I turned with my revolver drawn when I sensed more dreamscapes. Thuban burst through another doorway, shadowed by Situla and eight more Rephaim.
Ankou pumped his shotgun and pointed it straight at Thuban. We were so close to freedom, so close I could taste it, thick as the smoke that was leaching through the ceiling and beneath the doors.
“Just let us walk, Thuban,” I called to him. Each word stabbed me in the chest. “Don’t disappoint the blood-sovereign again by letting this place burn.”
“If you imagine that you and the concubine are going to leave here with your heads,” Thuban said, as he passed a brazier, “you are sorely mistaken.”
I stared as he came into the firelight. His right eye was a pit, and ectoplasm had dried on his cheek.
“An eye for an eye, Arcturus,” Thuban hissed. “I will pluck hers from her skull and watch her swallow them.”
All at once, I recognized the oily smell beneath the smoke. Paraffin. My gaze went from the soaked carpet to the chandelier above, laden with candles. Léandre aimed his pistol at it.
Thuban began to run. As I bundled Zeke through the doors, Léandre emptied his pistol into the chandelier. One of the bullets shattered its fixture, and as we all piled into the north wing, it plummeted. I had barely pulled Léandre through before the chandelier crashed straight into the sea of paraffin.
The conflagration was blinding. The candles ignited half the gallery, forming a wall of flame between us and the Rephaim. Thuban disappeared behind them. Léandre and Ankou slammed the doors shut.
The rest of the escape was a series of flashes, with darkness between. The sprint across another parquet floor, seeing only by glints of moonlight. The first soldier that fired through the window. Using my last bullet—the one meant for Jaxon—to splinter a scarlet visor. Watching Ankou hurl his axe across the room and Léandre finish the soldier off with a knife across his throat. When Ankou stopped to wrench the axe free, its blade glinted with blood.
Then a small room, full of silhouettes. Léandre shoved me ahead of the prisoners, through a half-open door that could have been part of the wall, onto a stone set of steps.
“Go,” he called after me. His hands were covered in blood. “I will guide this group.”
I went. At the bottom of the steps, I lurched right into a shallow pool. I shone my headlamp to the left—to the west—and illuminated a subterranean chamber. Water lurked around a line of pillars, which disappeared beyond my light. This was the abandoned reservoir that ran beneath the long parterre behind the palace. The smell made me grope for the pendant between my collarbones.
I turned right, as Renelde had instructed, into an arched tunnel. Hearing Zeke behind me, I sidled between two moss-covered pipes, ducked beneath another, and made for the end of the passage ahead. My calf now ached so deeply that I was afraid to put too much weight on it.
Frigid air chilled my skin. Renelde must have found a way to street level. When I saw a shaft of moonlight, I switched off my headlamp and came to a dead end. With a surge of adrenaline, I planted my boot on a loose brick, grasped the edge of the opening above, and hauled myself up, into the snow on Rue des Réservoirs. Blood drenched my trouser leg.
We were out of the palace. Now to escape the city.
Zeke climbed out of the tunnel behind me. Arcturus came next. High above us, black columns of smoke were pouring through a swallet in the palace roof. Flames raged across the upper floor, where I had left Jaxon helpless. I could no longer sense his dreamscape.
Halfway back to the cemetery, I came to a clumsy stop, holding a stitch in my side. There was one more thing I had to do. I opened the top of my oilskin, angled the camera toward the inferno, and pressed the tiny button on its side until it made a distinct click.
Ducos would have something to send to her superiors. As I limped after Arcturus and Zeke, I sensed every soldier from the front of the palace leave their post and storm inside.
In my wake, Sheol II burned.
****
Volcanic orange illuminated the sky. The air was thick with the stench of burning hair and smoke. Maria would be proud of me, reducing a magnificent seventeenth-century palace to cinders.
Back through the city, dripping blood. Arcturus gave me a boost over the cemetery wall. Waiting near the mausoleum was Ivy, armed with her crowbar.
“Paige,” she called. “Are you hurt?”
“Not badly.” I went to her. “You came.”
“I had to.” Her eyes were dark mirrors for the sky. “Renelde has already taken Le Vieux Orphelin through. She said the tunnel would collapse if we all went at once.” Her gaze dipped to my throat, where bruises must have already formed. “Thuban was in there, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you got a decent shot at him.”
“Rammed a knife right in his neck. And Warden took his eye out.”
A look of surprise, then grim satisfaction. “Well.” Her smile was thin. “For now, that will help me sleep.”
“Mahoney?”
I turned. A whisperer was slumped against a nearby grave, breathing hard.
“Nadine?” I crouched beside her. “Is that you?”
“Somewhere under the bruises.” A weak smile cracked her lips. “Took you long enough to find us.”
Zeke had cleared the wall. He came straight to Nadine, and she wrapped an arm around him as he spoke to her in gentle tones. Skin had been flayed from the backs of her fingers, leaving them raw and bloody.
“Go, now,” I called to Ivy. “I’ll wait for Léandre and Ankou. They have the prisoners from the south wing.”
Zeke half lifted Nadine to her feet. When she saw the darkness in the mausoleum, she almost bent double. Her shoulders heaved as Zeke led her inside. Ivy saluted me with the crowbar and went after them.
“Go with them,” I said to Arcturus. “I won’t be far behind.”
After a moment, he said, “Be safe, little dreamer.” Then he followed the others into the mausoleum, leaving me alone among the dead.
I willed the others to appear. When Léandre arrived, a half-conscious woman in his arms, I rushed to meet him. Ankou fired his shotgun from the top of the wall, while Léandre pushed me toward the mausoleum.
“Vite. Into the passage.” He all but threw the woman at me. “Take my sister.”
Ankou pumped his shotgun and let rip again. A ghastly sound answered, loud as a horn. A legion of voices in one cry.
Emim.
“Léandre,” I barked at him. “The prisoners—”
“Leave them to me,” he snapped back. “Just get my sister out!”
The mausoleum closed around me, black and airless. I tried to support the woman—La Tarasque—with what little strength I had left in my arms. She was raw-boned, long white hair streaming around her shoulders, and from the look of her, she had just been possessed. I guided her into the hidden entrance, then slid in after her and pulled my headlamp back on.
By the time we reached the ladders, La Tarasque had woken up a little. “Climb down,” I urged her. “Hurry.”
She placed her bare feet on the rungs, looking as if she had no idea where she was. I hoped she had the self-awareness to hold on.
We descended, one ladder after the next, back into the Passage des Voleurs. At last, we reached the bottom. La Tarasque draped her arm around my
neck, too spirit-drunk to walk in a straight line. We were almost halfway back to the sleeping chamber by the time I hauled my focus to the æther.
There were still only four dreamscapes behind us.
Logic kicked in first. The prisoners must have been dosed with Emite blood, too. Yet my heart pounded, and my instinct warned me to go back. I helped La Tarasque sit and wrapped my oilskin around her.
“I’ll be back,” I told her. “You’re all right.”
She managed a dazed nod.
I started to run back to the ladders. Léandre was already off them and marching. Hot on his heels were Ankou, a silver-haired man with a cloaked aura, and a polyglot. No one else.
“Where are the others?” My voice cracked. “Léandre?”
“We could not bring all of them down here.” He brushed right past me. “They will have to take their chances in the woods.”
All feeling deserted my limbs. Jaw trembling, I caught up with him and grabbed his arm with a ferocity that took us both by surprise. He snapped around to face me, his features knitted with impatience. Ankou marched on.
“You left them.” My voice was a string, wound tight enough to snap. “You abandoned all those people?”
“I sent them toward the Forêt de Meudon. They have a chance, at least,” he said. My backbone turned to ice. “I only ever agreed to take our people through this tunnel, Underqueen. You thought we were going to be able to take more than thirty prisoners back with us?”
“And these two?” I said hotly. The strangers tensed. “Did they pay for the privilege of a way out?”
“They kept up.”
His lips were set in a determined line. “This was always your plan,” I breathed. The realization clotted inside me, choked me. “You always meant to leave them.” I shook my head. “They’ll never make it through the forest. You don’t know what’s out there, what will happen—”
I turned and broke into a run.
Anyone who tried to leave through the forest would die. The Emim would hunt them. The traps would get them. I sprinted back to the first ladder and grabbed a rung. Before I could get a foothold, Léandre hauled me away from the ladder and tackled me into the wall.
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