The creature within Isabelle, having formerly inhabited the body of Lance Ashcroft, has tried everything to control Scarlet—seduction, charms, mind control. None of it has worked. It has resorted to steel. Because steel always works.
Chenguer did not sleep well in unfamiliar houses.
This was not a complaint. It was simply a fact he had learned to use. While the others slept, he lay still and let the web settle around him—the threads of it faint and cool in the darkness, a map of nothing significant. Servants. A dog somewhere below. The slow, rhythmic pulse of people at rest.
Earlier, he only saw the sickly colored threads of the Unfinished, but during the battle in Faerlong Dell, it had become more refined. He could see the faint threads of everyone—all living creatures within a certain range—a couple hundred yards, perhaps. He could see the Unfinished at much longer distances and the more powerful they were, the further away he could see them.
But he had not seen them since Faerlong Dell, nor their source, which made him question his earlier claim that the Usurper was definitely in Stormrest. He had been doing this since. Mapping whatever house he was in. Learning its texture. He knew this house now. He knew where Philip slept, and Drogoth, and Scarlet—and he knew, three rooms down from Scarlet on the same floor, where Isabelle Marlow lay.
He had noticed her thread for two days. He had said nothing.
The first reason was uncertainty. He had learned long ago that uncertainty, announced prematurely, did more damage than silence. He watched instead. He mapped. He waited to understand what he was seeing.
The second reason was more awkward. He had seen two threads from one person before—a pregnant woman in Faerlong Dell. He had thought about that for two days, watching Isabelle Marlow move through the house, sit beside Charles at dinner, accept a petit four and not eat it. He had thought: perhaps that is what this is. Perhaps she is expecting and the second thread is new life, and it is none of my business.
What he was seeing was two threads from one person, one cold and one not, and he did not understand it and he did not want to be wrong about it in either direction. Sometimes it moved when she was still. It pulled in two directions at once. One thread was weaker, the other much stronger. He lay in the dark and watched it, the warmth of his blanket a comfort against a room that was cool despite the active fireplace.
At the third hour past midnight, it lurched.
He was out of bed before the sensation resolved into thought. He had his blade in hand and his feet in the corridor in the time it took most men to sit up. Constellation threw no light here—he had not drawn on it—but he did not need light. He needed the web.
He moved down the carpeted hallway, his movements quiet. Oil lamps, mounted every twenty feet or so, ran the length of the long hallways along the central spine of the estate.
Seventy-five feet ahead, at the far end where a lamp burned low against the wall, something was happening to Isabelle’s thread. It was splitting. The weak thread had become gradually brighter, and then the strong thread underneath turned colors, almost like the Unfinished. The weaker thread diminished back to its former state.
Two threads, two directions. One body.
He opened his mouth.
“Scarlet!”
The shout left him before he fully understood why he had chosen her name and not Philip’s, not Wardyn’s. Some part of him had already calculated the geometry—Scarlet’s room, the position of Isabelle’s thread, the angle of what was about to happen.
He was already running.
Scarlet felt an immediate chill, her body recoiling from the intrusion of the blade.
Then she felt Isabelle stop.
The dagger was still in her, and Isabelle’s right hand was still on the hilt, but her left hand had come up and locked around her own right wrist, and the two arms were shaking with opposing force.
Scarlet fell back onto the bed and felt the blade pull from her chest. She felt the warmth of blood and pressed her hand to it—an effort to stop the flow.
Isabelle’s face was a war. Her jaw was set. The tendons in her neck were straining. Her left hand was white-knuckled around her own wrist, holding it, fighting it—as if she was trying to force a door closed while simultaneously trying to open it.
She turned her eyes to Scarlet. Something was happening in them. A surfacing.
“I’m not me,” she said. The voice was a ruin. More a gasp than a statement. It cost her everything she had left.
Wardyn and Charles came through the door as she said it.
Wardyn took the scene in one breath—Scarlet lying on the bed, blood flowing from a chest wound, hand pressed to her breast, Isabelle with the dagger, the shaking arms, the two opposing forces—and Shadowbreaker was already out and he swung the great weapon at Isabelle.
Charles, a half-step behind Wardyn, screamed no. The word tore out of him before he understood what Wardyn was doing, and what followed it was silence and the terrible weight of not knowing if it had been the right thing to scream. He stood in the doorway with his heart hammering and watched.
But there was no rending of flesh. The blow had not struck her. Instead, it passed across her, and the shadow of the blade struck the shadow of her body on the lamplit wall. The shadows had collided. The severing occurred in the shadows, where it mattered.
The sound that followed did not come from Isabelle’s throat.
It was not a human sound. It was not any living creature’s sound. It came from somewhere between the room and somewhere else entirely, a wail with four thousand years of fury in it, and then it was gone.
Isabelle crumpled.
Charles was already moving. He caught her before she reached the floor—dropped to his knees with her, got his arms under her, and held on. Her weight against him was real and warm and present in a way it had not been for weeks, and he did not know yet what that meant but he felt it in the way you feel the end of something that has been wrong for a long time.
Philip appeared in the doorway.
He crossed the room in four strides and got his hands on Scarlet—one arm around her back, one hand over hers at her chest, pressing it there. She let him because she was losing strength.
“I have you,” he said.
“My—my sw—life—,” she gasped, her eyes focusing near the wardrobe.
Philip turned and saw the wardrobe. Saw the sword leaning up against it.
Lifegiver.
He brought it to her, unsheathed, meaning to hand it to her, but it left his grip and hovered over the bed, parallel with Scarlet, as though it had been waiting for exactly this.
She felt the warmth moving through her chest. It was like sunlight reaching somewhere it had never quite reached before—slow, and certain, and unhurried. The coldness evaporated. The pain contracted and then released. Under her hand, she could feel the flesh mending and the skin closing.
She did not look down.
Philip did, his eyes on her bloodied nightgown, and she felt his arm tighten around her—not dramatically, not with the urgency of fear, just the small involuntary tightening of a man who has nearly lost something and is making sure it is still there.
She looked instead at Charles, who was on the floor with Isabelle in his arms, her dark hair across his sleeve, her eyes closed now. He was rocking slightly without knowing he was rocking. His face had not yet decided what he felt, and was simply holding on to the girl in front of him until he could.
Wardyn stood near the wall. He had not sheathed Shadowbreaker.
For a long time no one spoke.
Whatever the wail had been, it had passed through the house. The lamp burned on, though the flame had shrunk to almost nothing before recovering itself. The room smelled of blood and something else—something vaguely earthy and rotting. No one moved to open a window. No one moved at all.
Philip met her eyes.
“She’s alive?” Scarlet asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“She said—” Scarlet stopped. Her eyes went back to Charles.
He had heard it. He had been close enough to hear it.
I’m not me.
He was still rocking, and he did not look up, and she did not finish the sentence.
They knew what it meant.
Drogoth appeared in the doorway. He took in the room—Wardyn with the unsheathed blade, Charles on the floor, Philip with his arm around Scarlet—and said nothing. He leaned against the frame and folded his arms.
And now they all knew where the Usurper had been, and how long he had been there.
Isabelle’s eyes fluttered open, her breathing rushed, her eyes wide as she scanned everything. Her voice came out like dry parchment. “It’s—it’s gone,” she said.
“You’re okay,” Charles said, cradling her.
She reached up to him with both hands, holding his face. Warm hands. “I love you,” she said. “I should have said so before. I thought I’d never ever get the chance again.”
He kissed her forehead. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Scarlet sat up in bed then slid to the floor next to her.
“You saved my life,” she said. “I saw what you did.”
“You saw me stab you,” Isabelle said, tears running down her face.
“No,” Scarlet said. “I saw the Usurper stab me. You stopped him.”
“I was trapped,” she said. “In my own body. I was a prisoner.” She pressed both hands to her own face as though checking that it was still hers. “I could hear him. His thoughts running through my head. I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t—” She broke off.
“Take your time,” Scarlet said.
Isabelle lowered her hands. Her eyes had the look of someone who has seen things they cannot unsee and is deciding how much of it to say. “He is very old,” she said finally. “Older than anything I can put a number to. And he is—patient. That is the thing that frightened me most. Not the hatred. The patience. As though time is something that happens to other people.”
“What did he want?” Philip asked.
“At first, the land. Through Charles, through me, access to the Wentworth name and the restoration. When that failed—” She paused. “When Scarlet refused him, he pivoted. He always pivots. He’s been doing it for so long that it costs him nothing. One plan fails and the next one simply begins.” She looked at Scarlet. “You were the alternative. If he couldn’t use you, he would remove you.”
“And Charles?” Scarlet asked quietly.
Isabelle looked at him. Something passed between them that was not a question and not an answer but something older than both.
“He wanted Charles alive,” she said. “As long as Charles was useful.”
Charles said nothing. He was still holding her hands.
“Could you sense his thoughts?” Wardyn asked.
“Oh gods!” Isabelle said.
“What is it?” Drogoth asked.
“He means to—” She stopped. Her hands were shaking. “The things he was thinking. The things I had to—” She closed her eyes. “He wants them all dead. Everyone in the city. Everyone in Bravia. He wants—” She couldn’t finish it.
“Then, we have a problem,” Wardyn said. He leaned leaned his head against the wardrobe and closed his eyes.
Philip crossed to Chenguer and crouched beside the chair.
“Chen.”
He didn’t move for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.
“I should have said something sooner. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How do you explain two threads in one person?”
“It’s not your fault,” Scarlet said, still not looking up.
Chenguer nodded once.
Philip stayed crouched beside him. The writing desk had a single candle burning at its corner. Constellation lay unsheathed before him, no light in the blade.
Outside, the city was silent.
Then Chenguer’s hand came down on Constellation’s grip.
“They’re moving,” Chenguer said.
“How many?”
Chenguer looked at him and answered.
“All of them.”
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.
I feel an epic battle on the horizon!
Scarlet is ok! Thank goodness! I’m so glad Isabelle is too