Crown of Briars Page 21

Zoe refocused her thoughts on Simon. You found me once through that connection. I know it’s still there. The Briars love you. They’ve got to want you home as badly as I do.

  Slowly, the needle steadied… and swung gently around.

  Zoe let go of the spell quickly, before her power could overwhelm it. She breathed out. “I think… I think it worked.”

  The seigneur’s touch left her mind. That low-level panic ebbed back into her thoughts — but it was tempered by the knowledge that she’d found a path to Simon.

  “Bon,” Jean murmured. “Perhaps the rest shall be so simple.”

  Tangy skepticism colored his aura as he said it… but he clearly meant the words to be encouraging, and so she let them stand.

  Chapter 15

  Zoe wasn’t entirely sure how long they walked, following the compass — time in Arcadia could be misleading, even with a clock to check the time by. But eventually, the way forward cleared, and they found themselves on a hill overlooking a massive Victorian estate. From a distance, it seemed shabby and run-down — and perhaps it was — but if so, it was kept in exactly the condition that its lord preferred.

  On the up-side, the strange rain had gone. The violet clouds parted, and the stars shone above them in a pitch black sky.

  Unfortunately, the stars were wrong.

  Zoe looked away instinctively before the image of the sinuous, shifting lights above them could fully register. Her mind stuttered, assaulted, and she found herself fighting to forget the sight before it could seep into her brain. Thankfully, her Witchsight wasn’t so strong that she could see something that distant with it; the alien stars simply hovered at the edge of her awareness, hostile and hungry.

  Jean, less conversant with the dangers of simply seeing the wrong thing in Arcadia, glanced upward with interest. Zoe lunged toward him, grabbing his head and forcing it down.

  The seigneur did not like that — not least because Zoe was shorter than he was, and this resulted in a terribly awkward position which craned his neck. She saw his silver eyes flare with red for just a moment… but slowly, he calmed himself, belatedly recognizing the danger he had been in.

  “…sorry,” Zoe breathed, forcing herself to relax. “Uh. In case it wasn’t obvious — I don’t think it’s a good idea to look at those.” Carefully, she released him again.

  Jean straightened, casting his eyes carefully downward. “I am quickly beginning to despise all things faerie,” he murmured.

  “I can’t say that’s a bad opinion to have,” Zoe muttered back. She glanced down the hill toward the main house of the estate. The compass was quite clearly pointing toward it. “We’re headed that way, looks like. I’m gonna guess we don’t want to walk in the front door and give the butler our calling cards.”

  Jean narrowed his eyes. “If there is any sense at all to this place, there should be a servants’ entrance to a home like that. Near the back.”

  Zoe frowned. “I don’t know that it’s safe to assume there is any sense to a realm called Delirium. But it’s worth a try.”

  The two of them started down the hill. The hedge followed them as they went, twisting and turning now at less sensible angles. The piece of the Briars within Zoe warned her that the hedge walls here were even more poisonous and less friendly than before; though they both did their best not to touch the thorns directly, she couldn’t help but notice that every time a new red scratch opened on her hand, the lily at her neck quavered insistently.

  Though they eventually set foot on level ground, the twisting hedge maze continued well before them, blocking the way to the great, tattered building at the center. Zoe eyed it distastefully, before turning to Jean. “Hey. You mind giving me back that envelope?”

  The vampire gave her a level look, and she sighed. “I just need something to write on. I’m shit at mazes.”

  Jean plucked the envelope from his coat pocket and handed it over to her wordlessly. Zoe rummaged for the pen she’d borrowed off Dorian earlier, and started marking on the back of the envelope.

  Time distended as they traveled through the twisted hedge maze. Zoe’s makeshift map was frustratingly less-than-helpful. More than once, they hit a dead end and retraced their steps, only to run into a path that seemed different from the one they’d just left. As they walked back out into an intersection she’d never seen before, Zoe hissed in frustration.

  “I’m not imagining things, am I?” she said. “This place is changing.”

  Jean spread his hands. “I cannot begin to fathom the minds of faeries,” he said. “But I cannot see that offering a clear path forward is of any benefit to the seigneur of this realm.”

  Zoe pursed her lips. “Yeah, well… I’m not interested in wandering around here for the next few months.” She considered the path before them. “I’m gonna have to risk some of the Lady’s magic. It might draw some attention.”

  Jean frowned slowly. “What happens in that case?” he asked.

  “We’ll probably both be screwed,” she muttered. “Think positive thoughts, huh?”

  Zoe reached down into the seed of Arcadian power that had burrowed into her soul. It had begun to settle there — setting down roots, worming its way into every corner. It was still vaguely foreign to her, but that didn’t matter; the moment she touched it, it responded eagerly, coiling in her blood.

  Slowly — very carefully — she pressed the power of the Briars against that of Delirium. The Lady probably would have cast her power directly against the hedge, forcing it aside… but that wasn’t the way that Zoe had been taught. Instead, she insinuated that same seed of power into the plants before her, urging the Briars to stretch and crawl through them, as if they were a poison of her own.

  Delirium knew the poison game. As the realm found itself unable to twist away from her power, it instead began to head her off strategically, sacrificing bits of itself in order to hem in the damage. The realm wanted to isolate her infection… which suited Zoe just fine. She wasn’t crazy enough to try and conquer the whole realm — she just needed a bit more control over the parts right in front of her.

  The hedge before them shivered… and slowly parted.

  “Let’s make it quick,” Zoe said to Jean, shoving the maze-covered envelope back into his hands. “The longer I do this, the more likely it is we’ll get caught.”

  The way cleared before them as they went. Zoe made a beeline straight for the back of the great, dilapidated house. Overhead, she was dimly aware of the stars shifting overhead, endlessly hungry for some intangible quality that the two of them carried. A distant rumble shook the skies, and she had to keep herself from looking up instinctively.

  Jean twitched, but kept his eyes cast to the ground. He had his hands folded thoughtfully behind him, as though to prove how unnecessary all the tension in the air was. “Et ça, c'était quoi?” he asked.

  Another faraway rumble followed the first. Zoe felt a tug at the piece of the Briars that had nested in her soul. “I think that’s our distraction,” she said. Thank god. She barely prevented herself from expressing the thought out loud. The seigneur was unimpressed enough with her planning as it was. He didn’t need to know that she’d half-expected the Lady to sulk in the Briars, or become distracted by some petty argument with Blackfrost.

  She hurried ahead, keenly aware of the growing pressure at the borders of the realm. True to Jean’s intuition, there was a servant’s entrance near the back of the manor — for use by what creatures, Zoe wasn’t entirely certain. A discreet set of narrow stairs led down to toward a single, basement-level door, partially hidden behind a curtain of deep violet ivy. Zoe checked the compass in her hands — it pointed directly forward. Carefully, she nudged the ivy aside to pull at a twisted silver door handle.

  Predictably, it didn’t budge.

  She growled at the door, considering her options. Never one to ignore a lesson, Zoe had palmed a particularly sharp letter opener from Dorian’s office during her time there, in the case that she needed to get at her own bl
ood in a hurry. She slipped her hand into her pocket, rubbing her fingers over it as she thought. Normally, Scorpio magic wouldn’t do much of anything to a real object — but in Arcadia, the mental and the physical had little separation. If she applied herself properly, maybe she could eat through the door itself—

  Jean politely brushed past her, and slammed his shoulder into the door.

  Hinges cracked and splintered. The door shuddered in its frame.

  The vampire smashed into the door once more — this time, his supernatural strength was enough to bust it open entirely.

  Jean stepped back again and straightened, rolling at his shoulder. Red faded slowly from his eyes. “Après vous,” he murmured.

  Zoe let out her breath. “Yeah. Ladies with faerie magic first, I guess.”

  They weren’t alone in the servants’ wing.

  Wavering, mirage-like creatures rushed back and forth. What they were doing, exactly, Zoe couldn’t tell — there was no rhyme or reason to their movements. The faerie creatures were vaguely humanoid, but inexplicably difficult to focus on. Every time she tried to look at one head-on, its features and colors blurred.

  One smoky, oil-smudged figure tried walking straight through Zoe as she walked in the back door. She jerked back quickly — but as its arm ghosted through her body, her vision wavered and went black at the edges.

  Childish laughter.

  Malcolm’s voice. “I can show you things you never imagined possible.”

  Blood. Screams.

  Simon’s whisper against her lips: “I love you.”

  The lily at Zoe’s throat shuddered violently. She came back to herself with a jolt, breathing hard. Jean glanced at the flower around her neck.

  “That is a bad sign, yes?” he observed.

  Zoe fingered the flower worriedly. A rotten black spot had spread across one of its crimson petals. “Yeah, that’s bad,” she muttered. Her voice shook. For just a second, she’d felt as though she were coming apart at the seams — stuck in a hundred disconnected moments at once, with no sense of the single, central individual to whom they all belonged.

  The servants rushed onward, just as ubiquitous as they were oblivious to the presence of the two interlopers. Jean frowned at them. “Are they faeries?” he asked.

  “Maybe?” Zoe said. “I don’t know. They’re made from Delirium, so I guess that means yes.”

  The seigneur narrowed his eyes. “They have emotions,” he said.

  Zoe blinked. She focused her Witchsight more directly on the creatures, though the act made her head dizzy. “No… they’ve got something. But I don’t think it’s emotion.” She shook her head. “Nothing born from Arcadia has emotion. Some of them have…” She struggled to articulate the concept. “They have the idea of emotion. Like one of those crappy plastic candles with a light bulb flame. It lights up the room okay, and maybe it even looks right from a distance, but… it’s not real fire.”

  Jean considered the creatures for a long moment. Zoe felt him stretching his power, and she knew he was thinking about trying to consume some of that false emotion. “I know you’re a gambling sort of guy,” she said. “But I really wouldn’t do that.”

  The seigneur smiled wryly. “Perhaps I have lost enough to my gambles for one day,” he said. “Fascinating as it might be to throw the dice.”

  Outside, the sky rumbled ominously again. Zoe took a shaky breath… and carefully stepped back inside the manor. After only the briefest of hesitations, Jean stepped in after her.

  Avoiding the faerie servants was doable, but difficult. Zoe had to keep one eye on the compass as she went, adjusting their route accordingly. Every time she looked away and back at the creatures surrounding her, they seemed to distort even further — becoming more unearthly and less well-defined. Jean, who moved with a kind of liquid, inhuman grace, had fewer issues than she did; occasionally, he reached out to jerk her back by the edge of her borrowed shirt, pulling her out of the path of one of the hazy ghosts that walked Lord Wormwood’s halls.

  The corridors twisted and turned — less frequent than the hedge maze, but even more dizzying and claustrophobic. More than once, Zoe saw the compass swing back and forth as they climbed stairs upward or walked just slightly too far, unable to find a door in the direction she needed to go. The closer she felt them get to Simon, the more an urgency rose in her chest.

  Figures blurred and stuttered. Even with the flower at her throat, Zoe felt the realm around her like a fever dream. There was a strange, floating euphoria to it, but even that pleasure held an unhealthy edge. They were getting dangerously close to the center of Wormwood’s authority. That power was like a drug, calling her in — promising only a potent, never-ending dissolution of everything she was. It was still tempting, for no particular reason she could discern.

  The taste of lavender tea on her lips.

  Cold blue eyes, shrouded in darkness deeper than a starless night — power rising to enfold around Malcolm as he staggered backward from the sight.

  Simon’s fingers threaded through her hair. “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui rend ta rose importante.”

  Jean’s hand came down on her shoulder. Numbness spread through her mind again, more strongly this time. Zoe realized she’d stopped dead in the middle of the hallway, allowing one of the creatures to whisper through her entire body.

  The lily at her throat shivered again. More than half of its petals had withered black.

  Zoe gasped in a labored breath and staggered out of the way. Jean followed — his own movements were stilted, as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him. She scrabbled at a door handle, dragging them through into a side room.

  “God damn,” she managed hoarsely. “This place is getting to me.”

  The seigneur leaned heavily against the door. His eyes had sparked with red again, but there was a distant, satiated quality to them. He took a long, steadying breath. Zoe saw a flicker of ecstasy go through him, and the disquieting thought hit her: was he being drugged off her emotions? She couldn’t see her own emotions, and so couldn’t see him feeding on them. But the seigneur looked as though he might sink down to the floor and drift away.

  “You all right?” she asked warily.

  Jean blinked slowly. She watched as — with great effort — he reclaimed his presence of mind. “Neither of us shall last much longer,” he said. “Where does your compass point?”

  Zoe turned to regard the room in front of them. Walls of vibrant stained glass spread out before them like a kaleidoscope into the shape of an overly-grand conservatory. Dusty and scarred by disuse, there was nonetheless a heady quality to it. At the center, a tall fountain of glass and tarnished silver stood floor to ceiling, its arms overflowing with an acid green liquid.

  The compass pointed straight forward… but Zoe didn’t need to check it again. There was a figure wound within the blackened arms of the fountain, trapped in its cloying embrace. Simon slept there; his glasses were nowhere to be found. His skin looked as though it ought to be an ash grey color, but it was hard to tell, in light of the steady green drip of liquid across his face and the ghostly dash of colors created by alien stars shining through the kaleidoscopic ceiling.

  Zoe rushed toward him, her heart in her throat. Simon was still alive — she could tell by the faint, nauseating spin of his aura — but he didn’t look good. She nearly reached out to wipe the green liquid from his face… but some lingering shred of practicality stopped her just in time. The liquid in the fountain had a bitter, pungent smell that instantly went to her head.

  Simon was absolutely poisoned. Zoe barely had to focus her Witchsight to see it. The sickly green haze infected every inch of his body. She itched to wipe it all away, to let him rest properly… but first, she needed to pry him loose from that ghastly fountain.

  “Absinthe,” Jean murmured. He was already behind her, though she hadn’t heard him move. “Probably much stronger than my usual tastes, however.”

  Zoe turned to regar
d the vampire, fixing her eyes on the lily at his throat. It still had a bit more white to it than hers did. “Can you get him free?” she asked. “However strong that stuff is, there should be enough juice left in that flower to protect you for at least a few seconds.”

  Jean glanced over the metal arms that curled around Simon. Calmly, he set his coat aside and rolled up his sleeves. Red flashed in his eyes once more… and he began to peel the tarnished fountain away from Simon.

  Acid green coursed over the vampire’s pale hands as he lifted away the metal curled around Simon’s throat. The crimson lily convulsed like a patient in a sick bed — black flickered visibly through its veins. As the seigneur reached for the arm about the warlock’s waist, and then for the one at his feet, the lily withered entirely, overcome by the blighted concoction.

  Jean dragged Simon quickly back out of the fountain, letting him down gently to the floor. Zoe gave into the impulse to drag him into her arms, holding him close. Her body trembled with a mixture of bone-deep relief and brand new worries as she gently wiped away the liquid on his face with her sleeve.

  “Simon?” she whispered, though she knew he couldn’t hear her. “Simon, I’m here. I’ve got you.”

  His body shivered faintly… but she worried that it might be more from fever than from any recognition of the change in his circumstances. She fumbled for the wooden box with the last lily, pulling it out and fastening it around his neck.

  Two of its petals withered instantly, spiralling away to the floor. The shivering stopped, and Simon’s pulse strengthened… but he didn’t open his eyes. Zoe swallowed. “Okay. That’s… that’s something.” She glanced toward Jean. This deep within Delirium, the poison in the air was already getting to him, now that the flower at his neck had died. She set her jaw, and reached for the lily at her neck, but the vampire stopped her with a hand on her wrist.

  “I can endure,” the seigneur said shortly. He broke his grip on her to pick back up his coat, pulling it around his shoulders. “You have less mass. The poison will affect you more quickly. Let us leave, and it will soon become irrelevant.”