He drove within a few miles per hour of the speed limit, so as not to draw attention. From I-71 to Route 146. And off an exit into what seemed like an oblivion of flat countryside. The summer wind gusted, and a massive cloud of thin, parched dust rolled across the used-up land. Any car out on these farm roads would attract attention. The farmhouses seemed like deserted, hollow shacks. The Blake property was by far the largest, yet still . . . dead.
Mason came to a stop in front of a long drive with a mailbox built into a crumbling brick gateway, though the gate itself was missing.
Cari had heard that Blake House was basically falling down, but that wasn’t true. Not yet, at least. To her the place resembled a house of cards. The structure of the farm house itself was all right angles and gabled roof, a rectangular porch jutting out from the front door. But the consistency of the paint-peeling wood and other materials seemed somehow flimsy, disintegrating, unsafe. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought that the place was still standing by the power of the Blake ward stones alone. Without magic, the house would fall.
She reached for her bag to get out her phone to alert the House they’d arrived and to release their wards. But Mason—who must’ve sensed something—was already accelerating down a cracked concrete road toward the House. They both got out of the car. Mason came around in time to shut her door, but his attention was on the building.
That house, she knew, was packed with Lures, and she wanted to get out of it, preferably with him, of her own free will.
He grunted with dislike. “You will stay close to me.”
Cari looked over at him, the human daring to boss the Dolan around.
A hint of a smile crinkled the outside corners of his eyes, the fine lines crisscrossing into a strange form of hieroglyphics. They weren’t smile lines exactly, or not only. What other powerful expressions had created them? She knew if she studied him, as he’d said he’d studied her, she might read the story of his life. She didn’t know if she could bear what she’d learn, though.
The thought was more dangerous than any Lure. So she regarded the house again.
“If you feel uncomfortable,” he said, “no one would blame you for backing out. You have a House to think of.”
“I’m not worried.”
His cowboy smile flashed in her peripheral vision. “Well,
I’m
worried.”
She laughed. “I won’t let the Blakes get you.”
“I’m not afraid of the Blakes.” He put a hand to her lower back to start them forward, a casual touch. But the Lures knew how potent a casual touch could be. From the point of contact, warm glitter diffused throughout her system.
She wanted him. Fine. She admitted it. She was tight with wanting inside of her—a rare feeling in her experience. She’d wanted him for almost a decade.
Then take him.
Cari nodded to Maeve, though the fae couldn’t see her.
I think I will.
She would not live with this wanting-and-not-knowing any longer. Eventually she would have to marry, and she did not want Mason in her fantasies when she did.
They approached the pathway to the house together. When they came to the front porch’s steps, Cari looked down with a pang of alarm. The boards were in all the right places, some of them split and crumbling, but it appeared that nothing was actually holding them together. Fun.
The front door opened as she tried her weight on one. Mason moved more quickly, stepping up and putting himself in front of her.
She couldn’t see which member of Blake House had come to welcome them, because she was staring at Mason’s back. But she could sense the umbras of seven people beyond him, grouped on the main level, on the other side of the house. Two were nearer, one just behind the door.
“You will not approach us,” Mason said.
“We only want vengeance for our dead,” rasped an elderly voice. “Same as any other House. We want the source of this plague found.”
Cari gave Mason a little push to get him to step aside. A Dolan didn’t hide.
Mason moved, but just enough for her to follow him up to the porch proper. It had to be Takum Blake before them. He was built squarely, with no excess on him. His eyes had begun to yellow around the black irises. His white hair was sparse, and his umbra was weak. She didn’t know yet the limits of her new access to Shadow, but she felt she could predict that this one was going to die soon.
“I’m here to gather what information about the death I can,” Cari told him. “Mason Stray is going to assist me.”
Takum glanced at Mason with loathing, but managed to twitch a sort of invite.
Good enough. Cari started forward.
But Mason put a backward-facing hand out—touched her belly this time—to hold her back. Every touch seemed to warm her.
“You will go back into the house,” he said to Takum, “and we will follow.”
Cari found she was a little uneasy about entering, too. Her heart was skipping beats.
The Blake sneered at them and entered his house, leaving the door wide open.
Mason turned back to her and murmured. “I feel Shadow just beyond the threshold, to the left.”
“I see it,” Cari answered. Then one-upped him. “I think it’s a woman.”
“All right, then.” He let out a dry cough. “I don’t feel superfluous.”
His wisecrack helped her find a few of her misplaced heartbeats. He could never be superfluous. She knew that now. If something needed to be done, she’d want Mason to do it. Kaye Brand had simply figured that out first.
“It’s a good thing you’re pretty to look at.” She flushed. She obviously didn’t know how to flirt. Never had.
He led the way across the porch, glancing back once with a cockeyed smile. “You think I’m pretty?”
Her heartbeat went perfectly even. Mason’s secret magic was to make her feel up to any challenge. When they got back to Dolan House she was absolutely going to proposition him. She’d have to think of a better line.
Dingy stairs clambered upward to the far right. An open room was on the left, smallish, which led to another room beyond. The ceilings were lower than she was used to, making the place feel close, and Mason seem extra tall, extra broad of shoulder. The walls had once been a pale, sunshine yellow—happy for a farmland—but had since gone dingy.
What kind of life was it to be born a Lure with an aptitude only to entrap those of their own kind? No one welcomed them. No one wanted them for friends. Could a Blake turn his back on his own House and choose a human life instead? Maybe as a teacher, a lawyer, an artist?
Could she ever turn her back on Dolan House?
Could she deny who or what she was?
No.
So she’d give them as much respect as she had the Vau-clains. “Where did Lorelei die?”
Upstairs. Narrow hallway to a bedroom with a sloping ceiling. None of the Blakes followed, which was simple self-preservation against possible contagion. Cari and Mason were immune. The Blakes would need to find a way to burn the body afterward, hopefully without burning down the rest of the house.
Mason opened the door first, looked inside the bedroom, and sighed. The strain across his forehead told her to prepare herself.
Cari followed him to where the Lure who’d once captured Kaye Brand waited.
Lorelei Blake lay on her bed, her head on her pillow. Her skin was gray with death, not Shadow. Deflated blood blisters were scattered across her visible cheek; an egg-sized mound festered below her ear on her neck. Her eyes were open and dewy with slime. She still wore a shoe, so it appeared that she’d collapsed in bed almost immediately upon arriving in the room. And the smell . . .
Takum had preserved everything for them, but then he wasn’t covering up a murder like Francis Vauclain had been.
“Carefully, now,” Mason said.
As she had practiced in her bedroom, she did not draw on magic, did not call upon Maeve. She used only what came to her naturally to see. This had to have been how her father had worked: use only what was in the world already.
Shadow cloaked her sight, and the past lurched into the present.
Lorelei’s antumbra staggered from behind them this time. Cari whipped around to see the Lure clutch the doorframe to keep herself upright, then trip on the bed where she trembled in pain and fear until she was dead. The Shadow evaporated, but the body lay in the same position.
Cari sought the umbra of the House that had killed Lorelei, and this time, at long last, she perceived something different in the Shadow of its latest victim: Blood.
Magic had been infused with the organic matter of life. The Shadow itself still had the raw quality she’d sensed both at her father’s death and at Vauclain House. No umbra, no identity. This Shadow had been blooded.
“It’s not mage-made, is it?” Mason scrubbed his mouth and chin with his hand, as if to control his reaction.
She glanced over at him. His skin had turned dusky, every line and plane a monochrome of untamed magic. He was potent, there was no denying. Someone like Mason, with great ability, but no thumbprint, could have done this. Mason, who was a wild card of loyalties.
You can’t trust me.
Had she, as her stepmother had suggested, been unknowingly seduced by him?
She was in fact seduced. Every part of her wanted him. Had he . . . encouraged that in her?
Cari reached out gently for magic from Maeve, because she had to see Mason. She had to know him so that she wouldn’t be tormented by doubts of what he was capable of unleashing on magekind, the race of people who’d shut him out all of his life. He had reason to be angry and bitter—his life, his son’s, all the insults to his blood. Had he created the mage plague?
Cari asked, and Maeve gave: the Shadow within Mason eddied, then convulsed. His eyes narrowed at her, so he knew she was using her power on him. That she suspected him of something, one more insult to his stray pride.
For so many reasons, this couldn’t be helped.
Mason’s Shadow was like stormy clouds over a bitter sea, but she was the mistress of Shadow, the queen of the night, and if she willed it, the Shadow clouds would part.
Yesss, dove . . .
At her command, they did part.
Maeve had mentioned that Mason had a beautiful blue star of a soul within him—a pretty thing that she had wanted to toy with. But Cari had no words for the light that pervaded Mason’s person. A star? Only if she were standing this close, three feet, from the star itself, its heat and radiance challenging the constitution of her flesh and bones, her umbra. She wanted to hide her sight from his brilliance.
Tantalizing, is he not?
Maeve sighed.
Cari’s eyes burned and she filled with longing. She wanted one of those, to be like him, and burn forever so brightly. But the mighty Dolan was like Lorelei, who had been left with nothing at death. A generation, and she would be forgotten.
No wonder there were wars between Order and Shadow. No wonder Light always won. Mason Stray, outcast and human, the
least
of the Shadow born, was astounding.
Mason endured the brush and soul stroke of Cari’s power. She’d suspected, or had known outright—there was no hiding. She shredded the hold he had on his Shadow to look inside him.
He was human.
Had she suspected he was worse than that? A killer? Yes, he’d killed before. Or did she think he was even more evil? The source of the plague?
Look hard then.
“You finished?”
Cari let go of the Shadow and cleared her sight. He was innocent; she knew it with absolute certainty by the magic of her House. “You’re right. I think that whoever is doing this isn’t a mage. There’s blood mixed in with the Shadow, and I think it’s the blood that is killing the mages. Poisoned. Burning us from the inside out.”
“Angelic?” He was referring to the angel who’d thrown a spear at her.
“Or human,” she said. She would not force an admission of humanity from Mason. But someone like him—if there was another—needed to be considered.
Mason’s jaw twitched at that, but he didn’t defend himself. Cari suspected his pride wouldn’t let him, and she didn’t want to push him any farther just then.
Maeve, am I right?
Cari didn’t like addressing the fae, but she didn’t want to lose this opportunity. She had her father to think of.
I cannot see who brought death upon that child.
The child being Lorelei, though she must’ve been in her forties.
Then could it have been made by someone with a soul?
Yesss.
Mason’s jaw flexed. “We need to warn Kaye Brand, though Jack Bastian will know more about what to do.”
Maeve rose inside her, causing a panicked feeling in Cari’s chest.
I don’t. Like. Angels.
“At least we have a theory to report.” Cari could barely look at Mason, with his bright soul. She’d had a crush on him once, and even then her fantasies had seemed ludicrous.
“We’ll need more than that.” He looked around the room.
She tried to follow his gaze, careful of his anger. “What are you looking for?”
“We need proof.” He took an empty plastic water bottle that had been left to the side of the bed. Opened the lid. Let the water inside glug to the floor. “We need a sample.”
She almost laughed—bitterly. “We can’t hold and transport Shadow.” That’s exactly what her Umbra project was supposed to do. She’d scream if Mason managed it with a plastic bottle.
“The Shadow won’t keep, but the blood will.” He went over to the body and scraped an open wound with the funnel of the plastic top. A little bit of Lorelei Blake glopped to the bottom of the bottle. Gray, bloody pus lay in a smoking, noxious little lump.
Cari was going to be sick. It was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen.