A Breath of Frost (5 page)

“Did you see who did it?” Tobias asked. His usually fastidious clothing was marked with soot.

Cormac thought of Emma dropping a witch bottle. “No,” he replied. He’d been right behind her when she’d been racing back to Margaret’s side. The magical traces on her person wouldn’t link her to the victim. Small mercies. He doubted the Order would think so, or even Tobias for that matter. They’d been to school together and Cormac considered him a brother, but there was no denying Tobias was a bit more starched than he was. He didn’t have five sisters to plague him, to begin with.

He shook his head over Margaret’s broken body. This might have been her very first ball. She certainly wasn’t trained enough to use magic to protect herself. The Greymalkin family preferred to drain witches before they learned how to fight back. His fists clenched. “I thought the Greymalkin had gone into hiding,” he said, glaring at the unfurled knot on the girl’s palm. It was a scornful imitation of a regular witch knot, which could be drawn with a single unbroken line. The Greymalkin severed the pattern, deliberately unfurling the petal-like points into spirals. “Or were wiped out altogether.”

“Greymalkin? Really?” Tobias took a closer look at her palm. There were few families who rivaled the bloodthirst of the Greymalkin. Stories were told about exploits hundreds of years old that still held the power to terrify. “They haven’t done this sort of thing since my mother was a deb,” he added. If Cormac recalled his history correctly, Tobias’s mother also used to hunt them. Tobias swore briefly, tones clipped and icy.

“What do you see?” Cormac asked him. Cormac had charms that allowed him to discern hidden marks but his own magical lineage had skipped him entirely, choosing instead to concentrate
its considerable power on each of his five younger sisters. That bad-luck problem again.

Still, clearly he had better luck than Margaret York.

Tobias’s blue eyes narrowed to focus on magical residue Cormac couldn’t see, even with his True Sight charm. “Blood curse, I think. It’s hazy.” Tobias was a brilliant tracker. If he couldn’t pick out the magical traces with any certainty, there were few others in London who could.

Sweat curled Tobias’s hair as he struggled to harness the dark magic swirling around them. Even ungifted as he was, Cormac felt it too. Anyone could. Murder left its own mark, even beyond blood and brutality.

“It was definitely someone at the ball,” Tobias confirmed, leaning against the tree and panting as if he’d been chased down by rabid dogs. His voice was hoarse as he tugged at his cravat.

“That narrows it down to nearly three hundred guests,” Cormac said. “Not to mention several dozen servants.” He rose to his feet. “Some of which are coming this way, even now.”

He jerked his head in the direction of three footmen heading back toward the kitchen with empty buckets. The smoke was no longer thick enough to hide Margaret’s body, or either of them, for that matter. They couldn’t afford to be caught in the web of questions that would inevitably result. They couldn’t even wait for other Keepers to arrive. Once the girl’s family descended, they wouldn’t have the chance to do what needed doing. Magical trails went cold fast. Screaming mothers seemed to make them go even colder, faster.

“I can track it awhile yet,” Tobias said grimly as they stepped
back into the concealing shrubbery. By the time they made their way around several statues, a fountain, and clipped hedges, the first cry of alarm rang through the wet and smoky night. They slipped around the guests crowding together, and pressed against a row of harried footmen who were trying to keep them from disturbing the body. Whispers of murder caught faster than the fire in the brocade drapes.

The chatter faded in a wave, retreating like the tide, when the rumor of a dead girl was proven to be fact. Someone screamed. A decorated captain who had fought in the Battle of Trafalgar fainted. Cormac stayed near Tobias, all the while searching for anyone who might look guilty, and for Emma’s distinctive red-brown hair.

“There’s magic leading that way.” Tobias nodded to the hydrangeas Cormac had tossed Emma into. “It’s connected to the murder.”

He went cold. “Are you sure?”

“It’s not a clear read,” he admitted, frustrated. “But it’s there. It’s connected magically somehow.” Before Cormac could suggest it was a simple matter of magic attracting magic, Tobias turned his head sharply. “Ow, bloody hell.” He massaged his temple. “It’s over there as well. And there.” He sighed. “It’s bleeding into the general panic of the guests.”

“Let’s try past the gates,” Cormac suggested. “If we’re lucky, the murderer has already left the party.”

“He has,” Tobias confirmed. “He’s just gorged on himself on someone else’s power. He wouldn’t be able to hide the effects, or the residue of violence. Not with so many witches in attendance,
even if it is mostly debutantes. And he’d have to know the Order is on its way.” By the time they’d reached the road, Tobias was stumbling. He paused to be sick behind a carriage painted like a peppermint bonbon.

“Magic leads that way,” he said when he was well enough to lift his head. He pointed straight to a passing carriage. A familiar face stared at them through the window. “Isn’t that Emma Day?”

Cormac clamped down on his expression, refusing to betray any emotion. The carriage rumbled by.

Tobias wiped his mouth with a pristine white handkerchief. “The bloodcurse trail goes that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction, much to Cormac’s relief. They followed it around the corner, past several mansions and over to the next street bordering the park. Tobias retched one more time.

“Blood curses are vile,” he said wearily. “They taste like rotted leeks.” He wiped his face with a grimace. “Nasty business.”

“That’s not all,” Cormac said steadily, reaching for the dagger in his boot. “If I recall, Greymalkin magic of this kind always unleashes the Sisters.”

“Bollocks.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

Two hours later
and the strange, peculiar night was no closer to making any sense at all.

Emma had leaped into the carriage and proceeded to stare so wide-eyed that Gretchen asked her if she’d had too much champagne. She desperately wanted to tell them what had happened but Aunt Mildred was dreadful at keeping secrets. So she could only sit against the cushions as the carriage rattled over the cobbles, the image of the mole clambering out of the dead girl’s chest repeating in her mind.

It made no sense.

Not the first time she replayed it, and not the hundredth.

“Well, that was fun.” Gretchen grinned, slouching back against the seats. The swinging lantern cast long fingers of light over her face. They’d been safely in the carriage and driving away before Margaret’s body was found. Emma wasn’t sure
why it was so imperative that she or her cousins be out of the vicinity, but Cormac’s fear was contagious.

“What have we learned from this, girls?” Mildred asked primly, as if she hadn’t just been scrambling onto benches to watch the ballroom burn.

“Never attend a ball?” Gretchen guessed.

Mildred’s nostrils flared. “Do I have to remind you, yet again, that you have a duty, Gretchen Thorn?”

Penelope groaned and kicked her cousin’s ankle. “Now look what you’ve done.”

“I don’t see how marrying some balding old earl who smells like liniment paste is my duty to king and country,” Gretchen replied mutinously. “Napoleon is out there and I’d rather be a spy against the French than a wife.” She rubbed her hands together. “I think I’d make a dashing spy. Or I could dress as a boy and be a soldier.”

Emma was barely listening. She’d just seen a girl die in front of her. She widened her eyes at Penelope. Misunderstanding, Penelope rolled hers in response. Mildred’s speeches about duty and manners were only outnumbered by Gretchen’s speeches about becoming a spy.

“Do you still think this is a game?” Mildred snapped, the mask of prudish and slightly befuddled maiden aunt slipping. “Even now, after your come-out? You have one duty and one duty only, to repay your parents’ kindness by securing yourself an eligible bachelor to marry. Before they choose one for you, and they shall, if you don’t smarten up.”

Gretchen blinked, sitting up slowly. “Aunt Mildred,” she
said, even though Mildred was only technically Emma’s aunt through her father’s side. “Why are you so upset? Did the fire frighten you? Do you need your smelling salts?”

When she reached for Mildred’s reticule, Mildred rapped her across the knuckles with her fan. The delicate ivory sticks snapped. “You will all three of you listen to me most carefully,” she said severely. “You have two options: find a gentleman with manners who will marry you, or wait for your father to find one for you. The first is preferable, though by no means guaranteed. The second is most likely, and most unpredictable. You may scoff at my methods, but I think you would prefer to choose your own husbands. Girls always do. And I suspect boys do as well, despite what earls and viscounts convince themselves once they have children of their own.”

“Or we could not marry at all,” Gretchen felt the need to point out, rubbing her pink knuckles. “Like you.”

“And be a burden on your family instead? What happens when your father dies, Gretchen? Or your brother? Who will take care of you then?”

“I can take care of myself.”

Mildred snorted. It was the most indelicate thing they’d ever seen her do, which only underscored her seriousness. “Do you not think I thought the same, when I was your age? I was going to be a novelist. I turned down a perfectly good offer of marriage, and by the time I realized my foolishness, there were no more to be had. Instead, I’ve had to live off my brother’s largesse and endure the pity of my friends and the impertinence of my ungrateful nieces.” Her eyes flashed. “Make no mistake.
Marry, or become a governess or a mistress. There is only one clear and acceptable choice.” She turned to stare out of the window and did not speak again. Her cheeks were red with temper.

“Damn,” Gretchen muttered to Emma under the cover of the creaking carriage wheels. Mildred was seriously put out to have mentioned the indecorous and invisible subject of mistresses. “What’s got her skirt in a knot?”

Emma just shook her head, equally bewildered. Mildred was usually a faded, kindly woman who fussed over the right color gown and the proper way to pour tea. None of it seemed terribly important to Emma at the moment.

She could only take herself up the dry path to the front door after her cousins were dropped off and her aunt left for her own small house. The rain must have missed this part of London, even though the Pickfords only lived a few streets away. The house echoed around her as she let herself in. The butler, Jenkins; the housekeeper, Mrs. Hill; and all the other servants were asleep. Not that it would have mattered. Her father had strict rules that the family was never to encounter the maidservants in any of the rooms or even on the stairs. They had to scurry into empty corners whenever Emma passed by. It hardly encouraged a sociable household. Especially when Emma tried to befriend one of the housemaids when she was thirteen and the girl, just thirteen herself, was turned out. Her father was an unsympathetic man, made of rules and protocol and the august pride of the Hightower earldom.

He was dull as dishwater, really.

She went down the hall to the library, her wrap dripping
unpleasantly when the tassels dragged against her leg. Draping it over the grate to dry, she lit one of the candelabrums and lifted it high, casting a warm glow over gilded letters and leather spines. She rifled through them at random, hoping for a mention of moles, marks, or Orders. She wasn’t surprised when her search proved futile; she hardly expected her father to have books of such a nature. He preferred political tracts, historical treatises, and plays in their original Latin. Even novels were too frivolous for Lord Hightower.

Too anxious to sleep, Emma did as she always did when she returned to an empty town house large enough to comfortably house a family of ten. She snuck down into the kitchens, skirting the maid asleep on a pallet by the empty grate, and helped herself to a handful of almond biscuits and a jar of blackberry jam. Then it was back up to her bedroom, the smallest in the house, awkwardly shaped and drafty in winter. But it had the benefit of a wide balcony that she’d converted into her very own observatory. She’d hung gilded stars strung from the ceiling on silk thread. They shimmered when the lantern light caught them. Emma had also dragged a chaise to the railing (scratching the floor in the process), and covered it with cushions and a blanket. Angled just right, she could see most of the sky.

She’d found comfort in looking up at the stars since she was a little girl. It was a shame the infamous London fog often covered them in a yellow veil, but on those rare nights when the lanterns were put out and the wind was brisk, the sky became a field of fireflies. Rain clouds hung in tatters over the river, but on her secret balcony, she was alone with a thousand stars
and stolen sweets. It was as warm as the frigidly opulent house ever felt.

Before curling up on the balcony, Emma dragged her mother’s box from under the bed. She’d found it in the attic when she was eleven years old and had been hiding from Penelope, Gretchen, and Gretchen’s twin brother Godric, in a game of hide-and-seek. It was an old-fashioned patch box with one dusty heart-shaped patch left in one of the compartments. Ladies would have worn them to cover smallpox scars. Curiously, the compartment for the brush was filled instead with salt and wrinkled rowan berries. The third section had held the small green glass perfume, which was now mostly lying in shards on the Pickford ballroom floor. The last section was locked.