Not Quite Human

Chapter 18

Neil decided to stay the night at the castle. He wanted to hear what Abbadon's team came up with at midnight, and — if he was being honest — the guest bed had been impossibly soft, the kind of soft that suggested royalty had very strong opinions about mattresses. He called his mother to let her know, confirmed that Spots was keeping her company, and settled in to wait.
The room was quiet except for Loki, who was bouncing a squeaky ball against the wall with metronomic regularity, each squeak landing precisely on Nerezza's last nerve. Neil sighed and watched the ceiling. Midnight was still hours away.
One floor above the basement, in a room that smelled of iron and old magic, Henrietta's body lay on an examination table.
Six fey stood around it, none of them young — the youngest had been on earth for several centuries at minimum. Three were nomads, neutral by choice. Two had been sent by the Seelie Court. Queen Ballona had spared one of her most favoured fey for the cause, which alone indicated how seriously the Unseelie Court was taking things.
It was Ath — the Unseelie representative, a deeply academic fey who had spent several centuries specialising in ritualistic sacrifice — who suggested immersing the body in liquid iron. Certain spells, if carved into flesh, would become visible under those conditions. The murders hadn't looked like sacrifices in any traditional sense, but their number, and the fact that every one of them had occurred on a moonless night, had caught his attention. The blood moon was only a few months away — a brief window during which the seals on Ement weakened. He found the timing difficult to dismiss.
He watched from the side while the others did the physical work. Wrest, the Seelie healer, glanced at him once with mild disapproval and said nothing. Ath had never much liked Wrest. Too philosophical. Too inclined toward meaning when facts would do perfectly well.
The iron drained away slowly. What it left behind was worse than any of them had wanted to find. Spells and symbols covered Henrietta's body entirely, layer upon layer, deeply carved. Marcus, one of the nomads, made a quiet sound.
None of them felt any satisfaction at being right.
They went to find the king.
The door opened with a bang, six agitated fey filing in at once.
Neil sat up, startled — and then startled again when he recognised one of them. The man from the street, the one his aunt had been talking to, the one with the candle speech. Wrest. He'd assumed he'd never see him again. He wasn't entirely sure he'd wanted to.
Ath stepped forward, pushing his enormous glasses up his nose. "It's a sacrifice, aye — ye'all be looking at the weeping rose. A spell to open the gates o' Ement itself, 'tis what 'tis. Ye've got a few months at most if ye don't do somethin'."
"R.I.P. English," Loki murmured beside Neil.
Neil bit the inside of his cheek very hard.
The others in the room did not share his difficulty maintaining composure. The implications were clear enough: if the people behind the killings weren't stopped before the blood moon, the beings of Ement would have a door left open for them, with nothing and no one to push them back through it.
"With evil descending upon us, the tree of life shall perish," Wrest said quietly, more to himself than the room.
"Mind 'im not, laddy — Wresht an' 'is philosophical nonsense, words don't do much good 'ere," Ath said, noticing Neil's expression.
Neil pinched his own arm. Loki snickered. Neil pinched harder.
He was aware that this was serious — more serious than anything that had happened so far. He just didn't entirely know what Ement was yet, which made it difficult to calibrate his fear appropriately. It had to be genuinely frightening if it was making Abbadon look worried.
"Worth noting," Marcus said, glancing at Neil in a way that Neil immediately didn't like, "that only a blood fey can perform the actual spell."
Abbadon dismissed this with a wave of his hand. The boy couldn't keep a Veila and an Ork off him. The suggestion was frankly absurd. He did file away the Veila, though — she was still at large, still unidentified, and if she'd managed to stay hidden this long, that said something about who she was working with.
Abbadon was neither foolish nor inclined toward false comfort. If they didn't gather every available resource from both courts, there was a real chance this would go badly. He also knew — with the particular cynicism of someone who had spent a long time watching people make catastrophic miscalculations — that whoever was behind this hadn't thought it all the way through. What exactly did they imagine would happen once the gates of Ement were open? That the demons inside would be grateful? That a shared enemy made them allies?
Things didn't work that way. They never had.
He began, quietly, to think about contingencies. What came after, if they were too late. Who could be trusted to act, and in which direction.
Because good didn't always triumph. And he had never been entirely sure he believed in good, anyway.