Page 66 of Blackwicket (Dark Hall #1)

I could have held Fiona for hours, days, never asking questions, but she pulled from the embrace, sat fully, and I took stock of her. Her skin was sallow, the signs of curse rot obvious from the sunkenness of her cheeks, the softness of her collarbone.

“You’re Drudge?” I whispered.

“I am.” Her eyes glimmered in the faint light of morning. “Hazard of the occupation, I’m afraid.”

My face collapsed as I realized what she’d done for me. The Drudge I’d thought to be Auntie, who’d come to me in the hellish inferno of Nightglass Estate and taken the worst of William’s curse, had been my dead sister. Who wasn’t so dead after all.

“You saved my life.”

I sobbed, and she kissed the tip of my nose as she’d done often when we were children, her favorite way of showing me she was the big sister.

“Were you responsible for the fire?” I asked when I could breathe again.

“William’s flair for ambiance usually outweighs his common sense.” Speaking of William curdled her tone, her contempt palpable. “The candles were already a hazard, I only gave them encouragement. I didn’t know you were there.”

Her brows knit together in exasperation, as though she’d just remembered she was upset about something .

“Why didn’t you stay away?”

“If Victor is to be believed,” I said, hoping to defuse her consternation and discourage myself from crying again. “I don’t listen well.”

Fiona glanced over my shoulder to where Victor stood nearby, giving us distance for our reunion while positioning himself for an advantage if anything went wrong, a reminder of his inherent distrust. His defenses remained in place, but I could sense the dark energy roiling from him, still agitated from Fiona’s chaotic arrival.

But there was more than Victor’s power brushing the hairs on my arms. Fiona’s presence was also detectable, sickly.

“Take some of my magic, Fiona.” I took her hand. “I can spare it. You look wrung-out.”

Fiona’s smile was indulgent, like someone who’d heard something critically na?ve.

“Magic doesn’t help anymore, Ellie,” she said.

“But between us, we have plenty of curses,” Victor said impassively. “Maybe those will do.”

A wave of pain clenched Fiona the way I’d seen it take hold of Victor. Her skin became dappled in the crimson drench of the rising Drudge, then ebbed, leaving her catching her breath.

“Inspector Harrow,” Fiona drawled, on edge from what she’d endured. “How good of you to be preying on my sister in my absence.”

Victor responded with a hostile laugh.

“You two are familiar with each other?” I said, battling some bitterness over Victor’s withholding of this information.

“The good Inspector enjoys harassing women who want nothing to do with him.” Fiona’s falsely sweet smile dripped with venom.

“She’s talking about Thea,” Victor replied in explanation .

“Thea never told you about her connection to Victor?” I asked, surprised.

“I know all about it.” Fiona’s response was bitter, making it clear that she didn’t like Victor on principle. “But being what I am, I recognize another Drudge when I see it. No matter what your intentions were, Inspector, you made everyone’s lives here harder.”

“By making it more difficult for you to murder people, Fiona?”

“That’s enough. We’re all murderers in this room, for fucksake,” I said tersely to them both, stunning my sister. “You should have shown yourself, Fiona. We could have figured something out together.”

“Ellie, you were as trapped as I was the minute you stepped foot in Nightglass,” my sister replied. “I wanted to warn you at the morgue, and I tried to in the only way I could with Farvem standing outside the door.”

The Drudge that had attacked me at the funeral home. I hadn’t seen it as a message, but as a lingering symptom of my sister’s illness.

“How did you fool Mr. Farvem?” I asked. “He’s dealt with so many dead. How couldn’t he see you were alive?”

She pressed her lips together, knowing this revelation would wound me.

“It was his idea for me to fake my death in the first place.”

“Farvem’s?” I echoed, disbelieving.

“Before you arrived, I was staying in the morgue, out of sight. I didn’t know you were there until Horatio came barreling in, panicking, telling me you were demanding to see my body. I thought my warning in Devin for you to stay away would have been enough.”

“You didn’t think I would come after finding out you were dead? ”

“You weren’t supposed to ever know, Ellie.”

“William made sure that I did,” I snapped. I was angry with myself for being gullible and so readily manipulated. Fiona was about to speak, and I didn’t want to risk hearing an apology I wasn’t ready for, so I intercepted. “What possessed you to make a deal with Farvem? The man was insane.”

She nodded, resigned to telling me even worse news, and I braced myself.

“I was working with the Veil from the moment the Authority procured Jack for Grigori. I couldn’t live with what we were doing anymore, and William was letting his father’s ideologies consume him.

I was so deep in everything. Farvem offered protection for Thea and the boys if I’d help take care of the Brom. ”

“But he hated Curse Eaters.”

“Because we’re unnatural, Eleanora,” Fiona said, holding my gaze. “We shouldn’t exist here. This isn’t our home. He knew that.”

“That’s not true,” I replied firmly.

“It is. Even mother knew it. That’s why she raised us the way she did.”

There was a bitterness in my sister I was learning to share.

My mother had thought cloistering us from the world was safety, feeding us pretty lies about enchanted gardens that could take the burden from our shoulders, when it only held them in time, the same way I was holding the curses I’d collected in my wooden lock box.

Then she’d offered Grigori as a single evil for us to focus on, so the overwhelming horde of factions who wanted to eat us alive wouldn’t worry us.

“By the time he came to me, I was eager to believe Farvem’s lies, bought into building a world without curses, becoming normal.

All we needed to do was eradicate the right people, and everyone would be safe. He was so sure. He seemed so good. ”

Fiona pushed the hair from her face, eyes darting around the floor frantically as though she were tracking down the memory of what had driven her to trust the old man.

I wanted to ask about Roark, where he’d come from, where he’d gone, but it seemed a lot to request all at once.

“So you started feeding Brom to the Fiend?” I asked.

“I’d already been doing that,” she replied, unruffled by my knowing. “I was furious, lost, and the Drudge had already been forming for years.”

She touched her chest delicately, indicating the creature scratching at the walls of her fragile magic, and I finally understood her desperation.

I squeezed her hand to show her I was still there, that I wouldn’t abandon her even in the face of these admissions. I felt certain I understood, but she pulled away from me, ashamed.

“I started the work I did because I wanted to, the Drudge needed me to.”

“Is that what drove you to attack Jack? The Drudge?”

I was freshly aware of the abomination lurking in my own magic, one that had dug far deeper than any I’d held before. A parasite, just out of reach.

“Of course not, I wasn’t trying to hurt him!

” She was insistent. “I was in the tower and saw William getting out of the car. I panicked. I wanted to hide Jack in Dark Hall, keep him safe for a little longer. I knew the house wasn’t going to reject William.

It was too weak by then. I’d been feeding off it for too long. ”

This explained why the house had acted so strangely, why it had eventually grown silent.

Fiona had been siphoning curses from it, consuming them for the power she needed when her magic was struggling to bounce back from its scourge.

It likely required more and more to remain stable, like a drug.

Victor’s pitiless comment made sense now.

He’d come to that conclusion already, knowing what it took to handle being inhabited by Drudge.

I had so many questions, but Fiona looked tattered, defeated. She knew what she was, and didn’t need me to point it out anymore.

“I thought you were Auntie.”

I offered this small bit of humor in hopes it would help bridge the chasm between us. Return us to our history as sisters, reminding her we’d once shared so much and that regardless of her transgressions, I loved her.

“I suppose I am,” she said, giving me a faint smile. “There was no more Auntie after Mom entered Dark Hall. I naturally filled that void.”

Just as I’d thought I’d caught up, Fiona gave me a new revelation to struggle over.

Auntie wouldn’t have followed our mother into Dark Hall so willingly, not when she’d avoided capture for so many generations.

Then a horrible knowing crept in—all those nights Auntie had stood in our room guarding us, keeping other Drudge at bay, mother always making excuses for why she couldn’t unravel her, humanizing her with a name, giving us a lullaby to sing when we were afraid.

A song a mother would recognize through the haze of the Drudge.

Oh, Moira, my love

Weeks ago, I would have rejected the suggestion, but with the work Isolde Blackwicket had done our entire lives, there’d been plenty of room for a Drudge to take root. The unease I’d soothed previously returned, and the curse, settled comfortably in my magic, breathed.

“Mom?”

“Yeah,” Fiona said, pained. “I didn’t know until that night. She’d changed, Ellie, permanently. I think that’s why she did what she did. Why she left.”

Fiona was fighting tears again, and she wiped them fiercely from her face.

“I made sure every person I gave to Dark Hall had earned it, that they were all people who’d hurt her or would have. It was going so well for a while. Then Grigori caught on, and Roark disappeared.”

“And so you killed Grigori Nightglass. Slit his throat,” Victor said casually from his station nearby, strung tight.