Chapter one -The Queen Returns.
The train is torn in pieces by the fog. It was so that the screams were heard as the metal met metal slowing down, and the steam was shot into the night,--thin, short ghosts, creeping along the platform lamps. Blackwood Hollow manifested itself in pieces: in stone houses poked into mist, iron fences glittering in rain, the lines of the bridge above the river creating a black line against even blacks. This town did not welcome the newcomers. It just put up with them.
Seraphina Vale appeared even before the door was opened.
The hour before, the last hour, she was not sitting down. She was a white, ugly-featured woman, rated to the shadows, vibrating in the window with every stroke of the engine--black-haired and lipped like old rose. The carriage lamps were lighted on the lines of her face, and made her colder than she was. The coat was a tailor-made charcoal wool, and under this coat she was wearing a silk dress that rustled with each movement. Gloves. Leather shoes to her calves. Nothing was accidental.
She didn't breathe.
The train hissed and stopped. Doors slid open. Laughter, luggage rattling, and treading feet upon rock, leaked in. A rain, a coal smoke, and something metallic, something that made the impression of blood, were in the air.
Seraphina closed her eyes.
Home.
The word felt empty. Just memory now.
She came out on the stage.
Bites her the soles of her shoes. The town thronged all at once, the old bones of Blackwood going humming along the streets, the ley lines going through bone and root and old wards being touched somewhere in the core of brick and iron. Even after all these years she could sense the web of power under her feet. That is the way Lucilius built it first the crypts, then the catacombs and finally the town.
All this was no more than covering what was underneath.
Gathering her coat she walked away with the thinning crowd. Strolling between the people, but a very few of them listened to her--as water over a fracture. She was struck by one man, and apology was sworn to her, which she ignored. One of the females saw her, and smiled and turned her head.
Seraphina kept walking.
Blackwood Hollow had not changed, he had merely changed his skin. The houses had since become more shabbily dilapidated, and were smoked and moss-covered. The cathedral had also been wrecked, and at the back end of the main street, a crowned ruin, the scaffolding was suspended to what was left of the spire. Slender windows had flickering candle light. There was music of some sort beating somewhere up in the basement. The hour somewhere chimed with dull and slow bells of church.
The apothecary was closed up, which she crossed. The meat-shop of black windows. The book-binding house which was a restaurant. Vale Estate was at the edge of town, where the river bends, and the trees become tight. She'd go there soon.
First, she needed to feed.
She had arrived bearing the starvation of an unshaven desire, a yearning of long teeth beneath her breast. It always happened this way. The space drained away the magic in her veins, and reduced the blood memory to such thinness that it ripped. She had repressed herself in the train. Laws were not unimportant, ways which kept her back.
But now Blackwood was all around her, and repression was as courtesy which she was in no way obliged to any longer.
She turned toward the river.
One of the black arteries passing through town was the River of Graves. Its banks were flagellated with stone, and weeds and fragments of ancient rites rusted hooks, half buried charms, witch knots blown white by rain. The dead had been drifting here over centuries, battle to battle but no one had gathered his woe to author it. The water was not forgotten even till this day.
Seraphina stepped down little by little hewn in the embankment. Fog it was so heavy along the river as not to be able to tell which were the streetlamps. The air became even colder when she went down, wet streaming down her coat, her hair.
She listened.
Her thoughts were increased by heartbeats. Two lovers arguing harmoniously on top of the bridge. A still other homeless man with his cardboard sleep, a little lower. The faint rumble of traffic. And over--someone--someone really close--someone passing over the river. Boots crunching gravel. Breath quick and nervous.
Seraphina melted into the shadow.
No rush. She was well acquainted with this language. She was making it slow this time of night. Well, the fellow came in, see, a kid, about twenty, jacket was too thin, and the shoulders were bent up against the mist. He checked his cell phone, cursed behind his back and shoved it aside.
And she permitted him to walk, a step or two.
Then she moved.
She had caught him on the wrist, and the arm straight across his chest and pulled him back. It was painful and dreadful, and he frown, and she was near, and her breath touched his ear.
"Quiet," she whispered.
The word was made compulsive to it, not the hammer of it but the silk-thread persuasion of which she was fond. His muscles went slack. His pulse became irregular, and then hastened.
She ushered him along the embankment with practicable gentleness. His feet were slipping through wet rock. She had no trouble in catching him, and placed him against the cold wall, and examined his features in the faint light. Brown eyes wide. His cheeks were freckled through. He stank of soap and cigarettes and terror.
Her mouth curved.
Do not fear, she said, it makes it all the more wonderful.
Two fingers raised his chin and set his lips to her lips.
It was not a lover's kiss. It was a claiming. His lips were chilled to her, and as he opened his mouth, in reflex, she stole that, as well, and smelled his breath, his pulse, the warm life of his body. The fangs of her mouth slipped beneath, without hurt. She sank her teeth at the point of sale of his neck and shoulder.
Blood flooded her mouth.
It had always been, heat and iron and the rushing of a human life into her veins. She moved slowly with the sense of his pulse beating her tongue, of his hands trembling inaudibly at her hips. She might be touching his memories as they left short impressions upon her mind: a bedroom of her childhood, a dog called Atlas, an unfinished degree. None of it mattered.
She took what she needed.
Not enough to kill him. She did not kill without a purpose.
She retreated, and closed the cut with a touch of her tongue, and gripped him till he threatened to sink down. She put a folded bill into his pocket, touched his cheek with her gloved fingers,and gave him a suggestion that would leave him going home with his headache and a story which he would tell himself differently the next day.
He stumbled away.
Seraphina followed him with her eyes into the mist, and turn and returned to the river.
The blood sang in her, strength running in her members, cleansing the world. She shut down her eyes and left it alone.
That was when she felt it.
Alteration in the Blackwood deep architecture. A drawing, such as a muscle bending under the town. Some distant wards are moving somewhere down below. Circles of stone and of bone and of the buried changed old sigils, which responded to the alteration in her presence.
Lucien.
She did not have to look at him to know. Their relationship was not an emotional one; it was an organizational one. Her construction had been a construction by him, just as he had built the crypts, and very carefully, with the deliberation of an architect. Her return was not a secret. It was an upheaval in the field.
She had opened her eyes, and laughed.
"So," she said to the river. "You felt that too."
There was no answer of water, and the current and its action on the rock were slow.
She got up once more on the embankment and returned to the street. As she proceeded inland the fog had cleared away, and in its place came a fine cold drizzle which darkened her coat and covered the cobblestones with grease. At this time Blackwood was all closed; the square of the town was empty, the shops closed, the bunting hung slack at the wrought-iron brackets. The fountain in the middle was stale and its basin lay full of butts and leaves.
She went through the square and onto the side streets, which no one ever notices, especially tourists. Brick gave way to older stone. There were gas lamps shaking in iron cages. She crossed the closed doors of Coven Hall--scraped out now with half the sigils--and she could feel the ring of witch magic bruising her skin.
They were watching. They always were.
She welcomed it.
Her phone tickled in her pocket. She did not answer it. However much surveillance Lucien might be already going would be buzzing now--cameras coming to life, informants roused, old kindnesses invoked. He did not end up with her this night. He would allow the build-up to linger.
The waiting had always been his favorite thing.
Seraphina swung round to Vale Road, in which the trees grew thicker and the houses withdrew behind hedges and gates. Here the air became stiller, the noise of the town was absorbed by the shadow and the leaf. The property of her family was at the terminus of the road, a dark bulk at the back, behind rusted iron, with its windows covered and a jagged roofline that curved back at the low clouds.
She slowed as she approached.
The Vale Estate had been long since abandoned, and had been officially bought and sold, by shell companies and trusts, which were not to her. She had never abandoned it in any respect. The wards which were woven into its foundations still knew her blood. Witch-seals were covered with peeling plaster, and carved with hands long since ground to dust. The house had been constructed, using bones as its walls and secrets in its cellar.
It was the place where she knew how to be dangerous.
She stopped before the gate.
The iron work was covered with vines, the thorns of which were entangled in the filigree. The road further on was weedy. The rain was beading the crest of the Vale, and a stylized rose was cut into the stone pillar, where the erosion of the petals had been wrought away.
Her palm was in contact with the cold metal.
The wards sighed open.
It was not dramatic. A flash of light, or even a ripple, he saw nothing. Only a sigh, as of a breath passed out after a deep suspension. The gate swung back on hinges which groaned with a low moan.
Seraphina stepped through.
A wilderness now were the grounds. The statues were growing high in grass, and the ivy was creeping on the facade, through shattered shutters and cracked bricks. The air was of muddy soil and decay and leaves of autumn. Some cawing crow somewhere in the trees, then was quiet.
And slowness by slowness she paced the path and took her time. The porch was a sagging structure. The column with which he was standing had separated along the middle, and the plaster flesh of it had been stripped off, and beneath it lay raw wood. The front door had the signs of attempted entry--scratches, dents, an outline where a lock had been changed, in which the color had faded.
She climbed on the steps and touched the door.
She was back to being nineteen and standing with blood on her dress and smoke in her lungs and the shadow of Lucien a long way behind her. She could hear the crackle of fire and the shriek of people a moment, the manner in which her voice had broken when she pleaded.
She closed her eyes.
Not tonight.
She pushed the door open.
The house breathed in her the stuffiness of stale air. Swirling in the rays of the porch-light were dust motes. She was before the foyer in dingy decay--grand staircase leading up to the left, its balusters set in warp; chandelier dangling like a sheet over the body, portraits down the walls; the sheets on the walls shrouding the bodies.
Her footsteps echoed.
She had entered and shut the door after her.
The darkness was accumulated in the corners of the room, dense and waiting. She waited and allowed her senses time getting to know her, to hear the old house settle around her. The Vale Estate was a living thing, as the slightest, but constant, and added to the sigils it bore in its foundations, and the ley line which wound round its cellar.
She took off her gloves and stuck them in her pocket.
The silence pressed close.
Seraphina went farther into the house beyond the parlor with its broken roof, beyond the dining-room where a table was, and still fell, like a tableturned altar. She felt her way along the wall with her fingertips, and pitched in the grooves of the plaster where witch marks had been kept up to season. They were weak now, yet answered to her.
On the upstairs level, the boards gave away as she fell. She would go down the hall of bedrooms, with doors open, curtains in rags. At the end of her old room was waiting her window, which commanded the river curving round. She picked it up in the doorway, the naked frame of a mattress, the broken mirror, the scribbles on one wall that she did not recognize as her own hand.
She smiled.
Change was inevitable. Power was not.
Her phone vibrated again. This time she answered it.
"Yes," she said.
The line paused, there was the shortest suspension of breathing.
You have passed across the wards, said Lucien.
The sound of his voice echoed down the stone-lined passages and candlelit rooms centuries of centuries of developing power. It was an invitation to a warm and dangerous place, that was slender with the intimacy of a man who felt he was possessing every inch of her life.
"I always do," she replied. "You made them to recognize me."
"You could have gone anywhere."
She was bending against the doorway and looking into the dark room. And relieve you of the pleasure?
He laughed softly. "You've been feeding."
She did not deny it.
He continues, Blackwood, he feels you. The witches are going to be lighting their circles. The wolves will be crossing their dead. You are a gifted trouble-maker.
She closed her eyes. "You taught me."
Another pause. She could feel his focus become more like a blade being drawn.
Remain in place, stay, he told Lucien.
"No."
A smile curved her mouth. She pictured him standing before one of his high windows at the Blackthorne Manor, the town below him being like a chessboard. She was picturing his hands clasped behind his back, his face very watchful of expression.
You had never been fond of following orders, he said.
"I like choices."
"You are not a choice."
She opened her eyes. "Neither are you."
There was a silence between them, with history. She could touch him via the connection, how his reign was slowly drawn in when he was put to the test, how his objectiveness lurked beneath tactics.
We shall talk later, Lucien said at length. "Welcome home, Seraphina."
The line went dead.
She put the phone back in her pocket and walked away out of the door.
It was the library, which she found down the steps, the shelves bent down, but still standing, the fireplace filled up with ash and rubble. She flung some room on the floor, shook off her coat and sat, leaning her back to the wall, huddling one knee under her chin.
The house settled around her.
Rain moaned on the broken glass. The water flowed in its course. And somewhere in Blackwood Hollow mighty forces re-adjusted themselves about her coming.
Seraphina shut down her eyes and allowed the darkness to possess her.
Queen had returned to her throne.
And the town was already bleeding already.