Page 80 of The Scarlet Ball

People gathered on the street by the iron gates of Howard House, drawn by the explosion that had taken out the roof and then turned awestruck by the vision in the sky. Surges of heat and lightning threw hectic light against the cloud cover. Sometimes I could see the shape of something moving up there, something more flesh than fire, but then the lightning forked, so blinding that I winced.

I watched, we all watched, and it came to me that this was not a thing we should see. It should happen on some distant steppe, at the center of the sea. It should happen somewhere there were no lives to end, but of course there were always lives to end.

We should have run. At least, I knew we should run, or that I should run, but where was there to go? I stood beside Mielle, and we watched the sky. The fire surged, glowing as bright as the center of a forge, its eye broadening to burn down the city.

Then the thunder spoke, and what it said was victory.

In a final blinding flash of lightning, the fire faded from the sky, sparks falling to land harmlessly in the snow, on the roofs, even on our heads.

The silence after was the next thing to holy, and by my side, Mielle took my uninjured hand in hers. We both stared up at the smoke drifting in the sky, and his name came to my lips—

The first pellets of hail stung like needles, and the cry went up around us. Then the sky lit up again, forked lightning like cracks in the world. The pressure slammed down, making me clutch my ears, and this time I did fall, stumbling to my knees in the yard.

“Oh, he’s having a good time,” Mielle said, asperity not hiding the fear in her voice.

As the people ran for cover, Mielle dragged me back under the shelter of Howard House’s eaves. It might collapse on us, but at least we would not be killed by the hail, now the size of hens’ eggs and striking with enough force to shatter glass.

“Sebastian!” I shouted at the sky. “Goddamn you, stop this! I am telling you to stop this.”

For a moment, I thought I detected a lessening in the storm, something the size of a city holding its breath, something made of hunger and lightning pausing. Then I realized it was nothing at all, and the thunder roared its victory over the city of New York. Above us, the clouds rolled as if in torment, and a man fell stunned to the street, a vivid ribbon of blood flying from his head as a woman ran to him with a cry.

“He’s not going to listen to you,” Mielle said. “We should leave. By ship or by train or by carriage, we can leave this place, and—”

“There’s no way to outrun that.” Somewhere up the street, there was a terrible crash, something enormous brought down to the ground. “He came from who knows where in a matter of minutes when he was starving. There’s no direction we can go where he isn’t already there.”

“Then we should hide. Come on, there’s the cellar, we can—”

“No,” I said. I didn’t have the words for it. I was bleeding from a half-dozen places, my dress weighed me down like a corpse, and my face, still half-stitched over with some bastard girl’s, would probably never be the same. Of course I should hide.

I wasn’t going to.

“No,” I said, and spite isn’t strength, but it will keep you going when everything else has failed. “He’s not taking this city. He’s not driving me out, none of them are.”

Mielle’s eyes were wide. She plucked at my skirt almost nervously.

“Judith.”

“He,” I said furiously, “will come when he is called.”

Eighteen

In the thunder and lightning, Mielle and I ran around to the back of the house. The storm above us raged, showing no sign of stopping, no sign it had ever worn a human face or looked at me with starving eyes, and I put away my anger for the moment.

Mrs. Howard had said that Parsons in the stable would have the mare prepared at nine. Parsons was the groomsman who brought the horses from their stable yard, and tonight he had brought a beautiful black mare I didn’t recognize to the sheltered pavilion before the carriage house. He had also killed her, and I only hoped that he had driven the hammer through the top of her head before he broke the delicate joints of her knees. She lay there, a heap of cooling meat with one knee thrust toward the pavilion’s roof, and I stopped, staring at this peculiarly heartbreaking scene. I hadn’t been so outraged for Odile Dryden or any of the other girls who had fallen before the demon lords this season, but something in me cried for the black mare.

Mielle stood with her arms crossed over her chest, gazing over the ruin that had once been a living animal.

“Do you want him?” she asked abruptly.

“He’ll wreck the city if I don’t—”

“Cities fall,” she said shortly. “People die. One story ends and another begins, even if it’s on a different continent, under a different name. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“So I ask you again. Do you want him?”

Above us, the thunder spoke, and in it I heard my name. I thought of a palace of ice, I thought of power at my fingertips and in my bed.