The Raven Spell (Conspiracy of Magic #1)(76)

This was madness. There was nothing left to salvage. No bright speck of hope left in Mary to catch the eye or change the heart. Except . . .

“Will you give it back?” Edwina spun around and leaned against the wall, trying to present an air of bravery. “His memory is precious to me.”

“Did you mean what you said? Do you really think I’m a monster?”

Edwina resisted the urge to lay a comforting hand on her sister’s shoulder. She’d once said she would forgive everything. Understand fully. But she was wrong. She didn’t understand anything anymore. All those men dead so her sister could feel euphoric. “They’ll hang you,” she said. “Nick. The lads. The police have them in custody already. Soon they’ll have you, too, and then you’ll all hang for what you did.”

Mary looked up sharply. She’d expected the usual comfort. Forgiveness. Perhaps an apology. Never a rebuke. “If I’m to hang, then I guess I won’t be needing this any longer.” In an instant of retaliation, she let the bauble holding Ian’s memory drop from her hand. “Goodbye, sister.”

The orb rolled down the tiles, then bounced off the tower roof, falling between the walkways below. Edwina’s eye caught the orb’s motion in free fall. Without thinking, she jumped after it, transforming in a midair acrobatic. But the change made her momentarily take her eye off the gem. Had it dropped in the water? On the roadway? A wagon drawn by a single draft horse lumbered over the span of road above the water. The bauble had to be there somewhere. Please don’t let it be in the river, she thought as she landed on the bridge.

The wagon drew nearer. The thought of the memory being crushed underfoot of the horse made her jump about madly and spread her wings, scaring the animal so that it veered away to its right.

“Easy, easy,” the driver said, gripping the reins to settle his horse. “Bloody damn bird.”

The wagon wheels passed by mere inches from Edwina as she scanned the road, using her superior vision to check every crevice. It couldn’t be lost. It couldn’t. She thought of Ian and all the stolen moments he would never get back if she didn’t find the shiny orb. The tender memories that could never be reclaimed. She would look for it all night, if she must.

And then the bridge shuttered. The noise of an engine rumbled to life. Somewhere a bolt slid open. The road lifted, tilting to let the oncoming ship pass through. And with it the round orb, no bigger than a marble, rolled free of its resting place in a crevice along the railing. The road rose higher and the memory picked up speed, rolling toward the end of the bridge and a certain drop into the river. Edwina spread her wings and swooped under the structure, anticipating the arc of the falling bauble.

But at the last second, the orb hit a rivet, altering its momentum. It bounced once and plummeted off the bridge, where it sank beneath the river’s surface.





Chapter Twenty-Six


After leaving the Constabulary headquarters, where he’d been made to give a formal statement, Ian returned to the shop. The clock tower had already chimed the hour by the time he knocked on the front door a few minutes past midnight. He feared the old man had gone to sleep and readied a lock-opening spell on his tongue, but then Elvanfoot and Hob both met him at the door.

“Great blazes, where have you been?” Elvanfoot rushed him inside and through to the back room where Edwina kept her cupboard of herbs. “Come this way, I have something to show you.”

“Has Miss Blackwood returned?” Ian asked, making a quick search of the back room.

“I thought she was with you,” Elvanfoot said.

Ian’s heart sank from guilt as much as worry. “Aye, she was, but she took off after her sister again. I have no idea where.”

“I tried to find you,” Hob said. “But all I could see of you was fog.”

“Sorry, I had to lock you out. You would have been roasted on a bonfire if I hadn’t.”

Hob leaned in to sniff Ian’s clothes. “Smoke and blood,” he said and wrinkled his nose.

“We got him,” Ian explained. “The Brick Lane Slasher. That’s who Mary led us to.”

“Yes, yes, we heard all about that,” Elvanfoot said, rummaging in the bottom of an umbrella stand.

Thinking he’d brought shocking news, Ian was surprised to find them uninterested in the information. “Wait, you canna have heard already. I only just returned from the station house.”

Hob informed him otherwise. “The police were here! Searched the place top to bottom.”

“Witch or mortal?” Ian asked. He supposed Singh could have sent a team while he was giving his statement.

“Both,” Sir Elvanfoot said as he retrieved one of Mary’s orbs out of the umbrella stand and set it on the table. “They came to gather evidence.” Then he added softly, “It wasn’t my George.”

So the old man had had his suspicions too.

“Nae,” Ian said and tried to understand the pain it must cause to feel relief at such news, only to still anguish over the missing son’s whereabouts. “It was a local hooligan Mary had befriended. Claimed he only killed the poor sods to satisfy her”—he pointed to the bauble in Elvanfoot’s hand—“peculiar obsession.”

Elvanfoot nodded, taking in his meaning. “Only it’s more than an obsession,” he clarified. “With Mary, I suspect her odd quirk of nature is as natural as eating, drinking, or sleeping for you or I.”