Chapter Eight

Eight

That night , Lorelei dreamed of drowning.

She sank below the surface of deep, black waters, so cold it snatched the last gasp of air from her lungs. Bubbles burst from her lips. Her hair drifted wildly around her, reaching toward the faint thread of light filtering in from above. But when she looked up, it was nothing but darkness overhead and darkness all around her.

In the distance, pale shapes came into view, beckoning her with their moonlit glow. As she swam closer, her vision rippled. She could barely make sense of what she was seeing. There were rows and rows of bodies, floating in a vast sea. One by one, their white faces turned toward her. And there, in the center, she saw them.

Ziegler, her eyes flung wide, her broken teacup in hand. Aaron, blood seeping from the wound in his head like a cloud of smoke rising.

The people she had failed to save.

Lorelei reached for them blindly. Pale hands clamped around her wrists, but she could not find it within herself to panic. After all the ways she’d failed, would it be so terrible to die? To let her limbs go lax and close her eyes for the last time. It would be sweet, after all these years of fighting, to rest.

You let us die, a voice hissed in her ear.

Lorelei jerked awake, gasping for air that would not come. Her entire body was paralyzed, save for her roving eyes. Her lungs burned as if someone had filled them up with stones. A strange, weightless sensation bloomed in her skull. No, that hadn’t been a dream. She was drowning—this time, in open air.

Alpdrücke.

She could barely see the alp through the gloom and her own heady delirium. But she could see the glint of its sharp, yellowed teeth in the dark—and, of course, its damnable tarnkappe. The bright red cap bled through the darkness like a beacon. The alp crouched on her chest, drinking down her life force with every breath she failed to draw. She desperately tried to recall something, anything, that Sylvia had written about these creatures.

How pathetic, she thought, that she would save my life.

What was more pathetic, she decided, was that her very last thought would be of Sylvia. Lorelei grabbed hold of her racing thoughts and— yes. She remembered now.

“Coffee,” she rasped.

The alp fixed its beady eyes on hers. Some of the pressure eased from her chest. Lorelei took the opportunity to scramble upright and put some distance between them. She pressed up against her headboard, grasping instinctively for the silver chain around her neck.

Gone.

“Coffee?” the alp repeated. There was a spark of interest in its voice. It felt like a whisper against the shell of her ear, an echo in her skull. Even the shape of its body eluded her, shifting in the shadows like light over rippled water. All that was solid was its stupid hat.

“Yes,” she wheezed, resisting the urge to tack on something acerbic. “Coffee. You like that, don’t you? If you let me go, I’ll give you some.”

“Lying?” it said, a childish hopefulness tingeing the word.

“No,” Lorelei said slowly. She felt perfectly ridiculous, speaking to this beast. “Not lying. Now get out. Once I’m in the hallway, you can follow me.”

She felt its delight more than she saw it, a crackle in the air like lightning. By the time she blinked, it had transformed itself into a skein of shadow and slipped out through the keyhole.

Lorelei rested her head on her knees, sucking in greedy lungfuls of air. The dissipating rush in her head and the soreness in her chest made her want to weep from some bizarre combination of stress and relief, but she fought down the impulse. Instead, she focused on the newfound clarity of her mind.

She pulled on her coat, lit a lantern, and surveyed the room. Her window was latched, but her lemon-and-bell chimes lay in a heap on the floor like a discarded toy. It did not take much effort to reconstruct what had happened. One of her dear colleagues had come through the door, torn the wards from the lintel, and lifted the chain from around her neck while she slept her drugged sleep. They had tried to kill her in the most cowardly, indirect way possible. She almost admired it.

As she crossed the room, something on the floor reflected the light. She picked it up and held it up to the lantern. A brass button, abandoned like a glass slipper in a ballroom.

It was too large to have come loose from a gown—and too inelegant to belong to Ludwig. No, she’d seen this many times before on many different people: a button from a military uniform. Lorelei closed her fist around it as a sick sort of triumph slithered through her.

Johann.

He’d been careless. This was hardly enough evidence to convince the others, but now she had a target to pursue. At least for tonight, all that remained was to deal with her unwelcome guest.

She slipped into the hallway. The bells hanging from Sylvia’s door—the one just across from her own—glittered through the dark. The sight of her unbroken wards comforted Lorelei more than she cared to admit. She could sense the alp behind her, practically vibrating with excitement, but she caught only a glimpse of its black garment from the corner of her eye. It kept stubbornly to the shadows.

She’d read several of Sylvia’s accounts of her run-ins with alps, stories told with far more flourish than necessary. They were, evidently, self-conscious about their appearance. If you looked at them head-on, they turned invisible, feathering themselves into the darkest recesses of a room, or transformed themselves into something more beautiful. Sylvia had a particularly popular tale of how she’d banished one by presenting it with a mirror. Lorelei didn’t know exactly how their magic worked, but she knew that they needed their tarnkappe to shape-shift.

She led the alp to the kitchen. It had a ghostly air this late at night, without the cook and the beleaguered servant who brought them their meals. She puttered around, boiling water and rummaging through the cabinets until she found what she needed. She tried her best to replace everything as she had found it, lest Cook think the kitchens haunted (again).

Possessed by a moment of hysteria, she considered asking it how it took its coffee. How had her life so swiftly unraveled? Not two days ago, she was primed to become one of the most respected folklorists in the nation. Now she was providing hospitality to imps.

Once it had brewed, she inhaled the rich, dark aroma and poured the coffee into a mug. Unconsciously, she had chosen Sylvia’s favorite, the one with the engraved silver handle and champlevé enameling. She hated that she recognized it. She crouched beside the stirring shadows. The alp’s tarnkappe bobbed, red as blood in the darkness. She thought of her dream, of blood unspooling from Aaron’s wound, and suppressed a shudder.

“Here,” she said, as sweetly as she could muster. “For you.”

The alp took the cup from her. Just as its little clawed fingers curled around the handle, she snatched the cap from its head. It shrieked, reeling back. The mug shattered. Porcelain went skittering across the floor, just as the shadows dissipated to reveal a small, loathsome creature covered in coarse fur. Lorelei did not bother trying to hide her revulsion.

“Lying!” it cried, rending its face.

It was all a bit too dramatic to be convincing.

“None of that now. You shall have your coffee and your tarnkappe both if you tell me what you’re doing here. Did someone let you in?”

“No one, no one,” it whimpered. “Please.”

“Think carefully.” Lorelei fixed it with a nasty smile. “I’ll tear it in two, and where will that leave you?”

She tugged on the seams. A stitch popped, and the alp wept anew.

“What on earth is going on in here?”

Lorelei startled at the sound of Sylvia’s voice. She stood in the doorway of the kitchen with an expression caught somewhere between horror and irritation. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, as wild as flame. Again, Lorelei found herself having to blink against the foolish thought that she looked spectral in the pale moonlight.

“Lower your voice,” snarled Lorelei. “What are you doing here?”

“You keep sneaking out!” Sylvia spoke in a stage whisper that set Lorelei’s teeth on edge. “And it seems I was right to follow you, since I’ve found you tormenting this poor creature.”

“This ‘poor creature’ tried to kill me in my sleep.”

The alp wailed piteously.

“And my wards were broken off the door,” she continued. “Someone let it on the ship—the same person, I assume, who murdered Ziegler. It knows something.”

“Alps are not loyal,” Sylvia said, clearly exasperated. “You have its tarnkappe. If it had the information you want, it would have told you immediately.”

“Yes, yes! Know nothing!” The alp nodded, looking beseechingly at Sylvia.

Sylvia shot Lorelei a sharp look that said, Hand it over.

Chastised, Lorelei sighed and tossed the cap to the alp. It snatched its tarnkappe with scrabbling claws and pulled it aggressively over its horns. It shot her a downright spiteful look. “Come back someday,” it hissed.

“I welcome it.”

The shadows whispered over it, and just like that, it vanished with the same gravity of a child slamming a bedroom door.

“Saints,” Sylvia muttered. “Quarreling with an alp of all things. I would hate to see you encounter something that has a will to match yours.”

“I would say you fit the bill.”

“Yes, well.” Sylvia flushed. After a moment, she fixed Lorelei with a pained look. “Was that meant to be a compliment?”

“Take it as you like.” It occurred to her that she was still crouching at Sylvia’s feet. Clearing her throat, Lorelei rose to her full height and straightened the high collar of her greatcoat.

Sylvia crossed her arms, her mouth set in a pensive line. “You really believe someone set an alp on you?”

“Are your wards sound?”

“Of course they are! What do you take me for?”

Lorelei winced. Did she have to be so loud ? “Then it couldn’t have gotten into my room without help.”

“This is very bad! You told me—emphatically, mind you—that we would be safe so long as we did not investigate. And now you’ve nearly died from an alpdrücke .” The way she said it dripped with contempt, as though it were a very ignoble death indeed. Lorelei was almost offended. “How did you escape, anyway?”

“I offered it coffee.”

Sylvia fixed her with a very unusual expression. “I don’t recall ever discussing alps with you.”

“No?” Heat crept into her cheeks. “I’m certain you must have some time or another. Or perhaps I read it somewhere.”

“You must have, although I’m only aware of one book that discusses alps’ weakness for coffee.” A horrible, self-satisfied smile spread across her face. “Lorelei, have you…read my books?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “I have better things to do with my time.”

“You have!” Sylvia clapped her hands together. “Oh! I hardly know what to say. Did you like them?”

The truth was, Lorelei had read every word Sylvia had ever published.

For the first few months of her tenure at Ruhigburg University, Lorelei had not known her name. She only knew her as the white-haired girl who attended every single visiting scholar’s lecture with a clear intent to argue. Her hand shot up constantly—sometimes her entire body, if she felt compelled to argue her point strongly. It was only after a while that someone interrupted her mid-speech and said, That’s enough, Miss von Wolff.

Von Wolff. She knew that name. Before the First War of Unification, she would have been royalty. Now she lived among her conquerors, all of them watching her for the moment she turned traitor. But most of all, Lorelei knew the shape of the name alongside her own. Ziegler kept a list of every student in the natural sciences department, each of them in order of rank.

Putting a face to the name filled her with a feeling she couldn’t entirely describe. Lorelei had always borne a grudging respect for her anonymous rival. She, too, must have understood what it was like to succeed when everyone wanted you to fail. But knowing that she was a bloviating try-hard, a fop with a too-loud voice and a too-easy smile…It was almost too much for her pride to bear.

That was the moment she decided to hate Sylvia von Wolff.

Within a year, Sylvia published her first book. Lorelei had devoured it with a vicious hunger—and all the ones that followed. She refused to be uninformed in her hatred.

What could she say about her work? Sylvia sailed in every wind and danced in every stream. It was drivel. And yet it enraptured her. Her tales were charming , and they detailed every adventure Lorelei had yearned to have. Her exuberant, heartfelt sincerity was enough to win over even those most suspicious of her. It only made Lorelei’s resentment burn brighter.

“Did I like them?” Lorelei repeated. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

“On second thought, no.” Sylvia deflated. “What should we do?”

“Nothing.” Lorelei pressed the heel of her boot into the broken porcelain on the ground. It gave a satisfying pop . “We’ll be in Albe tomorrow.”

“Someone tried to kill you! I can’t do nothing .”

“Well, you will have to manage it!” Lorelei paused, then regarded Sylvia suspiciously. Something had disquieted her that she could not put a finger on. “Is that why you are following me around?”

“Following you?” Sylvia laughed, far too nervously. “I beg your pardon! Why would I—”

“Why would you, indeed? And yet, you are. You found me with—the body.” Damn her voice for faltering. “And now, you have found me here.”

“Our rooms are very close together, and for some reason, you’ve made it a habit to go stomping about in the dead of night. I cannot help overhearing.”

Lorelei very much resented the suggestion that she stomped anywhere. “To do, as you’ve seen, all sorts of unseemly things. One might begin to wonder at your curiosity.”

Sylvia glared at her. “What were you talking to Adelheid about yesterday?”

“Nothing of import,” she said defensively. “Can I not speak with Adelheid?”

“You never speak to anyone without a reason.”

Lorelei could not argue with that. By way of redirecting her, she asked, “Since you’re keeping a full account: I spoke to Ludwig, too. He told me the most interesting story about you and Heike.”

“Ludwig,” she muttered viciously under her breath. “That is none of his business, and it is certainly none of yours. I ought to—” She cut herself off with a gasp. “I knew it. You are snooping .”

“I am not,” Lorelei said. “Please, go on.”

“You are changing the subject,” Sylvia hissed. “Will you not accept help for once in your life?”

“I can assure you there’s nothing to help with.” Lorelei was teetering on the brink of losing her patience. She could not quite remember why they were arguing. All she knew was that she did not want Sylvia’s help. She would ruin all Lorelei’s plans with her lack of subtlety, and worse, she would throw herself into danger for no good reason. She’d already demonstrated an alarming lack of self-preservation, if she went chasing both nixies and everything that went bump in the night. “Honestly. I don’t understand all this fuss. I imagine you’d be happy if someone succeeded in killing me.”

Sylvia stared at her for a long few moments. Her lips parted as though she wanted to say something. In the end, she must have thought better of it. Her jaw snapped shut. “You know, Lorelei, sometimes I think so, too.”

With that, she turned on her heel and stormed off. In the heavy darkness, Lorelei was reminded of Sylvia standing by the river. Of the way she had imagined Sylvia’s white hair slipping down, down beneath its depths, wavering just out of reach. She was struck by the desire to catch a lock of white between her fingers. Instead, she clenched her hand into a fist and stared down at her own mystified expression, reflected back at her in a puddle of cold coffee.