Chapter 6

Clowns are a greater class of specter than the average poltergeist. Their origins are mysterious. Though powerful, they often present as childlike and harmless. A group of fanatic worshipers who paint their faces to resemble these specters can be found gathering near the Castleway Circus. They believe the beings are gods who created our world and everything in it on a whim. Never attempt to argue otherwise with them. They cannot be reasoned with.

-A Witch's Guide to the Arcane

Rorick

Isprinted from room to room on the first floor and found most doors locked up tight and sealed by a black fleshy substance that resembled scales. The ballroom, kitchen, and scullery remained open. A quick pop-in confirmed my fears. The castle had closed every exit, blocking each window and door to the outside.

Back in the ballroom, chairs were stacked on tables, furniture covered in oilcloths. Hoping brute strength would win the night, I attacked the east facing wall. I clawed at the wood until splinters pierced my fingers, ripping free boards, popping nails. The same threatening, inky substance stained the stones beneath the wood, the dark essence Quiet had warned me not to touch. I growled at it, baring my fangs, then started again on another corner of wall. The same rot was underneath.

The first segment of wall I'd torn down to its studs had already repaired itself, the paneling patched back together, oozing a sickly black element that turned my stomach.

In a temper, I snapped the boards in my arms over my knee and let the remnants clatter to the floor. The destruction did nothing for my mood. Disheveled hair fell in my face. I raked fingers through it, trying to tame the madness of the strands as well as the thoughts whirling in my mind.

Trapped. Trapped like a rat. The large castle felt like it was shrinking around me, the rooms no longer needlessly vast. They were small and suffocating and bitterly cold.

Like a coffin in the earth.

At a trudge, I returned to the foyer and found Quiet silhouetted by glowing insects, standing near the overturned sideboard. She stared bleakly at the faceless oil painting on the floor, a portrait of one of my great-great uncles whose name I couldn't recall.

If I had a pulse, it'd have been surging in my throat right then, pounding in my ears. The phantom thump of it burned in my neck. Out of habit, not necessity, my lungs heaved. Danger lurked around every corner, my senses screamed at me, because no situation felt more threatening than one that put such dread on the face of my usually unshakable partner.

Things didn't unbalance Quiet. She was too well-prepared to be caught off guard, too clever not to see a trap coming or to find a solution when a problem presented itself. At the moment, she looked lost and dazed, and that was more unnerving than if a hungry devil had suddenly dropped from the vaulted ceiling. I'd take on the great vicious creature that couldn't be killed by any weapon known to man over whatever trouble made a witch like Quiet distressed.

Her cloak was wrinkled and covered in soot and dust from the mad wind, like she'd lain down in the fireplace and rolled in the soot.

Right before my eyes, she pulled herself together, straightening her shoulders and standing tall—an impressive thing to witness. She shook out her cloak. In a snap, the panic vanished. Her expression hardened into something determined.

"The doors are blocked. Do you know if your cousin did in fact have a secret passage out of the castle?" she asked.

My shoulders dropped. I was about to disappoint her once again. "I do believe he had one, but the man had a lot of secrets he didn't share. I don't know where the entrance is. With any luck we might find an old map of the castle. There's bound to be one somewhere."

Instead of responding, she readied her wand shaped like a fancy dagger with a pearlescent handle. With a flick of her wrist, she flourished it, and something silvery pooled out of the tip. Her little beetle friends lit up excitedly.

Moths and butterflies flew out of her pockets to join the mass of light bugs. An army of fat black ants crawled down her skirts to line up on the floor in long rows. She drew the silvery thread of magic into a web, one just like a spider would make, but hers glowed like starlight and it floated in the air before her, anchored to nothing. There must have been something mystical to the shape of the webbing, a significance in the wheel and spoke pattern, but none of it made any sense to me. Then again, I hadn't spent the first half of my life studying magical insects or the arcane, so perhaps it shouldn't.

"Just like you taught me," she said to the light beetles, and she jabbed the bladed tip of her wand through the center of the magical web.

Something blue and luminescent grew there in the enchantment she'd woven, the new light a replica of the lightning beetles' hindquarters. Quiet returned her wand to her pocket, and she pulled out a pinch of something. She brushed her lips over it.

"A kiss and a bit of garlic for luck," she said, adding the powder to the light.

The moths fluttered toward the glow. I felt a similar pull and moved in closer, mindful of the ants crowding my boots. The eclipse of moths circled each other for a time, and then one of the larger ones, a moth as big as a sparrow, sailed in through the enchantment, catching in the magic, its wings spread wide.

The silvery threads retracted into the moth, breaking down the web around it. The blue glow stained its off-white wings until it too glistened the same as the beetles. When the threads of magic had been fully absorbed, the glowing moth alighted on Quiet's shoulder, dusting her blouse in luminescent powder. Its wings drooped, exhausted.

"Well done," she told her assistant, and the bug responded, raising one antenna briefly before it fell again.

Quiet fished in her pockets, dragging out an object with a long, long wooden handle. The thing just kept coming and coming.

Her broom—artefact, I mentally corrected myself, and my lips quirked.

She'd attached a bicycle seat to the staff piece, and it took some tugging and maneuvering to get the rest of it out. The bristle end was made of coarse black feathers and ashen straw, secured by thread and leather thong. It smelled like nutmeg and cold winter air.

When her broom was free, she leaned it against the overturned sideboard. The ants gathered around it. "This needs to replenish its energy. If we could leave it near a fire, that would help. Heat encourages magical regeneration, but I also don't want to agitate the castle and the essence haunting it just now, lest it destroy another room on top of us. It seems to want to keep the place cold and dim. Let's humor it for a bit until we find our bearings, eh?"

I rubbed at my scalp where I'd taken the biggest hit earlier. It still smarted. I healed quickly, but the blow had nearly knocked me out right on top of my partner—ex partner. "When we get out of here, I hope you don't expect me to ride on that contraption of yours."

Quiet frowned at me. "How else will we get to the city in all the snow? Just think of the cemeteries, the wilds, and the creatures. We could fly over them all."

Instead of cemeteries, I thought of how falling from her artefact would make my already sore head feel so much worse, assuming it didn't destroy my brain on impact and kill me a second time. "I'm no fan of heights. You know I won't ride on your—"

She cut me off with one threatening finger raised to my lips. Her scent was strong coming off her skin, citrus and herbs. "It's a powerful artefact. Don't you dare disrespect me or it by calling it a—"

"—broom!" I hadn't intended to be contrary, but then she'd gone and goaded me, hadn't she?

She gritted her teeth. "The wood is cut from an ancient bog tree found deep in the wilds. It took weeks of hiking and camping to reach it. The straw woven between the feathers had to be carefully collected from wheat grown naturally near a cemetery that was at least a century old. Those crow feathers on the end required careful enchanting that took months of effort and an abundance of magic. My coven and I spelled one plume at a time using each of our arcane specialties. It's a masterpiece. It's not just some tool for cleaning up crumbs!"

I snatched the artefact off the sideboard and used the feathered end to quickly sweep debris into a small pile. "Broom," I said, dropping it back against the overturned furniture.

Quiet didn't respond, mouth pressing into a thinner and thinner line, and then I noticed the fingers of her free hand twirling gently at her side. The ants on the floor had noticed too, and they followed her direction. Marching in a long scrawling line, they spelled out one letter at a time with their bodies across the floorboards.

Hefting her broom, Quiet stepped over the ants and stomped toward the stairs. The glowing moth fluttered on her shoulder.

"Cantankerous old woman," I said fondly, watching the ants continue to spell out a message for me.

Fuck off, it read.

She'd stormed up the stairs, leaving me alone on the first floor. It didn't seem wise for either of us to be by ourselves in this murderous castle for long. We were stronger together, whatever our opinions of each other. I jogged after her.

When I reached the first flight of carpeted steps, I paused where the stairs divided in opposite directions. Quiet had made it to the second story. She stood below an oil painting of my uncle, Jonathan Rorick, the First Duke of Castleway, hanging near the entrance to the library.

A flurry of lightning beetles ignited the painting. The first duke's eyes were icy blue. Mortal eyes, from before his transformation. Though I hadn't seen my reflection in many decades, I knew I resembled him and the other Rorick men hanging along the wall: same dark hair, same square jaw, same tall and lean build.

Quiet pointed down the hall at the paintings of the other wiry, dark-haired aristocrats. "You Rorick men could all be brothers."

I chuckled. My uncle was in the prime of his life in his picture, dressed in riding gear, wearing a stern expression. He didn't seem like anything special to me, but after his death he'd been the first vampire ever to rise, so there had to be something extraordinary about him. Alex had always insisted our uncle was just a man, but he said it with such an unmistakable hint of envy burning beneath the surface of a well-polished veneer. I was surprised Alex had never gotten around to replacing the painting with one of himself.

"Did you know the first duke well?" Quiet asked, acknowledging me as I climbed another few steps closer. Her glowing moth continued to recuperate on her shoulder, its blue light illuminating the side of her neck. She leaned against her broom—artefact.

"No one knew him. He was a recluse," I said.

Quiet studied my face with those all-seeing storm-cloud eyes of hers. "Your cousin doesn't look like the rest of you," she noted.

I shrugged. "Alex is a Harker. He took after his father. He hated that, actually. The differences between him and the Rorick men made people whisper."

"How is it another Rorick didn't inherit?" she prodded.

I bristled at the line of questioning, knowing she would poke and push at all my family secrets until she got down to the very worst ones that I didn't want to talk about. She was like a bulldog once she got her teeth into something—she clamped down and didn't let go. If I gave her new pieces to chew on, even something small, she'd only want more, but if I pushed her away again, we might never find the will to work as a unit.

And I wanted out of this castle. Denying her everything could prolong the entrapment. If anyone was going to figure out this mess, it was Quiet, and whether she liked to admit it or not, she was better with me. Not against me.

I buried my hands deep inside my pockets. My fingers knocked against the silver penknife I'd forgotten I'd tucked away there. "My uncle favored his sister, Lady Eloise Harker—a mortal. She was quite a bit older than him and more like a mother than a sibling." The words were out of my mouth before I finished thinking through it all. This was a leap of faith, an olive branch to my former partner, and I didn't want to talk myself out of it now. "He left everything to her in his will. Sometime into his prolonged disappearance, he was declared dead and the will was evaluated. But Eloise was many years deceased by that point, as were most of my family members. Her only living heir was her son, Alex, an immortal. Ged laws didn't always allow the undead to claim an inheritance, but times were changing. Alex took the title and the castle."

Quiet squinted up at the painting of my uncle, then at me. "That was a simple question, wasn't it? Why are you acting as though I'm trying to pull out your fangs?"

"Because there's more." I rubbed the back of my neck. "According to family legend, there were naysayers in the Rorick line, distant ged cousins who came crying when the duke went missing and Alex took the duchy. They claimed Alex had a falling out with the duke and a new will had been written after Eloise died, but no firm evidence of such a document could be found."

Quiet scrambled to collect her journal from her hat, propping her broom against the banister. She scribbled rapidly across a fresh page. "And what happened to these naysayers?"

I tried to ignore her notetaking, resisting the urge to grind my teeth. I hated feeling like the subject of the investigation, but this was her process. It had come in handy for us in the past. I had to trust in it now, whatever it did to my nerves. "They were geds, so Alex simply waited them out. They did what humans do after so many years: they died and their offspring either forgot or moved on. Alex kept the duchy uncontested."

More scratching and scribbling ensued. She hunched over, using her thigh to brace her journal. Her position lowered the neck of her blouse, displaying the tops of her breasts, rosy slopes of soft flesh cradled gently by a lace chemise and the cups of her white corset. Suddenly I minded being questioned far less.

I was dead—undead—but I still loved breasts. Even if they belonged to the most frustrating witch alive.

The wide brim of her hat slumped over her brow. "The way you say ‘family legend,' you almost sound like you don't believe any of it."

"I don't fully," I confessed, dragging my eyes from her chest because I might have been damned, but I did still try to be a gentleman. Sometimes I even succeeded in the effort. "Most of what I know came from one man, and I'm quite certain he was unreliable at the best of times. The rest I got from snooping."

Quiet lowered her journal. Her expression softened sympathetically. "You mean Alex was your source, don't you? You mentioned to me once that he was your maker, but I hadn't realized then that he was family. I mean, he's a duke and he lives in all this, and you're you, a private detective who usually dresses like a grocer and rents a simple flat in the city. And Alex didn't look like a Rorick with his pale hair. How would anyone guess?"

"That's right." I squeezed the back of my neck. On the step below me, the carpet had torn in a thin line where the fabric had creased. Such imperfections glared at me, shouting at my keener senses. "I tried questioning a few relatives this past year, but they're also geds and they're not getting the information firsthand. They said my uncle never left his castle, as far as they knew, and Alex was his only visitor. The vague rumors the living ones could recall about what happened couldn't help me put the pieces firmly together. I wanted to ask coven members what they might know because at least they were around then, but their loyalties are with Alex. I couldn't risk them warning him about my questions."

"It sounds like you were investigating your cousin."

"I was," I said.

Her mouth gaped. Licking her lips, she closed it, then asked, "Why's that?"

"It's a theory I can't prove, and you know how I feel about those—if I can't prove it, then what good is it? But in this case, I suppose you have a right to know. I believe Alex murdered my uncle," I said with a sigh. At that, the stairs rumbled under my feet. I grasped the railing just as the vibrating stopped.

Not taking any chances, I zipped the rest of the way up to the landing before the haunted castle could mount another attack. Morning was approaching. I could feel it. I wasn't moving as quickly as I did during deepest night.

Thankfully the castle remained still after having a fit. It was more of a grumble this time rather than a full-blown outburst.

The glowing moth on Quiet's shoulder fluttered to life. "Oh good, he's ready," she said. She put away her journal and gathered her broom.

I was grateful to be done with the inquisition. That hadn't gone as poorly as I had suspected it would. She hadn't dug at all my secrets until I felt naked and bare and monstrous.

"What's he do?" I followed her and the enchanted insect as it swooped in a wide circle down the hall before rounding back the way we'd come.

She speed-walked after her glowing assistant. "He'll make investigating significantly easier. I've enchanted him with a seeking spell that took me a full year to get right. He'll bring important things to my attention, and theoretically he'll help me find what I want the very most, which in this case is to get out of here."

"That's brilliant," I said, and the corners of her eyes crinkled. "I could just about kiss that brain of yours. Such a shame that it's attached to you."

She rolled her eyes, but the twist in her lips suggested she was repressing a smile.

"What do moths eat?" I asked.

Quiet sent me a sidelong glance. "Grains mostly when they're larvae, but full-grown garlic moths have a preference for nectar."

"You there," I said to the creature, "find us a way out of here, and I'll give you all the nectar your tiny body can handle."

The moth glowed brightly at that. Quiet shot me a grin that inspired my own.

He swooped in low and settled on the brass doorknob of the bedroom not far from the library. Quiet laid a hand on the door, and her assistant returned to her shoulder. She peeked through the keyhole, which proved uneventful. I listened for dangers.

"I don't hear anything," I told her.

She armed herself with her dagger-wand as a precaution before turning the knob. Inside, the room was cluttered but not unsanitary, and it was warmer than the rest of the house. Curtains hung around the bed frame in the old style from back when geds believed cold air carried diseases. The mattresses were layered to such a height that a wide stepstool remained at the foot of the bed to help sleepers climb into it.

A mismatched ottoman sat in front of a plush armchair. Staff must have tucked them here out of the way to repair later. The chair had a stain on the seat cushion, and the ottoman was ripped. The grate in the fireplace was so clean it must not have been used in ages, logs that smelled of pine stacked neatly inside.

Quiet breathed a sigh of relief. "This is much better," she said, resting her broom against the wall near the door and returning her wand to her skirts. "You can feel the difference. The presence here isn't nearly so malevolent. This castle holds so much history, I wonder if a child wasn't born in this very room. The joy of a mother and father meeting their babe for the first time—that leaves a mark."

There didn't seem to be anything particularly special about the space to me, but I sensed a different presence as well. A pleasantness permeated it, or perhaps it was simply a complete absence of the darkness that haunted the rest of the castle.

On the outside, the walls appeared free of that creeping rot, and the air smelled clearer. Unfortunately, there weren't any windows, which meant that it probably had been a birthing or medical room of some sort. Old superstitious geds believed that when someone died, their soul left out the window. Tending to the ill and injured in a room without them was supposed to encourage the soul to linger. Additionally, the second story closest to the stairs was believed to be good luck.

I picked up Quiet's vivid scent again, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it was a far superior smell to death. On the other, I really didn't need to make myself any thirstier. I'd answered her summons in such a hurry I hadn't bothered to take the time to feed properly. Odd of me. I didn't usually walk around so uncomfortable, but I hadn't felt much like myself lately. The constant cold made me miserable. I always needed more blood during the winter months, but I'd lacked the foresight to predict I'd soon be kidnapped by a murderous castle.

"I see now," Quiet said to her moth. "What I was really wanting was someplace safe to lay low. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what it is I'm wishing for. Especially when it's multiple things all at once: Safety. Freedom. To solve a murder before my coven is dismantled . . ."

"To get away from me," I suggested.

She wrung her fingers in her skirts wistfully. "You took quite the thumping for me earlier," she pointed out, another olive branch extended, "so that wish goes to the bottom of the list for now."

If the darkness wasn't here, perhaps we could make our escape. I started to pull at the baseboards around the wall, prying loose a nail.

Quiet stopped me. "The darkness hasn't reached this place yet, but that doesn't mean it won't force its way inside eventually. I'd rather you didn't give it an easy path in. If you open that wall, it'll bring the room down on top of us like it did before. I like this space, and I don't want that taint in here, do you?"

I shoved the nail back in the baseboard with a sigh.

Quiet shut and locked the door. She added a line of salt along the threshold—a quick precaution. Afterward, I helped her search the room for our victims' faces.

"If I were Penance, I'd hide out in here, if I had any choice in it," Quiet said, pulling open boxes and peering inside. "If you know where she is," she said to the glowing moth, "now would be a great time to show me."

The moth sat on a padded blotter on the desk against the far wall. Its antennae twitched, but otherwise it made no efforts to leave its new perch.

I lowered onto my hands and knees and checked under the bed. In the back corner where the wall met the bedpost, I spotted a familiar journal. At some point it had fallen off from wherever its home had been and lodged itself there by the baseboard.

I freed it with some difficulty. The sun was coming, and my muscles were tired. I held up my prize. "This looks like yours," I said, fingering the leather spine. It was the same size. A gilded emblem decorated the bottom, the image shaped like a reaping hook. Hers too had a similar emblem.

"Those journals were given out during a witch symposium ages ago. They're enchanted to never run out of pages. You can rip free what you're finished with and always have more." She fought with the lid on another box and coughed from the dust stirred up.

I opened the journal and flipped through it. "Look here, Jonathan Rorick signed these entries . . . It's written a bit like notes for a memoir. But why would my uncle have a witch's journal?"

Quiet shrugged. "He must have attended the symposium, or a witch gifted it to him."

"My uncle didn't go anywhere, they say. After his transformation, he never left this castle, and I doubt he knew any witches." I turned another page, skimming the words for something important. "What's the significance of the reaping hook here?" I tapped the etching on the cover.

Quiet raised a brow at me. "It's a Society of Academic Sorcerers coven symbol. Tell me about your crescent first, and we can trade symbol for symbol."

I shook my head. "Never mind. I doubt it's important. Ah," I said, chortling after skimming another few lines. "Apparently my uncle was some sort of hopeless romantic. I had no idea. You should read this."

"I want to keep looking for Penance before I run out of steam tonight. I won't be able to keep my eyes open much longer. Give me a summary, why don't you?" She moved aside another box to free the next.

I rolled onto my back across the plush carpeting, holding the journal aloft over my head while I read. "According to this, Jonathan Rorick traveled to the Nothing after his fall from a balcony. In death he observed his life lived in full in other worlds because in the Nothing, time doesn't exist. He gained the will to rise from the grave out of a desperate desire to find love."

"Hm," Quiet grunted softly. "The first witch Hecate returns to our world in unpredictable bursts. She's written articles about visiting the Nothing with her magic. She too commented on it being ‘where time does not touch and where all souls pass to reach their peace,' but her articles are more about her theories on the ramifications of our universe and its impact on interconnected dimensions beyond it."

She'd stirred up so much dust in her enthusiastic search that she paused to cough like she had the consumption.

Eyes streaming, she continued, "Fascinating. So the duke crawled out of his grave and rose as a vampire all for the promise of love, eh? Does it say how he managed that? How did he leave the Nothing to become the first vampire without any magic of his own?"

I skimmed the entries further. There weren't many of them, and some were quite mundane. Finally, I found one of merit. "It says here, ‘Death gave me wings.'"

"Well, that's not very helpful." Quiet nosily pushed around the contents of the next box, knocking a jar of buttons onto the carpet. "It raises more questions than it answers. Does he mean literal wings or the metaphorical sort? Is he referring to the god Death or the act of dying?"

"He doesn't explain. There aren't any images of him from after his transformation. He could have had literal wings. Alex avoided mentioning our uncle."

She paused her search. "And what if that's the answer? Your uncle found his love and ran off with him or her."

"And said nothing to no one about them? And why not just move them into the castle?"

"Perhaps his love doesn't like the smell of rot or drawing rooms that try to kill guests," Quiet teased.

"Perhaps. I'm going to keep this journal handy for my own notetaking, if it's as useful as you say." It was heavier than it looked, and the gilded symbol glinted. I could feel the enchantment on it, like smoke around my fingers, as I rose to my feet and tucked the small leatherbound book into the inner pocket of my waistcoat.

I checked the standing clock beside her stack of boxes. The hands were spinning in the wrong direction. "The sun will rise soon. I can feel it. I'll be no use to you for hours then."

"I'm aware of your limitations," Quiet said, arms buried in sewing supplies and fabric bundles.

A heaviness grew in my bones, the exhaustion the morning brought on settling in. Not wanting to collapse on the floor in a heap, I crossed to the bed and climbed onto the mattress. "I'm not sleeping on the floor," I warned her.

"Well, I'm certainly not sleeping on the floor either," she said, shooting a glare. "I plan to ward this room for our safety, and then I deserve a good rest, too."

"We've shared tight sleeping quarters before during lengthy cases," I pointed out as I worked off my boots, letting them thump against the carpet one at a time. "It could be just like that."

"You could sleep on the floor. You sleep like you're dead anyway. You wouldn't even notice," she said, always so pragmatic, but her gaze was on the ground and her cheeks went pink.

"I'd be cold and miserable on the floor. Trust me, I'll notice." I had the strongest urge to tease her about the rising color staining her face, but the notion suddenly left my head.

Everything left my head as the sun slumber stole over me.