Eliot was gone. Perhaps she’d only imagined him.
“You need the clear one,” said a shaking voice, and Ilsa pivoted towards the source. It was Cassia. She was sat against the wall, her hands lying limp in her skirt, two wolves stood over her.
“She din’t do it,” said Ilsa again, with enough strength to startle the room.
Oren was at her shoulder in an instant. “How close did you get? Are you certain they were a Whisperer?”
Cassia made a scoffing noise. “Ask Ferrien,” she said, eyeing the wolf dangerously. “He’s seen my aim. If I wanted to hurt Ilsa, I wouldn’t have shot her in the shoulder. But mind control doesn’t lend itself to good hand-eye coordination, it seems.”
Ilsa lifted herself to a seated position, ignoring the protests from Fliss and Fyfe, and swung her legs over the side of the table. The pain in the shoulder was incessant and fierce, but the shock that had made her swoon had passed, and her injuries from falling revealed themselves to be a collection of dull, innocuous aches.
“It was Pyval,” she said.
“You saw him?” pressed Oren.
“Yes I saw him. He…” Ilsa summoned everything she had to go on. It felt like a confession. It felt like her fault. And it was. She should have known. “He was working for Alitz. He’s always been working for her. She was with him in that carriage.” She swallowed hard, wincing as Fliss pressed something to the bullet wound. “It’s her. Alitz killed my family.”
Failing to hold back tears of rage, Ilsa explained about the carriage meeting Pyval as he fled the park; about the insignia on Alitz’s ring, worn proudly for anyone to see in a city that didn’t care who hated whom, or why.
As Ilsa spoke, the blood drained from Fyfe’s face. He shook his head throughout her explanation. “But” – he looked from Oren, to Cassia and back to Ilsa – “but Pyval poisoned her too. She can’t be… she can’t be the Sage!”
“One can build up a resistance to smokeweed,” said Oren. He gripped his glasses so tightly in his fist that they were bent out of shape. “She may have used this method on her enemies before.”
“P’raps but—” If I wanted to distract you from the present moment, of course I would show you things you wished to see. Ilsa cursed her own stupidity. “I ain’t sure she drank the tea at all,” she confessed. “She was using my thoughts to distract me. She said it was the lesson.”
Cassia pulled herself to her feet. “The antidote probably made her sick for a few hours. Nothing more. It would be a small price to pay for such a convincing alibi.” She gasped and turned wide eyes on Ilsa. “Alitz knew about the messenger from the Docklands. The one who told us you were alive. I – I told her. I didn’t think anything of it. She must have sent someone to find you when we sent Fowler.”
“And they found Bill and decided to wait for me,” said Ilsa. The hot burst of hatred felt like a knife twisting in her chest. Alitz had played at being, if not Ilsa’s friend, then her ally. She had taken tea with her in her house. All the time, she was the reason Bill was dead.
“She’s been the Zoo’s intermediary with the Whisperers for decades,” said Cassia, breathing hard. “She’s had access to all our sensitive information to use as she pleases, not to the benefit of Whitechapel, but the Fortunatae.”
The fewer who know that Gedeon Ravenswood is a loose cannon, the better.
“The Fortunatae have known all this time that Gedeon’s gone!” said Ilsa.
“And she knows that Hester’s not leading us,” said Fyfe, catching on. “She could have made a push by now, tried to dismantle the Zoo entirely. Why hasn’t she?”
“Alitz Dicer has demonstrated the utmost patience,” intoned Oren. He was pale, and his eyes drifted without taking anything in. “Years of it. A faultless front. If she is biding her time, there must be a reason.”
There was so much death and terror in the history of the Zoo that Ilsa barely had it in her to process it all, and she realised then that Oren, like Hester, had witnessed some of their worst times. He had smuggled her through the portal the day she was born. He had left his alpha and his people and returned to find them slaughtered. By Alitz.
“Oren,” said Cassia, reaching a hand towards his shoulder. But before she could touch him, Oren lurched abruptly for the door and vanished.
“Where’s Eliot?” said Ilsa, trying to sound casual. Fliss had applied some numbing concoction to the wound and was extracting the bullet with expert surety. “I thought I saw him, but…”
“You did,” said Fyfe. “He saw you chase after Pyval and followed you. He brought you back here, then took some wolves after him again.” Fyfe rubbed his hair. “The stewards will never let them cross the border, Principles or no Principles. I don’t know what he was thinking but… well, he was angry.”
“He’s always angry, Fyfe,” said Cassia, then turned to Ilsa. “Ilsa, I’m so sorry.”
“You din’t do nothing,” Ilsa said, biting back a wince as the bullet came free.
“Precisely. I’ve trained to block out Whisperers. I just didn’t see it coming. I thought we were alone.”
“Ilsa!”
Eliot burst into the room with all the force of the monstrous cat he sometimes was. His shirt was stained with Ilsa’s blood. When his gaze fell on her, it was stormy and frantic, and her heart twisted. Suddenly, inexplicably, she wanted to sob, and she thanked residual shock for helping her keep it in.
He was in front of her in three long strides. His hands drifted up like they would cup her face or touch her hair, but changed their mind. Instead, his eyes swept her face and body, lingering on the bullet wound. He frowned at the
