She tried to remember how she had gotten there.
There had been a bathtub, and a bottle of something that smelled of lavender. Ilsa had complained weakly, but a female voice had told her they needed to wash the blood off. But before that? A late summer’s day. A beautiful clear sky. A park – Regent’s Park – was right outside.
And a teacup, with a syrupy, magenta liquid inside. The steam had been a deep blue, and sparkled like starlight. The girl said it would ease her worries and put her to sleep. She had called it magic.
Ilsa had drunk it willingly – why?
Because of the fish market. Because of the Oracles, and the stranger in the hood, and…
Ilsa sucked in a breath like it was her first for days. Blood pounded in her ears. She wasn’t in London. She had gone through a portal to the devil’s realm. A world of Oracles and swift assassins and beasts as big and as fearsome as anything Ilsa could become. So many of them.
And Martha. Martha was dead.
She wrestled free of the sheets and scrambled out of bed. Her feet hit the floor hard and she tensed, afraid someone would come looking, but a plush carpet had absorbed most of the sound and the boards beneath didn’t protest. She was in the grand white mansion where Captain Fowler had left her, and as her eyes adjusted in the dim light, it was obvious.
It wasn’t an ordinary room at all; it was the grandest room Ilsa had ever seen. Heavy, floor to ceiling curtains shrouded the windows on opposite walls of the wide space. They matched the sumptuous, floral pattern on the walls; in her human form, Ilsa could not have reached the decorative crown moulding at the top of them had she been wielding a broomstick. In the centre was the bed, big enough that half the girls in Ilsa’s boarding house could have slept top-to-tail and would have considered themselves lucky. Its painted frame was carved in a pattern of vines and accented in gold leaf, like a wedding cake piled with soft linens. There was a matching bureau, a wardrobe, a dressing table, and silk-upholstered armchairs before a marble fireplace, empty of coals in the late summer heat. Above her, a chandelier blossomed from an ornate ceiling rose. It was unlit, and in the moonlight and the violet of the sconces it threw a warped, surreal shadow across the ceiling, like a nightmare looming over her.
As whatever she had drunk wore off, a chill went down her spine.
It was afternoon when she arrived – how long had she been sleeping? Was she a prisoner now? The thought made her nauseated, and she cursed herself for not considering it sooner. The night – or day – before had promised answers, but had it promised safety?
Only one thing was certain: she would not wait here to find out. She was in the Witherward now; she had answered the biggest question. There must be someone else in this city who could help her piece together the rest. Someone who had known her parents. Someone who hadn’t kidnapped her.
Whoever had helped her bathe had put her in a nightgown, which wouldn’t do. Listening hard and treading lightly, Ilsa scoped about for her clothes, but there was no discarded heap of fabric in any of the places she knew to expect. This wasn’t the sort of room in which the occupant’s only good dress lay folded over the end of the bed on every day but wash day.
So she tried the wardrobe, the hinges of which were mercifully silent as she pulled the doors open. But her clothes weren’t there either. It was stocked with fine and pristine summer clothes; dresses patterned in forget-me-nots and pastel stripes; white muslin blouses with lace collars and sleeves. Ilsa pushed down the urge to wipe her hands first and grabbed the plainest skirt – pale blue with no bustle – and a blouse and hastily dressed. As she buttoned the skirt at her waist, it became clear it was too big for her, but before Ilsa could root around for something to belt it, the fabric tightened around her all by itself. Panicked, she grappled with the waist with shaking fingers, trying to rip it off before she was suffocated by whatever dark magic was working on the garment. But the skirt was already inanimate again – and a perfect fit. Tentatively, she put on the blouse, holding her breath as the sleeves and collar did the same. What kind of magic could make a garment shift the way a Changeling did? What if these magic clothes could also supress her magic, like the cord Captain Fowler had used to bind her wrists?
Well, she was about to find out.
Ilsa went to the window and made a gap in the curtains just wide enough to see through. She was on the first floor overlooking a garden. The shadows of shrubbery and ornaments stood like sentinels clad in black against a silver, moon-drenched lawn. Around the edge of the garden ran a wall, heavy with blooming wisteria and taller than two of Ilsa, but that didn’t matter. She planned to fly clean over it.
She had unlatched the window and was about to pull it open, shift into a sparrow, and be gone from here, when one of the black sentinels unfurled.
Ilsa sucked in a breath. It was a wolf. As she watched, afraid to withdraw behind the curtain and catch the beast’s eye, another
