She lived in the tenement with a man. Her captor. He mostly worked at night, under the moon, but this evening a storm raged.
And that rod…
The shrillness of the machinery had almost drowned out the driving rain pounding against the tenement. The building rocked. Thunder crashed. Lightning struck and the rod screamed with light so bright it turned the laboratory white.
Then an edge cut that light, too. A shadow slashed the cold blue touching her foot.
The monster shimmered with the blinding electrical buzz. The raw lightning bolt scar on the side of his face glowed. He rolled his massive shoulders and he roared at the storm outside.
In his laboratory, under the blistering blue light, her captor had stitched arms to a chest. He’d implanted a heart meant to pump a monster’s blood through its stolen veins. He’d added legs. A head.
Fangs.
Her captor stood two paces from his creation and for some reason, for some prickly numbness, she remembered the dark, blotchy stain on the arm of his otherwise perfectly white shirt. He liked his clothing pristine. He always smiled and thanked her when she cleaned his shirts well. Told her that whiteness reminded him of his mother’s loving touch and that she should be proud to be compared to such an excellent woman.
The monster clasped his massive hand around her captor’s throat.
“Oh, Victor,” she’d whispered. You fool, she’d thought.
This will be your final mistake.
Fear stiffened her bones. Horror quaked through her arms and legs. The monster was a vampire. He was a monster’s monster, and all monsters were a threat.
To her, yes. But mostly to their makers.
The vampire sank his fangs into the side of Victor Frankenstein’s neck.
One, she counted. Two. Three, and the white tone of Victor’s skin changed from the ruddy physical manifestation of abject terror to the rubbery thickness of meat without blood.
The vampire lifted his head away like a swimmer coming up for air. And then he ripped Victor’s skull from his body.
The memory changed: A flash of running through the storm. Of trees and wolves and deep wooded darkness.
Then Robin Goodfellow found her in the muddy forests outside Edinburgh.
Wrenn inhaled sharply. The exhale stuttered out of her throat as one popping whoosh. Two more quick breaths followed.
She wasn’t in Victor’s lab. Her feet touched the stone floor of her apartment.
And she stood up.
Stood so fast that she’d knocked her tea onto the files.
“Damn it!” Damaging the pixie vellum meant—
She dropped a towel onto the tea and the files. When had she picked up the towel?
Samhain, she thought. Damn it damn it damn it.
This wasn’t the first time a thinning veil had caused a flashback. She should have realized one was coming.
She should have realized. She…
Wrenn extended her arm, her hand perpendicular to the floor. Her fingers shook. Her eyes blinked rapidly. Her breaths were too shallow, but she had the magic to get it under control, rules be as damned as her flashbacks.
She sighted along the shaft of bright pre-Samhain sunshine touching her toe. She inhaled again and mentally grabbed at the red and green magic floating around her body. A containment spell manifested at her fingertips.
She flicked it at the shadow’s edge.
The flick was more symbolic than direct; the memory was inside her head, not on the floor. But the magic understood, and the magic did its work.
The tension caused by the flashback yanked out of the muscles of her head. The tightening around her eyes that distorted her vision and the spasming in her jaw that caused her to grind her teeth pulled away. Then the spell forced the tension down her neck and into the large muscles of her upper back.
She placed her hand on her stomach. The magic forced the knots in her belly into the large muscles of her backside and her legs.
The panic would wait there as potential energy, in storage, for as long as she needed.
“Why now?” she whispered. It’d been six years. The monster’s not here, she thought. Not in Oberon’s Castle, and most certainly not in her apartment.
Her investigations had not yet yielded any concrete information about the demon built by the fool named Victor Frankenstein. The monster had vanished after he killed Victor. No overt signs remained. No trail of corpses, or tales of an eight-foot demon. Nothing at all. She had only the artifacts and papers rescued from Victor’s burned-out laboratory—a diary detailing his first attempt at his corpse-building alchemy. About how that monster had murdered Victor’s younger brother.
And the monster’s other travesties.
At least Victor had left her evidence that he’d killed the fiend on an Arctic ice floe.
She looked at the case files again. When she looked back at the threshold, the line between light and shadow distorted. The shadow buckled and the sun refracted around the door’s frame.
A rainbow of color manifested for a fraction of a second. Only for that fraction—only that micro-moment—as the light transitioned across the edge.
“Heh,” she said. If she believed in portents, she would have dropped to her knees and wailed.
“He’s part of this, isn’t he?” she asked the magic of Samhain.
He had to be. How, though, she didn’t know.
On the floor, the edge of light moved away from her big toe. She inhaled yet again, and exhaled slowly, and a little voice at the back of her head said it was safe to look at the windows again.
She hated that little whispering inner voice. Hated that it was both her savior and her jailor.
Wrenn blinked a few times to clear any residual vividness. She faced the Samhain sunset. She’d go out. She’d find a concrete lead. Something that would let her take care of Victor Frankenstein’s demon once and for all.
Time to do her job.
Time to hunt monsters.
Chapter 3
Outside Wrenn’s windows, beautiful chrysanthemum fireworks blossomed in the sky in blues, greens, reds, and purples. Booms followed, and lots of laughter from the street.
She’d chosen this particular realm because it reminded her of the Edinburgh of her memories—cobbled streets and strong, solid timber-and-brick
