Page 142 of The Dragon and the Dove

Anouk had her arms pulled tight around herself. ‘Terrors,’ she whispered. ‘That’s what they were calling us in the streets.’

They went on, picking through the detritus of the day, but their voices soon faded. Sera’s mind was slipping, the pressure in her chest too much to bear. Seizing the distraction, she slipped away from the altar and stumbled down the aisle into the cavernous din of the cathedral.

She had to disappear, find a quiet space to weather the after-storm of Nadia’s making, and keep Ransom from seeing just how badly it was hurting her. She made for a side chamber, a room for candlelit prayers and solemn thought. It was empty, and by Oriel’s mercy, housed a small bathroom. The second Sera locked the door behind her, the retching began, her body convulsing as she folded over the sink.

There was so much blood.

Too much.

Help me, Saint Oriel.

Afterwards, she slid to the floor, and by some miracle, managed to cling on to the last shred of her consciousness. Minutes passed, and she hauled herself up again, hastily cleaning the sink and washing the blood from her mouth. She had been careful not to bloody her sleeves but there was nothing she could do about the burst vessels in her eyes.

When she returned to the side chamber, a prick above her hip made her pause. A new thorn settled there, like a rusty nail scraping through her marrow.

She hiked up her shirt, tracing the black ink. The vine was close to her naval now.

‘What is that?’ said a cold quiet voice.

Sera froze, snapping her chin up.

Ransom was standing in the doorway. His eyes spun gold, and the room plunged into shadow, until it was just the two of them, and fate’s vine, like a curse on her body.

Chapter 39 Ransom

When dawn came, Ransom was sitting alone on the steps of the cathedral. A guard dog on alert. Or a beast in seclusion. The midnight rain had come and gone, washing the blood from the square. It had chased off Andreas’s assassins too. Only their arrows remained.

As the sun dragged itself over the spires of the Saints’ Quarter, Ransom unfurled his magic. Shadows bled from him like oil. It was like exhaling. Or finally scratching a maddening itch. He couldn’t hold it in any more. He didn’t want to hold it in any more. It was too much – the regret, the fear. The sight of those black thorns wreathing Seraphine’s body.

He welcomed the rush of his magic and let his nightmares devour the dread in his heart and the creeping sense that she was slipping through his fingers.

Beasts flooded the square.

Ransom prowled alongside them, searching for signs of danger. Wanting to find something amiss, just to rip it apart. He itched to kill, to maim.

Darkness pooled at his every step, as if the shadows slipping from the lamp posts could not resist the ones that seeped from his soul. Raking his hands through his hair, his thoughts reeled back to her.

All magic had a cost.

But not like this.

Not like hers.

He lingered by a fountain, watching the dawn light dance across the floating blossom. Spent prayers. Wasted petals. And yet, for a moment, it felt like he had stumbled into an oil painting, the kind he used to marvel at for hours as a boy wandering the galleries of Fantome, greedily devouring the grand breadth of nature, all that beauty in its rawest form.

When he became a Dagger, his imagination got darker, crueller. He sketched nightmares instead of landscapes, and monsters instead of people. The artist in him was all but dead, the light fading from him like colour bleeding off a canvas.

He scowled at his reflection. His hounds stood next to him, but the fountain offered no mirror. It was as though nature itself had turned its back on him.

At a twitch of his fingers the hounds turned to black smoke and were replaced by a sea serpent with a gruesome dragon’s head. It dipped beneath the water without so much as a ripple.

The blossom curdled to ash.

‘And yet more ruination,’ crowed a familiar voice.

Ransom turned around.

Madame Fontaine was sitting on a nearby bench wrapped so tightly in her shawl he’d never spotted her. Now, in a sudden shaft of sunlight, she was impossible to miss, as if Saint Maurius himself had parted the clouds to reveal her.