Auguste had sentthe carriage back to Amon's house—even more impressive and gleaming by daylight—after returning to Rooksgrave, and we were piled in together, halfway back, when Amon stiffened.
Ezra had my bare feet on his lap, my back leaning against Jonathon's chest, and I caught the sudden glow in Amon's gaze, the tick in his jaw. There was a ruffle of feathers, as if his wings were fighting to burst free.
I sat up, reaching for him, and Amon flinched at my touch before settling again, covering my hands with his, black claws where his fingernails should've been.
"Something is wrong, my star," Amon said, staring at me without seeming to see me. "I need to fly."
"Fly? But—Oh!"
Amon pushed my hands away, reaching for the carriage door and throwing himself out, feet not even touching the ground before great dark wings bloomed out behind him, beating once and drawing him up into the air.
"That's not exactly subtle," Ezra said, frowning and drawing the door shut, leaning forward to peer out its window.
"He might have magic to conceal himself, I'm not sure," Jonathon answered, and he and I crowded with Ezra close to the window too.
There was a dark shape up in the sky, but Jonathon might've been right because it looked more like a vulture or a hawk than my sphinx. My heart was racing at the sudden interruption, worry plucking dangerous thoughts out from the shadows of my own mind.
"Was it his house or Rooksgrave?" I asked, continuing before anyone answered. "When Mary left, he knew things about her. Things he couldn't have known."
"Sphinxes are a bit prophetic, or something like it," Jonathon said, catching my confusion and explaining. "They sometimes know of the future, like a prophecy. They have dominion over secrets, keeping them and revealing them."
"It's Rooksgrave," Booker said, voice low and dreadfully calm.
I'd been so busy searching the sky for hints of Amon's flight, it wasn't until Booker pointed to the horizon that I noticed the obvious answer to my question. Dark clouds rising from the usual morning mist. Smoke.
"No. No! Auguste," I gasped, staring at the black haze growing just south of the village. I pushed for the carriage door, but Jonathon had already banded his arms around my shoulders.
"You can't run there faster, Esther," he said softly, his arms tight with equal worry.
Ezra knocked on the roof of the carriage, calling up to the driver for more speed, and the road grew suddenly bumpier than it had been on our patient drive of a moment ago.
"What about the other girls and Magdalena?" I asked, struck with sudden anger over my uselessness, trapped in a carriage, traveling along a road like we might never arrive.
Jonathon trembled around me, ducking his head and pressing his face to my throat. "Mr. Tanner won't fit in here with us, love. We have to stay calm until we arrive and see what can be done."
"But—"
Ezra leaned forward, a little transparent as he captured my face in his hands and poured his focus into me. "Just hold tight, puisín. We'll be there in a moment."
But the moment weighed between us like hours, the smoke in the distance growing taller, wider, but never quite closer. Jonathon was shaking, Mr. Tanner eager to break free and address the danger, and I put all my spinning anxiety into stroking my hands over his arms, holding onto him with the same intensity he held onto me.
The smell of the fire snuck in through the cracks of the carriage doors, the horses leading us starting to whinny, our pace jerking. For a moment as we rounded a ridge in the valley, I thought Rooksgrave had been lost entirely, that Birsha had transformed it into this dark cloud, devoured it in one of his eerie illusions.
And then one by one they appeared, small figures in pale nightdresses, standing at the edges of thick dark fog, staring up through the smoke to the burning bricks of the manor.
Ezra and Booker were out of the carriage first and fastest, my cry to stop them strangled by Jonathon's grip on me. He carried me out, kicking and twisting, his arms growing thick and stretching at the seams of the white dinner shirt he'd worn the night before.
"You're not stepping one precious foot into that place, little girl," Mr. Tanner growled out, replacing my doctor, his grip impossible to break but careful not to crush me no matter how I squirmed and fought.
"Ezra! Booker!"
I screamed for them as they ran into the churning waves of smoke pouring out of the shattered windows of the manor. Ezra's red hair twitched by the open black doorway of the manor, and then he and Booker were rushing inside. "Let me go!" I cried.
"No."
"Esther! Oh, Esther, there you are."
Magdalena came running out of the smoke, wrapped in a dark robe, her hair tangled and loose over one shoulder, the ends singed. She had soot on both cheeks and hands, eyes bloodshot, and a bleeding cut over her collarbone.
"Three ifrits appeared this morning. They had Siobhan's invitation," Magdalena gasped, eyes wild, unable to settle on us or the house or the lost wandering girls who gaped at the destruction in front of us.
"Amon, the others, Auguste," I cried, giving up fighting Mr. Tanner and letting him simply trap me to his chest.
"Amon is at the lake, trying to help put the blaze out. The vampires are…" Magdalena blinked and shook her head. "I couldn't even reach all the girls in the wings, although some of the men have brought them out safely. Booker won't be hurt, Esther."
Booker wouldn’t, but Ezra might. And Auguste was somewhere in there, lying helplessly underground without any idea of what was happening.
"You have to go in," I whispered, blinking and finding Mr. Tanner's face, the dense angles and the tight focus on me. "Jonathon said he couldn't hurt you. You have to go in and get Auguste out."
"It's daylight, little one," Mr. Tanner said softly in my ear, shaking around me. "Bringing Auguste out would kill him."
I blinked between Magdalena and Mr. Tanner, studying them both, and shook my head. At the manor, a window on one of the upper stories broke up with a sudden burst of glass, a great blue incubus flying down with two girls in his arms.
"No," I whispered, watching the manor girls and their monsters trickling out of the fire one by one, none of them my men.
"Fire is one of the ways to kill a vampire," Mr. Tanner continued. "If he's somewhere secure and I let the fire in, that would do it too."
"No!" I screamed, my fist suddenly flying out, connecting hard to his chest, the pain reverberating up my elbow.
“I’m immortal, not invincible.”
I drummed against Mr. Tanner, my hands bruising as I struck him, the scene of monstrous men and girls in their nightgowns and the endlessly smoking manor blurring in my vision.
"No! No, no, no! Let me go! Let me go, you—you—" But I couldn't say it. Mr. Tanner was right. Auguste was trapped, maybe gone already, and there was nothing we could do to bring him out.
"The village men are coming," Magdalena whispered, and Mr. Tanner flinched around me.
"Booker," I whispered. "Booker and Ezra."
The tether. I had Booker's tether, I controlled his will. It took me a moment to hunt it down, my head too chaotic—everything had just gone wrong, so disastrously and irreparably wrong—to find the thread.
It was cool, quiet, calm in the chaos, and I let the manor and the fire and even Magdalena and Mr. Tanner vanish around me, sinking into the relief of Booker. I tugged, and Booker tugged back, refusing my call. I pretended the tether was a cord I could wrap around my fist, winding it once, twice, three times, and then yanking. There was give and then sudden tension again, Booker's refusal.
I whimpered and Mr. Tanner called to me, more voices rising outside the manor, the men from the village coming to fight the fire. What would they see, the strange faces, and men with wings and scales? We certainly didn't look like a finishing school now.
I pushed it all away, taking hold of Booker's tether with my entire body, all my concentration. It was like dragging him by the hand, all his weight and strength refusing against me, but inch by inch, I knew I had him.
Amon's voice murmured nearby and that almost broke my focus until I shut him out too. Booker. I wanted Booker out of that fire. I wanted him and Ezra and Auguste somehow safely packed up, reappearing on Rooksgrave's doorstep.
The tether finally went soft and slack, Booker giving up his fight against me.
I woke with a gasp, brushing away Amon and Mr. Tanner's hands, fighting my way down to the ground, running for the door as Booker appeared. His clothes were singed and he had a body in his arms, but Magdalena was right—he was unharmed.
The body wasn't Ezra or Auguste.
A glimpse of red, a round pink hand hanging limply out of Booker's embrace. It was Cassie, small and soft, wrapped in a burnt sheet with her hair trimmed by fire, skin puckered and discolored in patches. She wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing.
"Downstairs," Booker said. "Trying to get to George."
Trying to get to her vampire.
I let out a sob that ought to have been for Cassie but was really for Auguste, and this time as Mr. Tanner lifted me from the ground, I didn't fight. Someone took Cassie's body from Booker's arms, and he followed me with slow obedience, glancing back over his shoulder.
My hand snapped out and I grabbed onto his wrist, ignoring the way it burned my palm.
"We have to get back, out of the smoke. Away from the eyes," Amon said.
"Ezra is stuck underground," Booker said and I stiffened, not sure if I was breathing or not, not sure of anything but waiting for the sound of his next words. "The cavern to Auguste caved in."
I choked on a sob and Mr. Tanner tucked my face in his shoulder shushing me. "Caved in isn't burnt, little one."
Caved in might be crushed. Or trapped in a tomb. I wept in Mr. Tanner's hold until I couldn't breathe, and the cost of being so close to the burning manor struck, wracking coughs tearing out from my chest.
The manor girls and guests were huddling together under the shadows of trees, but there was no good disguise to some of the men and the villagers were staring, eyes wide and watching, studying the eerie faces trying to hide. Even Mr. Tanner and Booker were curious to them, and I watched blankly as one man looked between the manor and the group of us, and then turned away to head back to the village, willing to let us burn.
"We have to get everyone somewhere safe," Magdalena murmured. "Somewhere secret. Before they start to believe what they're seeing."
"My home is open to you all," Amon answered.