Nameless: A Tale of Beauty and Madness (10 page)

The Family had some funny ideas about Fate, and try as she might she could never get Papa or even Nico to explain them. Maybe you had to be born in to understand.

Sweat slid down her back, soaking into velvet. The dress was too
heavy
, and it dragged the floor. If she danced, it would have to be a slow waltz, or she’d trip over the material.

Oh please, come on, the powder room. Please.
Her tongue was a knot, and so were her lungs, struggling against the noise and the glare and the veil’s gauze, plastered to her face. Her questing fingers slid against a crystalline knob, she twisted savagely and shoved the door open. Stumbled into welcome cool, dark quiet, pushing the veil aside and gulping in dusty air full of neglect and stillness. The door swung shut behind her and she leaned against it, not caring where she was as long as she could
breathe
.

The darkness, after all the whirling color and motion, was a shock. Her ribs heaved; her wrists twinged sharply. It took a little while for her heart to stop pounding, and the dripping from her abused costume was loud in the stillness. Whiskey and calf, of
course
. It was never going to come out. Marya would scold and scold.

As soon as she could breathe again, she patted at her belt. The reticule was there, with all the supplies for the evening. She could dab at the dripping with the small charmcloth in her reticule, but it was all down her front. She probably looked like Bloody Scot Mary, for God’s sake.

She clipped her veil aside and took stock.
Where am I?

A parquet floor. Shrouded shapes of furniture, antique gasjets jutting from the walls. Tall narrow windows choked with heavy rotting velvet drapes—what
was
this room? It looked like it hadn’t been open for ages. The furniture was low, and there were high lamp-shapes with ancient, cracked tubing dangling from them.

Oh. It’s a Borrowing room.

They didn’t have them in all the Family houses anymore, just the older ones. There was the fireplace with its carved screen, and above the dangling tubes were the glass canisters, filthy with dust. The vessel, Family or human, would lie on the higher couch, the Borrower on the lower and wider one with the flowerlike cup to their mouth, and the red light from the canisters would grow dimmer and dimmer as the vessel was drained. This wasn’t the private Borrowing between a Seven and one of their honored servants; this would be where the
Festas Scarletas
would be held and treaties would be cemented. It was also where an Elder would Borrow from a breathing Family member, with other Unbreathing in a circle around the two to make certain the Borrower didn’t take too much.

The furniture was likely as old as New Haven itself, and the drapes were probably so rotten they would fall at a touch.

I shouldn’t be here.
She reached behind her for the doorknob, but it slipped against her sweating fingers.
I really should
not
be in here. Powder room. It can’t be far away.

But it would be full of slim bright-eyed Family girls and their lacquered mothers, all of them knowing who Cami was but few deigning to speak to her, and never without a sneer. At least they didn’t actively
do
anything like some of the girls at school—it was beneath the pureblood girls to even notice the Vultusino foundling. It would be different if she’d been from a charming clan, married into the Family to cement an alliance or to strengthen the bloodline. Papa’s dead wife had been a Sigiled charmer, a shining mortal star among them, from what Cami could tell.

What did they think of Papa giving her that name? She’d sometimes wondered. There was nobody to ask, and the wondering always led her to a deeper, more uncomfortable question.

What’s my born name?
Her wrists ached, sharply. She twisted at the knob again.

It refused to budge. Her sweating hand couldn’t grip properly, and the music throbbing outside was oddly muted. Cami’s dripping skirts brushed the deep dust griming the parquet. Nobody had walked in here for a long time.

Alcohol fumes rose from her ruined costume, she could almost
see
them; her Potential moved uneasily in the dimness around her, its heatripple haze almost visible as well.

What is that?

One of the curtains was slightly askew, and a cold white glow edged the folds of velvet.
An outside window? Not in a Borrowing room. And it’s raining, there’s no . . .

A shudder slid through her entire body, crown to soles. The music had changed. It wasn’t the
tarantelle
or the
moresca
, not a waltz or a foxtrot, not even a tango or a
capriccine
. It was a queer atonal moaning, several voices piled atop one another and echoing, a soft drip-drip-dripping with no pattern stitching the chant together.

And yet . . . it was familiar, in some way. The cold touch of her nightmares down her back began, ice cubes against sweating skin.

I can’t . . .
Cami stepped away from the door. The dust-thickened curtains moved slightly, as if touched by a hand or a vagrant breeze, and her footsteps—the Moon wore silver slippers with metal at heel and toes, so they chimed while she walked—were muffled and grit-crunched.

Skritch-scratch
. Fingernails on glass, maybe? A small scrabbling sound.

The stone in her throat was dry. She smelled apples, wet salt, cold stone. Shadows moved at the window, brushing across the faint powdery silver light.

They’re calling me
, she realized. Chanting voices, the rustles and drips from her costume blurring, and there was another sound underneath it. Faint and far in the distance, a train’s lonely whistle, perhaps.

No. Not a train
. A howl, lifting cold and clear on a snowy night. Not a wolf’s uncivilized cry, though. A dog’s voice, a hunter’s song, one she had heard before.

Skritch. Skritch-scratch.

A thumping. Cami took another step. How had she gotten halfway across the room? The crouched couches on either side watched her with no interest. Her footsteps had become silent, even the scratchy gauze of her veil not whispering as it rubbed against the Moon’s dress, silver ribbons fluttering from her sleeves as if she was running. Her scalp crawled, her braided hair twitching as if every individual one wanted to stand up.

Apples. A breath of heavy, perfumed smoke.

The window was smeared with dust. Shadows and shapes moved behind it, whirling dancers and staggering drunks. A single bloody gleam—not the Vultusina’s ring, but something else—pierced its foxfire glow, and the curtains shivered uneasily.

Wait
. The cold was all through her, and a trembling like a crystal wineglass stroked by a wet fingertip.
It’s not a window. Not in a Borrowing room.

Glass. Flat glass full of light.

They were
mirrors
, behind the age-stiffened curtains. The crawling under her skin intensified, every inch of her alive with loathing but miserably compelled forward. The voices rose, a chorus with no music to it, echoing strangely as if the walls had pulled away. As if she stood in a vast cavernous space, the silvery foxfire gleam strengthening. Not moonlight, but a diseased glow.

The mirror
. The calling was coming from the mirror. She couldn’t decipher the word.
My name. The mirror’s saying my name.

Her
born
name. But she couldn’t hear clearly.
Come closer . . .

Her right hand lifted, trembling. The ring on her left was a millstone-weight, its stone cold and dead, and her fingertips hovered an inch from the glass. Half an inch, and when she touched it, she would
know
—

The locked door barged itself open. Giggling, a Family girl staggered in, a burst of golden haze behind her. It was Mocia della Sinistra, and one of her clan-cousins, the Sinistra boy who always wore calfskin driving gloves. They stumbled, his mouth at her ear, her hair half-undone, and his gloved hands had worked themselves into her bodice—she had dressed as Esmerelda Gipsicana, and he was in a tuxedo and a shining mirrored half-mask, pushed aside as his face rubbed against her.

Their dance was a drunken whirl, and the music from outside was a blare that covered Cami’s footsteps as she darted aside, taking shelter behind a long row of canister-trees and higher-backed couches. They would be dazzled from the sudden darkness too, and it looked like they were in a world all their own.

Her cheeks scalded. The inebriated pair fell on a low shrouded couch, and dust rose thick around them. Cami’s breath jolted in her throat. Neither noticed her ghosting past; they were knotted together and murmuring with thick smacking sounds, and Mocia—she was Wild, there was no doubt about it—moaned as her cousin’s fangs scraped her throat. Was he going to Borrow from her?

Her mother is
not
going to be happy with that.
It was a sane thought, a comforting thought, and Cami clung to it as she hurried along, her skirts pulled up and the Vultusina’s ring waking again with a ripple.

The door was closing, its slice of golden light and noise narrowing, but Cami ducked through just in time. The noise burst through her head, the clanging chimes of the
capriccine
—had she missed the other dances?

“
There
you are.” Nico appeared out of the crowd. “Mithrus, Cami, what happened to you?”

She couldn’t quite remember, her head full of buzzing noise and her bones cold. Ice under her skin and muscles, chilling her from the core out, and it was difficult to think. “H-home.” She could barely force the word out. “I. W-want. T-t-t-to g-g-g-g-go—”

“You’re covered in it.” He was a rock in the middle of the crowd, and she clung to his arm. He’d had more, it was obvious from the burning red pinpricks in his pupils and the way he too-carefully tipped his head back, avoiding the smell from her dress. “Did someone throw something? What the
hell
?”

“H-home,” she kept repeating, but he wanted to stay with the Cinghiale boys and drink a bit more. In the end he handed her into the limousine and Chauncey drove her silently through Dead Harvest night, and when she woke Nonus Souls morning, Nico had already left for Hannibal.

Pierrot did not follow the Moon, after all.

T
HE MONTH OF
N
ONUS WAS SERE AND COLD, DRY AND
achingly bright. Icy flakes began falling a week after the Festival’s orgy of candy and parties; Cami almost shuddered every time she had to walk outside. Ruby drove her home with mind-numbing incaution every day. Stevens, dry and sticklike, was looking particularly gray. Marya wore layers of fine thin spidery black, her long fine hair scraped back and her usually apple-blooming cheeks pale. Trigger and his security teams were unseen, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there—a prowler was chased away the first night it snowed, a Twisted beast found just at the edge of the property another night.

It was a sign that it was going to be a hard winter, Trig remarked, if things were so desperate to try even a Family estate’s boundary.

The snow kept falling, and the plows and harnessed titons came out. Slump-shouldered, massive gray Twisted things, the titons were chained every winter, dragging plows along, their tiny yellow eyes alive with charmlight and their horny knuckles scraping the icy concrete. They ate bones and offal, as well as gravel and lumber with their broad flat black teeth, and were mostly docile if kept fed. They were trapped out in the Wastes between cities and provinces by teams of jack bounty hunters, and kept in pens on the edge of every city’s blighted core. Rumor had it they were sometimes pitted against minotaurs in the cages, and the betting was fierce.

Nico would probably know. But he would never tell her.

“Mithrus
be careful!
” Ellie shrieked, grabbing at the dash. The radio reeled off names—it was the three-thirty newscast, and two more charmer girls had vanished last night, one right from her own bedroom.
No suspects
, the announcer said, as Ellie let out a short jolting scream.

Cami just held on grimly as tires spun, the car sliding. Ruby yelled a cheerful obscenity, goosed the accelerator, and steered into it. Tire chains and silvery octopus-leg catchcharms gripping again, ice crackling on the window as Cami, wedged uncomfortably in the glossy black Semprena’s tiny concession to a backseat, found her lips moving silently.

Praying, she had decided, would not hurt.

“It’s just
snow
!” Ruby crowed, and shot them through a yellow light with half a second to spare. The newscast crackled through the speakers.

—brings the total toll of disappearances to seventeen. The mayor’s office had no comment, but Captain Ventrue of the New Haven Police Department—

Titons reared, their horns stabbing empty air, a plow behind them creaking as the zooming little car startled the giants, and Ellie and Cami screamed at the same time, in oddly perfect harmony. Their cries swallowed the end of the ’cast and the Red Twists came on, the bassline of “Born Charmed Enough” thumping the windows and rattling Cami’s teeth.

Driving with Ruby was always an adventure, but it was better than the small, cushioned but stifling buses Juno used to take less fortunate girls straight to their doors. Private schools did not like losing their students, and if there wasn’t a transporter or two on file you
had
to use a bus. Walking home in New Haven was risky—in other words, it was only for the public school kids.

Like Tor
, Cami thought, and squeezed her eyes shut.

She’d seen him around the house, of course. Things weren’t quite upside down with Papa gone, but they were definitely not the same. Some of the maids had been let go, Marya piqued about something or another they did wrong or didn’t do right. Chauncey had caught the head groundskeeper “intoxicated, Miss Cami,” and asked her if he should be fired.

Like she knew. But with Papa gone, Marya sulking, and Nico off at Hannibal, she was the only one to ask.
N-n-no
, she’d told him.
N-not unl-less it h-h-happens ag-g-gain.

And he had nodded, looking profoundly relieved, and walked away whistling as if he’d heard it from Papa’s mouth. She squirmed at the memory.

She’d even turned Ruby down when it was time to skip and head to Southking again. And Rube was not happy over
that
.

Stop being a foot-dragger, Cami. Mithrus, you’re turning into an old lady overnight. Being engaged makes your brain soft.

Missing Nico was never pleasant. And before he left, he’d been odd. Treating her like . . . what, exactly?

Like she was something new. Something strange. And he hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye. Just vanished like a Dead Harvest dream, and Marya had scolded Cami both for her own costume and for the shredded ruin of Nico’s.

He’d gone out with the youngbloods after all.

Think about something else.

Something had happened to her at the Stregare party, but it had vanished just like the nightmares, and all she could remember was the Borrowing Room and the dust choking her as Mocia and her clan-cousin writhed on the couch. A bolt of queasy heat went through Cami’s belly whenever she thought of it. Had Nico ever, with a Family girl . . .

Ruby shrieked, a wild joyful cry, and Ellie cursed with colorful inventiveness as the Red Twists harmonized about being born with flippers or fins. The car lifted as if it intended to fly.

Cami let herself think about Tor the garden boy instead.

He sometimes fetched things for Marya, carried things into the cellar, and the feywoman had started to ask for him. Not by his name, of course, she called him the Pike because he was long and dark.

Hearth-fey didn’t like big changes inside their domains. Marya was . . . upset.

And me? What am I?

Nothing but the pin holding the house up. A tired, shivering pin. If she was a Family girl, would it be easier?

That
was another incredibly uncomfortable thought, one she did her best to shove away. The Semprena slowed, banking like a plane and gliding to a stop. Ruby twisted the volume dial down to merely “overwhelming” instead of “minotaur roar.”

“You can open your eyes now, Cami.” Ruby sighed. “That wasn’t even very
fast
.”

“Death by cardiac arrest, induced by vehicular shenanigans.” Ellie waited for a few seconds, unclicking her seatbelt. “There’s the Strep.”

Cami’s eyelids fluttered open. The world poured in, full of the peculiar flat blue-white of snowlight. The Sinder house on Perrault Street was a fantasy of four stone spires and a sort of grim medieval feel, not helped by the tall curlicue wrought-iron gates. Ruby’s Gran had a teeny, welcoming, very expensive cottage in Woodsdowne, but this was Perrault and the houses had serious, carnivorous faces. A tall line of firs frowned over the charm-smoothed stone wall enclosing the estate, and the glowing Sigil on the gates was a pair of high-heeled shoes.

The Strep was a famous charmer, after all.

Ellie’s dad was a lawyer specializing in inter-province negotiations, and gone an awful lot. At some point the Strep was probably going to get herself knocked up, probably by one of the boyfriends she brought in when Daddums was working late, and the hormonal shifts were going to make her even
more
of a pain in the ass for Ellie.

In one of the towers, a shadow moved across the golden glow of electric light. The Strep had a carefully fertilized mane of frosted-blonde hair, and it always sent a shiver down Cami’s back.

“Thanks for the ride,” Ellie said finally. “Babchat later?”

“But of course. Let Cami out, it’s her turn to pound on my dashboard.”

Great.
But she wriggled out while Ellie held the door, then hugged her. “C-c-courage,” she whispered. “T-t-t-tis only the St-t-t-trep Monster.”

The tired old joke wrung a tired old laugh out of Ellie. Her dad had been gone for two days, to New Avalon up north at the edge of the province, for high-powered negotiations. Something about inter-province trade agreements, fighting over who would pay to send rail-repair crews out into the Waste.

The smudges under Ellie’s storm-gray eyes were getting awful dark. “Someday I’m gonna walk home and get kidnapped just to avoid her.” She tried to sound light, but there was a terrible flat ring to the words.

“D-d-d—”
Stupid words.
“
Don’t
,” she finally got out, her breath pluming in the cold air. The iron gate was opening, sensing Ellie’s nearness.

“Shut the damn door, it’s freezing!” Ruby yelled, but Cami waited, leaning on the car door until she saw Ellie trudge, slowly and safely, up the paved drive and heard the dull thud of the front door slam behind her. “Come
on
, Cami! She’s not gonna get snatched in her own driveway.”

You just never know
. Some of the vanished weren’t charmers, just young mere-humans, but the entire city was on pins and needles now. Cami privately wondered how many people would be concerned if whoever was doing the snatching hadn’t started taking young charmers. None from Juno yet, but there were a couple girls gone from Hollow Hills. One had even disappeared between the Hills’ bus and her family’s front door, the snow scuffed as if a struggle had taken place and the branches of several nearby bushes broken.

The tabloids, for once, weren’t screaming about celebrity follies or Twists. Cami avoided reading them, but there was only so much you could ignore.

She dropped down into the front seat, pulled the door to, and took Ruby’s scolding all the way home with several nods, one or two
uh-huhs
, and five full minutes of cursing when Ruby opened up the Semprena on the straight shot of Grimmskel Boulevard. Remarkably, she didn’t stutter once while she was terrified.

Ruby told her it was a goddamn miracle, blew her a kiss, and the Semprena vanished toward the downward slope of the Hill before the large iron gate had finished scraping itself open.

Camille shivered, the wind nipping at her bare knees. The gate groaned, creaked, ice falling from its scrollwork and the charm-potential under the surface of the metal running blue with cold. The defenses here were old and thick, laid in with the stones when the Seven had first come to New Haven and added in layers with each successive generation. Papa had remarked once that the Family had been in New Haven before it was New, and once a long time ago, when talking to the wide, perpetually smiling Head of the Cinghiale, he had paused and looked into the distance.

I remember when we were hunted, before the Reeve made us citizens. We should all remember thus
.

And Marcus Cinghiale had nodded, his own iron-gray hair slicked back and his bullet-eating grin turning cold.
You are always cautious, old friend. We trust in that.

Neither of them had noticed Cami playing in the corner of Papa’s study, stacking wooden blocks.

She returned to the present when another gust of wind nipped at her knees, and the sound of cold air rushing over winter’s surfaces modulated into an eerie wail.

Almost like a wolf-cry. Or voices in a chorus, rising through a word that would explain . . . what?

For a bare millisecond she toyed with the idea of turning away and walking down into town. Going into the core’s diseased brightness, step by step, and seeing with her own eyes what the chaos-driven Potential in there would do to her. Would it make her a minotaur? Would she go running through the streets, bellowing, thick blankets of mutating Potential clinging to her body and her head swelling with bone and horn?

She was in-between, just like a jack. Not Family, not charmer-clan, not Woodsdowne clan, who knew if she was fully mere-human? Who would notice if she simply vanished? Would they say her name on the newscasts? Or would she be gone without a ripple?

Blank static filled her head, tugging at her fingers and toes. It formed words, spoken low and soft, so caressingly soft.

 . . . nobody. You are nothing.

“You gonna stand out here all day?” he said, quietly, and she jumped, letting out a thin shriek. Her schoolbag almost fell, she clutched at it and found Tor the garden boy watching her, leaning against the gate.