beaming.
“Aislin?” Seelie said. “Ms. Kendricks? Is that you?”
The veiled woman stood, not seeming to hear her.
“Eliza, I must attend to a bit of business. Can you…?”
“Continue the instruction?” Eliza shot a glare at Seelie. “I can.”
“Very good.”
Seelie watched, helpless and pinned in place, as Aislin walked from the room. She tried turning to follow her, felt the book on her head start to slip, and froze like a statue.
“I need to go with her,” Seelie said. “This is important.”
“The three keys to a young woman’s success in life—” The cane rapped against the floor again, crackling like a gunshot. “Pay attention, girl. I don’t speak to hear my own voice. The three keys are intuition, perseverance, and courage. Intuition, to guide you through the wilds of uncertainty when enemies are all about. Perseverance, to endure the unendurable. And courage, to stand fast in the face of terror.”
Seelie shot a desperate glance at the open doorway. Aislin was slipping away, deeper into the bowels of the dead-house, and the rooms and halls could twist again at any moment. Her hope was slipping away with her.
“Master each of the three keys in turn,” Eliza said, “and you will survive the labor ahead of you. You will suffer, but you will not die.”
“The labor ahead,” Seelie echoed. Her eyes widened. “The Eurysthean Labor, the curse on the grave site. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
The silver tip of the cane rapped upon the floor, punctuating each of Eliza’s words.
“Intuition. Perseverance. Courage.”
Intuition. Right now her intuition was screaming at Seelie to go, to chase after Aislin’s heels. But she couldn’t. She didn’t know what would happen if she put the books down, if she broke the rules—
Patty, again, echoing in her ear. “But witches don’t follow other people’s rules.”
“They write their own codes to live by,” Seelie murmured. “Outlaws by nature.”
Eliza turned one moldy, half-rotted ear. “What was that?”
Seelie tilted her head back and dropped her burning arms to her sides. The three books fell, clattering to the floorboards, forming the points of a perfect triangle around her feet.
“Thanks for the lesson,” Seelie said, “but I’ve really got to run.”
She bolted, darting through the doorway and down an endless hall. The gaslight sconces along the walls flickered. Then they began to burst, popping with showers of sparks, dying one by one. The shadows chased her. Then they overtook her, racing ahead as the lights blew out, plunging her future and her past into darkness.
51.
Seelie found herself at the edge of a gathering room, chairs in a circle, everything turned to grainy black and white. She hovered by an open window where a warm breeze drifted in, carrying the scent of fresh-baked bread. On the street one story below, morning crowds mixed on a wide cobblestone boulevard, not a car in sight.
They weren’t invented yet, she thought, spotting women in puff-sleeved dresses and workmen wearing rough, baggy shirts and soot-stained waistcoats. I’m inside someone’s memory.
Aislin’s memory. She stood at the head of the room, her face bared now, bright and alive and her fiery curls cascading down her shoulders. The gathering, mostly women and a couple of men, barely filled half the chairs.
“Everything we’ve done, to this moment,” Aislin said, “has been a stopgap measure at best. Eventually, the creature calling herself Leda Swan will succeed. She will recover the needle and thread and resume her work as if the revolution was yesterday. I propose a more permanent solution.”
She raised a wooden pointer, gesturing to a set of blueprints pinned to a standing corkboard.
“The relics were stolen from the underworld in the first place. They need to be returned there, brought back to their rightful owners.”
“But how?” asked one of the seated women. “We can project our spirits into Hades easily enough, but you’re talking about a physical gateway.”
“I’m talking about an Asclepion. We build one, here in New York. Dreams and death are twin sisters, and their magic is one and the same. You all know me, you know my specialty. I can do this.”
Aislin’s voice, disembodied, whispered into Seelie’s ear: “But I never did. The plan was carried out, the temple built, but I passed before I could open the gate and fulfill my duty. Damned flesh, so frail when you need it most.”
“It could work,” one of the men said. “In theory. But we’d be drawing attention. We’ve got Leda chasing lies and rumors halfway across the world. What if she senses something and comes back to hound us?”
Aislin ran