to worry about tripping over it in the half-lit rooms.
Gaslights did burn in the den where she'd found Sebastien working newspaper puzzles. They shed a rectangle of warm light through the doorframe. As Garrett slipped forward, she heard another loud thump and the sound of something rolling on carpet.
And a moan.
* * *
Mr. Priest. Garrett did not drop her carpet bag until she had passed through the door and assured herself that Mr. Priest was the only one in the room.
He was. And he was sprawled on his face, one arm outflung and the other flexed beneath his chest, an overturned end-table and pottery vase upset on the floor beside him. He was breathing—she could see his disarrayed hair fluttering against his cheek—and his fingers flexed as she stood, frozen for a moment, assessing the situation.
She went to him and fell to her knees at his side, her carpetbag falling on its side, this-and-that spilling forth unheeded as the latch was knocked askew. His skin was chill; violent shivers wracked his body. His lips were pale, and when she pulled them back with her thumb his gums were too. Even his mouth felt cold, which—coupled with the lack of convulsions or other symptoms—suggested a thaumaturgic rather than a natural poison. His eyelids fluttered as she felt for his pulse. Thready, quick, and she could not pick one heartbeat out from the next.
She rolled him onto his back. His left hand fell clear, and something dropped from his fingers: the paddereen. Which, by Garrett's own investigations, was clear of both malicious sorcery and latent poison. She flicked it away with the tip of her wand, making sure she noted where it came to rest.
In the few brief moments that she had been holding his wrist, Garrett thought Mr. Priest's heartbeat had become more erratic. She had the medical training all sorcerers received, which included emergency treatment of natural and of thaumaturgic poisoning (intentional and unintentional). The first step would be to establish stasis, while Mr. Priest was still drawing breath. It was a spell she carried prepared, hung in charges on her wand—the most basic of self-defense measures.
She released Mr. Priest's wrist, leveled the wand, and the silver tip wavered. He was almost gone. She'd shared Henry, all the years that she and the Prince had been lovers. And she'd shared Richard, too. But a half-minute's delay, no more than the faintest hesitation, and Sebastien would be hers alone.
Except for whoever else he went to, when he must. She had no idea who the rest of his lovers—his court, Abby Irene, use the ugly word when it's the right one—were. But they must exist, five or ten at least, to sustain him without undue risk. And being Sebastien—or whoever he'd been, before he'd forgotten the name—she had no doubt he considered each and every one of them a bosom friend. There was no doubt that Mr. Priest was right. Don Sebastien de Ulloa was, in wampyr terms, a hopeless eccentric.
Mr. Priest's breathing caught. He shivered.
And Garrett leveled her wand and froze him with a gesture, suspended in time. Still alive, on the edge of death.
She was still crouched over him, shuddering—a matter of no more than ninety seconds—when the front door opened again. "Jack?"
"In the den," she called. "He's safe for now—"
She never finished the sentence. Sebastien materialized beside her and dropped on one knee at her left hand, though she'd neither seen nor heard his approach. "What is this?" She couldn't have stopped him when he reached out, but he arrested his own hand before it quite brushed Mr. Priest's cheek.
"Your paddereen, I think," she said, and gestured to where she'd flicked it. "I've put him in a stasis. He isn't dead, Sebastien." Gently, she touched his sleeve. "He's quite safe, for the moment, and we have time to attempt a cure."
This time, he leaned his shoulder on her as if to borrow strength. He rested his hands on his raised knee, fabric dimpling under the tightness of a grip whose ferocity did not color his voice in the slightest. "But you tested the bead. No poison and no sorcery."
"No poison," she echoed. "No, nor any sorcery. But—" She let the tip of her wand rest on the carpet as she thought. "What if you took a spell and cut it in half?"
She could sense his impatience, but he held it in check. "Proceed," he said, tightly.
"It wouldn't be detectable as a spell. No active magical principle, not even a