drifted to the wall, then back to Silas. “It doesn’t bother me. That is—I don’t like getting woken up by the sound of screaming, and seeing blood drip down the walls, but I’m not upset by it, now that I know why it happens. I’m not afraid.”
Silas considered her for a long moment. “Then perhaps you should speak to my master after all,” he said finally. He turned. “Come with me. There is something I must give you. Something that, I regret to say, I have been keeping from you unjustly.”
He led her downstairs to a sitting room—one of the many rooms in Nathaniel’s house that she had peered into, but had never been inside. He didn’t light any lamps, so Elisabeth could barely see. By all rights being alone in the dark with a demon should have frightened her, but she only had the strange thought that perhaps Silas was distressed, in his own way, and was not himself, for he always remembered to light the lamps. She felt her way to a couch and sat down. Silas’s alabaster face and hands stood out, disembodied, as though his skin produced its own pale light.
A cabinet door opened and shut. He straightened with a long, slender bundle, which he held cautiously, as if it might burst into flame at any moment.
“This arrived from Summershall the day before I encountered you on the street,” he said, holding it out to her. “There was no note, but it was posted by someone named Master Hargrove.”
Elisabeth’s heart gave a swift, painful throb, like a hammer striking an anvil. She took the bundle with trembling hands. There was only one thing it could be, and when she untied the twine and parted the fabric, the faintest whisper of moonlight glimmered across garnets and a liquid length of blade.
“I don’t understand.” She looked up at Silas. “Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?”
His face was still as marble as he replied, “Iron is one of the few things capable of banishing a demon back to the Otherworld.”
She hesitated. “And you thought I might use it against you? I suppose I can’t blame you. I would have, once. Not to mention, its name is Demonslayer.” She gazed helplessly at the sword. She still hadn’t touched it. She couldn’t bear to, for fear that it might reject her; that it might scald her as though she herself were a demon.
“Is something wrong, Miss Scrivener?”
“The Director left Demonslayer to me in her will, but I . . . I’m not sure I’m worthy of wielding it.” A pressure built in her chest. “I no longer know what is right and what is wrong.”
His hands settled over hers, cool and clawed, and gingerly brought them to rest against the sword. “Worry not, Miss Scrivener,” he said in his whispering voice. “I can see your soul as clearly as a flame within a glass.”
They sat there in silence for a time. Elisabeth remembered that day in the reading room, when the Director had spotted her behind the bookcase and almost smiled. She had been breaking the rules, but the Director hadn’t minded. She had left her Demonslayer anyway. And she had not always been the Director—she had had a name, Irena, and she had been a girl once, too, and she’d had doubts and felt uncertain and made mistakes.
Somehow thinking about those things made Elisabeth feel as though she were losing the Director all over again, because she realized now that she had never truly known Irena, and would never get the chance. When a sob escaped her, Silas said nothing. He only passed her his handkerchief, and waited patiently for her to stop crying.
A long moment passed before she was able to speak. She dried her tears and blinked up at Silas. It struck her that he put up with a great deal from the humans in his care.
“Why did you fear my sword,” she asked, “if you can’t die in the mortal realm?”
A trace of a smile illuminated his beautiful features. “I fear not for myself. If I were banished, my loss would be an inconvenience for Master Thorn. It alarms me to imagine the state of his wardrobe. He would offend young ladies with his cravat.”
She laughed, taken by surprise, but it was a painful laugh, for the truth was terribly sad. If something happened to Silas, Nathaniel would be well and truly alone. He’d lose the only family he had left.