Laila woke with a start. Her dreams had been fitful, and that alone set her ill at ease.
The Pendulum had not quite begun its return arc to cast the light of day, and even in the depths of this bitter winter the room felt warm. Knowing she would not get back to sleep, she rose. The cold be damned.
Armed with a candle and a nightgown, she made her way downstairs. The manor was running through its morning checklist: Lambert’s prayers, Ursula’s kitchen, Cedric’s shuffling patter.
A sharp pang of panic hit her as she realised she was trying to hear things unheard. She moved quickly to the nursery.
Guarding the candle against the winter draught, she cracked the door and peered inside. The only disturbance was the gentle breathing of an infant at rest, and the occasional snore from Greta.
Safe. Nerves calmed, she shuffled back downstairs, hoping that some of Wylan’s coffee from yesterday had survived the night. It had, though not gracefully. Tea would not do.
Laila sat in the breakfast nook with barely warmed coffee. It did more to put her at ease in her hands than it would in her stomach.
Perhaps an hour passed. More movement in the manor: a cry from Aurora breaking the hush like a tempest, such that her father was roused to intervene, nanny or no. The crying did not easily abate, despite the combined efforts of nanny and father. It had even woken Wylan, against his considerable wishes.
Hearing Maximilian and Wylan’s brief morning spat, and Greta’s intervention, she exhaled. Three children, all accounted for.
She stopped. Started again.
Three.
Guilt and concern lashed her both at once. She stood carefully, and found herself drawn inexorably upstairs. An invisible tether dragged her without stay.
She knocked gently at Isabella’s door, knowing her daughter would have heard her coming.
No answer.
She knocked again. The silence that came back was not sleep and not refusal. It was emptiness. Laila knew the difference between a house settling and a footstep on the stair.
She opened the door.
The bed had not been slept in. The covers were undisturbed, the pillow undented, the small stack of books on the nightstand precisely where they had been yesterday. The room was arranged neutrally: left abandoned rather than lived in. Isabella’s coat hung on its hook. Her boots stood paired by the wardrobe. Her brush, her mirror, her writing case: all present, all accounted for, all useless as evidence.
Most of Isabella’s effects were here. That was the problem.
Laila crossed the room, retrieved the step ladder from the corner, and set it against the wardrobe. She had done this before. She climbed, steadied herself, and felt along the top where the dust was thickest and where Isabella, she was certain, did not know she checked.
The adventuring satchel was gone.
Laila stood on the step ladder in her nightgown in her daughter’s empty room and understood. Not missing. Gone. Packed light, taken only what she needed, and gone.
Something stirred at the edge of her vision.
On the far wall, cast by nothing, a shadow peeled itself from the skirting board and rose, thin and dark and articulate, until it stood at roughly the height of a child. It had no features, no substance, but it moved with purpose. A silhouette, gesturing with small precise hands.
Laila’s breath caught. She knew Saffron’s work when she saw it.
“What have you done with my daughter?”
The silhouette shook its head rapidly. Its hands fluttered, and she realised it was signing. Cruder than the language she had taught Isabella, but legible.
Gone. Not taken.
“Gone where?” she demanded.
The servitor shifted. Its shape became that of a siren, and off to the side a shadowed door stretched along the wall. The silhouette stepped through it.
“I didn’t ask for a puppet play.”
Another hand flutter. Watch. You learn.
The shadow dashed across the wall toward the door at the plaster’s limits. As it ran, the shape shed its form, no longer a person, and billowed into a pirate’s flag fluttering at its mast.
“Captain Voltari,” Laila said, with ice on her voice.
The silhouette returned to its former shape and nodded, unhelpfully.
“So she just left? To become a pirate? Why?”
The silhouette shrugged, and then in an exaggerated manner opened its mouth.
An echo of speech drifted into the room, distant, heard from the far end of a long corridor. But she recognised the voices.
“What should I tell the rest of your family?” Saffron.
“Tell them what they need to hear: goodbye.” Unmistakably Isabella.
The silhouette bowed, a strange and courtly gesture that was all Saffron and none of Isabella, and sank back into the skirting board. The wall was just a wall again.
The breakfast table had been set for five.
Cedric’s work, as always: silent, precise, and ahead of the household by a comfortable margin. Five places, five settings, the napkins folded into the crisp triangles he considered the minimum standard of civilisation. Isabella’s place was nearest the window, where she preferred it, with the sightline to the garden door that she thought nobody had noticed and everybody had.
Laila sat with her cold coffee and did not correct the table.
Maximilian arrived first, buttoning his cuffs, his hair still damp. He nodded to his mother, sat, reached for the coffee pot, and began the morning’s quiet negotiations with Aurora’s breakfast requirements via Greta, who appeared at the appropriate interval with the child and a cloth for the inevitable aftermath.
Lambert came next. He had already been up for hours, and it showed in the stillness of him: washed, dressed, prayer beads at his wrist, the Hyperion book under his arm. He set it beside his plate, a place normally reserved for morning newspapers, and unfolded his napkin without speaking.
Wylan was last, and least prepared. He had been woken by an infant’s tantrum and had not yet forgiven the world for it. He surveyed the table, the coffee, the faces, and the empty place setting by the window.
“Isn’t Isabella going to join us?”
“No,” Laila said.
“I can go and fetch her. Might be nice for us all to have a breakfast together. Been a while since I’ve been awake for one.”
Laila set her cup down.
“Your sister won’t be joining us today. I’m afraid she’s left.”
The table went quiet. The held-breath quiet of something about to break.
“What do you mean, left?” Maximilian said.
“I mean she didn’t come home last night, and she won’t again. It seems she has gone and joined Captain Voltari on her ship.”
The silence lasted two seconds. Then it didn’t.
Maximilian’s chair scraped back. Wylan’s voice cut across his. Lambert started to speak and was drowned out. The questions came in a tangle, overlapping, sharp. A family discovering the world has changed shape while they were sleeping.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And nobody thought to wake me?”
“I only found out this morning.”
“She didn’t even say goodbye!” Wylan’s voice cracked on the last word, and the room flinched.
“Yes, she did,” Laila said.
She reached into the pocket of her nightgown and produced a small pouch of green pigment. She opened it, dipped her fingers, and drew a quick symbol on the tablecloth. The air above the table shivered, and a sound drifted into the room, faint and distant, an echo heard from the far end of a long corridor.
“What should I tell the rest of your family?” Saffron, unmistakable.
“Tell them what they need to hear: goodbye.” And Isabella, just as clear.
The echo faded and the pigment dulled on the cloth. Nobody moved.
“But what does this mean for the Accords?” Lambert said.
“Lambert.” Laila’s voice carried a warning.
“I’m serious. If she’s gone, aren’t we exposed again?”
“I don’t know.” Laila closed her eyes and opened them. “I’m just trying to get through this breakfast.”
At that, the family turned their eyes down to the food that had just arrived. The staff served with the studied efficiency of people who had heard everything and were determined to have opinions about none of it.
They ate, but they ate in silence.
Laila sent three letters that day.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The first went to Isadora, care of the Autumn Embassy. The second to Saffron, at the Beaumont residence. The third to Manor Polidori, above the Catacombs. She paused after sealing the last one. Three letters to the extended family. She found it strange that each one served a different political function, and stranger still that she could not tell where the politics ended and the grief began.
The household moved around her. Lambert retreated to the chapel. Wylan disappeared into the workshop, each offering reverence to their own edifices. Maximilian dealt with Aurora, and with the correspondence that a duke could not ignore because his family was falling apart.
Laila checked equipment. She restocked her pigments, packed her dagger, her materials, all without thinking. Her hands knew the work and her mind was elsewhere.
The first reply came before noon, by messenger. Brief, practical, and carrying the faint scent of tobacco. Isabella had come to Freight Expectations late in the evening. Guillaume had arranged passage to Havralis. She had walked through a door and not looked back.
The second arrived by Embassy courier in the early afternoon. Isadora’s handwriting, careful and diplomatic. Isabella had formally relinquished her claims to the Autumn Court before she left. Nereus had accepted. Whatever obligation the Merovian Accords had held over her daughter, Isabella had severed it herself.
Between them, a picture formed. Her daughter had signed away her title, walked out of the city, and gone looking for a ship. Not captured. Not coerced. Not lost. Chosen.
Laila folded both letters, placed them in her writing case, and closed it.
The third reply came after dusk, carried by a pale boy with dark eyes who waited at the servants’ entrance and left without being offered tea. Cedric, who offered tea to everyone, had not offered tea to this one. The note was in Seraphina’s hand, in ink that caught the lamplight strangely. The way is ready. That was all it said.
By then, the household had done its work. Packs stood by the front door, arranged to the household’s usual standard, because expectations did not lower simply because the family was descending into a vampire tomb. Wylan’s satchel was full, his bracer packed with vials. Lambert’s cloak was draped over the banister, and beneath it, the shape of Caliburn wrapped in velvet. Despite its weight, its presence hung over them waiting to drop.
Laila read Seraphina’s reply once more, folded it, and stood.
It would not be the first time she or the family had to set aside their grief in the face of adventure.
Maximilian stood at the front door. The household had gathered in the entrance hall. They had done this before and wished they didn’t have to do it again. Cedric held the door and Elariana stood to one side, armed and not invited, her expression carefully neutral about that fact.
“Bring him back,” Maximilian said. He meant Esteban, but his eyes moved across the three of them and the inventory was broader than that.
“We will,” Laila said.
“And try not to get killed by our grandmother.”
“We’ll do our best.”
Maximilian looked at the packs, the cloaks, the shape of the sword under Lambert’s wrappings. Wylan watched his brother take stock. The duke who stayed home while the rest of the family descended into the dark.
“I could come,” he said. “Cedric can manage. Greta has Aurora. I don’t want to be stuck here playing house again while you three go off and—”
“Yes,” Laila said. “You’re playing House de Vaillant.”
Maximilian’s mouth twitched, and he stepped back from the door.
The carriage was waiting in the courtyard. They climbed in, three where there should have been four, and the door closed behind them. The driver knew the route to the Catacombs. Nobody examined that too closely.
? Carriage drivers are not paid enough to ask questions, but they are paid enough to remember routes. The distinction is considered a professional courtesy.
The city passed in darkness. The empty moon offered nothing, and the Pendulum’s arc had carried the last of the daylight west hours ago. The streets were lit by lamplight and little else, the cold pressing against the carriage windows, patient, with every intention of following them underground. Wylan watched the streetlamps pass and tried to decide whether he was nervous or excited. Both, probably. The distinction had never been especially useful.
Wylan broke the silence first. “So… another Dungeon.”
“Don’t,” Laila said.
“I was going to say something encouraging.”
“Don’t do that either.”
Lambert’s mouth thinned. Wylan pressed on regardless, because Wylan always pressed on regardless.
“Last time we went underground, we fought a giant beetle, nearly died in a lake, got seduced by haunted bells, and discovered our family was a breeding experiment. I’m just saying, expectations should be managed.”
“Need I remind you that our Dungeon was harrowing,” Laila said. “I don’t know what to expect from this one. By all accounts we are walking into a tomb that contains R?zvan.”
“Waking up vampires from a long-sealed Dungeon is starting to become family tradition,” Wylan said.
“Wylie!”
The carriage rattled over cobblestones and the lamplight outside strobed through the windows.
“Can we trust her?” Wylan said. “Seraphina. Honestly.”
Lambert treated this as a theological question, which meant considering it longer than it probably warranted.
“Probably,” he said. “So long as our interests align. The moment they diverge, she will likely act in her own interests, just as we would.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
The carriage slowed. Through the window, the familiar shape of Manor Polidori rose against the dark, its crumbling fa?ade committed to its long performance of neglect. Below it, the Catacombs entrance gaped like a mouth that had forgotten how to close.
They stepped out into the cold and into torchlight.
Half the court had assembled at the entrance. Seraphina’s retinue stood in formal arrangement, flanking the archway in two rows, and for the first time in the family’s acquaintance they were dressed. Winter furs, heavy and dark, collared and clasped, and the effect was striking: the most modest the family had ever seen them, which said more about the family’s previous visits than about the furs. One of them had a tattoo visible above his collar that Wylan chose not to read.
Seraphina stood at the centre of it all, untouched by the cold, dressed in something dark and ancient that moved when she did and stayed still when she didn’t. She regarded the three of them as they approached, and her smile was a fireplace: pleasant, contained, and backed by something that could burn the house down.
“My grandchildren. How wonderful.” Her gaze counted them. “Wasn’t there one more of you before? Oh yes, the siren. Is she not joining us?”
Wylan saw Laila’s hand close around her pigment pouch. “No. You just have us tonight.”
“Then perhaps it is good that I am joining you after all. Four is a much better number for Dungeons than three.”
She turned and gestured toward the entrance with a sweep that was pure theatre, and the retinue parted. Torchlight caught the stonework and threw long shadows down the stairs. The stairs had no interest in return journeys.
Seraphina caught Laila’s eye as they approached the steps. “I trust you have the obol?”
“We do.”
“Then we have no reason to linger.” She was already descending. “Come.”
They descended into the Catacombs.
The air changed within the first dozen steps, just as it had the first time. Not just colder but thicker. The earth had opinions about visitors and was not shy about sharing them. The lamplight Seraphina carried barely reached the walls, and what it found there it regretted.
Bones. Stacked with precision, skulls set into alcoves at regular intervals, femurs laid in radiating geometric patterns. The work of craftsmen who had long since stopped thinking about what they were working with and had started thinking about symmetry instead. Wylan remembered this part. The court filed through behind them in disciplined silence, furs brushing the narrow walls, torchlight multiplying off bone until the procession threw a hundred shadows down the corridor.
Seraphina moved through the labyrinth without hesitation, taking turns that seemed arbitrary and were anything but. Left, right, through a passage that narrowed until Lambert’s shoulders nearly brushed the stacked dead on either side, then into chambers where bones had been arranged into vaulted arches overhead. Wylan tried to track the route and after the fifth turn stopped bothering. Without Seraphina, they would not find their way back. That had been true last time, and trusting a vampire with your sense of direction did not improve with practice.
The miasma was worse. Last time it had threaded along the floor in wisps, curious and retreating. Tonight it pooled at their ankles and did not retreat, pressing against their boots like rising water, and the deeper they descended the thicker it became. Something had changed down here. Something knew they were coming.
The corridors tightened, widened, tightened again. The bones gave way to raw stone, then to something older, carved surfaces worn smooth by water or time or both. The air grew heavier, dense with moisture and the mineral tang of earth that had not seen the surface in a very long time.
They descended the final staircase and emerged into the grotto.
The ceiling vaulted high enough to swallow the torchlight before it reached the top. Water seeped down the walls in thin, glinting threads, feeding patches of moss that glowed faintly in colours Wylan had no name for. At the centre, half-reclaimed by the earth, the Sepulchre fa?ade stood where they had left it: carved pillars flanking an archway that led to nothing visible, script running along the lintel in dense recursive characters, the omega symbol cut into the keystone. The air in front of the archway was still and neither cold, nor warm. Measured, as though the archway were holding its breath.
The miasma here was thick enough to wade through. It curled around the base of the fa?ade, eddying against the plinth like dark water against a pier.
The court fanned out across the grotto and took their positions. Torches were planted in crevices and the formation was ceremonial, deliberate, a semicircle of winter furs and pale faces who had rehearsed this. Seraphina’s show of force. Whatever came out of the Sepulchre when it opened would find the court of Polidori waiting for it.
Seraphina produced a parchment from somewhere within her furs. The document was dense, its archaic lettering weaving a pattern of intrigue and uncertainty, or possibly just very old ink and enthusiastic penmanship. Her night name already shimmered at the bottom in something that was either red ink or something unnervingly similar.
“Our agreement,” she said, holding it open. “I guide you to the centre of the Sepulchre. In return, I receive the obol upon your safe return.”
Lambert stepped forward. “Before we sign. When you say the centre, do you mean where Lampetia is?”
Seraphina’s smile thinned. “I do not know precisely where Lampetia rests. The Sepulchre changes. I have not been inside.” She let that settle. “I believe our paths will converge. I cannot promise it.”
“You’ve never been inside,” Laila said. It was not a question.
“No.”
“And yet you’re offering to guide us.”
“I know more about what lies within than anyone living. Or unliving, for that matter.” Seraphina had studied this door for decades without opening it, and her voice carried every one of them. “I am the best guide you will find, which I appreciate is not the same as a good one.”
Laila took the parchment. This was the second supernatural contract they had been asked to sign in two days. Yesterday, divine. Tonight, vampiric. The pattern was not reassuring. Lambert read over her shoulder. The language was archaic, formal, deliberately overwrought with clauses that compounded upon clauses. Wylan caught fragments as Laila tilted the page toward the torchlight. In perpetuity. Bound by terms herein. Surrender of the artefact upon completion of the stated purpose.
“It’s dense,” Laila said. “And far too verbose. But the core is as she says.” She looked up. “With one amendment.”
Seraphina’s expression did not change, which was itself telling.
“The obol stays in the plinth,” Laila said. “It holds the portal open. Your court guards it. And you receive it only once all members of the party have emerged safely from the Sepulchre. All of us. Not some.”
The grotto was quiet. The miasma curled.
“You have grown into the role of de Vaillant matriarch after all,” Seraphina said. It was unclear whether this was a compliment, but she inclined her head. “Agreed. The terms are acceptable.”
Wylan was already reaching for the parchment. He pricked his finger without ceremony, a bead of blood forming, and pressed it to the page like he was signing a guest book. His name bloomed in vivid crimson across the page. He looked pleased about this.
Laila signed next, her face the same careful mask she’d worn through breakfast. Lambert lingered a moment longer, testing the weight of his mark before committing it. The blood sizzled against the page and his name joined the others in red. The parchment looked satisfied.
Laila caught Wylan’s eye as he stepped back.
“We are going to have a conversation about your enthusiasm for blood rituals,” she said.
“It’s thematic,” Wylan said.
Seraphina rolled the parchment with an air of satisfaction and turned to the fa?ade.
The obsidian mirror waited beside the archway, its surface shimmering faintly in the torchlight.
“The obol,” she said.
Lambert produced it from his coat. He crossed the grotto and placed the coin into the indent on the plinth. It clicked into place.
A vibration moved through the grotto. In the air itself, a low harmonic Wylan felt in his teeth and behind his eyes. The script along the lintel flared, each character igniting in sequence from left to right. The omega symbol pulsed once, twice. And the obsidian mirror came alive.
Its surface rippled and churned, spilling forth a thick, inky void that swallowed the surrounding torchlight. The portal opened onto a darkness that knew it was being looked at.
The court stirred, a murmur running through the formation, quickly suppressed.
Seraphina turned to her people. “You remain here. Guard the plinth. Let nothing enter, and let nothing leave. Your unlife depends on it.”
The court settled into stillness. The obol sat in the plinth, doing more diplomatic work than any coin had a right to. Beyond the portal’s edge, Wylan could make out the silhouettes of something vast.
Augustine stepped out of the formation. He had been standing with the others, furred and formal, but his posture had been wrong for a guard all evening. He crossed to Wylan and adjusted the collar of his coat, a small and oddly domestic gesture, then brushed dust from his shoulder that was not there.
“Come back,” he said.
Oh.
Wylan’s hands, which knew what to do with reagents and mechanisms and problems with measurable solutions, did not know what to do with this.
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
Augustine stepped back into the formation. The torchlight caught his face and then let it go.
Seraphina caught Laila’s eye.
“Children, eh?” she said. “So much enthusiasm.”
Laila said nothing, but her expression softened a fraction, and Wylan was not sure his mother should be finding common ground with a woman who had used her children as chess pieces.
Seraphina turned to the portal. “Shall we?”
They stepped through into the dark.