He had been going up to see the Blackwoods every few nights since Kit died.
He didn’t tell the Warden.
He told Adrian, because he couldn’t not tell Adrian; the sense between them made secrets difficult, and in any case Adrian always knew.
He went up through the tunnels after midnight, and through the empty streets of the Inner City, and climbed the stairs of the old building behind the National Library, and knocked on the door at the top, and Sarah let him in.
He told himself it was for the letters.
Arthur had dozens more, hundreds, the whole fifty-year correspondence between Abraham Van Helsing and Leopold Weiss, and Magnus wanted to read them all.
And he did read them, sitting at the kitchen table in the yellow lamplight while Arthur hovered over his shoulder, explaining, annotating, getting excited, getting distracted, telling stories about Victorian Vienna and Habsburg court politics and the time he had been thrown out of the Vatican Archives for trying to photograph a manuscript with his phone.
But it wasn’t for the letters.
Not really.
It was for the kitchen.
The lamplight.
The smell of coffee he could not taste and toast he could not eat.
Arthur’s endless, cheerful, rambling voice.
Sarah, home from a shift, in pajamas and an enormous cardigan, curled up on the sofa with a mug of tea, arguing with her father about whether Napoleon had been a genius or a sociopath.
It was for sitting in a warm, human, ordinary room, with people who were alive, and who were not afraid of him, and who did not want anything from him at all.
“You know what you are?” Sarah said, on the fifth night.
She had been watching him across the room for a while, over the top of her mug.
“You’re homesick.” Magnus looked up from the letter he was reading.
“I never had a home,” he said.
“I know.
That’s what I mean.” She smiled a little sadly.
“You’re homesick for something you never had.
It’s the worst kind.” She had been suspended, pending investigation, for the missing blood.
She hadn’t told him that.
Arthur had.
She had gone in the morning after the stairwell and told her supervisor that she had made a stock-control error and was very sorry, and they had sent her home on full pay while they looked into it.
She did not seem very worried.
She seemed, if anything, a little relieved.
“I’ve been a nurse for six years,” she said, when Magnus finally asked her about it.
“I’m good at it.
I like it.
But I’ve always felt like I was waiting for something else.
Something that mattered more.” She shrugged.
“Mum used to say I had a hero complex.
She was probably right.” “What happened to your mum?” Sarah looked into her tea.
“Cancer,” she said.
“Four years ago.
Pancreatic.
It was quick.” She was quiet for a moment.
“I nursed her at the end.
At home.
Dad couldn’t.
He sat in the next room and read his manuscripts and I could hear him crying through the wall.” Another pause.
“That’s when he really went all in on the Dracula stuff.
Before, it was a hobby.
After, it was all there was.” She looked across at her father, who was asleep in his armchair with a book open on his chest and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead.
“I think he needed something that couldn’t die.” Magnus looked at the old man, asleep.
Then at Sarah.
Then down at the letter in his hands.
Van Helsing, in 1906, writing to his friend about the heart in the cellar, beating, beating, beating.
“I know what that’s like,” he said.
The Northerners came on the seventh night.
Magnus felt them a second before they hit.
Not with the blood-sense.
With the second heart, which went suddenly, violently cold in his chest, the way it had gone cold in the great hall of the Ashen Court when Vasily’s lantern came up the mountain road.
Tap.
Sharp.
A warning.
And then, through the blood-sense, all at once, like a door slamming open in a cold wind: twenty presences.
Old, and cold, and very close.
On the roof.
On the stairs.
In the street.
And something else.
Something that was not a vampire, and not a ghoul, and not a human, and that the blood-sense did not know how to read at all.
Hot.
Wild.
Huge.
A heartbeat like a drum.
“Sarah,” he said, standing up.
“Wake your father.
Get him into the bathroom.
Lock the door.
Don’t come out.” She stared at him.
She had been reading.
She put the book down very slowly.
“What is it?” The window exploded inward.
The first Northerner came through the window in a spray of glass, and Magnus was there to meet him.
He did not think.
He moved.
He caught the man by the front of his gray greatcoat in midair and spun and threw him back out of the window the way he had come in, three stories down onto the cobbles of the street below, and turned to meet the second, who was coming through the door.
The door had not been opened.
It had been torn off its hinges.
The second Northerner came through it with a long, heavy, curved knife in each hand, and behind him on the stairs Magnus saw three more, and behind them, more.
“Bathroom!” he shouted.
“Now!” He heard Sarah drag her father out of the armchair.
Heard Arthur, half asleep, saying What—what on earth—.
Heard the bathroom door slam and the bolt shoot home.
Then he stopped hearing anything at all except the knives.
It was not like Prague.
In Prague he had been new, and starving, and alone, and he had fought like an animal, on instinct, throwing everything he had at everything that came at him until there was nothing left.
He had learned since then.
He had learned from the Northerner’s blood, the soldier’s memories, the long hall of ice and the men drilling in it.
He had learned from Ferrante’s blood, the patience, the precision.
He had learned from Elena Ward, on the roof of the cathedral, who fought like a chess player.
And he had learned, without ever meaning to, from Kit and the Sunday football in the luminous sand, how to hold his strength in, and let it out a little at a time, exactly when it was needed.
He fought the Northerners the way Elena had fought him.
One move at a time.
Watching.
Waiting.
Making them come to him.
The second Northerner went down with both knives broken and both arms broken and his face pressed into the floorboards.
The third and fourth came at him together, and he stepped into the shadow of the bookcase and came out of the shadow of the kitchen door behind them and put their heads together, hard, and they went down.
The fifth had a rifle.
Silver rounds.
Magnus heard the bolt work.
He reached out, through the blood-sense, and found the man’s blood, and took hold of it, just for a moment, just enough, and squeezed, and the man gasped and dropped the rifle and went down on his knees, clutching his chest.
He was holding back.
He knew he was.
He could have killed all five of them, in the time it took to breathe.
The voice in his blood was telling him to.
Kill them.
Drink them.
Grow.
He did not.
He did not because of the old man and the young woman locked in the bathroom behind him, and because this was their home, and because he would not have them come out and find it full of bodies.
And because, every time he used the blood, he felt the second heart surge, and he knew, now, because of Lyra and Mordane’s memo, that somewhere in England, two hundred feet under a country house, another heart was surging with it.
And listening.
And pointing toward him.
The flat was full of broken furniture and moaning Northerners and the cold, sharp smell of their blood.
Magnus stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, and listened for more on the stairs.
There were none.
The stairs were empty.
And then, from the street below, through the broken window, he heard the sound of chains.
He went to the window and looked down.
The street behind the National Library was narrow, cobbled, lined with old buildings, lit by old-fashioned iron lamps.
At this hour, it should have been empty.
It was not.
There were a dozen Northerners standing in it, in a loose ring, in their gray coats, looking up at him.
And in the center of the ring, standing a little apart from the others, was Vasily.
Magnus knew him at once, though he had only seen him for a few seconds, six weeks ago, as a burning shape running into the snow.
He knew the shape of the scars.
The tight, shiny, pink skin, pulled taut across the cheekbones and the corners of the eyes.
He knew the smell of him.
And Vasily knew him, too.
Magnus saw it.
Saw the burned face go very still, and then twist into something that was not quite a smile.
Vasily held a chain in one gloved hand.
A long, heavy chain of silver links, each one as thick as a finger.
It ran across the cobbles to the center of the ring.
And at the end of it, in the lamplight, something was standing up.
It had been lying down.
Crouched, low, on the cobbles, in the shadow of the ring of vampires.
Magnus had not seen it from the window.
Now it rose, slowly, uncoiling, and kept rising, and rising, and Magnus’s two hearts beat once, together, very hard.
It was a wolf.
It was not a wolf.
It was the size of a horse.
Larger.
Its shoulders were level with the top of the iron lamp beside it.
Its fur was gray, a pale, silvery, moonlit gray, thick and long and matted and filthy, hanging in ragged clumps from a body so thin that Magnus could count its ribs from three stories up.
Its head was enormous, longer than his arm, with a muzzle full of yellow teeth as long as his fingers.
And around its neck, and its four legs, and its jaws, were bands of silver.
Collars.
Wide, heavy, gleaming bands of pure silver, locked tight, so tight that the fur beneath them had burned away, and the skin beneath the fur had blistered and scarred and blistered again, over and over, until it was raw and weeping and black.
It lifted its great head and looked up at him.
Its eyes were gold.
Not the red of a vampire’s eyes.
Not the flat gloss of a ghoul’s.
Gold, deep and bright and burning, like the eyes of the wolves on the ridge above the Borgo Pass in Van Helsing’s letter.
And they were full of hate.
“The Voivode’s hound,” said Vasily, in Russian, looking up at Magnus.
His voice was soft.
“We caught her in the Urals, nine years ago, when she was young and foolish and strayed too far from her pack.
She has been tracking for us ever since.
She can smell a vampire across a city.
She smelled you from Poland.” He wrapped the chain once round his fist.
“She does not like vampires very much.
Not after nine years in silver.” A pause.
“And your little trick, the one that made the ghouls of Vienna stop, the one the whole world is talking about.
It does not work on her.
She is not of the blood.
She is not of anything you can command.” He let go of the chain.
The wolf came up the side of the building.
Not through the door.
Up the wall.
Three stories of old Viennese stone, and she went up it like a cat up a tree, her huge claws gouging long white scars in the stone, and came through the broken window in a single leap, and filled the room.
She hit Magnus like a train.
He went backward through the kitchen table and into the wall and through the wall into the hallway, plaster and lath exploding around him, and she came after him, snarling, snapping, her great jaws closing an inch from his face.
She was fast.
She was so fast.
Faster than the Northerners.
Faster than Ferrante.
And she was strong in a way that nothing he had ever fought had been strong: not the cold, efficient strength of a vampire, but something hot and wild and animal, all muscle and fury and nine years of hate.
He reached for her blood, out of instinct, the way he had reached for the fifth Northerner’s.
It was like reaching into a fire.
Her blood was not like a vampire’s.
It was not cold and slow and listening.
It was hot and fast and wild and it did not answer him at all.
It burned his mind like grabbing a live wire, and he snatched himself back with a gasp, and her jaws closed on his shoulder.
He screamed.
Her teeth went through the muscle to the bone.
It was not like a vampire’s bite.
There was something in her teeth, in her saliva, something that burned like the silver in the cathedral roof bullets, and the wound did not close.
It stayed open, and bled, and burned.
Kill her, said the voice in his blood.
Loud.
Urgent.
Afraid, for the first time.
Kill her now.
She is not ours.
She cannot be held.
Kill her before she kills you.
He got a hand on her throat.
On the silver collar.
It burned his palm, the way the iron cross had burned it.
He held on anyway, and pushed, and her jaws came off his shoulder, and for a second they were face to face, in the wreck of the hallway, with her teeth an inch from his eyes and her gold eyes blazing.
And he saw her.
Under the hate.
Under the fury.
Under the nine years of silver and starvation and chains.
He saw what was in those eyes, the way he had seen it in Mara’s eyes in the market, and Irina’s in the armory, and his own in the bathroom mirror of the safe flat every night for five years in the Ashen Court.
She was a prisoner.
She was a prisoner, and she was being made to hunt, by her jailers, on a chain.
And she hated him, not because of anything he had done, but because he smelled like them.
Magnus didn’t kill her.
He moved his hand from her throat to the silver collar, and took hold of it, with both hands, and the silver burned his palms to the bone.
He did not let go.
He reached down inside himself, past the burning, past the voice screaming kill her, to the place where Ferrante’s blood lived, the patient, intricate, precise knowledge of blood, and he called his own blood up into his hands, through the burns, and into the silver.
The collar went red.
Then white.
Then it cracked, with a sound like a church bell breaking, and fell apart in his hands in four smoking pieces, and clattered to the floor.
The wolf froze.
Magnus didn’t stop.
He reached down, with his ruined hands, and found the band on her left foreleg, and broke that too.
Then the right.
Then the back legs.
Then the muzzle-band, the last one, the one around her jaws, and that was the hardest, because her jaws were right there, and her teeth, and she could have taken his face off at any moment.
She didn’t.
She stood perfectly still, in the wreck of the hallway, trembling, while he broke the last of her chains.
He could see the raw black burns underneath, where the silver had been for nine years.
He could see her ribs.
He could hear her heart, huge and hot and pounding, like a drum.
When it was done, he stepped back, and held up his hands, burned black to the wrists, open, empty.
“Go,” he said quietly.
“You’re free.
Go home.” The wolf looked at him for a long, long moment with her burning gold eyes.
Then she lowered her great head, slowly, toward him, and breathed in.
Long and deep.
Smelling him.
His burned hands.
His bleeding shoulder.
His chest, where the second heart was beating.
And she changed.
It was very quick and very strange.
The great gray shape seemed to fold in on itself, like smoke drawing in, like a cloak being gathered.
The fur thinned and shrank.
The bones shifted, with a sound like knuckles cracking.
And then there was a woman crouched on the floor of the wrecked hallway, where the wolf had been.
She was tall, and terribly thin, wrapped in a ragged gray shift that might once have been a hospital gown or a prisoner’s smock.
Her hair was long and silver-gray, though her face was young, and it hung around her in a matted curtain to her waist.
There were burns around her neck, and her wrists, and her ankles, black and raw, the same burns the wolf had worn, in the same places.
Her eyes were still gold.
She looked up at him from the floor, and spoke.
Her voice was hoarse, unused, as if it had not spoken words for a long time.
It was in Russian, but an old Russian, a strange one, with words in it Magnus had never heard.
The second heart understood it anyway.
“You smell of the King,” she said.
Magnus didn’t move.
“The Wolf Mother told us,” she whispered.
“When I was a cub.
The King who wore iron.
The one who made the promise, under the moon, in the old days.
Who kept it.” Her gold eyes searched his face.
“They said he was dead.
They said his people killed him and broke the promise and blamed us.” She breathed in again, slowly, shakily.
“But you smell of him.
You smell of the promise.” “I don’t know anything about a promise,” said Magnus.
“I’m sorry.
I don’t know what you mean.” She stared at him.
Then something happened in her thin, young, burned face.
Something that was not quite a smile.
“You broke my chains,” she said.
“The King kept promises.
Perhaps you will learn.” And before he could say anything else, she was a wolf again, gray and huge and gone, out through the broken window, over the rooftops, into the dark, so fast that by the time he reached the window she was already a shape on a roof three streets away, and then nothing at all.
From far off, very far, over the rooftops of Vienna, a single long howl rose into the winter sky.
It went on for a long time.
And every dog in the city answered it.
Vasily was still in the street.
The other Northerners had scattered when the hound came up the wall.
They had seen her break free; they had heard the howl.
They were not cowards, the Northerners, but they had kept that wolf in silver for nine years, and they knew what she would do to them if she ever found them again.
Most of them were already running.
Vasily wasn’t.
He stood alone in the middle of the street under the iron lamp, with the silver chain still coiled round his fist, its end trailing loose on the cobbles.
He was looking up at the window.
At Magnus.
Magnus stepped out of the window, and fell three stories, and landed on the cobbles in front of him without a sound.
Vasily didn’t run.
Magnus saw him think about it.
Saw the scarred face twitch, saw the red eyes go to the alley behind him, to the shadows.
And then saw him decide not to.
“You burned my face,” said Vasily, in Russian.
“In the castle.” “Bogdan burned your face,” said Magnus.
“After you broke his neck.
You remember Bogdan?
The old ghoul at the top of the cellar stairs?
The one you killed?” Vasily’s face didn’t change.
“I remember,” he said.
“I remember everything.
The Voivode trains us to remember.” He let the chain fall from his fist.
It clattered on the stones.
“He’ll come for you himself now.
You know that.
After this.
He’s been waiting for you a long time.
Longer than you know.” “Then he can come.” Vasily laughed.
It was a strange sound, cracked and painful, through his stiff scarred lips.
Then he drew a knife from his coat, and came at Magnus, without a word, the way a soldier does when he knows it is over and has decided to die on his feet.
It was very quick.
Afterward, Magnus knelt on the cobbles beside him, in the lamplight, and looked at his face for a long moment.
Then he bent his head, and drank.
He didn’t decide to do it.
That was the thing that frightened him, again, the way it always did.
His hands were burned black to the wrists from the silver, and his shoulder was torn open to the bone and would not heal, the wolf’s bite still burning in it, and he had used more blood in the last ten minutes than he had used since Prague, and he was so hungry.
So hungry.
And Vasily was old, and his blood was the cold clean blood of the North.
It went down into Magnus like a glacier.
Like the first Northerner, in the great hall of the Ashen Court, but older, deeper, colder.
It went into his hands and he felt the silver burns begin to close.
It went into his shoulder and he felt the wolf-bite, slowly, begin to cool.
And it brought memories.
The long hall of ice.
The throne of antlers.
The Voivode, huge and still and flat-faced, in his gray greatcoat.
A night in winter, some winter, any winter, every winter.
A low door in the salt wall, and a small cold room beyond it, and a wooden chair.
And the Voivode, sitting in the chair, all night, without moving, in front of something hanging on the wall.
Magnus could not see what it was.
Vasily had never been allowed into the room.
He had only glimpsed it, once, through the door, as the Voivode went in.
A bar.
Old and black and pitted.
Iron.
As long as a man was tall.
Magnus came back to himself kneeling on the cobbles of the street behind the National Library, with Vasily white and empty beside him and the taste of the North in his mouth and the image of that iron bar burned into his mind.
He didn’t know what it meant.
He didn’t know why it frightened him so much.
He only knew that the second heart in his chest, which had been quiet all night, was now beating very hard.
Like a fist on a door.
Like someone, somewhere very deep, trying very hard to make him understand something.
The gate, it seemed to be saying.
The gate.
The gate.
Above him, at the broken window, Sarah Blackwood was leaning out, white-faced, staring down at him.
Behind her, her father, in his pajamas, with his spectacles crooked, holding a fire poker in both hands like a sword.
“Is it over?” Sarah called down.
Her voice was shaking.
Magnus looked at the empty street.
At the broken silver chain on the cobbles.
At the rooftops, where a wolf had gone.
And away to the west, very far, two hundred feet under a country house in England, he knew that another heart had just beaten, hard, in a golden box, and that somewhere, someone was watching a screen and marking a point on a map.
“No,” he said.
“I don’t think it is.”