“We’ll take the west side of the house. You take the east,” said Gabriel. “Shout if you see anything and we’ll converge.”
Gabriel cleaned his blade on the gravel of the drive, stood, and followed his brother around the side of the house. Will headed the other way, followed by Jem, with Cecily and Tessa just behind them. Will paused at the corner of the house, scanning the gardens with his gaze, alert for any unusual sight or sound. A moment later, he beckoned for the others to follow.
As they moved forward, the heel of Tessa’s shoe caught on one of the loose bits of gravel beneath the hedges. She stumbled, and immediately righted herself, but Will glanced back, and scowled. “Tessa,” he said. There had been a time when he had called her Tess, but no longer. “You shouldn’t be with us. You’re not prepared. At least wait in the carriage.”
“I shan’t,” said Tessa mutinously.
Will turned back to Jem, who appeared to be hiding a smile. “Tessa’s your fiancée. You make her see sense.”
Jem, holding his sword-cane in one hand, moved across the gravel to her. “Tessa, do it as a favor to me, could you?”
“You don’t think I can fight,” Tessa said, drawing back and matching his silvery gaze with her own. “Because I’m a girl.”
“I don’t think you can fight because you’re wearing a wedding dress,” said Jem. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think Will could fight in that dress either.”
“Perhaps not,” said Will, who had ears like a bat’s. “But I would make a radiant bride.”
Cecily raised her hand to point into the distance. “What’s that?”
All four of them whirled to see a figure racing toward them. The sunlight was directly ahead, and for a moment, as Tessa’s eyes adjusted, all she saw was a blur. The blur quickly resolved itself into the figure of a running girl. Her hat was gone; her light brown hair flew on the wind. She was tall and bony, dressed in a bright fuchsia dress that had probably once been elegant but was now torn and bloodstained. She continued shrieking as she barreled toward them and threw herself into Will’s arms.
He staggered backward, nearly dropping Eremiel. “Tatiana—”
Tessa couldn’t quite tell if Will pushed her away or she drew back on her own, but either way Tatiana moved an inch or so away from Will, and Tessa could see her face for the first time. She was a narrow, angular girl. Her hair was sandy like Gideon’s, her eyes green like Gabriel’s, and she might have been pretty had her face not borne the lines of pinched disapproval. Even though she was tearstained and gasping, there was something theatrical about it, as if she were aware of all eyes on her—especially Will’s.
“A great monster,” she wept. “A creature—it seized darling Rupert from the carriage and made off with him!”
Will pushed her a bit farther away. “What do you mean ‘made off with him’?”
She pointed. “Th-there,” she sobbed. “It dragged him to the Italian gardens. He managed to elude its maw at first, but it harried him through the paths. No matter how much I screamed, it would not put him d-down!” She burst into a fresh wave of tears.
“You screamed,” Will said. “Is that all you did?”
“I screamed a great deal.” Tatiana sounded injured. She drew fully away from Will and fixed him with a green gaze. “I see you are as ungenerous as you ever were.” Her eyes skated to Tessa, Cecily, and Jem. “Mr. Carstairs,” she said stiffly, as if they were at a garden party. Her eyes narrowed as they fell on Cecily. “And you—”
“Oh, in the name of the Angel!” Will pushed past her; Jem, with a smile at Tessa, followed.
“You cannot be other than Will’s sister,” said Tatiana to Cecily as the boys vanished into the distance. Tessa she pointedly ignored.
Cecily looked at her incredulously. “I am, though I cannot imagine what difference it makes. Tessa—are you coming?”
“I am,” Tessa said, and joined her; whether Will wanted her there or not—or Jem either—she could not watch the two of them walk into danger and not want to be where they were. After a moment she heard Tatiana’s reluctant footsteps on the gravel behind her.
They were moving away from the house, toward the formal gardens half-hidden behind their high hedges. In the distance sunlight sparked off a wood-and-glass greenhouse with a cupola on the roof. It was a fine autumn day: There was a brisk wind, the smell of leaves in the air. Tessa heard a rustle and glanced at the house behind her. Its smooth white facade rose high, broken only by the arches of balconies.
“Will,” she whispered as he reached up and unlocked her hands from around his neck. He drew her gloves off, and they joined her mask and Jessie’s pins on the stone floor of the balcony. He pulled off his own mask next and cast it aside, running his hands through his damp black hair, pushing it back from his forehead. The lower edge of the mask had left marks across his high cheekbones, like light scars, but when she reached to touch them, he gently caught at her hands and pressed them down.
“No,” he said. “Let me touch you first. I have wanted …”
Blushing furiously, Tessa pulled her gaze away from the house and the memories it contained. The group had reached a gap in the hedges on their right. Through it what was clearly “the Italian garden” was visible, ringed round by foliage. Within the circle the garden was lined with rows of statuary depicting classical heroes and figures of myth. Venus poured water from an urn in a central fountain, while statues of great historians and statesmen—Caesar, Herodotus, Thucydides—regarded each other with blank eyes across the walkways that radiated out from the central point. There were also poets and playwrights. Tessa, hurrying along, passed Aristotle, Ovid, Homer—his eyes bound with a stone mask to indicate his blindness—Virgil and Sophocles, before an earsplitting scream rent the air.
She whirled around. Several feet behind her Tatiana was standing stock-still, her eyes bulging out of her head. Tessa dashed back toward her, the others on her heels; she reached the girl first, and Tatiana caught at her blindly, as if forgetting for the moment who Tessa was. “Rupert,” Tatiana moaned, staring ahead of her, and Tessa, following her gaze, saw a man’s boot protruding from behind a hedge. She thought for a moment that he must have been lying stunned upon the ground, the rest of his body hidden by foliage, but as she leaned forward, she realized that the boot—and the several inches of gnawed-upon, bloody flesh that protruded from the boot’s opening—were all there was to see.
“A forty-foot worm?” Will muttered to Jem as they moved through the Italian garden, their boots—thanks to a pair of Soundless runes—making no noise on the gravel. “Think of the size of the fish we could catch.”
Jem’s lips twitched. “It’s not funny, you know.”
“It is a bit.”
“You cannot reduce the situation to worm jokes, Will. This is Gabriel and Gideon’s father we’re discussing.”
“We’re not just discussing him; we’re chasing him through an ornamental sculpture garden because he’s turned into a worm.”
“A demonic worm,” said Jem, pausing to peer cautiously around a hedgerow. “A great serpent. Would that help your inappropriate humor?”