With the quick grace of a dancer, Ambrose lunges and catches me, arresting my fall.
I blink up at him, my astonishment mirroring his own as he pulls me back to my feet.
"Alright, little wolf?" he asks, eyes searching mine.
I nod, hands still bunched in the front of his shirt as I cling to him. With an effort, I make myself take a breath and let go.
"Yes, I'm fine," I assure him. "But I guess you weren't kidding about those hidden doors and secret passageways, huh?"
Together, we turn and inspect the opening that had appeared at my back.
It's a small, rectangular portion of wall, which had detached from the rest and swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a patch of darkness beyond.
"No, I wasn't," he agrees. "Though I admit I did not expect the full cliché."
Freeing myself from his grasp, I retrieve the flashlight from where it had fallen in our excitement and turn it on the unexpected doorway.
Stepping through, I see that the 'passageway' is simply the space between walls, barely two-feet wide, but extending in either direction into the dark. Exposed crossbeams and plain wood panels, thick with dust, are revealed beneath the flashlight's unforgivingly bright beam.
The cold, stale air within is sour with the bite of age and a hint of decay, as of small, dead things, and I suppress a sneeze in the crook of my arm.
"Noah, love," Ambrose says, resting a hand on my lower back, "let's leave it for now. We're neither of us in top form at the moment, and it's going nowhere. We'll have your brother here in the morning, and do a proper search."
"It's Freya we'll want," I comment, scrubbing at my itchy nose with my sleeve. "She's the tracker."
"We'll have them both, then," he agrees, "and tear the place up—top to bottom—if we have to. Whatever secrets this place is hiding, we'll find them."
He keeps a hold on me as he speaks, as though he thinks I'll bolt off into the dark if he lets go. He's overestimating my sense of adventure, if he does.
"I just want to check something," I say, and point to my right. "This is August's room, isn't it?"
He nods and, reluctantly, releases me as I step into the narrow passageway and move down it a few feet, running my fingers over the inside wall.
Almost immediately, I find what I'm looking for: a tiny hole, barely larger than what might be left by a thin nail, at about eye level.
Leaning close, I peer through and can just make out a portion of August's darkened room on the other side. August himself lies draped across his bed, face down, with one arm hanging free and his fingers loosely wrapped about the neck of a bottle. It's no wonder he hadn't been disturbed by all the noise we'd made.
Moving a few feet further along the passageway, I find more holes, each offering a view of a different slice of the room. They'd be virtually invisible against the darkly patterned wallpaper on the other side, and I shudder as I realize they're likely in every room—including Ambrose's own.
The thought of someone watching us sleep—or not sleep—makes me shudder, and I can't help wondering if I'll ever feel safe in this house again.
Ambrose has followed me and now stands at the first hole I'd found, and I hear him swear under his breath.
"Fuck. From here the thief would have seen exactly where August hid his relic." He sighs. "And I brought them here, thinking it was safe."
"You couldn't have known," I whisper back, but he only shakes his head.
"Come on," he says, leading the way back towards the doorway. "It'll be dawn in a few hours. Let's try to get some rest. We could both use it."
I start to follow him when something on the floor catches my eye. Halting, I shine the flashlight on it, then crouch for a closer look.
"Ambrose?" I call, once I've identified it for what it is. "Come look at this."
He comes and bends close, staring at the spot where I point.
"Shit. Is that...?"
"Another tooth—just like the one we found at Thaddeus' house."
"Urgh." Ambrose crinkles his nose and stands as the smell of decay reaches him more strongly.
"Julian said Brutus saw a monster..." I say thoughtfully, studying the rotten, brown tooth. "Someone he recognized, and was surprised to see. I wonder..."
"What?" Ambrose prompts. "What are you thinking, little wolf?"
"How old does this tooth look?" I ask him, poking at it with a rusty nail I find between the floorboards. "I mean, how old would someone have to be for their teeth to look like this?"
"Not that old, depending on access to dental care, diet, hygiene..."
I shake my head. "Say with the best of all that—how old?"
Grimacing, he leans closer for another look. "Christ, I don't know. Old."
"Too old to be crawling around through walls and murdering people?"
"I'd say."
"Ambrose, there's only one of your relatives you've described in a way that fits. You even said he'd be 'a right monster,' by now. The only one who would have aged."
"Aengus?" He raises his brows. "But that's impossible. He gave his Gift back. He died decades ago, and..."
He trails off as a blank looks steals over his face.
"Ambrose?"
"Rowan," he says.
"What?"
"Rowan's the one who told me that. Who told me what had happened to him."
"And?"
"The thefts began right after he died."
"I'm not following you." I get to my feet and he takes my hand, pulling me along with him back towards the doorway.
"What if Rowan was keeping Aengus here, this whole time? Maybe against his will, maybe not. And what if he got free? Aengus' Gift was persuasion, the ability to make others see and believe what he wanted them to see and believe. If he's here—among us—he could be standing in the same room in broad daylight and we wouldn't see him if he didn't want us to. It's the same sort of trick I used on you at Thaddeus' party, remember?"
I nod as he pushes me through the opening and pulls the hidden door shut after me.
"It's a sort of mental influence, except while for me it's a natural ability, for Aengus it was a combination of his Gift and learned skills. He was a con-man, basically. Even when he had me to work his 'miracles' for him, more than half of it was him convincing people he was some sort of medical messiah. He was as much a stage magician as a real one—knew all the tricks. It was from him that Jack learned sleight of hand, and—"
He cuts off abruptly, staring at something behind me, and I turn slowly, afraid of what I'll see.
A man peels himself away from the wall where he's been standing, arms crossed in a casual pose.
"Sleight of hand, Rosie? I think you mean sleight of mind."
He grins, revealing a broad, white smile.
He's about Ambrose's height, tall and thin, with dark mid-length wavy hair. His skin is papery pale, his eyes are ice-blue, and his voice is deeper and more accented than Ambrose's own. On his right hand I see a glint of gold. He's not an exact match, but in the dark, from behind, in a grainy photo taken at night, he might be mistaken for Rowan Oakfield, or for Ambrose himself.
"You..." Ambrose gasps, trying to force me behind him even as I bristle with instinctive protectiveness for my mate. "How... How are you..."
"Here? Alive?" the man suggests. "Your 'dog' figured it out—mostly. After Ainach refused to take back my Gift, I came here—to Rowan—seeking his help. Do you know how he repaid me for my years of friendship, for my sacrifices and suffering on his—on all of their—behalf? By locking me in his basement for seventy-odd years."
He laughs, and I have the strange, horrifying impression that I'm not seeing his real face—that it's an illusion or a mask of some sort, behind which lies something terrible.
"There I was, rotting away beneath this place like a fungus-eaten corpse, thinking I was beyond all hope, when finally—at last—a stroke of luck. I slipped my chains, and for months—" he laughs again "—for months, Rowan thought I was still down there, still the miserable living sack of skin and bone I'd become—when really I was here, whispering in his ear at night, watching from the walls, and getting things in line."
"Why?" Ambrose breathes. "What do you want?"
"What do I want? What do I want?" Aengus—for I'm certain by now that it is Aengus—asks with mock incredulity, and then continues in a snarl. "What I want is simple. What I want is to fucking die. It's what you want, Rose—or should I say Ainach—that presents the difficulty."
"I don't... I don't understand," Ambrose stammers, and I'm distressed by how lost and confused he sounds.
Even when wracked by pain or struck through with fear, he'd always maintained something of his cool collected strength. Now he seems stripped of his confidence in a way I haven't seen before, and his unfamiliar vulnerability feeds my protective instinct.
"You've been stealing the Gifts," I state. "Why?"
Aengus turns his cold gaze on me and I shiver.
"Because it's what Ainach wants, of course," he says. "He wouldn't take just my Gift, when I summoned him and offered it. He said that 'all Gifts were one Gift,' and he could only take one back if he took back all. That's why I went to Rowan. To ask for his help. What good is immortality, anyway?" he scoffs. "You fall into a pattern, doing the same thing over and over and over, year after year—and before you know it you can't break free. You become a...a monster of your own making, don't you?" he muses.
"Rowan didn't see it that way, though," he goes on. "He was content with his lot—as were the others. Fucking hypocritical ingrates. Why—when we were young..."
He presses his hand to his mouth, then spits into his palm before tossing something off to the side. I have a sick suspicion I know what it is.
"Well, we had ambitions, dreams, aye? And I'm the only one to pay for it. The only one to see the cost. The only one to suffer..."
"You're not the only one," Ambrose snarls. "What about Jack? What about Rosie Macleod, or...or Kitty, for that matter?"
"Kitty?" he laughs. "Rosie's little girl, you mean? Jesus. She didn't live long enough to suffer." He shakes his head. "No. They were the lucky ones. And now it's my turn. Ainach will take my Gift, as long as I can give him all the others—and one more thing as well: a dragon's heart. Took you long enough to find yours, didn't it Rose? I suppose, given your weakness for animals, I should have expected it would be a dog. A mutt, no less," he adds, sneering at me.
Ambrose's face goes livid with anger, but I cut in before he can say anything.
"Mixes have the best personalities," I growl. "It's the pure-breeds that have all the issues."
"Is that so?" Aengus drawls. "Well, Rose, seems we've got some training to do. Why don't we see how your dog compares to mine?"
He whistles, and from the darkness at his back, a hulking shape emerges—a sort of hound made of shadow and smoke, with eyes of coal and teeth like ivory knives. A thick chain trails from its neck, and Aengus picks up the end as the beast comes to sit at his side.
A growl rumbles in its chest—so low I can feel it in my own.
"It's not real," Ambrose whispers, grabbing for me. "It's not real, Noah. Don't be afraid."
"Isn't it?" Aengus asks and takes something from the pocket of his coat. I recognize it as one of my socks—one of the superhero pair Freya gave me for my birthday one year. "Can you be sure, though?"
He lets the beast sniff at it and then tosses it to the side.
The creature lunges after it, knocking over a table and breaking the vase atop it as it does.
Catching the sock, it tears it to shreds in a second, shaking its head back and forth with triumph at its 'kill.'
"Good boy," Aengus says, tugging at the chain as the hound returns to his side. "Seems he's got the scent well enough."
Then he looks up and meets my eyes.
"So, now," he says, unclipping the chain. "I'll give you a head start. One minute. Starting...now."
"Aengus!" Ambrose shouts. "Stop this. It's an illusion, Noah—nothing more. He's fucking with us."
"Rosie, Rosie." Aengus shakes his head. "How many times did I have to teach you this lesson? Being is believing, remember? So now..." he shifts his gaze to me. "Will you stand there like a stunned possum, or will you run, dog, run?"