Lady Breckenridge’s good name will protect her from any overt action, but a name isn’t armor. It isn’t a sword. It isn’t even as good as secrecy.
The Book of the New Moon Door
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Once outside, Isabel takes a full breath for the first time in hours. Reder Angrove’s ghost remains, for the moment, inside the chapel, and the grip of his fear and grief releases. The air is cold, and it scrapes against her throat. Autumn has arrived in Mondirra.
“Did they ritually remove your brain as part of your training, Sentinel?” Geray demands in her ear, voice shaking with suppressed rage. “Take it out and put it back in the wrong way, perhaps?”
Isabel places her hat on her head and pulls the brim down over her eyes. She can still see Geray, trudging half a step behind her with his feet two inches above the ground. “Whatever you have to say, I don’t want to hear it,” she says through her teeth.
“I had an easy solution,” Geray shrieks. “I practically served it to you on a platter!”
“Enough.” Isabel presses herself against the small kitchen’s exterior wall and cranes her neck to see out to the front of the building. Her uniform will hide her in the dark, but only if she’s careful.
Geray floats out in front of her. “Whatever happens in there is on your hands, then.”
“If there is a haunting, it is your duty to dispel it. What are you doing here?”
“I can’t,” Isabel says. Her eyes burn, and she swallows the catch in her throat. “Something is wrong.”
The Book of the New Moon Door
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Isabel turns to the door. Darkness has fallen over the chapel, and a black abyss stretches between her and where the constable, presumably, is trying to get in. The church is haunted. Maybe the incongruousness of a ghost on holy ground will delay the authorities’ realization of the fact, but the signs are obvious.
The knock of a heavy fist sounds again. Geray gets up and floats through the black, his form disappearing like a breath on a cold day. A howl of agony shakes the chapel.
There’s no way they can’t hear this. Isabel shelters her candle, the only light remaining in the church, with both hands. Her fingers ache with cold.
Geray reappears, accompanied by a chorus of distant screams, both animal and human. “They’re going to knock down your door if you don’t answer,” he says. “They have a battering ram and everything.”
What are you going to do, Sentinel? Run? Turn yourself in? Listen to me.
Chapter Six
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Isabel wakes with a start and sees nothing. It’s grown dark, which means she’s slept much longer than she planned, and she’s not entirely sure what day it is now. The translucent form of Arden Geray hovers beside her narrow bed, the sockets of his eyes as dark as the night outside.
For however many blissful, oblivious hours she was asleep, she had forgotten about him. She groans and pushes herself up. “What are you talking about?”
“A spirit,” he says, enunciating carefully as though he is speaking to a child. “It’s just arrived and it’s none too pleased. What are you going to do about it, Sentinel?”
The old monk bleeds from lacerations on his face and arms. One side of his thick lenses shows a crack through the center. “Ondir preserve us,” he wails. “This is holy ground!”
The Book of the New Moon Door
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Berend takes a sudden, involuntary breath. Pain digs into his ribs. He kicks at the bedclothes, the ache moving down his legs, and tries to sit up.
The nurse’s hands on his shoulders are firm and heavy. “Be still,” she says. “It’s all right.”
It is most assuredly not all right. At best, there’s a member of the illustrious and unscrupulous Belisia family here to threaten his life, limbs, and everyone he cares about—a dwindling number, these days, and one he can count on one hand, but still. At worst, someone is here to kill him.
“My effects,” he says. Talking moves the pain up underneath his lungs. “Where are my things?” His pistol almost certainly isn’t loaded, and there’s no chance he could lift his saber in this state, but his mysterious visitor doesn’t know that.
“They’re locked away on the lower floor,” the nurse says, pushing him into the bed. “What’s wrong?” Her hand moves to his wrist, gentle but strong as a vise.
A shadow darkens the entrance to Berend’s curtained room. He looks up, his pulse pounding in his ears and under the nurse’s fingers. At least she’s here. There will be a witness.
Does it feel worse to be strangled or to have your soul damaged?
The Book of the New Moon Door
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It’s a sure sign that Berend is alive. He’s never heard of Ondir’s realm being a painful one, though he’d have to ask the Sentinel to be certain. A high, shaky note rings in both ears. Beyond it, muffled voices and footsteps move in and out of his awareness. There is light, also, pressing against the lid of his good eye.
What a beautiful day it will be, he thinks, but when he opens his eye, pain shoots through his skull. The ringing in his ears reaches an agonizing crescendo. He closes both the eye and the empty socket, squeezing them shut, and the pain subsides to a dull throb.
All he can remember is Arden Geray—serial murderer, mad sorcerer, and destroyer of souls—and how Berend shot him in the chest and cut him down. After that, something had slammed into Berend’s body, and he must have lost consciousness. The brightness tells him that it must be broad daylight now, so he’s been out for several hours, at least.
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