Violet was waiting when the door opened, and Devon came down the shallow stone steps into the alley, pulling his cap down low over his stupid flop of hair with a characteristic dip of his head. He didn’t see her until he was two steps into the alley, and by that time, the door had closed behind him.
‘Where is it?’ said Violet.
The alley was a crack between buildings, and it had started to rain. She was only half aware that she was wet. The closest gas lamp was on Turnmill Street, but she could see the night gleam of the wet cobbles, the darker shapes of the rotting boxes on her right, and she could see him, could see the pale fringe of hair that hung down like a valance under his cap. Devon took a single step backward. His heel slid on the muddy slush of a cobblestone.
She said, ‘Where is the Shadow Stone?’
‘Why don’t you ask your friends the Stewards?’
She hit him.
He went sprawling onto all fours in the wet mud, his white hair tangled in his eyes under the cap, which had survived the brief journey. Ridiculously, he clutched it to his head with a lifted hand. Then he raised his chin, blood blossoming on his lips, and looked right at her.
‘Oh, that’s right.’ His teeth were red when he smiled, sickly. ‘What was your story again? They kidnapped you? Then you’ll be glad they’re dead, won’t you? All that Steward self-righteousness rotting in the ground—’
Violet’s vision blurred, and she was grabbing him by the shirt collar, dragging him up, and hitting him again, knuckles against flesh. The impact was a reverberation, sickly satisfying. It snapped his head to one side, knocked the cap from his head, and finally – finally – he was struggling against her, bareheaded as she’d never seen him, his eyes huge and dark as he scrabbled on the muddy cobblestones. Her fists were in his shirtfront; she had followed him down into the mud. Her body was above his, pinning him down with her weight.
‘Shut up. They were good. They were good and you killed them—’
‘I knew you were one of them,’ Devon sneered up at her. ‘Your brother didn’t believe it, even after you ran out on him. He kept saying you were loyal—’
‘You did this,’ said Violet. ‘You and my father, you dragged Tom into it. Got your hooks into him. He’d never be a part of it if he knew—’
Devon’s cap was gone, but under it he was still wearing a dirty bandana, and she snatched at it, furious at him, instinct acting to deprive him of possessions, of composure, of dignity. And suddenly he was really fighting her, grabbing desperately at the bandana, trying to hold on to it and looking for the first time truly afraid.
‘Stop it, let go of me, let go—’
She ripped the bandana away from him, threw it to the side, and Devon let out a terrible cry, as if the sound had been ripped from him too.
Devon was staring up at her, horror in his wide eyes, his forehead totally exposed.
There was a deformation right in the centre, a lumpy thing that had been hidden by the bandana. For a moment, she didn’t understand what she was looking at.
She stared at it – at the wrongness of it, a grotesque artefact under the wet hair; it protruded half an inch. A ruined pearlescent stump, growing from the middle of Devon’s forehead.
The alleyway seemed to fade from view, and her hands opened, releasing him.
She remembered lifting it from its lacquered black box: a long, straight wand of ivory, spiralled from end to tip. She remembered holding it in her hands, the reverence of it, the way it changed the beat of her heart and shallowed her breath. Long gone. Long gone now, the last of them bright. She recalled the tactile, physical sensation of it, the wide base rougher at one edge, as though it had been partway sawn and then snapped off. She had touched that jagged wick with her thumb, like testing the sharpness of a blade.
The horn all seek but never find.
She was staring at its mutilated fit now, sawn like bone, an amputated limb. ‘You – you’re—’
She felt sick. She was going to be sick.
Devon was trying to get up, get away from her, but he couldn’t; he was too hurt, something wrong with his ankle and shoulder, lank white hair plastered to his head more steel than silver in the rain, blood sliding slowly down his face.
‘Why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell us—’ Her words scraped out. ‘That you – were—’
‘Why?’ Devon’s voice was thick with blood. ‘So you could put the rest of me in your collection?’
‘We wouldn’t,’ said Violet, ‘we wouldn’t have.’