“Right.” I looked back at the spectral woman, her face flickering between porcelain and fissured black. “So festive.”
Margarita Avramov turned her head to look at me, mercurial eyes narrowing as she took me in. There was something dread about her regard, a fearsome sense of power and enormity. As though she could quash me with a single thought, even from whatever unfathomable realm she now inhabited. I struggled to maintain respectful eye contact with her, in favor of a sudden urge to run shrieking from the room.
But instead of annihilating me on a whim, her lips curved in a fond smile.
“A pretty little Harlow, come to see me!” she exclaimed, tilting her head. “Oh, what a treat. You have the look of Elias about that pointy little chin, you know, quite unmistakable; I hope you pay your respects to him when you can. Dreadful bore that the man was in life, our little Grove would still have been nothing without his hand at work.”
Talia and I exchanged puzzled looks. I had no clue what Margarita was talking about, and Talia clearly didn’t, either.
“I’ll . . . be sure to light a candle for him on Samhain, founder Avramov,” I said. When her gaze lingered on me, darkening, I hastily corrected myself. “Ah, Dread Lady, I meant.”
Mollified, she nodded once, then shifted that piercing gaze back to Talia.
“Darling Natalia, you know I run short of patience by temperament,” she said, a brittle edge to her tone. “Speak your piece, before I lose the precious little that I have.”
“The final Gauntlet obstacle awaits us,” Talia said. “And though the Blackmoore scion is . . . regrettably proficient, House Avramov has partnered with House Thorn to thwart him—and we still have a fighting chance. We were hoping for any words of wisdom from you, any advice you might be willing to share.”
“I see,” Margarita said, her eyes sparking pale yellow with new interest. “An unexpected partnership, how enterprising of you. And now you test the Gauntlet’s rules for give, trace their edges for frayed threads that you might pull to your advantage.”
“Something like that,” Talia admitted, tilting her head side to side, unabashed.
“While your initiative appeals, I’m afraid the four of us did promise not to meddle once we shuffled off this mortal coil.” She sighed, a little ruefully. “Caelia and I might have been . . . more flexible, perhaps, had it been only up to us. But Alastair and Elias, well. Always so insistent about keeping a balanced scale.”
She pursed her pale lips, looking put upon. “Bless their hearts, ever preoccupied with fairness. So terminally dull. No wonder I was the last of us to go; I shouldn’t wonder if those two perished first of the sheer frightful boredom of so much integrity.”
I almost laughed, before it occurred to me that she might mistake that for disrespect. I had just about negative interest in seeing the Dread Lady’s pissed-off face.
“But the Blackmoores have been winning for centuries . . . that’s hardly fair. And is giving your advice really meddling?” Talia pressed. “We’ve already asked the living elders for their counsel. Is it so wrong to ask the same of you?”
“You do make strong points, Natalia,” Margarita said, another flash of approval glinting green in her eyes. “Why don’t I just take a little peek—purely for my own edification, of course, as is perfectly permissible . . .”
Her big eyes went distant, then clouded over, as if rimed by a thin skin of ice. Then her eyebrows lifted, and genuine surprise flitted over her unearthly face.
“My, my, how very curious,” she said, more to herself than us. “The both of you! I would not have thought it done, and yet . . .”
The frost cleared, and she focused on us again, a smug little smile playing on her lips. “You don’t need my help after all, Natalia,” she said. “You’ve already got the way of it, you clever child. Simply forge onward together, just as you have begun.”
She clasped her hands in front of her, fingers intertwined, giving us a meaningful nod above them, her eyes bright with a wicked mischief that looked just like Talia’s.
“Farewell for now, my beastly girl,” she said, breaking into a smile that was suddenly crowded with too many sharp teeth. “And do be sure to bring those Blackmoore bastards merry hell.”
23
Like Starlit Oceans, or Alien Skies
Talia and I sat on the window seat with the window flung wide open between us, still buzzed from the intense flood of endorphins the necromantic magic had left behind when it receded. And the taste of the medovukha had grown on me, as we passed Margarita’s samovar back and forth between us like a flask, taking little sips of liquid lightning.