Just like As Tascen, thought Lila. The spell that had allowed her to make a shortcut into the world, step from the street onto the ship.
“Unlike your magic,” continued Maris, “this portal stays open, no matter how many people pass through. As long as the spell is active, an entire army could move from one location into another.”
Horror hardened into anger. Lila’s jaw clenched. “Do you ever think,” she said, “that instead of storing the world’s most dangerous magic, you might simply destroy it, and save us all the headache?”
“If I had done that, there would have been no rings to share Antari power, and the three of you would have lost to Osaron, after which London would have fallen to his plague, followed swiftly, I imagine, by everywhere else. If you only think of the wrong hands magic can fall into, you forget that now and then there are right ones.”
Lila raked a hand through her hair. “So one thief made it off the ship. And the other two…？”
“Didn’t,” said Maris simply. She flicked her fingers at Katros, who produced a small pouch.
“Everything that was in their pockets,” he explained, passing it to Lila. She pulled the string and tipped the contents out into her palm. Nothing but a few red lin. Barely enough to pay for a meal.
“Tell me you have more than this,” she said, returning the coins to the pouch.
Maris cleared her throat. “He also had a mark burned into his skin. A handprint.”
At that, Lila muttered a quiet “Fuck.”
“Ever the poet,” said the captain of the Ferase Stras, and Lila thought, not for the first time, that she should have paid for the damned glass eye some other way.
“I suggest you find the box quickly,” added Maris. “Before someone puts it to use.”
“And here I thought I’d take my time.” Lila shoved the pouch of coins into her pocket. “Anything else?”
Maris drew something from her pocket. A card-sized piece of glass. “This might help.”
Lila took the object, turned it over in her hands. It looked ordinary enough, but since it was here on Maris’s ship, chances were it wasn’t. She held it up. “Are you going to make me guess?”
The old woman let out a sound that might have been a laugh. It came out dry as paper.
“Think of it as a backward glance,” she said. “In case, like me, you find yourself a step behind.” She explained how to activate the spell, but when Lila lifted the glass to her eye to test it, the word already on her tongue, Maris’s hand shot out, old fingers closing around her wrist.
“Use it wisely,” she warned. “It only works once.”
“Of course,” the Antari sighed, slipping the fragile pane into her coat. “Well, if there’s nothing else…” She unsheathed a small blade from her hip, but as she brought the steel to her skin, Maris cleared her throat.
“I wouldn’t. The wards bent for my nephew. I doubt they’ll be so kind to you.” She nodded at the boarding platform, which jutted like a narrow tongue out over the sea. It reminded Lila of a plank, the kind mutinous sailors were forced to walk in penny dreadfuls. “Better safe than sorry.”
Lila stepped up onto the plank. The ship bobbed in the current, the wooden board dipping beneath her boots, but she didn’t stumble. She took one step, and then another, past the body of the ship and the wards that shielded it until she was safely out over the sea.
She could have stopped there, but something urged her forward, to the very edge of the plank. Lila looked down at the black water as she drew a sliver of wood from her pocket. A piece of the bird at the bow of her ship. Alucard had had a fit when he noticed the missing feather, chiseled from the sculpture’s wing. But Lila had good reason.
The persalis may be an impostor’s magic tool, but it understood one thing.
Never open a door unless you know where it leads.
She pressed her thumb to the edge of her knife, felt the bite of metal, the well of blood.
“Delilah,” called Maris.
Lila looked back. “Let me guess, you want me to be careful.”
Again, that dry laugh. “Careful is for old bodies crossing wet floors,” said Maris, breeze tugging at her silver braid. “I want you to get me back that fucking box.”
Lila smiled, and pressed her bloody thumb to the wooden feather.
“Aye aye, Captain,” she said, stepping off the ship as the spell left her lips.
She never hit the waves.
* * *
A heartbeat later, Lila landed on the Barron’s deck.