Nathaniel’s brow furrowed, as though he saw something in Elisabeth’s expression that troubled him. He looked away, squinting against the downpour. “Silas?” he asked.

“Yes, master?” The servant’s voice was little more than a whisper in the storm.

Somehow, Elisabeth had forgotten about Silas. She struggled to keep her eyes open. And there he was—impeccably dressed, balanced effortlessly on the edge of a rooftop high above them. He gazed down at the scene with detached, pitiless interest. The pounding rain left his slender form untouched.

How did he get all the way up there?

Shadows advanced from every side. They loomed at the corners of Elisabeth’s vision, permeating the fog with their carrion stench.

“We could use some help down here,” Nathaniel said, “whenever you’re finished admiring the view.”

Silas smiled. “With pleasure, master.” He removed first his right glove, then his left, and neatly slipped them both into his pocket. Then he stepped from the edge of the rooftop, out over a four-story drop.

Elisabeth couldn’t see him after that. Her eyes sagged shut on the sliver of now-empty sky as all around her there came a chorus of yelps, and crunches, and howls, punctuated every now and again by the sound of something limp and heavy being flung against a wall. All of that came from far away. Her thoughts had stuck on a single image: the sight of Silas’s hands when he’d taken off his gloves.

He didn’t have fingernails. He had claws.

“Elisabeth?” Nathaniel asked, and the sound of her name chased her into the dark.

TEN

ELISABETH WOKE SURROUNDED by sunlight. Though she had no idea where she was, a peaceful sense of well-being enveloped her. Silken sheets whispered against her bare skin as she stirred. When she turned her head, her bright, blurry environment resolved itself into a bedroom. The walls were papered with a pattern of lilacs, and the delicate furniture looked as though it might break if someone accidentally leaned on it too hard, which Elisabeth supposed meant that it was expensive.

She wasn’t alone in the room. Porcelain chimed soothingly nearby. She listened for a moment, then sat up in bed, a down comforter tumbling from her shoulders. Puzzled, she inspected herself. She had on her spare nightgown, and a bandage had been neatly applied to her arm. Not only that—someone had bathed her and brushed her hair.

Her head throbbed. A light touch revealed a knot on her scalp, sore beneath her fingertips. Perhaps that explained why she couldn’t remember a thing. Across the room, Silas stood with his back to her, presently in the act of lifting the lid from a sugar tin. He was dressed, as usual, in his emerald livery, and appeared to be making her a cup of tea.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You are in a guest room of my master’s house,” Silas replied. “We thought it safest to convey you here after the attack.”

The attack. Her gaze fixed on his spotless white gloves, and her blood turned to ice.

Last night came rushing back: the snarls and the chaos, the lightning and the rain, and along with it her memories of the journey to Brassbridge, the ones he had somehow suppressed. She now clearly remembered the way he had caught her in the woods outside the inn; how he had made her forget that his eyes were yellow, not once but many times. Whenever she had drawn close to understanding what he was, he had turned her thoughts away.

“You’re a demon,” she said. Her voice sounded clumsy in the delicate room, too loud, out of place among the lilacs and fine china.

Silas tilted his head, acknowledging the obvious. “Do you take sugar in your tea, miss?”

Elisabeth didn’t answer. She slid to the opposite side of the bed, as far away as she could get, and seized a chamberstick from the bedside table. It was heavy, fashioned from solid silver. “I know what you are,” she warned. “You can’t make me forget again.”

He stirred the tea one last time and fastidiously placed the spoon on a folded cloth. “As it happens, you’re correct. You have a surprising resistance to my influence; I doubt I could have continued much longer.”

“What do you mean, your influence?” she demanded. “What did you do to me? And why?”

Silas turned. He merely looked at her, trembling and clutching a chamberstick, a single startled reflex away from hurling it at his head. After a few seconds of meaningful silence, Elisabeth was forced to admit that he had a point.

“Humans,” he sighed. “Such excitable creatures. At least you didn’t scream, and I thank you for it. Some demons enjoy the sound of mortals shrieking and pleading for their lives, but I have never possessed a taste for melodrama, unless it is safely confined to the opera.” His eyes moved to the chamberstick. “That won’t do you any good, by the way.”

Slowly, Elisabeth lowered it to the bedspread. She watched Silas cross the room. When he set the tray down beside her, she flinched, but he withdrew without touching her, standing with his hands politely folded behind his back. It was the same way he’d stood in the thicket. She wondered if he was trying to make himself look less threatening, which was such a peculiar thought that she bleated out a laugh.

“What is it?” he inquired.

“I didn’t know that demons could make themselves look like us. I expected . . .” She wasn’t sure what she had expected. Horns and scales, like a fiend. She certainly hadn’t expected him to be beautiful. “Something else,” she finished.

A shadow of a smile crossed his face. His hair wasn’t powdered, as she had first assumed. Everything about him was the flawless white of marble, down to the long pale lashes that shaded his sulfurous eyes. “Highborn demons such as I are able to change our shape according to our masters’ wishes. In society I appear as a white cat, but when at home or running errands, Master Thorn prefers me in this form. Otherwise I am, as you say, ‘something else.’ ”

A chill passed over Elisabeth. The Lexicon’s words of warning came back to her. The grimoire had made it sound as though merely speaking to a demon was dangerous. But after everything Nathaniel had done to bring her to the city safely, she didn’t think he would leave her alone with Silas if he posed a threat. She recalled the night in the Blackwald, remembering the quiet sound of Silas’s laughter, the way the two of them had joked like old friends.

“Please.” Silas’s voice interrupted her uneasy thoughts. “Won’t you drink your tea?”

She hesitated before she reached for the teacup. Steam wreathed her face as she took a cautious sip, aware of Silas’s expectant gaze. Her eyes widened in surprise. “It’s good.” In fact, it was the best cup of tea she’d ever tasted in her life. Not what she had expected, considering that it had been made by a—

She set the cup down with a clatter, sloshing hot liquid over her fingers. The heat and the steam had brought back a sudden, visceral memory of the man holding a hand over her mouth, his breath damp on her cheek. Then the way he had simply been gone, as if he had vanished into thin air. What had Silas done to him?

“I killed him, miss,” the demon said softly. “He would have done the same to you, and you wouldn’t have been his first victim. I smelled it on him—so much death. No wonder the fiends were willing to follow him.”