In the moonlight, something wet glimmered on the walls. She approached the wainscoting with hesitant steps and touched the substance. When she raised her hand, it gleamed crimson on her fingertips.

The walls were weeping blood.

Then she blinked, and everything returned to normal. The screaming ceased. The blood vanished from her fingers. Bewildered, she let the poker fall to her side. In the sudden quiet, she heard voices down the hall. They were coming from Nathaniel’s bedroom.

“Master,” Silas was saying. “Master, listen to me. It was only a dream.”

“Silas!” This raw, tortured voice had to belong to Nathaniel, though it sounded little like him. “He’s brought them back again, Mother and Maximilian—”

“Hush. You’re awake now.”

“He’s alive, and he’s going to—please, Silas, you must believe me—I saw him—”

“All is well, master. I am here. I will not let you come to harm.”

Silence descended like a guillotine. Then, “Silas,” Nathaniel gasped, as if he were drowning. “Help me.”

Elisabeth felt as if there were a rope attached to her middle, towing her forward. She didn’t will her steps to move, but she approached the room nonetheless, transfixed.

The door hung open. Nathaniel sat up in his nightshirt, tangled within a snarl of bedclothes, his hair in a wild state of disarray. His expression was terrible to behold: his pupils had swallowed up his eyes, and he stared as though he saw nothing around him. He was panting, and trembling; his nightshirt clung to his body with sweat. Silas sat on the side of the bed, angled away from Elisabeth, one knee drawn up to face Nathaniel. Though it had to be two or three in the morning, he was still dressed in his livery, aside from his hands, which were bare.

“Drink this,” he said softly, reaching for a glass on the nightstand. When Nathaniel tried to grasp the glass and nearly spilled it, Silas guided it to his lips with the surety of many years of practice.

Nathaniel drank. When he finished, he squeezed his eyes shut and slumped back against the headboard. His face twisted as if he were trying to stop himself from weeping, and his hand sought Silas’s and clasped it tightly.

Elisabeth suddenly felt that she had seen enough. She withdrew and retreated down the hall. But she lingered at the corner, stepping first in one direction and then another, torn with indecision, as though she were pacing the confines of a cage. She couldn’t bring herself to go back to bed. She wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing Nathaniel was in such pain. Not after what she had heard, what he had said. She recalled the comments people had made about Alistair. Nathaniel had been having a nightmare, but was it only a nightmare, or something more?

After several long minutes, Silas appeared in the hall, and she realized that she had been waiting for him. He nodded at her without surprise—he had known she was there the whole time. She couldn’t read anything in his expression.

“Will Nathaniel be all right?” she whispered.

“Master Thorn has taken medicine, and shall rest undisturbed until morning.” That wasn’t precisely an answer to the question she had asked, but before she could say so, he went on, “I would be obliged if you didn’t mention tonight’s events to my master. He feared this would happen. He has nightmares often. The draught will make him forget.”

Oh, thought Elisabeth, and the world seemed to shift ever so slightly beneath her feet. “Is that why he didn’t want me to stay here?”

“The answer is complicated—but yes, in part. His nightmares drove his father’s human servants from the house long ago. They often cause him to lash out with his magic, as you saw, and he worries that in time, he might lose control in even worse ways.”

“So he pushes people from him,” she murmured, thinking aloud. “He doesn’t let anyone get close.” Her gaze drifted to the wall, then back to Silas. “It doesn’t bother me. That is—I don’t like getting woken up by the sound of screaming, and seeing blood drip down the walls, but I’m not upset by it, now that I know why it happens. I’m not afraid.”

Silas considered her for a long moment. “Then perhaps you should speak to my master after all,” he said finally. He turned. “Come with me. There is something I must give you. Something that, I regret to say, I have been keeping from you unjustly.”

He led her downstairs to a sitting room—one of the many rooms in Nathaniel’s house that she had peered into, but had never been inside. He didn’t light any lamps, so Elisabeth could barely see. By all rights being alone in the dark with a demon should have frightened her, but she only had the strange thought that perhaps Silas was distressed, in his own way, and was not himself, for he always remembered to light the lamps. She felt her way to a couch and sat down. Silas’s alabaster face and hands stood out, disembodied, as though his skin produced its own pale light.

A cabinet door opened and shut. He straightened with a long, slender bundle, which he held cautiously, as if it might burst into flame at any moment.

“This arrived from Summershall the day before I encountered you on the street,” he said, holding it out to her. “There was no note, but it was posted by someone named Master Hargrove.”

Elisabeth’s heart gave a swift, painful throb, like a hammer striking an anvil. She took the bundle with trembling hands. There was only one thing it could be, and when she untied the twine and parted the fabric, the faintest whisper of moonlight glimmered across garnets and a liquid length of blade.

“I don’t understand.” She looked up at Silas. “Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?”

His face was still as marble as he replied, “Iron is one of the few things capable of banishing a demon back to the Otherworld.”

She hesitated. “And you thought I might use it against you? I suppose I can’t blame you. I would have, once. Not to mention, its name is Demonslayer.” She gazed helplessly at the sword. She still hadn’t touched it. She couldn’t bear to, for fear that it might reject her; that it might scald her as though she herself were a demon.

“Is something wrong, Miss Scrivener?”

“The Director left Demonslayer to me in her will, but I . . . I’m not sure I’m worthy of wielding it.” A pressure built in her chest. “I no longer know what is right and what is wrong.”

His hands settled over hers, cool and clawed, and gingerly brought them to rest against the sword. “Worry not, Miss Scrivener,” he said in his whispering voice. “I can see your soul as clearly as a flame within a glass.”

They sat there in silence for a time. Elisabeth remembered that day in the reading room, when the Director had spotted her behind the bookcase and almost smiled. She had been breaking the rules, but the Director hadn’t minded. She had left her Demonslayer anyway. And she had not always been the Director—she had had a name, Irena, and she had been a girl once, too, and she’d had doubts and felt uncertain and made mistakes.

Somehow thinking about those things made Elisabeth feel as though she were losing the Director all over again, because she realized now that she had never truly known Irena, and would never get the chance. When a sob escaped her, Silas said nothing. He only passed her his handkerchief, and waited patiently for her to stop crying.