“Darcy, call off your ghoul,” said Lord Stagston as his packmate trotted into the grand foyer, their daughter spilling from her arms. Beatrice edged up behind them, the armored skeleton clanking along in her wake.

“Do not speak over me as though I can’t understand you,” grumbled the dead horse. “It’s very rude.”

“Stop your screeching, all of you,” said someone just out of sight, an edge of laughter bleeding through their words. “I’m trying to work.” But somehow Beatrice was certain that if she could see the speaker’s face, they’d be grinning. She caught a whiff of a scent like honeyed citrus and edged closer. But Darcy, still blocking the way into the foyer, shifted stance—her posture going statue-straight. A warning.

“Archemedes,” snapped Darcy. “Out.”

The skeletal creature sighed, trotting towards the exit and flicking what remained of its tail.

“As for you,” Darcy rumbled, stalking up to Charles as the little girl bounced off in the direction of the unknown speaker. “It’s already too late for you, and you brought the girl here. So of course, it’s your responsibility to see her either matched off or employed and boarded elsewhere. And with the greatest possible haste. Are we understood?”

“Of course,” echoed Charles. “Now don’t you have packing to do? Or have you got corpses for that as well?”

Darcy scoffed.“You know perfectly well that I do.”

Then she extended one gloved hand, spreading her fingers wide and twisting them swiftly through a series of signs. There was a rustle and the banging of a door somewhere down the hall behind Beatrice, and she gasped and flinched against the wall as something long and pale whipped past her.

Only when it came to a stop, gleaming and wickedly beautiful in Darcy’s hand, did she realize what it was. A sword, carved entirely of seamless bone and lacquered to a gleam. From what manner of creature it had come, she couldn’t imagine. The mage pressed its tip to Lord Stagston’s throat. Charles, for his part, sighed.

“Really, Darcy? In front of our daughter?”

Distantly, the child giggled.

“Swear you’ll enforce my orders while I’m gone. The rest of the pack is to stay away from her. No one but yourself is to speak to her.”

“You know I won’t swear that.”

Off to the side, Lemon Sunshine snickered, and Darcy’s gaze snapped up in their direction before returning to Charles, still pressed between the wall and her sword. But from what Beatrice could tell, he was not much concerned about it.

“Fine,” she said, drawing the word out. “Spit on my courtesy, I know how it pleases you. But you know it doesn’t matter.”

Shadows began to creep from the corridor and corners to whirl around her. For a few heartbeats her form disappeared from view in a shroud of inky black. When the darkness trailed away in tendrils, her second body was revealed…uncommonly large, ashy-silver and spotted in black. The sword of bone hovered before her for a moment, then clattered to the ground at Charles’ feet.

Though a chill crawled across her skin at the sight of the beast, Beatrice edged closer. Almost all the way out of the corridor now, she could finally see the source of the other voice as well, standing at the railing of the foyer’s open upper level. It was a young man, or so she supposed—from where she stood she could see no marker to indicate otherwise. Shoeless and dressed in loose britches, he wore an open smoking jacket crusted in a rainbow of paint daubs and no shirts at all. He held a paintbrush in one hand like a long-stemmed cigarette, and as she watched, his sparkling smile transformed into a scowl.

“What’s wrong, Papa Jemison?” Pressed the little girl, tugging at his jacket. “Is she doing the thing again?”

The man tossed a few locks of auburn hair back over his shoulder, eyes narrowing. “You mean abusing her power? That she is, my little demon. That she is.”

Darcy growled as Beatrice looked from one to the other—feeling the edge of the silent command passing from shifted Silver to ordinary pack member. The little hairs at the back of her neck raised as power crackled through the air. Then, shadows trailing at her heels, Darcy turned toward the main entrance. A pair of Suits sprang to action, opening the doors for her to pass out of the house and into the gathering mists.

With their antagonist gone, both Lords Stagston present fixed their attention on Beatrice.

“Ms. Baraclough,” breathed Charles, striding up to her. “I’m so sor—”

Upstairs, the little girl gasped.

“Don’t, Papa Charles!” she trilled. “You’ll get sick!”

The Silver paused for a moment, brows twisting up in confusion and relaxing again the next heartbeat. He shook his head, huffed something under his breath, then turned to smile up at the girl.

“Don’t worry yourself, dearest. I am quite immune.”

Her eyes going wide, the child tugged again at Jemison’s jacket until he bent obligingly so she might whisper something in his ear. In a low murmur, he began to explain what “immune” meant. Charles returned his attention to Beatrice.

“As I was saying, I hope you’ll forgive my household’s rather…chaotic reception. I knew Darcy might not take your arrival with perfect composure, but it seems I underestimated her capacity for overreaction,” He sucked a long breath through gritted teeth, one of his hands twitching at his side. “In any case, please allow me to introduce my packmate, Lord Jemison Stagston, a Tiger and artist of some renown. And of course, our daughter, Victoria. They both know who you are, but I shall still formally introduce you, if you like.”

Beatrice gave Charles a brief shake of the head before glancing up again at the man in question, reminding herself he was half dressed, and looking away with heat rising in her cheeks.

“What is going on here, Lord Stagston?” she asked, finally unleashing the question that had tormented her for the entirety of the previous exchange. “Why does Dar—Dame Stagston hate me so, and…” she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me that your pack has a child?”

Hauling in another deep breath, Charles glanced up at Jemison, towards the door, and back to Beatrice.

“Come,” he said, his expression settling into a sad smile. “This is the sort of discussion that calls for comfortable seating. And tea.”

When Beatrice quirked her head questioningly in Jemison’s direction, Charles sighed.

“He has been compelled to keep his distance and silence where you’re concerned. Though he’s never refrained from speech for so long while conscious, and I fear if we don’t leave soon it’ll drive him mad.

Charles offered his arm but she did not take it.

“Very well,” she said instead. “To seats and tea, then. Please, my lord, lead the way.”

He did, taking her up one floor and into a space that snatched her breath away. It was a great tower of a greenhouse, positioned at the end of the north wing and beyond a rise of stone such that Beatrice hadn’t yet seen it and had no idea of its presence. The second-floor entrance led out onto a sort of indoor balcony that looked out over all the rest, green fronds brushing the furnishings where they spilled over the rail in lush profusion.

As he held the door open for Beatrice and her guardian Suit to pass, he waved up another from down the hall and called for a tea service. Taking a seat near the balcony’s curved outermost edge, she waited for answers—hands fidgeting at the folds of her skirts. Charles took a seat at the other side of a low table facing her, leaned forward and worked at his brow with one hand as though it pained him.

“Firstly, I apologize I didn’t tell you about Victoria. You asked who was in our pack, not our family. And so, technically—”

Beatrice raised an incredulous brow as he looked up, and, catching her expression, Charles stopped short to correct himself.

“I knew you would have concerns enough about coming to stay here,” he admitted. “and potential pack members have a tendency to be quite…cagey…about existing offspring. As for Darcy, she does not hate you. Or at least, if she does, it’s truly only the concept of you which she hates.”

“But why?”

“We lost a packmate two years ago.”

The words fell from his lips like sharp-edged stones, cutting him on the way out. “Victoria’s birth mother. We all had our own kind of relationship with her, and her loss wounded us all in different ways. But Darcy, perhaps, most of all.”

Beatrice paled.

“Lord Stagstone, I had no idea. I’m so…” she gnawed at her lip, searching for adequate words and finding none. “I’m so sorry.”

He gestured limply, gaze darting away from hers to peer out the paned glass of the curved greenhouse walls.

“To Darcy, accepting someone new into the pack means replacing Alice. Her absence, the hole it left in our home…it’s almost as though she cherishes it, now. “

Is it uncouth to ask what happened? Beatrice wondered desperately, deciding from the tortured look on Charles’ face that it was.

“So she’s afraid of more of the pack feeling a Call to me,” said Beatrice, tone softened to a gentle hush.

“Yes. Because if that happens, their need for you would overpower her ability to compel them. They would demand you be given the choice to stay, and she would have to allow it.”

“They?”

Charles met her gaze again.

“Us. We would demand it. I may be able to resist the Call on my own behalf, so much as I am truly willing to assist you in finding another pack or place if it proves necessary. But if others in the family were to share my condition, it would be another matter entirely.”

“I see. And how likely do you think it that I really shall have need of another home? Darcy does not seem a person whose final opinion it would be easy to sway.”

Charles unleashed a grating sigh. “Indeed she is not. But there is hope. As I am Called to you, it’s incredibly likely that, given adequate exposure, the others will be too. Darcy included. She would fight it, of course, but even her strength has its limits.”

A shiver rolled down Beatrice’s spine at mention of his condition. If Darcy would only allow herself to feel it…but then…

“Forgive my overhearing, but you mentioned packing bags. Is Dame Stagston going somewhere?”

“She’s been called away on League business. I expect she’ll be gone a few weeks, perhaps more.”

At the thought of Darcy’s imminent departure, a hole opened up in Beatrice’s core that filled promptly with a bitterness like acid bile.

Spirits curse this Call.

The door to the balcony opened and a Suit entered, pushing a tea service ahead of it on a cart.

“If I am so unwanted here, than the sooner I may find my true place, the better,” said Beatrice, taking a steaming cup from the armored skeleton.

“Ms. Baraclough, I don’t think you understand exactly how vital it is that you do find your pack, and quickly,” replied Charles.

She stared at him, her insides twisting in fear at the warning in his tone.

“My lord, is there something else I need to know?”

“Our pack may have a sort of nebulous dual citizenship here by way of mixed birth and the Mountaincross Treaty, but as a knight, Darcy is beholden to the Dustren crown in ways which the rest of us are not. When she reports in, they will ask for confirmation that her pack has taken for ward the infamous fox shifter, and she will be bound to give them the truth.”

Beatrice felt the hammer hovering over her head, and with it a compulsion to cower back into the couch cushions. Instead, she straightened her back.

“And so?”

Charles’ expression darkened.

“And so, they will know for certain we have you. And, if you remain unclaimed, it will only be a matter of time before they demand we turn you over.”