by Maren Smith
“I’m going to remember this,” he warned.
“So will I,” Draven replied.
“You haven’t seen the last of me.”
“Drop in any time.” With a wave of his arm, Draven shooed them all the hell out. “I’ll put a roast on.”
He’d sooner carve every one of them into roast-sized pieces, but society tended to frown on certain things and Draven didn’t particularly want to hang.
Visibly seething, the Sergeant stormed back out of the flat, his officers falling into step behind him. Their booted footsteps sounded just as thunderous leaving as they had arriving.
“That… could have gone better,” Dr. Phillips commented.
“Could have gone worse, too.” Crossing to the window by the bed, Draven peeked through the curtain, content to watch until every last constable had filed out of his shop. Walking up the street, Sergeant Hatman looked more angry than defeated. Police with backs that stiff and shoulders that squared usually came back, sometimes with re-enforcements. And sure enough, when they reached the far end of Butcher Row, at a curt word from the constable, one officer separated from the rest. Slipping into a doorway, he tried to melt into shadows from which to watch Draven’s shop.
“I sincerely hope this girl has family,” the doctor said, startling Draven because he hadn’t realized anyone was that close to him. Standing shoulder to shoulder at the window, they watched the spying officer together. Dr. Phillips shook his head. “If she doesn’t, she’ll be in police custody before the week is out.”
“There’s a husband out there,” Draven insisted. “There has to be. Otherwise…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. If she was married, then his heart could shelter itself in the knowledge that she was already taken. All he had to do was hold out until he found out who that man might be.
If she wasn’t married, then not only was she an unfortunate, but it was likely that she didn’t have anybody. Only a sergeant ambitious enough to take her into custody, a thwarted killer who wanted her dead…
And him.
Chapter 5
“Maniac killer loose in London!” the paper boy cried, gathering coins and thrusting his evening paper into the reaching hands of the men and women already flocking to his cry. The markets were closed now, and the sun was going down. His back and feet both aching from a full day’s labor, he still paused on his way home long enough to dig into his pocket for the half-pence needed to purchase The Star’s evening sheet.
He could practically smell the freshness of the ink. What story, he wondered, had been set to run on the front page before this morning’s work was discovered, lying on her back with her skin peeled away? Whatever it had been, his story was there now and it was selling far, far better. Horror Upon Horror, he read, a corner of his mouth curling. Whitechapel is Stricken at Another Fiendish Crime. A Seventh Victim of the Maniac. If only they knew.
Smoothing fingers across his moustache, he wiped away his smile. No one else was grinning over the evening news and it wouldn’t do for him to stand out from the rest of the sheep. But, ‘a great terror’, they called him, and that tickled him. A nameless reprobate—half-beast, half-man. God Himself could not inspire better awe and publicity than this.
And then he heard it: “He’s done for now, the beast,” one man not far ahead of him said.
“What?” a woman next to him replied, looking up from her own paper in wide-eyed surprise. “Why?”
“His eighth victim,” a third man said. “She’s still alive.”
“Eighth victim?” The woman searched the newspaper account for that unknown information.
“Interrupted in the midst of his crime, the maniac was chased off his last victim. She’s holed up in a butcher shop down on the Row.”
“Constables’ll have him in custody within the fortnight,” the first man predicted. He beamed a smile, first at the woman and then at him. “Just see if he isn’t.” Folding up his paper, the man slapped it under his arm in a show of happy confidence and walked away.
Folding his newspaper too, he barely resisted the urge to crumple it into a wad and leave it to soak up the filth of the gutter, which was exactly where such statements belonged.
The sheep had a point, though. His was a hobby capable of landing him on the gallows. Hobbies like that did not tolerate witnesses. A quiver trembled his gut. Telling himself it was the excitement of the hunt beginning to build inside him, he thought about the woman. Holed up in a butcher shop, was she? No doubt the same one occupied by that giant of a man who’d chased him down Harrow Alley. He’d been seen by that man too, yet The Star had specified only one witness. Apparently, the morning shadows had been just dark enough to shield him from total disaster.
Still, the woman… she was a problem.
He didn’t like problems. He couldn’t afford them, and yet there was no official likeness of him in this evening’s newssheet. No artist’s rendition of his clothes, face, moustache. Nothing.
The woman might not be as great a threat as he feared.
Horror upon horror, he mused, tapping the folded paper against his thigh as he started walking in the direction of Butcher Row. Nameless reprobate. Half-beast and half-man.
He did so like how the papers portrayed his artistic, playful side.
Horror upon horror… Slipping his hand into his pocket, he clutched the locket and chuckled.
***
She was stuck, trapped. Her legs strained to run and yet her feet rooted to dark, wet brick streets as if she were an old-growth tree. Now and then, she broke free enough to take a frantic step, but for every one she gained, he gained three. He was going to kill her.
The hard soles of his shoes hit the cobblestones as sharp as gunfire. The narrowness of the streets and dense, close buildings amplified that sound, turning single shots into a warzone. It was dark, pitch blackness everywhere but directly ahead. At the farthest end of the block, a giant circle of blue swirling light beckoned. She should have been frightened of it, but she wasn’t. That light was a doorway. It was home. It was safety. All she had to do was reach it and she knew—she just knew—the killer closing the distance behind her would never touch her again.
But she couldn’t reach it. Her feet were stuck and the bootheels beating the street behind her came so fast and loud that they shook the ground. She could hear him breathing. She could hear the burbling, choking gasps of someone dying for lack of air. She could hear the sickly crunch of a blade hitting bone. She could hear the raindrop patter of blood falling to the floor until every gasping breath she took was tainted by the sickly sweet smell of it.
And then he was on her.
Hands seized her by the neck and she jolted upright, coming up off the feathered softness of her pillow in a dimly lit room, with nothing but darkness on the other side of two small windows, a single candle lit upon a table across the room, a small fire crackling in the hearth and Draven standing over her. With the light at his back, he looked ghoulish. Shadow bled into the hollows where his eyes should have been and his hands on her shoulders felt claw-like as he shook her, snapping her back to wakefulness.
She almost screamed, but the pain when her throat tensed was abruptly eclipsed by the stabbing agony that shot through her head. She sucked another breath, but in the next instant Draven pulled her upright, making the room spin wildly. He also sat on the bed and somehow that change in position was enough to let the light filter in around him, turning him back into a man. Shadow still chiseled his already lean features, but at least now he had them.
“Here.” Shoving something small and bitter into her mouth, he brought a fragile teacup to her mouth. “Drink this.”
She hurt so bad, she obeyed without thinking. That bitterness dissolved the instant the tea touched it. It spread across her tongue, sinking into all the recesses of her mouth no matter how much she swallowed. Oh God—she wrenched her mouth from the cup as soon as it was empty—the tea wasn’t sugared anywhere near what she would
have liked.
“That’s awful!” she gasped, coughing once and covering her mouth with the back of one badly shaking hand. Eyes squeezed shut, she concentrated only on keeping what she’d just ingested down.
Unoffended, Draven chuckled. “Yeah. That’s pretty much what I said every time me mum forced this swill down my gullet, too. But it works.”
It did, too. Even before he got up from her bedside to refill the cup from a teapot hanging over the crackling flames, already the sharpness of the pain began to dull. She moved her hand from her mouth to her forehead, cupping her brow while the intensity of the spiking hurt diminished. Her fingers touched the wound there. She had no memory of its being washed, much less stitched, but she could feel the knots and threads sticking up all the way into her widow’s peak. She winced.
“Doc Phillips tried to keep the stitches small, but”—Draven came back to the bed—“there’s going to be a scar.”
Right now, she didn’t care about a scar anywhere near as much as she cared about her throat. It felt rough as sandpaper when she swallowed. “Wow, ow,” she rasped, barely above a whisper.
“Feeling better?” he asked, reseating himself beside her. She opened her eyes when the warmth of his hand founds hers.
“God, no,” she groaned when he pressed the teacup into her palm.
“It’s just honest tea now, dovey, I promise. Drink. You’ve slept all day. You could use a little something in your stomach.”
As if in agreement, her stomach chose that moment to rumble.
His mouth curled at the corner. “Maybe something a bit more substantial than tea, yeah?”
The low rumble of his voice trembled her belly. She put a hand over the awkward sensation and startled when she felt nothing but the softness of blanket directly under her hand and a different fabric softness directly on her stomach. She looked down at herself. This… this wasn’t what she had been wearing earlier… was it? No, no her dress was currently draped over the back of a nearby chair. “M-my clothes…” she said hoarsely.
“You needed rest and corsets don’t help with that.” Draven wandered as far as the short table by the hearth. When he came back, it was with a knife, fork and a single tin plate laden with potatoes, onions and a slab of meat—all fried and slathered in gravy. “Don’t worry. I was a perfect gentleman throughout. Now and then, I even tried not to look.”
Clothes entirely forgotten, she stared at the plate. Her mouth was watering so badly she dared not open it for fear of drooling, and her stomach rumbled louder. Embarrassed, not entirely sure why, she made herself look away only to find herself staring into the fire in the hearth. Coal popped and her whole body jumped. She could see the coal and the flames and nothing else, and yet part of her mind was convinced there were clothes burning in the shadows of it.
Her chest tightened. “Wh-what time is it?”
“Half past time to eat.” Sitting down at her hip, Draven lay the plate in his lap to make a careful cut of potato. Dabbing off some of the gravy, he offered her the bite directly off his fork. “Why?”
She stared from the fire to the potato, swallowing hard and repeatedly and only barely resisting the need to get the hell out of this bed. She felt anxious, trapped by both Draven and the blankets, and some faceless threat that she couldn’t make come out of the shadows in her mind long enough for her even to identify it. “I-I don’t know.”
He offered the potato that much closer, bringing it right to the edge of her lips. “Running late, are we?”
For some weird reason, her eyes kept trying to see the gravy in his plate as blood. She was looking right at it, recognizing meat, potato, onions, and yet that was not what she was smelling. Her stomach quivered. Her lips rolled, pressing together. She shook her head. “I don’t want it.”
“Is there a reason?” he asked.
Thin notes of panic began to well up beneath the confusion and near-consuming hunger pangs.
“I—” She floundered. “I don’t know. I—” The footrail of his bed towered over the mattress by less than a foot. As far as escape avenues went, it was the only one she had. Kicking out from under the rag quilt, she took it. She might have mooned him in her clumsy, off-balance scramble to get off the bed, but she swung her leg over the rail and got her feet flat on the floor. “I have to go—oh…” She cupped her head, the room spinning when she tried to stand. “Go.”
“Right,” Draven said with a sigh. He also ate the rejected bite of potato. Setting the plate and utensils on the bedside table, he stood. “Go where, luv?” he asked, strolling around the end of the bed to where she struggled to get her wobbly legs steady under her.
“I don’t know.” The room was spinning. One hand on her head and the other on the wall, she stumbled as far as the foot of the bed. When Draven offered his arm, she took it.
“Do you remember something?”
The clumping echo of booted footsteps bouncing through a narrow brick alleyway…
She shook her head, as much in answer of his question as to shake the haunting memory out of her ears.
“Do you know where you need to go?” he asked, leading her around the foot of the bed.
Bright, swirling, blue ball of light…
“No,” she whispered, her shaky legs beginning to buckle. When he turned the corner, she followed. She couldn’t get the room to stop swimming. Thankfully, it was only a few steps before he turned her around and down she went, with a soft feathery ‘paf’ into the still-warm dent in the bed she had just fled. “I can’t,” she moaned, lying back when he lifted her feet and tucked them back up under his rag quilt. The room was still swimming in lazy figure-eights when he appeared above her, one hand braced on the headboard as the other tugged and tucked the quilt back in around her.
“What’s your name, dovey?” he asked, brown eyes smug, handsome mouth half curled in a smile.
It was right there, right at the tip of her tongue. But try as she might, she could not get it to come out any further than that.
“Right.” One strong hand still gripping onto the headboard and the other knuckling into the pillow to the left of her shoulder, Draven leaned over her, coming so close that she could smell the potato on his breath and the cleanness of whatever soap he must have used earlier that day. “Now you listen to me.”
She looked at his lips. Mostly because they were moving, but also because in the confusion of this medicated moment, she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to feel lips that strong and masculine—and delicious-smelling—kiss hers.
“If you get out of this bed before you can tell me your name,” those lips told her, “or where you need to go, or the names of the people waiting to take care of you, I will whip your pretty little backside and put you right back in it. Is that clear?”
The tea was really starting to take effect now.
“You say such lovely things,” she slurred.
That mouth of his didn’t just curl now; it smiled.
“How do you know it’s pretty if you didn’t look?”
“I said I tried not to look. There’s a difference.”
“Pervert.”
He didn’t argue with her. Instead, he picked up the plate to offer her a small bite of potato. “Eat.”
This time she took it, chewing with relish as the savory taste filled her mouth. It wasn’t good for anyone to eat as much grease as she could see swimming on that plate, but who cared when it tasted this good? He followed the potato with a little bite of meat.
“Mutton?” he asked as he fed it into her mouth.
She groaned, the hot juices sliding down the back of her throat. It hurt to swallow, but not enough for her not to want more. She opened; snorting, he fed her another small bite, then took one for himself.
“Maybe I can guess it,” he mused, studying her as they both chewed.
“What?” she asked around her mouthful.
“Your name,” he specified. “I can’t spend my days calling out, ‘oi, woman’ all the tim
e. If I get close, might be I shake your memory enough for you to say if I’m right or wrong.” He offered her a small bite of onion. “What do you think? Want to try?”
For some reason, just thinking about it made the anxiety build once more. She squirmed, trying not to hear the ominous echo of those bootheels bouncing though the inside of her head or feel the prickling trepidation of being somewhere she shouldn’t, as if any minute now she expected to get caught for it. Perhaps reprimanded, perhaps worse. He pretended not to notice her heightening discomfit as he offered her another bite of mutton. For some reason, it didn’t taste as good as before. She chewed, but the meat—still juicy, still savory—sat like ash on her tongue.
“Let’s see.” He studied her, eyes narrowing in thought. “How about Ann, or maybe Carol? You could easily be a Carol.”
That she felt no internal response to either suggest, surprisingly, made her relax a bit. She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Rose?”
She made a face.
“Mary?”
“I don’t think so, but it is soft like that.” The anxiety pricked at her for helping him, but worse than that was not knowing why.
“Soft, mm. Emily? Hannah? Lily? Lilian? Elizabeth?” Was it a trick of her mind that he seemed to hesitate? “Elise?”
“No.” She closed her eyes, trying to force it to come. “No, it’s like…” Her mouth worked, but she couldn’t even settle on where in the alphabet to begin.
“Lucy? Fanny?”
A jolt of awareness like electricity fizzled all the way up her back. Her mouth found ‘f’. She grabbed her head.
“Fanny?” His tone changed, ever so subtly finding focus. “Freddy? Winifred? Florence?”
Her eyes snapped open. At the same time, every nerve snapped too. Her body hummed. “Florence,” she echoed.
He tipped his head. “Are you a Florrie, luv?”