He was entirely correct. My face heated—and burned all the hotter for the new knowledge that he could tell even in the dark—but I felt a rush of hope that I hadn’t even realized I’d abandoned.
I said, “Doctors are always particularly dreadful at treating themselves, and the Armed Forces would prefer to think of wounds as purely material. Mostly, people don’t survive an encounter with a Fallen as close as mine was.”
“Did it touch you?”
“Glancingly.”
“Then you are a very stubborn Scot to be alive at all.”
“My orderly saved me,” I said and realized I no longer resented him for it. Which was an odd epiphany to have in a cobwebby storeroom somewhere underneath Lambeth. “Which makes him, I suppose, an even stubborner Scot.”
“Either very brave or very foolish,” said Moriarty. “I’m afraid I would have left you to die.”
“Oh, so would I,” I said. “I was yelling at Murray to drop me right up to the point I passed out.” I sighed, assessing the state of my aching body. “I’m prepared to go on, I think.”
“Then let us waste no time in doing so. It’s nearly daylight, and I prefer not to be abroad in the sun.” Said loftily, as if it were mere eccentricity, although I knew better. Folklore said that vampires were blind in direct sunlight; I decided to take advantage of my forced and unwanted intimacy with a representative sample, and as I crawled laboriously over the box, I asked him if it was true.
“Not blind,” he said. “But bright sunlight hurts our eyes, and we sunburn fast and badly. We blister almost immediately, and it takes weeks to heal. I have scars on my forearms from a sunburn I took when I was a kit in Dublin.”
Despite his manacles, Moriarty followed me easily over the box, and we began searching for the way out. Escaping the storeroom was easy enough, for while it was long it was very narrow, and there was really only one way we could go, but once outside the storeroom, we found ourselves in a spiderweb of tunnels, and the clamor of the trains, seeming now to surround us on all sides, had gone from being a beacon to being a bewilderment, throwing off Moriarty’s innate sense of direction. The best we could do was look for staircases going up, though we could not seem to find one that ascended more than a flight—leaving us still somewhere short of attaining the platform.
“What I would not give for a simple egress sign,” Moriarty said. “Or a map. Or some passing and benevolent Virgil to take pity on us poor benighted wanderers.”
I was about to say something about Dante and only wanting to go to London, not Paradise, when a voice behind us said, “Are you gentlemen lost?”
I think I knew who that high, husky tenor belonged to before I turned around: only an angel could move so silently that a vampire could not hear them coming.
We had been found by the Angel of Waterloo.
He was a tall, gaunt angel with unkempt dark hair and eyes like a hawk’s—pale amber ringed with dark brown. He had a hawk’s wings, too. They were mantled up around him defensively; he was expecting trouble.
“Sir,” said Moriarty, “you come well upon your cue. Yes, we are lost, and we would be deeply obliged for some guidance.”
The Angel of Waterloo stared at him unblinkingly for several seconds. Then he tilted his head, even more birdlike than Crow, and looked at me. “A vampire,” he said, “and a hell-hound.”
“We are not banned from the precincts of Waterloo Station,” Moriarty said and got another stare, while I bit back the urge to protest that I was not a hell-hound. The angel had spoken no more than truth; a hell-hound was exactly what I was.
“How did you come here?” said the angel.
“The story is a very long one,” said Moriarty.
“From below,” I said.
“Yes,” said the angel, and I saw that he was looking at Moriarty’s manacles. Then he looked directly at me. “Where do you wish to go?”
“The surface,” I said instead of staggering back under the impact of the angel’s gaze.
“Very well,” said the angel. “Follow me.”
18
The Master of the Hunt
When I returned to Baker Street, some twenty hours after I had left, I had scarcely closed the street door behind me when Crow came barreling down the stairs and enveloped me in a hug that seemed like a combination of entanglement in a deck chair and assault by a pack of feather-dusters. I managed, after several intensely uncomfortable, nerve-jarring seconds, to free myself, and he demanded, “Are you all right? Oksana Timofeyevna and I were certain you’d be killed.”
“Can I sit down first?”—and while I meant to be peremptory, it came out decidedly plaintive.
“Oh, good grief, what’s wrong with me? Yes, yes, yes, come upstairs! Do you need help?”
“I can manage,” I said, reckoning to myself that the odds of that being true were about fifty-fifty. I leaned heavily on the wall all the way up, and I was aware of Crow just behind me, waiting to catch me if I fell, which was infuriating and ridiculous—my mass being greater than his, he would succeed only in pitching us both to the bottom of the stairs—and yet for all that, it was also somehow comforting.
I achieved our flat and my armchair and finally felt as if it was possible—although perhaps not entirely prudent—to relax.
Crow closed the door and blurted out, “He’s gone.”
“Gone?” I did not need to ask who he meant.
“I went up to the attic after you and Oksana Timofeyevna left. The trapdoor to the roof was open. He wrote ‘thank you’ on the wall, so that I feel fairly certain he doesn’t intend to come back.”
“After the edifying spectacle of us fighting over him like two dogs over a bone? I can’t think why not.”
“He and I talked that night after you … left. About whether his oath was enough of a defense to save him from hanging. I had to tell him I think so, but I don’t know. Marriage oaths are. And it was a serious oath that Small made Anuvadaka swear, serious enough that I really do think he would be acquitted.”
“Maybe he will turn himself in,” I said. “Or maybe he will find a way back to India and we will never know what becomes of him.”
“He wants to go home,” Crow said and sighed. “I do see your point, Doyle. I just wish we could have helped him.”
“We kept Jones from arresting him,” I said dryly. “And that’s quite enough.”
Crow opened his mouth to argue, then visibly changed his mind. “Oh, never mind! What happened to you?”
I told the story as simply as I could, given that Crow interrupted every other sentence to demand more details. When I mentioned the vampire, he became very still, staring at me with intensity worthy of the Angel of Waterloo, and when I mentioned the vampire’s name, his wings snapped wide and he shouted, “Moriarty!” adding in a lower voice as he went to pick up the end table he had knocked over, “I hope you did not trust a word he said.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes,” said Crow. “My business has taken me among the vampiric hunts several times. They are unfortunately excellent places to look for missing persons. I know most of the East End hunts, and the Moriarty Hunt is the worst.”
“Then you really won’t like this part,” I said and folded back my cuff.
Crow’s wings snapped wide again, this time making a clean sweep of the breakfast table. Luckily, Mrs. Climpson had learned after the first disaster not to put out the good china. This was all secondhand mismatches—if not precisely intended to be broken, then certainly expected thus—although the clatter and crash they made hitting the floor was every bit as cataclysmic as the good china, and brought Jennie up immediately.
“I am so sorry,” Crow said. He was already crouched down, carefully picking up half a cup here, a jagged seventh of a plate there, making a pathetically tidy pile of the wreckage.
Jennie said, “Let me, Mr. Crow,” and gently nudged him away from the broken china.
“I think some of it is mendable,” Crow said hopefully.
“I’ll take it all to Cook,” Jennie promised. “She’s good at mending things.” And she left with her apronful of broken china.
“Oh dear,” said Crow, standing up and pulling his wings in tightly against his back. He stood a moment, wringing his hands like the fussiest old maid imaginable, then abruptly turned to me and said, “Show me.”
I was half inclined to tell him to go to the Devil, but I held out my hand and let him run his cold fingers over the mark. He said, more quietly, “How did this happen?” and I explained my choice between vampire and hemophage.
His eyes became very wide as he listened. “I certainly wouldn’t have wanted you to choose differently,” he said. “Do you think it’s true that Small feeds on vampires?”
“He looked like it was true,” I said and yawned jaw-crackingly.
“Oh dear,” said Crow. “I don’t want to keep you from sleep any longer, but … all right, tell me the rest quickly.”
I laughed and yawned again. I described the fight between Moriarty and Small, and then it was easy enough: “Moriarty followed the noise of the trains to Waterloo Station, and then the Angel of Waterloo showed us the way out.”
“You saw Waterloo?” Crow said. “He spends almost all his time up in the rafters.”
“I think he sensed us,” I said. “We were down where the public don’t go, and I suppose a vampire and a hell-hound together isn’t something one comes across every day.”
“Even Waterloo becomes curious,” Crow said. “He and Victoria—the Angel of Victoria’s Station, I mean, not the Angel of the Needle, nor the Queen, for that matter—are both a little peculiar. I don’t think we’re really meant to watch over that many people all at once.”
“Is that what you think angels are designed to do?”
“Well, of course,” he said. “Shepherds watch over their flocks. And angels watch over shepherds.”
“But then why bind them to habitations?”—a question that had perplexed me greatly as a child.
“So that we don’t have to choose which people to watch,” he said. “It’s why I take clients, as a way of limiting how many people I feel responsible for at any one time. We are very bad at making choices. It is a kindness of our Maker to remove that choice from our remit.”
“You view it as a blessing?” I said, surprised.
“A mixed one,” he said, one shoulder and one wing shrugging together. “I would give a great deal to have a habitation again—just not any of the things I should have to give up for that to happen. But you need to sleep, and I’ve been distracting you. Come along, Doyle.”
I let him chivvy me to my bedroom, but there he stopped and said, quite seriously, “We were going to rescue you. Oksana Timofeyevna has had her brother trying to find out more about the hemophages’ warehouse. And she herself—we had heard rumors that they had captured a vampire, and she was going to … oh crumbs. I have to send her a telegram that she doesn’t need to go to any of the vampiric hunts! You go to sleep.”
I was only too happy to comply.
* * *
My sleep was patchy; I kept dreaming I was turning into a hell-hound and jerking awake to be sure it wasn’t true. Somewhat to my own surprise, I was still human when I got up again at four o’clock, even if not noticeably better rested.
I came out of my bedroom, feeling as if someone had been striking matches on my eyeballs, and found Crow scribbling furious notes to himself on a piece of foolscap.
“You look perturbed,” I said, sitting down.
“‘Perturbed’ is perhaps a little strong,” said Crow, “but I’m definitely vexed. The Nameless cannot find Anuvadaka, and prior to this I would have said there was no one in all of London whom they could not find.”
“He grew up hiding from tigers and ghouls,” I said.
“True,” said Crow. “But I cannot help him if I cannot find him.”
“I think it’s safe to assume he doesn’t want your help,” I said, as gently as I could.
“Yes,” Crow said gloomily, “I think so, too. But I think I ought to help him all the same.”
“Is this legal help or illegal help?” I said. “He is a murderer.”
“Yes, I know that, too. But I don’t think he will be well served by the British system of justice.” He fixed me with one of his penetrating stares. “If I found him, would you turn him in?”
“No,” I said, “but I am able to lie to the police about it.”
“Touché,” said Crow. “You think I should just drop the matter?”
“I suspect,” I said, “that Anuvadaka can take care of himself, especially now that he’s free of Jonathan Small. I might feel differently if he did not speak English.”
“If he did not speak English, he would already be dead—although I keep expecting to see a notice in The Times or the Standard that they’ve pulled a ‘savage child’ out of the Thames. London’s not really less dangerous than the jungle, just dangerous in different ways.”
I opened my mouth to argue, thought of the rookeries of the East End, and subsided.
Crow sighed. “But you’re right. If he doesn’t want to be helped, then my help is useless to him. I just … it seems such a terrible position to be trapped in.”
“Being Jonathan Small’s traveling companion was worse,” I said with certainty.
“I suppose that’s…” His head jerked up. “There’s someone at the door. Someone … Good Lord.”
“Crow?” I said, as he shoved violently to his feet.
“It’s … I can’t believe…”
There was a tap at the door and Jennie came in with a card on a salver. “There’s a lady to see you, Mr. Crow.”
Crow took the card and held it so that I could see it. In an elaborately engraved script, it read: KATHERINE MORIARTY.
“Moriarty’s Master,” I said, a little numb with the surprise.
“Oh the infamy I am bringing to Mrs. Climpson’s respectable house!” said Crow, half laughing, half dismayed. “I invite her in, Jennie. You can show her up.”
“As long as Mrs. Climpson can’t smell vampires,” I said; any vampire going out in daylight was sure to have masked its true nature.
Crow said, “The aetheric disturbance—” and then Jennie opened the door to admit our visitor.
Fashionably hatted and heavily veiled, Master Moriarty had golden-blond hair and a tall, statuesque figure. Her nails were hidden by kidskin gloves (no doubt padded at the fingertips), and the inhuman whiteness of her skin, like the baleful yellow of her eyes, was camouflaged by the combination of hat brim and veil. She closed the door carefully behind her and said, “Thank you for seeing me.” Her voice held a hint of Ireland, worn almost smooth by centuries in England.
Crow, unable to lie, said, “Curiosity trumps most things.”
She raised her veil and said, “That is perhaps the only thing vampires and angels have in common.”
She was quite lovely, if one ignored the eyes that did not belong in a human face, and she knew the art of cosmetics: she could almost have powdered herself that stark paper-white. Almost.
“How else is an existence measured in centuries to be tolerated?” Crow said, quite seriously.
“A telling point,” said the vampire. “My name is Kate Moriarty—as you know, but I do like proper introductions.”
“My name is Crow, and this is Dr. Doyle.”
“Forgive me for not standing,” I said. “I am still most abominably fatigued.”
“James was afraid you had worsened the injury to your leg,” said Master Moriarty.
“No,” I said. “It aches, but nothing untoward. I admit I would have preferred not to know what lies beneath Lambeth, but I have taken neither permanent nor serious hurt. I trust you were able to get the manacles off?”
She gave me a curious look—no doubt she smelled what her husband had smelled—but said, “Oh, yes. One of my friends is a locksmith,” with the most delicate possible stress on “friend” to indicate that she m
eant an addict. “Poor James is very bruised, but thankfully nothing worse.” She gave me another, harder look. “James said he marked you. Is that true?”
I folded back my cuff and let her see the mark. She inspected it nearly as carefully as Crow had. “He should not have done it, but at least he did a nice clean job.”
“Shouldn’t have done it?” Crow said indignantly. “What, pray tell, should he have done instead?”
“We only mark those we have asked to join our hunt,” said Master Moriarty. “James has no intention of asking Dr. Doyle, and I am sure Dr. Doyle would not consent if he did.”
“No, I would not,” I said, with more force than tact.
“Therefore he shouldn’t have done it,” she said. “But now that he has, there’s no use fretting over it. Dr. Doyle, you are welcome to our hunt.”
It was the last thing I had expected her to say, especially since we’d just agreed I had no intention of becoming a vampire. I managed to say, “Thank you very much.”
“Show that mark to any vampire of the Moriarty Hunt, and they will help you to the best of their ability. In return, we would ask you the same consideration.”
“I can’t imagine how I could be of assistance to a vampire, but I certainly owe your hunt a debt. Yes, as long as it’s legal, I will offer help to the best of my ability.”
“We would not ask you to do anything illegal,” Master Moriarty said, so gravely that I suspected her of secret amusement. “But that is only one of the reasons I have come.”
“And what is the other?” said Crow.
She looked at us, her golden eyes burning in her white face, and said, “We want the treasure.”
* * *
It was not a surprise. I had not missed James Moriarty’s keen interest when the treasure was mentioned. He had been polite about the matter, not demanding details, but I had not imagined he would forget it. Vampires, unlike angels, do not forget, any more than they forgive. It would have been surprising if the vampires had not evinced interest in the Agra treasure.
The Angel of the Crows Page 20