Transmuted

by Karina Cooper

  At my side, kneeling with her husband, Mrs. Booth wept.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again, blubbering through and unable to stop. “I never wanted this.” I cried openly, eyes squeezed shut, panting for air to fuel my tears and unable to take more than a half breath through them.

  Fanny’s skin was cool beneath my palms. Soft and so familiar.

  The fragrance of her favored powder, the aroma of lavender and the stronger bergamot she preferred from her teas, surrounded me in excruciating comfort.

  The most delicate of caresses, a spider’s web of sensation, eased over the skin at my temple. My eyes opened, met the pale blue seam of fading life.

  Hazy, reddened at rim and whites, Fanny’s eyes searched my gaze as she smoothed back the hair curled at my temple. I’d managed nothing more than a braid to hold the whole back after I’d torn the veil from my head in my haste.

  There was no disapproval in Fanny’s countenance.

  “My dove,” she managed, barely a whisper through dry, bloodless lips.

  I labored to smooth the grief from my face, but no will could overcome. Fresh tears flowed anew as I whimpered. “Please stay with me, Fanny.”

  “Oh, tosh.” Warmth turned her pale eyes to the summer’s dawn, to a gaze of love and equal sorrow. “You’ve… You’ve no more need…of me.”

  “No,” I insisted, smoothing back the hair from her brow as she had me. “No, you’re wrong. I need you, Fanny. I always need you.”

  Her breath was so shallow as to barely move the thin cage of her chest. The blood that marred her was obscene. I tugged the blanket over her, held it to hide the terrible injury done her body—and her pride.

  Fanny had never been a woman whose carriage was subject to the whims of others. Hadn’t she taught me to walk with pride? With confidence?

  “This was my fault,” I admitted, crumbling in the face of the truth I knew but dared not admit. She was dying, my Fanny. Fading away with every shallow breath.

  “Child.” The word came on a broken whisper. “No tears. This is not your fault.”

  “It is,” I sobbed. “Please, Fanny, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’ll say it every day, please stay with me.”

  She cupped my cheek, and I turned my face into her palm with a broken sound. “You have…have done right by me, Cherry. By your friends. Whatever else… I am…proud.” The color of her eyes clouded slowly. Yet it was a smile that touched her thin lips as she whispered, “I have always loved you, my dove.”

  “And I you,” I said, unable to halt the flow of my tears no matter her directive. “I would wish for no other mother but you.”

  Her smile grew by a fraction; acknowledgement of the place I’d gifted her. Of the role I would give no other. Her eyelids fluttered lower. I gripped her hand in mine, held it against my cheek. Her mouth worked, but whatever she hoped to say claimed no air to fuel it. No energy to shape it.

  As I called her name, as I pleaded with her to stay with me, my dearest Fanny faded away.

  As footsteps thundered through the open hall, all I could do was keen the pain and loss that filled me; disgorge the broken heart I nursed in tears that had no power of resuscitation, no hope of resurrection.

  No alchemical power could ever soothe my loss.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The doctor, a nervous fellow with a thick black beard and an Irish slant to his words, tended Booth and his wife as I recovered my wits and acumen in the kitchens below. Thanks to the quick work of the earl’s gondolier, he had come in time.

  The fog continued to swirl past my knees and ankles, but there was nothing to be done about it. The kitchen’s windows had been broken, shards of glass sprayed out into the lane beyond.

  More blood smeared the floor, and another splatter in what had been Zylphia’s room suggested the sweet had delivered as good as she’d gotten, but of any of my guests, there was no sign.

  Hawke. Zylphia. With them, Zhànzhàn had vanished.

  I had expected the Veil to make his move, but I had not thought he would bypass me entirely. The urge to sink into despair loomed heavy and dark, but I fought it.

  I could not lapse into immobility now.

  Based on what evidence had been left behind, I imagined that Ma Lài had turned his beast loose upon my family’s home. Claws scored through wood and plaster, and the congealing remains of splattered fluids suggested whatever had been set on my family, they had bled for it.

  I had been a fool to discount the Veil’s ruthlessness.

  “Girl!” Communion’s thunderous report blared from the lane behind the kitchen. I stepped out of the open door, its hinges bent as though something heavy had torn through it, and found Ishmael crouching upon the sodden cobbles. The fog brought with it a humidity that clung to everything, staining it black and wet.

  In the cradle of his arm, my house-boy looked terribly small.

  Black smeared his face, which I took to be smoke and char before a bit of the lantern light set at the window painted his skin red. He held his arm at an awkward angle, pain etched into dark grooves upon his youthful countenance.

  “Levi!” I gasped, running for him.

  He lifted his chin, and well I knew the weighty burden of a street boy’s pride as he warned me from fawning with but a tilt of jaw. “I’m right as rain,” he declared, though with a ragged edge that swore he wasn’t. “Come with news.”

  I hid my fists behind my back, met Ishmael’s gaze and saw within a promise. He would not allow the boy to suffer, but it would be best for Levi if I allowed him his dignity.

  I nodded. “Let’s hear it, then.”

  Very gently, with steady hands of rock-sure support, Communion helped the boy to his feet.

  He wobbled, but held. If the big man’s fist in the back of his trousers was half the reason, I made sure my houseboy did not see that I knew it. “After Hawke went after the big black thing, I followed the others,” he said, and my eyes snapped wide.

  That my heart, tattered though it was, shuddered in a sudden surge of painful hope forced my hand to close over the front of my shirt. “Hawke’s alive?” I searched the shifting miasma beyond. “Where is he?”

  “I think the beast led him on a merry chase. The rest led me ’round Battersea Bridge.” Levi flinched as his hand whitened over the awkward shape of his arm. Though it pained me to do it, I said nothing of it. “I lost ’em,” he continued. “But I can say for sure they went Underground.”

  Underground Battersea wasn’t all that far from the Thames River Tunnel, less than an hour by hackney.

  Perhaps less so by way of direct Underground line.

  I racked my brain. “What do you know of the Battersea passage Underground?” I asked Ishmael.

  He shook his head, and rumbled, “’Ware crossing. More than a few go lost ’round there.”

  A sign that whatever group of Underground vermin minded the entrance, they did not encourage witnesses.

  Levi stepped closer to me, his jaw clenched so hard that I was certain his teeth would fracture from it. Ishmael’s arm straightened a bit, but the boy held fast. “Be careful,” he said through the grit of his teeth. “That big black beast was with’em for sure. Teeth and claws and yellow eyes.”

  “Just one?”

  “I only saw the one.” The very idea of more forced an aching shudder down his slim form.

  I touched his uninjured shoulder. “Thank you, Leviticus,” I said, firm enough that he could not mistake it for coddling. “Do you know what happened here direct?”

  He shook his head. “Only thing I know is I were eating, and then the door up front broke down. There was howling, miss, and then Booth were yelling to get upstairs, but me and Mrs. Booth couldn’t get down the hall.” His voice turned low and strained, as though he fought back tears.

  I pretended not to notice the sheen of them in his reddened eyes.

  “Mrs. Booth pushed me out,” he said, looking down at his feet. “Found a bantling, like you always do, and sent for Commu
nion.”

  Over my houseboy’s head, the dark head of the Baker leader inclined.

  “I am grateful to you,” I told the boy. “For your bravery and your speed.”

  He nodded, a silent version of gratitude I would not begrudge him. Pain and trauma no doubt conspired to strip Levi of what pride he retained, and so I softened it for him.

  “Go inside,” I said gently, “and see the physician.”

  He argued not at all.

  Once he was gone, I expelled a harsh breath and turned to Communion. “Round up your Bakers, Ish. We’re going hunting.”

  “They will arrive within the hour,” he growled, his teeth bared in a white gleam of raw menace. “They took my woman.” This simple statement of fact bore within ominous promise of terminal consequence. “They’d best pray to their heathen gods they have not harmed her.”

  “They have not.”

  This time, when a shadow loomed from the fog, source of the masculine assurance, I was prepared. The weapon I’d placed in the pocket of my borrowed coat filled my h and as through it belonged.

  The speed with which I’d accomplished it mattered nothing at all as I promptly breathed, “Cage,” and lowered the pistol to my side.

  He stepped from the dark and black as though it were his own Menagerie grounds eaten up by his long stride. His shirtsleeves were filthy, bronzed skin smeared as Levi’s had been, and he lacked shoes and stockings entirely.

  His eyes sheened wicked blue, and veins popped at his forearms, his throat. Every step taken was a promise of menace so perfectly delivered that Communion shifted his weight, easing that much closer to me.

  Even so, bare of foot and with his hair streaming loose in a black tangle, Hawke did not frighten me. The lights lit in the house behind me turned his colored stare to the sheen of an animal’s, yet I did not hesitate.

  The weapon I held dropped into my pocket. Rounding Ishmael, I sprinted into Hawke’s embrace, forcing him to catch me regardless of whatever else he might have intended. The smell of blood and wet earth, that unique signature of spice and heat that was his own all filled my senses as I wrapped arms and legs around him.

  That his arms came around me, bands of flesh and bone, relieved me as little else could. “Thank heaven,” I said into the skin of his neck. His flesh was feverish, as it always was, and damp with his efforts. A tinge of the Thames flitted about him, and even that was not enough to force me to let him go. My fingers tangled in his long hair.

  His mouth pressed against my temple, breath hot as he eased out a sigh that seemed to me as if it shook. Yet there was nothing fragile or uncertain in the taut planes of his face as he caught my chin in hand and took my mouth in a kiss as hungry as it was fierce.

  And as relieved as he didn’t say.

  Though it was a short kiss, I tasted desperation upon his lips.

  Ishmael, no stranger to such matters, waited for the moment in which Hawke allowed me to slide to the ground. Once my feet touched solid cobble, he asked curtly, “What did you see?”

  Hawke anchored an arm at my waist. If I wanted to leave his side, I would not be allowed. “There’s an Underground entry beneath the north side of the Battersea Bridge,” he said, every note a flat one. Strained just this side of ragged. “Osoba made his attack, then drew me off. In my absence, the Veil’s allies took both women. Zylphia,” he added, “is alive.”

  Communion’s shoulders rolled, such a tempest formed in muscle that I briefly pitied the Veil.

  “Osoba,” Hawke continued, his gaze falling to me, “is beyond help or reason.”

  I could not hold that gaze, so fierce and sure. “I…am sorry.” For the fact that I had made of Osoba a deadlier creature, for one, but more importantly, that I had not cleaned up my own mess. He was alive to kill now because I had failed then.

  Hawke brooked no such guilt. “Do not.” A command. “He made his choices. He will not suffer anything less but to die by them.” He turned his stare to the house, and in the arm he clamped around me, I sensed a shift. A softening, for all it did not sit easy upon him. “Your…Fanny.”

  Because my throat closed, I could only shake my head a fraction. My eyes closed.

  As he did when I suspected he could not do other, his hand cradled the back of my head, held me close against his chest. The heartbeat that seemed so loud thundered beneath my ear. “We will,” he said, so low and intense that it rumbled through him into me, “avenge her.”

  It was no softly spoken condolence, no gentle reassurance.

  It was promise, certain and implacable and fraught with retribution.

  “Aye,” Communion rumbled.

  For the briefest of moments, I allowed this. Reveled in it, this equal vow between these men and myself.

  Vengeance had not brought my late husband back, nor had it eased the scars from Ashmore. Vengeance would not undo what had been suffered.

  But for this, for Fanny, I would at least see justice done.

  The Veil could not be allowed to persevere.

  And I would not stand by the grave of the only woman I cared to call mother and admit to failure.

  “You know this to be a trap,” I said, not because I hoped to dissuade the men I trusted at my back, but because I wanted no uncertainty between us.

  A footstep upon the stoop behind me earned both sets of eyes. I turned to find Maddie Ruth holding a brace of pistols, two knivesand a fierce glower. “’Course it’s a trap,” she snapped, thrusting the weaponry our way. “But they ain’t so clever they can outdo a collector, the bloody ringmaster of the Menagerie, and the Baker Street’s dimber damber.”

  I took the brace of pistols from her, but caught her hand with the other. It shook within my grip. “Maddie Ruth, would you—”

  “You best not be asking me to go,” she said, throwing back her froth of curls, left loose like the wild thing she was. Her wide brown eyes snapped in fierce intensity. “That bloke in there’s going to need a ready set of hands.”

  Gratitude all but undid what the bracing of commitment forged within me. My grip tightened upon her hand.

  She turned it’round until her palm pressed mine, fingers intertwined. Her smile, tight and defiant as it was, eased my dread. “Won’t let nothin’ else happen here,” she promised. “Flip’s come to lend hands, and a kinchin’s out to find Delilah. Her current man’s an apothecary,” she added.

  A fact I didn’t know, but was grateful to learn it. Delilah had been one of those sweets so cruelly used in the Veil’s schemes.

  I nodded in soundless acknowledgement of a debt I would gratefully take on.

  “You bring her back whole, you hear me?” she added, sharp over me.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Hawke’s head lift, nostrils flaring as a beast scenting tender flesh. The gleam in his eye spoke of sharp teeth and a thirst for blood—but the words he forced did not growl, as I’d expected. “We will all return.”

  If Maddie Ruth’s features seemed a touch paler after, her palm a bit damper in my hand, I allowed her the dignity of ignoring it. “See that you do,” she said primly. Too far. Taking cue from the intellect that had seen her through many years of uncertainty and danger, she fled back inside when that locked growl escaped Hawke’s thin patience.

  I rounded on Ishmael and Hawke, holding up pistols and blades. “Preferences?”

  “My crew will bring what I need,” Communion said.

  Hawke stared at the weapons as though they offended him.

  Well enough. The more for me, the merrier.

  As we waited for Communion’s men to show, I buckled on the tools of a trade I intended to abandon. Enough was enough. Once and for all, after the Crown’s request was fulfilled, I’d leave collecting behind.

  Assuming, said a small voice of caution deep inside my walled-off fears, we survived what was to come.

  ***

  So it was that a small band of Baker few, their leader, the displaced ringmaster and myself made our way to the Underground passage at
Battersea Bridge. The door proved to be no obstacle, for I recalled Saltlick Sims and his lantern-related acrobatics.

  It took very little effort for me to locate the switch that triggered the mechanism, and the door in the base of the bridge swung wide.

  The Bakers, usually a jovial if mannerless lot, were silent on the journey, well aware of the stakes. Among them was a golden-haired man with a scar twisting his lip—Luther, a loyal man under Communion’s watch and mouthy most days.

  The unfortunate matters of the Veil’s attempt to wipe out the Bakers—courtesy of Ma Zhànzhàn, I knew now—had sobered him some. Still, he walked with a purpose unique among them what followed Ishmael Communion.

  I’d seen many a crew formed below the drift, walked the territories parceled out by strength of man and number, but the Brick Street Bakers were something else.

  And because they were, no matter how thin their numbers or how bloody the fight, when Communion called, they came.

  Luther stepped forward to take the lantern, wordlessly accepting the risk. Him with the light was often the easiest target in the dark.

  Hawke stepped within first. His senses, primed as they were, needed no light.

  I wished, not for the first time, that Ashmore could have come. All the instincts I had honed in the fog, all the feelings I had learned to obey whilst hunting my quarry, clamored together to assure me that this would be no small fray.

  The air felt unusually heavy, humid as it always was in the Underground, but thicker. The flavor of it upon the tongue transcended the usual morass of sewage and worse; a peculiar prickling that made me want to spit at regular intervals.

  A glance at the men around me assured me that though they may not know exactly what it was that irked them, they felt it too.

  On the other side of the long passage down, there were no guards.

  This was unusual enough that I whispered, “Halt,” and beckoned Luther to come with the lantern. The light gleamed brightly in the dark, lacking the intrusive fingers of the smoke and fog to dampen the flame.