Kiss of the Spindle

by Nancy Campbell Allen

“Why did you not break free from her then? It would have been the perfect time for you to disappear, to begin fresh.”

  His mouth tightened. “She tethers me to her.”

  Isla stared. “How?”

  “A blood spell between the two of us. She can locate me anywhere in the world. She knew I was on that airship, so once in telescribing range, I told her you were searching for her and I was trailing you. I decided the fewer lies I told, the better.”

  “She’ll know we’re here, then. Please tell me you brought at least one of my weapons.”

  “She can’t track you, only me. I telescribed that you’re still at the inn. She believes I’m staying here because I prefer it to the manor house.”

  Isla stood and transferred her weight from foot to foot. “Why did you not just tell the others to keep me at the inn, take all of us into your confidence?”

  He snorted. “Those four men bow at your feet. You could talk them into anything in a matter of minutes. I couldn’t possibly leave you with them. Even Pickett, who seems the most vested in your welfare, would do whatever you said.”

  She detected an undercurrent of tension, but his expression was unreadable. His eyes showed the only spark of emotion, and she realized that what she’d once read as coldness actually blazed.

  “Nigel, you told me you were an artist. You’d carved out a life for yourself before all the business with the Committee. There must be a way to break free from your mother.”

  “There is a way.” He smiled, self-deprecating. “When she is dead, I will be free. Though a condition of our blood connection is that neither of us can kill the other.”

  She raised a brow. “You would kill her?”

  His lips pursed, the familiar cynicism returning. “Of course I would. I had hoped that once she finished her obsession with you, she might leave me alone, find someone else to torment.”

  “Yet she is your mother.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “You never envied Gladstone’s connection with her?”

  He eyed her flatly. “When I was six, she began taking vials of my blood even though I cried and begged her to stop. She would look at me with a smile that held nothing in it. My comfort and contentment were inconsequential to her. I began hating her then.”

  Isla moved closer to the fire and extended her hands. “How can I possibly be cold in this climate?” she mumbled.

  “Malette held nothing in reserve with this curse. You are as close as a person can get to death every night.”

  She swallowed. “Well, that does explain it.”

  Silence grew between them, and he finally broke it. “I am sorry. For everything.” He met her eyes and then looked down, scratching his neck.

  “Thank you for helping me. I have a request.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I cannot promise to meet it.”

  “Telescribe Daniel and tell him I’m safe. He will be concerned. I fear they all will.”

  “I’m certain they will be. You gather an entourage wherever you go.” It wasn’t a compliment, but a cynical observation.

  “You are jaded, sir.”

  He smirked. “You haven’t the least idea.”

  “Where are we?” She looked out the window and saw nothing but dense foliage. He was silent, and she turned her attention to him. “At least tell me that much. How far can I go dressed like this and without shoes, anyway?”

  He sighed. “My family property. A few miles from the main house.”

  “And she is not aware I am here?”

  “She will be, eventually. Which is why I must get to her first.”

  “Please tell the others where I am.”

  “No.”

  She sighed. “Why?”

  “They must remain in town. I’ll not have their deaths on what little is left of my conscience.”

  “You are assuming there will be deaths! We are an accomplished group of people, Nigel, and it may well be that none of us will die!”

  “My mother is a shifter.”

  She blinked. “Very well, I do know a thing or two about that.”

  “Not this.” He turned and grabbed a ring of keys from a nail by the door.

  “Wait! Please, wait. I can defend myself, you know I can, especially if you’ve been trailing me all year. What kind of shifter is she?”

  He looked at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Stay here, Isla. You’ll hear from me in an hour or two.”

  Before she could blink, he was gone, locking the door behind him.

  Isla looked in the cabin’s lone cupboard for the third time, wondering what she hoped to find that hadn’t been there before. The cabin consisted of the one room and an attached, tiny bathing room, which was little more than an outhouse. The only windows in the whole place were small and chest-high to her and had been crudely barred from the outside with wide pieces of lumber. Shimmying her way out of the small openings might have been a difficult feat, but she couldn’t even try. The boards had been nailed securely in place. The door was a solid affair, and the bolt locking it too big to be either picked or kicked loose. She was tempted to try climbing up the fireplace.

  Nothing in the cupboard, nothing in the outhouse, nothing under the bed, nothing in the small kitchen dry sink. There was a tiny closet that contained a pair of men’s breeches that looked as though they’d been sitting on the shelf for a century, but nothing else.

  As soon as Nigel had left, she pawed through the satchel where he’d retrieved her robe and found bread, which she ate, a canteen, which she filled with water from the pitcher, and a length of rope. She grimaced. Had he considered tying her up with it? The satchel also contained a small blanket, a bottle of liquid she identified as chloroform, and a leather-bound journal and pen.

  She resisted opening the notebook for quite some time, but as the hours crept by and afternoon arrived, she decided there might be something useful in it. She unwound the leather strap and opened the cover, feeling an enormous twinge of guilt. As she began fanning through the pages, guilt gave way to shock.

  There was little by way of written word; the bulk of the contents were drawings. They were exquisite in detail, and accurate to an amazing degree. He had drawn buildings and street scenes in London, images of a pastoral countryside, and people. The definition would not have been clearer on a daguerreotype or photograph. There was a picture of Gladstone, capturing every cruel angle and plane of his face, even the dead look in his eyes. There was a woman, cold and beautiful, who resembled Gladstone, and Isla assumed it was Malette.

  There were rough sketches of some of London’s government elite, incomplete versions as though he had simply needed to do something with the pen in his hand and didn’t care to finish. She turned the page and saw a drawing of her street, then one of her house. She swallowed. Her heart thumped harder as she saw page after page of pictures of herself in various settings. Toward the end of the notebook were beautiful pictures of the airship, portraits of Daniel, Quince, Bonadea, and Lewis. And several more of Isla—standing at the railing, dressed in breeches and corset, down to the dagger at her waist and the one around her thigh.

  There was a picture of her on the beach, long, tangled hair blowing in the breeze along with her skirt. Her hand shielded her eyes as she looked over the water. Her eyes burned with tears as she flipped through the last few pages: drawings of the ship’s passengers sitting around the fire, their faces depicted in gentler lines than his first renderings. He’d even sketched Samson and Monkey.

  Monkey! What had he done with Monkey when he’d taken her? Possibly nothing at all. The little fellow could have screeched until the cows came home, and Isla would never have heard it. Everybody else in the inn would have, however. She bit her lip. If Nigel had used the chloroform on Monkey, she hoped he’d been conservative with the amount.

  She
flipped to the last page on which he’d written a line of text: Life’s but a walking shadow . . .

  Her heart thumped. Why that quote? Why could he not have written “All’s well that ends well”? Or even “bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”? “Life’s but a walking shadow” didn’t bode well.

  She could only assume he’d gone to confront his mother, but he had been gone for hours, and she felt uneasy. His plan, well-intentioned though it was, was far from sound. If Malette had incapacitated him, not only would Isla be none the wiser, she’d be trapped in this little cabin. Nobody knew where she was.

  She closed the notebook, wrapped the fastenings, and placed it carefully back into the satchel. She’d intruded on something personal, but blast it all, he hadn’t given her much choice. He’d taken all of her choices away, in fact, and she was restless and frustrated. She could not remain in the little room much longer. He’d said the cabin was roughly a few miles away from the main house, although she knew nothing about the area or the terrain. If she could find her way to the mansion, she might then locate Nigel and gain use of his telescriber before midnight. Hiking a few miles typically meant nothing to her. True, she was usually armed and had shoes, but she was strong, well-conditioned.

  She chewed on her lip for a moment and made a decision. She withdrew the breeches from the closet and shook off the dust. They were too long, and too big around the waist, but she slipped them on, rolled up the cuffs past her ankles, and used the sash on her robe for a belt. The robe itself was shorter than the nightdress, reaching only to her knees. She ripped the seams and ruffles of her nightdress until it was roughly the same length as the robe, allowing her much better freedom of movement. “Apologies, Mama,” she muttered. The nightgown ensemble was worth a small fortune at Castles’.

  The lack of shoes was a problem, but there was no help for that. She glanced at the boarded windows and hefted one of two small logs from next to the fireplace. The glass was thin and easily broken, and she then went to work on the crossed boards. She heaved with all her might, using the log as a battering ram until her arms screamed in protest. She stopped, breathless, and then began again. Finally, the outermost board gave a fraction of an inch, and the tiny progress strengthened her resolve.

  Ten long minutes later, sweat dripping down her face and her hands raw from the log, the boards fell free of the window and swung down to one side, hanging by a large bolt. She used the rope in Nigel’s bag for a harness that she attached to the canteen, and then threaded her head and one arm through the rope.

  She wrapped the log in the torn fabric from her nightgown, cleared away the remaining shards of glass from the window, and surveyed her work. It would be a tight fit, but she could manage it. She climbed onto the chair and used it to hoist herself up. Head and then shoulders, twisting this way and that, finally emerged, and she angled the rest of her body and hips through the splintered opening.

  The exit wasn’t as graceful as she might have hoped, but she used the boards hanging by the side of the window as a brace and clumsily lowered herself to the ground. Her hands and ankles were red and cut, but she was out of the cabin. She dusted off her hands and took in her surroundings, feeling horribly exposed but unwilling to stay locked up any longer. She didn’t know where Daniel and the others were, or if they’d even be able to track her, but her aim from the beginning had been to confront Malette, and she would do it or die trying. She couldn’t live in limbo, and her time was nearly up. There had to be something the woman would want. Everybody had a price.

  The sun had dropped lower in the sky than she’d realized, but it was still late afternoon. She had hours yet, and if midnight approached before she’d located Malette, she would find a place to hide. The thought was unsettling, but she didn’t have many options. She looked carefully at the lay of the land outside the cabin and noted soft impressions in the dirt. Nigel’s boots. She followed the footprints into the undergrowth and thick vegetation, which led to a walking path that had seen many years of travel.

  Nigel had said the cabin was some distance away from the main house, and she hoped that she was headed in the right direction. She could be heading away from the manor with each step, but she had no way to orient herself, no point of reference to anything familiar.

  She stepped as carefully as possible but before long her bare feet were a mass of scrapes and bruises. She didn’t much care for spiders or large insects—she’d rather face a large predator any day—and prayed she wouldn’t step on anything that creeped or crawled or could inject her with venom. The light in the thick forest dimmed the farther she walked, and the sense of foreboding she always felt when the dark crept in was heightened by danger.

  She looked around at the trees, shrubs, rocks, ferns, and low-lying ground cover. It blended together in her mind’s eye, and where she was usually adept at noting landmarks and distinctive features, she was utterly at a loss. Her only saving grace was that the narrow footpath continued to wind throughout the vegetation that was thick enough in places she was forced to duck down and pause to untangle her hair from branches and needles.

  “Curse you, Melody, to the moon and back,” she muttered. “And you as well, Nigel Crowe.”

  Life would be so much simpler if Melody had simply listened to Isla and did exactly as she said. Except, she had to admit, it was Isla’s heavy hand that had driven Melody to Mr. Brixton in the first place. If she’d only trusted her little sister to make even small decisions for herself, might Isla right now be at home in England, preparing for a normal sleep?

  It was neither here nor there, and Isla did not like to dwell on the past or opportunities ignored or avoided. She would, however, change her approach to Melody when she returned home. If she returned home. The sun continued to dip lower in the sky, and her heart sank with it. She moved steadily forward, her feet aching with each step.

  “No weapons, no boots, no telescriber, nothing,” she muttered. She paused when she heard something in the forest singing a different tune and recognized it as water. She kept moving forward and eventually came to a river cloaked in greens and grays, the shadows playing on the water as it tumbled over rocks. Spanish moss spilled over tree limbs and hung in delicate, yet thick bundles that touched the water or littered the ground. The humid air felt heavy in her lungs.

  Wonderful. Nigel, I am adding you to my complaint list, second only to Melody.

  She walked the riverbank, first one direction and then the other, and looked as far ahead through the vegetation as she could before it disappeared in darkness. There was no hope for it. She would have to cross the river by foot, and no one location seemed better than another.

  She rolled the trousers to her knees and bunched the fabric of her makeshift tunic in her hand. Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the river. It was much colder than she would have guessed, given the hot climate, but the sun did not shine brightly in this section of forest. The water was slow, which felt like the first stroke of good luck she’d had all day. Her feet stung from the nicks and cuts, but she shoved the pain aside when she began stepping on unknown elements with a slimy texture. Speed was to her benefit, she decided, and she gritted her teeth against the pain as she moved forward as quickly as she could.

  At its deepest point, the river reached her thighs, and slimy things continued to shift under her feet. “Ooh, Melody, there are no words!” The sound of her own voice was an odd sense of comfort. She felt isolated, as if she were the only person on a strange planet with no hope of escape.

  The water level decreased as she neared the opposite shore, and she detected a faint odor of rotting vegetation. She held her breath to avoid gagging and rushed the last ten feet to the muddy bank.

  She coughed and gagged, and took a moment to imagine she was back on her little island, safe and serene. She noticed an odd, light pressure on her legs and looked down to see herself covered in large, black leeches.

  She sucked in a huge
, horrified breath, but when she tried to scream, nothing came out but a squeak. She’d never fainted in her life, but she felt light-headed and swayed in place.

  I am a fierce hunter. I handle sharp weapons, she told herself, but she stared, transfixed, at the slimy bodies that pulsed infinitesimally on her skin.

  Sweet mercy, I am going to vomit.

  She lost the small amount of bread she’d eaten from Nigel’s bag, coughing and spitting on the ground next to her feet.

  “I am Isla Cooper. I am Dr. Isla Cooper.” She chanted the refrain softly in a voice that sounded on the verge of madness. “For the love of heaven, pull yourself together!” The command sounded as though it came from a small child, but she forced herself to bend over without whimpering.

  She pulled the leeches from her legs one at a time and threw them into the water with as much force as she could muster. Her actions were more frenzied than efficient, however, and some of the leeches wound up in the trees behind her. The sight of blood on her skin made her dizzy again, and she fell over, narrowly avoiding the vomit puddle.

  She felt the sobs rising, then, and was incapable of stopping them. She cried as she hadn’t for years, releasing all the pain, anger, and frustration that had been building and had now reached volcanic levels. She fought criminal werewolves, she calmed confused young predators who had only just begun shifting, she conversed with people from all walks of life and had proven herself time and again in school and in her career.

  But leeches?

  It was the final straw, the last piece of trauma she could stand, and she pulled her knees to her chest. “Melody, if I ever make it home I am going to slap you silly, do you hear me?” Her cries echoed through the trees and mingled with the crickets, which heralded evening’s approach with an increase in volume.

  Isla stood and stumbled away from the riverbank, searching for another footpath. She traveled upriver through dense undergrowth for a time before spotting a narrow clearing in the trees, almost as though someone had tunneled through the forest and left an opening behind.