Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Good. It was long past time I marked him.

  Knowing that he would carry that mark through the night jarred something loose inside me, something savage and wild. My release tore away all sense of light and dark, touch and sound, until all I knew was shuddering gratification, wicked decadence; so much want that I was a simmering cauldron of it boiling over into desperate selfishness.

  When I sagged, losing my grip beneath a tide of fatigued weakness, hard arms banded under my thighs. He allowed me to fold, to trust him with all of my weight, until my forehead came to rest against flesh hotter than it should be.

  This. This is what forced me to return. This is what my body missed, even when I’d allowed myself to find comfort in another man’s arms.

  I may have been tutored in Society’s proprieties, gentled and softened by silks and sweetness, but I was in the end little more than a slave to the temptations Micajah Hawke engendered in me.

  I would not call it love.

  A hammering at the locked door tore through my hazy sense of self. Listless, still panting, I could only hang in his grasp.

  Blood oozed from the wound in Hawke’s shoulder, a sluggish well of crimson coalescing under my clearing sight. I blinked hard.

  Just above, imprinted at the muscle where his throat met his shoulder, a perfect indentation of teeth rapidly turned black and red.

  An overabundance of fluid at my thighs cooled rapidly against my own body heat, drawing too much of my own attention to the flesh that would no doubt ache, and soon.

  I blushed so deeply, I thought the whole of my head might melt right off my shoulders.

  The door rattled.

  Hawke cradled my face in rough hands. “Look at me,” he ordered, not gently.

  I forced myself to obey, to meet the eyes that seemed darker than when we’d started. Not wholly brown, but not entirely blue.

  Behind me, the bars shuddered.

  The damp hair on my nape lifted as the lion made known his anger at our transgression; no doubt the musk upon the air irritated his sensibilities when his lionesses remained caged so far away.

  Hawke’s voice was not altogether steady. “This is over, Cherry. You cannot help me.”

  Anger forced a trickle of strength to my limbs. I caught his wrists in my hands, thicker than my fingers could encircle and rigid. “I won’t leave you. I’ve come to rescue you,” I said, and my voice, too, trembled.

  Shocks still rippled down my limbs, snapped in my blood as though I’d seized a living current in both hands.

  The skin over his cheekbones seemed too taut, and as I watched, his eyes flared wide. The exotic ream of black, lashes thicker than seemed fair for an already beautiful man, flinched. Ignoring my ineffective grasp, his hands left my cheeks to close over my shoulders. “I will not leave here.”

  The door thudded hard enough to send the animals around us snarling and screaming.

  I flinched. “Why? What binds you?”

  “Just do as you are told,” he returned, a strained growl. “I am barely in control of myself, do not tempt me any further!”

  I made to grasp his face as he had mine, to force him to look at me, but he had never been so easily handled—and would not look at me as I demanded. His flesh slid from mine, tore a gasp from my lips, and he turned me as effortlessly as though I weighed nothing.

  He was not kind. He shoved me against the bars, hard enough that they rattled; an echo to the door and the muffled shouting behind it. He gripped my wrist, tucked it high up on my back until my shoulder burned. His lips brushed my ear. “Enough,” he said, so low that it scraped over the primal instincts already overly aware of the predators around us. “This is enough.”

  For whom?

  “I can help you fight them,” I said, ashamed to be pleading for it. “I can help you garner control. Come with me!”

  Strong teeth nipped hard enough at the shell of my ear that I yelped—trapped between stark arousal and pain. “What will it take to ensure you never darken my door again?” he demanded harshly.

  I had no answer to give. He waited for none. With a cruelty I had always known him capable of, he jerked the arm he held.

  The sound of a shoulder as it separates from the joint is unmistakable, and only my scream masked the wet pop. Agony knifed through my chest, my throat, every sense I possessed, and my vision went red and white.

  A hand flattened at my décolletage, my flesh burned hot and then cold, and Hawke tore me from the bars he’d pinned me against. I stumbled.

  “If you never do anything else,” he said roughly, “obey me this time. You have no choice.”

  He was right. With this single act, the brutal finish to the gift I’d demanded of his body, he’d savaged my ability to fight. And well he knew it.

  He handled me. He’d always handled me, manipulated me.

  Always to save me.

  Tears streamed freely from my eyes, but it was anger that pushed me to stand alone. My right arm hung useless at my side. Every breath sent knives through the brutalized socket.

  Gasping through sobs, I managed, “Why?” Gripping my arm did not salve my pain, or my pride. “Damn you, Hawke, why must you always take it on yourself?”

  He reached over my head. Glass shattered. “Leave London before it’s too late.” It was not the answer I wanted; he never gave me the answer I wanted.

  If he thought me useless with only my left hand, he misjudged. As glass shards peppered us both, as he reached again for me, I cocked my fist and landed a blow to his cheek that snapped his head to the side. The skin at his cheekbone whitened, and the tic just beside it went a long way to soothing my stinging pride.

  It still did nothing for the pain I suffered, but I had long known that Hawke would always be a source of it.

  Damn it all, I would not call it love. “Stop protecting me!”

  The door behind him splintered.

  Jaw clenched tight, Hawke caught me about the waist. “Go,” he ordered. I realized his intent the moment my head rose level with the window.

  It was too small for Hawke, but I could fit.

  Another splintering crack told me the door wouldn’t hold for a third. Much as I despised knowing it, Hawke was right.

  Only one of us would escape this—and he had no intentions of allowing me a choice.

  What would I do?

  Exactly what he demanded of me. I had no other choice.

  The bastard.

  “I will return,” I vowed.

  “Go.”

  Grasping the ledge with one hand, I braced my feet against his shoulders and wiggled through the narrow frame. Glass caught at my arm, but it was an insignificant pain compared to the burning fury of my heart—and the agony he’d forced into my shoulder.

  I had suffered this injury before. It was common enough among those of us who made an art of contortionism. I knew how to set the joint without help, but it would ache for days.

  Fitting.

  The last I heard as the door fell apart was Hawke’s final order.

  “Do not disappoint me.”

  If he and I survived this night, I would murder him myself.

  But not before I forced him to grovel at my feet.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There was no time for tears. Feeling sorry for myself would have to wait. I barely cleared the narrow window, flesh stinging where the glass had not let me pass through without argument, before loping into a staggered, awkward run.

  Behind me, a narrow rectangle of blue light bloomed like a second moon.

  The voices I imagined must be raised did not trickle past the ground that swallowed them.

  The bit of smoke I’d taken in wasn’t enough to keep me floating in bliss for long. I didn’t know when the smoke had worn away, whether it had come before or after the blistering moment shared between Hawke and I, but I no longer floated. My body ached, my shoulder screamed in excruciating pain, and over it all, my anger fulminated.

  It was enough to keep me warm
in the cold March night, though I remained markedly underdressed for it.

  The beauty of the Menagerie was such that few might consider me out of the normal element. The coins that had not torn loose jingled and flashed in my wake, unusual enough that I could be simply a working girl beneath notice. The sweets that worked the grounds were often dressed the same, or wearing less, and as long as none offered me coin, I might escape unremarked.

  Of course, this might have held true were it not for the sudden howl, hellishly ragged, that rose like a beastly symphony through the pale lantern light.

  I had never heard its like before, not even when the dogs of the blackened streets lifted noses to the sky. Only the lions in that dingy cage came close to the primordial awareness that shuddered through me—an arrow of fearful panic surging into the forefront of my mind.

  Run.

  Whatever made that sound, whatever godless creature had been unleashed upon the Menagerie, I did not want to meet it.

  Cradling my arm, I followed the same path I’d taken when last I’d escaped the Veil’s interrupted attempt at punishment. Every step jarred my shoulder, until ragged fingers of bloody crimson flickered at the outset of my vision, but none had come to stop me. I thought it odd, at first, until I stumbled between two market stalls left empty and barren and fought to catch my breath.

  The lanterns did not lace through the small square, as if to remind attendees by way of looming shadow that it was not meant to be a market night. On warmer evenings, such shadows might prove a welcome relief for those seeking darker corners, but here in the cool damp, the skeletal stalls looks angry and unwelcoming.

  A fitting enough place to take a respite.

  I panted, teeth gritted tightly, and staggered to lean against the thick support beam of the nearest stand. Fitting my throbbing shoulder against the grainy wood, I sucked in a sharp breath and threw the whole of my body weight in and up.

  The stand did not so much as creak at my awkward assault, but the loosened joint crackled wetly and snapped into place. I could not entirely silence my warbling shriek of pain, but at least I didn’t scream outright.

  A small victory that meant nothing when another eerie howl lifted in answer.

  It seemed closer, as though it followed my trail, and I remembered again that moment when Hawke had come from nowhere to roll me into the mud. I’d thought him beastly then.

  No less so when his flesh filled mine; it frightened me how much I welcomed it.

  I knuckled at my eyes with a shaking, tingling hand. My arm hurt like the very dickens, but I could move it again in the manner it was meant.

  I pushed away from the beam supporting my weight, flinched when a flash of hurt echoed from shoulder to wrist. Beyond the luminescent sea of glowing orbs wrapped in elegantly patterned Chinese paper, the circus remained a distant marker.

  As I aligned my sense of direction to it, a shadow slipped between the lustrously illuminated paths.

  I had no reason, no evidence to explain why the hair on my nape suddenly stood on end, but the gooseflesh I suffered bit deep. Squinting hard, I searched the shadowed expanse of ground for a better glimpse.

  It came, but not in the direction I stared.

  A flicker of movement to my right forced me to turn. My heart slammed against the overly tight corset I hadn’t removed, and I flattened a hand against my bosom.

  Something hard, cylindrical ground into my sternum, nestled firmly between my breasts.

  Keeping one eye on the drifting dark, I tucked two fingers into the corset’s band and plucked free a phial.

  It was warm from my body heat, filled with liquid a color I could not discern. It did not slosh as particularly diluted fluid might, but oozed sluggish and thick.

  When? How?

  Yet the instant I thought it, I remembered the feel of Hawke’s hand against my chest, and the cold slide I’d thought had come from the pain of my dislocated shoulder.

  Do not disappoint me.

  That bloody-minded fool. Had he given me this in lieu of his company?

  Of course he had. He’d meddled again, ignoring my wants entirely—all for the sake of what he thought must be done. It was almost worth screaming over, but for the fact I’d rather he be present to suffer through my insults.

  My fingers folded over the glass phial.

  I glimpsed two more shadows skulking across the lawn.

  For all I knew, Hawke suffered now beneath a lash, chained in his cage or dragged before the Veil for once more placing himself between me and the forces I did not yet wholly understand—but as I tucked the phial he’d forced on me back into my corset, I resolved to unravel the riddle.

  He’d provided me a method.

  All I had to do was lose my peculiar pursuers.

  I turned and sprinted away from the dark market, into the lit paths where less patrons strolled than I expected. The wager I made with fate was that even the Veil would not send its altered Ferrymen into the light where they might be seen by just anyone.

  Of course, this would only matter if I could make it to a place occupied by more than just those of Menagerie employ.

  My feet knew the paths, my head remained focused through the dull ache of my brutalized shoulder, until it all became a groaning refrain: run, run, run.

  No figures fell into line behind me, proving that my wager was at least partially correct. The ground shifted beneath me, from well-traveled path to soft grass and again to tamped earth, and as I approached the private gardens—gated, now, for use by patrons willing to pay more coin for it—a lyrical strain of a violin lifted from the deeper shadows beyond the first row of hedges.

  Whatever followed me, they must have realized my intent.

  All hope of stealth faded. Footsteps pounded upon the earth behind me, underscored by snarling, panting; a monstrous cacophony culminating in an excited, rasping scream. “Take her!”

  It was both a man’s order and a guttural grind, overflowing with a hunger that demanded blood and flesh for the table. For all I might have likened Hawke to a hungry beast, this one put that overblown metaphor to chilling shame.

  I looked back over my shoulder to find three figures tear from the dark—men, they were, yet half-stooped and lumbering. All were large, gangly in the sense that their limbs seemed too long for the trunks that loped and staggered between them, but it wasn’t the shape of them that caused such panic within me.

  The eyes of a cat in dim light often startled them what weren’t paying attention; gold and green, white and sometimes red, they reflected light like a monster crawled from hell.

  Three sets of eyes glowed hotly on me.

  The hair on my nape threatened to tear free and flee. My flesh crawled, and my heart beat hard enough that I feared for its place in my breast, and still, I could not stop to gain my breath.

  I was quarry again, but this time, I only partially recognized what chased me.

  The Veil had twisted the Ferrymen, of that I now had the proof, and I remembered in grisly, colorful detail exactly what these monsters had done to the Bakers.

  If I would die, I refused to do it torn limb from limb.

  I eschewed the gates entirely, and the craggy-faced footmen in black and green who watched this parade with less surprise than I expected. Also Ferrymen, then, like the others.

  Hell and damnation.

  The creatures following me were faster than I, eating up great strides of ground. Unfortunately for them, I’d years of experience to call upon—I’d gone through the hedge more than I’d ever gone through the gates, and I was wearing less tonight to snag.

  The branches I threw myself into stung as they scraped at wounds collected and aggravated by sweat. Flinching, I pushed through the sharp twigs, tore free when my bustle caught. The draft this caused slipped under my too-stretched bloomers and earned a muttered uncivility. I wasted precious time to ensure the knee-length fold of fabric did not remain behind in the bushes.

  I had precious little room for embarrassment
, but I could not stomach the thought of escaping whilst my nakedness be flaunted for all to see.

  A lady, thin as my claim to the title, deserved at least that much.

  I fell into open air, torn leaves whirling in my wake. As luck would have it, there were no patrons in my path. Running along the mazelike hedgerows suggested there were less still than should be.

  All attention remained on the circus, which was not how it should have been. Were there more lower class in the line I’d waited in with Ashmore? I couldn’t recall, and dared not waste the energy trying.

  Twigs snapped, a body barreled through the narrow hedges separating the paths, and I drew up short and a long-limbed man fell gracelessly into my path. He had only just hit the ground when his knees bent in a manner that should not have been possible.

  Gristle popped, his jaw unhinged and the roar he belted loose blasted through my ears.

  I did not stop to think. I simply hitched my stride and caught him square in the chin with the top of my booted foot, snapping his too-wide mouth closed and shattering more than a few teeth doing it. I leapt over him as he fell backwards, fingers like claws tearing at the air.

  If I searched him with Eon, would I see in him the same blue thread I hypothesized belonged to Hawke?

  If so, where did the phial he’d given me fall in this mad scheme?

  I overshot my leap, had to crouch to achieve a balanced landing, and darted into another hedgerow. This game continued for an eternal minute more as I dodged the rustle of my pursuers, and forced each to loop again and again.

  The violinist whose music I followed did not stop playing.

  When I spilled into a small and delicately appointed courtyard, it was not as empty as the paths had been. A man I recognized waited within. A hat was pulled over his dark hair, and a grizzled kind of care had left deep lines into his features.

  He wasted no time on introductions, beckoning to me with frantic hurry. “This way,” he hissed.

  The sound of it jarred a memory loose from the sweat-stained panic riding me. Nye. The name came to me in Maddie Ruth’s voice, and I realized then that I’d seen him before on my way to the circus. I’d never met the man direct, but I remembered his voice as he tended to the same mechanical apparatuses that Maddie Ruth had done.