His next moves were mapped. Lily felt the claustrophobic weight of his checkmate. There was no avoiding it. She could not win.
What was she going to do about it?
She set the files down.
“Thank you for returning my property, Miss Albright. But I’m afraid this has progressed rather beyond my forgiving the trespass.”
Lily adjusted her grip on the iron poker, weighing it in her hand.
The calm of his expression shifted, replaced, for a moment, by a real fear.
The sight of it fired a quick satisfaction through her veins. For all his cold confidence, he recognized that she could be dangerous.
“Strike me with that and you’ll hang.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Lily replied.
She moved toward him. He stepped back, circling toward the door, putting the desk between them. She let him do it. As much as part of her wanted to fight, it wasn’t a battle she was going to win.
She stopped with her back to the wide, elegant French windows.
Hartwell shouted over his shoulder.
“Edward! Mr. Kendall! To me!”
Lily turned to the glass panes. She flipped the latch and yanked them open. Cold air blasted into the room, tossing the curtains. It was snowing, the white flakes spilling down onto the plush green carpet.
She stepped onto the sill, looking down.
The garden was too far away, at least twenty feet from where she stood to a cold flagstone patio.
“You’ll break a leg, at the very least, if you attempt to jump,” Hartwell said behind her. “You may trust my word on it. I am a physician.”
He was right. To jump would be madness.
Lily looked up.
A footman and Hartwell’s butler arrived in the doorway.
“Restrain her, please,” he ordered.
They moved toward her.
She swung the poker out before her. The hooked end caught the telephone wire bolted to the side of the house. Lily adjusted her grip on the handle, then, as Hartwell’s men reached for her, she fell.
The wire bowed under her weight. She slid along the length of it, flying out over the shrubs and pathways of the garden. She reached the low point in the wire’s arc and stopped with roughly ten feet between her dangling boots and the soft grass below.
There were shouts from the house and the shrill peel of a police whistle.
Lily let go.
She fell, twisting to take the impact on her side, rather than her ankles. She rolled across the snow-dusted lawn, then stumbled to her feet and ran.
Behind her, there was a crack as a door flung open, followed by the sound of pounding feet. She risked a backwards glance and saw Hartwell’s men racing after her across the lawn.
She sprinted for the yew hedge, grabbing the Triumph from its hiding place. She engaged the ignition, then hopped on and pedaled furiously. The engine caught, roaring to life, and she flew forward, leaving her pursuers behind.
She rode blind, the snow stinging at her face. She tugged her goggles from her saddle bag and strapped them on. The road slipped under her tires but she refused to slow, keeping her breakneck speed until she had left Kensington behind her and wove her way through the familiar dirt and clutter of the city.
She reached Piccadilly Circus. The marquees were dark, the broad thoroughfares, usually jammed with traffic, all but deserted. Black pavement vanished under a drifting fall of snow. Roads radiated out from the still, empty fountain like the spokes of a wheel.
Which way to go?
Hartwell’s men were lost a solid mile behind her. The constable who hurried past, his collar turned up against the storm, spared her barely a glance.
That wouldn’t last. They would come. She had gone beyond the pale, handing Hartwell the power to silence her. He would see her thrown into Newgate, tried and convicted as a housebreaker. And who would stop him?
Ash and The Refuge? She had shut them out, refused their help.
Her father? He had turned her away. Why would he put his position, all the power he had spent his life carefully accumulating, on the line for the sake of a daughter he didn’t even claim as his own?
If there wasn’t an even deeper reason for his refusal to go after Hartwell, she thought, aware of the crumpled memo in her pocket.
As for Strangford . . .
The thought of him brought with it an unexpected ache.
There was no point denying it now, pretending it was anything else. It had been fear, plain and simple, that had driven her decisions—fear of how much he was coming to mean to her. Fear of how deeply she wanted him. Fear of how vulnerable that would make her to being hurt again, being abandoned. She had shut him out and now she had run out of time.
Hartwell would come for her. Among the many paths that sprawled out from where she stood, straddling the idling Triumph, it seemed there were only two ways this could go. She could wait and allow herself to fall under his power. Or she could run, abandoning the life she had built, the people she had come to care for, and disappear.
Lily came to a decision.
She revved the engine, then turned the motorcycle and skidded into gear, blasting up past the shuttered theatres of Shaftsbury Avenue—towards home.
TWENTY-EIGHT
LILY STEPPED INSIDE.
The warmth enveloped her, wrapping her up like a blanket after the bitter cold of her ride. Her hands ached inside her leather gloves.
The hallway of 702 March Place looked as it always did, from the rust-hued wall-paper to the worn oriental carpet on the floor. The space smelled of boiled greens and suet, Mrs. Bramble’s infamous nettle pudding.
But something was off.
The sad pilchards still glistened in the horrid still-life on the wall, next to the stuffed kittens frozen into their scene of cozy domestic bliss. Yet in the air was something other than the scent of steamed nettles, an energy of tension that radiated down the stairs.
Estelle’s door was open. There was nothing unusual in that, but there was in the low voices that drifted to where Lily stood, their murmuring quick and agitated. The mat under her feet was soaked, marked with still-melting bits of snow. Mrs. Bramble should be there, scolding her about neglecting to clean her boots. The house felt as though it were waiting, hushed and uncomfortable.
She climbed the stairs. They were silent under her boots, no creak singing out her arrival as she reached the open door and looked into Estelle’s flat.
The signs were subtle, easy to overlook. The room appeared as it always did, save for the full glass of vermouth sitting on the table. The dreadful Chinese urn was toppled from its stand onto the rug. The dog-shaped lid had come off and cracked in two. No ancient emperor’s ashes lay inside, just a cobweb and the delicate remains of a moth.
Lily didn’t call. She walked inside, heart pounding against her ribs, and followed the sound of the voices through the drawing room and down the hallway to Estelle’s bedroom.
“Are you sure she isn’t still out?”
“The lecture should have ended two hours ago. Even with the storm, she should have been home by now.”
“Perhaps she met a beau, went out for a drink. Or she might have run off with the gasworks man.”
“Honestly, Agatha!”
Lily stepped up to the door. Miss Bard and Mrs. Bramble turned to look at her. Miss Bard’s face was pale, making her eyes look wide and dark like some frightened animal.
“What’s going on?” Lily asked.
Before they could answer, her gaze fell on the mirror behind them, the glass over Estelle’s vanity table. It was cracked, a spiderweb of fractures radiating out from a point of impact.
The images of the vision played out, vivid and clear as a set of photographs. Estelle at her glass. The shadow behind her, moving from the open door of the closet. The glint of silver in its hand, a weapon thin and sharp as a rapier.
No, she realized. Not a rapier.
The dream had been imperfect, as they always were, her
mind filling in for the unfamiliar, the things it lacked the experience to grasp.
The dog split in two on the floor in a pile of ashes—it was how she had interpreted the breaking of a Chinese urn she’d never seen before.
The shadow stood in for the form and face of a man she hadn’t met. She could fill them in now, knew who it was that had made his way into the house, probably hours before, when the comings and goings of the inhabitants would’ve masked the sound of one more door opening. Who waited, concealed inside Estelle’s closet, until she was there, alone, at her table.
You have her?
Those were Hartwell’s words into the telephone an hour before. He hadn’t been discussing the transfer of another poor prostitute unlucky enough to fall into his care. It had been Waddington reporting the success of his mission to retrieve Estelle.
That silver weapon in his hand?
It was a needle.
What did you inject her with?
He had come for her, driving the needle into her arm, drugging her with some sort of sedative. She had fought him, the mirror breaking during their struggle.
Lily could imagine it, fill in the spaces the vision had left empty or jumbled with symbols—how he must have dragged her into the drawing room, Estelle reaching out weakly, just managing to strike the urn off its pedestal as they passed.
And then . . . ?
She recalled the rest of what she had foreseen—an unfamiliar space, shadows shifting in the flickering of a single flame against a backdrop of walls of dark glass. They resolved themselves now, took a firmer form as she melded them to Hartwell’s words over the telephone.
Yes, the warehouse will do.
It was one of the thousands of warehouses that crowded the city’s wharves. That’s where he had taken her, where he would prepare her for the next phase of Hartwell’s experiment.
Draining the blood into bottles, stealing it from victims while they slept, hadn’t worked. He would try something different this time, a new protocol. Something that required not just the blood to be stolen but the woman herself.
A procedure that would see Estelle’s blood taken from her veins and poured directly into Joseph Waddington, a change Hartwell hoped would make the transfer of her power permanent.
Lily could see her as vividly as if she were in the room. Estelle, sitting up, pale as a ghost. The blood seeping through the hand clasped to her throat, her eyes wide and vacant.
Thief. Murderer. Alukah.
Alukah. Blood-drinker.
The full horror of the truth settled in.
They had been watching her.
Hartwell had set his men to follow her after she had provoked him in the gallery. She had noticed them outside the house, dismissed them as a case of paranoia.
One of them must have seen the guests streaming in and out through the door and become curious. All it would’ve taken was a casual question and he would learn that a medium lived here.
That’s how Waddington had known where to find her. Estelle didn’t advertise her services. Lily thought that would keep her safe. Meanwhile, she had led a killer directly to her front door.
She remembered Estelle’s story the morning after the séance—after Lily had let Waddington inside the house—of a client at the séance she believed was a competitor, a man who could see the dead.
It was Waddington, using a power he had stolen from Annalise Boyden, his grasp on it fading as he searched for a new victim.
It was her fault. Lily had made this happen, brought all of it about through her foolish attempts to change what was to come.
Just like she had before.
The horror of it hit like a blow, roaring in her ears, pushing her back from the doorway.
“You alright? You’ve gone over a bit queer,” Mrs. Bramble noted, frowning at Lily.
Miss Bard looked over as though just noticing she was there.
“Do you know what this is?” she demanded. “Do you know what’s happened to her?” She stepped forward as Lily backed away.
“I’m sorry. I’m . . . not well.”
She ran, bolting down the stairs, tearing open the door. She staggered out into the street, the cold snapping at her, snow-covered stones slipping under her feet. She fell, tumbling to her knees in the middle of the road, the rows of respectable brick houses standing stoically back to observe through their darkened windows.
She was alone. No carriage tracks or hoof prints desecrated the unbroken perfection of the snow, even her own trail quickly swallowed up in the thick, hushed fall of it.
The cold seeped up through her trousers, sinking into her bones.
Estelle was going to die.
And she had made it happen . . . just like she did fourteen years ago.
The world shifted to another night on another street, one far less respectable than March Place. A Covent Garden alley, papered with fading playbills, stinking of stale beer and urine. The sound of drunken laughter rang in the distance alongside the hoarse calls of prostitutes.
She had agreed not to wear red. To leave her jewels at home. Not to go alone. She had done it, kept all the promises Lily had wheedled from her, begged and cried for her to adhere to.
Lily’s intercession had led directly to her mother lying on the ground, blood spilling from the stab wounds in her chest, turning a pale blue gown to crimson. Paste jewels sparkled, scattered across the paving stones. A dead man lay beside her, another casualty of Lily’s attempt to thwart what some greater force had already ordained.
Her fault. All her fault.
In the emptiness of March Place, the snow melted to ice against her knees, dusting her back, the storm whirling around her with the ferocity of a wild animal.
It would always be like this. She would be battered with knowledge that meant nothing. Any action she took would rebound back upon her, destroying the lives of the people she loved most. There could be no purpose in that, no hope—just an unending torment of grief and powerlessness.
Despair rose up, choking her as she stood in a vortex of spinning snow.
She had failed. She was always going to fail.
The full implication of that knowledge came at her like a shadow rushing out of darkness. She held her breath, braced for it, for accepting everything it would mean . . .
The wind changed. It fell back. Instead of twisting and consuming her, the snow hung suspended in the air. The world went quiet, the thick and pregnant silence of a room full of people anticipating some great announcement.
The snow-covered ground beneath her wasn’t a respectable city street any longer. It had become something else—a crossroads with the darkness of the unknown waiting at either end of it.
There was still a choice.
She could acknowledge that her power was the embodiment of futility and go back to desperately ignoring it, abandoning any hope of something more. Of a purpose.
Or . . .
She remembered Hartwell’s voice, the words ghosting into the black receiver of the telephone.
I’ll be there at dawn.
It wasn’t dawn yet.
It was next to hopeless, a gamble with almost no chance of success. There had to be a thousand warehouses in this labyrinth of a city and Lily had no logical way of narrowing her search to discover which one Estelle was being held in.
She would be giving up her chance to flee. Hartwell would already be positioning his forces, preparing to exercise the control he knew he had gained over her. Any hope of gathering what scraps of her life she could and running would be gone.
But she could still choose to fight.
She thought of The Refuge’s attic, of the figure from Evangeline Ash’s painting—a goddess out of myth, a force to be reckoned with.
She hesitated.
Against all her own logic, she knew she was looking for a sign. For something like Robert Ash’s Parliament of Stars to tell her which way to go.
The wind turned again. The ebb of the storm had passed and it redoubled in
intensity, blowing into a howl. Ice battered at her cheek, stinging in its ferocity.
She stood, her bones aching, muscles battered.
There was one weapon she still possessed, one course that presented her best hope of turning this slimmest of chances into something real.
The idea of using it filled her with fear.
She would do it anyway . . . but not alone.
TWENTY-NINE
THE TRIUMPH SKIDDED TO a stop, tires sliding across the snow-covered Bayswater street. She shifted her weight, fighting for balance, barely saving herself from wiping out.
Lily had been taking the roads slower than her racing heart would have liked, but it didn’t matter. The storm was thick enough now that the motorcycle was a liability. She would need other means of transportation for the rest of the evening.
She killed the engine, pulled off her goggles, and looked up at Strangford’s front steps.
They were covered in an unblemished blanket of white. A little cone of snow rested on the head of the iron pug. The flakes continued to drift down around her, glittering in the glow of the gaslights. At the end of the road, the park was a wilderness unmarked by so much as a single hoof print.
It was past midnight. The windows of the fine houses lining the road reflected the storm like dark mirrors. Everyone in this respectable quarter of the city was certainly asleep. It would be hours yet before even the cooks and chambermaids rose from their beds.
It was an abysmally poor time for a call.
She looked up at Strangford’s dark windows and felt a quick jolt of fear. The thought of being turned away cut as surely as the cold in the air.
No, she admitted. This door would open for her, no matter how inappropriate the hour. She knew that with a bone-deep certainty.
She set the Triumph against the iron rails of the fence and jogged up the steps. There was only a moment of hesitation before she grasped the brass knocker and rapped it, loudly and repeatedly, a demand no one could mistake for anything else.
Then she waited.
There was no answer.
The trepidation crept back. She forcefully ignored it, took the knocker, and swung it again.
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