Tarnished

by Cooper, Karina

  How did they get any plants to survive? These were indoors. What was the secret? A fertilizer, maybe. Something scientific in nature; I resolved to experiment when I could.

  Across the room, a fire crackled in the polished hearth, which was made from wood as red as a cherry and engraved with an array of eye-boggling designs. Mirrors glittered back the flame in burnished gold, making the room seem larger and brighter than it was. There were no trinkets in the room at all.

  A high, wide chair faced the hearth, its back to me, made of the same red wood as the mantel and draped with brilliant gold silk banners. Silhouetted in the transparent fabric, a tall figure remained still and unbothered by my abrupt entry.

  To its right, however, was another chair of the same style, and Micajah Hawke rose from its depths with murder in his eye.

  I meant to say something. I had the words, the clever accusations all ready.

  But the sheer animal grace with which he stood took out every viable thought in my head and replaced it with blank terror. As the firelight painted one half of his lithe body in gilded shadow, my overactive mind painted him as a black hunting cat, wild and sleek and hungry as the panthers I’d read of in India.

  He stalked toward me, disarmingly dapper; unmistakably dangerous. The muscles in his thighs flexed with every step, a ripple of black, his jaw was a rigid line of temper.

  I jerked as his hand wrapped around my upper arm, tight enough that I knew it’d bruise come morning, and my teeth clicked together as he propelled me backward toward the door. “You are worse than a child,” he said between gritted teeth, so low I struggled to hear him. “I thought I’d made it clear—”

  I found my voice. “Get your hands off me,” I hissed. My boots skidded on the lush carpet.

  His greater strength was undeniable. Willing or not, I was bodily dragged toward the door, all with a single hand at my arm.

  “Tíngzh˘i.”

  He froze. Not in the way a man pauses at a familiar voice and turns to look at the speaker, but as if he were suddenly a statue. Because I had no choice, I froze with him, and watched as a muscle ticked in his jaw. He stared at the door, features taut with . . . anger? Exasperation?

  I couldn’t tell.

  I glanced at the chair, but the silhouette hadn’t moved. Long, thin ornamentation wrapped around the figure’s shoulders, making the shadow seem distorted. A spate of foreign-sounding gibberish filled the tense silence, speckled with the silvery whisper of delicate bells. The voice sounded higher than my English ears were accustomed to, but I recognized the language as some form of Chinese.

  I made a mental note to learn the bloody language as Hawke’s fingers tightened on my arm. I winced. Easily, he spun around to face the chair and crackling fire, hauling me with him. My teeth snapped together with the speed of it.

  When he answered the silhouette in the same language, he didn’t pitch his voice higher as they all seemed to do. Each foreign syllable rolled off his tongue in his husky, deeply rich voice. Short. Cut to the quick.

  The voice responded; I supposed equally as short, because that muscle leapt in his jaw again. I watched the tanned column of his throat work as he struggled to swallow whatever it was that burned so intensely behind his rigid mask.

  Without a word, he turned, shot me a quelling glare edged with dangerous warning and dragged me out. It was all I could do to maintain my own footing.

  The door shut behind us. Just as fast, he let me go, shaking his gloved hand as if I’d burned him through the red fabric. I staggered. He didn’t help. “You are a failure at comprehension,” he said, his voice flat.

  Finding my balance, I squared up as pugilists do, shoulders back, chin high as I met his glittering stare and stabbed a finger into his chest. “I know a lie when I hear it,” I returned readily.

  There. That tick again as his gaze dropped to my finger.

  This time, my stomach yawned unsteadily as he slowly reached up and encircled my hand with his. His gloved fingers were warm. His touch exceedingly gentle as he pushed my hand away.

  I snatched it back before he could feel it shake in his palm.

  When I met his eyes again, they were weary. “Leave it, Miss Black.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I’d never mastered the art of lifting only one. “You expect me to just do so? That’s my bounty!”

  “I expect you to use your head,” he said evenly. “I’ve told you there was no bounty delivered. Have I ever lied to you?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How would I know?”

  His mouth tightened. “Wherever it is you call home, Miss Black, I strongly encourage you to go there.”

  And for the second time that night, giving me nothing but the iron obstacle of his will, Micajah Hawke turned his back on me.

  I watched him reenter the door he’d hauled me so unceremoniously out of, kept my silence, and hoped no one but me noticed how badly my legs were shaking.

  Leave it, he’d said first.

  Like hell I would.

  Chapter Five

  I left the Menagerie after retrieving my coat, my mind circling around and around. Why had Hawke lied about my bounty? Had he, in fact? Was it even possible that he was telling the truth?

  Of course it was. As much as Hawke made me nervous, and as much as I didn’t like being made nervous, I had to admit that I was fixated on something that might well be nothing. I’d have to find Cummings, if I could. That was the only way to get the truth.

  And underneath all of these thoughts yawned the void of the night’s earlier events. What would happen now that the marchioness’s family had made clear their feelings? Would my staff suffer? Would I?

  I would have been happy to stay for the rest of my twentieth year in exile, inherit my father’s estate and set off on a tour of the world.

  But what would happen to Betsy? To Booth, crippled as he was?

  Without me, Mr. Ashmore had no reason to keep the staff. As much as I loved them, they were his more than they’d ever be mine. I had no doubts as to the loyalty Booth felt for his employer. He doted on me, I knew. But it wasn’t the same.

  I trudged quietly, my breath fogging in the cold, my throat itching despite my respirator. As I passed under the struggling light of guttering lamps, I huddled into my coat and tried to make sense of my predicaments.

  I’d made a muck of all of it, and I didn’t even know how.

  My feet took me through Limehouse, across the immigrant border and into Blackwall. I jammed my hands into my overcoat pockets for warmth, and peered through the goggles set firmly over my eyes. Even as I watched the road before me, I kept a wary sliver of attention on the shadows around me.

  It never paid to be caught unaware. Even a single streetwalker could prove to be the bait for a footpad searching for a juicy pocket.

  It wasn’t until I found myself at the front stoop of a faceless door that I realized where my feet had taken me. With unerring precision, no less.

  I looked at the worn druggist shop window and remembered the pound notes I’d put in my pocket before I left.

  It was the last of my dearly hoarded allowance.

  I rocked back on my heels, hesitated for the fraction of a moment it took to recall the emptied vial tucked under my mattress, and seized the latch.

  I wanted to sleep dreamlessly tonight. And I wanted to do so without Betsy’s worried stare.

  The interior of this particular druggist shop was not as familiar to me as others, but it smelled exactly like its kind. Musty, fraught with the aroma of powdered herbs and thicker substances, dust and the underlying stench of coal smoke. The light was dim, the cobwebs thick in the corners.

  I stripped off my goggles and mask, inhaling greedily as I paused in the entry. The door eased shut behind me. A bell’s tinkling warning faded into the hushed silence of an academic’s study.

  The druggist—a short, rotund man with red caterpillars for eyebrows and tiny spectacles perched precariously on his nose—looked up at me over a collection of b
ooks and assorted tools of the trade.

  Those eyebrows pulled together. “This here’s a business establishment,” he warned, and I held up a hand to halt him as I crossed the small, cluttered floor.

  “And I am here for business,” I replied, “with coin to purchase with.” Albeit the last of such for the next fortnight.

  It was as if I’d spoken the magical words. His expression cleared, and he beckoned me closer with ink- and herb-stained hands. “What may I do you for?”

  “Tincture of opium, if you’d be so kind.”

  His eyes gleamed over half-moon lenses. “Opium eater, eh?”

  The question wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, but my back straightened. “Do I look like a Turk to you?” I snapped. “It’s for sleeping.” But I tasted the lie even as I claimed it with such authority.

  It was never just for sleeping, was it?

  Still, he hastened to smooth the offense. “No, no,” he reassured me. “Apologies, miss.”

  I swallowed down my irritation with effort. Everyone knew only Turks ate the stuff whole, anyway. Civilized people distilled it. “I’d like to see your store,” I told him. And smell it. I knew the flavors by rote, and some that came out of China were worse than others.

  The druggist didn’t argue with me, though he leaned ponderously back in his chair and folded his arms across his barrel chest. The buttons on his coat strained. “I’d be pleased,” he replied, with a surprising grace of manners. “But I’m afraid that my store’s run out.”

  “What?”

  “Just yesterday. I only just replenished my stock when these two blokes be wandering in, looking to see my stores.”

  I grimaced. “And they bought it all?”

  “Every last grain,” the druggist said, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. That was a lot of money to be throwing about below the drift. A lord’s servants, maybe? Merchants with an itch?

  “Did you gain a name, by any chance?”

  “Nothing,” the man replied, shrugging. “But they seemed a scholarly sort. One old bloke, graying, patches at the elbows, you know the type.”

  “And the other?”

  The man rubbed the side of his jaw with the backs of his stained fingers. I watched him shiver. “Can’t say I much cared for the gent. Tall, thin sort. Couldn’t see much past the hat and collar, though. Soft-spoken bloke. Called the other ‘Professor.’ ”

  “Professor?” I leaned back on my heels. “Professor of what? Perhaps with the university?” The man only shrugged again, and I sighed. “Well, thank you for your time.”

  “Come back in a few days,” he added to my retreating back. “I’ll have it in again. I sent out a man special.”

  A few days. The very thought fisted hard in my chest, but I only nodded as I saw myself out.

  What in God’s name would a professor be doing with that much opium?

  I replaced my goggles, but left my respirator in the pouch. I was close enough to the docks, anyway, that I’d have no need for it. I gritted my teeth as I stalked into the street. I could have just as easily walked to the next shop, I knew of another not far, but I was exhausted. I’d worn myself into circles. Between the marchioness and Hawke, I was tired of dancing around the questions and lies.

  I just wanted to sleep.

  London had a feel, a thread of familiarity that persevered from the darkest underground tunnels to the heights above. So wound up in my own predicaments, it took me longer than it should to recognize the subtle shift in resonance. I wasn’t alone.

  I looked up just as a shadow detached itself from the coal-ridden fog in the alley beside me.

  “What—Oof!” Long arms thrust from the swirling silhouette of a flowing coat, caught me square in the chest. I staggered over the pitted cobblestone, slammed against the corner edge of the brownstone shop and flailed for my goggles as they slid off my nose.

  They slipped through my grasping fingers, clattered loudly to the ground, as loud as a pistol shot in the sudden darkness fogging my vision. Effectively blinded, I rolled off the building’s wall and farther into the alley, praying neither my assailant nor I would step on the discarded goggles.

  Fog swirled in front of my face, etched in darker whorls of dirty yellow and black. My eyes wide, I strained to see through the burning miasma.

  The damp stone beneath my feet gleamed in flashes of light trapped in gray; the rubbish of forgotten passersby rustled as I stepped over it, and the sound was a scream in my too-sensitive hearing.

  And in his.

  He came at me from the swirling striations of mist. I received an impression of height, motion and the faintest reflection of light in eyes all but concealed by the wide brim of a bowler hat. A man, I thought as I danced back out of reach.

  And a knife.

  The long, thin stiletto slid from the folds of the coat like a silver whisper of death, and my heart exploded into my throat.

  This was real. No foggy nightmare concocted in opium remnants. Not that I’d ever been prone to such things.

  I sank down into a half crouch, my fingers tight at the base of my spine. The hilt of my own flat blade fit into my hand, but I hesitated before drawing it.

  I shouldn’t have.

  He came at me wordlessly, his features obscured by his high coat collar and the low hat. Another collector?

  A ruffian after the contents of my pockets?

  I ducked low under his grasp, circled around him in fluid motion. I felt as much as heard the whisper of steel by my ear, and my blood surged. Playing for keeps, then. I snapped my fingers around his wrist, felt warm skin between the edge of his glove and cuff of his sleeve, and jerked hard with all my might.

  At the same time, I rotated on the ball of my foot, jammed my shoulder under his armpit and hauled like the bellboys of Westminster. “Allez, hop!” I huffed.

  The man didn’t soar so much as tumble over my smaller height, but he made no sound as he collided with the broken stone wall on the other side. With an agile twist, a flutter of limbs, the coat swirled and he landed not gracelessly, as I’d hoped, but on his feet, knees bent and one hand braced on the ground in front of him. Spiderlike and all too fast.

  The head turned—I saw the silhouette of the rounded hat tip, a flash of paler skin between the collar and brim—and then he launched himself upward and past me, barreling his shoulder into mine.

  I fumbled for my knife and my balance, but the road was too uneven, too eager to make my acquaintance. I sprawled on my backside, one knee pointed up, the other foot caught in rotted wooden crates, my braced hand sinking to the wrist in cold mud. I swore the foulest dockside oaths I knew as the fog closed behind the ragged slap of retreating feet.

  I inhaled a shaking breath, wiping at my burning eyes with the back of my sleeved arm. My heart pounded loudly, so thick in my ears that it was all I could do to force myself to concentrate on the direction of my assailant’s escape.

  Who was he? What was he after?

  And what the devil had I done to make an enemy from a stranger?

  I returned home with my mind racing. And extremely angry.

  The fall from my head had cracked the right lens of my goggles, splitting the glass into four distinct segments barely held within the frame. Although the yellow lens was unscathed, I’d have to fix the right before I wore it again.

  I needed to scrounge some leather, and quickly.

  I was too shaken to sleep without aid, but I tried, anyway. The laudanum sat too low in the decanter to risk Betsy’s interest. For what seemed like hours, I tossed and turned. I’m not sure at what point my waking energy transferred to sleep, but I soon found myself in a feverish dreamscape.

  Demonic light and a thousand mysterious colors haunted me as I slept. Ink-black strands of spun webbing, voices from beyond my memory or knowing. Fire sprang to life in a wild cacophony of orange light and furious sound, crackling, feasting, devouring all it touched. Footsteps rang out, voices shouted, glass and silver and damp stone reflected a voracious f
lame.

  “Not the laboratory!” cried a desperate voice, hoarse with fear. “Please, not my girl!”

  I thrashed inside this painted prison, watched it swirl into the aether as if pulled through a watery drain, and suddenly I stared into jade green eyes. I called for help—didn’t I? Didn’t I fling my hands for succor? Please, my lord, help me.

  But the earl only turned away, cold and unyielding as marble. From the rigid line of his shoulders, feathers sprouted. Rending, tearing, they spilled from his back like a froth of lace and violent water, until angel’s wings hung heavy to the floor behind him.

  I awoke gasping, my breath heaving inside my chest. I clung to the crooked coverlet. My legs hung bare from my nightdress, tangled around my hips. I tugged at it, only half awake, trying to untwist the material from my sweat-damp skin.

  My heart pounded. Blinking hard, I threw off what bedclothes I hadn’t already kicked off and swung my feet over the edge of my soft bed. Daylight trickled through the closed drapes, and I rubbed my face. Every inch of my skin prickled, as it always did after a bout with nightmares. I felt drawn, horrid.

  What in God’s name would compel me to dream of the earl as some kind of avenging angel? He certainly wasn’t anything of the sort. The earlier bits of my dreams were as familiar to me as my own name. My nightmares always held fire. Fire and a man’s voice pleading for mercy.

  My body ached, remnants of the scraps I’d gotten into below. I threw my arms over my head in a stretch that unkinked the tension from my body.

  Energy flooded through me, as if by doing so I’d uncapped a dam from somewhere inside. “Aah!” I sighed, arching my back. Nightmares or no, today was a new day. There were mysteries to solve. I only had to await the night to once more travel below and locate my vanished quarry.

  I could stop by another druggist when I was done. I’d be damned if I went through another night without aid.

  And with that solid thought, the vague memories of my dreams faded away, replaced by that which I knew was real. I knew nothing of fiery laboratories or angels, after all.