Tarnished

by Cooper, Karina

  Who would make a useless piece of jewelry?

  Although whomever had, he had certainly been a craftsman. The make was exceptional. Delicate gold filigree framed a burnt umber oval, striking in both design and color. Polished to a beautiful sheen, it set off the black silhouette raised in the center.

  The tips of my fingers skimmed over the features of a lady I couldn’t see. I could feel the cut of her cheek, the graceful sweep of her neck and her shoulder. I traced what seemed to be a wealth of hair, or perhaps the folds of a gown.

  It felt expensive. And thicker than a bit of jewelry should.

  And warm.

  A clue?

  Most assuredly so. I caught myself as I started to grin. Surely someone would remember making it, seeing it. Even hearing about it.

  I had to go find Ish. I turned.

  “No!” The rasping, oddly muffled voice sliced through the dark. “Give it back!”

  I whirled. And then the world turned white.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Stars ricocheted across my sight. I found myself careening into the gurney, grunting with the impact as the metal edges dug into my stomach. Pain licked along my skull with sudden, shattering force.

  The cameo spun from my hand as I clutched at the surface.

  Energy flooded through me. Fear and raw survival combined inside my roiling veins to send an urgent message to my limbs. I let go of the supporting edge, dropping my weight solidly to the floor just as the gurney shuddered beneath an impact that rang through the small room like a tinny gong.

  I rolled, gasping for breath.

  My skull echoed with pain and the ongoing rapport of metal on metal. Whatever had been used to strike me, I could already tell that the result would hurt horrifically. Just as soon as I stopped trying to survive long enough to pay attention to it.

  Metal clanged once more, and I caught a glint of copper tubing as it dropped to the floor. It rolled listlessly away. A black shape flitted between the gurney legs, scrambling to collect the cameo I’d dropped. Much too quick for my pain-blasted eyes to see more than a vague impression of a dark coat. A bowler hat pulled low on his head.

  “Stop,” I gasped, and launched myself to my feet. I wasted no time in attempting to dart around the gurney. I vaulted over it, one hand braced on the surface, legs kicked out.

  My aim was good. My fury did the rest.

  With my feet lodged squarely in his back, my assailant collapsed under my weight. The cameo sailed from his grip. I teetered as I caught my balance, the cameo spinning wildly in front of me, but the man wrenched himself back with superhuman effort.

  The top of his head smacked into my chin, dislodging his bowler hat. My head snapped back even as my fingers closed on the thick oval.

  Sprawling on my backside on the cold floor, I tried to roll away, but he was quick. And much more determined than I expected. No wilting flower, he leapt on me, and I realized that this wasn’t the same opponent who had cornered me outside the druggist’s shop. This man was bent, reedier beneath his bulky coat and wearing something that covered his mouth and nose. His hair was an iron gray corona around his head, his eyebrows bushy over fierce eyes I couldn’t see the color of.

  We rolled gracelessly, each struggling to maintain a grip on the cameo. I didn’t know why it was so important to him, but for me, it was a clue. A link.

  And more important, I didn’t want the bloody bastard who’d coshed me to have it.

  I grunted as his knee found my ribs. He didn’t seem to notice the fist I drove into his covered cheek, but my knuckles caught on the sharp brass rods built into what I realized was a respirator. Pain sliced through my hand, jarring a muffled sound of surprise and anger from my lips as he latched onto my other arm.

  My head cracked against the floor as his elbow planted itself into my cheek. For the third time in only a handful of minutes, sparks once more shot across my vision. Like a writhing, many-jointed spider, my assailant twisted and kicked and drove everything he had at me.

  The cameo skittered across the floor, glittering.

  He rolled off of me, but I caught the back of his coat in my grasping fingers, hauling back with everything I had. I heard a masculine voice growling something, wheezing through the mask and utterly indistinct. “No, you don’t,” I shot back.

  His boot caught me square in the stomach. I let go, gritting my teeth, and scrabbled after him. Digging the toes of my boots in to the floor, I launched myself across his back. A rush of exultation lanced through me as his chest hit the ground, legs akimbo.

  We reached for the cameo at the same time. My fingers closed over it first, his locked tightly around my wrist. He wrenched me to the side. My legs hit the side of the work table. Metal rained from the surface, pinging and clanging loudly. Something hard rebounded from my knee, sending aching shockwaves all the way to my spine, and clattered loudly amid our struggles.

  At the same time, the man slammed my fingers against the floor. I locked my jaw. Tightened my grasp, my other fist flailing for the man’s head.

  He slammed my hand again. The cameo dug into my palm.

  And again. My fingers went numb.

  A tiny, almost imperceptible click undercut our desperate panting as we struggled for the damned thing.

  The man went still, his fingers tight around my wrist.

  Perhaps something about the way he froze translated across the tenuous, violent contact between us; I went still as well, my face level with a tiny gold dial turning cog by cog in the cameo’s edge.

  His fingers spasmed around my wrist. “No!”

  It was the only word I actually understood since the fight began, hoarse and muffled behind the copper- and brass-fitted respirator.

  This was my only opportunity. I bucked hard, managed somehow to splay my free hand over the man’s face. His respirator caught on my fingertips, cracked even as a thin seam split along the cameo edge.

  The man groaned. To my surprise, he let me go so suddenly that I found myself flailing against nothing at all. A foot planted firmly on my back, driving my face down against the cold ground once more.

  In the suddenly too-acute focus of my right eye, the seam at the cameo’s gold edge widened. There was another click, a puff! as if something had blown through a narrow channel, and a wisp of pink and gold wafted into the air.

  Into my face.

  I sucked in a breath. Too late. It slid into my nose, and it was as if I’d inhaled a head full of raw brandy. It slipped into my mouth, my throat. My lungs. I knew this feeling.

  It was as if I’d inhaled raw opium. Only not just opium. It tasted . . . different.

  “I’m so sorry,” the man said over me; pleading, I thought. Raging? “I’m so sorry, forgive me, forgive me . . .” And then I saw his feet beside me. I struggled to get to my feet, made it only as far as my knees before the cameo dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers.

  I blinked. Sparklers filled the corner of my vision. I took another deep breath. Once more, it tasted of . . . of something thick and faintly bitter. Like medicine. Like smoke.

  The cameo vanished into gloved hands. I reached for the man, but his back was to me. He was fleeing. His footsteps echoed all around me, crashed like a wave long after his body no longer moved in my sight.

  What sight I had.

  Pink glittered across it. Pink and gold, like the warmest summer sunrise.

  I shook my head hard. Saliva pooled in my mouth. I could hear my heartbeat, feel it throbbing inside my chest. I reached for the edge of the worktable, found it and held on as the air turned to spun sugar around me.

  I croaked out a sound. Maybe I only thought about it.

  I’d been drugged. I had enough presence of mind to realize that much, and I could taste the opium within it. Opium, I could handle.

  But this was different.

  “Girl?”

  The deepest night would never be so rich as the sound of Ishmael’s voice.

  I shuddered as it rolled over me, an ocea
n of resonance and opulence. My blood exploded inside my veins, suddenly warm. Too warm. I pulled at the high collar of my corset. “C-cameo,” I managed.

  “Girl, where are you hurt?” Large, callused hands pulled at my arms, wrenching me upright.

  I gasped. “Cameo! Where—” Even speaking sent vibrations along my throat, my lips and tongue; it was as if I were suddenly alive. More alive than any human body could stand. I shuddered. “A m-man! I saw him, g-gray hair . . .”

  His full lips turned down as he studied me. “Cameo? What man?”

  “Drugged,” I managed. My cheeks felt flushed. My breathing came in shallow gasps.

  My blood surged. I felt full. Too full, as if the drug pushed against my skin from the outside. Threatened to split it. To rip me open. The first spasm hit me low in the stomach. I bent over as the world went crinkled around the edges. Waves of pain radiated from somewhere inside my belly. My lungs. “Oh, God,” I managed. “It hurts!”

  He grabbed my wrists. “I got you,” he rumbled, suddenly all too grim. “But damnation, girl, you hold on.”

  I gritted my teeth, biting back another moan of pain. Around my gasps, the muffled voices of men echoed from the warehouse beyond.

  “Damn it to bloody blue,” he growled. “Sorry ’bout this, but we’re running now.” He caught one hand at the back of my neck, swept the other arm under my knees and hauled me over his shoulder like a sack. It sent the room into a slow, pink swirl.

  Every motion squeezed me from the inside. Nothing like the sweet, clenching feeling I’d experienced in the Menagerie amphitheater, this was vicious and raw. This was being fed, toes first, through a washerwoman’s wringer.

  I had no chance to struggle, to argue or think before the spasms started again. Filling me. Stretching me. Tearing at my insides.

  I screamed as Ishmael sprinted between shelves. He barreled through the door, out into the Square, and didn’t stop for anything. I retained only the vaguest impression of startled men, of shouts and commands behind me, before the tide of pain overwhelmed me and I stopped caring about anything but the pressure locked beneath my skin.

  I tossed and turned on the bed. My body was on fire. It raged inside me, worse than any fever I’d ever had. I turned over, tangled in the blankets someone had tried to cover me with.

  I turned back again, limbs moving. I was moaning. It hurt. I was filling up with pink and gold; I was dying inside. It had begun in my stomach, in my veins, in my chest. Now even my fingertips hurt, pulsing as if there was too much pressure trapped inside my flesh.

  I had to let it out.

  I had to let it go.

  I clawed at myself, desperate to release the golden light from the trappings of my body. Flesh tore, blood gleamed slick and eerily crimson against my skin. It glowed.

  I glowed, as if lit from inside by a soft light. I cast my own shadow, turning the light inside the bedroom to something eerily alive.

  A Chinese man stood over me. I didn’t know him. I didn’t care if I did. He was short and frail-looking, with long black hair pulled into a knot at the very top of his head and a full mustache growing straight downward on either side of his moving mouth.

  “You must be still,” he was saying. I didn’t care. I arched, sweat gathering across my shoulder blades. My clothes were gone. It wasn’t enough. I was burning up.

  The man flung a handful of verdant dust into the air. It glittered, sparked like emeralds, and settled over me like a cloud.

  It sizzled, but not against my skin. It didn’t even reach my skin. I gritted my teeth as I struggled to make sense of what was happening to me.

  I couldn’t. This was like no drug I’d ever seen. None I’d even heard of.

  “What caused this?”

  Another voice. This one slid over me like the rough velvet of a great cat’s tongue. It soothed the pain. It nursed the ache. I gasped for breath, my heart pounding so hard and fast inside my breast that I felt it would explode out of me.

  “Móshù.”

  “What?” I gasped, struggling to raise my head.

  “The devil it is!” Warm, callused hands gripped my upper arms. I found myself wrenched up, staring into eyes that burned. A river of blue flame cut through one. Cut through me; scored a path from my sight to my core and twisted. “Miss Black, can you hear me?”

  I clenched my teeth. “C-can’t hold . . . been drugged.”

  He looked over my head. “What kind of magic?” he demanded.

  I managed a sneer. It bit off on a hard, painful sound as I jerked at Hawke’s hands. “No such—” I couldn’t finish. The man threw another handful of dust into the air. This popped and sizzled over my head like the green dust had, but only portions of it settled to my skin, to Hawke’s skin, like a fine layer of gold.

  The rest flickered, scorched the air for a single second. Flashed wildly. And in the sparkling reaction, I saw the shape of a woman.

  She stretched her arms to me.

  As if in answer, my heart slammed wildly. Something twisted hard inside of me, kicked outward as if it would tear free of my body and surge into those ghostly arms. I writhed in Hawke’s grip, half screaming and half sobbing. My nails found my chest, dug so deeply I felt the fibers of my own flesh give way.

  “Jesus Christ!” He caught my hands, wrestled me back and slammed them to the mattress beside me. He glared not at me, but at the man with the dust.

  “Watch,” the Chinese man told him.

  Hawke dropped his eyes to mine. To my breasts, full and bared under his scrutiny.

  His eyes widened. “It’s healing?” Narrowed just as fast. “What kind of sorcery is this?”

  The Chinese man shook his head, releasing a string of syllables that grated across my skin. I sucked in a long breath, howling, twisting against the shackle of Hawke’s implacable grip.

  “Get it out,” I sobbed. “I can’t—I can’t take it, get it out of me!”

  Hawke stared at the Chinese man.

  And then Ishmael’s voice, resonant like the deepest bell at Westminster Abbey. “She said something about a cameo. And a man.”

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “The Philosopher’s Square.”

  Hawke’s eyes shifted to me, angry and tight. His sculpted mouth compressed. “Too many spirits?” he asked, but he wasn’t asking me. I thrashed against him, kicking the blankets free, wresting every inch of control I could.

  The Chinese man put away his dust. “Only room for one,” he said in English so heavily accented that it was almost its own language. “Another one want in. She waits there.” He pointed to the ceiling above me, but I saw nothing. Felt nothing but fear and anger and pain.

  And pressure.

  Hawke’s lip curled. “Get out.”

  The man stiffened. “Wˇo xiˇang—”

  Hawke let me go. I arched into the bed, naked and uncaring, grabbing at the pillows around me. Searching, struggling to find something, anything that could soothe my feverish brow. That could protect me.

  Footsteps clattered. Voices rose. The Chinese man hurled invectives as the commotion passed me, and all I knew was that they were leaving. The pain slammed home, stole my breath; I could only gasp as it welled inside me. A deep, viscous fluid, a rising sense of . . . of other. Of not me.

  “Don’t let anyone in,” Hawke ordered.

  “As you wish.” Ishmael hesitated. “Cage, will she . . . ?”

  “She’s ignorant and a fool,” Hawke said flatly. “But I won’t let her go.”

  “The Karakash Veil—”

  “You let me handle the Veil,” Hawke said.

  Ishmael sighed deeply, and I felt it drag against me. Inside me. “I had nowhere else to take her.”

  Hawke swore. Then, curtly, he said, “You saved her life.” The door shut.

  The bowstring of my body snapped. Throwing my head back, I screamed, dragging my nails along my body in a desperate bid for release. It hammered inside me; filled me, overflowed from my body and my mouth and my
thoughts until I was nothing but pink and gold and bloody red and not me.

  Hawke’s hands closed around my wrists again. Pinned them to the bed above my head. Hawke’s eyes glittered down into mine. “I told you,” he seethed, his voice strapped taut. “I told you to leave it alone.”

  I wrenched against his grip, but could only gasp as every nerve under the seal of his flesh around mine compressed to wild points of heightened awareness. No words made it through the wild cacophony of my thoughts and feelings.

  “Miss Black.” He shook me. My gaze snapped back into focus, but it was hard. So hard. “Do you recognize me? Do you know where you are?”

  “Menagerie,” I managed around a tongue thick and dry as cotton. I swallowed with effort, and my eyes once more darted around the room. “What . . . what’s wrong with me?”

  Hawke hesitated.

  I clenched my teeth as another vicious cramp swept through me, toes to forehead. “I feel . . . I feel like I’m going to tear apart. I feel like I’m going to . . . to burn away.”

  “Too many spirits,” he said grimly. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I laughed. It sobbed on a wild note of amusement. “T-try me,” I gasped.

  He held me as I wrenched beneath him, his grip implacable. His eyes glittering dangerously while he waited me out. I sank back into the bed, sucking in air. “You’re being haunted,” he finally said, as flatly as if he spoke of collector’s business. “A ghost of a woman.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been mucking about with the dead, Miss Black?”

  This time, my laugh bordered on hysteria. “People . . . dropping dead.”

  The thick sweep of his lashes was like a fan, I realized. Lacy and black as the hair sliding over his shoulders like a velvet curtain. I could see each individual hair. Some were traced with gold. Lingering gold dust.

  What was it?

  And was it the opium within the drug that caused my senses to react this way? It had to be. I could almost think through it. Almost.

  I wasn’t so far gone that I’d swallow the tale of a ghost so easily.