Tarnished

by Cooper, Karina

  I wasn’t fit for anything but the streets below the drift.

  My knees buckled. The nausea roiled, yawned wildly in my stomach and I swayed. I was going to be sick again.

  A light knock slid through my muddled, chaotic thoughts, and I jerked my head up as the door swung open. “Wait, I’m not—”

  It wasn’t Hawke. Even as I realized it, as Zylphia stepped inside, my legs gave out. I sank to the floor in a tangle of silk and fine cotton, my eyes squeezing shut.

  She hurried to me. “What’s wrong?” Small, cool hands cradled my face.

  I clenched my teeth as tears welled up in my throat. Behind my eyes. “Where,” I rasped. “Where am I?”

  “The Menagerie.” Her voice was low and soft. Pitying, I thought. Knowing. She knew. She knew what I’d done with that . . . that man and she—“How are you feeling?” she asked gently. “You gave us all a terrible scare.”

  My eyes snapped open, and though hot words of abuse and recrimination sprang to my lips, I found her studying me with such worry in her blue eyes, such heart-wrenching concern, that I couldn’t let them fly.

  I sagged. Her arms came around me as I wilted. She pulled me close as the first spasms wracked my body, splayed a hand at my cheek and set my head against her shoulder.

  I didn’t fight it. I cried. I let the tears loose and she held me, whispering nonsensical things that soothed and did not judge. She let me sob, great wracking heaves of muddled air and tears, until I was reduced to nothing but blotched skin and the occasional, wringing hiccup.

  I was spent. Exhausted and feeling ill and so very alone.

  And angry.

  That I’d lost my virginity to Micajah Hawke wasn’t truthfully the root of my upset. Truly, I’d never considered it one way or the other. The Church of England would have an impure woman cast aside, fallen and beyond redemption. Society would be the first to send me to the streets for my sin, but I was neither overly dependent on the clergy’s favor nor particularly interested in the peerage that would see me cast aside one way or another.

  The men who’d propositioned me in the past had never succeeded simply because I’d spent too long among the doves who peddled themselves. I knew what came of such things. To my way of thinking, there was always a price for that sort of behavior, and I was in no hurry to pay it.

  Somewhere along the way, my virginity had simply become a part of who I was. And now it was gone. I couldn’t even remember the event.

  One more thing to lay at the feet of my drug-addled memory.

  Zylphia smoothed a hand along my loose hair, her other supporting the bedclothes she held to my naked back. “There,” she soothed. “A good cry does wonders. You’re well again, that’s all we can ask right now.”

  I sucked in a shuddering breath.

  And raised my head. Her gaze was steady, not a shred of recrimination in them as she took the edge of the sheet and wiped at my cheeks. It came away smudged with gray.

  Her lashes flickered.

  “Where is—” Hawke. “—everyone?” I somehow managed calm. Wrung dry, but calm.

  “Working,” Zylphia told me. “It’s nearly midnight, and there’s a show to put on.” For the first time, I realized that she wore a draping confection that was almost sheer. Just opaque enough to keep a man guessing. It gathered at her shoulders, hugging her lush body, made of a pale blue gauze that made her skin look rich and inviting.

  And the cut of its draped collar revealed the outermost edges of raw, scabbed lines at her back.

  My gaze narrowed. “Zylla—”

  She rose to her feet, suddenly overly brisk as she fixed the collar to cover the dark lines. “You’re a mess. Your wounds are gone, but you’re still smeared with the aftermath.” The word made me flinch. “We’ve got to get you cleaned up. My employers want to see you.”

  “Wait, they what?” My voice rose two octaves in the space of a breath.

  Zylphia picked up a handful of leather and linen from the edge of the bed, and as I watched her, trying to get a better glimpse of what I feared were whipping marks, she bustled to a small basin and collected dampened cloths.

  Slowly, feeling even sicker than I already had, I shut my mouth.

  She’d seen my hair; her palm was black with it. She’d noticed the stains I’d left on the pillow, and she’d let me cry. She didn’t ask. And she quite obviously didn’t want to talk about the wounds on her back.

  I looked down at my unmarred, bare flesh beneath the blanket and repressed another shudder.

  I could respect her privacy. I would have to. At least I wouldn’t have to meet the Karakash Veil nude. Would I be whipped, as well? Like some slave?

  Like Zylphia?

  I got to my feet, swallowing back a knot of raw anger. “The Karakash Veil wants to see me, then.”

  The look Zylphia shot me as she helped me dress was filled to the brim with worry. And dark warning. “Mind yourself,” she said quietly. “This isn’t a lark about. Whatever happened before, it’s gotten the Veil’s attention, it has.”

  “Whatever happened before,” I replied, straightening my work shirt while Zylphia sponged off my face, “it got my attention.”

  “Is it related?”

  “To what?” Then I met her direct gaze and remembered. “It might be,” I replied, taking a deep, steadying breath. I shrugged into my corset, waving away her hands as Zylphia tried to help. I’d designed it to be a one-woman affair, easily pulled tight by my own efforts. The plating slid into place.

  “The professor I thought might be the murderer . . .” I hesitated. “Well, wasn’t. In fact, he was murdered in a spectacularly brutal fashion.” I fastened the corset’s high collar around my neck, quickly running my hands down the leather facing tailored to protect me from chin to waist.

  “You think the sweet tooth did it?”

  I blinked at her. “The . . . sweet tooth?”

  Zylphia shrugged, but sheepishly. “We needed a name. We couldn’t just call him him all the time. There’s a lot of hims in the gardens.”

  The sweet tooth. It was too macabre to be funny. “I think it’s possible,” I finally replied, “but not proven. I was hoping to find something at the Square.”

  Zylphia’s lush mouth compressed. “So you did.”

  And how. “A man drugged me, and that’s telling enough. I was getting close to something.” I took a deep, steadying breath. Then another. “But all I’ve got is a hangover and—” Patchy memories. I flinched, rubbing my face. “Nothing I can use.” I checked my hands.

  “It’s gone,” she assured me. Speculation lingered in her features, but she very deliberately collected the blackened cloths and said nothing else. As I watched, pulling on my boots, she stripped the bedclothes with brisk efficiency and balled it all together.

  I bit my lip. “Zylla, I—”

  “Some of the girls have said that Micajah Hawke is a fierce thing between the sheets,” she said offhandedly.

  I froze. My cheeks warmed.

  “But you wouldn’t know, would you?”

  “What?” I croaked.

  “You,” she said as she bundled the bedclothes under her arm. “And him. Rather, the lack of a you and him. They say all he did was keep you from giving in.”

  Giving in? I stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Of course, I felt more like I’d lost mine. “I don’t follow,” I said carefully.

  She flicked me a glance. “Really? You think—Oh,” she finished on a knowing sound. “You think he lay with you.” She shook her head. “Cherie, I’ve seen that man after a night of lovemaking.”

  I bit my lip before I asked if she’d been the one in his bed that night. Or any night. Then caught myself imagining Hawke in the very bed I stood beside and looked away.

  “Trust me,” she said, “he didn’t ravish you in your haze.”

  “He didn’t?” I was beginning to sound stupid, even to my own ears. I cleared my throat quickly. “Of course he didn’t, he only—” But I couldn’t fi
nish the sentence. I had very distinct images rattling about in my mind, and I wasn’t sure I could steady myself long enough to explain them.

  Not to her satisfaction, and certainly not to my own. It was a relief to know that Micajah Hawke might not have actually ruined me, but he’d come close enough that I wasn’t sure where the line was. He’d seen me nude. He’d put his hands on me. His mouth on me.

  Where had he stopped? Did it matter?

  I just wasn’t sure.

  “He’d be in a finer mood if he had,” she added tartly. “They call him Cage, by the by.”

  I blinked my friend back into focus. “What? Why?”

  “I suspect it has to do with the fact that it’s a natural shortening of Micajah, isn’t it?” But a corner of her mouth slid upward as she gestured me to the door. “Or it may be a so-subtle reminder of his circumstance. A tiger, that one is. Caged but not tamed, trapped between iron bars.”

  I swallowed hard, rubbing my suddenly chilled arms. Gooseflesh peppered my skin.

  “But then,” my friend continued, oh so nonchalantly, “aren’t we all?”

  I did not look back as we left the room.

  Zylphia held on to the bundle of soot-stained cotton as she escorted me through a vast, elaborately decorated hall. Here and there, Chinese men and women bent to servile tasks—cleaning, sweeping, polishing, carrying—and the occasional white or mixed face worked among them. Servants, indentured or slaves.

  Slavery wasn’t exactly the thing these days. Not officially. The Queen had abolished the ownership of slaves and the Anti-Slavery Society had long since lobbied Her Majesty to outlaw slavers as pirates.

  But signing a writ didn’t make it so. And the Veil had a long reach.

  Zylphia paid them no mind, hastening me past several other rooms and doors. I caught glimpses of rich furnishings and affluent décor, all flavored heavily by the Orient.

  Finally, she stopped outside a set of polished wood double doors. The carvings on each were exquisite. Dragons and tigers and ornate birds tangled together in a frenzied dance. A war? A struggle?

  “I’ll be here when you come out.” She knocked smartly.

  The door swung open, without any hands that I saw. A faint mist of perfumed smoke rolled out to greet me.

  I blinked.

  “Best never to keep the Veil waiting,” Zylphia whispered.

  With my heart in my throat, and my stomach roiling uncomfortably, I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

  The floor was utterly bare.

  The walls were not.

  I had never seen such ornate paper as that which covered the walls of the Karakash Veil’s chambers. It gleamed like silk embroidery, reflected back the firelight in a thousand shades of crimson and gold. It was as if I’d stepped into the heart of a furnace, only it was dragons and tigers that reared at me, not flame.

  In front of me, two stocky men in red trousers and odd, undecorated tunics bowed to me, their hands in their wide bell-like sleeves. Each sported a black topknot of hair.

  They didn’t look alike. One had a long, hooklike nose while the other had lips so wide his mouth was almost fishlike. But they moved alike, each in step as they gestured an arm to the interior—the opposite arm, so that I stepped through them like two halves of a gate.

  The room had been divided by silk screens on polished wooden frames. The fire crackled merrily behind one, and almost immediately, I found myself sweating. A soft haze clung to the air, oddly sweet but with none of the properties I’d come to associate with Chinese opium. Incense, I think, but spicier than I’d ever seen them use during Mass.

  It was vaguely reminiscent of Cage.

  Hawke. Of course I meant Hawke. We weren’t so intimate—friends, I hastily corrected myself and gave it up, shaking my head. I didn’t know what to think. Not about that, not about this room.

  Another set of dividers had been placed halfway across it. More of that opulent crimson silk, with ornate gold scrollwork embroidered along its length. It comprised three panels, much like the other screens I picked out.

  I saw no one else. I frowned. “Hello?” I called. “Is there anyone here?”

  There was no answer but the pop and sizzle of wood sap.

  My frown edged deeper. I didn’t have time for this.

  I turned, took one step when a whisper of sound behind me caused me to pause. I glanced over my shoulder. Though nothing had moved, I was almost certain that I wasn’t alone.

  I looked at the Chinese men, who looked upon me with blank eyes. Then again at the screened room.

  I cast my cards to the wind.

  “I’ve no time for games,” I told the men, moving toward the door.

  They didn’t move, but they didn’t have to. I caught the subtle tension in both as they grounded their weight. A simple shift to the balls of their feet.

  A fight? I could fight.

  Although if they fought at all like the storied Chinese warriors I’d heard about, I was in trouble.

  “Take no more steps, Miss Black.”

  That wasn’t Hawke’s voice. It wasn’t any voice I recognized, either, and it had come from behind me. Or, I realized as I spun, behind the crimson screen.

  There was no silhouette. Only a disembodied voice. Male? Female? It was impossible to tell.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Come out where I can see you.”

  “That will not be possible,” said the calm voice. Not a trace of an accent graced the English words, although the inflection was . . . off. Too careful, almost too precise. As if the speaker had practiced until every last trace of dialect was erased.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Are you the Karakash Veil?”

  Something drifted from behind the screen. A muffled laugh? A sigh? “So eager, are you? So impatient. Where are your manners, Miss Black?”

  “I have no face to which I must be polite.” And no way of ascertaining to whom I was speaking, for that matter. Maybe I should have been more cautious.

  But I was exhausted, and ill.

  “Ah.” The tone remained all too calm. “A very English point of view. We shall, as they say, get to the point. We understand your life was saved by members of this Menagerie.”

  Saved? I said nothing, my hands settling to my corseted waist.

  “A great deal of magic—”

  I snorted. I didn’t mean to, but it escaped before I could muffle it, loud and most unladylike. The voice paused.

  Was it amusement I heard as it asked, “You do not believe in magic, Miss Black?” Was it curiosity? Or was it something less forgiving?

  I cleared my throat and said curtly, “Magic is simply the word people use to describe something they have no explanation for.” I was beginning to feel foolish, standing in the middle of a bare floor and addressing a silk screen. But I wasn’t so impolitic as to use the terms unenlightened or ignorant.

  My host was not so kind.

  “Ah. Regrettably, this very unenlightened belief does not erase the fact that you brought móshù into the Menagerie.”

  The word slid across the faded remains of my memory like a sharp blade. I flinched. “Mo-shoe,” I repeated. It didn’t sound at all the way the disembodied voice said it.

  “The word, broken to its basest point, means ‘magic.’ More precisely, it is someone else’s magic brought into our home. Dangerous, Miss Black. Dangerous to all parties involved.”

  I narrowed my eyes, but I didn’t have to look to know that the men behind me hadn’t once shifted position. They were waiting. For an order to take me down? A command to kill me?

  I squared my shoulders. “I didn’t see any of this mo-shoe,” I said flatly.

  The voice sighed. “Please, Miss Black, show the language mercy. You may use your native tongue. We shall endeavor to keep up.”

  My stomach pitched suddenly, and I was spared the effort of responding to the thinly veiled insult by the necessity to keep from throwing up the bile rising in my throat. I swallowed hard, teeth clenched, shuttin
g my eyes as if blocking out all the red and gold could salve my insides.

  It didn’t work.

  “Are you feeling unwell?” asked the voice, not wholly unkindly. Decidedly, I thought, clinically. As if I were a specimen in a glass cage. “That’s to be expected. You were barely saved from a most unfortunate end.”

  That was too melodramatic, even for my taste. “What do you want?” I demanded tightly.

  “As was mentioned, you brought outside magic into the Menagerie. As well, one of our w¯ush¯ı was forced to expend a great deal of energy to ascertain the nature of your . . . dilemma.”

  Dilemma. A delicate word to describe the hell I’d gone through. I inhaled as silently as I could, trying to force down a rising tide of nausea.

  Then I blinked. “One of your what?”

  “Such magic is not easily obtained, Miss Black,” the voice continued, unruffled by my sharp question. “In other words, you owe us.”

  My fists clenched against my waist. “Like hell I—”

  “Need we discuss what might have happened had Mr. Communion not taken you here?” There was nothing delicate about the steely edge in the faceless voice now. I glared at the screen as it continued. “Let us be clear: you would not have survived. Oh, your body would be ambulatory, as it is now, but your mind would no longer be within it. Your very soul ripped asunder by the creature that assaulted it.”

  I had no words. None. Was this person as barking mad as I was beginning to suspect?

  “Shall I translate into words your scientist’s mind”—the voice sneered the words—“can understand? Pay attention, Miss Black, we are not accustomed to explaining ourselves.”

  Bully for the Karakash Veil. “I’m listening,” I said evenly.

  “The . . . drug, as you so called it, weakened the bond between your body and your soul.” The voice behind the screen said this in easy conversational tones, as if every word didn’t sound like something out of a penny dreadful found in a gutter. “While so weakened, your body was as undefended as an empty castle, do you understand? And like a castle, it was under assault.”

  Impossible.

  “While we’re sure that the ma—the drug acted as the catalyst, Miss Black, we lack proper understanding of how. Rest assured, however, that if left to your own devices, you would now be something not dead and not alive. A revenant, enslaved.”