Tarnished

by Cooper, Karina

  Nothing. Frowning, I turned away. What if she was unconscious? Dead, already?

  No. I wouldn’t let myself think it.

  I pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders and turned back to the open yard. Here and there, the shape of a silent steam engine thrust from the cloud. A smokestack, a still caboose.

  It was as if I’d stepped into a train cemetery.

  “Bet—”

  Fabric bunched at my neck, and suddenly I was choking on my own voice as my cloak dug into my throat. Something pulled hard, yanked me back into that alley so fast that it was all I could do to lodge my fingers beneath the clasp to keep myself from strangling.

  My back collided with the wall, sharp and damp, my head rebounded with enough force to make me cry out. Heart thumping, I struggled, only to grunt as rough hands seized my shoulders, my cloak, and spun me around.

  This time, my chest slammed into unforgiving brick, my cheek grated against the pitted stone. A hand flattened against the back of my head, holding me still. Grinding my face against the surface.

  The pain at my cheek was nothing to the sharp point digging into the small of my back.

  I wasn’t the only one with knives. Unlike me, however, my opponent had already drawn his.

  “I’m delighted you came,” came a low, soft-spoken voice. It was masculine, I could hear that much. Even pleasant, nonchalant, for all the knife at my back was neither. I didn’t recognize it; to be fair, it was barely a murmur.

  My hands tightened against the wall, but I didn’t dare push away. I’d impale myself on the rotter’s weapon if I didn’t play the next few moments carefully. As I took a deep breath, I smelled damp grit and the choking stench of coal. No cologne or fragrance; or at least nothing strong enough over the rail-yard rot. Nothing helpful to identify my assailant.

  “Good evening,” I greeted, as drolly as I could manage with my face crushed against a wall.

  “Why, Miss St. Croix.” The knife shifted, and suddenly it was at my neck. The warmth of a man’s body slid in behind my back as his breath tickled my ear. “So polite.” He chuckled, and though I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t have to. Every fiber of my being hissed a wild, panicked warning.

  I’d heard laughter. I was familiar with the sound. But I’d never heard anything like this.

  Subtly unhinged. Mildly threatening.

  Every breath of it so easy, so uncaring, as if the man uttering the sound was beyond any comprehension of human understanding.

  The hair on the back of my neck prickled. “Why did you take my maid?”

  For all he encroached on me, keeping me still against the alley wall, the man didn’t press. He didn’t take advantage of my position, though I knew he could. It was only the blade at my throat. The hand at the back of my head.

  His words soft in my ear. “How else was I to gain your attention? Subtlety had failed spectacularly.”

  “What?”

  “A mad one, that professor,” the voice said gruffly, and I frowned. Why did that voice, those words seem so familiar? “They say ’e collects bodies.”

  A smoky room. A faceless rumormonger.

  I gasped. “You were in that den!”

  “As were you, naughty girl,” he said, once more in his soft-spoken tone. My opponent was a chameleon, then.

  “Why?” I demanded. “Who are you?”

  “Which should I answer first?” The point of the knife lessened, just a touch. “I followed you to the den. You looked ridiculous, you know.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Charmed,” I muttered. “If all you wanted was an introduction, you didn’t have to take my maid. The flowers were a fine start.”

  “Flowers are trite and inconsequential. Hardly fitting for you.”

  I flinched. “You don’t know me well enough t—”

  The edge at my throat tightened, and I bit off my acidic admonishment. “More than you’d think,” my assailant whispered. “Shhh.” His breath ghosted warm and damp against my ear. It smelled faintly of tobacco.

  I shuddered in revulsion. But because I couldn’t help anyone with my throat slit, I fell silent.

  When day turned to night in London below, even in areas where there was nothing but fog and sky above, the light faded suddenly. Rapidly. Even as I stared out at the murky fog, I recognized the subtle changes in the color of the gloom.

  I was running out of time. Soon, it’d be full dark. I had to find Betsy first.

  All I heard was the rapid beat of my own heart. The faint, almost obscured sound of wheels grating on rusted rails and the constant hiss and whoosh of steam traps venting to the open air.

  I shifted my shoulders. “I don’t hear—”

  “Tsk.”

  The knife at my throat vanished, and with it, the man. I didn’t push off the wall, I lurched hard to the side instead. Away from the alley, my stomach launching into my throat as I expected to feel several inches of razor-sharp steel sink into my back.

  It didn’t come.

  At the alley mouth, I spun, fog swirling around my ankles. The damp clung to my hair, forcing it into a frizz. I wiped at my cheek with the back of my arm. “Where did you go?” I demanded.

  The alley remained dark and still in front of me.

  I swallowed hard. The man wanted me to follow. That much was clear. But I knew what waited for unarmed women in alleys such as this.

  I looked around, forcing my brain to push through the fear, the frustration. The shiny edges where the events of the night past hadn’t quite worn off.

  There. A piece of piping tucked just inside the mouth, discarded and broken at one end. It was clumsy at best, but sharp. And it afforded me much greater reach than my knives. It would do.

  Quickly, I loosened the clasp and let the cloak puddle to the ground. Shivering in the immediate damp, I knelt swiftly and picked up the pipe. “Come out and face me!”

  My voice faded into nothing.

  Summoning every ounce of courage I had, I strode into that shadowy alley.

  My footsteps echoed as I followed the narrow lane. I heard a faint drip, drip, drip of puddling water, and the scurrying whisper of things on tiny claws and feet. Steam whispered its release somewhere beyond the walls rising high on each side of me, nearly black with slime and coal-choked moss.

  Gripping the pipe end in both hands, I eased along one side, mindful of my back.

  He was tricky. That much was certain.

  As I came to a corner, I paused. My palms were damp, and I reaffirmed my hold. My nerves all but climbed out of my skin, I was straining so hard to see, to hear. To be anything but simply defensive.

  I didn’t like what I couldn’t see.

  Holding my breath, I rounded the corner, pipe raised.

  There was no tall figure in black. Only a dank, narrow lane stretched out ahead of me. An iron gate closed the lane behind me, locked fast. I hadn’t heard the sound of what was sure to be rusted hinges, so I turned again to the open path.

  My footsteps slapped against the broken cobbles, echoed back to me in a thousand directions as I sprinted down the open lane. I burst out of the small alley route and found myself once more in the rail yard. Here and there, a small lantern guttered, allowing just enough light to see nothing but shadows and fog. Bloody bells.

  “Betsy!” I called, knowing full well it’d mark exactly where I was.

  But the faceless man didn’t need my voice to find me.

  I passed two trains, still and cold side by side, and froze as his chuckle echoed from between them. “Where, oh, where is the dear little maid?” he asked in a lilting tune. “Is she on a train? Perhaps she means to leave London forever.”

  I whirled, my pipe raised in both hands. I saw a glimmer of white, maybe a flash of teeth. A whisper of a handkerchief. It could have been anything. He leaned indolently against the engine, his hat still too low to see anything.

  “Tell me where she is,” I demanded, already losing patience.

  “Perhaps she huddles on a church
stair,” he continued conversationally. “Cold and alone. Why, oh, why won’t her lady find her?”

  I laughed, though there was no humor in it. “I am no lady.”

  He straightened, and I backed up quickly, my sweaty palms already slipping on the pipe. “No?” And in that single syllable, something sick curled into his voice. Something sharp as a razor and hungry for it. “If you are no lady, Miss St. Croix, you must be something else entirely.”

  “You don’t frighten me,” I spat, shaking my head. Tendrils of my hair clung to my fog- and sweat-damp cheeks.

  “Come now,” he said dryly, and eased back along the train. He vanished into the dark, and I rounded the two engines carefully. “You aren’t so foolish as that.”

  Now he was a disembodied voice, leading me from the dark.

  My throat ached, but I swallowed down a knot of uncertainty as I cautiously made my way across the uneven ground. A glint of metal became another railway, this one set next to three more and all merged together.

  We were nearing a switching station.

  I steeled my voice. My nerves. “I’m not playing with you.”

  “Yes, you are.” It came from everywhere. Nowhere. I spun, turned again as only shadows and fog swirled around me. “Tell me, Miss St. Croix, why would I lead you to dear Professor Woolsey?”

  A shrill whistle split through my confusion. A train was coming in.

  “Because you . . .” My voice faded to silence as my eyes darted from whirling patch of fog to shadowed pockets shrouded and revealed with each eddy. My forehead furrowed deeply. “Because you knew I would suspect him?”

  That silken laughter slid out from the dark again. “And rightfully so, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I tilted my head, but didn’t look directly, as something flickered at my peripheral. Instead, I half turned my body away. “Did he kill those women?” I demanded.

  “No,” the man said lazily. “I did.”

  There. Just behind me.

  “But then, you knew poor, fragile Woolsey couldn’t have overpowered strong doxies like pretty Annie, didn’t you?”

  I set my jaw. Even hearing him say Annie’s name made my skin feel mired in grime; desperate for a bath. “What of Mary?”

  Silence.

  “And the dove just a few days past?” I pressed.

  A sound of disgust trickled out from the dark. “Useless, and a complication.”

  That made no sense. “Did you kill them?”

  “I have no need for the pocked doxies of the East End.” He practically snarled the words. “I shall race you, my dear Miss St. Croix.”

  “Race me?”

  That laugh again. “To that ripper of the East End,” he singsonged. “Talentless lout, eager for attention. Desperate for glory. My glory.” Barking mad, then.

  This was leading me nowhere. “Who are you to Professor Woolsey?” I demanded, searching for the light of sane reason in the morass of confusion he spewed out from the shadows.

  He made a small, mournful sound. “Partner. Friend. Murderer, of course. He is quite a brilliant man, you know. Truly on the verge of something marvelous. I’d always thought him talented.”

  “Talented,” I repeated, my tone desert dry.

  “A genius, almost.” But there was a thin sound in those words, as if he smiled in razor-edged humor.

  I backed up slowly, as if watching the shadows play in front of me. “Who are you?”

  “A scientist of sorts,” he tossed out. Too easily. Laughingly. “A connoisseur.”

  The whistle came again, shrill and brassy.

  I sucked in a harsh breath. “Were you the second man seen with Woolsey?”

  “Ah, the apothecaries,” he breathed, and his voice circled around me, carried by the shifting banks of black and gray and yellow. I didn’t need sound to pinpoint him. “It was only a matter of time before someone saw me. Do you know, Miss St. Croix, you threw me for quite a loop outside the Blackwall druggist. To think it was you with all that black hair.”

  The whistle shrieked once more, and in it I heard the murderer’s mocking laughter. Laughing as he killed the sweets. As he butchered them like animals. All for an experiment that his friend, his partner, developed.

  It all collided in my head in a whirlwind of sparks. “You’re a monster,” I whispered, the sound all but strangled as my chest wrenched painfully. Anger knifed through me, sharper than any blade. Suddenly I spun, leapt on the shadow and swung my pipe. The metal caught on something solid, fleshy. It jarred all the way to my elbow, and the man grunted.

  Something glinted, something wicked sharp, and I spun. Though my shoes skidded on the gravel, I neatly avoided his thrust, caught his knife hand between my arm and side, and wrenched hard.

  He staggered. I seized his collar, pushed with all my might and slammed into his chest as his back plowed into a discarded train car. His breath gusted over my face in a surprised sound.

  I jammed the broken edge of the pipe under his chin. He stilled.

  “Now,” I said, panting breathlessly. “Why are you after me?” Everything else had become an afterthought in my head. All I saw was the shadow of his features, thin and barely more than a blur.

  I had him now.

  “Ah.” The sound was a sigh. The dark thickened, almost absolute, and all I could see was the merest hint of light reflected in his eyes. Against my body, I could tell that he was thin beneath his swirling overcoat, but it wasn’t enough.

  I needed to know more.

  “You are magnificent,” he said, and I stared at him. That sounded like . . . pride? Was he proud of me? As if aware of my confusion, the man very slowly opened his hand. I heard the knife drop to the gravel.

  “Why?” I demanded again. “Who are you?”

  He wasn’t at all intimidated. “Can you kill an unarmed man?”

  I glared up into his face, wishing I could see more than the flash of his teeth as he smiled over my rusted weapon.

  “Of course you can’t,” he continued. Aside from a faint tremor of strain as he labored to keep his chin steady, he seemed unconcerned. Truly, not even a whit frightened.

  What kind of monster was he?

  “You’re Cherry St. Croix, you don’t kill.”

  “You don’t know me,” I whispered, but every word he spoke slipped into my ears. Danced around in the fringes of my exhaustion.

  “Oh, my dear.” So bloody kind.

  A whistle blasted, and I gritted my teeth. “Where,” I demanded, slow and as sharp as the broken barbs at his throat, “is Betsy?”

  Again, that flash of teeth. “The trains wait for no woman.”

  “I don’t want a train, I want—”

  “Cherry,” came the masculine sigh. “Use that brain of yours.” My arm stiffened, and his voice cut off on a sudden note of caution, his chin lifted higher as the pipe ground against it.

  No matter my fury, my intent, my anger, I knew I couldn’t do it. And so did he.

  His chuckle grated. “Do you hear the train coming? It’s me or your Betsy,” he rasped. “There’s only time for one. If you strike me, I will struggle. I will waste precious moments, and your Betsy will be nothing more than a bloody memory.”

  My grip at his collar loosened.

  “But I promise you,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear it under the train’s shrill warning. “If you save her, I shall wait in the Underground.”

  “You bastard,” I breathed.

  His head inclined, the merest fraction that my impromptu weapon allowed. “Like you,” he allowed, “we all have a price. And a motive. What is mine?”

  I didn’t know. The man was mad as a hatter, clearly, but he’d taken my friend and left her out on a track, of that I was certain. The train whistled.

  For God’s sake, why?

  I pushed away from him, sprinted past the silent engine and onto the track beside it. His laughter followed me, crept over my back in a prickle of unease. Sweat centered between my shoulder blades, much like I
imagined his knife would.

  It still didn’t come.

  He was toying with me.

  The whistle shrieked, and I dropped the pipe as I ran along the uneven girders. “Betsy! Betsy, talk to me!”

  And then I heard it. A low moan. Not a word, but a question nonetheless. Just ahead, nearly invisible, a lump of motionless gray huddled on the track.

  Relief nearly overwhelmed me.

  Only to send my heart plummeting once more as I heard the unmistakable crunch and screech of railway wheels. The train would wait for no woman.

  “God help us,” I whispered, and threw myself along that track. “Betsy!” The oncoming train’s whistle blasted, so close I couldn’t even hear myself scream her name.

  I sank to my knees beside my maid, quickly taking in her sallow cheeks, her glazed eyes, her white lips. The blood smeared across her forehead. “Betsy, sweeting.”

  Her lashes fluttered closed as she moaned. Opened again, as if forced.

  “It’s all right,” I said, as reassuringly as I could while I tore at the rope pinning her hands to the rail slats. They refused to give. A knife, I needed a knife.

  Betsy’s eyes widened as the dull roar of oncoming wheels filtered through her uncertainty. “Train?” she breathed, and then twisted. “Oh, God, help me!”

  The whistle shrieked. The wheels seemed louder, faster, and wrenched the knife from the front paneling of my collecting corset. The fibers gave under the sharp edge, and with my arms wrapped around Betsy, I wrenched us both off the track.

  She was heavy in my arms, but alive. Sobbing, but dear heaven, she was breathing.

  The train whistle blew, long and loud, ear-piercingly close.

  And I stared down the empty track.

  As I gasped for breath, clutching my friend to my chest, I listened to the rhythmic hiss of steam and the roar of the engine and saw nothing.

  What devilry was this?

  Only now, with my friend safe and my slamming heart slowly finding a quieter rhythm, did I realize that I’d felt no vibrations on the rails. I’d seen no lights.

  As if on cue, the whistle cut off mid-shriek.

  I’d been had.

  I buried my face in Betsy’s hair and took a deep, trembling breath. “You’re all right,” I said fiercely, rocking her as her arms tightened around my chest. She cried so desperately, I felt every tear as a burning ember in my heart. A twist of a guilt-ridden knife, sunk to the hilt in my breast.