by KJ Charles
“You need to know your place,” Crane gritted out. “And that is?”
“On my knees, my lord. For you. Ah!” he gasped as Crane’s hips thumped against him. “Oh God, no, please. Too much.”
“Not enough,” Crane said, and let loose all control then, slamming into Stephen, so the smaller man’s body was bounced off the floor like a toy. At the same time one hand came round to grip Stephen’s cock at last, and that friction was enough to send him over the edge. He was screaming as he came so hard it dizzied him, and then flopped forward, boneless and shaking, as Crane thrust again and again to the accompaniment of Stephen’s diminishing cries. He gave a shout as he hit his own climax, and as his seed flooded Stephen hotly, the magpies took wing.
Stephen sucked in breaths that felt like fiery ice. Every hair on his body stood straight as he struggled to control the rush of power that was carrying him like a tide, a second possession no less welcome than the first. The ring pressed between his chest and the floor throbbed searingly on his skin, responding to the power that burned in Crane’s blood and semen, around and inside Stephen, and he shook with the surges of it.
Crane collapsed over Stephen’s back with a sated grunt, his etheric presence so powerful that Stephen’s vision went momentarily black and white, and he couldn’t find the breath to protest at the man’s weight.
“Christ, I needed that,” said Crane, his hand stroking tenderly through Stephen’s curls. “Can you breathe?”
“No. Get off.”
Crane propped himself on his elbows, allowing Stephen to fill his lungs. As he moved, Stephen felt the slither of the slim chain falling away from his neck.
“Blast,” he muttered. “It broke.” The Magpie Lord’s ring was hot against his skin. He wriggled sideways to get away from it, and Crane’s hand snaked under him, plucking ring and chain off the floor.
“I’ll get it fixed tomorrow— Good Lord.”
“Mmm?”
Crane dangled the broken chain in front of his face. At least… Stephen squinted at the ends, not quite focusing, then frowned. “What happened to that?”
“Well, you’re the expert, but it looks for all the world as if it melted.”
It did, the delicate links at both ends of the chain liquefied into tiny shapeless blobs. “That’s…odd.”
“Is it sufficiently odd that we have to worry about it now?”
Stephen didn’t think he was capable of sustained thought at this moment. He made a negative sort of noise into the rug and lay there, muscles too lax to consider moving, as Crane deposited the ring in his desk drawer in the sitting room, then returned to the hall and hauled him to his feet. “Come to bed.”
They stumbled to the bedroom, and Stephen sat on the bed as Crane, cursing mildly, untangled his shirtsleeves enough to undo the cufflinks and free him from the tangle of cloth.
Stephen looked at himself in the mirror as Crane worked at the cufflinks. His eyes were glowing gold from the flood of power, one cheek reddened by friction against the rug. His whole body was flushed, the pale skin of his hips marked by Crane’s strong fingers. With his arms pulled behind his back he looked, he thought, like a rent boy, and a cheap one at that, an impression made even stronger by the tattooed man positioned behind him. He couldn’t help grinning at that thought, and Crane looked up, so that their eyes met in the mirror.
“All right?”
“Mmm.”
“You look devastatingly whorish.”
“Thank you.”
“Also slightly odd,” Crane added, as a magpie tattoo fluttered over the skin of Stephen’s shoulder and on to his chest. “Do you think I’m ever going to get that one back?”
“You’d be welcome to it,” Stephen said, not quite truthfully. He had been decidedly unnerved when one of the seven magpies that decorated Crane’s body had taken up residence on his own shoulder blade, and he would probably have refused the unintended gift if he’d had a choice. But on the nights he spent alone in his own chilly little room, it had become a comfort to twist round and see Crane’s brand, black and white, inked into his skin. Marked as Lucien’s, for life.
Crane released the second cufflink and pulled Stephen’s shirt off. “Are you staying tonight?”
“I’ll need to be gone by six.”
“Then be here till five forty-five.” Crane kissed his ear, and Stephen leaned back against him. “If you’re to work damn fool hours, I am going to be very demanding indeed about your leisure time.”
Stephen smiled into the mirror at him, relieved. “Yes, my lord.”
Chapter Three
Crane’s eyes snapped open in the dark.
For a second he was back in the shadowy dankness of the condemned cell in China where he had spent two endless days and nights and where soft movements were the prelude to vicious attack, and then he emerged from the last shreds of sleep with the full awareness that there was someone moving around, close by.
Stephen, leaving? But no; he never heard that, and in any case, for a wonder, the small form of his lover was curled by him, breathing softly.
And it wasn’t Merrick. Merrick and Crane had slept within twenty feet of each other for two decades. He knew Merrick’s movements as he knew his own heartbeat.
Someone who was neither his lover nor his henchman was moving around his flat.
Crane rose from the bed, not wasting time with clothing. He stepped silently from the bedroom into the dark corridor and listened till he was sure the intruder was in the sitting room.
How the devil had they got in? He’d bolted the front door himself; no matter how drunk Merrick might have been, he would never leave the back unsecured.
Crane moved barefoot to the door, which stood slightly open, readied himself, and threw it wide.
One window was open, curtain pulled back to shed the faint light of London on the scene. A dark figure was visible at Crane’s desk, turning whip-fast at his unexpected entry. Crane went for the burglar without hesitation, flinging himself forward as the intruder sprang for the window. He grasped an arm, crashed to the floor with the thief half under him, and got a vicious kick in the hip as his captive scrambled for freedom. Crane returned a savage short-range punch and heard a yelp of pain, then there was a thud of extraordinary force to his shoulder, like the kick of a mule, and he lost his grip on the other’s wrist as he was thrown backwards. The thief scrambled up, sprinted to the open window with Crane right behind—
—jumped out.
Crane’s momentum took him too far forward, so that he half tripped on the window seat and had to grab the frame to stop himself falling. That was by instinct only, because he was staring out at the dark form as it took a dozen rapid paces across the empty sky to one of the silver birches in the mansion block’s private garden.
The figure swung into the branches with acrobatic grace, and paused for a second. Her pale, shoulder-length hair glinted, and she gave Crane a cheeky wave, before descending through the tree with the rapidity and sureness of a tumbling toy.
There were hurried footsteps behind him. Crane swung round to see Stephen standing in the doorway, smothered in one of Crane’s Chinese padded silk dressing gowns. “Lucien?”
“We’ve been burgled.”
Stephen turned the gas lamp on, igniting it with a thought, and walked over, past the desk with its drawers standing wide, past the litter of papers on the floor, and over to the open window, with its fourth-floor view and the impossible leap to the trees.
“Did you see—” he began, and his voice cracked.
Crane winced. “It was her. Miss Saint.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“I saw her. I saw her face. Fair hair. I’m sorry.”
The look in Stephen’s eyes made Crane’s fists clench. He took two swift strides over and pulled Stephen to him, feeling the tension in his shoulders, wanting
to curse the treacherous little bitch aloud.
“She knows that you’re my friend. Mr. Merrick’s teaching her— How could she?” Stephen’s voice was raw.
“You have to talk to her,” Crane said, for form’s sake. “There may be some sort of explanation.”
“Such as?”
Crane didn’t waste his energy thinking of an empty reassurance. He looked over at the chaos of the desk. “I’ll see what’s been taken. I don’t think there was much—”
“My ring.” Stephen pushed back to look up at him, horror dawning on his face. “Lucien, my ring. Was it in there?”
“Shit.” They lunged for the desk together.
The drawer where he’d left the Magpie Lord’s ring had been pulled out and emptied onto the blotter. Crane searched round the floor while Stephen scrabbled through the litter, fruitlessly.
“Anything?” he asked, knowing there was not.
Stephen’s eyes were filled with angry hurt. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I heard a noise, came in. I saw a figure in here. It was dark. He ran for the window—”
“He?”
“She, I suppose. I didn’t realise at the time. I grabbed for him—her, we scrapped, she hit me with power. She jumped out, ran to the tree, turned and waved at me. That was when I saw it was a fair-haired woman.”
Stephen grabbed his bare arm. The power that ran through his fingers was flaring hot. “A woman, or Saint?”
“It was Saint.” Crane felt absolutely certain of that. “But look at this.” He picked up his notecase. “This was in the same drawer and there’s thirty pounds in it. That’s the devil of a lot of money for someone in her position. Why would she not take cash, rather than a hard-to-fence ring of only moderate value?”
“She must have come for the ring.” Stephen looked sick. “She’s seen me wearing it, maybe she realised it has power. She wouldn’t know she couldn’t use it.”
“Can’t she?”
“Not unless you’re bedding her,” Stephen said tartly, and then added, “Probably. That is… I don’t know. Maybe she could. It’s not dormant any more. It’s a damned powerful focus.”
Crane said, reluctantly, “If she came here in order to get a ring that belongs to you, you realise what that may mean.”
Stephen nodded. “She knows about us.”
“It could be sheer coincidence that she only pocketed that,” Crane offered. “It was dark. I interrupted her.”
“Maybe.” Stephen jerked the gown around himself and headed back past Crane to the bedroom. “I’ll know when I ask her.”
Which he was clearly planning to do without loss of time. “Would you like company?”
“No.”
Crane didn’t want to leave him, with that miserable anger on his face, but it was Stephen’s business to deal with. He stepped back. “Then I will see you later.”
Saint lived on the top floor of a boarding house in Saffron Hill. It was a foul area even by London standards, of pinched houses that leaned on one another like drunks, sodden and quietly rotting. The railways had ripped through some of the worst rookeries, but many more of the filthy, ancient rabbit-warren homes had been left to stand till they fell.
She shouldn’t have to live here, Stephen thought. She didn’t have to—the Golds would have made space, but Saint had been on the street for too long to settle into a regulated family home, especially one run by Esther. Like Stephen himself, she preferred to spend most of her miserly salary on a little piece of privacy.
Stephen had particular reasons for wanting privacy, of course. He hadn’t previously asked himself if Saint did too.
The house stood towards the end of a row, and was shuttered and dark. There was no point waiting outside, since Saint would doubtless return home via the rooftops if she was coming back at night, so Stephen went round the back, climbed a slimy wall, and made his way through a series of tiny stinking yards, ankle deep in half-frozen slops. He lit his way through the darkness with a glimmer of power, silencing a couple of dogs and a gaggle of affrighted chickens as he went. Once at the right house, he found a scullery window fastened on the inside by a wooden latch. A moment’s focus pushed that open, and he clambered in, careful not to send pans flying and for once actively grateful for his stature.
He slipped quietly up the stairs to the top floor. Saint’s room was obvious from the faint familiar tingle of her presence in the ether. She lived here, but she was not home. The door was bolted on the inside, with iron, but Stephen had no compunction in compressing the wood around the cheap screws until the whole thing came loose and he could simply push it open.
Saint’s room was a tiny attic space with a cheap wooden bedstead and a couple of rough rumpled blankets. There was no fireplace, and it was bitterly cold. Stephen moved the single wooden chair so that he could not be seen by anyone coming in the window, wrapped himself in his thick, expensive topcoat, and considered what he should do with her.
The justiciary, underpaid, overworked, intensely disliked and far too few in number, relied on moral authority as much as anything in enforcing the draconian laws that kept practitioners in line. They could not afford a corrupt or criminal justiciar. Without the halo of superiority, when Stephen confronted a misbehaving practitioner, he had nothing except his own powers to fall back on, and he was too often outnumbered to make that an inviting prospect. That meant Saint would have to be punished brutally, far harder than another practitioner for the same offence. Justice would have to be seen to be done, or every justiciar would suffer.
And thinking of suffering…
She had stolen Stephen’s ring, which had once been the Magpie Lord’s, given to him at a moment when he and Crane had faced death, and Crane’s thoughts had been for Stephen and not for himself. Stephen didn’t know if there was ever a single moment when one fell in love, but if he had to pick one shining instant from it all, it would be then, when Crane had closed his fingers around the great lawgiver’s ring and told him, with that unshakeable confidence, “You’re doing his work.” The words still made his skin prickle.
The ring was the gift of his lover, the relic of his hero, the source of power that lit up his body and mind like a match to gas, and Jenny Saint had stolen it. She couldn’t know what it was to him, but she had violated Crane’s home and Merrick’s trust to take the most precious thing Stephen would ever own, and the betrayal stung at his eyes and stuck in his throat.
It was a lengthy wait in a room without comfort. The chair was hard, with no cushion, but he was not going to sit on her unmade bed. There was not much else. A ewer and a chamber pot. A few cheap pictures were tacked to the walls, playbills and woodcuts and the garish covers of religious tracts with bright blue skies over mustard-yellow deserts. There was a single book, a tatty child’s reading primer, lying on the bed.
No wonder she wanted more.
Saint was a justiciar, for God’s sake. She risked her life to enforce the law. She shouldn’t have to live like this.
Many had it far worse, of course. There were thousands of people in London for whom this rat-hole would be a palace, and it was in any case nonsensical for Stephen to compare Saint’s poky, bare room to the flat on the Strand and Crane’s sheer privilege. Still, when one saw how the truly wealthy lived, when one considered how much Crane had spent on that new Hawkes and Cheney suit…
Obviously, stealing from the rich was a crime, but it would have been one Stephen treated as a slightly lower priority than every other case of malpractice, harm, cruelty or deceit in the entire London region, if Saint were not a justiciar. If she hadn’t robbed Crane. If she hadn’t stolen the ring.
He sat, waiting in the dark, for two hours before Saint came in.
The rattle at the window woke him from a semi-doze. It was closed, but she clearly kept it oiled, and seemed to have put a handle on the outside. There was a thump of f
eet on roof tiles, a soft scrape of wood and a rush of even colder air, and she clambered in, wearing the boy’s clothes she usually adopted for windwalking.
Stephen waited till she had shut the window before he said, “Good morning.”
Saint shrieked like a banshee, spinning round. “Jesus Christ! Mr. D? Gawd, I jumped out of me skin.” A candle flared into life with a sputter of cheap tallow. “What you doing here? Something up? It ain’t Mrs. Gold, is it?”
“You know what it is.”
Saint’s eyes widened slightly, then her chin tilted, an unmistakable gesture of defiance. “Which I don’t. There a problem?”
“Give me the ring.”
“You what? What ring?” She was doing a good job of looking confused. She always did. Stephen had taught her for four years, and had become very familiar with her skill at plausible denial. The girl could lie more barefacedly than he could himself.
That was not something he would tolerate now. Stephen slapped his hand on the shaky arm of the chair with a force that made her flinch. “The ring! Don’t dare lie to me, and don’t waste my time. You were seen. Give it to me, and explain yourself, and by God you will need to make it good.”
Saint had been blustering back, trying to interrupt. “I don’t know what you’re on about with any ring, alright? And as for seen, so what if I was? I ain’t done anything wrong.”
Stephen spluttered. “Stealing isn’t wrong?”
“Stealing?” Saint shrieked.
There was an angry bang on the wall that made Stephen jump, and a cry of “Shut yer hole!” from the next room.
“Fuck yer mum!” Saint yelled back, and waved a hand, throwing silence across them. “And I ain’t stolen nothing in two years and more, and you got no right to say I did—”
“Lord Crane saw you, not two hours ago.” A tide of colour swept over the girl’s pale skin, as clear a confession of guilt as anything. “He caught you in his flat, he saw you windwalking, you waved at him, for God’s sake. He saw you quite clearly, so no more lies, no more denial. You broke into his flat and you took the ring. My ring. I want it back.”