Flight of Magpies

by KJ Charles

  “You still haven’t explained why I shouldn’t force you to tell me where the ring is and hand you over to the Council,” Stephen pointed out.

  “Because if I can tell the Council that the thefts were me, not Miss Saint, then I can tell them all about you and your noble love nest. Love nest, Crane. That’s quite good. Do cranes nest?”

  “They’re birds, of course they— Shut up. Tell the Council what you like, and go to the devil. I won’t be blackmailed.”

  Pastern’s eyes narrowed, then he let out a little whistle. “I believe you might mean it. How self-sacrificing. Of course, the problem is, while you’re being shouted at by the Council or packed off to another gaolyard, who’s looking after Lord Crane?”

  “What?”

  “Lady Bruton wants him. As much as she wants you. And with you out of the way, what’s to stop her taking him at her leisure?”

  Stephen could feel the blood draining from his cheeks. “What’s she doing?” he demanded.

  “She’s not quite ready to make her move. But I doubt it will take her much longer. It’s all lined up. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste any more time. Go after her, kill her, now. You need to do it.”

  “What do you know?” Stephen leaned in, fingers curling.

  “Nothing I can tell you.” Pastern held up a hand. “Look at it from my point of view. Ideally, you get me out from under Lady Bruton’s hold. I’m trying to help you do that. But if I help you and she finds out—no. So the next best outcome for me would be that she kills you and your bit of stuff, and is so happy about it that she lets me go.” He gave a flashing smile. “The lot of you can kill each other with my blessing, as long as I get away. Lord Crane would be a waste, but there are lots of other pretty men. I really don’t care.”

  Stephen felt dizzy with rage. He was going to take this little swine apart, and be damned to consequences. “Listen to me—” He reached out as he spoke, and felt his hand hit something so solid in the air, it could have been a wall.

  “Uh-uh,” Pastern said. “None of that. I’m not stupid. I know you could force me by fluence to say where the ring is. I’ve taken precautions about that, which obviously I’m not going to describe to you, but I can promise you, if you drag the information out of me by force, you’ll never see the ring again. If you want it back, you deal with Bruton.”

  “Be damned to the ring,” Stephen snarled, and shoved, but Pastern’s etheric barrier had shifted a crucial few inches. Jolted, Stephen changed his focus, but it cost him a second’s lost concentration, and in that second Pastern shot upwards, from his seated position, scrabbling backwards straight up the wall like some sort of lizard.

  Stephen gave a stifled shout of alarm and fury, and lunged for him. The ether whipped out to his bidding, a savage strike far more powerful than he’d intended. Straw and scraps and dust billowed from the ground in a cloud, hats flew off heads to a chorus of cries, and the playing cards of nearby gamblers fluttered upwards in a chaotic rattle of pasteboard.

  That was too strong. Too strong, and too late, because the windwalker had already reached the top of the wire-lined wall and vaulted backwards over it in an impossible acrobatic flip.

  “What the sodding hell,” breathed a voice, and Stephen looked round to see that half a dozen of the other inmates were staring, pointing, gaping at the unfeasible escape. Someone was already feeling the wall to work out what he’d used for handholds. Others were batting at the dust that had engulfed them.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Stephen said curtly, and strode for the gate to demand a lawyer. He urgently needed the services of Hannaford and Greene.

  While Stephen sat in the gaolyard, Crane was in the gymnasium.

  He didn’t belong to any of the sporting associations that he might have been expected to join. The way he and Merrick sparred had nothing to do with the Marquis of Queensberry, everything to do with years of practice in staying alive by any means necessary, and would probably have got them thrown out of any decent institute of athletics. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but nor did he particularly want to explain his vicious scrapping style to curious members of his own class. And he and Merrick were decidedly less noticeable stripped to the waist in places where a higher proportion of the other men were also tattooed.

  He mostly attended a working men’s establishment in Houndsditch, conveniently between his Limehouse office and the Strand. The vicar who ran the place was of the muscular Christian type, believing in salvation through bodily health and exercise, ploughing his meagre salary into funding the club and equipping it with a collection of books and periodicals to encourage mental improvement. Crane registered as Mr. Vaudrey, paid the standard subscription plus a generous donation in return for an absence of awkward questions, and had quickly succeeded in becoming a part of the scenery, so that he had long stopped attracting gaping watchers. He did still have to put up with the odd wag yelling, “Good morning, Mr. Magpie!” at him, but that was a small price to pay.

  Crane was at the punchbag now. He would rather have been sparring—he would have liked to spar with Merrick today, very much, and for that reason, he hadn’t. If it turned into a real fight, he’d have to find another gymnasium after they got thrown out, and he wanted a real fight. He shot a look over at Merrick on the other side of the room now, muscles working, chest bare except for the little hide bag that hung around his neck on a leather thong. It was a shaman’s talisman that he’d had for years, worn for protection, or out of habit. Crane was strongly tempted to throttle him with it. If it hadn’t been for that bloody business with Saint…

  He forced his attention back to his exercises, away from his thoughts. Sweat ran down his bare back as he worked the punchbag with as much controlled force as he could manage. He landed blow after blow with his right fist, working out his anger with Stephen and himself and Merrick and England, shoulder muscles singing with exertion, head buzzing with an anger that hadn’t calmed since the previous night.

  Bloody shamans. Bloody liars. Bloody Stephen. Did they not have enough between them of love and loyalty and narrowly saved lives that Stephen would tell him the truth, just sometimes? That he would listen? That he would stop taking responsibility for the whole God-damned world and let Crane take some for him?

  He switched to jabbing with his left, pounding out the frustration. Stephen was living on his nerves, fraying at the edges. They could scarcely have a conversation without it degenerating into an argument. It was maddening.

  And it was worrying. Stephen was overwrought, overworked and nervous, but he wasn’t self-pitying or self-indulgent. He was usually one of the fairest-minded men Crane had ever met. But he had weak points—Crane himself, his justiciary team, his overwhelming sense of responsibility—and all of those weak points seemed to be under attack at once. Just as they needed to stand together, the stresses on Stephen seemed to be pulling them apart.

  Crane paused, letting the bag swing back and forth for a few beats, then took up a steady rhythm of punches, left, right, left, right.

  He had spent four long months holding himself back, respecting Stephen’s independence, restraining his natural tendency to take over any situation in which he found himself. Well, fuck that for a game of tin soldiers. Stephen was in trouble, he was sinking, and it was time for Crane to stop pussyfooting around the obstinate little sod’s pride and start hauling him out of that trouble, whether he liked it or not. He would make Stephen listen, and he would fix whatever problems he could with the expenditure of whatever or whoever it cost, and come to that, he would make the bloody man stop working if he had to kidnap him and take him across the English Channel by force. He was sick of Stephen’s sodding justiciary—his fist hit the leather bag with brutal force—sick of the Council—another savage strike—sick of the harassment and the concealment and the constant fucking fear—

  Crane smacked a vicious right hook into the punchbag, which exploded.

&
nbsp; He jerked back, startled, as the horsehair filling burst out around him. The split leather bag bobbed wildly on its chain. The gym was, he realised, completely still. Everyone was staring at him.

  Merrick was at his elbow, grabbing his arm, voice low and forceful. “You. Out. Now.”

  “I should pay—”

  “Fucking out.” Merrick gave him a savage shove, emphasised by a knuckle to the kidney. “Move.”

  Crane moved. Bare-chested, Merrick looked like his old self, not the respectable black-clad serving man he liked to appear these days, but the tightly knotted mass of muscle and scar tissue, tattoos and aggression, who had held his own in the fight cages of Shanghai. He had beaten seven bells out of his nominal master on several occasions in years gone by, when the young Lucien Vaudrey had needed to be taught a lesson. Crane saw that expression on his face now, and did as he was told.

  “Why so urgent?” he asked as they swung towards the changing room. Everyone they passed was staring, some of them open-mouthed. “It’s just a punchbag, it must have been worn out—”

  “You punch ’em. You don’t kill ’em,” Merrick retorted. “And why so urgent is, while you were smacking that thing, your fucking magpies were flying all over you like a fucking raree-show—”

  “They what?”

  “And now look.” Merrick shoved him towards a spotted mirror in the changing room. Crane looked, and recoiled.

  There was a magpie tattoo, unmoving, as if it had always been there, inked right across his face: his left eye and cheek completely obscured with black and white, the tail stretching across his mouth and onto the other side.

  “Jesus Christ. No.”

  “Because if that fucking thing is going to stay there—”

  Crane grabbed for his shirt. “It won’t. Surely. They always go back to where they belong—”

  “Except Mr. Day’s one.”

  “I need Stephen. Get Stephen.”

  “You need to get home before anyone else sees this. The fucking state of you.” Merrick was dressing fast. A young man poked his head into the changing room, retreated rapidly at the manservant’s doglike snarl. “And I’ll tell you what else, there was nothing wrong with that punchbag. You hit it too bloody hard. You hit it like Jen hits stuff. Like a shaman.”

  “That’s magic. I’m not magic.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to the vicar. Only not now, because you look like the King of the Cannibal Isles, and every fucker here knows you didn’t have a magpie on your face when we came in. Come on, we got to get out of here.”

  Chapter Eight

  Merrick got them in a cab with haste. Crane didn’t feel any different physically, but the knowledge of the disfiguring mark across his face had him cringing inside.

  Stephen would deal with it. Surely.

  What the hell had happened?

  He wasn’t magical. He held on to that with grim determination. There was power in his blood, that was undeniable, but Stephen was the one with the ability to tap it.

  The magpies only flew when he joined with Stephen, when Stephen had Crane’s blood or seed in his own body. That was safe, that was tolerable. If the bloody things were going to move around his skin, over his face, in public and without his knowledge—

  Crane wouldn’t have called himself vain, as such, but he was well aware of his good looks and, frankly, enjoyed them. He liked turning heads, liked the way Stephen watched him. The idea that his face would be, not just marred, but made into something out of a carnival sideshow, was sickening.

  “Stephen will do something,” he said to himself as much as Merrick.

  “Course he will. We’ll get you home, you stay put, I’ll go find him, we’ll sort this out.” Merrick paused. “Where’ll he be?”

  “God knows. Leave a message at his rooms. Send to the Council and the Golds’ surgery.”

  “Cos, he’s not always that easy to find—”

  “I know.” Crane did not want to think about what it would mean if Stephen went off on one of his three- or four-day absences now, especially after that stupid row. “We’ll send messages to his rooms and the surgery and then think about how many appointments I’m going to have to cancel.”

  Merrick directed the jarvey round to the servant’s entrance to Crane’s building, lurked while he waited for an opportunity, and whisked him in. They passed a housemaid tripping down the stairs. She threw Crane a quick glance, then her head snapped round in an open-mouthed stare.

  “All right, move along,” Merrick growled, hustling past her.

  “I’m already tired of this,” Crane said grimly as Merrick unlocked the back door.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t have to look at it.”

  Merrick sent the notes requesting Stephen’s urgent appearance by messenger boy, to Crane’s gratitude. He didn’t want to be alone in the flat with his disfigured face.

  “Can you not do something?” Merrick asked, as they both stood by the fire, too on edge to sit.

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno, they’re your tattoos. You’re the magic one. Tell it to move.”

  “I have no idea how in the hell I’d do any such thing,” said Crane, who had been surreptitiously trying exactly that, to no avail. “And I’ve explained this at least thirty times—”

  “Yeah, you got the power but you can’t use it, you said. Except I just saw you knock a hole in a punchbag. And with your right hand, and we both know you’ve a right like a fainting nun, so don’t tell me that was natural.”

  Crane glared at him. “Would you like to try my right out now?”

  “Not if you’re going shaman on me.” Merrick grimaced. “Are you?”

  “No,” said Crane, with more conviction than he felt. “This is—I don’t know what it is, but I’m not a shaman. I don’t feel any different.”

  “You sodding look different.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well, you got to—” Merrick broke off, head turning, as they heard the scrape of the back door. Both men sprinted to the hall. Merrick got to the kitchen first and swung through the doorway to one side, allowing Stephen, dishevelled and flushed, to push past him towards Crane. He looked up, mouth open, and almost tripped over his own feet as he came to an abrupt halt.

  “Lucien? What happened?”

  “I was at the gymnasium. The tattoos started flying all over me. I want this thing off my face.”

  “Sit down. Let me reach you.”

  Crane headed into the sitting room and sat on the sofa. Stephen came up and put a tingling hand to his cheek, peering at the skin. “Did anything happen there? A fight, or, um…well, anything emotional?”

  “If you mean, was I getting my cock sucked, no,” snapped Crane, and went on over Stephen’s distressed denial, “I was, since you ask, at the punchbag, and I punched a hole in it. You’re not supposed to be able to do that,” he added for the benefit of the unathletic shaman. “They’re designed to be hit.”

  “You… When was this?”

  “About two hours ago.”

  Stephen stared at him, eyes stricken. “Oh God.” He swallowed. “I think this is my fault.”

  “Actually your fault, or is this you being responsible for the world?” said Crane sardonically.

  “No, actually my fault. I lost my temper. I was using my powers… That shouldn’t happen.”

  “No, it shouldn’t. Jesus. I could have been in my office. At Blaydon’s. In the House of bloody Lords. You can’t just set tattoos flying all over me.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I had no idea it would happen. I’m so sorry.”

  He looked utterly distressed, white and wide-eyed. Crane took a deep breath. “Get this fucking thing off my face. We can deal with recriminations once I’ve stopped looking like a Venetian mask.”

  Stephen nodded and clambered onto the sofa so he knelt nex
t to Crane. He touched his face, and at that familiar warm prickle on his skin, Crane reached out in instinctive, unthinking response, hands closing round Stephen’s curly hair. Strained and tired and longing, Stephen met his eyes, and Crane pulled him forward, and then they were kissing like starving men, hanging on to each other with desperate need, neither wanting to be the first to break off. Crane dragged him onto his lap and leaned back so he had Stephen’s body against his own, sharing his warmth, sensing the thundering heartbeat, feeling the painful desire in lips and tongue that were clumsy with urgency.

  “I’m so sorry,” Stephen mumbled in Crane’s ear when at last they broke for breath. “So sorry. I was foul to you and I’ve made such a mess of everything and you were right all along, about it all. You should be furious with me.”

  “I am,” Crane said against his neck. “Livid. Can’t stand the sight of you. Come here.” He found Stephen’s mouth again, warm and responsive, and kissed him hard, taking charge now, pushing against Stephen’s lips with intent to bruise till his lover was making whimpering noises in his mouth.

  Crane pulled away slightly, took Stephen’s reddened lip in his teeth and nipped, none too gently.

  “Ow.”

  “And don’t do it again.” He kissed Stephen again, softer now. “Are you all right?”

  “No. It’s been the worst day since…April.”

  “That bad?” murmured Crane, running his fingers through Stephen’s hair.

  “I killed a man. I got arrested. Lady Bruton’s definitely after you. The man who approached you yesterday is the windwalker who stole my ring, and he works for her. There’s another dead policeman, and… Oh, it’s gone.”

  “What? What is?”

  “The tattoo on your face. It moved.”

  “Bugger the tattoo. Start again, from the beginning. No, wait.” He hauled Stephen forward for a deep, open-mouthed kiss that ended with his lover gasping and breathless as Crane nuzzled at his sensitive neck.

  “We have to talk,” Stephen managed. “Lucien, this is important.”