Bruton walked over and backhanded him across the mouth, his ring splitting Crane’s lip open. “Shut up. Everyone, in position.”
Crane licked the blood off his lip, breathing deeply, and sat back on his heels as the six warlocks spaced themselves in a circle round the foul display. He and Stephen were surrounded, bound, helpless, and even he could feel a subliminal throb in the air, a sense of brooding, intensifying power. The six looked alive, vivid, as if more real than everything around them. Haining’s burns already appeared less angry, and Helen Thwaite’s wonderful hair glowed, so lovely to look on it almost hurt.
Bruton began to murmur. The obscene mess of death on the pedestal seemed to quiver, to move, and Crane looked at it with horror.
“They’re drawing down the power,” said Stephen softly.
Crane turned and looked at him properly for the first time. Stephen’s face was swelling, one eye half closed, blood dried around his nose. He looked pale and shaky and sick, and very intent.
The warlocks shuffled forward, closing their circle round the filthy tangle of bones and skin. Bruton took out a long knife and tested the edge, turned slowly and looked over at the two kneeling men with relish.
Hell and the devil, thought Crane. After all he’d seen and done, everywhere he’d been, this was the end, at last, and it had to be here, in bloody Piper. “Stephen…”
“Who are you going to kill first?” Stephen asked, with not quite enough bravado.
Sir Peter and Lady Bruton glanced at one another.
“Kill Crane,” said Helen pettishly. “He’s horrid.”
Baines gave her a look of contemptuous dislike. “We kill the justiciar first. Get rid of him now.”
“I want to make the pansy watch,” said Lady Bruton.
“Which one?” asked Haining with a smirk, and there was a ripple of laughter.
“Day.” She was talking to her husband. “Kill Crane and make Day watch. I want you to see his face when his boy friend screams for help, when he knows he’s failed before he dies. For you, and for Thomas.”
Bruton swept her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “My dear. Perfect.”
“Lucien,” said Stephen, and as Crane turned, he lunged awkwardly sideways, intent unmistakeable, and Crane met his mouth with his own. Their lips hit painfully, and Crane moved to cover Stephen’s mouth with his own in one last, desperate kiss, and felt the other man’s teeth sink viciously into his torn lip.
It was excruciatingly painful. He jolted, but Stephen was pulling as he bit, and sucking hard, dragging Crane’s bloody lip into his mouth, and chewing on it, even as Bruton’s fist hit the side of his head, so Crane’s flesh tore again as they lurched apart.
“Degenerates,” said Bruton with disgust. He grabbed Crane’s arm, hauled him to his feet. “I’m glad you’re dying today.”
Crane looked round, bewildered, betrayed, mouth aflame with pain. Stephen was hunched over, head down, shoulders rounded, a small, defeated heap.
Bruton pushed Crane forward a step towards the obscene altar and the knife.
“Wait.” Stephen was still staring at the ground. “Stop. Please. Just…one moment. One.”
Bruton turned, face twisted with contempt. “Go on, Day. Beg.”
“One,” the little man whispered. “One…”
“One what?”
Stephen looked up. His lips were red with Crane’s blood, and his eyes were wide black pits ringed with molten gold.
“One for sorrow,” he said, and there was a soft clink as the iron at Crane’s wrists fell away and hit the grass by his feet.
Stephen blinked, and a flutter of black and white danced across his eyes.
“Two for joy.” He spread his chainless arms wide, and something that wasn’t there, something black and white with a flash of metallic blue, seemed to unfurl beneath them.
“Peter!” screamed Lady Bruton.
“Day!” roared Bruton.
“Five thousand for justice,” said Stephen, and the magpies of Piper rose off the trees around them in one huge, terrible, boiling cloud of black and white and glittering blue that blotted out the sun.
Then the birds descended.
Bruton bellowed something and grabbed Crane’s arm. He felt a sudden awful suction, like the way the candles had bent towards Stephen but in his own body, and the instant realisation that Bruton was trying to strip him was matched by an equally instant physical reflex as he spun, snapped his skull forward and broke Bruton’s nose with a crunch.
It was a dogfight after that. Crane didn’t try to see what was going on, in the swirling mass of beaks and claws and feathers, the clouds of dust that the wingbeats raised from the dry ground, the endless, awful screaming. He didn’t look to Stephen. He simply tried to keep Bruton busy.
Aside from his powers, the man was close to Crane’s height and much bulkier, a little younger, much less tired. He had every advantage except one: he fought like a gentleman, not a Shanghai dock rat.
Crane went for eyes, ears and testicles, using teeth and nails and knees. The magpies screamed and clawed and stabbed around them, and Crane hit and twisted and ripped, and the two men rolled on the ground together, Bruton desperately trying to fend off Crane’s vicious assault, Crane equally desperate to keep the man occupied, until, with a grunt of effort, Bruton gathered the shreds of his strength and an invisible force pushed Crane violently away and flung him onto his back on the earth, knocking the breath out of him. Magpies rose away from the ground in a cloud.
Bruton roared something incoherent through bloody lips, rising, pulling his hand back to strike, and there was a sharp, loud retort that echoed off the stonework around them. Bruton jolted, a stunned expression on his face, and fell forward. Crane looked down at the shattered bloody mess of his skull, and up at Merrick, standing a few yards away, holding a smoking pistol.
“I thought I told you to go to London,” Crane said.
“Yeah, well.”
There was a hoarse shriek from the other side of the Rose Walk. Merrick turned and sprinted and, instinctively, Crane followed. They both vaulted benches and dodged through thorny growth, and skidded to a halt, seeing Miss Bell, features distorted with effort, both hands out, as if trying to push away the scratched, bloody form of Lady Thwaite.
“Oi!” bellowed Merrick.
Lady Thwaite looked round and gave a cry of fury. She pushed hard at Miss Bell, who staggered back, her face twisting.
“Put down the gun! I’ll kill her!” Lady Thwaite crooked her hands in a clawing gesture, threatening, but there were tears running down her cheeks.
“Step away from her,” said Crane. His mouth was agony as he spoke. “You’ve already lost.”
Lady Thwaite turned on him with a tear-stained face full of hate, and stopped abruptly.
“One chance.” Stephen’s voice came from behind Crane. “No mercy. Down or die.”
Lady Thwaite’s eyes darted from side to side. She looked again at Stephen, gave one suppressed sob, and made a sudden lunge towards Crane, which stopped almost instantly. She shook for a second, a gout of blood erupted from her mouth, and she fell forward.
There was no question in anyone’s mind but that she was dead before she hit the ground.
“What the hell was that?” said Merrick.
“Judgement,” said Stephen.
He walked forward, five feet tall, and Crane knew that even the most lethal killers of his past would have shrunk back to let this man go by at this moment. His eyes were their normal tawny colour again, but every time he blinked, a flutter of black and white and blue danced across them. Magpies pecked and jumped around him, and gathered silently in the bushes and trees around them. There was a heavy thump as one landed for a moment on Crane’s shoulder.
Stephen looked intensely solid, almost vibrating with energy. His face was dirty and spattered with drying blood, but he didn’t look beaten, and his fingers weren’t raw and crooked, and he no longer moved like a man in pain.
He
glanced down at the woman he had just killed, and up again.
“Miss Bell. And Mr. Merrick. What, exactly, are you doing here?”
Merrick shrugged defensively. Crane tried to remember the last time his henchman had felt the need to justify himself. “Went up to Miss Bell’s place, we had a little chat, reckoned we might do more good here than on a train. So we come over. Got here about five minutes before they brought you out. Miss Bell had her eye on the brown-haired lady, and I had a gun on the big sod the whole time. I was just about to take the shot when—” He made a gesture with his hands, fingers fluttering upwards and outwards. “Didn’t realise you had it under control, sir, beg your pardon.”
“In fact, I didn’t. Thank you.” Stephen nodded acknowledgement, and something in the atmosphere relaxed slightly.
“You, on the other hand,” Merrick went on to his master, “you need to get your hands dirty more. Letting that bloke kick you off.”
“Did not. Swine used magic.” Crane spat blood onto the ground.
“So you say.”
“I refuse to get involved in this,” Stephen said. “And Miss Bell? Why are you here?”
Miss Bell looked slightly self-conscious. “It’s like what you said, before. There’s no good doing the right thing unless you stop people doing the wrong thing. Is there?”
Stephen smiled at her, the real, crooked smile that lit his eyes. “There isn’t, no. Thank you, Miss Bell. Thank you very much.”
She huffed. “I didn’t do anything, in the end.”
“You held that cow off,” said Merrick supportively.
“You came to help,” said Stephen. “You acted. I appreciate it.”
He walked forward, holding out his hand. Miss Bell stepped around Lady Thwaite’s body, took it, and immediately snatched her hand away again with a sharp intake of breath. “What the—how are you doing that? Why aren’t you burning up?”
“Good question. Come on.” Stephen started back to the other side of the Rose Walk.
Crane took a long stride to catch up, and Stephen turned to him. “How’s your mouth?”
“Hurts.”
“I am sorry, Lucien. I didn’t have any choice. Here.” He reached up, and as his fingers closed round Crane’s jaw, the prickling turned to a warm, intense glow that rapidly grew searing. Crane made a noise of protest, but Stephen held on with a soothing murmur for a few seconds more. “Better?”
Crane explored his lip with a cautious tongue, realised that his bruised eye was also eased. “Yes. Much. You can heal wounds?”
“Me? No. This is borrowed. From Piper. The charnel posture’s broken, the flow is coming back.” Stephen gave him a swift smile. “There’s power in this house.”
“So I see. Tell me, if, as I deduce, the ring is giving you access to the Magpie Lord’s power, why exactly did you leave it quite so bloody late to use it?”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” Stephen said. “I worked it out in the cellar. Your blood had met mine, on our hands, and when I tried to do—something—I felt the power stir, and I realised. Stupid of me. It should have been obvious that the ring needed Vaudrey blood. But there wasn’t enough from just our hands, and I was about to say so when those swine came in. And then I had to find a way to get more of your blood into me before they killed one of us. That got a bit closer to the line than I’d have liked.”
“Yes, it did, didn’t it,” said Crane, with some restraint. “So it came down to blood, bone and birdspit in the end?”
“Indeed.”
“Does that mean, if you’d just come to bed last night—”
“Probably.” Stephen pushed through the roses. “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say a word,” said Crane, grinning.
They were back in the open space by the Rose Walk, and Crane looked around for the first time. The ground was covered with dust and feathers and uprooted grass, bare earth now at points. Bruton lay on his face, blood wet on his shattered skull. Haining was on his back, blood trickling from his mouth and nose, eyes dark and bulging, not breathing. Beyond him was a vaguely human form that Crane glanced at once and turned from.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Baines,” said Stephen. “The magpies had him.”
Crane’s eyes flicked again to the bloody, sprawled mess on the ground. White ribs showed through the torn skin and flesh. “Why?”
“He made the charnel posture, I think. They didn’t like that.”
“The— Where is it?” demanded Crane, belatedly realising. “The damned thing’s gone!”
“The magpies took the remains. They’ll have burial under the sky. I think probably the birds know what’s best for Vaudreys, in Piper.” Stephen was looking at Miss Bell, not Crane. She nodded abruptly.
Crane was frowning. “Haining, Baines, Bruton.” He strode over to the stone pedestal, looked behind it, flinched at what he saw.
“Stephen, you should see this.”
“I felt it.” Stephen didn’t move. “Lady Bruton stripped Miss Thwaite, yes?”
“Someone did.” Crane couldn’t take his gaze off the terrible rictus of staring eyes and clenched teeth on Helen Thwaite’s yellow corpse. “And Lady Bruton’s nowhere to be seen.”
Stephen sighed. “Lady Bruton clearly persuaded her dear Muriel into this business with the promise that Helen could be turned into more than a flit by the power of the charnel posture. She was virtually talentless and knew it, and it was driving her mad. Easy enough to dangle a cure in front of her mother.”
“Would it have worked?”
“No idea. Maybe.”
“And Lady Bruton stripped Helen to get away. Lady Thwaite chose to die just now, didn’t she?”
“She was going to anyway,” Stephen said. “Don’t feel too sorry for her. She chose her path.”
“Maybe, but the other lady was the worst of a bad lot, if you ask me.” Miss Bell gave an emphatic sniff.
“Inarguably,” said Stephen. “And I will catch up with her, in due course.”
“I’m sure you will.” Crane looked around. “Meanwhile, what do we do with all the bodies? And what the hell do we tell Sir James?”
“We’ll have to burn the Thwaites, at least. Is there any chance of a tragic house fire?” Stephen asked Miss Bell.
Miss Bell tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Baines’s house would do. It’s isolated enough.”
“But what would Lady Thwaite have been doing there?” asked Crane.
Stephen shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Look at the corpses, Lucien, we can’t let people see that. We fire a house with the bodies in it and leave a terrible mystery, or we burn them here and their families never find out they’re dead. I say the former unless anyone has a good reason not to. Let’s leave Bruton and Haining here, I’ll get the magpies to take them. And I hope someone drove here, because we’re going to need a carriage.”
Chapter Nineteen
Later—significantly later, leaving an isolated house burning—Stephen Day finished washing his hands in the scullery and walked back through Piper’s long corridors until he reached the library door, outside which Crane was leaning, propped by his shoulders against the doorframe.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” Crane said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. More or less. How are you?”
Crane’s eyes narrowed. “Are we having a polite conversation?”
“It’s been a fairly trying day,” Stephen said. “If you need some time for reflection—”
Crane reached out, jerked him off his feet, pulled him into the library, and shoved him against the door to push it shut.
“Right,” he said, leaning down into Stephen, voice low and intent. “There is now plenty of power in this house. You’re perfectly capable of throwing me across the room with a thought. Right?”
“Yes…am I going to want to?”
“Let’s find out,” said Crane. “Because the hell with ghosts, the hell with families, I intend to have you, right
now, and that’s not up for discussion or reflection.”
He wrenched Stephen’s shirt off as he spoke, jerking at the buttons, dragging the torn, filthy linen over his narrow shoulders.
Stephen’s mind stuttered to a stop. In the brief respite since he’d finished killing people and burning bodies, he’d veered between the fear that the end of the danger would spell the end of Crane’s interest, and the fantasy, sternly pushed away, of a private compartment on the train home with uninterrupted time for Crane’s perceptive, teasing lovemaking. He had not expected to be unceremoniously fucked against Piper’s walls with the blood barely washed off his hands.
Not here, he thought helplessly, as the old fear of this house, this family stabbed through him again. Not like this.
Crane’s hands stroked Stephen’s thin bare chest, lined white with faded scars, brushed his nipples and slid down to his hips, where Stephen’s body, unlike his mind, felt no doubt at all. The long fingers ran over his stiff cock, his arse, then flicked the buttons at his waist open, and Stephen made a stifled noise that was somewhere between need, protest and terror.
Crane pulled sharply back to look into the shorter man’s face. His hands were still firm on Stephen’s body, his breathing ragged with lust, but his eyes were questioning, concerned, and with that second’s pause, Stephen could think again.
Hector was long gone. Piper was cleansed, purified by fire as the bodies burned and the fresh air rushed in. The hands that claimed his body now had held his bloody fingers in the darkness of the cellar.
The past was dead. They were alive. He wanted this man so much.
Right here, right now, exactly like this.
“Yes,” he said aloud, and saw the smile in Crane’s eyes for a second before the man hauled him up and into a ferocious kiss.
As soon as they broke for breath, Stephen grabbed for Crane’s belt, hands sparking and prickling. They kicked and wrenched each other’s clothes off impatiently, and Stephen gave an astonished gasp as he saw the final two magpies that adorned Crane’s body, one across a lean hip and the top of his groin, one on the opposite inner thigh.
Crane gave him no time for admiration, let alone second thoughts. He’d long concluded that Stephen thought a great deal too much. Instead he picked the smaller man up, clear off the ground and pushed him against the wall, holding him up with one hand as the other probed with practised skill. Stephen, whimpering, wrapped his legs round Crane’s hips and grabbed on to his shoulders, and the power in his hands spangled through Crane’s skin like shards of diamond, leaping with Stephen’s gasp as Crane’s fingers worked inside him, opening him, tormenting him, and their cocks jutted hard against each other’s bodies.
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