by Bec McMaster
"I'm not going to present you to the queen," he replied, as one of the Coldrush Guards who protected the tower jerked the hack door open. The guard's hair was a pale blond, typical of his blue blood status.
Before the revolution, the craving virus remained the exclusive right of the aristocratic Echelon. It gave them enhanced senses, extended their lives, and increased their ability to heal until they were almost invulnerable. The blood lust was an unfortunate side effect, and the photosensitivity tended to inhibit their movements during the day—especially as they aged and their craving virus levels bloomed—but that mattered little to an entire social class who did most of their frolicking at night anyway.
While the Council of Dukes had once held the power to limit who received the blood rites—prominent sons of influential members of the Echelon mostly—accidents tended to occur when the craving virus was so proprietary and bloodletting was the prime means of a blue blood's diet.
Any "rogue" blue blood was offered one of three options; join the Nighthawks who patrolled the London streets and served as thief-takers and hunters; the Coldrush Guards who protected the Ivory Tower and the queen; or be executed.
Malloryn slipped out of the carriage impatiently.
Gemma followed.
"This way," he said abruptly, leading her toward the squat tower at the northern edge of the walled courtyard. Thorne Tower.
Oh, blast.
Home to traitors, political hostages, and those prisoners whose crimes were dangerous enough to warrant further questioning, Thorne Tower loomed over the courtyard like a watchful guardian. She was responsible for a good handful of its inmates.
"Care to tell me what this is all about? I know you enjoy holding all your cards close to your chest, but I'm about to expire from curiosity. What sort of dead body are we looking at?"
"We have a slight problem," Malloryn replied. "Jonathan Carlyle is dead."
"The Chameleon?" Dead? Gemma's eyes narrowed. The man had been wanted for the murders of fifteen high-profile blue blood lords. He'd had the aristocratic Echelon who'd once ruled London on edge for years.
Nobody knew whom he worked for, though she and Malloryn suspected. Nobody knew why he'd killed the men and women he had. And for an assassin, he had a peculiar signature style unbecoming for the trade.
It was as if he'd wanted the world to know which deaths belonged to him.
Even as he'd spent years protesting his innocence once he'd been caught.
"Why is it a problem if he's dead?" Gemma's mind raced. "Half the Echelon will sleep better at night knowing he's no longer breathing. He tried to kill you too, if I recall."
"Tried." Malloryn gestured her through the main door to the tower, ignoring the pair of guards on duty. "He's not the first. And I'd like you to draw your own conclusions. You were the one who captured him. You know him best. I want your opinion on something."
Malloryn. Always as bloody oblique as he could be.
"Your Grace." One of the tower guards waited inside, wearing the proud livery of the Coldrush Guards. "I've kept the scene for you."
Malloryn hadn't yet viewed it? Hmm. This was rather disconcerting.
"Ah, Jamison. I've bought my secretary to take some notes for me." Malloryn gestured obscurely toward her. "Now, show me to his cell."
Secretary. She could work with that. Gemma immediately let herself fade into the background, hunching her shoulders a little and lowering her gaze. No sign of the flirtatious Gemma Townsend remained behind, and nobody watching would ever notice how much she could take in during such an act.
Thank God Malloryn had made her clean her face and strip off her rumpled overdress in the carriage.
Gemma followed him up the circular stairs leading to the prisoner wing, tugging her cape jacket neatly into place as she went and smoothing her rumpled skirts and hair. By the time they reached the top, she'd completely shed her flower girl persona, twisting her hair into a neat chignon.
"We found the first guard here," Jamison said as they turned the corner into the prison wing.
A body lay on the other side of the barred door. Jamison unlocked it, even as Gemma peered around him.
The guard on the floor wore the same uniform Jamison did. He had a pistol in his hand, and most of the left side of his face was missing. Whoever did this wanted it to look like a suicide.
Which meant they'd somehow managed to subdue the guard without alerting any others, kill him, then pose the body. Unusual.
"This door was locked?" Malloryn asked.
"Yes, your Grace."
"Nobody saw anything out of the ordinary?"
"Not a damned thing. It happened in the middle of the guard shift."
"And nobody heard anything?"
Jamison shifted uneasily as they stepped through the door to where they could get a better look at the body. "Some of us thought we heard something, but it occurred during parade training in the yard. Lots of yelling and horns. Lots of noise. Whoever did this timed it spectacularly well."
Hmm.
"Do you have regularly scheduled parades?" Malloryn asked.
Jamison shook his head at her. "No. This was organized yesterday. The commander was displeased with the recent turnout of the guards, so thought we needed drilling."
Who? Gemma mouthed, prompting Malloryn to ask the questions she couldn't while she was supposed to play his subordinate.
"Who is he?" Malloryn asked, resting his hand on hilt of the cane-sword sheathed at his hip.
"Robert Kirkland. He's been an officer of the guards for nearly ten years. Good man." Jamison's voice roughened. "Or at least, he was."
Malloryn asked a few more questions, before looking impatient. "Show us the cell."
They moved along the hallway.
The iron-bound doors set into the stark stone walls were closed and locked down. Occasionally she heard people shifting behind them, but Thorne Tower was meant to break men. Not offer them a single luxury. Even light and sound was denied to them in the solitary wing.
Another body lay slumped in the hall.
"John Dunne," Jamison explained. "He's the warden. The curious thing is, he had keys upon him, but they were still in his pocket."
"Or maybe someone put them back?" Malloryn mused.
Gemma examined Dunne. Throat cut from behind, ear to ear, though that wouldn't kill him. Blue bloods could heal from almost anything short of decapitation or removal of the heart. In this long, narrow tunnel, there was no way he couldn't have seen or heard his assailant coming. Which meant he knew the perpetrator.
Little pieces of the puzzle began to fit themselves together.
The next cell door lay ajar. Gemma's steps slowed.
"Who opened the door?" Malloryn asked.
"It was open when the guards made their rounds," Jamison explained. "That was the first sign something was wrong. We were coming from the other direction, so we didn't see Dunne or Kirkland until it was too late."
Gemma examined the door. The lock hadn't been tampered with. The keys hadn't been taken. Perhaps the killer had their own set of keys? A breathless sensation swept through her.
An inside job.
It had always been the first clue.
Three dead bodies.
Jonathan Carlyle.
She'd been working undercover in Lord Randall's house when his new footman—Carlyle—had murdered him.
She'd spent a year on the Chameleon's tail, trying to track him down. The second they got word Randall was the next target, she'd been sent in to stop it. Instead, the murder happened right in front of her, with the last man she'd ever expected.
The Chameleon had never needed to break and enter. He was extraordinarily patient, and they could never quite work out how he was getting into houses that were the virtual equivalent of a locked vault, until Carlyle betrayed himself.
Carlyle posed as a footman to Lord Randall, and from the forged reference they'd found on Randall's desk he'd previously been working for Lady Harrenhall,
the fourteenth victim. They couldn't tie him to any of the previous thirteen murders. It was as if Carlyle appeared out of nowhere, presumably killed Lady Harrenhall, and then moved on to Randall. But the letter of reference, Gemma's eyewitness account, and confirmation of his previous employment with Lady Harrenhall were enough to condemn him. Case closed.
A sudden horrible suspicion swept through her, and she pushed inside the cell.
Jonathan Carlyle had spent years protesting his innocence. He couldn't remember a damned reason why he'd shot Lord Randall, and he'd managed to stick to his story the entire time they questioned him. The most exquisite liar she'd ever met, she'd always told herself, though she'd marveled at his inability to break, even when under questioning.
And now he was dead.
She stopped abruptly when she saw the body.
The three years since she'd captured him hadn't been kind. Carlyle lay on the floor, his thin body arranged carefully with his hands clasped over his chest and his eyes closed.
A flashback of Lady Harrenhall slammed through her mind, superimposed over Carlyle for a brief second. She'd been training her memory since she was four, and it was easy to recall the precise details.
Gemma circled the body, forgetting herself enough to lose her mild secretary persona. "A single bullet to the temple." From the blood spatter pattern on the wall, Carlyle had been standing in front of it. "He saw the killer enter. He faced him. He died."
No trained assassin would ever let down his guard long enough for another to draw a pistol and pull the trigger, and the Chameleon had been the best of the best.
How the hell had someone gotten the drop on him like this?
"Could you give us a moment alone to view the body?" Malloryn asked, though his tone left little doubt it was no question.
Jamison vanished.
"Well?"
She knelt by the body, careful not to touch it. "Inside job. Assailant had his own set of keys and knew the building, the guard roster, and forthcoming events. He chose his time well. Dunne knew him, and didn't protest when he saw him. Indeed, I suspect he was comfortable enough in our killer's presence that he voluntarily turned his back on him. Then our killer moved on and shot Kirkland before staging it to look like a suicide. I want to know if all the Coldrush Guards carry the same style of pistol."
"You don't suspect Kirkland?"
"He kills Carlyle, slits Dunne's throat, then walks all the way to the barred gate before shooting himself? Highly unlikely. And why kill himself?"
Gemma frowned. Why stage Kirkland's death to look like a suicide at all? The second the guards saw Dunne or Carlyle, they'd know this was a murder.
"None of this makes any sense," she muttered, her gaze turning to the playing card the corpse held in his rigid fingers. The posing of the body. The bullet hole to the head. The presence of the playing card.
A horrible suspicion lurched inside her chest.
Malloryn knelt on the other side of Carlyle and then used one of his daggers to turn over the card.
Gemma swallowed.
It was the King of Diamonds.
"Gemma?"
"This is the work of the Chameleon," she said breathlessly, though she'd known in some part of herself. "Or as near to it as I can imagine. I'm sure it will be confirmed when you have the bullet retrieved."
There'd be a diamond etched into the outer casing of the bullet.
A calling card of sorts.
"As I suspected." His lips pressed firmly together, faint sign of inner turmoil. "Which brings us to a rather intriguing question: How did the Chameleon murder the Chameleon?"
3
THE RIDE BACK to the Company of Rogues' private safe house was quiet, leaving Gemma lost in her thoughts.
She couldn't help going over the Carlyle case in her mind, wondering if there'd been something she missed.
There was no disputing Carlyle killed Lord Randall with the Chameleon's trademark diamond-engraved bullet.
But she couldn't stop herself from recalling the strangely blank look in his eyes as he did it.
And then the retort of the pistol had broken the spell, leaving her gasping in shock as she rushed forward to disarm him, and Carlyle blinking, as if he came awake from a nightmare....
Or perhaps came awake to find himself in a horrible dream.
What she wouldn't give to be able to go back in time and question him most thoroughly. Were you working alone?
Or....
Did someone give you that bullet and insist you kill him?
Was the real Chameleon still out there?
Had he been laughing at her, all this time?
Was he cleaning up his mess?
What had happened today in that cell? Why now? Why kill Carlyle now? Why had he been quiet for the past three years? Or was it a copycat?
Malloryn himself stared out the window, his fingertips drumming a steady tap on the sill. It was as much as sign of agitation as she'd ever seen from him.
"What is it?" she asked.
They'd been working together for nearly fifteen years. She knew this man from the inside out.
"We long suspected the Chameleon worked for the prince consort," he murmured. "You captured him the day the revolution overthrew the prince consort. There's been not a single murder since then, and it seemed you had your man."
"I saw him kill Lord Randall with my own eyes."
"I'm not disputing your recollection." Their gazes met. "I know your talents, Gemma. Your recall is better than mine. But why has it taken three years for someone to murder the Chameleon? We were no closer to getting a confession off him. Nothing else has changed. Except, of course, for recent events."
A couple of months ago, a disgruntled group of blue blood lords had begun plotting against the queen and the Council of Dukes who ruled the city.
A rogue dhampir agent named Zero had been found pulling their strings, and they'd been lucky to stop her before she fed dozens of people to her stable of vicious vampires.
An uneasy suspicion swirled through Gemma's midriff. "You think the Chameleon's murder has something to do with the current issues we're facing."
"Someone's pulling strings. Someone wants to cause chaos in the city, overthrow the queen, and destroy me. You heard what Zero said when we captured her." The enemy agent had been almost gleeful as she told Malloryn something was coming for him. "This is aimed at me. All of this. I have a vendetta with an unknown enemy. And now, suddenly the prince consort's most dangerous assassin is murdered in the same way he used to kill others? Why? I cannot help but think it's connected."
"Blood and ashes, I hope not. We've barely recovered from last month when Lord Ulbricht and the Sons of Gilead tried to poison the Echelon's entire blood drinking supply with Black Vein," she muttered.
"Anarchy doesn't rest."
"No, but I wouldn't have minded another week to recover," she said with a sigh.
London flashed past her sash window, pedestrians hurrying along through the foggy afternoon as Gemma stared through them, feeling vexed. She hated unsolved puzzles.
A dull roar began to churn beneath the hum of the carriage's steam engine; Gemma tilted her head intently, trying to make out the sound. On the footpath, a young governess grabbed her charge's hand and hurried him away. A butcher hastily yanked the door closed to his shop, and flipped the latch. A haberdashery yanked their blinds down as London began to stir.
"Down with the queen," someone roared.
"Take back what's ours!" another man yelled.
Her eyes met Malloryn's. "Oh, heck."
The duke tensed.
"It's probably a good thing we took the unmarked carriage." As one of the Council of Dukes who ruled the city, the embossed silver griffin symbol that was the House of Malloryn's personal sigil would have only inflamed the current situation.
"Might take the long way around, Your Grace." The tinny echo of Herbert's voice vibrated through the small speaking device installed in the carriage. It looked like any
other hack on the streets, but Jack, the inventor who worked for Malloryn, had made improvements. "Streets ahead look congested."
A polite way of saying a riot was brewing.
This was precisely what they'd been hoping to avoid. The revolution to overthrow the prince consort had changed London forever; no longer were the humans, verwulfen and mechs—those who'd lost limb or organ and suffered a mechanical replacement—considered the lesser classes.
The queen had taken control of the city and the realm and brought new order and stability to the empire, challenging the status quo of the vicious, bloodthirsty Echelon who'd once ruled.
And everyone lived happily ever after....
Wishful thinking.
The humans and mechs resented the long years they'd spent crushed beneath blue blood heels. The blue bloods who'd once done exactly as they pleased resented the new rules. The queen walked a knife edge of balance, trying to assuage all the races, and so far, it seemed she could please nobody.
Gemma caught a glimpse of the crowd ahead, a bottle arcing through the air and smashing against the nearest brick building, as Herbert guided the steam hack down a side street.
Here we go....
One glimpse of a pasty face, and this entire section of London would go up as though someone had struck a match. She'd never hidden her face before, but there'd been reports in the paper of people being beaten because of how pale their complexions were. A couple of innocent humans had been torn apart last week in Hyde Park. The Nighthawks who patrolled the streets were pushed to the brink of their capacities, especially with their leader still recovering from an assassination attempt last month.
Whistles suddenly blew. A dozen Nighthawks appeared out of nowhere, clad in the strict black leather uniforms that heralded them. Charged with keeping the streets quiet, they'd been dealing with unruly mobs all month since the last clash between rioters and Nighthawks turned deadly, and now trouble constantly brewed, like a storm on the horizon.