by Bec McMaster
they were going to beat the sun home, so he opened
the door and... nothing. Apparently."
"An earl." That was going to be bothersome.
The aristocratic Echelon might no longer be in
charge of the city, but they could make things
difficult if they wished to. "No wonder the London
Standard is haunting us."
"I thought it might have been your pretty eyes
they were captivated with," Ingrid said, appearing
at his side with little fanfare. "Are we going in or
not?"
Copeland's eyes widened as he took her in,
bearing
all
the
hallmarks
of
masculine
appreciation. "Ma'am. Unfortunately we've got
orders to—"
"Keep the scene's integrity preserved," Ingrid
finished, practically batting her eyelashes at the
man. "Until Malloryn's unit gets here."
"Ah, yes, ma'am." Copeland's stance softened,
a smile flickering over his mouth.
Byrnes bared his teeth. It might have passed
for a smile. He hoped. "Well, I think we're the elite
unit you're waiting for." Tugging a sealed letter
from his waistcoat pocket, he shoved it in
Copeland's face before the bloody idiot could fall
at Ingrid's feet in worship.
"What have you gotten yourself into, Byrnes?"
Brasham asked, taking the letter off a flummoxed
Copeland and examining it.
He smiled. "Trouble, hopefully."
"Only you would say such a thing." Brasham
shook his head. "Through you go."
Grabbing Ingrid’s hand, Byrnes tucked it in
the crook of his arm and escorted her through. Ava
and Charlie followed, Ava lugging her precious
carpetbag along with her.
"Keep your mind on the job," he told Ingrid as
the gates shut behind them. "Copeland doesn't
deserve your games."
That earned him an arched brow. "Who said
they were games? He has pretty eyes. And you're
the one that insisted that I play your partner. If you
cannot handle it, Byrnes, then do be a dear and
speak up."
He was going to throttle her. Slowly. Or
maybe kiss her. He hadn't quite decided.
"This way." Ingrid swept under his arm and
headed across the grass, shooting him a knowing
glance as she went. "Some of us want to see the
scene of the crime."
The Venetian Gardens had been crafted for
pleasure. Both upper and lower classes could buy
their ticket in, and there were often fireworks,
acrobatic shows, and pavilions where parties
could be hosted. Broad canals crisscrossed the
sprawling gardens and white lacquered gondolas
sat in a row at the boarding docks, bobbing up and
down in the breeze as they waited for night to fall
and passengers to come.
"Which way is the Grand Pavilion?" Byrnes
asked.
"You've never been to the Venetian Gardens?"
Charlie Todd seemed surprised.
"Not really my sort of affair," Byrnes replied.
"He's more interested in gambling dens than
in garden parties," Ava added, with a tsk of
disapproval under her breath.
"Oh, but this place is so much more than that.
This way," Charlie called, heading toward a huge
pavilion that was circled by Georgian pillars. It
dominated the grassy space, and french doors
opened on all sides to reveal the room within.
"Anyone approaching the pavilion should
have been seen," Byrnes noted.
"It was dark," Charlie replied, raking the
roofline. He pointed. "If I were going to enter
unseen, I'd use those trees for cover, then climb
them to get to the roof."
"That doesn’t negate the fact that the grass
surrounding it provides inadequate coverage,"
Byrnes shot back. Bad enough working with Ingrid,
let alone all three of them.
"Let me look inside," Charlie replied.
"There's got to be a way that someone got in and
out—with all the guests—without being seen by
the staff."
"If Carrington was an earl, then there's high
chance he was a blue blood," Byrnes said, looking
around. Not every single member of the Echelon
had been infected with the craving virus that had
once been considered an elite privilege, but most
of the upper nobility were. Or the males, at least.
Females were considered too prone to hysteria and
overruling passions to be able to control
themselves should they suffer from the bloodlust.
Accidents happened, of course, and there were
both rogue blue bloods like himself, whose
existence hadn't been sanctioned, and a handful of
female blue bloods.
"He was a blue blood," Ava said, flipping
through her notes. "It was in the earlier report at
Malloryn's."
A man fidgeted by the entrance to the
pavilion, his stained fingers holding a half-smoked
cigarette, though his glazed eyes stared at nothing.
Byrnes held out his hand. "Caleb Byrnes,
Nighthawk."
"Silas Compton," the fellow greeted, "I'm the
manager of the Venetian Gardens."
"We'll leave you to it," Ingrid murmured,
taking Charlie and Ava inside with her.
Byrnes watched them go. "You're the one who
found the earl and his guests missing?"
"Aye." Compton ground his cigarette out
among the stubby corpses of several other half-
finished blunts. Though his clothes were distinctly
upper class, his hair was rumpled and signs of
disorder streaked through, with his crooked tie and
an inch of shirt that hung loose at his waist.
Clearly bothered by the ordeal.
Byrnes flipped open his notebook, filing that
away for future notice. "Do we know how many
guests were in attendance?"
"Got the register from the gates," Compton
announced. "Thirty-two of them remained at this
late hour, sir. Including the Earl. Plus there were
eight attendants from the Venetian Gardens, taking
away the food platters and the glasses."
"So forty people are missing altogether?"
Byrnes glanced up from the notes he was writing.
"Sounds like a small private party for an earl."
"Birthday party, by all accounts. Carrington's
pockets are shallow, according to gossip."
Compton shrugged. "Been hit hard by the
Revolution and the new laws."
"I would have thought the Pavilion to be
expensive to hire."
"It is. Not as bad as some, but appearances
have to be kept, sir."
"So Carrington was trying to balance the party
between affordable, but stylish enough to pretend
he didn’t care about that sort of thing. Minimal
guests, not a lot of food and drinks, that sort of
thing?"
"Aye."
Byrnes looked around. "You saw nothing?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary," Compton
replied. "And I've been racking my brain, sir. The
doors were open and guests trickled out to watch
the fireworks, then they went back inside. By the
time I came around to alert everyone to dawn's
imminent arrival, the doors were locked and
nobody was there. Nothing but... a trace amount of
blood, though that could have been from their own
private flasks. The only person I saw leave was a
beautiful woman who exited the party ten minutes
before I came. I only noticed her because I was
overseeing the arrival of crates of blud-wein at the
time."
"Can you describe her?"
"Dressed in white, I think. Pale hair. Blonde,
perhaps? I didn't take much notice, sorry sir. We
were running short of blud-wein, so I was
attempting to sort out that mess."
"And you didn't hear anything?" Byrnes
paused with his pen pressed against his notebook.
"Nothing, but then that might have been the
fireworks. There was also another party over the
eastern side, and the gondolas were busy with
other guests."
Byrnes assessed his notes. "If you think of
anything else, let me know," he said, handing the
fellow his card.
Then he was free to enter the pavilion.
The room was eerily silent. A table by the
wall held a row of champagne glasses stacked in a
pyramid, and champagne lay flatly in the glasses.
Ice buckets still held half-drunk bottles of blud-
wein, judging by the coppery scent of it. There'd
been an automaton orchestra in the corner, but
they'd long since wound down, the automata caught
in frozen tableaux over their instruments. Their
glass eyes made him shudder. They alone might
have been witness to whatever had happened in
here, but nobody would ever know what they'd
seen.
"Over here, Byrnes," Ava called.
The three of them were gathered in the
northern corner. Someone had painted a bloody
“0” on the gauzy curtains that surrounded the room.
There were several blood spatters on the marble
floors, but no other signs of a skirmish.
"Do you think that's some kind of symbol of
ownership?" Ingrid asked, staring at it.
"Possibly." Every now and then he and the
Nighthawks worked a case that was clearly
committed by the same person. They all tended to
have their signature tricks. Byrnes frowned,
running his finger through the blood and then
rubbing his fingers together. "It's tacky in some
areas, but mostly dry."
"Not fresh then," Charlie said, his nostrils
flaring and his eyes darkening to a bottomless
black before he turned away from the curtains and
forced the hunger back down.
The hunger had never overruled him before,
but Byrnes knew that other blue bloods sometimes
struggled with its grip. "Is it going to be a
problem?" he asked quietly, and Charlie shot him a
sideways look before shaking it off.
"No time for dinner this morning," he
muttered, his hand delving inside his pocket for a
flask of blood. "That's all."
"So we have forty people who are missing,"
Byrnes commented, looking around. "And an empty
room, with minimum signs of a struggle. How did
forty people just vanish? That's what we need to
know."
"Through
the
roof?"
Ingrid
suggested
dubiously.
"People would have seen them leaving," he
pointed out, then looked around.
"Underground. It had to be through a tunnel.
Perhaps there's an entrance to Undertown here,"
Charlie suggested.
"Perhaps." Byrnes shoved a table out of the
way. Nothing beneath it. "Undertown was formed
where the Eastern link of the Underground project
collapsed. That's a long way from here."
Charlie grinned at him. "You think like a
Nighthawk, Byrnes. I'm a thief from Whitechapel.
There's not a section of London that's inaccessible
from
below.
There
are
tunnels,
sewers,
underground rivers, old plague pits... It's an entire
world down there."
"How do you think we ran the revolution?"
Ingrid snorted, shoving aside a rug.
And he was forced to remember that she'd
once been a humanist, one of the founding members
of the revolution that tore the prince consort from
his throne.
"I'll leave you to it," Ava said, scraping some
sort of residue into a small glass vial that she had
tugged from her carpetbag. "My place is not
scampering through tunnels. I'll try and work out
what this smoky residue is. It's dirtied the floor in
areas."
The three of them crawled across the room,
shoving chairs and tables out of the way and
peeling back rugs. Byrnes used his knife to feel
around the edges of the large floor tiles, keeping an
eye on the other two.
"Got anything?" Byrnes called, watching as
the lad paced a rug on the floors, sniffing at the air.
Charlie flipped the rug out of the way, his
face lighting up. "This tile is loose! I can smell
blood."
Byrnes crossed to his side and used his knife
to feel the edges of the tile. It wiggled upwards.
Clearly loose. "It's moving!"
Charlie slipped his fingers under the edge of
the tile as Byrnes pried it clear of the floor, and
together they eased it aside. Beneath it was a grate.
Hauling the grate out of the stone, Charlie set
it aside with a ringing sound, wincing. "It's heavy."
"Which means our perpetrator is either
supernaturally strong, or they used a mechanical
contraption to shift it," Ingrid said.
"And someone stayed behind to ease the rug
over the grate again." Byrnes considered what
Compton had told him. "Actually, Compton said a
beautiful woman left the party nearly ten minutes
before he discovered the missing persons. She
might have replaced the rug. I'll check the guest list
to see how many women were on it."
Charlie knelt beside the grate, peering into the
darkness. "The scent of blood's clearer here."
Fine. "Ladies first." Byrnes gestured.
Ingrid lowered herself through the manhole
and vanished with a splash. One of the things he
admired most about her was her willingness to do
what needed to be done in the pursuit of a killer.
She hadn't even flinched at the scent wafting up out
of the tunnel, and her knee-high boots and leather
breeches meant she was dressed for the occasion.
"Youth before age," Charlie said with a wink,
and disappeared after her.
"You all right here, Ava?" Byrnes called.
"Fine." She waved a hand, absorbed in some
kind of chemical test she was performing.
> Byrnes stepped through the open grate and
landed in a splash of water. The predator inside
him reared its head, his vision cutting through a
dozen colors, and ending up in shades of black and
gray as it intensified.
Some blue bloods had trouble dealing with
the other side of the craving virus: the darkness,
the hunger. Instead of trying to control his darker
side, Byrnes had learned to use it to hunt, and thus
assuage the urge to kill. If he glutted his predator
half on the thrill of the chase, then most of the time
it left him alone.
Just one problem now: he wasn't focusing on
blood, or the scent of whoever had done this... No,
all he could smell were lilies, and the heated musk
of Ingrid's skin. His gaze locked on her, as though
she were the prey.
Focus. Byrnes curled his fingers into fists and
closed his eyes, forcing himself to hone in on the
droplets of blood in the water. It was more
difficult than he'd expected.
"I can smell several different perfumes,"
Ingrid announced, splashing forward through the
gloom. She tripped on something and caught
herself. "Appears to be some sort of... tracks...
underneath. Rail tracks?"
"Not wide enough," Charlie replied, peering
through the murky water. Enough light gleamed
through grates set at varying intervals along the
tunnel for them to be able to see. "Perhaps closer
to what you get in a mine, or in Undertown, when
you're using wheeled carriages to carry heavy
objects."
"Whatever it is, it's under ten inches of
water," Byrnes pointed out. "So it hasn't been used
for a long time."
"Can you smell that?" Charlie asked, his
nostrils wrinkling up, as they splashed along.
"All I'm getting is that perfume." Byrnes knew
he was a good hunter, but the rookery lad just
might own better senses than he did.
"Smells sweet," Ingrid murmured, her amber
eyes a beacon in the dark.
“And kind of rancid,” Charlie muttered.
They moved silently through the tunnels, just
in case whoever had done this was still here.
"The scent of blood's getting stronger."
Byrnes waded ahead, one hand on his knife, as he
tracked the scent. “It’s— Oh.”
A woman floated facedown in the shallow
pool of water. Above her, the grate allowed weak
sunlight through it, highlighting the edges of her
rose-colored silk gown. A gown that was stained
and bloody.
Byrnes slowly rolled her over. Her abdomen
was torn apart, like a feral dog had been at it, and