The Business of Blood

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  I wondered, as well. I wondered all the time. In the beginning, it had been an obsession. A comfort. Pondering the dastardly things I’d do to Jack.

  Did that make me a monster, too?

  “That song was a favorite of Da’s.” I squeezed Nola’s hand, and she lifted her head from my shoulder.

  “I know. I sang it for him when we were little.” She patted me indulgently as if I were the looney one.

  And perhaps, I was.

  I glanced around the foyer, wishing I possessed a sense of divine direction, real or imagined. “Aunt Nola…does—does Da ever…does he ever talk to you?” Lord, I needed my head examined.

  “No.” Releasing a sad sigh, she gave my hand another regretful squeeze. “He’s moved on. They all have.”

  Of course, they had.

  “But I know what he’d tell you to do with that letter.”

  I blinked at her. “You do?”

  “I know what killed your father, Fiona.”

  At that, even my ability to blink disappeared. The death of my father, of my brothers, had never been solved. But it had always been explained in one concise sentence.

  They died in the Troubles.

  They’d died as soldiers on the losing side of a war, and no one investigated the deaths of soldiers as murders. But they were murdered. Down to young Fayne at merely thirteen.

  “We Mahoneys are a fierce and scarce lot.” Nola sat up tall like a sage, making certain to maintain my attention. “Your father tried to fight an entire war by himself, and it got them all killed. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t need to blink as tears moistened my eyes once again. “I don’t understand.” I never had.

  “Your father would tell you not to fight this war against the Ripper alone, Fiona. If you do, the outcome will undoubtedly be the same. You are clever, but he is evil, and to beat the devil, you have to play his game. I don’t think you can. You’re too innocent. You’re too…good.”

  Was I good?

  Stunned, I stared at Nola for a long time. She spoke with clarity. Conviction. With the strength and wisdom of the woman I’d known her to be at my age. Her hands didn’t tremble now. Her voice didn’t shake.

  “Who do I go to?” I asked, gripping onto her moment of sanity like a drowning man would a rope. “I don’t know who to trust.”

  “Your father would tell you to go to the police.”

  He would, but my father was the police, not a criminal.

  “Not the one who brought you home,” she clarified. “The…” She made a gesture at the side of her face, imitating muttonchops.

  “Aberline?”

  “Him, you can trust.”

  She’d been introduced to Aberline maybe twice. He’d come to fetch me on occasion to hire me for a job. He also conducted me home safely after I’d completed one. In truth, I thought Nola might be a bit sweet on him.

  “This is his war, too,” she remarked with a pointed expression.

  She was not wrong about that. Aberline had been a foot soldier since the very beginning, searching dark alleys and vast shadows for the Ripper when other men dared not leave their lofty offices. The search still consumed him. It was something we had in common.

  I checked the watch on my broach. If I hurried to Scotland Yard, I’d be there in time for tea.

  Standing, I folded the letter carefully, fitting the broken halves of the seal back together. “We can have supper together when I return, would you like that?”

  Nola nodded and then held her hand out to stop me as I made to fetch my umbrella once again. “The dark squares, please!”

  Of course. The dark squares.

  How could I forget?

  16

  By the time the mob tipped my cab over, I was too terrified to be angry at the driver anymore.

  Too often, a woman’s word of caution was patently unheeded by a cocksure man. Because of this, I found myself crumpled against the inside door of my coach, which now rested on the cobbles.

  I’d been uneasy when we’d passed the small groups of livid men with union signs. The last time the Labourer’s Union and the Fair Traders clashed in Hyde Park, there’d been casualties.

  That had been four years ago, at least. Before I’d come to London.

  As we clopped along, I’d spotted signs for the Social Democratic Federation and marked the strong presence of the Irish National League.

  When the poor stormed the West End en masse, nothing good came of it.

  And when the Irish wore their colors, even in this age of advanced enlightenment and ceasefire treaties, there could be no doubt they were going to war.

  I’d unlatched the window and called into the diminishing rain, “Mightn’t we take the long way to Scotland Yard? I sense trouble.”

  “Naw. Just a few rabble-rousers on their way to Trafalgar Square, miss,” the cabby had tutted at me. “In’nt that where you Irish riot these days? We’ll stay along the river and be perfectly safe unless you want to join your countrymen.”

  When a crowd became a mob, their violence was indiscriminate. I had no desire to be anywhere near such an occurrence.

  “I’d rather we just turn around and go back to Chelsea,” I’d pressed. “I’m not political, and I fear that this could quickly become dangerous.”

  “No easy feat in these cramped streets,” he’d snapped. “If you want to go back, get out and walk.”

  I’d been too frightened to leave the safety of the carriage at the time, but now I wished with every bone in my body that I had done so when I’d had the chance.

  A murderous energy had vibrated in ocean-like ripples through the humanity in the streets, and the closer we clattered toward the House of Lords, the thicker the throng became. They bumped the carriage at first, like a shark testing a fisherman’s dory. Then they pounded on it, shouting the vilest threats.

  I could hear the panicked screams of the horse, and the curses and warnings of the driver as he swung his whip, hoping to dislodge the hangers-on.

  Of all the days for one of Aunt Nola’s outlandish predictions to be accurate.

  Despite my misgivings about divinity, I’d closed my eyes and whispered a silent prayer of the dear-God-please-let-me-survive-this variety.

  The next time I’d peeked out the window, they’d been dragging the driver away and working at unlatching the horse from the carriage.

  Where are the police? I’d frantically wondered as the coach had begun rocking with the violence of an Atlantic sea gale.

  A rock the size of my fist broke through the left window. It would have landed in my lap had I not scrambled onto the seat, using my bent legs as shock coils, stabilizing myself as best I could with my arms outstretched, braced against the walls.

  Once the carriage tipped to the left, the fall seemed to take an eternity. Long enough for me to clutch at the plush seat covers.

  The impact with the ground threw me forward, and I cried out in pain as my hip landed hard on the door handle. Glass crunched beneath my weight.

  I looked up as a canopy of mutinous faces and hands grasped at the door, which had now become the ceiling. Daylight dappled through their fingers until enough of them swarmed the coach to hide the golden spires of parliament from view.

  They were going to get into the cab. And once they did, they’d tear me apart.

  Desperate, I searched for a weapon. I had my knife, my pick, and my umbrella. None of which would save me from a violent horde.

  Still, I took my blade from my pocket, opened it, and held it at the ready. In my left hand, I grasped my umbrella, preparing to poke out a few eyes if I had to.

  The window cracked beneath the weight of so much force, giving me just enough time to open my umbrella before the glass shattered. Shadows of shards slid off the thick fabric, ripping it in places.

  Better it than my flesh.

  A victorious roar echoed through the mob as my umbrella was torn from my grip and disappeared.

  When they couldn’t fit through the
window, someone managed to pry the door open.

  Hands were on me. Clawing. Lifting. And whatever made me human, a person, fled before an animalian fear so electrifying, rage billowed in to fill the spaces reason had deserted.

  A sharp ringing in my ears drowned out the cacophony of their obscene words. My vision blurred, then sharpened. All I could see was my knife. How bright it glinted among their rough and often dirty fingers.

  I took a few of those fingers with my blade. Several, in fact, before someone managed to drag me from the coach.

  They called me a whore. They called me a cunt. They called me worse than that, and with no reason.

  I’d barely marked them.

  The blade was like a part of me I’d never learned how to use. A claw that had been retracted until this moment. Whenever it found purchase in flesh, I snarled with a sense of triumph. When blood erupted from a wound, my own sang with glorious ferocity.

  I was no longer a lady. A woman. Or Fiona. I was a wild thing.

  Perhaps a killer.

  I knew not who I cut or where.

  I expected to be stabbed, myself, at any moment. Or bludgeoned, punched, kicked, trampled. But when I was finally dragged into the crowd, the sheer press of humanity was both my protector and my enslaver.

  I sank into that ocean of bodies. Gulping for air with lungs left no room to inflate. My fingers became talons, clutching my knife, considering whether I could angle it to use against myself.

  Despair crushed my throat like a boot heel.

  The report of a gunshot echoed from the west, along the river, and a reprise of startled screams created the chorus, followed by a verse of more explosions to the south.

  As if of one mind, the throng surged north, toward Westminster Abbey. I was powerless to do anything but ride the motion like a wave, lest I be trampled.

  Another shot broke through the discord. This one right next to me, in the middle of it all.

  The devastating pressure of bodies against me abated as though it had never been. I stood and inhaled air greedily as people screamed and scrambled like rats from a matron’s broom.

  An arm clamped around me from behind. Still a creature of instinct, I stabbed at it. A hand gripped my wrist, popping my fingers open with embarrassingly little pressure against the tendons. My knife clattered to the cobbles.

  I’d thought if anyone might rescue me, it would be Inspector Croft. The gunfire surely belonged to the police, didn’t it?

  But I could not smell clove smoke and sharp vanilla.

  And the color of the hand was all wrong. Too dark.

  My wiry struggles proved feeble to the preternatural strength of Aramis Night Horse.

  I sagged against him, not knowing whether to be comforted or distressed. My body, apparently, chose relief.

  The sounds of pain, of violence, drew my notice, and I looked over to see the Hammer using the butt of his pistol to break a man’s jaw.

  Hammer, indeed.

  He bared his teeth in an eerie, deceptively calm smile. “Do come along, Fiona.” He beckoned to me as one might invite a friend into his house.

  Night Horse’s shoulder became my bulwark against a sea of bodies, and I was happy to tuck myself against his smooth, solid frame. To bury my cheek in his loose hair and let him half-drag, half-carry me along. I liked to think my feet helped, but I couldn’t be sure.

  As the crowd surged north, the Hammer cleared a path toward Great College Street by way of punishing brutality.

  He was the sort of man crowds parted for.

  Had I been religious, I’d have said he was the sort of man the seas parted for.

  In that moment, he was my savior, and I would have worshiped him thusly.

  After breaking a few bones, he pointed his pistol at anyone who should happen to venture too close, and luckily, the mob was now wary of stray bullets.

  The crowd thinned at Great College Street, and the Hammer fell into step beside us. “They’ll herd the blighters back to the East End. We’ll press this way until we’re safe.”

  “Who will herd them? The police?”

  A laugh, rich as warm cream, was discordant in such chaos. “The police? You think those imbeciles could organize themselves against such a mob so quickly?” His hazel eyes danced at me. “No, darling, the Tsadeq Syndicate will restore order, here. The mob of unions and gangs must be reminded that the city is mine, after all.”

  Even in my shaken state, his grandiosity amazed me.

  “Butchers,” Aramis warned. “To your left.” He thrust me to his right and used his body as a shield.

  Night Horse snatched one by the throat in mid-run, used his momentum to jerk the poor sod back, and snapped his neck with a good wrench on his necktie.

  “That,”—he motioned to the broken man on the ground—“is why I don’t like cravats.”

  Duly noted.

  Pressing anxious fingers against my own still-healing throat, I looked away from the body in time to witness the upward arc of the curved blade clutched between the Hammer’s fingers. It caught the man running at him with his cudgel raised, right below the navel.

  It only took a few swift, merciless jerks. Then the Hammer stepped back in time to avoid the brute’s innards splattering against his expensive shoes.

  “The city is mine,” he informed the doomed assailant exactly as he had us only seconds prior. I don’t think the man marked the reminder. He was too busy gawking at his own guts.

  He fell to his knees, and by the time his face hit the earth, life had deserted his eyes.

  The Hammer spat on the ground next to him. “They won’t forget after today.”

  Nola had been right yet again.

  They would be washing organs from the pavestones.

  17

  As dazed as I found myself, I’d not failed to notice how expertly the Hammer had gutted his adversary. He’d opened the stomach cavity with that short, curved blade, without perforating the intestines.

  So far as I could distinguish, anyway.

  As Aidan had pointed out, the act took a certain kind of knowledge. Talent.

  Practice.

  Could he have done Frank Sawyer thus, and so quickly?

  I remained shielded by Night Horse’s shoulders long after it was necessary. Partly because I didn’t trust my legs. And partly because I felt he understood the animal I had become. He understood it better than I did. He was someone with the morality of a wolf, or a fox, or an owl.

  He was someone with claws. Blades.

  He didn’t wear much for such a chilly, rainy day, I dimly realized. Trousers, boots, and a vest with no shirt beneath it.

  I wondered where his jacket was before he settled it around my shoulders.

  I clung to his umber arms, taking comfort in the strength I found there.

  I couldn’t tell you how long we walked or how many turns we took. Only when I was unable to clearly read the street signs did I realize I’d lost my spectacles somewhere in the fracas.

  We eventually ducked beneath a doorway arched into a stone garden wall, where I was allowed to catch my breath.

  “Are you hurt?” Aramis removed his jacket from around my shoulders and performed a cursory physical examination that, on any other day, would have left me feeling more than a little molested.

  “I-I don’t think so.” Over my clothing, his questing fingers found a few tender bruises or abrasions. A great deal of blood stained my torn pelisse. He inspected it roughly, shoving the sleeves up my wrists in search of the wounds.

  “It’s not mine,” I whispered, more to myself than him, I think. “The blood isn’t mine.”

  “Do be careful, Night Horse, she’s a tendency to sever the fingers of men she does not want touching her.” Though his tone was light, the Hammer watched our exchange with displeased speculation.

  I pictured the detached digits that likely still rested in the up-ended coach and shuddered. I’d had to disassemble a few bodies in my day, mostly thanks to the Hammer and Mr. Night
Horse, but not someone still alive and bleeding. I’d never get used to the feeling of blade against bone.

  At least, I hoped I wouldn’t.

  Shame brimmed into heat in my cheeks as I contemplated the violence, the permanency of what I’d done. To be without fingers…I couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I-I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to…”

  “Don’t apologize. It was well done, Fiona. If a fraction of my generals were half so as fierce as you, I’d be twice as powerful.”

  I gawked at him dumbly, this man who had an army all his own.

  The empire bowed to a great queen, an empress, but London had a king, as well. And it was wise to show him the respect he claimed as his due, lest I incur his wrath.

  “Thank you,” I murmured, feeling the gratitude down to my bones, which, because of these two men, were all still intact. “Thank you.” My second articulation at Night Horse wobbled as my entire body seized with uncontrollable shivers.

  All three of us perked to the distant pitch of police whistles pealing above the chaos we’d escaped.

  The Hammer thrust his chin back toward the fray. “Make certain all is as it should be,” he instructed the Blade. “We do not want police casualties. It will change the conversations of the public and the press.”

  I was certain the Blade’s hesitation was imagined, at first. He increased the pressure of his hold on my arms from barely perceptible to almost painful.

  At my flinch, the Hammer said, “Not to worry, I’ll see Fiona to safety.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been clinging to the assassin until he pulled away from me. My fingernails had bitten little half-moon crescents into his bare arm and accidentally tangled into the long, loose, ebony hair spilling over his biceps. He only glanced at me when the strands caught and pulled at my fingers. An unholy darkness glinted in his eyes.

  “Take off your pelisse.” My head whipped around at the Hammer’s gentle command.

  My hands trembled too much to be effectual, so he undid the oversized buttons with deft and steady fingers. “This is becoming a distressing pastime, Fiona. Ridding you of bloodstained clothing.”

  I made a sound somewhere between a giggle and a sob, causing the brackets around his mouth to deepen fondly. As far as I could tell, my violet blouse had escaped the gruesome stains I might never be able to lift from the wool of my pelisse, and I inspected my plum skirt and wide belt with its golden arabesque buckle for evidence of the carnage.