My Lady Quicksilver

Five

Fog lingered in the alleyways, seeming to lurk in the still corners and doorways where no breeze stirred. Rosalind dragged her shawl tight around her shoulders and moved swiftly through the evening crowd. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted. It was the silence, she decided, the way everybody’s voices were muted and nobody would meet each other’s gaze. Martial law had choked the city since the bombing, with metaljackets on every corner and rumors of humanists in every whisper. The unease was universal. Even she felt it, despite nerves that should have turned to steel long ago.

A quick glance at her pocket watch told her she’d best hurry. It was almost half eight and she had to be home before nine. If she were caught out, she’d be arrested.

Fifteen minutes later, she took out her key in front of the door that led to her leased apartment. The door jerked open.

Rosalind slapped a hand to her chest as Ingrid glared at her over the threshold. “Damn it, Ingrid. Are you trying to give me a fit of the nerves?”

“Nerves?” Ingrid asked in a smoky voice. “You?”

Rosalind pushed past. The door slammed and then the lock clicked behind her as she tugged at her gloves, each finger at a time. She hated wearing them; they made her right hand sweat and it was difficult to grip a pistol with them. But if anyone caught a glimpse of her bio-mech hand, they’d alert the authorities. It was clearly not enclave work.

Mech limbs never came cheaply and it sometimes took as many as fifteen years in the enclaves for a mech to pay off his debt. After they had worked off their bond, they often returned to the enclaves as free men—or women. The streets of London weren’t the same for a person with a mech enhancement. The Echelon saw them as less than human and, therefore, without even the punitive rights most humans lived by.

Sometimes Rosalind wondered if it would be better if she’d not had the replacement, not that she’d had the choice. It made her stand out and that was dangerous in her world. But it also gave her two working limbs and that was invaluable for an assassin.

Rosalind tossed the gloves aside, flexing her steel fingers. You’re not an assassin anymore. But sometimes it still felt like it. Sometimes in the night she woke sweating, seeing a victim’s face flash through her mind. It was the only time she couldn’t protect herself from the memories.

There’d been five of them in total. Balfour’s enemies. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing they’d been blue bloods. Still…

Shoving them aside, into that little mental compartment in her mind that she kept locked, she turned toward the sitting room and the decanter there. The fire was stoked, casting a merry light over the stuffed armchairs, with their wilted lace doilies clinging to the backs and a mahogany table between them. Sparse accommodations, but then she didn’t truly live here. This was just a facade for her little game.

Silence lingered and she cast a distracted glance over her shoulder. Ingrid leaned against the doorjamb, a frown drawing her dark brows together. “You are nervous. I can smell it.”

The problem with living with a verwulfen—their enhanced senses could smell anything. Rosalind shrugged out of her cape and feathered hat, discarding them on an armchair. “I’m tired. I’ve been dragged to Kensington and back, upstairs, downstairs, and then home again, with no luncheon or refreshment to speak of. The man’s a machine—a well-oiled machine that runs on fumes.”

She sank into the remaining armchair and slumped in an unladylike manner. Lynch had been an unstoppable force today, his mind making leaps of logic that even she struggled to follow. He questioned everything, checking over every inch of the house. The only aberrance they’d found had been a pair of small metal balls in the dining room that looked somewhat like the clockwork tumbler balls children played with in the streets. The sickly sweet smell lingered around them, though undoubtedly the children had been behind their presence.

Ingrid stepped closer, dragging a footstool forward and tugging Rosalind’s boots up before straddling the edge of the footstool herself. “Got something for you.”

Slipping a slim, rectangular box out of her waistcoat, she handed it to Rosalind. From the weightlessness, the box might have been empty.

Rosalind opened it. A thin, pale glove of almost translucent material lay on crumpled tissue paper. The artistry was exquisite, with fine blue veins of cotton barely showing through the outer layer of synthetic skin and slick scars that looked like ancient burn marks marring the back of the hand. Small oval scales were embedded into the fingertips with painted half-moons and a rosy hue.

“Synthetic skin,” she murmured. “Where did you get this?”

“There’s a man in Clerkenwell who knows someone who does this sort of thing. I asked him for it.”

“This must have cost a fortune.” Rosalind looked up. “Ingrid, how did you pay for this?”

Their eyes locked, the burnished gold of Ingrid’s irises flaring. “Made some money in the Pits,” she admitted.

“Ingrid!” The Pits were notorious dens in the East End where men pitted themselves against other men—or even beasts. Sometimes the fights stopped when a contestant was unconscious. Sometimes not.

Forbidding it wouldn’t stop the other woman. Indeed, quite the opposite. Still, she had to say something. “You’re not invulnerable.”

“The fighting helps to keep me temper under control. And I don’t like you being unprepared. If the Nighthawk asks to see your hands,” Ingrid said, “then what shall you do?”

Rosalind slowly closed the lid over the glove. “It won’t hold up under scrutiny.”

“No. But all you got to do is let him catch a glimpse so he don’t start getting suspicious.”

“Thank you,” Rosalind murmured.

Ingrid nodded gruffly. She’d never say how worried she was, but she was fretting and that would put her on edge. They’d first met when Ingrid had been just a little girl, trapped in a cage in Balfour’s menagerie. Rosalind had been well fed and cared for, but she had been a pawn-in-training, just as alone in some ways as Ingrid. The pair of them had struck up a friendship and eventually Balfour had let Ingrid out of the cage at times to duel with her. Of course, pitting her against an opponent who was stronger and faster than her, but untrained, had been nothing more than a test of her skills.

He’d underestimated the bond the two girls had struck however.

Ingrid cleared her throat “No word of Jeremy?”

“I haven’t had a chance to look. There was a massacre.” Rosalind didn’t know what else to call it. “Lord Falcone tore his household apart then tried to do the same to us.” She swiftly relayed the day’s events as Ingrid tugged off her boots. The woman dug her thumb into Rosalind’s heels and her eyes glazed. She was half tempted to shut them, but the memory of Mordecai’s face flashed through her mind. She’d been trained to always finish her report, no matter what state she was in. “I saw Mordecai there. He was outside, watching the house.”

Ingrid froze, then her thumbs slowly resumed their massage. “Did he have anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know.” Rosalind rubbed at her forehead. “I’m beginning to suspect they had some plan up their sleeve when they broke with us, something they didn’t deem fit to share with the rest of us.”

“A weapon?”

“Something that drives a blue blood into bloodlust.” She’d considered the thought many times today. “I’ve never heard of the like. But why else would he be there? And how did he do it? Is it a poison? A toxin in the air or in Falcone’s cup of blood? An injection perhaps?” She shook her head. “No, not an injection. Lynch had the body examined thoroughly this afternoon, back at headquarters. He wouldn’t have missed something like that.”

“He might have.”

Rosalind laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know the man. He’s painstakingly thorough.” Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe I’m aware of half of his thought processes. There’s nothing on his face, but I know he’s thinking. Always thinking.”

“Does he suspect you?”

“I don’t believe so,” she replied. “He was distracted by the case.” Rosalind considered the day’s events and the way Lynch had glanced at her. “And he would never suspect his pretty young secretary is his adversary. He’s attracted to me.”

Why had she blurted that out?

Ingrid’s eyes narrowed. “You smell nervous again.”

Rosalind shoved to her feet, her skirts swishing around her stockinged ankles. “Of course I’m nervous. The man’s a blue blood.”

“As long as you don’t forget that,” Ingrid said.

“I never forget.” Nathaniel’s face swam into her mind and a pang of grief soured Rosalind’s embarrassment. She still felt his loss each night, when she slid into her blankets and he wasn’t there. The days weren’t so bad, but the nights… She had nothing to distract herself then.

The blue bloods had taken him away from her forever. It might have been Balfour’s hand, but it was by the Council’s edict. The threat of the humanist movement had been so terrifying to them that they’d had a harmless dreamer of a man murdered.

She was not harmless however. Their mistake. For Nathaniel had been an orator, not a fighter. His war would have been fought in courts and in rallies. Hers would be fought in the streets, metaljackets against the enormous metal Cyclops army she’d been building in Undertown.

“I’m going to find Jeremy,” she said hollowly. “Then I’m going to finish the Cyclops project and destroy the Echelon. I will never, ever forget how much they’ve taken from me.”

“And Lynch?”

Rosalind clasped her hands behind her back and stared unseeing at the wall. This time a new image overtook Nathaniel’s. One of carved features with the sharp aquiline nose and piercing gaze.

“I’ll deal with him,” she said quietly. “One way or another.”

Lynch eased open the door and slipped inside the room. The surgery was small with only the most basic of operating facilities. The craving virus healed almost anything short of decapitation, hence there was no need for more, and the Council funds barely covered the men’s wages and upkeep.

The sound of rasped breathing filled the air. It wasn’t loud, and yet in the midnight silence of the room, it seemed as if every man in the place should hear it.

A phosphorescent glimmer ball turned the room a sickly green. Tucked in the narrow bed, the stark sheets pulled up underneath his chin, Garrett slept restlessly. There was no sweat on his forehead—a blue blood couldn’t perspire—but the sickly pallor of his skin spoke of fever.

Perry slumped in the chair beside the bed, her head resting in her hand as she dozed. Lynch let the door click shut behind him and her eyes blinked open, her hand straying to the knife at her side.

“Sir.”

Lynch gestured for her to relax, then crossed to the bed, staring down at the wounded man. He’d had frequent reports from Doctor Gibson all evening, but he still had to ask. “How is he?”

“He asked for you,” she said, a touch of reproof in her voice.

Lynch nodded. He came because he had to—and because the not coming would haunt him all night—but he didn’t want to be here. Any blue blood that was so injured as to be bedridden was unlikely to get up again. And Garrett… Damn him, Garrett was one of his.

“I should have…” His words trailed off. He didn’t know what to say. I should have taken one of the others. I should have stopped Falcone. I should have been faster…

The truth was hard to admit. “I failed.”

“No more than I did. I was right there, sir. I saw Falcone coming and—I didn’t expect it. I froze. Garrett didn’t. If I’d been one second faster he wouldn’t—”

“You’d be lying there instead,” Lynch said. “Has his breathing changed?”

Perry shook her head, her dark hair curling around her face. She’d clipped it short enough that no one could get a handful of it, and he’d seen hints of blond at the roots over the years to know she dyed it.

“No, sir.” The words were soft. Broken.

Lynch looked at her sharply and saw her dark gray eyes were gleaming. He went still, his stomach clenching. Bloody hell. He rarely thought of her as a woman. He’d never needed to. Perry always did her job, rarely voicing a word of dissent. Rarely voicing anything, as a matter of fact.

She’d come to him nine years ago, a trembling waif in the rain, her dyed hair tumbling around her shoulders and the hunger burning in her eyes. The clip of an aristocratic accent had flavored her words and though he knew some of her secrets, he never mentioned it. Perry wasn’t the only Nighthawk hiding from her past.

Perry was an accident, he guessed. Women were never offered the Blood Rites for fear that the hunger would overwhelm their delicate sensibilities. The only other exception was the Duchess of Casavian, and she had the power of a great house behind her.

She’d shorn her hair that first night and swathed herself in the uniform he’d presented to her—having a shortage of any other garments—and that was how she’d stayed.

“I’m sorry, sir.” Perry took a deep, shuddering breath. “Garrett’s my partner. I just feel…so helpless.”

“I know.” He squeezed Perry’s shoulder. “If anyone could survive, it’d be him, the stubborn bastard.” Then he winced as he heard what he’d said.

“I know,” she said, with a weak smile. “I just hate seeing him like this.”

“I hate seeing any of them like this.”

Forty years since he’d formed the Nighthawks. A lot of good men had died in that time. The Council didn’t care. They were only rogues. But they were his, each and every one of them. Lynch frowned, feeling the steady muscle of Perry’s shoulder beneath his palm. It grounded him and he realized he rarely touched anyone anymore.

He had once. He’d shared his meals with his men, even laughed with them, but that had died over the years, as they had. And slowly he’d stopped taking his meals with them. He’d buried himself in the job, until the names of the dead meant another strike, another failure on his behalf—but nothing more.

So why did Garrett lying here like this effect him so much?

He knew the answer immediately. Garrett refused to keep his distance, his humor wearing away at even Lynch’s determination to keep his distance.

Cor, sir, don’t you look dapper this evening. Why, put a smile on your face and half the gentry morts from here to the city would be lining up.

Perry leaned her head against his hand, as if she took some solace from his touch. “I can’t believe he did it. Garrett always said heroics are for fools.”

“Perhaps he was trying to impress someone.”

“Mrs. Marberry,” Perry said with a frown.

The thought of Garrett and Mrs. Marberry together darkened Lynch’s mood. To hide it, he said, “Well, the only other option is you or I—and I don’t think he wants to get either of us into bed.”

Perry stilled. “No, sir. I believe not.” She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. The motion jerked her shoulder out of his grasp.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, sir. You’re right, after all.” A smile edged her lips, as if she were trying to make him feel better, but her gray eyes were still lost. “You’re not his type in the least.”

Lynch almost choked. “Hell, I should hope not.”

She patted his hand. “You should go and get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

It was the opening he needed. Lynch pushed himself to his feet, though sleep was the last thing on his mind. He desperately needed it, but there was too much to do. And guilt was ever a harsh mistress. He snuck a glance at Garrett. No. No sleep tonight.

“Send word,” he said quietly. “If the situation changes.”

“I will.” Perry knew precisely what he spoke of. Her hand slid over Garrett’s, as if she unconsciously sought to keep him from death’s door, through pure persistence if nothing else.

Lynch took his leave with quiet efficiency. Through the door he could still hear the faint rasp as Garrett’s abused lungs sucked in another tortured breath.

His chest constricted and Lynch shoved away from the door. Sickrooms. Bloody sickrooms. He hated them.