Fire & Frost (19 page)

Two, she couldn’t blame him for it. After all, she’d been asking him to choose her freedom over his—and she understood all too well how the need to take charge of one’s own life could drive a person to make selfish and desperate choices. And so as the locomotive’s steam engine had chugged its way around a steep mountainside, she’d made her own desperate choice.

In a maddened effort, she’d broken away from Caius and jumped from the railcar.

Only sheer luck and a tree had saved her. The last she’d seen of him, Elizabeth had been clinging to the top of a tall white pine that stood on the side of a deep ravine while Caius had searched the rocky banks of the river below, calling her name until he’d shouted himself hoarse. His voice had finally failed him, but still he looked for her along the stones and the rapids. A full day had passed before he’d searched far enough down the river for Elizabeth to alight from her tree—exhausted and bruised but free.

She’d hoped that Caius would believe she was dead. Without a body, however, her father must not have been satisfied and sent his hunters after her again. And this time, he apparently hadn’t trusted Caius to complete the job alone.

Matthias and Amelia still waited outside the boarding house door. Caius was possibly in her room at that very moment, searching through her belongings.

There wasn’t much to search through. She never purchased more than a few changes of clothing suitable for blending in with the local population. Too many times, she’d had to abandon everything but what she carried—and so Elizabeth carried everything that she needed with her in a satchel and in pockets sewn under her clothes. When she’d escaped the sanctuary five years before, she’d taken a small fortune in gold and jewels. Some she kept with her; she’d hidden the rest of her money away in various cities.

Elizabeth didn’t worry about what Caius might find in her room. She never left anything that might reveal where she spent her days or where her next destination would be if she was forced to run again.

And she was
always
prepared to run again.

At this time of day, she could easily leave Brighton by one of four routes: a boat at the pier, traveling by post steamcoach or boarding a locomotive to another town, or purchasing a fare on a passenger airship. If those failed, there were several other, more difficult routes by foot or horseback or steamcart, or by hiring a personal balloon. It wouldn’t matter
where
she went; for now, she just needed to put distance between herself and the hunters.

But first, she had to wait until the hunters left. Every muscle tense, she watched through the window, winding up another toy. After a few minutes, a man emerged from the boarding house, and her heart stopped.

Not Caius.
Her father.

Tiny gears ground beneath her clenching fingers. She released the windup’s key. Her hands shook as she replaced the little bird in the window, its wire feet skittering over the shelf. The music box chirped a cheery tune and the copper wings flapped, and Elizabeth was struck by the sudden terror that the noise would give her away.

Trying to control her panic, she glanced across the street again. Her father didn’t look in her direction; he was speaking to the hunters. More gray peppered his dark hair. From this distance, she couldn’t see whether her absence or time had lined his face, but she knew his eyes would be as sharp and bright as the mind behind them. A brilliant man, her father. But never a cold one. When he loved, his heart burned unceasingly.

She should have known he’d never accept death as the end. Her father never had.

While she watched, he gestured north along the street. Relief slipped through Elizabeth, releasing some of the tension holding her in its grip. He must have spoken with the boardinghouse matron. Elizabeth never left anything for someone to find—except for lies. She’d told the matron she intended to spend the day on Modiste Row. In truth, Elizabeth had walked to visit the menagerie at the Retreat, as she did almost every day. Now she would run south as soon as her father went north.

The three started in that direction. Movement near Amelia’s feet drew Elizabeth’s gaze. A pair of lean gray dogs were rising from the walk at her heels.

The hairs along Elizabeth’s spine prickled with cold sweat. Hounds. Her father wasn’t tracking her by scent yet—he would want to discover her himself, and follow her as far as his information took him—but as soon as he discovered that she hadn’t been to the dressmakers’ shops, he’d use the dogs. No doubt he had a handkerchief or some scrap of fabric from her room to provide a scent. When he did, Amelia’s hounds would lead them straight to her.

And now Elizabeth’s only option was an airship. One that was leaving within the next half hour. Any later than that would be
too
late.

She waited until they were out of sight and fled.

SHE WASN’T DEAD.

Although he’d followed Elizabeth—
a living, breathing Elizabeth
—for the past hour, Caius couldn’t truly believe it. Not until he spoke to her, until he touched her, until he heard her voice. He needed to now. But he forced himself to wait, standing in the shadow of a parked lorry with his hat low and his gaze fixed on the tinkerer’s shop. From his angle, the window reflected an image of the street, of passing steamcoaches and pedal buggies, but now and again he saw her face peering through the glass like an apparition.

But she was no ghost.

Elizabeth Jannsen was alive.

And now she was bolting out of the tinkerer’s shop, racing along the walk on the opposite side of the street. Heading toward the airship field, most likely. Flyers departed on a more regular schedule than boats, and she would know that her best chance of escaping the hound was by sea or by air. Elizabeth always made her trail difficult to follow—so wary and clever, it had taken Caius three years to catch up to her the first time.

He couldn’t lose her again now.

The need to pursue her tore at him, but Caius remained where he was until she reached the end of the street and rounded the corner, tugging her hat over her brown curls as she ran. She’d grown her hair out again. Careful to keep distance between them, he started after her, desperately seeking out any other changes when he caught sight of her darting across the high street crossroad. He would have recognized her back and shoulders anywhere—and it was fortunate he’d recognized them an hour before, or she’d have turned and spotted him in the menagerie, and this chase would have begun then.

Caius didn’t intend to capture her now, though. He only intended to make certain that Willem Jannsen never would.

Elizabeth was already a step ahead of her father. Caius was, too, but only because he’d pursued her for so long. He knew her better than Willem Jannsen did—not the woman her father wanted her to be, but the woman that she was. So when Caius had arrived in Brighton just ahead of her father’s airship and discovered that Elizabeth wasn’t at her boarding house, he’d gone to the place she’d most likely be: the Retreat.

Over the Horde Empire’s two-hundred-year occupation of England, the governors and magistrates had used Brighton as a summer retreat. When the Horde had fled during the revolution over a decade before, the governor had abandoned a collection of exotic animals rescued from the European continent. Now they were tended by volunteer zoologists who hoped to breed the rare beasts and restore populations that had been eaten to near-extinction by zombies.

Caius had known that Elizabeth would visit the menagerie as often as possible, just as she’d visited the sanctuary’s keep each day. Even at thirteen years of age, she’d spent most of her time in the company of animals. That hadn’t changed as she’d gotten older—or when she’d been on the run.

Or when everyone had believed her dead.

Caius could still feel the painful jolt his heart had given when he’d seen her standing at an enclosure overlooking an Iberian lynx. He’d barely been able to stop himself from going to her then and there.

He only wanted to keep her safe. But Elizabeth wouldn’t have felt safe if she’d seen him. She’d have fled—and in her panic, might have run straight into her father.

She’d once been desperate enough to jump from a railcar to escape that fate. Caius would do anything to see that Elizabeth was never so desperate again.

That meant he had to follow her at a distance and be content with the little he saw. The flash of bright red stockings and sturdy black boots as she ran. Her strong grip on the satchel slung crosswise over her shoulder, preventing the bag from bouncing against her hip. The tail of her blue scarf hanging down her back, and the line of her jaw when she stopped at a street corner and waited for a spider rickshaw to pass.

As she paused, Caius drank in the sight of her. He’d thought the jolt to his heart would ease as surprise faded and truth settled in.
She was alive.
He’d thought the need to touch her and to take her into his arms would diminish, but that desire was only growing.

But that desire had always grown. From the day he’d met her until grief had shattered his heart, that need had never diminished.

Of course it wouldn’t now, either.

The rickshaw skittered by and Elizabeth broke into a run again—still headed toward the airship docks. Caius kept pace at a jog that he could maintain for hours.

Elizabeth moved just as easily, as if she’d never leaped from a railcar into a ravine. But he couldn’t assume she hadn’t been injured. The menagerie might be the reason she’d come to live in Brighton…but more than half the people born in England during the Horde occupation possessed mechanical prosthetics or tools grafted to their bodies. Even if she’d lost a leg, it could be replaced here, and she had enough money to purchase one that moved as smoothly as a limb made of flesh. Until he saw skin, Caius couldn’t know that she’d escaped unscathed.

A heavy ache filled his chest. How the hell had she survived that jump? Christ. He could still see her, that last wild glance back at him before she’d leapt. He could still feel the terror and disbelief when he’d lunged for her, when his fingers had brushed the hem of her coat but he’d gripped nothing in his fist. The memory had haunted his nightmares for two years.

But she was alive.

The street widened leading to the airship field. Almost fifty balloons floated overhead in ordered rows, from luxury passenger liners to sturdy ferries to flyers for hire that Caius wouldn’t trust to carry him across the Channel. He slowed to a walk beside a steamcoach, using its bulk for cover when Elizabeth stopped at the schedule written on two slate boards near the field entrance. Choosing the next departing airship.

It wouldn’t matter which one she chose. This would have been the best route of escape when Caius had been chasing her, because he would’ve had to wait until he found another airship headed in the same direction. At one time, it would’ve been the best way to lose her father and the hound, too. No longer.

His gaze rose to the south end of the docking field, where the private airships were tethered. A cloud clipper with a gleaming hull and twin balloons hovered in the fourth station, smaller than many of the personal yachts in the same row, but sleek and swift—the
Mary Elizabeth
. Her father had purchased the airship shortly after Caius had removed his shackle of indenture. In the past two years, the sight of that clipper had meant one thing: it was time for Caius to run. Not to escape Jannsen but to lay a false trail, leading Elizabeth’s father and his hunters away from what mattered most—but Caius had inadvertently created a path leading them to Elizabeth.

He wouldn’t let that trail end in her capture.

A moment later Elizabeth sped past the slate boards, into the northern docks. Caius waited until she was out of sight before going to look at the schedule, his gaze sliding down the list and stopping on one.
Kingfisher.
The skyrunner was leaving in twenty minutes—a four-day journey to the Ivory Market. A fast flyer and a destination where she couldn’t be easily traced. She would have chosen that one.

A glance at the fare made him suck in a sharp breath. He’d spent most of his money hiring an airship to bring him to Brighton ahead of her father. This would take every last denier he had.

He’d pay it, gladly. But Caius would be stranded in the Ivory Market until he earned enough for a fare home, and he’d already been away longer than he’d intended.

Caius’s mother would understand. His sister would, too.

His daughter wouldn’t.

The cost of this trip wouldn’t be the money. It was the additional weeks of his daughter’s life that he would miss and never get back. It was the four days of being on the same airship with the woman he loved—all the while knowing he would never have another four days with her again.

Yet it was well worth the price if his daughter and Elizabeth were safe. Willem Jannsen
would
come after her. But he wouldn’t expect to find Caius standing in his way.

So the chase was on. And this time, Caius meant to end it.