God Save the Queen (The Immortal Empire) (12 page)

“For wha—” And that was all I got to say before I was struck by lightning and died.

I woke up a few seconds after my heart started beating again. Sprawled face down on the crypt floor, I was drooling on the dirt. Crypt dust tasted just like I thought it would. At least I hadn’t pissed myself from the jolt. That was something to be bloody thankful for.

I spat out most of the grime coating my teeth and gingerly pushed myself to my feet. My muscles were a little twitchy, but otherwise I was all right.

Brushing the dirt from my clothes, I cursed myself. The bitch had shocked me good. She must have used a professional-grade
machine – the kind usually only available to Scotland Yard and a few government agencies. Good shockers were hard to get, for the very reason I had just experienced – they rendered a half-blood useless.

I could only assume I was still alive because she felt she owed me for saving her life. The irony of her debilitating me the same way the betties had her was not lost on me. The next time we did this particular dance I would have to make certain I knew the steps a bit better. She’d got me because I let my guard down. I was so intent on finding answers I forgot to be vigilant.

My dagger was on the floor. I swiped it up and slid it back into my coat. Nice of her, I suppose, not to take my weapon. She couldn’t have known what, or how valuable, it was.

Or, I thought, turning to the coffin, she’d got what she wanted and just wanted to get the hell out of there. Call it a macabre hunch, but I opened the casket. The crispy half-blood was still there, releasing a sweet charcoal smell into the air. But I smelled Fee as well, and when my gaze fell upon the corpse’s hand, I realised what she had been there for – Dede’s ring.

I knew Fee was a thief – Val had the surveillance photos to prove it – but why take a melted ring? She could try fencing it, but pawn shops were reluctant to take items that were obviously aristocratic – trouble tended to find those who bought and sold stolen aristo goods.

I had given Dede that ring for her birthday. I’d wanted her to know that she was a part of the family, even though she often felt left out. She’d cried.

There was a splintering sound as I slammed the casket lid shut. My breathing quickened and my heart began to pound as irrational rage bubbled up inside me. It raced up my spine, brought heat to my neck and cheeks. I felt like I was about to come out of my skin, the flesh over my cheekbones taut and hot.

I wanted that bloody ring back. I didn’t know what Fee’s game was, but I was going to find out.

I ran out of the crypt, causing debris to kick up and twirl in my wake. As I swung the door shut, I sniffed at the night air; I’d always had a very sensitive sense of smell, even for a halvie – another perk of my breeding. As with every sense, when it was extremely keen, you learned how to “tune” it and ignore those things on the periphery. It had taken me years to get so those industrial rubbish bins restaurants used didn’t gag me – or worse, the whiff of sewers. Church used to tease me and tell me I had the senses of a goblin.

I hadn’t taken it as a compliment.

But now, I had no such squeamishness. I sniffed my hands, digging past the dirt and wood and burnt flesh to find Fee’s scent. It was there, as subtle and unique as jasmine amongst wood chips. I chased it to the street, whipping past tombstones so fast my eyes stung. But there, outside the gates, the scent faded, mixing with others – petrol and rubber and steel. She’d been picked up, or had a vehicle waiting.

I sniffed again. The scents were so familiar, trying to sort through them was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that was all the same colour. When I finally found all the pieces, they’d faded to almost nothing, and I was certain one of them had to be wrong because the person it belonged to had been lost to me for a very long time. But the other … the other wasn’t really dead at all.

Dede
.

Now I had proof the briquette in that coffin wasn’t Dede – not if I could smell her this well. Scent can linger on things – clothing, skin – but not like this. This was full-flesh halvie smell. Living. Breathing.

And gone.

I could tell which direction the motor carriage went, but that was it. Wherever Dede was now it was east of where I stood. I could panic and rage, but neither of those would do me any good. So I made the conscious decision to keep my head firmly on my shoulders and
think
rather than go off on instinct. Trying to guess where Dede might be would be like looking for a goblin claw in a heap of offal – unpleasant, pointless and time-consuming. I’d drive myself absolutely mental chasing shadows all over London. My best option was to start at the places I knew she’d been.

Across the street was a Met station. I hurried down the worn stairs to the platform, where a scuffed oak-panelled train had just stopped, its faded red engine chugging puffs of steam that drifted
up and out of the vents cobbleside. The lights were extremely bright down here – a naïve deterrent against goblins. Emergency cases held the standard axes and fire hoses, and then there were the ones that contained huge UV cannons – those might actually keep you alive if one or two goblins came a-hunting. You’d think the aristocracy would outlaw anything that might hurt their own kind, but none of us were safe from goblins, so it was an acceptable risk.

Besides, I could crack the bones of a human forearm in half before they could successfully break that case open, so unless there was a crowd of them already down here, with the cannon at the ready, I wasn’t in much danger. No one paid me much attention anyway. I was a freak as far as humans were concerned, but I was the kind of freak most of them had grown up with. Halvies were part of their cultural lexicography, and aside from the odd wanker, they left us alone so we’d leave them alone.

The air was humid and smelled of wood polish, dirt, human and metal. I hopped on just before the doors slid shut.

I had to transfer at Baker Street for a train that would take me to Whitechapel, where Dede had moved barely six months ago. At the time I thought it was strange – not to mention dangerous – her wanting to live in a predominantly human section of London. Now I wondered if there wasn’t more to it than rebellion and her excuse that her doctor thought she needed to be less dependent on family.

She’d given up living with Avery and me, to get a smaller place in an area that had once been the most notorious rookery in the city. Now it was a trendy neighbourhood of renovated town houses painted bright colours, home to artists, uni students and pretentious bohos. It was lovely, but not what I would call safe for a halvie, and hardly the kind of home befitting the daughter of a duke.

But it made her alone – no one to notice her comings and goings but humans who woke and slept by a different clock, and probably didn’t care about the local “half-breed bastard”, as we were often called.

She would have lived quietly, privately. No one to tell her nosy older sister what she might have been up to. And I was convinced she had been involved in something, because people didn’t go around faking their own death – or having it faked for them – without good reason. Why else would Fee grab a melted, unpawnable ring if not to give it back to its rightful owner?

I had a set of keys to Dede’s place, and I let myself in through the downstairs door of the red brick and white trimmed Georgian. The flat was suspiciously clean for a place inhabited by my sister. Not a speck of dust in sight. Barely any food in the fridge – nothing perishable. No rubbish in the bin either. Almost as though she had planned on being away. Although it could easily be argued that as a professional young woman living alone, she was hardly home and probably ate takeaways for most of her meals.

But I was tenacious by nature, so I sought out clues that would support my theory that Dede was alive, because nothing short of being visited by her ghost would convince me otherwise. Desperate, yes, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t right.

Her antidepressants weren’t in the kitchen cupboard where she usually kept them. They weren’t in any of the cupboards. She could have run out, though, and just hadn’t picked up the new prescription. In Bedlam they would have doled them out themselves.

It wasn’t proof that she was still alive.

Her toothbrush was still in the holder in the bathroom, but that kind of thing was easy to replace. I opened the cabinet. Nothing there but a box of tampons, toothpaste and dental floss.

I went into her bedroom. It looked pretty much as it had last
time I was there, though there was one thing missing. The fanged teddy bear I’d given her on her eighteenth birthday was gone. It was something probably no one but me would notice.

Buoyed by the discovery, I yanked open the wardrobe door. There were clothes hanging there – a sight that would have depressed me if there weren’t spaces throughout. Dede was a clothes horse. There was never a space in her wardrobe. No, clothes were missing. All her favourites, from the look of it.

There was no laundry in the hamper. I couldn’t tell if any underwear was missing, or jewellery or make-up. I grabbed a lipstick she’d stolen from me and slipped it into my pocket before going out into the living room. The beige carpet, off-white furniture and oak accents had a very mellow feel to it, relaxing. Dede had worked hard to keep herself on the most even keel she could after the baby died. Her AC player wasn’t in the dock and her favourite video cylinders were gone, as was the photo of the four of us from last Christmas. The player she might have had on her when she was taken in, but she wouldn’t have been carrying movie cylinders, or a framed photograph. What more evidence did I need? I spent the most time with Dede. That was probably why Avery and Val got the call about her “death”. If one of them had come here, they wouldn’t have seen what was missing – I was the only one who’d even visited her here. Mostly Dede had come to us, which now seemed suspicious as well.

“I’m going to find you,” I murmured to the empty flat before I walked out the door. “Whether you want me to or not.”

Downstairs I knocked on the landlady’s door. Mrs Jones was the only human I’d ever met and liked despite myself. When she answered the door she took one look at me and burst into tears. She pulled me inside and into her arms for a fierce hug. Pressed against her sugar-biscuit-scented self, I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t got all the crypt dirt off me.

“I wanted to come to the funeral,” she told me a few moments later, as she fussed about her kitchen making us a cup of tea, “but I had to wait for a plumber to show up – no getting out of it.”

I didn’t doubt her sincerity. “Dede knew you loved her, Mrs Jones. You didn’t have to go to her funeral for that.”

The grey-haired lady wiped at her eyes as she filled a teapot with hot water. “You’re sweet to think of an old woman in your time of sorrow, so considerate.”

Consideration had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t thinking of her at all. Still, I gave her a slight smile, and sat with my back to the wall so I could keep my attention focused on her. I liked her, but that didn’t mean I was stupid enough to trust her.

“Have you noticed if anyone other than me has been to the apartment?” I asked. I got up to help her when she tried to carry a tray heavy with tea, cups and biscuits to the table.

She gave up her burden with a smile. “Thank you, dear. Other than you and the folks from the hospital, I haven’t seen anyone around Dede’s place.” She dabbed at her eyes again.

I had been in the process of pouring the tea, and sloshed a little over the side of my cup I’d been so startled. “People from the hospital?”

Mrs Jones smiled. “Yes, the nice young man and woman they sent to get some of Dede’s things. Let me wipe that up for you.”

Bedlam didn’t send people to collect an inmate’s belongings. That was the duty of family – if the inmate was allowed to have any personal items. It was an asylum, after all. And asylums hadn’t changed that much during Victoria’s seventeen and one half decades on the throne.

“Was one of them a woman with blue hair?” I asked, following my rising suspicion.

Mrs Jones’s wrinkled face brightened. “Why, yes, it was! Had a very handsome gentleman with her – from India, I think.”

I wasn’t interested in the tosser with her. “Did you happen to see what they took? Just so I know when I pack the flat up.”

The brightness drained from her features. “I’m afraid not. They had Dede’s keys. And you needn’t rush to tidy things up, dear. Dede paid up to the end of the month. Such a good tenant. I was so surprised when she gave notice.”