Tarnished (19 page)

“Is it?”

“At least.”

“So you claim.”

I snarled. “Do I need to go speak to the Karakash Veil, Mr. Hawke? Is that how you want me to open this discourse?”

By the gray light of day, I’d thought Micajah Hawke would be bereft of the midnight mystery he wrapped himself in. I’d thought him just a man, any man. Flesh and blood.

I hadn’t expected flesh and blood to be so real.

Or to get so close.

He moved into my space, a single step from long, powerful legs, closing even the whisper of distance between us with fluid ease. Before I could leap back, he’d snapped out a hand, caught the wrist of the offending finger I kept poking into his chest, and yanked me forward.

If I thought him close then, it was nothing to the sudden lack of oxygen I suffered as he cupped the long fingers of his other hand around my jaw and tipped my face up, up, up until my world was comprised of brown and blue.

Golden skin, black, black hair. Azure flame.

His white teeth bared. “Do you think this a game, Miss Black?” The very gentleness of his tone belied the aggression of his hold; his fingers were warm and faintly damp with sweat at my cheeks. Roughened, I realized with surprise. Working man’s hands.

His body towered over mine, his breath warm against my lips, and I gasped. Seizing the front of his shirt in my free hand only gave me the barest impression of balance. Of control.

His fingers tensed at my jaw.

Fear and raw awareness flipped to anger. And the even sharper knowledge that his chest was solid with hard muscle. That the bare skin of his arms gleamed faintly with his exertions, and his breathing wasn’t labored at all.

I swallowed the hard knot of anxiety balled in my throat and hissed, “Let me go.”

A flex of one arm, and my face wrenched higher beneath the pressure he applied. Closer to his. I was drowning in the angry glitter of his eyes, vibrating along the awkward curve of my back as I fought to maintain my balance on my toes.

“You are worse than any child,” he said, and I remembered the scathing words he’d thrown at me when I burst in on him before. “Is there nothing you won’t meddle in?”

“I am
not
a child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” he growled, mere inches from my face.

I sucked in a shuddering breath. Smelled warm male, honest sweat and something raw. Something all him. Edged, angry.

I let go of his shirt to grasp at his wrist. Tendons moved beneath my grip. Muscle and sinew. “Let me go,” I demanded again, but it wasn’t more than a whisper.

“Will you behave?”

I opened my mouth to retort, but my voice lodged in my throat as his furious gaze dropped from my eyes to my lips. Traced them. As if it were his fingers sliding along my damp lower lip.

As real as any caress.

I gasped.

His eyes narrowed.

“My gardens are open to all manner of creatures,” he finally said. I stiffened, but he bent his wrist, forcing my head to the side. I saw only the bare skin of his shoulder in my straining vision as he lowered his mouth to my ear to murmur, “All manner of monsters, Miss Black. You are not the most dangerous pet in my Menagerie.”

His breath ghosted against my sensitive skin. Gooseflesh rippled over every inch of my body and I shuddered. “I am not your pet,” I said between clenched teeth. “And I don’t belong to the Menagerie.”

“Not yet.” And suddenly, he let me go. Left me standing alone, so fast that I stumbled. When I regained my balance, he had already put distance between us, half turned away. “And for that reason, Miss Black, you’ll turn around and return to wherever it is you come from. I’ll give you the promised payment for Cummings, but leave the murderer to better men. This is not your problem.”

Better men? Red colored my vision. I
was
“better men.”
I’d
accepted the bounty.
I’d
made the deal.

I’d found the evidence leading to Woolsey, who had died because of my interest. I was sure of it.

I glowered at him, rubbing at my cheek. At my still-tingling skin. “People are dying, Mr. Hawke.”

His shoulders moved, a powerful roll of indifference. “People have that tendency.”

“They’re dying because of me!” I realized only once the fog sucked it from my lips that I had shouted it, but as I took a step—perhaps to grab his arm, perhaps to gesticulate expansively, even I didn’t know—his head came around. As sleek as a predator. Aggressive and intent.

His eyes glittered again, telegraphing something I wasn’t capable of translating.

Menace, I thought. Or warning.

“Don’t,” he said quietly, “flatter yourself. Go home.”

“I cannot,” I told him. Threats hadn’t worked. Perhaps honesty would. “I need to find this killer.”

“You won’t find him here.”

“How do you know?”

His jaw ticked. Once. “This is not a charity. You’ll get nothing for nothing, Miss Black.” He looked away. “Go
home
. You cannot pay this fee.”

I frowned. “What fee?”

His lips curled. Mockery. A sneer. “Exactly my point.” As was his wont, he turned his back on me, dismissing me so thoroughly that I could only stare. The nerve.

The sheer bloody-mindedness!

“Very well,” I said, drawing myself up. Lifting my chin, which even still ached from his grasp. “If you won’t help me, Mr. Hawke, I’ll find somebody who will.”

He turned, then, a graceful spin of powerful, lethally sinuous grace, and I was reminded once more of the fallen angel he truly was. The bow he sketched me was contemptuous at best. “You will not find someone to help you here, Miss Black. Good day.”

I stared at him, fuming silently as he strode away.

And wishing desperately that I wasn’t imagining the bare expanse of that muscled chest, slick with humidity and rippling with muscle as he tipped his dark head back and laughed beside a nude woman.

“Satan, indeed,” I muttered.

I’d show him. I’d solve this bloody riddle, and show him once and for all.

With or without his help.

But perhaps with someone else’s.

Chapter Twelve

T
he last child to run a message for me into the Brick Street Bakery had been murdered. I could have gone in myself, but Ishmael had been clear in his warning.

There was no jury of my peers to convict me here. Or to exonerate me. If his lads found me on their beat, I’d be as good as dead. Even I couldn’t take on the Bakers and hope to survive.

With misgivings, I found another child to run courier for me. I paid him handsomely to ensure he was careful, bid him to run swiftly and trust no one.

I was on tenterhooks the whole of my wait. I didn’t dare pace, but every fiber of my being strained to do something. Anything. I was antsy. Nervous.

And I was wholly out of opium.

Finally, my patience—or at least my stubborn hope—was rewarded. I heard Ishmael Communion’s distinctively heavy tread long before he loomed from the dark.

I stepped out of my vantage point. “Ishmael.”

“There you are, girl.” Like everyone else, he had no name to call me by, but it didn’t bother him. He’d always called me
girl
. One day, I assumed I would have to give him some kind of
nomme de plume,
but I hadn’t found a good reason.

I answered to
girl
easily.

“Thank God,” I sighed. “The kinchin cove found you.” That was Ishmael-speak for, I had always assumed,
grubby yet useful young criminal
. I’d picked up some of his vulgar street language along the way.

His broad, flat face split into a smile. “Easy.” It faded quickly. “You’ve never called by day.”

“I know it.” Quickly, I outlined the circumstances. His features registered no recognition as I said Woolsey’s name, nor any flicker of familiarity when I described the exhibit warehouse.

But they darkened as I got to the bit about my plan. “You want us to crack a case in that Square?” he asked, frowning. “By day?”

“It’s not as if you haven’t worked by day before,” I pointed out, dry as a desert in summer. I waved my hand in the gray air. “Day’s not exactly bright below the drift, right?”

He grunted. After a moment’s silence, I realized Ishmael was studying me oddly, and I barely kept from wincing. It was statements like that, which sounded as if I had the knowledge to contrast this world with the one above. Ishmael may have been part of a brutal gang, blessed with a face only a kind soul could love, but he wasn’t stupid.

I hastened to add, “I’ll pay you for it.”

He still looked unconvinced. “I’d have to get my cracking tools,” he rumbled. “Bess and glim, just in case.”

I looked up into his dark face, made all the more so by the soot that invariably clung to everything. I widened my eyes, as innocuous as I could manage behind my goggles. “Zylphia hired me to take in this murderer. And I think he’s the same what murdered Rufus and Woolsey. This rotter’s killing sweets, Ish. I want to pin him.”

If possible, his expression of unease knitted even tighter. “That’s something else, girl.” His huge hands, larger than the whole of my face, fisted against each other. “This hang-in-chains, he’s long past the point of any old miller. There’s no call to be messing in his way.”

I blinked. “Er . . .” Hang-in-chains. I got that one. After a murderer was hung from the gallows, he’d be hung on display from chains for a while. Gruesome business, but
hang-in-chains
was vulgar dialect for “murderer.” Miller? I wasn’t sure. I frowned. “Wait, so you knew about the dying sweets?”

He nodded once. “One of mine, he found the first dove. Zylphia, she told me the rest.”

And yet I was kept in the dark? I didn’t like that thought. But I’d have to address it with Zylla later. “And he’s not known to yours?”

“Bakers?” His teeth bared, but it wasn’t a smile. Not even close. “Bad as we are, girl, this cove’s worse. That’s a whole other monster, much bigger than us.”

Monster. Ishmael was the second man to use that word to me today. I didn’t like the frisson of apprehension it caused.

If this murderer could keep the Bakers in line, he’d have to be a frightening monster, indeed. I rubbed at my cheeks beneath the line of my goggles, hoping it would suffice to ease the brewing headache from behind my eyes. “Zylphia and her girls, they’re scared, Ish. I need your help.
They
need your help.”

“Everyone needs help,” he rumbled. But then he sighed like a gust of wind. A heavy hand came down on my shoulder. “I’ll get my tools.”

“Thank y—”

His thick fingers tightened. “Just stay the bleeding hell away from the ripper by yourself, are you hearing me?”

I didn’t need reminding. “Oh, yes.” I blew out a hard breath. “I hear you.”

T
he immediate difficulty presented itself upon arriving at the Square.

“What the hell is this,” Ishmael muttered, not a question. We were wedged between two of the warehouses, half-hidden behind a pile of discarded crates and up to our ankles in alley muck. Ishmael towered over me, which meant he could see much more than I could.

I frowned at fragments of rotting wood, and the blurry patches of fog-smeared Square beyond. “What?” I demanded. “What do you see?”

“Traps.”

“Traps?”

He didn’t look down at me, but he didn’t have to. I could sense his patient effort from where I knelt. “A constable,” he clarified. “And bobbies.”

I wanted to smack my forehead in frustration. I didn’t. I was acutely aware of the lampblack I was determined not to smear today. “Of course,” I sighed. “And why not? It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?”

Ishmael wasn’t the type of man to speculate. “We’ll have to go in a back way.”

“Is there a back way?”

He grinned down at me, but said nothing. Wordlessly, he inched his barrel-chested frame back along the alley we’d come, completely unbothered by the green and black splotches of grime rubbing off against his overalls.

Grimacing, I followed, though I checked over my shoulder often.

Only the faint murmur of masculine voices ghosted through the fog behind us, but it was enough. I didn’t know what they were saying—what sort of clues would they find, I wondered?—but I worried an officer would walk by and spy us creeping along like common criminals.

Which, really, we were.

For all his size, Ishmael moved like a bloody ghost. I almost lost him twice as he bent low and darted from shadow to shadow. Much to my relief, we made it to the back end of the exhibit warehouse without any hue or cry, and Ishmael squatted by the scarred door inset a meter up from the muddy cobbles.

I let him do his magic. Ishmael was one of the best crackers I’d ever known, which largely explained the foundation of our relationship.

Within moments, he’d selected a small pry bar from a worn leather satchel he wore over his shoulder and fit it into the seam between door and stained wall. With his other hand, he wadded a thick cloth against the joint.

A sharp tug, a careful twist and the lock split.

The cloth muffled the worst of the sound and the door swung open.

I leapt lightly to the stoop and patted Ishmael on his bare head. “Brilliance.”

Again, he grinned, though he was quick to carefully replace his tools. He was, after all, a craftsman. Of sorts.

The door led directly into the warehouse proper. I recognized the mazelike array of shelves, though it was terribly surreal without the electrical hum I remembered. The lanterns were dark, suggesting the power Professor Woolsey had been using had been turned off. Perhaps by the bobbies?

Ishmael tugged the door closed, cutting out what hazy light filtered through. “Where?”

“What, rather,” I replied, my voice a low whisper. “I’d like to find a study, or some sort of storage provision where he’d keep all records.”

“Split?”

“Up ahead,” I agreed, and led the way in.

Ishmael eyed the tanks as we passed by them, but the interiors were dark. If he picked out any details, he made no noise to tell me, and we didn’t have the time to speculate on the matter. I wiggled my fingers at him as we approached a crossroads.

The very place where an earl had kissed me.

Clearing my throat, I tipped my mouth to his ear as Ishmael lowered his head to hear me. “I’ll take the left wall. Have you a timepiece?”

The look he gave me suggested I was daft to ask.

Of course he did. His mother had been the slave of a watchmaker. I’d forgotten.

“Ten minutes, here,” I said quickly, wincing at my lapse. My mind was worthless of late.

“Be careful, girl.”

“You, too. Mind the bobbies, they’ll be in and out if they’re still investigating.”

“I know what bobbies do, girl.”

I grinned. He probably did, better than most.

We split without another word, and Ishmael became nothing more than a soundless shadow in the dark. It amazed me that someone so large, so vital, could vanish so easily.

He could take care of himself.

I had to do the same. I traversed the dim interior as swiftly as I dared, passing row after row, tank after tank. I paused by one, cupping my gloved hand against the glass and straining to see through it. I saw no hint of its contents, and a quick scrutiny revealed no sign or label.

Had the police taken it all?

The warehouse was large, and even small sounds could echo with disturbing ease. I caught myself straining to hear every tiny sound. I felt isolated. Alone. Perhaps I was just remembering how full it had sounded with the electricity running through it.

Perhaps I was just recalling the professor’s earnest eyes, owlishly large behind his spectacles.

Ten o’clock. And I’d failed him.

Somehow, I’d come to think of the man as a victim, not a suspect. But it was hard to consider a corpse anything else. I set my jaw, hurrying across the floor. The air was cool inside. Darker than I liked for easy vision, but just dark enough—I hoped, anyway—that I had a measure of freedom from prying eyes. If the police came through, I’d hear them long before they saw me.

Sooner than I expected, I came upon one wall, its bare woodgrain dingy from lack of regular cleaning. Silhouetted crates provided a haphazard obstacle to the right, so I turned left.

Pipes thrust from the wall at various increments, some attached to flexible tubes and others left raw and unfinished. None were warm to my touch; whatever they were used for, it hadn’t been recent. Eager to find my hoped-for records, I stepped over a twisted nest of tubes.

I didn’t see the step inset just behind it. My mind expected to find floor, but my foot encountered thin air and I staggered. The pipes groaned as I caught one in each hand, swinging my body in a graceless tangle of flailing limbs. “Oof!”

My backside hit the step. Pain slammed through my tailbone, zipped up my spine and I saw stars as I stared at the ceiling, my feet splayed out in front of me.

Utterly inelegant.

For a long moment, I didn’t move. I barely even dared to breathe.

The air pulsed with anticipation. I held my breath, but there was no sound of alarm in the distance. No sign that my clumsy misstep had alerted anything but my own exasperation. Carefully, my teeth gritted and every nerve jangling in alarm, I eased up from the nest of tubes. They creaked and rustled.

Who the devil would leave something so unsafe as a
stair
behind a bundle of tubes?

Well, that was easy enough an answer: a preoccupied professor, clearly.

I stepped away from the clutter, dusting myself off with as much dignity as I could muster. Not that there was anyone to see me.

As if in answer, I heard a clang behind me. I froze, searching the shadows. For a long moment, even my breath stilled as I imagined all manner of things in the darkness beyond the shelves: men with weapons, monsters with fangs, even the bobbies carrying their truncheons.

I turned slowly, eyes wide behind my goggle lenses as I strained to see.

It came again, somewhere out of reach. Almost out of hearing.

“Ish?” I hissed. And immediately felt foolish. It probably
was
Ishmael, all the way on the other side of the warehouse. He’d likely put his cracking tools to work again.

Regardless, the sound didn’t come again. Rubbing my aching backside, I very cautiously tested the floor ahead of me with a foot. No gaps met my searching toes. No more ledges.

Grumbling under my breath, I reached for the wall and froze.

My hand passed through open air.

I’d found another room.

And I should have brought a lantern.

The room was darker than the warehouse proper, and I got a sense that it was nowhere near as large. My footsteps didn’t echo, and even the very air felt more contained.

My goggles were useless in this darkness. I set them carefully atop my head, blinking rapidly in the gloom.

Nothing moved; or at least, I didn’t hear anything. I waited for my eyes to adjust, all too mindful of the treacherous ground I’d already found by accident. Without knowing what waited for me, I didn’t dare risk falling into a hole. Or over metal piping. Or into a strange but incongruously placed collection of chimes.