Tarnished (29 page)

My voice rebounded on me, undercut with his laughter.

“Why should I do that?”

I spun, long-gun aimed back the way I’d come, but there was nothing in my faint circle of light to shoot. And no real guarantee the tunnel wasn’t distorting the direction of his voice.

I needed to draw him to me. “Because you and I have unfinished business,” I said evenly.

“A bullet does not count for business,” he responded, but fainter. More echoes traveled with it, garbling the syllables.

Fine. I’d try for tact. Setting my jaw, I strode forward. I tucked my rifle under my arm—easy to get to, but not primed for quick firing. “Because I’ve questions only you can answer,” I yelled.

That laugh. That deucedly cold laugh.

Muttering silently, I stepped over the remains of what looked like an old bundle of discarded cloths and followed the path he laid before me. Because I was helpless not to.

Because I wanted those answers.

Too much, I think. I wasn’t paying attention, lulled into the complacency of following his trail. By the time I realized the echoes had stopped, he was on me.

I
felt
him, sensed his presence as he slipped into place behind me, but I wasn’t quick enough.

One hand curled around my ribs, half lifting me from the ground. I drove an elbow into his chest, a foot into whatever portion of his leg I could reach, but he didn’t let go. I had always prided myself on being a decent scrapper when required, but this man was far and above anything I could manage.

“Have you considered my motive, Miss St. Croix?” he demanded at my ear.

I smelled it seconds before it covered my face; bitter as medicine, sharp as the most pungent swill.

I gasped, and the smell filled my nose, my mouth, my throat. Laudanum on cloth. A tactic I’d used myself, on occasion. To take the fight out of my quarry.

“I’m a collector, just like you,” he said, his voice filling the tunnel. My head. “Remember?”

I held my breath, struggled wildly. The lantern clanged as it fell to the cobbles. Glass shattered. The lantern rolled, light flickering violently. It leapt to blue flame as the gas within caught fire.

The hand at my mouth tightened, smothered me. Blocked my nose and mouth and I clawed at his gloved fingers. Warm, damp skin pressed to my temple as the sweet tooth murmured, “Delightful as you are, in the end you
are
just my bounty.”

It was no use. My lashes fluttered shut. In the darkness behind my eyelids, ghosts danced in wicked blue.

A
t first, I thought the walls whispered to me.

“Just you wait, my girl,” came a voice, dry as autumn leaves and thick as the gutters they crumbled in. “All will be well, all will be like it was . . . Won’t that be lovely?”

Would it?

What was it like, when it was?

My thoughts came at me as if through honey, sticky sweet and wrapped in a layer of fine cotton. My lashes fluttered open.

Where was I?

You are just my bounty.

All remnants of lethargy vanished beneath a surge of adrenaline so swift, so sharp, that I went rigid. Flat metal bands dug into my shoulders as I tried to struggle upright. A heavy lock clanked loudly beside my hand, hinge protesting as I wrenched my upper body.

It was all I
could
move.

I looked down at my feet, saw the bands across my ankles. My knees. My waist and, finally, my ribs and shoulders. The brass gleamed dully in the lantern light, tinged with a patina of age and use. A rigid band around my forehead clattered faintly, and I felt something shift and drag with every motion. Cords? Weights of some kind?

The inexpertly pinned mass of my hair had fallen loose, tangled by my shoulder in a pin-strewn nest, and it blocked most of my vision to my right.

My left arm throbbed steadily, mirrored counter to my heart, and I tilted my head as far to the side as I could. The last moments of my single-minded chase through the Thames Tunnel seemed like a dream. It was possible I’d wounded myself before—

“Dear God,” I breathed.

There was a glass tube in the crook of my arm.

My mouth went dry with terror.

The liquid inside was murky, but colorless. It flowed through the glass, sucked in to the open wound carved into my arm, and I visually traced the flexible tubing attached to the other side as it coiled its way around a tall structure made of brass, copper and iron.

There was a
tube
buried into my
flesh
. And it was attached to something. Forcing something into me.

A drug? A poison?

I didn’t feel any different.

My gaze traveled to the nest of cords protruding from the metal connector, sharpened on the table beside me. More tubes draped across the space toward it. The light flickered wildly as the lantern beside me popped and sizzled, preventing me from seeing anything beyond the shroud draped across the table. The tubes vanished into the dingy fabric.

I sucked in a breath, forcing myself to breathe. Calm. Coolly. I was awake, which meant whatever was happening to my arm wasn’t enough to sap my consciousness. There was hope.

Where the bloody bells was I?

The open room had a hollow, impenetrable feel to it, as if it were a protected bunker or somewhere far out of reach of casual intrusion. Fixtures loomed out of the murky edges where the lanterns failed to illuminate, alien to me and brimming with handles, dials, levers, gauges. Even the table I was strapped against boasted a series of cords and tubes inset into the panel beneath me.

A laboratory. It had all the hallmarks of the small room I’d seen in Professor Woolsey’s exhibit, and as I thought of it, I realized the arrayed tubes reminded me exactly of that.

Not the laboratory!

I flinched as echoes of something forgotten shuddered across my memory.

Every sound bounced from walls shrouded in darkness—whispers of motion and movement from somewhere in the dark, the tinny clanks of unknown metal bits, even the sputtering oil in the lamp.

And the muttering. Half under his breath and ever coming, the thin figure hunched over a worktable and continued speaking. To himself? To me? I didn’t know. I caught glimpses of motion as his quick, dexterous fingers flashed and fluttered like a manic butterfly to the tools near him, seizing this or that and always, always muttering.

My heart thudded, painfully loud against my ribs as I jerked against at my restraints.

This time, the clanking alerted my captor.

He straightened, quick as a lizard sensing trouble. “So I see,” he murmured. “You were right, she lives enough. All right, all right, penance due . . .” He trailed off, and as he half turned and frowned at the object cradled in his dirty hands, I glimpsed the outline of gray hair. Beetled eyebrows over wide, thick goggles.

My stomach twisted itself into an icy, forbidding knot. “Professor!” I gasped.

“Ah, you remember me.” Although Professor Woolsey made no motion toward me, my heart tripled its dance, sending my blood surging out toward my limbs as if desperate to be used. To move.

What was going on here? “I thought you were dead,” I told him, accusation shuddering in each word. I was beyond confused.

And just a little bit angry.

“Yes, well, yes.” The meandering way the man spoke hadn’t changed, and it dipped from quiet to clear to a murmur all in the same breath. “That was rather the intent. The powers of deduction evidenced by the police leave something to be desired, don’t they? Ah, come on, then, get your money and be gone.”

Money? I set my jaw, mercifully free of restraint, and wrenched my head around as far back as I could. The band around my forehead pinched painfully. I saw more flickering light, swallowed by the gloom above me. That shrouded figure, still and quiet on the table next to mine. And a flutter of movement.

A whisper of a footfall.

My entire body startled as a tall, greatcoat-wrapped figure detached itself from the shadows pooling behind my fettered prison. I blinked rapidly, unconsciously clenching my left hand as the tube shifted inside the hollow circle cut into my skin to accommodate it. It hurt.

I growled as the man I’d been hired to collect paused just out of my direct view. I could see his gloved hand rising. I could sense his eyes on me, still hidden beneath that bloody bowler, and I swear I
felt
his smile.

“As requested,” he said, his oddly soft-spoken voice nevertheless creating a barrage of echoes in the darkness around us. “One Cherry St. Croix, whole and in her right mind.” He paused, thoughtful. “Perhaps a few bruises,” he allowed after a moment.

I twisted, wincing as my flesh ground against the metal bands in my fervor to look at him. As my arm throbbed angrily in protest.

I wanted to know his face, damn it. “Show your face to me!” I demanded.

The hat tilted; a nod, or a dip to hide a smile I couldn’t see, anyway. “I will not.”

“Coward,” I spat.

“Now, now.” He rebuked me as if I were a child. “Young ladies must behave for their fathers, musn’t they?”

I jerked my gaze back to the old man. Then scowled. “Stop playing games,” I snapped. “Professor Woolsey, release me this instant!”

The darkness ate my voice, swallowed it as neatly as if the sweet tooth had carved it from the air with his knife.

Or maybe the professor wasn’t listening. Without so much as a hitch in his demeanor, he seized a billfold from the worktable beside him and threw it toward me.

No, toward the collector.

It arced through the air, flapping open over my head. I saw pound notes. A great many pound notes. My quarry picked it out of its trajectory as if delicately fishing for something beneath his contempt. His lips twisted, no longer even close to resembling a smile.

“Get out,” the professor demanded, and for the first time, there was nothing distracted to it. He glared at the collector, something oval glinting in his hands as he raised it threateningly. “Out!” he ordered again. “Out! Out!”

The faceless collector shrugged, such an elegance of movement as he turned. Away from me, damn him. “Payment received,” he said, and pocketed the billfold. “Contract fulfilled. Cheerio, Miss St. Croix.”

“You . . .” Words failed me as bile rose like acid on the back of my throat. “You
toad
,” I spat. “How dare you!”

“Cherry, really. Young ladies musn’t behave in such ways.”

This admonishment did
not
come from the collector, who silently faded into the shadows like the vile creature he was. He whistled a jovial little tune that died away even as I snapped my gaze back to the professor, my eyes wide, my mouth hanging open.

“Or must they?” He paused thoughtfully. “I must confess, I haven’t the foggiest.”

I stared at the man as if he’d grown two heads, and in my opinion, he may as well have. “Professor Woolsey?” I wanted it to come out sure and certain, but instead, my voice trembled.

“That man,” the fragile-looking professor said with a flick of his fingers. He sat back on his stool, slicking his free hand over his wild hair. The large spectacles over his eyes glinted as he shook his head. “Woolsey was no better than a lab assistant, and a poor one at that,” he scoffed. “The fourth time he singed my pots, I had him expelled.”

I wriggled under the bars, but the lock securing the longest bar held the whole cage firmly in place. “Why am I here?” I demanded. “What do you want of me?” And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I blurted, “Did you really know my parents or was that a lie?”

“No lie,” he said hastily. “Not really. I know your mother, ha ha, quite well—Yes, yes,” he added, his tone testy. But his gaze was fixed on the table beside mine. The silhouette beneath the cloth remained still. I hadn’t heard anything. “Now, then. Where was I?”

The world had gone mad while I slept. Or maybe I had. There was no other explanation. “Professor, perhaps you should release me,” I said slowly, summoning my best, most winsome smile. “We can talk about—”

“Still confused, girl?” The professor propped his head upon his thin fist, his wired spectacles winking at me as he flipped a thick gold disc through his fingers. “Ah, yes, I suppose I musn’t be too disappointed. You were only a tiny thing when last you saw me.”

“Yes,” I said, gritting my teeth as my patience wore thinner by each passing second. I wriggled my shoulders, my hips, to no avail. “We established that at the exhibit.”

“Oh, for the—I’m not Woolsey, that fool,” the professor snapped, sounding waspish and . . . familiar. Surreally so. I stared at him as he stood, adjusting the crinkled apron protecting his patched trousers and shirtsleeves. “Woolsey has been dead for years.”

“Hours,” I croaked.

“Years,” the professor repeated. He pointed two fingers at me, the oval held squarely between them. My eyes widened as I recognized the clockwork cameo. “I am rapidly reassessing my level of disappointment, Cherry.”