Demon Blood (60 page)

Not every bounder who returned had a title and a bulging purse. Newberry had come so that his wife, suffering a consumptive lung condition, could be infected by the bugs and live.

“Report, Newberry.” She accepted the sleeveless, close-fitting black tunic whose wire mesh protected her from throat to hips. Usually she wore the armor beneath her clothing, but she did not have that option now. She pulled it on and began fastening the buckles lining the front.

“We’re to go to the Isle of Dogs, sir. Superintendent Hale assigned you specifically.”

“Oh?” The dockyards east of London weren’t as rough as they’d once been, but she still visited often enough. Perhaps it touched another murder she had investigated. “Who is it this time?”

“The Duke of Anglesey, sir.”

Dear God.
Her gaze skidded from a buckle up to Newberry’s serious face. “The Iron Duke’s been killed?”

She had never met the man or seen him in person, and yet her heart kicked painfully against her ribs. Rhys Trahaearn, former pirate captain, recently titled Duke of Anglesey—and, after he’d destroyed the Horde’s tower, England’s most celebrated hero.

“No.” Newberry glanced around, as if making certain that no servants were around to faint—or to spread false gossip before he could correct them. “It isn’t His Grace. He only reported the murder.”

Newberry sounded apologetic. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her to feel the same reverence for the Iron Duke that most of England did. Mina didn’t, though her racing pulse suggested that she’d taken at least some of the stories about him to heart. The news sheets painted him as a dashing figure, romanticizing his past, but Mina suspected he was simply an opportunist who’d been in the right place at the right moment.

“So he’s killed someone, then?” It wouldn’t be the first time.

“I do not know, sir. Only that a body has been found on his estate.”

Mina frowned. Given the size of his estate, that could mean anything.

When she finished fastening the tight armor, the gown’s lacings pressed uncomfortably against her spine. She slung her gun belt around her hips; one of the weapons had been loaded with bullets, the other with opium darts, which had greater effect on a rampaging bugger. She paused after Newberry passed her the knife sheath. Mina typically wore trousers, and strapped the weapon around her thigh. If she bound the knife beneath her skirts in the same location, it’d be impossible to draw when she needed it. Driving through East London at night without as many weapons as possible would be foolish, however. Her calf would have to do.

She sank down on one knee and hoisted her skirts. Newberry spun around—his cheeks on fire, no doubt. Good man, her Newberry. Always proper. Sometimes, Mina felt sorry for him; he’d been assigned to her almost as soon as he’d stepped off the airship from Manhattan City.

Other times, she thought it must be good for him. God alone knew what had happened to the Brits who’d fled to the New World. In two centuries, their society had devolved into prudes. Probably because the Separatist pilgrims had arrived first, and they hadn’t had the Horde scrub away all but the vestiges of religion. A few curses remained. Not much else did.

She tightened the knife sheath below her knee and grimaced at the sight of her slippers. Newberry hadn’t brought her boots—or her hat, but it was probably for the best. She wasn’t certain she could shove it down over the knot of hair the maid had teased into black curls. She took her heavy coat from him as she turned for the door, stifling a groan as her every step kicked her yellow skirts forward.

A detective inspector turned inside-out on top, and a lady below. She hoped Felicity did not see her this way. Never would she hear the end of it.

Newberry’s two-seater waited at the bottom of the front steps, rattling and hissing steam from the boot, and drawing appalled glances from the attending servants. Judging by the other vehicles in the drive, the attendants were accustomed to larger, shinier coaches, with brass appointments and velvet seats. The police cart had four wheels and an engine that hadn’t exploded, and that was the best that could be said for it.

As it wasn’t raining, the canvas top had been folded back, leaving the cab open. The coal bin sat on the passenger’s side of the bench, as if Newberry had dumped in the fuel on the run.

Newberry colored and mumbled, heaving the bin to the floorboards. Mina battled her skirts past the cart’s tin frame as he rounded the front. She resorted to hiking them up to her knees, and his cheeks were aflame again as he swung into his seat. The cart tilted and the bench protested under his weight. His stomach, though solid, almost touched the steering shaft. Newberry closed the steam vent. The hissing stopped and the cart slowly pulled forward. Mina sighed. Though the sounds of the city were never ending, courtesy usually dictated that one didn’t blast the occupants of a private house with engine noise. Always polite, Newberry intended to wait before he fully engaged the engine until after they’d passed out of the drive.

“We are in a hurry, Constable,” she reminded him.

“Yes, sir.”

The engine roared. Mina’s teeth rattled as the cart jerked forward. Smoke erupted from the boot in a thick black cloud, obscuring everything behind them. Too bad, that. She’d wanted to see the attendants’ expressions when the engine belched in their faces, but she and Newberry were through the gate before the air cleared.

“Have you met His Grace?”

Mina glanced over as Newberry shouted the question. He often looked for impressions of character before arriving at a scene, but Mina had no solid ones to give. “No.”

She’d eaten lunch at Trahaearn’s feet, however. Near the Whitehall police station, an iron statue of the duke had been erected at the center of Anglesey square. At twenty feet tall, that statue did not offer a good angle to judge his features. Mina knew from the caricatures in the news sheets that he had a square jaw, a hawkish nose, and heavy brows that darkened his piercing stare into a glower. The effect was altogether strong and handsome, but Mina suspected that the artists were trying to dress up England’s Savior like her mother lighting candles in the parlor.

Perhaps all of him had been dressed up. The news sheets speculated that his ancestors had been Welsh gentry and that he’d been taken from them as a baby, but nothing was truly known of his family. Quite possibly, his father had pulverizing hammers for legs, his mother fitted with drills instead of arms, and he’d been born in a coal mine nine months after a Frenzy, squatted out in a dusty bin before his mother returned to work.

Twenty years ago, however, his name had first been recorded in Captain Braxton’s log on HMS
Indomitable
. Trahaearn, aged sixteen, had been aboard a slave ship bound for the Americas, and was pressed with the crew into the British navy. Within two years he’d transferred from
Indomitable
to another British ship,
Unity
, a fifth-rate frigate patrolling the trade routes in the South Seas. Before they’d reached Australia, Trahaearn had led a mutiny, taken over the ship as its captain, renamed the frigate
Marco’s Terror
, and embarked on an eight-year run of piracy. No trade route, no nation, no merchant had been safe from him. Even in London, where the Horde suppressed any news that suggested a weakness in their defenses, word of Trahaearn’s piracy had seeped into conversations. Several times, the news sheets claimed the Horde had him close to capture. He’d been declared dead twice.

Perhaps that was why the Horde hadn’t anticipated him sailing
Marco’s Terror
up the Thames and blowing up their tower.

“Is he enhanced?”

Mina almost smiled. Even shouting, Newberry didn’t unbend enough to use “bugger.”
Enhanced
had become the polite term for living with millions of microscopic machines in each of their bodies.
Bugger
had been an insult once—and still was in parts of the New World. Only the bounders seemed to care about that, however. After two hundred years, not a single bugger that Mina knew took offense at the name.

Of course, if Newberry called her by the name the Horde had used for them—
zum bi
, the soulless—she’d knock his enhanced teeth out.

“He is,” she confirmed.

“How did he do it?” When Mina frowned, certain she’d missed part of the question, Newberry clarified in a shout, “The tower!”

He wasn’t the first to ask. The Horde had created a short-range signal around their tower, preventing buggers from approaching it. Trahaearn
had
been infected, but he hadn’t been paralyzed when he’d entered the broadcast area. Mina’s father theorized that the frequency had changed from the time that Trahaearn had lived in Britain as a child, and so he hadn’t been affected on his return. She’d heard the same theory echoed by other buggers, but bounders preferred to think he hadn’t been infected with nanoagents at the time—despite the Iron Duke himself confirming that he’d carried the bugs since he was a boy.

Her father’s theory seemed to Mina as sound as any. “Frequencies!”

Newberry looked doubtful, but nodded.

Frequencies or not—it didn’t matter to Mina, or to any other bugger. Thanks to the Iron Duke, the nanoagents no longer controlled them, but assisted them. The Horde no longer constantly suppressed their emotions—violence, lust, ambition—or, when the
darga
wanted them to breed, whip them into a frenzy.

After nine years, many who’d been raised under Horde rule were still learning to control strong emotions, to fight violent impulses. Not everyone succeeded, and that was when Mina often stepped in.

With luck, this murder would be the same: an unchecked impulse, easily traceable—and the murderer easy to hold accountable.

And with more luck, the murderer wouldn’t be the Iron Duke. No one would be held accountable then. He was too beloved—beloved enough that all of Britain ignored his history of raping, thieving, and murdering. Beloved enough that they tried to rewrite that history. And even if the evidence pointed to Trahaearn, he wouldn’t be ruined.

But as the investigating officer, Mina
would
be.

By the time she and Newberry reached the Isle of Dogs, the nip of the evening air had become a bite. Not a true island, the isle was surrounded on three sides by a bend in the river. On the London side, multiple trading companies had built up small docks—mostly abandoned. The southern and eastern sides held the Iron Duke’s docks, which serviced his company’s ships, and those who paid for the space. In nine years, he’d been paid enough to buy up the center of the isle and build his fortress.

The high, wrought-iron fence that surrounded his gardens had earned him the nickname the Iron Duke—the iron kept the rest of London out, and whatever riches he hid inside, in. The spikes at the top of the fence guaranteed that no one in the surrounding slums would scale it, and no one was invited in. At least, no one in Mina’s circle, or her mother’s.

She was never certain if their circle was too high, or too low.

Newberry stopped in front of the gate. When a face appeared at the small gatehouse window, he shouted, “Detective Inspector Wentworth, on police business! Open her up!”

The gatekeeper appeared, a grizzled man with a long gray beard and the heavy step that marked a metal leg. A former pirate, Mina guessed. Though the Crown insisted that Trahaearn and his men had all been privateers, acting with the permission of the king, only a few children who didn’t know any better believed the story. The rest of them knew he’d been a pirate all along, and the story was just designed to bolster faith in the king and his ministers after the revolution. That story and bestowing a title on Trahaearn had been two of King Edward’s last cogent acts. The crew had been given naval ranks, and
Marco’s Terror
pressed into the service of the Navy . . . where she’d supposedly been all along.

The Iron Duke had traded the
Terror
and the seas for a title and a fortress in the middle of a slum. She wondered if he felt that exchange had been worth it.

The gatekeeper glanced at her. “And the jade?”

At Mina’s side, Newberry bristled. “
She
is the detective inspector, Lady Wilhelmina Wentworth.”

Oh, Newberry. In Manhattan City, titles still meant more than escaping the modification that the British lower classes had suffered under the Horde. And when the gatekeeper looked at her again, she knew what he saw—and it wasn’t a lady. Nor was it the epaulettes declaring her rank, or the red band sewed into her sleeve, boasting that she’d spilled Horde blood in the revolution.

No, he saw her face, calculated her age, and understood that she’d been conceived during a Frenzy. And that, because of her family’s status, her mother and father had been allowed to keep her rather than her being taken by the Horde to be raised in a crèche.

The gatekeeper looked at her assistant. “And you?”

“Constable Newberry.”