Dreadfully Ever After (33 page)

“They take blood from us all,” he said. “All of us who don’t develop infections or ... change. They had our parents here, too, at first. They didn’t last long.”

“I’m sorry,” Lizzy said. “So, so sorry. But they won’t hurt you anymore. That’s done. I promise.”

She let go of Gurdaya’s hand, stood, and turned to Mary. She’d sheathed her sword, but Kitty noticed her hand grip the hilt.

“Where are they?” Lizzy growled.

“Most are in here.”

Mary led her to one of the doors nearby. Kitty slid in beside them, staying close to Lizzy. It was one thing to slaughter your prisoners when they’re zombies. If Lizzy did as she seemingly intended, that would be something else entirely.

“My, what a lovely cell,” Kitty said as they peered in through the small bar-striped window. The room beyond was pleasantly appointed in the style of a gentleman’s bedchamber. The furnishings were far more elegant than the occupants, however. Half a dozen rough-looking men lay strewn about on the bed and chairs and floor. Some were conscious, some not. All were bruised and bloody.

“This was my accommodation for the night,” Mary said. “I traded it with my hosts only an hour or so ago.”

Kitty cocked an eyebrow at her. “You couldn’t escape before then?”

“The door is too sturdy to kick down, and picking locks is a Shinobi skill, not Shaolin.”

“Fortunately, I was able to talk her through it,” the Man in the Box said.

“Might I remind you,” Nezu broke in, addressing himself (again, the twit!) to Lizzy alone, “the dreadfuls are swarming, London is aflame, and we still haven’t found what your husband so desperately needs. I would think a little more alacrity is—”

“Yes, yes,” Lizzy snapped. “What of it, Mary? Have you found anything that looks like a cure?”

“Far too much that does. Sir Angus’s laboratory is overflowing with elixirs and powders and the like. Which is why we’ve been trying to get a little help narrowing the search.”

“This way,” said the Man in the Box, and with a few simple quavery commands to Ell and Arr, he led them into a chamber of horrors, complete with blood stains on the floor, gooey splatters on the ceiling, and a man seemingly about to be consumed by a wriggling gristle-covered skull and spine.

“Hello!” the man said, sounding remarkably chipper for someone tied to a table with a zombie tethered inches away. “My goodness! So many friends you’ve brought with you. Were they hoping for a tour? I’m afraid we don’t do those anymore.”

“This is Dr. Sleaford, Bethlem’s assistant administrator,” Mary said. “I believe he knows where the cure is, but he refuses to tell us, even with Judith here as inducement.”

Kitty waved her battle axe at the skinless, limbless dreadful snapping its teeth at the doctor. “Judith?”

Mary nodded. “She was introduced to us yesterday under much the same circumstances, though Dr. Sleaford’s position and ours were reversed.”

“And he won’t talk?” Nezu asked. He’d stopped just inside the doorway, his ninjas spread out beside him.

“Oh, he will talk. Most pleasantly. What he won’t do is answer questions.” A rueful expression came over Mary’s face. “He doesn’t seem to believe that we would let the dreadful bite him.”

“What good am I to you if I’m dead?” Dr. Sleaford said, and he said it pleasantly, indeed. “True, I don’t know anything about this supposed cure you’re looking for. But there is a serum that can slow the progress of the strange plague. Such a thing would be worth thousands, tens of thousands even, if made available to the public at large. Release me, and I will share its secrets with you.”

Lizzy stepped close to the gurney on which the man lay.

“Dr. Sleaford, I will ask you politely
once
, and with fair warning: My husband’s life hangs in the balance. Where is the cure?”

“I am sorry, Madam. But I swear to you, I know of no cure.”

“I see.”

Lizzy reached out and gave Judith’s trolley a nudge forward.

The zombie promptly sank her teeth into Dr. Sleaford’s right arm.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Lizzy caught Kitty’s eye and jerked her head down at the dreadful, which was munching away happily on the doctor even though the masticated flesh had no throat to travel down.

Kitty pushed back Judith’s cart, raised her axe, and brought the heavy blade down flat across the creature’s skull with enough force to crush it. A great gooey geyser of rotting brain squirted onto the floor, and Judith was at last not merely dead, but
dead
.

Lizzy leaned in beside a still-screaming Dr. Sleaford and brought her lips to within an inch of his ear.

“Now
your
life hangs in the balance. Tell me where the cure is, and you will get the first dose.”

“Over there! In those drawers! The top one, the top one!” Dr. Sleaford lifted his head and strained for a look at his arm. “How much of me did she get?”

“Not much,” Kitty said, appraising the man’s wound with a cocked head. “Only a chunk about the size of an apple.”

“Ohhhhhhhhh!”

“Well, a small apple. Maybe just a lime.”

Lizzy opened the drawer Dr. Sleaford had indicated and pulled out a small glass tube with a needle at one end and a plunger at the other.

“It looks like a poison dart,” Kitty said. She glanced over at Nezu. “The sort of thing your lot would like.”

Nezu still wouldn’t meet her gaze, but he wasn’t wearing his usual look of stoic remoteness. He looked pained, strained, like a man fighting some great inner battle. Or perhaps stifling a belch.

“It is an invention of ours,” Dr. Sleaford said. “The Sleaford Needle.”

“The other one calls it the MacFarqwand,” said Gurdaya, who was peeking into the laboratory through Nezu’s legs.

The ninja turned and shooed her away.

“Sleaford Needle, MacFarqwand, call it what you will,” Dr. Sleaford said. “It is a device that allows us to safely make subcutaneous injections, if that means anything to you. Now will someone at least staunch the bleeding? I’m starting to get all soppy here!”

Lizzy looked at Kitty and nodded.

“Hands only.”

Kitty unfastened the straps around the man’s wrists and helped him sit up. She then handed him a hankie, which he pressed to his wound.

“Thank you. That’s so much better.” Dr. Sleaford looked down at his arm and winced. “I shall probably need a tourniquet. Honestly, did you have to let Judith bite me so hard?”

Lizzy lifted a small dark vial out of the same drawer from which she’d produced the MacFarqwand.

“The
cure?
”

Dr. Sleaford nodded and began explaining to Lizzy how to administer what he called the “vaccine.” A moment later, she was filling the MacFarqwand’s glass tube with black liquid from the vial.

“More,” the doctor said. “More. There. Stop.”

“So much?” Lizzy asked. “That’s half the vaccine. Is this all you have?”

“I’m afraid so. It is not easy to make. Now, if you please?”

Lizzy brought the needle toward the man’s arm.

“Wait,” Mary said.

Lizzy froze.

“Oh, please!” Dr. Sleaford wailed. “You’re going to torment me now? That’s just cruel!”

“I merely have one more question, while you’re still inclined to be candid,” Mary said. “Your former lodger across the hall: It was whom I thought?”

“Yes! Yes! Now can we get this over with?”

“By all means,” Mary said.

Lizzy jabbed the needle into Dr. Sleaford’s arm and pushed down the plunger. Slowly, the blackness in the tube disappeared. When it was gone, Lizzy pulled the needle out and said, “And now you are cured? As simple as that?”

“Now I
might
be cured. The vaccine is still experimental.”

“But it worked on the king,” Mary said.

Dr. Sleaford sighed. “Please tell me you’ll be discreet about that.”

“The king?” Kitty said. “You mean
our
king?”

“Well, I certainly didn’t mean Nebuchadnezzar.”

Mary looked rather proud of her attempt at wit, but all she got from Kitty was a blank stare, and Lizzy stared off dreamily at nothing.

“Of course,” Lizzy said. “That’s why the king was kept out of sight all these years. He wasn’t mad. He was here, in secret, under guard. Stricken with the strange plague. And the serum that was keeping him from becoming an unmentionable ...”

She looked over at the doorway. Nezu no longer blocked it, and Gurdaya was back, peeking in warily from the hall.

It had always been a mystery why the plague never spread beyond Great Britain. It had something to do with their island isolation, some said. A peculiarity born of the purity of English blood.

And now, looking into Gurdaya’s dark, sad eyes, Kitty understood where the cure lay: in the blood of foreigners.

“It is abominable,” she said.

“I might concede you the right to judge me,” Dr. Sleaford said, “if your sister hadn’t
let a dreadful bite off half my arm
.”

“Oh, you didn’t lose half. An eighth, at most.”

“None of that matters now,” Lizzy said.

“It matters to me,” the doctor grumbled.

Lizzy ignored him. “We have the cure and we know how to use it. We must get it to Rosings immediately.”

She turned back toward the tabletop on which she’d left the vaccine. Nezu stood there now, the vial in one hand. With the other, he drew Fukushuu.

The other ninjas—all six of them now spread out around the room—drew their weapons as well.

“Oh, yes. The cure is going to Rosings,” Nezu said, slipping the little stoppered bottle into a coat pocket. “But you and your sisters will be staying here, Elizabeth Darcy. Permanently.”

“Finally,” Nezu heard Ogata mutter.

“We should have slit their throats a week ago,” Hayashi whispered back.

“We didn’t have the whatever-it-is then,” Ishiro said. “The thing the mistress wants.”

“Well, thank Death that Nezu has it now,” said Ren. “I cannot
wait
to kill that little fool who’s laughing all the time.”

“Oh, yes! Her!” said Momoko. “I would’ve gutted her already if Nezu hadn’t—”

“Shut up, all of you,” Kenji said. “The time to strike draws near.” And he threw Nezu a glare that added,
Why do you still talk to those we must kill?

Nezu was thankful the ninjas ringing the room spoke no English. That he’d been educated, hand-picked for “improvement” by Lady Catherine, had always set him apart from his fellow assassins. He was Shinobi, but he was also English, in his own way, and that made him an outsider even in a clan of outsiders. This was going to be difficult enough without them knowing just how far outside he’d almost strayed.

“Nezu,” Kitty said.

He forced himself to look at her, but it was difficult gazing into her eyes. He could see too clearly the pain of betrayal in them. So he tried to focus on her nose. It was such an admirable nose, though—not dainty or buttonish, but slightly bulbous in a way that seemed proud, unapologetic.

He tried looking at her chin.

“What is the meaning of this?” Kitty said.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Elizabeth Darcy replied for him, and Nezu was grateful for the excuse to look elsewhere. “Lady Catherine has not been helping us. She has been using us, and now our usefulness has come to an end. She has what she wants—Darcy and the cure—and now vengeance shall be hers as well.”

“Nezu,” Kitty muttered, stunned, “how could you do this to us?”

She didn’t add “to
me
,” but Nezu could hear the accusation in her voice.

He raised his katana a little higher, looking at it rather than her.

“My father gave this sword to me. I named it Fukushuu—Revenge—after he died.” He gazed at Elizabeth Darcy. “It was you who killed him. He was one of the ninjas sent for you at Pemberley after your marriage to Mr. Darcy.”

“And you would blame her for that?” Kitty said. “Wish revenge upon her because she defended herself?”

She took a step toward Nezu that forced him to look at her once again. Or look at her left ear, anyway.

What a fine ear it was….

“You fool,” Kitty said. The words came out sad rather than spiteful. “If you wish to hold someone accountable, choose the woman who threw away your father’s life on a petty vendetta.”

“Lady Catherine is my mistress. I have sworn my life to her, as did my father.”

Nezu dragged his gaze away from Kitty’s ear and found himself looking into eyes that reflected distress but not despair. Even now, he could see hope and love and
life
in Kitty Bennet. Everything that had always been lacking within himself.

“Duty and honor cannot be ignored—you know that,” he said. “We do what we must. We obey. We avenge.”

“Not always,” the Man in the Box said. “Sometimes, we change.”

Nezu had almost forgotten the Man was there. It would have been easy to do. If not for his dogs, he could have been mistaken for a small cabinet on the other side of the laboratory.

When Nezu looked his way, he saw the barrel of a gun protruding from the bottom of the Man’s box.

It was pointed at Nezu.

“You side with them?” he said.

“I do. As should you.”

“Kore de ii no?”
Hayashi said.
“Douka shimishita ka?”

What’s going on? Is something wrong?

Kenji was more assertive.
“Shizuka ni shiro dare ka o korose!”

Shut up and kill somebody!

But Nezu preferred to take first things first. Priority number 1: not dying.

He threw himself into a somersault, vaulting high enough to run a few steps on the ceiling, then flipped over and landed on the opposite side of the room, behind the Man and his gun. By the time he had his feet planted firmly again, everyone else was in motion.

Momoko and Ogata were bounding along opposite walls, hurling throwing stars, while Mary Bennet matched them bounce for bounce, catching every star they threw and whipping them right back. Hayashi and Ishiro, meanwhile, were rushing the Man in a pincer movement, arcing in on each side, their long sai daggers ready to plunge through the top of the wooden box and into the head just beneath. Ell and Arr intercepted them in midair, latching onto the men where they could inflict the most damage—or the most pain, anyway. And Elizabeth Darcy was dodging poison darts from Ren’s blow gun as Kenji charged Kitty twirling twin kama scythes.