Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (28 page)

Anne-Marie slipped into the shadows like it was a warm bed on a cool night. She was out of shape but bristling with determination. The air was brisk against her cheeks, and the exhilaration of her mission kept her moving.

When she’d been at the Folies Bergere earlier, she’d noticed convenient climbing niches in the bricks outside. She skittered up with a prowler’s grace, glad that she’d kept her hands from going soft. As part of her dedication to keeping Ministry training on her mind, she gave herself the same birthday gift every year: a midnight trip past the Louvre security to enjoy the works of art on her own. She used a different and more challenging entrance strategy every year, and she’d touched the Mona Lisa with bare hands more than anyone since Da Vinci himself.

At the top of the building, she pulled herself onto the roof of the Folies Bergere and skittered over to a cracked window. Wrenching it open, she squeezed through. It was an attic of the most depressing sort, with rows of small and dingy beds meant for servants.

Anne-Marie’s soft-soled boots whispered across the boards and down the stairs to the next level. The long hallway housed themed rooms decorated in glitzy excess. Perfume hung heavy in the air, and Anne-Marie held a handkerchief over her sensitive nose.

As she crept down the next staircase, the air warmed, and the sound of voices and music thumped through the cracked walls. The song ended to thunderous applause, and a woman’s voice boomed as if heard underwater. Anne-Marie stopped, one hand to the wall.

“Mes amis,
are you ready to meet Madame Allemande’s Jewels of Paris?”

Whistles, stomps, and applause answered her.

Anne-Marie looked up and found a copper tube bolted to the ceiling, pointing down the dark hallway.

“Oh, la la! These girls need more of a welcome that that!”

The voice had definitely come from the tube, and Anne-Marie followed it as it snaked past red velvet curtains and disappeared into another wall beside a narrow door. She had the lock picked in moments, opening it silently onto a hall lit by green lanterns.

“The Folies Bergere is proud to present... the can-can!”

Anne-Marie hurried faster when she realised she didn’t just hear the echo of the pipes but the actual woman’s voice. Just ahead, a door was cracked, showing a thin line of light. Gun in hand, she pushed it open just enough to see inside.

The room was large, lit with gas-lamps and filled with ornate parlour furniture, bizarre statuary, and a low, annoying ticking sound. A strange hodgepodge of scents made Anne-Marie’s nose twitch: oil, metal, and expensive perfume. She slipped through the door and hid behind a sofa.

A thin woman in a taffeta gown of emerald green stood with her back to the room as she spoke into an amplifying box, the source of the copper pipe. She paused to peer through two holes at eye level in the wall, watching the cabaret on the other side. After another round of deafening applause, the woman turned and spoke to an empty corner.

“I see a new Englishman out there. Perhaps he’ll be the one to finally admit to murdering my poor darling Lizette. We know just what to do with him, don’t we? Come, Maurice. Come, Fabrice. Murderers must be punished,
n’est-ce pas
?” Her accent and the way she spat
“Anglais”
marked her as a native Parisian. Anne-Marie felt panic rise behind her corset as she thought about Joe in the crowd, unsuspecting.

Something large moved, some metal contraption that squealed and clanked and then... purred? Anne-Marie ducked around the sofa to see what sort of clockwork padded to the woman’s side, but a heavy weight landed on her back, shoving her flat. Her gun clattered to the ground, and she felt the bone-jarring weight of metal on her spine and arm as claws spread over her leather corset and wrapped around her shoulder. Pinned as she was, she couldn’t reach any of her weapons. Struggling to turn her head, she saw a blinking yellow eye and a demonic, gibbering face.

Footsteps rounded the sofa. Anne-Marie could barely see the woman looming over her, a metal creature at her side.

“Ah, the curious baker. Inject her, please, Maurice.”

Anne-Marie felt the cool pinch of a needle in her arm and struggled to turn over, to reach the knife in her corset, to do anything but lay there helpless like an idiot. She failed. Numbness spread quickly from her belly to her extremities as the injection took effect.

“You wish to know what happens to meddling Englishmen who enter my city unwanted? Who hurt my girls and refuse to pay my bills? Do you know which of those monsters murdered my poor daughter? If you are on the side of the English, you will meet their same fate.” She leaned close, sniffed deeply, and sneered. “Half English, at least. You stink of tea and broken promises. Come. My pets will show you the most beautiful views in Paris.” Her grin was skeletal, mad, her wrinkled lips painted red. “Starting with the tunnels in the catacombs.”

Just before her eyes fluttered shut, Anne-Marie remembered her tracker ring and managed to push it with her clumsy thumb.

“If I’m in trouble, will it alert you?”
she had asked Joe.

“If you push it, I’ll know.”

But how long would it take for Joe to receive the signal? How long?

It was the wind that roused Anne-Marie, tearing at her hair; that, and the odd, mechanical movement of whatever carried her. Her body instantly recognised that she was very high up, that she was uncomfortably dangling from rigid arms. Although her instinct was to go stiff and fight, she recalled Madam Allemande’s words and the rusty stains dappling the cobbles in front of Notre Dame just that morning. She opened her eyes on a moonlit night, the stars impossibly close.

She thumbed the switch on her tracker ring again and again. Why had Joe not come when he’d promised her he would? Was her partner cozied up to some cabaret girl in the Folies Bergere, unable to hear or see the tracker’s alarm amid the dizzying crowd?

But no. A soft beeping told her exactly why she had not been rescued. She let her head loll sideways, and her vision filled with the tails of a dinner jacket. Joe jounced ahead of her, tossed over the back of a clockwork beast like a sack of cake flour. The creature was like nothing she’d ever seen, with a twisted, nightmare body like a monster out of a painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Two horns sprouted from its head, while great silver wings sprung from its back with razor-sharp feathers; Joe flopped between them, unconscious. Taloned feet squelched through the cathedral’s gutter, marching toward the grand spire.

Anne-Marie let her head fall the other way, her eyes following the riveted seams upward to the same hideous goblin face and gold-glowing goat eye she remembered from Madam Allemande’s quarters at the Folies Bergere. It was so very familiar, and yet so very wrong. Glancing down to judge the distance to the cobbles, she solved the mystery behind the Englishmen’s deaths.

Plated in grey metal that matched the original stone, the demonic automatons were nearly identical to the famous monsters that guarded the cathedral. No wonder no one had noticed them, then—they were part and parcel of Paris, of Notre Dame. Anyone spotting animated grotesques on the roof would assume they’d had too much to drink and go home to sleep it off.

Anne-Marie knew she had maybe a collection of seconds before her new partner was just an extra-large splatter on the streets of Paris. Regardless of her time away from Old Blighty, she was a Ministry agent with a cool head, and she had no plans of dying on her first mission. She would find a way out of this mess.

At least the grotesques were lurching along the lower gutter instead of the slippery iron plates of the peaked roof. With a deep breath, she turned as a restless sleeper might and allowed her body to partially fall from the creature’s arms, steeling herself to grab for random bits of architecture should it drop her completely.

The grotesque froze and scrabbled to catch her with steel talons. She let her body weight slump into the cold slurry of the gutter. As the clockwork beast reached for her, Anne-Marie slipped a tin from her belt, flicked it open, and removed a glass ampule. Her gloves wouldn’t be enough to protect her, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Turning her face away, she smashed the glass pill against the gargoyle’s chest and whipped her hand away.

For a moment, the creature stubbornly persisted in trying to hoist her over one shoulder, but then the deadly mixture of corrosive acids bloomed with a rusty red that resembled an arrow to the monster’s heart. Anne-Marie didn’t dare look at her own hand, knowing full well that the acid had eaten into her glove and would soon sink into her numb skin, hunting for bone. A hand was a small price to pay against two agents’ lives.

When the grotesque shuddered and dropped her completely, she had only one good arm with which to catch herself as she rolled perilously close to the gutter’s edge. The creature was more rust than metal now as the acid spread. Its arms fell off, shedding bolts like fleas. The golden light in its eyes went out, and it toppled slowly over the edge of the cathedral. Anne-Marie didn’t bother to lurch up and watch it crash against the cobbles. She barely had time to mutter a prayer before the other grotesque latched on to the spire, hell-bent on climbing to the top and tossing Joe to his death with a machine’s heartless accuracy.

Much as she hated to admit that the English brute was right—Anne-Marie had always been a bad shot, and her spectacles were of little help. She had one more ampule of acid, and she didn’t have a chance in heaven of hitting the bugger—she might even hit her partner—but watching the clockwork creature inch up the spire with Joe flopping over its wing, there were no other options.

She lobbed the little glass pill.

“Joe!” she managed. “Wake up, Joe! Wake up and hold on!”

A tiny clink let her know the ampule had hit something; but even squinting, she couldn’t quite see if it had found its mark. She struggled up to her elbows and pulled herself closer toward the corner where Joe would fall, if he did fall, half-glad and half-furious that her extremities were still numb from the injection. It’s not like she could catch him, even with two good hands. The grotesque carrying Joe paused and shook its foot, and she finally saw the growing flower of rust spreading along the creature’s metal talon. Unfortunately, part of the insidious acid had also found home in the iron plating of the roof, and if she didn’t get Joe away quickly, both he and the dying grotesque would fall through the collapsing ceiling and splatter inside the church instead of outside on the street.

The clockwork demon lurched sideways, dropping her mammoth partner, who slid down the roof with frightening speed. Anne-Marie balled her numb hands into fists and crawled through the gutter until she was directly below his sliding bulk. She braced herself for the impact, and the gutter shuddered beneath them. Metal shrieked on metal as the second monster slid down the slope, talons raising sparks. It landed on top of Joe with a heavy thump that drove the air from her lungs. Joe grunted and flexed as she struggled.

“Feeling bitey? Such a naughty girl,” he said in the cultured British accent he’d used before departing for the cabaret.

She gasped and swallowed. “That’s not me. There’s a dying clockwork gargoyle trying to eat through your jacket. Shove him off so we can go home.” Joe went completely still and pressed her more firmly into the gutter as he reached back to pry the monster off his back and toss it over the edge.

“It’s not a gargoyle, it’s a grotesque,” he murmured sleepily. “Why am I numb?”

“It’ll wear off shortly. I can already feel my hand burning. I need to get away from this water, and fast.”

She tried to hide the fact that she was panting and whimpering as the pain spread to her palm, but he was too close to ignore it. With care she hadn’t seen of him, he edged off her body and into the gutter, wiggling backward toward the corner where the handholds began.

With her arms finally free, she rolled onto her back and pulled a different tin from a different pocket. She would only have one chance to stop the acid from spreading before she lost her hand entirely and could look forward to a mechanical one from the Ministry engineers. In a flash, she’d opened the tin and shoved it right up against her palm, hissing as the powder instantly neutralised the acid and halted the burning. The pain didn’t abate, but the worry did.

“Better?”

Anne-Marie spoke through gritted teeth. “A little, thanks to Our Lady of Chemistry. Now all that’s left is to climb down sixty-nine meters of rain-soaked stone at midnight half numb and wounded without dying.”