Transmuted (32 page)

Mrs. Booth shook her head, tears falling like rain. “Gone.”

I clutched at my chest. “Where?”

“Taken,” rasped Booth, and his wife shushed him. It broke upon her lips. With great effort, he covered her straining hands with his own. “Leviticus…followed.” He took a breath. It wheezed. “Missus…”

“Yes,” I said, though my breath came too fast. Too quick. “Where is Fanny?’ Booth’s eyes squeezed shut.

I dared not give name to that what shaped his expression. Dared not wonder aloud what it was that he could not say.

Don’t you leave us
. Us. Mrs. Booth had spoken in the plural.

Communion grasped my shoulder, swallowing the whole of it in one large palm. “Girl.”

At the same time, my gaze fell again upon the cloth tangled behind Booth.

Leaving the Baker to watch in helplessness, I approached the oak bed frame that had been Fanny’s.

So much blood.

So still.

“Physician,” I whispered. And then, as my shaking hand parted the folds of the bedclothes, I screamed it. “A doctor! Ish, please!”

Fanny lay nestled within the tousled blankets, as though hastily wrapped. Her paper-thin eyelids closed over eyes sunken deep. She had always been pale, but the bloodless nature of her skin now made her look like an ephemeral thing—little more than spider webs and hope.

Her pallid lips were gently parted, her frail form motionless.

Ishmael’s heavy footsteps thudded away, but as I crawled onto the bed to tear the cloth from Fanny’s chest, I knew it would not matter.

Flesh and bone were not meant to survive that what had taken her.

“Fanny,” I whispered, trembling for the grief of it. My tears ran hot and heavy, and I sniffed back my screams lest they offend her ears. Her hair, always so perfectly coiffed, remained pinned; a halo of white mixed with the iron gray I had always known her to possess.

As my fingertips came to rest at the fragile skin beneath her jaw, Mrs. Booth swallowed her sobs and cradled her husband’s head against her own.

She could not look at me. At Fanny.

I could not blame her.

“Oh, God,” I whispered, thick with sorrow. With a grief I never thought would come so heavy, so abysmally painful. My heart twisted, until nausea followed, and still I could not breathe.

I could not believe.

“Fanny,” I said again, insistently. I bent over her, cradling her cheeks, wiping a bit of blood from the corner of her mouth. The pulse beneath my fingertips was so faint as to be nonexistent.

No doctor would arrive in time.

No Trump could bring back the dead, not without a power I didn’t possess and preparation we had not made.

No part of Fanny, my dear stern-faced Fanny, would ever crave immortality.

“Please,” I begged, whispering it, over and over. “Please wake up. Please, Fanny. I’m sorry.” Hunched over her, I clasped her cheeks in both hands and braced my forehead against her own. My tears fell unchecked, dropped to her skin and rolled into crevasses etched into her beloved features by the years she carried so gracefully.

At my side, kneeling with her husband, Mrs. Booth wept.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again, blubbering through and unable to stop. “I never wanted this.” I cried openly, eyes squeezed shut, panting for air to fuel my tears and unable to take more than a half breath through them.

Fanny’s skin was cool beneath my palms. Soft and so familiar.

The fragrance of her favored powder, the aroma of lavender and the stronger bergamot she preferred from her teas, surrounded me in excruciating comfort.

The most delicate of caresses, a spider’s web of sensation, eased over the skin at my temple. My eyes opened, met the pale blue seam of fading life.

Hazy, reddened at rim and whites, Fanny’s eyes searched my gaze as she smoothed back the hair curled at my temple. I’d managed nothing more than a braid to hold the whole back after I’d torn the veil from my head in my haste.

There was no disapproval in Fanny’s countenance.

“My dove,” she managed, barely a whisper through dry, bloodless lips.

I labored to smooth the grief from my face, but no will could overcome. Fresh tears flowed anew as I whimpered. “Please stay with me, Fanny.”

“Oh, tosh.” Warmth turned her pale eyes to the summer’s dawn, to a gaze of love and equal sorrow. “You’ve… You’ve no more need…of me.”

“No,” I insisted, smoothing back the hair from her brow as she had me. “No, you’re wrong. I need you, Fanny. I always need you.”

Her breath was so shallow as to barely move the thin cage of her chest. The blood that marred her was obscene. I tugged the blanket over her, held it to hide the terrible injury done her body—and her pride.

Fanny had never been a woman whose carriage was subject to the whims of others. Hadn’t she taught me to walk with pride? With confidence?

“This was my fault,” I admitted, crumbling in the face of the truth I knew but dared not admit. She was dying, my Fanny. Fading away with every shallow breath.

“Child.” The word came on a broken whisper. “No tears. This is not your fault.”

“It is,” I sobbed. “Please, Fanny, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’ll say it every day, please stay with me.”

She cupped my cheek, and I turned my face into her palm with a broken sound. “You have…have done right by me, Cherry. By your friends. Whatever else… I am…proud.” The color of her eyes clouded slowly. Yet it was a smile that touched her thin lips as she whispered, “I have always loved you, my dove.”

“And I you,” I said, unable to halt the flow of my tears no matter her directive. “I would wish for no other mother but you.”

Her smile grew by a fraction; acknowledgement of the place I’d gifted her. Of the role I would give no other. Her eyelids fluttered lower. I gripped her hand in mine, held it against my cheek. Her mouth worked, but whatever she hoped to say claimed no air to fuel it. No energy to shape it.

As I called her name, as I pleaded with her to stay with me, my dearest Fanny faded away.

As footsteps thundered through the open hall, all I could do was keen the pain and loss that filled me; disgorge the broken heart I nursed in tears that had no power of resuscitation, no hope of resurrection.

No alchemical power could ever soothe my loss.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The doctor, a nervous fellow with a thick black beard and an Irish slant to his words, tended Booth and his wife as I recovered my wits and acumen in the kitchens below. Thanks to the quick work of the earl’s gondolier, he had come in time.

The fog continued to swirl past my knees and ankles, but there was nothing to be done about it. The kitchen’s windows had been broken, shards of glass sprayed out into the lane beyond.

More blood smeared the floor, and another splatter in what had been Zylphia’s room suggested the sweet had delivered as good as she’d gotten, but of any of my guests, there was no sign.

Hawke. Zylphia. With them, Zhànzhàn had vanished.

I had expected the Veil to make his move, but I had not thought he would bypass me entirely. The urge to sink into despair loomed heavy and dark, but I fought it.

I could not lapse into immobility now.

Based on what evidence had been left behind, I imagined that Ma Lài had turned his beast loose upon my family’s home. Claws scored through wood and plaster, and the congealing remains of splattered fluids suggested whatever had been set on my family, they had bled for it.

I had been a fool to discount the Veil’s ruthlessness.

“Girl!” Communion’s thunderous report blared from the lane behind the kitchen. I stepped out of the open door, its hinges bent as though something heavy had torn through it, and found Ishmael crouching upon the sodden cobbles. The fog brought with it a humidity that clung to everything, staining it black and wet.

In the cradle of his arm, my house-boy looked terribly small.

Black smeared his face, which I took to be smoke and char before a bit of the lantern light set at the window painted his skin red. He held his arm at an awkward angle, pain etched into dark grooves upon his youthful countenance.

“Levi!” I gasped, running for him.

He lifted his chin, and well I knew the weighty burden of a street boy’s pride as he warned me from fawning with but a tilt of jaw. “I’m right as rain,” he declared, though with a ragged edge that swore he wasn’t. “Come with news.”

I hid my fists behind my back, met Ishmael’s gaze and saw within a promise. He would not allow the boy to suffer, but it would be best for Levi if I allowed him his dignity.

I nodded. “Let’s hear it, then.”

Very gently, with steady hands of rock-sure support, Communion helped the boy to his feet.

He wobbled, but held. If the big man’s fist in the back of his trousers was half the reason, I made sure my houseboy did not see that I knew it. “After Hawke went after the big black thing, I followed the others,” he said, and my eyes snapped wide.

That my heart, tattered though it was, shuddered in a sudden surge of painful hope forced my hand to close over the front of my shirt. “Hawke’s alive?” I searched the shifting miasma beyond. “Where is he?”

“I think the beast led him on a merry chase. The rest led me ’round Battersea Bridge.” Levi flinched as his hand whitened over the awkward shape of his arm. Though it pained me to do it, I said nothing of it. “I lost ’em,” he continued. “But I can say for sure they went Underground.”

Underground Battersea wasn’t all that far from the Thames River Tunnel, less than an hour by hackney.

Perhaps less so by way of direct Underground line.

I racked my brain. “What do you know of the Battersea passage Underground?” I asked Ishmael.

He shook his head, and rumbled, “’Ware crossing. More than a few go lost ’round there.”

A sign that whatever group of Underground vermin minded the entrance, they did not encourage witnesses.

Levi stepped closer to me, his jaw clenched so hard that I was certain his teeth would fracture from it. Ishmael’s arm straightened a bit, but the boy held fast. “Be careful,” he said through the grit of his teeth. “That big black beast was with’em for sure. Teeth and claws and yellow eyes.”

“Just one?”

“I only saw the one.” The very idea of more forced an aching shudder down his slim form.

I touched his uninjured shoulder. “Thank you, Leviticus,” I said, firm enough that he could not mistake it for coddling. “Do you know what happened here direct?”

He shook his head. “Only thing I know is I were eating, and then the door up front broke down. There was howling, miss, and then Booth were yelling to get upstairs, but me and Mrs. Booth couldn’t get down the hall.” His voice turned low and strained, as though he fought back tears.

I pretended not to notice the sheen of them in his reddened eyes.

“Mrs. Booth pushed me out,” he said, looking down at his feet. “Found a bantling, like you always do, and sent for Communion.”

Over my houseboy’s head, the dark head of the Baker leader inclined.

“I am grateful to you,” I told the boy. “For your bravery and your speed.”

He nodded, a silent version of gratitude I would not begrudge him. Pain and trauma no doubt conspired to strip Levi of what pride he retained, and so I softened it for him.

“Go inside,” I said gently, “and see the physician.”

He argued not at all.

Once he was gone, I expelled a harsh breath and turned to Communion. “Round up your Bakers, Ish. We’re going hunting.”

“They will arrive within the hour,” he growled, his teeth bared in a white gleam of raw menace. “They took my woman.” This simple statement of fact bore within ominous promise of terminal consequence. “They’d best pray to their heathen gods they have not harmed her.”

“They have not.”

This time, when a shadow loomed from the fog, source of the masculine assurance, I was prepared. The weapon I’d placed in the pocket of my borrowed coat filled my h and as through it belonged.

The speed with which I’d accomplished it mattered nothing at all as I promptly breathed, “Cage,” and lowered the pistol to my side.

He stepped from the dark and black as though it were his own Menagerie grounds eaten up by his long stride. His shirtsleeves were filthy, bronzed skin smeared as Levi’s had been, and he lacked shoes and stockings entirely.

His eyes sheened wicked blue, and veins popped at his forearms, his throat. Every step taken was a promise of menace so perfectly delivered that Communion shifted his weight, easing that much closer to me.

Even so, bare of foot and with his hair streaming loose in a black tangle, Hawke did not frighten me. The lights lit in the house behind me turned his colored stare to the sheen of an animal’s, yet I did not hesitate.

The weapon I held dropped into my pocket. Rounding Ishmael, I sprinted into Hawke’s embrace, forcing him to catch me regardless of whatever else he might have intended. The smell of blood and wet earth, that unique signature of spice and heat that was his own all filled my senses as I wrapped arms and legs around him.

That his arms came around me, bands of flesh and bone, relieved me as little else could. “Thank heaven,” I said into the skin of his neck. His flesh was feverish, as it always was, and damp with his efforts. A tinge of the Thames flitted about him, and even that was not enough to force me to let him go. My fingers tangled in his long hair.

His mouth pressed against my temple, breath hot as he eased out a sigh that seemed to me as if it shook. Yet there was nothing fragile or uncertain in the taut planes of his face as he caught my chin in hand and took my mouth in a kiss as hungry as it was fierce.

And as relieved as he didn’t say.

Though it was a short kiss, I tasted desperation upon his lips.

Ishmael, no stranger to such matters, waited for the moment in which Hawke allowed me to slide to the ground. Once my feet touched solid cobble, he asked curtly, “What did you see?”

Hawke anchored an arm at my waist. If I wanted to leave his side, I would not be allowed. “There’s an Underground entry beneath the north side of the Battersea Bridge,” he said, every note a flat one. Strained just this side of ragged. “Osoba made his attack, then drew me off. In my absence, the Veil’s allies took both women. Zylphia,” he added, “is alive.”