Transmuted (33 page)

Communion’s shoulders rolled, such a tempest formed in muscle that I briefly pitied the Veil.

“Osoba,” Hawke continued, his gaze falling to me, “is beyond help or reason.”

I could not hold that gaze, so fierce and sure. “I…am sorry.” For the fact that I had made of Osoba a deadlier creature, for one, but more importantly, that I had not cleaned up my own mess. He was alive to kill now because I had failed then.

Hawke brooked no such guilt. “Do not.” A command. “He made his choices. He will not suffer anything less but to die by them.” He turned his stare to the house, and in the arm he clamped around me, I sensed a shift. A softening, for all it did not sit easy upon him. “Your…Fanny.”

Because my throat closed, I could only shake my head a fraction. My eyes closed.

As he did when I suspected he could not do other, his hand cradled the back of my head, held me close against his chest. The heartbeat that seemed so loud thundered beneath my ear. “We will,” he said, so low and intense that it rumbled through him into me, “avenge her.”

It was no softly spoken condolence, no gentle reassurance.

It was promise, certain and implacable and fraught with retribution.

“Aye,” Communion rumbled.

For the briefest of moments, I allowed this. Reveled in it, this equal vow between these men and myself.

Vengeance had not brought my late husband back, nor had it eased the scars from Ashmore. Vengeance would not undo what had been suffered.

But for this, for Fanny, I would at least see justice done.

The Veil could not be allowed to persevere.

And I would not stand by the grave of the only woman I cared to call mother and admit to failure.

“You know this to be a trap,” I said, not because I hoped to dissuade the men I trusted at my back, but because I wanted no uncertainty between us.

A footstep upon the stoop behind me earned both sets of eyes. I turned to find Maddie Ruth holding a brace of pistols, two knivesand a fierce glower. “’Course it’s a trap,” she snapped, thrusting the weaponry our way. “But they ain’t so clever they can outdo a collector, the bloody ringmaster of the Menagerie, and the Baker Street’s dimber damber.”

I took the brace of pistols from her, but caught her hand with the other. It shook within my grip. “Maddie Ruth, would you—”

“You best not be asking me to go,” she said, throwing back her froth of curls, left loose like the wild thing she was. Her wide brown eyes snapped in fierce intensity. “That bloke in there’s going to need a ready set of hands.”

Gratitude all but undid what the bracing of commitment forged within me. My grip tightened upon her hand.

She turned it’round until her palm pressed mine, fingers intertwined. Her smile, tight and defiant as it was, eased my dread. “Won’t let nothin’ else happen here,” she promised. “Flip’s come to lend hands, and a kinchin’s out to find Delilah. Her current man’s an apothecary,” she added.

A fact I didn’t know, but was grateful to learn it. Delilah had been one of those sweets so cruelly used in the Veil’s schemes.

I nodded in soundless acknowledgement of a debt I would gratefully take on.

“You bring her back whole, you hear me?” she added, sharp over me.

I glanced over my shoulder to see Hawke’s head lift, nostrils flaring as a beast scenting tender flesh. The gleam in his eye spoke of sharp teeth and a thirst for blood—but the words he forced did not growl, as I’d expected. “We will all return.”

If Maddie Ruth’s features seemed a touch paler after, her palm a bit damper in my hand, I allowed her the dignity of ignoring it. “See that you do,” she said primly. Too far. Taking cue from the intellect that had seen her through many years of uncertainty and danger, she fled back inside when that locked growl escaped Hawke’s thin patience.

I rounded on Ishmael and Hawke, holding up pistols and blades. “Preferences?”

“My crew will bring what I need,” Communion said.

Hawke stared at the weapons as though they offended him.

Well enough. The more for me, the merrier.

As we waited for Communion’s men to show, I buckled on the tools of a trade I intended to abandon. Enough was enough. Once and for all, after the Crown’s request was fulfilled, I’d leave collecting behind.

Assuming, said a small voice of caution deep inside my walled-off fears, we survived what was to come.

***

So it was that a small band of Baker few, their leader, the displaced ringmaster and myself made our way to the Underground passage at Battersea Bridge. The door proved to be no obstacle, for I recalled Saltlick Sims and his lantern-related acrobatics.

It took very little effort for me to locate the switch that triggered the mechanism, and the door in the base of the bridge swung wide.

The Bakers, usually a jovial if mannerless lot, were silent on the journey, well aware of the stakes. Among them was a golden-haired man with a scar twisting his lip—Luther, a loyal man under Communion’s watch and mouthy most days.

The unfortunate matters of the Veil’s attempt to wipe out the Bakers—courtesy of Ma Zhànzhàn, I knew now—had sobered him some. Still, he walked with a purpose unique among them what followed Ishmael Communion.

I’d seen many a crew formed below the drift, walked the territories parceled out by strength of man and number, but the Brick Street Bakers were something else.

And because they were, no matter how thin their numbers or how bloody the fight, when Communion called, they came.

Luther stepped forward to take the lantern, wordlessly accepting the risk. Him with the light was often the easiest target in the dark.

Hawke stepped within first. His senses, primed as they were, needed no light.

I wished, not for the first time, that Ashmore could have come. All the instincts I had honed in the fog, all the feelings I had learned to obey whilst hunting my quarry, clamored together to assure me that this would be no small fray.

The air felt unusually heavy, humid as it always was in the Underground, but thicker. The flavor of it upon the tongue transcended the usual morass of sewage and worse; a peculiar prickling that made me want to spit at regular intervals.

A glance at the men around me assured me that though they may not know exactly what it was that irked them, they felt it too.

On the other side of the long passage down, there were no guards.

This was unusual enough that I whispered, “Halt,” and beckoned Luther to come with the lantern. The light gleamed brightly in the dark, lacking the intrusive fingers of the smoke and fog to dampen the flame.

I surveyed the path carefully.

A dark blot marred the mucky stone, all but ground into obscurity by the passage of feet. I plucked it with care, smoothing out the material.

An edge glowed white in scalloped hem, easily perceived through the lens of my clipped on protectives.

“Part of Zylphia’s nightclothes,” I said, holding it up to Communion to see. He hunched in these tunnels, wide shoulders rounded and head low.

He hunkered down into a crouch and took the scrap from me. A quick study, and then he pocketed it, nodding in silence.

Either she’d tossed herself into a scuffle, earning a bit of torn clothing, or she was leaving clues.

I surveyed the path before us, maze-like passageways splitting off. The fabric had been closer to the left, and so left we turned.

The lack of wardens, them placed there by order or badgers looking for tolls in and out, worried me.

When we came upon another scrap of fabric, it was cleaner; a beacon in the dark.

Though we hurried, navigating the Underground—especially in unfamiliar territory—was not a quick thing. We walked with care, and occasionally Hawke came back to warn of sunken passages or dead ends.

By the time we stepped into drier corridors, I was quite unsure where we were.

At least, until we spilled out of a long passage and found ourselves in a crossroads of a sort, with a multitude of tunnels all leading out in a fan. The trickles of unclean fluids following some made for eerie echoes in the hollow dark.

Hawke waited at the center of the fan. He balanced easily upon the balls of his feet, crouched upon the damp stone. “There is too much here for me to trace it.”

Luther lifted the lantern high. It cast golden hue over the wet cobbles, caught in Hawke’s eerie stare once more. That his shoulders twitched, as though he forced back the need to recoil, worried me a touch.

I approached on what passed for soundless tread when all that one trod through was wet or mucky. “Are you all right?” I murmured, halting before him.

His teeth gleamed faintly in twisted reveal. “A word, Miss Black.”

Ever so formal for a filthy hole as this was. I frowned. “What is it?”

When his hand lashed out, caught my wrist in iron grip, I jumped, but did not scream. I trusted Hawke more than that.

Though I recalled all too easily the harm those hands could inflict.

He tugged me closer, down into a crouch, and held me there to lower his face to mine. “I am approaching the end of my endurance.” A simple statement. A hard one.

I did not understand. “Are you wounded?”

“In spirit,” he said flatly, surprising me again.

I would never have expected Hawke to admit to weakness as this.

But then, I had not often expected him to trust me so.

Was this because he swore to be mine?

The fingers at my wrist tightened painfully. “Pay close attention,” he said, his deep voice lowered into that implacable regard he so often delivered me. “Ma Lài is not the source of this sickness within me, but he knows well the flow of
qì
. In my state—”

I leaned forward, bracing my free hand on his thigh for support. The muscle was flexed to hold him steady, rock hard under my palm.

That it earned me a suddenly indrawn breath was a matter best turned aside for the moment.

“Are you,” I said fiercely, low for all I cut off his words entirely, “telling me that
you
will fall prey to
him
?”

Because the Bakers remained far enough back to afford what little measure of privacy could be granted in such dark confines, I could not wholly see the details of Hawke’s expression. I knew that his features were set, that his eyes were difficult to see behind the implacable wall he forged within them.

That the muscle in his cheek leapt in fractured patience.

Hawke’s face turned a fraction away. “I have,” he said with great care, and notable strain, “restrained myself for you. I have chained the thing within me and pretended that I did not crave the taste of pain upon your lips.”

A shudder pulled low in my body—pain and pleasure, an art Hawke knew all too well.

“I have sat at your table,” he said fiercely, “and behaved as though I did not wish to see your family tattered and bleeding, but this curse will only get stronger when the blood flows tonight.”

“Bollocks.” His head jerked as though the word smacked him direct, his gaze pinned mine—though I could not see what filled them with the light caught within. I took a leaf from his own book, ignoring the ache his fingers forced in the bones of my wrist to seize his chin in my fingers and hold it tight.

A shudder caught in a throttled breath, all but unnoticeable but for the fact my fingertips bit into his jaw.

Leaning forward, my knee coming to rest upon his leg, I halted a fraction from his face and summoned all the feelings I had not yet given words to. The heartache I’d nursed, the loneliness of my life. Grief and fury and promised retribution.

Love, as peculiar as I’d ever known it.

“You listen to me, Micajah Hawke,” I said, and watched the thick ream of his black lashes flare as my breath wafted across his lips. “There will be no weakness, no loss of who you are. Curse or no, blood of a long-dead people or otherwise,
you
are
mine.
”

His breath tore from him, just short of a snarl, but I sealed it with a kiss as harsh as he’d ever delivered me.

I knew his language, that what drove his blood.

I knew what it was he craved.

My breath came quicker as I let him go. “If the beast you restrain wants to argue the point,” I said, striving for smooth though I felt altogether too rattled, “it can try to best me after all this is over.”

Hawke’s fingers eased from my wrist.

I stood. “Now get ahold of yourself,” I ordered, clipped to the quick. “We’ve a Veil to tear down, and a cure to acquire. I’ll have none of this prissing about.”

I swear, I heard one of the Bakers muffle a snort.

Hawke’s head did not lift. Instead, a bronzed hand lifted to his eyes, as though he could not bear to look at me. It did not seem as though anger colored the gesture.

“You will,” he said, low and deep, “be the death of me.”

“If so,” I said, giving him my back, “then I will follow quickly after.”

Let him make of that what he would.

I strode back to Communion, picking my way over the trickling currents of the rancid water. “We’ve a decision to make.”

Luther nodded, the light caught in his features and giving him a demonic appearance. The scar twisting his lip into a permanent smirk looked all the more ghastly for it. “Near as we can tell,” he said, “we’re somewhere south and east.”

“South and east,” I repeated thoughtfully. “Wapping’s that way.”

Hawke pulled a harsh hand through his tangled hair, shoving it back as though it irritated him. “These four tunnels head east,” he said, pointing at the farthest right.

“You sure?” Communion rumbled.

Hawke nodded once. “They smell like it.”

Good enough for me. “All right, we’ll split here,” I said, already dreading the need.

The Bakers exchanged glances.

I gave them no time to argue. “Communion is with me. Luther, take one of yours. The other can go—”

“I’ll go alone,” Hawke said flatly.

Sheer, naked relief flooded the Baker boys whose names I didn’t know.

I met Ishmael’s gaze, read a mutual shrug within, and said instead, “All right, that covers only three.”

“I’ll take one alone,” rumbled Ishmael.

I could all but hear Hawke’s teeth grinding behind me.