Author: Karina Cooper
Date: 2013-02-10T06:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Harlequin
Rights: Copyright © 2014 by Karina Cooper

Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

By Karina Cooper

Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

Forced out of London's coal-blackened streets, Cherry St. Croix is faced with her most difficult undertaking yet: sobriety.

At long last, my guardian, the enigmatic Mr. Oliver Ashmore, has revealed himself—and his order is clear: I am to be dried out at once, regardless of my wishes.

I loathe the country estate I am imprisoned within. Footsteps follow me, voices call for me, and my sanity wavers. In my fevered dreams, I am haunted by those I failed, while waking proves no protection from the ghosts of my reckless past. The craving for laudanum plagues me. I require a distraction.

To unravel the alchemical mysteries of my mother’s family, I must rely on Ashmore’s tutelage. I am lured to the art and drawn by the secrets my guardian possesses. Yet the deeper I delve, the more I believe that something dreadful disturbs these haunted corridors. In my madness, I fear that what it wants most…is me.

106,000 words

Dear Reader,

My vow to you is to not mention the holiday that starts with a V in this letter for the February releases. If you’re like me, you’re probably on holiday overload after all of the winter festivities, and you wish you could just blank out all of those advertisements for diamonds and chocolates and fancy dinners. Of course, if someone wanted to buy us any of that, that would be okay…

Instead, let me tell you about the sometimes-romantic and sometimes-not lineup of books we have for you this month! Fans of Alison Packard’s The Winning Season will be glad to know that JT and Angie’s story releases this month. Look for sparks to fly in Catching Heat. Author Christi Barth finishes up her Aisle Bound series with A Matchless Romance. You won’t want to miss this playful story about a sexy gamer who just needs a beautiful Chicago matchmaker to help him see how hot he really is.

Also in the contemporary romance category is Party Girl by Tamara Morgan, following up her well-reviewed romance The Derby Girl. When a good-time party girl meets a backwoods hermit, the only thing bigger than their differences is their attraction. Fan favorite Inez Kelley joins the contemporary romance offerings this month with smoking-hot lumberman Jonah Alcott, who wants to do more than fight with gorgeous mountain activist Zury Castellano in The Place I Belong.

Lynda Aicher brings her trademark sizzle to a new erotic romance story in her Wicked Play series. In her first male/male romance, Bonds of Denial, security nerd Rockford Fielding finally finds a man worth coming out of the closet for, but Carter Montgomery has to move past his own insecurities before they can claim a future they both thought was impossible.

Opium addict and Victorian bounty hunter Cherry St. Croix is back again in Karina Cooper’s Tempered. Dragged to a neglected estate and forced to dry out, Cherry tries on the role of helpless Gothic heroine—and tumbles headlong into danger when she takes to meddling in her family’s alchemical history instead.

Returning to Carina Press with a new series is Eleri Stone with the first book in her new paranormal romance series. In Reaper’s Touch, Jake and Abby work together to find a cure for the infection that turns men into flesh-eating monsters. We’re also welcoming back Jody Wallace with her newest paranormal romance, Witch Interrupted. Wolf shifters heal from tattoos as if they were never inked, so why is the same sexy wolf back in Katie’s tattoo parlor for more? And last but not least in the paranormal romance category, we’re also pleased to bring back Victoria Davies and her newest novella Demon by My Side. When a tempting demon prince crashes into her life, a demon hunter struggles to figure out who she can trust and one wrong move will cost her not only her heart but the safety of the human world as well.

Concluding her wonderful epic fantasy series, Shawna Thomas wraps up with Journey of the Wanderer in which to save Anatar once and for all, Ilythra must risk everything she loves.

But with every ending there’s a new beginning, and we’re happy to welcome male/male romance author A.M. Arthur to the Carina Press team. A reformed troublemaker meets his match in an inexperienced bookworm when what was supposed to be a casual relationship starts to look a lot like love in No Such Thing.

And we’re happy to introduce debut author Holly West. Holly delivers a fascinating, well-plotted historical mystery, the first in a new series. In Mistress of Fortune, Isabel Wilde, a mistress to King Charles II who secretly makes her living as a fortune-teller, is threatened when one of her customers is murdered after revealing a conspiracy to kill the king and the diary of her illicit activities as a soothsayer goes missing, a page of which turns up in the dead man’s pocket.

Coming in March: look for the newest installment in Marie Force’s Fatal series!

Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend.

Happy reading!

~Angela James

Editorial Director, Carina Press

Dedication

For all my dedicated readers. There would be no hope for Cherry without you.

Acknowledgments

This book, and possibly the world at large, would have seen a very different story were it not for my editor. She kept me focused, on track, and asked all the hard questions. I may have been driven to drink on more than one occasion, but the result was worth it. Thank you, Mallory.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

About the Author

Chapter One

I shall never forget the moment I first laid eyes upon the estate that would contrive to take my life.

The wound festering in my back was too painful to tolerate on my own, and I had not slept for what seemed an eternity. Every rut in the road from London, every depression and fissure in these rural lanes, had become a litany of pain quelled only by the ruby draught of laudanum. My once guardian and now twisted savior, Mr. Oliver Ashmore, allowed me only enough to ease the agony on this long journey.

He paid no mind when I demanded more.

My name is Cherry St. Croix, and I am a collector—or, rather, I had been, before the series of unfortunate events that culminated in an injury of body and soul.

As a seeker of bounties for coin, I was no stranger to wounds acquired when hunting down a quarry. Such prey were often born of those too far in debt or too dangerous to leave unchallenged, and they occasionally gave as good as I delivered, yet of all my various scrapes and bruises, none had ever been as bad as that I suffered now. This gash in my back, raw edges seeping through hastily wound bandages, had been delivered by a vile murderer, quite infamous in the broadsheets, in those few moments before I struck him down. What should have been victory, painful as it was, turned into betrayal, and my injury was subsequently aggravated by the machinations of a criminal Chinese mastermind determined to bring me low.

Such maneuverings had succeeded.

I slumped in the curtained carriage my heretofore absent guardian had acquired for his planned evacuation from London. My feet curled up on the seat, and every jostling sway felt as if it would bore holes through me. Every shudder of the wheeled monstrosity seemed designed to lay upon me the greatest of the impact—I could not breathe for fear of jarring the aching injury, and could not sleep without pain startling me awake again. The ermine tucked about my shoulders did little to ward off the October cold; a welcome contrast to my overly heated flesh.

Rain pattered gently against the window, tapping the vast emptiness of the moor into dreary submission. As the road curved—a pitted country lane, given the pitching and yawing of the conveyance—I flattened one pale hand against the water-beaded pane and struggled to make out the details of this unfathomable hell I was to be dragged into.

All that had come before remained a nebulous haze; all that spread before me loomed dark and dreary. The indistinct blur thrusting from the gray moor turned into a sprawling estate with all the welcome of an asylum for the terminally insane.

If this was to be my haven, I could not fathom how.

What charm the manor might have once exhibited had long been worn away by neglect. The moor had reclaimed what care had been taken for the extensive grounds, swallowing all in an endless shroud of brown vegetation too thick and brittle to wade through without effort, until there was no distinguishable path beyond that of the narrow lane we navigated. Two turrets, reminiscent of a lighthouse, sprouted from each end of the manor, jutting into the frothy gray skies and shadowed in part by the black clouds colliding overhead—as if the very gods themselves frowned upon our arrival.

The paint peeled from the exterior, leaving a bruised and cracked appearance stained by weather and time. The whole of the manor, once quite fine gauging by the bones beneath the façade, now seemed to squat like a skeletal boil upon the unforgiving landscape.

I could not fathom who had once lived here, nor why the empty windows seemed to scowl down upon me in warning—of danger, I thought. A dismal declaration of souls abandoned and hope lost. Something dreadful turned over in my chest. For the first time since being whisked from London’s familiar streets—even beyond the laudanum turning my thoughts slow and my blood sluggish—I was afraid.

This house represented all that would destroy what was left of me. I had very little doubt of it.

The carriage finally halted, jarring loose a strained uncivility as the momentum tipped me too far forward. I grasped at the straps beside the window, groaning aloud when that tore at my bandaged wound, and the ermine wrap slipped to my waist. A perfunctory knock introduced my taciturn guardian to the interior.

I was too laden by the opium I’d been drinking steadily to care that I had not been allowed to change from the thin blouse and bloomers I’d been forced to wear for the Menagerie’s last showing. The man who’d rescued me—who’d kept me full on laudanum throughout the journey—seemed to feel no shame.

“We’re here,” he announced.

I summoned a word to my cracked lips. “Where?” My voice croaked.

“Siristine.” The name was not familiar, and evoked no response. Not in the same way the appearance of it had. “Out you come,” he added. He grasped my bare arm, his gloved hands firm and grip unbreakable—not that I had the strength to try. Tears of pain, already thick in my gritty eyes, overflowed with the effort I made to stand.

He noted my discomfort, for as I ducked below the carriage’s entry, one dirty foot desperately seeking for the step, Ashmore swept my legs out from under me and pulled me into his arms.

It shamed me that he was little more than a red and brown blur. My world had always been soft along the edges, courtesy primarily of the opium I had taken to consuming in quantity, but now I struggled to make sense of the color of his skin—pale, almost unhealthily so—and the look in his eye. I could do neither.

Where I blinked blearily, I saw blue eyes tinted with madness, and heard the voice of a woman who called my name. They filled my thoughts so completely that I might have sworn that Ashmore’s eyes gleamed like the twin hearts of a flame burning azure bright; but no, these were the eyes of the madman Micajah Hawke had become, ere his attempts to subjugate my will, and they haunted my waking dreams. The opium fantasies that filled my sleep had only grown in strength—until I could no longer be sure of what I dreamt and what played out across the canvas of my waking reality.

In the shadow of the leering house before me, such dreams were preferable to the truth of the world about me. I found reality to be a miserly master, empty of bliss or succor, and the estate looming over me to be the harbinger of fear.

I was miserable.

Ashmore’s heartbeat beneath my ear was steady, a strong beat that played at odds with the sluggish throb of my own. Rain peppered my skin, until he reached inside the carriage and scooped the ermine from the floor where it had fallen.

My fingers did not grasp with any strength, but curled listlessly against the damp fabric of his greatcoat, tucked beneath the covering he pulled tight about me. My eyelashes drifted down once more.

Sleep. I just wanted to sleep.

Like a good girl.

“Will that be all, sir?” asked a gruff, unfamiliar voice.

“That will,” Ashmore confirmed. The rumble of his pleasing tenor through his chest snapped my eyes once more wide, as if a physical hand had shaken me. His was not the voice of a showman, but it bore an uncanny effect on my senses. Nestled deep within polite, if brusque, tones, I fancied I heard a roar. “See to the horses and be on your way.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Wait,” I croaked, my throat rusted through by disuse.

Neither man cared to listen—or if they did, they made no sound to acknowledge me. I strained against the arms of the man who carried me, but his restraint did not soften and the shapeless figure I took to be his driver did not turn to see my struggle.

“Be still,” Ashmore told me, his tone even but not wholly kind. Not at all like the gentle reassurance he’d given when first I’d woken in that carriage—and in his care.

Or had I imagined that?

I tipped my head up, but the world seemed inclined to tilt with me, and I closed my eyes as a fierce ache seized my head and throat. “Please,” I whispered. “More. It hurts.”

“I know.” Footsteps crunched against harsh ground. “It will the more, soon enough.”

I couldn’t grasp the intent of such words, not wholly, but something must have forced its way through the too-bright haze my world had become. Suddenly, I trembled; an unwilling tremor that would not stop. I looked up, stared wide-eyed and fearful at the looming structure that grinned with such skeletal glee, and I cowered.

The grip about my shoulders and knees tightened. “You won’t thank me, before this is done.”

“Let me loose.” Even to my own ears, it sounded weak as a kitten’s starving mewling.

“I will not.”

In the gloom afforded me, I saw little more than the angle of his jaw, gilded by a darker corona of whiskers nearly the same shade as my own loose hair, and the autocratic flare of nostrils as he used his shoulder to brace the door wide.

The musty smell of disuse poured from the interior.

My trembling turned to violent shuddering. “I don’t want to,” I managed between chattering teeth. “I don’t want to be here.”

“Hush.”

I found the energy to drive my elbow into his chest. “Let me go!”

He cursed, more a gasp than a fully formed uncivility, and his arm at my shoulders slipped down to gouge into the bandaged injury I suffered. This stole the blood from my face, dragged vicious agony across my senses as the foyer—little more than a gray haze in front of me—wobbled.

I shrieked, flailing madly. There was no thought, no intellect guiding my actions. Only raw feeling filled me, and the overwhelming sense that I was one precarious step from being devoured by the blackened depths of the abandoned manse.

Ashmore nearly dropped me, but for his quick thinking. Letting my legs fall, he seized my upper arms and steadied me half upon my feet and half against his own body. The ermine caught between us. The grip at my flesh bruised.

A much fainter concern beneath the torment of my wound, and the vicious need for the balm of opium to ease the pain.

“It would be better, Miss St. Croix, if you did not fight me,” he gritted out over my head. He paid no mind to my gasping efforts, did not allow me any opportunity to steady myself. He pulled me deeper into the foyer, leaving the comfort of the wrap behind us on the floor. I glimpsed wide stairs curving at either end of the room, reaching up to a landing whose corridors were shrouded in shadow.

Within those black corners, my mind painted visions of leering faces.

I twisted in his grip, only hurting myself all the more. “I won’t stay here. You can’t keep me!”

“I can.” With a move I did not wholly understand, he simply turned my arm just so and I was once more airborne—yet this time, over his shoulder as if I were no more than a sack of flour. My hair fell over my face, obscuring my sight in a tangled curtain of red. “And I will,” he continued, heedless of my strangled screams. “It is long past time you were dried out.”

A clap of thunder punctuated these chilling words. As the walls shuddered beneath such stormy rage above, I found myself gripping the man’s coat, all the breath driven from me in abject fear. “I won’t.”

“You will,” he countered. “Mrs. Fortescue should have done this years ago.”

The mention of my erstwhile chaperone’s name did not drive splinters through my heart, as it once had. Frances Fortescue, a stern widow from the outset, had been first my governess and then my chaperone. It was to her credit, and that of my staff, that I had turned from a hellspawn of thirteen to the well-educated miss I’d become. That she had not cared for the scientific interest I displayed was not her fault—Fanny had always been a lady of the ages, and it was not at all the thing for a young miss to be enmeshed in such tools of men.

To think that she had been so proud when I’d agreed to marry the earl that asked.

My newly acquired husband, Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, Earl Compton, had been slain on our wedding night, and his mother, a marchioness who had despised my very existence, had dismissed all of my staff and imprisoned me in the trappings of a widow for eternity.

All these things had conspired to send me into the fog, into the dangerous streets to hunt the murdering man who styled himself my rival.

I did not know what became of Fanny, or Booth and his wife. I did not wish to know. I wanted only to be left to my own devices—to take the opium I craved, to soothe the ache buried in my heart and mind.

I did not want to think of all I had lost.

What a cruel man was he that Ashmore did not care?

What little I saw of the estate as he strode through it did not bode well for my captivity. Much was dark, given to looming shadow and suspicious noises—deep-seated creaking from the interior, thunder rattling through the rafters, and over it all, the echoes of my panting terror.

I hammered at his back, his thighs, all I could reach, kicked my legs until he banded an arm around them. I screamed.

“I will see you hanged for this,” I raged, shrill and ragged. “I will see the flesh peeled from your bones, drawn and quartered like a common traitor, you…you…” I had no vile enough names, and the cant I’d learned in the streets abandoned me.

I did not frighten him. Silent and unbending, he carried me into a small room—as dark inside as the man’s blackened soul, I swore it.

He pulled me from his shoulder, his grip as unshakable as hammered iron. One sleeve of my blouse had come loose, and it slid down my arm so far as to leave a portion of my breast bare to his scrutiny.

I was too angry for shame.

He was too determined to care—if he were even man enough to notice the curve of pale flesh. I had no chance to find my feet before I was deposited on a narrow bed. “Stay here, bloodthirsty thing that you are, and I won’t tie you to the bed posts.”

I bared my teeth, elbowing up so that I was no longer quite so supine. The advantage this afforded me was minimal, at best. He glowered down at me, an aristocratic blur with dark, empty eyes, and I snarled my fury—what it was I latched onto to mask my fear. “You are nothing but a demon.”

To my surprise, he laughed. “You may be right,” he said, somehow amused by me. I couldn’t possibly see why. “Until you are sober enough to carry a reasonable discourse on the subject, this will be your home.”

“I hate this house,” I spat. I could not explain why, I simply did. It was large, dark, empty. It echoed. I had seen no staff, no lights. What little I’d caught of the furnishings appeared heavy and menacing.

There was no opium to be had here.

He brushed the damp off his greatcoat as flashes of lightning burned through the drapes, painting his features in demonic white and blue. The accompanying crack of thunder rattled the walls.

I gasped, drawing myself into as tight a ball as my trembling limbs allowed. “Don’t leave me here.”

“Be strong,” he advised, and turned away. “You will be afforded laudanum for your wound at intervals decided by me.”

I locked my groan behind my teeth, glaring at his shadowed silhouette.

“That allotment will start in small measures and it will shrink to nothing, am I clear?”

My throat dried. My heart, sluggish and tired, launched into a patter so fast, it drew the last of the blood from my head.

The walls abruptly closed in. “No.”

He did not acknowledge my whisper. “You may scream, rage and insult all you like, but there are only two of us here,” he continued, as matter-of-factly as if he spoke of the storm beyond the flashing window. “Threaten, beg or bargain, it will not sway your fate. You will be dried out, Miss St. Croix.”

I seized the edge of the bed, struggled to rise—the wounded flesh I fought to ignore twisted like fire. I was forced to let go, already sobbing from an effort that had not wholly begun. “Please,” I begged, hating that I’d already capitulated to pleading. “Please, it’ll do me in for good, you know it will.”

His head tilted as he turned to regard me, a bit of his bright red hair glinting in what little light afforded around the drapes. “I doubt it,” he said, but thoughtfully, as if contemplating the possibility. “You seem a resolute sort.”

“I’m not,” I said quickly, hoping to gain enough concern that he might lengthen the allotment. Give me more, at more regular intervals. Anything; I would take, do, say anything. “I’m weakened by this wound and I’ll like as not expire.”

I’d heard of men whose opium use had grown so acute that taking it away killed them—simply forced the body to cease. I was not sure if I would be one, but I would do much to ensure I never found out.

“Your stock is robust,” Ashmore told me, shrugging. “At the very least, it shall be an enlightening experiment.”

He began to depart, to leave me in this cramped room. Sweat bloomed over my flesh, and I seized the front of my blouse. “I’ll give you anything you like,” I called.

He stopped, suddenly still; a frozen statue trapped within the frame of the door that was my only way out.

With shaking hands, I pulled the edge of my thin white shirt down, until a button popped and the thin disc clattered to the hard wooden floor. The air was cold on my exposed breast; the sweat slicking my skin clammy.

If he only turned to see what I offered, if he only—

Ashmore eased out a long, low sigh. “Don’t,” he said softly, and did not turn. The door closed behind him.

As the tumblers clicked into place, I fisted my hands against my bared chest and screamed my rage.

* * *

Anger is not a finite resource, and it can be overwhelmed. The days passed. The nights crawled. Every small rebellion I could dream of, Ashmore undid—patiently, silently, neither engaging my taunts nor acknowledging my efforts.

When I attempted to form a rope from my sheets, thinking to escape from the window, he stripped the bed and left me only with two thick blankets I could not tear, no matter how hard I gnawed and wrenched at the fibers. When he found me testing the window casement, I opened the curtains not long after to find him upon a ladder, locking the shutters in place.

Day and night turned to nothing more than a faint gray ream around heavy drapes, and my thoughts turned ever inward.

As my allotment of laudanum lessened, my dreams—those I saw in fitful bouts of slumber and those that haunted my waking moments—worsened. In them, I witnessed all over again the final betrayal of the Midnight Menagerie’s ringmaster. Though he was, in the end, only a puppet for the Karakash Veil that owned him, it was him I blamed for all the wrongs done me. In my nightmares, I stood again on that stage, laid out before the iniquitous stares of London’s particular elite while Hawke carved portions of my flesh for them to snarl and claw over.

I pleaded for him to have a care with my heart, and he tore it from my chest while his eyes burned in unholy blue delight.

These dreams grew so violent that I no longer slept by choice.

I refused to eat, determined to starve myself until he gave in, and Ashmore—the heartless monster—simply tied me to the bed and forced a foul-tasting liquid down my throat. I had not the strength of will to choke on it on purpose—afraid that if I did, if I died from the rebellion, I would never gain laudanum again.

He took from the room all that would provide a danger to myself or a weapon at hand, until I was left with nothing more than a privy pot, the bed I did not sleep on, and a nightshift I couldn’t bear to wear. Every brush of the material felt like nettles against my skin.

Weeks turned into an eternity of agony, of fevered dreams that did not wait for exhaustion to claim me but came at all hours. I hurt, but no longer did it stem from the wound healing rather more quickly than it should. I hurt in other ways; in awful, bone-deep ways that had nothing to do with flesh wounds or heartbreak and everything to do with a craving so sharp as to devour all that I was and leave me sobbing and without pride. The base of my back ached fiercely, where it seemed as if I were repeatedly kicked throughout all hours. I could not lay still, tossing and turning, sweating from the need of the laudanum my demon captor had slowly, methodically lowered to a mere sip.

When I resorted to throwing the privy pot at him when he deigned to check on me, that, too, was taken.

I have no clear memory of what came after. Only tangled skeins of memory too horrific to examine.

Every hour became that of unimaginable torment. I did not bathe, I did not brush my matted, tangled hair. I did not clean my teeth nor eat or drink with any regularity. I screamed until my voice was raw and begged until I forgot how to speak. I threatened unspeakable evils, hammered at the walls, the door, the floor until I was sure that he would hear my pleas no matter where in the bloody place he hid.

I dredged up the most vile acts, the most debasing, the most wanton and wicked I’d ever heard the birds in London low speak of, and I offered them to him.

I dreamed. I hallucinated. Tangled red threads wrapped about my wrists and turned into a snarled mass of my own dark red hair, and all the while, a woman’s voice sang a lullaby so sweet that I wanted to claw at my ears until they were naught more than bloody stumps.

Perhaps I tried. I don’t recall. There came a point where I was tied to the bedposts, at first like a tiger—straining at my bonds, tearing at any who came near, be they flesh, demon or ghost—and then like a broken thing, beaten and abandoned.

I sobbed until I had no tears left, until my lungs felt filled with water.

I soiled myself, the floor, even the bed. I had no care for such matters. I was cleaned, sometimes by a version of Ashmore whose features were twisted by hellish design and other times by monsters dredged from the depths of my blackest nightmares, and I could feel no shame, no fear.

Sometimes I heard the baying of hounds, creatures sent from hell to drag me to eternal punishment.

At times, I thought I felt the touch of my father—kind gray eyes and gentle voice as he called me poppet once more. I had spent the entirety of my life ignorant of my father’s affection, imagining what my mother might have said to me as mothers say to their daughters. I hallucinated these things without obstacle or end, and where I desperately craved succor, the mirage I entertained would turn to a hauntingly beautiful aspect of Micajah Hawke. His callused hands bruised against my bare skin, and effortless demand turned his voice to an unbearable burden. Familiarity turned to brutal betrayal and it was not Hawke but a thing that wore his skin that poked and prodded me, jeered and took such pleasure in my degradation.

They all circled me in this corpse of a house. Those who had died at my feet, those who were murdered, those I’d hunted.

Those I had killed, whose lives ended because of me.

Those I’d betrayed.

This nightmare I lived was the worst I could ever have imagined, and even that wasn’t enough to keep me from my need. I begged the ghosts who haunted me to fetch the Chinese tar.

Dead as they were, without material form—without the faculties for mercy, for my failures had denied them even that—they did not heed my pleas.

Give in to me.

What sweet voice counseled this, I had no functions by which to know. I simply heard.

Driven beyond all expectations of endurance, I obeyed.

Chapter Two

I awoke slowly, if waking is at all what I did. I could no longer tell the difference.

The room was exactly as I remembered it, but it always was upon waking—it never changed, from one nightmare to the next, until the ghosts that haunted me deemed it time. Then, it would take shape through some bile-inducing means—running like mercury in rivulets, collapsing in on itself until I was convinced I would be caught between the walls, splintering until every sharp point pierced my ruined flesh.

I stared at the ceiling, waiting for its pale, empty form to take some kind of shape.

It did not.

I had been untied, this time, and the knots taken away. When, for what reason, I had no clue to discern. I did not move. I stared, empty, aching.

I did not want to be here.

Not here, as in this house—in the company of a demon whose delight for my torment would never end—but here. Anywhere. I no longer had the will to continue on.

Staring unblinking at the empty canvas of the shadowed ceiling, I wanted to die.

Anything was better than the want for this thing I could not have.

Had I been anything but selfish, I could have drawn upon any number of reasons to excuse my thoughts, as if by doing so I could rationalize the want for death. There was so much to choose from—each tragedy alone more than enough cause for such despair, and unbearable all together.

This curse overshadowing my existence began with an obsession; my father’s for my mother. Abraham St. Croix had been a gifted doctor of some repute, touched by more than a hint of genius in his profession. My mother was a Society woman above his station—a great beauty, by all accounts, so charming in all things that her unfashionable coloring could be excused by all who cherished her.

I had her coloring—the bold auburn hair more suited to opera singers and actresses—but none of her social graces. My father’s blood gifted me with an intellect that would not be quelled by mindless woman’s work.

I had no memory of the laboratory accident that left me an orphan, nor of the orphanage that took me in. Somewhere in Scotland, where my father’s estate burned down, I was placed with other children and given Godfrey’s cordial—a bit of opium and treacle used to calm children to rather great effect.

So did the death of my parents lead to the first taste of the balm I would cling to for the rest of my life; this wretched, worthless life.

When I was of walking age, I was purchased by Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Curiosity Show. The good monsieur was a cunning man who knew the benefit of bribery, and he treated us all to opium in some form or another—as long as we obeyed that what we were told, and skilled enough to accomplish his demands.

I became a proficient sneakthief, a pocket-fogler of great skill. To avoid the flesh auctions, I made myself useful in other ways—including taking on the dangers of his circus shows.

Much of that time remained lost to a memory clouded by opium smoke and tar. Instinct assured me that it was not kind, and my great fear of the circus rings continued long after I ceased attending them.

Ashmore, my father’s executor, had dispatched men to locate his misplaced ward, but by the time his barristers found me, I was a criminal thirteen years old and quite gone on the opium I was given. If they had tried to dry me out, I did not remember, and it did not take.

Fanny had done her best by me, and for seven years, I’d lived the life of a well-to-do heiress, to inherit my father’s estate upon my twenty-first birthday.

Where, then, had I gone so wrong?

I couldn’t bear the weight of such a question. If I followed it, if I pulled apart my choices and studied each with the clinical scrutiny of the scientist I’d always claimed I was, I might see that choosing to become a collector at fifteen years of age was the birth of my undoing.

I took a breath, but it was not a deep one. The very act dragged painful tremors from within me. I felt as if a great hand forced me into the bed, pushing me down though I had no interest in fighting the efforts. It was as if I’d been remade of parchment, with no clear memory of any time I’d ever been strong—or so needy.

I did not make a noise. I lacked the will to try. I could not even summon tears, for I had precious little fluids within me to make them.

I was hollow, hurting. No longer myself. I was not a collector, not an heiress. I had no parents to call me daughter, no lover for all I had allowed myself to be used as one. I had abandoned those who considered me a friend.

I had nothing left by which to measure my existence.

Slowly, with great effort, I turned my head—it seemed inordinately heavy, awkward and filled with leaden weight. The room was near pitch dark, or perhaps I had simply forgotten what it was to see. What little light peered through the seam around the window was the faintest gray, leaving the room plunged in shadow thick as treacle and clinging to all.

As I lifted one hand, it seemed weighted by the same heaviness as that what filled my head. I dragged it over my chest, thought to measure my heartbeat, but I felt nothing but paper-dry skin and edged bone beneath. My tongue was swollen, my throat raw.

I feared swallowing the sore-ridden flesh my tongue had become—and then wondered if it might not be preferable.

A failure, even that. I could not summon enough saliva to swallow at all.

My nightshirt had bunched over my ribs, a ream of sweat-creased cotton and I patted it absently, awkwardly until I remembered what it was.

A way out of this hell.

Of all the factors Ashmore had taken into his torturous account, he had failed to consider one: this bit of cloth. It was not the finest—no need, when I’d like as not ruin the weave with my hapless behavior—but it was thinner than the blankets I’d kicked to the side.

The effort to sit proved even more difficult than I expected. I shook violently as I forced my body to bend—cramps seized at my insides as though the very act of motion was enough to force my organs to erupt, one by one. Sitting should not have been so difficult, yet it to took an eternity.

When I thought myself close enough to the goal, I paused for breath.

The room tilted, a tremor that could have been my imagination—or simply a lack of blood flow to my head. In the corner, a shadow shifted.

An icy balm of dread turned my clammy skin to something bitterly painful.

“Who’s there?” I tried to say, but I could barely wrap the words around my engorged tongue.

It didn’t matter. There was no one to answer me, simply more nightmares—more hallucinations to lay out for me in great detail all the ways I had disappointed those I had held most dear. The eyes I sensed staring from the darkness were my own conjurings, my own failures.

I would not fail this time.

Shuddering from my own efforts, from a lingering fear that would not leave its bitter claws from me, I struggled to sit higher on the bed—to rest my back upon the frame. The wood hurt when it touched my skin.

My eyes skittered often to that black corner as I maneuvered into place. I half-expected a fearsome thing of teeth and all too familiar features to storm from the dark, fall upon me and rend me limb from limb.

Or perhaps a haunting voice from beyond the grave, to whisper all the ways I was meant to be loved.

Loved.

The word scored a deeper terror than any shadows could.

In one night, I’d killed two men deep within the devil-thick fog of Whitechapel’s railyard; one had claimed to love me. He was the second man to ever do so, and the second to die for it.

With violent determination, I pulled and struggled and tore at the nightdress until it was gathered at my throat. The bed frame grated, worn joints peppering the empty room with echoed whispers of my own demons. I twisted, the mattress shifted.

A creak of floorboards, or perhaps settling walls deep within the house that was my prison, broke through my resolve. I froze, my gaze once more turning to that dark corner from whence I imagined the sound came. When no shape filled it, I turned my attentions to another.

Neither disgorged whatever terrors I summoned in my nightmarish fancies.

Yet I swore that I remained watched. Measured.

This house choked me. The room stifled me. In its cruel grasp, I could not escape the truth of my existence, and it was that I would forever be found wanting.

I reached behind me to find the ornate newel protruding from the bedpost, its top a head higher than mine and carved like a fleur de lis.

The house groaned, a measured sound that could be a heavy tread upon old boards but seemed to me like encouragement within its discontent. In this moment, in this intention, I would do what I had never before contemplated while in my right mind.

That I was not in my right mind did not matter. I would redress the wrong of blood with the tainted blood I carried.

The manse taunted me; the creaking jeers seemed closer, sharper. Something deep in the shadows rasped, a scrape of wood upon wood.

Was I alone?

Was I ever?

When the ghosts that haunted me did so wearing the faces of those I had loved, those I had never imagined loved me to such distraction that it painted my world in all the grotesque colors of murder.

In this empty house, with its hungry shadows, something watched.

Shuddering, panic crawling within my fragile skin, I looped the ends of my nightshirt over the carved prong and closed my eyes.

Ashmore was an awful thing, a demon with no compassion. He would never give me the bliss I wanted—would never allow me to be free the way I chose. Regardless of his thoughts, of Society’s demands, of all the ghosts that would not let me be, I demanded the ability to choose my own path.

That I craved it to be one of Chinese tar was my business.

Mine.

Without the ameliorating balm of opium, I would never be anything more than this: feeble, meaningless. Hollow as a glass jar lacking in all but empty air.

Without it, I would be forced to remember all that I desperately craved to forget.

My lord husband’s face, with his steely green scrutiny and gentle encouragement. Compton was too good a man to ever lower himself for the likes of me, and it was this burden of genteel love that cost him his life.

Fanny’s approving smile, rare enough that I’d come to enjoy the sight, no longer burned in my memory. Zylphia’s ordeal, the whip scars upon her back placed there because of her trust in me—a trust I’d betrayed—weighed upon me. I knew only that she had fought in that final confrontation between Hawke and myself. I did not know if she survived; I did not care to know, for such knowledge would only cause me greater pain.

I was so tired of feeling pain. My heart twisted.

As if I’d unleashed them all, they came at me from the dark—memories I had not the strength of will to muffle. Hawke’s challenge, a swath of blue carved down the middle of his brown eyes, and the flame that filled them when he touched my skin. I had given myself to him, the culmination of years of friction between us, and he had turned me out of his bed immediately after.

Black Lily’s scarred face, her pretty features flayed open by a rival collector as a message. For me, no one else. And because she was a friend, she was marked for death by the Veil I had thought to outwit in my arrogance.

I’d ruined her. Just as I had turned my back on Zylphia, who had been nothing less than a friend to me.

Just as I had killed Compton—as sure as if I’d pulled the blade on him myself.

I recalled the hatred of Lady Northampton, Compton’s mother, and the grief she must have experienced when her son was murdered on his wedding day.

His blood had coated my hands, saturated my gown as Compton died in that filthy, choking fog of London low. I could feel it now, gushing too hot against my skin as his heart pumped it all out into my hands.

The sweet tooth, a rival collector, had spit vile fury from the black.

Weep for the widowed bride!

The words hissed at me now, lost in the black of this hell in which I lingered. Though he had kept his face hidden from me, I knew them now as the hateful legacy of my closest friend.

My dearest Teddy. Although he had greater prospects as the third son of a viscount, he had never abandoned me to Society’s machinations. We’d debated every Wednesday over the science periodicals, argued good-naturedly over facts and hypotheticals. Though I had never told him of my secondary life as a collector, he had never told me of his. Our paths unwittingly collided, and while I did not recognize him, he identified me.

I was meant to love you.

Such a refrain he’d whispered in my ear, so much sentiment from the mask of a murderer.

I had never once dreamed that Teddy might love me; we were only ever friends. Was it this, then, that drove him to become the sweet tooth, whose delight in assassinations drove him to murder the midnight sweets for coin?

Or had that been me, as well? Had I made him? My ignorance of his affections surely drove him to such lengths, for my obsessions lingered below London’s thick and foul-smelling fog, where the collections were plentiful and coin easy to accrue.

Was Teddy’s undoing my fault?

Would I leave nothing but tragedy and misery behind me—a ghastly wake of blood?

I clutched at the blanket beneath me, its thick nap gouging into my fingers as if it were made of knives.

No opium to ease the pain; no smoke to forget within.

This was not the world I chose to live in.

On a broken sob, I leaned out over the edge of the bed, felt the fabric tighten at my neck. My chest seized, my stomach clenched—a painful thing that forced a hoarse cry from me. Too weak to do anything else, I allowed my weight to pull me over the side.

No! A denial that screamed where there was nothing to scream with. It came in the voice of a woman, but it might have been my own.

The buttons at my throat snapped taut. The bed jerked, and held.

As my body spasmed, an awful din crashed through the silence, rending the quiet into tatters. Perhaps it was my body as my legs hit the floor. Perhaps it just seemed louder, seemed to shake the very walls, because of the awful pressure filling my head.

I jerked against the constraint—some greater, deeply rooted instinct forcing my leaden limbs to comply—but it was too late. The cotton stretched, seams tore as my neck bent; my head slammed against the bedpost, and all oxygen fled my lungs.

A figure loomed from within my mottled sight.

Death, it seemed, would come personally for me.

Chapter Three

Where one wound ended and the next began was not a distinction I could fathom. All I knew was that I hurt, from forehead to heels and deeper still—an awful pressure within me, as if an infection festered and swelled.

At first, I drowned in a tide of unrelenting, crushing disappointment—what use was I? I could not even end my own life with any degree of success.

Yet as my lashes flickered, as my sight struggled to turn the blinding array of light and color and shapes into something I could recognize, a spark of something else came to settle beneath my misery.

Relief.

I awoke upon my back, cradled in a soft bed with no telltale sign of struggle. The soft ruffles of a nightdress once more enfolded me, the coverlet tucked under my chin and the pillows downy beneath my head.

I blinked dry, crusted eyes, torn somewhere between deeply rooted confusion and a certainty that I was not where I was supposed to be.

The room was lit in soft grays, courtesy of the daylight streaming in through a portion of the single window. The curtains were violet, corded by green and gold, and the furnishings I could see from my supine position appeared both delicate and finely made.

This was not my prison.

Aching, sapped of all strength, I turned my head.

A man reclined in an arm chair in the corner.

No ghost—he was tall of form, trim of figure. His long legs, encased in brown trousers, stretched out towards me, crossed at the ankle and exposing his plain footwear. Perched as he was on the very edge of the seat, it allowed his shoulders to curve into the back rest, his chin practically upon his chest and his neck held at a painful angle. He wore no tie of any kind, his shirtsleeves bared.

In the muted daylight, the hair left to stand out in wild corona became a strange red, too bold to be real and too flat in tone to reveal the glints of copper and flame I instinctively knew would be buried within. His features, already pale, turned waxy. The somewhat gaunt shape of his jaw and cheekbones were softened by a mat of dark red whiskers, unkempt enough that I suspected he had not shaved for some days. His lips, softer than expected amidst all the garnet shadow framing them, were delicately parted in sleep.

Mr. Oliver Ashmore slept the exhausted slumber of a man pushed beyond all reason.

He did not look at all like the demon I had long thought him.

That he’d pulled me from the dark room, unwound the last vestiges of my courage from around my throat and carried me here should have made me angry, but I could not will such exhausting emotions into flame.

He had found me in my darkest hour, and rather than let me die, he’d obviously spent untold hours by my bedside—lest I try again, or perhaps for another reason I couldn’t imagine.

Why? What was it to him?

I turned my face again to the ceiling, but its delicate arch told me nothing. I could barely force whole thoughts through my mind; I felt as if I could sleep forever, would I but close my eyes.

Eternity in slumber, as near enough to death as to walk hand in hand with the ghosts I could not escape.

Unbidden, entirely without warning, my eyes burned. I closed them.

What right had I to weep?

I was living, dreadful though the circumstance was, and I would continue to do so, as long as that wretched man was present.

I could not hide from the truth. As I formed the acerbic thought, a tear slipped from under my tightly seamed lashes. I took in a breath that shook.

Quietly, so as not to wake the man in the corner, I freed a hand from beneath the heavy coverlet and pressed it to my mouth. I had made no sound, I was not even sure I could, yet I could not stop the air from shuddering out of my lungs.

I missed them.

It was a truth I could no longer avoid. I missed Compton, with his infuriating desire to take care of me and his shrewd mind to see the woman I wanted to be. I missed the way he would take my hand on the dance floor, the devil to the Society what watched and judged.

I summoned a mental image of the man who had been my husband for less than a day’s time, yet it was not sandy hair and golden mustache I saw but the black stain of spilled ink and mis-matched eyes. Hawke.

More tears beaded under my lashes; they slipped over my temple to soak into my hair. My nose filled, throat aching with it, and I sniffed as quietly as I could manage.

Micajah Hawke was no saint, no gentle soul, but that I’d given him what little virtue I had was no empty gesture. Long had I revered the dark charms that were his temptation—his gift, an effortless authority that seduced all who paid to enter his Menagerie. He’d demanded everything of me, and I could only stop fighting for one moment—a breathless and forbidden moment taken so much more easily than it was offered. I’d fought that devil-born attraction he wielded so well, never sure where his allegiances truly lay. To be cast aside by him so readily when I had only just chosen to trust hurt as deeply as any wound.

And for all that, I missed his autocratic impatience and the way he could raise an eyebrow with such eloquence. I had never mastered that art.

They came for me again, one after the other—not ghosts, but the memories I was so desperate to forget. Zylphia’s exotic heritage turning her impish grin to something wicked and delightful, Betsy’s sweet calf eyes imploring me with such concern.

The tears poured down my cheeks, and I turned my face into the pillow, curling up onto my side as if it would protect me from a beating I delivered upon myself.

I could easily recall the arrhythmic step-thunk-step of Booth’s approach; my butler’s stride had always been hampered by the ornate brass prosthetic that replaced his war-claimed limb. I ached so badly to hear that echo in the halls once more; so much that I held my breath, my face pressed into the damp pillow and ears straining to hear the cue.

It did not come. Only the empty, throbbing silence of this godforsaken prison.

The sob broke from me, swallowed by the bedclothes.

As if she were there beside me, I heard Fanny’s whispered comfort when the Northamptons had delivered a cut direct. My poor child. As if it were only yesterday, I could all but feel Teddy’s arm at my elbow, escorting me through the crush to the cold air outside, determined to ensure that the peerage knew I’d retained at least one ally.

God help me. Teddy.

I could no longer hold the ragged edges of my control together. I wept into my pillow, sobbing with each gasped breath, my fragile body bowing with it as I finally, finally wept.

For Compton, who I had so terribly let down; for my staff that I had abandoned. I cried scalding tears for the abominable way I’d treated Zylphia.

I screamed for the knowledge that I’d never know which was the mask and which the real face of my beloved friend. The painful lack of Teddy’s company had become a hole in my life that I would forever feel.

Strong hands eased under my shoulders, splayed across my lower back as I was lifted from the mattress. The coverlet fell back, and I could not see through my tears as I sobbed for all the pieces of my heart, shattered and broken behind me.

Gentle fingers swept under my hair, rested upon my nape. I clung to the man I’d always called a demon, buried my face in his neck and wailed my misery without thought for ego or form.

“Best to let it all out now,” Ashmore said, his voice a soothing hymn in my ear. His cheek rested against my head, his arms firm around me as if he could alone fend off those ghosts I could not stop myself from dredging up.

My fingers curled into his shirt, and as he held my shuddering body—each sob tearing from me as if it violently ripped a layer of tainted flesh from an infected scar—I wept for the innocence I’d lost when I murdered a man with my own hands. I howled until I was gasping, for the husband I’d never allowed myself to mourn, the friend who had killed him. I keened for the years I’d lost to servitude and the choices I’d made since then.

And all the while, Ashmore held me against his heartbeat. Although his voice reverberated against my ear, I could not hear what it was he told me in my grief.

When I’d finally lost all thread of voice, when I had no more tears left to shed, I remained slumped against his shoulder—now quite damp from my fit. My eyes closed, too exhausted to feel more than a mild flicker of unease as he cradled my unresisting body in one arm and bent over the bed.

Laying me down as gently as if I were made of glass, he cupped my flushed cheek. “Sleep,” he said quietly, no less an order for all the sonorous melody of it seemed to engender in me great lassitude.

I wondered if he’d lay his lips against my brow—a paternal gesture I did not know I craved until it did not come.

The coverlet once more was tucked about my shoulders.

I made a small sound, a questioning rasp, and the hand smoothing the coverlet into place paused. His fingers brushed the side of my throat. “I’ll be here when you wake again,” he told me.

Perhaps it was enough—or I simply had no more energy with which to function.

I slept.

This time, when I dreamt, I danced to a woman’s lullaby, and crimson threads wrapped tight about my neck.

* * *

I was bored. More than bored. I had traveled so far beyond any definition of the word that I feared I’d invented an entirely new category of the affliction.

Some days had passed since waking from what should have been a final slumber, and while I was no longer in that abominable room with its shuttered windows, I was still confined to bed with precious little to while the hours away with.

“I’m bored,” I announced to my captor when he arrived with a tea and a meal I was not hungry for. I wasn’t hungry for much; a fact Ashmore ignored each time he brought in food. Three small meals, like clockwork. Whether the morning’s offering, dinner or supper, it had not changed—my stomach would not accept anything heavier than dry bread and a bit of dressing. Even that had been somewhat delicate a balance.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” replied said captor, lacking all sympathies for such an earnest declaration as I’d given.

I scowled. He did not.

Despite all my best efforts to impress upon him the wild imaginings I had long associated with the man, Ashmore steadfastly refused to sprout horns or breathe hellfire. I was hard-pressed to recall just why I thought him a terror for so many years, and did not like wondering if it were a matter of laudanum.

He regarded me without rancor, his expression one of maddening patience. “Have you read the books already?”

I had not. The books he’d acquired for me were not interesting—dry, dusty texts regarding such inane subjects as the mathematical processes of migratory birds. I would have preferred something far more intellectually stimulating. I would have especially enjoyed the penny dreadfuls Fanny occasionally turned a blind eye toward.

I wrinkled my nose.

He raised his dark red eyebrows, his eyes a hue reminiscent of a brown-eyed cat and the look within them nearly as critical. “What, then, do you propose?”

“I want to go out,” I said immediately.

“You cannot.”

And thus was the crux of my issue with the man.

Ashmore’s demeanor tended towards a detached gentility—as if I were an experiment for a scientific periodical, and his efforts to bring me food merely reminiscent of a need to water a particularly delicate plant. Although he had not shaved the lengthy whiskers from his jaw, his hair was somewhat more tamed than I’d remembered it being previous, swept back from his forehead like a guided flame. His rustic attire, while hardly the height of fashion, was worn with an easy confidence and without cravat or tie. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his shirtsleeves; a fact that would scandalize Fanny to no end, were she here to see her so very proper Mr. Ashmore.

I wish I’d recalled that his hair was so very red prior to this. It might have softened my initial impressions of him; after all, red was no more fashionable for gentlemen than it was for we unfortunate females born with such bold coloring.

When I attempted to dredge up earlier memories of the man, they tangled—those fears from my girlish nightmares and the gentleness with which he’d treated me after my disastrous attempt to take the life he’d sought to protect. From my muddled memories, I could recall only a sense of fearful presence and monstrous growling, though I might have dreamed the latter. My impressions stemmed from the few visits he ever made, wherein he returned to the Cheyne Walk home under cover of late night, and slept the days away from my frightened curiosity.

The rest—eyes that glowed like hot coals, a demonic rage and the smell of sulfur—surely must be victim of my own opium machinations.

I could not shake the belief that I had vilified my benefactor most terribly.

Ashmore left the tray beside me upon the bed, its warm bread and steaming tea telling me he’d only just made it fresh. “Once you are hale,” he said, “then we will revisit the subject.”

I said nothing, not even the courtesy of gratitude. All of my attempts at conversation fell stilted and short. I didn’t know how to treat him, how to address the man I had spent my youth fearing, only to learn that he was rather more decorous and patient than I had credited him.

Even this, a compromise that acknowledged my wants and promised a later opportunity to address them, was more than I had expected. Hawke would have categorically denied me, and Compton would have been much gentler with the same result.

Ashmore’s patience bothered me, if only because it undid the resentment I wanted to feel.

“Try to eat what you can,” he said. With a well-mannered bend, a stiff courtesy, he and his sharp eyes left me to my own devices.

I did not eat that meal, though the tea was welcome. I ignored the books I had no interest in, and stewed within the confines of my frustration.

I was not allowed knitting needles nor embroidery accouterments for fear of doing myself harm. I was not allowed paper and ink, simply because the nib of a writing instrument could be quite sharp.

I was not a fool. I knew what the attempt on my own life had cost me. I did not require Ashmore to explain his reasoning.

As I’d neither thrown anything nor attempted to do myself harm with what few items I was allowed, he had returned the privy pot—and a second, for those moments when what little food I attempted did not wish to linger. The hours where the need came upon me—sudden, angry, almost violent in intensity—I was denied every request to soften the want.

The room felt smaller than it was, the walls leaning inward with looming intensity.

I could not pace, for I had no strength. I could not focus. Such manic thoughts came upon me, and I would lay in my bed, ranting and raving at the ceiling as if it would debate my every point and give to me a reason to funnel such awful rage.

When night fell and a hush spread over the world, I struggled to remember why it was I should keep breathing.

As the darkest hours painted the room in shades of black and deepest gray, I imagined that the walls whispered. Shadows filled my room, thicker than simple darkness should be, and I feared smothering beneath their torturous weight. The house came to life in the night, swaying with the wind that howled across the moor, creaking wildly.

Bound to my bed by terror, I struggled to find a sense of self in all the wild fancies afflicting me. Filled with such agitated energies, I flung the covers from my bed. Somehow, despite my weakened state, I took long steps—not to the door, but to the window, where I twitched at the curtains and retraced the path.

I was wont to pace when I had no other recourse, a fact that caused Fanny such fear when she found me at my worst, yet I did not make it beyond two circuits before my debilitated limbs gave way. I fell to the floor in a pitiful mound of frothy white cloth and angry tears. The floorboards shifted beneath my weight, a jarring pain rippling up my hip and through my elbow as I sprawled—graceless and weak.

It did not take long before the door to my bedroom eased open, and light spilled over the tangled mess I had become.

Beneath the veil of my matted hair, I watched two stockinged feet pause beside me.

“Go on,” I snapped, squeezing my eyes shut. “Laugh.”

The golden tint behind my eyelids brightened as Ashmore placed the delicate lantern upon the floor. “I’ve no intention,” he said, in a tone so kind I was convinced I’d only imagined it. A hand curled around my left arm, the other sliding beneath the right and splaying over my shoulder. “Up you go, Miss St. Croix.”

That he did not refer to me as a countess was not a subject I was ready to brave—not yet, and most certainly not in these circumstances.

He lifted me all too easily; an observation having more to do with my fragile state of being than any admission of strength on his part. Ashmore was not a particularly hefty man, not at all like the bruisers in London’s gangs below the drift, but his understanding of mass was sound. I found myself not so much placed upon my feet as permitted to set my feet upon the floor, the bulk of my weight held against his own body.

I looked up, allowing my hands to rest on his shoulders. I assured myself that doing so would help him balance the burden that I had become, though even I, in my illness, understood that he did not struggle beneath my weight. The shirt he wore must have been neatly starched at one time, but felt soft and worn nearly thin beneath my hands. His collar was crooked, left unbuttoned and with no pressing.

His eyelashes were not overly long, but they glinted copper in the firelight, framing eyes that seemed endlessly deep—all too knowing for the apparent youth of his features. I might have thought him no more than thirty years of age, yet there was a worldliness about the man that I considered alternately engaging and disconcerting, as if his gaze should be trapped in the wrinkled and gaunt face of a man three times his age.

The hair at his jaw graduated from that uniquely fiery color of that atop his head to the more jewel red tones similar to my own. My fingers moved with no determination from me. They slid over his cheek, the length of his untended whiskers softer than I expected against my fingertips.

His eyes widened.

Mine mirrored the act, and I pulled my hand back so fast it thumped against my breastbone—a hollow sound that echoed between us.

“I-I’m terribly sorry.” The stuttering apology was mine, the embarrassment I felt clashing with the utter confusion of my gesture. What had I hoped to ascertain?

Ashmore’s surprised countenance quickly vanished; contained, perhaps, behind gentlemanly courtesy. “No need,” he assured me, shifting his grasp upon me so that his left forearm curved around the small of my back. That it tucked my hips more firmly into his did not seem to register with him. My face, however, turned hot. “You are in a phase not uncommon for returning intellect. Many in your very position have found their senses engaging once more in the most unusual subjects.”

My fingertips tingled, as though I’d touched a current of moderate electrical activity. I dragged them against my nightshift; this did not remove the sensation. “You mean to say that I am confirming the veracity of my surroundings?”

“Just so.” He looked down at my bare feet, then up over my shoulder to the bed. “Might I inquire as to what you were attempting?”

I latched upon that as if it were a veritable rope in my drowning state. “I’m bored,” I insisted. “I’ve these thoughts in my mind since waking and they’re a cacophony of…of madness. They will not let me sleep.”

He considered this, his lower lip moving somewhat as though he gnawed on the inside. It was a habit I was relieved to recognize, for it somehow humanized the man.

I desperately needed Mr. Oliver Ashmore to be human. Not that I suspected he wasn’t—such fantasies were better left to dreams I no longer wanted. Rather, I needed to see that he was not a perfect thing, neither the formed marble of Society’s demand nor the cold logic of a scientist. I was no longer afraid of him as I once was, such foolishness did not linger after the state in which he’d cared for me, yet there remained a great gap of understanding between the demon that I once thought I knew and the man who stood before me now.

Such flaws as gnawing on one’s own lip or chewing on a nail were fundamentally small, but necessary to my peace of mind.

Since waking, my recollection had slowly filled in the wispy fragments of my time in this house. I had come to feel such a deeply seated sense of vulnerability while in Ashmore’s company that I did not know what to do with myself. I could barely look him in the eye, could not see his hands without recalling how often he cared for me, could not hear his voice without remembering the night he held me in the dark and encouraged me to grieve.

He had seen me at my worst. How was one to move beyond such a hateful cast?

“Will you sleep now?” he asked me.

“No.” I did not require time to think of it. Sleeping invited dreams, and with them, the night terrors of years past. Without laudanum to ease my way, I dared not risk the attempt.

Or so I had always believed. That I still feared the night without a draught might have been habit, or simply the intoxication of the opium grains I craved.

“Can you?”

This time, I hesitated.

Ashmore looked down at me, his eyes a candlelit flicker reflected back in gold. “Is it fear that keeps you or want?”

My throat closed on the lie I had summoned; I looked away, beyond his shoulder to the door he’d left open.

He expelled a quiet breath. It stirred the hair tangled over my ears. “That, too, is reasonable,” he assured me, and eased my weight so that I stood more firmly upon my own legs. “Come. You need rest.”

Guiding me back to the bed took more effort than either of us was wholly prepared for, and as I leaned back among the pillows, a fresh bout of perspiration clung to my skin.

Ashmore deftly pulled the covers over my shoulders, his breath a little harder than when he’d started. “Regain your strength, and I’ll search for books of your own choice.”

“How would you know what I like?” I asked, not entirely without derision.

“I gather it isn’t mathematics,” he pointed out, dryly enough that a bit of my scorn faded under a surprising wash of humor. I nearly smiled, but when I locked eyes with the man and saw in his gaze all that I desperately did not want to concede, my amusement choked.

If I asked him why it was he cared for me now, I would be forced to ask why he had been at the Menagerie then. I would have to ask what it was that painted my memories of that event with such startling colors—red as blood and blue as azure silk, green and violet trapped in a bottle and setting all it touched ablaze.

My imagination, desperate for resolution, whispered magic when I dozed, but my intellect fought back; magic was simply a thing science had not yet acquired answers for.

I wanted those answers, truly I did.

It was only that I didn’t want them yet; a contrary stance that confounded me, because to get those answers, I would have to ask questions. When I asked all my questions, I would no doubt be forced to endure Ashmore’s, and I was not prepared to talk about all the things that led me to that moment in the Midnight Menagerie, when I was naught but a showpiece for a sadistic creature wearing a lover’s skin.

Once more, I looked away.

“Have I misunderstood?” asked Ashmore, puzzled.

“No,” I replied, a lame enough concession that deliberately did not explain my hesitation. “My interest in mathematics begins and ends with scientific formulae and measurements therein.”

“A scientist, Miss St. Croix?”

There was no mockery in the question, not as I’d come to expect from nearly all around me, but I could not meet his gaze again. “Once,” I said softly. I turned upon my side, my back to him as he stood by my bedside, and pillowed my cheek upon my arm.

Once, I had considered myself quite the scientific intellectual. Every week, I would devour the recent periodicals, convene with Teddy in my parlor and debate the merits of such theories as were written within. I called myself a scientist because that is what I chose to believe.

A fallacy, that. Hubris.

I was no better than a fool repeating a lie as though it would make it truth.

I had too long been bent upon my longing for the opium grains I needed to truly practice the scientific theory I so enjoyed.

A gentle press of fingers against my shoulder was all the farewell my erstwhile demon guardian afforded. The floorboards creaked with his passing, the lantern was picked up, and shadows danced like wicked sprites across the wall.

The door eased shut behind him.

This time when I cried, I managed to be quiet about it.

Chapter Four

“I am well aware that you are concerned,” I said crossly, watching Ashmore pick up the tray I had once again failed to eat much of. Half a bit of toast, dry and without the jam I so favored, was no honest meal, but I couldn’t stomach much else. “However, unless you’ve got laudanum just laying about—”

“Talking about it does your case no favors,” he cut in, always with the mild and brisk tones of a man certain he held the winning hand.

Blast him, but he did.

I let out a gusty sigh. Today, I’d managed to sit up on my own without too much struggle, braced by a veritable fortress of pillows at my back. I was much more cognizant of my environment, and also of myself. I had, much to my surprise, lost a great deal of weight. Beneath my borrowed nightshift, I was scandalized to know my ribs protruded rather more than they should.

I had always been taken to task for my unfashionable figure, retaining rather more thickness to my waist than even a corset could satisfactorily tame, but this was not the way in which I felt it should be addressed. Cleansing me of opium’s bitter hold had cost me much more than time.

I could not rectify this situation while I was so confined and forced to nibble on toast. I wanted my appetite back—and my freedoms. I folded my arms over my upraised knees, the coverlet making a tent in front of me.

“I’m trying to be reasonable,” I pointed out.

“Your judgment is less than sound.”

And a right bloody la de da to him. I pulled a face I hadn’t bothered with in years, sticking out my tongue and widening one eye in a caricature of frustration.

He merely raised an eyebrow, tray carried easily in his hands. Not so much a rattle of the dishes, even. I couldn’t decide if Fanny would love his concepts of masculine authority or be appalled at his determined lack of propriety in regards to his dress, his insistence on tending me himself, or his manners.

“All I’m asking is to visit the study where the books came from,” I said, giving up on the expression. My jaw thrust out. “I’m well aware there is one.”

“Yes, I can see that.” His tone was once more wry.

If he thought me so unintelligent as to remain ignorant of where the books he’d brought me had come from, well, I simply had nothing I could say about it. It was obvious that he’d acquired the new tomes from somewhere. He hadn’t left the manor, not that I’d been made aware, and certainly this estate was nowhere near a bookshop of any repute.

Each tome was a volume regarding various scientific matters, including one written by Angelicus Finch—inventor of the aether engine, among other various sundry implements not nearly so well-known. A rather rare first edition. This suggested a collection was close at hand.

I’d devoured most of the stack in a day and a half, reading by candlelight when I’d finally convinced my cautious captor that I had no intention of burning the estate down.

Not that the thought didn’t occur. I had not grown comfortable in this neglected house, and even my small room afforded me no respite from the pressing weight of the whole. Often, the house creaked and groaned around me, jarring me from my reading with my heart lobbed up in my throat and the certainty that I was being watched.

Burning the whole down might do the world a greater favor than letting it settle further into decay.

Yet as I’d stared into the heart of the small flame the first night, I had also considered that were it to be burning one’s self alive or quieting the ghosts of my memory by feeding my intellect with books, the latter would prove much less painful.

I was no longer in any hurry to prove or disprove the concept of an afterlife.

I glared at Ashmore. “If you don’t allow me the opportunity to do something, I shall go quite mad.”

“A state of mind you’ve only just abandoned.”

Oh, him and his clever wit. I wished he’d do us both a service and hurl himself off the nearest balcony. I seized a pillow in both hands and jammed my face against it, shouting my exasperation. Peppered as it was with no small amount of uncivilities, I quite expected the man to be gone by the time I was finished.

No such luck.

He waited, tray in hand, head cocked in a way that suggested I had become a thing to study. “You have quite the mouth on you.”

“I learned quickly,” I retorted. “Since my guardian didn’t see fit to stay at home and teach me.”

His eyebrows came together. “Are you suggesting that had I remained at your side, you would have not chosen the path you did?”

I glowered, holding the pillow to my chest, for all it afforded me no protection from such naked honesty. I couldn’t say for certain which path I might have taken, but the odds were not in his favor. Yet I wasn’t in the mood for fairness. “We will never know, will we?”

“No, we won’t,” he agreed. “You were a termagant when you were found, and time has only sharpened your edges.”

“Fine words from a man who couldn’t be bothered to look after the frightened little girl he plucked and abandoned,” I shot back, fingers gouging into the feathery padding I clutched.

“Plucked from the hell of a sideshow circus, you mean?” His words drove a shaft of icy fear into my chest; for all my regained wits, the memories of my childhood remained vague and shadowy. Impressions, not facts. Yet I still flinched at the word circus, and my skin crawled when I thought of the good Monsieur’s traveling show.

I feared the day his face crystalized within my memory. It would not be a good one.

“So you say.” I blew an errant bit of frizzy hair from my mouth, made sullen by the exchange. I was angry with him, but even I could not disassociate the feelings of my forced convalescence from the memories mired in laudanum. “Go away, demon.”

His eyes crinkled, but he did not laugh. “You are a mess, Miss St. Croix.”

“What do you expect?” I sniffed. “You’re no lady’s maid.”

“If I were to fetch for you tools to tend to your grooming, would that please you?”

My scowl transformed into open-mouthed disbelief. He met my stare directly, forcing another uncomfortable blush to my cheeks. I had often accused Hawke of looking at me with an intimacy he had not earned, but this from Ashmore was all the worse—for he had earned it in altogether different ways, and his inexplicable abstinence from using it like a weapon in our battle of wills confused me.

Not once had he pointed out what he had done—what he still did—for me.

A part of me wished he would, so that I might reject him and his unwanted efforts entirely.

I looked down at my knees. Although I still entertained a prickly fit of pique, I also recognized it as mulish and even thought it unwarranted. It made me feel like a child.

Honesty suited the topic better. “It would be nice to plait my hair out of my eyes,” I admitted.

“Right, then. We’ll see how you fare.” He left on that cryptic statement. The door closed behind him.

I sighed.

While I did want to fling the book I reached for against the door, that would deprive me of the chapter I intended to finish. Unwilling to spite myself to such lengths, I instead concentrated on the treatises detailing at length the various theorems that inspired Dr. Finch to formulate his conclusions on aether.

The first of the footsteps caught me by surprise. They thudded softly, as a man’s might when he walked without haste or concern.

I looked up, expecting to see Ashmore returning with proposed grooming items in mind, but the door remained still. Sunlight, brighter than I expected for a wintry day, streamed through the window, banishing all shadows to a muted gray haze. Ashmore had taken to leaving the curtains open, at my request. Whether day or night, I felt less smothered when I could look outside—even if the same dull heath was all that looked back at me.

The footsteps did not come again, so I returned to my book, then peered over the top of it, raising my eyebrows when the sound repeated. Dust motes swirled in the light, drifting aimlessly across the open expanse of the room. Across from the bed, a large vanity occupied the wall, its mirror covered with a sheet to protect its finish. That the vanity was in the bedroom and not in a separate dressing room or boudoir suggested that this was not an extravagant room, and certainly not the room of the lady of the house. An armoire draped with a lovely purple cloth brought out the colors in the valance.

All in all, hardly the sort of place in which one entertained ghostly mirages.

I frowned at the door, which did not open. “Ashmore?” Pitching my voice to carry, I lowered my book and added, “I’m quite decent.”

There was no response.

Perhaps I’d only heard the vestiges of Ashmore’s tread as he passed my door. Shrugging somewhat, I lifted my book once more—propping it upon my knees for balance—and found the place where I’d left off.

A floorboard creaked, near enough that I startled.

The book slid to the bed, its pages rustling before the binding slapped closed. I caught the leather facing with one hand, lest it bounce, and glowered fiercely at my empty quarters.

“If you’re playing a joke,” I warned, “I am of no mind for it.”

The still air swallowed my annoyance. The dust motes danced lazily.

Was I losing my mind? Certainly, I was lucid and intelligent enough to know that such things might happen for want of a draught. The need was never far away.

I swallowed hard.

Another creak of straining floorboards twisted my heartbeat into a frightened patter. I half-turned upon my sickbed, glared at the corner it seemed likeliest from. The room chilled around me, a wash of frigid air prickling across my clammy skin. A vein throbbed in my forehead; dull counter to my stuttering heart.

I was not alone. I had not been alone for a very long time, but I was supposed to be free of opium’s grip—and with it, the ghosts that I’d clung to in the haze. My mouth dried and my throat burned.

The need of the tar mingled with the fear I could not let go, and still the house groaned around me. I was already within its maw; what more did it demand of me?

I rubbed at my eyes with a trembling hand, sealing out the light, and then staring hard into the bedroom when I thought my senses clear.

All was still. Only the dust motes floated in serene disposition.

When no other sounds beyond that of the subtle noises of an old home made themselves apparent, I blew out a sigh.

This was nothing. I was only suffering from overly rattled senses, likely from remaining abed too long. Not entirely convinced by my own pragmatism, I reached for my book once more.

With no more warning than a faint clatter, the door creaked open.

Such was the manner in which Ashmore found me hefting my book in both hands, wild-eyed with no small amount of terror, and prepared to launch it at his head.

We both froze, he with a wide wooden case cradled in his arms and me with my book held over my shoulder in preparation for the lob.

Very slowly, an eyebrow crept upward.

My cheeks turned feverishly warm. Letting out the breath I held, I lowered the offending weapon while my arms, tested for the first time in weeks, trembled.

“I saw a mouse.” What a blatant lie.

“I had not taken you for a female given to hysterics over a mouse.” The tenor I’d grown accustomed to had not lost its dry characteristic.

That stung. “It surprised me,” I informed him stiffly. “I didn’t want it to climb up onto the bed.”

His gaze scoured the room’s floor. “Siristine is an old estate,” he finally said, features remarkably deadpan. “Most likely any mice about are more afraid of you than you are of them.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Then my premise stands.” Crossing the room, he laid the case at the foot of the bed. “Here are the things for your grooming.” He said the word like I was a purebred in need of a good brushing.

Given the state of my hair, he wasn’t all that far off. I left the book beside me and watched as he opened the case to reveal crimson velvet within. Laid out upon the plush material, four exquisite items caught the daylight and all but glowed in response.

Each piece was shaped of ivory and tipped with silver, carved with such superb scrollwork that I feared to touch it, lest I mar its surface. The brush’s bristles were clean and white, the comb folded within its case. A mirror with carved handle lay face-down upon the velvet, while a small glass jar with a matching ivory and silver lid held what appeared to be a hastily gathered array of pins.

“Oh.” It was a gasp. “So fine. I can use them?”

“Do.” Ashmore let go of the case, clasping his hands behind him in a gesture so reminiscent of that I’d seen Lord Compton do that pain stole my breath. One hand flattened against my chest, though it did nothing to ease the ache.

Would I spend my entire life remembering things like this? A shape of a smile, the gesture by a veritable stranger; would they be enough to send my thoughts back to those few moments with a man who had given his life for reasons unresolved?

The muscles of my face ached with the need to crumple. I fought the urge with all I had, frightened—inexplicably so—of the thought that Ashmore might see me weep.

Doing so in the haunting loneliness of night was one thing, but the day’s light was not a merciful host.

He cleared his throat. “Miss St. Croix?”

I wrenched my stare from the line of his hip, fumbling instead for the ivory pieces within the case. “To whom did these belong?” A fruitless attempt to draw his attention from my lapse.

“Are you unwell? You’ve gone quite pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said, then regretted my sharpness when silence fell like a shroud between us. Forcing my trembling fingers to still, I bent all my focus on the implements I would use to tame my long, snarled hair.

It did not take me all that long to learn what it was Ashmore meant for me to understand.

I had no more begun to work the comb through one portion of my hair than my arm started to shudder. Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to pick at the knots, to strike through the hank of stubborn hair until my elbow and shoulder sobbed for mercy and my muscles gave out altogether. So afflicted was I that I barely noted the harshness of my treatment against my scalp. Sweating, winded, I flung the offending utensil to the foot of the bed.

I had managed all of ten minutes, and that for sheer bloody-mindedness.

Ashmore had not moved, nor had his expression changed.

“Bollocks,” I snarled, burying my aching hands into my lap. When he said nothing, I dropped my head, blinking back tears of frustration and weakness. My hair, useless fall of matted red as it was, concealed my sight. “If all you’re going to do is gloat, leave me be.”

A glint of silver caught the light from between the knots in my hair. The whine of floorboards and accompanying click of his shoes did not vanish into the hall as I’d expected. Instead, they brought him closer.

The curtain of my hair swept aside beneath a gentle hand. “I am not here to gloat,” he told me, his fine voice all too serious. The man was bloody good at shedding my expectations; I’d swear he did so on purpose to spite me. He pulled my hair over my back, easing the heavy mass from my shoulders. “I only want you to understand that you are still recovering. It will take time, Miss St. Croix.”

I clenched my teeth lest I give in to the tears his kindness engendered. Of late, the desire to do so hovered all too near the surface. “I hate it. I am not weak.”

“No, you are not.” He lifted one portion of the matting and, much to my surprise, he worked the bristles through the ends. “If you were weak, you would be dead. Make no mistake about that.”

My chest squeezed. “Not for lack of trying,” I whispered.

The hair in his hand went taut, but delicately so. “True,” he allowed. I squeezed my eyes shut. “Had it not been for the wardrobe’s rotted foot, it would not have fallen, and I would not have heard the commotion. But for a bit of bad luck, you might have succeeded.” I let out a sigh.

It was an oddly comforting thing, to have my hair worked on so. Even if it was at the hands of the man who was once my guardian. His fingers delved into the hair at my nape, separating with great absorption. This task engrossed him, leaving us each alone in silent contemplation.

Then, a small inhalation. “Do you suppose,” he mused, “that your thoughts in that moment were genuine?”

“Of course not,” I said, more quickly than reassuring. I held my breath again, my fingers twining tightly together in my lap. “Rather,” I said on the slow exhale, “I think that they were, then. I would never try such a thing with ulterior motives for attention.”

The fingers at my nape stilled. Then, without comment, returned to the puzzle of my tangled hair.

“I have no real gift in such manipulations,” I added, watching the blood leave my knotted fingers. They turned white beneath my grip. “Fanny used to despair that I’d never garner more interest than a sour word from any would-be patrons.”

“Mrs. Fortescue is not entirely an optimist.”

This rather matter-of-fact observation earned a throaty chuckle from me that surprised us both, I think. Again, the hands embedded in my hair stilled.

I turned my head somewhat, peering through the untangled skeins he’d managed. Ashmore’s eyes had closed, a look of such raw emotion carved into his features that I could not understand—or bear to look. I felt as if I might have intruded upon a moment so private that he might be more embarrassed than I to have shared it.

That I thought such things even after all he’d put me through was testament to my state of mind. I was in no position to trod upon delicate ground, not as long as I remained so fragile.

I no longer thought of Ashmore as the demon of my laudanum-fueled visions, but I felt awkward treating him with any greater care.

Quickly, I looked back at my hands before he caught me peeking. “Thank you for seeing to my hair,” I said, more loudly than strictly necessary. As I’d hoped, he remembered his task, and the brush once more dragged through my tresses.

“You are now sufficiently cognizant to mind the mess of it,” he replied easily enough. No trace of that baffling emotion, no wariness, no embarrassment. It was as if I’d imagined it. “It costs me nothing to see to your comfort until you are healthy and hale.”

A bit of a smile tugging at a corner of my mouth, I glanced sideways far as I dared and saw only the high fit of his trousers. Brown, naturally. I wondered if he possessed any other color. “Can I see the study, then?”

Exasperation colored his tone as he said sharply, “Miss St. Croix, your lessons do not stick.”

“Fanny used to say the same.”

This time, I swore I heard something like a laugh—muffled too fast that I couldn’t get an ear of it. “Raise your chin,” he ordered, tugging on my hair to enunciate the point. When I obeyed, he dragged the brush across my scalp, sending shivers of pleasure though me. Then, briskly, “As weak as you are, it may take some doing. Let me consider it.”

“Why? I can simply just go.”

“And how will you navigate the stairs alone?” he asked.

I frowned. “I can do it.”

“I have no desire to put you back together when you tumble head over heels,” Ashmore told the back of my head. I did not see his face, but I heard the firmness with which he spoke, and wondered what he might do if I disobeyed. “All I ask is that you allow me the time to consider the best method to move you about without lengthening your convalescence.”

It was as close a commitment as I was likely to get.

I sighed. “Very well.”

“Thank you.”

He plaited my hair with more skill than I expected, always remaining behind me or at the side. I could not see his face. He tied the waist-length braid off, packed the case once more, but left it upon the vanity.

“You will tend your hair every day,” he said before he left. “It will help you regain some routine, as well as your strength.”

“What of a bath?”

“If you believe you are sufficiently strong enough, then we will see to it.” This time, it was he who colored—a surprising and admittedly fascinating stain of red across his cheeks. “Perhaps ’tis time I locate a companion to see you through such things.”

I would never have accorded him the capacity to blush at such a trivial thing. He had already seen me at my most vulnerable, after all.

Was it that I was now cognizant of his ministrations that worried him?

“All right,” I said, yawning around the words and failing to remember to cover my mouth.

I nestled back into the pillows, rather more fatigued than I was willing to admit. My eyelids closed of their own volition.

His footsteps made for the door.

“Mr. Ashmore?”

A hesitation. “Yes, Miss St. Croix?”

“Thank you.”

This time, a longer hesitation. Then, quietly, “No need.” The door closed, the remnants of his renunciation hanging in the silence left behind.

His voice had seemed so…

What? Sad? That was ridiculous. What had Ashmore to be sad about? Disappointed, more like. His own ward had turned into a right mess, hadn’t I?

It was time I began tending to myself. A visit to the study would be just the thing. I resolved to give him a few days, hoping to regain more strength by then, but I expected to have to bother him again about my request.

Chapter Five

The next morning, I managed a full slice of toasted bread, though the bit of fig spread placed beside it proved too much for my constitution. I left it untouched.

The air was cold. Forced to leave the blankets that kept me warm in favor of the wet cloth I used to bathe myself, I shivered as I hastily cleaned what skin I could reach.

I was daydreaming of a hot bath when the knock came at the door.

“One moment,” I called, hastily tugging my nightshift back over my shoulders. The wrapper I’d been given was lavender in color, thick enough to ward away the chill, and so long that I was forced to hike it up on the rare occasion I attempted to walk.

I did not attempt it often. The act only reminded me of my own weakness, which in turn led me to consider how easily I could regain my strength—to wit, with the help of laudanum’s gentle bliss.

A dangerous turn of thought.

I belted the modest wrapper in place and added, “You may enter.”

Ashmore did, leaning around the door first as if to ascertain my whereabouts. Seeing me leaning against the vanity, concern and worry flickered through his initial expression of polite inquiry. “Why are you standing?”

“I wanted to bathe a little.” Truth be told, that I braced myself upon the edge of the vanity only corroborated his concern. I felt as if I’d run a race simply from getting from one side of this room to the other.

Still, I could not help my smile. Not only had I done it on my own, I’d also cleaned myself. For my next endeavor, I would wash my hair.

A task somewhat beyond me, at the moment.

“And your meal?”

“I’ve had enough, thank you.” When he cast a speculative glance to the tray left abandoned upon the bed, I braced myself to contest whatever mother hen he intended to channel.

He surprised me. “Would you care to leave the room?”

“You’ve no idea,” I admitted, relief taking the starch from my overly prepared armor.

When he smiled, it was neither the muted humor of Compton’s rigid control nor the wicked slant of Hawke’s temptation. Ashmore smiled like a man who did not often do so, and whose wayward curve did not wholly suit his face. Yet the shape of it caused the corners of his eyes to crinkle, which in turn made him appear so much more affable.

I stared, my head tilted as I worked out that particular puzzle.

What little I knew of Mr. Oliver Ashmore did not lend itself to such an innocuous countenance. A shame that he did not smile more often, now that I’d seen it. He should. It softened that worldliness about him.

He approached me, hand proffered as I imagined he might offer to a lady upon the ballroom floor. “We shall take this as slow as necessary,” he told me, rather more sternly than his smile warranted. “If you feel yourself tiring, tell me straightaway.”

I nodded, taking his arm with only a slight hesitation.

When he guided me out of the room, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Certainly not the wooden chair waiting just beyond the door.

It was polished to a shine, yet worn from what I could only imagine was years of use. The contraption featured heavy brass wheels on each side, the spokes wide and glistening with oil, with a wooden circle bolted in place on the outside of each wheel. The seat boasted cushions with threading beginning to wear thin, yet seemed comfortable enough for hours of sitting. At the back, two brass handles tarnished by time protruded, and at the base, a footrest. At the forefront, swinging from an overhanging rod, a small lantern glowed.

“A wheeling chair?” The obviousness of this answer did not bear Ashmore’s repeating, so I did not wait for his reply. “’Tis enormous.”

The back rose nearly to my shoulders. Though I was not considered tall by any stretch, the whole of the chair seemed that it would outweigh two or three of me.

I wondered if it might hold up under use outdoors.

Ashmore led me to it. “It was your grandfather’s.”

This caused me to stumble; an act he easily rectified by tucking an arm about my waist with grace. I stared up at him.

“My grandfather’s?” Again, my gaze turned to the chair. “My grandfather sat there?”

“Indeed.”

The reaction this knowledge invoked wasn’t clear. I couldn’t quite grasp what it was I was made to feel. I had no knowledge of the family beyond the parents I’d lost, and rather more knowledge of that particular loss than I was comfortable with. Although I knew that my father had three homes—the Cheyne Walk home in London’s bohemian Chelsea district, an estate rumored to be a castle in Scotland, and one all but unspoken of in the country—I had never considered that I had grandparents to live in any of them.

I touched the closest wheel with a finger. The brass was icy cold. “Was he ill?”

“He was,” Ashmore confirmed—though not without a measure of some respect, I think. There was a certain care about his manner as he helped me into the chair. “This allowed him to move through the house without help.” He circled behind me as I tucked my robe tightly around my legs. “He preferred independence. Not unlike a certain someone I’m acquainted with,” he added dryly.

“Did you know him?”

“I did, for a time.” When the chair juddered, a muted clank of a mechanism disengaging, I realized it had been locked. Clever thing, this chair. “I shall go slow, so as not to—”

This time, when I smiled with the full force of my delight, it was he that hesitated. “Slow, my foot,” I chided. “Off we go.”

Whatever he saw in my demeanor, some visual cue that caught him off guard, his regard melted quickly into a courteous kind of amusement. He offered once more that slightly stiff bow. “Aye, aye, captain.” Bracing his feet upon the floor, he seized the handles in both hands and pushed.

Accompanied by the weighted groan of floorboards, we sailed through the hall and into the great beyond.

For all my imperious demand, he did not allow us to go quite so fast. We rattled our way past closed doors and through narrow corridors, a strangely convoluted array of halls that led me to believe this house much larger than I’d thought.

“Did my father live here?” I asked, raising my voice to carry over the accompanied groan of strained flooring and working wheels.

“Only for a small time. He was never one for the bucolic lifestyle.”

I’d just wager. My smile turned to a thoughtful frown as we approached the end of the hall. A wide door waited, its dark wood carved in bold lines. “Did you know him well?”

“Not as such.”

“But aren’t you his executor?” I glanced behind me, just in time to see Ashmore shrug.

“I knew him enough to be given the role,” he replied, not at all an answer.

“Not friends, then?”

A beat of silence, broken only by the creaking of the chair’s springs and the groaning hall. I tucked my feet more securely under the wrapper as the cold bit at my slippered toes. “St. Croix—your father, that is, was a difficult man to know.”

“You may call him St. Croix,” I told him as the chair eased to a stop. “I never knew him as my father.” And certainly had not thought him worthy of the moniker after his attempts to see me murdered. Even then, I had no reason to suspect the absent-minded Professor Woolsey of being my dead father in disguise.

If I were to put a fine enough point on it, I might suggest that this plot of my father’s—the attempt to bring my dead mother back to life utilizing my body as her replacement—signaled the most drastic changes to my otherwise simple life.

To think that before September’s dreary arrival, I had been quite content as a collector of bounties, an heiress waiting to inherit, and a troublesome wart on the face of a Society who did not like me, but did not care to notice me either.

Life had been so much simpler only a few short months ago.

I wondered if I should enlighten Ashmore to these truths, or if keeping the peace between us was better.

It was unlikely he would believe anything I had to say on the matter of my father’s existence. To be considered dead for years, then miraculously appear again under a new name, only to be killed by one’s own assistant at the climax of the plot was the sort of tale I read of in adventure stories. I had no evidence to say I had not dreamed it.

Even Hawke’s people had not been able to find my father’s laboratory after, much less his body. When I located the hidden laboratory, cleverly concealed behind an alchemical symbol carved into the walls of the tunnel, it was empty. Neither the bodies of my rotted mother nor my murdered father, in the guise of the hapless Professor Woolsey, were in evidence.

I realized that I was plucking at the collar of my nightdress, and deliberately lowered my hand.

“Here is the gradient your grandfather had installed,” Ashmore was saying, forcing me to return my attentions wholly to him. That I found my mouth watering at the memory of my father’s machinations was not a good sign. The serum he’d injected me with had used opium as a base.

A fact I would do well to keep from Ashmore. Talking about such matters would only make him think I was not mending.

I cleared my throat. “Is this a way to avoid the stairs?”

“Just so.” Ashmore opened the door, revealing a hall whose gentle decline was wide enough for the chair. “Fortunately, he installed a working mechanism by which the chair may be guided up and down this corridor. I will see to its maintenance today.”

“Can I help?” My voice echoed down the corridor, to vanish into a sprinkle of lilting reverberations.

Ashmore raised his eyebrows. “If you’d like.”

“I would,” I assured him. “It will give me something to do.”

“You may have more to do than you think,” he replied, once more circling behind me. “Hold fast.”

I did, and he carefully guided the wheeled chair down the incline, only occasionally muttering when a wheel scraped the wall beside us.

I had never been one to fear closed spaces. By the time Ashmore’s man had plucked me from the good Monsieur’s circus show, I had been locked in any number of small boxes for the delight of a crowd. Some had been pierced with swords.

The air inside this hall was musty, laden with enough dust to set my nose twitching. I clapped both hands over it, barely catching a sneeze as it erupted from my mouth.

“Bless you,” Ashmore said behind me. “I’ve a kerchief to offer once I no longer need to ensure your slow descent.”

“I’m all right.” Fanny would be downright outraged to hear me deny the offer, but as I wiped at my eyes, I didn’t much care. I watched the shadows flee from the lantern, just far enough out of reach that I could not see the landing.

Ashmore offered nothing else until we left the hall, wide door swinging closed behind us.

The atmosphere of the house did not change overly much from its hollow, gloomy character. As he guided me down the hall—a servant’s corridor, unless I missed my guess—and into the wide foyer, I saw furnishings covered by protective sheets and gray light streaming through unwashed windows caked by disuse. Shadows clung to every corner, filled the open spaces beyond doors left half ajar, and made the whole seem rather smaller than it should be. The sheer pall of the place infected my mood, until I felt walled up and jittery.

I expected nothing particularly grand when we approached a large set of doors. Unlike the others we’d passed, these porticos were left wide open. A flicker of gold turned into a breath of warm air as he pushed me over the threshold.

Into heaven.

“A library,” I cried, all vestiges of my prickly mood stripped away.

Shelves upon shelves lined the walls, as far up as to require a ladder to gain the highest tomes. The room was much larger than the study I’d spent hours reading within, large enough that it might fit three or four of such rooms within it. A large desk occupied one portion of the floor, but it seemed as if my grandfather had been something of a social man. Sofas arranged together near the fireplace must have been the site of meetings; gatherings, perhaps, like-minded souls to discourse over a good book or social agenda.

The fireplace was so large as to allow a woman of my stature to stand upright within it, and its blaze crackled merrily in welcome refrain.

Ashmore had taken care to ensure the room would be warm and bright.

I turned in my chair, bracing a hand upon the back of it to smile at the man with all the joy placed within my heart.

His gaze, fixated somewhere over my head, flicked to me. His eyes widened.

“Thank you,” I told him, as sincerely as I knew how. “I will never be bored again.”

He cleared his throat. “That is the idea.” Though his glance turned upward once more, it did not linger. He circled the chair to offer a hand. “I’ll see you situated on the sofa and acquire for you any books as you may like before I leave you.”

When I turned to follow him, a swatch of white caught my attention beyond his shoulder. I leaned to the side, the better to see the large rectangle hanging upon the wall. Whatever was beneath it had been covered by a protective cloth, like most everything else outside the library.

“Did you forget a cloth?” I asked, taking his hand.

His fingers tightened around mine for a brief moment before loosening. “No,” he said simply, and helped me stand. “Can you walk?”

“I’ll bloody well try,” I returned without thinking. His chuckle took my attention from the cloth on the wall, earning him a sheepish smile as I added, “My apologies.”

He nodded, though I saw none of the censure I would have expected. He helped me situate myself upon the sofa with remarkable ease. “I’ve already collected a handful of books for your perusal,” he said. “Do you require anything of a different subject?”

I looked past him, drinking in the sight of all the shelves, all the spines placed outward in various shades of red, green, blue and brown. Some were so old as to be nearly black with age, some had gilded letters that still glinted in the firelight.

There were so many to choose from, I couldn’t possibly decide. “Are there any personal journals of my grandfather’s?”

Ashmore’s smile turned to a serious line. He shook his head. “No.”

“He wasn’t the chronicling sort, then?” My hopes turned to disappointment. “I would have thought—” I caught myself.

It didn’t matter what I’d thought. I hadn’t expected such a desire to know the family beyond the parents I’d lost. I folded my hands in my lap and shook off the threat of discontentment. “What of any fictional adventures? Penny dreadfuls, gothic horrors, or anything of the sort?”

“You enjoy that sort of nonsense?”

“I do,” I replied, spine straightening.

“I should have guessed.” He waved a dismissive hand. “I believe I saw some while I was looking for more scientific pursuits. Remain here.”

I did, watching him as he moved from shelf to shelf, collecting a stray tome now and again. Within moments, he’d returned, five books cradled in his arms. He stacked them beside me.

“I’ll bring you tea and check in on you regularly.”

“Thank you,” I told him, already opening one of the books he acquired for me. The Monk: A Romance. I’d read my copy of it perhaps six times over, though this book was dated earlier. 1796, rather than the 1798 version I’d possessed.

“Miss St. Croix?”

I looked up, my finger tucked under the following page.

Ashmore’s scrutiny was rather more forceful than I felt I deserved. “You will mind yourself, won’t you?”

I refrained from making a face, choosing instead to craft a serene smile. “I will be the quietest of mice.”

“Given your latest encounter with a mouse, perhaps I might convince you to play the part of an invalid with grace?”

This time, I did make a face. A woefully unattractive one. “If I must.”

He did not smile again. “I would consider it most kind.” With that, he left me alone in the vast library, a book held open in my lap and my slippered feet tucked beneath my wrapper.

Within moments, I was already lured into the convoluted—and rather more disreputable than I recalled—dealings of the monk Ambrosio. By the time I’d reached the middle of the first chapter, it became clear that what I read was a first edition—whose following editions had been carefully cleansed of all passion and reason for offense.

I held in my hands the most sordid tale I’d ever been allowed to possess.

When I burst into laughter, I smothered it guiltily against the edge of the book, its pages rasping against my ineffectively sealed lips. Though I glanced about the library, automatically assured that Fanny would be the first to bring me to heel with a stern glare, the room was empty.

Of course. I’d forgotten myself.

If only Fanny could see me now.

My amusement faded beneath the painful slice such nostalgia caused in my heart.

I missed her.

My staff was, in the hindsight afforded me by enforced lucidity, the kindest I could have ever hoped to have. Fanny had always been stern, but she was strict for the purposes of my upbringing, and it was not her fault that I’d turned out the way I had. I’d always been an independent thing, thanks in no small part to the criminal childhood my father abandoned me to.

Fanny, Booth and his wife, and even Betsy, who had left my employ after she had been kidnapped to gain my attention, remained the brightest stars in my life.

It hurt abominably to know that I had allowed that light to extinguish beneath the wash of opium I’d consumed to forget.

Slowly, the book slid to my lap, and then to the plush sofa cushion beside me. I had developed a habit of inserting the edge of my thumb between my teeth and worrying at the nail the way a dog worries a bone, and this I did now. Unease filled that space within me that remained empty; a portion of myself that seemed unable to react to laughter, comfort, joy. As if there was some part of me that only would rise when I felt something painful or sad.

As if it gloried in the feeling. Welcomed it.

It encouraged me to mend the hurt the only way I knew how. All I needed to do was take a draught, chew a bit of the tar, smoke it as I’d done in the Chinese dens in London’s murky Limehouse. So easy.

So very, very easy.

Forcing my hand from my mouth, I took in a big gasp of air, letting it out on a tight hiss from between my teeth. This wouldn’t do.

I slid off the sofa with more energy than grace, a manic rise of ability that would not bow to weakness. My slippers clung to the thick rug, its colors reminiscent of the Oriental patterns I’d seen in my own home.

My father’s home, I suppose. Ashmore’s.

Now part of the Northampton estate.

Bloody bells, was I doomed to wander as a ghost among my own poor choices?

I seized the thick plait of my hair, tossing it over my shoulder as if by doing so, I would unburden my back from a weight I did not want to carry. My eyes darted from shelf to shelf, skimmed over the large desk and the various writing implements upon it.

I thought of writing letters, but who would I write to? I had no knowledge of Zylphia’s living status, and even considering this stole my breath and left behind it a pain so deep that I dared not traverse those winding thoughts until I felt strong enough to try. I could write to Betsy, but she had fled my house to save her own life, and I did not begrudge her that. I did not want to drag her back into the darkness.

“Bollocks.” I dug my balled-up hands into my eyes.

Enough was quite enough. I turned, dropping my hands to gather the frothy mass of nightshift and wrapper in my fists. So assured I would not trip over the too-long hem, I approached the desk with grim determination. Of all who filled my thoughts, it was Fanny I owed too much to. She had raised me as her own, waited out all my tantrums, tutored me, guided me. I couldn’t bear to let her worry any longer.

Even if my actions were so deplorable that she might hate me, at least she would know what had become of me.

I paused in front of the mantle.

What then? Was I not going back to London? Would I tell her nothing of my plans?

I had no plans.

The truth of this settled upon me slowly, like a heavy fog slipping over my shoulders, muddling my sight. I had nothing for which to plan. Aside from the expectation levied upon me by Ashmore’s care—to wit, mend so that I no longer craved the bliss—I had nothing truly to look forward to.

My staff was gone, my family scattered.

I had no parents, which was difficult enough a prospect for any orphan, yet I labored under the knowledge that mine attempted to murder me.

I had no husband, who despite his flaws had thought only to protect and cherish me.

My friends were gone, whereabouts entirely unknown, London was days away, and what waited for me there?

I faced the fire, frowning into the snapping logs.

The heart of the blaze burned a pure, clear blue, as powerful an intensity as the eyes of the man I’d taken as my lover. That Hawke had betrayed me, turned me out of the Menagerie after taking what little virtue I possessed, was beyond forgiving. Of all that Hawke and I had ever battled over—the nature of his usual disregard for my wants, the stubborn manner in which I taunted him—I had never thought myself vulnerable to the same charms he wielded to great effect within the Menagerie he minded. I’d fallen, as so many before me.

Yet it was not that decision to share with him his bed—a decision that was mine in the end—that weighed upon me. I regretted nothing of the act, the understanding of torrid passions that he taught me.

It was not his touch that I resented.

What I dwelled upon was the highhanded manner in which he had Zylphia eject me from the Menagerie after.

That stung, and even still, that did not hurt as badly as that final pitched battle between us. It was the Karakash Veil that had bound me, dressed me, and delivered me to him, but it was Hawke what guided the show I had become. His final betrayal was to turn me into a toy for his own iniquitous pleasures, and that of the social elite he’d invited.

That creature, that caricature, was not the Hawke I thought I’d known. What my imagination repeatedly painted in the dark was not so much truth as a thread of it colored by the fantasy of too much bliss. I couldn’t possibly think that Hawke had become a different man.

Couldn’t possibly, yet that was exactly what I thought. That night was the last I remembered before the hell of Ashmore’s determined care, and even those memories were shrouded in the opium the Veil forced upon me. All I knew with any clarity was that the man who gifted me to the audience was not the man I’d shared myself with. He wasn’t anything like the Hawke I had known since I was but fifteen—always cruel, but never careless.

The rest, the oppressive heat and the wild flashes of light and color that had torn the world around me like so much tattered silk, felt too much like a dream to grasp fully. In the end, no matter how hard I thought of it, I could comprehend only one certainty: Hawke had betrayed me.

This time, I said a word that would have earned me a fresh scolding, tearing my gaze from the fiery hearth. I’d meant to abandon the world entirely for that of the book I’d left behind, but my eyes fixed upon the cloth draped over what must be a painting.

My head cocked. Although I lacked the skill to lift one eyebrow, I raised them both as I studied the white facing.

What was so appalling that it must remain hidden? A portrait of my grandfather, perhaps; fat and florid, or thin like a broomstick. If his expression was sour enough, or a grinning leer, I could imagine the decorous Ashmore maintaining the shroud lest such a face promote ill humors.

I had no such hesitations. With one hand braced high on the mantle above my head, I reached as far as possible on tip-toes. My fingertips grazed the trailing cloth. Dust drifted off the material, a faint haze gilded by the light.

I could have made the effort to drag a chair to the hearth, but I didn’t pause to consider such alternatives, and I wasn’t certain I’d have the strength to try

I stretched and strained, until my knees wobbled and my ankles ached. The fire hissed as a log fell apart, sap crackled and heat seared through my nightclothes. Groaning with the effort, I wiggled my fingers until the very hem of the cloth slid between them.

“Success,” I crowed, and tore the whole of it down.

“What are you doing?”

Ashmore’s voice thundered across the library as the cloth floated to the ground in a cloud of dust. I almost spun like a guilty child, hands already darting behind my back, when an array of color so vibrant caught the firelight and stopped me dead in my tracks.

For a long, tense moment, no sound interrupted that of the whisper of cloth as it settled to the floor. Even the fire withheld its sparks, chewing silently upon the charring wood and devoting all its luminescent attention to the painting above.

I had never before seen a true likeness of my mother. For reasons I’d never understood, my father’s study had no stills of her, no paintings, not even a sketch. The closest I’d ever seen was her profile, carved into a cameo, which lacked all detail. No one had ever shown me what she’d looked like, only suggested that I favored her in face and color.

Now, I looked up at the enormous painting, met eyes of brilliant green within a face truly elegant in nature, and recognized the pity of such words for what they were.

Josephine St. Croix’s beauty was not a thing to which I could ever hope to aspire.

Whatever artist had painted this masterpiece, he had poured blood and soul into the oils. Within the ornate gold frame, my mother appeared young and fresh, with soft pastels turning her cheeks to peaches and a glint captured in her eyes. She stood alone, her lissome figure draped in a gown some decades out of fashion, but so blue as to turn her skin to porcelain and her hair to that of light trapped in the finest rubies from exotic India.

The soft curls draped over her neck carried the eye to her décolletage, as pale as moonlight. Her hands were not clasped at her waist nor useless at her side, as most artists might paint. Instead, she carried a globe of red glass in the crook of one arm, its top and sides banded by ornate reams of brass, and in the other, an astrolabe of such exquisite design that I half expected it to tumble from the flat canvas.

She looked out at me with charm, a winsome smile curving her pale pink mouth where I had expected something rather more placid, as ladies were meant to be

Where I had often insisted that I was not my mother, I never expected to feel such hurt to learn that it was true.

She was, by all counts and under all circumstances, a true beauty. It was no wonder Society could not let her memory fade.

Chapter Six

A hard hand clamped over my shoulder. “I told you to keep out of trouble.”

I turned, surprise widening my eyes as more fury than I expected stared down at me from Ashmore’s aristocratic countenance.

I frowned, uneasy at the force of his response. “I wanted to see what was under the cloth.”

The fine shape of his mouth, framed but not yet hidden by the whiskers he did not tame, twitched in compressed anger. He glanced up at the painting, jaw hardening, then down at the cloth a mere tick from the hungry flame. “You could have been hurt,” he muttered, his fingers leaving my shoulder to reach instead for the fabric.

My confusion eased. Of course, he’d be worried. I had barely managed to stand earlier, and here I was, playing in front of the hearth. I kicked one foot against the marble frame designed to keep the fire from casting sparks on the floor. “I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m—”

“Just…” He tugged the cloth away, leaving it to fold itself against the desk, and rose from his stoop, his demeanor stormy. “Just go sit before you do yourself in. Obviously, I can’t leave you alone for even one minute.”

That hurt. Apology flipped to a scowl, though I nevertheless obeyed the directive. Now that my interest was piqued, I found my energy to be remarkably depleted.

“’Tis a good thing I’ve already arranged for a companion,” he continued, as if he were reassuring himself.

“Who?”

“Never you mind,” he replied, rather more stiffly than I felt I deserved.

I stuck my tongue out at him. I couldn’t help it.

Ashmore did not notice, returning to the tea service he’d wheeled in while I was distracted with the painting’s reach.

I studied the bright oils filling the canvas, met my mother’s gaze with a tilt of my head. “If my father didn’t live here long,” I said, “then why is there a painting of my mother in his library?”

“It was your grandfather’s library first, and his before that.” Ashmore’s tone hadn’t softened, but at least he’d let off the lecture. I turned in my seat to find him dropping a lump of sugar into my tea. Upon perceiving my study, he glanced at me. “You still prefer two sugars, do you not?”

What details hadn’t Fanny sent in her letters? I nodded.

Ashmore brought me the teacup and saucer, its lavender and rose pattern so delicate as to be nearly thin as parchment. His ungloved hands looked terribly rough against the china.

Mine did not look any different, though not quite so worn. Whatever travels Mr. Ashmore had engaged in, he did not bear the hands of a man unused to work. Mine sported more roughage than any woman in Society, but nothing truly so obvious as the calluses of a seasoned swordsman or brawler. Even the burns I’d acquired from sliding down a rope had faded without scars.

The cup rattled faintly in its saucer as I claimed the offering. I rested it upon my lap with care.

“I don’t understand,” I said, looking again at the portrait. She seemed so radiant above the fire. A veritable angel, though I doubted any church would allow such a bold woman upon their walls. “Did my grandfather favor my father’s choice of bride?”

Ashmore did not follow my gaze, busying himself instead with a wrapped parcel. “Not especially,” he replied, as brusque as if he were once more a physician or scientist gathering figures. “Your grandfather opposed the marriage of your parents.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t much care for your father.”

“His own son?”

Now he looked at me, confusion replacing whatever wall he’d meant to erect between us. A line furrowed between his copper brows. “You misunderstand,” he said, shaking his head and lowering the string-tied parcel to the seat beside me. “This house belonged to Mr. Hamish Pepperidge Carberry, your mother’s father. Not to St. Croix.”

I straightened rather more quickly than the tea in my lap could forgive. As the liquid sloshed over the rim, pattering to the saucer and dampening one hand, I looked again at the painting.

She smiled most knowingly back at me.

“This was my mother’s house?”

“Until your grandfather’s death, wherein it passed to your mother’s husband.”

My wide-eyed stare turned back to him. “And you knew them both?”

Again, a twitch at his jaw. “I did,” he confirmed.

“And my grandfather?” Hamish Pepperidge Carberry. I’d never heard the name.

“Just so.”

“Tell me.” I leaned forward, hand over my tea cup lest a bit of my wrapper be caught within. “How did my grandfather die?”

This time, it wasn’t so much confusion as mild distaste shaping that furrow in his brow now. “That’s a morbid curiosity.”

Hardly. I ignored that. “It wasn’t bliss, was it?”

His grimace warned me that I shouldn’t have asked. With a hand on his hip, he ran the other through his wild hair—though it already stood nearly on end. It was a fashion no longer in vogue among the young bucks of Society’s rule, but it suited Ashmore. From his rather pale skin to the overly bold color of his hair, he seemed to stand outside the borders of acceptable fashion—and did so without apparent care for the consequences.

How nice it must be to feel so free. I had long been taken to task for my hair color, yet his was almost painfully bright in comparison and very likely had never been held against him in matters of comportment or charm.

Compared to the painting over the mantle, the both of us seemed little more than pale imitations.

The air swirled about us, notable most by the dust motes released from the cloth. The fire crackled in rather noisy remonstration, seemingly in order to fill the silence fallen between us.

I knew that I should not be asking after opium in any form. I flushed.

I did not like being made to feel so small. I most certainly did not like feeling this way over a perfectly innocent question.

Even if it wasn’t wholly so innocent. An answer in the affirmative would suggest that my grandfather might retain a store somewhere within the home he had lived in.

Awful. I was awful. I opened my mouth to defend my question—or to protest innocence, I wasn’t certain which might fall out—but he cut me off with a sigh. “An illness,” he finally said. “The same illness that claimed your mother.”

I drew back as if he’d slapped me; the words much harsher than the gentleness of the tone might indicate. “Illness?” I frowned. “Not so. My mother died in a laboratory fire—”

On cue, as if only waiting for the right key to unlock the memory, my father’s voice rose in my mind.

You were only five. Maybe six.

His voice had broken, then turned sharp as knives as he loomed over the table that bound me to it. I remembered pink mist, a surge of pain, an unusual feeling of separation within myself—as if I were me, and not me. He’d done that. His alchemical serum had done that, the same he’d used to ensure that I might be detached from my own body and my mother allowed in.

Yet it was not me that he’d wept for.

She was sick, you know. So sick.

The preposterous ramblings of a madman.

I shook my head hard enough to send my braid bouncing over the back of the lounger's wooden frame.

“A weakness of the body,” Ashmore was saying, rather more crisply than the revelation warranted. He plucked free the string from the brown paper parcel. “She was beyond help when the accident claimed your parents.”

Only one, I wanted to say, but clamped my lips tightly around the admission.

There was so much I couldn’t discern—what parts coming to me were done in a dream, and what was real. I needed to know.

“What illness?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Such things are not for you to be concerned about,” he said flatly.

“But what if I’m afflicted?” A reasonable request, surely.

Ashmore left the parcel beside me, turning his back on me—and the painting he did not look at. Strange, for all it drew my eye with such bold color and warmth. “You are not.”

“But I might be.”

“But you are not,” he repeated, and flung a hand to the side as if he might ward off any more questions. “Busy yourself with the books in here and the periodicals just delivered from London. I don’t want any more trouble from you, Miss St. Croix.”

I shifted, easing the saucer from my lap so I could better turn to glare at his slim back. “I could investigate the symptoms. Perhaps I might even—”

“Leave it alone,” he cut in, so bitterly reminiscent of Hawke’s most common refrain that I felt the color bleed from my face. The room shrugged around me, pitching my belly into a cramping roll.

Did he do it on purpose? Did he willfully embody aspects of the two men whose hurts I carried most closely, from Compton’s careful posture to Hawke’s authoritarian dictates?

From the mantle, my mother watched with serene gentility.

A shudder clutched at my spine.

Of course, I was being unreasonable. Ashmore had no way of knowing anything of either man—no more than common rumor might allow. I was too sensitive.

I firmed my jaw. “It would give me something to do,” I called after him.

“Read the gossip columns,” he replied, a curt finality that would not be broken. He left the library before the echoes of his dismissal could die.

I did not throw my teacup. It was far too delicate a piece, and I confess to wanting the warmth of it. Instead, I ground my teeth and ignored my discarded book for the paper wrapped stack of periodicals he’d left me.

Gossip columns, my slippered foot. I’d rather use them for kindling. What was it about a woman that enforced this belief that we preferred gossip rags to that of the educated periodicals? I had gone ’round and about with Fanny over this very topic, and here I’d thought Ashmore much more modern in his way of thinking.

Perhaps I would give him some time to cool.

After all, he’d gone to all this trouble for me when he could have left me to rot in that bed, bored beyond words. It seemed only right that I at least pretend to enjoy the offering, before I made further demands.

Although pretense wasn’t an appropriate word for the ambivalence I felt. While I was grateful for the use of this library and all its books, I felt somehow ignored, as if I’d been tucked away to amuse myself while he took care of heaven knew what—masculine things, I’m sure.

Once I was no longer the invalid I despised being, I would search the grounds for things of interest. This estate had a great many rooms, many likely untouched in the intervening years since my grandfather’s demise. It wasn’t likely that Ashmore had sorted through them all himself.

If I looked hard enough, would I find journals in my grandfather’s hand? What of mementos? Keepsakes?

Perhaps I might even locate accountings of his illness, the better to investigate the details.

For much of my civilized existence—that which came upon my delivery to London—I had operated under the certainty that my parents were killed in a laboratory fire. Until Mad St. Croix resurrected himself, I had no reason to doubt the veracity of those claims.

Suddenly, I had been forced to reconsider the information I’d been given. My father was alive, but my mother was still dead. She died from a fire; only wait, she was dying anyway of a wasting illness, and nobody had bothered to tell me that until Mad St. Croix hinted at it in his lunacy.

To have it confirmed by Ashmore, to suddenly be told that my grandfather died of the same, was one more crack in the crumbling foundation that shored up my whole life. It was almost too much to take in at once.

I resolved to give him time to cool, and in so doing, allow myself the same.

So decided, I settled in—a kind of ceasefire between myself and the unwitting Ashmore—to read about the Society I had fled, and the people whose existence had become little more than a dream.

Had Fanny read these same words?

Not for the first time, I wondered how much my chaperone had known of my family’s circumstances. Did she know of the illness that afflicted my mother and grandfather?

I chewed on the tip of my thumb as I opened the London Times to the middle and skimmed news of strikes threatened at the docks—again, or still, I wasn’t sure. I passed over various reams of print, not so much reading as picking out a sentence here and there. It all seemed so jarring, as if I was reading the news of an unfamiliar land I could not completely grasp.

The paper I held was one printed sometime in November.

I had lost so much time to my sickbed, I did not even know what month it was now.

I folded the paper, ready to set it down for more interesting reads, when a headline writ large in a narrow column caught my eye.

ANOTHER WHITECHAPEL MURDER

All the air fled from my lungs. Time froze about me. The silence filling the library tightened to such a degree that I felt caught in a vacuum, stretched thin.

Impossible.

The fire lost its luster. As I held the paper between shaking fingers, the air went cold.

The article did not begin with kindness.

During the early hours of yesterday morning another murder of a most revolting and fiendish character took place in Spitalfields.

A faint ringing sound filled my ears as I read the accounting. A woman had been found not very far from the location of the first of the so-called Leather Apron’s victims, and while each of the murdered women prior had been mutilated, this murder had gone beyond even the fragile bounds of insanity. Whatever this was—whatever visceral rage drove this man—there could be no name for it. His victim’s throat had been cut, so viciously deep as to bare the spine. Her nose and ears were removed, breasts cleanly cut off and left on a table beside the bed as if in revolting gift. Her liver, her abdomen—all removed.

The details brought a surge of nausea to my throat. Such brutality was the mark of the very murderer I’d hunted in the Whitechapel railyard. The one I had killed.

As I read more, sparing no details of the grotesque mockery made of the victim’s corpse, the ringing in my ears turned to a desperate shriek. Had I dared to give voice to anything, it might be a scream.

I’d hunted that man, that monster—Jack the Ripper, he called himself. I’d used him to lure the sweet tooth out into the open.

The Ripper had injured me gravely, but I’d finally won. It was I that stuck him with one of my own blades, me who had killed him in the dark and cold. Not the sweet tooth who fancied himself my rival. Me.

That man, that monster, was the first I’d killed, and I felt that wound in a deep, dark place within myself—it was a scar I would forever carry.

I could still feel the knife sliding into flesh, the warmth of the mad man’s blood as it pumped over my hands.

Swallowing hard, I let the paper slip from my grasp. It fluttered to the floor at my feet.

Had he mended? In the few weeks between that late October night and the printing of this November paper? Was this, the most awful of all the killings in Whitechapel, his answer to me?

The one occasion I’d accidentally interrupted the Ripper at work, he had fled the scene and turned his rage on another hapless woman, marring her so awfully as to be monstrous beyond measure.

That I’d murdered him in that dark night should have been the end of it.

If he lived, had I caused this surge of rage? Was this death on my hands too?

Was I to be given no quarter by the demons that haunted me?

Trembling violently, I reached for another periodical—even as I forced air through my nose and into my straining lungs.

My fingers spasmed. Had I the means, I would have salved this panic with the opium tar I’d once kept in my pocket.

I had no such recourse now.

Swallowing as much oxygen as my too-tight chest would allow, I very deliberately set eyes upon the first column revealed to me from the thin pages of the periodical.

A gossip column. As tension ratcheted through my bones, I forced myself to read the first paragraph. The second. The names meant nothing, each tittering word little more than a dull roar through my tunneled senses.

When I found a name I knew, all of the world ceased to exist.

That the Viscount Helmsley and his brood were not in attendance at a certain pastoral rendezvous continues to raise eyebrows and complaints of boredom, no doubt, from the rather more well-to-do of the rural set.

Such snide tones. From them, I ascertained only that the viscount had withdrawn his family from the usual country gatherings they attended come Christmas. The Viscount Armistice Helmsley the Third and his three sons had long been admitted as hedonists across all of London.

Until now.

They were in mourning. My doing.

I had not stopped the bloody reign of the Whitechapel murderer, but it was my attempt to end us both that cost Teddy his life—and any chance at redemption.

I could bear no more. It seemed as if the very world outside this estate were determined to strip the sanity from me.

I flung the periodical away from me with such force that the thin paper tore. I was on my feet before it touched the ground, without any true understand of what it was I did. A mania of such vicious fury gripped my heart.

I could not live like this. I could not rise each day and look at what was left of my world. “More rags,” I muttered, my voice hoarser than even a whisper should allow. “Always, rags.” The gossiping papers, the whispered rumors. No matter where I looked, where I turned, whether here faced with periodicals or in London surrounded by a Society that did not care, I would never escape the reminders.

I could not think of Teddy without drowning in such fierce guilt that it rose to choke me.

I did not want to live this life with a broken heart.

There was a cure for my pain, and it was no different than the panacea physicians all over London suggested for that very thing. I was not the unreasonable one here. I was the victim, the invalid; it was my pain needing curing, and I no longer chose to be denied.

I began by turning the desk drawers all but upside down. Within, I found books, yellowed papers, even some boxes whose contents revealed mementoes and the odd cigar, but nothing of the tar or laudanum I knew Ashmore must maintain.

He’d weaned me from the stuff, it would be here somewhere.

I was half across the room, my steps short and quick, when I realized he wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave such things in the same room where he deposited me.

I fled for the door, hurried into the hall as a painful vise clamped about my head and chest.

I could not breathe.

The echoes of my own gasping efforts followed me as I fled for the stairs I recalled in the foyer. I did not meet Ashmore between here and there. I did not see any sign of living thing, attributed the leap of shadows to my fumbling efforts to see through the gloom. I did not even scream when a cobweb clinging to the bannister I gripped on my climb wrapped itself about my hand.

I craved sedation. I desperately needed the soothing burn of the opium grains within the ruby liquid Ashmore carried, and I would do anything to get it.

On the assumption that he would not want to be far from my quarters—the better to hear such sounds as I might make—I darted to the left as I finished my climb. My rasping breath filled the hall, surrounded me with the echo of harsh whispers.

I was gasping for air as I seized the first doorknob that came to hand. Locked. I staggered for the next.

Also locked.

Again, and again, I tested every door, falling upon them in desperation.

The first doorknob that turned sent such sweet elation through me that I did not pause—I did not hesitate, did not think what I might do. I simply threw open the panel, let it slam hard against the wall and stumbled into the room.

Gray daylight streamed from the windows, the curtains opened to allow as much of it to fill the interior as possible. The bed within was much like mine, a valise opened upon it, although the colors of both bedding and drapes were blue and burgundy.

Ashmore straightened from his bent scrutiny in a vanity mirror, his now beardless face glistening from a wash and an open razor held easily in his left hand. He was shirtless, a fact that did nothing to halt my advance, and the ghostly light turned his skin so white as to be nearly blue. A cloth had been wrapped about his shoulders for care, and the fact that he bore a certain lean muscle beneath his dreary brown togs should have warned me that he was no weakling.

I did not care. I could not even be bothered to study the markings staining the skin of his forearms with any pointed interest.

He would not be the first man of my acquaintance to display tattoos. I had met many a sailor in my time, and even some few sweets wore ink on their skin.

He took one look at my advance, and something in my carriage must have warned him. The blade in his hand clattered to the vanity’s surface, ringing a shrill scream in my ears as it hit the bowl of water he’d used to rinse the shaving soap from the blade.

Seizing my moment, I grasped my wrapper and shift in both hands and sprinted for the valise.

Ashmore was not a slow man. He caught me half across the room before I’d registered that he moved at all, arms banded about my waist, and pulled me clean off my feet. Spun in a circle, it was all I could do to beat at his restraining arms.

“Stop,” he ordered, voice terse in my ear. “What are you doing?”

“Leave me be!” I sobbed the order, kicking my feet wildly. I couldn’t summon enough thought together to will my body to fight as I knew how. All form had left me, all instinct—save one.

The light bent as I strained against his grasp, my head against his shoulder and his chest plastered to my back. I screamed my fury when he did not let go.

“Stop this at once,” he demanded, shaking me hard. “What has gotten into you?”

“I don’t—I don’t want to be here!” An elbow driven into his ribs earned me a muffled curse. My heel driven into his knee caused him to dance out of the way, my body held at an angle so awkward I could no longer do anything but flail at the air.

He dragged me from his room and into mine just beside. Kicking the door closed took enough of his attention that I was able to drop my head far enough to seize the sinewy muscle of his forearm between my teeth and bite as hard as I could.

This curse was not a muffled one. Yelling it, he caught me by the hair, pulled me free and spun me about so my back plastered against the door. My wrists in his grasp and pinned above my head, Ashmore held my body in place with his own and stared down into my upturned face.

I couldn’t summon enough air. Gasping, I watched his tense features soften through my watery sight.

His mouth seamed into a twisted line that might have been sorrow. “I knew it was too soon.”

I wrenched at his grip. “Give me the laudanum.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No,” he repeated, so patiently that I would have bitten him again—just by the towel now draped loosely about his shoulders—if he did not seize both wrists in one hand and slap the other against my brow, holding my head in place against the door. “Stop that.”

I clenched my teeth together so hard, my panting breath hissed between them. The dark pigment on his skin was so close, I could not see it clearly.

“What the devil caused this?” he asked me.

My nostrils flared as the scent of something more woodsy than soft filled them. As if my mind could not bear to let it go, the fragrance turned abruptly to that of coal-choked fog and the coppery odor of fresh-spilled blood.

When the train had made impact, Teddy’s blood had spattered all over me. A veritable wash of it.

I would never be rid of the stain.

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t want to what?”

I tried to shake my head, but his grasp over my forehead denied that.

His voice lowered, body straining to keep my struggles in check. “Talk to me, Miss St. Croix. Tell me what you need.”

“Opium!” I sobbed the word.

“No.” A firm denial. “What is it that makes you think so?”

Memories. Guilt. Craving.

He wouldn’t care. Demons didn’t, after all.

“Tell me.”

I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I simply couldn’t bear it. I clenched my eyes shut, as if it would block out the sight of him underneath his hampering palm—steady, resolved. So much more in control than I.

The fight bled from me.

Slowly, the hand over my forehead lifted. Long fingers smoothed back my hair, damp at the hairline from my exertions.

“Such relapses are bound to happen,” he told me.

I opened my eyes to find his close enough to drown in—a brown that now seemed glossed with green, like a thin coating of moss over a stone. His hair blazed so brightly as to be nearly blinding against his milk-white skin.

His mouth, softer at the lower lip than such a stern countenance might have ordinarily allowed, eased into a slanted smile. “There’s no shame in it,” he added.

So he claimed.

My breath came slower, but no less easily. As if I’d run a race, or sobbed my heart out.

With every rise of my chest, the warmth of his bare skin seeped into my wrapper—eased into my chilled flesh. My lips parted.

Ashmore’s gaze dropped to the small motion.

Red climbed his cheeks, so stark against his pale skin that it was as if he’d been branded.

He did not let me go. Whether flushing in discomfort or of sudden awareness that he was a gentleman half-dressed in a woman’s bedroom, he was not so easily swayed as to risk letting me loose again. That I had once been his ward no doubt helped nothing.

I took a breath that shook. “Ashmore.”

I watched his pupils dilate in a hazel field.

A heady rush of power filled my veins, turned ice to warmth and craving to something much different—for all the outcome might be the same.

He could help me. In that moment, with the fragrance of his shaving soap in my nose and the strength of his grip about my wrists, I resolved that he would do for me what Hawke had taught me to understand.

Ashmore would be my diversion. If I could not have the tar, the draught or the smoke, then I would have flesh.

I would become flesh.

I licked at my bottom lip to wet the dry skin.

His throat worked as he swallowed hard. “I want you to comprehend—”

“Would it be so bad?” I asked, breathy with the force of a wanting so sharp as to bleed in a wholly different manner than the guilt that rode me.

He frowned. “You have come so far, Miss St. Croix, but you can’t be expected to handle your recovery so smoothly. These things—”

“No.” Again, I cut him off. “I mean, would it be so bad if you were to distract me?”

Possibly, he had never once in his life considered such a proposition from his ward. He only looked at me as if he was not sure whether I was playing a game or handing to him a venomous snake wrapped in a gilded bow.

Then, as my meaning sank in, his eyes widened. “I don’t think that is at all proper.”

“’Tisn’t,” I admitted, my voice husky.

“Nor do I believe it helpful.”

“Care to acquire evidence to support your claim?” Slowly, I leaned my head forward, aware of his hand braced against the door behind me. All he had to do was seize my hair, and I would go nowhere.

He did not.

A tremor ripped through his body as my tongue flicked out over the sharp angle of his clavicle.

The first taste of his flesh stirred something dangerously warm within me. He tasted like nothing I could imagine—both clean and a little bit salty, with undertones of something I could only designate as forbidden fruit.

The fingers at my wrist turned bruising. “Don’t,” he rasped, and the echo of it sent shivers through me.

He’d ordered the same once, when I’d offered him my body in exchange for freedom.

I would not allow him the opportunity to deny me again.

Obeying a strange voice within my fluttering senses, I caught the flesh just over his collar bone between my teeth and bit down. Slowly. Deliciously slowly. Until the skin went taut and Ashmore’s groan ripped like a guttural admission from his chest.

I let it go, my point smugly proven.

“This can’t—” He seemed at a loss for the words. “I’m your guardian, here to help you recover, not—” A gasp as I nuzzled the skin of his throat. “Not this.”

“This will help me recover,” I said, thrilling when he responded to the way my lips brushed against his flesh. “It will give me something else to concentrate upon.”

“What of the books?”

“Intellectually stimulating.” I opened my mouth over that skin I spoke against, dragging my tongue over the pulse thudding hard against it. His hips jerked against mine. “But they do not give the same loss of sense as physical pleasures.”

“You know this?” A hoarse inquiry.

This time, I sucked at his pulse, drawing his flesh into my mouth with undeniable delight as his breath escaped on a harsh uncivility. When I let it go, I wondered if it might bruise.

“I know this,” I confirmed, uncaring what he might think of me then.

Another curse, and he wrenched me from the door frame. Fingers tight at my wrists, he all but dragged me to the bed, only pausing long enough to help me right my balance as I stepped on the hem of my wrapper and stumbled over it.

With an arm tight around my waist, he half-carried me into place, to deposit me on my bed and strip the unmade covers from the surface.

The angles of his face were so taut, harsh planes and shadowed grooves, that delicious anticipation filled me where there had been only the need of a draught.

“I’m a widow,” I told him. “I can do as I please.”

“Say what you will.” Terse fingers pulled the draped cloth from his shoulders. “Such things will never end well.”

“I don’t care.” I sat up, kicking my slippers to the floor. “You were already prepared to give me your attentions.”

A hint of that wry humor emerged as he admitted, “Different attentions entirely, minx, and you know it.”

I waved that away. “’Tisn’t as if I ask for love.” Even the word caused a shudder of revulsion to fill me, as though Teddy breathed it again into my ear.

“Well, I know.” He bent, bracing both arms on either side of me upon the bed, his face now so close that I could see each individual glimmer of green that sometimes turned his brown eyes muddled. “The women of your blood do not love.”

“Remember that,” I said, husky of voice and harsh of intent, before seizing his face in both my hands and drawing his mouth to mine.

Chapter Seven

My personal experience in such matters was not overly rounded. I was rather more aware of matters of the flesh than I suspect Society would be pleased to know, and had been since before my arrival to London at the age of thirteen, but most came from observation.

The flesh tables where the good monsieur would auction the girls, the stolen moments behind the carts where—if one was quiet and possessing of a keen sense of timing—one might hear a lucky hand earning a bit of attention from a girl. Upon my collector’s path, I spoke often with the working women, and had utilized a dollymop’s brat for many an errand.

Each of these did much to educate me on the subject, but my experience was limited to much less a sampling.

Of the men who had kissed me, I could count these upon a single hand. Of those who had a more intimate understanding of my body, and that which made me beg for more, there was only one.

I would not think his name now. Not when Ashmore’s lips closed over mine, capturing my kiss with such finesse that my thoughts fled all corners and focused suddenly, intently, upon this. Here. His mouth against my own, his breath mingling with mine.

I lay half reclined upon the bed, my wrapper askew and my knees slightly open, his face held between my palms, while he loomed over me—a knee planted between mine for balance, his weight braced upon his arms on either side of me.

An odd pairing, to be sure, and one that did not seem to wholly know how to come together.

He did not lower himself to cover me, though my skin burned at the thought of his bare chest so far away. I knew what it was to have a man laying atop me, to pin me with his weight and sear with his body a brand of possession upon me.

I wanted that again. In those moments—when I experienced a release flooding through my veins, sweeter even than the laudanum I wanted—I was allowed to forget.

Ashmore’s breath was fresh from a cleaning; breathing in filled my senses with all manner of delights. He wore no cologne that I could discern, only the scent of his skin and a woodsy fragrance I attributed to the shaving soap he used. His lower lip was soft and sweet beneath the exploring stroke of my tongue. While I had no trouble hearing the ragged sound this caress engendered within him, I could not understand why he held himself so rigidly—or why his hands, tightened into fists beside my hips, did not touch me as I wanted him to.

Instead, he feasted at my mouth as a man of famine might—cautiously at first, but with growing hunger. He caught at my teasing tongue with his own, flicked at it as if to encourage me to taste deeper of his mouth—to be the aggressor where I had not considered any farther than to be the lure.

A gasp caught at my throat as his head tilted just so, an angle that allowed him to seize my mouth in a deeper kiss. His tongue swept beyond my lips and retreated, speeding my pulse with thrill of a challenge. His teeth nipped at the tender flesh, a cheeky warning, and again at my lower lip as I sucked in a strangled bit of air.

When he raised his head, leaving me bereft of his warmth, my lips throbbed and tingled. That wicked heat between my legs had intensified shamelessly, until all I could imagine were his fingers there—stroking me as I knew was sinfully delightful, claiming that bit of me in order to send me flying as I yearned to.

Long fingers curled around my upper arms. My eyes flew open as Ashmore deftly scooped me from the bed, the tensile muscle in his shoulders coiling with the effort.

A glimpse of his eyes forced me to still, the flesh between my thighs tightening as a glint flared within his gaze. Yet his grip was unshakable, his body rigid as he sat behind me, his back to the headboard.

Before I knew what he intended, I was placed upon his lap, his chest warm against my side and his arms banded about my waist. My legs draped over his hip, knees tucked against his side and clamped in place by an elbow.

I tilted my head to the side, a frown forced through my hazy sense of arousal. “What is this?”

“Sanity,” he replied, curving one hand over my bare leg and one over my hip.

An experimental wriggle assured me that it wasn’t lack of interest that motivated him. His eyes narrowed, mouth twitching as my hip lodged against the front of his trousers.

I did not like this. Not one little bit.

“I would much rather you were kissing me,” I told him, lifting one hand to the loose collar of my wrapper. “Wouldn’t you?”

His head leaned back against the headboard, his eyes closing. “There are many things I’d rather do,” he replied, a strained note of amusement in the rejoinder. “Kissing you is not and has never been on that register, as I value my reason.”

The rejection smarted.

As I sat clamped in his grip, my fingers gripping my wrapper, the hollow ache in the core of my body seemed only to mock me.

Tears stung my eyes. I looked down, hiding my face. “If you don’t want me,” I began, rather very small.

“Damnation.” Ashmore straightened, shifting uncomfortably beneath me. “If you cannot deduce how much I’d like to take you here in this bed, you’re too sodding inexperienced for the taking.” The intensity with which he spoke nearly growled from him, but his hands did not leave my waist or knee.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Then why?”

“There are many reasons.”

To my horror, a sob filled my chest. I forced it down hard as I could, but in vain. It twisted from me, evolving into a hiccup merged with a gasped inhalation.

“That’s one,” he said, but not unkindly. Ashmore tugged me closer, until it was not his face I saw when I opened my eyes again but his bare chest, pale and hairless where I’d expected at least a sprinkling. While he did not exhibit the refined muscle of Hawke’s physique, his was a ropy, tensile strength that spoke of long hours in motion. Even that flat taper at his waist showed evidence of such effort.

Not at all what I had expected of my absent guardian.

Because it cost me nothing—what little pride I’d managed to find had deflated—I allowed my cheek to rest upon his shoulder.

His demeanor softened, body easing back into the headboard behind us. The hand at my waist stroked over my braid, instead. “I am aware of your wants,” he told me. His voice echoed from two directions—the tenor from his mouth and the rumble easing from his chest. “’Tis not so uncommon as to trade one vice for another in a bid to escape the hold of the first.”

I flinched. “You make me sound so mercenary.”

“Not at all. Simply predictable.”

I bit at my lower lip, fidgeting with the collar between my hands.

For a moment, all that spoke between us was his heartbeat, slow and steady beneath my ear. Even mine had eased to a measured pace, as if the arousal his kiss had caused in me had no will to linger without immediate attention.

My smile, when it finally came, was bitter. “I’m too thin, aren’t I?”

“What the devil are you saying now?”

“I’ve lost too much flesh.” I made as if to straighten from his hold, but the hand at my braid splayed at my shoulders. I settled again, but did not realize what was causing him to shake until I heard laughter bubbling up from under my ear. “What?” I asked, annoyed. “’Tis true, isn’t it?”

“No,” he denied, although the chuckle in the single syllable made it wobble. “Not even a little true.”

“Bollocks.”

This only seemed to make him laugh harder, until I had no choice but to raise my head from his shoulder lest he rattle my brain with his chortling. I glowered at him openly, now; he didn’t seem to notice, his eyes closed and mouth curved up in undue merriment.

Whatever he found so funny, I was not amused.

I jabbed him in the chest with my knuckles.

His laugh turned into an exhale of surprise, and he let go of my knee to rub at the offending spot, eying me with a mix of wary acknowledgement and lingering humor. “That was uncalled for.” The warmth in his eyes turned them to a lovely glow, so startling in color against his copper hair that it gave him a fiery appearance all together—as if a flame burnt inside his chest, rather than a heart.

That my heart gave a bit of a kick beneath his study only fed my ire. I would not be swayed by merely a look, especially while he withheld his attentions. “Your amusement, given the circumstances, is not polite,” I said, nose in the air.

His snort caught me off-guard; as did the hand that caught my cheek and turned my face to his. Before I’d taken a breath to scold his continued good-humor—a bloody nuisance, in my state—he pressed hard enough on my nape with his other hand that I was forced to lean forward.

His lips brushed mine. Once. Then again, when my eyes went wide. A third time, his lower lip rubbing against mine with sumptuous care.

My scolding turned into a shuddering exhale.

This time, when he allowed me to lean away, his eyes were heavy-lidded, mouth curved into an indolent smile. “Make no mistake,” he said, his lovely voice now huskier than I’d expected. “You are delightful in every way. Any man you favor is altogether too fortunate for his own good.”

The octave did something to my insides I could not explain—something reminiscent of arousal but deeper. Delicious, in a way; like being touched without physical contact.

“However, your recovery is altogether enough to claim your focus, and I’ll not be the bastard who keeps you from it.” The hand at my nape had not moved, but his thumb stroked a line down the curve of my neck. Back and forth.

I tilted my head some to allow him greater access. As I did, I lifted my worrying thumb to my mouth.

Ashmore’s other hand caught it. “That is not a healthy habit. You’ll wear the skin down.”

“I mend quickly.” A truth rather more literal since the day my father attempted to murder me. Whatever had been woven with the opium in his serum, it had left me a swift healer.

“I’ve noticed.” His thumb stroked across my knuckles. “Who did you allow to touch you?”

What tender ripples of feeling he had coaxed from me vanished. Ice filled my chest. Ice, and the sudden, angry lash of scorned memory. I jerked my hand out from his. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The warm glow in his gaze altered to something darker. “Were you forced?”

“No!” The quickness of my reply must have only worried him, for his features turned thunderous. I turned so that I could face him more directly and lay a hand over his chest. His heart pounded against my palm, much faster and harder than moments before. “No,” I repeated firmly. “I chose my own path.”

He searched my gaze. “Did you give yourself to your husband before the vows?”

I could not hold his stare. I glanced away, pain lancing through my heart. “No. Compton was too proper a man for that.” To say nothing of my own ambivalence on the subject. Compton’s kiss had stirred me, but it was as a gentle breeze compared to the tempest Hawke had caused.

That I had never truly come to terms with my wifely responsibilities before our marriage was another thing I would carry forever. While it was true enough hat I’d accepted the earl’s hand in marriage, I had done so for reasons that had little enough to do with love. Compton had promised to allow me independence to pursue my intellectual hobbies, to furnish me with all that I wanted, to provide for me in all the ways his station allowed him to.

Even Hawke had demanded I marry my earl, in exchange for forgiving not just my debt but the earl’s younger brother, who was just the sort the Menagerie liked best to visit.

Compton had once assured me that I would grow to love him.

I would never know if this was true.

“I had taken Compton for a gentleman,” Ashmore acknowledged, so simply that my gaze flew to him in surprise.

“You knew him?”

“Of him,” he corrected, and if he felt at all strange about discussing my late husband while I lay curled in his arms, he did not show it.

I couldn’t even be sure how I felt about that, either.

Truly, I was a disaster.

As the company he afforded me—chaste though it may be—was preferable to being alone, I allowed myself to once more relax into his embrace. Absently, I tucked the edge of my thumb into my mouth and chewed a ragged line.

“I did not hear of your wedding until days before it. Post is slow in India.” His rumble was quiet; respectful, in a way, though I wasn’t all that certain he’d intended it. “By the time I made it back to London, Compton was dead and you were gone.”

I heard no censure in his voice, although I did not need to in order to feel it. Pain shot up my hand, and the salty tang of blood slid over my tongue.

I winced. “I— Well, the Lady Northampton was not inclined to allow me to avenge her son.” Not that she had any idea that I would, either. Had she, I suspect I might find myself taken away to Bedlam, rather than banished to a widow’s bower.

Those long fingers I admired slid through mine, forcing my hand from the edge of my teeth. As I looked up, he raised my bleeding thumb to his lips and drew the ragged wound into his mouth.

It didn’t hurt at all when his tongue caressed the tiny tear.

Hawke had done that. The memory of it assaulted me without warning. The visceral impact of the ringmaster’s tongue sliding over the raw wound in my hand had started a decadent flame deep within me that I still remembered.

One that had culminated in my yielding to his bed.

My eyes widened. “Why?” I whispered.

It was as if Ashmore hadn’t realized what he’d done. He stilled, my thumb now a breath from his lips, and looked down at me with something so raw I could not fathom its heart. Horror, perhaps? That I’d seen him do something so strange? Or sadness?

He lowered my hand to my chest, smoothed his own over my fingers. “It is my deepest regret,” he said quietly, looking away, “that I was not there for you when you needed it most.”

Confusion beset me from all sides. I frowned at his profile. “You could be here for me now.”

“I am here for you now.” Slowly, he laid his head back against the headboard and closed his eyes. “You simply won’t see it for what it is.”

Delivered as it was with such weary compassion, I had no words with which to counter it. I did not want him to be right—I wanted him to be giving to me the forgetfulness which I demanded.

Was my own guilt, my own craving, infecting all that I decided for myself? Would I be so weak?

I listened to his heartbeat in silence, weighing the things I had learned when all I’d wanted to do was forget.

Could it be that Ashmore had attempted to come to my wedding? If he had managed to arrive in time, I wondered if my groom would have been murdered—if I would have been forced below, hounded by the sweet tooth.

Would I have been compelled to see all I was destroyed?

Squeezing my eyes shut, I curled into Ashmore’s warmth and tried to block the disastrous dance of what-if and perhaps playing in my head.

I don’t know how long we sat in my bed, his back to the headboard and his hands cupped around me as I drifted in silence against his naked chest. I didn’t want to sleep—didn’t want to dare the ghosts that haunted my memories—but fatigue and my lingering weakness stripped the choice from me. Loosely clasped in Ashmore’s arms, I slumbered.

It was the first in a very long time that I did not truly fear to do so.

* * *

I awoke with no awareness of my surroundings.

With the uncertainties of one who had stepped from a dream to waking bemusement, I found myself perched upon a vanity’s seat, delicate glass jar in one hand and a startled reflection of myself framed within the mirror I stared into.

How had I gotten here?

A fragrance drifted in the air, a little sharp for my tastes and smelling faintly of lilies. Immediately, my nose twitched. I had always been adverse to the smell, often lapsing into fits of sneeze on the ballroom when the blasted flower became the rage.

I glanced at the indigo blue jar, but did not lift the nozzle to my nose. I could well assume it as the source of the needling odor. I set it down with great care, its fragile design much finer than anything I’d be likely to possess.

Silk rustled when I moved.

My gaze darted back to the mirror.

My hair was parted in the middle, my too-long fringe at the front now swept into the mass and allowed to blend. While it seemed I’d made an attempt to create a loose knot at the nape of my neck, half now hung awkwardly over my shoulder, as if I’d gotten too tired to continue. A delicate ivory comb rested on the vanity in front of me, ready to be tucked into that coil.

It was not a fashion of the day, but it suited the gown I wore, which was many years out of style. The fabric was a brilliant shade of blue, one so deep that it that turned my hair to a ruby shine. It hung loosely upon me, neither structured by a corset nor wholly suited to this unhealthy thinness I had acquired, but it was nevertheless an exquisite creation.

I splayed a pale hand over the bodice, which would have fitted more closely had it been made for me, my shoulders bare and draped sleeves hanging over my arms. The waist was rather more high than I was accustomed to.

I startled to recognize the gown from that of the painting within the library.

This was my mother’s. I had found my mother’s gown, somehow put it on without my being aware of it. I’d even begun to mimic the hair style within the painting.

I stared at the reflection looking wide-eyed back at me. I did not look like my mother—I did not even come close. In the silvered mirror, I looked a child playacting in her mother’s clothes, a shadow too small to ever compare to the radiant flame her mother had been.

I looked pitiful.

I rose so quickly, the delicate chair I sat upon tottered. As I spun to catch it, the heavy skirt swept it aside. The chair crashed to the floor.

I did not realize how badly my hands were shaking until I looked down to see them reaching uselessly, tremblingly for nothing.

A heavy film of dust and murky light turned everything to a dreary gloom, save for the splash of brilliant fabric spilling from three open trunks arrayed along the farthest wall. From vivid verdigris to muted lavender, the yellow of a daisy’s eye and a hint of red; these were the gowns of a bold, confident woman.

Had I walked here in my sleep? Did I dream of that painting, or of my mother?

I recalled nothing of my sleep at all.

I didn’t like this. It felt wrong. I shouldn’t have lost time and memory, not since coming off the tar. Was I falling into relapse despite Ashmore’s efforts?

Was it something else?

Ice slipped down my spine, curling my toes and fingers with the force of a fear I had not felt since I’d escaped the malice masked within the dreary London fog. Those of us who spent any degree of time in the thick miasma saturating all of the poverty-stricken streets learned to sense danger before it came. Of all I recalled of my prior adventures, it was that malevolence evoked by the men who stalked it that I remembered most clearly: the Ripper, monstrous in madness, and the sweet tooth whose calculated assassinations put even the Ripper’s to shame.

Even in my dreams, I remembered what it did to me to be stalked through that wretched fog by a murderer.

It was that I felt now. That lingering evil, that ooze of malevolent intent.

I was being watched.

I spun slowly, shoulders rounding as if I expected a blow; shadows and silhouettes turned to evil lurking where only décor had been moments before.

Seeing nothing did not salve the visceral fear.

It was the same feeling I’d harbored in my room only the day before. My skin prickled, my instincts shrieked at me. In the gloomy bedroom I stood within, I heard only the wheezing rasp of wood settling, groans and creaks as filled this empty house, and I could not move.

The knowledge coalesced inside my thoughts like a splash of icy water. If I did not escape right bloody then, I would not survive what came next.

I did not pause to think that could possibly happen. I did not truly believe that the house would come alive to snap me up into eternal darkness, yet my senses screamed that it was so. Such terror bloomed within me that I did not think. Seizing the heavy skirt in both hands, I fled the boudoir as though the Devil himself gave chase, the back of my neck and shoulders prickling as though I ran a mere finger’s length ahead from skeletal hands.

I spilled into a large open hallway, my bare feet tangling into the too-long hem of the borrowed gown, and nearly tumbled to the dusty carpet softening the floor. Turning, limbs flailing, I bit back a scream as a figure rose tall and threatening before me.

Ashmore caught one arm as I stumbled. “What the devil is all that racket?”

Had I the presence of mind to speak, to form coherent thought beneath the onslaught of pervasive terror, I might have managed a sensible word.

I could only flutter my hand behind me in wordless terror.

His glance flicked to the open door over my bare shoulder, then narrowed and fell not upon my face, but my attire.

Ashmore pulled his steadying hand back so fast, it was as if I’d burned him. “You look ridiculous,” he said, angry where I’d expected sympathy. “Put it back where you found it.”

“I—There’s someone there!”

He had no interest in my flights of fancy. “There’s no one,” he snapped. He turned his back on me. “Take it off and put it back.” Without further wasted word, he strode from the hall. The sharp, angry staccato of his footsteps echoed long after he turned from sight.

I stood in the corridor, abandoned and confused. Terror rode me, and as his footsteps faded into nothing, I swore I heard the creaking echo of a mirrored tread knocking from within the looming walls.

I groaned, a shuddering sound.

Was I mad?

Was it the want of a draught that finally pushed me to such meanderings of the mind?

Although I understood the logic of such a trick, that my desperation created for me a motive to demand the balm of laudanum, it did not matter. My senses would not heed such reasoning.

Once more hiking the skirt high enough to clear the floor, I escaped the gloomy wing and its imagined ghosts.

Chapter Eight

I stared at the cloth covering the painting once more and could not bring myself to get off the sofa and remove it. It was not all fatigue, though it seemed I suffered it more acutely after my ill-fated wanderings into my mother’s boudoir of some days past. There were times I could not fight the need for sleep, and others when I wanted so badly to pace but could barely sit on the sofa I claimed as my own.

No matter what I tried, what distractions I contrived to lose myself in, I could not shake free of the certainty that I was watched. Such abject paranoia had become my most steady of bedfellows that it was all I could do to bury myself in what books I could and ignore the urge to rail at the dark.

We were alone, Ashmore and I, of that I had no doubt. My alternate theory, that this house despised me as much as loathed it, was so far-fetched as to be ludicrous.

That left me mulling over a scientific explanation, and that was that I had done myself irreparable harm by the ongoing consumption of opium.

This conclusion caused me no end of concern.

I had no need to remove the white covering to see Josephine St. Croix’s radiant smile. It all but blistered me where I lay, my feet curled up beneath my wrapper—likely hers, too, now that I’d thought about it—and a book left open and abandoned over my chest. She judged me from her gilded frame, and I could do nothing but glower back at the white drape that covered it.

Somehow, I doubted very much that she would ever have allowed herself to be in this situation, were it her. She was too flawless for such mishaps.

For the past four days, Ashmore had been the perfect guardian. The food he brought had begun to gain a little more character—sausages with breakfast’s usual toast, a bit of jam to sweeten the dry fare. The portions continued to be small, but I still could not eat more than a bit at a time. I simply enjoyed the variety, forcing myself to eat a little of everything while I bolstered my strength and attempted to earn back some lost flesh.

He made no complaint when I asked to be taken to the library, and wheeled the heavy chair I was forced to use with conscientious patience.

We did not speak of that stolen kiss, or the sweet comfort he had afforded me—nor did I attempt to be given that comfort again. He did not bring up the strange moment in the hall, and I did not mention the elegant blue gown balled up and shoved beneath my bed.

I had not been able to bring myself to travel past the staircase and into the abandoned wing again. I told myself that my unwillingness stemmed from the weakness turning such efforts into difficult endeavors, and that was true—but it was also an excuse I comfortably hid behind.

The whole of it frightened me. I jumped at shadows that had, as near as I could discern, always been there. I heard noises in the walls that I truly understood to be nothing more than an old house suffering all the rotted aches and pains of neglect, and yet they inexplicably made me afraid.

I had never been one to jump at shadows, yet when I faced straight ahead, I was certain that hands reached for me from the side. When I looked, I shuddered to imagine that a shape flitted away too quick to see. My heart no longer remained content to beat in easy rhythm, but juddered within my breast so loudly that I thought I heard footsteps instead of a pulse.

When I watched the library carefully, nothing moved but firelight and shadows, and still I was not convinced. Even the halls became a lesson in endurance.

I did not like to be alone in my room until I was certain that Ashmore occupied his beside me. I’d have preferred he stay in mine, yet to ask seemed a loss of pride and an admittance to a deep concern now preying upon my mind.

So I did not tell him.

Instead, I read all I could, ignoring the periodicals left abandoned on the floor beside the sofa. When I felt capable enough—or simply gave in to restless fervor—I scoured the shelves I could reach for anything that might interest me.

I wanted something more personal than these books. The thoughts of my grandfather’s illness would not leave me be, and I wondered many times what it was that afflicted him—and why Ashmore was so certain it would not touch me. It felled my grandfather, did it not? And it had affected my mother, though her life was so tragically shortened by the laboratory fire.

I wanted to know more about the family I had not known existed.

Why did they keep no personal journals? My mother was known to keep diaries—I had been given one by Compton’s brother as a gift. The journal was a small one, but it catalogued many of my mother’s thoughts on aether and alchemy. It was the first time I’d ever known that my mother had fancied herself something of an alchemist—or that she and the Lady Northampton had been friends, once.

I’d given it, the remaining sample of my father’s alchemical serum, and a drawn picture of the cameo device he’d used to secret it, to Ishmael Communion before I’d gone hunting for the sweet tooth and the Ripper. Communion was not the sort of friend Society would have been pleased to know I had, but I trusted him beyond all things. An extremely large man whose black skin and near-black eyes gave him a terribly intimidating demeanor, he was a member of the Brick Street Bakers—one of London’s many under-fog gangs.

Ishmael had refined much of my cracking knowledge—to wit, how to break into a building—and was among the most skilled lockpicks I knew.

I hoped he still possessed the things I’d given him to hold. Hoped, too, that my flight from the Menagerie that fateful night had not forced the Veil to turn its eye on the Bakers. While the accords between them had always been civil, I was a known associate of Ishmael’s. If the Veil felt particularly slighted, it could cost my friend greatly. The Bakers were strong, but small, and, when I’d left them last, already embroiled in a conflict with the Black Fish Ferrymen.

I chewed on the broken skin of my thumb and glowered again at the covered painting.

If my mother was a chronicler of any sort, surely she had learned it from her father. The man who had raised a theoretical alchemist such as my mother must also be a mind given to intellectual pursuit, wouldn’t he? Such minds always maintained diaries of one kind or another.

No matter how often I’d searched, I found nothing.

Ill-tempered and denied every opportunity to quiet my chattering mind, I let my hand fall over the side of the sofa and stared blindly up at the high, vaulted ceiling.

The shadows leapt and frolicked across it, a mesmerizing ebb and flow of light. I allowed myself to watch the patterns flicker, even so far as so entertain a brief moment to close my eyes in rest.

So it was I found myself in a strange state of dozing and wakefulness when an awful baying rose above the merry pop and sizzle of the fire. My eyes snapped open, my body torn between sitting up and guarding what little strength it could claim, so that I only jerked sharply in aborted motion. “What—!” A bitten off gasp.

Nothing in the library had changed, though I no longer expected it to. My idle-minded dreams were no different than the opium-induced delusions I’d harbored for so long; my efforts to ignore them were only somewhat more successful when I was in the library with the fire bright and books.

Still, my heart pounded as the baying increased—a terrible, mournful sound echoing from somewhere beyond the walls I hid within.

I seized the back of the sofa and hauled myself upright, frowning fiercely.

Dogs. Whatever my imagination wanted to paint the sound, I was not so missish that I didn’t know the sound of dogs. They howled and barked in the manner of hounds clambering for attention.

Inside the house was quiet, or those parts I could hear from where I held a lonely court. That meant the dogs were kept outside.

A stable, perchance, or a groundskeeper’s abode?

A flash of recollection parted through the cloudy haze my youthful memory hid beneath, its vision bright as a summer bird’s wing and startlingly sharp. I recalled a time when I huddled in my own bed, not so long ago, while the hall of my Cheyne Walk home filled with a presence I thought dangerously hungry. Snuffling filled the space behind my closed door, and I recall associating Ashmore’s demonic memory with that of hounds unleashed by hell itself.

Perhaps the grip my years of laudanum wrapped about my shattered memories was slipping; if so, I could thank Ashmore for the care that allowed me to recall such small a thing and place it.

The man kept dogs.

I buried my face against the brocade and laughed in helpless embarrassment.

How far gone was I then that only now in my restless sobriety did I recognize the truth for what it was?

Somewhere, a door slammed, and Ashmore’s voice murmured through my rueful amusement. Feminine laughter undercut whatever it was he said.

My laughter abruptly died.

A woman?

The devil it was. Mr. Oliver Ashmore was a mystery in many ways, but I found the concept of his bringing a woman to this, the site of my convalescence, utterly out of character. In all the years he had served as my guardian, he did so absently, and never once brought a woman to the home he held until my inheriting.

That left perhaps a maid. A cook? Neither necessary, for Ashmore saw to what little care was needed—although in retrospect, I had not seen him take a duster to the furniture yet.

What else was there to mind?

Me.

Of course. A companion. Hadn’t he claimed to have sent for one? How many days had it been? Surely more than enough to fetch some busybody of a creature from whatever village was closest.

My hand curled into a determined fist atop the sofa’s back.

I didn’t want a companion. I had no reason to trust one, no desire at all to exist with a stranger underfoot and hovering.

I was already convinced that Ashmore was avoiding me as often as his conscience allowed. This woman, whoever she might be, would only allow him to do so with impunity.

I turned, wincing when the act of putting my feet down upon the carpet only drew my attention to how tired I seemed to be. My muscles ached as though I abused them; my bones felt heavy and fragile. It wasn’t a sleepiness of the mind, though I did not sleep enough already. I simply felt as if I lacked all energy.

I would be forced to pretend, then. Long enough to rid this creaking house of its new guest.

The voices came closer, echoing eerily from my vantage, and I caught myself lifting my thumb to my mouth.

No. Such tells betrayed my worries. Ashmore would surely see that for what it was.

A gentle rapping came upon the library door, and I did not turn when it opened. “Miss St. Croix, we’ve a guest.” Ashmore’s tone was not the deferential respect of a butler—Booth would have been far more elegant in his introduction—but there was a self-satisfied air about it that I yearned to take him to task for.

“Oh?” I summoned an air of indolent disinterest, though belatedly, I realized I should have held open a book. Too late, now, as I heard two sets of footsteps approach. “I’m not up to guests, Mr. Ashmore, please ask her to return another time.”

He cleared his throat, pointed reproach.

I ignored that too.

Whoever this woman was, she could sod back off to wherever Ashmore had plucked her.

If it was unreasonable jealousy I felt, I was all too happy to turn it reasonable by bloody-minded strength of will.

I expected an argument. Instead, a shape rounded the sofa I sat rigidly upon, darkening the corner of my vision as she approached from my left. Brown skirt—drat that tedious color—and a pale blouse beneath a long-sleeved fustian jacket. A man’s traveling hat perched atop brown hair, and as the first inkling of recognition tugged at my senses, she came to a stop just in front of me.

I could not avoid Maddie Ruth Halbard’s smile, and in that moment, I abandoned all thought of driving her away.

“Maddie Ruth,” I cried, cheer replacing ire so suddenly, it drove the weakness from my limbs. I stood, only be seized in an embrace so tight, my breath was forced from me.

As abruptly as my heart lightened, my throat closed, and I burst into baffled, frantic tears.

Maddie Ruth Halbard’s was not a face I expected to find in this, my grandfather’s library. When last I’d seen her, she had maintained the Midnight Menagerie’s many and varied mechanisms—including the fog-pushers keeping the Menagerie clear of the black shroud covering the rest of London low. She and I had gone ’round and ’round, for Maddie Ruth wanted to be a collector, and I had been unwilling to allow it.

Much of our relationship remained tangled in that opium net I struggled to extract my memories from, but my affection for the girl had not abated.

She embraced me despite my sobbing, stroking my back and muttering nonsense as she waited me out. I cried on her shoulder, embarrassed to have lost such control, but ever so pleased that she stood here, safe and whole, and not at all swept up in the Veil’s machinations.

The girl looked worn, but her rounded figure—like mine before the illness—seemed to be in healthy form, and her cherubic cheeks bright red. Likely from the cold she’d traveled through.

As my sobs died to rueful hiccups and broken apologies, she guided me back to the sofa and sat beside me, holding my hands in her cold ones. She wore no gloves—surprising me, for I recalled she used to keep them often in her belt.

“I couldn’t believe it when this bloke pops out of nowhere,” she said, cheerful despite my outburst. Her boots were thick and warm, new enough that I wondered if Ashmore had furnished them for her. “He says, ‘You Maddie Ruth Halbard?’, all gruff-like. I’m thinking I’d best be calling for Nye, but he takes out this card and hands it to me, like a gent.” She spoke rapidly, her brown eyes sweet and still no less innocent for all I was certain Maddie Ruth knew more of the Menagerie’s wicked ways than even I.

Wiping my face with a sleeve—a gesture guaranteed to have sent Fanny into a fuss, had she seen it—I turned to look behind me. “Ashmore, did you—” My wry inquiry was halted when I found the library empty of his presence.

He must have delivered Maddie Ruth and made good his escape at our reunion. He likely had not even seen me weep.

The shaft of hurt that did to me went unremarked. I could not even fathom why it hurt.

Tamping it down, perhaps to be examined during the loneliness of the night, I turned my attention wholly to the nattering girl, my smile forced. “Was it Mr. Ashmore’s man, then?”

“Aye,” she replied, a little bit breathless with it. “I’d never seen the like. He’d strolled right into the Menagerie, can you believe it?”

That pain turned into a heavy rock inside my chest. After everything else I had burdened myself with, I wanted to avoid thinking any more of the Menagerie. Trapped as I was in this old mausoleum of a house, I did not want to fill it with any more ghosts than it already possessed.

Dredging up the Menagerie would bring to mind the Karakash Veil, and from the Veil, my thoughts would run once more to Hawke—and all that I had given.

“He was dressed fine enough,” she was saying, kicking her booted feet towards the blazing fire, “so I don’t think anyone suspected he’d come by way of Baker land.”

I clasped my hands in my lap, my throat suddenly aching. “I was just thinking of them. Maddie Ruth, how is Communion? Is he well?”

Maddie Ruth’s eyes no longer went big at mention of the man. Although Communion had a reputation as fearsome as his large size, he had saved Maddie Ruth’s life once—and mine a few more than that. To see such affection bloom in her expression did much to ease the burden of my heart. She scratched at her cheek with a work-callused hand. “The Ferrymen and the Bakers are at war, you know.”

“What, officially?”

She nodded. “Near enough. The Ferrymen been edging in on Ratcliffe, and the Veil’s let it be. There’s blood’n the streets.”

“Is Communion all right?”

“As rain,” she hastened to add, perhaps because I’d leaned forward and lost the color from my cheeks. She caught my shoulder when I swayed. “Are you?”

I waved that away. “Are they looking for territory?”

She shrugged. “The Veil’s letting them have at, long as they stay out of Limehouse and don’t disrupt business.”

That seemed rather like the Veil. “And the Menagerie? Last I recall—”

Fire. Blood. A flash of blue light filled my mind’s eye, brighter than anything natural, and I squeezed my eyes shut as her face went spotty. Like the memory of Ashmore’s dogs that surfaced from the fog in my head, another sliced free. Hawke’s eyes, blue where they should not have been, dancing madly in the reflected glare of a brilliant scarlet bloom of light.

Leave me.

My lungs constricted; when I gasped for air, it came to me tainted by the noxious fumes of the Veil’s maddening incense. I battered at nothing in front of my face as my heart slammed in my chest.

Maddie Ruth’s fingers twined with mine, jarring me from the waking dream I suffered. “Take deep breaths, now. Same as me. See?” She took a breath, slow and steady, and let it out at the same pace. This time, when I followed suit, I smelled only the fragrance of the wood in the fire, and the faintly musty scent of the books surrounding us. After three deep breaths, my head no longer seemed poised to fall right off my neck.

I shook it hard. “I’m all right,” I said when she took a fourth.

She let it out on a laugh. “You’re better than when I saw you last. I’d’ve passed on a wager for your living long.” A beat, and a horrified o shaped her mouth as I opened my eyes. “I mean—I don’t mean to say—”

I squeezed her hands. “I know it,” I said wryly. “No need to fall over yourself.”

She sighed a blustery thing. “You’re too thin, though,” she added.

I looked down at myself. “Ashmore’s been starving me.”

“I doubt that. No appetite, am I right?”

“Right enough.”

She nodded. “Same happened to my da, but he was too far gone for saving. Seems that cove out there is doing right by you.” At that, I grimaced. She raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t he?”

I didn’t want to speak of that. There were too many things I hadn’t worked out for myself. While I had come to understand that my own recollections of the man were wildly out of bounds, I still had not acclimated to my own efforts to seduce him; that he rejected such efforts made it all the more difficult to broach. I hadn’t truly given up on my theory, but I hadn’t the physical endurance nor the strength of pride required to follow-up.

Explaining all of that, relegating the art of seduction to a scientific hypothesis, without sounding like I belonged in Bedlam was beyond me.

I returned the subject to one she’d sidetracked herself from. “The Menagerie, Maddie Ruth. What has the Veil been up to?”

“A sight less than I expected,” she replied, waving a hand between us. “And on the subject of things what aren’t expected, why didn’t you let on you were a toff?”

She referenced the fact that I’d maintained a secret identity as London’s only female collector—a black-haired woman with no name, usually called Miss Black by Hawke and his ilk, or variations of “girl” by everyone else. All of that had been torn apart the night the Veil called in the debt I owed, and Hawke revealed me with my distinctive red hair to members of Society whose tastes ran towards the darker pleasures.

I did not want to address that, either.

I grimaced at her. “You are avoiding my questions, Maddie Ruth.”

Ah-ha! A guilty wince as she looked at the mantle. Her gaze lifted to the cloth-draped painting. “What is—”

“Maddie Ruth.”

She slumped, slanting me a sideways plea. “I only just arrived, and I’m not to talk about the Menagerie. You don’t want to see that cove toss me out so soon, do you?”

A very nicely turned bid for sympathy. Unfortunately for her, the guilt I already carried made her futile attempt feel like a soft breeze in comparison. “A fair attempt.” My words earned a quick grin before it was gone again. “To refute your theory, you are to be my companion and make certain I don’t expire of boredom, go nosing about for the laudanum Ashmore keeps around here somewhere—”

This time, the expression flitting over her round features was concern. I ignored it.

“—and most important of them all, save him from having to deal with me personally.” If my smile was a little more bitter than I intended, I hoped she’d attribute it to my convalescence. “I am an invalid, Maddie Ruth, but my intellect is not affected. Now, the Veil. What happened after my departure?”

Rescue, more like, but I wouldn’t quibble.

She sat back more fully into the sofa, facing me with a newly gathered demeanor of gravity. “You know yourself it’s not all fun in the Menagerie,” she began, and I nodded. “After the mutiny—”

Already, I interrupted. “The what?”

Her nose, more snub than attractive but darling as a button in her plain country features, wrinkled. She had always been lacking in the finer face that would have forced her to be a sweet for the Menagerie’s selling. Instead, her keen grasp of mechanical workings and a dab hand at tending injuries allowed her a measure of freedom from the other girls.

A freedom that had allowed her to help me without too much fuss. I owed her too. More than I could ever say.

“You didn’t know?” was her surprised rejoinder.

I glowered. “I did not.”

“Oh.” She touched her thumbs together, looking at them rather than me. “There was talk of mutiny against the Veil. Them what were tired of the lashings and the rules and such.” More than that, I’d wager. Even I had noticed a worrisome decrease in tolerance from the Chinese masters running the Menagerie through mouthpieces like Hawke. Whips, they called them. If there was more to the unrest, I wouldn’t be surprised.

“Zylphia was among them,” I said. Not a question, and Maddie Ruth did not take it as such. At her nod, I frowned. I desperately wanted to pace, but felt sure I’d only lose the ability halfway.

So I sat still, gripping my knees through my wrapper and nightshift, not at all concerned by how familiar it had become to entertain another’s attention while wearing them, and struggling to slog through all the memories choked up in that smoky fugue.

How much had I missed when I had been so bent on myself?

The last I saw Zylphia, she had been fighting with the ferocity of a born scrapper—yet I felt as if there had been more in that moment, important knowledge lost to the fog I had lived in.

I had been given so much opium that night.

My thumb slipped between my lips as I worried the edge, worrying the memories at the same time. Nothing came to me. Only a faint bit of pain from my teeth gnawing at worn flesh.

The morning before that fight, Zylphia had informed me of my exile from the Menagerie. It had come just after the night I shared myself with Hawke—giving in to the temptation of his command as so many other women had done, I was sure. Betrayed, I had left without a backwards glance.

I grumbled around my thumb and extracted it before I drew blood. “Is she all right?”

Maddie Ruth did not hesitate. “She’s in Baker territory, but that’s a secret.”

I could not hide my relief. “If Communion’s got her, then even the Veil will think twice.”

“I’m not so sure,” came the reply.

“No?”

“After the Veil’s men lifted you from the Bakers,” Maddie Ruth explained, “there’s been tension ’tween ’em. I think the Veil is waiting for the turf to settle before closing in on the Bakers.” I only vaguely remembered a bit of a scuffle. I was half out of my mind with grief and denial, gone on a ball of opium that should have lasted me days were it not for the fear of the monsters I hunted.

Regardless of what I remembered, if the Veil had sent warriors to retrieve me, Communion had no chance. He’d done the intelligent thing by handing me over without quibble; I would not hold it against him.

“Do they know Zylphia is there?” I asked.

“Nah.” She shrugged. “Not for sure, but I don’t know they need a reason to check. Besides, the Veil is—”

At that, her eyes grew large, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

I reached over, quick as a wink, and circled her wrist, tugging her hand away sharply. “What?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“You’d best,” I warned her, glaring with all the repressed irritation I’d reserved for Ashmore. “What is the Veil doing?”

“You won’t like it,” she warned, but quietly—and with more than one glance over my shoulder to the door. If Ashmore intended on bringing us tea, he was taking his time about it.

I leaned forward, letting her go only so that I could brace my flagging weight against the cushion between us. Eyes narrowed, I lowered my voice. “Tell me, or I’ll—”

Her fingers came up over my mouth, callused and still cold from the wintry air she’d come from. “Don’t do that,” she admonished, but gently. Sadness filled her eyes, where I was so accustomed to simple good-nature. “You don’t have to do that.”

Shame bit hard. Swallowing back a heated retort, I looked away.

I was rather too used to threats and outright lies to get my way. I did not like the hurt it painted on Maddie Ruth.

“Keep your voice down,” she continued after a moment, sighing with deep resignation. “At least if I get tossed out on my ear, I’ll have a bit of warmth before I go.”

I nodded, although I did not do so patiently.

After another hard look at the door across the library, Maddie Ruth leaned over and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Things are very bad,” she said. “Most of the girls are coming back with injuries what wouldn’t be tolerated before. There’s less freedom to come and go, and everyone’s always watched. Worse, the sweets aren’t allowed out of their quarters unless it’s time for them to perform.”

“The Veil is tightening the leash, is it?”

She nodded slowly. “When I saw Zylphia last, right before that cove’s man tracked me down, she said the Bakers’ve been feeling some resistance from places that usually let them or their smuggled goods pass.”

“What kind of resistance?”

“Everything to do with Limehouse, including permission to cross it.” She rubbed her hands together, the dry rasp of her toughened palms like rough paper. “Something about the Menagerie has changed, but no one’s talking about what.”

“Something?”

“Someone,” she amended.

I studied her face for a moment before the strange emphasis in the word slotted into place. My heart thudded against my chest. “Hawke.”

She nodded. “And it’s only getting worse.”

Chapter Nine

“Them what survived the fighting were punished.”

“I remember a little bit,” I said, staring into nothing as I labored to draw the names and faces from the slurry my memory had become. “Delilah and Talitha were there, I think. As flesh for the show.”

“And Jane.” Maddie Ruth lowered her voice even further. “Black Lily’s death hit Jane hardest, and after, she was talking to some of the girls about escaping. They took her away. She were still cursing when they dragged her from the quarters.”

My stomach clenched as anger bubbled forth, drowning the shards of broken guilt. “What happened to her?”

“That’s just it. No one knows.”

“She’s just gone?” I glowered at the brocade beneath my fists. “That’s not likely. Has anyone asked Hawke?”

“Are you barmy?” Maddie Ruth snorted rather rudely. “He’s as bad as the worst.”

I looked up. “Tell me.”

She did. The circus had become the main event most nights, only tolerable because the market had turned even more dodgy than usual fare. Goods included that of wares crafted to charm the coin from a rich pocket and flesh peddled for an evening’s service. Maddie Ruth’s solemn gaze did not waver as she said, “Some girls are sold and don’t come back for morning. There’s boys, too, now, and brats younger than usual.”

The thought left me feeling ill. “That can’t be allowed,” I insisted. “Does Hawke do nothing?”

Only then did her eyes turn away from me. “He doesn’t.”

“That isn’t like him.” I frowned. “Tell me.”

She needed no more prodding. In no uncertain terms, Maddie Ruth spoke of a man so cruel that he was kept locked away by the Veil when not required for performances so dark and dangerous, blood spotted the rings after. She spoke of eyes of wicked blue and tastes the likes of which turned my insides to a quivering mass of remembered fear. I did not wholly remember all that had been done to me, neither under Monsieur Marceaux’s tutelage nor the opium haze of my last confrontation with Hawke, but that what she described left me breathless and disbelieving. It was unholy; it was so far beyond that of the Menagerie’s common fare that I could discern no coin in the offering.

“Are you sure?” I asked, because anything else seemed too complex to give voice to.

I had known something was amiss about Hawke’s behavior of late. I’d seen it with my own eyes. What she told me now only verified it.

She nodded, clasping her hands in her lap. “The girls what come back from his shows are bleeding, some broken so awful, they won’t talk of it. Hawke isn’t right, anymore.” Her mouth drew into a sad line. “Ikenna Osoba’s the whip what does all the talking to the likes of us.”

“Osoba.” As I shaped the name, a vicious hiss came out with it. It was the savage lion-prince of far-flung Africa what had twisted Black Lily’s head until her neck snapped. “Didn’t Zylphia take him on?”

The girl stared at me. “What? When?”

“The mutiny.”

“I don’t know about that, but if so, it’s a wonder either are standing,” she said, awed. “Zylphia’s got a thing about her folk only whisper of, and Osoba’s always been respectful-like about it.”

I felt as if I’d missed an important detail, but needling at my head wouldn’t help. “You didn’t see them go at loggerheads?”

“No, I wasn’t anywhere near the fighting.” She shrugged a single shoulder awkwardly. “Us down in the pits, we don’t talk with the others much. Maybe they meant it that way to keep us clear.”

I could see Zylphia doing just that. “Do you know what it is about her that’s so odd?” I asked, but Maddie Ruth’s expression shaped into a moue of utter curiosity—and no fear, I noted, which is partially why I did not want her taking up the collecting profession. She had no instinct for self-preservation.

“Never you mind,” I added, cutting off her obvious denial. Instead, hoping it would come in time, I asked, “Are you sure it’s Hawke doing the hurting?”

“Aye.” She grimaced. “And taking the hurt.”

I sat up straight. “What?”

“The Veil has him punished all the time,” she told me. “They keep him locked away like a tiger, starving him from all comforts until he’s practically foaming at the mouth.”

Each word drove another shard of guilt into my chest, until I leapt to my feet, hand plastered over the imagined ache. “What is wrong with him?”

A steady hand slipped under my elbow. “I don’t know,” Maddie Ruth said.

I frowned at her. “I knew something was off when I first saw those eyes. Blue isn’t Cage’s color.”

“Cage?”

I blinked, then looked down at Maddie Ruth’s grip where it supported my arm. When I looked back at her, it wasn’t surprise that shaped her expression but a willful kind of smugness. “Well, that’s…It’s part of his name, isn’t it?”

“Only for them what earned the right,” she said, satisfied as a cat. “I wasn’t certain you’d still felt the same way about him after you and he—”

I slapped a hand over her mouth so quickly, it caused her to yelp in mingled sting and surprise. “Shush, Maddie Ruth,” I hissed, looking warily over my shoulder.

She caught my wrist and tugged it down, amusement rife in her eyes. “You mean your cove doesn’t know?”

“Not as much as you do,” I retorted. I twisted free of her grip, shaking her off as I turned away, my mouth tight with worry. With anger. Not at Maddie Ruth, bless her for coming all this way, but certainly at the news she brought.

What was I supposed to do about it?

I imagined Hawke restrained by the Veil he’d chosen to serve, and anger mingled with bitterness and no small amount of worry. Hadn’t he made his own bed? I would much rather leave him to lay in it with whatever companions he felt he deserved.

Micajah Hawke was no longer my concern. He’d tried for years to make me understand that I was not welcome, and it took his final performance to make that clear. He had abused my affections, betrayed my trust, and in the end, he had demanded I leave.

I did. I was free of him, free of concern or all those I left behind in London. Ashmore had done me a service. Zylphia was in Communion’s care, who was himself no fledgling when it came to violence. They would be fine. Maddie Ruth was here, safer than she’d be at the Menagerie, and my staff was likely ensconced elsewhere; good, honest work would see them through.

I had no reason to return.

So why did this very thought cause my throat to thicken?

“I’m not going back,” I said, and turned in a swish of ruffled skirts. I tightened the belt at my wrapper firmly. “Thank you for telling me all this, but I’m quite content where I am.” It was a lie, although a possible truth in the making. I had made no plans; I had no idea what plans I should make, and resented my own guilt, which suggested I turn my eyes back to the London I left.

Maddie Ruth had always possessed a sharp eye. “You don’t look content,” she told me.

“The devil I—”

“I mean it,” she insisted over me. Frowning in bemused impatience, I watched her bend on the other side of the couch and retrieve a small pack.

It couldn’t have held much. Was it all she’d come with?

She braced the case upon the sofa. The whole of it was so small, I imagined she’d been forced to roll whatever her clothing into as small a bundle as possible. Maddie Ruth did not believe in corsets or underskirts, which made traveling lighter as a rule, but surely she believed in changing her clothes now and again.

“There’s no reason to be making any sort of decisions about your future right now,” she said firmly, denying me the opportunity to commit. Clever girl that she was, I’d wager she knew just what it was I struggled over. “You’ve mending to do, and I’m here to see you do it. So, let’s not worry about anything else, right?”

“I am serious,” I replied, frowning. My hands tucked up on my hips. “Look at me, Maddie Ruth, I feel fine.”

“You look like death on a pike,” she said, a bald-faced truth even I recognized as genuine. “Mr. Ashmore specifically instructed—”

“Sod Mr. Ashmore,” I returned hotly, smacking the empty air with the back of my hand as if I could ward him away like a bothersome gadfly.

“Aye, as you say. Mend first, and then I’ll go with you to bring them what for, hey?” She grinned, utterly unimpressed with my temper. She’d grown saucy in the intervening weeks. Once upon a time, I’d frightened her some.

Knowledge of my identity likely turned me into something less a threat.

I’d show her. For all the luck that had seen her through a Baker brawl, the vagaries she spoke of in the Menagerie, and her own pigheaded foolishness that demanded she try to walk in my footsteps, she was not me. I had earned my place on that collector wall in London low; it was me who had put the fear of London’s only female collector into the hearts of vagrants and degenerates all over the city.

I’d caught murderers and thieves; she greased gears and serviced aether engines in a small room beneath a bloody circus.

That I was being unfair only aggravated my ire, and a fresh bloom of sweat gathered on my upper lip. A wave of exhaustion tumbled over me so suddenly, it was as if a pin had been taken to my inflated strength of limbs.

I sagged, head hanging, and let out a long sigh. “You may stay, if you must.”

“Good.” Her smile widened. “I’ll just go put this in the bedroom next to yours.”

“Isn’t that Ashmore’s—”

I should have kept my fool mouth shut. Maddie Ruth’s brown eyebrows climbed so high, they nearly vanished into her hairline. “You mean that handsome cove has been right next to you this whole time?”

I bit my lip.

Her mouth shaped that shocked o again. “You didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” I snapped, but I flushed.

Maddie Ruth laughed, her young voice so at odds with the subject we spoke of. She shrugged. “Pity. I might’ve.”

My spine straightened. “You are too bloody young for that sort of thinking.” I waved at her. “Go. Get out. I don’t want to hear you spouting off this nonsense.”

Still, it wasn’t all anger as she slung her case under her arm and smiled with unapologetic glee. “I’ll be back.”

“If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead,” I muttered, not at all meaning it.

She knew it, too, for her laughter cracked without a shred of propriety about it. Leaving me to my devices, she left the library to set her things in the room Ashmore must have abandoned for her.

So I was right about my initial concerns. He had abandoned me to my new companion’s care. With Maddie Ruth plucked from London low, was he to once more turn into the absent guardian whose comings and goings came like smoke on the wind?

I stood in the empty library and folded my arms over myself.

Looking up, my gaze snagged on the cold white cloth hanging over the mantle.

It bothered me. Not the painting—my mother had always been a figure looming over me—but my conflicted emotions as to the nature of Ashmore’s care. I knew how much I owed him for this, my drying out, and I was somewhat surprised to learn that I liked him. The somewhat easy camaraderie I’d found in his company was not the same as that I’d enjoyed with Teddy, but I recognized something of a kindred spirit in Ashmore. Even his stiffness was something of an endearing trait.

What would have happened had he taken me up on my offer of shared flesh and pleasures during the night?

I honestly did not know. The one man I’d ever given myself to was not the sort who waited about until morning. It was quite possible nothing would have come of it with Ashmore, either.

I felt the familiar press of guilt.

All of my thoughts circled back to what Maddie Ruth had told me. Everything came down to Hawke, and the manner in which I’d left him.

Ashmore had plucked me from that decadent show Hawke had strived to make of me, but as happened before, I saw Hawke clear in my mind’s eyes—his tawny skin, black hair and the brilliant flare of azure eyes that did not belong in his face.

First he’d humiliated me, and then he’d called my name and demanded I leave him.

All the colors that haunted such memories, the flashes of light, the screaming, smoke and blood, masked the truth of that night, and all I understood was that Hawke had turned me away. Whether he’d meant to end my life, sell it, or save it, I couldn’t possibly know.

The Veil claimed that he was a sorcerer of some stripe, and while I had a great deal to say about the quaintly unenlightened views of the Chinese organization that owned the Menagerie, I wondered if my imagination had taken such a conversation and twisted my memories to suit.

A man did not require magic to betray a girl; it was Hawke who had fooled me so utterly. Hawke, and my own imprudent choice to trust in him regardless of the warnings I knew in my heart to be true.

A woman could do far, far better than the fickle attentions of a showman such as he.

Unexpectedly, tears pricked at my eyes.

Damn it all to perdition. Stripping me of the protective layer of opium’s smoke had softened my resolve too much. I cried at the faintest provocation. Impatient, I dashed at my eyes with a forearm and determined to focus on one thing at a time.

I needed to get better.

In order to do that, I needed to occupy my mind to the point where everything I was remained bent on one puzzle.

My grandfather would provide the source. If it was at all morbid that I searched for details about a man long dead, I did not let that bother me. With so much tumbling about in my mind, I needed something to sharpen my re-emerging intellect—or so I assured myself when my mind raced at the simplest provocation.

I felt rusty, like an old hinge left too long to accrue the detritus of all that passed. I was very much out of practice; it seemed like ages since my last scientific debate. My grandfather would serve to hone my sluggish skills. His death might provide answers to my questions regarding the illness that afflicted our family, and his life—were I fortunate enough to find records of such—might give me something in my ancestry I felt attached to.

Certainly, I felt no kinship with my parents. If my grandfather’s only sin was in allowing his daughter to marry Abraham St. Croix, I thought it an easy sin to forgive. Based on his library, I liked to imagine that we might get on smashingly.

My interest in the man’s life and death meant I would need to find Ashmore and plumb his mind for all the details he could recall—or figure out where the man had gone and ascertain if he’d be back anytime soon to impede me from my efforts.

So armed, I stepped away from the mantle.

Another surge of fatigue nearly drove me to my knees. I stumbled, caught myself on the sofa.

“Bloody bells,” I muttered, allowing my weight to sink into the brocade.

First, I would rest. It would do me no good to collapse in the middle of this great big empty tomb.

I allowed my eyes to close. A moment, I’d only need a moment.

I took more than one. My restful comfort turned to the relief of a body too tired to continue on. I fell asleep where I lay, and did not wake again for hours.

* * *

When I finally opened my eyes, it was to find Maddie Ruth asleep in the striped chair beside the sofa. A book was splayed open against her chest, her legs hiked over the arm as if too tired to bother with propriety.

Knowing Maddie Ruth, the word had likely never entered her brain.

The fire had burned low, turning the light into an orange glow painting only a portion of the darkened library with light to see.

I rubbed at my eyes, easing the sleep from them. I hadn’t intended to rest for quite so long.

I could not ascertain what had woken me.

I lay in silence, listening to the noises of the house as it breathed around me. Deep in the recesses I had never been to, walls groaned, floors settled. The creak of old wood and the draft whispering through rafters became something of a phantom, lending a living presence to the old estate.

There were no timepieces in the library—a deliberate remission, I wagered, to keep me from fretting at the passing hours—but it did not feel very late at all.

I rose from the sofa, cautious that I did not wake my new companion. Maddie Ruth slept as one of the dead, lines of exhaustion touching her youthful face and her hands tucked beneath her chin like a child’s at rest. She breathed slowly and deeply, but did not snore.

Children who made their way on the streets learned how to sleep with no sound. Sleep turned us all into our most vulnerable, and this upbringing showed in the girl who wanted so badly to follow in my footsteps.

What she did not know—what I had only just come to realize myself—was that during my time above the drift, ensconced in downy beds in the care of my sweet, stern chaperone, I had forgotten what it was like to sleep with one eye open.

I rubbed at my chest. It hurt. Worse, it felt empty—hollow of all the things that would have made me real, such as laudanum, tar or smoke. I felt as if my insides had been scraped out, removed like those of the Ripper’s victims, and a throbbing ache had taken residence in my fingertips and toes.

I needed a reprieve.

That what I wanted would not be allowed me, and if I spent too long thinking about it, I could very well drive myself mad with the need.

On the round table beside her chair, a small brass chamberstick waited for the ember that would light the waxy slope of its pale candle. The perfect accessory to my plans.

I lifted it with care, made my way to the fireplace and knelt to flick at an ember with a quick finger. The bright flare sparked, caused the remains of the wood to pop loudly, and I froze.

Behind me, Maddie Ruth slept on.

Poor girl. She’d best get used to all hours if she was to mind me.

Tipping the candle to the glowing ember, I waited until the wick caught, then righted the chamberstick once more. Cupping it in both hands, I sidled around Maddie Ruth’s chair and turned quickly, blocking the light with my body, when she stirred.

I held my breath.

Beyond the windows, night colored the heath in a black so thick, it was as if pitch had been poured over the land. I had never been out to the country, no matter how often I’d begged to go to Balmoral Castle for the Halloween festivities. I’d always wanted to see the large bonfire, the theatrics of the witch burning, the carnival-like atmosphere.

Fanny had never allowed it, and I had never been invited.

Now that I knew much of the countryside was dull, gray moor and empty landscape, I was somewhat less concerned with my lack of visitation.

The wind had strengthened, rustling against the shrouded glass and causing a shutter to rattle in eerie rhythm. When no sleepy inquiry came from Maddie Ruth, I glanced behind me to find her awkwardly shifted to her side, her cheek pillowed on the hand braced against the arm of the wide chair. She slept the sleep of the innocent; or at least that of a child who found for the first time a roof over her head and occupants within she trusted. I wished her joy of it. As for me, sleep was the very last thing my body demanded. An empty, aching hollow had opened somewhere within me, hungry and searching, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt what it craved.

It had been made clear that I would not be allowed the opium I wanted, no matter how badly I craved the bliss. No rational argument, no emotional plea would serve. Though my body hurt as though I’d broken something within, though the night seemed overly black in answer to my hopeless craving, I crept out of the library.

I needed to find Ashmore.

The very thought sent nerves skittering along my skin, but I would not be swayed. If I could not have the tar that would soften this awful, empty ache, then I would have the man to ease it.

Outside the library, a faint ream of orange slipped into the hall from the open doors. My shadow danced in every direction, cast into sharp relief by the candle I held aloft.

By day, the house was gloomy and foreboding. By night, it became a nest of looming shadow, thick malevolence, and a presence I could not quite put a finger on. It was as if it read the fearful imaginations I struggled not to give voice to, then turned them about in a seething black mass.

No lights had been lit. Perhaps it was that we lacked staff to do it, or perhaps Ashmore had not remembered that I was in the library. Whatever the case, the foyer I crossed echoed my footsteps back at me with a sibilant repeat that rustled and whispered long after it should have ended.

The watchfulness I’d marked by day grew to an unnerving intensity. My skin prickled, fine hairs lifting at my nape, and the need I suffered tangled with the certainty that I meandered through the belly of a manor that would swallow me forever in its crumbling maw.

My heart slammed so hard in my chest, I could feel the juddering force of it all the way to my toes. The cold night arm slipped beneath my wrapper, battered at the candle in its chamberstick and sent shadows dancing over the walls. The molding that might have looked charming if the paper it crowned were not peeling now looked little more than a streak of crusted scab affixed to a ramshackle wall. I glowered at the black just beyond the reach of my candle.

“You don’t scare me,” I muttered, lying baldly through my teeth to do it.

The candle’s flame flickered.

I did not know where Ashmore might be, but I suspected he had changed his room entirely. Given the hour, I wasn’t sure that he’d be abed already. He struck me as an individual who enjoyed the night.

Wishful thinking, perhaps. With every step away from the library, a feeling of loneliness gripped me tighter and tighter.

The house was large—too large for me to explore all on my own. I left the foyer, slipping into one of the doors left ajar, and held my candle high.

Pale ghosts rose in sharp relief, fingers of pallid white thrusting suddenly from the faded seam of my weak light. I jumped, candle guttering, and almost shrieked before I recognized the distinctive curve at the top of a large harp beneath a protective cloth.

The floor groaned beneath my weight as I stepped further inside what seemed to be a music room of some sort. Dust clung to every surface, turned even the floor to a paler version of itself where a rug had not been laid down to dampen the echoes.

In the corner, tucked beside a large window, the pallid shape of a piano beckoned. Heavy drapes concealed the windows, turning the protective cloth into an ashen blur.

Curious, I padded across the music room, my slippered steps evoking that rustling echo once more.

The sound raised the hair on the back of my neck.

I turned, chamberstick thrust out as if I could will the light to pierce through to every corner and reveal whatever it was I felt breathing in the room beside me.

My imagination would not be so easily resolved.

Grimacing at myself, I rubbed the back of my neck and approached the piano with deliberate carelessness—as though I could not give a toss for whatever shadows haunted me.

As I twitched the covering clear of one corner, that lie became truth.

Wood gleamed in the candle light, smooth as glass and richly hued. No dust touched the surface, no smudges stained the varnish.

Despite my surroundings, despite the hours and hours of forced tutelage, I could not help myself. Sympathy filled me. How shameful that such a beautiful instrument go unused.

I had no true skill with the piano or the pianoforte—similar instruments but for the softer refrain of the latter and a lesser range of tonal quality in the former. While I was often reminded of my mother’s great skill on both instruments, I could only passingly pluck out a composition or two—assuming it was not complicated.

It was because of my academic education on the matter that I recognized a Broadwood and Sons piano for what it was.

I tugged aside more of the cloth, revealing the wood it was carved from. The beautiful finish was unmarred, the grain vertical and the Indian Rosewood exquisite. This was a gorgeous instrument, like as not the pride of any owner.

Was it my mother’s? Had she grown up learning to play it?

Was my grandfather the man who’d bought it?

The company had been in residence in London since the early eighteenth century, specializing first in harpsichords and pianofortes. This beautiful instrument couldn’t be more than mid-eighteenth century at the earliest.

Was it purchased by my grandfather’s parents? His grandparents?

Trembling at the weight of this discovery, my fingers stroked across the uncovered keys. That the protective cover had not been pulled down, even despite the cloth shrouding the whole, surprised me. Surely, whoever had shrouded the piece would have thought to take better care of an heirloom.

Plink. The delicate note tinkled like a sweet bell, shockingly in tune.

The sound arrowed through the room’s thick silence, only to be swallowed by the surrounding black.

As if irritated with my meddling, the house groaned in reply. I felt as a child might, caught with her fingers in the tin of sweets.

Quickly, I dropped the cloth back into place, shuddering. Even despite my knowledge of the old estate’s ways, I hurried to make my exit.

Of course my surroundings would make sounds. This manor had like as not been crumbling slowly for decades—possibly longer. I did not know if my father had ever taken up residence here after my grandfather’s death, but it did not seem to be the case.

Tugging my wrapper more firmly about me, I held the candle aloft and hurried into the hall.

The vacant shadows huddled together, marking my passage with a startling creak from within the walls I passed beside.

Heart pounding, I abandoned all thoughts of finding Ashmore and fled to the dubious safety of the library once more.

If I imagined that ghostly hands reached out to snag my trailing hem, I could blame nothing but my own recent reading of outrageous Gothic romances.

The warm air inside the library seemed to welcome me with open arms. I inhaled deeply, relieved the moment I set foot inside. Blinking in the remarkably brighter glow—my eyes readjusting quickly after the gloom—I noted that Maddie Ruth had not moved.

To be so innocent as to sleep with such sound faith.

I envied her.

I crossed the open expanse of the floor, my heart slowing its frenetic beat. Though the longing in me had not eased, I resolved to bend all my attentions on something else instead.

I would make it through this night as I did all nights since waking in Ashmore’s care.

What else could I do?

I rounded the sofa and Maddie Ruth’s slumbering figure quietly, intent on stoking the fire and feeding to it the wood Ashmore had seen piled in an iron grate beside it. As I passed the desk, I blew out the candle and set it down.

I paused, confused when the desk proved to be less bare than I remembered.

A book rested just under the chamberstick I set down, its dark leather cover so old as to be nearly black in the dull firelight. What words had been embossed into the front were no longer gilded, and the facing was worn away.

My head tilted.

All thoughts of loneliness and want abandoned, I moved the chamberstick aside and picked up the book with care. The binding bore signs of weakening, but on inspection I found it not so frail as to worry me.

Bemused, I opened the cover.

A bit of parchment slid out, nearly fluttering out of my grasp but for a quick gesture to catch it. The ink upon it was dark enough to read easily.

Perhaps this will interest you. — A.

The initial caused my eyebrows to raise. Had Ashmore come to the library while I was searching for him? Such missed connections were usually vexing, but I could find no irritation within me. He’d brought me a book, which was rather sweet. I certainly couldn’t deny that I enjoyed books, and loved that I could be surrounded by them and still acquire the more.

I turned the first page, cautious so that the parchment—rough and dry, as good stock was wont to turn with age—did not tear or rustle so loud as to wake my companion.

Beneath the title—A Journal, was all it said—a name had been scripted.

Hamish Pepperidge Carberry.

My grandfather’s journal.

Such joy—such eternal delight—filled me upon reading the narrow handwriting. Ashmore, despite his assertions that none existed, had found for me a journal belonging to my grandfather.

He understood.

Smiling so boldly as to feel it ache from ear to ear, I clasped the book to my chest and hurried to stoke the fire once more into a crackling blaze.

So prepared, I returned without rancor to my place upon the sofa and began to decipher my grandfather’s hand.

Chapter Ten

By most standards, I read quicker than expected of me. I enjoyed doing so, for my speed allowed me to read more of the books I liked than considered appropriate. The only preoccupation that ever kept me from spending all my pocket money on acquired tomes was the need to save it for the opium grains or draught of laudanum I’d consumed instead.

Despite this, I found myself struggling through my grandfather’s writings. He often wrote with a strong hand, but on occasion would fall to a shortened variation I could only surmise was his method of writing quickly or of matters he did not necessarily wish any readers other than himself to know.

Much of what I read was a day to day accounting. He spoke of matters of philosophy and of finances; of trade and of authors he admired or refuted. He did not often speak of his family in this journal, and there were no dates per entry to allow me an understanding of his age at the time of scribing.

All night, I ensconced myself in front of the library fire, brow furrowed deeply as I worked my way page to page. When daybreak struck, turning the sky beyond the windows into a subtle wash of pale gray and pink, I had still seen no sign of Ashmore—a fact I only recognized because I wanted to thank him for the gift.

When the craving gathered in my belly and my mouth dried for want of the bliss, I buried myself in my grandfather’s myriad thoughts instead. It became something of a game; when the need came to me, I made it a point to read every word, sound it out in my thoughts and hold on to each until I was sure I recalled the entirety of the sentence.

It was a game no child would ever play, no soiree would ever host, but word by word, sentence by sentence, I made it through each hour.

Maddie Ruth exhibited discomfort from her night spent in the chair, greeting me when she woke with an exclamation quite crude in formation.

I chuckled outright, but did not complain when she fetched tea and toast from the kitchen I had not yet visited. Her portions were larger than Ashmore’s, and she included eggs and cold sausage.

She busied herself without me for most of the day, content to leave me to my reading when she realized I was happiest there. On occasion, I dozed for half of an hour or some lesser time, only to start awake when I felt myself no longer alone.

The first it happened, I rose up from my slumber like a puppet pulled on strings. Startled into abrupt wakefulness, I found myself sitting up, gripping the back of the sofa and gaping at nothing at all.

For what reason my pulse pounded and my senses prickled into paranoid awareness, I didn’t know. I surveyed the library with wide eyes made dry by a fitful sleep. A black shape gathered in the far depths of my environs did not move, as I warily expected, but became the shadow spilled by the overhang of the shelves beside it. The drapes by each window did not move, or mold to the silhouette of a man eager to wrap his hands around my throat; what dreams I spun in my restless sleep to imagine such a thing.

Whimsy, mostly. The library remained warm and bright, and the book heavy in my lap, but no one came to keep me company.

Come midday, Maddie Ruth coaxed me upstairs, foregoing the too-heavy chair but allowing me to lean on her as we navigated the steps.

I felt better today than I had prior.

After the bath she surprised me with, I felt even more so. For the first in far too long, I was able to wash my hair without fear of drowning myself from the effort.

In the end, she dressed me in a tea gown that fit rather more comfortably than I expected, and I thrilled at the opportunity to own one. Tea gowns were a type of dress Fanny had never allowed me to acquire. Designed to allow women such as myself to move about our homes with comfort, rather than the rigid structure demanded by corsets and bustles, tea gowns were informal things to be worn among close friends at relaxed dinner engagements or when not expecting company.

They were, in the eyes of my dear Fanny, only one step away from scandalous nudity.

That I could wear one now, its rose-colored material spilling a froth of lace at elbow and bodice and its waist structured so as to allow for no corset, only made me miss her all the more.

A part of me yearned to hear her scandalized lecture.

The rest of me delighted in my appearance as I admired my new dress.

“Where did it come from?” I asked. Such a fashion had not been in evidence during my mother’s time, so it could not have come from her trunks.

“Mr. Ashmore’s man had me pick it up from a London shop before I came,” she replied, twitching my hair into place and pinning it loosely. She was no lady’s maid, but I didn’t much care for anything more than the coiled plait she made of my hair. I was enjoying my freedoms far more than I expected to. “I altered it some in the carriage here.”

Another thing for which I was grateful. Would Ashmore show his face so that I might thank him?

My smile died as I looked at my hands, and the book I’d left just by my hip as I sat upon the vanity chair.

“There,” Maddie Ruth said, beaming. “You look like a dream.”

I scoffed at that. “I look like an invalid.”

“That too,” she acknowledged, nodding rather more sagely than the observation required.

I waved her teasing away, picking up the book and cradling it in the crook of my arm. From what I’d read so far, my grandfather was a man who was not given to display of overt humor. He was a stern man, with a startling intellect I found rather sharp. He did not hold with fools, nor with those who could not grasp the most basic concepts of science, mathematics, naturo-philosopy and the fundamentals of music theory.

A demanding man.

It was no wonder my mother had turned into the accomplished woman she was reputed to be.

As Maddie Ruth once more escorted me down to the library, busying herself with putting away the books I did not intend to read again, I returned to the journal.

I gleaned that he had, some years before writing this particular volume, been taught the precepts of alchemy. His references to it were minimal, at first, but grew in evidence as time passed—which I noted when I finally realized the small numbers in the corner of each page marked the passing of the months and not of days. An odd way of doing it.

Another meal came and went—another plate I did not wholly finish, though I was suitably impressed when I looked up from my reading to find the food left upon it to be rather less than I expected. Maddie Ruth praised my efforts when she came to collect the tray.

For the rest of the evening, I whiled away the time deciphering the script that turned more and more puzzling. The occasional symbol jostled my recollection, turning out a flash of recognition here and there. The combined letters I had once mistaken for Ey were instead an ornately scripted Fu—one of the alchemical symbols for fusion. The letters DG represented digestion. The man who had taught me that much, Mr. Pettigrew, had been murdered shortly thereafter by the woman utilizing those alchemical symbols in her stolen formula. It was I that had been tracking Miss Hensworth, though I had not known it was her until too late.

Another instance in which my meddling had cost a good man his life. Mr. Pettigrew—who had insisted I call him Gus with refreshing informality—had been a bookseller of remarkable age, whose shelves held many of the rare delights I loved to read. I’d gone to his shop near London’s Philosopher’s Square, where many such intellectual activities could be pursued, searching for a book stolen from my possession by my erstwhile quarry. He had offered to translate the formula I’d acquired, and his generosity earned him a murdering at Miss Hensworth’s hands.

The logical, indubitably rational steps taken by both myself and the suitably intelligent—if drastically misguided—Miss Hensworth in pursuit of our respective goals did nothing to salve the hurt of his loss. Mr. Pettigrew had been a wonderful gentleman, and thinking of his squinting, myopic stare and warm smile now put a trembling ache deep in my heart.

Alchemy. Not all that long ago, I’d considered it the domain of scientists nearing the onset of death, too afraid to face it with courage. Since my father’s attempt on my life, I had stumbled more and more over the scientific application I had once dismissed out of hand.

When my mother’s journal had discussed the applications of aether and alchemy, my belief had begun to change. I was not so ignorant of my own foibles; I assumed that my mother’s interests colored mine, as my father’s intellectual pursuits had long done so. Whether I strived to mimic them or simply utilized both as an excuse to continue educating myself of such matters Society claimed as beyond my natural reach, I couldn’t be certain.

Now I read of alchemy in my grandfather’s journal, proving that my family had long concerned themselves with this strange scientific art, and thought it considerably less strange.

When supper had ended and I could no longer convince Maddie Ruth to allow me to stay in the library—lacking also the cruelty to force her to sleep in the chair a second night—I went to bed, candles stocked and book in hand.

I did not sleep. I was no longer tired, feeling as if each page I successfully deciphered filled me with a new strength.

My grandfather spoke little of his immediate family, though occasionally of J, whom I took to mean his daughter, Josephine. Often, he seemed convinced that his weakening body was the result of a conspiracy to end his life—a refrain that echoed many times in the later chapters he penned. I wondered if madness was a thing that came part and parcel with genuinely towering intellect or if this was the inevitable onset of age, and that what it did to a mind suffering it. Sometimes, his ramblings of such things reached overwrought heights eerily reminiscent of my own manic episodes at the worst of my cravings.

Of all the things I learned in this journal, from my father’s favored reading to his alchemical concerns, it was this recognition that made me uneasy.

By morning’s light, although I did doze off for a bit here and there between lines, I had run out of candles and finished the last of my grandfather’s pages. I enjoyed the read, for the most part, and it became easier once I’d deciphered and grown used to his shorter way of writing. That what I was most ecstatic over was his references to a laboratory. Though several of his later entries spoke of it in conjunction with the desire to cure the poison he was sure ailed him, I saw no directions as to where it might be—a fair lapse, for it wasn’t as if he needed to remind himself of its location.

Armed with such knowledge, I vowed to find it.

* * *

Come the day, the house was no less gloomy. Most of it remained covered and dark. Ashmore seemed content to leave it this way, and Maddie Ruth did not appear to be inclined to argue.

I probably should have felt guilty for abandoning the library she had so trustingly left me in, but I didn’t. The thrill of discovery filled me, a provocation I simply could not resist. If this estate claimed a laboratory, then I wanted to know what was in it.

The anticipation gave me strength—or perhaps I was simply feeling more the thing. I hadn’t felt nearly so fatigued as I had after waking in my mother’s boudoir; all my rest had done wonders for my stamina. My limbs did not drag, and the ill humors I suffered from want of the thing I could not have had eased to a murmur. Bolstered by the promise of day and the hope of revelation, I resolved to begin in the south wing first and make my way through each door.

Any that were locked, I would open. The few pins Maddie Ruth had used to hold my plait in place were more than sufficient to see the job done.

Had I any inkling as to how dusty, befuddling and secretive this blasted estate could be, I might have begun with greater care.

An hour passed as I made my way through room after room. Many were unlocked, covered by the same pale cloths as the rest of the lot, and some had shown recent signs of passage. A secondary study, for example, lacked the dust and stale air of the rest—one I suspected Ashmore had taken for his own use.

As I made my way through three sitting rooms, a woman’s parlor, and a grand ballroom, I tugged futilely at my skirts and blew out an annoyed breath. There was nothing here to see, beyond that what one might expect from an abandoned estate such as this.

Unsurprising, I supposed. The south wing was also where the library was located, and I doubted my grandfather would keep a laboratory where guests might stumble into it.

So affirmed, I turned for the eastern wing, just below the family wing Ashmore had abandoned me within so unceremoniously. It was here I’d found that cast off music room, and the Broadwood piano.

Simply by stepping into the wing’s wide corridor, it seemed as if I wandered into a different house. The shadows were lengthier, thicker. What paper had once elegantly softened the walls was mired in a rime of wear and time, patterned by cobwebs and dust. I paused, smudging a finger down one panel and revealing a bit of embossed design in sage green. Or perhaps it was meant to be a different color, and time had leached it of its original hue.

I wondered if I should retrieve the chamberstick from the library I’d left it in, but the ambient light trickling through the narrow, dirty windows at the end of the hall provided enough that I could see where I traveled. Going back would waste time, and Maddie Ruth would no doubt hound me if I stumbled across her path.

I would find the laboratory first, I decided, then bring her into my mischief. Maddie Ruth had already displayed a keen intellect to me, including a sharp observational eye. If I could show her a laboratory, I was certain she’d be all too happy to assist me in my plans to catalogue it.

So bolstered, I tucked one hand into my lacy skirts to lift the hem out from under my slippered toes and strode all the way to the end of the hall. Starting there would provide me a means to working my way back out.

I turned to regard the corridor behind me. Although nothing to my eye had changed, the foyer seemed as if it stretched a greater distance away than it should. Shadows pooled between the window I stood before and the farthest door. Here, the sound of the bitter winter wind tearing across the moor gained a life of its own. Were I an imaginative creature, I might have likened it to a woman’s wail.

The window panes faintly rattled in their moorings, battered by the gust.

I grimaced.

Were this a Gothic romance, I would turn slowly to the window, stare outside it and raise a candle high. As all such stories demanded, I would then see a woman in white drifting alone and lost in the treacherous heath.

The ghost of whatever foolish woman earned herself a murdering by the dark and dangerous lord of the estate, naturally.

My grimace turned into a grin, and I glanced at the window in dismissive contempt. Through the spotty grime, the moor was as it had been since the day I arrived—damp, gray, brown, bits of dark green where the wintry cold hadn’t deadened the bracken.

Any woman out there, ghost or otherwise, might do better to consider a kinder afterlife.

I continued my search through the first door to my left, finding little more than a storage room. Many of the objects within were covered, and I spent a few moments risking dust and moldy spores peeking under the coverings. Old bureaus and tarnished silver, brass candlesticks by the dozens covered in a green patina. A few paintings, nothing I would have considered more than amateur watercolors—not that I bore any skill in the art—and two portraits of a rather morbid character.

One was a stocky man with a towering white wig—such as seen in the annals of history. He wore a coat of a particularly vibrant shade of purple patterned by pale blue florets. His breeches nipped off at the knee, and his tights were white but also dotted by the same florets. Were I to speculate—and I could for once thank Fanny for her rigorous education on all matters of fashion—I thought the cut of the coat and style of breeches paired with the formal periwig might place this fellow somewhere in the midst of the eighteenth century.

Anything else regarding time or era was unrecognizable. His face was that of a grisly haunt’s, a skeletal leer under drooping skin and dull eyes lost behind flaps of loose flesh. In his boney hand, a walking stick topped by a brilliant jewel in quite a lovely shade of amber. In the crook of his other arm, he cradled an elongated globe that appeared to be made of green glass. Brass topped it in an ornate crown, then banded it on all sides in a cage-like affair that would allow it to hang from the chain draped over his arm.

I crouched before the leaning portrait, studying the strokes with what I liked to think of as a critical eye. I certainly had no education on the matter of paintings, save that the Lord Pennington’s lady mother-in-law—ensconced comfortably in the home beside my own Cheyne Walk residence—had taken to painting the most extraordinary nudes from the relative privacy of her veranda.

My maid and I had spent many long hours peeping from my window and giggling over the scandal.

Whoever this gentleman was, I saw nothing engraved upon a plate or marked within the frame. The colors were boldly chosen, however, and aside from the cadaver-like portrayal of the man’s face, I did note the way the artist had given the lord’s bearing a certain sense of self-righteous decorum.

Behind Lord Floret’s—as I thought I’d name him—was another painting. This depicted another man, seated with one leg propped over the other in quite a rakish pose. He rested an elbow upon the back of the chair he sat on, the other raised in front of him to cup an astrolabe eerily similar to that my mother’s portrait showed. Unlike Lord Floret, this man’s placement was strange to me; the mode of his dress denied me any clues as to when it might have been painted.

While the fellow did not wear a wig, he did sport a turban-like affair often seen on Orientals. This was an informal touch, utilized by the occasional philosopher or well-traveled gentleman even in this modern age. Like the cap, his banyan was also not unusual for an informal setting. It was a muted shade of gold, lined by a pattern of red in elegant contrast. Kimono-like in shape and form, its folds hid whatever clothing he might have worn beneath.

Were it painted in this modern day, Lord Banyan would be wearing trousers and typical shirtsleeves beneath. Or, if he were at a familiar dinner with friends, perhaps he’d wear it over a waistcoat for a certain rakish panache.

As with the other painting, the man’s face was an emaciated compilation of peeling flesh and the hollow shape of gaunt cheeks. The blue color of his sunken eyes were startlingly bright in the deep circles surrounding them. His smirk seemed to suggest that my efforts to place him were amusing, though the left half of this grin peeled back even farther to expose the ghastly rictus of his skull.

I stroked a finger down the canvas, feeling the faint impression of the brush strokes as I did. These, too, were made with rather vivacious colors, turning gold and red into brilliant patches in the gloom. They contrasted beautifully with the drape of green behind him. It was only where faces and flesh should have been that the artists had chosen to paint a nightmare.

“You’ve had a rough go, my lords,” I said to them both. Each stared out from the canvas, twin terrors caught forever within a gilded frame.

The quiet of the storage room only made the faux cheerfulness in my voice seem all the more chilling.

Allowing the cloth to cover them once more, and ensuring the paintings did not fall when I laid them back into place, I left the silent portraits to their own and left the room.

The hall had darkened in my wake.

A shrill whistle drifted through the quiet, and I frowned at the murky window. The gray skies, always threatening to spill over, had turned black, and the window rattled beneath the onslaught of the heightened winds.

A storm was coming in.

Brilliant. I hadn’t come equipped for this. If the daylight faded too quickly, I’d lose all my illumination. I didn’t think to bring another candle with me.

If I were fortunate and moved quick enough, I’d have a little bit longer to check a few of the other rooms. There was no telling when I’d be able to free myself of Maddie Ruth’s company again. I hurried to the next door, found it also unlocked and stepped inside.

A brilliant flash of light seamed the drapes covering the far windows, turning the interior into a soft blue. Almost precisely on cue, a clap of thunder shook the walls. It did not fade, but grumbled over and over as it rolled from cloud to cloud.

My heart sped in time with the stormy protest.

“Get a hold of yourself,” I muttered, shaking out my skirts with force. As if by doing so, I could shake off the sudden rise of my own uncertainties. It was a storm, nothing more. A common enough occurrence out in the country, or so the books I’d read suggested.

It did not seem as if a girl could retire to a bucolic estate without at least once finding herself assailed by a tempest.

Of course, in those stories, that girl was often plagued by ghosts, as well.

Ice slipped over my skin. Perspiration bloomed a breath behind. All at once, my heart seemed as if it filled my throat, pounding against the narrow confines.

This overly sharp sensation of threat looming mirrored the feeling of watchfulness I’d felt in my mother’s boudoir. The room before me was dark enough that even if a ghost waited within, I wouldn’t see it. I held my breath, pulse throbbing in my ears, and wondered if black hands tipped with sharp claws might reach from the murky interior.

The very thought was embarrassing enough.

“Bosh,” I hissed, clutching my skirts tighter—just in case I needed to move swiftly. At this rate, I would only frighten myself out of nothing at all.

With deliberate effort, I made my way into this new room. Though I informed myself that the groans I heard were simply caused by the wind within the drafty estate, that the walls were settling as the storm gathered its strength—and that the thunder, while rather loud, was only thunder—it seemed as if every step came slower and slower.

The shadows fled when lightning burst around the drapery seams, then loomed thicker and closer around me when it faded. I felt as if I pushed through treacle with every moment. No obstacles impeded my path, and I flushed to think that it might be fear I struggled to overcome as I alternately held my breath and expelled it on miniature gasps with every illuminating flash.

The furnishings within were clustered close together, sheltered under white cloths smudged with dust and cobwebs. Another storage room, I supposed, although my gaze remained bent on the tall fixtures at the far end. They looked like bookshelves. If so, I wondered if they held anything I might be interested in.

Perhaps old family journals?

Thinking of the laboratory my grandfather had only hinted at, I wondered if other recordings from his own parents or grandparents might speak of building the lab. Or how they had found it.

Whatever the case, there was only one way to be sure.

I would not be bested by wild imaginings.

A scientist must only believe what she sees with her own eyes, and what I saw was prospective knowledge. Had there been anything to suggest my waking fears were tangible—a footprint, a bit of ash from a used pipe, even a swatch of fabric caught on a splinter—then I would have been more careful. I was no longer caught in the haze of opium’s grip; I understood what caring for myself in moments of danger meant.

Yet all of this was moot, for this house was occupied only by myself, Ashmore, and Maddie Ruth. None of us cared to play such games—much as I would have preferred to blame either of my companions for my fears. This was all my own doing.

I ignored the crackling energies splitting the stormy skies outside, did not jump when such streaks of light burned around the curtains, and I paid no heed to the thickening gloom around me. All of it was in my head, and I reassured myself this with every step.

So it was with single-minded delight that I reached the first of two rectangular structures towering to the ceiling above me. In my wake, the room closed in, shadows reaching to snag the trailing hem of my tea gown.

I grasped the cloth in my dampened fist. I stepped back, half-spun in order to put the whole of my weight into the pulling, and hauled on the cloth to wrench it completely from its rest.

As dust flew into the air, turned the already dismal room into gritty murkiness, and the cloth sailed over my head to flutter to the floor behind me, every instinct I possessed urged me to run.

I did not. I would not be defeated by my own fears.

As the last folds of the protective cloth glided through the musty air, I looked up.

I glimpsed a dull gray shroud—a figure that turned brilliant white in silhouette as lightning colored the room. I heard no sound but that of my own heartbeat, the subsequent crash of thunder so intense as to cause the floor to judder and the shelves to shake.

I took a breath, my body snapped into a posture carved into my instinct by years below London’s fog, but too late. Pain erupted through my head. All of the world went briefly red, then stark white.

I did not feel the floor beneath me as I crumpled upon it.

Chapter Eleven

I was cold. So utterly cold, shaking from the force of it. A dull roar filled my ears.

Hands seized at me from the din and dark.

“Cherry.”

My lashes lifted.

Ashmore’s face filled my vision, so bright as to nearly sear his features into my mind with an unspeakable radiance. His aristocratic face had twisted into a mask of barely concealed fury. A deep furrow wound between his dark red eyebrows; I wanted to smooth out the groove and lull the ire snapping from the frame of spiky red lashes.

The grip at my upper arms was hard enough to bite through my hazy, nebulous grasp of awareness. The cold filling my heart and limbs sharpened, painfully so.

I was wet; drenched near to the bone, more like.

My gaze abruptly focused.

I gasped, turning my head to discover a veranda I hadn’t known existed until I found myself standing upon it.

A heavy rain battered at us both, slicking Ashmore’s hair down to a crimson stain and turning my tea gown into a sodden mess of limp lace. It was bone-chillingly cold, and I blinked furiously as the rain slid into my eyes.

“I—” My teeth chattered for it. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I—?” A flash of light and an immediate clap of thunder cut short his furious rejoinder. This time, there was no curtain to mute the sight. A truly remarkable sheet of blue-white electricity arced from black cloud to black cloud.

I stared up into the downpour, my mouth hanging open in mute disbelief.

He shook me hard enough to snap my teeth together. “What are you doing out here?” he roared. “We’ve been looking for over an hour!”

Impossible.

But how did I get here?

Another shake rattled what few thoughts in my head I’d managed to recover. “Get inside and dry yourself before you catch your death,” he shouted, and made as if to force the issue as he took a half-step to the side, dragging me along with him.

Anger slotted into place, fueled by a fear I was afraid to give voice to. “Unhand me.” The storm all but drowned my demand. When he ignored me, I rotated my arms in a manner guaranteed to force his hands at awkward angles to retain his hold, then wrenched free when his fury turned to surprise.

“I am not yours,” I shouted. “You cannot force obeisance from me.” I flung a hand as though I might sever whatever it was he considered between us. Droplets slid from my fingertips, splattering his already sodden chest.

I don’t know what it was that shaped Ashmore’s glower as he looked down at himself, but it was not easily deciphered. Anger, certainly, but there was that moment of raw emotion too bare to easily look upon. Whatever it was he thought, it was not kind—though to me or himself, I couldn’t fathom.

The rain turned his waistcoat and trousers nearly black, and the state of his now transparent shirtsleeves stripped from him aspects of the gentlemanly demeanor he’d labored to claim.

In the blustery gloom, which painted his pale skin to something more like carved moonlight and his hair to a ruby-studded gleam, he looked even less the part. With the markings upon his forearms stark against his sodden shirtsleeves and the harsh light in his eye when he raised his gaze again to mine, Ashmore did not look quite so mannerly as I’d grown accustomed to. In truth, he seemed rather more untamed.

The muscles in his arms bunched as his hands closed into fists. “You challenge what you don’t understand.” Thunder rumbled, as though to lend his warning heavenly credence.

“What challenge?” I raised my chin in a semblance of dignity. “You have already made your rejection clear.”

“I have offered no rejection,” he growled, patently impatient with my obstinacy.

I thrust my face closer to his, teeth bared. “You have rejected everything!”

His eyes flared, blazing with an unholy light captured in an echoed streak of violet above our heads. He moved so fast that the shadows had not yet encroached again when I found myself crowded against the veranda railing, his hands taut on either side of my hips and his mouth a hairsbreadth from mine. I gasped in surprise, and as though he had only waited for that opportunity, he took my lips in a kiss that not only contested the cold with the heat of it but scorched the walls of that desolation I carried inside me.

It was as if the storm possessed us both. I seized his head in my hands, twisting my fingers into his sopping hair, and gave back a kiss every bit as hungry as that he levied upon me. Like two challengers too long denied, we dueled by way of tongue and lips; by the roughness of his grip at my nape and the coarse fabric of his trousers clenched between my bare thighs.

Somehow, he had torn my skirt out of his way, flung the fabric to the side to free my legs. I wrapped them around his hips as he ground his body against mine. Such blatant need robbed me of all breath and reason—his kiss was not the sort any self-possessed gentleman would ever have allowed.

All perfectly within my desires.

I did not want a gentleman, and I did not want to be loved. I was no treasure to be carefully handled. I wanted forgetting, I wanted bliss that did not require the tar I so craved to consume again.

I wanted this, now, and although I did not know what had changed in his mind, I thrilled to be getting it.

All thoughts of cold and memory vanished as I clung to his shoulders. All feelings beyond that of hunger and furious need fled as he spanned my hips and dragged me to the very edge of the balustrade. Although the stone was wide enough that I could sit comfortably, it wasn’t so wide that I wouldn’t fall over the side if he let me go. The veranda was too high to survive the fall.

A flutter of fear only heightened my arousal.

The rain hammered down upon us, as fierce a thing as the passions that drove us to ignore the tempest raging overhead. Ashmore’s eyes were heavy-lidded as he drew back, his mouth parted on a rough gasp. I cried out my denial of his loss. One hand left my hip, and I allowed my legs to fall open farther as he freed himself from the placard of his trousers.

There was precious little to debate—and nothing at all I wanted to do less. I wanted this too sharply, a veritable pain within me, and so I panted with impatient hunger as he took himself in hand and met my urging stare.

His eyes were wicked gold and green, as fierce as I’d ever seen him, and they pinned me to the wet stone with an intensity that stole the will from my limbs.

He said nothing. I expected nothing to be said.

As my trembling thighs once more bracketed his hips, he closed that distance between us and his flesh entered mine.

A part of me expected cold, as his fingers had been, but I could not spare the energy to be surprised when it felt of heat and intensity. I screamed from the relief of it, from the fierce joy coursing through me. My flesh tightened around this ungentle intrusion, and my nails dug into Ashmore’s still-clothed shoulders as he filled me so completely in a single thrust.

He did not wait to see if I was well, nor did he pause to kiss me again. Instead, he withdrew, leaving me aching and wanting, and entered me hard once more. I cried out with every impact of his flesh against mine, clung to him as he steadied me upon the veranda rail and drove into me with all the ferocity of the storm around us.

Again and again; he drove me to unimaginable heights, only hesitating once when I let him go to brace my hands just behind me on the stone balustrade. His grip tightened at my waist, his eyes flared, and his skin gleamed like wet marble as he threw his head back and pounded into my body with all the savagery I demanded.

The words he spoke were lost forever in that tempest, but I didn’t imagine that they would be sweet, gentle or appropriate.

My release fell over me not like the rain, but like a tide welling from somewhere low in my belly, between my legs. My fingertips burned, my muscles ached with the fury of it, and I screamed in mingled passion and violence as that spring within me uncoiled.

Ashmore’s voice did not join mine, but his body seized, hips tight against the vee of my legs, and his eyes clenched hard as he found the same release as I, nearly as sudden and ultimately as forceful.

We each panted for breath.

The rain continued unabated, and lightning scored a brilliant swath overhead. It turned us both to living statues, locked together with my sodden skirts draped over the rail and his arm curved around my lower back lest I tumble over the edge.

We said nothing. Bliss filled my body, my limbs. A sweet lassitude plucked at my senses. For this instant in time, this strange and surreal moment, I felt nothing but the glow of satiated pleasure.

It wasn’t to last. All too soon, a low groan torn from him, Ashmore’s forehead fell to my shoulder.

I cupped the back of his head, my fingers trembling. Tipping my face to the violent sky, I exhaled a slow and shuddering breath.

When I burst into tears, it surprised nobody more than me.

Chapter Twelve

Bless the demon who ravaged my senses, for Ashmore did not leave me to my embarrassment. Hurriedly adjusting his trousers, he scooped me from the rail, ensuring the drenched folds of the tea gown fell appropriately, and carried me inside.

I clung to his shoulders, torn between abject mortification and the sobs that would not release me from their iron-fisted hold, and buried my face against his wet shirt.

Though we must have left a trail of water in our wake, Ashmore did not seem inclined to care. The air inside was only marginally warmer, and I shivered within his arms.

“Is she all right?” Maddie Ruth’s voice broke sharply from somewhere beyond me. I cried all the harder, hiding my face.

I couldn’t stop. I wanted to—bloody bells, did I want to—but the tears blinded me, tore from me all reason.

“She’ll be all right,” Ashmore said over my head. “Stoke the fire in my room, Miss Halbard, I’ll be watching her tonight.”

Maddie Ruth did not hesitate. “Aye,” she replied, and her footsteps hurried off.

A large hand splayed over the back of my head. “All will be well,” he murmured against my hair. “Have it all out, then.”

I heard no guilt in his voice. If he felt himself responsible for this outburst, as I feared, he did not share it. Instead, he murmured nonsensical reassurances as he carried me through the hall and into the bedroom he’d claimed as his own.

This was a large one, with a fireplace to keep the chill at bay and a sitting room for visitors and proper dressing. By the time Maddie Ruth had finished fueling the fire and took her leave—likely smiling the whole of the way; that girl knew most all the secrets of life already—my sobs had slowed to the occasional whimper.

Ashmore did not ask me of my thoughts. He did not encourage me to speak. With gentle hands, he sat me down upon his lap and slipped free the narrow buttons seaming the back of my gown. My braid had fallen, made too heavy by the wet to retain its shape with so few pins, and he carefully wrung it out over the hearth.

A strange sort of listlessness filled me, then—a dissolution of care or shame. It was all too familiar, for Hawke had taken care of me in a like manner and I recognized in me a weakness for it. Stripped of my gown, shivering as the air slipped over my damp skin, Ashmore lifted me once more off my feet and placed me in his bed.

It all afforded me an illusion of care.

I watched as Ashmore undressed, doffing his clothing with a neatness indicative of efficiency. He did not waste efforts with unnecessary motion, and if he was at all concerned for my watching, he still did not show me.

Oliver Ashmore was not a man easy to read.

It seemed I would forever be drawn to them what weren’t.

When he was as nude as I, and the firelight wrapped a pale glow about his so white flesh, he reached for a dressing gown hanging from a rack.

“Ashmore.”

He hesitated.

I did not. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I am not leaving you.”

I shifted, the bedclothes rustling, and a fascinating play of tension slid through his shoulders. “Lay with me.”

His head lowered, as though he might find answers to his thoughts at his feet.

I thought I might be rejected once more, but before I could decide to ask again, his hand lowered from its reach.

With the same economy of motion I had earlier admired, he turned and approached the bed. His eyes were dark in the firelight, the occasional glint of gold caught inside their hazel depths, but his expression was not unkind.

Wordlessly, he slid beneath the covers.

I gasped as his skin settled against mine. “You’re warm.”

“As will you be soon enough.” He reached about me, gathered up my body in the crook of his arm and tugged me more fully against his side.

We lay as lovers entwined, one of my legs wrapped about his and his heart beating against the palm of my hand. His flesh was so light in color as to make me think of ice and snow, but it was soft beneath my cheek and oddly cozy.

Thunder rumbled in harmony with the fire’s crackle.

True to his word, I warmed soon enough. Shortly thereafter, as his heart sped beneath an open-mouthed kiss upon his flesh, he rolled so that I lay trapped between his arms and his eyes burned into mine.

Again, he did not speak of what lay in my thoughts. Perhaps he felt he did not have to; whatever lay inside his own mind, he did not bare it for me, either. Instead, he took my invitation with a kiss that was much more gentle than the last, though no less searing for it.

I learned that Ashmore was a man whose preference for love-making tended to an inescapably thorough finesse. In the course of a few short hours, he taught me many things about my body that I had not considered—including that of graduating pleasure, teased out so slowly as to leave my mind shattered in the wake of final release.

It made me wonder what it was that had seized him out upon that veranda. The demons that must ride him to force him to behave that way seemed to mirror my own.

Was it me that had forced that encounter? Or was it his own burdens torn so violently free?

And in so doing, did it allow him now to behave so gently?

The man was a puzzle I was eager to unlock.

Some time later, we sat before the fire—once more stoked to a cheerful blaze—and shared a cold meal Maddie Ruth left outside the door. I knew that soon I would be forced to leave this chamber. I owed Maddie Ruth some explanation, and no doubt she would demand details no girl of sixteen should know how to ask of, but for now, I enjoyed this oasis of harmony between Ashmore and I.

I wore his abandoned dressing gown, which smelled of his woodsy shaving soap and the warmth of his skin. He wore a pair of trousers and little else, copper shadow clinging to his jaw.

He offered me a bit of sausage. I took it from his fingers with my lips, earning a crooked hint of smile from him. “Mind that,” he warned, “or you’ll never be free of this room.”

I swallowed the morsel before asking, “Would that be so bad?”

His smile turned thoughtful as he studied me. We were seated across the hearth from each other, but it wasn’t so large that my feet could not burrow under his leg for warmth and comfort. A pillow behind me provided comfort, and I felt rather less weary than I should have.

“It might,” he finally said, but without the sting such an admission should have engendered. “Would you care to talk about those things on your mind?” He picked up his tea, still steaming within fragile porcelain. It smelled of bergamot and, as famished as I was, heaven. I had already finished mine, denied more until I ate.

That he even bothered to ask for my thoughts was a mark in his favor. Still, I flushed as I turned my gaze to the fire. No less bright than his eyes, but at least the fire did not leave me feeling as if I had no secrets left to hide.

I plucked a bit of winter cheese from the plate, broke it in half with my fingers. If Fanny could only see me now. What an awful fit she might have.

“There is no need to force yourself,” he added gently into the lingering quiet.

The storm had raged on past, leaving behind nothing but the soft rush of rain as it pattered the roof and the always constant groans of the house as it shifted in the dark.

I frowned down at the bit of cheese crumble stuck to my fingers.

This sense of security, this gentle atmosphere, did more to soften my resolve than anything I could have dreamed. I looked up. “I have little enough to hide.” The truth, as I meant it, and spoken so firmly that he nodded in acknowledgment of the resolution.

Fear tugged at my heart.

Though I said the words, I trembled at what they might mean. There was a great deal I had not told anyone, and more that I wasn’t certain I knew how to say. So much was so complicated, wrapped forever in a hazy cloud that forced me to struggle to remember what was real and what was not.

The awful feeling within me when I had ended a man’s life—regardless of who it was I’d killed—had been so real. Yet now as I considered that the Ripper might well be alive, I could not sort my thoughts on the matter.

Was it relief I felt that I had selfishly avoided the act of taking a life? I could no longer avoid the truth of that particular shortcoming. Once upon a time, I might have considered that one death was no different than five—that if I’d murdered even one person, it would be as ghastly as if I’d murdered many more.

I was ashamed that when confronted with this very truth, I felt relief that I might have only been directly responsible for killing Teddy. It was my doing that put us both in front of the train; he saved me that night, compounding my guilt. Thinking that the vile Ripper escaped my blade should not have made me feel so comforted.

Shame upon shame, especially when I considered that in so failing to take his life, I had also failed in my commitment to collect the Ripper before he killed again. My failures always seemed to cost someone else’s life.

When I considered this burden too closely, my throat closed and the ache in head and belly burned so sharply as to steal my breath.

It was times like this that I thought it prudent to ask for help, yet knew no manner of asking would gain me what I wanted.

Ashmore was too strong a man to give in to the likes of my pleading.

There was so much wrapped up in my conflicted emotions that I couldn’t even begin to think how to give voice to them, much less offer solutions where I saw only failure.

I tucked a broken bit of cheese into my mouth and concentrated on the sharp flavor as it dissolved upon my tongue. It was no tar, but it would do for the moment. For this, for Ashmore’s care and my own sense of self, it would do.

He was patient as I considered all of these things. That Ashmore had slipped inside this nest of worries I carried was an entirely different matter.

What would he say if I told him I did not want to return to London?

Such a declaration would not go unchallenged, and I feared that as much as I welcomed it. As with the rest of my conflicted thoughts on my future, I was not even certain of what I wanted, much less what I needed. I considered how wonderful it might be to leave London forever. It seemed an eternity since I last imagined the life I’d wanted to lead—laden with my father’s fortune and taking to the skies in a private airship from where I might see the world at last.

Ashmore traveled extensively. Would he take me?

Would I be happy if he did?

Somehow, I could not imagine that I would be. Something, a part of me laden by the bonds I’d forged in the city I’d left behind, would not let me fly free.

I sighed. “I find myself,” I said to the flickering orange flame, “balanced upon a rope. To my left, there is London. On my right, the vast and unexplored world.”

He inclined his head. The fire caught in his hair, turned it to a glittering mass of hammered copper and sparks of red. It fascinated me. Mine was much darker, with only the occasional bit of copper glint and surprising thread of violet gleam. To find another with hair even more ginger than mine delighted me to no end.

I could be so very shallow about the oddest things.

“The problem with this,” I continued, toying with my remaining bit of cheese, “is that each requires a long tumble down and a rather sudden stop.”

The muscles of his thigh bunched as he shifted his weight upon the floor, then eased again against my feet when he leaned back against an array of cushions dragged into place. He looked nothing less than a sultan as pale as moonlight, sprawled bare-chested and barefoot upon the floor and ready for his harem girls to tend him.

I giggled at the imagery and swallowed it back when he raised an eyebrow at me.

“Passing fancy,” I said quickly, dismissing his curiosity with a wave. “Pay no heed.”

“Your fancies have always been fascinating,” he replied, but did not elaborate when I returned it with lifted eyebrows. “’Tis true enough that returning to London will bring with it consequence.”

His gift for understatement drew my attention. I eyed him. “You don’t say.”

“I can’t speak for the world on your right,” he continued, benevolently ignoring my sarcasm, “but perhaps I might soften the landing on your left.”

“Oh?” I wiggled my toes, trapped beneath his leg.

He stroked the top of my foot briefly, but did not linger. “My solicitors are currently engaged in an effort to annul your marriage.”

That earned my undivided attention. I straightened, cheese forgotten. “You’re doing what?”

“Annulment,” he repeated. “We are pressing church and crown to have your marriage negated.”

I did not know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I felt as if I might be doing Compton a terrible disservice.

On the other, something painfully like relief filled me.

I could not frame any words around the shame and hope I battled with.

Ashmore took my silence for inquiry. “Although you were married, your husband was slain before the wedding night. According to precedence, consummation is required for a legitimate marriage in the eyes of Queen and God.”

I curled my lip at mention of the latter, but did not realize I did so until he sat up, leaning over to smooth his thumb against the corner of my mouth.

“If your marriage is annulled,” he said quietly, not unkindly, “your inheritance reverts to me to hold, and you upon your majority. It will be as if it never happened.”

My hands clasped against my chest, the cheese falling to the floor between us. I closed my eyes. “I feel…”

How could I explain how I felt? I was not used to the concept, spending so much of my time wrapped in lies—of my own design and others’. “I feel as though I would like that very much.”

“And?” A gentle coaxing.

“And,” I repeated, whispering my shame, “as though I should be the most awful creature on this earth to want it so. Compton was a good man.”

“A very good man.” His hand slid over my clasped fingers, squeezing gently. “You do him no disservice by ensuring you remain safe and protected.”

Protected. The earl had wanted that for me. He had told me as much. In his dream of our future, I would grow to love him—a wish I wasn’t certain wouldn’t have come true with time, for he was truly a good man—and he would ensure I remained always safe. I would be allowed to pursue dreams of what ever scientific interests I pleased, to create a salon, to be a smart and clever wife.

All I had to do was play the good hostess, to be a countess and all that it entailed. With the protection of his name and title, I could be more free than I had ever thought to be allowed.

Without him, the title became a prison—his name a guilty verdict in the eyes of his grieving family.

I nodded, the faintest dip of my chin, and his fingers brushed my jaw. “Eat,” he reminded me, nudging the platter closer to me.

I opened my eyes to find no judgment upon his face, only a quiet concern. Although I was not positive of my appetite, I reached for a bit of bread.

Once he was satisfied I would eat some more, he leaned back against the pillows. “There is no certainty that my solicitors will be successful, but there is a strong case.”

I nodded. “Thank you for the attempt.”

“No need. My duty is to you, as my ward.”

“Duty?”

As if suddenly aware in just what position he found himself, having spent the past hours engaged in scandalous behaviors with said ward, he flushed fiercely. I could not help my smile. “I have nothing that will make the drop on your left any gentler,” he continued, following through on my whimsical metaphor at the expense of my teasing. “To be perfectly honest, if you choose to return to London, ’tis best you don’t visit the lower streets again.”

My smile faded.

Ashmore touched the top of my foot. “There is danger there greater than any I may protect you from. I do not ask this lightly.”

I opened my mouth to assert than I was more than capable of protecting myself, but the claim turned to ash on my tongue.

I was not. I had learned that lesson at the expense of the well-being of so many of them what called me friend, and I was not certain I knew what to do with the knowledge.

Returning to London without going below should be no hardship, for London above the drift was as large as below.

Yet I could not imagine myself doing it.

I looked up at my erstwhile guardian, eyebrows knotting over sharp scrutiny. “Why are you not lecturing me for all my choices until now?”

He shrugged. “What will that accomplish?”

“That sort of thinking never seemed to hinder Fanny.”

His lips quirked into a neat grin. “I do believe that only makes my point, minx.”

“I’m quite serious,” I said, though I battered aside a like smile with a quick wave of my hand. “Shouldn’t you be…I’m not certain what I mean to say,” I amended, humor draining as I searched for the words. “I’m certainly not a veritable paragon of Society’s virtue.”

“Am I?”

That earned him a silent lift of inquiring eyebrows.

He folded his hands behind his head, turning his bare arms into a ropy frame of pale, tensile shadow. His gaze did not waver from mine. “Only you can choose your path. That you, as a woman, must struggle all the harder to be allowed to is your great burden.”

An oddly aware statement from a man who had likely never labored to be recognized. I studied him. “That’s a rather enlightened view.”

“I have spent too many years walking this world,” he said, now looking not at me, but the ceiling. “Good souls are easy to find, if one removes the blinders set by an ignorant majority.”

“You don’t like London much, do you?”

The shaped swatch of sideburn just at his jaw hitched as he allowed himself a crooked smile. “Not especially.”

“Society, either?”

“It has more disadvantages than not.”

“What of India?”

“A fascinating place,” he replied, “if one is able to step beyond Her Majesty’s frontier.”

I wiggled my toes again, gouging them into his thigh. “I don’t understand.”

He reached beneath his leg, extracting my foot to place it against his hip. Satisfied, his arms once more went behind his head. “I mean that the British Empire, like most civilized empires, find themselves utterly consumed with dominating other cultures in a bid to stamp out that which makes them different. To wit, less civilized.”

“That’s seditious of you.”

“Is it?” He turned his head to look at me, then, such seriousness in his eyes that all flippancy died. “There is a beauty in savagery that no gilded polish will ever match. I have seen things that would turn London’s peerage upon their collective ear if they so much as caught a scent of it.” Awed, I watched as his countenance turned to a passion rarely seen in those of my acquaintance. “I have watched monsoons drown a land for weeks on end, and crossed a desert so dry that no water flows for an eternity. People do exist in such circumstances.” His eyes flashed. “No. More than the mere tedium of existence, they thrive.”

I could only stare, caught in a web woven of his husky tenor and that worldliness that seemed beyond his years. Such uncharacteristic disdain for the heart of Her Majesty’s empire caught me off-guard.

I could all but touch the light of his fervor, it glowed so brightly from within.

When I said nothing—unable to summon anything to say that would not break this spell—he turned his face again to the ceiling overhead. “There are sights in this world I count myself fortunate beyond measure to have seen, even while I know I will never see them again.”

“You sound…” I struggled for the word. “Wistful, I think.”

“Do I?” This time, he reached down to encircle my ankle with his fingers. Reassurance, I think, though for him or for me, I could not be sure. “Perhaps.”

We both fell silent, me with my thoughts and Ashmore possibly revisiting lands I’d never seen. I wondered if I might ask to go with him, next time he traveled. I could visit India, see those things he had spoken of with my own eyes. I’d always wanted to see the Orient, even travel as far flung as Africa.

A good sky ship and an endless sky could take a lady far.

Wasn’t it what I always wanted? Adventure, exploration.

Freedom.

But at what cost?

The city I thought to abandon waited only a short journey away. In the blighted, poxy streets of London below the drift, those I had counted as friends now struggled. The gangs at war, Zylphia in hiding, and poor Fanny, lacking any information of my well-being.

I thought of what it might cost to leave everything I had fashioned behind me; every consequence, every tangled knot of poor choices and culpability.

I owed Zylphia an apology for the abominable way I had treated her—this was a truth I did not like to admit. She had done her best to care for me, and after Compton’s death, I’d turned her aside. I thought to save her life, and in my clumsy efforts, I pushed her into Hawke’s company.

I had plunged my inept fingers into all that I stumbled across and left broken lives behind. This was my burden, that what I ate the tar to lighten, and I could no longer run from it.

I looked up at the ceiling, mirroring his posture with my hands laced behind my head. The too-large sleeves of his dressing gown slid down my arms, baring my elbows.

All that Ashmore spoke of seemed a dream, and an ephemeral one, at that—with no more substance than that what I’d taken from a pipe.

I could not turn my back on them what needed me now. I could no longer run.

It was in London I’d committed my most unforgivable deeds, and so it was to London I’d return. I no longer knew what it was to be a St. Croix, save to be a little mad, but it was time I do a greater service to the name.

“Mr. Ashmore?”

“Yes, Miss St. Croix?” A fallacy of politeness for the both of us, for we’d had long transcended such propriety and we both knew it. His thumb stroked across my ankle, again as if he wasn’t entirely aware he did it.

I built no preamble for him. “I can’t go with you.”

The thumb upon my ankle stilled. “I sense there is a greater purpose to this statement.”

I lowered my gaze, looking across the narrow distance between us, to find him watching me instead of the shadows upon the ceiling. I favored him with a small smile. “I know you didn’t ask,” I said, “but I…” To my horror, an ache seized my throat. I cleared it, lest it turn to the tears I no longer could control. “I have always dreamed of adventure. I want nothing more than to see the sights you speak of.”

His tone remained level as he said, “You dance around the acknowledgement of debts owed.”

Damn his shrewd understanding. I nodded, because anything else might jar loose the tears threatening to overwhelm my efforts.

His thumb once more took up that idle stroke, sending gentle shivers up my leg. “I thought it might come to that.”

In that simple sentence, Oliver Ashmore—my guardian who had been absent from my life for so long—displayed a knowledge of my character that precious few had ever indicated a willingness to learn.

The first of my tears welled over my lashes.

“Oh, sod it,” he said upon seeing them, and surprised a snort torn from my aching chest.

Chapter Thirteen

I could not help myself. Though my tears ran freely, I laughed until my sides ached, bolstered by the warm sound of his own laughter as I blotted at my cheeks with the wide sleeves of his dressing gown.

When the fit finally released me from its hold, both of my feet were planted upon his hip, and he lay back on his pillows with an arm draped over his eyes.

His smile truly was a beautiful thing.

I took a deep breath to steady my weary nerves. “I apologize,” I said, though lightly. “I can’t seem to get a grasp on my emotions.”

“No need,” he replied, though less curtly than he’d said the words before. He did not remove his arm, but his smile remained beneath it. “’Tis expected. You will find harmony, in time.”

The sooner, the better. I was not prone to tears, and the absence of them entirely in the wake of Compton’s death made me shockingly embarrassed to shed them. If I hoped to return to London, to hold my head up among those I wronged and work to salve the pain I’d caused in my wake, I needed to have better control of myself.

Once more, we lapsed into a companionable silence. The lull of the fire, the sweetness of the company, dragged at my senses until I felt as though I existed within languid comfort.

Whatever might happen after this time, I thought I might be able to bear it with some dignity.

Ashmore stirred beneath my feet. “It was Hawke, wasn’t it?”

My comfort vanished. My eyes snapped open, and I propped myself up on my elbow to ascertain what expression might accompany that matter-of-fact question.

He had not moved. While he no longer smiled, I could see no trace of anger or disappointment beneath his arm either.

My fingers splayed upon the floor beneath me, though it offered no greater sense of balance.

How was I to answer that?

There was only one option.

“Yes.” The truth freed itself on a whisper.

Ashmore said nothing at first, and I wondered if I had offended him. His chest rose and fell with slow rhythm, gilded prettily by the fire we lounged beside.

Then, he lowered his arm, hand coming to rest just over his navel, and met my gaze direct. “You intend to return to London low for him?”

“I hadn’t—” At his raised eyebrow, I let out a hard breath and fell back to my pillows. “How do you know what I have not yet worked out for myself?” I groused, nearly a snarl. Of all my pretty sentiments, I had deliberately avoided thoughts of the man I still owed a well-placed boot to the delicates. That I didn’t know what my reception might be, or even what I intended to do when I sought him out, was a truth I could examine once I was in London again.

He had already done me a nigh unforgivable wrong. I wouldn’t dare call my willingness to hear him out—or force him to hear me out, every last word—a strength. All I knew was that I hoped to see him again.

If he were to reject me, it might cauterize this wound I carried.

“You are not so difficult to understand,” Ashmore assured me. “Regardless of all things, your sense of guilt is the greater burden to bear.”

I said nothing.

“I could tell you that what happened in the Menagerie that night was not your fault,” he continued, his tone thoughtful and slow. “You were merely a tool, used as a means to bring a greater concern to heel.”

My memory of that night—even of most of the fortnight prior—was so unreliable as to be worthless, and I latched onto this assertion with honed determination. “What do you mean? What greater concern?”

Ashmore was no man’s fool. “If I tell you, will you assume this burden as your own and let it weigh you down even more?”

Damn him. One night in his bed, and he’d all but deciphered me completely.

I sighed. “I already feel so much guilt that I’m swimming in its bitter brine. I don’t believe you can say anything else to add to it. Drowning is drowning.”

“It’s that very resignation that gives me pause,” he replied, his voice quiet. “Cherry, I know how little you recall, and the longer you remain separated from the knowledge, the more a dream it becomes.”

I flushed, though I could not fathom why. This was a matter of scientific fact; opium dulled the memory. Still, I felt embarrassed for it. “I’d prefer to know,” I said. I firmed my shoulders. “Please.”

It was Ashmore’s turn to sigh. “Very well. I said that you were merely a tool, and by my sources, I believe this to be true. You were not the goal.”

“But my debt—”

“A small one, in the greater scheme,” Ashmore said, shaking his head. The firelight glinted off his hair as he did, crackling into a copper gleam. His eyes remained steady. “Regardless of what it was, and I am not asking,” he added, “it doesn’t matter. In the end, what the Veil wanted was Hawke. You were the means by which they guaranteed his loyalty.”

I scoffed at that. “They already owned him.”

“Did they? Are you so sure?”

Was I? For a long moment, only the crack of burning wood and the hiss of sap as it smoldered in the fireplace filled the air, and Ashmore kindly allowed me the opportunity to think on the matter in peace.

Had the Veil owned Hawke as securely as I’d mockingly assumed?

The question tore the wool from my eyes. Put in such a way, I remembered the lurid scars on Hawke’s back, placed there by the Veil in punishment for saving me from my father’s serum without the Veil’s permission. He had never said anything of it, leaving that discovery to chance and Zylphia’s loose tongue.

Had his intent been just as pure when he offered me release from the debt if I married Compton? I hadn’t considered the consequences; I’d thought he spoke in the Veil’s place.

If I dredged through all of my memories, if I looked even at the first true lie I’d ever caught him telling me, he’d done it all to keep me from the Veil’s sight, and out of the danger he saw that I did not.

Perhaps, in contrast with the villainous role I’d painted him in, this new revelation cast him as too virtuous. Even if I allowed for ulterior motives, this new understanding of Hawke’s behavior was a jarring tilt to a world I was just coming to understand without smoke to soften it.

I looked into the heart of the blaze, where the wood blackened and curled and the glow turned wicked blue—a narrow ream of azure flame, as scorching as the river of blue in Hawke’s mismatched glare.

For all the years I’d known him, fought and argued with him, his eyes had bedeviled me. They were brown, as clear as if a candle burned from behind, save for a vertical swath of blue bisecting his left eye. I’d always considered it the mark of the devil that rode him, but I had never expected to learn how spot-on that really was.

“Ashmore,” I said, each syllable coming slowly. I could barely believe that I could even give the suspicion I held voice, yet voice it I did. “Is there something awry with Hawke?”

“There is a great deal wrong with him,” Ashmore replied, dry as dust. “What are you specifically referring to?”

His eyes. I knew of no reason why they might change color, yet the last I’d seen him, the night he’d spoken of subjugation and showmanship, his eyes had been that wicked blue, not a trace of the brown they should have been.

It was a clue I had given no real thought to.

I turned my gaze to the man who had become my second lover, and for the first time in so very long, I felt no guilt at the choice I had made.

Ashmore had given to me what I desperately needed. For all that I ranted and railed, for all the awful things I had done in his care, it was Ashmore who forced upon me the sobriety to choose for myself a future—and the strength of will, no matter how fragile it might feel, to face my past. In his embrace, I found comfort, and with his body, enough physical bliss to ease my transition.

I owed him so much more than I could ever repay, and perhaps I’d spend my life trying, but my future was not his. He would never be Hawke, and I would never expect him to try.

He studied me with his too-sharp gaze fixed upon mine, and finally inclined his head. “Yes, Cherry. There is something terribly wrong with him.”

“Then I have to help him.” This was no whisper; I spoke it calmly, as though it had always been so. “I owe him more than enslavement to the Karakash Veil.”

“Because of your relations?”

Color flooded my cheeks—to be talking so openly of such things to the man I had only just given myself to seemed surreal and inappropriate. I looked away, but he reached down to capture my foot, lifting it far enough that my leg straightened.

His lips pressed into the arch, and I shivered. “You will not shock me,” he said, lowering my foot to his chest. His heart thudded solidly beneath my heel, and he returned to stroking my arch with his thumb—a gesture as much to soothe me as himself, perhaps. “I am long past the age of requiring undying affections. You cannot break my heart.”

Perhaps not, but he could set mine to pounding. I tugged the dressing gown over my bared thigh as though it might afford a return to modesty.

He chuckled quietly. “Do I inspire you?”

“It seems vastly unfair that you do,” I muttered.

“Unfair because of him?”

Not content with baring my heart, he seemed determined to prise open all of my secrets. I covered my face with both hands. “Is it disloyal?”

“To whom?” He cupped my calf with his warm fingers, delicately tracing my limb. I shuddered. “Me?” He chuckled. “As I said, I demand nothing of you that you are unwilling to give.”

I was very much afraid that time would make me all too willing to give a great deal.

“Is it Hawke that worries you?” he asked.

“Some.”

“Don’t. As you are right now, you are of more use to him than he is to you. Mend, first, so that you will not be the tool he wishes you to be.”

“’Tis not Hawke you’re speaking of.”

“It is,” he countered, “though I grant you your debate. Whether it is the man you knew or the man you never knew he was, the end result is that he had plans for you that you did not have for yourself.”

“You can’t know that,” I said into my palms.

“I know it,” he returned calmly. “The last you met is reason enough.”

“He wasn’t himself,” I insisted. “How can I judge, when I don’t remember clearly much of the event?”

“Probably best that you do neither,” Ashmore murmured, but I was too focused on my intentions and did not address this.

“I intend to save him from whatever is wrong.” It sounded like sanity, but smacked of promise and hopeless ambition. “Him, and Zylphia too.” Friends. Not an easy word, and one I even wavered before attributing it to the Micajah Hawke I had known, but a word I would use nonetheless.

He did not argue with me, as I’d expected. “Then do so, once you are done saving yourself.”

I dropped my hands, startled into meeting his lazy smile. “Am I saving myself?”

“You are.” He let go of my leg, as though done proving a point, and patted my arch. “You are a grown woman, and though for all intents and purposes Society must think you virginal, you are not. You are free to do as you please, which does include abstaining if that is your desire.”

“What if…” I hesitated.

“Mm?”

I took a deep breath. “What if I’ve not yet made up my mind as to that?”

“Then I shall be here when you do.” He placed my foot upon the ground, and eased the other off his hip. Sitting up, he folded his legs in the lotus style I first saw at the Menagerie and offered his hand. It brought the ink staining his forearm into stark relief. “However, you will need to be made safe from consequences of such things.”

“Safe?”

“More, you’ll need to be trained if you intend to go against the magic Hawke brings to bear.”

I eyed his hand as though it might hide a serpent. “Magic.” A flat sound.

Now that I saw the tattoos clearly, I recognized some. The slashing lines and black sigils carved in precise rows down each defined forearm carried alchemical symbols within them.

I had never met a sailor with that upon his skin.

His chuckle demanded my attention; he mocked me openly, though it lacked the sting of malice.

“What?” I demanded.

“You have some nerve,” he returned, though good-naturedly. “Truly, how can you sit there and disbelieve something you have seen with your own eyes?”

“These eyes,” I replied with indignation, “were somewhat less than trustworthy, or have you forgotten my affair with the smoke?”

His amusement eased, and he captured my left hand in his. “True enough, but I believe you do yourself a disservice by relying on the fallacies instead of the truths you know.” Drawing me to sit up, he twitched my borrowed dressing gown into place over my bent legs.

“Magic is a thing that science—”

He cut me off with a wry, “—that science has not explained yet. Yes, I am familiar with that particular debate.”

“Then you understand,” I said. “The Veil, the entirety of the Menagerie, was built upon the precepts of the exotic and the fantastical. Hawke is just a showman.”

“You are surprisingly close-minded.” He pointed at me. “What do you recall from the fight in the Menagerie’s grounds?”

“Color,” I replied, but had to pause again to consider my faded memories. Color was the most clear detail I could summon; streaks of light in blue, red, violet and green. “I’m sure it was the usual ringside tricks—”

“Stop,” he said, cutting through my musing dialogue with a grumbled order. Ashmore eased forward, bracing a pale hand beside the platter of food between us. “If you choose not to believe in magic, then what do you postulate alchemy is?”

I frowned at him. “I once considered it the scientist’s superstition. An ill-advised attempt to save old men from the creeping tide of death.”

“What do you consider it now?”

“An enigma.”

He did not smile. “I shall assume you are not being flippant.” When I nodded, he swiped a bit of bread and cheese from the dwindling platter, but did not fall back to his pillows. His gaze held mine, as though searching for something within it. “Alchemy is the scientific art of perfection.”

I blinked. “Perfection of what?”

“You are familiar with alkahest?” This time, I shook my head. “What of chrysopoeia?” Another denial from me. His eyebrow inched upward in obvious contest. “Then tell me how you can possibly turn your nose up at a thing you know nothing about?”

I had no answer for that, and because none came readily to mind, I found myself contemplating the question rather more seriously than I might have, were I more quick-witted about it.

“I…” Humility was not a thing that came easily to me. I sighed. “I suppose I mustn’t.”

“That goes doubly for what you think you know about Hawke.” He laid a finger upon my nose, forcing it down some to illustrate his point. “Lesson one, minx. Forget everything those regimented fools ever taught you.”

“Lesson?” I stared at him. “Am I to be taught by you?” When he only nodded, an expression something like pained tolerance shaping his features, my stare turned to confused curiosity. “I don’t understand. Alchemy may be labeled an art, but I gather ’tis based on rules of science. How would this explain what you claim Hawke wields?”

“You mean magic,” he said, and I could not help myself. I projected deliberate disbelief with a studied lift of my eyebrows. “Put it this way. Whether a culture calls it magic, alchemy, science or divinity, does it matter what the name is if the outcome is the same?”

I thought about that. “What one calls magic might be science.”

“And what one calls science might well be magic.”

“So Hawke knows a form of science that those who don’t see the formula call magic.” Then, as I raised my fingers to my mouth, I added, “The Veil’s spokesperson called him a…” The word escaped me. “A magician, I think.”

“Wūshī.”

“That’s it.” I gaped at him. “Do you know Chinese?”

He nodded. “Enough to get by.”

“Will you teach me?”

This time when he laughed, it warmed parts of me that I thought too empty to ever be warm again. “One thing at a time, minx. You’ll have enough to learn already, and I don’t want you taking ill.”

I smiled. “Then what will you teach me first?”

He pointed to the plate before me. “How to finish a meal.”

“Ashmore.”

He only tilted his head.

So compelled, I reached for a bit of bread and sausage. To my surprise, I found myself rather more hungry than I expected. “Ashmore,” I said again, but this time a question as he leaned back on his elbow and watched me eat.

“Yes?”

“Did you learn alchemy from my grandfather?”

He sighed. “No.”

“But you know alchemy, yes?”

He lifted a hand, loose fist tipped to display his forearm. “Yes.”

“I noticed it before,” I admitted. “But I don’t entirely understand. What is that for?”

“Structure.”

When he made no other comment about it, I leaned forward. “And you’ll show me?”

“If you behave, work hard, and give me no cause to doubt your reason.”

I frowned. “My reason? Do you mean my sanity or my intellect?”

“Among other things,” he muttered, and again pointed to the food. “Eat, please. You need to gather your strength.”

I nodded at him over my bread, the sausage and cheese I’d heaped upon it tottering. “Did you learn beside my mother?”

He was silent. I used the opportunity to take a bite of the cold fare. “Your mother,” he finally said, “was the most gifted student I had ever seen. I was fortunate enough to work beside her.”

“Did she learn here? Was she marked like you? Is there a laboratory?” I added quickly.

His fingers extended, as though flicking that bit of knowledge away. “No, there isn’t. In all honesty, you have proven to have all of your mother’s pride, and more than a bit of your grandfather’s stubbornness. We shall see if your intellect overcomes these foibles.”

I ate in silence, digesting this information even as I worked on the plate he occasionally filched a bit of meat from.

I wondered if he simply hadn’t read my grandfather’s journal. Was it possible that he didn’t know of the laboratory within the book he gave me?

I thought over this. It made me wonder how long he had known my grandfather, and how old he must have been when the old man passed on. “Ashmore?”

“What is it now, minx?”

I caught a bit of falling cheese and placed it very carefully back upon the bread. “Did you know my mother well?”

A pause. “No. Not many did.”

“And my grandfather?”

“Rather more than I did her.”

“Was he…” I looked up to find him watching me, his expression closed. I must have stretched his patience. I shook my head. “Never mind. I don’t mean to open old wounds. ’Tis clear you respected him.”

“I did, in part.” He smoothed a wayward curl from my brow. “In a great many ways, you are better off as you are, your own woman without familial burdens.” He spoke with such a deep sadness that I wasn’t certain how to respond.

He gave me no opportunity. “Eat,” he added sharply, and rose to his feet. “I’ll fetch more tea and a preventative.”

Without another word, Ashmore left me in his room to contemplate all that he had revealed.

And all that I had revealed to him.

It felt…oddly comfortable. As if for once, I was accepted for who I was. What I was.

No, more than once. Hadn’t Hawke accepted me, as well?

I’d thought so. In that night before he’d turned me out, I thought I’d seen in him an understanding that reached out to something in me.

Was it only the tar I’d sensed, after all?

I couldn’t be sure, but I also didn’t want to consider that I had been used.

It seemed easier to think that if Hawke’s behavior had been reprehensible from the start, that it was only because his Chinese masters demanded it.

Was I prepared for an alternative?

Not yet, anyway.

As I worked through the last of the plate, licking my fingers like an uncommon savage, I wondered what Ashmore might have to teach—and whether I would have the skill to learn it.

Alchemy.

My father’s mad plans. Miss Hensworth’s invisibility draught, which allowed her to murder the professors who had barred her entrance to the university because she was a woman.

These were the only brushes with alchemy I had known, and each had gone terribly awry. My father’s serum did not strike me as any method of attaining perfection—whatever that meant. Miss Hensworth’s formula had caused her body to deteriorate at a rapid rate, which seemed the very antithesis of perfection.

Was there something good to be done with alchemy?

When Ashmore came back, a tarnished silver tray balanced between his hands and clad in a dark green dressing gown, I looked up. “Ashmore.”

“More questions, minx?”

I shook my head. “Thank you for the book.”

He knelt, setting the tray down beside the hearth. “I’ve given you many.” But he smiled, and that was all I’d hoped of him. “You are welcome for them all.”

I returned his smile, feeling oddly at ease. I hadn’t felt that way for so long, I wasn’t positive what was expected of me.

“Drink this first,” he instructed, passing to me a small glass phial, the cork plucked by a simple twist between his fingers.

I studied the murky gray contents. “What is it?”

“A preventative,” he said. “It will make sure that our activities of the past day will not result in a child.”

My eyes went enormously large. “Is that…” I floundered.

“Safe? Or moral?” Now, a bit of a smile touched his lips, though it was a little more droll than I think he might have intended. “I cannot help with the latter, that’s between you and your conscience. I would prefer to sire no children and hope that you might feel the same.”

“No!” As his eyebrows rose, I amended quickly, “I mean no offense. I simply…Children have never…” I hadn’t even considered it when I‘d agreed to marry Compton.

Me? The mother of a helpless child?

I shuddered. “No,” I said, deeply heartfelt. “I’ve no desire for children.”

That relief shaped his regard did not offend me. “Then drink that down. ’Tis perfectly safe for your constitution.”

I obeyed, wincing some when the flavor spread upon my tongue. “It reminds me of milk and…” I smacked my lips, searching for the descriptor. “Rather more of the Thames than I’d like to have swallowed.”

Shaking his head in amusement, he handed me a full tea cup, its delicate rim glinting gold in the firelight. “I apologize that I did not consider your feelings on the subject when first we…That is, when I took you earlier.” Now, brilliant scarlet patches bloomed on his cheeks.

I took the cup gratefully. “I am glad you did.” No lie, there. I was the fool who had not even considered the idea of children before the word was spoken before me. I would be much more careful in the future. “One more question.” At his inquisitive sound, my smile widened. “Can we start tomorrow?”

To my delight, he laughed without shame or moderation, until the sound of it filled the room. “You will wish you did not ask.”

I leaned back into my pillows and cradled the cup.

“Mr. Ashmore,” I told him with great dignity, “your challenge is duly accepted.”

Chapter Fourteen

I had never regretted impulsive words so much until some two days later. My one tea gown had been laundered and returned, somewhat worse for wear but serviceable for my needs.

Maddie Ruth, oddly unconcerned for my behaviors resulting in hours spent in Ashmore’s bedroom, saw to my care with a breezy enjoyment I found endearing. That it allowed her to remain nearby whilst I studied the things Ashmore desired of me did no harm to her motivations.

Oh, but the things Ashmore placed before me were mind-numbingly dull.

He tested me first of my grasp upon basic scientific principles, including my memory of the periodic table. When I faltered even once, he sent me back to the books.

We did not debate the truth of things so much as he spoke and I listened, occasionally taking notes in the journal he furnished me with in order to do so.

It was only a full day of this before I lost my patience, railing at Maddie Ruth within the privacy of my bedroom that night. “I have been reading of these things for as long as I’ve known my letters,” I seethed, tossing my journal to the bed where it slid over the edge and vanished. A muffled thud indicated its landing.

It could rot there.

“Don’t you want to learn what he knows?” Maddie Ruth asked me, shaking out my nightshift and wrapper with brisk efficiency. “He’s a good enough teacher.”

“How would you know?” I snapped, irritated beyond all measure.

She did not rise to my ire. “He taught me how to fix the chair lift in the gradient.” When I stooped mid-stride to stare at her, she favored me with an impish smile. “He didn’t realize I was good with my hands.”

I sat on the bed with a heavy sigh. “He was to teach me that.”

“You,” she told me, tossing my night shift at me in a floating swath of white, “are to be learning alchemy.”

“Why aren’t you?” I caught the material out of the air, but only wrung it between my hands. “Aren’t you interested in such things?”

She shrugged. “I dabble a bit in what I know, but I’m not really of a mind to learn all the true secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and all that rot. I’ll leave it to the lot of you.”

“Immortality not in your agenda, then?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Do you believe it?”

“No.” I leaned back in the bed, allowing the bedclothes to enfold me in soft succor. I tucked the nightshift under my chin, as though it were a blanket, and watched the ceiling and its lantern-lit shadows. “Maybe.”

“What changes your mind?”

I shrugged. “I do believe ’tis capable of great feats.”

“Rightly so.” She leaned over me, smiling down into my eyes. Her braids, kept in two as a child’s might, fell over her shoulders. “Are you going to sleep?”

“No.” I still hadn’t mastered more than a few hours at a time, and mostly when I was too fatigued to fight the urge anymore. “I’m going to study.”

“Thought as much. I’ll fetch the tea.” She offered me a hand, which I took, and she utilized that to lift me once more to a seated position. Before letting me go, she turned over my palm. “Your scars are gone.”

“I’ve retained none at all,” I admitted. “Not even from the Ripper’s parting assault.”

“Hmm.” A thoughtful sound, though not one she continued to press as she left me to my studying and a painstaking report, as demanded by Ashmore’s strict tasking.

An essay as to my theories on the nature of aether seemed a step in the right direction. At least it held some link to alchemy, as opposed to simply scientific theory.

Maddie Ruth returned whilst I was ensconced in my assigned reading, and she left the tray beside my bed upon a nightstand. When I remembered it was there and reached for the now cooled teacup, my fingers brushed a leather binding instead.

I looked up.

My mother’s journal rested beside the pot of tea.

Seeing it gave me no surprise, but a sheepish sort of resignation—Maddie Ruth’s machinations no longer shocked me. She must have acquired it from Ishmael Communion’s keeping and thought of no better time to give it than when I began to work upon the art the journal spoke of.

With a wistful smile, I plucked the book from the tray.

A length of glass slid from the pages, bouncing gently upon the coverlet. A bit of a gasp clutched at my throat, quickly gone again when I remembered that the rectangular square was pressed by a smaller bit of glass, sealing the remains of my father’s alchemical serum within.

I remembered all too well the puff of pink air as it slid from the cameo mechanism that once held it, and the consequences I had suffered after breathing it in.

That was the first I’d ever stumbled across Abraham St. Croix’s alchemical efforts.

When I gave the empty cameo to Maddie Ruth, she’d scraped the last bit from the interior and saved it for me. I picked up the glass, studying the faintly pink shimmer smeared atop it.

To think that this was the heart of my father’s skill, and the foundation upon which I’d first fallen to Hawke’s seductions.

Perhaps one day I might know enough of alchemy to deconstruct the serum. Would I learn something from this little bit of pink and gold shine?

Was there even a way to do so?

I tucked the glass between the cover and the page bearing my mother’s dedication, which bequeathed the journal to Almira Louise Compton, Lady Northampton—my sworn enemy, were she to tell it, and unless Ashmore’s solicitors were successful, my mother-in-law.

The relationship between my mother and the marchioness was a complex one I did not have an inclination to sort out. One was long since dead, and the other a harpy. Whatever their relationship, it had nothing to do with me.

The rest of the book was a diary transcribing my mother’s thoughts on the matter of aether and its use in alchemical theory. Much of the pages were bent upon the morality of alchemical experimentation, though there were large portions within that seemed more focused upon this formula or that as the fancy took her.

I recognized more of the symbols than when I’d first opened the pages, but not by much.

In the midst of the book, held flat by the pages, I found Maddie Ruth’s drawing of the cameo parts. The face of my mother remained in profile—another instance of my father’s undying love for Josephine St. Croix.

To think that she had died so young.

Love really could turn a good man mad.

I did not sleep again that night. This time, when I closed my eyes, it was my father’s owlish gray stare I pictured, and the interminable sorrow within. Nothing I could ever do would have eased his sadness; I was not my mother, for all he wished I was.

The following day, tired but eager, I occupied not the library but the smaller study Ashmore had claimed for his own.

“Tell me of perfection,” was his opening gambit.

I raised my eyebrows at him—though I labored for one, I simply could not get the hang of it. “Perfection is impossible.”

“Is it?” He did not stand, but leaned a hip against his desk; the very model of confidence in a teaching role. “What is the goal of science?”

“To learn and explain the cosmos.”

He tipped his head. “Is that not impossible?”

“Of course not, but it might take some time—” I caught myself when he lifted a finger. “Oh,” I added after a moment. “I see. Alchemy is about attaining perfection.”

“’Tis a journey,” he replied, “just as any scientific method is. One begins with a question. In this case, that question is?”

I hesitated. “How…does something become perfect?”

“Fair enough a start.” Ashmore plucked a pouch from the desk beside him, the velvet so worn as to have faded to gray. “Chrysopoeia means transmutation into gold, the perfect metal.”

“And alkahest?”

“A universal solvent, capable of dissolving all things. Perfection in destruction, if you will.”

I was beginning to understand the nature of the art. “What of immortality?”

“Also perfection,” he replied. “Although this is one of the more dangerous aspirations. Material perfection of base metals and even that regarding medicinals is one thing. Immortality is altogether something else.”

What had begun as a lecture ended on such a dismissive note that I sat back in the chair allowed me and studied him in silence.

He noted it. “Why do you stare?”

“You have a furrow just here,” I pointed out, tapping my own brow between my eyebrows. “Do you not believe in attaining immortality through alchemy?”

His eyes narrowed as he rubbed at his own brow, goaded into smoothing the furrow away by force. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because ’tis never been achieved,” I said simply. “It is nothing more than a fancy without any evidence to sustain it.

He dropped his hand, but only so that he could open the pouch. “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” he muttered. “Still, let us move on from the details and settle upon a simple truth. Alchemy is the art of achieving perfection, and in so doing, freeing the cosmos from temporal being.”

Lofty, but I’d heard much the same superior turns of phrase by them what considered naturo-philosophy as a greater science than most. I nodded. “Definition duly noted.”

“Good. In order to understand the principles of alchemical theory, you should start with a focus,” Ashmore said, pulling out a deck of cards and laying them into one hand.

I eyed the faded colors painted upon the back of the cards with disbelief. “Playing cards?”

“Not quite.” With a deft flick of his fingers, he turned one over. A single figure looked at me from within the faded remains of a gilded frame. Seven sheaths of grain sprang from his head, and he held a long stick. “This is a tarot card.”

My incredulous stare lifted to Ashmore, who was not smiling as I’d expected of such a jest. “Tarot,” I repeated. “As the gypsies use?”

“Them and more.”

“Am I to fortune-tell, then?” I asked dryly. “I thought this was science.”

He turned his back. “If you’re not serious—”

“I am, I am,” I hastened to say, but I could not wholly tamp down my skepticism. I was already uncertain about the verisimilitude of alchemical theory; tarot stretched my inclinations rather more than I was comfortable with. “I don’t understand, is all.”

“Then pay attention,” he said, reverting to the stern taskmaster he became when teaching. “In these enlightened ages, we call this Trump the Fool. This is where your journey begins.”

“A fool, am I?”

He did not smile. “You have lost everything. You are empty, with neither riches nor memory to your name. Truly, you lack even basic common sense to tell you that what you wish to undertake will be painful and difficult.”

“Come, now,” I protested, but subsided when he fixed me with that severe stare, which I took to mean he would brook no further interruptions. The firelight leaping behind him did not soften his approach.

My rueful smile faded to a strange sort of intellectual dawning. Perhaps in part lulled by the cadence of his voice, I understood what it was he said.

He was too right, and it did not sit well. I had lost everything to my choices. I’d lost my family, blooded and otherwise, and I’d lost much of my memory and freedom to the smoke. I’d even attempted to take my own life.

I was, for all intents and purposes, newly returning to this world.

I was not entirely sure how comfortable I was being likened to a naïve fool without sense, but in light of this lesson, I grudgingly accepted the moniker. “So I am a fool intent on a new journey.”

“What’s more, you intend to pursue a journey most would call folly,” Ashmore said, and held the card up between two long fingers. “Your journey begins now.”

I did not recognize this warning for what it meant. Not until he pointed the edge of the worn card to my ignored daybook.

“The first Trump is called Apis,” Ashmore said briskly. “It corresponds to the letter ‘A’ and the number one.”

I hastily wrote that which I could keep up with, but paused with a frown. “Is the Fool not a zero in tarot’s numbering?”

“What did I tell you?” he returned with sharp impatience. “Forget what you know and all that you have been taught. Become the Fool, or you’re doomed to failure before you’ve begun.” When I said nothing, sealing my lips against a burning rejoinder, he once more held up the card. “Apis’ symbolic meaning is that of the bull.”

He did not wait to see if I transcribed that which he said quick enough, moving to the next card in his deck. This was lifted to reveal a man in crimson robes, a large hat upon his head and a table arrayed before him. Like the first, the gilded edges no longer glinted, worn nearly bald in places by care and time.

“The second Trump is Bacatus-Typhon.”

A bit of my ill-remembered Latin came back to me. “Bacatus means ‘pearl,’ does it not?”

A flicker of a smile. “Good. ‘Pearl’ or ‘strewn with pearls,’ as you like it. Why is that?”

That caught me. “Why is what?”

When his smile vanished, and he returned to his lecture, I grumbled beneath my breath and hastened to keep up. “The second Trump corresponds with the number two, and—”

“The letter ‘B’?” I hazarded.

An inclination of his head. “The symbolic meaning is that of adversity and duality.”

“Why is that?” I repeated back to him, more than a little sardonic about it.

“That will be your assignment,” he replied, unruffled, and drew the third card. A woman upon a throne. “Caeles-Isis.” When I did not volunteer any bits of murky knowledge, the card twitched once, but he did not pause. “You may assume that each card corresponds with the following letter in the alphabet and the following number. Caeles-Isis is associated with the divine.”

I scribbled madly, although in the privacy of my own thoughts, I felt it all a little too occult for my taste. I wanted facts and scientific hypothesis, not this nonsense.

“Diana,” he said, revealing another seated woman holding a shield and what looked to be a sword or stick. “This card’s symbolic meaning is the four elements—” He eyed me. “Are you paying attention?”

I grimaced. “In Greek myth, Diana was the goddess of the moon.”

“Good. I’m delighted to learn some of your lessons remain with you.” He tucked the card beneath the others. “Diana represents the four phases of the lunar moon.” Another card, this one a wizened old man with a flowing beard. “Eon, symbolic of quintessence.”

I looked up at that, my eyebrows climbing my furrowed brow. “The fifth element. Aether?”

“Correct,” he said. “Pay attention, now.” So warned, I poised my pen over the journal I filled with terse listings of Trumps and the occasional scribble of impatience. “Science has marked this fifth element, but they are not wholly understanding of its source. They believe that it simply exists, independent of the others.”

“Is that wrong?” I asked, but slowly. I had always considered aether to be its own element.

In our weekly debates, Teddy had always suggested there might be more to it.

A painful knot gripped my heart.

I did nothing to ease it, allowing it to fill my chest, to tighten my throat and hurt as a wound needed to. If I was to be this fool, to start on a journey, I needed this infection to run its course.

Teddy had made his choices; it was small comfort, and it did nothing to soften the ache, but I had to move on. I accepted the guilt I carried, but I could not fall victim to its poison again.

If I did that, I may as well go back to the tar.

“Cherry?”

I started. “Quintessence, yes?”

Ashmore studied me, lowering the card. “Do you need a rest?”

“No,” I insisted. I straightened. “You were telling me whether aether exists independent of the other elements or not.”

“So I was.” Though I could tell that he watched me carefully for signs of fatigue, he returned to his lecture. “The Greek philosophers believed that there was a fifth element hidden within the four.”

“Hidden?”

“Beneath the elements of earth, air, fire and water, there is aether.” He turned the card over, showing me its back. “It cannot be seen, touched, smelled, or felt. Quintessence forever exists in potentia, but it can not exist without all four of the elements to give it shape. It is what the divine might call spirit.”

I blinked for a moment. “Does this mean that Mr. Horatio’s theory of aether-to-oxygen ratio is incorrect?”

“He posits that aether may be enclosed in a vacuum and still be lit, correct?” When I nodded, he did not mirror the gesture, or give any indication that I was right or wrong. “What do you think?”

“I think,” I said slowly, pen lowering, “that if quintessence requires the other elements, then sealing it in a vacuum would cause it not to exist.”

Ashmore tucked Eon under the rest as he had with the others. “What would happen to your theory were I to inform you that while the other elements are always transitional, aether is constant and everlasting?”

“Wait,” I said, sitting upright, “how can that be? You just said that it does not exist without the other four.”

“Mysterious, is it not?” He allowed me a smile, one that I did not mistake for anything but a challenge. “I will look forward to your eventual hypothesis. We shall continue. Flamen, symbolic of heavenly light.” And so we moved through the deck, one by one listing the Trumps and what they symbolized.

It wasn’t until I heard him say, “Hamaxa,” that I leapt to my feet.

His voice stalled, attention focused entirely on me. I could only stare, open-mouthed.

Across the vestiges of my memory, a searing light blinded all who saw it, and I heard a masculine voice cry out. Hamaxa!

“Miss St. Croix?”

My gaze abruptly re-focused upon his face, and the concern writ there. “You said that once.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In the Menagerie.” When his features closed down, I knew I had him. Journal clutched in my hand, I lifted the other to point at the card he held. “Hamaxa. You called that word right before a burning light turned the world to fire and pain—” My voice broke on the recounting, though I could not reason why as my skin shivered.

The card lowered. “Sit, Miss St. Croix.”

“I don’t—”

“Sit before you fall over,” he said, sharper now. “Yes, I called upon Hamaxa, but it is too early for that lesson.”

I was ready to argue when the meaning of what he said struck me.

I sat, though on admittedly wobbly knees, and held my journal to my chest. “You mean there’s more to what you’re teaching me than the names of Trumps?”

He sighed. “You are remarkably impatient. Yes,” he added before I could answer that. “There is more, but you are attempting to sprint when you’ve not even mastered the crawl. Patience.”

I leaned forward. “So there will be scientific experimentation later?”

“Much later,” he said firmly. He lifted another card. “Now, if you’ve no other outbursts, let us return to ensuring your grasp of the foundation is impeccable, shall we?” When I nodded, he continued his list.

Twenty-two Trumps in all, each with a number and letter associated, and a symbolic meaning I dutifully recorded. At the end, when he questioned me on the list, I was fortunate enough that I’d detailed exactly that which he required of me.

“Well done,” he said, sliding the cards back into the pouch. “Your assignment today is to utilize the library and find for me the reason why each Trump bears the name it does.”

What little elation I’d garnered sizzled into outright challenge. “That’s rather vague,” I pointed out.

“Then I wish you luck.” He withdrew a gold pocket watch from his waistcoat—brown again, surprising me not at all—and checked the time. “You have until morning. I suggest you start now.”

I muttered about his bloody assignments all the way back to the library.

They did not leave me alone for very long. By some unspoken agreement I did not hear them make, either Ashmore or Maddie Ruth remained nearby every moment. While I appreciated that it made the house I remained in seem less gloomy and oppressive, it also did not afford me any opportunity to investigate any more clues regarding my grandfather’s laboratory.

I did not want to traverse the halls in the dead of night, but it was likely my only prospect. Maddie Ruth needed to sleep, and I had been rather well-behaved of late, keeping to my room to study.

If I could find the laboratory, I would have a wonderful surprise for Ashmore—and the tools with which to advance my knowledge.

The mysteries regarding my grandfather’s proposed conspiracy to murder him only piqued my interest on the matter.

Denied the opportunity for the moment, I dutifully remained in the library, taking my dinner and supper there, and worked to learn that what Ashmore wanted me to learn.

I must admit that in the end, I was inordinately pleased to find that I was capable of deducing what it was I was to show him. My revelation started first by happenstance—a reference to Orcus in Roman writings. This was also the name of the thirteenth Trump. I learned that Orcus was the Roman god of the netherworld, which corresponded to the Greek Hades, whose helmet allowed for invisibility so that one may enter and exit the realm of the dead without trouble.

Once I suspected the theme, I began to study on all the Trumps. Kronos, whose symbolism focused on the correspondence between letters and numbers, was also the god of Time. In Greek mythology, he swallowed his offspring, which suggested that all things were taken by Time.

Oh, how clever these alchemists were.

Hamaxa intrigued me greatly, for its symbolic meaning was that of a crystal sphere, yet the Latin word itself was indicative of a chariot, which lead me to references of Athena, who was credited with devising the chariot in her mythologies.

Once I started finding connections, I could not stop, until my journal resembled little more than a series of lines and arrows leading back through the pages to reference things written prior.

I muttered often as I worked, and sometimes I would look up when a fresh pot of tea was set nearby, to find Ashmore looking rather more pleased than I would have thought possible. The expression would quickly shutter to stern taskmaster once more, and I returned to my efforts.

As I read of Noxa, the Trump who was closely associated with the symbolic “human being,” I could not repress a moment of unease. The word in Latin meant harm, and I could not quite get the image—a man hanging by his ankle with his hands bound, like a sacrifice—from my mind.

Later that evening, when I’d ensconced myself upon my bed with a night’s store of candles and an armful of books, I was still considering what Noxa might mean by its literal translation and alchemical symbolism.

“Good night, Cherry,” Maddie Ruth said from the door of my bedroom.

“Sleep well,” I said absently, and only waited until I heard the door to her own room close beside mine.

Abandoning the books I brought, I found my mother’s journal from underneath the bed where I’d stored it—beside the crumpled ball gown I could not bear to pull from its dusty hiding place and my grandfather’s journal.

Leafing through the pages, I allowed my gaze to skim over the elegant script until a word caught my eyes.

Pluvia.

The fifteenth Trump, corresponding with water and flow.

So my mother had been aware of these principles. It made perfect sense, really, for if she was a gifted alchemical student, then she would be given the same foundation Ashmore was attempting to teach me.

The pages regarding my mother’s use of Pluvia did not make a great deal of sense. Many of the symbols following reference to the Trump were indecipherable—I suspected they were alchemical symbols meaning very specific things. I recognized a few, mostly because of what little I’d learned from Miss Hensworth’s formula of October last.

It seemed, looking back, as though I had only been given the barest of tools before each of those willing to teach me were taken so abruptly—often by mortal mischief.

Despite that, I had faith that Ashmore would not be so easily stolen.

I closed my eyes, allowing my mother’s diary to fall to my chest. The candlelight flickered madly behind my eyelids, painting all that I visualized in orange and red.

Hamaxa! Ashmore’s voice rang out with uncanny clarity in my memory, accompanied by a purple shine I thought had been formed from opium dreams.

Had Ashmore utilized alchemical means to rescue me from Hawke’s Chinese sorcery?

Creak. A floorboard’s complaint shattered my deliberations, forcing me upright in startled bewilderment.

Though I expected to find one of my eternal busybody watchers in my room, perhaps coming to blow out the candle upon finding me apparently asleep, there was nobody in view.

Shadows filled the corners, as was often the case come nightfall. My single candle was enough to read by, but not so strong that it would illuminate all. Even in the darkest edges, nothing in the room was unfamiliar by now, and yet I found myself watching those corners with unease.

Was it the house settling, as I often thought?

Did someone walk by my room and trod upon a loose floorboard?

When there came no tap upon my door, and no following step to suggest a body had turned away, I reached for the chamberstick my candle valiantly fought the gloom from and slid my feet into waiting slippers.

All thoughts of assignment fled. Of the lessons Ashmore hoped I would learn, the hardest was that of belief. Whether magic was magic or science, whether alchemy was science or fool’s hope—whether I was the fool I thought myself to be or simply a victim of my own choices as everyone else—a singular warning ran through it all: I couldn’t believe myself to be all-knowing.

This house had bothered me from the start, and I was tired of being made the missish waif startling at every creak. There were secrets here, and if they came by way of bolt holes traveled by large and clumsy mice or something much more ominous, I would find out.

At the very least, I might face this bloody manor head-on and come out the victor for it.

I hurried to my door, turned the knob ever so slowly and was rewarded by quiet instead of abject complaint from the hinges. When I cracked upon the portico, nothing but shadow and a faint glow from my own candle filled the seam.

I slipped out into the corridor, raising the light high.

There was no silhouette to suggest company, and no noise to indicate that either of my companions were anything but asleep.

For all of a breath, I contemplated returning to my room.

Then I remembered I had been hoping for just this moment. Would I allow wayward imaginings to halt my progress?

“Bollocks,” I declared, a breath of denial, and turned instead for the junction connected to the grand staircase.

Chapter Fifteen

There was something terribly wrong with this house.

Every step made me feel as though I were being watched—some dark and vengeful shape in the gloom waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

It was a foolish fear, one like as not fueled by my own overactive thoughts, but I could not help peering behind me every few steps as the occasional groan followed in my wake.

This estate was not in good repair. It was obviously a case of old timber and the howling wind beyond the walls, wailing over the moor.

Still, I glanced around me in wary regard, braced for any shape or sound of ghostly danger.

These are the lonesome and fearful thoughts of a mind left in the dark to dream. Were it daylight, I was sure I’d hear such creaks and groans and attribute them to where they belonged, but in the quiet hours of the night, I was afraid.

For that reason, I continued forward. Of all the circumstances that had conspired to end me, I would not give in to an empty house.

I gripped the bannister tight as I proceeded down the steps. More than once, I froze and clutched the rail as though I might be thrown from it; searching the black behind me revealed nothing reaching to do so.

My skin crawled. Hysteria welled. My heart thudded so loudly that it should have deafened me to all else, yet the whistle I was certain must be wind still filled my ears. In it, I fancied I heard the tuneless melody of the murderer out for my heart—and in the dark hall I stumbled through, I imagined that it was not my love he demanded but the pounding organ within my breast—ugly and black and so fragile.

Such fitful fancies, malignant and hungry, filled me that panic clawed at my shivering flesh. I wanted to run; I needed to flee.

Still, I refused. I needed to be stronger than this. For myself, first.

For those who counted on me second.

Ashmore, who trusted me, and Maddie Ruth who had risked much to come this far from the Veil’s command.

I had plans, did I not? They did not include falling to hysterical imaginings.

Raising my chin, I thrust the candle in front of me and marched to the library.

I was surprised to find the door ajar.

Less so when I saw Ashmore’s shoulders and the bright gleam of his copper hair above the sofa’s carved wooden back.

The door whined as I pushed it gently open.

He stirred, looking away from the mantle. He had removed his waistcoat, leaving him in his trousers and shirtsleeves, boots upon his feet.

It was a remarkably attractive whole.

He frowned at me. “Can you not sleep still?”

I shook my head, even as relief filled me from toes to crown. All of my fancies, all of my fears, mocked me now. I must have heard Ashmore’s step beyond my door, and simply missed his passing when I’d looked.

He beckoned, and I wasted no time in blowing out the candle upon the chamberstick and obeying.

“You forgot your wrapper,” he observed when I rounded the sofa. “Come here.” He looped both arms about me, tugged me into his lap.

“Are you all right?” was all I could think to ask.

Settling me into place, his chin came to rest upon my head, and I felt him take a deep breath. “How go your studies?”

It wasn’t an answer. Still, I felt his body give somewhat beneath mine, as though my presence allowed him to relax some.

I’d wager that Ashmore spent a great deal of his time worrying what I was up to.

Worthless, really. It would serve him best to assume I was always up to something, and all he needed to ensure was that I could not find his valise.

The lure of the tar was not entirely gone. I simply kept it occupied.

“They go well,” I said, “I think. I’ve discovered all manner of connections to the Trumps.”

His arms folded about my waist, hands tucking with intimate confidence at my hips. I was still too thin, for all I was working on that as quick and comfortably as I could. I could not yet eat enough to replenish what I lost.

Ashmore did not seem to mind. “What sorts of connections?”

“Well.” I cautiously allowed my hands to settle over his, an act he did not deny me, to my relief. I was not entirely sure where I stood with him—somewhere between lover and student—and had not yet considered where I might go from there. “Take Trina, for example.”

“The nineteenth Trump.”

I nodded, though carefully as his chin still rested companionably atop my head. “The meaning is that of the moon, and also of Hekate, but trina in Latin means three. I mean,” I amended, “triple.”

“Or threefold.”

Another gentle nod. “Did you know that every nineteen years, the full moon occurs on the same day of the year?” I asked.

“Oh, ho.” A surprised chuckle, but one in which I heard approval. "Found that bit of wisdom, did you?”

I opened my mouth to say where I had, then realized it was within my mother’s diary. Quickly, I amended my thoughts to, “As the nineteenth Trump, it reflects those nineteen years.”

“That’s called Enneadecaeteris.”

“The world abhors a know-it-all,” I told him, good-natured enough that there could be no sting. “’Tis more commonly known as the Metonic cycle, thank you.”

I could feel the way his jaw moved when he grinned. “What else?”

I shifted, content when he opened his legs a bit to allow me comfortable purchase between them. “Hekate’s purview was that of birth, life and death. I wondered what might distinguish Trina from Diana,” I continued, “and found it mostly in the mythology offered. Hekate was associated with Artemis, or Diana, and Selene, which helps round out the triple goddess aspect with the virginal, maternal and the wise crone.”

“Good,” he said.

“She was a chthonic deity, which allowed her governance of magic, prophecy and necromancy.”

“Are you a believer, then?” he teased, and I tilted my head back to scowl into his laughing eyes.

“I’m simply stating the accounting,” I assured him, digging my elbow some into his ribs as I deliberately shifted. He grunted a laugh, easing my elbow aside. “My point is that she was called the Queen of the Ghostworld, Hekate Trevia.”

“Hekate of the Three-Ways.”

I held my hands up in the shape of Trina’s capital letter. “The Trump’s letter is made of two paths which create a crossroads of three, you see?”

“Clever girl.” It wasn’t too much, but even that praise made me feel warm and accomplished. “Do you understand why it matters?”

I turned, so that I could better study Ashmore’s features. Mine remained serious. “I don’t think so.”

When he tilted his head, the fire caught within his hazel eyes, mirrored brightly in the messy corona of his short hair. “Where are you confused?”

I looked down at my hands. “All of it, really. I see where the connections are, such as Trina or Diana’s relevance to the four elements, but I don’t understand what it means. Like Pluvia,” I added, looking up to see his own gaze lift above my head. “Or Hamaxa. What do they matter?”

“Pluvia is associated with Cybele, whose name was derived from Kubaba, which means something like ‘hollow vessel.’”

I had followed these traces of lore already, but it told me nothing at all. “What of Hamaxa? Why is it associated with a crystal sphere if it’s to be a chariot?”

Ashmore’s mouth quirked, and he finally looked at me with a small shake of his head. “As the eighth Trump, it corresponds with the eighth heaven.”

“What is that?”

“Usually thought to be a crystal sphere,” he said with a shrug. “It separates the spiritual realm from the material.”

That made unusual sense. I turned so that I could wholly study Ashmore, placing a hand upon his chest. “Do you believe in all this talk of heavens and gods?”

“No.” The word came without thought or heat. It surprised me how calmly he denied it. “What I believe in is the symbol, and that what it calls forth. They are tools.”

Frustration filled me. I wriggled off his lap, out of his hold, and stood before the mantle with my fists clenched at my sides. “I don’t understand,” I said tightly, glowering into the flame. “Why learn all this if ’tis nothing more than dressing?”

“The mind requires symbols.”

“But to what purpose?”

“Always,” he said calmly behind me, “always to the base purpose of the whole. Perfection.”

I groaned. “But what perfection does Trina pursue?” I turned, planting my hands upon my hips. “Or Diana?”

His gaze slid from mine, to trail over the ghost-like vision I must have made in my too-long nightshift. When they lifted again, amusement touched them. “You’re looking for finite rubrics, Cherry. Therein lies disappointment.”

He spoke my name so easily.

To my chagrin, it felt nice.

I wasn’t certain I should feel so. Not when I struggled so badly with that what he attempted to teach.

My thumb slid between my teeth and I gnawed on it as I contemplated what he’d said. If the mind required symbols to attach meaning to, then did that mean science, comprised of symbols intellectual men applied to concepts to create a formula, used the same theory of understanding as alchemy?

Which suddenly made a great deal more sense to me.

“So,” I said around my thumb.

With lanky grace, Ashmore rose from the sofa and reached out to lace his fingers with mine, removing my hand from my mouth. “Don’t do that,” he cautioned. “Concentrate on me. What strikes you?”

My hand twitched in his. I frowned at our entwined fingers. “So,” I repeated again, slower. “If I were to think of the images and concepts applied to each Trump as a formula, it would be the same as scientific formula comprised of letters and mathematical variants.”

A flash of pride sparked in his hazel eyes. “There, you’ve gotten it. If each Trump is comprised of symbols, and some Trumps share symbols, then what happens next?”

I tilted my head. “Experimentation?”

His teeth flashed in a grin here and gone so quick, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it. “A good attempt, minx.” He tugged on my hand, leading me not to the sofa but to the desk and its stocked parchment. “Theoretical application.”

“You mean writing about it,” I translated dryly.

“Exactly so.” Ashmore pushed me gently down into the chair behind the desk, and tugged the inkwell and pens closer to hand. “If alchemy is the art of perfection, then what are the Trumps in accordance to that?”

“You ask for miracles,” I muttered.

“No, I ask for intellect and understanding.” Leaving me to it, he retired once more to the sofa, a book balanced upon his knee. He did not have to look up to be in the right when he added, “Do stop making that face. If you’re going to avoid sleeping, you might as well put your mind to work.”

I pulled my tongue back inside my mouth and sighed deeply. “Did my mother have to do all this?”

“No.” An idle tone, too focused on his own reading to pay much mind to me. “By virtue of being raised in this house, she was all but weaned on the precepts of alchemy.”

“That’s bloody unfair,” I muttered.

His humming noise was little more than acknowledgement of my speaking.

I tapped the edge of the pen I used against the margin I wrote upon. “Ashmore?” When he made another such sound, I leaned against the desk to study him. “Did my grandfather ever mention to you that he was being poisoned?”

The book lowered, his gaze lifting to clash with mine so quickly that I was a bit taken aback by its intensity. “What on earth are you asking me?”

I hesitated. It was possible, given my grandfather’s age and what I assumed to be Ashmore’s, that my grandfather kept that secret to his journals. According to the writings I had gleaned, my grandfather despised weakness. He like as not would have kept it from my mother and anyone else who might be close to him.

I shrugged a little, uncomfortable with the feeling that I trod too close to a wound Ashmore might still be nursing. I wondered if he’d mourned my grandfather’s passing—and my mother’s. My gaze flicked to the mantle’s shrouded painting.

Was it possible that he had?

“I was just thinking aloud,” I said, rather more lamely than I’d intended.

“Leave that be,” he replied, leaving me certain that I’d hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I meant no harm.”

“No need.” That he used such words to discard my sincerity rankled.

“’Tis obvious my family meant a great deal to you,” I replied, frowning. “I only want to know a bit about the family I never knew.”

He lifted his book again, clear dismissal. “I did not know them all that well.”

“But you said—”

The book snapped close with a sound like thunder, silencing me. “If you aren’t intent on learning these precepts, then you are wasting my time,” he said tightly, eying me as though discerning if I were worth the effort of even saying that much.

Chastened, caught between remorse at my well-intentioned goading and irritation at being treated so callously, I turned again to my assignment and tried not to think that there was something wrong with him that he would reject all attempts to speak.

He did not like to talk of my family. Why?

I looked up again. “Ashmore.”

This time, he blew out a breath as he selected a new tome from the small stack beside him. “What is it now?”

“Do thoughts of my grandfather pain you?”

His eyes closed, as though he fought for patience. “He was taken by a wasting disease before his time, as was your mother. Does it seem so unlikely that I might wish to avoid speaking of them?”

A fair point. “No,” I admitted. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

That earned me a startled glance. Then, curtly, “Do your work, Miss St. Croix.”

I did. It was not the exploratory effort I had hoped for, but there was nothing for it.

For some few hours, I applied myself to the task with only the occasional rustle of turned pages and the snapping accompaniment of the fireplace to keep me company. Ashmore said nothing, leaving me to work as he had instructed, his attention upon whatever book caught his fancy.

If occasionally I looked up to find his gaze lifted to the cloth drape obscuring my mother’s portrait, I did not interrupt his reverie.

The more I learned of this symbol-rich methodology, as I worked out my thoughts on parchment, the more excitement built within me. As I slotted pieces of the puzzle into place, tucking each new fact with the others, I felt as though I grasped a greater truth.

For the first in a very long time, I felt as if I might accomplish something truly remarkable. Something that did not require blood spilled or lies to get by. Something that would not cloud my mind or put my friends in harm’s way.

I hovered on the brink of understanding, and exulted in the feeling of accomplishment this brought me.

I could do this. All I would have to do was learn.

* * *

It was mid-morning before I could summon the courage to resume my search for my grandfather’s laboratory or any other stored journals. That Maddie Ruth was with me when I suggested the adventure only helped salve my pride.

With her at my side, I would be less likely to allow my imagination to run away with me again. Empty as it was, harmless as a shadow, I truly despised this manor. I couldn’t help but feel as if it were a living creature, a taunting entity in the dark jealously guarding its secrets. I wanted to be the one to tap those secrets, and if that meant I swallow my pride and ask for help, I would.

Maddie Ruth was the least likely to offer resistance.

“Are you feeling up to it?” she asked me, tying off my waist-length plait with a simple band. She had given up on wasting any more pins, applying only a few to keep errant curls from my face.

I was. More than up to it, I was feeling quite inspired. So much so that I felt not only capable of confiding in the girl, but quite excited to do so. I turned upon the vanity seat, smiling up at her with a bit of manic delight. “It shall be an adventure.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Compared to them other adventures, this one seems better.”

I laughed. “That’s almost the spirit.”

“We’re only after some books?”

“And,” I drew out, so deliberately that she put her hands on her rounded hips and bent enough that she could meet me eye to eye.

“I knew it,” she informed me. “You’re up to something. Confess.”

My smile deepened. “We’re searching for a secret laboratory.”

She stared at me as though I had admitted to cultivating a collection of human heads for science.

I pressed my advantage. “In my grandfather’s journal, he speaks of a laboratory in this very house. ’Tis the only reference I have, as my mother’s diary speaks of theory and bears fragments of formula I can’t decipher yet.”

Maddie Ruth finally closed her mouth. Then opened it again to say with dry comprehension, “You’re trying to skip ahead in the lessons with Mr. Ashmore, ain’t you?”

“Just so,” I intoned, channeling the man at his most stern.

She grinned, her brown eyes earning a sparkle that matched my own excitement. “Will this laboratory help you do that?”

“’Tis bound to have more information within it, don’t you think?” I rose, shaking out the newly laundered tea gown with some care. The bodice still did not fit quite right, but the draped lace at the waist did much to soften the obvious gap. “At the least, I might learn more of my family’s history.”

“At the best?” she inquired, knowing me rather too well for our minimal acquaintance.

I gestured rather more emphatically than the question required. “I shall find all I ever needed to know in a precise format regarding the principles and execution of alchemical sciences.”

“And then conquer all of the world, aye?”

I laughed outright at that. “I’ll acquire an airship to explore it, but hang ruling it.”

Maddie Ruth was still giggling as we exited the bedroom together.

I wasn’t quite sure when it had happened, but I really was feeling more the thing. I hadn’t felt overt fatigue in a few days, and I found my thoughts straying more and more to alchemical workings and my family’s secrets than to the tar I used to devour.

I wondered if this meant I was on the mend.

“Is it true your grand-da got sick?” Maddie Ruth asked, breaking into my thoughts with the lack of tact I’d long since grown used to from her. She meant nothing by it, usually.

I found it a great deal more refreshing than the verbal dueling Society preferred.

I nodded, stepping aside so that she could walk beside me rather than behind. We were of a similar height, which made for companionable discourse requiring neither of us to strain to see the other. “Ashmore says that my grandfather and mother both suffered the same illness.”

She studied my face intently. “Doesn’t that mean you’ll get it too?”

“He says not.”

“How would he know?” she asked, and I had no answer to that, so I shrugged. “Maybe it strikes young?”

“Possible,” I replied, “though my grandfather seemed surprised at the start of his journal when he first fell ill.”

This time, Maddie Ruth held the chamberstick, allowing me to walk with care by holding up my skirts. Fortunately, due in part to Maddie Ruth’s hasty alterations, they were not nearly so long as my mother’s borrowed clothing had been.

“Did your mother speak of any illness?”

I shook my head. “Not in the thin diary you brought back for me.” I glanced at her. “Thank you, Maddie Ruth.”

Companionably, she linked her arm through mine. “Thank Communion for remembering.”

I would, just as soon as I made my way back to London.

That was another conversation I had not quite figured out how to have. Ashmore had touched upon it—I’d all but admitted to it—but the details seemed too complex to decipher now. I could barely think ahead a few days, much less the weeks, perhaps even months required of me to mend.

I knew I needed to be well, that I needed to be stronger, but if I put my return off too long, would there be anything to go back to? Maddie Ruth spoke of blood spilled in the Menagerie, of a war between Ferrymen and Bakers. The Ripper had killed again; would there be more women slain before I returned?

So many concerns haunted me, joining my retinue of guilt and responsibility with remarkable ease. I wanted to hie off to London now, to rattle my metaphorical saber at the gates, but I couldn’t. I simply could not take the risk—and I was finally sober enough, dry enough, to know that as the truth it was.

Mend, first. A mantra I had taken to repeating. I could help nobody, rescue nobody, until I was stronger.

We walked in silence, our footsteps stirring the floor to creaks and groans as though we were elephants on march. As we entered the wing where the bookshelves had been, I hesitated for a moment, seized with a sudden desire to show Maddie Ruth the music room long abandoned.

I tugged on her arm. “Follow me.”

Perhaps it really was the company. With another body beside me, I did not think the gloom to be so thick, or the dust so dour. We both endeavored to avoid touching the walls, for the cobwebs still clustered thick and gray along the panels, but it did not seem so oppressive as I’d remembered it being.

I led Maddie Ruth into the music room, giving a flourish as I did.

She surveyed the cloth-wrapped interior with raised eyebrows. “It looks like a haunted ballroom.”

“’Tisn’t nearly so big as to dance in,” I said, “though I’ll admit to feeling it haunted in the gloom. This is a music parlor, where guests might gather for a small soiree.”

She looked uncertain. “And you played in places like this?”

“Not I,” I admitted, more than a little wry. “My mother was quite good on a handful of instruments, but I lack that particular talent.”

She bent to peer beneath a cloth, then tugged it up so that she could pluck a harp’s string. It sounded flat to my ear, but nevertheless sang delicately. “I always wanted to learn how to play something.”

This was said with such wistful regard that I couldn’t help but touch her shoulder. “Would you like if I should teach you?”

I admit to being a little relieved when she laughed that away. “No, no. My da always said I had an ear for a gear set wrong, but none at all for music. I’ll leave it to better hands.”

“Your hands are better,” I said, stung to loyalty on her behalf.

It was no compliment at all to note a strength in compensation for an abject failure. How many times had I been told that at least I had my mother’s face, if I could not have her talent?

Too bloody often.

She gave me a smile, then wandered ahead to lift the cloth from the piano. She trailed her fingers over the lid that protected the keys. “This is beautiful.”

I stared at the wood she touched, my hands settling to my hips as I struggled to remember if I’d put the housing down or not.

I must have. I’d been rather surprised to find the keys left unprotected when I’d seen the instrument last.

While I thought it over, Maddie Ruth lifted the protective lid and could not avoid the same lure I had given in to before. She touched a key, a lower note than I had, which filled the room with a soft note.

“It’s not very loud, is it?” she asked.

I passed her to twitch aside the rest of the cover, leaving it folded over the housing. “That’s because this surface is down,” I explained. I wrestled the lid open, propping it in place and baring the hammers, keys and strings to the air. “Try now.”

She touched another key, a higher one, and the much louder plink it created made us both smile.

“Do you remember anything?”

“How to play?” I frowned at the keys. “I’m not sure.” She stepped aside, leaving room for me to bend and place my fingers upon the keys. For a moment’s effort, I froze.

Could I remember the music I had once been taught?

I struck the keys with halting effort, occasionally pressing down on the wrong one. After the third such error, I snatched my hands from the piano and tucked them behind my back, wrinkling my nose.

“Don’t stop,” Maddie Ruth said quickly, ushering me to sit before the keys I could not master. “That were lovely.”

“It were awful,” I replied, deliberately utilizing her vernacular to do it. “Don’t lie to me, Maddie Ruth.”

“It were better than me,” she retorted. “Play something, won’t you? Play it through, I want to hear.”

So goaded, I allowed myself to be seated, to look down at the array of white and black that had once been my bane. I had no sheet music to read from, but as I delicately placed my hands upon the keys, a song sprang to memory.

I touched the notes gently at first, eking out note after note without due consideration of what would come next. Behind me, I heard Maddie Ruth take in a delighted breath at the first time I hit three at once. The lovely harmony rang through the room.

The melody I played was not simple, but as I allowed the music to soar, and as my toes came down upon a pedal to turn some notes longer, the room faded around me.

It was as if I watched myself from a distance, my fingers ghosting over the keyboard like they belonged to someone else.

The musty air, the filtered light streaming from behind dusty drapes, even the ache within my joints unused to such practice turned into the lush sound of the music as it filled my heart like I’d always known it.

I don’t know how long I played. Torn from time and thought, it was all I could do to keep up with my own fingers.

Crash!

The piano shuddered. My hands spasmed, and they came down on the keys so hard that the jangling note tore through the music room and slapped me into waking awareness.

I looked up to find Ashmore poised beside the piano, eyes flashing with a rage I could not comprehend. The lid propped open to allow the music to soar now trembled in the aftershocks of its closing, the remains of the brace that held it open splintered upon the floor.

He breathed heavily, as though he’d run all the way across the estate, and his grip was white-knuckled upon the sealed wood.

I leapt up from the seat. “What is—”

“Don’t,” he said over me, the word a barely restrained growl. “Do not ever play that again.”

To my left, I could hear Maddie Ruth sucking in a breath—but she remained silent. Wisely so.

I was not so wise.

“What is wrong with you?” I demanded.

His lips peeled back. “Get out of this room.”

I leaned away when he reached across me to slam the protective lid down over the keys. Had I not moved my hands, my fingers would have been crushed beneath.

“Out,” he snarled. “Get out, this is off-limits to the both of you.”

I could not argue in the face of such unreasonable childishness. Trembling with resentment, I clutched Maddie Ruth’s arm and dragged her from the room.

“I think we made him angry,” she whispered.

“I’ll make him angrier yet,” I snapped, though I had no real plans for it. It made me feel better to imagine myself poking at all the places that would irritate him again—starting with that bloody piano.

I could not believe he’d broken an heirloom instrument so casually. Was he insane? Even at my worst, I’d never brought harm to an innocent, beautiful instrument.

Only to living, breathing human beings.

I squeezed my eyes shut, allowing Maddie Ruth to take the lead, hand laced tightly in mine.

Perhaps this house was getting to him, as well. All the groans, all the reverberations as the wind battered at its facing, all the creaking floorboards. Ashmore was clearly getting impatient.

So he took it out on me.

I grew angrier at that conclusion. I hated this house as much as he did; I despised the moor, I loathed the noises, I was weary and stretched thin from all the fancies painting eyes in the dark. What right did he have to make me feel even worse?

We hurried to my room, whatever dubious sanctuary that was, and I flung myself upon the bed with a biting series of uncivilities that had Maddie Ruth giggling at the end. Spent, I rolled over to my back, glaring at the ceiling. “It was just a piano.”

She nodded in the corner of my sight, perching on the edge of the bed side me. “That were a beautiful song, Cherry.”

Now, jarred from it so suddenly as I was, I couldn’t recall what I’d played. Likely something from the endless hours of practice Fanny had honed into my bones. I shrugged a little. “Apparently not.”

“It was.” She hummed a few notes, though doing so only gave credence to her father’s judgment of her abilities. The girl didn’t have much ear for tone.

I turned my head to grin at her. “You really can’t sing, can you?”

She was too honest to be offended, laughing outright. “Not a note.”

That made two of us, at least.

Unless a miracle were to happen—wherein I magically discovered a latent talent for music I had never before displayed—I had no intentions of trying to play again.

Despite my resolve, I found myself humming softly now and again throughout the day.

I did not recognize the tune.

Chapter Sixteen

Whatever I had done to anger Ashmore, he did not find me to explain. I thought briefly of locating him, but for much of the day, my pride demanded I make him come to me.

I had not been the one to behave so abominably. I was not the one who had broken that beautiful piano, and it was not I who had yelled at Maddie Ruth.

Yet as I sat within the library and stared at the half-penned assignment, my thoughts strayed again to the fury twisting his face to such extreme violence.

What had I done to deserve that?

I slumped over the desk in the library, allotting a portion of my thoughts to feel relief at the merciful give at my waist. Tea gowns truly were the mark of a freed woman.

I wondered if my mother had ever contemplated wearing a gown without a corset. Would she relish the freedom, as I did? Or did she prefer the rigid boning and elegant posture it forced?

I straightened again, gaze sliding up to the portrait hiding behind the white shroud.

“What do you think, mother?” I asked, though my voice wavered some upon the word I very rarely spoke aloud. Mother was not a term I found reason to use comfortably.

What would my life have been like, had she not faded?

I stood, ignoring my assignment in favor of a fit of mischief. Flouting Ashmore’s apparent dislike of the painting, I reached up to tug the cloth free of its anchor, twitching it aside to ensure the material did not fold into the fireplace.

The startling color painted on that canvas did not fail to hitch my breath.

In the firelight, Josephine St. Croix was the very epitome of beauty. The artist had truly loved her; there was no doubt he had labored intensely over the contours of her figure in such lovely blue. Every fold of her skirt, every tendril of ruby red hair, even the impish twinkle in her wide green eyes spoke of dedication.

I looked at the red globe she carried, the astrolabe in the other hand, and thought how shameful it was that I had not benefitted from her teachings.

My gaze slid to the astrolabe again.

It was the same as in that macabre portrait shrouded in storage, wasn’t it?

I wished I could pull the painting from the wall, so that I could study it in greater detail. Craning my neck did not garner much more than the overall view—stunning, to be sure, but lacking in the minute specifics I labored to examine now.

Lord Banyan had been carrying that astrolabe in his hand, I was sure of it. The globe was the same in shape as that held by Lord Floret, only his had been green, not red.

Did she hold a show globe? Recognized throughout England as the mark of a pharmacist, they hung in windows to proclaim that medicinal help could be found within. They were often filled with liquid, and the color of that liquid could change based on chemicals applied.

Did the show globe represent something else for alchemists?

I stepped back, looking now not at the central figure my mother presented but at her surroundings.

She stood before bookshelves, though they were the wrong color wood for this library. Just off the canvas—its edge trailing away into the gilt frame—a long emerald curtain posed a distinctive color contrasted against her blue gown. I squinted at a dark shape just by her elbow. It was a tube-like vessel of fire-hardened clay, narrow at the base and then oddly angled as it climbed. The mouth of it would make a triangle shape.

That one, I recognized. A Hessian crucible, so named for its original creation in the Hesse region of Germany. While long since replaced by more common crucibles, this was a relic out of history. I had seen one displayed before, years ago at an exhibit in the Philosopher’s Square, but I had never before seen it in use.

I pursed my lips, tapping my thumb against them idly.

Three paintings, two of a ghoulish subject, each bearing tools of alchemical trade. My mother’s bore the show globe, the astrolabe and a crucible. Lord Floret’s depicted the show globe and an amber jewel upon his stick—I wondered if it was meant to represent anything at all besides wealth.

Lord Banyan showed off his astrolabe and unusually comfortable informality.

What else did they have in common?

I backed away from the painting with slow, measured steps, allowing my gaze to unfocus over the whole as if it might help me see more than what was painted before me.

Painted.

Could that be right?

Frowning, I closed my eyes, called to mind the portraits I’d studied so closely.

Was it my imagination that they seemed to bear distinctive similarities in bold color and style of stroke?

A family of artists, then, or a master passing his art to his apprentices. It seemed strange that each painting should be painted with such differences—my mother’s blooming beauty and the desiccated cadavers made of the men—but perhaps that was why those remained in storage.

My eyes popped open.

Green cloth.

It hung as drapery just to my mother’s left, but for Lord Banyan, hadn’t it been more centered behind him?

Bookshelves, green drapes, alchemical tools.

Was it possible that I’d stumbled upon the clues to my grandfather’s laboratory? If Lords Banyan and Floret were somehow related to my mother’s line, was it likely that it had been their laboratory in their time?

Excitement gripped my heart.

If I could locate these particular bookshelves, or the green drapery depicted, I might be that much closer to locating clues—not just to the laboratory, but possibly to more information about the family Ashmore would not tell me of. A part of me wanted to drag every last iota of information from him, but remembering how such pain had shaped his features, I couldn’t bring myself to try.

I could learn more without hurting him again.

Yet as soon as I turned away, I hesitated.

Didn’t I promise that I would work hard? Didn’t I tell Ashmore I was willing to learn what he taught?

My gaze slid to the desk, and my half-formed treatise upon it.

I had already broken down a handful of the Trumps, based on what Ashmore had suggested. To study alchemical science was to seek perfection. Yet I’d noted that a great deal of the information regarding each Trump involved a mental or spiritual aspect, not just a material symbol.

If perfection was the goal, then was it possible that alchemy was as much about transmutation of base metals to gold as it was about transmuting the inner self to a greater purpose?

I wasn’t sure if what I wrote would make any kind of sense. I was a devout believer in this Age of Reason, not of spirit and divinity, yet there was an undeniable thread of self-improvement regarding each Trump I researched.

It began with Apis—the Fool, whose journey into the unknown was only beginning—and ended with Zodiacus, whose nature mirrored that of the tarot’s World and thus—as near as I could gather in alchemical references—the cosmos. The cosmos was everything, the culmination of all things, and generally the symbol of a journey’s end; to wit, completion and attainment of perfection.

A veritable journey of the soul, wasn’t it?

Though I yearned to throw all caution to the wind and sate my thirst for adventure, I did not. I had given my word, encroached upon Ashmore’s time and tolerance far too long. He had done much for me, and he was still affording me the opportunity to better myself.

Giving this my all was the least I owed him.

Muttering to myself, I circled the fallen shroud and returned to work. I would turn in this assignment first, and then explore.

If I felt at all that my mother’s serene smile turned to impatience with my decision, I simply fancied that it was my own eagerness taking shape in my imagination.

Ignoring her brilliant stare, I completed my treatise with painstaking care.

Maddie Ruth came by several times to check on me, collecting a few books for her own purposes and delivering dinner—which I ate nearly all of, though I didn’t recall making a point to do so.

The light outside the library windows had faded to the gray mist of late afternoon by the time I finished. I barely waited for the ink to dry before snatching up the pile of papers and waving them at a surprised Maddie Ruth, who had ensconced herself upon the sofa.

“Are you done, then?”

“I am done at last,” I declared. “I’d best deliver it to Ashmore.”

She grinned at me. “I saw him leave for the stables not long past. Like as not, he’s off to feed his dogs.”

“Dogs?” I remembered the infrequent baying, and snapped my free fingers. I liked that I could do so without the constant obstruction of gloves. “I forgot about them.”

“They’re large, friendly beasts.” She waved at me. “Take a shawl, it’s devil cold out.”

I was half to the door when I hesitated. When I turned, I found her looking back to her book. “Aren’t you worried for me?” I inquired.

She glanced up once more, obviously puzzled. “Should I be?”

“Aren’t I an invalid?”

“You seem healthy enough,” she replied. “Do you feel like an invalid?”

I thought about it, earning a deepening smile from my companion. “I don’t feel much like one,” I said, but slowly. As I said the words, I felt them out, tested them against my own body’s senses.

I truly did not feel like an invalid.

I did not prod at the wounds of my memory too hard, lest I accidentally tear one raw and be forced to remember the smoke’s lure again—to say nothing of all the hurts I had not yet figured a plan to deal with—but I had to admit that I felt rather more whole than I was used to.

I looked down at my faintly crumpled papers, gripped tightly in one hand.

Was this the reason?

The source of this accomplished feeling had to have come from something I’d done.

When was the last time I’d felt this thrill of completion?

My smile, when it came, was slow. I felt it tug at my lips first, then spread from ear to ear as I looked back at Maddie Ruth’s patient grin.

“I feel good,” I admitted. “I truly do.”

“Good.” She waved, shooing me along as though I were a bothersome child. “Go find Ashmore in the stables. Come back when you’re thoroughly—”

“Maddie Ruth,” I interjected, half amused and more than a little embarrassed.

“—graded,” she said, her brown eyes large and shining with such innocence. “That were what you wanted, right?”

“You’re an awful creature,” I informed her, laughing as I did. “Don’t be so nosy.”

“As if I would.” She snorted.

I left her to her book and her amusement, fleeing the warm library for the stables I’d never before visited.

Allowing me into the frigid winter air was not likely a good idea, nor was I wholly prepared to meet the demonic dogs my imagination had painted with glowing red eyes and fangs the size of my hand, but I needed to share this accomplishment—preferably with the man who would understand what it meant.

Not simply my completed treatise. This was about so much more than words on parchment, or theories given form.

How would I frame my thoughts? How could I explain that I had made the choice to see to my responsibilities? The act had left me feeling accomplished.

I liked it.

I hurried up the stairs, although I did not take them two at a time as I’d used to do. I may have felt better as a rule, but I was not so reckless that I would test myself on the old staircase.

I fetched a shawl from my room, left hanging upon a rack, and was hurrying back to the foyer, papers in hand, when a step from the family wing on the other side of the stairs earned my attention.

I froze, every hair on my neck lifting in visceral awareness. From the black smothering the hall, the floor creaked, another step echoed, and my throat dried to a desiccated rasp. Even if I wanted to cry out, to call for Maddie Ruth, I couldn’t force a sound.

I’d lowered my guard, and this monstrous house had pounded.

I backed up one step, eyes so wide as to ache, fists trembling. My heel came down on the edge of the top stair.

The shape that loomed from the shadows was man-sized, taller than I, and spoke with Ashmore’s voice. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

Panic dissolved to relief—and annoyance. Clutching a hand to my chest, I glared at him as he stepped fully into the fading light trickling through the grimy foyer windows.

His face was solemn, but I read nothing worrisome within it.

“I was prepared to find you at the stables,” I managed, plucking at the wrap about my shoulders as though it could bear witness. It was a lovely shade of cream, its weave thick for warmth and fibers soft to the touch.

My hands trembled against the material.

He took in the shawl, the papers in my hand, and shook his head. “Not dressed like that, you won’t be. ’Tis bitterly frozen outside. I suspect we’ll see snow by morning. Are you all right?”

“You scared me near to death,” I said, laughing now at myself even though I was not amused. My heart hammered still, and I wasn’t sure my knees would hold much longer. I frowned. “Will your hounds be all right?”

“The stables are warm enough for them.” He studied me, rather more intently than I felt I warranted—it caused a flush to heat my cheeks. “Did I really frighten you?”

Quickly, I thrust the papers out at him. “I wanted to give you this.”

“Your assignment?”

I nodded.

He took them, his fingers brushing mine and causing a tingling warmth to spread up my hand. I found myself pressing that hand to my shawl, as though I might cling to that heat a little longer.

“Come to my chamber,” he said, his gaze upon mine. “There’s a fire lit and I’ll be able to read clearly.”

I nodded again, though my heart’s tempo changed to a beat that spoke of wants I had not pursued since before he started to teach me. We walked in silence, his expression difficult to read in the murky light and my own footsteps sounding overloud in the empty corridor.

When I broke the silence, my voice was huskier than I’d intended, and a little more breathy than the situation warranted. “Why were you in the family wing?”

A corner of his mouth hiked up as he shot me a sidelong glance. “That is not what is on your mind, is it?”

I did not like that he seemed to understand what I thought before I had even decided. I raised my chin. “Were you looking for something?”

His smile faded. “I was ensuring all the windows were shuttered for the coming snow. The house is drafty enough without adding to it.”

A reasonable enough explanation, though too mundane for interest; there was not enough material to continue on this subject.

I grasped for another as we approached his bedroom door. “I believe I’ve figured out that what you were attempting to force me to learn.”

“Oh?” He opened his door, allowing the warmth accumulated inside to wash over us both. I inhaled the fragrance of charred wood with delight. So much better than musty air. “And what is that, pray tell?”

“Perfection,” I replied simply, offering an inclination of my head as he gestured me to precede him.

Had Fanny ever thought that I might enter a bachelor’s bedroom with more comfort—even anticipation—than strictly allowed, I suspect she might have an apoplectic fit.

It was a wonder she’d survived me these past few years. I was certainly a handful, even when making an effort for propriety’s sake.

My smile widened despite myself, only to catch when I turned to find him dead still, his eyes pinned to my mouth and the papers clutched tightly in one hand.

“Ashmore?”

He shook himself, as though caught in a dream, and gently closed the door behind him. “I apologize. You were saying?” He did not look at me as he said this, but at the papers. He passed me to sit not upon the bed, as a casual lover might, but upon the chair arranged in the corner of the chamber, bathed by the banked fire’s glow.

I watched him, unsure of what it was he seemed bothered by. Was it me? Had I said something wrong?

Hardly. Perfection was a word uttered often enough in his teachings.

I rubbed at my lower lip with my thumb, but when he glanced up once more at the motion, I deliberately lowered it again; that I tucked my thumb in my palm helped make certain I would not nibble upon it. “Perfection,” I said again, “is the goal of alchemical science. Base metals transmuted to gold, the perfect metal, am I right?”

He inclined his head, but again, he focused upon the pages I’d written.

“In regards to the human form, immortality is the perfection of the body.” I hesitated. “Am I right?”

Another inclination. “Longevity is considered a step towards perfection, thus alchemy’s contribution to modern medicine.”

A fair thought. I tucked my hands behind my back, though I caught myself picking at my thumb with the nails of the same hand—a habit I was having difficulty breaking. “Yet as I was going over the Trumps, I thought that some might actually speak of perfection of a different sort.”

“What sort?” Papers rustled as he tucked one beneath the pile. He read quickly, even as he listened. A good skill to have, I supposed.

“It seemed to me,” I said thoughtfully, rocking back on my heels, “that they speak of perfection of the soul.”

His eyes flicked up to me, as though to gauge my reaction to my own theory.

I shrugged. “Perhaps that seems a melodramatic way to phrase it, but I speak of spiritual growth and harmony.”

He did not mock me. Lowering his hand, he let the papers fall to the floor at his feet, then braced both elbows against his knees and clasped his fingers. He regarded me intently. “What do you think of that?”

Again, I peeled at the skin of my thumb. The force of his stare lacked Hawke’s lashing scrutiny, but I had trouble meeting it nonetheless. That ageless strength of will shining in Ashmore’s green-tinted gaze made it difficult to concentrate.

Was it his alchemical knowledge that gave him such depth of passion?

Could I ever achieve the same?

I thought of the way he’d taken me so violently in the rain, and then again of the interminable patience he’d displayed as he coaxed my body to unimaginable pleasures. It was almost as if he’d been different people.

No. That was unfair to say. I had seen that sort of difference in Hawke, and Ashmore’s was not the mold. It was more like he’d forgotten himself the first time.

Perhaps I’d goaded him to it. Or perhaps he had his own demons to feed.

“Cherry?”

I startled again to hear my name upon his lips, meeting his gaze directly. “What?” was all I managed.

“What do you think of this revelation?” he asked me, patiently and more than a little stern about the eyes and mouth.

I pursed my lips. Then, with a sigh, I admitted, “I would like to hope ’tis true.”

“Why?”

“Because I think perfection of the body might be impossible without perfection of the heart and soul,” I said, blurting it out. “Without a heart and mind to drive it, the body will rot.”

Silence filled the chamber. Only the wind whispered, not so loud as to wail but not soft enough to go unnoticed through the drafty halls. Even the fire, little but glowing embers casting a deep orange heat, remained still.

Ashmore’s head drooped, his clasped fingers coming to rest against his lips.

For a moment, I thought him terribly disappointed. My heart clutched. Had I gotten it wrong? Was I so far off track that he would cast me from his sight?

His shoulders shook.

I realized he was laughing. I took a step towards him, my fists coming out to plant on my hips. “What is so funny?” I demanded. “Did I unwittingly make a jest?”

“No,” he chortled, but could not ease his amusement enough to speak normally for it. “No, no. Not at all.” He cleared his throat, lifting his head. Amusement filled his eyes, shaped the contours of his face as he openly smiled at me. “You surprise me, Miss St. Croix.”

I hovered on the brink between relief and indignation. “How?”

He stood, the chair creaking as he did, and approached me. “You have often been a staunch supporter of reason and intellect over such matters you can not see.”

Obviously, Fanny had been thorough in her detailings to my guardian. I thrust my jaw out. “Inner harmony is no different than sharpened intellect.”

“That is what surprises me,” he confessed. When I did not back away, he came to a stop before me, so close that I was forced to look up.

I felt myself bathed in the approval radiating from his eyes, more brown than green in the orange firelight. I shivered—warmth, accomplishment, delight.

Anticipation.

More. I wanted more. More of this feeling, more of the warmth I felt in Ashmore’s presence.

“To sharpen one’s skill, one must sharpen one’s mind,” he said softly, reaching up to cup my face in both of his long hands. I took a deep breath. “This is not only common sense, but for alchemical theory, it is imperative. One can not shape the cosmos without the strength of will to do so. Do you understand?”

I nodded within his grasp, my eyes wide.

“Bear this in mind,” he said, lowering his head slowly. “You will need to remember this truth in the coming days.” My sight turned soft and hazy as his gaze captured mine; it was as if I fell into a soft sea of mossy brown. Such warmth cradled me, such delight and comfort, that I did not fight it.

It was almost as sweet as the bliss I’d fought so hard to hold.

As if the memory was all it took to trigger it, a fierce knot of need cramped within my belly. I flinched, but Ashmore’s grip was too strong, and my face remained turned to his.

I think I said something—a protest or a warning.

Those eyes did not blink. “Eon,” he whispered, his breath mingling with mine.

“Quintessence,” I replied, my own voice a throaty sound. The words came from someplace deep within me; a confidence I did not know I’d retained. “Corresponding with the fifth element.”

Ashmore let me go, but only so that he could walk around me. Though I was released from the hold of his stare, my body felt heavy as marble, yet soft as air. My heart thumped in my chest as his hands came to rest upon my shoulders. “What else?” he asked me, his voice low in my ear.

I shuddered. “Eternal to the impermanence of the other four elements. The very personification of aether.”

His fingers stroked down my arms, causing me to shudder beneath the drag. The thin lace of the tea gown’s sleeves was little enough protection, yet as he found the bare skin of my forearms, I sucked in a breath that ached.

When he found my wrists, he grasped the back of my hand, raising it up. As his other arm curved gently about my waist, he pulled my hand through the air, sketching a shape I did not recognize until his lips brushed against my ear. “Say it.”

The sensation of it, the warmth of his breath and the husky command in his voice, shot through my body like a sweet drug. I shuddered, eyes fluttering closed.

“Say the name,” he ordered.

The word shook as it left my lips. “Eon.”

It was as if the air turned to fire and lightning around us. My skin prickled, the fine hairs upon my body lifting as though a charge raced through me.

Ashmore let go of my hand, but he did not set me free. With his chest snug against my back, holding me close enough that I felt his every breath, he cupped my chin and ordered, “Open your eyes, Cherry.”

I did.

The last vestiges of a symbol shaped in brilliant blue light faded, leaving aftershocks of an E turned upon its side carved into my sight. The world banked white, blinding me.

I cried out, reaching back to grasp a fist full of Ashmore’s shirt, but he held me upright, easily withstanding my attempt to tear free.

When my sight returned, as swiftly as it had burned away, my mouth dropped open.

To my shock, the world had turned to fire.

Chapter Seventeen

“Look.” Ashmore cupped my throat in a way that allowed me to turn my head without separating from him, and I stared wide-eyed at the ripples of light now studding the room.

It was as though an artist had taken brilliant light and overlaid it atop the world. The room was there, I could see the bed and the vanity, the mantel and the floorboards. I could even see the ceiling, the windows, the gloaming beyond.

Yet what stood out more brilliantly than the rest was the blue fire that traced it all.

I reached out with my free hand, uncertain whether I meant to catch it or ward it away. Strands of energy floated through the air, as ephemeral as a cobweb. It dissolved when my fingers touched it, and I gasped again when I noted that my own body had turned to a wild cacophony of color. Blue, orange, violet and green. Skeined through the heart of my hand—as though a single thread held it all together—a crimson line glowed softly.

“What is this?” I asked, whispering in case a loud noise might disturb it all.

Ashmore did not let me go, but his voice lacked the surprise or awe filling me. “Aether. You are viewing the cosmos.”

“What?” Though I tried to turn to look at him, his arm only tightened at my waist.

“Look there,” he said, grasping my jaw to turn my head towards the window. His breath stirred the fine hair just by my ear. “Can you look beyond?”

I frowned at the wash of blue, trying to see beyond the subtly shifting shades painting my sight.

As I did, a streak of violet flashed once and was gone.

“Why are there so many colors?” I asked. “Is this all ambient aether?”

“Very good. Close your eyes.”

I did, and his palm came to rest over them, ensuring that I no longer saw anything at all.

“This represents your initiation into the exoteric paths of alchemy,” he said, his voice a low, determined note that filled my senses. Without my sight, with my mind still reeling from what I’d seen, his voice overwhelmed me. “From this, you will develop your skills, your mind and soul, and seek perfection. There is no turning back. Do you understand?”

My throat dry, it was all I could do to nod.

“Keep your eyes closed,” he told me. The arm about my waist loosened, then left me altogether, leaving me standing alone in what I imagined was that sea of blue.

Aether. I’d seen it. Without use of Mr. Finch’s aether engine, without any sort of tool, I’d seen it. I’d touched it.

It filled me.

Did it fill Ashmore too?

I wanted to turn, to look at him, but a gentle hand upon my back kept me still. Then, soft as silk, a cloth banded my eyes. “You cannot call upon the crystal sphere to return your sight to normal,” he said, even as he tied the cloth tight. “As with all skills, one must master each step before moving to the next. The Trumps are the pinnacle of alchemical understanding.”

“Was it your doing that allowed me to see this?” I asked, tilting my head a fraction. With all the light denied me, my balance suffered. I splayed out my arms.

“Just so. You will not be able to call upon them by yourself yet.”

“When?”

“When you are appropriately prepared. Even then,” he continued with such stern warning that I could not hide a smile, “utilizing the Trumps will drain you of energy and will. Master the scientific process first.”

I licked my dry lips, tottering some as I reached out blindly. “Why show me this now?”

“Your mind needs goals.”

A fair enough assumption, and one I could not argue with. To be able to see raw aether, to draw from it as one might distill it from the ambient air in the manner of Mr. Finch’s aether engines, seemed too incredible for words.

As ambitions came, I had never expected mine to fall in line with what I would have called parlor tricks even some few months past.

I touched the blindfold with one hand. “Until then? Am I doomed to remain blindfolded forever?”

“No.” Warm fingers brushed my neck. “This will wear off in time. Until then, your eyes will be unused to a world gilded in quintessence. This is for your protection.”

I shuddered, tilting my head to allow him better access. He did not disappoint me, easing his fingers into the hair just beyond my ear. I sighed. “I cannot study like this.”

“No, you can’t, can you?”

“What shall I do instead?” I asked, voice catching as he tugged gently upon my hair. I turned with the movement, though I did not know where he stood, or what he expected of me.

“What do you choose to do?”

Everything. I’d seen it with my own eyes—the aether that moved through the world. I’d seen it in my own body, could still see it clear as day in my mind’s eye.

I could do anything I chose.

How arrogant and ignorant I had seemed, declaring such things to be nothing more than superstitious nonsense.

I reached out, found Ashmore’s chest an arm’s length away. My mouth curved up. It was not my imagination that his heart pounded beneath my palm.

“Ashmore.”

“Yes, minx?”

I stepped closer, sliding my hands up his chest, over the warm, strong column of his throat. I felt him swallow beneath my palms. His hair tickled the tips of my fingers as I slid them into the silken strands.

“Will you pass the time with me?” I asked, my face tilted upward. My gaze searched the black behind the blindfold, but whatever he had done to the cloth, no trace of quintessence burned my vision.

I felt the way his jaw muscles moved when he smiled. “Without your sight?” he inquired, but with a wickedly delicious note to his voice I felt as much as heard.

Without any sight at all, it was as though the things he did were sharper, more emphatic.

Delightfully pleasant, even.

The tip of his index finger touched my lower lip. I jumped once, but my fingers tightened in his hair, and he laughed softly.

“If this is what you choose,” he told me, as though it were all the response he needed.

I smiled beneath his caress. “Will you allow me?”

“Cedo maiori,” he said, and replaced his finger with the heat of his mouth.

I yield to a greater person.

As I would yield to the sensations slipping beneath my skin. In so doing, I imagined that I bathed in the blue glow of the aether Ashmore had shown me. It wrapped around me, wrapped around us both as he carried me to the bed and laid me upon it.

Thoroughly, intimately, Ashmore guided me through the black oblivion of my sight. I found release twice in his arms, directed unerringly by his touch, and again when he finally entered me with his own body.

He made no move to remove the blindfold. I reveled in the wicked thrill this granted me.

Later, when I lay in the cradle of Ashmore’s arms, he tugged the blindfold free. I squinted, the dim light all at once too much after hours of darkness, but there was no blue glow, no threads of orange and violet and that skein of red beneath my skin.

Only Ashmore’s face, smiling lazily down at me, his eyes a sated mossy green. “Dare I ask how you feel?”

I wiggled my toes, which I once more wedged beneath his leg. His calf, this time, earning me an aborted chuckle and a clamp upon my feet to still them. “Was that a dream?” I asked.

“I’m flattered, minx, but—”

When I thumped him upon the chest, he laughed without any attempt to muffle it at all.

I thought him terribly handsome, then—even more so than I had before.

He tugged me closer to him, the better to ensure I could not easily maneuver to hit him again. “That was no dream,” he told me, though amusement still colored his warm tenor. I set my cheek upon his shoulder. “You have seen the world as alchemists know it. What will you do now?”

That was an easy question, and an easier test. “Study harder.”

“Why?”

“I have seen the truth,” I replied. “What more evidence do I need that I am on the correct path?”

He stroked my plait, which had managed to hold during our antics. “Then what?”

“Then I get better,” I said, sobering. I was silent for a time, and then asked softly, “You will help me master alchemy, won’t you?”

His heart pounded steadily beneath my ear, counter to my own, which eased at a slower pace. The pleasure I’d felt, that bliss I’d hoped to find, remained soft and warm within me.

When no answer came from him but the steady rise and fall of his breathing, I thought perhaps he’d gone to sleep.

I closed my eyes, a small smile tugging my lips.

I had worn him out with my antics. This achievement only added to my contentment.

Just as I felt myself nodding off, Ashmore lifted a hand to cradle my head against his chest. “God help us both,” he whispered, so quiet I was not sure I heard it correctly. “But I will.”

I meant to answer, to indicate that I valued his undertaking, but I could not fight free of the lassitude that filled me.

Satiated, trusting in my contentment, I allowed myself to sleep without apprehension.

Such was my downfall.

* * *

I did not run. Smoke boiled around me, swirling and tossing as though it were a living sea, yet I could not lift my feet from the ground upon which I stood—a ground so black as to be indistinguishable from the hazy air.

I turned my head this way and that, and though I opened my mouth, no sound came from my throat.

This was not the comfortable dark of Ashmore’s blindfold, nor the familiar acrid sting of London’s dreary miasma. This gave nothing to the senses, not sight nor smell, taste or sound. I could not feel the air upon my skin, nor will my body to move from where I stood. I heard nothing.

I dreamt of formless, empty existence, and in that dream, I was trapped.

Fear welled up within me, an icy tide turning my fingers to shuddering fists. I could not lash at what I could not see, and the smoke ghosted playfully about my face as though it knew my dilemma.

Was I alone in this black reverie?

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs so that I might scream my way free of this crushing silence, but the smoke slipped into my mouth and nose did not retain its lack of form. It seared my senses, sliding through my body with the familiar spice and burn of the smoke I had come to forget.

My body throbbed in remembered need.

My heart slammed against the fragile cage of my ribs, as though it might tear itself out.

I closed my eyes, black upon black, and sweat bloomed upon my skin as the blissful fingers of the Chinese smoke combed through me like a sweet summer wind.

I shuddered. No. Had I not worked so hard?

Had I not promised?

Let go, sweet girl. The voice did not speak, for my ears did not hear it in the shroud of smoke. It did not ring, or purr, or sing.

Yet I felt it within me, a lilting voice, feminine and soft. Comforting.

Won’t you let me in?

Was it me? Was that my voice, begging myself for something? It did not sound like it, but dreams were devilish things and I could not grasp my reason. I made as though to turn, but the dream held fast, and my limbs twisted oddly. I looked down at myself.

I wore the blue gown stolen from my mother’s closet, yet its fit was that of perfection. Without seeing it, I knew that a choker clasped about my neck, a cameo upon it in delicate filigree. Thick curls slid over my shoulder, artful decoration to the loose twist the rest had been made into.

I knew all this without seeing it for sure, in the way one knows the events of a dream without knowing why.

I struggled, but to no avail.

Cherry.

The smoke drifted. A thin gleam of red glinted through the black. I made as though to gasp, yet still I had no voice.

Within my heart, terror bloomed.

Red strands clung to my wrists and upper arms, skeins of bloody thread wrapped so tight the skin beneath turned white.

Tears sprang to my eyes, panic rooted in my spirit, and I wrenched at the bonds that seemed so fragile to look at.

The flesh at my arm parted. I jolted with the expectance of pain, but I felt none; only horror as blood welled thick and crimson from beneath the ruby threads and slid like red ink down my arm.

You’re such a good girl, murmured the voice I could not be sure was not mine. Such a sweet girl.

I looked up, clamped my teeth over my lip as the threads tightened at my wrists.

If it sliced through the skin there, if it severed the veins pale and blue beneath such fragile flesh, would I die in this dream?

I took another breath, intent upon demanding my freedom, and the smoke once more filled my lungs.

My head.

I closed my eyes again.

Give me everything.

Terror eased. My blood splashed to the black floor, perfect droplets that did not splatter as they should but remained sweet and succulent; cherries scattered like glass marbles in the smoke.

I could see it as clearly as though I watched from overhead.

I could feel it, though it was not pain I felt.

I could hear it.

I was promised everything.

Sympathy overwhelmed fear. My chin lowered, the curls at my ears skimming over my jaw.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and this was the sound that sheared through smoke and shadow.

The woman I heard, the voice I felt as though it came from myself, laughed. I knew the resonance, though I could not recall from where it echoed.

It slid through my heart, my mind, and in my dreaming, I felt arms wrap around me in the dark. A subtle fragrance cut through the emptiness I stood in; a whisper of lilies that forced my nose to twitch in remembered response.

Sleep, she whispered. I will show you what you yearn for.

Because I knew what it was to want everything, to be denied all that the heart and soul craved, I obeyed.

My hand lifted of its own volition, tugged upwards by skeins of red. Some snapped, trailing listlessly in the dark, and beads of my own blood rolled down them.

I watched, fascinated, as my own fingers sketched a T into the air. The lines it formed shimmered pale and gray, as ethereal as moonlight.

Trina, the voice whispered.

My hand, independent of my thoughts, drew a circle around the whole. “Trina,” I repeated dreamily, and all turned to black.

Chapter Eighteen

I awoke without warning or sound.

I was not asleep in Ashmore’s bed. I had not been moved to my own, or ensconced before the fire. I was not wrapped in black and smoke, as I’d dreamed.

I didn’t know where I was.

My eyes, used to the void of my dream, adjusted quickly. Shadows gathered so thick they stole the oxygen from the air, and the graceful sway of cobwebs shimmered in the faintest ream of light from a source I could not locate.

I looked down at myself, at the shift I did not recall putting on and the lavender wrapper belted around it.

I stood in the midst of an unfamiliar room, clad in my nightclothes as some heroine out of a penny dreadful, and could not remember how I’d gotten here.

The air was cold, dusty. It smelled abandoned—that musty fragrance associated with the slow rot of paper and wood—and as I turned, the movement displaced currents of air, sending puffs of dust motes to skate across the gloom.

The light trickling from beyond brightened.

“Welcome to Siristine’s infamous laboratory, my love.”

The voice, sweet and musical, reached out as though it might wrap me in soft comfort. Startled, I turned again, then was forced to slap a hand over my nose as my quick movement shot dust into the air around me. At the same time, a wash of fatigue rolled over me. Coughing, blinking hard to combat the grit, I waved the other hand before my face to clear it.

Exhaustion wrenched my senses into disarray, which only served to make her appearance all the more surreal. She stepped from the dark like a ghost; that sad woman in white I’d imagined might stem from the Gothic romances, though it was not white she wore.

Josephine St. Croix was not a woman who favored the color.

All thoughts froze to crystalline shock.

“Mother?” That voice was mine, though it came little more than a rasp from a dry throat.

When she smiled, she did so with same serene curve I’d seen in that painting above the library mantel. Her eyes, as green as mine but sharper with an intellect beyond any that I might have attributed to myself, sparkled with warmth and welcome.

She wore a gown in a shade of yellow so bright as to turn her hair to shining red. Her skin glowed with a luminescence that seemed to come from within her, turning her figure to the source of white light radiating out over the room we stood in.

Unlike mine, her hair was unbound, and the soft curls flowed like melted jewels in a breeze I did not feel. She wore no gloves, earning an immediate sense of kinship, and if her feet bore any shoes, I could not see it, for the hem of her gown seemed unduly sheer, as though she floated upon mist.

She was so beautiful, my heart ached.

She held her hands to me. “Oh, my sweet girl, how lovely you’ve become.”

I did not reach for her; I took a step back, my hands twining into my wrapper—into her wrapper, rather.

Her smile wilted. “Please don’t fear me.”

“Mother?” This came with less a rasp, though I could not strain the disbelief from it. I wanted to tear my gaze away, to search instead for a way out of this surreal trap, but it remained fixed upon her face. I could not get enough of it.

This was the face of my mother. My face, though I was somewhat more round in the cheek, plainer by comparison and a head shorter than she. Still, it was uncanny enough that I could not decide if I was still dreaming it, applying my face on the ghost of my mother.

“Yes,” she told me, and reached out again. She did not walk to me so much as drift, her hair tugged in that wind I could not feel. “Yes, ’tis your mother. I’ve waited all this time for you.”

“How can this be?”

Her smile returned, but sadly. “Only a temporary reprieve. The call will fade, and with it, the gateway will close, severing me from you until next Trina opens the way.”

I blinked at her. “Trina?” My lessons returned to me. “The Queen of the Ghostworld. I called upon the triple path?”

Josephine’s smile could charm the birds out of song. “You did,” she said, with such approval that something heretofore unknown in my heart took root. “My sweet girl, you allowed us to meet after so, so long.” A tear drop spilled from her lashes, crystalline and perfect.

I did not know if I was supposed to reach out to her, to offer her a handkerchief I did not have, to say that it would be all right—I knew nothing more than what I saw, and what I saw was my mother.

My dead mother.

I sank to my knees, a shudder seizing me. “I don’t understand,” I whispered hoarsely. “I don’t—Did I call you forth? Did I pull you from heaven?”

When Josephine eased to the floor beside me, it was with such grace that I could not believe she was anything more than light and air. Her hands came to rest over my shoulders, but I did not feel flesh—only cold, bone-chilling ice.

“I’m so sorry, my sweet,” she crooned, though tears now fell like silver rain upon her luminescent cheeks. “It was not my choice to leave you. I clung with all my might to the hope that you might one day learn the very tools so that I might speak with you. Even once,” she wept. “Just once was all I craved.”

My eyes stung. I lifted a shaking hand, intent upon touching the mirage before me, but such sorrow gripped her features that my fingers froze just over what I imagined was the smooth skin of her cheek. “You aren’t here, are you?” I asked, torn between anger, disappointment and yearning. “You aren’t real.”

“I am here,” she replied, “but I am not flesh. I am not as you are.” The hands lifted from my shoulders, easing the chill but still I shuddered. A kernel of ice remained curled within me. “Oh, Cherry, how much I’ve longed for this day.”

“Mother,” I said again, tasting the word upon my tongue as though for the first time. When her gaze lit, joy raw and unabashed within it, my tears spilled over. “Mother.”

She cupped my cheek, and it was as if I laid flesh against ice and snow. “There,” she crooned. “My lovely girl, you’ll ruin your complexion if you keep up like this.”

I sniffled a laugh that was as watery as it was embarrassed, but I did make an effort to bank the tears I cried.

She stroked my hair, trails of cold in her wake, and though it caused pain within my head, I did not pull away. “We won’t have much time, for the moon is waning and the aether cannot fuel the door for very long.”

I sat upright, eyes wide. “You’ll leave me again?”

“No, sweeting.” As she knelt beside me, her hair a dark claret shroud floating about her head, she smiled so beautifully into my eyes that my heart eased its wild thump. “Not for very long, I hope.”

“What can I do?” I asked. “Must I call upon Trina again?”

“No,” she said quickly, lifting her hand to hover over mine clenched upon my lap. “No, please do not be so hasty. The Trumps must be learned in order, for each is more powerful and requires more resolve than the last. To leap ahead will put you at risk.”

Ashmore had not told me that, but then again, he had not revealed the power of the Trumps until just earlier.

I was only just coming to terms with the concept of the cosmos as a naturo-philosophic term for the elements of this world. I could not imagine utilizing that what I learned to…

Well, to converse with ghosts.

“You only managed this with my help,” she told me. “I cannot cross the boundaries of the spirit to do it again, and I fear another attempt so soon will only harm you.”

I slumped when the full meaning of her words became clear. “So I cannot talk to you again?”

Josephine rose, an act reminiscent of a current rather than flesh and blood lumbering into position. “Do not be so quick to give up,” she said, her tone that of a gentle scolding. “Are you not my daughter? Do you not bear the power of the cosmos in your hands?”

I looked at my hands, sickly pale in the light radiating from my mother, and turned them palm up. “I don’t know.”

“That is not the answer I seek.” A bit of a lash crept into the ghostly voice, and I found her looking rather more stern than gentle. “Am I doomed to be disappointed in death, as well as life?”

I cried out as she turned away, reaching for her elegant back. “No! I can do anything asked of me, I simply don’t know what must be done.”

She did not stop, but beckoned with a graceful hand. The light she cast slid over the floor, stone where I expected hard wood and rugs. The edge of a table slipped into stark relief, only to vanish again into shadow as she passed it.

She did not walk, her head did not rise and fall. She glided, the trailing edges of her skirts disturbing nothing at all.

Unlike me, who cast dust in my wake.

“We shall only have one chance at this,” my mother warned, but gone was the severity. She smiled at me over her shoulder, and I realized that I could see through her form.

Had I really called the ghost of my mother?

Sorrow gripped my heart, and the fierce surge of wanting I had never known I carried. Always, I’d fought against the comparisons Society made between myself and my late mother. I’d despised coming up short in every challenge.

When my father had thought to sacrifice me for her, I had in some way accepted it as part of the pattern five years of London’s uppercrust arenas had taught me.

I had never imagined that I would come face to face, flesh to spirit, with the mother I’d told myself I didn’t need. How different would my life have been if it had been Josephine who raised me and not stern Fanny? Would I have chosen my path differently?

The images that assailed me were no less fanciful than the looming malignance of the house that had once been hers, that would have been mine if I hadn’t failed so abysmally. I imagined us seated together on the piano, our brightly hued heads together, picking out keys amidst laughter and harmonic delight. I imagined that we walked arm in arm, as mother and daughter, along the fancy bridges connecting London’s upper platforms to each other.

Would she have welcomed Earl Compton?

Would his mother have hated me less if Josephine had been there to soften the meeting?

Heaven help me, it hurt to think that my father might have been so different if she had only lived.

I froze in place, rooted to the floor.

My father. Abraham St. Croix had attempted to kill me. He’d chosen alchemy as his tool, a means to raise my mother from the grave—an effort far beyond a lofty ambition far beyond the scope of the brilliance that earned him the moniker Mad St. Croix.

Did she know?

Dare I tell her?

She did not float far before drawing up beside a stone wall, its wooden girders gray with the combined efforts of her radiant light and the cobwebs wrapped about them. Beside her, a switch thrust out from the tangled nest of dust and spider’s thread.

When she turned to find me, motionless, her head cocked. Her hair slid like a ruby ribbon over her cheek. “What is wrong, my love?”

“Father—” My voice broke on that word, for I had difficulty giving to him the appellation. My memory was not so perfect that I knew all of what he’d said to me, but I did know he’d thought to replace me with this vision now floating before me.

Her expression fell, so heartbreaking that my own shuddered as though it were fragile glass. “I know,” she whispered, and even that maintained a lilt that seemed to float upon the stagnant air. “We both left you so very young. I am so sorry.”

“No, I—” I hesitated. It was obvious she did not know of my father’s machinations; clearer still that she thought him the man she’d married. I did not know what sort of man that was, but I could not find it in me to betray that faith.

“’Tis all right,” I said instead, approaching the switch she stood beside. “It wasn’t your fault. You were ill. He was only trying to help you.”

“He has always been determined,” she said with a sad smile. “You have inherited that trait.”

“Ashmore says ’tis your determination I inherited,” I said, and watched her eyes widen. Then narrow quickly.

Her hands came to settle upon her waist, the faint clash of her gown beneath her transparent fingers jarring. “You are learning from Oliver Ashmore?”

“I am.”

“And is he treating you well?”

I looked not at her, but the switch before us, weighing my answer as quickly as I dared. I could not very well admit to my mother that I’d gone to the bed of her father’s young associate, could I?

Ghost she might be—dream this all might turn out to become—but I refused to confess such things to my mother.

I’d rather face Fanny’s certain disapproval than the uncertainties of Josephine’s judgment.

I nodded. “He is the reason why I am studying so hard,” I said simply.

Her expression remained clouded. “Has he…Has Oliver given you any gifts?”

I did not like the clench I felt in my belly when she used his given name in lieu of any other. I shook my head. “Nothing more than teaching.” Even as I said it, I remembered the alchemical draught he’d given me to prevent the conception of a child.

Color bloomed in my cheeks.

“Nothing at all?” my mother asked, her gaze level upon my face.

“A book,” I said quickly. “He did give me one of your father’s journals.”

She did not appear surprised, but her expression did clear some. “Good.”

“But why?”

“I will explain shortly. Throw this switch, then,” she continued, “and be prepared to see that what you were searching for.”

I did as directed, shuddering some when the cobwebs clung to my fingers. I saw no spiders to crawl among them. I steeled myself, plunged my bare hand through ephemeral skeins of clinging threads and grasped the switch. It wrenched easily up into position.

Somewhere in the dark, a mechanism engaged. Dust rained from the wall we stood beside as a long pole I’d thought inset into the stone shifted, rotating once and rising to the ceiling.

Josephine’s gaze lit up in nostalgic delight as metal groaned, and the strident screech of old hinges tore through the black. Her smile widened, anticipatory, and I took my cue to follow her gaze.

Above our heads, at regular intervals upon a patterned grid affixed to the rafters, points of blue-white light popped into existence.

I stared, awed into silence. Each flicker gained strength, until I realized they were not brightening as a gaslamp might but curling and twisting as ink does through water.

In a few moments, each of the lights revealed themselves to be show globes, glowing with an alchemical radiance that caused the shadows below them to flee.

“Brilliant, no?” My mother’s laughter was musical—and hauntingly familiar. A shiver coursed down my spine. I clenched my teeth, tamping an unreasonable seed of panic into silence.

Under the light, I expected her own radiance to dim, but it did not. As though her ghostly luminescence created a shield around her, the light from the globes clashed and forced a corona that made her look more like an angel than any ephemeral ghost.

She drifted into the laboratory proper, allowing me the opportunity to study that what the incandescence revealed.

The laboratory was not a myth, after all.

I could not imagine what part of the house might hide this vast secret. The floors were stone, as were the walls, yet heavy tapestries adorned the latter as though to combat the dank chill within. They were nearly all gray with dust; nothing a through beating wouldn’t mend. Shelves lined parts of the wall, adorned with various implements in no certain order I could distinguish—a great quantity of bowls, crucibles, mortar and pestle, retorts and beakers. Some still had contents within, though long since dried and evaporated to a thick stain.

Books filled others, tomes my fingers itched to seize.

Examination tables lay arranged just so, with larger crucibles of a more recent make than the Hessian bowl I’d seen in my mother’s portrait. Three sat upon a low worktable, each connected by a pipe that would transfer heat from the furnace hulking just behind them.

Various other apparatuses made themselves known by their uses outside alchemy, familiar to me through the simpler sciences. The sand bath was cold to the touch, as expected, but were it hot, the sand would evenly heat contents within the unit, rather than rely upon sometimes unreliable convection. This would allow for a safer and more even chemical reaction with less stirring needed.

I saw racks of tubes and the twisted retorts, used for gaseous material, and more implements I did not recognize.

It was, in short, an unkempt alchemical paradise—and a scientist’s haven, really, for many of the tools I did know were also used in common laboratories of the enlightened thinker.

My mother waited in the center of the laboratory. A large gap had been cleared, and I thought it odd until she raised a hand to halt me in my tracks.

She pointed down. “That is a barrier you will be wise to avoid crossing, even casually.”

I looked down where she pointed, then raised my eyebrows when I saw the circles carved into the stone floor. They were gouged so deep that no amount of wear would ever truly smooth it out. The circles were large enough to stand within with room to spare, each line rimmed with symbols I did not recognize.

The three circles intersected each other, creating a rather more complex pattern than it seemed at first glance.

“What is it for?” I asked, frowning at the lines.

“Less than the original creator had hoped,” came her cryptic reply, “but possibly useful to our purposes. You remember the importance of Trina?”

“The crossroads,” I said, and in so doing, a sickly feeling stole into my stomach. “This seems rather more occult than alchemical.”

“Sweet girl,” my mother chided gently. “Whether ’tis occult or alchemy or science, does it truly matter what one calls it if the results are the same?”

My gaze turned to her, my eyes wide as a version of Ashmore’s lecture came back to me in her melodious voice.

“Remember,” she continued as she drifted around the circle with great care, “the third Trump is what?”

“Caeles-Isis.” A beat, and the connection slotted into place. “Divine, and often illustrated by Isis of Egypt.”

“Exactly so,” my mother said. “Divinity is as much a part of alchemical potency as reason or a dab hand at maths. Ergo, never discount that what only seems to be fanciful imaginings. Come quick, now, we’ve less time than I’d like and I worry about your longevity should I vanish too soon.”

“My longevity?” I skirted the circle, my skin prickling as I neared too close to the symbols. I did not imagine that anything might actually come of the design, but I wondered if the intent had been to meddle with the affairs of death and immortality.

Both Trina and Caeles-Isis revolved around the concepts of the moon, the Underworld or Ghostworld, and in Isis’ case, resurrection of her betrayed husband, the god Osiris.

It was better to not die at all in the pursuit of perfection, but I imagined that resurrection might be a step up from the finality of death.

While I could imagine a great deal, the nature of the experiments attempted in this laboratory before its abandonment worried me.

Josephine came at last to stand beside a bookshelf and a table cluttered with dusty tomes, many left open to gather grime. The pages had all yellowed, and some were so thick as to be older parchments bound much later in time.

“You are how old, now?” she asked.

I approached, wrapping my arms about myself to ward out the cold that seized me. “Almost one and twenty,” I told her.

“You haven’t much time, then.”

“For what?” I asked, bewildered.

My mother floated closer, until her radiance blocked out that of the lights overhead. Her eyes filled my sight, glistening and brilliant in shades of green. “The illness that claimed me, and my father before that, is not a disease of the body.”

I stared at her as cold flitted against my skin. It crept along my body, as though seeking a way inside.

I shuddered. “I don’t understand.”

“’Tis a trap,” she said softly. “A means by which Oliver Ashmore may sustain the longevity of his life. He feeds upon us, don’t you see?” She cupped my cheek, and the burn of the frozen touch seared through my confusion. “You will be next to fall to him, just as soon as you have unlocked the power of the Trumps.”

I gasped, and the breath that came from my lips turned to white mist. “No,” was all I could manage. My throat ached with the cold.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and in her eyes I read grief. “I’m so very sorry. I had always hoped that you might lead a life free of such a burden, but ’tis not to be. Ashmore tricks us all by unlocking the secrets of the cosmos for us. When we are strong enough to wield them, we are ripe for his taking.”

My mouth fell open.

Her hand fell away. “When you are ready,” she continued, “he paints a portrait. Every generation, he has painted us. Me, my father, my grandfather, my great grand-mother.” Her skirts shuddered, though she did not move. They spilled in a soundless ripple of light and nothing. “I was so close to learning what alchemical sorcery he concocted to do it, but he painted my portrait and I was lost.”

“No,” I croaked, my eyes burning as much from the wide-eyed stare I levied upon her as the lingering ice clinging to the cheek she’d caressed. I clasped my own shaking palm over the cold flesh. “Death from a painting? It’s impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible,” my mother assured me, and sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, my love. All that I tell you is true. Once we are painted, we are consumed. Over a hundred years has he extended his life this way.”

A hundred years and more. I recalled the paintings in storage; the sameness to each of them I attributed to a family of painters, or a master and apprentice.

I had never thought it would be one master for all.

The ground fell from beneath my feet. I swayed, spots gathering across my vision.

No. No, it couldn’t be. He’d cared for me. He’d taught me so much.

It was thanks to him I was free of the Menagerie’s dark games, thanks to him I had not ended my life. I owed him my sobriety, from which I had learned what it was to accomplish something under my own power.

Was it all for nothing?

The table shook as I leaned heavily against it, my lungs seizing from the cold I desperately tried to inhale. I couldn’t breathe.

“Cherry,” my mother crooned. “Sweet girl, don’t give up hope now. There is a solution.”

The ragged wound of betrayal carved deep. I had let him into my bed. I’d all but demanded his attentions.

How he must have laughed at me.

My mother stepped back, but the air did not lose its chill. I wasn’t certain that I’d ever be warm again.

What was it that led the men I trusted to betray me? To abandon me?

No matter how I looked at it, no matter how deeply I might search, only one common variable existed between them—me.

Was it something I did? Something about me that led them all to leave me behind?

“Cherry,” my mother said, her tone insistent. “Look at me, sweeting.” When I did, her luminescent hand fluttered over her breast in manner similar to an overwrought matron. Again, her eyes shone with unshed tears. “I thought to continue my father’s work to cure this disease. Oliver distracted me. He stole my heart and seduced his way into my bed—”

I made a sound I was not sure made it past the vise in my chest. Denial—and raw anger. My knees shook. Clutching the edge of the table, I bent over it until I could breathe around the pain centered in my belly.

An icy draft over my back suggested my mother attempted to comfort me.

“By the time I understood what he had done, it was too late,” she said softly. “I was already caught in the web he’d woven. He took my life without causing death, sealing my anima as he had done my father before me, and all those of direct line before him.”

Anima. That was a word that came up frequently in my mother’s journal. It was that what the alchemists called the soul, or the spirit.

My mother claimed that each painting housed a spirit.

Was that why those I found in storage looked more like cadavers than living beings?

I cleared my throat harshly. “How?” I looked up at her. “Did my father know you were ill when you married?”

She nodded so sadly, my heart fractured for her. “’Tis a slow, often secretive decline. When I married your father, it had already taken root.” Her mouth tightened. “It cannot kill too quickly, you see. Oliver must guarantee a child to continue the line. All so that he can continue his unnatural life.”

I closed my eyes, covering my face with one hand while I braced my sagging weight with the other. “I didn’t know.” It meant nothing that I said it. My ignorance did not salve my hurt, would not ease my pride.

I wished it would.

“My love, all is not lost for you.” I looked up at that, my jaw clenched so hard I felt the pain echo in my head. My mother’s gaze was steady. “I clung to this world with all my strength until you were old enough, and I believe this is that time. Will you end this circle of death?”

That she asked was simple courtesy, and I knew enough of us both to recognize it. I had no choice in the matter. Of course, I would.

I stood with effort. It hurt, somewhere deep inside my heart where I’d learned to trust Ashmore and all he’d done for me, but I did straighten. I would not cower.

“What must I do?”

She pointed to a book, whose cover was stained a red similar to that of polished cherry wood. No dust clung to it, though the edges were blackened and scorched. The red ribbon tucked between the worn pages was frayed at the end. “There is a formula in here. Follow it, Cherry. Save yourself where all of us failed before you.” Her voice took on a tonal quality eerily similar to the wail I’d heard in the wind. Her fingers started to shimmer, color leaching from the edges of the mirage she presented.

I reached out, my heart in my throat. “Mother, wait! I’ve never composed an alchemical formula, how will I—”

When my hands passed through her shoulders, it was as if I’d dipped them into a frozen river. I cried out, pain and frigid shock forcing me to snatch my hands back to my chest.

Josephine St. Croix melded away slowly, until her beautiful smile and the light of her green eyes was all that remained. “I’m counting on you, my sweet girl,” she whispered, hauntingly melodic. “Break the cycle. Help me.”

Silence filled the laboratory as the last of her words faded into nothing. She was gone. With no fanfare, no shimmer of aether, nothing. Only my throbbing fingers, which were tinged blue at the very tips when I set them down upon the book she’d shown me.

I stared sightlessly at the strewn worktable, my hands shaking.

She was gone. I’d never been so close to my mother until this surreal moment, and she was gone. The hurt this forced inside my bruised and battered heart brought fresh tears to my eyes. They trickled loose before I could force them away, and I scrubbed hard at my cheeks.

I was alone; I was always alone—and even as I came to recognize this, I steeled myself, forcing my shoulders to align. Dream as I might, imagine another world as I did, I could not change what was true and what was not.

My mother’s spirit was locked in this house. All my fears embroiled in tattered walls and all my mocking recollections of penny dreadfuls now must be put aside. I had faced a ghost, and she needed my help. I could do nothing else for my mother—I could not save my Mad St. Croix from his own lunatic humors, I could not retain the inheritance that she had contributed to. These failures were in the past.

I huffed out a breath, wiped my arm under my nose, and said quietly, “Allez, hop, Oliver Ashmore.” My version of beware.

Ashmore had said he did not know my mother. He’d told me so.

I’d trusted him.

To learn that he’d seduced my mother infuriated me; to think that I’d walked so easily into his web. Had he charmed his way into my grandfather’s good graces? Had he been earnest and helpful, sincere?

His stern expression when he taught me of the Trumps, his approval when I turned in my assignments, all collided into a twisted, tangled knot of anger and wretched betrayal within me.

Mad St. Croix.

Teddy.

Hawke.

Ashmore.

Whether friend or lover, mentor or even father, each had turned me away. Each had betrayed my trust.

Was I the singular reason that no man could bear to love me? Was it something I provoked simply by existing?

My knees buckled.

I collapsed to the cold stone floor, clinging to the edge of the table as I sobbed out the bloody remnants of my pride, and all that was left of the illusions I’d harbored.

Who was I to be loved for myself?

Absolutely nobody at all.

Chapter Nineteen

The laboratory boasted two exits. I chose one at random, finding myself in a narrow hall so dark that I stumbled blindly through it. My footsteps caused the floor beneath to creak, stirring up echoes ahead of and behind me.

My shins barked against something hard and unyielding, earning a fresh batch of tears—all pain, regardless of whether it stemmed from my bruised legs or my heart.

Of all the cruelties to be so revealed, I was not so strong that I could swallow betrayal as though it were nothing. I was tired of it, fatigued by the thread I now recognized through every facet of my life. The faint sensation of accomplishment I had thought to be so brilliant now seemed only a laughable memory.

I was no saint, I had never been the good girl to knit and smile and say nothing, but I did not deserve this. I had never truly trusted Compton, certainly not Hawke, but Teddy and Ashmore had always been part of my life from the moment I came to London. Our camaraderie had been so easy; had I actually been in a frame of mind to appreciate him, I imagined that Ashmore and I might have become boon companions much earlier than I thought we did.

Perhaps it was not their fault at all, but mine. When had I become such a poor judge of character?

Fumbling at the panel blocking my way, I found a small knob in the center. The door it affixed to rattled once, then opened when I turned the bit in my hand.

Light blinded me. I fell out of the wardrobe I found myself within, stumbled over the raised platform that gave the portico the appearance of a simple armoire, and fell to my knees heavily outside it.

The door swung wide in my wake.

Groaning with the aches and pains I’d earned on my unexpected jaunt, battling the oppression of exhaustion, I turned over, resting upon my elbow so that I could look back at the polished wooden armoire.

The corridor behind it looked out of place, covered in grime and dark enough that I shuddered to think of all the cobwebs I must have passed through. The frame of the armoire was clean and polished to a soft gleam.

I swept my hands over my face and hair, disengaging tangled silver threads. None carried a spider, which I appreciated.

It seemed one of the two passages led to Ashmore’s chosen study. The fire crackled happily, brightening and warming the room around me. In the orange glow, stains clung to my wrapper, dirtied the hem I lifted as I dragged myself to my feet.

Fatigue adhered to my mind, turned my limbs leaden. I staggered to the armoire, closed the case and stepped back with a weary sound. It looked like nothing more than a collected bit of furniture, the type that might hold treasures of interest.

I never thought it would hide a secret passage.

How many wormed through this house? I wondered if it was at all like the Menagerie, whose structures all claimed staff corridors for use by servants and those who must go unseen.

Did Ashmore know?

Could I assume he didn’t?

I was tired. Every part of me ached, and I no longer could distinguish the pain of overexerted limbs, joints grating in fatigued sockets or even the dull throb in my head from the heartache of it all.

Slowly, feeling all of my twenty years as though each was an anvil upon me, I trudged to the study door.

It opened before I reached for it.

My hand froze mid-grasp as Ashmore drew to a halt before me. His hazel eyes, surprised at first, rapidly turned stormy. “There you are,” was his ungentle greeting.

I laughed, though it came out more a snort.

His eyebrow climbed.

“So I am,” I acknowledged, lowering my hand. He entered the room, passing me with ease when I thought the crackling fury surrounding me might cause him to stumble.

“You vanished.” He did not turn around, shoulders rigid. He was angry with me. Once, I might have thought it out of concern.

Now I considered it fear that his plans for me would be ruined were I to depart.

I sneered at his back. “Afraid I might leave?”

“In the dead of winter?” Ashmore sat behind the desk; a tired motion that did not show grace, but weariness. How long had I been gone? An hour at the most? Had he been searching all this time?

Or was he simply feeling his age?

My fingers folded into my wrapper. “Why—” I hesitated; not out of fear, but because I did not know how exactly to frame my jumbled thoughts into an appropriately cutting question. How did one ask if one’s entire relationship with a person was based on a lie?

His hands covered his face, rubbing as though he might peel the fatigue from his eyes by force. “You cannot simply vanish,” he told me, impatience clear in the way he spoke. “You worried me and upset Miss Halbard.”

My fists clenched in the soft fabric.

When he dropped his hands, his gaze slid over my attire. “Did you go exploring in the abandoned rooms again? You’re filthy.”

I squared my shoulders. “How old are you?”

He looked at me as though I’d lost my head. “What is this, all of a sudden?”

“How old?” I demanded. Something in my tone or my appearance must have warned him I was serious, for he sat back and studied me with his ageless eyes.

I had often thought him to exhibit a worldliness that seemed beyond his apparent years. I had never imagined that I would be so correct.

He lifted a hand to rub at his smooth chin. “I am a few years past thirty,” he finally said.

The pain this lie caused me was unbearable. I turned my face away, though too late to keep the admission of this hurt from my expression.

He half-rose, hands going to the desk to brace his weight. “What on earth—”

”No.” The denial tore from me. I threw out a hand as though I might force him to freeze by sheer will. “Stay back.”

He did, though I suspect surprise held him, not I.

“Cherry,” he began, reproach and concern.

“Lies.” I dragged my forearm over my eyes, though it did nothing to dry my tear-dampened lashes. I could not bear to look at him, to watch him pull a mask of falsehood over his features again. “Why are you lying to me?”

He was silent, leaving only the pounding of my heart to give voice to the desperate yearning I clung to. I wanted to hold my breath, but it hurt too much to try.

He sat back into his chair. “How did you learn?”

So calm. Gone was the concern I’d heard—or hoped to hear. He was serene, stern Ashmore once more.

I looked up, my breath shuddering in. “You aren’t as clever as you assume yourself to be,” I said. My voice trembled. “Did you think that you could seduce me as you did my mother?”

His lips thinned into a hard, white line. “Mind your tone, Miss St. Croix.”

“I will not.” My voice shook with rage. I took a step toward the desk, my fingers hurting with how tightly I clenched them. “All of my life—” A sob welled in my throat. “All of my life, I have been compared to her and I have been found wanting. All who knew her loved her best.”

Ashmore’s eyes banked, his expression lined in unreadable severity. “’Tis not what you think it is.”

“Then enlighten me!”

He stepped from around his desk, but did not come close. Whether it was my stance, poised to flee or fight, or his own reasoning, he hesitated far enough away that he could not easily reach me. His hands hung by his sides. “I am three hundred and forty-six years old,” he said quietly. “Through study and no small sacrifice, I have found one part of a key to the perfection of life.”

“Sacrifice,” I spat, my hands balling on either side of my temples. “You murdered all of them, didn’t you? You sacrificed my lineage for your unnatural life.”

His mouth flattened. “Not all of them.”

It was as much an admission of guilt as I could expect. I laughed, though it was so pitiable that I could not bear the shame. “You monster. You…You murderer. How often did you lie to me?” I squeezed my eyes shut, heel of my hands digging into my head. “This was my family.”

“A family who would rather see you dead,” he returned sharply, with such fierce heat that my eyes snapped open. “Or do you not recall that what your father attempted only months ago?”

I froze, staring at him as the meaning of his words sank like a stone within me. “You…You knew?”

“Not until recently, but I did gather enough information to fill in the gaps left by your accounting.” His cheeks flushed, he reached up to his throat to loosen the highest button at his collar. “My name has changed over the centuries, but I was baptized Nicholin Folsham in the year 1542.”

I shook my head. “That can’t be.”

When his eyes met mine, they were bleak. “What is the true purpose of alchemy, Miss St. Croix?”

Perfection.

And what was immortality but the perfection of a flawed human existence?

The collar of his shirt came undone. Another tug loosened the second, and he dropped his hand to the desk beside him. “Don’t look so horrified,” he said with grim humor. “You were all too keen to learn such things not a day earlier.”

Again, I shook my head, but no amount of denial would take back his words. “I don’t…I don’t understand.” Only I did, didn’t I? I understood exactly. It was as my mother said. The cost of his immortality came from me and mine. “You claimed to sacrifice, but what did you truly surrender? Not your life.” I laughed bitterly, though tears spilled over my lashes. “Certainly you have suffered nothing but time. All of this, all the effort to mend and teach me, all the hours—” I broke upon that one, unable to give voice to the time we had shared. “What was the lure, Ashmore?” I demanded.

“Lure?”

“Tell me true. Did you simply miss my mother? Did you think to have another taste of her whom you so bitterly betrayed? Did you see me and think of her?” Again, I dragged my arm across my eyes, stealing the tears I did not wish him to see. Not him, who had so sweetly coaxed me to cry and allowed me the use of his shoulder do it.

I stepped back again, my sight turned blurry.

“I hate you,” I said brokenly, barely able to form the words. “I hate you, Oliver Ashmore, Nicholin Folsham, whoever you are, I hate you. I wish you’d never found me.”

“Cherry!”

I turned and fled through the open door, but he was quick on my heels. I made it only to the foyer before hard fingers snapped around my wrist and I spun forcefully.

Ashmore had not been present to watch me learn the skills I had required to survive as a collector below London’s drift. I turned, and with sharp perversity that listened to no reason, I treated his grip as though it were a dancer’s hand. I spun once under it, forcing his fingers to bend awkwardly, then wrested my wrist from his grip.

Attempting to compensate forced him to snatch at thin air while I danced just out of reach.

Panting, breathless with only that effort, I clutched at my waist and stared at him as he drew himself to his full height. His eyes did not leave mine. “Listen to me,” he demanded, in that low manner he had when we spoke of more intimate matters.

I blanched, shook my head until my hair tumbled over both shoulders. “You have nothing—”

“There is a greater tale to be told,” he said over me. “It isn’t what you think!”

“How could it not be?” I flung a hand behind me, as though to indicate the stairs and the family wing beyond. “’Tis your fault my family sickens, will you deny that?”

I watched as his jaw tightened, pulling his features into stark relief. “I will not deny it.”

Hearing it hurt more than I thought it might. I laughed bitterly. “As my mother sought to undo the cause, you seduced her.” I turned my back, unwilling to watch his face any more—whether truth or lie, neither was bearable. “You earned her trust as you earned mine, and then you betrayed her—”

“No,” he cut in.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Cherry?” Maddie Ruth’s voice called uncertainly from the stair she stood upon, her hands gripping the bannister as she watched us. A furrow marred her brow. “What is the matter?”

“’Tis nothing,” I said, summoning frivolity when all I wanted was to be swallowed by the world and allowed to rest in silence. I sniffed back the hurt, forcing it to remain a hard knot of agony in my chest. I approached the stair with measured steps. “I’m tired, I want to—”

“Cherry, wait,” Ashmore said behind me.

My shoulders went rigid. “There is nothing you can say that I—”

“I loved Josephine.”

I did not think I ccould hurt any worse than I already did. My step faltered, nearly pitched me to the floor but for sheer instinct and a grasp for the newel just in front of me. He loved my mother. He loved her, the true idol that was Josephine St. Croix.

I was but a dull reminder of all that he had lost. Just as I was for my father.

Of course. It all made so much sense now.

I laughed quietly, though there was nothing humorous about the sound.

It was not love I had given Ashmore, nor love I expected, but I had never wanted to be my mother’s replacement. I’d thought he’d understood.

I’d thought he at least liked me for my sake.

What a foolish thing I was.

“I understand.” I picked up the hem of my wrapper, hiking it high enough that I could take the stairs two by two. “Excuse me.”

Ashmore’s step fell hard behind me. “Cherry, where do you—”

“You are relieved of your duty,” I said, still without looking at him. “I no longer need your interference.” With that, I hurried up the stairs, rounding my trajectory that I could pass Maddie Ruth.

“Catch her,” Ashmore commanded, and she did, seizing me by the waist before I’d made it past.

“Let me go,” I snarled, just as he thundered, “I forbid it.”

Maddie Ruth held on, her eyes large and filled with fear. “You don’t need the bliss,” she insisted, in tune as to where my thoughts had gone. Perhaps I bore the same demeanor as that of her father, who had succumbed to the Chinese smoke. “You don’t!”

All I wanted was to sleep again. Real sleep, the kind that only the laudanum could give me. The need pounded in my chest, raked agonizing fingers over a place that already hurt so much.

That longing for release consumed me.

It was for that reason that I lifted an arm and drove my elbow into Maddie Ruth’s cheek. She gritted her teeth, head snapping to the side with the momentum, but she did not let go.

Not until I stomped on her slippered foot with my heel and caught her by the side of her head. She cried out as I pulled her around me. She let go to catch her balance, allowing me to push her completely from my path so that I could continue up the stairs.

Maddie Ruth screamed. Ashmore called a warning. There was a terrible sound, a jarring thud, but I did not stop until I reached the top of the stairs.

Hands tight in my skirts, I turned to view the chaos I left behind me.

Ashmore crouched far below, his gaze turned up at me with such bleak accusation that it was though he drove a knife into my soul.

Maddie Ruth lay in his arms, her eyes enormous, all color leached from her face. Her legs were splayed, one ankle gripped in her hands. The pain she suffered was writ large and clear in every line of her body; a twisted foot, or a broken one. I almost laughed, but it was not humor that drove me. I’d pushed Maddie Ruth down the stairs.

My friend, my companion—a girl no more than sixteen who had admitted to looking up to me. And for what?

So that I could betray her as all the world betrayed me.

Yet still, it was she who called to me one last time. “Please, Cherry!”

Ashmore wrapped an arm about her shoulders. He looked away from me. “Let her go,” he said, his tone flat.

I truly was a monster.

So be it.

“I want you out of this house by nightfall,” I shouted, and fled for Ashmore’s bedroom—and the valise he kept within.

It did not take long to locate the laudanum. There was a full flask left, and I drank half of the ruby liquid down—even when the now-unfamiliar burn of the bitter draught forced me to choke and cough.

Neither Ashmore nor Maddie Ruth came to see me. None intruded upon me. As the bliss stole into my belly, easing through the pain in my chest and soothing the wound with its forbidden bond, I waited to hear footsteps in the hall.

They did not come.

I drank more.

Chapter Twenty

It did not surprise me at all when I found myself dreaming of that black place. The threads that bound me cut into my flesh as I tried to turn, but this time, I felt the pain of it.

Perhaps it was merely my own, translated to that what my sleeping mind could conjure.

I floated in silence for an eternity, Ashmore’s face and Maddie Ruth’s fear roiling over and over inside my thoughts.

I loved Josephine.

How cruelly he’d spoken the words, yet they had rung of truth. Was he so talented an actor that I would never know his lies?

I wanted to weep. The laudanum stemmed such needs, and so I remained in silence and lethargy, willing to sleep the whole of my life away once more.

I did not want to wake again.

For so many years, I had fought for my place while dancing to the tune of another, and I was tired of it.

I was tired of this life. I did not want to hurt anymore—neither myself nor others.

I sagged within crimson bonds.

A faint shimmer gathered.

Will you leave me in darkness?

My chin drooped. My hair hung over my face in a curtain the same color as the threads binding me.

Josephine stepped into existence before me, her gaze so sad as to force the tears to drop like diamonds from my cheeks. She touched my face, and I flinched, but I felt no cold. I felt nothing at all.

Have you no will?

No. I did not. I wanted only to float away forever.

Though I could not feel her grip, my head lifted in her grasp. With my face so framed, I had no choice but to meet her eyes, cold and green in her ghostly radiance. Her mouth set in a firm line, forcing grooves at the corners with the severity of it.

I wanted to assure her that she would no longer be alone—that I would keep her company—but no words came to me.

I drowned in green pools of twin eternity.

One of her hands left my face, fingertips coming to settle upon my sternum—five needle-like points of frigid cold.

Then I shall help you, came the haunting whisper, even though her lips did not move.

The cold at my breast turned to vicious, burning agony. I shuddered, tried to take a breath to scream my pain, yet my lungs seized upon the attempt. The threads at my limbs tightened to unbearable intensity, resisting my efforts to get away.

Trapped as a fly within a spider’s web.

I looked down to find my mother’s pale hand vanishing into my chest. The light she radiated pooled within my skin, until she was wrist-deep inside my own flesh.

A sight not wholly unfamiliar.

I had dreamed this very thing upon my father’s laboratory table so long ago. The pain had not been so intense then as it was now.

This time, I could not scream. My eyes widened until the sockets strained. I opened my mouth, but no sound would come.

She caught me about the back of the neck with her other hand, her mouth twisting into a grimace of effort as she drove her arm so far into my chest that she must have burst from my back.

Wrist to forearm. Forearm to elbow. My back bowed beneath the strain of it, blood dripping like rubies to the black ground as the bindings dug into my flesh. The threads at my wrists snapped, a tearing sound that cut through the awful laughter swirling around us.

She held me as she drove whatever intent she demanded into me.

Ice filled my chest, my belly. It spread to my shoulders and around my throat.

It climbed to my head.

It halted my heart.

I threw back my head, found my voice to scream with. “Kronos!”

The eyes of Josephine St. Croix burned brilliantly green. Reflected within was the pale blue glow of a glyph similar to that of a K.

Kronos. Past, present, and future. With this Trump, the sacred number ten, the aspects of Time tore free.

The dream shattered. Firelight filled the black void I had been standing within, and I stumbled to find myself no longer supported.

The rug beneath my feet was bright with color, the very same beneath the sofa I had claimed in the library. I patted my chest to find it all in place, looked down to see no wound or scar.

Laughter, familiar and sweet, seized me.

I looked up in surprise.

Ashmore faced the draperies, green where I recalled them to be a darker blue in color. His shoulders were rigid, his hands braced against the wall behind the fabric. He groaned, a husky sound, and it was then I realized he was not alone.

A woman’s skirts spilled on either side of his legs. As I watched, horrified to be seeing such a thing, one stockinged leg curled about his waist. Ashmore’s hips drove hard, and the woman gasped.

Delicate fingers pushed into his hair, its waves longer than how I knew it now. “Yes,” she coaxed, her voice exultant and throaty. “Yes, more, more.”

The skin at Ashmore’s nape flushed red. He grunted with effort.

I stumbled away, unwilling to see this tryst, but the world moved to suit my direction. No matter where I turned, there they were before me, uncaring of any who might see through the window or come through the door.

I dug my fingers into my eyes to break the dream, and when the noises stopped, I breathed a sigh of relief.

What wicked dreams I had.

“Oliver!”

I jerked my head up, startled into looking, then was forced to clap my fingers over my mouth.

My mother was nude, her hair unbound like a fire trapped within a brilliant ruby. She was perfect, her back slender, her body that slim contour so favored by Society’s exacting standards. She rose and fell upon Ashmore’s lap, his trousers pushed half down his legs and a look of such sublime peace upon his face; jealousy seized my heart.

She was divine in every way. I truly was nothing but a weak imitation.

His fingers bit into her waist. Her skin glistened with sweat, and I fisted my hands.

Was this what I was meant to learn? Would I be forced to witness the truth of my mother’s love for the man who would betray her?

Kronos. The Trump bequeathed to the number ten, represented by an X in Roman numerals, which was then associated with Chronos—the God of Time.

Was this a door I’d stumbled through? I must have called upon it, but I did not know how, or how to break it. I should not have even been able to do this much, unable even to call upon a single Trump alone, yet here I stood, witnessing what surely must be the past.

I couldn’t bear it.

Ashmore’s hand tangled in her hair, clutching it as though he might never let go. Josephine’s back arched, her throat bared as she cried her release.

Even in such a blissful, strenuous moment as that, she was radiant.

She slumped against his chest, gasped for breath. He continued to drive into her, nearing his own climax.

I shuddered, wrapping my arms about myself. I wanted this to stop. I didn’t want to see anymore.

Josephine’s head turned. Bracing her cheek upon Ashmore’s shoulder, she focused on something to her right—though she continued to gasp and moan as expected. Her expression was not as it should have been for a woman caught in the thrall of pleasure.

Frowning, I leaned to the side to see what it was she might be viewing.

A man with gray hair peered inside the door. It hung ajar, as though only hastily closed. From the narrow divide, I recognized the wheeling chair he sat within.

I gasped. Why did her own father look in upon her in such a manner?

As Ashmore’s breath came faster, as he clung to the woman who made all the right noises to goad him, the man leaned over to grasp the door. The smile he bestowed upon his daughter was eerily satisfied.

She nodded in return.

The door creaked shut as Josephine cupped Ashmore’s head and drew his mouth to hers.

The scene turned black.

My heart beat in my chest as conflicted emotions roiled within me. What had I witnessed? Was something terrible going on between mother and father?

Had Josephine been given permission to lay with Ashmore?

I turned, but everywhere I looked, it was only darkness.

Metal clanked from somewhere beyond me. Gears shifted, familiar only in that I’d heard it not that long ago. I looked up.

Blue-white light formed in the show globes overhead.

Jade green silk rustled as Josephine threaded her way through the work tables. It was cleaner than I remembered, lacking in the dust and grime that had accumulated over years of neglect.

She held in her hands the astrolabe I recalled from her painting. Unlike before, her hair was bound into a soft coil, secured by the same comb I’d found in my possession when I’d woken in her clothing.

Were these items she cherished? Is that why I gravitated to them?

A step behind me forced me to turn, but the world juddered about until I was once more facing Josephine. Ashmore strode through me, a surreal sensation that left me feeling as though he’d scattered parts of me in his wake. Though I yelped from the sensation of the unwitting assault, he did not slow.

Neither turned.

“Your father is dead,” was Ashmore’s ungentle greeting.

I frowned at his back, which was clad in a style reminiscent of that what he favored, but cut in the fashion of some decades ago.

Not, I noted, brown. He wore an elegant blue, and his trousers were dark gray.

A strange thing, to see him in color.

Josephine did not turn from her task, sliding the astrolabe into place on a shelf. “So it would seem.” There was nothing kind about her voice, either.

Were they not lovers?

I followed in Ashmore’s wake, but halted when he did. “Did you murder your own father, Josephine?”

She laughed. “And if I did?”

My jaw dropped.

“Patricide is not an alchemical precept,” Ashmore replied dryly, though by the inflexible set of his shoulders and the rigidity of his spine, I did not believe he took the suggestion so lightly.

I watched my mother’s face as she turned to smile upon us both—though she did not know I was there. She approached with delicate grace, her skirts dragging upon the floor. Unlike me, she did not seem in danger of tripping over them. “You are so unbending, Oliver.” When she was close enough for the attempt, she lifted a hand to stroke his cheek. “A lady could spend decades unraveling you.”

He caught her wrist before it could touch his face. “I suspect that is your notion.”

Surprise halted her in place for a moment. Her eyelashes lowered, sultry lines softening her features. “Come now, my love. Don’t be cross. I was only testing a theory of mine.”

“Your theory killed your father,” he replied tightly.

In a flash, the seductive appeal of her smile was gone, something harder and much more cruel replacing it. It aged her face, drew deep lines of severity.

She pulled her wrist from his grasp. “Don’t lecture me. What do you care? ’Tis your fault he’s dead.”

“Own your actions, Josephine.”

“Own yours.” She presented to him her back, tossing her head. “It was you who showed me your deceit. How can you expect me to watch my father fade away before my eyes while you grow ever stronger?”

I didn’t understand what was being said here. My mother had murdered my grandfather? I thought he’d died of the disease—of Ashmore’s meddling?

Ashmore speared both hands into his hair in a familiar gesture, but I could not see his face to know what it was he felt as he exhaled hard.

When he closed the distance between them, I couldn’t be sure he did not reach for her to throttle the slender column of her throat.

His hands slid over her set shoulders.

He bent, folding in on himself, until his forehead rested against her nape.

It was such a humble posture—a needy one—that my throat ached with it.

“I am sorry, Jo.”

She made a small hmph! sound, as if to indicate these words were not enough.

Ashmore’s chuckle sounded more pained than not. “I never expected that my line would ever produce something as brilliant as you.”

My mind reeled at the implications. Before I could wrap my intellect fully about it, Josephine spun in his arms, catching his hands in hers. Her face had transformed once more, a sunny smile all but brightening the room she occupied. “Do you mean it?”

“I do,” he replied, brushing a kiss over her knuckles. “Your father’s fate was already sealed, long before I…” Pained determination flitted behind his eyes. “I am sorry for that, Jo. You will never know how much.” Another kiss. “I will refrain from pursuing my purpose anymore.”

Her eyes widened, shimmering pools of green adoration. “But, Oliver, what of your vow?”

“Sod the vow. I will wither and die before I harm one hair on your head.”

I held my breath.

Josephine searched his face, such delight upon hers. “You say the most delightful things.” She stepped back, clutching his hands in hers, until they were arm’s reach apart. For a moment, they stood in such sweet balance; dancers preparing for the orchestra.

Her smile hardened. “You fool.”

Surprise caused me to take some steps forward—a mistake, for the scene jarred itself back into place around me. Vertigo slithered through my head, forcing me to shake it clear before I could see properly again.

She dropped his hands, and now faced him with her fingers laced by her waist. “You hold the key to immortality in your grasp,” she spat, venom now clear in her demeanor, “and you would squander it for what? Love?” She scoffed. “What has love ever achieved?”

“Josephine.”

“Don’t speak to me.” She swept aside, her skirts trailing the floor with a harsh echo. “You’re weak. You always have been.”

He reached out, but a flare of violet shattered the air before his fingers. An answering light sparked from the ground, and we both looked down to find Ashmore caught squarely in the patterned circles.

Josephine’s laughter sent fingers of remembered fear through me.

I knew that sound. It had haunted me all these long months; laughter in my dreams, chasing me through my nightmares.

Ashmore’s hand left the barrier. “You cannot hope to mirror what I’ve accomplished.” He turned as Josephine circled him, mindful of the symbols before her feet. Now I saw him fully, the harsh lines of his pale features, his eyes glittering green and brown.

This was not the bearing of the love-blinded. This was the fury of a man scorned.

“Free me from this circle, Jo.”

She scoffed again, flicking her fingers in a gesture eerily similar to one I employed. “Stay within and rot. I will prise the secrets of your immortality from you.”

“You cannot hold me.”

“I have labored to ensure I can,” she replied.

Ashmore studied the circle at his feet. His lips curved into a sad smile. “You have failed.” With no more preamble, he flung one hand against the barrier. It sparked, flashed so brightly that Josephine turned away as violet cracks rippled through the barrier.

She slashed an H into the air. “Hamaxa,” she cried out as the air in the laboratory shuddered.

Ashmore’s fingers splayed in the wash of light. “Not enough.”

What came of that, I was not to see, for the vision changed, dragging me along with it. Exhaustion plumbed my body and mind.

Bloody bells and damn it all, I had only wanted to sleep.

As though I were nothing more than a ghost myself, I watched as the music room long since abandoned coalesced into view. Josephine leaned over the keys, her fingers plucking a harmony so familiar, I clutched my hands to my chest.

I had played this. This stunning melody filled the room, battered at the shadows. She drove at the keys, as if she might force all her emotion through the notes.

The door slammed open. The music abruptly shuddered to a silence, though Josephine did not turn.

Ashmore did not enter. “Your carriage to London is here. Are your things packed?”

“I am prepared.” She turned, gathering her elegant violet skirts from around her feet, and rose. Fury scalded the air in her wake as she walked with undying dignity to where he waited. “Are you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Your fate is sealed, Josephine. The portrait is completed. You know the conditions.”

Her mouth twisted. When she made to pass him, his fingers curled around her nape, halting her progress.

“Never think to betray me again.” It was not a kind warning, for all he spoke it in soft reminder.

She did not look at him. “I will think nothing else until the end of my days.”

His fingers tightened. “And if I murder you here?”

Her chin lowered, hands tight at her waist. Her lips curved, but her smile was not kind, for all it seemed directed to Ashmore’s feet. “By your own foolish vow, you cannot. You would not risk so much of your self-worth on a moment’s satisfaction.”

Stark pain registered upon his face. For a breathless moment, I was not certain that her jibing reminder would be enough. I reached out, his name on my lips; not that I could affect anything here in my imprisoned theater.

His hand dropped. “So it would seem.”

Her smile turned to the satisfied curve of a woman who knew she had won. “Honor will get a man of your standing killed, you know.”

“If you truly want to see me dead,” he told the crown of her head, “all you need to do is refrain from conceiving a child.”

She looked up. “Why?” I saw in his face that he had an answer to that, but he did not reply. She frowned. “Why would you put your fate in my hands?”

Still, he said nothing; he did not need to. The way he searched her face was hungry, yet terribly restrained.

Her frown eased. “Why, Oliver,” she said, a purr of sweet mockery. “Do you mean to suggest that after all that, you still love me?”

His smile lacked humor. “Love is not so easily purged. I assure you, I will spend a great deal of time trying.”

She blinked. Then, with a sigh, she told him, “You truly are a fool.” Leaving no opportunity to draw out a farewell, my mother brushed past.

Strands of her hair clung to his shoulder as she did. A look of such pain filled his eyes, I clutched at my heart.

I knew such loneliness.

The ache within his gaze only banked when he closed his eyes against it.

For a long moment, he did not move.

I wanted to go to him, to wrap my arms about him in an embrace that would assure him that he was not so alone as he felt—yet, I could not bring myself to do more than think it.

Ashmore’s secrets were too weighty to bear alone, and too incomprehensible to me to understand. All I knew for certain was that my mother had betrayed him, as he had betrayed me.

What tangled webs had been woven in this house long before my birth?

Only once he was certain was she gone, when silence filled the house and left nothing but the whispering wind in its wake, did Ashmore bow his head.

I braced for another scene to come, another thing too intimate for my comfort, but the large library revealed by the fading black divulged no occupants. I took a breath, prepared to endure whatever it was I would be shown, and smelled the fragrance of old parchment, books and dust, and the last gasp of a fire dying to embers.

My nose twitched.

The night pressed in against the windows.

I looked up, saw the white cloth masking my mother’s portrait, and swayed. Relief filled me; it found no purchase beside the doubts slogging through my haze. I was once more myself, though I had no recollection of how I came here. I felt rattled, jarred out of place, as alien in my skin as I often felt in the Society soirees I’d hated.

My body ached as it had not in ages, worse still than anything else I had suffered once sobriety had become my normality.

I turned, lace swirling about my ankles. Feeling returned to my limbs, and as my fingers cramped against hard edges, I looked down to find myself clutching the scorched book my mother had shown me within the laboratory.

Black soot from the charred cover appeared like bruises against the bright yellow silk I wore. This gown was eerily similar to that my mother had worn when she’d come to me in the lab, designed to fit across the bodice and high-waisted in the style of her time. Like the blue dress I’d woken once to find myself wearing, it did not fit as it should.

It was not my choice to put it on.

Had I any more choices truly my own? The dreams I endured, the need for the laudanum, these did not allow me the choice—they chose for me. I was forced to crave, forced to watch, forced to wear the things I did not want to wear. The forces puppeting me at my most vulnerable were determined to turn me into the woman I did not want to be.

I was tired. I was so tired of being anything but myself.

Yet I could not fathom who I was to be.

I had spent my life in the fog of opium, and now I lived as the puppet of a woman I had—for a mere fraction of a time—thought to be the loving mother I’d never realized that I’d needed. Not only through manipulations, but so literally as to be nearly impossible to believe.

I understood now what it was I’d failed to note prior.

The red threads that had haunted my dreams, the laughter I’d first heard on my father’s laboratory table. How long had the spirit of my mother been haunting me?

How often had she taken over my body?

I recalled now the sight of the world stripped of mortal limitation, Eon’s ability revealing the threads of quintessence, of aether, as it shaped the world. Within me, within my hand, there had been a crimson skein.

My mother’s influence. Red as blood; red as rubies—red as the color of the hair we both shared.

How stupid I was to discount the reality that had so haunted my opium-fueled existence.

In that willful ignorance, I had hurt my friends.

A glimpse of Maddie Ruth’s plaintive features slipped into my thoughts. My knees buckled. I sank to the floor, hunched over the book I hugged to my chest and squeezed my eyes closed. Breathing deeply brought a faint fragrance of lilies to the whole, and I buried my face against my knees before it caused my nose to run.

It did nothing to change my circumstances.

I was alone. In the depths of the house I despised, I heard the measured groan of a structure whose foundation was as immersed in lies as it was in the harsh English heath it resided upon.

So much betrayal in one place.

Within one family.

And I had only added my hand to the lot.

The book trapped between my chest and upraised knees smelled like old coal and dusty pages; almost enough to mask the perfume causing my nose to burn and itch.

Lifting my head, I turned the tome over in my hands. The parts scarred and bubbled by flame were rough against my fingers, leaving soot to turn my skin gray. A familiar enough sight. I had spent long nights covered in the stuff as I tended to my collections in London low.

I found the ribbon and opened the book to the page it marked. I could not gather my thoughts enough to place the handwriting, but I knew it was not my mother’s or my grandfather’s. As worn and beaten as the book was, it could have come from anywhere.

Huddled on the floor, I labored to piece together the fragments of formula.

When the nature of it clicked, as a key into a lock, my heart slammed.

I could do this.

With some effort, the result could be achieved. The symbols I did not recognize could be learned—yet even as I thought so, a whisper of memory came to me.

Aether and opium. The first was marked by three triangles around a circle. Mr. Pettigrew had shown me that one.

As for the latter, it was simply designated with a shortened lp, with the last letter given a bold underline. Lachryma papaveris. The tears of the poppy.

Aether and opium. The very root of that formula that my father had attempted to force upon me.

My mother demanded that I undo what Ashmore had done; I had thought she meant to confront Ashmore, defeat his villainy once and for all, and free her from this spiritual prison.

This formula corrected my naïve assumption. It was not freedom to attend an afterlife she wanted, but the autonomy of life itself.

I held the key.

So be it. I would break this cycle once and for all.

Ashmore’s willful lies. My mother’s deceptions.

I could not be certain which of the two retained the most truth, but I knew neither could be allowed to continue as they were.

A ghost and a madman. Always, such Gothic tales come down to one or the other. It seemed my particular story involved both.

I needed to find the madman, at least; Ashmore retained flesh and body enough that if he would not help, he could be a dangerous hindrance.

I turned for the door, but hesitated.

Was I prepared to take on the man who had been there for me at my most vulnerable? I had trusted him. I’d thought him a lover, a man to help me ease from opium’s blissful succor, and I’d come to see him as something of a mentor.

I might not be alive were it not for him.

Did I have the strength within me to run him to the ground if he proved recalcitrant to my demands?

I lifted my chin.

In this, I would not prove the weaker.

“Ashmore!”

Sprinting out of the library, I called again for him. When I heard no reply, I searched his study, traveled the halls I knew, found the kitchens.

I found nothing.

I hurried up the stairs, the book tucked into my arm, and hammered on Maddie Ruth’s closed door. “Maddie Ruth? Are you there?”

When I heard no answer, I attempted the knob and found it unlocked.

Stepping inside revealed that she was not within. The room was dark, hearth cold, and the bed clean and unrumpled. I did not bother to peer behind the furniture, for the outcome was certain—Maddie Ruth had not been here for some time.

Had I hurt her so badly?

The lack of timepieces in this bloody manor was enough to drive a sane woman mad, and I still wasn’t certain that I was sane. That I ambulated about muttering of ghosts and alchemy was sign enough of my rattled wits. The house seemed to echo around me, offering no sign of companionship in its creaking depths.

Had it been days since I drank down Ashmore’s laudanum? Hours?

The haze had left, leaving a muddled sort of awareness behind, but I did not think myself so far gone as to still be dreaming.

Did they truly leave me?

I hurried to Ashmore’s chosen chamber farther down the hall.

This, too, mirrored Maddie Ruth’s—dark and cold. The drapes had been left open, revealing snow as it drifted beyond the window pane. It was eerily pale, glittering in the night as such infinitesimal stars might should they fall from the sky.

This was no sort of weather to be out and about in.

Had I been abandoned so suddenly? His valise was not in view; had he taken it with him?

Was that flask of red laudanum no longer here?

Thinking of it brought a ball of need to my throat so large, it was all I could do to breathe around it.

I wanted it. I craved it, the bliss it would bring me and sweet forgetfulness. That small sampling I’d taken earlier, for all it emptied half the contents, was not enough.

Yet as I dug my fingernails into the charred binding of the book I carried, I remembered the look of desperation upon Maddie Ruth’s face as she’d begged me to reconsider.

I had nearly killed her in my foolishness, and still she pleaded for my well-being.

“Leave her,” Ashmore had commanded.

So cold.

Regardless, the secrets I untangled surely put my own actions to shame. Josephine claimed to kill her father to keep him from Ashmore’s hands, yet I could not fathom the cold-bloodedness required for such an act.

Had she learned that from Ashmore? The man sired a line, utilized his own blood to advance his longevity. Few could be so monstrous as to sacrifice one’s own blood over and over.

And still, I did not understand why he warned my mother to refrain from bearing a child. Did he want to die?

I could not look at the bed where I had spent those hours. In all honesty, it was not the relations that bothered me quite so much. After three hundred years—a number that stuttered in my reasoning, for such a thing seemed so impossible—there was no concern of blood too close. By and large, many of Society’s kissing cousins were a great deal closer, and their marriages raised no eyebrows.

Oliver Ashmore—Nicholin Folsham, I supposed—was certainly not my cousin, and we’d done so much more than exchange kisses.

Was all of it the ruse it appeared to be?

Shivering, I left Ashmore’s chamber and made my way once more down the stairs to the foyer.

Every step ached. I had hoped that a taste of the bliss would once more turn my body invulnerable to such concerns, but I still hurt.

I could not let it stop me. If I had truly been abandoned, I needed to know for certain. The only method that would reveal my circumstance was a visit to the stables.

I could not imagine Ashmore leaving without his hounds. If they remained ensconced comfortably in the stables, then I knew Ashmore must be about somewhere—sulking, perhaps.

Or seeing to Maddie Ruth’s injuries.

With all my heart, I would make this up to Maddie Ruth ere this was done.

In the murky light afforded by the raw ambience of the windows and the pale snow fluttering outside, I appraised the portico I had struggled so hard to avoid entering when first Ashmore delivered me to this frightful place.

It was wider than expected, each panel made of oak and larger than I was accustomed to seeing in the forefront of any home. I had not visited any bucolic estates in my time, leaving me to wonder if it were simply a statement of wealth and flamboyance. Guests would arrive to the large doors, sweep inside and be greeted by the lavish dual staircase beyond.

Tiny white fingers of ice and snow danced along the panes inset in each, though the faceted glass fractured the light into pale shattered moonlight beyond.

Would I find naught but emptiness behind this door? A ghostly wail drifted from the dark and wintry moor, echoing a shuddering groan from somewhere behind me.

Dreamlike in its being, I hesitated between two lonely worlds—that of the creaking mausoleum that had taken the remnants of my family and turned it all to shadow and dust, and the treacherous heathland covered in a blanket of glittering ice.

Both promised isolation. Emptiness.

Possibly even death.

Instinct, driven and sharp as blades, demanded that I remain inside where it was warmer, safe. Were I to step one foot beyond the threshold, I knew without knowing how or why or even what that I would lose.

I would lose something important.

Rubbish, certainly, for there was no life for me here. Only ghosts and a madman.

The mysteries of the crumbling estate called Siristine had proven too much for me, after all.

Bracing myself against the cold I expected, I seized the doorknob and threw the door wide.

At the same moment, a wild howl arose across the night. Wind sheared through my gown, blew my hair over my shoulder in a fan of red. I shivered as icy claws dragged into my skin. The moor was hungry this night.

Before my eyes, a figure covered in shards of sparkling white convulsed. Hunched, twisted, it unfolded like a thing torn between ice and shadow. Pale gray glittered in the faint light afforded by the drifting snow.

Surprise and fear wrapped into a strangled noise as a long, thin limb lashed out.

There was no glint of moonlight through translucent form, no sparks of ghostly power. What struck my temple was solid and real.

I spun from the impact. My sight turned white. The book fell from my flailing grasp, to thud hard against the floor and fall open, pages fluttering in the wintry wind.

I collapsed to the cold floor beside it, my suddenly numb fingers a mere reach from the threshold I sought.

As I fought my shattered consciousness, the figure crept slowly into view.

Filthy garments. Matted gray hair.

Pale, owlish eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” a voice said, a worried mutter. “Don’t be hurt, now. Don’t cry.” It bent to pick up the fallen book with spindly fingers and blackened nails.

My lashes fluttered closed.

Chapter Twenty-One

The bright light bore a blue cast to it, edging away darkness and the smothering sense of heaviness I struggled to surface from.

My head throbbed terribly, but not so much that I could not hear the shuffle of feet upon stone flooring. The same floor provided no pillow for my back.

It smelled of stale air and gathered dust, as all things in this house did.

I cracked open my eyes, only to groan as the brilliant blue-white light of the laboratory’s show globes seared through my sight.

So I’d been carted all the way to the laboratory. I raised my hand to shield my gaze while I struggled to gather the rest of my senses.

Discarded, as a broken toy might be by an absent-minded child, I lay unwatched and alone between two worktables. To my right, a series of flasks and spherical, long-necked retorts bubbled and hissed.

To my left, mortar and pestle were left among an array of old books, each cracked open and left to dampen in the cold air. I seized the edge of the table to drag myself to my feet. In the mortar, gold dust glinted in soft sheen.

Beside it, a squashed globule of brown tar caught my eye—and my senses.

My fingers cramped against the table’s edge. My throat closed.

I could think of so many reasons to reach for that opium. Sweet medicine, Turk’s delight, I could take a bite from it to ease the pain in my head, and to settle my nerves. I knew as inarguable fact that it would make that what I needed to accomplish so much easier—both to achieve and to bear.

Guilt—my old, familiar companion—twisted in my belly.

“Cinnabar and arsenic,” came a strained mutter. “Poppy tears, yes, yes. What is that? What is it?”

I tore my gaze from the innocuous brown tar.

It was to ginger hair that they focused upon first.

Bold copper hair flown wild and swept back from pale skin. Blood, fresh enough to gleam in the unwavering light, stained the back of a torn shirt, crimson where the shirtsleeves met the blackened hem of a dusty waistcoat.

Ashmore sat within the innermost ring created by the triple circles, his back to me and shoulders rounded. Beside him, curled around his hip as though dropped where she lay and left abandoned, Maddie Ruth lay in utter stillness.

“Maddie Ruth!” My worry slipped from me, startled and shrill. The graveled voice muttering beyond the carved circle in the laboratory floor ceased.

Ashmore’s shoulders stiffened, but he did not turn. Instead, a long, protective hand curled around Maddie Ruth’s shoulder.

Still, she did not move. If she breathed, I could not see it.

“Stop!” Porcelain shattered upon stone; a sound so loud as to send echoes like birds flocking for safe escape.

I jumped, my heart surging with surprise and raw fear.

“Awake, she’s awake now. We can begin, my precious girl, see?”

I took a step towards the carved circles, but the muttering sharpened.

“Wait. No. No, no, poppet, leave that one be. Dangerous, yes, dangerous.”

Slowly, gripping my skirts in my aching hands, I turned to the wasted, gaunt figure beckoning me with hurried, secretive motions.

His hair was stringy and gray, standing on end about a skeletal rictus framed by a matted beard nearly all white. His clothing hung on him, lashed into place with strips of other bits of cloth. His feet were bare against the cold stone, toes blackening at the tips. He looked a ghastly shade of gray, his skin stretched taut over his thin features. It mirrored the gaunt thinness of his limbs.

His eyes sparkled. Pale as a cloudy winter sky.

My penny dreadful tale now involved one ghost, two madmen.

And me.

Never, in any of my wildest imaginings, had I thought to face this man again. “Shush,” he hissed when I opened my mouth. “Little ears are all about. Come, come.” Begrimed fingernails gestured. “Come here, poppet, there’s a girl.”

I glanced at Ashmore’s back, but he did not turn his head to regard me. He did not acknowledge me. Cradling Maddie Ruth’s motionless figure, he did nothing else.

Why did he not break free of the circle as he once had before?

“Cherry,” hissed the emaciated vision.

My feet felt as though lead weights had banded to them.

I could not let on my fears now. If I did, if I gave any thought to the conclusion I’d reached, I was afraid that I would betray my knowledge. I did not know if my mother was present, or if she simply occupied the flesh that was mine and claimed it when she could, but I strove hard to empty my thoughts.

I filled them instead with a recounting of the Trumps.

It always started with a fool.

Taking a deep breath, I raised my chin, straightened my spine, and strode past the stone etchings with care.

Silver glinted from within some of the carved symbols surrounding Ashmore’s prison. A bit of liquefied gold filled the channels, hardened now to a solid state.

I wanted to prod at the designs, to peer at which had been filled with noble metals and which were left alone, but doing so might tip my hand.

Not that I had much of a hand to play. Not yet.

I passed Ashmore without a glance, though my foot came down in a bit of blood that squelched beneath my weight. The feeling this invoked was the same as if I’d stepped unwittingly upon a garden slug. Every fine hair on my nape lifted.

I swallowed down a cry, compelled myself to approach the wildly beckoning creature.

“Hello,” I said, coming to a stop not far from the outstretched hand. Forcing my hand to remain steady, gritting my teeth as every nerve within me demanded I run, I took his filthy, spindly fingers in mine. “Father.”

Behind me, I heard Ashmore curse.

The wide, pale eyes behind a curtain of grimy hair shone brightly as he beamed a near toothless smile upon me. Abraham St. Croix, or what was left of the mad doctor my father had been, furrowed his bushy gray eyebrows at me. “There you are,” he scolded, tugging at my hand as he pattered back to the table he’d abandoned. “You naughty girl, you made us worry so.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. It came harsh from my throat. Tears filled my eyes, but I could not let them fall, and so I cleared my throat and said with greater force, “I was delayed by Ashmore’s efforts.”

A pop of violet light flared behind me. “Cherry, get away from here!”

I turned, unable to help myself, and nearly faltered with relief when I saw Ashmore standing. The amount of blood saturating his clothing from the back had looked too large to indicate a small wound.

His glower, his fierce fury, could all be addressed later.

“Why did you come?” he demanded. The desperation upon his face tugged at my heart.

I said nothing, unable to say the words that would brand him a traitor. If I offered encouragement, comfort, then it would betray my true intentions.

I turned my back.

St. Croix scoffed, a whispering hiss that I did not realize was laughter until I saw his emaciated shoulders shaking with it.

I’d found the doctor and the alchemist, as mad as they came, but where was the ghost?

“Father,” I began gently.

He stopped laughing as though I’d pulled a switch. “What is it?” he demanded, abruptly irritable. His shoulders moved as that of a vulture or creeping bird of prey, thin enough that I could easily see the bones from the gaping collar of his too-loose shirt. “Why do you wait? Get to work, girl. All will be as it was.”

The echo of the phrase he’d prattled on to me those months ago did not frighten me this time. Abraham St. Croix was not the man he’d been, even then when he was already quite mad. This was a frailer version of the doctor who had bound me, prepared to sacrifice me for the woman he loved. If he came for me now, even in my weakened state, I could handle him easily.

Whatever he had gone through after being stabbed through the heart, whatever sorceries or alchemical mysteries had saved him, it had all taken too great a toll.

I pitied him.

I thought of reaching out to him, but he had made no move to touch me since dropping my hand. Instead, he busied himself arranging the bowls upon the table from smallest to large. He continued to murmur to himself, though only the odd word made itself clear.

I leaned closer, though the fragrance of his unwashed body was eye-wateringly sour. “Father, have you been watching over me?”

He looked blindly down at the work table, his hands held out as though reaching for something. Yet he did not move. Instead, his beard twitched. When he tilted his head sidelong, his gaze did not quite fall on me. “Shall I tell her? Shall I share watching her with the noose about her delicate neck?”

“Cherry, damn it,” Ashmore growled. “Look at me!”

I ignored him, my innards twisting into a complex knot of uncertainty, guilt, fear, and in an awfully roundabout way, gratitude. “Did you fetch Ashmore to save me?” A gentle inquiry. I was not sure if saying the man’s name would provoke a lapse into high emotion.

To my relief, St. Croix shrugged his bony shoulders. “Couldn’t see me,” he muttered, looking down at his gnarled hands. “Couldn’t be seen. Pushed the wardrobe, kicked the foot out.”

“And then Ashmore came running,” I filled in.

The overlarge head on his skeletal frame bobbed.

I wasn’t certain what to say. As he busied himself at the table once more, I forced myself not to glance at the circles behind me. Instead, fingers clenching at my side, I whispered, “Thank you.”

If he heard me, he did not say so.

“I am at your service,” I added. “What shall I do?”

“What?” The bowl he’d cupped clattered to the table. He shot me an irascible glare from under tightly knitted eyebrows. “What’s the matter with you, girl? Pay attention.” He jerked his head; not a tic, for I followed the line of his chin and saw the old, charred book beside him.

Smudges of grime were left on the pages. Fresh writings decorated the margins, but I could not make heads nor tails of what it said. The hand mirrored closely the writing on the pages, were it not for the sharp departure from sanity that colored the new ink.

So this was my father’s original journal.

I had, after all, asked for journals from my family. Only fate would be so cruel as to deliver them like this.

On cautious feet, I approached the book. He growled something without words, but his fingers trembled as he arranged the bowls to his exacting standards. “Is this the formula that will keep Ashmore from preying upon mother?”

“Yes.” A low hiss. His beard shook with it as he curled his lips back. “Finish it, poppet. Finish what I can’t. I can’t see it anymore, you understand?” The tips of his fingers grazed the bowl he framed. It shuddered. “I can’t see it. Only you can make it right.”

“Is mother all right?”

He froze. Eerily still, he stared down at the bowl he cradled, then turned his head so slowly, a whisper of disquiet shuddered down my spine.

Whoever—whatever—this man was, he was not my father. Not anymore. Barely anything sane peered out at me from the windows of his diamond pale sight.

“You’re fine,” he said, rather more steadily than I’d expected. His shoulders smoothed, his mouth eased into a more natural smile as he faced me. “Aren’t you, my girl?”

Of course. I hadn’t ever been his girl.

I was not my mother, but Abraham St. Croix had never truly understood that. Not when he’d filled me full of opium and aether, and not now, in the height of his lunacy. He thought I was Josephine now, and it was better that I leave him to his illusions.

I inclined my head and forced resolve through my jangling nerves. “Of course,” I murmured. “What was I thinking? I’m quite fine.”

His smile brightened. “Then let us attend to our magnum opus, shall we?” He held out a hand that would have been considered gentlemanly and quite dashing, were it not for the filthy and malnourished thinness of his fingers. Yet his smile did not fade as he watched me with unabashed adoration.

I took his hand despite my revulsion. “Tell me what you have accomplished thus far,” I said softly, “and I shall see to the rest.”

His laughter squealed. The grip on my fingers tightened, painfully so, and I watched what brief sanity he’d re-gathered crumble to nothing. Shoulders hunching once more, he tugged on me so hard I stumbled.

“See,” he cackled. “See what I’ve done for you? See, poppet, how easy it will be. Look, look.” He proffered a bowl, its contents settling into dry bits of muted green and brown. “This is for you.” The bowl hit the table, flecks scattering across the surface.

I reared back when another, smaller bowl was thrust beneath my nose. The silver contents within sloshed close to the rim.

“This too,” he cried, gaping smile a crooked slash in his beard.

“Quicksilver,” I managed, identifying the liquid by its mirror-like shine.

St. Croix made as though to tip the contents into his mouth.

“Don’t do that,” I gasped, reaching for him.

He danced out of the way, cackling madly. “No, no,” he admonished. “Not for drinking, is it, poppet? Mustn’t go wasting the prima materia on just anything. Yes? Yes?”

Mercury, called quicksilver for its gleam, was often considered the prima materia from whence all matter could be formed. Primitive and pure.

He showed me others, but he did not name them. There was no need; I recognized most. Opium, aether, mercury, cinnabar and arsenic.

Gold dust, as well. Prima materia could create gold, in theory, yet that wasn’t all it could do. When banded with gold, it would create an alloy of something else depending on what ingredients might then be added to it.

My mind reeled as I worked through the evidence laid out before me.

The serum I was to create was the very same that St. Croix had forced upon me in that Thames Tunnel laboratory. I thought I’d recognized elements of the formula, but had not realized exactly what the fusion had entailed.

St. Croix shuffled to the distillation rack, trilling a monologue I could not wholly catch as it rose and fell. I turned, found my glance snared by Ashmore’s searing stare.

Unable to look away, he raised a deliberate eyebrow at me. Maddie Ruth slumbered at his feet, her hair a curtain over her face.

I gritted my teeth. No matter how conflicted I felt about the man’s past, his secrets and his lies, I did not wish him dead. Saying so, even hinting at this, might cost us both. “Break out, if you’re so offended.”

His jaw set.

“He can’t,” called my father, laughing when Ashmore’s mouth flattened in response. “The fool, laid low by love.” The word spat from him, causing the open flame before his face to flicker against the base of the retort it heated. The vapors inside wafted unevenly.

Ashmore’s gaze did not leave me, despite the taunt.

I looked away. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t know, did you, poppet?” My father nudged a beaker into position, studied its placement for a moment, then shuffled away from the table. He approached a large armoire, twice the size of the one in Ashmore’s chosen study. “The magician has a secret.”

He’d called me poppet. In his eyes, I was myself once more, so I phrased my question simply. “That he loved my mother?”

The door to the armoire cracked hard as my father’s arm jerked on the swing. A wild chirp of birds accompanied my suddenly pounding heart.

Mad St. Croix bent to retrieve that what he wanted.

I did not glance again at Ashmore, afraid that I might inadvertently see that awful pain I knew instinctively he did not want to share.

When the wild-haired man popped back upright, he was smiling once more. In his arm, a cage. A flutter of wings inside revealed a small bird, whose frantic chirrup only made St. Croix’s calm all the stranger. “Did he tell you?” he asked, nonchalant as he shuffled to the distillation rack once more. “Did you know when you set out to seduce him?”

My cheeks burned. “I didn’t—”

“Oh, tosh,” he snorted. He set the cage down upon the floor, then knelt to open the small catch and seize the flailing creature in one fist. “Such things occurred before our marriage, I know, I know.” He said the words soothingly, a gentle reassurance to the panicked bird. “I should not hold such things against you, my girl. I know.”

There were those who might go quietly, fashionably insane—men of towering intellect whose foibles might be forgiven. I had always imagined Abraham St. Croix to be one of these, long before I’d ever come face to face with the truth in London. His guise as the sweet and absent-minded Professor Woolsey was much more what I’d thought my father might have been. Even that split from his true face as Mad St. Croix, less sweet and far more dangerous for it.

The months following his ineffective murder had not been kind to an already crumbling façade.

St. Croix plucked a blade from the table beside him and held the bird above the warm glass beaker.

“Wait,” I whispered.

His moon-pale eyes flicked to me.

“How did you get Ashmore here?” I asked, hoping to forestall this bit of grisly necessity. I was not squeamish as a rule, not about matters of science or experimentation, but the mad fluttering to he fragile wings captured in his spindly hand drew a lump to my throat.

He grinned, exposing his blackening teeth. “Shot him outside the stable.” He waggled the poor bird, which garbled in panicked terror. “Before the dogs, of course. Bloody dogs, howling all the time.” His other hand thumped the table, the knife glinting in the light. “It’s my house,” he growled. “I can walk where I want!”

“Including through the walls,” I asked, a faint smile forced to my mouth. “You had me quite frightened.”

St. Croix beamed like I’d offered the highest praise.

“Why is he here?” I asked. “Can’t we just—”

“Revenge!” The word crackled. “Just as you wanted, my girl. Always as you want.” St. Croix’s eyes filled, milky fluid turning his already pale gaze murky. “Yes? Yes, of course.”

“Of course,” was all I could murmur, for I couldn’t envision a solution to Ashmore’s predicament.

All I could do was hope to seize the opportunity before such revenge bore fruit.

“Now we draw the aether,” St. Croix announced, and capturing the bird’s frantically writhing throat between thumb and blade, he cleaved it in two.

The tiny head bounced to the ground.

St. Croix’s gaze held mine as he squeezed the helpless creature between his fingers. Blood dribbled into the glass container. Thicker gobbets clung to his skin.

I swallowed hard.

Aether from blood. It could be drawn from the ambient air, as Mr. Finch’s aether engines did, but this was not mechanical aptitude we spoke of now. This was alchemy, and if ’twas life we sought to perfect, then quintessence from life would create the most powerful solution.

My stomach clenched in mingled fear and abject remorse.

That bird had done nothing for this.

St. Croix dropped the twisted, fragile corpse to the ground and bent to stare into the red-rimmed glass. “This is all I can do,” he said, his mouth pulled into an abstract frown. One large eye magnified in the glass, and pinned on me through it. “You must do the rest, all right, poppet? Just like we practiced.”

“Practiced?”

When he jerked upright, I hastily raised a hand.

“All right, all right,” I said, and hefted the book as proof. “Let me go over the directives once more.”

“Quick, quick,” he muttered. “Quick as she can, she says, quick as she can. Yes, yes.” The repetitiveness of his muttering grated, but I stared down at the page and tried to concentrate.

What could I do? He’d caught me unawares, but there was a monstrous strength to his twisted body that would easily overpower me.

Even if I did manage to escape, I could not go far. Ashmore was trapped, and I couldn’t possibly leave him in that circle.

Silver and gold melted into the symbols. Which symbols?

“Need to say the words,” he said, poking at various tubes set up in the rack. “The words, what were they? I’m sorry, my dear, I can’t recall. Something clever, something ever so pointed for—” he caught himself, stuttering over whatever he’d meant to say, and I looked up from the page I stared at to find him scowling at Ashmore.

For his part, Ashmore stood motionless, his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze focused somewhere else, not here.

“Why him?” my father scoffed bitterly. “Bloody nuisance. I could have—” His hands jerked, and he turned as though something might have blown against his ear. His eyes were huge as he rubbed at his cheek. “No, no,” he hastened to say, shaking his head for emphasis. A plaintive note crept into his voice. “No, I understand. Yes, my girl, yes, yes, all will be as it was. Didn’t I promise?”

The book sank in my arms as I watched this exchange. Torn between pity and dismay, I winced as he hunched against a blow I could not see. What did he imagine?

Where did he think he stood?

“I’m sorry,” he said in broken syllables. “I’m sorry, of course I know.”

The book I held jerked, and I tightened my hold in surprise, taking a step back. The act brought me sharply against the table, sending a wicked burst of pain through my side. I winced, looking about me with wide-eyed uncertainty.

My mother was close. I had not thought her capable of affecting the material world, not without alchemical help, yet I did not imagine that tug. My father clearly saw something; his lunacy left me doubtful as to the veracity of what it was he saw. I was obviously not my mother, but could he see her ghost?

St. Croix jumped. “Are you ready?” he demanded, and I looked to find him glaring at me once more. “Hurry, hurry, the blood is nearly thin enough.”

“Yes, I will be,” I called, and focused intently upon the page. Not all the sigils written on it were known to me. Some I knew, such as Fu, for fusion. Others I thought I’d known, until I’d learned that DG’s reference to digestion was not only that of the body’s ability of the same name, but a means by which a substance would be carefully heated over a period of weeks.

This lapse, then, might indicate at least in part where Miss Hensworth’s invisibility formula had gone awry in early October. The substance she’d imbibed had weakened her body, and would have continued to do so to the point of catastrophic failure had I not found her first.

She’d chosen to take her own life rather than give in to my offer of help, but even so, I regretted that she had gone so far.

Just as I regretted that I had allowed myself to do much the same, giving up everything so that I might simply cease to exist by way of opium.

My heart stilled within me. The familiar pulse of craving I no longer welcomed gathered in its place. I closed my eyes and tried not to notice that my mouth watered at the thought of the tar that had turned so bitter.

Poor Miss Hensworth. If only she had known that the symbol for imbibition was a six-pointed star, as the Star of David. It might have saved her life, if not her sanity, to know the difference between imbibition and digestion.

I opened my eyes and turned my back upon Ashmore and St. Croix both. “Have you gathered all I need?” I asked.

“But the aether,” he insisted. “Quick, hurry!”

How to extract aether from blood? I didn’t know that one.

“You must hurry,” he demanded.

So I would be forced to complete that what had taken decades for my family to learn—and in a matter of hours, no less.

As I crossed the floor, Ashmore stirred. A flare of violet glowed beside me, sparks flying, and I jumped to the side; a useless gesture, for the light bloomed only when Ashmore attempted to cross the barrier.

His eyes seared into mine. “Don’t do this.”

I had no answer for him. I looked away. “Don’t speak to me,” I whispered.

“Cherry, don’t. Your blood is so much more important than this.”

The intensity in his voice ate at my resolve, but the words galled me. Of course it was better than this—he needed me to survive, did he not? I would not mistake his intentions again. Regardless of how I felt about him, I would not accept the burden of his life.

He and I, if we survived this, would have words. Perhaps we would scrap. Whether we drew blood from each other, tears, or apologies, his was a life I intended to hold on to—I would not walk under the burden of his corpse as I did too many others.

I approached my father’s side with the book in hand, set it down beside the distillation rack and watched the vapors as they coiled through the tubes, dripped into other containers.

My blood was only important in that it carried the madness of this entire family.

I almost laughed at that.

“Don’t listen to him,” my father said, his shoulder nudging mine. I shuddered at the feeling, for it was as though he were made only of bone.

I glanced at him to find his eyes pinned earnestly upon me. They shimmered, innocent as a child’s.

My heart hurt. Perhaps it was only wishful thinking that drew a gleam of sanity to his demeanor, but I could not stop myself from embracing it.

Of all the things I regretted, I did lament my inability to tell my father goodbye.

“Father,” I said softly. His eyes brightened some, and a long, spindly hand settled on my arm. A tear slipped over my cheek. “You are supposed to be dead.”

His smile was kind. “Come now, poppet. Didn’t I say? Didn’t I tell you? What did I say?”

I didn’t know. When I only stared at him, he patted my arm awkwardly.

He had never known how to treat his own daughter.

That was not all madness, I think. Some men are not natural fathers. I would never know for certain if mine was one.

“Didn’t I tell you that I’d learned the secret?” He leaned in, his gaze shifting left to right. “Didn’t I say I’d taken the draught I’d made for your mother?” His whisper sounded overly loud, echoing into a sibilant hiss. “It was an accident, you know, that fire. All those fools come to end me, yet I promised your mother I’d survive. I took the draught, thought to make it again.”

“Can’t you?” I asked.

The light in his eyes faded. “What for? She died. My girl. My sweet girl.”

My sweet girl.

As I heard it in my father’s voice, I remembered it crooned by the ghost of my mother, and I flinched.

“Don’t worry,” he hastened to add, gripping my forearm tightly. “Don’t worry, poppet, we can bring her back! That’s what matters now. That will bring a smile.”

Bring her back. That had always been my father’s goal, hadn’t it?

The hurt I suffered dulled to a muted twinge. How could I ever forget? This was only a repeat of the events in that laboratory those months ago. My father—mad as a whippoorwill—had not changed his tune.

But I had.

Once and for all, I would see this done.

I nodded and faced the distillation rack. Picking up a cloth, I made as though to gauge the temperature of the nearest bit of tube. I took a step forward. “I’ll just—” My foot came down heavily upon the silken hem of my gown. My hand flailed. The cloth slipped, earning a genuine cry of pain as my fingers collided with the hot beaker. It slipped from the heat source, clipped the edge of the table and fell. Glass shattered.

The blood my father had wrung from that poor bird splattered to the floor.

“No,” my father shrieked, falling to his knees and scrabbling at the bloody, too-hot pieces.

I caught at his shoulders. “Wait—Father, don’t!”

The heat did not seem to matter to him, nor did the sharp edges gouging his palms. “Josephine, Josephine.”

Such pity filled me that I could not hold back my sob. Tears spilled from my eyes. “Father. Stop, I will fix this.” He stopped resisting me, his hands falling limply to his sides. Blood covered them, though I could not distinguish what was his and what came from the spilled glass.

He looked up, large tears rolling down his filthy, weathered cheeks. “Josephine? Can you really?”

I did not flinch. “I can. Fetch me another retort.”

As a child given a task he knows is important, he clambered to his feet and scarpered off to do as I demanded.

I did not have to turn to feel Ashmore’s stare upon my back.

I could not stop to reassure him. I could not even acknowledge his concern.

I was closer to my reveal; all hinged on my next actions.

I wiped the blade my father had used upon the gown, leaving a grim smear of too-bright crimson against the material.

It was, I decided, all too apt.

My father returned, all but falling over himself to deliver the requested container. The mouth just over the twisting, reaching neck was too small to catch the blood I intended to let into it, but my father had apparently considered this, for he’d fetched a bowl as well.

“Thank you,” I told him, surprised at the courtesy.

Was it possible that something of reason still lingered behind his manic stare after all?

No. I could not think such things; not if I intended to follow through with my plans.

I laid the blade against my arm. “The blood of a bird is all well and good,” I said, pretending a confidence I did not feel. “Yet this effort requires greater sacrifice, don’t you think?” With a deft flick of my wrist and a sharp downward slide, the blade parted my flesh so quick and easily that I cut too deep in my haste. Blood welled; I gritted my teeth as pain struck a moment later, bringing tears to my eyes.

A splatter of red upon the table warned me that I’d jerked too far from my goal. Breathing through my teeth, I struggled to clear my vision.

I could not.

Thinking it, planning it, even visualizing such a thing was so much different than watching one’s own self bleed freely. I had not considered the reality of the act, which was that of pain and fear all conspiring to draw the resolve from me.

The floor dipped beneath me. Suddenly light-headed, I swayed. Blood dribbled down my arm, soaked into my bright yellow sleeve, and I cried out when it seemed as though I might simply fall.

An arm caught about my waist; skeletal fingers clamped like a vice just over my elbow. With a hard tug, I was upright again, and the wound held unerringly over the bowl I’d missed.

The awful fragrance of my father’s unwashed aroma filled my nose.

“Mustn’t spill,” he muttered. “Mustn’t spill the—” The voice halted. The fingers about my arm loosened. “What is it? What is being done?”

Making a fist, I stared not at the filthy hand wrapped about my waist and arm, but the bowl I bled into. “Distilling aether from a source guaranteed to fuel the serum,” I said, forcing calm. “It should have greater impact than a meager bird, don’t you think?”

“Do I?” My father leaned over. The smell of his breath wafted over my face, putrid and foul. It took all I had not flinch as he turned his head to smile a wide curve with yellowed teeth.

“Bright girl, poppet. Always was a bright girl,” he crooned. He shook my arm to the get the last drops from my skin. It jarred fresh needles of pain through the wound. “Mustn’t waste, mustn’t use too much. Can’t think.” His smile faded, and he let go of my waist to pat absently at his clothing. “Handkerchief. Where’s…?”

I covered my wound with a hand, bending my arm to seal it against my own sleeve. “No need,” I said. “Won’t you please pour the fluid into a fresh retort?” I pointed to the spherical flask. “We’ll begin distillation immediately.”

“Yes.” The old, filthy creature blinked at me, his owlish stare filled with glee. “Yes! She hadn’t thought of this, did she? Of course. Blood to blood.”

Blood to blood was exactly what I was counting upon. As Abraham St. Croix poured my blood into the glass with great care, it was all I could do not to look at Ashmore.

Two of this old house’s mysteries were now solved. The sense of paranoia I’d attributed to my fears, and my own sleepwalking adventures.

One ghost and two madmen, isn’t that what I’d said? The men were here, one imprisoned and one barely cognizant of reality.

Now, I would have to encourage the ghost to attend this morbid family reunion.

Chapter Twenty-Two

It took two hours or so to prepare the serum directly. I worked in silence save when I needed to offer direction to my father, whose faculties seemed to come and go.

Sometimes he spoke to me as his daughter, others as his wife. On occasion, he spoke to me as if he had no recollection of who I was, but some company was preferred to none at all.

Ashmore did not try to capture my attention again. He did not have to. I was desperately cognizant of the blood upon him, and the lines of pain carved into his features as he watched us work. Maddie Ruth still did not stir, which worried me greatly.

There were moments, especially when I found myself frustrated by aspects of the formula I chased, when I would suddenly find myself embroiled in a task I had not realized I’d started. That was often the time I caught my father talking to me as though I was Josephine.

When I looked, whatever task I’d completed in such a fugue was exactly that what the formula demanded.

Still, all of this preparation was little more than basic science. That I could extract aether without help from one of Mr. Finch’s patented devices was a small victory, yet the time for real alchemy was quickly arriving.

The thought covered me in a cold, nervous sweat.

What if I couldn’t do it?

I could not ask for comfort from either man. The one lacked reason with which to function. The other was a prisoner of an alchemical circle he couldn’t break, and showing him any favor now would alert my captors as to my true loyalties.

No one could know that I intended to free Ashmore and Maddie Ruth.

It was for that reason that I focused all my being upon the formula before me.

It took time, and my forearm throbbed and ached with every gesture. The blood slowed, scab forming quickly. It hurt, but I could function; I did so without complaint. Finally, exhausted and jangled to manic attentiveness, the hardest part arrived.

Gold and opium mixed with quintessence pulled from my blood. The remnants of my blood had become useless, which I hadn’t accounted for. I should have been more careful when I’d cut myself the first time.

The mercury had acted as a base, while I believed that the arsenic served as part of the key to separating spirit and body. A certain kind of death needed to be achieved, which made me consider that the serum was a great deal more complex than I had originally appreciated.

Opium to separate the anima from the material base of the body. Arsenic to physically create that aspect of death, so that a new anima could inhabit the discarded body. Aether to bind it all.

The rest to stabilize the serum itself and draw out previously locked qualities in each, for such things required more effort than simple mixing.

“Father?”

He started, a snort escaping from his throat. “Eh?”

I closed the book with a loud snap. “Why aren’t you doing this yourself?”

“Eh.” He swayed in the manner of a drunk man, but he had not imbibed anything. I’d not even seen him eat.

Was that concoction he spoke of the reason he still lived? Had he truly and by accident discovered the secret to immortality?

I could barely believe it, but he’d said himself that he’d taken the cure he’d meant for his wife. Had she taken it, she might have remained alive forever—illness or otherwise. Looking at him now, I wondered if my mother might have turned into something like him.

The walking dead, for all intents and purposes.

I did not know what it would take to end him. I was not positive I had it within me to try. My father had supposedly been killed in a laboratory fire, but was not. He’d taken my mother’s serum and escaped. Nearly twenty years later, he was stabbed through the heart, and still he had not died.

Now he was here before me, a stranger wearing the skeletal grin of an ambulatory corpse with a madman’s mind.

He waved his bony hands at me. “Used to,” he confessed, then kicked at the ground as a child scolded. “Used to be able to do it, didn’t I, Josephine? Never as skilled as you, I know, I know, but I tried.”

I couldn’t keep up with how often he transferred my identity in his faltering mind. I said nothing.

Perhaps he had simply fallen too far into madness to draw upon his knowledge.

I turned away from the worktable.

Ashmore lay slumped in the circle, his already pale skin now deathly white. He hunched over Maddie Ruth, as if in his last moments, he might use his body to keep hers safe.

My heart leapt into my throat, but I forced myself to keep turning, until I faced instead the crucible we’d chosen to house the serum.

I donned the heavy gloves my father provided and cracked open the small door. It was shaped as a stove, though its temperatures could reach far beyond the normal. Using tongs and great care, I reached through the shimmering waves of heat to extract a heavy clay bowl.

“Easy,” whispered my father. “Easy. No spilling it, now, or we’ll start all over again.”

“I know,” I muttered, arms shaking with the effort to hold the heavy tongs and the bowl steady. The scab forming over my wound cracked. “Lay out the tablet.”

A heavy thunk indicated he obeyed. I turned, sweat pouring down my face from the brief heat, and almost dropped the bowl upon the clay tablet laid on the work table.

The clay would absorb the heat and protect the wooden surface beneath.

I blew out a hard sigh.

“What color is it?” my father demanded, his voice strained. “What color, poppet? Is it pink? Pink like flesh? Like the sun on new skin?”

I winced. “Yes,” I said. I lay the tongs down beside the bowl, the hot ends resting on the protective tablet. Inside the clay bowl, the serum did not slosh. It was dry as dust, all liquid dried by the crucible’s heat. Yet the components had fused, as they should.

“Wasn’t it liquid before?” I asked, peering at the shimmering pink and gold contents. It looked right. The very fact my body tightened in fearful anticipation suggested I would never forget the look of the stuff that had almost killed me.

“Per deliquium.”

“What?” I frowned at him, expecting more of that mad nonsense instead of perfectly acceptable Latin.

It wasn’t insanity that filled his eyes when he looked at me, but rational approval. “Per deliquium,” he repeated. “Without the right chemical process to turn it liquid, it will absorb all moisture as salt does, but remain dry as bone.”

That was not what I wanted to hear. The first time I’d been assaulted by the stuff, it was a dust—a powder. It could be inhaled, but doing so would not allow me the result I needed.

I straightened, my back aching from so long hunched over bowls and ingredients. I stripped off the gloves. “What chemical process?” I asked, reaching for pen and ink. “I can make it for ease of delivery. Imbibition will be easier than inhalation.” I was not sure if I lied or not. The last I’d inhaled the stuff, it worked pretty quickly—but not so well that Hawke wasn’t able to undo the process.

The second time, St. Croix had injected it directly into my veins. That had been rather more touch and go. Were it not for the opium base, we would not be standing here contemplating a third attempt.

Such repetition often served a scientist well.

“Well considered,” he said, his tone bright. “In order to create a liquid base, it requires—” Without warning, he halted.

I looked up from my blank page to find him staring at me. As I watched, the light faded from his eyes. “No,” he said, shoulders hunching.

“No?”

“I’m sorry,” he continued, so quickly that I don’t think he heard me. “I’m sorry! I know it’s time, I know, but I thought to make it easier—” I did not move, but he cringed, lifting a gnarled hand to hide his face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please, forgive me. I did all you asked. I did it all, didn’t I?” He half-turned, his voice breaking. “Even when it cost me. It cost me so much, and I did it all gladly. For you, my girl, you know that.”

The understanding that fell over me did so with painful clarity. I was beginning to comprehend the nature of my parents’ relationship all too well.

I had always thought my father the driving force in this relationship, but what I viewed now turned my assumption upside down. My mother’s duplicitous nature, her easy management of Ashmore’s trust, even the way she’d convinced me that she was the wronged party, suggested now a dominant woman whose demands trumped all things.

My father might have been gifted, but it was Josephine St. Croix who guided him.

This was it. The time was now; I would not get another opportunity.

I had too long awaited this family reunion.

“Let’s talk to mother, shall we?” I lifted one hand. As calmly as if I knew what it was I did, I sketched a T into the air.

“Cherry.” Ashmore’s voice, suddenly agitated where I expected sullen or slurred. It seemed he wasn’t quite so weak as he let on.

Good.

“Cherry, don’t!”

Disregarding him, I drew a circle about my intangible letter. Summoning all I had, barely even aware of what it was I used to fuel the call, I declared the Trump. “Trina.”

It unfolded exactly as I’d seen it in my dream.

The sigil I sketched flared blue, and I felt a great drawing from me—a surge of sensory awareness that rippled from feet to forehead. If it were electricity, I imagined my hair would stand on end.

Instead, it stole the breath from me, leaving me gasping as the aether flared out from my body to bathe the laboratory in a bright blue radiance.

St. Croix screamed, covering his eyes, and even I was forced to look away, lifting my hand to block the light before it seared my sight from me.

I staggered back against the table, catching my weight with an elbow. The book fell to floor at my feet, its pages rifling in a sudden and stark wind.

Just as abruptly, it all ceased.

My heart pounded a staggered beat inside my chest. I felt somehow lighter, yet burdened with an exhaustion threatening to swamp my conscious mind. It took more dreadful effort than I feared I had, but I pushed myself once more upright to squint through the after burn in my vision.

“You surprise me, sweet girl.” My mother’s voice did not fill my head, but lilted delicately through the laboratory. “I did not think you had the means.”

I could summon no quick wit to reply. I simply shook my head as my vision cleared beneath the blue-white light of the show globes overhead.

My father huddled in a shaking, sobbing mass of gaunt skin, rattling bones and overlarge clothing. Trembling violently, his hands reached out for the vision in blue between us.

Josephine St. Croix paid him no heed. Her smile was for me, as serene and filled with pride as I had ever hoped to see from even one of my parents.

That it came on the presupposition of my murder made it all the more monstrous.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Josephine.” Ashmore’s voice cracked like a whip.

I startled, jarring the table beside me. The bowl upon its clay tablet juddered dangerously, but the contents did not puff out as I’d expected it to do. Even still, I did not realize I’d held my breath until I expelled it on a sigh of relief.

Josephine turned. Her skirts made no noise, unlike my borrowed silk, for as in my dream, it seemed as if the material below her knees faded into a mist. Her hair settled like a rippling jewel down her back.

Her smile deepened. “Oliver.”

“No.” My father’s voice quavered, weak and thready.

It was as if he did not exist. She did not spare his denial one glance, or even allot him the courtesy of a reaction.

All of her focus suddenly fastened upon Oliver Ashmore.

He stood, though he did not stand with pride as he had before. His shoulders rounded, one arm wrapped about his ribs as if useless. His face was gray with effort, sweat obvious on his skin, but his eyes blazed in furious demand. “End this nonsense.”

I half-turned, gathering my skirts in my hands and baring an expanse of leg to do so. When I reached for the cooling clay bowl, my mother’s brilliant green stare flicked to me.

With my heart in my throat, I affected a shrug. “Ignore him,” I counseled, picking up the bowl with my fabric-swathed hands. I could feel the heat of it seeping through the layers, warm enough that my fingertips tingled in warning. “I shall transfer this to an appropriate ampule.”

“Josephine, ’tis over,” Ashmore called, cutting over my nonchalance with vicious anger. “It has been over for decades. End it with dignity.”

She rounded on him, flinging an arm back to halt my father as he took a staggered step forward, a growl locked between his teeth. “Over,” she scoffed, bitterness lacing every sharp word. “Over, you say, with the privilege of the living!”

I forced myself to take measured steps to the worktable where we had left much of the glass phials and beakers—and the blade, cast aside after it had so greedily drank of my blood.

“Give it up,” Ashmore snapped. “For all your schemes, you have lost.”

“I don’t want to hear a demand of surrender from you, whose alchemical bonds deny the encroachment of the death you so gaily bestowed upon me.”

Pain simmered in my chest. Tears blurred my sight, but I could not allow them to interfere.

So much death and hatred in the air.

“Josephine.” My father’s frail whisper did not cause so much as a dent in my mother’s spiteful focus.

I glanced to St. Croix’s huddled shape, his emaciated arms wrapped around bony knees as he rocked back and forth, back and forth. His eyes remained focused upon my mother’s radiant light; a stray dog desperate for a word of love.

He would find none here.

That truth, inalienable and cruel, did more to damage my composure than the accusations of murder and betrayal behind me.

For all I’d claimed myself my father’s child, taking after his interests and pursuits, what few meetings I’d ever had with the man left me feeling little enough by way of kinship—until now.

What terrible things abandonment does to a body and mind. That was a pain I shared; the first of such empathy. We had both been abandoned by the woman who was to love us.

Biting my lip until blood flowed was all the recourse I had. I could not get caught up in pity or sorrow; I could not join the fray of words behind me. The small pain cleared my thoughts enough that I could force myself to transfer the shimmering pink contents from the clay pot to the small glass globe I chose. My hands shook, causing a fine layer of pink to scatter across the table.

Being near the stuff that had caused me so much suffering terrified me. Without it, I might never have known the pleasures, and the subsequent heartache, found in Micajah Hawke’s bed. I might never have seen my father again—might have spared myself the agony of knowing without a doubt how little I meant to the parents who sired me.

Without it, I might have never fallen in debt to the Karakash Veil, and so doing, saved myself the turmoil I felt from the ringmaster’s brutal handling.

One wrong move, and I’d find myself at the alchemical concoction’s mercies once again.

“Are you so desperate that you will murder your own child?” Ashmore called, and a cold sweat enveloped me.

I wanted to turn, to glare at him until he shut his gob, but I could not risk the act. That his accusation was a legitimate concern only made it worse. Distracting her was fine; reminding me of what was at stake increased my nerves.

I very carefully stoppered the palm-sized globe and lifted the glass to the light above. The dust clung to the sides, leaving an iridescent sheen in its wake.

“Cherry is the finest daughter I could have asked for,” my mother declared, seizing her ghostly skirts in one hand and marching towards the circle. I caught the glimmer of her luminescence as she passed me, but slanted a look at her back—and over her shoulder, at Ashmore.

He had no eyes for me. All his focus, all his attention remained fixed on the woman he loved.

Such sweet pain seemed all the easier to bear, when compared to the churning agony and fury battling for supremacy within me.

My mother’s words meant a great deal more than I wanted them to.

“My girl.” St. Croix’s shaken, desperate summons meant nothing to anyone here. He sobbed against his bony knees when Josephine spared him no attention.

Of the two, my mother was demonstrably the strongest force. He had spoken to me—to her—as though he could see her, hear her, and perhaps he always could.

It was no wonder Abraham St. Croix had turned into this shell of a creature. She must have driven him beyond all endurance.

Was it my mother that had fueled his mad scheme in London? Was it she who whispered to him in the night, cajoling him for help? For flesh and blood?

A part of me yearned to reach out a hand to this pathetic scrap of humanity—to find a glimmer of sanity, of my father, in him—but I could no longer bring myself to think of him as anything more than the man who had tried so often to murder me.

To replace me.

I had never had parents. There was no call to start now. My empathies could not halt my hand.

“Does she know?” Ashmore demanded. A crack of violet light behind me said he tested the barriers again. “Does she know how you used her when she slept unguarded?”

I suspected.

“She’s a good girl,” Josephine replied, all too satisfied with my compliance. “Utilizing her body allowed me the means to set this trap. You certainly fell into it easily enough. Did you think your apprentice would be so strong on her own?”

I winced, my fingers jerking.

Another pop of purple light, and Josephine’s laughter tinkled like silver bells. “Struggle all you like. You haven’t been harvesting the power within my portrait, have you?”

My hand closed on the blade.

Ashmore growled, accompaniment to three such flares in a row. “Had I known you clung as a ghost, I would have.”

“Still the fool,” Josephine said behind me. “Because of your moronic sentiment, your power dwindles. Could you not at least have fed from your own apprentice?” Before he could answer, her amused tone deepened to something biting and cruel. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t, can you? You’re bound to protect any child of the direct lineage until such a time as there are no more.”

Ashmore said nothing, but what was there to be said? The truth of it was so obvious. Once my mother’s spirit overtook my body, there would no longer be a line for him to feed upon.

Such was the nature of her revenge. Her reasons to have a child became clear. By having me, he thought his line assured, while she had planned to save her own life and watch his dwindle at the same time. Overtaking my body would end the cycle.

It made a poetic sort of sense.

“Torn between your vow and the last vestiges of your bond with me, tsk. How you must have looked at my portrait with such desire. Rest assured,” my mother purred, a sultry sound I remembered from the series of images I had been forced to witness. “I shall take excellent care of her without you.”

If I were my mother, I would destroy him first. After all, to live in immortality, ’tis best to remove one’s rivals immediately.

I turned, a smile pasted upon my face. The knife I held behind my back seemed heavier than it should.

That fatigue demanded my attention did not help my clarity of thought or vision.

“Mother, this—”

“One moment, sweet girl.” Josephine thrust a hand against the circle, the faint translucence of her flesh colliding with the barrier carved into the stone and sealed with noble metal. Yet where I expected resistance, I saw a colorless ripple.

Behind me, joints popped and creaked as St. Croix lurched to his feet, in a manner uncannily reminiscent of the house we occupied.

I watched in mesmerized fascination as my mother’s arm shot through the barrier, the whole swirling about her pale limb, and seized Ashmore by the throat. His chin snapped up. Though he stepped back, his heel drove into Maddie Ruth’s prostrate figure, and so snared, had nowhere left to evade Josephine’s grasp.

The lines of his throat were a blurred contrast through her ghostly hand.

What little color anger had put there now leached from his face. “Jo—” A rasp, strangled into silence.

She smiled. “Think of all that you will miss when I drain the life from you.” Her head rose, and in shock, I saw that she floated before him, dragging him closer to the barrier.

Violet sparks gathered where his skin came too close.

Angry red welts appeared beneath my mother’s fingers. Still, he did not resist as she dragged his face to hers and claimed his mouth for a kiss.

When last my mother had touched me, I remembered the burning sensation of her frozen grasp. I could not imagine what it must be to kiss those lips.

The already painful grip upon my stolen knife tightened.

Ashmore’s lips turned blue. His eyes widened, but she did not let go, bestowing upon him the sort of kiss reserved for the most intimate of lovers.

Damn him. His mouth parted for hers. His eyes closed.

“No, no…” St. Croix pushed past me, driving me to my knees as my exhausted body failed to adapt. I retained hold of knife and phial both, biting back a startled uncivility, but it cost me the ability to soften my landing.

My father did not stop. He did not see me. His lanky body sprinted towards the barrier, murder in his roar. “Don’t touch her!”

My knees cracked against the stone floor.

This time, it was no shimmer of violet light, no pop and sizzle, but a crack of thunderous noise and a blinding flash. I flinched, crying out.

A frail tangle of limbs sailed through the air like the most awkward of birds. It collided with a bookshelf, caused the items upon the shelves to tumble and fall. The astrolabe toppled over, plummeted to the stone floor and cracked.

Amidst the blinding spots left behind, I barely made out the still figure of my father, listless and awkwardly bent.

I could not help myself. I cried out, surging to my feet. Josephine watched me as I flew past the circle.

“Don’t fret, sweet girl,” she called after me, once more completely outside the barrier and looking rather unruffled—and somewhat more pink than I recalled her ghostly skin being.

Ashmore had fallen to the ground, one hand wrapped around his throat, his lips still too blue. He choked on the air he struggled to breathe.

I could not save him if I did not focus.

St. Croix did not move, even when I staggered to my knees beside him. His thin chest rose and fell, as fluttery as that of the bird he’d so willingly beheaded. His eyelids blinked rapidly, but his skeletal fingers scrabbled on the ground, skated over the books and bowls that had fallen around him.

“Father.” I hunched over him, the hand with the knife flattening over his chest and pinning the blade flat between us. “Father, can you hear me?”

His lips, cracked and bleeding, moved. No sound escaped.

Josephine sighed. “Look well, Cherry. This is what comes of strong men succumbing to love.” I jerked, but I did not dare look around at her. If I did, I was afraid she’d see in my stare all the vile things I wanted to say to her.

Whoever this woman was, she was no angel of mine.

Ashmore coughed hard, but managed, “He was just a puppet.”

“At least he was useful,” she replied, utterly at ease. “Your father worked hard to make this moment happen, sweeting. Forgive him his lapse.”

I fought back tears as one of his scrabbling hands found my knee. His breath wheezed from him, whistling in a manner that suggested his bones had broken about his lungs. Perhaps even a puncture, though I was not so gifted in anatomy that I knew how to fix it.

Leaving the fragile glass phial by my side, I gripped his struggling hand. I bent over, until my ear was on level with his mouth. “What is it?” I whispered. “What are you saying?”

It was not to my credit that I hoped for words of affection. Perhaps even a murmur of regret.

How damaged a wretch was I that I hoped for some small token for all that had been done at my own father’s hands?

His breath was barely a whisper. I needed no more than the faintest stirring of it to hear him. “I love you, my girl.”

I was not so foolish to misunderstand. I had never been his girl.

A sob built in my chest. No, not a sob—a scream. Even now, despite the evidence before him—the words of his own wife—Abraham St. Croix loved her.

As Ashmore loved her.

As Society loved her—or at least that perfect façade she’d portrayed.

As I had wanted to be loved.

If I had any heart left unbroken, it crumbled.

“He’s served his purpose, Cherry.” My mother’s voice, closer now. “It was his foolish pride that forced this. Leave him. We have important work to continue.”

Foolish pride. That was what she called a love so deep-seated that he could not stand the sight of his wife—the woman he had sacrificed his life and his sanity for—embracing another man.

It seemed that love would forever be the undoing of my bloodline.

I straightened, and though the tears ran unchecked down my cheeks, I forced my flagging shoulders to go rigid. “Right,” I said, tight with effort. Using my body to mask my actions, I lifted my father’s bony hand and turned it palm-up. “I have one question, mother, if I may?”

“You may.”

“Cherry,” Ashmore croaked.

“You be silent,” Josephine ordered, and if she did anything, I did not turn to see it. I only heard the crackle of the barrier, saw the reflected shadow of violet light.

Ashmore’s sound of pain locked between his clenched teeth.

Foolish pride, was it? Certainly there was no shortage of that in this pedigree. I was about to risk everything on the precept that Ashmore was as strong as I thought him to be; much stronger than he was loyal.

The blade scored a line down my father’s forearm. So far gone in lunacy, his body only twitched, pale eyes darting from under fluttering lashes. His lips moved, over and over. I love you, my girl.

“Will you tell me true, mother?” I asked, fisting the hand holding the phial in my own lap. The wound I’d scored in it earlier had already scabbed too thickly to easily bleed now.

Blood welled from my father’s arm, dripping openly onto my gown.

“Be quick,” she said sharply. “And for the love of God, put that creature out of his misery.”

I swallowed hard. “What will you do?” Though I struggled to keep my voice steady as I dragged the sharp point of the knife down my forearm, it cracked. Pain shot sparklers across my sight. Hurriedly, I twined my forearm with the filthy limb of my father’s.

“To what are you referring?” Josephine asked, and her voice drifted closer.

Panic seized me. I needed enough time to ensure our blood mingled, and if she saw me now, she’d know what it was I intended.

This was why I’d needed to draw her out. I needed her out of my head, tangible—or as tangible as a spirit could be.

The only way to make her fully physical was in this phial. In so doing, would her grasp on the barrier imprisoning Ashmore fade?

I was hoping for just that.

I dropped the blade into my lap, gritted my teeth as pain flared along my arm. Blood welled at an alarming rate, and as it pooled into the yellow silk, I feared I’d been too enthusiastic in my cutting. If St. Croix expired before our blood had been shared, it would all be over.

I picked up the globe of pink dust and lifted it.

The light caught it, turning its contents into an iridescent gleam. Pink and gold.

I despised those colors.

“Don’t come any closer,” I snapped.

In the corner of my vision, the radiant gleam I associated with my mother halted. “Cherry?” Confusion filled her voice now.

“I just want him to die peaceably.” Not all the truth, but not wholly a lie. “If he sees you, he might cause a fuss.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right then.” Just as quickly as it arrived, Josephine’s confusion eased. “Hurry it up, won’t you?”

“I will.” I had no choice. My stomach felt sick, the blood loss and the fatigue all combined to turn everything about me into a dull, heavy haze.

The pool of blood thickened between my father and I.

His eyelids slowed in their frantic flutter.

“Will you keep Ashmore alive?” I asked. I no longer had the energy to keep the pain from my voice. “Or will you drain him of all his secrets and dispose of him?”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her tone gentled. “Sweeting, are you in love with him?”

The word did not sit well upon me. Love might not be a weakness as my mother knew it, but it had not done me any favors.

I did not look for love; I would not be accused of it.

Easing my father’s arm away from mine, I bound it quickly with a bit of his own clothing. It would bleed through soon enough. Leaving my own to drip, I stood.

It took monumental effort not to pitch forward into the already crooked shelves.

The world tunneled in to a narrow point of light.

Dragging my un-injured arm across my face, I turned. The laboratory dipped and swayed.

My mother, radiant and pure, became that single focus of light.

“No,” I said softly. In that syllable, I did not lie.

Her smile returned. “Excellent. Then let us waste no more time with these laughable creatures.”

Behind her—clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw was even whiter than the ashen pallor of his features—Ashmore’s glittering, feverish gaze met mine.

I could not read what lay within. Apology, perhaps, or anger. Fear for my safety, I had no doubt.

All that would happen in the next few moments would depend on whether or not my theory was correct.

“Laughable,” I repeated. My tongue slurred the word, thicker than I felt it should be in my mouth. Lazy. I was tired. So very tired. “Laughable creatures.”

Josephine drifted closer, her pale white hand reaching for me as a furrow marked her brow. “Sweet girl, none of that blood upon you is yours, is it?”

Mustn’t scar the merchandise. I giggled. As her eyebrows both shot up, I only laughed more. Without warning, I sobered just as quickly. “They loved you, did you know?” I looked down at the thin glass vial, and the dust within. I nudged at the stopper. It gave easily. “They loved you so much as to risk their lives for you.”

“As men do.” Impatience crept into Josephine’s demeanor. “This isn’t for you to fret over, Cherry. Complete your task.”

“Yes.” I dropped the stopper at my feet, only now realizing how much blood soaked the front of my gown.

A little too enthusiastic, indeed. I had no intentions to die here. Such thoughts and feelings belonged to another girl, another time.

I would fight for the life I had left.

I lifted my gaze. “Did you ever think about what you left?” I asked, summoning the words from a great void just beyond my reach. “Society worshipped you.”

Her mouth twisted, eyes turning dark and hard. “As soon as I chose your father to marry, they turned their backs on me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just as Oliver intended to. Just as your father would!”

My fingers turned white over the glass. “Didn’t father care for you?” I cried, pushed beyond all exhaustion. Blood loss made me dizzy, but I fought through it to gesture at the man prostrated behind me. The vial in my hand caught the light and refracted it back in a pearly sheen. “Didn’t he install the Cheyne Walk door chimes to make you smile when they sang out?”

“Chimes?” She stared at me, bemused for a moment before she must have realized I meant the melodic bells that played when the door pull was engaged. Her laughter cut. “I despised that sound. It only served to remind me how much reputation I lost when I married him.”

“Then why did you marry him at all?”

“Because he of all my suitors had the intellect and reach to help me attain perfection,” she snapped. “Had I known that he was too weak, I would have chosen some other fool with more money than intellect. Your father was well enough off, and his mind burned brightly, but too fast.” She scoffed. “Barely a glimmer, in the scheme of it all. I was disappointed, Cherry. They always disappoint you.”

My throat ached, but the tears could not surface. I was too tired; too bloody disappointed, just as she said. The irony would be lost on her. “Was it you who drove him to this?”

She didn’t even afford him the courtesy of a glance. “He fell to this because he was weak. Whether I encouraged it or his own genius burned out too quick, I don’t care.” She sighed. “Really, Cherry, I credited you with more understanding than this.”

I did understand, now. I wished I’d understood sooner.

Was it in some fragile, sorrowful part of me that I’d hoped I’d come from a love match?

Foolish pride, indeed.

A calm fell over me. I recognized it. I had felt it at least once before, when I’d thought I killed the Ripper stalking London’s streets. Just before Teddy’s unveiling.

It seized me now.

Letting out a shaking breath, I nodded. “Thank you for being honest with me,” I told her. Surprise only made her all the more beautiful. Summoning a smile, I added, “Mother.”

I let go of the phial.

Her eyes widened. She reached out. “Cherry, no—”

Such thin, fragile glass was not meant to withstand this harsh treatment. Glass shattered behind me. I sucked in a breath.

A pink cloud of dust floated into the air.

As each mote danced and spun, a sparkling net of shining golden and pink stars, my mother covered her face. “What have you done?”

I tried to get away, to lurch out of the pink radius, but I could not fumble fast enough.

My mother became a demon in truth, her features ghastly in rage. Bitterly frozen fingers found my throat. The pain of it shattered that eerie calm, slithered into my spine. Agony laced through my body as my mother bent all her focus upon me. “Breathe,” she snarled. She shook me violently, though the ice spreading within my soul numbed all sensation. “Breathe in, damn you!”

I did not. My lungs tightened. My body clamored, my mind shrieked desperately for air—to breathe, to live—and I dared not obey as the cloud drifted around us.

Pale skin, a shimmering wave of ruby hair, all blurred together.

Icy currents tore through my skull.

I could not hold out. I needed oxygen, desperately needed to inhale. I fell to my knees. Without my command, my hands scrabbled at the ghostly fingers wrapped about my throat. I tried to push her, to escape her, but she clung like a rabid thing. She screamed at me. “Breathe!”

Spots appeared before my eyes.

The grip upon me eased. The mirrored twin to my own stare widened, until the whites gleamed clearly about the emerald shine. Fear filled her. “No,” she whispered. She jerked away.

I fell heavily to my side.

“No, you can’t do this,” she said, shrill. Desperate. “What did you do?”

It took all I had to grasp the floor, to drag myself across it.

Ice sank into my ankle. My chest burned.

“Wretched creature, what did you do?”

Grasping the leg of a workshop table, I hauled myself as far from the cloud as I could. I didn’t know if I was completely out of it; I couldn’t see past the myriad spots and sparklers masking my sight.

I had no choice.

Opening my mouth, I gasped for breath, dragging in wheeze after wheeze of air. My heart slammed. My arm throbbed with it. If I still bled, I couldn’t pick that pain from all the rest.

I flung myself onto my back, arms splayed, and struggled not to lapse into insentience.

Hard fingers grasped one wrist.

They yanked hard, bodily pulled me out from under the table, and jerked me farther from the cloud. Firm arms wrapped around me, but they did not stay. Plunked inside the circle where Maddie Ruth still lay, Ashmore set me gently beside the pool of blood he’d shed.

“Hamaxa,” he intoned, and the violet H seared through my struggling sight.

That ruddy bastard.

What anger I wanted to muster did not come. Exhausted beyond all measure, desperately fighting the swirling nausea within me—afraid that at any moment, I would feel the burn of the alchemical serum’s effect—I slumped against Maddie Ruth.

She was warm. Much warmer than I’d think of a corpse, even in my semi-frozen state.

“What are you—” My father’s voice, but with none of the whine. “What has happened? What have you done to me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ashmore asked, but I did not hear anger in his voice. As if he knew what it was I felt, channeled it, weariness dogged his every word.

I wanted to see. I needed to see what it was that came next, but part of my view remained blocked. Ashmore’s shoulders, not so broad as Hawke’s but no longer hunched over in pain, loomed over what had been my father’s fragile body. Blood coated all of us.

I could not even distinguish the smell of it.

“Your daughter proved to be more than a match for your intellect,” Ashmore continued.

“No, stay away.” My father’s voice sounded thin and panicked. He must have struck out, for Ashmore’s shoulders dipped, his head lowered, and I watched his back stiffen and cant to one side. An arm flared out, and was it my imagination to see a frail wrist in his grip?

“That formula,” Ashmore said, still so very much calmly, “was originally created for your body. Your daughter’s blood carries all the same markers as yours.”

“No!” A shriek, eerie to hear in my father’s voice.

I could barely force my eyes to stay open, yet I dared not look away.

So Ashmore had understood. That was good. It heartened me some to think we might have shared the same hypothesis.

Ashmore knelt, revealing now only the top of his head. The light caught in his bright copper hair. “Cherry mixed her blood with your husband’s. When he inhaled the powder, the terms for the merging were met. Your blood, Jo. Your spirit is bound to that pathetic, crippled body you hated so much.”

“No,” Josephine sobbed in St. Croix’s voice.

I shuddered. Not until a salty tear slid into the corner of my mouth did I realize I wept openly.

Ashmore’s head dipped. Despite my father’s—my mother’s pleas, I heard the scrape of metal upon stone.

The knife?

All that I had left in me demanded I close my eyes.

“Your daughter,” I heard, a low thread of anger bubbling into his quiet tone, “deserves more than you. Sod it all, she deserves more than me. By all rights, it should be her to end your threat—”

“Oliver, please.”

“But I will not allow it,” he said, ignoring her. Them. What part of my father might still be within, I couldn’t know. I had struggled under the serum’s effect; I knew what it was to feel like myself, but not me.

I wanted to push myself up, to stagger to my feet and hammer against the barrier he had sealed me behind, but I lacked all energy to do it.

The Trumps I had called on. The loss of my mother’s ghostly influence within me.

All the blood I had shed.

I had nothing left to give.

“Ashmore,” I whispered.

“I will not allow you to haunt her any more than you already will,” he said, and now there was nothing kind in his tone—nothing gentle or loving. “This is my responsibility.”

Such words took the breath from me. All my conflicted emotions, my hurt pride and wavering trust, shuddered. In Ashmore’s avowal, I heard what it was my mother did not.

He was saving me.

Unlike previous matters involving my hide, I was not being saved physically—I’d done the saving this time. I suspected that her power fluctuated when her spirit fought the pull of St. Croix’s physical anchor. I had hoped that my mother’s wavering focus might weaken her circle’s barrier, and Ashmore had not let me down.

Just as he did not let me down now.

By all rights, my parents were my responsibility—my mother my burden to bear.

Ashmore saved me from committing a murder I might never recover from.

“You love me,” Josephine cried.

“Yes,” he replied.

Drained of all my reserves, I could not escape insentience. It loomed over me, swept me into a black tide. I lifted a hand, could not manage to think why it should concern me that my fingertips be blue.

“But that, too, will fade.”

“Oliver!”

“Shall I teach you the ultimate secret to immortality? You did not stay with me long enough to learn the whole.”

I wrapped my arms around Maddie Ruth’s shoulders, buried my face into her tumbled hair, and closed my eyes.

A scream tore through the laboratory, echoing and re-echoing from wall to wall.

“Zodiacus.”

Whatever came next, I could not stay awake to see it. To hear it. What Ashmore did, if Maddie Ruth lived, even if I was meant to survive this bone-deep cold, none of it gave me the strength to continue.

I would never forget this; I had no opium haze to fall back on, no bliss to soften the sting. Ashmore murdered for me, ended the threat that would end me if he did not.

Guilt dragged at me, and with it, the relief that softened its bite.

I slid into a slumber so deep, I didn’t know how to wake.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A strange snuffling noise woke me from a dreamless sleep.

I was warm—much warmer than I ever thought I’d be again. Parts of me ached, and a sharp pain seemed to gather specifically about my left arm, but the padding beneath me was soft, and the weight atop me indicative of blankets. Lovely, warm blankets.

And an unusual heavy mass against my side.

My lashes lifted. For a split second, one in which my heart pattered into a rapid pace, I thought I might be blind.

The dark shape looming over me shifted. A waft of hot air bloomed over my face. I inhaled the unmistakable odor of hound’s breath.

“Bloody bells,” I croaked, thrashing to escape my suddenly dog-laden prison. The hound—a large beast half as big as the bed and whose dense, gleaming fur was black as night—bounded into a roll that accomplished the rest of what I sought to achieve. Encouraged by his wiggling body, I was ousted from the bed.

My feet hit the floor, but my knees would not hold. On a strangled cry, I fell over entirely. The jarring thud of my body against the carpet preceded a heavier thump of muscle and fur.

Such was the manner in which Maddie Ruth found me, hollering for help while a dog did his level best to smother me with affections.

Her laughter was not the sort of decorous trill encouraged in ladies above London’s drift. She gasped with it, howling out her amusement while I struggled beneath the beast.

Convinced it was a game, the dog barked happily, his enormous paws bounding on either side of me.

Giving up, I flung my uninjured arm over my eyes. “Do let me know when you’re both—mmph!” A wide, wet tongue slurped over my face—and my open mouth.

Maddie Ruth’s laughter reached critical hysteria as I gagged.

It took some few minutes, but as I scraped out dog saliva from my mouth, Maddie Ruth eventually collected herself enough to seize the thick collar about the dog’s throat. The beast was enormous, even more so when I had managed to force my way to a seated position and found the hound’s head towering above mine.

It sat, sides heaving, pink tongue hanging out as it watched Maddie Ruth with adoring brown eyes. A Newfoundland. Massive dogs already, this one surely must reach nearly two meters in length.

I glowered at him as I scrubbed my face again. “Some good morning.”

Maddie Ruth knelt by my side, her amusement obvious in her own brown eyes. It would not be kind to indicate similarities between the hound and the girl. Still, as she smothered her laughter and helped me to my feet, I could not help but notice how sweet both were.

Even if one had attempted to bury me under black fur.

“It’s afternoon, not morning,” Maddie Ruth corrected me, beaming with such delight that I could hold no grudge.

Nor could I continue any façade. Tears filled my eyes.

“Oh,” was her response, quickly forgiven as I wrapped my arms around her. She was not shy in returning the embrace, for all it caught her by surprise. “There, there. All’s well, now.”

“I was so afraid you were dead.”

Maddie Ruth scoffed, but she did not let me go. “It’ll take more’n a she-devil riding your skirt to end me.”

“But you were hurt!” I wailed.

She rubbed her cheek against mine. “We were near to the stables when he pitched over. Bullet missed my skull by a hair. When Mr. Ashmore dropped me, my head hit a watering tough. I went black.”

I grimaced. “I’m so sorry. I swear, I didn’t know—”

“Ah, stop it, will you?” Maddie Ruth patted my back. “I said all’s well. You’re all right, and I’m all right, and…” She hesitated.

“Ashmore?” The name did not hurt on my lips as I thought it might. I leaned away, steadying myself, then all but staggered when the large Newfoundland beast thrust his shoulder beneath my hand. I was already diminutive in stature; the animal made me feel downright tiny.

Maddie Ruth rubbed the beast’s head. “This is Ichabod.”

“That doesn’t—” I stopped, frowning at the patient dog. He watched me and Maddie Ruth equally, though I suspected a roving eye for any who might have wandering hands. “Why is his name Ichabod?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” she said cheerfully, ruffling the dog’s floppy ears. She looked far too happy at his presence. “There’s another named Phinehas, and one called—”

“Allow me a guess,” I cut in dryly. “Eli?”

Her eyes widened. “How did you know?”

I’d only suspected. Biblical names for his dogs; Ashmore had a devilish streak in him. I sighed. “Why was he in my bed?”

“Because you were in Mr. Ashmore’s bed?”

Ah. I hadn’t noticed. I realized now that I stood not in my own room, but Ashmore’s. The fire glowed brightly, keeping the air inside warm. The bedclothes were rumpled, but only on one side, I noticed. Whatever the dog had been doing, it had not involved snuggling under the sheets.

“Why was it in Ashmore’s bed with me?”

Maddie Ruth smiled. “To keep you warm. You were suffering hypothermia.” She tilted her head, one long brown braid slipping over her shoulder. “I think that’s what he called it.”

“’Tis a very real condition,” I assured her, but frowned at my hands. They looked healthy, flush with warmth. I pulled the long sleeve of my nightshift up, expecting to see only a shiny pink line of new skin, but the bandage covering it denied me my curiosity. It hurt, though.

Maddie Ruth nudged the dog aside. “Come, let’s get you dressed. I think you should go see Mr. Ashmore.”

I looked up. “What happened?”

With the dog shooed to one side of the bedroom, Maddie Ruth proceeded to lay out my tea gown and the box of grooming tools. “Best you ask him,” was all she said.

I frowned. “Ask Ichabod?”

At his name, the beast’s tail thumped against the floorboards.

She shot him a sweet smile, but spared me a roll of her eyes. “I mean Mr. Ashmore, of course.”

Of course.

I suffered impatiently under Maddie Ruth’s care, but she was quick and uncomplicated. With no corset, few pins, and little recourse aside from a single plait, I was not so difficult to help into a passable appearance.

Though I did not like to admit it, I was all but out of energy halfway through her efforts. By the end, I had to hold on to her weight—and, naturally, the helpful dog who almost shouldered me aside in his continued efforts to assist—in order to stand.

“I wish you’d tell me something,” I groused as I eased into the rolling chair. I did not like getting back into it, not after what I’d seen of my grandfather as he’d spied upon his own daughter’s trysts, but I had little choice.

I did not want to remain abed. If I did, I would stare at the ceiling and think of all I could have different.

Ichabod, apparently relieved of duty, clambered back onto the bed and flopped mightily down.

We left him to it. He’d earned his rest.

Maddie Ruth labored to push the chair down the hall. “I don’t rightly understand,” she managed between efforts. I tried to help as I could, utilizing the rail built about the wheels. “If I tried to explain, I’d only bollocks it up, so best you ask him.”

Grumbling, I held my tongue until we arrived at the gradient Ashmore had shown me. Maddie Ruth opened a small hidden panel beside the door, and pulled a switch similar to the one in the laboratory. The floor trembled as a mechanism engaged, and a clanking sound accompanied the sensation.

I glanced at Maddie Ruth, who grinned back. “The chair-moving device.”

I’d almost completely forgotten. Within a few moments, the device was ready for me. She wheeled the chair upon brass girders, buckled the whole in place utilizing slots I could not easily see, and pulled the switch once more.

Although it was a bumpy slide down, the device did carry us both all the way.

I checked that I still had all my teeth once we were upon the ground floor. “It could be smoother,” I admitted, “but ’tis clever.”

“I’m already working on that.”

I waved at her. “Don’t. No need to waste your talent or time, Maddie Ruth. I’ll be ensuring we leave here soon as possible.”

Maddie Ruth said nothing. There was little enough she could say. I’d made up my mind.

This wreck of an estate was all but worthless to me. I wanted nothing more to do with it.

The chair creaked as we wheeled together down the corridor and into the foyer. She paused outside the library. “One moment,” she said, her round cheeks appling as she gave me an encouraging smile. She darted inside, but while I considered going after her, I could not will my limbs to obey.

I had exhausted myself wrestling with a dog.

Was I forever doomed to be this invalid? I grumbled as I slumped back into the chair.

“Here we are.” A soft mantle settled about my shoulders. Fur tickled my chin, and I opened my eyes—bleary, as if I’d only started to doze but could not recall making the effort to do so—to find a blanket tucked in around me. Maddie Ruth had donned a coat.

One of Mr. Ashmore’s, I think, for it all but swallowed her.

I muffled a snort of laughter. “You look the part of a precocious child.”

“You’re no better,” she replied, but without heat. “Come, Mr. Ashmore’s this way.” She wheeled me out into the halls, and towards the kitchens. The house was no less gloomy, which bothered me.

It bothered me that I was bothered, no less.

Had I expected Siristine to magically gain some sort of light and airy ambience with my mother and father gone?

My good mood slipped from me with no more effort than a dream.

Through the dark kitchen and out the door attached, we rolled down a ramp and onto a narrow path. The air was frigid, battling to creep inside my furs. It nipped at my cheeks like a creature possessed, until I was quite sure my nose had turned vibrant red with it. The gray winter sky seemed unbroken as it stretched out over the moor. Only the overgrown hedges cultivated around us disturbed the boundless sweep of brown and gray that was all the heath allowed.

“Where are we going?” I wondered aloud.

“Just here.” Maddie Ruth bent, gave me a quick squeeze, and pointed to the arch just ahead. “Through there. Can you make it?”

“In this beastly thing?”

“Or on your feet,” she allowed. As though summoned by our voices, a large, shaggy shape only somewhat smaller than Ichabod loped from the archway. This one was not black, but near enough, with hints of chocolate and toffee wrapped into his fur. “That’s Eli.” She paused. “I think.”

The dog came towards us with a happy wag of its shaggy tail. Like Ichabod, its eyes were dark, its muzzle wide, and its expression mildly stupid.

I don’t think the breed is known for its lack of intelligence. I simply couldn’t see past the large, goofy face.

“Will you help, then?” I asked, skeptical.

The dog came to a stop beside the chair, turned to face the way he had come, and waited.

Maddie Ruth shrugged when I slanted her a quizzical look. “I’ll be inside.”

Putting my fate in a dog’s paws seemed no less ridiculous than anything else I’d done of late. With a sigh, I seized the animal’s ruff in one hand, and leveraged myself off the chair.

I will admit to a certain amount of appreciation when the beast matched my tottering pace and did not appear to put up a fuss when I was forced to stop for breath. He even allowed me to lean against him.

As large as he was, I don’t know that my weight even registered.

Clutching the furs about me with my free hand, I was certainly not cold by the time we made it through the arch. I ducked under the overhang—as did my guide, huge as he was at the head—and did not mind leaning on him to do it.

The sight that greeted me was, in some obscure way, beautiful.

The moor stretched on forever. Freed of the hedgerows, I stopped to take in the whole of the picture. The sky and earth clashed in a ceaseless tangle of gray that was not entirely devoid of life. Birds flapped in the frigid air, black specks too far to identify. The wind tugged at the bracken left behind.

And in the middle of it, not so far that I couldn’t close the distance with effort, Ashmore stood before a large, open fire. Beside him, stacked knee-high with all the appearance of having already been whittled down, a pile of paintings waited.

He wore no coat, and his shirtsleeves were folded up. They displayed the ink upon his forearms, the alchemical and esoteric symbols that I had not learned to decipher.

The wind tugged at his bright hair, and as I labored closer, his face turned to me—as red as mine, I was sure.

He did not smile in greeting. “Good afternoon.”

I took his proffered hand. The dog waited until my weight was no longer fully upon him, then loped away to flop gracelessly—far from the flame, which surprised me. I would have assumed the animal might enjoy the warmth.

Ashmore guided me to a blanket he had spread upon the ground. The fire snapped and crackled, an eerie gleam of unnatural color in the flame.

He caught me studying it as he helped lower me to the covering. “’Tis the paint,” he explained. “Some are made with ingredients that color the fire.”

“Why are you burning them?”

He seemed to have trouble meeting my gaze. Instead of remaining nearby, he rose again easily—no trace of the wound that caused him such pain. When he retrieved a canvas from the pile, my eyes widened to recognize Lord Floret in all his vain posturing.

Ashmore studied it for a long moment. “His name was James Aubry Fairchild, or Worthy to his friends.”

I held my breath, lest I ruin this unlikely bout of honesty with the wrong word.

“You’d never know it by looking at this, but he was quite the rake in his time.” Ashmore’s eyes looked more brown in the gray light, save where the fire flickered within like a demonic echo. “An easy man to befriend, but a difficult one to reign in. He did not take to studies well.” Before I could say anything at all, he tossed the painting into the fire.

It snapped and popped, shooting sparks into the air that glowed faintly blue for a moment.

I watched the flame eat at that ghastly, skeletal face and wondered what it was Ashmore was attempting to do.

I sighed. “What is this, then? Are you making amends?”

His laughter was soft, but not wholly kind. “I think that I am far beyond such gestures, don’t you agree, Miss St. Croix?”

“Not particularly,” I replied. “Though I do believe we are far beyond other gestures.” I did not look at him—watching the fire slowly consume Lord Floret’s delicate stockings—but I knew he paused in the corner of my sight.

He shook his head, pushing his hair back from his forehead in what I assume could be exasperation. It was a familiar enough motion. “My apologies, Cherry.”

“No need.” That I turned his words back on him was no accident. His snort of amusement could not be wholly contained. I raised my knees beneath my blanket, cradling them to conserve warmth. I turned my gaze to Ashmore instead of the fire. “Am I right in believing that these portraits are involved in your alchemical perfection?”

As he had with Lord Floret, he studied the canvas he held. I wondered if he made an effort to recall the face, rather than the awful rictus depicted. “I became a painter, did you suspect?”

“Your hands are artist’s hands,” I said, surprising him enough that he finally looked fully at me. I only shrugged a little. “I’ve thought so, anyway.”

I didn’t know what I was supposed to see in his face, for he had once more drawn his usual mask down over it. Neither unfriendly nor implacable, he was different from Hawke in every way. Even his façade was amiable.

Yet I could read neither when they chose—and in Hawke’s particular circumstance, rarely even then.

“You have a keen eye for detail,” he acknowledged. With a final glance at his canvas, he threw it into the flame. Violet sparks shot with green flares; the fire hungrily consumed the image. Bold color surrounding a ghastly haunt. It was the same as the last. “I studied with many masters, but the man who gave me wings was da Cadore.”

That moniker caused me to frown in thought. “Da Cadore. Italian, unless Fanny’s lessons went terribly awry?”

A brief smile flitted across his lips. “They did not. Tiziano Vecello, otherwise known in intellectual quarters as Titian.”

I could only shake my head at the enormity of that revelation.

The man had almost single-handedly influenced Western art, and this during the sixteenth century. It defied all reason.

Yet here I sat, having defied a great deal of my own.

I sighed. “Tell me, Nicholin Folsham. Do you regret your artist’s hands?”

“Yes, very much.” The lack of hesitation before this simple agreement caused a twinge in my heart. Two more canvases clattered into the fire, and the flames soared hungrily to the sky. “And…” He watched the embers turn crimson, gold, then brilliant green in a subtle flash quickly swallowed. “And not at all.”

I could understand that. I rested my chin upon my upraised knees, the fur soft and warm against my cheeks, and watched him feed portrait after portrait to the fire.

When only one remained, he crouched beside it.

“I was ruthless in my youth,” he said, talking down to the frame, though it was clearly directed at me. “Like da Vinci before me, I was fascinated by all things regarding life, death and the cosmos. Even while I refined my art, I sought answers to all of life’s plethora of questions.”

“This does not seem so ruthless,” I said.

The wind slipped between us, fanning the flame so that it bent towards Ashmore as he looked up at me again. His eyes glowed unholy red; a trick of the light, though no less unsettling for it.

“Anima mundi consumed me.” If he appreciated my encouragement, I could not honestly tell it to be so. “The concept of the world soul, and all that it connected. I suppose it was my ill fortune to stumble upon the truth of my own foolish pride.”

Foolish pride. Again, that such a phrase would be associated with my family—with, in fact, the very progenitor of this line.

I blew out a hard breath.

“I sacrificed my family,” Ashmore told me, his tone matter-of-fact. “Nothing quite so literal, but I turned my back upon them. I hunted for the secrets to the philosopher’s stone to the exclusion of all else, and when I finally grasped the fundamentals, I no longer resembled the man I had been.”

“What did you do?”

He clasped his hands between his knees, crouched easily beside the fire. He did not look into the orange light, but tilted his head up, gaze skyward for all there was nothing to see. The wind ruffled his hair, then circled about to tug at my plait. Tendrils of wayward curls slipped free to blow about my cheeks.

“I had not yet achieved perfection,” he said, shrugging as though it were a foregone conclusion. “I did what I must to continue on my path. Longevity is a step in the right direction, but it is not immortality. I can be killed. I can also die of age, should I cease harvesting the anima of those of my bloodline. Your mother noted it when I could not initially break her barrier.”

“You did break it, though.”

“Only once her anima was attached to the weakened shell of St. Croix’s body,” he said, confirming my suspicions.

“But you broke her barrier even before,” I pointed out. Ashmore’s startled inquiry caused me to wince. “Ah, I…accidentally called upon Kronos when my mother was…” I hesitated. “She was—”

“Utilizing Noxa, the thirteenth Trump.” He freed a hand to scrub over his face. “I did not teach her that one. She must have found someone who could, if not learned it on her own.”

Ah, so it finally became clear. Noxa, as the symbol of the human being, but whose Latin definition was that of injury or harm. Associated with Dionysius, whose birth came from a form of possession.

My mother had called upon it to possess me, since our bonds were already forged.

Ashmore sighed. “You should not have been able to use such a Trump. I suspect your mother’s anima allowed it. An interesting loophole, and one I might have once considered examining more thoroughly.”

“Once?”

He shook his head. “To do so would require imprisoning you here until I was finished.” His eyes were dark with unspoken things when he set them upon me. “You would likely not survive.”

“Could you do that to your own flesh?” I asked, tilting my head.

“Did you somehow fail to understand the importance of those paintings?” Ashmore touched the one at his feet with reverent care. “Once the Trumps are unlocked within a person of my blood, they are fair game for my longevity. Few ever achieved as much as your mother—”

That hurt.

“But I did not require brilliance. I required adequacy,” he continued evenly. “Once assured of their ability, I painted them. I utilized Pluvia and Ruina to do it, as well as elements of Diana and Eon.”

This was almost too much for me. I frowned hard, burying my face against my knees as I worked it through. “Empty vessel,” I said, my voice muffled. “The better to hold the anima of your subject within a symbolic womb, yes?”

“Very good, Cherry.”

I lifted my head to see his lopsided smile. I returned it. “So you held their anima.”

“But the body can not exist without it,” he said. “In time, the body sickens and dies. The rate rarely repeated itself, it depended entirely on the person. Childbirth was the likeliest trigger of more obvious symptoms, which is why the women tended to sicken quicker. Your mother,” he added softly, “lasted much longer than any woman before her.”

“You loved her.” It was not a question, and Ashmore did not treat it as such. He said nothing, because anything he might have offered might come out only a platitude.

I respected that, at least.

“Why did she have a child, if she knew it would mean the death of your line?”

He shrugged. “To put it bluntly, I suspect she thought you might be the loophole to my vow.”

“The vow that said you must protect us?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He stood again, though he picked up the canvas with him. The back was plain, unadorned. “I was ruthless when I forged that alchemical bond, I admit this. However, I was not without awareness of it. I knew that impatience would be the death of me forever. I worked into the formula a guarantee that I would not accidentally end my own life by too soon ending the lives of my line.”

“So you could not harm us.”

“Not until my line was guaranteed with the birth of a child. I suspect she thought to have a solution before she died.” His chuckle strained. “She must have been furious in those last moments before her death in that laboratory.”

“Did you know she lingered?”

“As a spirit?” Ashmore’s amusement, pained as it was, faded. “No. Had I known it was possible, I might have done things differently from the start.”

I nodded, as though this were perfectly reasonable. In all honesty, I wanted to drop my head into my hands and sleep for the next few years.

Maybe when I woke again, this would all be a dream.

I watched him circle the fire, but he made no move to toss the canvas in. As he passed by the shaggy brown hound, the beast raised his head and watched his master pace by.

“Ashmore?”

“Yes?”

“What would you have done,” I asked, “if I had birthed a child with Compton?”

“I had hoped that you might continue your independent streak and refrain from such attachments,” he admitted. “The news of your nuptials threw me for a loop.”

I rubbed my chin across the soft furs, seeking absent-minded comfort. “You must have been relieved when he died.”

“I was.” His voice gentled, as did his expression as he knelt beside me. “Yet I was sorry that his life ended. As I said, he seemed a good man.” The canvas rested between his hand and the earth, its back painted gold by the fire.

A knot formed in my throat. “He was.” Echo of our earlier conversation, but it seemed it was all we could say of the matter.

I freed my hand of the blanket to touch his arm in gentle accord. “That canvas. Is it my mother’s?”

The stark pain flitting beneath his façade turned the lump to something painful and cold. “It is.” He turned it, revealing the bold color and lifelike realism that I now recognized as the learned elements of Ashmore’s Renaissance master. He had only gotten better with time, this unfortunately long-lived artist.

Seeing her again, that serene smile in such beautiful features, did not hurt as much as I expected it to. Though it tugged at my heart, it did so through a web of numb acceptance.

“I suspect,” he said, studying the canvas beside me, “by refusing to harvest Josephine’s anima, it gave her strength to linger long after her death. I had not thought it possible. The painting is simply a container for the anima, nothing more.”

“Ghosts are not common fare for alchemists?”

“Fortunately, no.”

“If you harvested her anima,” I asked slowly, my fingers caught in his sleeve for all I could not wholly understand why, “would her captured appearance take on that of the ghastly corpse in the others?”

His smile tugged at my bruised heart. “Just so.”

“Then I’m glad you didn’t.” At his startled glance, I firmed my grip upon his arm. “I had never seen my mother before, did you know? All I had ever been told was that I resembled her. A kind lie, I realize now.”

“Not kind,” he said, meeting my eyes with such intensity that I flushed beneath the stare. “Not kind at all. Hers was the face of an angel, but yours is something made of flesh and blood. Were I to do it all over again, it would be you I choose.”

I could not help my laughter. It spilled from me, easing the lump in my throat and somehow loosening the knots in my chest. Even Ashmore could not keep a rueful smile in check. “The centuries have refined your silver tongue, Mr. Folsham.”

“If only.” His smile faded. “I was weakened by my sentiment.” Again, for all his pretty words, his gaze could not stray far from the smiling beauty of my mother. “I have been subsiding on the last of the paintings, such as that of your grandfather’s and his mother before him. They are gone, now. All save this one. I have not harvested in some few years.”

“Will you take from it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “This…” The canvas tilted. “This is yours, Cherry. Do with it what you will.”

“What if I wanted you to take from it?” It was only curiosity that fueled the question; an impulse I regretted when he winced. “No, no,” I hastened to add. “I was only wondering.” I studied the tilted portrait for a long moment. “Why did you keep those others for so long?”

“I don’t know.”

Not entirely honest, but I had not the will nor the energy to counter. I suspected that in some, small way, Ashmore wanted to be reminded of all those who had come before.

Perhaps he looked at them when he felt he needed to self-flagellate over his choices.

I could understand that. Like me, Ashmore needed a little bit of help to turn his life—his extraordinarily long life—into something worth living. That’s what this gift meant. He may not say the words, but he didn’t have to.

I gave to him the laudanum I wanted and should not have, and he gave to me the last of the anima taken from his own bloodline. An addiction for an addiction.

Seemed fair.

“Help me stand,” I said.

He rose, offering his free hand. I took it, and he lifted me to my feet with ease. I was still too thin. Truly, I needed to repair this. I did not like being so easy to carry.

When I held out my hands, he passed me the canvas. It was heavier than I expected, nearly pulling me over to plant face-first into the earth.

Ashmore caught me about the waist, steadying with a murmured, “Careful.”

While the action caused my heart to pound, it was not, I decided with a small, sad smile, because of his grip upon me.

“Steady?”

“I am,” I said. “Help me to the fire?”

Though his jaw tensed, he did as I asked. Without needing the invitation, as though he understood exactly that what I required, he held one corner of the canvas.

“One,” I said.

His forearms flexed, the sigils upon his pale skin rippling. “Two.”

“Three.”

We lobbed the canvas into the flame.

Ashmore’s fingers carved a straight line through the air. “Iustitia.”

Sparks shot high, the wood feeding the heart of the fire cracked in half, and a wicked black flame erupted from within. The fire turned blue.

The wind spiraled around the hungry flame, feeding it, pulling it so violently that Ashmore’s arm came around me to sweep me bodily out of reach. Embers scattered in a shower of red and orange. As the gust tore off across the moor, I fancied that I heard a woman’s tortured scream.

“Let the Scales of Balance once more seek harmony,” Ashmore said, his voice almost too low to hear above my head.

I looked up.

This time, when I saw the raw, unfettered anguish he suffered, I did not feel as though I intruded. I laid my head against his chest and allowed myself to take what comfort I could as he did from me.

For a long time, we stood in silent vigil as the canvas turned to ash. The sky turned slowly dark. The fire eased to normal flickers and dancing flames.

I was not so cold wrapped in the blanket and Ashmore’s arms, though my exposed nose and cheeks felt all but frozen. I stirred. “Ashmore?”

“Yes, minx?”

The epithet made me smile. “Why did you call Zodiacus at the end?”

“Why do you suppose?” came his reply, and I huffed some, but gave it the thought he expected.

“As the final Trump, it signifies the completion of a journey.” I did not look up, keeping my cheek against his chest as I spoke. “‘Tis linked to the twins, Castor and Pollux, who each mind the gates to heaven.”

“Good. What does that all mean?”

I took a slow breath, the cold air biting at the sensitive skin within my nose, and buried my face more securely into the warmed fabric of his clothing. “Did you send my mother to heaven?”

His hand cradled the back of my head, as I imagined he might when he comforted his massive hounds. “The truth of immortality lies with the Heavenly Twins. Your mother likely utilized the Gates of Mortals to shed the natural order of death. I simply reversed the process, calling on the Gates of Immortals to right the wrong.”

“That is entirely too abstract,” I said into his chest.

His chuckle vibrated against my cheek. “That is twenty-two Trumps too complex for you to even be bothering with. Patience, minx. We’ll get there.”

I gave him no warning for my next question, asking simply, “Will you paint me, then?”

He hesitated. My spine tensed, and I admit that I prepared to move if I needed to—to tear from his grasp, to put the fire between us. My trust, hard won and deeply wounded, was still too fragile a thing.

Ashmore blew out a sigh over my head. “No.”

That he did not dither eased my wariness. “I don’t know how you feel, not really,” I continued, turning my gaze back now over the heath. “Immortality is beyond my interest. But I would be unhappy if you were to waste away now.” The moon was likely already out, though the winter sky would not reveal it. It smelled fresh and crisp; like the promise of snow.

Perhaps this time, it would stick in a blanket of white.

His heart thudded beneath my head. I though it might be my only answer, until he took a breath. “For all intents and purposes, I remain your guardian. You will need me when you return to London.”

“Yes.” I tucked my hands around his forearms, clasped over my chest. The wind nipped at my fingers. “I’d also like to continue learning from you.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

I did not object when Ashmore’s chin settled upon the crown of my head. “It will require staying in Siristine longer. You must be healthy and strong to continue.”

That, I didn’t like. I pulled a face. I don’t know how he knew, but he must have, for I felt him chuckle.

“Only until spring,” he amended. “Wholly dependent upon your progress. We will take the time to ensure you have a strong foundation of health and alchemical application.”

I could live with that. That I lived at all was something I could learn to be grateful for. I tilted my head, forcing him to lift his. “What of you?”

“What of me?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Will you waste away?”

He thought about this, and said, “I hope not. I will use this time to investigate alternative methods of ensuring I stay robust. Perhaps something utilizing your blood—”

When I blanched, he halted his musing. “There’s time enough to investigate our options,” he amended. “I won’t hurt you, Cherry.”

I would hold him to that for the rest of my hopefully natural life. “Ashmore?”

“What now, minx?”

“Thank you.” I did not have the inclination to verbalize all the reasons why. He knew them.

I only caught the shadow of his smile from above me. “Thank you,” he replied. His hand cupped my cheek. “I will fulfill my obligations to you until you no longer require me.”

That carried the weight of a vow I was not sure I wanted to bear. I stiffened, turning to separate us, but Ashmore did not allow me to draw out of reach.

The firelight painted his face in mingled shades of black and orange—shadows and hellish ferocity. For all that, his voice was soft. “I ask of you nothing, save that what is demanded in a student.”

I shook my head. “All who come to love me are punished. Don’t be one.” I managed calm, but he was too shrewd for the attempt.

He caught my face in his hands, holding it still so that he might look directly into my eyes. “Do you love me, Cherry St. Croix?”

My throat dried. “I do,” I said, my voice made hoarse by anxiety and fear. When surprise shot his eyebrows high, I caught his wrists in both of my hands and gently tugged his palms from my cheeks. “I do love you, but not in that way you loved my mother.”

I recognized my gaffe when his eyes closed, crinkles forming in a painful flinch—as though I’d cut him with my verbal disclaimer.

It was my turn to cup his cheek, though I was forced to reach up to do it. “I did not mean how that sounded. I mean that I have come to love you as I would a dear friend. Even more so,” I admitted, my cheeks flaming. “You have seen things of me that I have shared with almost no one else.”

“Almost,” he repeated. Then, with a low laugh, he added, “Hawke.”

I could not hold his eyes.

Ashmore caught my hand against his cheek and turned it over to lift my knuckles to his mouth. “In truth, while I would rejoice to be loved by you, I can only stand in awe of your resolve. You are right. I loved your mother, and those scars will take time to fade.” He held my hand between his. “Tell me true, Cherry St. Croix. Is there at least some room in your heart to keep me?”

“There is,” I said, finally allowing myself to smile up at him. “You will forever hold a piece of it.”

“Not as large a piece as the Menagerie’s ringmaster, I take it.”

As it was not a question, I did not deliver an answer. I suspected that he needed none, anyhow. As I had come to read the open anguish on his own features, he like as not had learned to read the embarrassment on mine.

“It will do, minx.” Ashmore’s smile, bright where the encroaching night insisted on painting him in shadow, curved wide and unfettered. “I can bear to be inspired by you, if I cannot be loved.”

“Loved in that way,” I amended, and stuck my tongue out at him as the impudent urchin I had once been.

“Loved as that gypsy bastard is.”

I winced, but as had become my wont, I returned his words to him. “Just so.”

“Your taste leaves something to be desired,” he told me, looping his arm once more about my waist to guide me back to the house I detested—even if I detested it a little bit less.

“You are the singular most unsuitable person to ever say that to me,” I replied, lifting my nose into the air.

His laughter echoed over the moor, countering the sorrowful wail of the lonely wind.

Across the estate, a hound bayed in answer.

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was a crisp March morning when we left Siristine for what I resolved would be the last time.

Maddie Ruth sat within the carriage, bundled warmly beside me, her cheeks rosy from the cold. Ashmore sat across from us, a fur tucked around him for added warmth, and hot stones had been provided. The driver—an ancient, earnest fellow named Harrison Pickford—doffed his threadbare cap upon seeing us in.

We had little enough to say. The months had been kind, if a little more strenuous than I had expected. My weight had not wholly returned, due in part to my return to physical conditioning. I had lost much of my dexterity in my months in recovery.

All said and done, I was healthier than I could ever remember being.

The wound on my forearm had sealed to a deep white scar. With my mother’s influence now exorcised, it seemed I no longer healed as quickly. Ashmore posited that the serum my father had initially applied to me had lingered, and my mother’s attachment stemmed from that aborted attempt to fuse us both.

The scar, however, was not all that I carried to remind me of the winter months in neglected Siristine. The soles of my feet ached with every jarring rut we trundled over.

Ashmore allowed me to tuck my feet upon his lap, and his fingers soothed the hurt as best as could be done.

The ink within the alchemical sigils branded upon me was not wholly healed. Unlike Ashmore’s, which scrolled the length of his forearm in neat columns and dedicated designs between, mine were much smaller. There would be room for more, and as I learned more than the two Trumps I’d mastered, I would need them to ground the power that each Trump called upon.

Each alchemist’s tattoos varied, according to the personal needs of the alchemist in question. Ashmore did not explain all of his, but we both carried the sigils that allowed us to draw upon the Trumps with greater ease; it would take less from me now.

Part of learning the art was creating the sigils necessary. I had not formed any of my own yet. I would eventually. As I needed them, as I understood those needs that would affect the progress of my own soul, I would shape the first of my own personal formulae.

Until then, I resolved to ignore the throbbing burn radiating through my feet. After all I had been through, a little bit of an ache here and there was almost laughable.

“I told you we should have waited until we arrived in London,” Ashmore said, keeping his voice down for the sake of Maddie Ruth, who dozed against my shoulder.

“And be bed-ridden first thing?” I wrinkled my nose over the furs. “No, thank you. Bad enough they had to be on my soles.” Not that there had been much choice. Given my plans, we had to choose the location of the ink very carefully. Fashions often bared a woman’s arms, and as I could not guarantee that my back or stomach would not be revealed, we had chosen the sensitive pads of my feet.

After that pain, this lingering ache was a welcome relief.

“I can’t say I approve of this scheme of yours,” he said, sobering. His fingers cupped my heel gently, and while I expected that to hurt, it did not. I let out a sigh. “Better?”

“Yes, much, thank you.” But I picked up the discourse without pause. “Once we get to London, I’ll have a better understanding of events. I promise not to do anything mad until then.”

“What if your ringmaster does not require your help?”

I looked away. My gaze fell upon the window, its draped pushed aside.

All that I had said of the moor in the depths of dreary winter, I took back now. Come sun and more temperate clime, the heath bloomed in a wild cacophony of red and gold and stunning green.

If I would claim one good memory of Siristine, it would be this.

“He will have to tell me himself,” I said softly.

Maddie Ruth murmured something unintelligible against my shoulder. It was no answer. She had fallen asleep like a child rocked into a lull.

“I was afraid you’d say that.” Ashmore hummed a regretful note. “I’ll do what I can.”

We lapsed into a companionable silence, broken only when Ashmore took his leave to ride with his hounds. I watched him pass the window now and again, the sunlight reflecting copper flame from his hair.

If he was lucky, he might gain a bit of color to his milk-white skin. While we had not yet managed to find an ideal alternative to his need for anima by utilizing my blood, we did stumble across a temporary solution. He required rather more blood than I was comfortable giving, but it was a temporary concern. I had faith in our combined intellect. As long as he did not suddenly fade on me, I would bear with it.

For the time, he maintained his current degree of ability, and it did nothing at all for his complexion.

I chuckled, pillowing my cheek against Maddie Ruth’s hair.

What I intended to do next would no doubt be dangerous. The Veil likely still wanted my head, Zylphia and Ishmael Communion would do all they could to stop me, and I instinctively knew that Ashmore would be just as stubborn as he was helpful.

With Maddie Ruth to protect, to say nothing of my own skin, I had no doubts that my adventures in London were far from over.

I closed my eyes. As had become the custom of late, I found myself wondering what Micajah Hawke might be doing now.

I was no swooning damsel to await the breaking of a spell. I had hunted vagrants and murderers in the murkiest recesses of London’s foggy drift. I had borne the scars of a friend turned betrayer, and would carry the guilt of an accepted proposal and the subsequent death of my husband for all my life.

I knew what it was to face down the dark—not just that of those around me, but the hungry dark within myself.

Whether the blood was mine or those who challenged me, whether I sacrificed or emerged victorious, I would not wait for Hawke to ask for help. For all the years I had known him, he had been a caged tiger, pacing the confines of his Menagerie and intimidating all in his path to submission. The tiger would never ask. That was the cost of the pride that drove him; that same intensity that beckoned me like a flame.

If there was nothing left of the Hawke I knew in the Midnight Menagerie’s wicked ringmaster, I would see it with my own eyes.

I hoped London had the presence of mind to be prepared.

The St. Croix Chronicles continues with The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway and Corroded—available now!

The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway

My name is Cherry St. Croix, and I may be young, but I am old enough to know when I am in over my head. My first collection seemed easy: Mr. Strangeway’s debts have come due, and the purse for his capture is hefty. Yet the wastrel remains one step ahead of me, and my efforts are hampered by another collector after the same coin. What’s more, a simple hunt becomes the forefront of a conspiracy that leads me on a chase through London’s low-class streets.

Not only does my pride demand success, but the well-being of many rests upon the choices I make—failure is not an outcome I can live with.

Corroded

My rival, a collector of bounties like myself, has murdered one of my own. In consequence, I have been removed from my house, my staff and all who would support me. I have nowhere else to turn, so I beg asylum within the Midnight Menagerie, London’s decadent pleasure garden.

Challenging my rival to a race is the only way to end this—no small task when the quarry is the murderous Jack the Ripper. As my enemies close in, I fear the consequences of this hunt. I am trapped between two killers, and what doesn’t kill me may leave its scars forever.

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About the Author

After writing happily ever afters for all of her friends in school, Karina Cooper eventually grew up (sort of) and went to work in the real world (kind of), where she decided that making stuff up was way more fun (true!). She is the author of dark and sexy paranormal romances, steampunk adventures, crossover urban fantasy, and continues to write across multiple genres with mad glee. Her award-winning steampunk series, The St. Croix Chronicles, is the RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards recipient for Best Steampunk Novel 2012.

One part glamour, one part dork and all imagination, Karina is also a gamer, an avid reader, a borderline hermit and an activist. She coexists with a husband, a menagerie and a severe coffee habit. Visit her at www.karinacooper.com, because she says so.

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ISBN-13: 9781426897924

TEMPERED: BOOK FOUR OF THE ST. CROIX CHRONICLES

Copyright © 2014 by Karina Cooper

Edited by Mallory Braus

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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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