Copperhead (6 page)

Helen realized she was paused on the street corner close to the trolley stop, staring at a shop completely covered in blue. Early on, the city had tried paying poor folks to scrape blue off of walls and streets. But the fey had seemed to organize and retaliate—targeting only the cleaners, until at last the mounting number of deaths had caused the city to abandon that plan. Her fingers clenched around the handles of Jane’s carpetbag as she stood there in the biting cold. There had been a bakery there, before. But the bits of fey kept coming and coming, like ivy climbing the walls, choking the windows and doors. The owners had tried everything. Finally they moved out. She thought she had heard they decamped to some relatives in the country—ironic, when all the fey once came from there.

After the owners left, the mists of fey just got worse and worse, till no one would walk up to that shop for love or money. The mist thickened. Bulged.

But she had never realized that it sort of thrummed before.

Or that the tendrils coming off the house came so close to the sidewalk.

Helen’s heart jolted, beat a wild rhythm, flooded her body with the command to run.

No, the house had not been like that before.

The mists were moving. Toward her.

The interwoven bits of fey flowed from the store, creeping toward her across the front walk, all of that thick deadly blue coming at her like a slow-building wave.

Helen ran.

She pelted down the street, breath white in the cold, eyes watering from the November wind. The carpetbag beat a lumpy rhythm against her side and still she ran, not looking back, down and around the corner until she got to the trolley station where, wonder of wonders, a trolley was just preparing to depart. She flung herself through the closing doors and it pulled away.

She moved to the window, looked out between the pasted-up notices and garish advertisements to see if she saw a blue wave tearing down the street after them. But she saw nothing more than the familiar thin scarves of blue that dotted the houses and shops and streets.

Her breath fogged the glass and her face came back into focus, white and strained, mouth dark and breathing fast.

Good night, she looked a mess.

Helen sat down in an empty seat with the carpetbag firmly on her knees, still breathing hard, and attempted to smooth her hair. Slowly she adjusted her skirts, straightened the silk jacket of her dress where it had twisted around her waist, felt her heartbeat slow. A weary ticket-taker moved down the aisle, stuck a hand out for her pence without inquiring into her distress.

She had only rarely been on the trolley, and never this late at night before. It had been down for most of the war—all the fey trade had ceased at the beginning of the war, and everyone had quickly run out of those fey bluepacks that used to power everything so cleanly. Tech had come lurching back in a number of different directions at once, as humans tried to make up for the missing energy. The electric trolley had been one of the big civic pushes to get going again—but that did not mean that everyone rode it equally. Men outnumbered women, but a few women did ride it. The working poor, in old-fashioned layers of skirts, headed home to the factory slums from some slightly better position elsewhere. Reformers like Jane, in trim suits or even slacks, working for their pet causes: women’s votes or
dwarvven
accessibility or some equally tedious thing. Women in silk dresses, no matter how civic-minded they were, did not ride the trolley. Helen wrapped her dark coat more tightly around the plum silk, as if that would help her blend in.

The passengers were the one thing Helen liked about the trolley. Despite the fact that they made it cramped and smelly, they were also interesting, because people were interesting. She had always liked people—but now with the fey mask her interest in people seemed even more pronounced.

People …

Helen realized with a jolt that all the men in the trolley were staring at her, whether openly or surreptitiously.

She had no iron mask.

She suddenly felt naked. The iron mask was not just protection from the fey. It was protection from herself. It was protection from her own fey charm affecting everyone around her. She had gotten used to the mask turning it off, but now it was on in full force.

Now she was vulnerable.

“Do you have the time, miss?” It was a young man, fishing for an opportunity to speak to her. You should never engage any of them, she knew, but she always felt a sort of kinship for the young ones. She knew what it was to
want
.

“I’m sorry, no,” said Helen. In the old days it had taken more than a smile to make a man blush, but now with the fey glamour every moment of charisma was magnified, and he went bright red to the ears, though he pretended not to.

“Does she look like she’d carry a watch?” said another man, rougher. “No place to keep it in that getup.”

Her coat was hardly revealing, unless he meant her legs. She was not going to inquire what he meant.

With effort she pulled the carpetbag onto her lap and started to go through it for something to do, some way to pointedly ignore the riders around her.

Surely among everything else the ever-alert Jane had some iron in here, something Helen could use to defend herself from fey. She opened the clasp and peered into the bag’s dark contents.

The trolley was dim and the inside of the carpetbag grey-black. Helen poked around the rough interior, trying to feel things out without exposing them to the gaze of the other passengers. That tied-up roll of felt, there—those were the tools Jane used for the facelift. Helen did not remember putting them in the bag, but she must have done it in her shock.

In a pocket compartment was a sloshy bag of clay in water. A larger compartment held a rough wooden box, secured in place. She would have to pull it out to discover what was inside. She rummaged around the main compartment, found a scarf and hairpins. A small leather-bound book. Train-ticket stubs.

Apparently not everything in here pertained to Jane’s secret work.

At the very bottom Helen found some of that ironcloth that Jane used to help her focus the fey power. Helen had tried it, but so far she had not gotten the hang of it. Jane used the combination of the iron plus the fey to direct the bit of fey she still wore on her face—give her the power to put Millicent into the fey trance, for example. Late one night Jane had confided to Helen that she had actually used the fey power to make someone do her bidding once—but that it had scared her enough that she never intended to do it again.

Perhaps the cloth would substitute for the iron mask that Alistair had taken; perhaps Helen could use it as protection. She pulled the cloth out to examine it, and her hand knocked against a small glass jar. Tam’s bugs. She must have put them in the carpetbag as she left the house.

Helen did not particularly like bugs, but her hand closed on the jar and she smiled wistfully, remembering Tam. The poor boy—mother gone, now stepmamma, left alone with that horrible man and his horrible friends. Should she have tried to take him with her? But how could she, when his father was right there? She did not know what you could do for a case like that.

Just then the trolley came to a jerking stop, throwing folks who were standing off balance. A very short elderly woman stumbled near Helen, her bag tumbling to the ground. Helen jumped to retrieve it and helped the woman to sit on the bench next to her, half-listening to the litany of complaints rising from all sides.

“How can I keep my night shift when—”

“Boss makes me punch in—”

“Docked pay—”

“Fey on the tracks,” one said knowledgeably, though that didn’t seem likely. The blue mist shied away from iron.

“Are you all right?” said Helen. The old woman had not quite let go of her arm, though it was likely she was finding the bench difficult as her feet did not touch the floor.

The woman’s fingers tightened and Helen looked up to find the bored ticket-taker staring down at them, his face now purple with indignation.

“Your kind isn’t to be here,” he spat at the old woman. “Back of the trolley.”

Helen looked to the very back of the trolley. She saw a cluster of very short men and women there, bracing themselves against the wall for balance. The trolley straps dangled high over their heads.

The
dwarvven
.

The woman’s wrinkled chin jutted out. No one from the back was running to her aid—though the
dwarvven
were said to be stubborn, fighting folk, these men and women looked tired and worn-out. Ready to be home.

“C’mon, dwarf,” the ticket-taker said.
Dwarf
had not been a slur once, but it was quickly becoming one under Copperhead’s influence. It was the way they said it. The way they refused to attempt the word the
dwarvven
themselves used.

Helen placed her hand on top of the woman’s wrinkled one. “This is my grandmother,” she said pleasantly to the ticket-taker. Confidentially, leaning forward, “Poor nutrition in her youth, poor thing, combined with a bad case of scoliosis. Oh, I expect by the time I’m her age I’ll be no higher than my knees are now.” She ran her fingers up her stockings to her knees, pushing aside the plum silk, and gave him a nice view of her legs in their bronze heels. “Can’t you just imagine?”

The ticket-taker looked a little glazed by the flow of words and by the legs.

Helen dropped her skirt and said, “Thank you so kindly for checking up on us. I feel so much safer now. We won’t take up any more of your time.”

With a lurch the trolley started again. Dazed, the ticket-taker stumbled on, and the
dwarvven
woman’s fingers relaxed on Helen’s arm. She pulled her knitting from her bag and began to focus on the flying needles. But under her breath the woman said softly, “I owe you,” to Helen.

Helen patted the woman’s arm, watching the wicked points of the needles fly. “Don’t be silly, Grandmother.”

Helen turned back to Jane’s carpetbag, grinning inwardly. She rather thought the
dwarvven
woman would be just fine on her own, now that she had those weapons in her hand again.

But the flash of legs had attracted the attention she’d been trying to avoid.

The boor nudged the young man who had asked about the time. “Ask her to the dance hall with ya. Pretty silky thing like that, even if she is stuck up.”

Helen flicked a glance over at the two men, assessing the need to be wary. She had encountered rough characters at the tenpence dance hall back in the day. But she had always had a knack for finding protectors. Their loose, dark button-shirts and slacks said working men—the young man, at least, was well-groomed and nicely buttoned, which spoke better for his intentions. She smiled kindly at the young man and had the satisfaction of watching him scoot away from the drunkard, trying to stay in her good graces.

“Too good for us, she thinks,” said the boor. “I could tell her a thing or two about that.”

Several seats down she caught an amused expression. A man had carved out a spot for himself on the crowded trolley by crouching lightly on the back of one of the seats, hovering over rougher, sturdier looking fellows. A fresh notice pasted behind him read:
YOUR EYES ARE OUR EYES! ALERT THE CONDUCTOR TO SUSPICIOUS PERSONS
. His face looked familiar, but she could not think why at first. He had a lean, graceful look, like the dancers she and Alistair had seen at the theatre last spring, before he started spending all his evenings with those terrible friends of his. Helen thought she had seen this man recently, exchanged a smile with him—that was it, wasn’t it? He looked like—or was—the man from the meeting tonight, who had perched on the windowsill during the demonstration. Everything prior to the disaster seemed to have vanished from her head. She looked more closely. The man was on the slight side, but all slim muscle and amused mouth. Amused at
her
expense—watching her try to cope with the boor. Helen was perfectly capable of defending herself through wit at a party—but what good would wit do you with a sloshed village idiot like this?

Well, she’d have to say something, or be on edge for the rest of the trip. Helen turned to face the boor, who was still making comments under his breath. Her mind raced through what she could say to tactfully make him stop.
Was
there anything?

“Like the story a sweet Moll Abalone,” said the boor, “who thought she was a lady fine, but when she found she could make her way by not being a lady … whoo boy! Just think on that, girlie. Oh cockles and mussels alive, alive-o…”

The lithe man raised amused eyebrows at Helen and Helen’s temper lit like a match touched to dry kindling. She unscrewed the bug jar she held and dumped the entire contents on the drunken boor’s head. Bugs and grass rained down around him, and his jaw fell slack in shock.

So did Helen’s, for she had not entirely meant to do that. What on earth came over her sometimes? It was as if she had no willpower at all.

The young man opposite laughed delightedly. “You show him, miss,” he said. “More than a pretty face, aren’t you?” and several others clapped.

Helen’s grin faded as quickly as it had come, as the drunken boor lurched from his seat, more quickly than she would have guessed. Crickets fell from his shoulders and suddenly the hot blast of whiskey was in her face, the rough red-pored face close and hot. In his hand was a knife.

Chapter 3

BAREFACED

She had no time to do more than register the danger and suddenly the man was gone, shoved away. The lithe man stood between them, his back to her. He was wearing some sort of dark leather jacket over slim trousers, made from a tough woven material. It was all very close-fitting, and free of loops and pockets and things that would catch. It was an outfit made for getting away from something. “Here now,” he said softly, dangerously, and then his voice dropped even lower, and despite the absolute stillness of the fascinated trolley car Helen could not hear what he said into the man’s ear. It was something, though, for Helen could see one of the boor’s outstretched hands, and it shook, and then he drunkenly backed up a pace, then another, then another, then turned and pushed his way through protesting bodies toward the other end of the trolley.