Dearly, Beloved (18 page)

For a moment I actually felt a mild rush of … not fear. Excitement. It was she who was testing her luck; I was just along for the ride. It was like watching someone
else
put a leaning tower of chips down on a roulette table.

“Screen, off,” I said. Once it was dark, I lifted my chin. “You realize what you’re doing. If my mother comes to learn of this, you will be punished.”

The maid didn’t speak. She didn’t dare take it that far. She took a few steps away from me, but didn’t leave my room.

I stood up, abandoning my project. “This better be good. For both our sakes.”

Suzanna’s eyes betrayed her terror. She wasn’t trying to be cheeky; she wasn’t confident of her ability to flout the rules and get away with it. Something incredible had to be going on for her to come up to fetch me like this.

Once she knew I would follow, the maid led the way downstairs. Luckily I was still wearing my aquamarine gown and faceted jade jewelry from earlier in the day, and had yet to take down my blond hair from the beribboned style I’d worked it into, so I didn’t look completely a fright. I moved after her, unsure where our little adventure was headed.

When we got to the first floor, Suzanna slid open a hidden door in the wall and entered one of the many back service hallways that connected the rooms in Éclatverre like a circulatory system. She shut the door on me, and for a second I grudgingly admired her cunning—she was splitting us up.
Nice
. I knew where the tunnel let out, though, and took the long way around to the butler’s closet, which was directly across from the music room. The orchestra was right outside, their music mingling with laughter and conversation.

Suzanna didn’t emerge. I waited for a minute or so, anger beginning to replace my excitement. If this was some sort of
trick, oh, my mother was going to hear about it, and Suzanna was going to have read the whole of Thackeray’s surviving canon to me …

Then, through the music room doorway, I glimpsed something odd.

There was a young man lying facedown on the carpet within.

My irritation only grew.
This?
That stupid woman had come up to my room, dared to communicate with me, to put her job in jeopardy, for
this
? Drunken partygoers were my mother’s responsibility, not mine. Besides, I couldn’t be alone in a room with a strange man. Was Suzanna insane?

Wait. Perhaps he was dead. That would be easier to deal with. Even if he reanimated, that would be easier to deal with.

“Sir?” I called from the hall. “You need to make your way outside again. This is most unseemly.”

The man sent his arms out, responding to the sound of my voice. He was alive. He tilted his head to the side, and my stomach flip-flopped.

It was Michael Allister.

Michael Allister was facedown drunk on the floor of our music room.

I knew then he must have asked for me by name. Suzanna wasn’t stupid, after all. I hurried into the music room and shut the door, hoping she’d hear the sound and leave. “Mr. Allister, you’d better be on your feet before I turn around.”

“Miss Mink?” His speech was slurred. “Oh, good. You made it.”

I turned. He was pushing himself up, but not as quickly as I’d have liked. In fact, after a moment of exertion Michael fell back onto his rear and stared incredulously about the room, as if he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. His suit was rumpled and covered in mysterious stains, his sandy hair a mess.

“Nice room. Is that a holographic training piano?” He waved his hands in the air like a barmy wizard. “Piano, on!”

Sure enough, a handsome tuxedoed instructor flickered into being at the keyboard of the black baby grand. “Accessing program. Please wait …”

“No, piano! Off!” I yelled, striding across the floor. The hologram obeyed, and soon the piano stood alone, just like the harpsichord, the wall-mounted rows of violins and violas and cellos, and my polished harp in the corner. “Allister, get up.”

Michael pointed at my feet. “You cannot tell me what to do, Miss Mink. Not tonight. Not ever. I’m in control, see?”

“Oh, yes. In control of your liquor, too.”

“That!” He struggled upward and once more fell. “Is an unfortunate side effect. I think I’m going to need lessons from Coco.” He started to giggle like a schoolgirl. “Coco. How on earth could you ever keep a straight face while making love to someone named Coco?”

I moved right up to his side. I had no idea who Coco was—a whore? Was Michael already following in his father’s footsteps? Everyone knew about Lord Allister’s revolving door of trollops. “A side effect of
what
? What are you doing here? Do you not realize that half of society is just beyond that wall? That if they see us, we are done for?”

“No, no. We’re not.” Michael managed to grab my hand after several attempts. Who knows how many hands he currently thought I had? “I would never hurt you. You’re the only girl I can trust.”

I took my hand back, distaste burning my throat. “Trust, yes. But nothing more. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Bah, you think I want
you
? What is it with girls thinking I want them?”

I struggled to maintain my cool. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“It is, too.” Michael started digging about in his coat pockets for something. I hoped it wasn’t a flask. “You’re all put out because I still want Miss Dearly. It’s understandable. I don’t judge you for it.”

“What?”
We’d met along the border between our country properties several times since the Siege, and our short conversations had always kept to the topic of that night—the things we had seen, the horrors we’d been through, and our mutual hatred of almost everyone else who was on that filthy airship, regardless of the fact that we owed them our lives. “You said she’s a worthless, pro-zombie loser! Those were your exact words. I know, because I remember agreeing with you, and I’d never agree with anything else!”

“Well, she is, as long as she’s got that deadmeat on her arm. But I think we can … I think
I
can … fix that. Fix her.”

“Why did you even come here? You don’t have permission to be here.”

“If I don’t need anything, it is permission. Er … you think of a prettier way to put that.” Michael’s eyes were far too bright. He continued to search through his pockets.

I tried one last time. “Allister, get up. Or I will kill you where you sit, and tell my mother that I came upon a body, rather than a boy, in our music room. Lord knows it’d be less scandalous.”

Michael’s response was to find what he was looking for and fling it at my feet.

It was a severed finger.

I screamed and danced back before the hem of my dress could touch it. He started laughing again. “Oh, the look on your face! Hot potato! Hot potato!”

“Wh-What …” I kept walking backward, unsure what else to do. “Where did you get that? Oh God, Allister, what did you
do
?”

“Calm down. Women!” Michael finally managed to climb to his feet. “I didn’t cut it off. It was another Brother’s turn to kill
one, and he made me take it as a souvenir. You have to kill one in front of the others. Give your number and kill one. So they know you’re serious.” He held up a finger, and I noticed he was missing his glove. “I? I will not do that. It’s vulgar. I need privacy for mine.”

“They? Who’s ‘they’?”

“The Murder. Stupid name, right? I didn’t pick it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d never heard of such a thing before. “Is it … it’s some sort of anti-zombie club?”

“Not a
club
!” He reached out and caught the edge of the piano to keep from stumbling around. “You make it sound like we get together and build models or something!” He pointed at his trophy. “We get together and kill
them
. Make their supporters run like mice.”

I looked at the finger, and fought the urge to vomit. Every lushly curved instrument in the room, every bit of filigree on the ceiling, every painted flower on the walls, seemed calculated to make that half-rotten finger look all the more horrific.

“Got an invitation about a month back. Don’t know who sent it. They use an old-fashioned letter system. Masks. No one knows anyone else. The only thing I know is we’re all upper-class.” He knelt down to retrieve the finger, studying it. On it, something glinted. Gold.

A wedding ring.

“I don’t understand,” I tried. Oh God, what was Michael doing?

He looked at me as if I were an incurable idiot, then back at the ring. What he went on to explain was not what I wanted to hear. “Brothers who brought the corpse man tonight said he was walking with his wife. ‘Till death do us part,’ right? Said she screamed and cried till she puked. Then they knocked her out, took the zombie into the sewers. Kept him tied up, waiting, in an old underground livestock tunnel. Chopped him to pieces.” Michael
took off the ring and shined it with his bare thumb. “I’m going to wear this, I think. For good luck.”

I’d never heard Michael speak so cruelly before. Everyone I knew flung knives made of words at each other, cut one another off at the social knees to remain on top of the metaphorical heap, and I happily played along with such games—but I’d never attacked someone. Ever. Not like he was talking about—had done.

Because he
had
done this. He wasn’t just talking. He was holding the proof.

“Why, Mr. Allister? Why would you do this?”

Michael pocketed the finger again and slid the ring onto his right hand. “Because I have to. Because Miss Roe and Miss Dearly drove me to it. I don’t care a fig about the Murder, but the way they’re doing things, they’re very useful. Somehow they’ve got underworld contacts like you wouldn’t believe. They’re my chance to do what I need to do. Then walk away, no one ever the wiser. Dad never the wiser.”

I wasn’t terribly close to Michael—he was a boy, after all, and went to a different school—but I’d met him often enough, before the Siege, to think of him as a very quiet, boring individual. He followed the rules, or at least appeared to. He never called attention to himself, and he was rarely the subject of gossip. The other boys I knew seldom talked about him, never seemed to go out of their way to include him in anything, but he had his friends. His father was so powerful, he had to have friends.

So I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was entirely unlike him. It had to be the liquor talking, the liquor making him act bombastic and brash and bold. I’d never seen any evidence for the idea of
in vino veritas
. With boys it was more like
in vino bullitas
.

Some confidence restored, I said, “This is about Miss Dearly, then? Are you going to do something to her?”

“No!” Michael laughed, the sound off-kilter and eerie. “I
would never hurt her!” His voice hardened. “But she’ll learn. And Roe. Someone has to pay for the plague.”

“I agree with that, Mr. Allister.” And I did, but right now I was prepared to tell him I owned property on the moon if it would get him out of my house. I tried to steady my face, my voice. “Look, there’s a party going on outside. Is that what brought you here? Surely your driver isn’t drunk.”

Michael squinted at the curtain-shrouded windows, faded from without by the party lights. The silhouettes of the revelers outside were superimposed one over another, a congealed beast with many heads. “No. I thought of you after I got out of the city.” He flung his arms out. “This morning I was down, but now I am
up
! Dad’s got me pushing paper at his office, my bank account is full again—do you know how expensive drinking has become since December? Maggot-men pickling themselves, must be …”

“How did you get in here?”

Michael scoffed. “I knocked at the door. What do you take me for, a lout?”

I breathed a sigh of relief. My mother hadn’t seen him, then. “You need to go before anyone sees you. Come on, I’ll show you out.”

Michael nodded, and allowed me to take his arm and lead him forward. He reached out his free hand as we neared the doorway, strumming the strings of the instruments on the wall, stirring up a set of notes that almost seemed frightened of one another.

When I got him to the foyer he turned to me and said, voice suddenly cold, “You won’t tell anyone.”

“No. But you have to stop giving me things to tell.”

“I have to tell someone. I think that’s it. I’m tired of not telling. Not acting.” He tried to touch my cheek, and I thrust his arm away. He caught mine, pinning me. “I’m going to cut Griswold’s heart out and show it to Miss Dearly. So she can see it’s
dead. That it never beat for her. And then I’m going to put a bullet in his head. And I need privacy for that. Can’t do it in front of the others.”

“Please.” Disgust aside, my patience was wearing thin. “I don’t want to hear about what you’re doing, or what you
think
you’re going to do. Once you sober up, you’ll look upon all of this with regret. You’re going to find that filthy thing in your pocket and—”

Michael gripped my cheek with a sudden passion, and I couldn’t help but cry out. I felt my face flush with shame—he had no right to touch me. I should hit back.
Roe
had once hit him! More than that, I should tell him how utterly insane he sounded. I should threaten him with the police, the asylum.

“Listen,”
he said.
“Just listen.”

“Let go of me and I will,” I whispered.

He did, slowly. His eyes were bright, his cheeks red. When he spoke, I could smell the whiskey on his breath. “They embarrassed you, too. Put you in danger.” He leaned close to me—far too close. “So you want to hear. Don’t you, Vesper?”

My chest tightened. “No, I don’t. I don’t want to know anything. And you’re
drunk
. You won’t re—”

At that, Michael actually slapped me. Shock froze my higher brain functions. I had no idea what to do, save to cup my cheek. I just wanted him
gone
.

“Drunk or not, I’m going to win. Like my father. My father’s even got doctors from Dearly’s side jumping ship,
begging
to work with him. One was at the office today, telling us how stupid Dr. Dearly is, how Dad can help. He always wins. I
always
win.”