Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles (9 page)

I cleared my throat. “The peddled children are an unexpected addition.”

The Veil sighed. “Please do not burden us with your hypocrisy, Miss Black. For all your so very British mortification, there is no shortage of those who will spend coin for even an hour with young flesh.”

My cheeks burned. The sweat upon them despaired of any to cool. “Have you given up all sense of morality, then?”

“Talk of morality from an avowed lover of the tar?” There, that lilting mockery returned.

Stinging, yes, but familiar.

I swallowed my retort when it only tasted like blame. “We are not speaking of me,” I managed instead, teeth grinding again. “Those are children.”

“They are given a warm bed and good meals,” replied the Veil. “Would you have us return them to the streets to die of deprivation?”

This was only partially a likelihood. Them what didn’t freeze or starve to death, or suffer an agonizing end from disease, would join one of the gangs, turn to thievery, and either rot in the nick or find a bloodier end on the streets. The working children, given to dismal hours slaving for the factories, received no kinder life.

Yet what the Veil touted as charity galled.

My knuckles popped from the strain of my clasp.

Patience. I was in no position to cast stones when I had no foundation upon which to stand.

I lifted my chin. “I have already seen what you do to them what deny your authority. Has Osoba brought me here so you could imprison me too?”

“No, Miss Black.” The screen did not move, but I heard a sound—a faint jingle, as though metal tinkled against metal. “We want you to kneel.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You have spent too long in the smoke you flog.”

“You have not lost your talent for bravado.” The Veil’s voice softened. “You are and always have been a strange creature. A countess, an heiress, a bedraggled child that has bedeviled our Menagerie for too long.”

“I am no child,” I said hotly.

The Veil countered with an even, “You were that and more when first you crossed our boundaries.”

I blinked at that, for I had not realized Hawke had reported my first foray within the Menagerie when I was but fifteen years of age.

I did not know his age then, but I wondered how much of Osoba’s storied boy of seventeen lingered in the ringmaster when we’d met. I wondered, too, if he’d seen something of himself in me at such an age.

I shook my head. Worthless thoughts; Hawke was not the sort to give sympathy. I wouldn’t inflict mine upon him. “What is the point of this, please?”

“The point,” the Veil said in staccato irritation, “is that despite all efforts to the contrary, you have interfered with us too long, and we are tired of humoring you. Better to have remained in your exile.”

“Better for whom?” I demanded. “You?”

“Spare us. You are little more than a gadfly that must be swatted,” sneered the Veil’s spokesman, possibly stung by my inference that I might pose a threat. Or even a bother. “Better for you, more like, and better still for our
wūshì
.”

The word meant “sorcerer” in the Chinese language, that much I understood. I had thought it little more than heathen ignorance, yet I knew now that it was I who had been the ignorant one.

Alchemy might have built its precepts on scientific formulae, but cleverer minds than mine had posited that whether it was called alchemy, science, or sorcery, all were names for a thing that simply demanded unraveling.

Micajah Hawke had been so much more than the Devil guarding this Garden of Eden. He was, in some way, affiliated with that art the Karakash Veil called magic. Although I had not been wholly myself at the time, I knew that he had utilized this talent more than once in my presence.

So why had he not utilized his unique abilities to escape the cage?

Why had he allowed Osoba to take me if he thought to protect me?

What in the name of reason did he hope to accomplish by remaining caged? I didn’t
understand
.

I had never truly understood him.

I touched my lips with one hand, irritated to find them trembling, but no longer bleeding. My feet remained rooted to the spot, for if I took one step, the servants would flank me. I needed space between us.

And fewer eyes upon my face, for I was certain I could not hide my feelings as well as I might once have. I fixed my gaze upon that screen and asked quietly, “What have you done to Hawke?”

“Done?” A laugh, brittle as the ice sliding down my spine. “Why, we have
done
nothing. Our
wūshì
is as he has always been.”

There was a trick there, buried somewhere in that statement, but I had not the tools with which to unravel its tangle.

“Fortune, however, favors you this day.” The Veil’s tone gentled; which is to say that the sting lessened, and once more left little more than smug certainty. “We are feeling generous with our gift, and generous with our wayward
wūshì
.”

This so-called generosity did not bode well.

I braced myself. “What do you intend?”

“An opportunity, Miss Black,” said the Veil, lapsing into the old habit of a given moniker.

“For me?” I asked.

“Oh, no.” The Veil’s inflection turned dry as bone. “That is no longer an option. However, you may rest easier to know that your death will not be a private affair.”

The words meant little enough—I had heard them before from this very spokesman—but the tone no longer bore a lightness, an amusement, that I had come to expect from the so-called dragon.

In prior threats, each reminder of what I would owe were I to fail had been painted in terms of flesh. Performance, coin for the pound—each option had included an opportunity for survival; assuming that one without pride might consider such vulgar displays as surviving.

My fists clenched, but not in fear. Not this time, and not for the Veil. “You would have me executed, then?”

“We should have done so at the first transgression,” returned the Veil, and that gave me pause.

To me, the tone smacked of an unspoken, “I told you so.”

Told whom? It made no sense to suggest such a thing to me, for I’d been here from the start, uneager to give my life to the Veil that demanded it.

I filed this away for a clue to be puzzled over later.

Assuming I survived whatever it was the Veil intended to throw at me this time. “I must admit that your threats grow tiresome,” I pointed out. “I believe we’d all be grateful if you’d simply—”

The door slammed open, in such a way as to create a vivid sense of
déjà vu
within me. We all spun—those of us on this end of the dividing screen—and I watched in wide-eyed wonder as the manservants aborted a maneuver that would have blocked the intruder from the interior.

Though my heart slammed high in reaction—in
hope
, blast it—it was not Hawke who provoked such a response, but a plain-faced Chinese girl.

There was nothing about her to speak of power or authority, especially clad in a similar knee-length tunic and wide pants as the servants favored. She bore no eyebrows to speak of, a detail that lingered in my awareness as a familiar thing.

Perhaps it was the courtesy given to one of their own, for she ignored the Veil’s warriors almost as quickly as they ignored her.

She ignored me too.

The high manner in which she peppered the spokesman sounded too similar to the Veil’s to truly understand the gist. Most of the Chinese I’d heard spoken did so. Only Hawke refrained from altering his deep voice; a thing I suspected lacked a certain amount of courtesy.

That was Hawke, after all. Barely polite, when he must at all.

I watched, the foreigner in my own city, as the woman faced down that screen with all the apparent confidence of a dragon-tamer.

Was I only an extra in this drama?

An inappropriate urge to laugh outright seized me, and I cupped a hand over my mouth lest it trickle out and mortally offend the players.

The Veil’s anger snapped in his reply, bore with it a ragged crack. I’d never heard the spokesman as such.

Fury might be too soft a word for it.

A string of cruelly sharp Chinese cut the air, and the servant flinched faintly about the eyes. Those eyes flicked to me, her wide mouth a pale line. Was she afraid? I could not tell, not without the words to garner for me a clue.

She shook her head. A message?

Bloody bells, I should have learned the language long ago.

“This behavior is your doing,” the Veil spat, and I understood that this part was meant for me. “You have turned our
wūshì
from us—”

“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” I retorted, stung to quick reply. The tension that filled the scorched air pressed in around me. Peeling the material of my skirts from my damp legs did little. Because I felt pushed to action, I added, “’Tis your own unwillingness to bend what cost you his loyalties.”

“Better
your
life be forfeit,” came the Veil’s near-shriek, and the girl, who stared at me as though she insisted I read her silent thoughts, shifted—as did I. The warriors had taken note, and now watched me with impassive black eyes.

I widened my stance, one foot placed ahead of the other, and quickly worked through my options. I had few enough. The servants would be a weighty concern.

My heart pounded.

“Always, you have meddled, always you question our honor and our authority. No more.” The voice cracked into a high screech. “There will be no more chances.
I
will have my tiger returned
.”

The Chinese girl’s eyes narrowed, and I recalled that she knew English.

And with that memory slotted back into place, I remembered where it was I knew her—outside Hawke’s door, a simple spoken girl who led me to the prison the Veil had placed him in.

While I might have thought her simple once, the manner in which she addressed the Veil now lacked the obeisance of a servant.

And I found this to be most intriguing.

“I don’t know why he turned against you,” I said, with thinly veiled pleasure, “but I can guess a fair amount. For all your vaunted authority and honor, I promise you that only a fool would ever claim Hawke tame.”

I couldn’t be certain that the Veil intended to speak; possibly I had goaded him into that blank-minded rage that left little room for vocabulary. Whatever the Veil intended next, it did not come to pass.

The girl flung out a hand to the Veil’s screen and snapped out a few words.

The warriors in my periphery moved, a shadowed white blur. One beckoned at me. The girl pointed to the exit, her dark eyes fixed on me. “Go,” she ordered.

I may not have known exactly what fractured the heretofore unshakable devotion of the Karakash Veil and its servants, nor what power it was this strange girl wielded in such matters, but now was not the time to ask.

I did not need to be shown the door twice.

I maintained a brisk pace short of a run, my pride forbidding such a display, but I hastened to leave the Veil’s sputtering anger behind. As I abandoned the overheated interior, grateful for the cooler air and the softer palette, the servant fell into step behind me. “Do not turn back,” she told me in heavily accented English. “You must escape.”

“Escape from what?”

“Everything,” she replied. When I looked back over my shoulder, she caught me by the back of the head and firmed my gaze straight ahead.

It was so out of character for any servant that I could not stop myself from asking in level tones, “Who are you really?”

“A humble servant,” she replied. Like I would believe that now. Yet she allowed no opportunity to engage on the obvious falsehood. “Your coming has upset the balance. The
wūshì
has cast off his chains.”

I would have stopped, but I had little doubt she would have bodily forced me along if I tried. Engaging her in a fight here would only cost me. “What does that mean?” I asked, but did not look at her to do it.

“It means that the tiger has left the man behind.”

Frustration spiked. Were they all only capable of riddles? “I don’t—”

“
Zhōngshān Láng Zhuàn.
” The spate of Chinese cracked behind me, and was followed promptly with, “If you are caught by either god, you will be devoured. Run, and do not look back!”

I could do little more than commit that what I’d heard to memory, as best as I could manage. Her hand flattened on my back and pushed with such emphasis that I had no choice but to stumble into a half-run.

As I did, I heard footsteps pattering behind me. Hasty. Hurried.

This girl was more than she seemed, and though this was so often the case in the Veil’s purview, I was growing tired of the layers of mysteries they wore like shrouds of silk and smoke.

I wanted answers. I would not, however, attain them today.

I had seen Hawke. I had seen for myself the state of his being, and it was not as in control as he likely wanted me to believe. Something was wrong with him, but what it was, I could not fathom. His eyes were not the eyes of the Hawke I knew, but his demeanor—though harder, more brutal than I recalled—was similar enough to suggest that he lingered.

There
was
hope there. Fragile as it was, a pale shadow held to the flame of my anger and desperation, but I clung to it. He was a prisoner, that much was made obvious.

I resolved anew to free him. To make him fight as I had always fought him. Whether he despised me or not, whether he cared or otherwise, it did not matter.

Pulling my skirts up, bedamned to modesty, I sprinted through corridors vaguely recalled as though the Devil himself were on my heels.

Chapter Six

I did not run away because I was afraid, although I
was
afraid. Afraid that I’d pushed the Veil too far, that Hawke would feel the brunt of that anger if he did not escape, and that I’d lost my one opportunity to free him.

But fear had become something of a bosom companion, and I no longer allowed it to rule me.

It did not occur to me until I spilled out of the front doors that I had not seen any sign of the plethora of slaves and servants the Veil maintained in those halls.

Although slavery had long been abolished by Her Majesty’s late father, that did not preclude the Veil from binding them what had no recourse to its will. Many were the indentured treated little better than slaves, and they came from all ports. British, Negro, Chinese; the Veil did not hold with prejudices that would preclude any from serving.

Yet I had never recalled a time when there were no servants to be seen.

This, even more than the telling performance delivered me by the Veil’s machinations, provided all the evidential proof I needed that something within this pleasure garden had gone terribly awry.

Men approached across the lawn—a dead run that warned me the Veil would not play fair. They wore no livery, not by day, but none were the Veil’s own warriors. The purpose with which they moved made it clear that I was their target.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered, grasping my skirt to twitch the sodden hem away from my ankles.

A shout rang out, something of a warning to the others, and the pale faces of the men clad in workman’s wool and canvas turned in my direction. I could not help a tight smile as the surge of blood inside my veins lent a strength to my limbs that I was entirely too familiar with.

Tools and armor, weapons and bravado. These things became something of a collector’s badge, but they would serve nothing at all without the wits to act.

In the dull light of the filtered morning, I counted the men who suddenly came at me from four directions and did not quail.

I was made of sterner stuff, even without the bliss.

Hiking my skirt high above my knees, I turned abruptly left and sprinted through the only gap left me—towards the circus tent, dull and squat without the lanterns to light it. As my sensible boots dug into the soft lawn, providing grip for my feet that ordinary day slippers would never allow, I calculated the likelihood of Osoba’s presence near the canvas.

Slim, I thought. If it was Hawke’s apparent escape that kept him busy, it would not be so easily solved.

It was a risk, but one I’d take. Past the circus, over flat paths and across the market, the private gardens provided an outlet to the district. The gate was not locked by day—I remembered that much—but often watched.

One man would be easier to take on than seven.

I cursed the pale color of my gown, briefly amused by the irony. Long had I desired a tea gown of my own. Now I only wanted to trade it for something darker, warmer. My shawl had been lost in the scuffle with that damnable lion prince, and soon enough, this reckless energy filling me would not be enough to keep out the cold.

Fortunately, I ran too hard to suffer more than the occasional shiver as sweat cooled in the brisk air.

That my lungs squeezed all too soon was something I’d learned to expect. My recovery had left me weaker—or perhaps it was that opium disguised these warnings of over-exertion. Regardless, I had little choice but to forge on, my breath gasping as the circus tent came ever closer.

Only the repeated reminder that I had no intentions of entering its hated interior allowed my feet to plow on, step by speedy step.

I held my breath as I darted past the whole, a crimson stain in the corner of my sight. I inhaled the air and held it as though I were superstitious and the tent were a cemetery—did so for luck, or to avoid the ghosts, or simply because if I breathed out, it might come as a sob of raw fear.

That was how much I hated the circus tent and all it represented.

Marceaux’s presence lent it no credibility at all.

I burst out from behind the canvas and gasped for air. A blur to my left registered upon my senses. I skidded to a stop, slipping in the mud. A man, caught off guard by my abrupt change, lost his footing and splatted into the muck beside me. I glimpsed little enough by way of description—ruddy skin, brown hair shaved near off and a nose like a fishhook gone awry—and then I sprinted away, sodden skirts wrapped in one hand.

I should have butchered the material off when I had a chance.

“Get back ‘ere!” yelled the cove, followed by a piercing whistle.

Muttering words the likes of which I’d learned from his low-class kind, I left my would-be assailant to find his feet and pushed my flagging body harder.

Pain blossomed in my side, a stitch earned from a lack of endurance. I could take no opportunity to mend now. Not when two men rounded the tent behind me, bypassed their fellow and sprinted in my wake. They were nigh indistinguishable at a glance; working-class sorts with similar apparel and varying build. Strong enough to run a risk, struggling as I was.

The hedges of the private gardens were a dark row just ahead. Tendrils of sodden hair clung to my forehead and cheeks, dripped into my collar to mingle with the bloom of exertion. I was gasping, desperate for air I did not have to fight through pain to intake, but I was ahead of the game through sheer bloody-mindedness, and could not afford to lose this lead.

During hours of standard operation, the private garden gates remained closed—opened only for them what had the coin for spending. Hawke sometimes roamed those paths, or visited a small structure within. I had rarely been allowed past the gates by choice—and did not expect to be so now—yet as I approached the entrance, I realized with great relief that the gates stood open.

Shouts erupted of a different tone—higher, far more tense than the pursuit of a lady across the lawn warranted. Grateful for any distraction that might bend their attention, I did not look back.

I should have paid more consideration to what the shouting footmen warned about.

The strike came from nowhere, or so it seemed at first. There was no flailing, no warning; one moment I was level with the gates, and the next a body slammed into me, swept me off my feet and into the muddy lawn bracketing the carefully maintained path.

The fall stole what breath I had left, and I could not afford the precious seconds I required to regain it.

The angle of my tumble had caused my assailant to overshoot his mark, and I rolled again. When I leapt to my feet, pain roiled up my side. That stitch would not be ignored any longer.

My knees buckled, my body cramped from hip to shoulder. Gasping for breath, I cradled my side. Weak. I’d gotten weak, and this was how my body betrayed me.

I was not certain I had it in me to tangle with the Menagerie men. As I wiped the filth from my streaming eyes, a shadow loomed upright from the mud that had claimed us both, ready sooner than I for a fight I had hoped to avoid.

My blood sang—one part the energy come from a dangerous opportunity, one part the pain ratcheted down through my cramping side. I braced, flipped the long tail of my hair from my shoulder and opened my mouth to say something smart, something witty and even offensive to the fool who challenged me, but it lodged in my throat.

Horror replaced it as my opponent straightened. He threw back his tangled hair with a flick of savage impatience.

Hawke.

The physicality was the same, of that there could be no doubt. Broad shoulders strained in wet muslin, an unadorned shirt stretched across a chest broad in width and tapered to a lean waist that masked a remarkable strength.

I’d thought him weaker behind those bars. I was still a fool. He was not weak.

Simply mad.

Above the hateful collar wrapped around his throat, Hawke’s features twisted into a mask of lunacy beyond measure. None would ever call the ringmaster of the Menagerie soft, and though he no longer claimed that position, he did not bend. To this creature wearing Hawke’s face, I was but a quarry—prey as I had never known the word.

As though we had not shared skin and sweat and pleasure. As though we had not only just met again, or kissed as desperate hungers demanded.

As though he had not forced me to suffer his order to send me away.

There was no recognition there.

My throat ached with a knot I feared would suffocate me.

If you are caught by either god
,
you will be devoured.

So this was what she meant.

Hawke’s was the face I recalled from those opium dreams, with eyes like the heart of a flame and a complete disregard for all manner of mercies. It was the beast of my nightmares, the truth of the untamed devil the Veil had made of him.

My heart ached for it. How proud Hawke had once stood, how effortless in control, and to have reduced him to this?

Unjust. So undeserved, but whether it was for his sake or for mine that I felt this way, I did not have the courage, or the luxury, to puzzle.

Whatever chains the Veil thought to bind him with, it was neither physical collar nor iron bars that imprisoned the Menagerie’s ringmaster. Something else caused this change. Something could be blamed for the monster it created. By aether and science, there would be an undoing.

I would find it myself.

Yet there was no obvious solution at hand, and as he stood from the muck that had softened his fall, my throat dried in mingled appreciation and fear. Rivulets trickled down his throat, soaked into his shirt and traced muscles that seemed all the more defined for the mud clinging to it.

He had always been a powerful figure, given to the athleticism of a working man rather than a gentleman’s diversions, but now I studied the shape of his hunched shoulders and thought he seemed thinner. The cords of his throat stood in stark contrast, and his lips peeled back from his teeth as he faced me like a king of beasts might a challenger.

I’d watched him seize metal bars and heard them groan, but only in this moment could I grasp that it was him that had caused it.

Osoba
knew.
Whatever it was Hawke struggled with, the lion prince knew what humors gripped the ringmaster he respected.

And still, none would outright tell
me.

No more shouts came from behind me. I dared not look to see if they had left me to this creature wearing the face of their erstwhile ringmaster.

Only a boisterous storm overhead could have made the moment any more dramatic. London’s dreary spring did not humor me.

“Cage,” I said slowly, testing out the boundaries of his awareness with a cautious name.

The distance created between my memory and my emotion came from the opium I had consumed at the time, but the weight of Hawke’s hungry stare now felt like a firm hand against my skin. I could not help but conflate it with the memories of the night spent in his arms. Of the kiss bestowed between iron bars.

Though I knew for certain that this creature only looked like Hawke, it was too difficult to separate them.

He did not stir at his name, but stared at me as though demanding I submit—as was right and proper, he no doubt thought. Beast or no, he had always behaved that way.

I took a step forward. “What have they done to you?”

A snarl trickled from between clenched teeth, and muscles rippled from neck to waist in a fascinating flow that spoke of mingled strength and vanishing control.

There was something far more wild about this man than I had ever before seen. Something that did not suit the tailcoat and top hat he’d once so easily sported, either in the guise of ringmaster or the sadistic showman he’d become.

The air before him steamed on a shuddering breath.

It was all the warning I received.

When he launched himself at me, he did so with such agility that for one moment, he truly was a tiger—all feral strength and masculinity bound into flesh that did not flatter the monster within. In the space of a blink, he was in the air.

And I was not so proud that I would not embrace the dirt at his feet to avoid him. I had already knelt once by choice. What was a second when it was my hide on the line?

I dropped, rolled beneath him. His feet hit the ground, a single hand braced against it for balance. I fumbled under my skirts, found the sheath there by pure luck. As he spun, already prepared to come at me again, I wrenched the blade free.

I had little choice, and no room with which to weigh the consequences. I caught the naked blade with my other hand, hefted it by my ear and let fly. That I prayed to whatever gods of divinity or reason might be watching over us was a new habit.

His gaze snapped up to the incoming knife. In a split second, one hand swiped through the air, and the blade halted.

I froze.

Time, it seemed, froze.

Hawke had not used magic, not that I’d seen. No color filled the air, no lights, no Chinese words or whatever sorcerous gibberish he was meant to say.

I did not feel that prickle of energy—that tremble in the air that happened when Ashmore first helped me to reveal the aether that filled the world.

He simply caught the knife, bare hand wrapped around the blade. It gave me no relief to know that my intent—to hit him in the forehead with the hilt, not the naked point—had been on the mark.

Blood oozed from his white-knuckled fingers. Had I preferred to strike at him with the blade, as his instinct no doubt assumed, he would have caught the handle. I had never known that he could be so quick.

My insides, misguided anatomy that I possessed, twisted. “Cage.” A raw whisper.

Hawke shuddered. The planes of his face tautened to near impossible implacability, echoed in the rigidity of his posture. His eyes fixed upon me.

Hunger, the likes I had never known in any mortal creature, all but seared me to ash where I stood.

When he presented me with his back, I remembered to breathe. He threw his head back and roared. It rang through the Menagerie, tore like claws through fabric and fog.

It was all the distraction needed by them I had not seen as they flanked me.