Tarnished (20 page)

One never knew, with scientists.

Over time, my eyesight began to adjust, clearing enough detail that I could walk forward in relative confidence. My initial assumptions proved to be correct; the room wasn’t terribly large, lacking entirely in windows or—near as I could tell without traversing every centimeter—other doors.

Strange shapes loomed from the murky interior as I stepped deeper in. I recognized the bulky, rectangular shape of a gurney as I came closer to it. There were no sheets atop it, no sign it had ever been used. The bare metal facing had been stripped of anything that would tell me what the professor had ever used it for.

I crouched, running my fingers along each leg. I found the wheels locked in place.

Curious, indeed. Perhaps a repurposed work table of some kind? Or a method by which his crated organs and limbs had been transferred. The tanks looked heavy. Surely Woolsey would have needed help. Barring an extra pair of hands, a gurney with wheels would do.

I was back to my theory of a second person. Perhaps, then, Woolsey wasn’t the killer at all but a victim in more ways than the obvious? Did the second person, if there was such a thing, collect the organs and pass them to the unsuspecting scientist?

I rose again, my clothing rustling faintly—the only noise daring to break the weighty silence. To my left, a wide table seemed home to a carefully cultivated morass of . . . rubbish, I thought. A tangle of twisted wires and sharpened cutters sat beside a pair of metal goblets smelted together.

I could see no viable purpose for fused goblets.

Dirty cloths and stained rags were piled on the floor beside the table, and I kicked them aside curiously. There was nothing hidden beneath. Copper coils had been left scattered across the table’s surface, some bent and others joined together by brass fittings.

It was as if the professor had only absently worked on this or that, picking it up and leaving it as the mood struck. No organization. No purpose.

A tinkerer?

The worst kind. I saw nothing of value amid the debris, nothing useful or even particularly clever. It was as if the truly useful items had been . . .

I covered my eyes with one hand. Of course! Whomever had killed Woolsey
must
have taken anything of value. Granted, most items a tinkerer made probably wouldn’t look like much—I still remember my first few attempts at fog protectives.

Maybe it meant, I thought slowly, that the person who’d killed Woolsey was also a tinkerer? Or familiar enough with such things to know what was useful and what wasn’t?

Or had Woolsey’s mysterious partner killed him?

It was a thought, anyway. I left the table, passing the gurney once more. As I did, a faint glint caught my eye.

I paused. Had I imagined it?

No. Something had winked, I was sure of it. A tiny, glittering gem? A sheen of paint? I crouched, surveying the gurney surface with a critical eye.

There. Again. I bent until my cheek was almost flush to the surface, my eye aligned just so. As I blinked, the light flared off tiny, almost invisible motes of . . .

Dust? Pink dust?

I touched the spot with the tip of my gloved finger. The gurney shifted, just a twitch. At the same time, I heard something that put me in mind of a footstep crunching on fine grit. I jerked upright, whirling to stare at the empty room.

Had the constable come in? Found me?

Certainly not, I thought almost immediately. I’d be arrested on the spot.

Nothing moved behind me. Or at all. I heard no other voices. I was alone. Still, my skin was prickling most uncomfortably, and time had to be ticking closer to the designated minute of reunion.

I left the gurney again, approaching a wide shape arrayed along the far end of the room. It turned out to be a large and rather awkwardly designed switchboard. Nothing quite so ominous as it seemed in the shadows. The whole was made of metal and entirely without labels of any kind. I scrutinized the array of switches, levers and pulleys with some wariness.

If I had learned nothing else from my forays into scientific theory, I knew this: never assume a scientist’s gadgets were harmless. Many was the article about laboratory accidents, explosions or injuries caused by the unwary fumbling of the ignorant bystander.

I walked the length of the switchboard, found the pipes and tubes crawling out of either side, and thought it looked awfully similar to the smaller tank Woolsey had attempted to show me before.

But this was so much larger than the individual switch he’d pulled. What was so complex that it required this much . . .

I hesitated to use the word
finesse
, but the concept remained sound. This had been designed to levy as much control as possible over the electricity I was sure had been funneled through the whole structure.

As I studied the silent and still dials, my gaze fell on a small oblong shape tucked amid a series of five levers. It was crooked. Not as uniformly set as the gauges just above it.

Not a dial at all, I realized as I plucked it from its unusual nest. A brooch of some sort. I couldn’t make out any details in the gloom, but my fingers found raised edges and a beveled surface.

Squinting, I backed up toward the door, seeking even a shade more light to see by. The piece seemed . . . familiar? No, not as such. It put me in mind of something my memory was struggling to grasp; I could sense the idea just beyond reach.

As I passed the gurney, squinting at the object, the ambient light brightened just enough that I realized what I held.

Quickly, I stripped my gloves off, tossing them to the gurney to better explore the palm-sized cameo. I was wrong; there was no pin at the back of the odd piece of jewelry. It wouldn’t fasten to any bodice or ribbon. There were no hooks by which to string a chain. It was too large for a necklace, anyhow, and there were strange raised marks along the edge. Hinges? Or knobs.

Who would make a useless piece of jewelry?

Although whomever had, he had certainly been a craftsman. The make was exceptional. Delicate gold filigree framed a burnt umber oval, striking in both design and color. Polished to a beautiful sheen, it set off the black silhouette raised in the center.

The tips of my fingers skimmed over the features of a lady I couldn’t see. I could feel the cut of her cheek, the graceful sweep of her neck and her shoulder. I traced what seemed to be a wealth of hair, or perhaps the folds of a gown.

It felt expensive. And thicker than a bit of jewelry should.

And warm.

A clue?

Most assuredly so. I caught myself as I started to grin. Surely someone would remember making it, seeing it. Even hearing about it.

I had to go find Ish. I turned.

“No!” The rasping, oddly muffled voice sliced through the dark. “
Give it back!
”

I whirled. And then the world turned white.

Chapter Thirteen

S
tars ricocheted across my sight. I found myself careening into the gurney, grunting with the impact as the metal edges dug into my stomach. Pain licked along my skull with sudden, shattering force.

The cameo spun from my hand as I clutched at the surface.

Energy flooded through me. Fear and raw survival combined inside my roiling veins to send an urgent message to my limbs. I let go of the supporting edge, dropping my weight solidly to the floor just as the gurney shuddered beneath an impact that rang through the small room like a tinny gong.

I rolled, gasping for breath.

My skull echoed with pain and the ongoing rapport of metal on metal. Whatever had been used to strike me, I could already tell that the result would hurt horrifically. Just as soon as I stopped trying to survive long enough to pay attention to it.

Metal clanged once more, and I caught a glint of copper tubing as it dropped to the floor. It rolled listlessly away. A black shape flitted between the gurney legs, scrambling to collect the cameo I’d dropped. Much too quick for my pain-blasted eyes to see more than a vague impression of a dark coat. A bowler hat pulled low on his head.

“Stop,” I gasped, and launched myself to my feet. I wasted no time in attempting to dart around the gurney. I vaulted over it, one hand braced on the surface, legs kicked out.

My aim was good. My fury did the rest.

With my feet lodged squarely in his back, my assailant collapsed under my weight. The cameo sailed from his grip. I teetered as I caught my balance, the cameo spinning wildly in front of me, but the man wrenched himself back with superhuman effort.

The top of his head smacked into my chin, dislodging his bowler hat. My head snapped back even as my fingers closed on the thick oval.

Sprawling on my backside on the cold floor, I tried to roll away, but he was quick. And much more determined than I expected. No wilting flower, he leapt on me, and I realized that this wasn’t the same opponent who had cornered me outside the druggist’s shop. This man was bent, reedier beneath his bulky coat and wearing something that covered his mouth and nose. His hair was an iron gray corona around his head, his eyebrows bushy over fierce eyes I couldn’t see the color of.

We rolled gracelessly, each struggling to maintain a grip on the cameo. I didn’t know why it was so important to
him
, but for me, it was a clue. A link.

And more important, I didn’t want the bloody bastard who’d coshed me to have it.

I grunted as his knee found my ribs. He didn’t seem to notice the fist I drove into his covered cheek, but my knuckles caught on the sharp brass rods built into what I realized was a respirator. Pain sliced through my hand, jarring a muffled sound of surprise and anger from my lips as he latched onto my other arm.

My head cracked against the floor as his elbow planted itself into my cheek. For the third time in only a handful of minutes, sparks once more shot across my vision. Like a writhing, many-jointed spider, my assailant twisted and kicked and drove everything he had at me.

The cameo skittered across the floor, glittering.

He rolled off of me, but I caught the back of his coat in my grasping fingers, hauling back with everything I had. I heard a masculine voice growling something, wheezing through the mask and utterly indistinct. “No, you don’t,” I shot back.

His boot caught me square in the stomach. I let go, gritting my teeth, and scrabbled after him. Digging the toes of my boots in to the floor, I launched myself across his back. A rush of exultation lanced through me as his chest hit the ground, legs akimbo.

We reached for the cameo at the same time. My fingers closed over it first, his locked tightly around my wrist. He wrenched me to the side. My legs hit the side of the work table. Metal rained from the surface, pinging and clanging loudly. Something hard rebounded from my knee, sending aching shockwaves all the way to my spine, and clattered loudly amid our struggles.

At the same time, the man slammed my fingers against the floor. I locked my jaw. Tightened my grasp, my other fist flailing for the man’s head.

He slammed my hand again. The cameo dug into my palm.

And again. My fingers went numb.

A tiny, almost imperceptible
click
undercut our desperate panting as we struggled for the damned thing.

The man went still, his fingers tight around my wrist.

Perhaps something about the way he froze translated across the tenuous, violent contact between us; I went still as well, my face level with a tiny gold dial turning cog by cog in the cameo’s edge.

His fingers spasmed around my wrist. “No!”

It was the only word I actually understood since the fight began, hoarse and muffled behind the copper- and brass-fitted respirator.

This was my only opportunity. I bucked hard, managed somehow to splay my free hand over the man’s face. His respirator caught on my fingertips, cracked even as a thin seam split along the cameo edge.

The man groaned. To my surprise, he let me go so suddenly that I found myself flailing against nothing at all. A foot planted firmly on my back, driving my face down against the cold ground once more.

In the suddenly too-acute focus of my right eye, the seam at the cameo’s gold edge widened. There was another click, a
puff!
as if something had blown through a narrow channel, and a wisp of pink and gold wafted into the air.

Into my face.

I sucked in a breath. Too late. It slid into my nose, and it was as if I’d inhaled a head full of raw brandy. It slipped into my mouth, my throat. My lungs. I knew this feeling.

It was as if I’d inhaled raw opium. Only not just opium. It tasted . . . different.

“I’m so sorry,” the man said over me; pleading, I thought. Raging? “I’m so sorry, forgive me, forgive me . . .” And then I saw his feet beside me. I struggled to get to my feet, made it only as far as my knees before the cameo dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers.

I blinked. Sparklers filled the corner of my vision. I took another deep breath. Once more, it tasted of . . . of something thick and faintly bitter. Like medicine. Like smoke.

The cameo vanished into gloved hands. I reached for the man, but his back was to me. He was fleeing. His footsteps echoed all around me, crashed like a wave long after his body no longer moved in my sight.

What sight I had.

Pink glittered across it. Pink and gold, like the warmest summer sunrise.

I shook my head hard. Saliva pooled in my mouth. I could hear my heartbeat, feel it throbbing inside my chest. I reached for the edge of the worktable, found it and held on as the air turned to spun sugar around me.

I croaked out a sound. Maybe I only thought about it.

I’d been drugged. I had enough presence of mind to realize that much, and I could taste the opium within it. Opium, I could handle.

But this was different.

“Girl?”

The deepest night would never be so rich as the sound of Ishmael’s voice.

I shuddered as it rolled over me, an ocean of resonance and opulence. My blood exploded inside my veins, suddenly warm. Too warm. I pulled at the high collar of my corset. “C-cameo,” I managed.

“Girl, where are you hurt?” Large, callused hands pulled at my arms, wrenching me upright.

I gasped. “Cameo! Where—” Even speaking sent vibrations along my throat, my lips and tongue; it was as if I were suddenly
alive
. More alive than any human body could stand. I shuddered. “A m-man! I saw him, g-gray hair . . .”

His full lips turned down as he studied me. “Cameo? What man?”

“Drugged,” I managed. My cheeks felt flushed. My breathing came in shallow gasps.

My blood surged. I felt full. Too full, as if the drug pushed against my skin from the outside. Threatened to split it. To rip me open. The first spasm hit me low in the stomach. I bent over as the world went crinkled around the edges. Waves of pain radiated from somewhere inside my belly. My lungs. “Oh, God,” I managed. “It hurts!”

He grabbed my wrists. “I got you,” he rumbled, suddenly all too grim. “But damnation, girl, you hold on.”

I gritted my teeth, biting back another moan of pain. Around my gasps, the muffled voices of men echoed from the warehouse beyond.

“Damn it to bloody blue,” he growled. “Sorry ’bout this, but we’re running now.” He caught one hand at the back of my neck, swept the other arm under my knees and hauled me over his shoulder like a sack. It sent the room into a slow, pink swirl.

Every motion squeezed me from the inside. Nothing like the sweet, clenching feeling I’d experienced in the Menagerie amphitheater, this was vicious and raw. This was being fed, toes first, through a washerwoman’s wringer.

I had no chance to struggle, to argue or think before the spasms started again. Filling me. Stretching me. Tearing at my insides.

I screamed as Ishmael sprinted between shelves. He barreled through the door, out into the Square, and didn’t stop for anything. I retained only the vaguest impression of startled men, of shouts and commands behind me, before the tide of pain overwhelmed me and I stopped caring about anything but the pressure locked beneath my skin.

I
tossed and turned on the bed. My body was on fire. It raged inside me, worse than any fever I’d ever had. I turned over, tangled in the blankets someone had tried to cover me with.

I turned back again, limbs moving. I was moaning. It hurt. I was filling up with pink and gold; I was dying inside. It had begun in my stomach, in my veins, in my chest. Now even my fingertips hurt, pulsing as if there was too much pressure trapped inside my flesh.

I had to let it out.

I had to let it go.

I clawed at myself, desperate to release the golden light from the trappings of my body. Flesh tore, blood gleamed slick and eerily crimson against my skin. It glowed.

I
glowed, as if lit from inside by a soft light. I cast my own shadow, turning the light inside the bedroom to something eerily alive.

A Chinese man stood over me. I didn’t know him. I didn’t care if I did. He was short and frail-looking, with long black hair pulled into a knot at the very top of his head and a full mustache growing straight downward on either side of his moving mouth.

“You must be still,” he was saying. I didn’t care. I arched, sweat gathering across my shoulder blades. My clothes were gone. It wasn’t enough. I was burning up.

The man flung a handful of verdant dust into the air. It glittered, sparked like emeralds, and settled over me like a cloud.

It sizzled, but not against my skin. It didn’t even
reach
my skin. I gritted my teeth as I struggled to make sense of what was happening to me.

I couldn’t. This was like no drug I’d ever seen. None I’d even heard of.

“What caused this?”

Another voice. This one slid over me like the rough velvet of a great cat’s tongue. It soothed the pain. It nursed the ache. I gasped for breath, my heart pounding so hard and fast inside my breast that I felt it would explode out of me.

“
Móshù
.”

“What?” I gasped, struggling to raise my head.

“The devil it is!” Warm, callused hands gripped my upper arms. I found myself wrenched up, staring into eyes that burned. A river of blue flame cut through one. Cut through me; scored a path from my sight to my core and twisted. “Miss Black, can you hear me?”

I clenched my teeth. “C-can’t hold . . . been drugged.”

He looked over my head. “What kind of magic?” he demanded.

I managed a sneer. It bit off on a hard, painful sound as I jerked at Hawke’s hands. “No such—” I couldn’t finish. The man threw another handful of dust into the air. This popped and sizzled over my head like the green dust had, but only portions of it settled to my skin, to Hawke’s skin, like a fine layer of gold.

The rest flickered, scorched the air for a single second. Flashed wildly. And in the sparkling reaction, I saw the shape of a woman.

She stretched her arms to me.

As if in answer, my heart slammed wildly. Something twisted hard inside of me, kicked outward as if it would tear free of my body and surge into those ghostly arms. I writhed in Hawke’s grip, half screaming and half sobbing. My nails found my chest, dug so deeply I felt the fibers of my own flesh give way.

“Jesus Christ!” He caught my hands, wrestled me back and slammed them to the mattress beside me. He glared not at me, but at the man with the dust.

“Watch,” the Chinese man told him.

Hawke dropped his eyes to mine. To my breasts, full and bared under his scrutiny.

His eyes widened. “It’s healing?” Narrowed just as fast. “What kind of sorcery is this?”

The Chinese man shook his head, releasing a string of syllables that grated across my skin. I sucked in a long breath, howling, twisting against the shackle of Hawke’s implacable grip.