Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  The boom of a long-gun split the air and one of the Englishmen waiting for orders abruptly staggered. He hit the ground as his mates jumped away, cursing harshly.

  The seven servants turned as one to watch the man bleed, then looked up at the tent.

  So did I.

  A glimmer of movement, a sudden bend of the big top’s frayed cover, and I realized that a shooter waited above. One of Communion’s, no doubt.

  Had they managed to corner Hawke inside?

  I could only assume so. Ishmael intended to end the threat of the Ferrymen once and for all.

  Which was why, I realized, the shooter was ignoring the Chinese servants of the Veil and focusing on all the others. We couldn’t tell the difference between them what could turn into whatever it was the dogs did and them what didn’t.

  Brilliant. Brutal, but effective.

  Another shot rang out, and the bloke closest to me grabbed at his shoulder and shouted. Blood bloomed between his fingers as he sank to his knees. I counted six seconds, and on the mark, a third shot dropped him where he crouched.

  Six seconds later, the second closest fell.

  The men scattered, even the Chinese servants, and when I realized a path had opened, I frowned.

  Was I invited, then?

  Fair enough.

  Holding my breath, lungs aching from the smoke, I lowered my head and sprinted for the canvas curtain. As I readied to force the flapping entry aside, I caught glimpse of two figures in white leaping for me from my left.

  I put on a burst of speed, the canvas brushed my fingertips, and then tore free of its moorings to discharge a wild, tangled ball of flesh and limbs directly in my path.

  I was so much smaller than the combination of Ferryman and Ishmael.

  It was as if I’d flung myself at a trampoline. I rebounded from them, flying backwards in a graceless tumble, hitting the ground and skidding along it for a moment before gravity let up and my limbs could remember which belonged where.

  The chaos that filled the air didn’t just smell of smoke and sound like war, but turned to vicious hunger and howling fury as Ishmael and a rabid creature who’d once been more man than beast ripped apart.

  Senses reeling from my unwitting roll, I elbowed myself up—flinching at the hurt lacing through me—to shove a muddy hank of hair from my face.

  It had been a very long time since I’d seen Communion outstripped by another man. Squaring off, it was obvious that the former was the larger, burlier figure, but the Ferryman’s twisted limbs and the predatory manner in which he crouched, one hand braced upon the ground, worried me.

  The two servants who’d lunged for me had hastily backed away, and this worried me further.

  “Cherry!”

  I shook my head at the familiar voice.

  “Up here,” Zylphia called, and I looked up to find her crouched on the edge of the canvas, far above. My first inclination was to fear for the child she carried.

  My second was to be grateful for the keen eye and steady aim that allowed her to use the Springfield hoisted in her arms. Either she’d kept it, or borrowed it anew from Booth’s armory.

  Third came the fury that she’d put herself and her child in such danger.

  I waved at her. “Get back!” I shouted.

  The beast’s head turned so quickly, I imagine joints popped. Eyes gleaming with that eerie animal sheen pinned on me. They widened, nostrils mimicking the flare as though searching for my scent.

  Ishmael took advantage of the distraction to lunge at him.

  A servant made the same move, and was rewarded by an immediate shot cracking through the growling fury of the beast’s rabid hunger. The man flew back, heart’s blood staining his muddy tunic.

  The twisted Ferryman met Ismael’s bulk with unmatched ferocity, and instead of twisting away from the larger man’s grasp, he thrust himself into it, drove himself into Ishmael’s space until I was sure they’d tangle and fall.

  Blood gleamed like a black sheen on the Baker’s face, colored his sleeve and trousers. He’d been worked over already, and the scratches at his cheek looked eerily like claws.

  Zylphia, from what I could see, was unscathed, but if she stayed up there and we lost, that wouldn’t remain the case.

  The combatants wrenched apart, gladiators without a ring, and blood spattered the dirt. Another gunshot found a man crouching behind barrels and he screamed, splaying over the contents.

  I all but vibrated in place, racked my mind for the alchemical Trumps that were all I could utilize in such a manner.

  None came to mind.

  Worse, merely considering the attempt drove such exhaustion through me that I staggered.

  I did not see the figure that leaned from the entry torn aside by the Ferryman’s clawed fervor. An arm wrapped around my throat, a hard edge drove into my back, and nausea filled me as I was swept off my feet and into the circus interior.

  Chapter Thirty

  I would not be made victim again.

  My captor, caught by surprise before my feet cleared the threshold, grunted as I fought like a wet cat in his grasp. His arm tightened over my throat, already painful from Osoba’s failed attempt to end my life.

  I drove an elbow into a gut softer and more vulnerable than I expected, and as a torrent of French hissed in my ear, I realized exactly who had claimed me.

  “Fool,” I spat, and rammed the back of my skull into the face of Monsieur Marceaux.

  Cartilage crunched. Searing pain rang like a bell through my head, and Marceaux howled, letting me go to clasp both hands to his streaming nose and split lip.

  Outside, I heard a shot that didn’t sound like Zylphia’s Springfield. I heard a woman’s shattered cry.

  A howl tore from the creature’s chest—ragged as the bestial fury I’d heard from the Ferrymen—and I lost all sense of justice. Without a weapon in hand, all I could do was rely upon my feet and fists, and I applied them to the staggering ringmaster without mercy.

  He’d never been one for fighting on equal footing. Fear had been his greatest tool, the fear he sowed and men what did his bidding. In the vast emptiness of the smoke-filled tent, he had nothing.

  And I... I had so much anger to give.

  I drove a fist into his belly, caught him by the back of his neck and drove his chest into my upraised knee. He yelled and grunted and screamed and sobbed, cursed and flailed, but he did not know how to fight as I did—and I had learned well.

  A pillar shuddered as he collided into it, one of them holding an unlit lamp high where crowds wouldn’t accidentally spill it. I slammed my boot into his back, forcing his chest against the thin post, and then rammed my knee into the same aching spot he’d done for me.

  His body rolled like jelly left out too long. “Mercy,” he groaned, sagging to his knees and gripping the post between mottled hands. “Please!” He wore clothing too fine for the likes of him, but they were stained with blood and dirt.

  I didn’t think this minor punishment enough.

  But I had never been a murderer by design.

  I hesitated, panting for breath, fists shaking for want of delivering such hurt that he would never forget. He sobbed, pitiful and weak, pallid jowls wobbling and his proud mustache a wilted, soot-smeared mess.

  He suited this empty circus. The stands were bare, and without the lights cast and the bodies to fill them, they looked worn and tired. The rings, vast mechanisms utilized by pulley and gear, seemed like little more than emaciated remains to me.

  The columns supporting the canvas, ropes hanging from above for use by workmen later, looked too skeletal to support the madness this place had engendered.

  I forced out my words. “Where is Hawke?”

  “I don’t know,” he cried out, flinching. “I didn’t do anything!”

  Do? “What was done?” I asked between clenched teeth, thrusting my face close enough that he shrank against the pole, clutching it for dear life.

  “The juice.” He wrapped both a
rms over his mottled, balding head. “It’s the juice, I swear!”

  I caught his collar, twisted it in my fist and jerked him back. His neck bent hard, and I loomed until naught but fierce reflection filled his eyes. And still, I saw no recognition. No awareness of who I was—or what he had made me.

  I caught his throat in the other hand. My nails, short as they were, bit into his flesh.

  He whimpered.

  “Where does it come from?” I demanded.

  “An alchemist,” he sputtered. “It’s an alchemist, a...” A bit off phrase in French that had me closing my fingers in warning, and tears ran from bloodshot eyes. “The Veil!” he croaked from around my grasp. “The Veil takes his blood and does something and I’m to g-give it to the Ferrymen and I swear I don’t know.”

  His breath, fouled and flecked with spittle, washed over me. Disgust filled me, drained my anger so rapidly that I could barely stand to look at him, much less force the issue.

  He was old. Much older than I had thought him, and weaker than I’d ever allowed myself to imagine.

  A broken man beyond his prime, serving debts for a lifetime of manipulation.

  I was better than him. I was better than this.

  I let Marceaux go, wiping my hands on my filthy attire as though it might somehow cleanse me of my association with the weak-willed showman with a crippled conscience.

  “Get out while you can,” I said, though it cost me a great deal to say it. I wanted to punish him, to demand of him that he remember me—one of too many children plucked, drugged and enslaved.

  But as I turned my back on the trembling, fetid excuse of a man, pathetic nightmare that he was, I could not bring myself to revisit those old wounds.

  I was not that girl anymore. Sober, though never far from the need; no longer a criminal. No longer a coward, content to hide behind my fears.

  I was Cherry bloody St. Croix, and I had more important matters to tend to.

  I strode from him with my shoulders straight, feeling oddly as though I could breathe again. The burdens I carried were mine to hold, but among them, I was surprised—relieved—to learn that the good monsieur was no longer one.

  He, on the other hand, did not feel quite so magnanimous.

  His first mistake was that he had not recognized me for the urchin he’d trained. The second mistake was to rush me from behind.

  I firmed my legs, caught his outstretched arm as it came over my shoulder, grunted, “Allez, hop!” and utilized his own massively frenetic momentum to throw him over my shoulder.

  It was all too easy when the power came from his own bulk.

  He went sailing over my head, and in the split second where our faces came close together, surprise—genuine, shockingly intense—filled his florid face.

  He had honestly thought to best me.

  How long had Marceaux lived in a world of his own design?

  Perhaps even longer than I.

  And him without the strength of a friend to show him the way out. I pitied him.

  Gravity slammed him to the ground, and he rolled, shouting and grunting, all the way down the steps that led to the rings. I followed in his wake.

  When he clambered to his feet again, wobbly but determined, I took advantage of his dizziness to push him against a larger column. The ropes hanging beside it swayed.

  “Get you,” Marceaux muttered through the blood sliding from his swollen lip. “Get you, I will. Nobody...” His eyes crossed. “Nobody makes a fool of... of...”

  “There, there,” I said quietly, and wrapped the ropes around his chest. I tied them tightly enough that he’d come to regret it when he was finally found and released. I had suffered those stinging needles before, and did not wish them on anybody as a rule.

  Except him.

  Leaving Marceaux mumbling in my wake, I clambered over the narrow divide separating the rings from the stands, and approached the circle that had briefly been mine. I was bruised and battered all over, but I called this one something of a victory.

  At the very least, I’d learned for certain that the Ferrymen dog serum was made of Hawke’s own blood.

  And that I was strong enough to overcome more than one of my own demons.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The disc had been lowered, providing ample room to swing down into the dark undercarriage of the stages silent and still above. Marceaux’s voice shrieked for help, for a hand; vitriol slung by way of threat and warning.

  I ignored it.

  Without lamps to light the way, the underground pathways filled with murky shadow and dusty corners. The pulleys that guided the trickery of the rings above swung silently in the quiet, as though a body had recently come by.

  What light trickled from the open discs I passed under patterned the wooden floor with faded gold and shadowed blue. Everything seemed much quieter without the cacophony of a show to prepare for, and as I stepped over a ream of coiled rope and a heavy block to hold it, I briefly remembered what it was to be a part of it.

  A rush, certainly. A surge of adrenaline, countered by the liquid slide of tranquility and fascination the opium caused to well within me.

  There was a certain thrill associated with the rings.

  A certain flush of excitement.

  Now, as I stood in the center of a room strung with complicated apparatus and limp spools of rope, I inhaled the musty air and did not shudder in revulsion.

  I could overcome this. I could let it go.

  More important matters deserved my attention.

  I had seen no sign of Hawke above, and knew they kept him caged below. If I were lucky—if he were lucky, rather—he was still there.

  And along the way, crates of items that clinked like glass phials.

  If I accomplished nothing else, I would find Hawke and destroy the last of those alchemical abominations.

  A sharp clank, as though a metal edge struck another, echoed from deeper within the tunnels.

  I froze, easing into a nimble crouch designed to allow me to sprint at a moment’s notice if need be. Senses straining, I searched the gloom for reason for the sudden noise.

  It did not come again.

  No shadows moved, no sign of living activity beyond my own passage.

  In the distance, a rope swayed, as those I’d passed before.

  Slowly, walking on the balls of my feet, I stepped over the pile of rope and the heavy anchor. Every footstep seemed too loud to me.

  I wiped at the grime congealed on my face.

  As I recalled, the passageways beneath the circus ran wider than the tent that covered it. I was certain that my chosen direction would lead to that corridor with the storage room just off it. At the far end, the animal cages.

  I sniffed carefully, but the smoke infecting the above air had filtered too strongly below. There was no way to draw the scent of animal pens from the overwhelming sting of char.

  I ducked below the edge of a platform caught halfway, as though designed to allow workers to use it easily to get from below to above. Marceaux’s vitriol had ceased, or perhaps he’d already been freed and thought twice of following me.

  Whatever the case might be, he had not put up a hue and cry in my wake.

  I appreciated that. My life was complicated enough.

  Holding my breath, I eased through the room, mindful of my step where I could see it, and hesitated just at the entry of the next.

  “Ain’t we s’posed to take it slow?” came a raspy man’s voice. It echoed eerily in the silent rooms, yet muffled enough to suggest some effort at whispering.

  Men of the street tended to come in two kinds: them what knew the value of silence, and them what didn’t.

  Ishmael couldn’t whisper to save his soul. Neither could these blokes.

  “Bugger that fer a jolly,” snarled another. “I ain’t dyin’ ’ere fer nowt.”

  “I dunno, Walt,” whined the first. “I jus’ dunno. These’re meant fer them that foreign bitch chooses, yeh? Y’ see wha’appened t
’ Bill?”

  “Bill was a idiot,” said the one called Walt. “Me? I’m a bleedin’ survivor, righ’?”

  A faint thump, and a clink of glass.

  “I dunno,” repeated the one who, apparently, just didn’t know.

  “Bottoms up, eh, mate?” said Walt, and there was a moment of silence. Then a shattering tinkle, as though something small fractured upon the floor.

  A sound, thick and pulpy, suddenly gagged upon the air.

  “Walt?”

  I pressed closer against the wall.

  “Walt, mate?”

  Wordless choking turned into a sound I had never heard before. Something I wasn’t certain how to describe. It was as if a thing both wet and fleshy had suddenly stretched taut, mashed together. As if a sponge filled with fluid thicker than water were squeezed rapidly between rough fingers.

  The choking sound became a high, manic scream.

  “Oh, bugger this,” opined the fearful one, and footsteps thudded across the floor.

  The scream became a howl, ragged and fraught with terror and pain.

  A man darted out of the entry I leaned against, features pale as though he’d seen a ghost. His eyes were so wide I could see the whites clearly even without bright lighting.

  He didn’t see me, didn’t note my presence as he skidded over a tangle of rope, caught himself against the wall he slammed into and tore off into the gloom.

  His mate’s shrieking howls followed.

  Unlike the cowardly Ferryman who knew nothing, I knew better.

  I couldn’t go against one of them monsters. Alchemy could be a terrible thing in the wrong hands.

  No wonder Ashmore was so careful in the pace he taught me.

  I slipped past the entrance, forgoing the route for a circuitous method. In time, the fading screams I left behind me ceased.

  It should have been enough, except I did not count on keener senses. It wasn’t long before the faint thumps, booms and shots that filtered through the musty quiet included another, far more unusual addition.

  I heard it first in my wake, and thought I imagined it.