Once we’d scaled it, the consequences of the fire made itself known.
The circus burned.
Fire was a constant threat in any big top, and the inferno consuming the whole lit the darkening gloom to a demonic orange and yellow. Manic shadows leapt and danced, hellish flames basting all who came near with terrible heat.
Had Marceaux escaped?
I shuddered, turning away from the fire. “The Veil’s manor—” I began.
“Cherry St. Croix!”
Hawke caught my arm and wrenched me behind him.
I knew Ashmore as a good man, a man who put himself out to take a wayward heiress and dry her out despite the inordinate amount of effort it took. I knew him as a gifted tutor, an alchemist, a friend.
Hawke knew him as the man who’d stolen me away.
I should have thought this one through.
A blue flare, similar to the one that had coalesced in his palm before, warned me. “No,” I began, but too late.
With a furious roar, the light arced from his hand to Ashmore.
“Hamaxa!” A shaped H upon its side and an arcane shield in violet script flared in front of Ashmore, painting his features in brilliant shades of blue and purple. The sorcery Hawke shaped slammed into the alchemical crystal shield and a thunderclap followed. It swept over Hawke, forced him back a step. Only his body saved me from a likely tumble.
The fire caught in the reaction guttered wildly, but only leapt higher.
“Enough,” I screamed over both. I grasped at Hawke’s arm, held on to it for dear life, and thrust a hand at my tutor. “Introductions be damned, the both of you stand down!”
Oh, what a ridiculous tableau we must have made. Me looking like a ragamuffin screeching at two of the most powerful men I knew.
“Step away from him,” Ashmore ordered, his eyes pinned on Hawke.
A snarl from the latter told me that my tutor had tread on that possessive nature.
I stepped closer to Hawke. “I won’t.”
A footstep from the right, farthest from the flame, caught my attention, and I threw myself between Zylphia’s aim and her target. “Stop,” I pleaded. “Zylla, it’s okay.”
“Where’s the Veil, Cage?” she demanded, tone as icy as the hue of her eyes.
Hawke all but vibrated in place behind me. That he allowed me to stand between him and Zylphia was, I have no doubt, as much to protect her as I thought to protect him. “I don’t know,” he managed, but it cost him. Every tendon of his body had locked down, all but trembling with the urge he fought back—a demand to pluck me from them he saw as a threat.
Heaven help the man, he tried so hard. For my sake?
Ashmore reached into a small satchel, and the glint of glass was a familiar one, though the green contents within were not.
I whipped my gaze back and forth between Zylphia and Ashmore, fear and panic and anger all bleeding together. I was one step away from bursting into tears, and that would only cause hell to break lose.
“Liar,” Zylphia snapped.
“I don’t know,” he repeated, louder. Harsher.
“We can all talk about this,” I insisted. “Please, put the weapons down.”
“He’s the Veil’s tiger,” Zylphia retorted. She shifted her stance, firmed her aim. “Ever since he saved you, he ain’t been the same. He’ll never be the same.”
I flinched.
I saw the recognition in her features, knew that it was sympathy and regret that she felt for me, but I also knew her resolve.
I reached out with the only thing I had. “If you shoot him, Zylla, I will never help you against the Ferrymen.”
Her mouth whitened. “You don’t have to. Communion’s whole and he’s done the rest.” A nod to Ashmore.
I turned a furious stare on him, and the level of disappointment he levied on me all but stole the heart I had left. “How could you let this happen? You knew what I wanted!”
He shook his head, copper hair a brilliant corona. “Because I care for you, I must. Step away from him, Cherry. We can’t let him get away.”
“He doesn’t have to get away!”
Hawke’s hands settled over my shoulders. “Enough.”
I shook my head. “I won’t—”
“Cherry, it’s enough.” Gently—far more gently than I expected—he turned me to face him. The fire rippled and howled, feasting on the canvas it devoured, and painted Hawke’s swarthy skin with leaping orange and shadowed black.
To anyone else, he must have looked monstrous indeed.
But I knew the features painted so unflinchingly. I knew the feel of his skin, the rough clasp of his hands. I didn’t want to let go. Not for a moment.
I was afraid to call it love.
He looked over my head at Ashmore. “Are you hers?”
I don’t know what face Ashmore gave Hawk, but his voice rang with certainty when my tutor answered, “Yes.”
“Cherry,” Zylphia called, “step away.”
The hands upon my shoulders tensed. I watched the pulse surge at his throat, and I reached up to flatten my hand over his chest. “Hawke.”
His gaze finally met mine.
I took an aching breath. “Do you...”
He turned me again, this time with the roughness I expected. “I will not say it,” he said low in my ear. “You would not believe me, anyway.”
I had no opportunity to argue.
He shoved me away, hard enough that I tripped over the ground and my own tangled feet.
“Do it,” he ordered.
Zylphia’s rifle fired.
I grunted as I hit the earth, but wasted no time catching my breath before I shrieked a denial.
A burning light seared through the incandescent flame, and for one eternal moment, everything turned agonizing white.
“Noxa,” Ashmore thundered.
The visceral agony of Hawke’s scream would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Noxa,” I said, staring into the flame dancing merrily in Fanny’s parlor. “The thirteenth Trump that corresponds with the letter N, and retains the symbolism of the human being.”
“Go on.”
My hands clenched over the journal I’d been using to chronicle my studies. The binding had not torn, but a gouge marred the edge from the strength of my grip. “My mother used it to fuel at least part of her mischief.”
“The facts, if you please,” Ashmore said sternly.
I squeezed my eyes shut. They ached. All of me did, even the wounds that had begun to heal.
Two days of sleep—sedated by force from one of Ashmore’s mysterious concoctions—had helped ensure I did not tear my own bandages off with my restlessness. I was still tired, but I’d had enough of bed rest. I simply lacked the energy to pace.
Impatience filled me. “Must we talk about this?”
“Yes,” he replied curtly. “You dabble in Trumps you do not understand and it costs you and everyone around you.” The lash of it was made all the harsher for the truth. I had informed him of my use of Magnitudo, and the lambasting I’d earned from risking so much of myself had been worse than any whip.
Ashmore had sworn to withhold all studies from me if I strayed so far again.
That he followed such a threat with a warning—that consequences of such meddling might yet be unknown to us—made it all worse.
I bent forward over my book, cradled my head in my hands. I wanted to cry, to sob for the day of fire and blood, but I lacked the energy for that.
All that kept me sane now was the information that trickled in through Zylphia, when she came, and Maddie Ruth, who had tended to my injuries.
Ishmael had required much less time abed, but he had always been a strong man. I’d been informed that the Bakers who had survived the night were well on their way to hunting down the last of the twisted Ferrymen.
Ashmore’s analysis of the contents had proven remarkably simple. The concoction was made with mercury, aether and
a handful of other herbs thought to be poisonous. What made it most effective was the esoteric bindings. Ashmore theorized that only a clumsy use of Apis would have bound the otherwise deadly ingredients into such a turn, forcing an aspect to the plant matter that should not exist.
Which explained only partially why it had twisted the men who drank it.
There was nothing perfect about the serum’s goal. Only death. That suggested a lackadaisical approach to the precepts of alchemy—and a focus on results regardless of consequence.
In hindsight, I could say the same for the Veil. Achieve victory at all costs.
I looked down at my own handwriting and said tightly, “The Latin word means ‘harm.’”
Such as the sort that caused a man to suffer. Endless, agonizing torment. Hawke’s last scream still haunted me.
And for what? None could say for sure who had perished in the flames that consumed the Menagerie. If the Veil had died in its manor, if Marceaux had been inside the circus tent. The Bakers were consumed with the hunt for the remaining Ferrymen, determined to annihilate the gang down to its last man.
Of the Veil itself, the manor was so much ash. No bodies could be found among them. Several of the Chinese servants had escaped, but many had simply claimed asylum with their brethren in Limehouse.
The warriors—those who had not been killed—had vanished.
The police had converged upon the pleasure garden too soon to facilitate a search for those we’d intended to destroy. Much of the clean-up, and the rest of the fighting, had been taken care of by the rozzers prone to shoot before asking questions. It hadn’t taken long, or so Maddie Ruth had told me, before the last fights had ended.
The death toll was high on every side.
Too high.
My only comfort was that the remaining sweets, Delilah and Talitha among them, were well cared for. As was Flip, who had insisted on sending Maddie Ruth with a kiss to share.
She had not. I suspected Flip still nursed a rattled skull for it.
Relief and anger and all the unknowing of it weighed upon me. Tears burned behind the parchment feel of my eyelids.
I was tired. So very worn.
And I was still afraid. For among those who had been so grievously injured, there was one who had not yet decided upon the land of the living or the release of the dead.
Ashmore turned a page in his book. “Noxa can also mean ‘injury,’ but is that all you know?” he asked, in a tone that suggested what I parroted back to him did not matter.
I forced my straying thoughts to focus. “No,” I said slowly. “Noxa symbolizes birth, death and resurrection.”
“Close,” Ashmore said, and snapped the book shut. Booth, entirely too composed to jump, lifted placid eyes to his employer, saw nothing he could tend to directly, and continued to refill Ashmore’s brandy. “Thank you, Booth.”
“Sir.”
My butler slanted me a subtle wink as he departed.
I summoned a smile, but knew it to be distracted. “What do you mean, ‘close’?” I demanded.
“The letter symbolizes birth, death, resurrection, and includes the inevitable fall of the resurrected and subsequent rise again.”
I stared at him. “That makes no sense.”
Ashmore’s features lent rather well to severity when he taught, but in this moment, the corner of his mouth quirked. It wasn’t an entirely free gesture, for I’d been very short with him since waking and he had not earned his way back into my good graces. “Then it seems you will have to study until it does,” he replied.
I threw the book at him.
He dodged simply by leaning to the side, expression falling into one of censure. “How can you expect to learn if you will not study?”
“How can you expect me to study?” I demanded, temper high. I rose to my feet, but I didn’t know where to pace. “What am I supposed to do? Everything is ‘wait for this’ and ‘wait for that.’ Every hour I want to peel the skin from my bones.” I drew a hand over my face. “There is nothing I can hold onto. Just bloody wait.”
Ashmore sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “There are few guarantees in this life, minx. One might say that death is a guarantee in every life, but—” My snort made it clear exactly what I thought of that. Ashmore’s tone gentled. “I am not the only one who has cheated death.”
“But—” But what did that mean? A part of me longed to treat that what my tutor told me as reassurance, yet I could not see how.
Hawke had not woken from whatever alchemical assault Ashmore had levied upon him. He slept, and even that word was too strong a descriptor. It was as though he lingered in a waking death—a pallid thing that barely breathed.
It was all I could do not to keep my ear pressed to his still chest.
I was so afraid that shallow thump of his heart would cease when I was not listening for it.
If he died, if Ashmore had betrayed me, what would I do?
How would I manage?
My hands shook violently.
Ashmore noticed. Of course he did, he noticed all such things. “Stop,” he ordered gently. “Stop thinking in circles and use your brain. You aren’t hearing me, Cherry.” He set aside his book, then reached down to collect my ill-treated journal. He placed it atop his own. “The Chinese have a number of myths,” he said, a non-sequitur that had me pausing with impatient confusion. “Among them is the legend of the dragon.”
“A godlike being so powerful that only the tiger can challenge it,” I said, folding my arms over my bodice. I was clad in a normal day dress, stays and all, and had been happy to do so for the sake of Fanny. She had retired already, as she had become wont to do.
She did not know how close I had come to leaving her again. I would never tell her.
For as long as I had left in this world, I would treasure her.
But her sympathies, her practical comforts, could not ease this screaming ache inside me.
Ashmore shook his head wryly. “This is why you don’t learn as quick as you should,” he pointed out, and I flushed. “Listen. Yes, the tiger can challenge the dragon, but he is not the only one. I have said before that there are others with, as you so delicately put it, delusions of grandeur. Those whose strength of body and will is more than a match for the tiger or the dragon.” Ashmore’s gaze flicked away from me, catlike gleam only forcing my ire. “One who has been through the gates of death itself and come out the stronger for it.”
I set my jaw. “I am trying so hard,” I said, voice shaking. I clutched at my skirts firmly enough to still the trembling I couldn’t hide. “All this metaphor confuses me. Just tell me what you mean.”
“You are—” he sighed, “—overly literal at the best of times. ’Tis no wonder you struggle with the Trumps.” He leaned back in his chair, scrubbing hard fingers through his wild hair. “For the love of all things reasonable, please explain.”
I all but snarled. “How can I—”
But what I meant to say, the frustration and protest I intended to levy, died as a masculine voice—rich, husky, beloved to the very marrow of my aching bones—spoke first.
“It means,” said Hawke from behind me, “that no matter how strong the tiger—”
My heart skipped a beat.
“—or how powerful the dragon,” he said, drawing each syllable out with level calm.
I turned. So very slowly.
“The fierce phoenix is more than a match for either.”
Ashmore inclined his head in acknowledgement of an answer correctly given, but I couldn’t care less for lecture and lessons. Not when Hawke’s voice, raspy from a sleep too close to death and hoarse from two days’ lack of use, came to me like a hymn.
Hawke leaned against the wall door frame, leanly muscled figure more than adequate to take up the whole. He wore cotton nightclothes better suited to a gentleman, and deep shadows marred his cheeks and the skin beneath his eyes. Black whiskers darkened his jaw, two days left alone, and it only served to highlight t
he savage incongruity between the man and the clothing.
But what I loved most were the eyes that met mine without flinching; a deep brown in hue with a river of Devil’s own blue down the left.
I didn’t care who saw. I didn’t care if Mrs. Booth herself came after me with a feather duster. I would not call it what it was, but there was no going back. Every part of me had been inscribed with the tiger I’d challenged, the man I’d fought to free, and in the end, fought to save—not from the shackles, or the hateful collar he no longer wore, but from a world without me.
I was arrogant. I would admit this. I was selfish. I demanded everything.
But I had earned him. Just as he had been indelibly marked by me.
I lifted the hem of my violet and gold day dress, planted a foot on the sofa, and marched right over it.
Hawke caught me as I leapt off the back.
* * * * *
Catch up on the other titles in Karina Cooper’s The St. Croix Chronicles today!
Corroded
Book three of The St. Croix Chronicles
Hungry for vengeance, Cherry St. Croix is forced to the fog-ridden streets of Victorian London.
My rival, a collector of bounties like myself, has murdered one of my own. In consequence, I have been removed from my house, my staff and all who would support me. I have nowhere else to turn, so I beg asylum within the Midnight Menagerie, London’s decadent pleasure garden.
Micajah Hawke’s dominance there will not tolerate my presence for long. I am fixated on revenge, but I walk a razor’s edge under his scrutiny. His wicked power is not easily ignored, and I must not allow myself to submit—no matter how sweet the sacrifice.
Challenging my rival to a race is the only way to end this—no small task when the quarry is the murderous Jack the Ripper. As my enemies close in, I fear the consequences of this hunt. I am trapped between two killers, and what doesn’t kill me may leave its scars forever.
Tempered
Book four of The St. Croix Chronicles
Forced out of London’s coal-blackened streets, Cherry St. Croix is faced with her most difficult undertaking yet: sobriety.
At long last, my guardian, the enigmatic Mr. Oliver Ashmore, has revealed himself—and his order is clear: I am to be dried out at once, regardless of my wishes.
Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles Page 33
