The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

  Lily’s grip on the staff tensed, her body ready to leap into the fight.

  The blade flashed in Waddington’s hand, swinging low toward Strangford’s gut.

  Strangford moved. The gesture was simple, light as the step of a dancer. His body twisted aside, one arm pressing into Waddington’s, forcing the blade down. His other hand snapped up, striking a quick, sharp blow to the man’s jaw.

  The doctor staggered back, then bulled forward again. He swung the blade. Strangford met him with another strange movement of his arms, made with the brutal grace of instinct. This time, the doctor landed on the ground.

  The tàijíquán, Lily realized. The art Ash had been teaching Strangford to increase his focus and control. He had told her it was also a school of self-defense. Strangford was applying it as such, whether intentionally or as a matter of reflex.

  From the floor, Waddington grabbed the heavy, broken remnant of a glass jar and whipped it at Strangford, forcing him to duck back. Then he was on his feet again.

  Behind her, Estelle groaned, her hand fluttering to the needle in her neck. Lily raced over, catching the woman’s wandering fingers and forcing them back to her side.

  Waddington and Strangford came together again, but the doctor was prepared now, recognizing that Strangford’s lack of a weapon didn’t mean he was defenseless. He feinted with the blade, then surprised Strangford with a blow to the side.

  The force of it pushed him into another tall block of shelves. It wobbled, then tilted, crashing into the one behind it. Lily threw her body across Estelle’s as more glass shattered onto the floor, knocking over the small table that held the kerosene lamp.

  It smashed. Flame rushed across the oil spilling over the dry wood of the floorboards.

  The two men, locked in a ferocious embrace, lurched out of the half-demolished room.

  Lily looked to Estelle, who lay on the table, eyes closed, fingers twitching. She could hear the crashing sounds of the fight, smashing soup bowls and splintering wood.

  She dropped her stick, grabbed the table, and hauled it across the floor, as far from the flames as she could get before running into the debris of the fallen shelves.

  Then she picked her weapon up again and ran toward the sounds of battle.

  Another crash, the quick bark of a curse—Lily rounded a corner to see the two men squared off at the edge of the hole in the floor that opened down to the pool below.

  There was a new slit in the arm of Strangford’s coat, a place where Waddington’s blade had found a mark. Lily couldn’t tell how deep it went.

  Strangford’s cheek was bleeding, his jaw smeared with red. Waddington had him pinned, the dark abyss of the gap opening behind him.

  “Stay back,” he barked.

  She didn’t listen.

  Lily ran forward. She snapped the ironwood at Waddington’s side, but Strangford’s protest had alerted him. The doctor turned as she approached, taking the blow at an angle and catching the stick in his hands. He wrenched it and it slid from Lily’s grasp, flying out over the hole in the floor. She heard it splash as it landed in the dark water below.

  He swung at her with the scalpel. Lily fell back to avoid it, landing on the rough floor. Waddington lunged to come at her again but Strangford hit him from the side. The impact took them both to the edge and then over it.

  She heard the water break as he hit it.

  She scrambled to the edge, looking down into the abyss, waiting.

  Waiting.

  The gasp of his surfacing echoed up from below. She could barely make out the pale oval of his face against the dark water.

  “Get out of there, Lily!”

  She glanced along the opening. Waddington hung from the floor a few yards away. As she watched, he swung his leg on to the surface, pulling himself up. His hand flashed out, grasping the silver glimmer of the scalpel.

  Lily ran.

  The firelight was dancing across the roof. The blaze was spreading. She had to get Estelle.

  She plunged back into the maze. The twists and turns felt like they were intent on tricking her, forcing her to double back. The air was thick with smoke, her lungs burning. She wanted to cough but fought the urge, instead crouching, moving lower to the ground, waiting all the time for some sign of Waddington behind her.

  At last, she rounded another corner and found herself back in the room of glass.

  Estelle was still on the table, but she was sitting up, her eyes open. The room around her danced with flame. The needle rested in her palm. Blood streamed from her neck, staining the side of her caftan.

  Lily hurried to her and pressed Estelle’s hand to the wound.

  “We have to go,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  It was as though Estelle didn’t hear her. Her gaze was distant, unaware of the building turning into an inferno around her.

  She muttered something. Lily couldn’t understand the words. They were nonsense or some language she had never learned.

  “Estelle, please. I need you to stand up.”

  The medium’s eyes drifted to Lily, then kept going, coming to gaze at some unknown distance over her shoulder.

  “Thief,” she said, the blood oozing from between her fingers. The word was thick, heavy with an accent that was not Estelle’s. “Murderer. Alukah.”

  Alukah.

  Blood-drinker. Hebrew, the language of Mariah Reznik, a woman driven to self-destruction by Waddington’s use of her body, her blood. The words of a dead woman coming from the mouth of a woman who could hear the dead.

  Estelle wasn’t gazing into the distance. She was channeling the voice of a victim who was looking into the eyes of her killer.

  Right over Lily’s left shoulder.

  She dropped.

  Instead of driving into her neck, the scalpel screamed over the top of her head. Lily scrambled around the table, lurching back to her feet. She grabbed a piece of shelving as she rose, whipping it back at Waddington, who paused to take the blow against his shoulder.

  She skidded around the corner, taking the broken board with her. Splinters dug into her palm. At the far end of the wood, the pointed end of a wrenched nail protruded.

  Waddington leapt at her.

  He caught her around the waist, his breath hot against her neck, his grip like an iron coil around her body.

  Instinct sang and she threw the board up in front of her. The scalpel that sliced toward her throat instead collided with the wood.

  She kicked out at the solid brick wall in front of her, driving Waddington back into the shelf behind. He loosened his grip on her to protect himself from a fall of glass spilling down from above, giving Lily time to put an arm’s length of distance between them.

  He shifted his grip on the blade and moved toward her.

  He would kill her. She knew he would do it without a moment’s thought or hesitation.

  Her lungs spasmed, her eyes burning.

  She made a desperate swing with the board. He dodged it, then retaliated. The blade flashed toward her ribs. She deflected the blow with the plank, pulling together some shred of control.

  He would come for her again, just as he had before. She needed to be ready.

  He charged. Lily threw herself to the side.

  She swung as she moved, driving the board at him from behind as he passed her.

  She aimed for his head and connected. The wood hit Waddington with a sharp crack, then stuck.

  He lurched forward, the movement pulling the weapon from her hands. It was lodged in his head, the nail driven deep into his skull.

  He crumbled to his knees, looking back at her with quiet surprise.

  Then he fell.

  Lily stared down. Blood trickled from the place where the iron had driven through his brain. His eyes were open, sightless. He did not move.

  The horror of that began to creep in, paralyzing her. Then another crash resounded through the warehouse, the smoke growing thicker.

  She needed to get out of he
re.

  Back in the operating room, Estelle was on her feet, wavering and unsteady.

  “Lily, someone’s set the room on fire.”

  Lily pulled Estelle’s arm over her shoulder, bracing her own around the woman’s waist. She propelled her forward.

  They skirted the inferno, plunging back into the dark maze of hallways. She passed the alcove of chemicals, now lying in shattered puddles on the floor, the stench choking her as thickly as the smoke. Lily tried desperately to pull together the memory of the way they had come. Had it been right or left after that stack of crates? Straight or turn after the jumble of IV stands?

  Then she saw it—the door to the stairs, lying at the end of the long, narrow hallway.

  Behind her came another crash of crumbling, burning wood. Something in the air shifted. The atmosphere seemed to pull away from her then rapidly expand again. There was a whoosh, low and substantial, followed by the thunder of flames igniting several gallons of volatile chemicals.

  She was thrown with Estelle into the shelf beside them. Chamber pots crashed to the ground, throwing up splinters of porcelain. The floor creaked, aching under the suddenly unbearable weight of Hartwell’s next endeavor.

  Lily hauled Estelle upright, then dragged her forward, her boots skidding on the floorboards. She heard more crashing behind her, shelves collapsing as the floor beneath them gave way. The blaze roared like a hungry beast, the air unbreathable.

  She gasped as they spilled out into the stairwell. She pulled Estelle along, half-stumbling their way down. As they passed the floor of furniture, Lily glanced through the doorway just long enough to see that it, too, was now ablaze.

  Strangford.

  Had he tried to climb back up into the warehouse to find them? Was he somewhere in that burning nightmare?

  The thought sent a panic screaming through her, threatening to cloud her thoughts more thickly than the smoke.

  Estelle’s arm pulled against her shoulder, the smoke choking her. Lily had to get her out of the building.

  She ripped herself away from the burning maze, forcing them the rest of the way down the stairs.

  At the bottom, they fell against the massive door. Lily let Estelle sink to the ground, freeing her arms to wrestle with deadbolt.

  She pushed the door open, clean air spilling over them. Lily hauled up Estelle and staggered with her out into the snow-covered yard. The slap of cold winter brought home how hellishly hot the interior of the building had become. The clarity of the air invading her lungs burned worse than the smoke. She collapsed into coughing, gasping for oxygen.

  She fell to her knees in the snow, Estelle drifting more slowly down beside her.

  Where was Strangford?

  The storm had passed. The air was still. Further up the Thames, the sky turned the soft pink of early dawn.

  Carriage wheels crunched across the yard. The horses that pulled the vehicle were matched, a pair of perfect bays. The black lacquer of the body of it was polished as shiny as a hearse.

  It stopped just before where she crouched in the snow. The door opened and a familiar figure stepped out—the long, elegant form of one of the empire’s most distinguished physicians.

  “You,” Hartwell noted, considering Lily as she gasped and choked on the ground. “I suppose I should have expected as much when I saw the smoke.”

  More boots crunched against the snow.

  “Any sign of Lt. Waddington?” he asked as two new sets of feet moved into Lily’s view.

  “He’s dead,” she wheezed.

  “That is unfortunate.” He sighed. “Let’s salvage what we can from this.” He lifted his gaze to the blazing warehouse. “At least it’s insured.”

  He turned to the trunk strapped to the rear of the vehicle, tossing it open. He pulled a narrow case from inside.

  “Put them both in the carriage, please.”

  Rough hands grabbed Lily’s arms, hauling her upright. She recognized the face of the man who held her. It was Gibbs, the one who had made the bruises that still ringed her throat under the wool of her scarf.

  She was too breathless to fight him, still winded by the impact of the clear, cold air.

  As he dragged her to the carriage, her heels leaving twin tracks in the snow, she watched the roof of the warehouse dip, then collapse. The fire roared hungrily in response. The whole building was ablaze, every window shining with firelight.

  The import of it hit her with the force of a train.

  If Strangford was inside that building, he was dead.

  Agony shot through her, a pain so sharp and complete it overwhelmed all thought.

  Hartwell plunged a needle through the cork of a vial of clear liquid. He lifted the syringe.

  “Bring her over by the carriage light, please. I need a vein.”

  Lily was thrust against the front of the carriage, her head knocking against the lacquered wood. The glare of the kerosene headlamp hurt her eyes.

  Two men held her body pinned in place. Hartwell took a handful of her hair, yanking back her head.

  “There we are,” he announced. The needle slipped into her neck.

  The world went gray. The fire seemed to rage in the distance like the memory of something that had happened a very long time ago.

  Strangford.

  The thought carried a last, desperate resistance. Then the darkness slipped over her.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LILY WOKE ON THE floor of a bare, narrow room.

  The walls were white, the acrid smell of fresh paint still thick in the air. The space was illuminated by the harsh glare of an electric bulb mounted on the wall and encased in a steel grid.

  She crawled to her feet. Her mouth felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton, her head equally thick. Her clothes reeked of smoke. It was cold.

  The room was completely bare, empty of any furnishings. It measured little more than a prison cell.

  A single window was set into the wall opposite the door. It was covered by another steel grid hung on hinges bolted to the frame and secured with a weighty padlock.

  She peered past it through the glass.

  This certainly wasn’t London. The landscape outside was pristine countryside, snow-covered fields and little tufts of woodlands. It was also vaguely familiar. She studied the low stone walls, the gorse hedges lining the gentle curve of the road.

  Hampstead Heath.

  Of course it looked familiar. She had taken her Triumph up and down these roads dozens of times, though never before in the snow. The curve she could see below her was the same one she had crashed on a few short weeks before.

  But where was she seeing it from?

  She forced her mind back to the day her chain had broken and flashed to the image of a great, sprawling old manor, sitting derelict on a low rise over the road. It had been enveloped in an air of desertion and neglect, despite the scaffolding covering one of the wings, causing Strangford to lead her to the farmhouse further down the lane for assistance.

  Strangford.

  Her mind shot back to a more recent memory, her last before she woke in this place—the glow of burning embers shooting up into the sky as the warehouse roof collapsed.

  Had he been inside? Had he climbed up out of the dark pool in the building’s core to try to find her?

  If he had, he was dead. Nothing could have survived that blaze. Nothing.

  Grief stabbed through her. She had pushed him away, done everything she could to drive him off. And why? Because she was so determined not to become any man’s mistress?

  No. She could see it all so clearly now. It had never been about a refusal to follow in her mother’s footsteps. It was fear, pure and simple. Fear of caring about someone. Fear of letting that need make her vulnerable, open to the possibility of being abandoned again . . . just like her father had abandoned her.

  Because of that fear, she had refused to acknowledge how much Strangford had come to mean to her.

  Now he was almost certainly gone.


  The pain of that tore, threatening to swallow her. She had to refuse it. She couldn’t fall apart, not now, not yet. She needed to gather every resource she had to determine where she was and how she was going to get out of here.

  From the angle of the road, she must be inside the great, abandoned house she had seen after she crashed. But how had she come here?

  Hartwell. Her last memory was of ashes dancing around his polished boots as he stood in the snow of the warehouse yard and a needle pierced her neck.

  He had drugged both her and Estelle, and now she was here.

  She remembered the papers she had seen on his desk, a mortgage for a property on Hampstead Heath. This was it—Hartwell’s next project. But why had he brought her here?

  It had been just dawn when the warehouse had collapsed. The sun was still low on the horizon, but . . . it was the wrong horizon. Lily was looking west, not east. It was sunset. The same day? Or had she been unconscious even longer?

  She felt a hum of alarm, an undeniable knowledge that someone was coming.

  A moment later footsteps sounded in the hall. They stopped at the door to her room, which opened to reveal the solid figure of Mr. Gibbs.

  “The doctor wants to see you in his office.”

  His tone was bland, but he watched her with a wary hostility. What she would give for her walking stick . . . She considered the likelihood of talking him into helping her. There were still scabs on his hands and face, the marks of vicious little wounds inflicted on him by Sam’s army of doves.

  No. She wouldn’t get any assistance from that quarter.

  She followed him out into the hall.

  It was long and sterile, brightly lit by more steel-caged electric lamps. Doors marched into the distance in either direction, all identical save for the numbers neatly mounted to the left of each one. Lily had emerged from 109. She counted off the others as she passed them—111, 113, 115 . . . There was something vaguely familiar about the scene, but her mind refused to place it, instead thrumming with nervous energy.

  They reached a set of stairs, climbing a single flight and then turning into another identical hallway. More close-set, regular doors marched by, numbers proceeding in rigid order—201, 203, 205 . . . Lily stopped at the door to room 207. It hung open, revealing a windowless tiled room dominated by an enormous iron tub.