Demon Blood

by Meljean Brook

  The bounders had no such worries. They’d returned, their heads filled only with grand ideas and good intentions, and they meant to force them onto the rest of Britain.

  But their intentions did not mean they’d returned for the benefit of their former countrymen. Not at all. A good situation within Manhattan City was impossible to find, they’d run out of room on the long Prince George Island, and the Dutch would not relinquish any territory in the mainland. So the aristocrats returned to claim their estates and their Parliament seats, the merchants to buy what the aristocrats didn’t own, and all of them to look down their noses at the poor buggers who’d been raised beneath the thumb of the Horde.

  Or to be horrified by them. Mina’s gaze sought her mother. Even in a crowd, she was easy to locate—a small woman with white-blond hair, wearing crimson satin. Spectacles with smoked lenses dominated her narrow face. Wide brass bracelets shaped like kraken circled her gloved arms. Currently, she was demonstrating the clockwork release mechanism to three other ladies—all bounders. Her mother twisted the kraken’s bulbous head, releasing the tentacles wrapped around her wrist. The ladies clapped, obviously delighted, and though Mina couldn’t hear what they said, she guessed they were asking her mother where she’d purchased the unique bracelets. Such clockwork devices were prized as both novelties and jewelry—and expensive. Mina doubted her mother told them the bracelets were of her own design and had been made in her mother’s freezing attic workshop.

  In any case, the novelty of the bracelets didn’t divert the ladies from their real interest. Even as they spoke, they cast surreptitious glances at her mother’s eyes. One leaned forward, as if to gain a better angle to see the bracelet—and gained a better angle to see behind her mother’s spectacles. Her mouth fell open before she recovered.

  Rarely did anyone hide their surprise when they glimpsed the shiny orbs concealed by the lenses. Some stared openly, as if the prosthetic eyes were blind, rather than as keen as a telescope and a microscope combined. This particular lady was no different. She continued to look, her expression a mixture of fascination and revulsion. She’d probably expected modification on a coal miner. Not the countess of Rockingham.

  But if mirrored eyes still horrified her, chances were she’d never actually seen a miner. Or perhaps she’d heard the story behind her mother’s eyes. If so, the lady’s gaze would soon be seeking Mina.

  Felicity must have caught the direction of her attention. “What is her goal tonight?” she asked. “A husband for you, or new recruits for her Ladies’ Reformation League?”

  Mina’s friend underestimated her mother’s efficiency. “Both.”

  As efficient as her mother was, however, finding new recruits for her League had greater possibility for success. A suitable husband was about as likely as King Edward writing his own name legibly. Mina was approaching thirty years of age—nine of them free from the Horde’s control—without once attracting the attention of a worthy man. Only bounders searching for a taste of the exotic and forbidden, or Englishmen seeking revenge for the horrors of the Mongol occupation—and Mina resembled the people they wanted to exact their vengeance on.

  A loud, hacking cough from beside Mina turned her head. A bounder, red in the face, lowered his handkerchief from his mouth. His gaze touched Mina, then darted away.

  She turned back to Felicity with arched brows, inviting comment.

  Felicity watched the man walk away. “I suppose it does not matter, anyway. They will all soon hie off to the countryside or back to the New World.”

  Yes. Without the bugs, the insides of their lungs would become as black as a chimney.

  They’d been made too confident by their success in America. They’d built a new life out of a wild land, taming it to suit their needs. Now, they thought they could return and reshape London—but London reshaped them, instead. The only way to stay alive in the city was to become a bugger, infecting themselves with the tiny machines that their ancestors had run from two hundred years before.

  From directly beside Mina came the quiet sound of a throat clearing. She turned. A ginger-haired maid in a black uniform bobbed a curtsy. Though Mina had noted that the servants from the New World usually lowered their gazes, this girl couldn’t seem to help herself. The maid studied Mina’s face, fascinated and wary. Perhaps she’d never seen a Mongol before—or, as in Mina’s case, a mongrel. Only a few of the Horde were left in England, and even fewer lived in the New World. The Horde trade routes didn’t cross the Atlantic.

  Mina raised her brows.

  The maid blushed and bowed her head. “A gentleman asks to see you, my lady.”

  “Oh, she is not a lady,” Felicity said airily. “She is a detective inspector.”

  The mock gravity weighing down the last word seemed to confound the maid. She colored and fidgeted. Perhaps she worried that “inspector” was a bugger’s insult?

  Mina said, “What gentleman?”

  “A Constable Newberry, my lady. He’s brought with him a message to you.”

  Mina frowned and stood, but was brought around by Felicity’s exasperated, “Mina, you didn’t.”

  She could determine motives of opium-addled criminals, but what she couldn’t do was follow every jump of Felicity’s mind. “I didn’t what?”

  “Send a gram to your assistant so that you could escape.”

  Oh, she should have. It would be a simple thing; all of the bounders’ restored houses had wiregram lines installed.

  “You mistrustful cow! Of course I didn’t.” She lowered her voice and added, “I will at the next ball, however, now that you’ve given me the idea.” As Felicity smothered a laugh into her hand again, Mina continued. “Will you inform my father and mother that I’ve gone?”

  “Gone? It is only a message.”

  Newberry wouldn’t have come in person if it was only a message. “No.”

  “Oh.” Realization swept over her friend’s expression, brushing away her amusement. “Do not keep the poor bastard waiting, then.”

  The maid’s eyes widened before she turned to lead Mina out of the ballroom. She could imagine what the girl thought, but Newberry was not the poor bastard.

  Whoever had been murdered was.

  They’d put Newberry in a study in the east wing—probably so the guests weren’t made nervous by his size or his constable’s coat. Though he must have been alone in the room several minutes, he stood in the middle of the study, his bowler hat in his large-knuckled hands. Mina had to admire his fortitude. Small automata lined the study’s bookshelves. If given more than a few seconds to wait, she could not have stopped herself from winding them and seeing how they performed. She recognized a few of her mother’s more mundane creations— a dog that would wag his tail and flip; a singing mechanical nightingale—and felt more charitable toward her host. They might not have provided dessert, but they unknowingly had put food on her table.

  Newberry’s eyes widened briefly when he saw her attire. She’d never worn a skirt in his presence, let alone a yellow satin gown that exposed her collarbones and the few inches of skin between her cap sleeves and her long white gloves. His gaze flicked back up so fast she might have missed his surprise if she hadn’t taken that moment to look him over.

  Her coat, weapons, and armor draped over his left forearm. She could have no doubt they were leaving now, and he’d come in such a hurry he hadn’t taken time to shave. Evening stubble flanked the red mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth and swept up the sides of his jaw to meet his sideburns. It offered the impression of a large, protective dog—an accurate impression. Newberry resembled a wolf-hound: friendly and loyal, until someone threatened. Then he was all teeth.

  Not every bounder who returned had a title and a bulging purse. Newberry had come so that his wife, suffering a consumptive lung condition, could be infected by the bugs and live.

  “Report, Newberry.” She accepted the sleeveless, close-fitting black tunic whose wire mesh protected her from throat to h
ips. Usually she wore the armor beneath her clothing, but she did not have that option now. She pulled it on and began fastening the buckles lining the front.

  “We’re to go to the Isle of Dogs, sir. Superintendent Hale assigned you specifically.”

  “Oh?” The dockyards east of London weren’t as rough as they’d once been, but she still visited often enough. Perhaps it touched another murder she had investigated. “Who is it this time?”

  “The Duke of Anglesey, sir.”

  Dear God. Her gaze skidded from a buckle up to Newberry’s serious face. “The Iron Duke’s been killed?”

  She had never met the man or seen him in person, and yet her heart kicked painfully against her ribs. Rhys Trahaearn, former pirate captain, recently titled Duke of Anglesey—and, after he’d destroyed the Horde’s tower, England’s most celebrated hero.

  “No.” Newberry glanced around, as if making certain that no servants were around to faint—or to spread false gossip before he could correct them. “It isn’t His Grace. He only reported the murder.”

  Newberry sounded apologetic. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her to feel the same reverence for the Iron Duke that most of England did. Mina didn’t, though her racing pulse suggested that she’d taken at least some of the stories about him to heart. The news sheets painted him as a dashing figure, romanticizing his past, but Mina suspected he was simply an opportunist who’d been in the right place at the right moment.

  “So he’s killed someone, then?” It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “I do not know, sir. Only that a body has been found on his estate.”

  Mina frowned. Given the size of his estate, that could mean anything.

  When she finished fastening the tight armor, the gown’s lacings pressed uncomfortably against her spine. She slung her gun belt around her hips; one of the weapons had been loaded with bullets, the other with opium darts, which had greater effect on a rampaging bugger. She paused after Newberry passed her the knife sheath. Mina typically wore trousers, and strapped the weapon around her thigh. If she bound the knife beneath her skirts in the same location, it’d be impossible to draw when she needed it. Driving through East London at night without as many weapons as possible would be foolish, however. Her calf would have to do.

  She sank down on one knee and hoisted her skirts. Newberry spun around—his cheeks on fire, no doubt. Good man, her Newberry. Always proper. Sometimes, Mina felt sorry for him; he’d been assigned to her almost as soon as he’d stepped off the airship from Manhattan City.

  Other times, she thought it must be good for him. God alone knew what had happened to the Brits who’d fled to the New World. In two centuries, their society had devolved into prudes. Probably because the Separatist pilgrims had arrived first, and they hadn’t had the Horde scrub away all but the vestiges of religion. A few curses remained. Not much else did.

  She tightened the knife sheath below her knee and grimaced at the sight of her slippers. Newberry hadn’t brought her boots—or her hat, but it was probably for the best. She wasn’t certain she could shove it down over the knot of hair the maid had teased into black curls. She took her heavy coat from him as she turned for the door, stifling a groan as her every step kicked her yellow skirts forward.

  A detective inspector turned inside-out on top, and a lady below. She hoped Felicity did not see her this way. Never would she hear the end of it.

  Newberry’s two-seater waited at the bottom of the front steps, rattling and hissing steam from the boot, and drawing appalled glances from the attending servants. Judging by the other vehicles in the drive, the attendants were accustomed to larger, shinier coaches, with brass appointments and velvet seats. The police cart had four wheels and an engine that hadn’t exploded, and that was the best that could be said for it.

  As it wasn’t raining, the canvas top had been folded back, leaving the cab open. The coal bin sat on the passenger’s side of the bench, as if Newberry had dumped in the fuel on the run.

  Newberry colored and mumbled, heaving the bin to the floorboards. Mina battled her skirts past the cart’s tin frame as he rounded the front. She resorted to hiking them up to her knees, and his cheeks were aflame again as he swung into his seat. The cart tilted and the bench protested under his weight. His stomach, though solid, almost touched the steering shaft. Newberry closed the steam vent. The hissing stopped and the cart slowly pulled forward. Mina sighed. Though the sounds of the city were never ending, courtesy usually dictated that one didn’t blast the occupants of a private house with engine noise. Always polite, Newberry intended to wait before he fully engaged the engine until after they’d passed out of the drive.

  “We are in a hurry, Constable,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The engine roared. Mina’s teeth rattled as the cart jerked forward. Smoke erupted from the boot in a thick black cloud, obscuring everything behind them. Too bad, that. She’d wanted to see the attendants’ expressions when the engine belched in their faces, but she and Newberry were through the gate before the air cleared.

  “Have you met His Grace?”

  Mina glanced over as Newberry shouted the question. He often looked for impressions of character before arriving at a scene, but Mina had no solid ones to give. “No.”

  She’d eaten lunch at Trahaearn’s feet, however. Near the Whitehall police station, an iron statue of the duke had been erected at the center of Anglesey square. At twenty feet tall, that statue did not offer a good angle to judge his features. Mina knew from the caricatures in the news sheets that he had a square jaw, a hawkish nose, and heavy brows that darkened his piercing stare into a glower. The effect was altogether strong and handsome, but Mina suspected that the artists were trying to dress up England’s Savior like her mother lighting candles in the parlor.

  Perhaps all of him had been dressed up. The news sheets speculated that his ancestors had been Welsh gentry and that he’d been taken from them as a baby, but nothing was truly known of his family. Quite possibly, his father had pulverizing hammers for legs, his mother fitted with drills instead of arms, and he’d been born in a coal mine nine months after a Frenzy, squatted out in a dusty bin before his mother returned to work.

  Twenty years ago, however, his name had first been recorded in Captain Braxton’s log on HMS Indomitable. Trahaearn, aged sixteen, had been aboard a slave ship bound for the Americas, and was pressed with the crew into the British navy. Within two years he’d transferred from Indomitable to another British ship, Unity, a fifth-rate frigate patrolling the trade routes in the South Seas. Before they’d reached Australia, Trahaearn had led a mutiny, taken over the ship as its captain, renamed the frigate Marco’s Terror, and embarked on an eight-year run of piracy. No trade route, no nation, no merchant had been safe from him. Even in London, where the Horde suppressed any news that suggested a weakness in their defenses, word of Trahaearn’s piracy had seeped into conversations. Several times, the news sheets claimed the Horde had him close to capture. He’d been declared dead twice.

  Perhaps that was why the Horde hadn’t anticipated him sailing Marco’s Terror up the Thames and blowing up their tower.

  “Is he enhanced?”

  Mina almost smiled. Even shouting, Newberry didn’t unbend enough to use “bugger.” Enhanced had become the polite term for living with millions of microscopic machines in each of their bodies. Bugger had been an insult once—and still was in parts of the New World. Only the bounders seemed to care about that, however. After two hundred years, not a single bugger that Mina knew took offense at the name.

  Of course, if Newberry called her by the name the Horde had used for them—zum bi, the soulless—she’d knock his enhanced teeth out.

  “He is,” she confirmed.

  “How did he do it?” When Mina frowned, certain she’d missed part of the question, Newberry clarified in a shout, “The tower!”

  He wasn’t the first to ask. The Horde had created a short-range signal around their tower, preventing
buggers from approaching it. Trahaearn had been infected, but he hadn’t been paralyzed when he’d entered the broadcast area. Mina’s father theorized that the frequency had changed from the time that Trahaearn had lived in Britain as a child, and so he hadn’t been affected on his return. She’d heard the same theory echoed by other buggers, but bounders preferred to think he hadn’t been infected with nanoagents at the time—despite the Iron Duke himself confirming that he’d carried the bugs since he was a boy.

  Her father’s theory seemed to Mina as sound as any. “Frequencies!”

  Newberry looked doubtful, but nodded.

  Frequencies or not—it didn’t matter to Mina, or to any other bugger. Thanks to the Iron Duke, the nanoagents no longer controlled them, but assisted them. The Horde no longer constantly suppressed their emotions—violence, lust, ambition—or, when the darga wanted them to breed, whip them into a frenzy.

  After nine years, many who’d been raised under Horde rule were still learning to control strong emotions, to fight violent impulses. Not everyone succeeded, and that was when Mina often stepped in.

  With luck, this murder would be the same: an unchecked impulse, easily traceable—and the murderer easy to hold accountable.

  And with more luck, the murderer wouldn’t be the Iron Duke. No one would be held accountable then. He was too beloved—beloved enough that all of Britain ignored his history of raping, thieving, and murdering. Beloved enough that they tried to rewrite that history. And even if the evidence pointed to Trahaearn, he wouldn’t be ruined.

  But as the investigating officer, Mina would be.

  By the time she and Newberry reached the Isle of Dogs, the nip of the evening air had become a bite. Not a true island, the isle was surrounded on three sides by a bend in the river. On the London side, multiple trading companies had built up small docks—mostly abandoned. The southern and eastern sides held the Iron Duke’s docks, which serviced his company’s ships, and those who paid for the space. In nine years, he’d been paid enough to buy up the center of the isle and build his fortress.