Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  To think that she had been so proud when I’d agreed to marry the earl that asked.

  My newly acquired husband, Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, Earl Compton, had been slain on our wedding night, and his mother, a marchioness who had despised my very existence, had dismissed all of my staff and imprisoned me in the trappings of a widow for eternity.

  All these things had conspired to send me into the fog, into the dangerous streets to hunt the murdering man who styled himself my rival.

  I did not know what became of Fanny, or Booth and his wife. I did not wish to know. I wanted only to be left to my own devices—to take the opium I craved, to soothe the ache buried in my heart and mind.

  I did not want to think of all I had lost.

  What a cruel man was he that Ashmore did not care?

  What little I saw of the estate as he strode through it did not bode well for my captivity. Much was dark, given to looming shadow and suspicious noises—deep-seated creaking from the interior, thunder rattling through the rafters, and over it all, the echoes of my panting terror.

  I hammered at his back, his thighs, all I could reach, kicked my legs until he banded an arm around them. I screamed.

  “I will see you hanged for this,” I raged, shrill and ragged. “I will see the flesh peeled from your bones, drawn and quartered like a common traitor, you…you…” I had no vile enough names, and the cant I’d learned in the streets abandoned me.

  I did not frighten him. Silent and unbending, he carried me into a small room—as dark inside as the man’s blackened soul, I swore it.

  He pulled me from his shoulder, his grip as unshakable as hammered iron. One sleeve of my blouse had come loose, and it slid down my arm so far as to leave a portion of my breast bare to his scrutiny.

  I was too angry for shame.

  He was too determined to care—if he were even man enough to notice the curve of pale flesh. I had no chance to find my feet before I was deposited on a narrow bed. “Stay here, bloodthirsty thing that you are, and I won’t tie you to the bed posts.”

  I bared my teeth, elbowing up so that I was no longer quite so supine. The advantage this afforded me was minimal, at best. He glowered down at me, an aristocratic blur with dark, empty eyes, and I snarled my fury—what it was I latched onto to mask my fear. “You are nothing but a demon.”

  To my surprise, he laughed. “You may be right,” he said, somehow amused by me. I couldn’t possibly see why. “Until you are sober enough to carry a reasonable discourse on the subject, this will be your home.”

  “I hate this house,” I spat. I could not explain why, I simply did. It was large, dark, empty. It echoed. I had seen no staff, no lights. What little I’d caught of the furnishings appeared heavy and menacing.

  There was no opium to be had here.

  He brushed the damp off his greatcoat as flashes of lightning burned through the drapes, painting his features in demonic white and blue. The accompanying crack of thunder rattled the walls.

  I gasped, drawing myself into as tight a ball as my trembling limbs allowed. “Don’t leave me here.”

  “Be strong,” he advised, and turned away. “You will be afforded laudanum for your wound at intervals decided by me.”

  I locked my groan behind my teeth, glaring at his shadowed silhouette.

  “That allotment will start in small measures and it will shrink to nothing, am I clear?”

  My throat dried. My heart, sluggish and tired, launched into a patter so fast, it drew the last of the blood from my head.

  The walls abruptly closed in. “No.”

  He did not acknowledge my whisper. “You may scream, rage and insult all you like, but there are only two of us here,” he continued, as matter-of-factly as if he spoke of the storm beyond the flashing window. “Threaten, beg or bargain, it will not sway your fate. You will be dried out, Miss St. Croix.”

  I seized the edge of the bed, struggled to rise—the wounded flesh I fought to ignore twisted like fire. I was forced to let go, already sobbing from an effort that had not wholly begun. “Please,” I begged, hating that I’d already capitulated to pleading. “Please, it’ll do me in for good, you know it will.”

  His head tilted as he turned to regard me, a bit of his bright red hair glinting in what little light afforded around the drapes. “I doubt it,” he said, but thoughtfully, as if contemplating the possibility. “You seem a resolute sort.”

  “I’m not,” I said quickly, hoping to gain enough concern that he might lengthen the allotment. Give me more, at more regular intervals. Anything; I would take, do, say anything. “I’m weakened by this wound and I’ll like as not expire.”

  I’d heard of men whose opium use had grown so acute that taking it away killed them—simply forced the body to cease. I was not sure if I would be one, but I would do much to ensure I never found out.

  “Your stock is robust,” Ashmore told me, shrugging. “At the very least, it shall be an enlightening experiment.”

  He began to depart, to leave me in this cramped room. Sweat bloomed over my flesh, and I seized the front of my blouse. “I’ll give you anything you like,” I called.

  He stopped, suddenly still; a frozen statue trapped within the frame of the door that was my only way out.

  With shaking hands, I pulled the edge of my thin white shirt down, until a button popped and the thin disc clattered to the hard wooden floor. The air was cold on my exposed breast; the sweat slicking my skin clammy.

  If he only turned to see what I offered, if he only—

  Ashmore eased out a long, low sigh. “Don’t,” he said softly, and did not turn. The door closed behind him.

  As the tumblers clicked into place, I fisted my hands against my bared chest and screamed my rage.

  * * *

  Anger is not a finite resource, and it can be overwhelmed. The days passed. The nights crawled. Every small rebellion I could dream of, Ashmore undid—patiently, silently, neither engaging my taunts nor acknowledging my efforts.

  When I attempted to form a rope from my sheets, thinking to escape from the window, he stripped the bed and left me only with two thick blankets I could not tear, no matter how hard I gnawed and wrenched at the fibers. When he found me testing the window casement, I opened the curtains not long after to find him upon a ladder, locking the shutters in place.

  Day and night turned to nothing more than a faint gray ream around heavy drapes, and my thoughts turned ever inward.

  As my allotment of laudanum lessened, my dreams—those I saw in fitful bouts of slumber and those that haunted my waking moments—worsened. In them, I witnessed all over again the final betrayal of the Midnight Menagerie’s ringmaster. Though he was, in the end, only a puppet for the Karakash Veil that owned him, it was him I blamed for all the wrongs done me. In my nightmares, I stood again on that stage, laid out before the iniquitous stares of London’s particular elite while Hawke carved portions of my flesh for them to snarl and claw over.

  I pleaded for him to have a care with my heart, and he tore it from my chest while his eyes burned in unholy blue delight.

  These dreams grew so violent that I no longer slept by choice.

  I refused to eat, determined to starve myself until he gave in, and Ashmore—the heartless monster—simply tied me to the bed and forced a foul-tasting liquid down my throat. I had not the strength of will to choke on it on purpose—afraid that if I did, if I died from the rebellion, I would never gain laudanum again.

  He took from the room all that would provide a danger to myself or a weapon at hand, until I was left with nothing more than a privy pot, the bed I did not sleep on, and a nightshift I couldn’t bear to wear. Every brush of the material felt like nettles against my skin.

  Weeks turned into an eternity of agony, of fevered dreams that did not wait for exhaustion to claim me but came at all hours. I hurt, but no longer did it stem from the wound healing rather more quickly than it should. I hurt in other ways; in awful, bone-deep ways that had nothing to
do with flesh wounds or heartbreak and everything to do with a craving so sharp as to devour all that I was and leave me sobbing and without pride. The base of my back ached fiercely, where it seemed as if I were repeatedly kicked throughout all hours. I could not lay still, tossing and turning, sweating from the need of the laudanum my demon captor had slowly, methodically lowered to a mere sip.

  When I resorted to throwing the privy pot at him when he deigned to check on me, that, too, was taken.

  I have no clear memory of what came after. Only tangled skeins of memory too horrific to examine.

  Every hour became that of unimaginable torment. I did not bathe, I did not brush my matted, tangled hair. I did not clean my teeth nor eat or drink with any regularity. I screamed until my voice was raw and begged until I forgot how to speak. I threatened unspeakable evils, hammered at the walls, the door, the floor until I was sure that he would hear my pleas no matter where in the bloody place he hid.

  I dredged up the most vile acts, the most debasing, the most wanton and wicked I’d ever heard the birds in London low speak of, and I offered them to him.

  I dreamed. I hallucinated. Tangled red threads wrapped about my wrists and turned into a snarled mass of my own dark red hair, and all the while, a woman’s voice sang a lullaby so sweet that I wanted to claw at my ears until they were naught more than bloody stumps.

  Perhaps I tried. I don’t recall. There came a point where I was tied to the bedposts, at first like a tiger—straining at my bonds, tearing at any who came near, be they flesh, demon or ghost—and then like a broken thing, beaten and abandoned.

  I sobbed until I had no tears left, until my lungs felt filled with water.

  I soiled myself, the floor, even the bed. I had no care for such matters. I was cleaned, sometimes by a version of Ashmore whose features were twisted by hellish design and other times by monsters dredged from the depths of my blackest nightmares, and I could feel no shame, no fear.

  Sometimes I heard the baying of hounds, creatures sent from hell to drag me to eternal punishment.

  At times, I thought I felt the touch of my father—kind gray eyes and gentle voice as he called me poppet once more. I had spent the entirety of my life ignorant of my father’s affection, imagining what my mother might have said to me as mothers say to their daughters. I hallucinated these things without obstacle or end, and where I desperately craved succor, the mirage I entertained would turn to a hauntingly beautiful aspect of Micajah Hawke. His callused hands bruised against my bare skin, and effortless demand turned his voice to an unbearable burden. Familiarity turned to brutal betrayal and it was not Hawke but a thing that wore his skin that poked and prodded me, jeered and took such pleasure in my degradation.

  They all circled me in this corpse of a house. Those who had died at my feet, those who were murdered, those I’d hunted.

  Those I had killed, whose lives ended because of me.

  Those I’d betrayed.

  This nightmare I lived was the worst I could ever have imagined, and even that wasn’t enough to keep me from my need. I begged the ghosts who haunted me to fetch the Chinese tar.

  Dead as they were, without material form—without the faculties for mercy, for my failures had denied them even that—they did not heed my pleas.

  Give in to me.

  What sweet voice counseled this, I had no functions by which to know. I simply heard.

  Driven beyond all expectations of endurance, I obeyed.

  Chapter Two

  I awoke slowly, if waking is at all what I did. I could no longer tell the difference.

  The room was exactly as I remembered it, but it always was upon waking—it never changed, from one nightmare to the next, until the ghosts that haunted me deemed it time. Then, it would take shape through some bile-inducing means—running like mercury in rivulets, collapsing in on itself until I was convinced I would be caught between the walls, splintering until every sharp point pierced my ruined flesh.

  I stared at the ceiling, waiting for its pale, empty form to take some kind of shape.

  It did not.

  I had been untied, this time, and the knots taken away. When, for what reason, I had no clue to discern. I did not move. I stared, empty, aching.

  I did not want to be here.

  Not here, as in this house—in the company of a demon whose delight for my torment would never end—but here. Anywhere. I no longer had the will to continue on.

  Staring unblinking at the empty canvas of the shadowed ceiling, I wanted to die.

  Anything was better than the want for this thing I could not have.

  Had I been anything but selfish, I could have drawn upon any number of reasons to excuse my thoughts, as if by doing so I could rationalize the want for death. There was so much to choose from—each tragedy alone more than enough cause for such despair, and unbearable all together.

  This curse overshadowing my existence began with an obsession; my father’s for my mother. Abraham St. Croix had been a gifted doctor of some repute, touched by more than a hint of genius in his profession. My mother was a Society woman above his station—a great beauty, by all accounts, so charming in all things that her unfashionable coloring could be excused by all who cherished her.

  I had her coloring—the bold auburn hair more suited to opera singers and actresses—but none of her social graces. My father’s blood gifted me with an intellect that would not be quelled by mindless woman’s work.

  I had no memory of the laboratory accident that left me an orphan, nor of the orphanage that took me in. Somewhere in Scotland, where my father’s estate burned down, I was placed with other children and given Godfrey’s cordial—a bit of opium and treacle used to calm children to rather great effect.

  So did the death of my parents lead to the first taste of the balm I would cling to for the rest of my life; this wretched, worthless life.

  When I was of walking age, I was purchased by Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Curiosity Show. The good monsieur was a cunning man who knew the benefit of bribery, and he treated us all to opium in some form or another—as long as we obeyed that what we were told, and skilled enough to accomplish his demands.

  I became a proficient sneakthief, a pocket-fogler of great skill. To avoid the flesh auctions, I made myself useful in other ways—including taking on the dangers of his circus shows.

  Much of that time remained lost to a memory clouded by opium smoke and tar. Instinct assured me that it was not kind, and my great fear of the circus rings continued long after I ceased attending them.

  Ashmore, my father’s executor, had dispatched men to locate his misplaced ward, but by the time his barristers found me, I was a criminal thirteen years old and quite gone on the opium I was given. If they had tried to dry me out, I did not remember, and it did not take.

  Fanny had done her best by me, and for seven years, I’d lived the life of a well-to-do heiress, to inherit my father’s estate upon my twenty-first birthday.

  Where, then, had I gone so wrong?

  I couldn’t bear the weight of such a question. If I followed it, if I pulled apart my choices and studied each with the clinical scrutiny of the scientist I’d always claimed I was, I might see that choosing to become a collector at fifteen years of age was the birth of my undoing.

  I took a breath, but it was not a deep one. The very act dragged painful tremors from within me. I felt as if a great hand forced me into the bed, pushing me down though I had no interest in fighting the efforts. It was as if I’d been remade of parchment, with no clear memory of any time I’d ever been strong—or so needy.

  I did not make a noise. I lacked the will to try. I could not even summon tears, for I had precious little fluids within me to make them.

  I was hollow, hurting. No longer myself. I was not a collector, not an heiress. I had no parents to call me daughter, no lover for all I had allowed myself to be used as one. I had abandoned those who considered me a friend.

  I had nothing left by which t
o measure my existence.

  Slowly, with great effort, I turned my head—it seemed inordinately heavy, awkward and filled with leaden weight. The room was near pitch dark, or perhaps I had simply forgotten what it was to see. What little light peered through the seam around the window was the faintest gray, leaving the room plunged in shadow thick as treacle and clinging to all.

  As I lifted one hand, it seemed weighted by the same heaviness as that what filled my head. I dragged it over my chest, thought to measure my heartbeat, but I felt nothing but paper-dry skin and edged bone beneath. My tongue was swollen, my throat raw.

  I feared swallowing the sore-ridden flesh my tongue had become—and then wondered if it might not be preferable.

  A failure, even that. I could not summon enough saliva to swallow at all.

  My nightshirt had bunched over my ribs, a ream of sweat-creased cotton and I patted it absently, awkwardly until I remembered what it was.

  A way out of this hell.

  Of all the factors Ashmore had taken into his torturous account, he had failed to consider one: this bit of cloth. It was not the finest—no need, when I’d like as not ruin the weave with my hapless behavior—but it was thinner than the blankets I’d kicked to the side.

  The effort to sit proved even more difficult than I expected. I shook violently as I forced my body to bend—cramps seized at my insides as though the very act of motion was enough to force my organs to erupt, one by one. Sitting should not have been so difficult, yet it to took an eternity.

  When I thought myself close enough to the goal, I paused for breath.

  The room tilted, a tremor that could have been my imagination—or simply a lack of blood flow to my head. In the corner, a shadow shifted.

  An icy balm of dread turned my clammy skin to something bitterly painful.

  “Who’s there?” I tried to say, but I could barely wrap the words around my engorged tongue.

  It didn’t matter. There was no one to answer me, simply more nightmares—more hallucinations to lay out for me in great detail all the ways I had disappointed those I had held most dear. The eyes I sensed staring from the darkness were my own conjurings, my own failures.