Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  I would not fail this time.

  Shuddering from my own efforts, from a lingering fear that would not leave its bitter claws from me, I struggled to sit higher on the bed—to rest my back upon the frame. The wood hurt when it touched my skin.

  My eyes skittered often to that black corner as I maneuvered into place. I half-expected a fearsome thing of teeth and all too familiar features to storm from the dark, fall upon me and rend me limb from limb.

  Or perhaps a haunting voice from beyond the grave, to whisper all the ways I was meant to be loved.

  Loved.

  The word scored a deeper terror than any shadows could.

  In one night, I’d killed two men deep within the devil-thick fog of Whitechapel’s railyard; one had claimed to love me. He was the second man to ever do so, and the second to die for it.

  With violent determination, I pulled and struggled and tore at the nightdress until it was gathered at my throat. The bed frame grated, worn joints peppering the empty room with echoed whispers of my own demons. I twisted, the mattress shifted.

  A creak of floorboards, or perhaps settling walls deep within the house that was my prison, broke through my resolve. I froze, my gaze once more turning to that dark corner from whence I imagined the sound came. When no shape filled it, I turned my attentions to another.

  Neither disgorged whatever terrors I summoned in my nightmarish fancies.

  Yet I swore that I remained watched. Measured.

  This house choked me. The room stifled me. In its cruel grasp, I could not escape the truth of my existence, and it was that I would forever be found wanting.

  I reached behind me to find the ornate newel protruding from the bedpost, its top a head higher than mine and carved like a fleur de lis.

  The house groaned, a measured sound that could be a heavy tread upon old boards but seemed to me like encouragement within its discontent. In this moment, in this intention, I would do what I had never before contemplated while in my right mind.

  That I was not in my right mind did not matter. I would redress the wrong of blood with the tainted blood I carried.

  The manse taunted me; the creaking jeers seemed closer, sharper. Something deep in the shadows rasped, a scrape of wood upon wood.

  Was I alone?

  Was I ever?

  When the ghosts that haunted me did so wearing the faces of those I had loved, those I had never imagined loved me to such distraction that it painted my world in all the grotesque colors of murder.

  In this empty house, with its hungry shadows, something watched.

  Shuddering, panic crawling within my fragile skin, I looped the ends of my nightshirt over the carved prong and closed my eyes.

  Ashmore was an awful thing, a demon with no compassion. He would never give me the bliss I wanted—would never allow me to be free the way I chose. Regardless of his thoughts, of Society’s demands, of all the ghosts that would not let me be, I demanded the ability to choose my own path.

  That I craved it to be one of Chinese tar was my business.

  Mine.

  Without the ameliorating balm of opium, I would never be anything more than this: feeble, meaningless. Hollow as a glass jar lacking in all but empty air.

  Without it, I would be forced to remember all that I desperately craved to forget.

  My lord husband’s face, with his steely green scrutiny and gentle encouragement. Compton was too good a man to ever lower himself for the likes of me, and it was this burden of genteel love that cost him his life.

  Fanny’s approving smile, rare enough that I’d come to enjoy the sight, no longer burned in my memory. Zylphia’s ordeal, the whip scars upon her back placed there because of her trust in me—a trust I’d betrayed—weighed upon me. I knew only that she had fought in that final confrontation between Hawke and myself. I did not know if she survived; I did not care to know, for such knowledge would only cause me greater pain.

  I was so tired of feeling pain. My heart twisted.

  As if I’d unleashed them all, they came at me from the dark—memories I had not the strength of will to muffle. Hawke’s challenge, a swath of blue carved down the middle of his brown eyes, and the flame that filled them when he touched my skin. I had given myself to him, the culmination of years of friction between us, and he had turned me out of his bed immediately after.

  Black Lily’s scarred face, her pretty features flayed open by a rival collector as a message. For me, no one else. And because she was a friend, she was marked for death by the Veil I had thought to outwit in my arrogance.

  I’d ruined her. Just as I had turned my back on Zylphia, who had been nothing less than a friend to me.

  Just as I had killed Compton—as sure as if I’d pulled the blade on him myself.

  I recalled the hatred of Lady Northampton, Compton’s mother, and the grief she must have experienced when her son was murdered on his wedding day.

  His blood had coated my hands, saturated my gown as Compton died in that filthy, choking fog of London low. I could feel it now, gushing too hot against my skin as his heart pumped it all out into my hands.

  The sweet tooth, a rival collector, had spit vile fury from the black.

  Weep for the widowed bride!

  The words hissed at me now, lost in the black of this hell in which I lingered. Though he had kept his face hidden from me, I knew them now as the hateful legacy of my closest friend.

  My dearest Teddy. Although he had greater prospects as the third son of a viscount, he had never abandoned me to Society’s machinations. We’d debated every Wednesday over the science periodicals, argued good-naturedly over facts and hypotheticals. Though I had never told him of my secondary life as a collector, he had never told me of his. Our paths unwittingly collided, and while I did not recognize him, he identified me.

  I was meant to love you.

  Such a refrain he’d whispered in my ear, so much sentiment from the mask of a murderer.

  I had never once dreamed that Teddy might love me; we were only ever friends. Was it this, then, that drove him to become the sweet tooth, whose delight in assassinations drove him to murder the midnight sweets for coin?

  Or had that been me, as well? Had I made him? My ignorance of his affections surely drove him to such lengths, for my obsessions lingered below London’s thick and foul-smelling fog, where the collections were plentiful and coin easy to accrue.

  Was Teddy’s undoing my fault?

  Would I leave nothing but tragedy and misery behind me—a ghastly wake of blood?

  I clutched at the blanket beneath me, its thick nap gouging into my fingers as if it were made of knives.

  No opium to ease the pain; no smoke to forget within.

  This was not the world I chose to live in.

  On a broken sob, I leaned out over the edge of the bed, felt the fabric tighten at my neck. My chest seized, my stomach clenched—a painful thing that forced a hoarse cry from me. Too weak to do anything else, I allowed my weight to pull me over the side.

  No! A denial that screamed where there was nothing to scream with. It came in the voice of a woman, but it might have been my own.

  The buttons at my throat snapped taut. The bed jerked, and held.

  As my body spasmed, an awful din crashed through the silence, rending the quiet into tatters. Perhaps it was my body as my legs hit the floor. Perhaps it just seemed louder, seemed to shake the very walls, because of the awful pressure filling my head.

  I jerked against the constraint—some greater, deeply rooted instinct forcing my leaden limbs to comply—but it was too late. The cotton stretched, seams tore as my neck bent; my head slammed against the bedpost, and all oxygen fled my lungs.

  A figure loomed from within my mottled sight.

  Death, it seemed, would come personally for me.

  Chapter Three

  Where one wound ended and the next began was not a distinction I could fathom. All I knew was that I hurt, from forehead to heels and deeper still—an
awful pressure within me, as if an infection festered and swelled.

  At first, I drowned in a tide of unrelenting, crushing disappointment—what use was I? I could not even end my own life with any degree of success.

  Yet as my lashes flickered, as my sight struggled to turn the blinding array of light and color and shapes into something I could recognize, a spark of something else came to settle beneath my misery.

  Relief.

  I awoke upon my back, cradled in a soft bed with no telltale sign of struggle. The soft ruffles of a nightdress once more enfolded me, the coverlet tucked under my chin and the pillows downy beneath my head.

  I blinked dry, crusted eyes, torn somewhere between deeply rooted confusion and a certainty that I was not where I was supposed to be.

  The room was lit in soft grays, courtesy of the daylight streaming in through a portion of the single window. The curtains were violet, corded by green and gold, and the furnishings I could see from my supine position appeared both delicate and finely made.

  This was not my prison.

  Aching, sapped of all strength, I turned my head.

  A man reclined in an arm chair in the corner.

  No ghost—he was tall of form, trim of figure. His long legs, encased in brown trousers, stretched out towards me, crossed at the ankle and exposing his plain footwear. Perched as he was on the very edge of the seat, it allowed his shoulders to curve into the back rest, his chin practically upon his chest and his neck held at a painful angle. He wore no tie of any kind, his shirtsleeves bared.

  In the muted daylight, the hair left to stand out in wild corona became a strange red, too bold to be real and too flat in tone to reveal the glints of copper and flame I instinctively knew would be buried within. His features, already pale, turned waxy. The somewhat gaunt shape of his jaw and cheekbones were softened by a mat of dark red whiskers, unkempt enough that I suspected he had not shaved for some days. His lips, softer than expected amidst all the garnet shadow framing them, were delicately parted in sleep.

  Mr. Oliver Ashmore slept the exhausted slumber of a man pushed beyond all reason.

  He did not look at all like the demon I had long thought him.

  That he’d pulled me from the dark room, unwound the last vestiges of my courage from around my throat and carried me here should have made me angry, but I could not will such exhausting emotions into flame.

  He had found me in my darkest hour, and rather than let me die, he’d obviously spent untold hours by my bedside—lest I try again, or perhaps for another reason I couldn’t imagine.

  Why? What was it to him?

  I turned my face again to the ceiling, but its delicate arch told me nothing. I could barely force whole thoughts through my mind; I felt as if I could sleep forever, would I but close my eyes.

  Eternity in slumber, as near enough to death as to walk hand in hand with the ghosts I could not escape.

  Unbidden, entirely without warning, my eyes burned. I closed them.

  What right had I to weep?

  I was living, dreadful though the circumstance was, and I would continue to do so, as long as that wretched man was present.

  I could not hide from the truth. As I formed the acerbic thought, a tear slipped from under my tightly seamed lashes. I took in a breath that shook.

  Quietly, so as not to wake the man in the corner, I freed a hand from beneath the heavy coverlet and pressed it to my mouth. I had made no sound, I was not even sure I could, yet I could not stop the air from shuddering out of my lungs.

  I missed them.

  It was a truth I could no longer avoid. I missed Compton, with his infuriating desire to take care of me and his shrewd mind to see the woman I wanted to be. I missed the way he would take my hand on the dance floor, the devil to the Society what watched and judged.

  I summoned a mental image of the man who had been my husband for less than a day’s time, yet it was not sandy hair and golden mustache I saw but the black stain of spilled ink and mis-matched eyes. Hawke.

  More tears beaded under my lashes; they slipped over my temple to soak into my hair. My nose filled, throat aching with it, and I sniffed as quietly as I could manage.

  Micajah Hawke was no saint, no gentle soul, but that I’d given him what little virtue I had was no empty gesture. Long had I revered the dark charms that were his temptation—his gift, an effortless authority that seduced all who paid to enter his Menagerie. He’d demanded everything of me, and I could only stop fighting for one moment—a breathless and forbidden moment taken so much more easily than it was offered. I’d fought that devil-born attraction he wielded so well, never sure where his allegiances truly lay. To be cast aside by him so readily when I had only just chosen to trust hurt as deeply as any wound.

  And for all that, I missed his autocratic impatience and the way he could raise an eyebrow with such eloquence. I had never mastered that art.

  They came for me again, one after the other—not ghosts, but the memories I was so desperate to forget. Zylphia’s exotic heritage turning her impish grin to something wicked and delightful, Betsy’s sweet calf eyes imploring me with such concern.

  The tears poured down my cheeks, and I turned my face into the pillow, curling up onto my side as if it would protect me from a beating I delivered upon myself.

  I could easily recall the arrhythmic step-thunk-step of Booth’s approach; my butler’s stride had always been hampered by the ornate brass prosthetic that replaced his war-claimed limb. I ached so badly to hear that echo in the halls once more; so much that I held my breath, my face pressed into the damp pillow and ears straining to hear the cue.

  It did not come. Only the empty, throbbing silence of this godforsaken prison.

  The sob broke from me, swallowed by the bedclothes.

  As if she were there beside me, I heard Fanny’s whispered comfort when the Northamptons had delivered a cut direct. My poor child. As if it were only yesterday, I could all but feel Teddy’s arm at my elbow, escorting me through the crush to the cold air outside, determined to ensure that the peerage knew I’d retained at least one ally.

  God help me. Teddy.

  I could no longer hold the ragged edges of my control together. I wept into my pillow, sobbing with each gasped breath, my fragile body bowing with it as I finally, finally wept.

  For Compton, who I had so terribly let down; for my staff that I had abandoned. I cried scalding tears for the abominable way I’d treated Zylphia.

  I screamed for the knowledge that I’d never know which was the mask and which the real face of my beloved friend. The painful lack of Teddy’s company had become a hole in my life that I would forever feel.

  Strong hands eased under my shoulders, splayed across my lower back as I was lifted from the mattress. The coverlet fell back, and I could not see through my tears as I sobbed for all the pieces of my heart, shattered and broken behind me.

  Gentle fingers swept under my hair, rested upon my nape. I clung to the man I’d always called a demon, buried my face in his neck and wailed my misery without thought for ego or form.

  “Best to let it all out now,” Ashmore said, his voice a soothing hymn in my ear. His cheek rested against my head, his arms firm around me as if he could alone fend off those ghosts I could not stop myself from dredging up.

  My fingers curled into his shirt, and as he held my shuddering body—each sob tearing from me as if it violently ripped a layer of tainted flesh from an infected scar—I wept for the innocence I’d lost when I murdered a man with my own hands. I howled until I was gasping, for the husband I’d never allowed myself to mourn, the friend who had killed him. I keened for the years I’d lost to servitude and the choices I’d made since then.

  And all the while, Ashmore held me against his heartbeat. Although his voice reverberated against my ear, I could not hear what it was he told me in my grief.

  When I’d finally lost all thread of voice, when I had no more tears left to shed, I remained slumped against his shoulder
—now quite damp from my fit. My eyes closed, too exhausted to feel more than a mild flicker of unease as he cradled my unresisting body in one arm and bent over the bed.

  Laying me down as gently as if I were made of glass, he cupped my flushed cheek. “Sleep,” he said quietly, no less an order for all the sonorous melody of it seemed to engender in me great lassitude.

  I wondered if he’d lay his lips against my brow—a paternal gesture I did not know I craved until it did not come.

  The coverlet once more was tucked about my shoulders.

  I made a small sound, a questioning rasp, and the hand smoothing the coverlet into place paused. His fingers brushed the side of my throat. “I’ll be here when you wake again,” he told me.

  Perhaps it was enough—or I simply had no more energy with which to function.

  I slept.

  This time, when I dreamt, I danced to a woman’s lullaby, and crimson threads wrapped tight about my neck.

  * * *

  I was bored. More than bored. I had traveled so far beyond any definition of the word that I feared I’d invented an entirely new category of the affliction.

  Some days had passed since waking from what should have been a final slumber, and while I was no longer in that abominable room with its shuttered windows, I was still confined to bed with precious little to while the hours away with.

  “I’m bored,” I announced to my captor when he arrived with a tea and a meal I was not hungry for. I wasn’t hungry for much; a fact Ashmore ignored each time he brought in food. Three small meals, like clockwork. Whether the morning’s offering, dinner or supper, it had not changed—my stomach would not accept anything heavier than dry bread and a bit of dressing. Even that had been somewhat delicate a balance.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” replied said captor, lacking all sympathies for such an earnest declaration as I’d given.

  I scowled. He did not.