Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  “As men do.” Impatience crept into Josephine’s demeanor. “This isn’t for you to fret over, Cherry. Complete your task.”

  “Yes.” I dropped the stopper at my feet, only now realizing how much blood soaked the front of my gown.

  A little too enthusiastic, indeed. I had no intentions to die here. Such thoughts and feelings belonged to another girl, another time.

  I would fight for the life I had left.

  I lifted my gaze. “Did you ever think about what you left?” I asked, summoning the words from a great void just beyond my reach. “Society worshipped you.”

  Her mouth twisted, eyes turning dark and hard. “As soon as I chose your father to marry, they turned their backs on me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just as Oliver intended to. Just as your father would!”

  My fingers turned white over the glass. “Didn’t father care for you?” I cried, pushed beyond all exhaustion. Blood loss made me dizzy, but I fought through it to gesture at the man prostrated behind me. The vial in my hand caught the light and refracted it back in a pearly sheen. “Didn’t he install the Cheyne Walk door chimes to make you smile when they sang out?”

  “Chimes?” She stared at me, bemused for a moment before she must have realized I meant the melodic bells that played when the door pull was engaged. Her laughter cut. “I despised that sound. It only served to remind me how much reputation I lost when I married him.”

  “Then why did you marry him at all?”

  “Because he of all my suitors had the intellect and reach to help me attain perfection,” she snapped. “Had I known that he was too weak, I would have chosen some other fool with more money than intellect. Your father was well enough off, and his mind burned brightly, but too fast.” She scoffed. “Barely a glimmer, in the scheme of it all. I was disappointed, Cherry. They always disappoint you.”

  My throat ached, but the tears could not surface. I was too tired; too bloody disappointed, just as she said. The irony would be lost on her. “Was it you who drove him to this?”

  She didn’t even afford him the courtesy of a glance. “He fell to this because he was weak. Whether I encouraged it or his own genius burned out too quick, I don’t care.” She sighed. “Really, Cherry, I credited you with more understanding than this.”

  I did understand, now. I wished I’d understood sooner.

  Was it in some fragile, sorrowful part of me that I’d hoped I’d come from a love match?

  Foolish pride, indeed.

  A calm fell over me. I recognized it. I had felt it at least once before, when I’d thought I killed the Ripper stalking London’s streets. Just before Teddy’s unveiling.

  It seized me now.

  Letting out a shaking breath, I nodded. “Thank you for being honest with me,” I told her. Surprise only made her all the more beautiful. Summoning a smile, I added, “Mother.”

  I let go of the phial.

  Her eyes widened. She reached out. “Cherry, no—”

  Such thin, fragile glass was not meant to withstand this harsh treatment. Glass shattered behind me. I sucked in a breath.

  A pink cloud of dust floated into the air.

  As each mote danced and spun, a sparkling net of shining golden and pink stars, my mother covered her face. “What have you done?”

  I tried to get away, to lurch out of the pink radius, but I could not fumble fast enough.

  My mother became a demon in truth, her features ghastly in rage. Bitterly frozen fingers found my throat. The pain of it shattered that eerie calm, slithered into my spine. Agony laced through my body as my mother bent all her focus upon me. “Breathe,” she snarled. She shook me violently, though the ice spreading within my soul numbed all sensation. “Breathe in, damn you!”

  I did not. My lungs tightened. My body clamored, my mind shrieked desperately for air—to breathe, to live—and I dared not obey as the cloud drifted around us.

  Pale skin, a shimmering wave of ruby hair, all blurred together.

  Icy currents tore through my skull.

  I could not hold out. I needed oxygen, desperately needed to inhale. I fell to my knees. Without my command, my hands scrabbled at the ghostly fingers wrapped about my throat. I tried to push her, to escape her, but she clung like a rabid thing. She screamed at me. “Breathe!”

  Spots appeared before my eyes.

  The grip upon me eased. The mirrored twin to my own stare widened, until the whites gleamed clearly about the emerald shine. Fear filled her. “No,” she whispered. She jerked away.

  I fell heavily to my side.

  “No, you can’t do this,” she said, shrill. Desperate. “What did you do?”

  It took all I had to grasp the floor, to drag myself across it.

  Ice sank into my ankle. My chest burned.

  “Wretched creature, what did you do?”

  Grasping the leg of a workshop table, I hauled myself as far from the cloud as I could. I didn’t know if I was completely out of it; I couldn’t see past the myriad spots and sparklers masking my sight.

  I had no choice.

  Opening my mouth, I gasped for breath, dragging in wheeze after wheeze of air. My heart slammed. My arm throbbed with it. If I still bled, I couldn’t pick that pain from all the rest.

  I flung myself onto my back, arms splayed, and struggled not to lapse into insentience.

  Hard fingers grasped one wrist.

  They yanked hard, bodily pulled me out from under the table, and jerked me farther from the cloud. Firm arms wrapped around me, but they did not stay. Plunked inside the circle where Maddie Ruth still lay, Ashmore set me gently beside the pool of blood he’d shed.

  “Hamaxa,” he intoned, and the violet H seared through my struggling sight.

  That ruddy bastard.

  What anger I wanted to muster did not come. Exhausted beyond all measure, desperately fighting the swirling nausea within me—afraid that at any moment, I would feel the burn of the alchemical serum’s effect—I slumped against Maddie Ruth.

  She was warm. Much warmer than I’d think of a corpse, even in my semi-frozen state.

  “What are you—” My father’s voice, but with none of the whine. “What has happened? What have you done to me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Ashmore asked, but I did not hear anger in his voice. As if he knew what it was I felt, channeled it, weariness dogged his every word.

  I wanted to see. I needed to see what it was that came next, but part of my view remained blocked. Ashmore’s shoulders, not so broad as Hawke’s but no longer hunched over in pain, loomed over what had been my father’s fragile body. Blood coated all of us.

  I could not even distinguish the smell of it.

  “Your daughter proved to be more than a match for your intellect,” Ashmore continued.

  “No, stay away.” My father’s voice sounded thin and panicked. He must have struck out, for Ashmore’s shoulders dipped, his head lowered, and I watched his back stiffen and cant to one side. An arm flared out, and was it my imagination to see a frail wrist in his grip?

  “That formula,” Ashmore said, still so very much calmly, “was originally created for your body. Your daughter’s blood carries all the same markers as yours.”

  “No!” A shriek, eerie to hear in my father’s voice.

  I could barely force my eyes to stay open, yet I dared not look away.

  So Ashmore had understood. That was good. It heartened me some to think we might have shared the same hypothesis.

  Ashmore knelt, revealing now only the top of his head. The light caught in his bright copper hair. “Cherry mixed her blood with your husband’s. When he inhaled the powder, the terms for the merging were met. Your blood, Jo. Your spirit is bound to that pathetic, crippled body you hated so much.”

  “No,” Josephine sobbed in St. Croix’s voice.

  I shuddered. Not until a salty tear slid into the corner of my mouth did I realize I wept openly.

  Ashmore’s head dipped. Despite my father’s—my mother
’s pleas, I heard the scrape of metal upon stone.

  The knife?

  All that I had left in me demanded I close my eyes.

  “Your daughter,” I heard, a low thread of anger bubbling into his quiet tone, “deserves more than you. Sod it all, she deserves more than me. By all rights, it should be her to end your threat—”

  “Oliver, please.”

  “But I will not allow it,” he said, ignoring her. Them. What part of my father might still be within, I couldn’t know. I had struggled under the serum’s effect; I knew what it was to feel like myself, but not me.

  I wanted to push myself up, to stagger to my feet and hammer against the barrier he had sealed me behind, but I lacked all energy to do it.

  The Trumps I had called on. The loss of my mother’s ghostly influence within me.

  All the blood I had shed.

  I had nothing left to give.

  “Ashmore,” I whispered.

  “I will not allow you to haunt her any more than you already will,” he said, and now there was nothing kind in his tone—nothing gentle or loving. “This is my responsibility.”

  Such words took the breath from me. All my conflicted emotions, my hurt pride and wavering trust, shuddered. In Ashmore’s avowal, I heard what it was my mother did not.

  He was saving me.

  Unlike previous matters involving my hide, I was not being saved physically—I’d done the saving this time. I suspected that her power fluctuated when her spirit fought the pull of St. Croix’s physical anchor. I had hoped that my mother’s wavering focus might weaken her circle’s barrier, and Ashmore had not let me down.

  Just as he did not let me down now.

  By all rights, my parents were my responsibility—my mother my burden to bear.

  Ashmore saved me from committing a murder I might never recover from.

  “You love me,” Josephine cried.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  Drained of all my reserves, I could not escape insentience. It loomed over me, swept me into a black tide. I lifted a hand, could not manage to think why it should concern me that my fingertips be blue.

  “But that, too, will fade.”

  “Oliver!”

  “Shall I teach you the ultimate secret to immortality? You did not stay with me long enough to learn the whole.”

  I wrapped my arms around Maddie Ruth’s shoulders, buried my face into her tumbled hair, and closed my eyes.

  A scream tore through the laboratory, echoing and re-echoing from wall to wall.

  “Zodiacus.”

  Whatever came next, I could not stay awake to see it. To hear it. What Ashmore did, if Maddie Ruth lived, even if I was meant to survive this bone-deep cold, none of it gave me the strength to continue.

  I would never forget this; I had no opium haze to fall back on, no bliss to soften the sting. Ashmore murdered for me, ended the threat that would end me if he did not.

  Guilt dragged at me, and with it, the relief that softened its bite.

  I slid into a slumber so deep, I didn’t know how to wake.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A strange snuffling noise woke me from a dreamless sleep.

  I was warm—much warmer than I ever thought I’d be again. Parts of me ached, and a sharp pain seemed to gather specifically about my left arm, but the padding beneath me was soft, and the weight atop me indicative of blankets. Lovely, warm blankets.

  And an unusual heavy mass against my side.

  My lashes lifted. For a split second, one in which my heart pattered into a rapid pace, I thought I might be blind.

  The dark shape looming over me shifted. A waft of hot air bloomed over my face. I inhaled the unmistakable odor of hound’s breath.

  “Bloody bells,” I croaked, thrashing to escape my suddenly dog-laden prison. The hound—a large beast half as big as the bed and whose dense, gleaming fur was black as night—bounded into a roll that accomplished the rest of what I sought to achieve. Encouraged by his wiggling body, I was ousted from the bed.

  My feet hit the floor, but my knees would not hold. On a strangled cry, I fell over entirely. The jarring thud of my body against the carpet preceded a heavier thump of muscle and fur.

  Such was the manner in which Maddie Ruth found me, hollering for help while a dog did his level best to smother me with affections.

  Her laughter was not the sort of decorous trill encouraged in ladies above London’s drift. She gasped with it, howling out her amusement while I struggled beneath the beast.

  Convinced it was a game, the dog barked happily, his enormous paws bounding on either side of me.

  Giving up, I flung my uninjured arm over my eyes. “Do let me know when you’re both—mmph!” A wide, wet tongue slurped over my face—and my open mouth.

  Maddie Ruth’s laughter reached critical hysteria as I gagged.

  It took some few minutes, but as I scraped out dog saliva from my mouth, Maddie Ruth eventually collected herself enough to seize the thick collar about the dog’s throat. The beast was enormous, even more so when I had managed to force my way to a seated position and found the hound’s head towering above mine.

  It sat, sides heaving, pink tongue hanging out as it watched Maddie Ruth with adoring brown eyes. A Newfoundland. Massive dogs already, this one surely must reach nearly two meters in length.

  I glowered at him as I scrubbed my face again. “Some good morning.”

  Maddie Ruth knelt by my side, her amusement obvious in her own brown eyes. It would not be kind to indicate similarities between the hound and the girl. Still, as she smothered her laughter and helped me to my feet, I could not help but notice how sweet both were.

  Even if one had attempted to bury me under black fur.

  “It’s afternoon, not morning,” Maddie Ruth corrected me, beaming with such delight that I could hold no grudge.

  Nor could I continue any façade. Tears filled my eyes.

  “Oh,” was her response, quickly forgiven as I wrapped my arms around her. She was not shy in returning the embrace, for all it caught her by surprise. “There, there. All’s well, now.”

  “I was so afraid you were dead.”

  Maddie Ruth scoffed, but she did not let me go. “It’ll take more’n a she-devil riding your skirt to end me.”

  “But you were hurt!” I wailed.

  She rubbed her cheek against mine. “We were near to the stables when he pitched over. Bullet missed my skull by a hair. When Mr. Ashmore dropped me, my head hit a watering tough. I went black.”

  I grimaced. “I’m so sorry. I swear, I didn’t know—”

  “Ah, stop it, will you?” Maddie Ruth patted my back. “I said all’s well. You’re all right, and I’m all right, and…” She hesitated.

  “Ashmore?” The name did not hurt on my lips as I thought it might. I leaned away, steadying myself, then all but staggered when the large Newfoundland beast thrust his shoulder beneath my hand. I was already diminutive in stature; the animal made me feel downright tiny.

  Maddie Ruth rubbed the beast’s head. “This is Ichabod.”

  “That doesn’t—” I stopped, frowning at the patient dog. He watched me and Maddie Ruth equally, though I suspected a roving eye for any who might have wandering hands. “Why is his name Ichabod?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” she said cheerfully, ruffling the dog’s floppy ears. She looked far too happy at his presence. “There’s another named Phinehas, and one called—”

  “Allow me a guess,” I cut in dryly. “Eli?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  I’d only suspected. Biblical names for his dogs; Ashmore had a devilish streak in him. I sighed. “Why was he in my bed?”

  “Because you were in Mr. Ashmore’s bed?”

  Ah. I hadn’t noticed. I realized now that I stood not in my own room, but Ashmore’s. The fire glowed brightly, keeping the air inside warm. The bedclothes were rumpled, but only on one side, I noticed. Whatever the dog had been doing, it
had not involved snuggling under the sheets.

  “Why was it in Ashmore’s bed with me?”

  Maddie Ruth smiled. “To keep you warm. You were suffering hypothermia.” She tilted her head, one long brown braid slipping over her shoulder. “I think that’s what he called it.”

  “’Tis a very real condition,” I assured her, but frowned at my hands. They looked healthy, flush with warmth. I pulled the long sleeve of my nightshift up, expecting to see only a shiny pink line of new skin, but the bandage covering it denied me my curiosity. It hurt, though.

  Maddie Ruth nudged the dog aside. “Come, let’s get you dressed. I think you should go see Mr. Ashmore.”

  I looked up. “What happened?”

  With the dog shooed to one side of the bedroom, Maddie Ruth proceeded to lay out my tea gown and the box of grooming tools. “Best you ask him,” was all she said.

  I frowned. “Ask Ichabod?”

  At his name, the beast’s tail thumped against the floorboards.

  She shot him a sweet smile, but spared me a roll of her eyes. “I mean Mr. Ashmore, of course.”

  Of course.

  I suffered impatiently under Maddie Ruth’s care, but she was quick and uncomplicated. With no corset, few pins, and little recourse aside from a single plait, I was not so difficult to help into a passable appearance.

  Though I did not like to admit it, I was all but out of energy halfway through her efforts. By the end, I had to hold on to her weight—and, naturally, the helpful dog who almost shouldered me aside in his continued efforts to assist—in order to stand.

  “I wish you’d tell me something,” I groused as I eased into the rolling chair. I did not like getting back into it, not after what I’d seen of my grandfather as he’d spied upon his own daughter’s trysts, but I had little choice.

  I did not want to remain abed. If I did, I would stare at the ceiling and think of all I could have different.