The Smoke Thief

by Shana Abe

  “Of course, milord.”

  “Thank you. Good evening.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Sidonie had to fight to push the door shut again, struggling with its weight, and in her distraction over the wind and the lord's final, slanted smile, she never noticed the second calling card that slipped between the door and the jamb just as she got it closed.

  Kit let his gaze linger on the little crabapple tree, dotted with glossy red fruit, as the abigail's footsteps faded off. He then pressed his palm to the door, easing it open, put his card back into his coat, picked up his bag, and silently entered the house.

  It was still an hour to daybreak before she dared to venture home, walking along the near-empty streets with her head bowed and the skirts of the maid's gown gathering grime at the hem. Finding an empty coach before dawn was well near impossible.

  She had remained in the ruined chapel as long as she could bear, curled up in the only remaining pew that didn't list. There were rats in the walls that kept scratching near her head. Whenever she nodded off they seemed to spin into a rabble, squeaking and scabbering across the old plaster.

  The vestry was cold, and uncomfortable, and she desperately wanted the safety of her bed. She had waited as long as she could. She had tucked her legs beneath her and dug her fingers into the worm-chewed wood and tried not to sleep, because in her nightmares she kept getting captured, over and over, surrounded by the drákon, pinned to the earth, smothered by them, unable even to scream. . . .

  The early edge of morning now hung gray and raw around her, sending a low, wet fog creeping across the sidewalks. Rue watched her feet kick into it, how it opened and swirled and closed up over her shoes again. She kept her pace steady, her hands to herself. She was no one special, just a servant on an errand, moving quickly and modestly with her eyes on the ground—but her ears, her heart and throat and all the rest of her being trembling with awareness and fatigue.

  The first of the fish hawkers were beginning to appear, heaving along their heavy baskets. Dairymaids walked, sleepy-eyed, through the mist, butchers with rust-stained aprons, washerwomen. A pair of young shoeblacks arguing over dice nudged into her, pushing away again without missing a word.

  And they were all only people. Not any of Them.

  At the edge of Bloomsbury she paused, stopping by a greengrocer's gate, bending over a bed of pansies as if to remove a pebble from her shoe. When she glanced up and around, not a single person was looking back at her, not even the grocer, setting up his stalls in the leaden light.

  Well, to hell with it. Rue lifted her chin, her confidence ebbing back. She'd been in worse spots than this before and she always pulled through. She'd been careful, she'd been deft, and after nine incredible years she was still free, despite all the rules and threats of the shire.

  She was free. And she had every intention of remaining that way.

  Kit Langford was probably already wed, in any case. The papers didn't know everything, certainly not when it came to Darkfrith.

  It was too early for even Sidonie to be up; Rue cherished her late hours, and so did her staff. It wasn't unusual for her to go missing all night. They'd have waited supper for her until twelve, then packed it up for luncheon tomorrow. Without the sun peeking yet past the horizon, they'd all still be abed.

  Rue entered her home with only a brisk, final scan over her shoulder, but Jassamine Lane lay utterly quiescent in the fog. Even the watchman wasn't about on his rounds, only a pair of black-tipped pigeons, eyeing her warily from their perch upon a signpost.

  The hallway was dark. Just as it should be.

  There was her mail on the silver salver by the door, a stack of cards and letters, all the hallmarks of a very commonplace life. She passed by with hardly a glance; she'd deal with it all later. Tomorrow. After bed.

  From upstairs came the faintest sound. She stopped at once, her heart pounding . . . but it was only Zane, turning in his dreams, mumbled words lost into his pillow.

  He didn't realize he talked in his sleep. Perhaps one day she'd tell him.

  First to go were the shoes—very damp—and then the limp pinner. She left the shoes by the stairs for the maid, crumpled the pinner in her hand as she made her way up the wooden steps to the master suite.

  There was a lamp burning for her by the basin on the nightstand, its flame blue dim in the gathering light.

  She dropped the pinner to the chair by the armoire, pulled the clips from her hair and combed her fingers through it, sighing. She was spent. What a hideous night.

  The water in the basin held a chill; she sank to the edge of her bed and ran a washcloth over her face, inhaling sharply, then collapsed back with it draped over her eyes, cool rivulets dripping down her neck to the coverlet. It felt wonderful.

  She wouldn't leave the house; they'd never find her here. She'd sleep for days . . . for weeks. . . .

  But she didn't want to fall asleep like this. Rue pushed herself back up with another sigh. The maid's gown was deliberately simple, some plain lacing, a few hooks. She didn't need assistance to unfasten the bodice, and then the panniers and skirt, shrugging out of everything to let it drop to the rug. The gown lay there, puffed brown and dirty white, softly leaking air between the folds. She stepped free, kicking it to a corner.

  She'd give it to Sidonie—no, to charity. She wanted never to see it again.

  In her corset and chemise she crossed to the bureau, opening the top drawer for her nightrail—

  —and lifting up instead the gown she'd abandoned in the museum yesterday, sea-green silk and exquisite lace.

  Rue stared down at the colors spilling over her hands, her mind a sudden, horrified blank.

  “Forgive me,” said a low voice behind her. “Perhaps I should have made myself known before now.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Clarissa Hawthorne whirled to the window behind her—a window Christoff knew to be closed—and pulled from the folds of the curtains a rapier, and a serious one at that: the polished edges gathered the light into a long, sinister sheen. She whisked it up easily, her arm flexed, her cat eyes on his, as he stepped from the shelter of her canopied bed and into the open quiet of her bedroom.

  In her chemise and stocking feet she was still beautifully aloof, her hair a chestnut scroll draped along one shoulder. Her skin was pale as stone.

  “I thought you'd like that back.” He indicated the seafoam gown, caught in a rippling fan across the bureau drawer, where she had dropped it.

  “Oh?” One elegant brow arched. “And my pumps?”

  Kit gestured to the armoire.

  “Thank you so much.” She swung the rapier at him, a flare of silver that parted the air with a lethal whish. He ducked and turned, shoving the chair between them, and the steel sliced into cushions.

  “Sorry about your wig, though. Lost it to the mêlée.”

  The rapier lifted, balanced in her hand; her gaze never left his. “That's quite all right. I have others.” And she thrust again.

  He leapt back. “Your own hair is prettier.”

  “You're too kind.”

  “Not at all.”

  They began a slow circle around the room, Kit with his hands loose at his sides, Clarissa pacing him, framed in misted light.

  He said, “You're very good with the blade.”

  “I know.”

  “French master?”

  “Italian.”

  She lunged and pinked his arm; the linen of his sleeve began to flower with blood. With his next breath, she had the point at his chest.

  She held motionless there with her left hand out and her hair now tumbled, her body a taut, leashed line from the patinado. The tip of the rapier was the barest prick over his heart.

  “I have no weapon,” he said evenly.

  “How shortsighted of you. Perhaps, my lord, you ought not to enter homes uninvited.”

  He managed a smile. “I did leave my card.”

  Her eyes narrowed a fraction; the blade tur
ned against his skin. “Why did you come here?”

  “Little mouse—why do you think?”

  “Perhaps you're a thief,” she said consideringly. “Perhaps you are, in fact, the infamous Smoke Thief, Lord Langford. I can only imagine what the press might make of your capture.”

  “That would be interesting.” He kept his tone peaceful, his body willfully relaxed.

  “Indeed. I hear there's quite a reward in it too.”

  “About sixty pounds sterling, so far.”

  “Splendid. I'll buy a new wig.”

  “Is that why you do it, Clarissa? For the funds—or for the thrill?”

  Now she smiled at him, her lips lifting into a luscious pink curve. “I fear you're greatly mistaken. Clarissa Hawthorne is dead. I have a copy of her obituary, in fact. It was all terribly sad.”

  He lowered his eyes. Despite her veneer of calm, she was breathing too quickly. Above the drawstring of her chemise a sweet, becoming blush began to warm the flawless white skin.

  She wore a knot of ribbons where the drawstring tied, a flourish of turquoise satin nestled just between her breasts. The chemise was so thin he could nearly see through it, drawn tight by the corset, a dusky hint of nipples, straining against the cloth. . . .

  With her rapier against his chest, Kit felt that dark thing within him rise up once more, eager for this moment, eager for her.

  “Clarissa . . .”

  “All I have to do is scream,” she whispered, all venom and fire. “I'll have three good souls in here in an instant, defending my honor. What will you do then, Kit Langford?”

  “Exactly this,” he said, and Turned, so that the rapier passed through his shirt and into the empty air.

  The front door slammed.

  Damn, damn, oh, dear God—

  She had let her temper and her fear get control of her—she'd meant to reason with him, to bargain—

  He knew where she lived.

  Rue looked around her room, at her rumpled bed and the rosewood nightstand and the little Renaissance etching of a shepherd girl hung up on the wall. The rapier was a cold weight in her hand.

  She threw it to the bed. She ran down the stairs and Turned at the door, chasing him up into the sky.

  The pigeons exploded into panic. She soared by them, through and past them, as they shrieked and vaulted from the post. Jassamine Lane shrank to a path and toy houses, miniature people never looking up. The day was brightening with the dawn and he was visible ahead of her, the smoky skill and grace she'd admired for years as a child, skimming the underbellies of the clouds.

  He was fleet. So was she.

  And then he vanished. She caught the spiral of vapor that meant he had climbed higher, breaking through the clouds, and so she did the same, piercing the dense layers, mingling with the cool, dirty mists, rising. . . .

  She burst free into blue sky and clean, thin air, and he was there too, still smoke—and then he Turned again, and he was drákon.

  Emerald and azure and shimmering scales; he glanced back at her only once, nearly blinding with the sunlight, a fluent twist above the earth. His wings were deeply scarlet, holding him aloft in powerful strokes. He turned his face away and plunged ahead again.

  It was a challenge, or a trick—she didn't have time to worry which. He would be even faster like this. She wouldn't be able to keep up, and it was too late to retreat now; she had too much at stake. So Rue did the thing she had never done before any member of the tribe—that she'd hardly dared even out here at the brink of heaven, all alone—and took her dragon self as well.

  Ah. Her first breath was like inhaling snow, fiercely cold, sending light and energy through her entire being. For a gasping instant it chilled her in place—then she had substance once more, she had form. She lifted her head and stole her second delicious breath, bounding across the firmament, a phantom creature that matched the sun and these purer clouds: her body pearl white, her scales rimmed in gold.

  The drákon were sleeker than the depictions that had survived in medieval tapestries and texts: no fat bellies, no lumbering gait, but living flame and speed and gilded wings that mastered the wind. No wonder the Others had rendered them so clumsy in their fables; in true life their radiance was almost incomprehensible, splinters of sky, as fatal and glorious as a hail of firelit arrows.

  And Christoff, the strongest of them all, was still so far ahead.

  Rue stretched thin to follow him, her wings out, leaping high to fall into a long, flat dive that tore the tops from the clouds in a swirling stripe.

  She was catching up. He glanced back at her again, did a clever, writhing loop at the sight of her, then soared on, higher, higher.

  She climbed with him.

  The air was much scarcer here. She'd never been this high before but he didn't stop, and the blue surrounding them grew deeper, closer to indigo, and the blanket of clouds below softened into a vast ivory curve. It was getting harder to exhale. He was slowing too, at last, the scarlet wings beating swifter—without the atmosphere to support them, flying was more difficult. Yet she was gaining, less weight than he, more desperate, nearly there—and all at once he spun to face her, so abrupt she couldn't pull back in time. As she tried to veer off he leapt forward and took her by the throat, his wings folded. They twirled together and then dropped like stones back to the earth.

  She arched backward, to no avail. His grip was firm and very sharp, not releasing. Rue saw clouds and sky and even the faint pricks of stars; she spread her wings, sending them into a sideways topple, but Christoff flipped and wrapped himself around her, crushing them against her back with his weight.

  The wind clawed at her. The clouds rushed forth with awful mass. She tried to Turn and could not—they were too high, descending too fast, and his breath was a hot heat on her neck, and his body an unyielding coil around hers. He was trying to kill them—if she couldn't Turn and she couldn't fly, they'd streak to their deaths like comets—

  Sir George stood slouched with his hands in his pockets, eyeing the stone symmetry of the floor as the men around him paced, their footsteps echoing in the high, empty chamber. The warehouse was dusty, uncomfortably cavernous for his taste. The air carried the distinctive odor of sheep's wool mixed with rodent and river sludge.

  They were late, the marquess and his prisoner. The day had broken and thus far the only people traveling the streets around this building were watermen and merchants. George pursed his lips, scratched the heel of his boot idly against the floor. Perhaps Christoff had failed. It hardly seemed possible to do what he had vowed, to track her through the city by the mere memory of her scent, to capture her unaided . . . even for him. . . .

  He felt it exactly as the others did, all of them checking in place. Above them—above them—raged the unmistakable presence of drákon. Everyone looked up at the ceiling, shocked.

  “Holy God,” said George. “Here they come.”

  They struck the clouds, a sudden gray smack against Rue's skin, and then they were free of even those, plummeting to the London skyline, moments from their ruin against the wide earth.

  The silver-glass snake of the Thames. Ships. Docks. Massive buildings racing toward them—

  Kit opened his wings. It jerked them up, slowed them down, but before she could react they smashed through an enormous roof—and it hurt, her back and shoulders screaming with pain, wood shingles flying—and then to a floor, where they landed in a hard bumping roll, still latched together, colliding against a wall that shuddered but did not fall.

  She lay there stunned, unable to move; the stars in her eyes now flashed blue and purple. She hardly felt Christoff shift. She hardly felt it when he took her again by the throat—more delicately now—and dragged her across an open floor, past a doorway, to a place smaller and dimmer than before. He laid her carefully back down.

  She swallowed. She blinked to clear her vision, and then Christoff was human again, beautifully nude, crouched before her with his fingers caught in the bright silken m
ane down her neck.

  “Clarissa,” he said.

  She shook her head, springing to her feet, and he backed away only a single step, gazing up at her, his face inscrutable.

  She Turned to smoke. But the door he had pulled her through was now closed, smooth and latchless, without the slightest opening to slip through. The chamber was bricks and mortar and no windows. The granite floor had no gaps.

  She was trapped.

  Rue took her human shape, coalescing in a corner with her hair snarled over her body and her hands pushed flat behind her against the walls. Christoff Langford watched it happen, making no move toward her, standing tall and alone in the center of the barren floor. There was a single candle burning in a bracket by the door.

  “Did you really think you were the first to run to the city?” he asked gravely, and lifted an arm to the room. “Behold. My father built this place especially for our kind.”

  She stared at him, panting, then brought a hand to her neck and pressed it against the ache there. When she took it away again, her palm was bloody.

  Her voice came as a broken rasp. “What have you done?”

  “It's a holding cell. I'm sorry.” He looked away finally, his lashes lowered. The candlelight shaded his mouth into a chiseled line. “I had to get you here somehow.”

  She could not seem to comprehend it, the sealed room, the black shadows, the solitary point of flame. The Marquess of Langford, with his remote composure and his eyes hooded green, no human modesty, no shame. He was drákon, and Rue realized now that she had never seen it so clearly in anyone until this moment: not mortal, not weak, but something ancient and formidable, barely bound in the sinew and grace of a man's unclothed body.

  Red smeared across his left biceps, darkening the muscled curve. A wound. She had done that with her rapier, a lifetime past.