Adam followed Immanuel’s gaze to the trunk and sighed. “May as well.”
Watching his companion shift uncomfortably, Adam gently squeezed his arm. As he let go, Immanuel caught his hand, holding it close as he gave him a weary smile.
“You look over his notes. I will dig through his bag,” Adam replied as he knelt down to retrieve the orphaned suitcase.
“Are you certain?”
“Very. If any of that is scientific, you would fair far better than I would. That and I have no qualms about rifling through his belongings.”
I did it with George, and I can do it again. The words nearly slipped out, but Adam clamped his jaw shut and turned away in time to stop them. Clicking open the suitcase, he applied himself to sifting through its contents, but his mind slipped back to George. He had lost track of how long it had been since his older brother passed. Two years at least. It had been several months before Hadley and Lord Dorset became properly acquainted, that much he remembered. Eilian’s first prosthetic had been the last thing George worked on but never finished. He had forgotten that.
Pulling out each article of clothing, Adam gave them a quick inspection and checked their pockets for anything of interest before carefully setting them aside. How many shirts and trousers had he folded when Hadley was too distraught to come out of the workroom? From the moment George passed, they had buried themselves in work. She focused on finishing the remaining orders while he arranged the funeral, took care of the will and financials, and moved George’s things to the attic. He had been shocked by how many shirts were flecked with dried blood that hadn’t come out in the wash, but what had disturbed him more were how large the cleaner shirts seemed. George had never been robust, and yet— He blinked, his eyes hot with a foreign feeling he hadn’t indulged in years. Crumpling the shirt into a wad, he hurled it against the wall. Adam could picture himself standing in his brother’s room, each breath heaving, caught on the sudden constriction in his chest. The hot lump of feeling that had been quietly building longed to escape, but he feared that more than anything. If he let it come, it may never stop. His hands curled into fists, then out into trembling claws.
Destruction. Blind destruction. That was all he could remember of that time.
Adam drew his hand back. Cradled between pairs of drawers was a gun. This time it was a revolver, and this one had not been lost to the corrosive kiss of the sea. The cold steel fell heavy in his hand as he snapped open the cylinder to confirm that it wasn’t loaded. Back then, it had taken everything in his power not to tear the room apart, not to tear himself apart. A storm raged within him, beating against his mind until he could scarcely discern it from his own thoughts. But Hadley had kept him together. She hadn’t known it, she still didn’t, but she needed him and he knew losing her twin so soon after George would have dealt her a severe blow. No, he had to keep going to work for her sake. He told himself he had to keep moving forward because his stalwart sister was falling to pieces.
Hadley and George had been the ones keeping them afloat, and after his death, Adam had to lend his support until he could reprise his rightful role as the black sheep. He released a short laugh as he snapped the cylinder in place and spun it for good measure. Once Hadley seemed to be getting on with Lord Dorset, Adam imploded. His farcical relationship with Matilda Merriweather had been the first casualty. Then, briefly his sanity, his identity, his employment at the firm, and finally his relationship with Hadley, but thankfully, he managed to salvage those in time. Glancing over his shoulder, a wistful smile crept across his lips at Immanuel’s knit brows as he poured over Jacobs’ notes. It had all turned out for the best, hadn’t it? He and Immanuel eventually found each other, and Miss Merriweather was now Mrs. Turnbull, which was far more than he ever could have offered her.
“Any luck?” he asked but Immanuel didn’t stir from the page. Despite trying to touch him lightly, Immanuel jumped the moment Adam’s hand made contact with his leg. “My apologies, darling, but did you find anything?”
Immanuel’s gaze traveled back to the paper in his hand before trailing to the wall of faces. “I’m not certain. Mr. Jacobs didn’t leave a key. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it, but I think the color of the pins represent how the women died.”
“So they were murdered?” Adam asked, suddenly thankful to have the cold reassurance of the revolver in his grasp.
“Not necessarily.” Immanuel stood before the wall, his hand moving from face-to-face with each flick of his gaze from the pile of pages. After a long moment, he stepped back. “If I have surmised this correctly from his notes, all of the women with black headed pins are listed as drownings in local records.”
Abandoning the suitcase, Adam stood at Immanuel’s side. While he hadn’t noticed it when they first entered, he could now see that most of the dull metal tacks had been dabbed with ink. Black dotted most of the heads. He tallied the number before he registered he had been doing it.
“Sixty-seven drownings. That seems excessive, even out here. I mean, did a ship sink?”
“No, that’s the strange part. Look at the dates at the bottom. The earliest date was nearly seventy years ago, but they go all the way up to this year. He has at least a page for each of them. Some more than others, and the black pins match with the deaths recorded as drownings.”
“Even over seventy years, that seems like a very high number. Do they say if they’re accidental or not?”
Immanuel shook his head.
“Well, what about the pins without paint and the red ones?”
“I’m not certain yet. I’m still picking through all of this. Some of the handwriting is really hard to read.”
“I can imagine.” With Immanuel’s cramped, narrow handwriting, it was often so illegible that he had to make certain if he was reading German or English. “Did you see what I found?”
“Another one? Was Mr. Jacobs preparing for battle?”
“He was a policeman. I’m sure they didn’t want to send him out to the wild unarmed. Honestly, two guns isn’t exactly an arsenal. Now, I have a spare. I’d have a third if I didn’t feel funny using the one from the boat.”
Immanuel’s face fell at the realization. “You brought your gun with you? What would possess you to do that?”
“Perhaps the fact that we were sent to deal with a murderer on an island with creatures that may or may not be human lurking about. You may have your magic, but steel is what makes me feel safe.”
Frowning, Immanuel stared down at the mess of handwritten notes but found he couldn’t focus on the words. Immanuel chewed his lip. His magic didn’t make him feel safe. It was unpredictable energy he could wield with a thought, and that was what made it so dangerous. Magic had the potential to be an entire world for him to explore. It inspired all the promise and vigor science had when he first began his studies, but it never made him feel safe. Quieting his mind, Immanuel felt the pull of their bond between his ribs. Magic scared him far more than it provided comfort.
“So where are you keeping it?”
For a long moment, Adam merely stared at him with a raised brow as if trying to discern his meaning. “Why? Are you hoping to dash my Colt into the sea like you did with my champagne?”
“As tempting as it may be, I’m glad you brought it. We may need it, but I don’t want to accidentally shoot myself. Tell me where you’ve stashed it.”
Keeping his eyes locked on Immanuel’s, Adam slowly unbuttoned his jacket and pulled it aside. Tucked against his hip was a black leather holster with only the butt of a gun sticking out. Immanuel swallowed hard. He hated knowing the gun was there, lurking against the familiar planes of Adam’s form, but at least it was safely contained.
“Satisfied?” Adam asked, catching him staring at the line where metal met leather.
“Just don’t take my head off if I get up during the night.”
“I haven’t yet, have I?”
A small smile crept across Immanuel’s lips. As quickly as it ap
peared, it fell away when his attention returned to Jacobs’ notes. “Adam, can you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
Immanuel’s pulse quickened. Opening his mouth, he found his tongue tacky and thick. “I need you to write the information up on their posters as I read it. I may have found something, but I need to see it laid out.”
***
By the time Adam and Immanuel finished, it had taken several hours, two pots of tea, and a hell of a lot of shaking and cracking of Adam’s hands to get out the cramps from writing on the wall in such careful script. Adam stepped back to admire their handiwork. Each face now had an approximate age, a location, a manner of death, offspring, and anything else relevant Immanuel discovered in the dead policeman’s notes. Setting the onion paper aside, Immanuel stared at the wall of faces, his blonde brows knit in concentration. Adam watched him, wanting to speak, but he held his tongue even as he confirmed what they had already suspected regarding the black pins. All of them had drowned. A shiver passed through him at the thought of such a horrible death.
“The red pins are murders,” Immanuel said suddenly, pointing to three flyers jabbed into the wall with red tipped pins. “See? This woman was murdered by her husband. Actually, all three were.”
Adam took a step back, his eyes skimming to where silver pins jutted from the wall. He had wanted to pull them off the wall and rearrange them into groups, but Immanuel had refused for fear of disturbing some yet unknown pattern Jacobs had left behind. Following Immanuel’s gaze from page to page, Adam felt the realization click in place.
“Black is drowning, like we thought, but unpainted is no cause. Look, none of them have causes of death.”
Retrieving their respective pages from the pile, Immanuel’s gaze flickered between the two papers. “You’re right. That’s strange, though. Statistically, many more people should have died from unknown causes than drowning. Maybe we switched them.”
“Immanuel, you rattled off every line of notes to me. I know we have them labeled correctly.” He stepped closer to the wall. “It is very strange though. Shouldn’t we have a bunch of women who died of old age or in childbirth?”
“Age…,” the word slipped from Immanuel’s lips before he could stop it. His eyes went wide as he moved from picture to picture. The drowned women all had at least one child. “There are no old women or very young women. No children either. Their ages range from—”
“Twenty to fifty-five.”
“But why? Why did Jacobs eliminate children and crones? Why focus on married women with children?”
Adam squinted, staring at the list of attributes beneath each name. “We’re missing something they have in common, we have to be. We know they all lived on the islands within the last seventy years, they were all women, they all had children, we are to assume they were married, and they all died here.”
“They all died here,” Immanuel echoed, his voice hollow. “All of their deaths are suspicious. We have an absurd amount of drownings, several murders, and the rest are unknown. He didn’t include women with natural deaths. That’s why there aren’t any old women or women who died in child birth or from illnesses.”
“So Mr. Jacobs came to investigate the deaths of nearly a hundred women who died on the islands. He couldn’t have thought they were all killed by the same person. That would be preposterous.”
The words died in Immanuel’s throat as the room fell into darkness with a shudder. For a moment, neither man moved. Beyond the cloaked window, Immanuel could make out the waft of waves on the beach below and the distant barks of seals beneath the patter of rain against the slate roof. How did light manage to block the world as well as a heavy curtain?
“Generators must be down,” Adam murmured, trying the switch.
In the bleak evening light, it was hard for Immanuel to make out Adam’s features, let alone the pages plastered to the wall. Releasing a tense breath, Immanuel sank onto the chaise. He closed his eyes and tried to recall what he had read, but all the faces blended into one. Even if he couldn’t see or think straight, he had to try to solve this. He had to. A hand landed on his shoulder, sending him from his thoughts with a jolt. Even in the dark, he could sense the soft look he knew all too well.
“Perhaps this is our cue to have dinner. I’m sure we’ll find some candles in the kitchen.”
Immanuel opened his mouth to protest, but as he gestured toward the wall, his heavy limbs reminded him of the damage he had done earlier. Perhaps eating was for the best.
“All right, but we’re going to talk over the case while we eat.”
A rueful grin quirked Adam’s mustache as he steered Immanuel out of the room. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
***
Immanuel’s heart thundered in his chest as a set of fine teeth appeared in the gloom, glinting like the Cheshire Cat’s until a pair of amber eyes glowed above it. The man’s smile cut him like a knife, pain welling in his breast at the thought of what he would do to him. Immanuel tried to close his eyes, but he was still there. A puff of hot breath laced with sulfur and cigarettes rolled from his mouth, scalding Immanuel’s eyes. A strangled cry escaped his lips as the man pressed the knife into the hollow of his throat before running it torturously down his sternum and along his dented ribs. He wanted to move. He tried to will his body to flee, but fear held him fast. Wrenching his chin up, the man forced Immanuel to confront his amber eyes. That knife smile sliced across his lips.
“I told you, I would make you suffer, boy,” Lord Rose said, sinking the knife deep into his heart.
Immanuel lurched awake. He kicked away the covers, pawing at his side and face. Patting his chest, he was relieved to find his body whole and his heart hammering beneath his ribs. Releasing a tremulous breath, Immanuel hung his head in his hands until his pulse slowed and the rhythmic puff of Adam’s sleepy breaths anchored him in reality. They were on Seohl-wiga Island, far from London and Lord Rose’s lead-sealed prison. Running a shaky hand through his hair, Immanuel wished they were in London, so he could visit Judith’s office and ask after Lord Rose’s vessel. No matter how many nightmares he had, he still feared one might be true.
Reaching across the bed to wake Adam, Immanuel was surprised to find the other side of the narrow mattress empty. He licked his lips and let his head rest against the heavy headboard. In his panic, he had forgotten Adam had insisted they take separate beds. It had taken a lot of convincing to even have Adam remain in the same room as him, but as he sat coated in cold sweat, Immanuel wished he had fought harder to keep Adam in his bed. After a nightmare, all he wanted was Adam. Wrapped in his arms, there was no room for monsters.
Rolling onto his back, Immanuel stared at the rough wooden beams bracing the ceiling and wished more than anything he could be home in his own bed with Adam and Percy curled up against his sides. Even if his cat would be the stuff of nightmares for those who didn’t know him, Immanuel loved him, and so did Adam, eventually. When he awoke from a nightmare, he could always count on Percy to come nosing at him, as if sensing his distress. After running his hand along his spine and smooth head for a few minutes, his breath would fall into sync with Percy’s silent purr. He missed that. As he slowly sat up and exhaled against the tightness in his chest, Immanuel tried to imagine what the cat was up to. Wreaking havoc, no doubt.
Running his clammy hands over his face, Immanuel watched Adam toss beneath his quilt just out of reach. In the scant moonlight, he could make out the hard line of his jaw and the faint peppering of henna stubble overlaying it. He could climb into bed with him and lay his head on his chest like he did at home. There Adam would instinctively pull him close even in slumber, but here— Immanuel sighed and quietly padded across the room to his suitcase where it sat on the dresser. Here, Adam would surely push him away. Sharing a bed in a strange place, even one far from prying eyes was too much of a risk, and he understood. He did, but that didn’t mean he liked it. Immanuel rubbed his arms against the mid night chill before clic
king open the latches of his suitcase as softly as he could manage.
He angled the open case toward the undulant beam of the lighthouse’s beacon and caught the glint of the precious cargo he had hidden within. The handkerchiefs and rags he had wrapped around them had fallen away during their travels, but at least they were whole. He wasn’t sure why he was so relieved to see his oil and mixing bowl. Adam would never throw them out, but somehow he had expected his companion to complain that Immanuel had brought them with him. He had found the palm-sized bowl in a cupboard in Hadley’s old workroom. Unwrapping it, he turned it over in his palm as the moon and lighthouse beam caught its lustrous surface to reveal a cluster of faded forget-me-nots painted in its center. He had decanted the oil into an old perfume bottle, but somehow he doubted they would need it for its true purpose when Adam would barely look at him, let alone touch him, here. Carefully tipping a thimbleful of oil into the dish, Immanuel drew in a breath to clear his mind.
At home, he would have taken a nib or penknife and punctured his palm to add his blood to the oil, but after nearly freezing and having a wretched nosebleed from overstretching his powers, he knew he couldn’t chance how much energy a blood spell might require. It was far more powerful and binding than anointing with oil or merely intent, but deep down, he didn’t want a piece of him tied to this godawful island, even if it would keep them safer now. Standing before the window, he closed his eyes and let his mind fall into the familiar labyrinth of his protection sigil. His finger swept through the sigil’s curves as he pictured bars locking, people walking past the house without paying it any mind, Adam’s arms tightly wrapped around him. With a final tap, the sigil hummed to life, faintly resonating in the dark.
Moving from window to window, Immanuel traced the cruciform flower. His bare feet barely made a creak as he walked through the house as if in a trance. With each sigil and twang of power, the Lord Rose shaped knot in his chest loosened until he found himself standing in what had been Mr. Jacobs’ room. Immanuel stood in the doorway for a long moment. Even after he and Adam had spent hours poring over every picture and note, the air remained charged with expectation, as if it’s owner would reappear at any moment. Placing the dish of oil on the desk, Immanuel wiped his slick finger on the edge of his pajamas and flipped on the lamps. The lights had come back on in the middle of their meager dinner, and though they had retired early, Immanuel’s thoughts never left the sea of faces and names.
Selkie Cove (The Ingenious Mechanical Devices Book 5) Page 15
