by Bec McMaster
A pair of enormous metaljacket automatons stomped behind them, more of a threat than anything else. Once the scourge of the prince consort, now they were used to bulk out the stretched Nighthawk forces.
"Do you think it will ever end?" she asked quietly. "Do you think we can ever come back from this point?"
Could there ever truly be peace in London?
Malloryn reached past her to tug the curtains closed.
"There is always hope, Gemma. I spent the last fifteen years fighting for freedom from a despot who had all the power. We did it then. We can overcome our problems now. It will just take time."
She sighed.
"Frankly, I refuse to allow someone to destroy our fragile peace." Malloryn rapped on the carriage roof with his silver-handled cane, as if to prompt Herbert for speed. "Which is why we must stop whoever is trying to rouse these riots and set London aflame. I know it seems overwhelming, but take it one step at a time, Gemma. Today we deal with the Chameleon. Tomorrow we deal with the true enemy."
The carriage hissed to a halt, Herbert releasing the steam valve, and setting the brakes. Gemma glanced out at Number 45. Home, sweet home for the Company of Rogues.
Malloryn's spy network was unparalleled, but he'd wanted a group who could deal with the current threat to the monarchy—the mysterious, as yet unnamed organization who'd been stirring up chaos in the past year with the intent of replacing the queen.
What he'd ended up with was the aptly named Company of Rogues.
COR had been formed several months ago from a random assortment of blue bloods, mechs, and verwulfen. Each member was a specialist in his or her field; Caleb Byrnes was the best tracker and investigator the Guild of Nighthawks had to offer; Ingrid Miller, now Ingrid Byrnes, had been a verwulfen bounty hunter who could find people nobody else could; Liam Kincaid had a unique link to those mechs who'd been reintegrated into the community when the enclaves closed, as well as a particular gift for mechwork; Ava McLaren, his fiancée, was a crime scene investigator from the Nighthawks; Jack Fairchild worked downstairs in the laboratory, creating all manner of mechwork weapons and gadgets to assist them in their endeavors; and Charlie Todd came from the rookeries of Whitechapel, where he was a jack-of-all trades. Thief. Roguish charmer. And what she suspected was a near-level genius, with his father's gift for tinkering with gadgets.
Which left herself, trained in the arts of espionage; the baroness, who ran the Company of Rogues in Malloryn's absence; and Malloryn at the head of them all, setting them into play like a master puppeteer.
"Are you going to bring the team in on this one?"
She knew he'd been keeping odds and ends of information from them, which meant one thing: he suspected he had a leak.
That he hadn't told her of his suspicions meant she was on the suspect list.
"Yes," he said finally, staring at nothing. "There's no sign of the remaining elements of the SOG—only rabble. Most of them have scurried off into hiding holes like the rats they are. Byrnes and Ingrid have failed to catch even the faintest glimpse of the dhampir agents working against us, which means they're up to something. The Chameleon's murder is the perfect thing to keep COR busy."
"They might sense something I haven't."
"Doubtful." He gave an irritated sigh as the door opened, and Herbert gestured him onto the footpath. "I'm mostly trying to keep the rest of your fellow agents occupied before they do something rash."
"I think they're distracted enough at the moment as it is," she said, with the faintest of smiles.
"Oh?" Malloryn asked as he stepped out onto the curb.
"You're getting married in a week, Your Grace. Odds on betting has reached fever pitch as to whether you're going to get the bride to the altar or not."
Malloryn shot her an irritated glare. "Clearly I've been lax if the lot of you haven't anything better to do."
Gemma stifled a groan. The last thing she needed was Malloryn making them busy. "If you throw them the Chameleon case, it might keep them occupied for a few days."
Malloryn's hand tightened on the hilt of his cane as he strode toward the front door. "Marriage, busybodies—or an inexplicable murder. I'm not certain which one I despise more."
Gemma trailed Malloryn up the stairs toward the training room, where the sounds of grunts and blows echoed.
Inside the room, Caleb Byrnes, Liam Kincaid, and Charlie Todd looked like they'd been busy beating the stuffing out of each other.
Byrnes appeared to have been doing most of the beating. Since his transformation into a dhampir two months ago, the color had begun to drain out of his skin and hair, thanks to the Fade, and while he'd been dangerously fast and lethal as a blue blood, now he was incomparable.
Kincaid, a newly infected blue blood with a mechanical arm, was still getting used to the changes to his body and his increased bloodlust. He and Charlie circled Byrnes, fists held up defensively, as Byrnes lashed out with a sudden high kick that almost took Charlie's head off his shoulders. Charlie ducked, slapping the blow aside, as Kincaid slammed his fists down on Byrnes's back.
Or where Byrnes had just been.
Byrnes spun low, sweeping Kincaid's feet out from under him, and then straightened abruptly, slamming the flat of his palm into Charlie's chest.
The pair of them hit the training mats, and Kincaid stayed there, cursing under his breath. Charlie flipped to his feet, his blue eyes twinkling as he noticed the pair of them in the door.
"Gemma. Malloryn." He winced. "Just in time to see Byrnes hand us a thrashing."
Byrnes swept his hair out of his face, showing no hint of surprise. No doubt he'd heard them coming up the stairs with his exquisite hearing. "You almost had me that one time."
"Once." Kincaid groaned, and found his feet with a flexibility he hadn't owned last month. There was no sign of the mechanical leg braces he'd once worn. "You were being generous."
"Where are the others?" Malloryn asked.
"Ava and Jack are in the laboratory downstairs, tinkering with Jack's next project," Charlie said promptly. "Ingrid's visiting with a friend, and I'm not certain where the baroness is."
"Probably avoiding Malloryn," Byrnes muttered sotto voce.
"I beg your pardon?" Malloryn shot him a sharp look.
"Nothing." Innocent did not become Byrnes.
"Tsk, tsk," Gemma chided, filling the sudden tense silence in a rush. Not all the Rogues were enjoying the lead-up to Malloryn's wedding. "If I were the ladies, I know where I'd be."
She waggled her eyebrows suggestively, enjoying the way Kincaid flushed and reached for his shirt and Charlie suddenly scraped a hand across the back of his neck as if he was still unused to her casual flirtations. Sometimes she simply enjoyed setting the cat among the pigeons, and it was almost too easy with these two. Byrnes, being Byrnes, merely arched a cool brow. He knew she wasn't serious.
"Herbert, can you fetch the baroness?" Malloryn threw over his shoulder. "Tell her to be in my study in five minutes, then send for tea."
"At once, sir." Herbert vanished.
"Perhaps you can solve a problem for us, Your Grace," Charlie called.
"Yes?"
"Let's say the three of us were discussing who the most dangerous rogue in the Company of Rogues is," Charlie said, with an impish smile as he hauled his shirt over his head. "Now Kincaid is a blue blood and Byrnes is dhampir, it's upset the ranking a little. We're trying to sort out who fits where."
Malloryn blinked. "Who fits where on what? A scale of which one of us is the Most Dangerous Rogue in the Company of Rogues?"
Men. Gemma rolled her eyes, though she couldn't help looking to Malloryn to see what his answer would be.
He abhorred wasting time, but she'd seen him start to warm to the rest of the Rogues in the past couple of months. Sometimes he needed a bit of lighthearted banter in his life.
"I already know the answer to that question," he replied, slapping the file he'd been carrying on the table. "I don't need to guess."
"My vote
's for Byrnes," Charlie explained. "Presuming all goes wrong and Byrnes loses control of his inner dhampir, I think he's the most dangerous. He's faster than us now, and stronger. Impervious to most wounds."
"My vote"—Kincaid crossed his arms over his chest—"is you. You destroyed Charlie and me in the ring last month. Barely even broke a bloody sweat." He suddenly grinned, which was good to see after his recent infection with the craving virus. "I think you could handle Byrnes."
"The question isn't, can I handle him." Malloryn snorted. "If Byrnes ever slipped his leash, then I wouldn't go after him myself. It's a ridiculous assumption."
A Malloryn answer to a T.
"And you're all looking at this all wrong," Gemma added, unscrewing the lid on the flask of blood at her hip. "All three of you look at strength literally. You should be thinking of strengths and weaknesses. Vulnerabilities. You're asking who the most dangerous Rogue is; not who the strongest one is. So sorry, Kincaid, you're out of the running."
The man could probably lift a carriage by himself, and with his mech arm a single blow from him could smash ribs, but he was nowhere near the top of her list.
"Byrnes isn't near the top of my list either. He has a ruthless edge Kincaid lacks, but we have a major trump card against him. If Byrnes gives in to his dark side, then Malloryn would send Ingrid in to bring him down," Gemma replied, sipping her blood. "Byrnes has three major weaknesses; his wife, sunlight, and the Black Vein serum. If you want to take him down without damage, you send in Ingrid to bring him to his knees. He's physically incapable of hurting his wife, and she'll have motivation enough to bring him down any way she can—except dead. If you want him dead, then you take a sniper dartgun and sit in wait where he'll least expect it, and use the serum against him. If you want to escape him, you'd better hope the sun is shining brightly, thanks to his newly acquired dhampir weaknesses."
Or you created an ultraviolet incandescent illuminator to use against him, but nobody technically needed to know about that—and Jack hadn't quite gotten the prototype she'd designed right yet.
Because Byrnes wasn't the only dhampir out there.
Just the only one who was working on their side.
"If I wanted Byrnes dead, then I'd send in Gemma," Malloryn replied. "He'd never even see her coming."
"But where does everyone else fit?" Kincaid demanded.
Because the size of ones balls is important.
"Easy. From least dangerous to most dangerous; Ava, Jack, Kincaid, Charlie, Isabella, Byrnes, Ingrid, Herbert—for you're all forgetting dear Herbert—and then Malloryn at the top," she replied.
"Herbert?" Kincaid blurted. "The butler?"
"You think he's a butler?" Incredible. "That's why you're down at the bottom of the list. You'd be dead before you even noticed where the threat was coming from."
"Charlie's above me!" he protested.
"Charlie's had the benefit of learning how to fight under the Devil of Whitechapel," she said with a shrug. "I've seen him with a cutthroat razor. And he's faster than you. Besides, when you fight, you fight to put a man down. You're a pugilist at heart. Not a killer."
"Hence," Malloryn said with no small amount of amusement as she decimated them, "why Gemma is at the top of my list. If, for some godforsaken reason, the Company of Rogues start fighting among themselves, my money's on Gemma taking you all down."
The three of them turned to look at her.
She smiled sweetly and merely sipped her flask.
"So who wins between you and Malloryn?" Byrnes’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Hypothetically?"
"Malloryn."
"Gemma."
They spoke at the same time, and then looked at each other.
"You're right," Malloryn said to Kincaid. "I wiped the floor with both you and Charlie last month. Who do you think taught me to fight?" He gestured toward her in an extravagant hand wave. "Gemma has skills none of you can ever dream of owning. Myself included."
Which was a polite way of saying she'd spent most of her formative years training to be an assassin.
A small knot formed deep inside her. "And yet, you're my equal now in the ring."
"Tell me you haven't thought about how to take me down, if such a thing was required," he said dryly.
Have a plan to kill everyone in the room. It was the first thing Lord Balfour's Falcons had taught her as a little girl. She shrugged uneasily. Hard to break small habits. "You don't think I'm actually going to tell you how I'd go about it?"
Malloryn shared a small smile with her. "Worth a shot."
"And you don't think I presume you haven't worked out how to take me down in return? If the pair of us went to war, you win. When it comes to pulling the trigger on you, I hesitate. You don't."
Trained as an assassin or not.
She'd never truly had the gift for killing.
Especially not friends.
"I seem to recall a different story."
"Seven years ago," she said pointedly, knowing he was stirring up the past to put her on edge. Malloryn simply couldn't help playing games; but she could play them too. "You're a far more ruthless man than you ever were, Auvry. Now? I think you'd pull that trigger now."
Malloryn looked vaguely uncomfortable.
"What happened seven years ago?" Charlie asked.
Gemma screwed the lid back on her flask and sucked in a small breath as she steadied her sudden nerves. Russia happened. "Malloryn didn't pull the trigger. He let me live."
And then he saved my life.
"You two were on opposing sides?"
Every face in the room suddenly sharpened at Charlie's question.
"No." Her voice didn't so much as quaver as she looked up and met the duke's eyes. "I was working for Malloryn, I just wasn't following orders. I decided to protect a target he wanted dead."
"An enemy agent who was about to tear down an entire alliance."
Her lips pressed together.
Dmitri was more than that to me.
But it was all a lie.
And so, she didn't argue.
"Malloryn had one shot at him, but he couldn't pull the trigger because I was between them. You say I let love ruin me, but you used to have a heart too, Auvry. It was the only weakness you potentially had. Now? I think you'd take that shot." She'd seen the darkness stirring in him throughout the revolution, and the lengths he'd gone to in order to defeat Lord Balfour and ruin the prince consort. The man that came out on the other side wasn't the same one who'd gone into that fight. "So if it comes down to Malloryn and me? He pulls the trigger. I don't. King takes queen," she conceded. "So I rank just below Malloryn."
"You might be surprised," Malloryn replied tautly, the pinched expression about his nose showing how closely her arrow had struck.
"It's a good thing we'll never have to find out," she replied, gracing the room with a false smile. "Problem solved?"
"Well, I'm convinced," Byrnes replied, scratching his jaw. "As cold as my blood runs at times, it's a little unnerving to watch the pair of you debate murder over a flask of blood as if you're discussing the weather."
Kincaid scowled. "Agreed."
Charlie shrugged.
"It's the important questions in life," she replied, and finally gave in to the urge to roll her eyes.
"Now... do you think we can discuss actual business?" Malloryn demanded. "As enlightening as this little discussion was, the Company of Rogues has a new problem. Someone has just murdered the most dangerous assassin that's ever graced the Echelon in the exact same way he used to murder others. We know how he was killed. We don't know how his killer got in. We also don't know who it is."
He slapped the file against his thigh.
"And... I have a credible report stating his next target is the queen."
Gemma looked at him sharply. Playing his cards close to his chest, indeed. "It is?"
No wonder he'd been out of sorts.
4
"They called him the Chameleon," Malloryn explained,
once all the Rogues—besides Ava and Jack—had assembled in his study. "A master of disguise who could kill any target, no matter how high profile or guarded. He was an assassin who plagued the Echelon in the years before the revolution, and he was caught the day the prince consort was overthrown. Or so we thought."
"Intriguing statement," Byrnes mused, his glacial eyes lighting up with glee. "Or so we thought."
Gemma settled into her usual armchair between Baroness Schröder and Charlie Todd. "Of course you'd be interested."
Byrnes smiled a devious smile. He never could resist a challenging case. "It's been a boring month. Malloryn's had me confined to the house while we waited to see how my transformation would affect me."
For years blue bloods had feared the Fade—the end stage of the craving virus, when all the color drained out of their skin and hair and they began to transform into a bloodthirsty vampire that would slaughter anything and everything that moved. However, the Company of Rogues had recently discovered there was one other course of transmutation for a blue blood. Using the elixir vitae, a closely guarded secret serum, blue bloods could become dhampir instead. As fast as a vampire, with the same weakness to sunlight, but retaining their mental faculties.
"Please tell me you're going to let me out of the house. Please don't tease me with the allure of a diabolical mastermind of an assassin, and then tell me I don't get to play with the case." Byrnes's eyes flashed black as the craving rose in him. "I'm going to go mad if you don't let me back into the field soon. Even Ingrid's struggling to distract me."
"You're on the case," Malloryn snorted, "or else you wouldn't be in here."
"Thank God," Ingrid muttered.
"Wearing you out, is he?" Gemma exchanged a knowing smile with her verwulfen friend.
"Driving me halfway to Bedlam, is more the point," Ingrid replied.
"Tell me more about this Chameleon," Byrnes purred, in the kind of voice one would hear in the bedroom.
"Fifteen assassinations over the course of seven years," Malloryn replied, tossing a file across the polished mahogany table toward Byrnes. "Gemma? You know the facts best."
