Corroded

by Karina Cooper

  Anger does not come so easy to a body blissed on the Chinese smoke. For me, who had not yet eaten a bit of my remaining tar, it came more like a sluggish burn than a high dudgeon. I could grab it, feed it until it carried me through the streets I knew so well, but to what purpose?

  A waste of the sweet lassitude of the evening, that’s what.

  The night was not young, and though I had missed my opportunity here, there would be more.

  There would always be more.

  A few hours spent in sublime delight could not be counted as a loss, could it?

  I was sure that the Karakash Veil would not see it as such, and more than certain that the Veil’s spokesman would even be so bold as to outright disagree with my logic, but what was done was done.

  If Micajah Hawke had a problem with how I conducted my business, he could seek me out himself.

  I shivered as the fine hairs on my nape lifted in abject alarm. Miserable as my memory had become, there were some facts—some recollections—that would not leave me.

  Most sharp were the memories of Mad St. Croix, my gifted father who all of Society had long thought dead. I found him only some few months ago, masquerading as a harmless professor. What should have been joy in the discovery of my father turned to a waking nightmare as he attempted—once by accident and then again by design—to end my life.

  His goal had been to return his wife, my mother long since deceased, to the world of the living.

  I told nobody of this. Only Zylphia, my then-maid, knew the barest details—that a wily old professor had mucked about with alchemical affairs beyond his understanding and paid the price. Even now, in my chilled flesh and blissed state of mind, I could not wholly embrace the depth of my father’s crimes.

  To destroy his own flesh and blood in the name of love.

  It does not bear remembering.

  Though Abraham St. Croix learned by accident that his alchemical formula considered me an ideal candidate for his machinations, he did not manage to take advantage of this fact at the time of its wayward administering. Ishmael Communion, my brave friend, had taken me—insensible under the influence of that first terrible concoction—to the Midnight Menagerie.

  For all it was the bloody ringmaster who had kept me from losing myself to the terrible effects of the drug I had been accidentally given, I still owed Ish a debt of gratitude I had not yet considered how to repay.

  Would that it had ceased there.

  Hawke saved my life in other, less respectable ways. Because of that, or perhaps in spite of it, I was viscerally uncomfortable with the knowledge I read in his mismatched eyes when he spoke to me. The ringmaster of that decadent place was all too familiar with my skin for my ease of mind.

  He demonstrated no inhibition in reminding me of the fact. To keep my mind from straying—my soul, he had insisted, from leaving my earthly body—he had placed his mouth on me in places I daren’t not say, forced my attention to the flesh lest I lose it.

  An unorthodox solution, to say the least.

  I was too worldly to be a prude, and not nearly so proper as to be unaware as to the conventions of the goings on between a man and woman, but half out of my senses as I was, I had no opportunity to come to terms with what had happened between us. I gave myself no occasion to try.

  My focus was bent on other, more important things.

  Such as, in the greater scheme of the world, searching for that black-hearted villain that murdered my husband mere hours after the vows that would have seen me freed of this debt.

  Or, rather closer to the present concern, acquiring the quarry that I could give to the Veil in exchange for a little more time so that I could find that murderous bastard.

  Smoothing my hands along my cheeks, and likely smearing the soot from the lampblack I used to coat my distinctive dark red hair, I spun in a semi-circle, held my breath as the fog forced me to clear my throat sharply.

  For many who plied their talents below, a constant throat-clearing was as a dinner bell for the starving. One could always tell a visiting toff by the tickle in the throat, and I had not been raised below the drift. I lacked the tolerance to the grit I inhaled with every breath.

  I hadn’t bothered to put on my fog-prevention goggles, or the respirator that protected my lungs from the black air. They hung in the tool pouch at my side, heavy and eager for use, but I ignored them.

  It seemed only right that I at least make an effort to blend in to the world I now inhabited, even should it continue to gather like an ache in the throat. Since I did not care to always wear the distinctive devices of a collector, I split my time between bare-faced forbearance and protectives.

  It was not the most comfortable of choices, especially during true peasoupers like tonight’s devil-thick miasma, but I had little choice. While I hid from my mother-in-law, a deucedly manipulative marchioness whose love for me had never warmed beyond civil intolerance, I could not return to the London I once knew. Not until I’d completed my objectives. Marchioness Northampton mourned her eldest son, I could understand that. That she chose to do so by painting me as the target of her grief—by attempting to imprison me in the confining trappings of grieving widow for the whole of my life—was a circumstance I could not allow. Not, anyhow, just yet.

  I would go back, eventually. I would grieve Cornelius Kerrigan Compton, both on my own and as Society deemed proper. I would wear black and drape the windows and hide the mirrors; pen wistful notes thanking others for their sympathies, whatever fashion demanded of a widow. But I would do so on my terms, and only after I had collected the murderer that had taken him.

  This was what drove me in the dark and the gloom.

  This was what haunted my every waking moment, and even those of sleep. That I had turned my back upon the man I’d married, left him to die in the fog alone as the villain I hunted outwitted me at every turn, was my own great burden.

  I was not a complete halfwit. I knew, logically, that I had fallen into a trap—that the vile murderer, whose efforts below the drift put even the Ripper to shame, had laid for me the sort of bait I could not willingly ignore. He had lured me with my maid and dear friend’s abduction, captured me when I had given chase, even saved me from my father’s dark and secret laboratory. His games were that which I professed to despise, and yet I played them.

  The flowers he left upon my window sill when I was recovering from my father’s villainy, the midnight sweets he murdered for Mad St. Croix’s diabolical schemes, all designed to put me in Bedlam.

  If I owed Hawke my life, I owed this sweet tooth—so named for his taste for Menagerie flesh—something much darker: the midnight sweets demanded his collection. Menagerie justice, they called it. I did not fool myself into thinking it would be anything kind, but I had long ago learned never to ask the outcome of my collections.

  I had failed, in every respect. Whatever this man was, monster or madman, he styled himself my rival, and I found myself lacking.

  If I were stronger, smarter, perhaps I could have saved Lord Compton from the sweet tooth’s angry vengeance. I could have waylaid the fiend before he murdered the man I had chosen to marry.

  I could have... Something. I could have done something, done anything at all.

  I did not. I failed, and a good man had suffered the terrible consequences.

  What could I say? Even here, in the dark where no one could see me, I felt watched. Always, I felt watched.

  I knew it was the eyes of the dead who watched me.

  My fists clenched by my sides. Pain knifed through my chest, the same ache that forced the love of laudanum into something much less benign.

  Weep for the widowed bride!

  So much venom in the murdering collector’s spittle-flecked demand, never more than a hairsbreadth away from echoing in my memory. So much hate in so few words, spat at me from across my husband’s bleeding body.

  All for so much blood.

  I would never scrub it from my mind.

  Blood for bl
ood would have to do.

  I turned away from the inviting stoop of the opium den and the sweet escape that waited within, hunching my shoulders beneath the thick fustian coat that was all that stood between me and the chill of mid-October’s autumnal bite. Tucking my cold fingers into the pockets, I began the short trudge back to the gates of London’s decadent pleasure gardens.

  It was there, alone and in the cold embrace of the damp fog, that the black tendrils of despair began to creep in.

  It all seemed so very hopeless.

  On the one hand, I missed my staff dearly. My chaperone, the widow Frances Fortescue, who had been my governess when first I stepped foot in my old Cheyne Walk home. So stiff and unyielding was her façade, but she’d cared for me as only a deeply nurturing soul could when faced with the hell-spawn I’d been as a girl of thirteen.

  I keenly felt the loss of my butler, a war veteran missing a leg from his time in Her Majesty’s infantry, and whose beautifully groomed chops and thick mane of white hair had always put me in mind of a gentleman pirate. It was his respectful propriety, his ever calm presence, his wife’s efficient housekeeping and the subtle indulgences of a childless couple that had earned Booth and his wife a place in my heart.

  I wondered what happened to Levi, the young house-boy Booth had taken under his patient wing, and whether my maid of only some months ago, Betsy, had found her new home in her husband’s Scotland village to be everything she’d hoped.

  I wondered, too, if they suffered the scorn of my reputation. If the letters of recommendation promised by the marchioness had carried my staff far out of my reach.

  That I had vanished only added grist to an already humming gossip mill.

  My guardian, the executor of my father’s will, surely would hear of this most recent scandal soon, if he hadn’t already. Mr. Oliver Ashmore, an absentee man in trust, had never spent more than a few hours under the roof of the home that was technically his, at least until my majority made it mine. He traveled the world, as my father had before my birth. I’d seen the man by face only once, and aside from a lingering terror of the man, I remembered nothing useful.

  I knew that my household often sent letters to him, likely fraught with all my latest antics and troubles. If he had ever written back to assure them of his sympathies, I did not know.

  Would he wash his hands of me, then? Upon my marriage, he was no longer forced to act my guardian. Even as a widow, the inheritance he vouchsafed now belonged to my husband’s benefactors—in short, not me. Mr. Ashmore had no further responsibility to me.

  I suffered a freedom now from such matters that was almost as terrible as the gilded captivity of Society above this blasted fog. Although I could come and go here, nearly as I wished, I still owed the Karakash Veil for the actions that had saved my life when my father’s alchemical serum nearly ended it.

  That they demanded my father’s alchemical concoction as payment—a thing they called magic in their foreign tongue—was the terrible price of that freedom. I could not locate the device that had carried it.

  Even if I had, I was not prepared to give that sort of uncertain power to a criminal enterprise.

  What, then, was I doing? Collecting Menagerie-posted bounties alone, in the hopes that each one would soften the Veil’s demand?

  It was a foolish hope, and a vain one.

  But what else was I to do?

  As I made my way ever deeper into Limehouse’s filthy avenues, I squeezed my eyes shut against a burn that seemed as if it came as much from the heart as the fog frothing behind me like a wake.

  I had betrayed everything. My staff, my dear friends, my husband. This was not mere misery, this was unavoidable fact—ladies of any stripe did not cavort with the creatures below the drift. They did not marry earls with one hand and wield knives in the other.

  They did not ever risk behavior that would see their staff ridiculed and turned out, cut by the rest of London’s elite and their own servants, whose airs mirrored their masters’ and mistresses’ so closely.

  I had done all of that, and more.

  What good, then, was a mistress who could not provide for herself, much less her staff? Who could not stand beside her husband?

  Who could not even state with any degree of certainty that she had loved him?

  None. Not a whit of worth in a creature as that.

  Even less when she struggled in debt up to her coal-blackened head.

  I passed one of the many narrow lanes carved between shop stalls and cramped Limehouse quarters, shuddering with an ache in my chest that no amount of opium could soothe. I all but hunched into myself, so much so that I had no inkling of motion or movement as fingers curled into the shoulder of my overcoat and wrenched me off my feet.

  I managed a gasped sound, a coughing rasp, and a thickly callused hand slammed over my nose and mouth. Pain lit like a brand across my cheekbone. I tasted the salt of sweat, a gritty layer akin to charcoal or soot, and then the air was shoved from my lungs as my back crashed into damp brick facing. My hat flew off my head. Firelight flickered behind my eyelids as the opium dulled the senses that should have registered such abuse.

  “You’re that collector bird,” came the accusation, a guttural breath sweetened by smoke and soured by decay.

  I had no opportunity to answer. I felt only an immense pressure constricting my voice and breath. Steely fingers banded around my throat, squeezing the high collar around my neck until my heartbeat pulsed within the confines of my skull and I felt as if only a second more might turn my head into so much pulp.

  My feet hung from the ground, leagues away from the command of my thoughts, and the brick gouged deeply into my shoulders. I seized the meaty wrist beneath my chin, so wide that I could only just scrape my fingertips together around it, but I could no more move it than I could will aside a locomotive.

  My breath rattled. My ears rang. In tune with my laboring heartbeat, my vision blurred and sparked. The shape before my straining, bulging eyes was man-shaped, beard-colored, but I was blind by darkness and what terrible melancholy had gripped me in the seconds between leaving the den and meeting this beast of a man.

  My eyes closed.

  “Not so much a fight,” my would-be murderer grunted. “I ought’er—”

  Whatever he ought to have done, he did not do. What he did instead was widen his eyes, as if something in my face surprised him. The skin there flinched, masking a glint of red I could not ascertain as reflection or rage, and he cursed a gritty wheeze, his body jerking abruptly. The grip at my neck flexed, grinding flesh to bone, then loosened as my flailing frame lurched like a fish trapped in the killing air. Suddenly, the weight in my chest was gone. My thoughts cleared; anger set in.

  What bollocks had I been on about? What had I been thinking?

  I floundered, clawing at the brick wall behind me, feet seeking purchase. A knee, a corner edge, anything would do. One foot flattened against the alley wall, the other found soft flesh that earned a taut yelp as Coventry staggered backwards.

  He dropped me to the ground, a discarded doll gasping for breath, choking through the swollen flesh of my throat. I managed to get to my knees just as smaller, faster hands dug into my coat. They dragged me to my feet. “Come, cherie, speak to me!”

  I coughed a word that wasn’t a greeting. As my vision cleared on the tail end of my quarry’s worn trousers, as he vanished into a swirl of fog and fading, pounding footsteps, I whirled on my erstwhile savior, shrugging off her hands in violent recoil.

  It was not her appearance that put me off, though there were many both in the drift and out who could not claim the same.

  Zylphia was a mulatto, her skin the color of dark tea lightened by a dollop of cream, her hair coarse, incredibly thick, and with enough kink from her Negro mother that it settled in heavy waves. Her mouth was too wide for fashion’s choice, which only appealed to the refined tastes of the Menagerie’s market, and her eyes were uncannily blue in her African face—legacy of her unknow
n white father, and all too clear a mark of the shame that birthed her, as far as London proper cared.

  Zylphia had once been merely a midnight sweet—those beautiful, cultivated creatures that served as flesh and temptation for the pleasure gardens. As part of my debt, she had become my maid above as well as my keeper below. One of few who knew of both lives I led, I had trusted her more than I should have.

  She’d vanished just before the marriage that would clear me of all debt to Hawke and his keepers, and thus relieve her of her duties to me. She had not been there when the rival collector we both hunted had murdered my Lord Compton.

  She returned sometime between my husband’s passing and my lapse into that terrible state of raw disbelief, but it was too late. My guilt had grown too weighty to bear.

  The murderer had known of my previous maid, dear Betsy of the sweet doe eyes, and had abducted her as neatly as he pleased. He had known of Lord Compton’s proposal, murdering him bold as brass in the street.

  He knew where I made my home, and that I acted the collector come evening.

  All that I held dear would remain in danger. Zylphia, the daft twist, had not taken to my demand to be left alone.

  We were no longer friends, and it was my doing.

  I glared at her from watery, burning eyes, my mouth twisted in anger. “You had no right to step in.”

  She flinched as if I’d slapped her. I possibly could have done worse if I’d tried. As a creature of the Menagerie acclimated to giving her pound of flesh on demand, she did not like to be touched when away from the work.

  Which made it all the more poignant when she caught my hand in both of hers, steadying me as I tottered sideways and staggered to a halt. “That’s one of the Bakers,” she told me, as if I were too daft a child to know. “He rivals Communion for size, what were you thinking?”

  “I bloody well know who that was.” I snatched my hand from her grasp. My chest twisted as hurt flashed across her exquisite features.

  I could stand on my own. I had no choice.