Corroded tscc-3

by Karina Cooper

  I saw no sign of the collector as I ran, but I heard the Ripper lumbering after me, his breath rattling with lunacy and rage. He called invectives, said such terrible things that I could understand easily how such a mind as his might carve a woman as if she were nothing but meat.

  Yet, still I underestimated the power of whatever insanity fueled him. Blood ran from his leg, I’m sure it must have pained him greatly, but all the Ripper did was come—closer and closer. It was as if I’d trapped myself in my own dreams, for I swore I felt his breath on my nape and the threat of death hanging like a pall around me.

  I heard a woman’s laughter. Her pleading voice. I wrenched one hand forward as if I expected skeins of red to drag me back into the dark.

  Madness for all, it seemed.

  I scrambled up the incline, reaching behind me to slip free my last knife—too late. With a mighty leap, the Ripper launched himself at me. I avoided the bulk of his attack, yet his arms folded about my knees and I slammed to the ground. Rock and dirt ground into my face, snapped off my respirator and sent my fog-protectives flying.

  Dimly, I heard the merry tinkle of breaking glass, and the shattering screech of the Wapping train.

  It was nothing to the agony tearing through my back. My side. Like liquid fire burst through my flesh and scorching every nerve to a crisp.

  I screamed. The Ripper’s panting, loathsome breath washed over my face. He held his bulk upon me, one bloody hand flattened upon my head, grinding my cheek into the dirt. With the other, he wrenched my own blade from my side. “Bitch,” he gasped. “Filthy whore.”

  If he considered me to be the same as the doxies he’d gutted, or if he simply assumed all women were the same, I didn’t know. I could hardly ask, what with the weight of him atop me and the opium I’d swallowed desperately attempting to smother the terribly pain he’d inflicted.

  The blade I’d drawn was caught underneath me, my fist aching around it. I sobbed my naked pain—fury prime beside it—as his fingers knotted in my hair. He climbed off me, but dragged me backwards by the knotted plait. The agony this tore along my scalp was nothing to the wound he’d already inflicted, but it allowed me the opening I needed.

  It surprised him, I think, when I not only managed to get to my knees, but launched myself backwards in a move that turned his own grasping momentum against him. He staggered back, fingers tangled in my hair. It tore the plait free of its pins, loosing hanks of tangled red. I twisted, finally able to get my knife between us, my blood and his now a terrible fragrance in the filthy smoke and fog. I gagged from the odor and pain and fear of it all.

  The Ripper did not seem to notice. He lifted me bodily by my hair, his features nothing more than a snarling mask of murderous frenzy. My own blood dripped from his hand, splattering my face.

  I gripped my knife with both hands and thrust.

  There was nowhere he could go. Tangled by my hair, a fall of bloody red imprisoning us together, he screamed into my face; spittle rained down upon me.

  It was as if I felt the skin part, interminably slow. Felt the flesh give away, melting beneath the point. Blood gushed over my hand, a fountain of it hot enough to burn my aching, chilled skin.

  He lurched. Jerked hard, as if I’d only just kicked him.

  The weapon he’d aimed at me glanced off my armor, leaving his arm curved around my side. I clamped my elbow over it, holding him in place, as his blood pumped over the hand that held the blade.

  I stared up into eyes made dark by the dim light and watched surprise replace rage.

  “Whore,” he whispered. “Just a—” I needed no more understanding as to the nature of his character. Whether he truly detested women, or simply them what sold their flesh for a living wage, I would never know. He tried again to label me with his madness, to call me whore or something new, but he could not. It bubbled, wet and red, too thick to shape a word from. Saliva trickled from his lips, dribbled to my cheek.

  Revulsion seized me. I twisted, sobbing when the act pulled at the wound in my side, kicked and thrashed and pushed until the Ripper’s bulk slid from me. Surging to my feet tore another wave of pain through me—the opium could not keep up. My fist tightened on the hilt of the knife drenched with another man’s blood. Nausea surged.

  “I...wanted...”

  The voice croaked. Thready, gurgling with effort, it begged for something I could not give. Face down in the dirt, the man who had terrorized a city gurgled into filth, shuddered. “I...”

  The distant Wapping train whistled. He jerked, as if surprised—vomited blood instead of words. Whatever he wanted, the act proved too much; it sealed his confessions forever. With a final, ragged gurgle, Jack the Ripper died at my feet.

  Something I had no name for broke within me. Something a clergyman might have called my soul, or perhaps another might have called my humanity.

  Were I any other, I might have called it innocence.

  I had taken a life.

  My hands shook. My breath painted the air in front of my face white, and the fog swallowed my shuddering exhale without judgment. Without malice.

  I murdered a man.

  Shock dulled the world. Eased the cold, even the ragged throb of torn flesh and the slow, hot drip of my own blood as it slid beneath my corset.

  Oh, Cherry.

  God, that I would be spared this awful, ghostly echo of my memory! I dropped the knife, stumbling away, clapped both hands to my ears and clenched my eyes shut. My features contorted to a terrible mask, and I squeezed as if I could collapse my own skull.

  Let go, the woman’s memory whispered.

  Opium hallucinations. Not uncommon, after the amount I’d eaten. Yet so horribly timed. “Leave me alone,” I hissed, teeth clenched.

  Cold plucked at me. The fog was silent.

  I opened my eyes to find myself standing upon the bridge, the far-off gleam of the Wapping train encroaching through the sheet of filthy gray and yellow. My eyes burned. My nose ran. I lowered my grime—and blood-stained hands slowly.

  The faint, tinny strains of music tinkled through the heavy silence.

  Still, the dream played out.

  Note by note, the song shimmered. I turned, looked out over the blanketed railyard and couldn’t pinpoint where.

  I must have lost my mind in dreams. I’d given up the reality of it all for the bliss. This surreal landscape was not mine.

  And yet I recognized it—a waltz, as often played in the soirees above this soiled drift. One two three. One two three...

  I hummed the next few, but my voice broke, and it came instead as a ragged exhale.

  A gentle hand slid around my shoulder. “There, Cherry. Do you hear it?”

  I swayed, could not summon the will to resist as he turned me. “There’s a girl,” he whispered. One two three. One two three... “There’s a good girl. You’ve done it, Cherry. I knew you could.”

  Gloved hands stroked down my arms, laced with my fingers and raised my hands. I looked up, but my eyes would not paint a picture I could understand. All I could see were two glittering eyes under a low hat, and the shape of a firm, expressive mouth as it slid a warm kiss over my knuckles.

  There was not enough light to know the face of the man who claimed me.

  I shuddered. My knees buckled.

  “No,” he said sharply, catching me quickly enough at the side that the wound beyond his fingers pinched. I groaned my pain. My disorientation only became worse. “Stand on your own. You deserve this, Cherry St. Croix.”

  “D...” My tongue was too thick, my voice husky with confusion. I clutched at him because if I did not, I would have fallen. His coat was thick and warm, his arms supportive as they came about me. “Deserve,” I managed.

  “I told you.” One two three. Slowly, he turned a circle. One two three. My feet found the steps by instinct, the rhythm by hours and hours of teaching.

  One two three. He eased me into a waltz that seemed as natural as breathing. Familiarity grasped at my heart.
/>   We danced in silence, swaying to the tiny notes plucking haunting chords through the fog. Yet I had not the will, nor the strength. My energy faded, and as he turned me around, I sagged in his arms.

  He caught me tight against his chest. “It’s all right,” he whispered, his breath warm against my temple.

  It wasn’t. Weep for the widowed bride...

  “I am so proud of you.”

  Proud. The monster who had murdered so many was proud of me.

  I had earned that, did I?

  The bridge beneath our feet began to shake, and even the shrill waltz began to stutter.

  I looked out over the bridge and did not flinch as the train whistle shredded this terrible, surreal dream.

  “We are much the same, you and I,” he said. An echo of words he’d told me in the shadows of the Thames Tunnel, moments before he’d delivered me to my father’s schemes. Warm lips caressed the nape of my neck. I closed my eyes, wrapped my hands around his where they crossed beneath my breasts, and held tight.

  “So you said,” I whispered.

  “So you have just proven,” he replied. “No other man is worth you. No challenge is beneath you. I knew you would not fail me.”

  And so I had not. My rival, the one man who had cost me everything. I had failed all others, but him, I pleased.

  “It has always been you, Cherry. I was meant to love you.”

  Love. That awful word. What monstrous things the emotion provoked in those who fell to it.

  I allowed myself a small, humorless smile.

  Clenching my fingers tight about his forearms, I rested my head against the shoulder behind me. I closed my eyes. “I know you,” I whispered. I did not know how, I couldn’t understand what it was that seemed so familiar, but I knew him. Every sense struggling to be heard through the train’s rushing approach, the fog that bandied about us, the pain and horror and fear of it all, they screamed a truth I could not ignore—even as I could make no sense of it.

  “Well you should know me. I am you.” His lips grazed my temple. “You are me. We are well-suited.”

  Of course we were. The soul of a murderer, were either of us likely to have a soul at all.

  Justice, I’d promised. A scream sworn to avenge the plucking of an English rose.

  “I love you, Cherry.”

  With trembling lips, I took a deep breath, held it for a moment until the train’s whistle pierced the silence—so close, it left my ears ringing with shrill warning.

  I exhaled my defeat into a weary two words. “Allez, hop.”

  Holding his arms around me, I pulled us both over the bridge.

  The collector managed only a gasp, a shocked cry; my sudden motion wrested his balance from him, and we fell together.

  The air currents took us, frigid air cushioning our fall. We spun—one two three—so morbidly slow, and as if that dream played without me, as if I watched it unfold on a tapestry, gravity tore his arms from my grasp.

  The flapping ends of his greatcoat left a dark stream around us. In the searing glow of the oncoming train, my hair tangled like spun rubies. The lantern affixed to the front of the locomotive highlighted every movement. Every expression.

  The bowler hat he’d always worn low went sailing off into the shadow.

  Sharp features. A nose like a blade. A laconic edge to a twisted mouth.

  His brown eyes sparkled, so much pride—and a terrible, crushing sorrow.

  Thin hands seized my ribs. In a split second, faster than I could have dreamed, the man I had once known as my dearest friend took my lips in a kiss as sweet as it was brief.

  What happened next came as a blur.

  Wrenching his weight in mid-air, he tightened his grip over my ribs and threw me bodily aside, forcing us both from the trajectory I’d chosen. The train shrieked, brakes applied as the conductor must have seen us, but too late. I hit the ground hard enough that my senses lurched, tangled and went black.

  But I heard the impact. Felt it as the solid train tore through the Honorable Theodore Helmsley’s body as if he did not matter a whit. A wet mist splattered where I lay, gasping for breath.

  It took me too long to realize I wore his blood.

  Sobbing in denial, in a grief I could not even begin to express, my body snapped back in shattered recoil.

  Agony overwhelmed me.

  In that moment of terrible weakness, I hoped never to wake again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  There was a scuffle. A feeling of arms carved out of oak and stone around me and the mountainous rumble that was Ishmael’s familiar voice against my ear. “Why do you take her?”

  Voices in quieter refrain. A cool threat, and a strangled growl I’d never heard from him.

  “You’d risk a war?”

  “No war,” answered a man’s soft-spoken promise. “Only death.”

  The world upended itself, spinning violently until I was sure that I’d retch from the speed at which it moved. I was jarred; pain erupted along my side.

  Blunt fingers at my forehead, as if he pushed aside my hair. “Sorry, girl.”

  I slid into a faint so deep, I did not twitch again when that bloody surreal voice called my name. The woman. A haunt, a ghost of a memory I could not shake.

  Opium smoke given form.

  Calling for me. Begging me. For what?

  Cherry...

  The high-pitched chant of a Chinese tongue tore me from the grasp of bloody webs. I pitched out of oblivion and into a reality that crackled with golden dust, yellow shimmering suddenly blue as it took form before my eyes.

  The noxious cloud settled to my exposed flesh, burned like fire. I screamed.

  But it did not hurt. Not wholly. It simply peeled back the layers of my skin, frothed and hissed. I bowed and twisted, thrashing against the bonds of grim-faced Veil servants. The pallet beneath me juddered sharply beneath my efforts.

  A man said something, a foreign command, and I was rolled over.

  This time, the powder he smeared into my wound sizzled, and agony stole my wakefulness from me.

  When I finally woke again, it was to a pressing heat. Sweat already dampened my skin, and as I inhaled deeply, I smelled spice and something thicker. Smoke.

  Opium.

  I tasted it upon my tongue, felt its spider fingers as it entered my nose and spread like a warm cloud.

  I sucked in air greedily, clambering to my hands and knees. My body twitched, but it did not scream as it had when last I’d woken. I thrust my tangled hair from my face, already aware that I would see two screens. One backlit by the glow of the fire the Veil preferred, and one to mask the Veil’s spokesman.

  “I know you’re there,” I shouted, heedless of the gravel my voice had become.

  There was silence. Empty. Eternal.

  It took me some effort, but I managed to push myself to my feet. I swayed, tottered.

  I was not, as I’d thought initially, nude. Once more, I found myself in a simple, bulky robe with wide sleeves and a large sash to close it. The hem folded underfoot as I attempted a step.

  This time, I could not catch myself. I fell to the polished wood floor, crying out when my elbow barked the unforgiving ground and my head bounced a breath behind.

  I lay in silence for the space of a heartbeat—one whose eternity lingered, thanks in part to the smoke I inhaled.

  A gentle clearing of the throat alerted me to my host’s presence. “The sleep you have had,” said that bloody polite voice from behind a screen, “often leaves one bewildered. Sit for a moment. Gather your strength.”

  I desperately desired to tell the voice exactly what uncivil practices he could do with his advice, but I did not. It would serve me nothing. Bruised, battered, driven beyond all measure of perseverance, I pushed myself up and I sat in place.

  In silence, I waited—and I desperately clenched my teeth against the nausea roiling in my stomach.

  The quiet stretched.

  Then, a small sigh. My moment of peace was
over. “That is three,” the Veil said. “Your life, Coventry’s failed collection, and now, your life again. You are an expensive habit, Miss Black.”

  I bared my teeth, but dared not unseal them. The room swam.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “What do you care?” I managed to grit out. My palms flattened against the too-hot floor. My hair clung to my neck, my sweaty cheeks—a bloody veil of my own. I blew it aside in loud impatience. “You’re only here to take your pound of flesh.”

  “A quaint enough truth,” replied the Veil. Once more, I read nothing in his nasal tone. Simply a voice. “You will be prepared, Miss Black, and you will take your place tonight.”

  I sneered. “I thought I wasn’t pretty enough to fetch a price.”

  “For this?” An oddly tinkling chuckle, as if I’d deeply amused him. “A very special event will be held, all in your honor. Rest assured, you will bring a price. And more.”

  My fingernails dug into the wood so deeply, one snapped below the quick. The sharp pain was nothing as to the fear that swallowed me whole. “No,” I whispered, all bravado forgotten. “The rings? The circus? I can’t... You wouldn’t...”

  “You can.” The veil’s tone sharpened. “You will. If you attempt to escape, if you balk even once, if you so much as open your mouth and dare to contradict us, we will punish you.”

  That I could take. That, I wholly deserved. I shuddered, though I forced myself to straighten my shoulders.

  Yet even as I opened my mouth, the Veil continued in the same razored manner. “We will begin by punishing our ringmaster, who has been too lenient with you.”

  My chin jerked up.

  “We will punish our sweet, who has failed in her endeavors to report on your actions.”

  My teeth came together again, so tight that pain drummed sharply in my temples. I inhaled deeply through flared nostrils, held the opium-laden smoke in my lungs.

  “We will punish the agreeable girl who maintains our Menagerie apparatuses.”

  “Why?” I hissed out.

  The tone did not change, matter-of-fact pleasantry. “Because it will hurt you to watch us do so.”

  The blood drained from my face. Stunned, I stared at the opulent screen, saw nothing beyond its crimson silk and ornate gold embroidery.