by Selina Kray
Tim rested his cheek on the frigid floor, counted out his breaths to slow them. The clack of heels running to and fro suggested Sister Zanna’s imminent return. Not bothering to shed his shift, though it reeked of the poultice, Tim wriggled his trousers over his rash-swollen leg, yanked on but did not fasten his waistcoat, and threw his jacket over his arm before discovering he hadn’t the foggiest idea of where they’d stowed his boots.
And the diary Sister Nora had confided in him was still tucked under his pillow.
Summoning up the last spark of his strength, Tim shifted to all fours. What this cost him in air gained him in mobility. And perspective—he found his boots on the far side under the bedframe. He retrieved the diary, stowing it in the inner pocket of his jacket while taking a short rest. He collapsed his head and most of his torso on the mattress, sleep and lack of air tempting him back into oblivion. Perhaps if he just closed his eyes for a moment...
“Fetching as I find you in that position, my dear, even I know now is not the time.”
Tim heard a soft click as the door shut. Tender fingers brushed through his hair, tested his brow. Tim accepted defeat. He’d fallen back to sleep. This must, after all, be a dream.
Dream Hiero crouched down and wove cosseting arms around him, pressing soft kisses to his temple as Tim reclined against him. With a gentle nudge of warning, he helped Tim sit up on the bed. Tim slumped into Dream Hiero’s chest, flirting with exhaustion.
“My brave boy. What have they done to you?”
“A fit brought on by failed lords-and-ladies poisoning,” he rasped, his voice still taxed by his damaged throat. Dream Hiero cupped one of his silken hands around Tim’s neck, rubbing his thumb in circles around his Adam’s apple, as if this could soothe the inner lining.
“‘Failed’? Which lords and ladies?”
“An accidental success.” A fit of coughs overtook him until Dream Hiero grabbed him a cup of water. “With a flower called lords-and-ladies. A kind of dark lily I’d never encountered before. She only intended to give me a rash.”
“Well, she’s done the trick twice over. Perhaps not such an accident.” Dream Hiero cinched his hold on Tim. “Sister Nora.”
“How did you know?”
“Scoundrel’s intuition.”
Tim attempted a laugh, ended up coughing. “I’m still cross with you.”
“How I know it,” he chuckled. “And by now you have even more reason to be.”
Tim sank deeper into his embrace, suspecting Dream Hiero was entirely too real, however ill-prepared Tim felt to deal with the consequences of his rescue. To test this theory, he gazed up into Hiero’s dark-star eyes, twinkling down at him with the glint of a trickster god.
“Then it’s as I feared.” Tim hated himself a little when their lights went out. “You shouldn’t have come for me.”
“Unlike some, it’s my profession to invent preposterous schemes to spare the lives of those I’m devoted to.”
“And it’s mine to fall on my sword for brave souls like Callie, Shahida, and Lillian. You should be with them.”
Hiero grunted. “I’m exactly where I’m needed most.” At Tim’s huff of frustration, he added, “And so are they. Lillian recovering, Shahida nursing, and Callie on the hunt with Han.”
Tim hoped his wheezing inhalation covered his shock. The slamming of a nearby door startled them both.
“What’s going on out there?”
“Pandemonium. Nothing to trouble yourself with.”
“What’s happened?”
“What hasn’t?”
“Hiero.” Tim cleared his throat, a poor attempt at persuading him. “Tell me.”
“No.” A rare glower from Hiero stopped Tim’s protest. “We are leaving this house of horrors with our lives intact. Let the damned Daughters eat their young. You will survive this case.”
Tim wished he could argue. But with the ladies safe... His heart felt five times too big for his chest, choking any objection. Hiero, whom he’d all but banished from the case, had saved them all.
Yet there was the small matter of his duty.
“Help me with my jacket, will you?”
Hiero was too shrewd a duelist to overreact to Tim’s feint. And perhaps even he understood there was no way they could tread the boards of Castleside without involving themselves in the drama being played out. He hurried to tuck and tidy Tim’s clothes into the bare minimum of propriety, pocketing his cravat instead of tying it so as not to constrict his ailing throat.
The rattle of the doorknob startled them apart. Hiero firmed his hold around Tim and tugged him to his feet just as Sister Zanna clattered into the room.
“And just where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.
“Away from this hell,” Hiero declared in a tone and of a temper Tim had never seen in him before.
“Are you quite mad? He needs another week of rest.”
“Better odds than if he remains.”
“Sister Zanna’s not one of them,” Tim insisted. “She saved my life.”
“Or primed you to be sacrificed during one of their rituals.”
Tim chuckled through the ache in his throat.
Sister Zanna was unamused. “Would have happily let him suffocate if I’d known he was in league with a thief like you. I may not know Mother Rebecca’s every chapter and verse by heart, but I won’t see her life’s work sold for profit.”
Hiero scoffed. “I’ll deliver you your little box in a dreary gray bow so long as DI Stoker departs from here posthaste. With me.”
She stared him down. “If you care for his life, you will not subject him to a journey he may not survive.”
“I care for a great many things, least of which is your opinion. Especially when it leads to entrapment.”
Tim sighed. “Hiero, let’s be gone—”
“A babe is missing.” Sister Zanna clenched her jaw, possibly against saying more than she should, possibly against screaming. “There should be five in the nursery. We hid them when you came yesterday but returned them this morning, and...” Her breath heaved as if she, not Tim, had a scorched windpipe. “One is gone. Felix is gone.”
A swoon of upset dizzied Tim. He used Hiero to straighten, to fight against it. He ignored Hiero’s near-silent grumbling exhalation. It might have been a ploy to keep him, but Tim doubted Sister Zanna would parrot such a tall tale. Unless he had misjudged her from the start—a not-unprecedented turn of events if she was the baby snatcher.
“How long?”
“He was given to his wet nurse sometime in the night. The babes were upset not to have slept in their cots this morn and caused a lot of fuss, so Sister Bernadette didn’t notice he hadn’t been returned till now.”
“Who is his wet nurse?”
“Sister Joan. But she’s...” Sister Zanna inhaled a shaky breath. “She’s just taken her vows. I suspect to stay with her child. Her daughter is among those being weaned. Why take another when—”
“—she could take her own. I see.” Tim bowed his head and closed his eyes to think, wanting his bed, wanting his health, wanting this fiend to stop endangering little children until he could recover enough to catch them.
“Our friends are near,” Hiero whispered to him. “Let’s away from here and let them see to this.”
Another untimely interruption gave Tim no choice but to act.
“Sister!” a voice screeched from the door to the infirmary. “You must come! She’s gone mad! You must come now!”
At Tim’s nod, Sister Zanna raced ahead. With a pointed growl, Hiero helped him lurch after her.
They broke through the heavy doors of the shrine. Chaos reigned. The rows of pews had toppled forward, their scaled backs like molted husks of snakeskin. Something swishy had gored the floral carpet with mud. The podium had crashed into the base of the stained-glass window; a lightning bolt crack streaked up its center. A dozen Daughters prostrated themselves before the altar, praying and keening for salvation. Hiero wondered if
their Almighty had finally sniffed the charnel scent of treachery on the wind.
Until he saw Sister Juliet in full, vengeful conflagration, chanting to the heavens and threatening to dash the candelabra she held over the carpet. Around her glistened a circle of oily liquid and, much to Hiero’s dismay, tangles of gossamer hair. Sister Juliet had given herself a drastic chop, her cornsilk hair now more like a bushel of straw, her pale brow stained with a cross of ash.
Winterbourne slumped over the front row of the left bank of pews, a candlestick the likely cause of the head wound Sister Zanna tended. Sister Nora, meanwhile, begged Sister Juliet down from a safe distance outside the circle. Fervent chanting drowned out her desperate cries..
Kip’s whimper brought Hiero back to the moment.
“We must stop this.” Kip gestured to his throat. For a moment Hiero thought he had lost his voice. “She wears a key on a chain around her neck. I’ll distract her whilst you retrieve it.”
“I rather thought to leave them to it while dear little Felix is in the wind.”
“There may still be women trapped here. We cannot let them burn.”
Hiero clicked his tongue. Kip’s righteousness, though rousing, proved damned inconvenient at times.
“Only once you’re safely stowed with Angus. I’ll not leave you here to be trampled or torched.”
“I’ll be fine.” Kip gazed at him with eloquent eyes. “Work your magic.”
Hiero sighed. How could he resist such a plea?
“Very well. But like the greatest illusionists, I’ll do better without a hobbled assistant.”
With more physical effort than he had expended in a good long while, Hiero righted one of the backmost pews and dropped Kip in it, ignoring his colorful protests. He fished Kip’s cravat out of his pocket, securing his wrist to the arm of the pew with one hand whilst dabbing the sweat from Kip’s brow with the other. A wink and a smile, and Hiero was off.
Catching Sister Zanna’s eye, he waved her and an ailing Winterbourne over to care for Kip should everything go pear-shaped. Or prickly pear-shaped, given his history with Sister Juliet.
Hiero considered how best to approach the situation. When that failed, he straightened his shoulders, flared out the tails of his jacket, and strutted up the center aisle toward the main stage. He may no longer be the Gaiety’s star player, but his luster hadn’t dimmed a single spark.
“... and the world will know Her wrath!” Sister Juliet thrust up her candelabra like a fiery banner. “Daughters, we must cleanse our hearts and our bodies of all their earthly ills. As Mother Rebecca prophesied, ‘The end will come easy to those who have labored in the Garden. Those of sweat-stained brows and soiled hands will be bathed pure by Her light.’ It is time to wash ourselves in fire. Give ourselves to the Mother of Us All that She might rise anew!”
A loud clearing of the throat got her attention. Even in her fervor, Sister Juliet couldn’t swallow her smile at seeing Hiero, the Beast to her beauty, the omega to her alpha, the snake in her... He shuddered as that last image took an unlikely turn. She could tend her own lawn.
“You see!” Sister Juliet bellowed to her devout. “‘In the final hours, the Serpent will rise, and you shall know him by his black and wicked tongue. Cut it out, lest you succumb as I have succumbed. Cut it out, and claim my victory!’”
If Sister Juliet had intended this as a battle cry, the effect on the Daughters was far from revolutionary. Those who didn’t stare at her dumbfounded cowered from Hiero as he walked, step by measured step, toward the altar. He challenged her smile with a smirk of his own, left eyebrow canted in a perfect, pointed arch.
“Be gone, Serpent! Be gone from us forever!”
“Happy to oblige once you’re feeling a touch less murderous,” Hiero said. “Too much of Sister Merry’s special cider, or is it a full moon?”
“You mock and you sneer.” Sister Juliet’s rabid grimace rather reminded Hiero of black pots and kettles. “But you will never know the Mother’s light, even as it cinders you.”
“As the French say, je ne regrette rien.” Hiero murmured his excuses as he breached the wall of Daughters. “Yourself?”
“Stop this instant!” Sister Juliet lowered the candelabra until it skirted the carpet—and, more dangerously, her skirts.
“Juliet, no!” Sister Nora ran up onto the altar. “Just give him what he wants, and he will go.”
Juliet barked a laugh. “Such men never have enough! Of our souls, of our treasures, of our skin... Already the Serpent has taken our most sacred prophecies, and still his desire’s not slaked!”
“Quite a turn from burning me alive. Unexpected.” Hiero continued his march to the center of the altar.
“Final warning,” Sister Juliet snarled, thrusting the candelabra directly at Hiero. “She will have Her revenge.”
With a deft sleight of hand, he plucked the weapon from her grasp and snuck it to Sister Nora before she could blink.
“I do hope so,” Hiero smiled. “That would be something to see.”
With an ear-splitting cry, Sister Juliet lunged at him. She rammed her angel-blonde head into his chest and pounded his sides with her fists. The effect was something akin to a Pomeranian battering a rakishly stylish Rottweiler. Hiero chuckled, patted her on the back.
Sister Nora, having extinguished the open flame, wrenched her into her arms. Sister Juliet wrestled against her, stomping and screeching.
“A valiant effort, but for naught,” Hiero declared, dangling the key he’d pilfered from around her neck before tucking it into his inner pocket. “Now if you’re done impeding the course of justice, we’ve an investigation to salvage.” He coughed. “I mean conclude.”
“Nora, dearest Nora,” Sister Juliet blubbered as she collapsed against her. “How have you strayed so far from the path? Allied yourself with this... this...”
Too late Hiero glimpsed a flash of the fury that still lit Sister Juliet’s eyes. Under pretense of gathering her into an embrace, she catapulted Sister Nora into Hiero and grabbed for the candelabra. Scaling the podium as they toppled to the ground, Sister Juliet smashed through the stained-glass window, a rain of dagger shards masking her escape.
Hiero turned to the back to the shrine before chasing after her to find no trace of Kip.
Chapter 21
Tim stole a few seconds of quiet as Sir Hugh perused the map, grateful for the wall that supported him and the cup of lukewarm tea Sister Zanna had retrieved from Sister Juliet’s office. Sir Hugh vouched for it not containing any toxins, agents, or otherwise harmful matter, and so far, Tim had not felt any ill-effects. Except, of course, for the total humiliation of having succumbed to such a ruse, and having his client discover him the worse for wear. Oh, and being tied to a chair by his supposed partner. The fact that Sir Hugh had been involved in this escape plot at all he chose not to focus on, for that way lay further madness.
“Your theory, Stoker, is we may uncover evidence of the crime, and perhaps more, in one of these three underground chambers?”
“It is.” Tim repressed the desire to hurry him. They stood kitty-corner from the infirmary at the intersection of the main hall with the small corridor that led to the cellar. Into which Tim would have already disappeared, if not for want of a lantern. “But might I remind you time is of the essence. Another babe has gone missing.”
“A fact that, along with your current state, that carnival we just witnessed, and Bash’s involvement, does not work in your favor.”
Tim couldn’t spare the breath to curse Hiero for involving Sir Hugh. Instead he appealed to his sense of honor.
“Sir, let me end this.”
“Oh, it is over.” He sighed. “Or would be if I had the manpower available. As it is, I fear you must count this as a loss.”
“But, sir, the child.”
“My boy, Stoker. You were tasked with reuniting me with my son.”
“Someone’s son will die tonight if we do not make haste! A boy named Felix is with
the killer as we speak!” Tim regretted his shout as soon as it finished echoing, drawing Sister Zanna out of the infirmary with, thank the fates, several lanterns.
The doors to the shrine clanged open, cutting off Sir Hugh’s angry reply. A few weary Daughters trudged out, with Hiero and Sister Nora hot-footing it behind them. Hiero’s normal twinkle was overcast by a stormy look, equal parts annoyance and relief, when he discovered them in the hall. Tim canted his head toward Sir Hugh and shot Hiero a look in return.
Tim attempted a more even tone with his superior. “Sir, if you care to retire to the nearest division house, we will join our associates on the hunt.”
But Sir Hugh had yet to pull his attention away from the map.
“Your associates are where?”
“At the farmhouse,” Hiero explained, pushing into their circle. “Or perhaps they’ve concluded their search. We really must rendezvous with them to know.”
“So they may be at the tree, or here... Where is this?”
“The question of the hour.”
Sister Nora took a hesitant step forward. “May I see?”
While Sir Hugh relinquished a corner of the map to her, Tim mouthed, “The key?” to Hiero.
“Patience” was his maddening reply.
“The potting shed,” she concluded, pointing to the fourth unknown chamber. “Must be.”
“And why are some of the paths red and some green?” Sir Hugh asked.
“That I could not say.”
“Our theory is they are impassable,” Tim said, losing the fight against exasperation.
Sir Hugh dismissed this with a curt gesture. “If your associates are at the farmhouse, then it is clear we must investigate the chambers beneath the potting shed and the tree.”
“We should break into teams,” Tim suggested, “one underground and one over.”
Hiero wiggled a hand. “A small point of contention. Sister Juliet has fled.”
“Fled!” Sir Hugh growled. “You failed to secure her?”
