With Fate Conspire (41 page)

Dead Rick spat out a mouthful of foul-tasting blood and flesh and whirled again, intending to deal with Chrennois—but the sprite lay motionless on the floor, in a growing pool of his own blood.

Milord shook his head when Dead Rick’s gaze shifted to him. “An unfortunate accident. The naga moved as I fired.”

Maybe it was true; maybe it wasn’t.
Probably is; I think ’e wanted to question Chrennois.

He didn’t feel much pity for the frog, and only a little more for the dead snake; the creature had been trying to kill him, after all. Changing back to man form, and then spitting more to clear his mouth, Dead Rick took stock of the room.

It looked as if it had been enlarged at one point; the entrance had dropped them in a narrow alcove, which widened to perhaps ten feet for half the room’s length, before opening up into something more like a proper chamber. Shelving blocked one archway at the far end, with rubble visible behind, but the other was open.

His ally asked, “Do you think you can recognize the plate in which they trapped the ghost?”

“Recognize it? No. Find it? Maybe.” He didn’t even know what a photographic plate looked like—but he had other things to look with than eyes. Dead Rick plucked a clean rag from the table by Chrennois’s body and wiped the blood off himself as best as he could, then licked an unstained corner for good measure. With the reek of naga thus reduced, he put his head warily through the open archway.

The naga was the only defender here; nothing else could fit. A rockfall closed off the end of the second chamber, and what little space remained was filled with crates. Dead Rick sniffed experimentally. Naga, hawthorn wood, chemicals, and straw.

Behind him, Milord said, “I’ve found his cameras. They’re all empty.”

Dead Rick joined him at the table. There were three cameras, two like the one he’d seen in the sewers, with pairs of lenses rather than single ones set into the front boards. Putting his nose right up against the wood, he sniffed along them both. As he’d hoped, the second still carried a faint stink of the sewers.
Now, let’s ’ope Chrennois ain’t been crawling around there regular.

There were a lot of crates in the side room, but one was much smaller, laid atop the others near the door, and it held an elusive trace of sewer reek. “That one?” Milord asked, watching from the door. When Dead Rick nodded, he took it down and pried the lid free. The skriker couldn’t see what was inside, but a triumphant smile curved Milord’s lips. “Excellent. And more quickly found than I expected. We cannot stay long, of course—but let us take a brief look at the materials Chrennois has been using; they may be enlightening, and useful in dealing with this.” He clapped the lid back down and retreated to the larger room.

Dead Rick followed, suspicion coiling into a hard knot in his gut. It was smoothly done—all very natural, as if it were only haste that made the fellow take so quick a glance—but Dead Rick saw with more than just his eyes, and knew his ally had been very deliberate in not letting him see inside the box.

He obediently followed the other into the workroom, and glanced over the carefully labeled bottles as if the words he saw there meant anything to him.
Vitreous humor (hawk). Lunar caustic. Vitriol of alder
. Most of his attention was on the small box tucked under Milord’s arm.
Just as soon as ’e’s busy …

Milord bent forward to examine a camera. In that moment of distraction, Dead Rick snatched the box from his grasp.

Before the other could do more than cry out in protest, he’d torn the top free, uncovering what lay inside. Nestled in a bed of straw was something Dead Rick recognized all too well.

A plate of glass, held in a thin wooden frame.

Dead Rick glared at his supposed ally, furious. “You knowed. This whole bloody time.”

Milord straightened slowly, warily, hands stiff at his sides. “I suspected. I
still
suspect; I have no confirmation. But the pieces of glass that hold your memories do sound a good deal like photographic plates, yes.”

Before Chrennois stole ghosts, he stole pieces of faeries’ minds. The same technique, advanced over the last few years? Or different things entirely? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that his ally had lied. Promising all this time to get his memories back, but now that they were here, the deceitful bugger would have rushed him right back out again, with never a mention of what he needed to know.

As much as Dead Rick wanted to knock the smug bastard onto his arse, there was one thing he wanted more. He slammed the box down onto the table and ran back into the side room.

“We don’t have the time!” his ally called after him, real desperation in his voice. “I promise, I
will
help you, but not tonight—it would take too long to search—”

“Iron burn you,” Dead Rick snarled back. “If you think I’m bloody well leaving ’ere without my bloody
mind
…” Words failed him. His hands did not; they tore the lid off one crate after another, digging through the straw and other contents. Some things were photographic plates; others were not; he didn’t have to look to know none of those were his memories. He would know them when he found them.

“You can be
valuable,
Dead Rick, staying where you are—work from within Nadrett’s defenses, and it will be far easier to destroy him when the time comes!”

The time to destroy him was after Dead Rick had his memories back. Growling, he burrowed deeper into the room, following instinct deeper than any physical sense, until his hands settled on a particular crate, and he
knew
.

“Blood and Bone,” he whispered, the lid falling from his hands to thunk against the floor.
So many.
Instead of straw, this box was lined with notched strips of wood, holding the small plates in tidy rows. Dozens of them, stacked several rows deep—and yet, when he thought about it, that wasn’t so many at all. Not for a faerie’s eternal life. How much did each plate hold?

This had to be all of them. Nothing else in the room called to him.

Dead Rick jammed the lid back onto the crate. It was almost too large for one man to carry, but he would be damned before he asked Milord for any more help. He ended up lifting it atop another box, then turning around so he could tip the weight forward onto his back, with his hands on the bottom edge.

Milord had given up his protests; he was in the outer room, looking rapidly over the bottles and other containers, as if snatching everything he could into his mind. The plate holding Galen St. Clair was tucked securely under his arm. It wasn’t worth trying to grab, not when Dead Rick had his memories at last. The skriker passed without a word, walking carefully to the alcove and positioning himself beneath the fanlike arrangement of stone tendrils. Hands full, he resorted to tapping one with his nose, hoping that would wake it up.

It did. The tendrils came down, wrapped around his body, and lifted him toward the street.

The City of London: August 6, 1884

He stumbled leaving the entrance, and nearly dropped the box. Panic beat in his throat—visions of it falling, the memories tumbling free, every last one of them
shattering
—

By the time he had it steadied, his heart was racing. Dead Rick squeezed his eyes shut and thanked all the powers of Faerie for his good fortune.
Now, to get them back safe in my ’ead.

Which meant going to the Academy, and hoping he could buy help there. Dead Rick opened his eyes and turned his steps toward the Onyx Hall—but not, for once, the Goblin Market. The thought lit a spark of joy in his soul.

A flare that died when he saw three men coming up the pavement toward him. No, not men: fae, under glamour. And the leader was recognizable as Nadrett.

He could have run—if he abandoned the crate. Dead Rick could have more easily abandoned his legs. Then they were there, and it was too late to flee. “Well,” Nadrett said, his voice soft and malevolent. He cocked a pistol, but didn’t point it at Dead Rick. Not yet. “So my dog’s got a backbone after all. You’ll regret finding that, you will.”

Dead Rick’s hands clenched on the box’s corners. “Iron burn you,” he spat. “I ain’t your fucking dog no more.”

A grinding sound, a whiff of new scent: the entrance had done its work once more, and his ally had emerged—at the worst possible moment. Nadrett looked past Dead Rick, and his eyebrows went up. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all this time, sneaking about. Thinking I wouldn’t notice. I notice
everything,
dog. Who’s your friend ’ere, then?” No answer from Milord, though Dead Rick heard the other faerie’s feet shift, as if he were settling himself to fight. Nadrett said, “I wonder what’s under that glamour, boys?”

Quick as a snake, he raised his pistol and fired.

It brought the entire street to a halt. The enchantments over the door protected against mortals noticing people coming and going from the Onyx Hall, but nothing more; seeing the gun, passersby began to flee. Dead Rick staggered, flinching instinctively away from the shot, and then one of Nadrett’s underlings seized him, unbalancing him still further. For one horrific moment, he was again on the verge of dropping his memories.

Iron. Not elfshot, or lead—the bastard’s shooting
iron
!

Bread protected against it, but not perfectly. Milord screamed and collapsed to the pavement, and the glamour covering him shattered.

Revealing Valentin Aspell.

The faerie was bleeding from the shoulder; Nadrett hadn’t aimed to kill. Aspell spat curses worthy of the lowest Goblin Market trash, and he sounded neither like his disguised voice nor his usual oily self; and Dead Rick kept staring.
Aspell. All this time.

Nadrett was spitting curses of his own. “I thought you was up to something, sending your lackeys like that, not talking to me yourself. I’m going to enjoy—”

He never finished the sentence. Aspell had one more twisty trick prepared. What he pulled from his pocket, Dead Rick never saw; but it exploded into light and smoke. He staggered again, this time into his captor, and on instinct he sank his teeth into whatever part of the fellow was closest to his mouth. He was rewarded with a howl of pain and freedom from the other’s grip.

For half an instant, his mind tossed out images. Putting down the box. Leaping on Nadrett. Helping the wounded Aspell escape.

Instead he ran. Away from the chaos, toward the Onyx Hall, nothing in the world but feet and lungs, his hands and his back holding his memories secure, and a devout hope that he could find safety in the Academy.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: August 6, 1884

The strangest thing was the familiarity.

Eliza knew well the look of a formerly decent neighborhood fallen to decay; that described many portions of the East End. She hadn’t expected to find it echoed in a faerie realm—even one that seemed to lie
below
London.

This is where they’ve been, all this time. Beneath my feet. And I never knew it.

Now they were all around her. She saw one, two, a cluster of four, all before she and her guides reached the arch of silver and gold that shone in the otherwise gloomy air. Even the most human-looking creature was nothing of the sort, and could never be mistaken for it. Yet she knew from experience how well they could change to look like humans. Here, in their home, they had no need to hide.

Their home: some kind of grand, crumbling palace, both timeless and very old. Eliza hunched her shoulders inward and wrapped her hands around her elbows, afraid to touch the stone. Mrs. Chase stayed by her side, but the Goodemeades walked as if they knew the way blindfolded.

Past the arch, familiarity vanished, and strangeness multipled a hundredfold. She’d been prepared for green fields, or hollow hills, or castles of crystal—not
machines
. They weren’t even human things, dragged down here like a crow would drag a shiny bit of metal; they had to be faerie inventions. Even the notion of faeries bombing railways paled into sensibility, next to that.

Owen,
Eliza told herself, trying not to stare at everything around her.
Owen is the only thing that matters.
If she held on to that, she might keep her sanity.

Her escorts hurried her onward, past the knot of folk clustered around something like an enormous loom. One of them greeted her companions, and Gertrude stayed back, asking after someone named Feidelm. “They’ll fetch your friend,” Rosamund said, leading her through into a library. “If you’d like to sit down…?”

She couldn’t. Eliza paced the room, up and down the length of the polished table, past shelves of books containing unknown wonders. Oddly, the two statues dominating the far end of the room seemed to be of a mortal man and woman, in old-fashioned clothing. The plaques at the base named them as Galen and Delphia St. Clair. She wondered who they’d been, and what importance they could possibly hold for faeries, that they would be memorialized here.

The
click
of a door’s latch drove all such thoughts from her head. Eliza turned, and saw Owen.

The sight of him drove all the breath from her body. Owen,
exactly
as she remembered him—Owen from seven years ago, as if not a day had passed since they parted.

He’d been among the faeries. For him, time
had
stopped.

The fourteen-year-old boy shuffled forward, guided by the gentle hands of Gertrude and a tall, elegant faerie with ginger hair. He seemed nervous, uncertain, and he didn’t look at her. Eliza had to force the syllables past her lips, a desperate whisper. “Owen.”

He didn’t react. She might have spoken another name entirely. And that was when Eliza knew the appearance was a lie; his face might be unchanged, but inside, he was not at all the boy she remembered.

They had warned her. But warnings didn’t come close to preparing her for the horror of seeing him like this, fourteen years old and shattered.

By this place.