He wasn’t a man to bear well with being thwarted Stephen said in her memory, and she saw again the newspaper article: East End Slaughter.

Servants gossiped, and Mina had read letters in the kitchen. It would be easy enough to find out where she lived and who her family was, especially for a man who could throw money around. Illness wasn’t as quick or—please, God—as irreparable as the thieves’ deaths had been, but it got her away from Stephen and it probably made for very satisfying revenge.

“Oh, God,” said Mina, except she didn’t really say it. Her lips shaped the words, but no air went past them. For one thing, she didn’t want to alarm the household. For another, her lungs didn’t feel like they contained any such thing as air.

She could be wrong. Asking if Florrie had touched anything or eaten anything unusual would be pointless. Children here were all on their own often enough, walking to school or running wild with friends. Even if Ward couldn’t curse from a distance, there were a thousand opportunities for a poisoned apple or a stealthy pinprick when nobody was looking. Mina was no detective, and there was little time.

She stepped up to the sickroom doorway again. “Mum,” she said, trying to sound calm, “I’m going out for a bit. I think I might know someone who can help. Maybe.”

“This man you’ve been working for?” Despite her fatigue, Mrs. Seymour’s eyes were sharp and knowing. “If you think there’s a chance—”

“Maybe,” Mina said again.

“You could send Bert.”

“No.” If she’d thought they’d understand, she’d have told everyone in her family to stay in the house and bar the doors. She wasn’t sure if even staying inside would help—but thresholds were supposed to offer some protection, and any direct housebreaking would make the neighbors notice and raise hell. “He’ll see me quicker.”

Not stopping to get drawn into further conversation—even further thought seemed perilous just then—Mina went to her room. Alice was asleep, and that was just as well. It spared Mina questions about why she was putting her coat on, and it spared her a great deal of discussion when she took the revolver out from under her pillow and slipped it into her coat pocket.

* * *

Fog filled the street outside, thick and yellow and choking, heavy with the smell of sulfur. Such fogs were nothing new—Mina had grown up with them every few days of her life—but now, with Florrie lying ill behind her and six weeks’ worth of magic and strangeness in her consciousness, everything seemed more sinister, and the fog was no exception. She thought of Hell, shuddered, and walked faster.

Then there were three figures in front of her.

She had no sense of their approach. Part of that was the fog, but not all. They moved too quickly and too fluidly to be people. She thought that they’d stepped out from the shadows under a nearby building, but there was more than one way to come out of shadows.

Mina stepped back and tried to bolt left. One of the shapes darted in front of her and grabbed her wrist with a gloved hand. As she screamed, it dragged her forward, and she could see that it was a shape, not a man. It wasn’t entirely a manes either. She wished it had been.

It was both. Bits of human features floated in shadow: one eye, a nose, a lower lip that stretched into raw meat before the shadow cut it off, and patches of yellow teeth. The hand on her arm was boneless and cold—not as numbingly cold as the touch of the pure manes had been, but with a crushing strength that made up for that lack.

“Come with us,” said the thing, its half mouth squirming around the words. “Come quietly.”

Mina yanked the revolver out of her pocket with her free hand and fired at the half man’s face, pulling the trigger over and over again. She realized that she was still screaming. She screamed louder when the bullets hit, when flesh and shadow tore away from the creature’s head and fell to the ground, and yet it kept standing, kept pulling her toward it. Its eye was gray-white, filmy.

Someone was shouting in the background. Footsteps rushed toward them.

The things looked at each other. Then the creature holding Mina said a word she couldn’t recognize, and everything went dark.

Forty-one

“There’s a boy at the door, my lord,” said Baldwin.

Events over the last few days had left the household reeling. Baldwin’s face was drawn with weariness, despite Stephen telling him to rest, and the latest development had clearly both baffled and worried him.

“He says he has to speak to you.”

“A boy?” Stephen turned from the last of his preparations and blinked. “I don’t know any boys these days.”

“No, my lord.” Baldwin swallowed. “He says it’s to do with Miss Seymour.”

The world stopped.

“Where is he?” Stephen asked. He was already walking toward the doorway.

“The kitchen, my lord. I didn’t—”

The stairs presented little obstacle; Stephen took them two at a time. He burst through the door of the kitchen and saw a boy rise hurriedly and shakily from a seat by the hearth.

Between a tall ten and an undersized fourteen, the boy straddled the gap between poverty and respectability as well. His clothes were clean, but patched and very plain. He snatched a gray cap off his head when Stephen entered, revealing a curly mass of brown hair, and looked up at the new arrival with a pair of dark blue eyes.

They were Mina’s eyes. And they were terrified.

Stephen froze.

“Sir. My lord. Sir?” The boy looked confused. Men like Stephen generally didn’t enter kitchens, and he was old enough to know it. “I—I need to talk to Lord MacAlasdair, sir, right away.”

“That’s me, lad,” said Stephen, as gently as he could manage. “What’s wrong?”

“I. It’s Mina. My sister. Miss Seymour, she would’ve been to you. My lord. She said she worked for you. She went out and she’s not come back, and Mum said as how she said she was coming up ’ere to talk with you.” The boy’s mouth worked silently for a second and then he swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing on his skinny neck. “And they say there was gunshots earlier, m’lord, and screaming.”

When Stephen’s heart went still, experience took over, freezing his brain and his blood, constructing an icy wall of action behind which his rage and regret became distant. When he spoke to Mina’s pale-faced brother, it was with all the calm he’d ever used to lead men.

“Near you?”

“A street away, maybe. People couldn’t see well for the fog.”

“Is that all you know?”

The boy nodded.

Action beckoned. Stephen held back. “Why was she coming back here?”

“It was about Florrie, m’lord.” Mina’s brother gulped. “Um. Our other sister. She’s sick.”

“I know. And Mina said I could help?”

“She said you might.” Now he looked hopeful as well as frightened, and Stephen felt an intense desire to put his fist through a wall.

Ward had set this up neatly.

“I’ll try,” said Stephen. “See here—Bert, isn’t it?”

Even in his panic, the boy’s eyes widened a little. “Yes, m’lord.”

“Stay in here. There’s jam in the pantry. I’ll be back before very long, or I’ll send someone else for you.”

Colin met him outside. “I heard the disturbance,” he said, “and the wards seem to be fine all over the house, so I take it the problem’s physical?”

“Mina’s gone,” said Stephen. “Her brother’s here. From what he’s said, it sounds like Ward’s taken her. And that her sister’s illness wasn’t natural. A trap, likely as not.” He let his breath hiss out between his teeth. “I should have known.”

“Yes, you really should be more omniscient one of these days,” Colin said. “Now, if you could flog yourself a little later, you can get me a bowl of water and we can get to work.”

“Scrying? Don’t you need something of hers?”

“I’ve already got it.” Colin grinned. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

A few minutes of hasty activity produced the bowl in question and sent Polly to the kitchen for supervisory and jam-distribution purposes. Then Stephen stood, his hands clenched at his sides, and stared into the bowl as clear water gave way to blue mist, which in its turn parted to reveal grimy walls and huge metal vats: a factory of some sort, obviously, though Stephen didn’t know what it had made. At present, it was sheltering Ward and five of the hybrid manes, who stood in a ring around a female figure lashed to a pipe.

Mina.

Stephen growled and felt his lips draw back, baring his teeth in a threat as instinctual as it was ineffectual. His nails lengthened into claws, cutting into the still-unchanged flesh of his hands. He felt dim pain and didn’t care. Rage was much closer, and much more vivid.

No. Not yet.

As Stephen watched, Mina struggled, and while the desperate energy in her movements tore at his heart, it also reassured him. She still lived. She still had enough strength left to fight.

Unless he could get to her soon, though, that strength might not do her any good. Stephen didn’t know what Ward had planned, but several horrifying possibilities sprang to his mind—and he didn’t know that he could get there in time to stop any of them.

He didn’t know exactly where Ward’s den was. In human form, it would take him at least an hour to find it. When he got there, he’d have five of the hybrids to fight, which would be no small task even with Colin—and he couldn’t bring Colin.

“He doesn’t have one hostage,” Stephen said. “He has two.”

“You think he’d kill the Seymour child?”