“Yes?…”
“And I know you. You’re about to charge off to find her, or rescue her, or some sort of harebrained goose chase. I need to make you safe.” He reached up to Helen, and before she could think of any clever way to talk him out of it, before she could jump from the motorcar and run so fast, so fast, he unbuckled the straps and lifted it from her face, leaving her skin exposed to the warmed air of the vehicle.
She blinked at him, and she thought then that perhaps her face would calm him, that he would turn and see how lovely she was, and give in. Maybe smile and call her his pet, like he used to do.
But he thrust his fingers through the eyehole of the mask he held and said, “Yes, this is much better, isn’t it? Much better for us both.” He patted her silk-skirted leg and then hurried from the car, her iron mask dangling from his canary-gloved fingertips as he hurried back into the house.
Silence passed, and at length Adam said, “Home, miss?”
As if she had a choice.
“Yes,” Helen managed, and turned her trembling lips away from his sightline, looked out the window into the icy night.
Adam turned out of the drive. She could feel his worry like a palpable presence. That was the way it was since Rochart replaced her old face with the fey version—she seemed to have a sixth sense of what people wanted, what they felt. Now Adam was trying to help her make things better, help her show a stiff upper lip. “Those oranges cheered my mum right up, I’ll tell you.”
“Good,” said Helen. The gaslights cast strange shadows through the mists of fey. “I’ll send over some more.”
Her eyes closed against the fey, against the night, thinking about poor Millicent. Without Jane’s fey power keeping Millicent protected and under thrall, no one could survive a process like the facelift. How long would Millicent stay in the fey sleep? Jane herself was no fey—her power was not that vast. If Helen did not find Jane soon … she was very afraid Millicent would waste away and die, as Mr. Grimsby seemed to want to believe already. Millicent was on death’s door because of what Jane had done, but it wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was that horrid Mr. Grimsby and his machine. How would she make those men believe that?
And what would they do to Jane once they found her? It would be Jane against Copperhead, and Helen didn’t give a fig for those chances. She had to find her sister before they did. She closed her eyes, in that moment hating herself for the blithe way she had seen Millicent’s escape, for the casual way she had set up Jane to help Millicent. As if it were all a game. “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered fiercely. “Jane, come home.”
“What’s that, ma’am?”
“Stop here,” she said, before she knew what she was saying.
Adam pulled to the side, looking dubiously at the strip of storefronts lining the wide thoroughfare. “Probably all closed, ma’am.” She heard in the cautious sentence all the things he couldn’t say, both: Don’t get yourself into trouble, and, equally, Don’t make me lose my position.
She seized Jane’s carpetbag. “I’ve got to find my sister,” she said. “She’s my family.”
He nodded slowly, thinking this over.
“Please don’t tell my husband when you pick him up,” she said. “I’ll—I don’t know. Take a cab or the trolley or something. If he finds out … I’ll swear to him I left from home and you know nothing about it.”
“Do you have money?”
Of course she didn’t. “Oh, Adam, why am I such a wreck?”
“You’re not a wreck, ma’am,” he said in his stoic way, and handed her some coins from his pocket. “I’d watch out for the trolley, though. Full of malcontent dwarvven causing trouble, they say.”
“I’ll be careful,” Helen said, and promised, “I’ll pay you back tomorrow morning.”
“I know you will, ma’am.” He opened the door for her and looked dubiously down at her unprotected face.
No mask. No iron.
She almost flung herself back in the safety of his car. But she had to find Jane. She had to save Millicent.
Adam’s grey-black eyebrows knitted. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”
He couldn’t order her to stay home and be safe the way Alistair could. It was as close as he could come to asking if she was certain she wasn’t mad. She supposed she was mad. She pressed his arm and said, “Not a word to Alistair. Not a word!”
He nodded solemnly, and she turned and set off as if she was full of purpose, hurrying off before she could change her mind.
It was pitch dark now, except for the faint glow of the eerie blue mist. Helen strode down the cold empty street, intensely aware of her bare face. She started every time she thought she saw a quiver from the mist.
Where was Jane living now?
Jane had lived with them for a couple months earlier in the year, helping Helen to convalesce from the fey attack. Jane had often taken the train down to the country to see her fiancé, Edward Rochart, and his daughter, Dorie. But as the grey summer continued, the blue bits of fey started appearing—little by little, settling over the city. Alistair’s gang turned from horses and dice to secret meetings where they plotted to rid the world of anything inhuman—dwarvven and fey.
Helen had not paid it much attention at first, assuming there was more drinking than politicking going on. But Jane did, and Jane was becoming more and more visible, agitating to fix the faces of the beautiful women. Beautiful women who refused to give up their dangerous beauty. Husbands who, though supposedly anti-fey, were not quite as quick to sign off on their wives returning to their old faces. It sometimes reminded Helen of that old fey story about the knight told to choose whether his wife should be beautiful at day and ugly at night, or vice versa. It was clear what these men were choosing.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the men. Helen had actually heard that fake masks were popping up at dances around the city. Not at the very best houses, mind you, but down a rung or two. For the price of some iron, you could pretend that you were a dazzling beauty underneath. Tempt some bachelor with the promise of what he might find, safe inside his home, once he carried you over that iron threshold …
Oh, Jane would never believe that one. Helen could just imagine her vitriol now. She sighed. Stubborn Jane did not see that you simply had to let these men, men like Alistair and Grimsby, have their own way. There was no arguing with obstinate fools. Not to mention that Jane’s temper (never good in the old days) had gotten on edge after her fiancé had gone into the woods with his fey-touched daughter—Helen didn’t know exactly why, as Jane called the decision foolish and pigheaded and refused to discuss it. Jane stopped returning to the country, and therefore spent more and more time at Helen and Alistair’s house. Which resulted in a violent quarrel between Jane and Alistair that ended with Jane stalking out to find some terrible shack to live in and Alistair threatening to hurl her ironskin self from the door if she came through it again.
Helen realized she was paused on the street corner close to the trolley stop, staring at a shop completely covered in blue. Early on, the city had tried paying poor folks to scrape blue off of walls and streets. But the fey had seemed to organize and retaliate—targeting only the cleaners, until at last the mounting number of deaths had caused the city to abandon that plan. Her fingers clenched around the handles of Jane’s carpetbag as she stood there in the biting cold. There had been a bakery there, before. But the bits of fey kept coming and coming, like ivy climbing the walls, choking the windows and doors. The owners had tried everything. Finally they moved out. She thought she had heard they decamped to some relatives in the country—ironic, when all the fey once came from there.