His eyes banked. Blue darkened, and in my wide-eyed confusion, struggling to regain the upper hand as he held me, I saw my terror and abject bewilderment reflected in a brown pool streaked with azure light.
Hawke sucked in a ragged breath. “Cherry.”
I seized his face in my hands. “Come back to me.” That I implored this was not something I am proud of.
His jaw shifted, that muscle I had never thought would be such a relief to see leaping in his cheek once more.
He did not address my demand. “Go,” he ordered.
Bollocks to that. “I won’t!”
The despair writ into his twisted grimace warred with fierce possession, and he shook me hard enough to rattle my senses. “Leave me.” A ragged plea that turned to a growl as another pair of hands tore me, addled and beyond understanding, from his grasp. I found my feet only to lose them again, spun out of the way by the ginger man’s rough handling.
His unfamiliar voice rang in my ear. “Get to safety!”
A tinkle of glass, all but inaudible beneath the madness, seemed so desperately out of place. Over the man’s restraining arm, I watched something violet, not quite light but not flame either, ripple up Hawke’s arm. It hugged his flesh, snaked up his shoulder as he half-turned to protect his face.
He whipped about, flailing that arm, howling his rage. Blue frenzy, naked venom, once more drowned his stare. Whatever the violet stuff was meant to do, Hawke flung it from him with a hard word that crackled.
It fell to the floor in shards of purple glass.
The stranger put me down, keeping his body between us, his arm flung out—hemming me behind him, keeping me away. “I only want the girl,” he called. “The rest of this mess is your own to clean.”
Hawke said nothing, his lip curling into a mocking sneer. Once more, that light gathered between his hands. Red as blood, evil as I would have always sworn light simply could not be. Light was light, color was color; neither good nor evil.
But I felt it. Even from this distance, my skin crawled beneath the vile touch of whatever power the Menagerie’s own devil summoned.
The world had gone utterly barmy; with it, my own senses. I could only stare, rooted to the spot, as the light gathered in intensity—frozen by the cold power in azure eyes.
“All who oppose me will burn,” Hawke said, still in that showman’s voice I despised. He turned that sneer upon the stranger and let fly the mysterious light.
The man I did not know sketched a shape in the air that glowed brightly purple, distorting the air about it. A contour appeared in his fingers’ wake, a pointed set of angles I did not recognize.
Hawke’s red light did not engulf him. It did not touch him.
The evil power banked over him, and Hawke’s smile turned to satisfied leer.
I stared, worn down to nothing but numb futility, as all in my sight turned red.
The cove turned, but too slow. “No!” he shouted. Fury filled it, and he flung one hand. “Hamaxa!”
Everything within me ignited.
My lungs burst. My eardrums popped. Blood filled my throat, my nose. My heart tore itself apart. Everything that could rupture, did.
Or at least, that is what it seemed to me.
Whatever happened after that, it all faded to the faintest of displays, as if I watched a play from far beyond the stage, buried in the wings. My body skidded across the ground, listless as a rag doll, and sent candles spiraling in my wake. No flame caught, but smoke filled the amphitheater.
When I finally fell still, I could not move. I could not will my body to stand, to twitch, even to breathe.
I could only watch in numb horror as everything fell to flame and chaos.
The tail of a rabbit can not be long.
Betrayal had come to the Karakash Veil after all. But did it come from my doing?
Or was this only a matter of course?
My lashes lowered. Weariness—a fatigue the like I’d never known—settled upon my limbs.
Sleep. All I wanted now was sleep. Perhaps forever.
Yes. Forever.
“Cherry!” Hands seized my shoulders; I did not feel them, not really. I was aware that it happened, but not that it hurt. It should have. Everything should have.
My sense of self dissolved into air and nothing.
Cherry. My sweet, sweet girl.
A woman’s voice coaxed me into slumber.
This time, I did not care that I dreamed it. I obeyed.
For once in my bloody life, I did not fight.
You will let me in.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The jarring is what woke me first. My world shuddered, sending vibrations all the way to my aching bones, and I came to already sobbing. It hurt. Everything about me hurt. My body. My head.
My empty, aching heart.
A steady arm wrapped around my shoulders, supporting me against a warmth that combatted the chill I suffered, but it did not help. Everything rocked. “Easy,” murmured a soft spoken voice. Masculine, firm. “Rest while you can, Miss St. Croix. ’Tis a long journey out.”
A glass rim touched my lips. Bitter alcohol coated my tongue. Because I was naught but a creature of habit, I drank every drop of the laudanum fed me.
I had learned nothing, after all.
Peeling my crusted eyes open showed me the blurred glare of a small lantern, and a glint of red where it reflected off copper hair. The gentleman cradled me against his side, his features lost in my bleary sight.
A carriage, I realized. We were in a carriage, it was night—or perhaps the curtains were drawn. The jarring came from roads that were not of London-make, yet that we took a carriage and not a sky ship suggested a certain amount of secrecy.
The laudanum burned a path to my belly. What little deductive reasoning I’d grasped faded away beneath a tide of sweet lassitude. Pain faded. Worry, theory, even interest dulled to nothing.
Opium to dull the pain, and I bore so very much.
My head lolled, and gently, the man I traveled with adjusted his arm so that he supported my inevitable wilting.
My lips moved. “Who...?”
The carriage rocked again, and this time he splayed his free hand over my chest, covered by an ermine blanket to combat the chill. It put his face closer—enough that I could see that his hair was short, messy as if he’d dragged his fingers through it repeatedly, and a bruise stained the pale skin of his jaw. Another abrasion marred his left cheekbone.
Aristocratic features. I could not place them; could barely be bolloxed to try.
“Rest, Miss St. Croix,” he murmured. The lantern reflected back in brown eyes. “There will be time for questions after we’ve dried you out.”
My eyelids drooped. I wanted to feel fear at the words, feel worry or anger or anything—I could not. Sleep beckoned, and with it, that woman’s ghostly song.
I didn’t want to hear it; didn’t want to dream of red ribbon wrapping my limbs, of echoes of weeping and my own worthless sorrow. I did not want to dream of a wicked man with unfamiliar eyes, taunting me from Micajah Hawke’s cruel sneer.
I whimpered my distress.
His arm tightened around me. “It will not be easy,” he said in soft tones designed to soothe. “We will nevertheless persevere. Non omnis moriar.”
My Latin had not been utilized for far too long. I could not parse his intent.
“Who,” I mumbled again. My fingers found his side beneath the blanket, clenched into his shirt. “Please...”
The hand he’d used to brace me now stroked my hair from my forehead. “It has been entirely too long, I think. Oliver Ashmore, at your service.”