Nap stepped forward and took the blade from Ethan’s hand, all the while keeping his pistol trained on Ethan’s heart.
“Will, how are you bearing up?” Ethan asked.
The thief swallowed. He cast a wide-eyed, fearful look Ethan’s way, but a second later his gaze was drawn back to Nap’s pistol. At last he gave a tentative shrug. “I don’t know.”
“He’s quite the intellect,” Sephira said, regarding Will with unconcealed scorn. “I find it hard to believe he eluded you for as long as he did.”
“Aye, well thieves are easier to find when you have another thieftaker doing all the difficult work for you. Why are you here, Sephira? Have times grown so difficult that the Empress of the South End must abandon the warmth and comfort of her home for a mere three pounds?”
She tipped her head to the side, a coy grin on her lips. “I never see you anymore,” she said, purring the words. “I’ve missed you.”
Ethan offered no response.
Sephira began to pace the room. As she strolled past Will, she traced a finger lightly down the bridge of his nose. The pup looked to be on the verge of wetting himself.
“Wells is one of those clients I’m not sure you ought to be working for,” she said at last. “You’ve seen his estate, you know the sort of men who live on his street.” She halted, her eyes finding Ethan’s. “I thought I had made myself clear on this point.”
“You have,” Ethan said, his tone light.
Arguing the point would have been useless. Sephira had told Ethan more times than he cared to remember that she expected him to limit his thieftaking to a clientele of her choosing. He could work for families of limited means, while leaving the wealthier clients for her. And he could work for those who came to him explicitly because they believed their property to have been spirited away by someone with access to the same conjuring powers that he possessed. This was her notion of an equitable arrangement. She appeared not to care in the least that he had never agreed to her terms, despite her threats of beatings at the hands of her men should he violate their “agreement.”
“Yet, you took on the inquiry anyway,” she continued, “without regard for my wishes. Will here is no conjurer, so I know that you didn’t take the job because witchery was involved. Therefore, I can only assume that you deliberately ignored my previous warnings.”
“That’s right.”
“And still you ask why I’m here.”
It was his turn to concede the point. He did so with a shrug. “So have I earned another beating?” he asked. “Or do you plan to do worse this time?”
“Neither, actually. I’ll take the gems, which Will was clever enough to hide on top of that table there. And I’ll claim your fee from Mister Wells. I’ll do the same with your next job, and the one after that. Perhaps, with time, you’ll decide that working without being paid makes little sense, you’ll concede that I’ve beaten you in this, as in everything else, and you’ll start taking on the sort of clients I’ve been telling you to work for all along.”
Ethan watched her, waiting for more: for the threats, for an order to Nap and his companions to bludgeon him a bit. But she said nothing else. She merely stared back at him.
“What?” she asked in unfeigned innocence-odd in and of itself coming from Sephira.
“That’s surprisingly … restrained of you.”
“I can have them beat you, if you’d prefer,” she said, sounding bored.
“No. Thank you, though.” He tipped his head toward Will, who was listening to all they said and looking more anxious with every word. “What about him?”
“You know what Mister Wells would say.”
“I do,” Ethan said.
Wells, like others who had hired him to retrieve stolen items, would want to see the pup punished as severely as the law allowed. Indeed, if he was as vengeful as some for whom Ethan had worked, he wouldn’t care about the limits of the law, and would want Will killed for his transgression.
“What?” Will asked, his gaze darting from one of them to the other. “What would he say?”
Before either of them could answer, several things happened at once. A pulse of conjuring power hummed in the floor; Ethan couldn’t say with any surety whence it had come. He thought he saw a flash of light as well, but he had no opportunity to see what it was, or to ask Mariz if he had felt the spell.
Because at that moment, Gordon, without uttering a word, or giving any indication of what might have provoked him, stepped directly in front of Will, and began to beat the pup with his cobble-like fists. A blow to the side of the head nearly knocked the lad from his chair. A second broke his nose, so that blood gushed over Will’s mouth and chin. One more, and the pup fell over, his chair toppling with him.
But Gordon wasn’t through. He aimed a vicious kick at Will’s side-Ethan heard ribs break.
At first, it seemed all of them were too shocked by the sudden assault to do more than gape. For seconds that might as well have been hours, none of them moved to intervene.
Sephira was the first to act.
“Gordon!” she shouted, the name echoing in the small room.
No response. The brute kicked Will a second time, then wrapped one fist in the pup’s bloodstained collar and hoisted him to his feet, his other fist drawn back to strike again.
By this time, though, Afton, Nap, and Ethan had emerged from their stupor and were converging on the man. Afton grabbed Gordon’s arm. Nap and Ethan wrested Will from the tough’s grasp and set him back in his chair, which Sephira had set upright. The pup’s head lolled to the side. He was unconscious; Ethan feared he might be dead.
Gordon struggled to free himself from Afton, the room quaking as the two behemoths wrestled each other.
Sephira planted herself in front of them. “Gordon, stop it!”
But still he fought, as if in a blind rage.
Another conjuring thrummed, this one coming from within the room. Gordon staggered, slumped in Afton’s arms. Afton eased him to the floor, where he lay still, his chest rising and falling gently.
“Is he alive?” Sephira asked, turning back to Will.
Nap knelt beside the pup and put a hand to Will’s neck, feeling for a pulse. “Barely,” he said after a few seconds.
“What did you do?”
They all turned to Mariz, who alone among them had not moved, though the blood had vanished from his arm, expended in the sleep spell that subdued Gordon.
He glared at Ethan, his knife poised over his arm, ready to cut himself and conjure again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Ethan said, knowing that he sounded slow-witted.
“What did you do to him?” Mariz repeated, his accent thickening as his anger flared.
Sephira snapped her fingers. Immediately, Nap stood once more and raised his pistol.
“You’re saying that Kaille used his witchery on Gordon? That’s why-?”
“I did not!”
“I sensed a conjuring, Kaille,” Mariz said. “And for just an instant I thought I saw your spectral guide appear.”
Ethan shook his head, even as he considered the magick he had sensed and the flash of light he thought he saw before Gordon struck his first blow at Will. He pointed to his forearm, which was still red with blood. “Look,” he said, holding it out for Mariz and Sephira to see. “The blood’s still there. Had I conjured, it wouldn’t be.”
Mariz blinked once, his brow creasing.
“Mariz?” Sephira said. Ethan sensed that she was seconds away from ordering Nap to pull the trigger.
“There are other ways for him to conjure. But the blood on his arm would have been easiest.”
Sephira appeared unconvinced. “Unless he wanted to hide what he was doing, isn’t that right?”
Mariz shook his head. “Even then I would see his guide, and feel his spell.”
“But you say that you did-you saw the ghost and felt a conjuring. That’s what you said.”
“I thought his guide had appeared. It was there, and then it was gone. I might have imagined it.”