Undeterred, Colin eyed him. “She’s been gone a day, you great idiot. The wards can’t be causing all of this mood. Are you going to become one of those nauseating sorts who has to have his lady in sight at all times?”
“I will not, and she’s not my lady yet,” Stephen said, though speaking the words did lighten his mood a bit, foolishly enough. “And I wouldn’t be worried if this were an ordinary sort of absence or at a better time.”
“This is an ordinary sort of absence. Oh, it’s distressing now and all that”—Colin waved a hand—“but human children get ill. They’re known for it. They recover, generally, and Lord knows you gave her money enough to buy half the doctors in the East End if she feels it needful.”
“And if Mina gets ill?”
“Then you’ll put her in a bed upstairs and bring in half the doctors in London, I don’t doubt. I’ll even go after that bloke in Yorkshire with the familiar spirit if we need more than that, or we’ll bring her up to Brigid’s Well in Ireland. But things won’t come to any such pass. She’s a grown woman, and a healthy, strapping sort of girl at that.”
“Thank you for noticing,” said Stephen, only half sarcastic.
“I said I wasn’t in love with the girl, not that I didn’t look. She’ll be back. She’ll be fine. Now cheer up before I hit you with a bookend.”
“Well,” said Dr. Stevens, straightening up, “her condition hasn’t gotten any worse.”
“But no better?” Mrs. Seymour asked.
Dr. Stevens shook her head. The lady doctor of song and story, or at least of letter and mild dinner-table controversy, was surprisingly young, with only a touch of gray in her brown hair. She was gaunt, too—in Mina’s experience, half the educated people in the world forgot to eat if left to their own devices, and the other half ate too much—and her face was sharp, softened now by a look of confusion and regret.
“It’s actually rather remarkable,” she said, “how little she’s changed. I’d have expected—” She broke off. “I’m sorry. This isn’t the time or the place to wax academic.”
Mrs. Seymour didn’t care, Mina knew. She probably didn’t even hear most of what Dr. Stevens said because her attention was fixed on a single point. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?”
“A fever,” said the doctor, and spread her hands. “Some sort of influenza, perhaps. None of you have been feeling sick at all?”
“Not a one of us. Nor any of the neighbors.”
“Let’s hope you all stay as healthy, then.” Dr. Stevens frowned down at Florrie’s unconscious body. “All I can say is that you should keep going as you were. If you’d like to bring in another doctor, though, that’s quite reasonable. If she doesn’t regain consciousness by the time I come by this evening, I’ll send for one myself.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Seymour, and turned with set face and thin lips to her youngest daughter.
Watching, Mina blinked hard to keep tears firmly behind her eyelids. She looked away, toward Dr. Stevens’s retreating form. The doctor was glancing back over her shoulder, regarding the scene with puzzled worry.
Mina followed her out, stopping her on the landing. “Wax academic now,” she said, too weary and scared for preambles. “I’d like to know.”
“Oh?” Dr. Stevens peered up at her, surprised, but then shrugged. “It’s simply odd. With most disease, there’s some change from day to day, even if it’s not significant. Patients get better or worse by tiny degrees. Sometimes they get a little better and then worse again, or vice versa. And I suppose that could have happened while I was gone, but—”
“But?”
“But your sister’s condition, as far as I can tell, is exactly the same as it was yesterday. It’s not the oddest incident in the medical books, but it does rather stand out. And she hasn’t woken up at all, which isn’t common with fevers. I’d have expected at least one of you to be sick as well. It’s all very strange.”
“Oh,” said Mina. “I see. Thank you.”
She watched the doctor leave. She stood very still; there was earthquake enough in her mind without adding physical motion to it.
Nobody else was at all ill. Dr. Stevens didn’t know what was wrong. Except for the fever, Florrie was asleep, sleeping like a princess who’d pricked her finger or bitten into a poisoned apple. Sleeping like the target of a wicked fairy’s vengeance.
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.