She told the concierge at the hotel that she had suffered an accident and a great shock and wished to be left alone. He stared at her scratched, bruised face behind the concealment of her veil, murmured polite words of sympathy, and had the porters usher her immediately to a first-class room with a private bath. Presumably, he did not want to take the of risk playing "host" to a young female having a case of strong hysterics in his hotel lobby, for he did not even require her to sign the register, but expedited her check-in himself. Immediately after, the concierge sent up a large bottle of brandy to her room.
She was tempted by it, but did not drink it, much as she would have welcomed the oblivion. Instead, she sent for a pot of hot water, and searched through her toiletries for her selection of Master Pao's herb teas. He had given her what he described as his "medicine chest": a tightly-packed box of herbal remedies, each packet with the purpose handwritten in his peculiar script on the front.
She found two, and hesitated between them. Sleep, said one, and Calm, the other.
But she was already calm; granted, it was the false calm of shock, but it was calm of a sort. Sleep was what she needed now, and that was the tea she chose.
She locked her door, checking it twice to make certain she had done so. Then she undressed, slowly, with a care for the hundred new bruises and aches she discovered with every passing minute. She put on the thickest and most enveloping of her night-dresses, drank down the bitter tea without bothering to sugar it, turned off the lights, and climbed into bed.
It was barely sunset, and her room had a westward-facing window. The setting sun made a red glow against the closed curtains, as if the entire city were aflame outside her window.
There were still those strange blanks in her memory; she also did not remember the train ride here. She must have convinced the men manning it that she was all right, or she suspected they would have delivered her to a hospital and not to the waiting taxi. Shock certainly did strange things....
Her window was open, allowing the sounds of the city to drift into the room. She knew two men in this entire city, and one of them had just torn out the other's throat in front of her.
If I were a normal, rational woman, I would send for the police, she thought, abstractly. But she knew that she would not. What was the point? Cameron would dispose of the body in some fashion, probably by burning it to ash. The chances that anyone would inquire after du Mond were minimal; she had the impression from Cameron that the man had no relatives—or at least none who cared about him. If Cameron was clever, he would file a report with the police himself, describing du Mond as having taking flight to parts unknown with a large sum of Cameron's money.
And why should she say anything to the administrators of justice? Du Mond had clearly been planning something horrible for her; Cameron had saved her. Du Mond had died quickly; possibly more quickly than he deserved. If Jason had shot the miscreant in front of her, would the result have been any different?
That was what anyone else probably would have done in the same circumstances, and du Mond would be just as dead, possibly just as bloodily dead. In newspaper stories, in novels, and on the stage, men were applauded for saving women in danger from their attackers. When the villain met his end at the point of gun, knife, or bare hands, there was no one crying out in reproach—rather, the saviors were toasted as heroes, and basked in glory afterwards. The police, if this were made known to them, would probably give Cameron a medal for heroism, not an accusation of murder.
A non sequitur occurred to her. She had always railed at the heroines of stage or literature who, when confronted by villains, conveniently fainted dead in their arms, making it perfectly easy for the cads to carry them off. She had sworn that if she had been in that situation, she would have fought tooth and nail, and her friends had always laughed at her, saying that she would never know how she would react, and that she would probably faint dead away. At least I proved them wrong, was her peculiarly flippant thought. And I have the bruises to prove it.
The scarlet light outside faded, deepened to dark rose, the bluish-rose, then deep, twilight blue. The light within the room faded with it, and with the loss of vision, her hearing became more acute. She heard the murmurs of conversation in the room next to hers; water running somewhere, and the clink of china and silver as a room-service cart was wheeled past her door.
There were no werewolves here; no men with the faces of beasts....
But there are men with the souls of beasts, and which is worse? Somewhere outside those windows, people who looked more human than Jason Cameron were doing terrible things to other people, things infinitely worse than simply killing them. Master Pao, although he was not a Christian, worked closely with some of the Christian missionaries who worked against the slave-traders and opium-suppliers. On her last visit, he had told her something of the evils they were combating; that there were hundreds of opium-dens in the Barbary Coast area alone, places where men took money so that other people could slowly destroy themselves. And he had told her that there were over a thousand "cribs," that he knew of, tiny, closet-sized rooms where Chinese girls as young as ten or eleven sold their bodies twenty times a night and more at the behest of their owners. Ten or eleven! She had been horrified—and more so when he told her gravely that this was not the worst thing that could befall a little Chinese child, brought to this country by the slavers. He had not told her what the worst thing was—and she had not really wanted to know.
Compared to that, Jason Cameron was a Saint George, a Sir Galahad. She had never seen the face of the beast until the moment when her life was imperiled; he had not lost control until that moment, which should tell her at least that he was fond enough of her to lose control at the sight of her being beaten and carried off.
But this fact remained—the beast had been ascendant, for that one moment. How could she trust that it would not happen again and again, until the beast was all there was left?
She was still mulling that over when Master Pao's tea went to work.
Cameron was dictating the most difficult letter of his life; Pao would surely repudiate him for it, but there was nothing he could do about that. Pao must know the whole truth now, for if Rose went to him for help, he must be fully aware of the situation she had faced. He had revealed the whole of his transformation and why it had happened, why he had brought Rose here, her growth in Magick, his growing love and need for her, and finally the murder at his hands—or teeth—of du Mond.
"She may turn to you; in any case, please, Pao, watch over her while she is within your sphere. If I had not been so certain that she could not remain here and also remain sane, I would not have let her go. She is probably in shock, and definitely vulnerable. Take care of her, if she will let you. I beg of you, for her sake, if not for mine." He fell silent for a moment, and the Salamander stilled. "Sign it, Respectfully, Jason Cameron." The Salamander burned the last of the letters into the page, and he took the missive and sealed it into an envelope, handing it back to the Elemental. "Now take it directly to him, and wait to see if he has a return message."
The Salamander nodded wordlessly, and it and the envelope vanished. Cameron hid his head in his paws and dug his claws into his scalp.