“She took pity on me,” Eliza said briefly, not wanting to have to invent an explanation for whatever the changeling had done. “Sergeant, have you found any proof of what I told you?” He shook his head, and opened his mouth to answer, but she stopped him with a raised hand. “I brought some for you.”
She would have expected Dead Rick to hesitate. His hatred of Nadrett ran deep, though; if stopping that monster meant showing his faerie face to half of Scotland Yard, he might have done it. Quinn’s chair scraped backward across the floor, and she knew the skriker had dropped his glamour.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Quinn whispered.
“Wrong on all counts,” the skriker said with aplomb. “Though it’s an ’onest mistake to make. You believe ’er yet? I don’t want some cove walking in ’ere while I’m ’alf naked.”
Eliza hadn’t heard such lightheartedness from him since before Nadrett stole his memories. The warmth it produced gave her the confidence to say to Quinn, “I showed you because I need your help. Yours, and as many more as you can get.”
Quinn was still staring at Dead Rick, but he answered her. “To find your boy?”
“No, that bit I’ve done. ’Tis the one responsible I’m going after now.”
He sat quietly as she explained it to him, though once or twice his hand drifted for a notebook, out of habit, before being called back. Nothing of the Onyx Hall, Hodge had insisted when they asked him; if what they found in West Ham saved the palace, they didn’t want to lose it promptly after to a throng of hostile neighbors or curious explorers. But that Nadrett was possibly trying to make a shelter for himself, yes, and that he was apparently using ordinary humans to build it.
That he would defend the place. And that there were things men could do—especially mortal men—to fight back.
By the time she was done, Quinn’s eyes had taken on a glazed cast. None of it, she suspected, was much like the fairy tales he’d grown up with. But he shook it off, alert once more, after she’d been silent for a few seconds. Then he grimaced. “I’ll help ye myself, just to see the truth of it with my own eyes. But it’s a devil of a hard thing to arrange more. Even if ye knew for sure he’s the one kidnapping these folk, that isn’t Special Branch business.”
“But dynamite is,” Dead Rick said, drawing Quinn’s attention once more. “Nadrett supplied the Fenians. For Charing Cross, and Praed Street, and the four in May. I doubt ’e’s the only one they gets it from, but cut ’im off, and you’ve at least done them a blow.”
“How do you know?” Quinn asked. Not suspiciously, but dutifully; he would have asked Queen Victoria herself where she got her information, if she offered some to him.
Dead Rick’s answering grin was fit for a death omen, even on his human-looking face. “I carried it to ’em myself.”
Eliza hastened to assure Quinn that Dead Rick had not cooperated by choice, but the sergeant waved it away. “’Tisn’t the first time I’ve taken help from somebody inside,” he said absently. “Christ, though—I can’t just go up to Williamson and say, give me a dozen fellows to hunt the faeries.”
What came next was properly Dead Rick’s to offer, but they’d agreed it would be better coming from Eliza. “There are ways to… persuade them,” she said. Nervousness made her fumble the words she’d chosen in advance. “And to make it so they aren’t too clear afterwards on what they saw—”
“Stop,” Quinn said. Not loudly, not angrily, but it cut her off like a knife. “I do not know what you might be thinking, but I won’t have your faeries fiddling with the heads of my boys. They know what they’re doing, or they don’t come at all. Do you understand me?”
She did—but she also knew what the other side feared. “Sergeant, they’re afraid, too. They might not be hiding much longer, the good ones won’t; but they don’t want the first news of them to be a fellow like Nadrett. They’d be hunted for sure, then. So unless you can persuade your boys to be keeping quiet…”
Quinn seemed to be chewing on the insides of his cheeks. He rose from his chair and paced the room, casting the occasional glance at the door, as if thinking about the men outside. Eliza and Dead Rick let him keep his peace. Finally he said, “How many would ye be needing? Not how many ye’d like, but what would be enough to try with.”
Eliza turned to Dead Rick. He knew far better than she did what kind of defenses Nadrett might have, and what men could do against them. He said, “If they’re brave, ’alf a dozen. Two for each door. Religious, if you can.”
The sergeant breathed out a quiet laugh. “That will be the easy bit. Half a dozen, then? So five, aside from me.” He shook his head, like a man about to take a wager he knew he should refuse. “They won’t all be Special Branch, but this won’t be an official operation, either. All right, Miss O’Malley—ye’ll have yer men.”
West Ham, London: September 2, 1884
Dead Rick watched Eliza pace up and down the edge of Stephens Road, hands knotted behind her back, a general waiting for her troops to arrive. The upcoming assault was as much hers as anybody else’s: she didn’t know as much about tactics or charms as Sergeant Quinn or Sir Peregrin, but she had the connection to both worlds, so everybody on both sides looked for answers to come through her. And it had been her idea to begin with.
An audacious idea, that might yet blow up in all their faces. But they had run out of time for caution, and every faerie with a sense of self-preservation had already left the Onyx Hall. What they had left were the desperate and the mad. A few more of those than expected, at that: in addition to the three knights of the Onyx Guard, Irrith, and Bonecruncher, they’d managed to rouse out Niklas von das Ticken, the puck Cuddy, and even Kutuhal, the monkey fellow that had come with them to Aldersgate. Dead Rick didn’t know if he was coming out of curiosity, loyalty to his Academy fellows, or vengeance for the dead naga, but ultimately the reason didn’t matter. The Indian cove had a strong arm, which was all they really needed.
So there were three fae for each door, and the rest of their forces should be here soon enough.
“Can you tell?” Eliza asked abruptly.
It made him jump a bit; he was as tense as she. When he cocked his head at her quizzically, she made a brief, abortive gesture at the rest of the fae, waiting in a clump some distance away. “Whether they’re going to die.”
Dead Rick’s hackles rose at the question. He shook his head. “No. It don’t work on fae.” Their deaths were always too far off to sense, until the moment they happened.
“But you’ll know about the mortals.”
“Only if I look.”
Eliza shivered, and looked down. “Don’t look.”
He wished, with sudden intensity, that he were in dog form; he would have gone and slipped his head under her hand. It was the sort of thing he would have done before, and he thought she might not refuse it now—but he wasn’t sure.
Hoofbeats and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels gave him no time in any case. A boxlike carriage with iron-barred windows approached along Stephens Road, and drew to a halt nearby. Sergeant Quinn jumped down from the front seat. With an effort at humor, Dead Rick said, “Planning on arresting ’em, are you?”
“There might be fellows that need arresting,” Quinn said. “The iron bars could be useful around the others.”
The carriage’s back door opened, and men began climbing out. None were in uniform, but they all had the sturdy, hard-bitten look of police constables. Also the ill-disguised nerves of men who knew they had not signed up for an ordinary fight. How Quinn had recruited them, Dead Rick didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. After what Eliza had said, he couldn’t not look—and as he expected, the possibility of death hovered not far from each man. Not a certainty, and that was something; but this might yet go very badly indeed.