A Study in Darkness (60 page)

With a terrible certainty, she realized she had to be nearing the right place when she saw the lights in Mitre Square. Police.
Another murder
. She stopped outside the entrance to the square. It was filled with the uniforms of the City of London police. They’d crossed the line that marked the divide between the central part of London known as the Mile and the larger area patrolled by Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police. Various steam barons had a foothold here, but this place seemed to be under the Gold King’s control. Along with the City police, she saw a handful of black-coated Yellowbacks with their extravagant guns. Evelina drew back, suddenly afraid to be seen.

“Second victim tonight,” someone was saying. “There was another on the Whitechapel side earlier. Didn’t get nearly so far as he did with this one. This is just—he’s a bedlamite, he is.”

A little farther down the way, someone was cursing and throwing up. Whatever was in the square, Evelina was absolutely certain she didn’t want to see it.

Then she saw movement—the swift furl of a cape. In the
shadows along Duke Street, Serafina was hovering in the space between two buildings, hood drawn up and cloak wrapped around her.
What’s she doing?
Now that Evelina had seen her, she wasn’t certain how to proceed. The one thing she was sure of was that Serafina couldn’t be left roaming the streets. Not after everything Evelina had seen that night.

She slowly strolled in her direction, doing her best to look utterly relaxed while her insides tried to squeeze themselves into a tiny, hard ball. “Serafina, what are you doing out here?”

The doll turned, her shoulders hunched. “I do not want to talk to you.”

Evelina paused. “I’m sorry I scared you earlier, Serafina. I promise I’m not going to touch you.”

“You are like him.”

“No, I’m not.” Evelina prayed not, and tried hard not to think of the life energy pouring out of Serafina into Magnus. “I don’t want to steal from you.”

“Do you promise?” It sounded oddly childlike.

“Yes.” Slowly, Evelina drew near and Serafina let her. “So what are you doing?”

“I want to replace what Dr. Magnus took.”

“You are looking for someone to kiss?”

Serafina shook her head. “I do not like the men here. They do not call me beautiful and bring me gifts.”

Evelina could well imagine. These weren’t clients of the Magnetorium, who knew that Serafina was an automaton. Unless they were completely drunk, most would be unpleasantly startled by the encounter—a few even terrified. “Then how are you feeding?”

“At night the women kiss the men—many men. I’ve seen them. I just need to take what I want from the women, because they must have gathered the life from all those men. After all, don’t they do the same thing as me, pleasing all the men who come around?”

That didn’t make sense. At the same time, it did. Horribly. Serafina had been watching the whores from the theater
windows and drawing her own conclusions. “How are you taking it?”

“The way the doctor takes it from me. But I’m having trouble. They must keep it in a different place than I do, because it always drains away before I find it.”

Serafina had that casing in her neck that held the whirling energy of stolen life. If she was looking for the same thing in the whores, that explained why she was slashing their throats.
Dear God!

Then Evelina’s gaze slipped down Serafina’s front, and Evelina felt as if her body had turned to clay—slow, cold, and oddly clumsy.

Suddenly, everything made sense. There was the knife, now coated in gore. The front of Serafina’s clothes glistened in the faint light, dark and wet. “Oh, no,” Evelina whispered.

“The doctor must not know, or he will be very angry.” Serafina’s head tilted in a plea. “I will find other clothes, and he will never see the blood. That’s what I did before, after the first time.”

After the first time
. How many had there been—these little incidents that Magnus had referred to with lips twisted in distaste? But it sounded like not even Magnus had the whole story about his lovely, clever, deceptive doll.

Evelina’s breaths were coming in short, sharp gasps. She reached into her pocket, feeling for the revolver. She slid her hand around the grip, ready to shoot it through the pocket of her coat if she must. Serafina wasn’t human, but she was breakable. A bullet through the head or heart would slow her down, if they could just get to an isolated spot. “Then let’s go find you some clothes. I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Yes, please,” Serafina said. “But I’m so hungry. I need someone.”

“Then come,” Evelina said, using the same gentle tone she would with a child. She held out her hand, as she always did, but Serafina shied away. She’d been drained once that night and, while she couldn’t refuse Magnus, apparently she wasn’t willing to come near anyone else.

They had started moving away from the square. Evelina’s
priority was to get away from all those police and Jasper Keating’s guards. She glanced up at the cloudy sky. There was no moon, just a rising fog. No wonder it was so dark. She wanted light desperately, but right then darkness was safety. People might come to the Magnetorium to see what they pretended was a living doll. Men might pay for pleasure with one. But to be keeping company with a vessel of black magic was quite another, especially when it was covered with blood and intent on further mayhem. Evelina started to shake.
I’m going to have to kill her
.

Serafina walked beside her, her skirts rustling wetly like the wings of a wounded bird. “Do you think we can find a man, and you could make him kiss me?”

“I could,” Evelina said, refusing to even picture that scene in her mind. A few yards more, and they would be well out of sight of the police. The sound of the gun would be a problem, but Evelina knew that she could run fast.

“But then you would want it for yourself.”

There was a sound behind them, a clatter of clay pots falling. Evelina’s nerves were at the snapping point. She whirled, grabbing Serafina’s arm, only to see a black and white cat bolting through the night.

Evelina realized her mistake a split second too late.

“No!” Serafina snatched her arm away. “I said not to touch me!”

Evelina raised the gun but Serafina moved with superhuman speed, knocking it away and locking Evelina’s wrist in a painful grip. Blind panic shot through Evelina like the jolt from a magnetic coil. She tried to wrench away, but she was snared. The doll was leaning close, her luxuriant hair falling loose from its pins. It was human hair, affixed bit by bit to the wooden scalp beneath. A strand of it near her face had been burned away—the way Evelina herself had once done when she grew careless with a lit candle. It was the one flaw in Serafina’s unnatural beauty.

“You lied to me!” Serafina protested, her voice tinged with betrayal. “You want to hurt me.”

Terror produced a strange lucidity. Images flashed through Evelina’s brain in rapid fire: the newspaper reports of the
Whitechapel murderer, the descriptions of the slit throats, the police in Mitre Square, and Serafina’s knife. And then there was that burnt hair—and a memory of candle wax melted on the floor of Hilliard House’s cloak room, where a young maid had died with her throat cut and bruises along her jaw—just like the Whitechapel victims. And next to the maid had been a woman’s shoeprint in blood. The police had assumed it was hers.

“Dear Lord.” Evelina had found the answer not just to the Whitechapel murders but to a mystery she’d never unraveled. “You killed Grace Child.” Evelina’s words were barely audible, pain robbing her voice of strength.

Serafina tilted her head. “Who was that?”

“Let me go!”

The doll’s fingers twitched, squeezing harder. “I don’t remember anyone named Grace. It must have been before Dr. Magnus made me better.”

Evelina began to struggle again, the fingers of her free hand clawing at the doll’s bruising grip. When that didn’t work, she pulled away with a desperate cry, using all her weight, and Serafina let go. Evelina fell back, staggering with the sudden release. It only lasted a second, because then Serafina’s hand was around her throat, the unnatural strength of her grip brutal.

The automaton drew her close, the impassive blue eyes scanning back and forth across Evelina’s face, looking for some clue or meaning that only she understood. “You know something about who I was before. Tell me.”

Evelina struggled to focus her vision. Her pulse crashed in her ears, a sensation of mounting pressure at war with increasing light-headedness. Her scrabbling fingers slowed, commands no longer reaching her limbs.

Serafina’s grip relaxed a degree. “Tell me about Grace. I want to know.”

Evelina’s breath sucked in with an enormous wheeze, choking and coughing. Serafina waited through it, lovely and still. “Let me go! Please.”

“Tell me.” The fingers twitched around her throat again. “Tell me, Miss Cooper. I want to understand.”

“She was the maid at Hilliard House,” Evelina said at last. “And then there were the grooms with the horse cart. They were taking Lord Bancroft’s automatons away.”

A beat followed while Serafina thought. Evelina was close enough to hear the faint whir of gears and wheels inside the doll. Then she tried to swallow, but the grip around her throat was too tight.

Serafina blinked. “Yes, I remember now. Dr. Magnus asked me to kill the men. He said no one would ever accuse me of such a thing, because of what I am. But the woman simply got in the way.” The fingers tightened again. “He took me apart after that. I stayed that way until the room. People are always shutting me in boxes. I don’t like it. I deserve to be whole.”

She took a step forward, her head tilted. Evelina had to stumble back, her hands trying to grab thin air for support. Serafina’s mouth opened slightly, the expression almost a smile. “But the room changed me. I can act for myself now. I can ask questions about the things I need to know.”

“What is it you want?” Evelina gasped.

She felt the knife slide into her belly a moment before pain exploded in a simultaneous rush from her toes to the roots of her hair.

“You touched me. I don’t want you to take what’s mine ever again,” Serafina said. “And I want you to tell me where you keep the life you took. You are like Dr. Magnus, so you know exactly what I mean. You’re
evil
.”

A gray haze suffused Evelina’s sight, robbing the dark street of form and color. Agony ripped through her, so acute that it was almost meaningless. Her senses couldn’t contain it for those first few seconds—and then the aftershock set in. Wave after wave of hot pain pounded through her like a surf, sucking her under. A sound escaped her throat, but it was soft. Her damaged body had forgotten how to draw air enough to scream.

Then she was on her back, and she could breathe again. Serafina straddled her, pulling at Evelina’s clothing and freeing the knife. “I’m not going to cut your throat, Miss
Cooper, not quick like the others, because then you can’t tell me a thing.”

Evelina moved her hands weakly, seeking something to use as a weapon, but all she found on the cold, filthy street was the sticky warmth of her own blood. She gave up, letting the pain drag her down into a murky fog.

And then the knife sliced in again. Evelina arched against it, her body tightening like the string of a bow. She could feel herself growing weaker, short of air, short of heat—and yet more blood escaped into fog-shrouded streets.

“Am I close, Miss Cooper?”

She couldn’t see anymore. She could barely hear. All she could manage was a grunt of protest, a fumbling against the blade flaying her entrails. And her hand closed around the doll’s.

In her weakened state, it was like opening the door onto a hurricane. Evelina had always sensed that Serafina was more human than the other dancers, but now that was abundantly clear. The soul inside the doll was not just a scrap of Dr. Magnus’s life, for there was another grafted onto it—a small, stunted, and twisted thing. And it must have hidden deep inside the clockwork workings, because she hadn’t truly felt it before now. But now it was out of hiding and it was terrified and enraged. The touch of it roused Evelina, like a primal need to shrink away from fire.

“Is it here?”

The knife went in a third time, but she’d gone past pain into a bright, white land beyond. Evelina lashed out, everything reduced to a feral need to survive.

Magnus hadn’t taken all the life from the doll. There were remnants, scraps like the crumbs on a platter. She could use that. Greedily, Evelina sucked the life force in, hungry and aching for it. It hit her like cheap gin, sending her consciousness reeling. Howling with frustration, Serafina kept cutting, shredding life even as Evelina wrested it from her. The pain had gone from mere sensation to something beyond—a vibration, a sound that was not sound, a high, shrill scream of the soul.

“Hey!”

The voice came faintly through the haze, as if the sound had come down a long, long tunnel. It stirred a faint memory, but Evelina’s mind could not fasten on it. Wordlessly, she invoked the healing spell that had healed her hand earlier that night, but it was a hopeless move. That had been a mere cut; this was wholesale destruction. Her limbs were growing cold, as if the darkness was eating her from the outside in.

“Hey!” The voice came again, this time with the pounding of running feet.

The knife jerked away and Serafina was gone, running in her turn. It should have been a mercy, for there was no more cutting, but other miseries had come. The melted-head creatures waited in the shadows, their eyeless faces turning her way. They grew more distinct as the rest of the world faded. Evelina watched them, her entire body frozen in a rictus of agony.

Deep inside, she curled around the scraps of stolen life, her dragon’s hoard, and fed them like kindling to the dying spark of her existence. The running feet stopped, and someone bent over her, breath hot on her face.

“Evelina!” It was Gareth.

Her hand shot out, as if it had a will of its own, clasping his wrist. The youth was full of life, sparkling and vital and more than enough to heal her body then and there. She could smell it on Gareth’s skin and wanted to rub along his hand like a cat purring for tidbits. That energy would be all good things—savory and sweet, laughter and sunrise. Her magic leapt for it, desperate for sustenance—but it was lunging at smoke. Magnus had been right. Evelina had no knowledge how to steal life. That was the one lesson she had refused to learn.