Copperhead (31 page)

Like her father, Dorie was neatly dressed, but the seams of her dress betrayed where they had been let out, and both outfits had places that had been carefully mended. At the clothes the resemblance ended, for Dorie looked like a china doll, with blond ringlets, blue eyes, and a rosebud mouth, whereas Edward Rochart tended to gauntness and was not conventionally handsome. One of his hands had two stiffened fingers; the other was ruined, the fingers stiff and curled in—he usually kept that hand in his pocket.

Mr. Rochart stood, clasping Jane’s hand with his mostly good one. “You’re holding up well,” he said to Helen, his eyes traveling over the face that he had created. He sighed and turned to Jane. “I wish I could help you restore all the faces, but—” He gestured with his crippled hands.

Jane laid a good hand on his ruined ones. “No,” she said. “I’ll be able to finish this task.”

“Not until you rest,” he said. “And more than that, we need to get the fey out of you.”

“We tried—but it looked as though it would make things worse,” said Helen.

“Let me consult,” Mr. Rochart said. “Dorie?” He turned to see Dorie and Tam sitting cross-legged on the floor together, both apparently entertained by something; Helen couldn’t think what.

Tam turned, and for the first time that morning a hint of a smile crossed his face. “Look what she can do!” he said.

Helen’s eyes widened as she saw that the little girl’s hand had disappeared, replaced by a hand of fey blue.

“Dorie,” said Mr. Rochart with some asperity. “Not now. Come and look at Miss Eliot. Can you lend your talents to study her? She’s not strong enough to resist the Fey King from coming back. We need to keep him out.”

Dorie obediently crossed to Jane, who smiled and hugged her close. Dorie’s hand of misty blue touched Jane, and Jane very obviously tried not to flinch, even as she kept her tight hug on the girl. Dorie shook her head. “Can’t get it out,” she said. “Give her a mask.”

“Is there damage? Is she all right?”

Dorie nodded. “Sure.”

“Please make your hand back into a human hand now,” Jane said patiently. Dorie sighed and obeyed.

Mr. Rochart sighed, an echo of his stubborn little girl. “This is part of what we were doing in the woods,” he said. “Dorie has fey heritage. She’s determined to find out more about what it’s going to mean for her future. We have a fey guide.…”

“And I still say there are safer ways to ‘explore heritage’ than go into that forest,” Jane put in, spots of color rising to her cheeks. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.” It was clear this was an old argument, and Helen briefly wondered if that was part of the reason Jane had refused to talk about Edward lately.

“Fey are dangerous,” said Mr. Rochart. “Capricious, even. But they’re not vicious. Not the mass of them—and most of them aren’t in the forest now, regardless.”

“No, they’re all in the city,” said Helen.

“Without a leader, they prefer just drifting around,” said Mr. Rochart. “The Fey Queen ruled for a thousand years. She molded them into shape. She started the trade with the humans. And she instigated the fey punishment of forcing them to split into pieces whenever they were being punished—the trade literally consisted of bits of fey, you know. Without her, they’d be more like the copperhead hydra—deadly if it strikes, but you can avoid it, or avoid provoking it. It wouldn’t come seek you out.”

“Bad analogy,” murmured Helen irrepressibly. She rose and started cleaning up the bacon grease for something to do. “Mr. Grimsby is very fond of seeking The Hundred out. He’d like to strike us all down.”

“And the fey,” said Jane.

“And the
dwarvven,
” said Helen.

“And all women really, and…,” said Jane.

“Wait, Mr. Grimsby?” said Mr. Rochart, interrupting this litany. “I don’t understand why he’d be so set against fey faces. He has one himself.”

Helen looked at him in dead shock.

“If it’s the same Mr. Grimsby,” said Mr. Rochart. “It was quite a while ago, but it was a very different case. Not like most of the clients. He had an unusual given name—Uriah or Ulysses, something like that.”

“There was a name like that in the journal,” Helen said slowly.

“Ulrich,” Jane said quietly. To Rochart she said, “It was only in your notes by the first name.”

“He was a very private man,” Mr. Rochart agreed. “I’m trying to recall the details. There’d been an accident of some sort.…”

“The motorcar accident,” Helen said. She felt all trembly and she sat down hard. “That’s what Mary said. He was in an accident with his wife. He went through the windshield. He … he must have been cut up all over his face. You can still see the scars in his hair, but they stop, just over his ears—” She looked at Mr. Rochart in horror.

“That’s correct,” said Mr. Rochart. “He wanted to look the same again. Not handsome.”

“And then no one ever suspected him of having fey in his face,” said Helen. “Because he’s—”

“Hideous,” said Jane.

“Mary said he changed because he hit a
dwarvven,
” Helen said. “That he went mad from guilt.” She shook her head. “But that wasn’t it at all.” She remembered the moment in the attic when he had seemed genuinely sad about Millicent. “It’s just like Jane,” she said. “Sometimes the old Mr. Grimsby comes out. But mostly—”

“He’s been taken over by the Fey King,” Jane finished. She looked quite ill. “The same one who controlled me. But why start Copperhead? They hate the fey.”

But Helen knew these kind of social mind games. You turned on whoever was necessary to rally your circle together, make you come out on top in the end. “It was the best way to get power,” she said. “And it explains so clearly why Copperhead has that weird bent against the
dwarvven
as well.”

“But you said he destroyed a fey. In front of everyone.”

“What better way to demonstrate his loyalty?” said Mr. Rochart.

Helen nodded. “To get into closed circles, you turn on your dearest, most unfashionable friend, and you destroy her.” She thought back to the warehouse. “But his machine then, the one that your friend Niklas made. Grimsby can’t be planning to destroy all the fey with it. That would be too far.”

“Niklas has gotten quite fanatical,” Jane admitted. “But he wouldn’t have made something to harm humans.”

“No,” said Helen. “But Grimsby’s been making ‘improvements’ to it—so who knows what its real purpose is? Well. Not the real Grimsby, of course. That horrible Fey King, making Mr. Grimsby destroy his own wife. Just like he made you…” The sentence trailed off as Helen saw Jane
realize
what she had done on the trolley.

Jane went ashen. The horror penetrated her bones, followed a split-second later by the mind-numbing, irrevocable guilt, and Helen felt it all along with her, because of her fey empathy and because it was her
sister
and she could not bear it.

A bewildered Mr. Rochart was reaching out to comfort Jane, but Helen seized her sister and helped her cry. With wet eyes she looked at Jane’s fiancé and said, “Even if you two wanted to come help us stop Grimsby, you can’t. Jane must stay here. You must stay with Jane.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Rochart. And Helen carefully helped Jane to sit up, and brought her more tea, and watched her looking at nothing as if she was taken by the fey all over again, and felt her heart crack even as she was glad to be the strong one, the one who was there for her sister.

Jane shook her head, trying to turn her thoughts away from what she had been made to do, trying to bear up under the combination of starvation, brainwiping, and anguish. “So long,” she whispered to Helen, and her face was white and red as her empathy for others poured out. “He’s been taken over for so long. His poor son.” Jane looked at Tam, who was playing on the floor with Dorie. Softly said, “His mother gone. His stepmother. And his father—?”

“Has long been dead,” said Helen softly in response. She remembered that moment when Grimsby had wept at Millicent’s side and amended her statement. “Or at least, there’s only a sliver of him left inside. I don’t know if it can come back out.”

Chapter 14

WHAT ALISTAIR DID

The Hundred met on the cobblestoned alley by the warehouse. Well, not quite a hundred. Despite all their best efforts, some of the women simply couldn’t be convinced—and then, of course, there were those who could not be found. Still, there were a lot of them, and they spilled out around the building in hues of violet and buttercup and rose. They were beautiful. They were delicate. They were mad.

Helen went among the newest ones, shaking hands and turning on her fey-enhanced charm to make sure they were fully rallied to the cause. She talked to them face-to-face, and then she had them pull their iron masks on and buckle them securely. By the time she had made the entire rounds, everyone except for her had on their full iron mask.

Now they looked grim. Even in their sea of beautiful dresses they were frightening with their identical iron grey faces. Helen smiled to herself at how delightfully awful they looked in the shining silks and glinting metal. The world was bathed in sunlight; the snow of last night was melting rapidly, and Helen found she was not particularly missing her wool coat. The slacks were a good deal warmer than the voile, or for that matter, than the skirt that usually went with the jacket. Helen took a deep breath of the crisp and river-stenched air as she made her way to Frye, identifiable as always by her trousers.

“The doors aren’t even locked,” said Frye. “It can’t be this easy, can it? That we just walk in?”

Helen grimaced. “I doubt it. But what else can we do? How else do you spring the trap?”

Frye shook her head, then grinned. “That’s why you’re the ringleader of this circus,” she said. “You get to make the hard decisions.”

“Yeah,” Helen muttered, and then a flash of movement behind Frye caught her attention. “Tam?”

He crept around Frye, wearing his binoculars and explorer hat and a stubborn look. “I followed you,” he said.

“Tam—,” she began.

He cut in quickly, “Dorie said you might need this after all.” He held out a copper hydra charm, shiny with wiped-off bacon grease.

She took it from him and said, “And now you must go home. We have to face your—”

“It’s
not
my father in there,” said Tam. “You know it’s not. I have to see.”

“It’s not a good place for you to be,” said Helen gently. “Besides, that creature
looks
like your father. That’s going to be hard.”

He set his lips in a line and she remembered Charlie picking up a staff and saying he was going in to fight.

It was hard no matter where you were. It was hard whether you stayed back, or went in, and though she would have protected him from this with her last breath she also would not stop him now. She looked up at Frye, who looked quite sympathetic to Tam’s cause. “You two stay to the rear,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frye.

“And if it looks at all as though he’s in danger, you take him away.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Frye again.

Helen looked down at Tam. “You swear to obey Frye? This isn’t a free-for-all. There are rules in war.”

He nodded, and Helen shook her head with the tension. Frye clapped her on the back. “Cheer up. You only live once.”

Gallows humor again. Helen smiled because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

It was eerily silent from within the warehouse. She held the shiny necklace in the palm of her hand and concentrated, studying the way the warehouse lit blue when she focused on it. She let go and the light faded. The women milled about, chattering, but she knew the nervous energy, the anticipation, would shortly turn to funk and gloom if they didn’t move soon. None of these women had done anything like this, knew what they were up against.

Helen squared her shoulders.
Nobody
knew what they were up against. Nobody had faced down a fey leader except her sister, six months ago.

And what Jane could do, so could she.

“All right, women!” Helen shouted. No need for a surprise attack. Whoever was inside knew the women were here, not least because Grimsby surely knew of Helen’s whereabouts through the necklace she held. Well then, let him see. She held it up as she moved through the crowd to the front, and shouted: “Everyone is in charge of finding your own face, first and foremost. As soon as you do that, focus on finding the women they’ve captured and freeing them. Don’t get distracted by whatever the men do. If we take back what we own, they lose control over us.” She took a deep breath. “Iron masks secure? Now. In we go!” Helen flung open the warehouse doors.

The room was a thick cloud of fey blue that swirled and blew. Helen could not see her hand in front of her face. She felt her way forward—and then shouts from behind made her turn.

Helen whirled to see the women behind her being pulled to the side of the warehouse as if being sucked under by a wave. In a clear space in the blue fog she saw a large strange machine that whirled and made a loud thrumming sound. The little iron letter opener Frye had lent her slipped through her fingers, slicing them as they went, and flew toward the machine.

“Masks off, everyone!” Helen shouted. “It’s magnetic.”

So this was part of the trap—they had to advance without protection. Several women helped those who had been caught get unbuckled.

The blue cleared as Helen stepped forward. Inside the cloud she saw them. The men. Twenty or so of the highest-ranking members of Copperhead. Alistair’s friends.

Each one stood in front of a supine body. A caged woman, a funnel attached to her perfect face. And in the middle of the room, sucking all their fey power into the copper hydra box—Grimsby.

Helen’s heart broke as she saw those women. Some she knew, instinctively, without seeing their faces. She knew the missing ones of The Hundred—and some of them had the misfortune to be the wives and girlfriends of Alistair’s friends. Without a doubt she knew that Morse, for example, was standing next to the body of his very own wife. And there, next to Hattersley—poor Betty, who had been supposedly taken by the police for curfew violation.