Lady Killer (7 page)

“I think you are wrong,” Clio said, her eyes challenging over her shoulder as they glided among the other dancers. “And I can prove it.”

“Indeed?” Miles slipped her arm through his. “How?”

“By bringing him to you,” Clio explained. Their conversation stopped while they entered a long arch made by the arms of the other dancers.

“I see,” Miles resumed on the other side. “And exactly what would motivate you to do that?” He swung her in a wide arc.

“Money,” Clio answered simply, not sorry that the turn had taken her out of his immediate gaze. “I propose that you pay me to find him.”

Miles’s feet kept time, but his mind left the dance. Even as he pulled Clio toward him, he was remembering the night he caught the vampire. The long scar across his stomach where the vampire had tried to drive his knife into Miles’s heart was the only physical evidence he had of the horrible battle, but the memory, the memory of that man standing next to the girl, of his lips… He could not let the woman now in his arms see what he had seen.

“Not only will I not pay you to find him,” he announced in the voice of one accustomed to requiring—and receiving—obedience, “it would be foolish for someone like you even to look.”

“Foolish? Of someone like
me
?” Clio spat out the words. She pulled away from him and there was anger burning in her eyes. “Why? What is wrong with me? Do you think I am incapable of it just because
you
failed to capture him?”

Miles heard only two words.
You failed
resounded in his head, and everything instantly went white. Then his mind became completely, acutely, clear.

The events of the evening snapped through his memory one after another—
I have already reserved an emerald pendant on a pearl choker. The vampire of London is back. Pay me
—and a clear picture of what had happened took shape. He stood still in the middle of the floor, his hands on Clio’s shoulders, his eyes looking at hers but not seeing them, a terrible smile on his face. “Will you and Mariana stop at nothing for money?” he sneered. “This was a rather elaborate ruse, making up that story about a dead girl. Elaborate and tasteless.” He pulled her forcefully toward him and his eyes bored into hers. “Next time, don’t tax yourself. Just have Mariana ask for my purse directly.”

“What in the queen’s name are you talking about?” Clio asked, numbed by the expression on his face.

“You said it yourself. You want money from me. But you made an error. I rarely pay women for services they perform with their clothes off, and never for those with their clothes on.”

Clio wanted to slap him hard until his cheeks burned but willed herself to keep her fists clenched by her sides. Her hands were trembling, but not for the reason Miles thought. Pushing past him, she grabbed Toast who had by that time successfully decimated the meat-pie table and was proposing the health of the entire assembled company with real wine, and stalked from the room. She tried to keep her pace slow and dignified, but she knew what was about to happen and wanted to get away before it started.

The first hiccup came as they stepped out of Dearbourn Hall, and they multiplied as she and Toast made their way quickly through the quiet streets. Clio hated the hiccups, not because they were uncomfortable, but because of what they said about her. They were a sign of the war that raged inside her, a war between the violent urges that seized her and her efforts to keep them at bay. She only got the hiccups—and always got them—when she had forced herself to subdue the powerful impulses that smoldered within her. Her hands trembled with the back-and-forth pull of violence and restraint, and she was appalled, as she always was, by the realization that she had wanted to do another person harm. She had never acted on one of these impulses, had never hurt anyone, but that did not mean that she never would, and the prospect horrified her.
You carry a devil inside you,
she could hear her grandmother’s voice saying,
just like your father,
and despite how hard Clio fought against believing the words, the hiccups were always an undeniable reminder.

Don’t think about them, she admonished herself. Don’t think about the hiccups or your grandmother or Mariana or Viscount Dearbourn, or dancing—

She stopped walking and stooped down to look Toast in the eye.

“Why did you take me there tonight?” she demanded. “Was it only for the food?” At the word food her stomach rumbled.

Toast shook his head but reached into his doublet and produced a slightly mangled meat pie, holding it out to her. When she refused it, he pushed it at her more insistently.

“No bribes,” she hiccuped. “Tell the truth.”

Toast held the meat pie out to her with one hand and put his other on his hip, with an expression—one worthy of Inigo—that said she would absolutely get no more information from him until she took the savory pastry. Many people would have felt ridiculous taking orders from a monkey, but none of them knew Toast, or were as hungry as Clio was. She acquiesced, devouring the meat pie in three blissful bites between hiccups. Then she picked Toast up and brought him level with her eyes.

“Did our going there have something to do with the vampire?” she asked seriously. “With the kerchief you smelled today?”

Toast nodded and began looking agitated.

“Was he there? The man you smelled?”

Toast nodded again, squirming in her grasp to turn and look over his shoulder at the street behind him. Even by the dim light of the waning moon, it was easy to see that it was deserted.

“Was he the man I danced with?”

Toast relaxed slightly, shaking his head in negation.

“But he was there.” Clio spoke the words as much to herself as to the monkey, setting him back on the ground. He ran ahead of her and she followed, letting the implication of her words seep in. The vampire had been at the ball. Given that her conversation with Miles had not been exactly private, he probably knew she was looking for him. And only Toast seemed to know his true identity. Her fastest route to finding the murderer, she concluded, was to keep him on a very short leash.

For a moment she wondered at what was really driving her forward. It was not simply that she wanted to catch the girl’s killer. That would have been enough, but she knew there was more. There was something deeper she was looking for, something personal.

She quickened her steps to catch up with Toast—her best chance at a solution—who was skipping down the street in front of her. Thinking it was a game, he increased his pace, too, and she had just opened her mouth to tell him to stop when a hook shot out of an alley, grabbed him, and dragged him, shrieking, away.

By the time Clio reached the alley the shrieking had stopped and there was no sign of her monkey in sight.

Chapter Three

Clio’s hiccups were gone. She ran headlong down the alley, struggling to listen over the sound of her panting, her eyes straining in the darkness. She slowed her pace, concentrating, and even still she almost missed it.

“I’ve got you,” a voice said behind a door just beyond her on the right. Clio crept back and put her ear next to it, listening.

“How would you like to feel these, eh? They’re sharp, they are. Sharp enough to teach you a lesson you’ll not soon forget.”

Clio pushed the door open and walked in. Toast, gagged, was hanging upside down by his legs from the large hand of a red-faced man. She had never been in this room before but she had been in the shop just beyond it, and she recognized the man with the hand as its proprietor, Arthur Copperwith, apothecary, slightly less than sober.

“Aye, Miss Clio,” he greeted her. “Saw this little devil running down the street and thought I’d show him what I think of his behavior.”

Clio kept her voice level. “What exactly has Toast done, Mr. Copperwith?”

“What’s he done? Why, what he always does. Robbed me blind, that’s what he done. Just the other day when you were in the store purchasing my serum. Snuck in here and helped himself to almost my whole stock of ourali.”

The behavior the apothecary was describing was not beyond Toast, Clio knew—he had a way of making anything edible disappear into the folds of his doublet and had in fact produced a handful of lavender lozenges after their last visit—but Clio had read about the herb Copperwith claimed Toast had taken and knew it was poisonous, smelled bad, and was decidedly inedible. Plus, Clio had made it a practice to keep a close eye on Toast in public for that reason, and did not recall him leaving the front of the store during their last visit. “Are you sure?” she asked, frowning.

“Sure as this little devil is a monkey,” Copperwith nodded. “You came in to get my famous serum, and after you left I walked back here for a little nip and what do I see but half my supplies gone.”

Clio looked at Toast. “Did you steal anything from this room?” The monkey shook his head furiously and Clio turned her gaze to the apothecary. “He says he did not do it. Couldn’t someone else have taken it?” Clio suggested.

The man was unmoved. “Says he did not do it, does he?” He gave Toast a violent look. “Didn’t have any other customers that morning. Had to be your friend. But that is the last time.” He brandished the pair of shears he had been holding in his free hand and brought them to Toast’s ear. The monkey wriggled in the man’s grasp, looking at Clio desperately. “Going to make sure he listens to me good next time I warn him.”

“Wait,” Clio commanded. “Put him down.” When Copperwith gave her only a suspicious frown in reply, she rushed on. “I will pay you for whatever he took. But don’t hurt him.”

The shears receded slightly from Toast’s head. “Pay me? When?”

“Tomorrow,” Clio answered positively, as if she had crates of gold inconveniently filling her foyer. “But you must put him down.”

Copperwith reluctantly, and not gently, lowered Toast to the floor. He scampered over to Clio and leapt into her outstretched arms.

“Thank you,” she said. She examined the monkey to be sure he was intact, then asked, “How much do I owe you?”

Copperwith looked around the storeroom for a moment, adding. “Ourali is mighty rare. Comes over from the New World, got to steal it from savages you know. And I’m about the only person around who’s got it. Should be eleven pounds twenty. But since you are a good customer, I’ll let you have it for ten pounds.”

Ten pounds was enough to feed Which House for a month, albeit not extravagantly, but one did not haggle over one’s best friend’s ears. “You may send someone for it tomorrow,” Clio agreed, wondering where the money would come from.

Copperwith glared at Toast for a moment, then nodded. “You be careful Miss Clio. Just a bit of that stuff and you’d be dead faster than you could say a prayer, and he stole enough to kill off half London. I wouldn’t want the little devil near me with that poison on him.”

“Thank you, Mr. Copperwith,” Clio said as she untied the gag from Toast’s mouth. “I’ll be cautious.”

“I was you, I’d lock that monkey in the house and never let him out again,” the apothecary said as he opened the door to let them out. “He’s going to get you killed, Miss Clio, mark my words.”

“I would trust Toast with my life,” Clio replied, little guessing how soon she would have to.

The Great Hall at Dearborn House had long since ceased to vibrate with the sounds of men laughing, women’s heels clicking, gossips whispering, gallants complimenting, and fine silks swishing when Lord Edwin Nonesuch entered his mother’s chamber to ask if she heard the infernal whistling outside her window that was keeping him awake.

Thirty-six women with distinct and highly varnished expressions looked at him from under thirty-six distinct hair-arrangements as he crossed the threshold. Or rather, thirty-seven, for Lady Alecia herself sat among the busts that held a portion of her famous collection of hairpieces, scrutinizing them.

No one knew exactly how many wigs she had, but she could go for more than two months without appearing in public in the same one twice, each more elaborate than the last, and all made of real human hair. Her most valued pieces were those taken entire from the heads of the dead or dying, and it was these that stood arrayed around the room. Every time she acquired a new treasure of this stature she had a stand for it made in the exact image of the person whose hair would sit atop it. Indeed, she had earned a bit of a reputation in France for delaying the execution of a golden-haired shepherdess, supposed to be a witch, long enough to allow an artist to make a sketch of her face that could later be applied to a bust. By far the most esteemed piece in her collection was the Anne Boleyn, which had reportedly been scalped from that unfortunate at the very moment of her execution. She had just had that bust redone, having deemed the older version too morbid, and it was toward the now smiling face of that doomed queen that Lady Alecia gestured.

“Do you think Annie would be better tonight?” she asked her son before he could speak. She was on familiar terms with all of her heads. “The Mary Hatfield kept getting in my eyes last time and distracting me, but I worry about sending the wrong message,” she explained. “It is really a question of whether one prefers to play the seductress or the murderess.”

Edwin frowned. “Why should it matter? Who will see you in bed? Did you hear someone—”