The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (41 page)

“Tomatoes,” Officer Dawson’s voice said, full of contempt. The smell of something sweet baking reached his nose and he breathed deeply. He wiped one hand on his apron, keeping the other firmly holding the knife, and then pushed strands of long hair back from his face. “Too far.”

The curtains and the birdsong and the hands covered in seeds melted away. More movement, more meaningless images, back and forward, now and then, come and go.

He suddenly gripped the knife at his side. He opened his eyes just a crack and found himself staring into the face of Duke Viktor val Daren. Strong arms surrounded him, cradled him, and his lips and tongue were entwined with those of the Duke, the roughness of his stubbled chin coarse against his face. He released the hilt of the knife to reach for the front of the Duke’s pants and the colour all ran together and vanished all at once.

“Oh,” Chris heard himself say faintly.

He’d never been kissed in his life.

The image
connected
again like being slammed into by a carriage, trampled by hooves and wheels both. He
slashed
out with the knife, and the Duke’s throat opened, whatever vocalization he’d been about to make turning into a horrific gurgle as blood bubbled up and squirted out like an undine’s eternal fountain. Blood splattered his face. It got in his eyes, in his mouth. It tasted like iron and salt, and the Duke’s eyes were horrified and terrified both as the light faded from them, before―

“I’m
sorry
,” Officer Cartwright moaned, and it washed away.

“No,
no
, stay with it!” Olivia roared. “Go
back!
Reconnect, do it again!”

“I’m sorry,” Officer Cartwright was panting like an exhausted dog. “Oh Gods, it’s too much.”

Back. A flash of the val Darens’ beautiful foyer.

Forward. The little room Ana and Ethan had laid together on the chesterfield in, covered in bloody rags and red smears.

Back. Fitting an antique key into an antique lock.

Forward. Carving long lines into a dead man’s arms.

The picture jumped and skipped and hopped and settled for only flashes at a time, and Chris could hear someone sobbing a universe away, sobbing and muttering, “Too much, too much.” Back, pushing aside the curtain in a taxi cab. Forward, tying him to the rafters. Back, skirts swirling in the dark along the walk. Forward, skirts heaped in a pile covered in blood. Back. Forward. Back. Forward.

Back.

He caught his reflection in the magic mirror gracing the wall of the val Darens’ foyer.

“
There
!” Olivia cried.

“Gods,” Maris Dawson breathed.

“
Hold
, William,” Officer Burke’s soft voice was sharp.

The image held.

His wavy, ebony hair was caught up with pins of diamond. His slight but shapely body filled the lines of his dark green velvets perfectly. One of his lace-gloved hands gripped the knife hidden in the belt beneath his skirts, sheathed but ready, and the other held tightly to an antique iron key.

Chris stared into the dark-as-black eyes of Vanessa Caldwell.

He blinked at the image. The lines of Miss Caldwell’s beautiful face shimmered and blurred, and he heard Officer Cartwright make a tortured sound somewhere very far away. But there was no denying it was her. That meant something, he knew. That meant…that meant…

He slammed back into himself with a physical jolt. His hands gripped Officer Burke and Officer Cartwright’s, and he felt the polished wood of the table cool against his forehead. He breathed unsteadily. He had some mild awareness of chairs scraping, Officer Burke gently prying his fingers from hers, quiet conversation. He breathed, breathed. He couldn’t seem to grab hold of and identify a single thought in his head. When he reached for them, they fluttered away playfully, like shy maidens or pesky flies.

“Mister Buckley,” he heard Olivia say at his ear, and the thought of responding to her seemed absurd. “
Christopher
.”

He should just tell her to call him by his first name after all. She did it anyway. Still, it would feel like losing a battle. He was inordinately pleased with himself for having actually framed the thought, but he only noticed Olivia had left his side minutes later, when he finally tried to respond.

Bits of stimulus floated through him and registered faintly. The door to the room opening and closing, chaos leaking in from outside, Officer Dawson and Olivia speaking heatedly in the corner, Officer Burke’s quiet tones being there and then being gone. He became aware of the fact that he was still holding someone’s hand. Curious. He no longer gripped the hand in a white-knuckled stranglehold, but rather, their threaded fingers rested gently on the surface of the table between them. Chris concentrated on that, flexing each of his fingers one after the other, and felt a jolt at self-realization go through him when the hand he held squeezed his in response.

He turned his head to one side, pressing his cheek against the table. At some point, somehow, his spectacles had come off. They lay on the table beside him, and his vision was so blurred he could barely make out Officer Cartwright’s face, but he could see enough to tell the boy looked as bad as he felt.

“I’m sorry.”

The words seemed to come from the world away, but Chris heard them and processed them. His brows knotted together.

“I probably should have warned you.”

Chris’s tongue finally remembered how to move and form words, though they sounded slurred and distant. “You wanted me to sit by you…”

“Yes. The closer you are to the seer, the more strongly you experience the flashes.”

Chris frowned, trying to warp his mind around that. Yes. Yes, that was the conclusion he’d come to, before this started. He nodded, the flesh of his cheek squashed up against the table. He kept nodding. Some of the cobwebs seemed to be clearing from his mind, bit by precious bit. “Why?” The obvious question took some time reaching him.

He saw the young man hesitate. “Your mother died at the Floating Castle.”

“My mother…” His mother. They only ever mentioned Michael. He was the important one, and she’d just been his wife. Everyone assumed it was his father he mourned, but he could have handled losing Michael. It would have been awful, but if Julia had survived…

He flinched away from the thoughts despite his state. That path always lead to shadowy dead end alleys, and
nobody
who’d been inside had survived the Floating Castle. He shook it off, and tried to push himself up from the table. He groped with his empty hand for his glasses. Only after he’d slipped them onto his nose and blinked in shock at how real everything looked did he realize he hadn’t even considered breaking the link between himself and the timeseer.

The other man was watching him intently,
something
in his eyes.

Chris cleared his throat quietly. “Officer…” He shook himself and tried again. “Officer Cartwright…” he began.

“Please, William.”

No, that would be rude. I barely know you. I’d hate to be rude.
“William, then. I…”

It was then that Olivia seemed to notice he’d come up out of his trance. She’d been speaking heatedly with Officer Dawson in the corner, and now whirled about to look at him. “
Finally
,” she said, abandoning Officer Dawson to start towards him. “I could hang you up by your toes, Will, for putting my assistant out of commission for so long.” She stopped before him, drumming her fingers on the surface of the table and looking down at him. She barely seemed affected by what they’d just seen at all. Perhaps she was used to it. Or perhaps it had never bothered her. “We need to go,” she said.

“Where?”

Olivia rolled her eyes and increased the rhythm of her fingers. “Does it
matter
? We’re
going.
”

Officer Dawson appeared behind her. “Vanessa Caldwell isn’t at the hospital, today. She didn’t show up this morning, and she was scheduled to. We mirrored her apartment, and there was no response. We’ll be taking a team there, now. You’re not
really
needed, but Olivia should be there, as investigator for the case.”

“Miss Caldwell…” Chris murmured.

“Gods, Will, did you put all of his brains back in
backwards
?” Chris grunted in surprise when Olivia reached down, looped her hands around the crook of his arm, and
pulled
. He half-stumbled to his feet, twisting his arm backwards before he thought to release William’s hand. “
Apparently
,” Olivia’s mouth pulled down in disgust, “Vanessa Caldwell killed the Duke. We need to make an arrest.”

“Stop sulking,” Officer Dawson snapped.

Olivia rounded on her, glaring fury. “It doesn’t
feel
right!”

“We have her at his house, with the key to his locked study, hand on the hilt of the knife that killed him, Faraday. I’m done talking about this. If you’re not calling an arrest, I am.”

Olivia clenched her jaw hard enough they all heard it grind, and turned all her stormy attention back on Chris. “As I said,” she spat. “
Apparently.
So let’s go.”

Chris turned to look back at William Cartwright before they left the room. The boy met his eyes, his head still resting against the table, his hand exactly where Chris had dropped it. Their gazes locked.

They emerged into utter chaos.

The room had been a whirlwind of activity before. Now, it was a hurricane. Officers ran in all directions, and the room rang with shouts, commands, and short, clipped replies. All the chairs and desks were empty as every police officer in Darrington scurried about the room like mice in a maze. Most of the activity seemed concentrated up where they had come in.

Officer Dawson stopped in her tracks. She scanned about. When a short, skinny boy with hair as orange as hers rushed by, arms full of papers, she grabbed him by his arm and yanked him back so hard he stumbled and his cargo went flying everywhere. “Aw, damn, Officer!” The youth cried, trying to dart after the snowing papers.

She held him tight. “What in the three hells is going on?” she demanded.

He let the snow continue with a sigh. To his credit, he didn’t cringe in the face of Officer Dawson’s fury. “Bringing him in now, Dawson,” he said, indicating the confusion up near the doors with a jerk of his chin.

“What are you talking about?” Officer Dawson demanded, shaking the boy as if he were a misbehaving puppy she held by the scruff of the neck. “Bringing
who
in? Why?”

The boy gaped at her. “Where you been all morning, ma’am?” he asked uncertainly. “Didn’t think there was a body here who hadn’t heard about what Doctor Livingstone did.”

Cold fear paralysed Chris’s heart. “
Francis
Livingstone?” he demanded sharply. The last of his fog cleared from his mind, and he thought of Rosemary. Had his read on the man been wrong? Had he made a horrible mistake to have trusted him? To have trusted Miss
Albany
? What if…

But what the boy said next made Chris’s absolute worst, wildest fears seem like paper tigers. He nodded vigorously, seeing their perplexed expressions, and tore himself free of Officer Dawson’s grip. “Got him on sabotaging the Floating Castle, would you believe it? All these years talking like he has, and he crashed the damn thing hisself.”

Chris couldn’t have stopped if he tried. His mind went blank and his legs just seemed to carry him themselves. He pushed past the boy, brushed Olivia off as she went to grab him, sidestepped desks and chairs and harried police officers and their assistants. He was curiously focused, and all the ringing sound in the room faded to nothing but a muted buzz underscoring the thumping of his own heart. Everything seemed to move both very slowly and very quickly, and the crowd somehow parted for him like grass bowing before the wind.

He met the doctor’s eyes as he was escorted into the building, bound in shackles and flanked by five police officers.

The sound all roared back to life. He could hear a crowd gathered outside, screaming and jeering and wailing. Reporters with flashbulbs pounded at the doors that closed behind them, shouting questions through the glass at the top of their lungs. “Doctor!” they cried. “Doctor!” Officers moved in all directions, some moving away, some pulling forward, some moving up to assist their peers in escorting the doctor. Most of the officers seemed to forget what and who they were, and called questions after the doctor just as openly as the crowd and the reporters had.

“How
could
you?” one woman screamed, and spat in his direction.

“
Bastard
,” howled another. “My son and his wife died that night! They weren’t even there, they had nothing to
do
with that damn castle! Your
statement
crashed right through their roof!”

“Doctor!” The man’s voice was desperate. “Doctor, we
know
you didn’t do this! I’ll do everything I can! I’ll clear you!”

“
Fuck
you, murderer! Piss on you and all you’ve done!”

He felt rather than saw Olivia’s presence beside him. He took a deep, gulping breath, leaning back into her strong bearing without thinking, trying to gain some grounding from it. He couldn’t get the sound of screeching metal out of his head, nor the taste of his own vomit out of his mouth. “Olivia…” he said hoarsely, but there was nothing Olivia could do, and she wouldn’t provide comfort for him even if he asked. He closed his eyes tightly, sucking in air.
Mother…

Very close at hand, he heard a woman’s voice in an angry mutter that cut through all the rest of the chaos around them. “I wonder whose pockets that monster Hector Combs had to reach into to pull
this
off. Is there nothing he wouldn’t do?”

Olivia heard it too.

“Oh Gods,” she breathed close at his ear, and she seized his upper arm in a grip tight enough to crush steel. He saw her in the corner of his eye as she fished about and then flipped open the file Ana had given him, on her person as always. He looked down as she ran her finger over the initials that signed the letter on top of the file, smudged where Kolston had licked his thumb and rubbed the page. “Oh Gods,” Olivia repeated, fire in her voice. “I know who HC is.”