The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (46 page)

“Only, the thing is, as he’s getting ready to leave Tarlish biscuits for Frelsh cheese, he hears he missed one piece. The crown of the collection, a sculpture that’s renowned throughout the whole world. He could have just let it go, because it was all a bit suspicious, but―”

“Oh, Godssakes, this is ridiculous,” Olivia snapped, startling Chris out of the trance the creditor’s voice had lulled him into. He blinked and then raised a hand to his mouth to cover his surprise at having been pulled into the story so completely. Olivia, apparently, hadn’t bought in for even a second, and she
liked
the vile man. She was scoffing aloud in anger, and shaking a finger at the man behind the desk. “I can finish this one for you and I’ve never even heard it before. The Faceless Rogue, in his infinite stupidity, can’t just accept what he’s been given, because he needs more! He needs to be
satisfied
. So he goes back to the estate, only to find it was a big dumb trap and he’s a big dumb idiot for falling for it, and then he loses
everything
and he deserves it for being so big and so dumb.”

“Something like that.”

“If he’d
only
just taken his score and gotten out while he could!” Olivia cried in mock despair. “Please. Moralizing doesn’t suit you.”

“No
moralizing
about it, love,” Kolston said. Chris couldn’t help but note how there was a dark edge to the man’s voice. Whatever sort of happy fool the creditor considered himself to be, he was not one who abided being laughed at. “Like I said, I know how it works. All that matters is your accuracy record, and anyone would believe little Vanessa were the one who put the knife into Vik. Just take what you’ve been given and move onto your next body, eh?”

“You have no idea what it’s like!” Olivia spat. “Nobody does. When something is off, when it doesn’t add up, when it doesn’t
feel
right, Gods, it’s like an itch you can’t scratch. When everything is racing towards the wrong conclusion, it’s like―it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces from another one, and they don’t fit and they
won’t
fit, and everyone is cooing over how nice the puzzle is! It’s awful. It’s bloody
awful!
”

Kolston met her eyes for a long moment. Something passed between them. Then the creditor picked up his paper, and opened it to a page seemingly at random. He sat back in his chair and, in shocking display of rudeness, propped one booted foot up on his desk. Chris could make out flecks of dirt falling onto the papers below, but the ratty little man didn’t seem to care. “Well,” he said to the paper. “Truthsniffers are wrong, sometimes, too.”

Olivia made a growling noise and took one step towards the man. For a moment, Chris thought she’d do more, but she stopped herself in midmotion. “Well,” she said, instead, her voice tight. “Thank you for nothing, Mister Kolston.”

She turned to flounce out of the office, and Chris followed her, but Kolston’s voice followed after them, and Chris saw Olivia’s shoulders bunch in barely deflected rage. “To be fair, lovey, that’s what you came here for.”

By the time they settled into the back of a fresh taxi and it jostled to a start, Olivia was like a pocket watch wound and wound and wound until every gear inside was creaking and straining and begging to be released. The staccato
clok clok clok
of the palfreys’ hooves made her flinch with every iteration. Chris tried very hard not to so much as breathe, willing himself beneath her notice. The last thing he wanted was for all that energy to snap and spring back full force at
him
. He wished she’d be
calm
, that she’d see it would all work out, somehow. Against all reason, Chris believed they’d find an answer that satisfied her. Somehow, despite or perhaps because of her wild eccentricities, he had faith in her. He wished she could have the same faith in herself.

To his surprise, her mood actually did seem to change. Her icy blue eyes lost their flintiness and became thoughtful, and the wood-stiffness went out of her shoulders. As the anger left, sadness seemed to rush in, filling the void, and he stopped wishing she would ignore him and not see him there. Instead, he started wishing that, somehow, he could do something for her.

These mercurial moods of hers, the way she hopped between manic cheer, popping rage, and this sort of…emptiness…well, he couldn’t imagine living that way. As the grinning, fey trickster, she was infectious or infuriating, and as the blazing firestorm of undirected umbrage, she was frightening. But as the listless, staring, blank-faced wanderer, he could never help but feel anything but sympathy, and wish for some way to pull her back to herself.

“I don’t know why I went there,” Olivia spoke into his ruminations. She didn’t look at him. “I knew he didn’t do it.” She scoffed. “Look, I can tell who didn’t do it. So useful.”

“Maybe you were…just looking for some guidance,” he said.

“It did
wonders
,” she muttered. Then, however, she stole him a look, and the apology in her eyes made it clear her ire was not aimed at him. She turned in her seat, away from him. “I’m always looking for some guidance,” she said. “I reach a dead end, and then…”

“I think it would drive me mad,” Chris said.

“What?”

“Knowing something is wrong, and not knowing what.” He reached up to run a hand through his hair, felt it fall back into its tousled waves. “I think about it, and I can’t even imagine. Being able to pretend things are good…even when they’re not…” He let it hang there, because there was no way to finish the thought without revealing more about himself than he felt comfortable.
It’s all I have.
It’s the only way I get through each day.

Olivia delicately shrugged one shoulder. It barely moved. “There are worse things,” she said. “I was
born
to be a truthsniffer. My Da always said I came into the world asking questions.” She blinked slowly. “I’d rather be aware of what I don’t know than just not know it. There’s nothing worse than ignorance. Nothing.”

Maybe if Chris were a truthsniffer, he’d have been able to tell whether or not he’d just been insulted. He wasn’t, though, and he couldn’t. “What…” He cleared his throat and tried again. “What about Doctor Livingstone?” he asked.

She blinked, and then her brow furrowed in confusion and she turned to give him a puzzled look. “What does he have to do with anything at all?” she asked.

He should have regretted asking, but the question hadn’t stopped weighing on him since he’d met eyes with the doctor in that flash of a second. Try as he might, he couldn’t find any answers, but if Olivia could… “You always say ‘it feels right,’ “ he tried to explain. She watched him like a disapproving, befuddled hawk. “Or ‘it doesn’t feel right.’ This arrest, the doctor…how does that feel?”

“Ugh,” Olivia groaned. “I don’t know. Why bother? It doesn’t matter what I think. The people in charge of all of this have their heads shoved so far up their damned arseholes that every single Tarl could put a pistol to their temples and beg them to cooperate, and the idiots would happily let us all slaughter ourselves.”

“I just―I just didn’t get the feeling the doctor was like that,” Chris said, and he admitted to himself he’d been planning to accept Livingstone’s offer as soon as this case had been over. Even with everything he’d have to give up, the chance to just leave it all behind had been so tempting when offered by a man he couldn’t help but trust. To take Rosemary away, yes, but to
be
away…

“And why do you care what the doctor was or wasn’t like?”

“I wanted to trust him,” Chris murmured. He realized Olivia was watching, her nose twitching as she snuffled out the truth from his words, but for some reason, he just didn’t want to stop talking. “I wanted―”

All three hells broke loose.

A deafening roar of sound erupted from somewhere off to his right, accompanied by a rush of blistering heat. At the very same moment, the carriage pitched to one side, sliding them both along the seats so they hit the far door bodily. Chris barely put his hands out in time to shield his head from knocking hard against the wall; Olivia wasn’t so lucky. The sound of her head
crack
ing against the metal curtain rod was as sickening as the lurch in Chris’s stomach and as terrifying as the sound of screaming outside.

“
Gods
,” he gasped, tearing at the curtain. “What’s
happening
out there?” Out the window, he saw spooked horses tearing off, carriages tottering behind on one wheel, and people shrieking and running as fast as they could in the opposite direction from where they were headed. Where they’d
been
headed, he realized; the carriage had stopped and it moved shakily from side to side, back and forth, as their cabbie tried to get the horses under control.

The skin on his arms felt tender from the blast of heat, and he realized, with growing panic, that the temperature was still rising.

“No,” he breathed. “Oh, Gods, no.”

Olivia blinked. She furrowed her brow, raising a hand to her head and wincing against the light from the window, a light that was tinged with orange and flickered across her pale skin. “What’s going on?” she asked dazedly, and gasped when he reached out and seized her by the wrist.

The fingers of his other hand shook and trembled as he fumbled with the latch to the door. “We have to get out of here,” he gasped out through his panic. His hand felt like it was made up of five thumbs attached to a raw steak, but he threw the latch, and then, when the door didn’t open, threw it again, and again, and again, as if the result would change. His gorge rose in his throat, and, in a moment of blind, terrified panic, he threw himself bodily against the door, which shuddered, but didn’t move.

A second roar of sound and blast of heat rocked the carriage from side to side. Their cabbie shouted something, their car
lurched
forward, and then the fleeing people outside the window were passing in a blur. “No, no,
no
.” Chris’s voice rose to a roar. “
No
! You’re going the wrong way!” He pounded on the ceiling. “Dammit, you’re going the wrong
way
!”

Olivia’s eyes sharpened momentarily and then lost their focus again. “What’s going on?” she repeated, her voice less fuzzy. The fingers of her hand curled around his wrist. “What’s happening?”

The heat was growing more intense, and Chris could hear the sound of crackling flames. His heart thudded in his chest. He focused all his attention on Olivia. He
needed
her to be here with him. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Now.”

Olivia’s head bobbed like a wine cork in a sink.
Dammit,
Chris thought.
Dammit, come back, come back.
And then her eyes snapped as she
willed
her ringing, spinning brains into focus. She nodded at him and yanked him towards the other side of the carriage, throwing herself against the other door. The horses were pounding forward at a dead gallop, whinnying their fear even as they grew closer towards the object of it, and Chris could see the cobblestones beneath them passing as nothing but a beige blur, but anything was better than rushing closer and closer toward a heat that grew more and more intense.

Olivia pulled the latch and jostled the door, but it didn’t move. She cursed quietly, yanked it, and then cursed
loudly
. She tugged and shook the door, a child’s tantrum more than any actual attempt to free them. “I think…” She shook her head once more, focusing her wits. “I think the heat melted something. We need to―if we both throw all our weight at it at the same time―”

He understood and moved himself close to the door. He should let go of her hand, he thought, but he couldn’t. Gods, he couldn’t.

She looked at him with frightening intensity. “On three,” she said. He nodded. She did, too.

“One,” she said. The heat grew stronger.

“Two,” she said, and her eyes were like chips of ice, the only cold things in the entire world.

“
Three
,” she said, and Chris closed his eyes and
heaved
himself against the door as hard as he possibly could, feeling her move with him.

Something
snapped
and
cracked
, and Chris had to seize the splintered frame of the door in two hands when he stumbled forward and nearly fell headlong down into passing road. The carriage door hit the ground and was gone in instants as they raced past it. Orange light was everywhere and flames surrounded them. The horses were screaming madly, careening without any restraint right towards the fire. Chris’s head hammered and his stomach twisted and lurched and groaned as he watched the road fly past. Suddenly, the flames didn’t seem so bad, compared to splattering against the walk…

…until he remembered what was in them. What was causing them.

“We need to jump,” Olivia said, apparently going through the same process as he had.

“On three?” he asked weakly.

“No time,” Olivia said, and pulled him forward towards the door―

A riot of red and orange and yellow exploded right before their eyes, and mortar and brick flew towards them. Olivia yelped and hit the floor of the carriage in an instant, her truthsniffing giving her some prescience. Chris was not so lucky. The last thing he saw was the cracked piece of rubble speeding towards him, and then everything went black.

For a moment, he was spinning down a hole with no bottom, limbs flailing in the wind. He couldn’t move, all the wind was knocked out of him, he was paralyzed, there was someone whispering at his ear
where is the list
and he was falling and falling and falling and―

He hit the far wall of the carriage, slumping onto the seat. Wetness ran down his face and into his eyes. He saw the entire world through a filter of broken glass. His stomach roiled and the stench of burning filled his nostrils. Burning rubber, burning fabric, burning meat. He was still moving. The carriage was moving. Not forward. The carriage was blowing backwards, it was
falling
―

Everything crashed to a halt. Olivia’s body pitched against his hard enough to make him cough and sputter for breath. He lay against the wall of the carriage, looking up, looking
up
at the exit, the exit was
up
? And the door was a ring of fire leading to an amber sky, and smoke was drifting up like a chimney.