The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (51 page)

Chris knew the proper response.

What Olivia was admitting to was monstrous. With her saying the words, taking ownership of the feelings, it was impossible to believe she was just a misunderstood genius. What she’d done to the Duchess, the entire val Daren family…terrorized was right. Tortured was right. She confessed to it, and it rolled off her like rain.
I never do,
she said, as if she did this all the time.

And she did, Chris realized, and suddenly he knew with perfect clarity where the mysterious Constance had gone. She’d heard this very confession and she’d reacted the way any normal, sane human being would have. She’d recoiled in utter horror, stared at her employer with terrified distress in her eyes, and under the weight of the sort of judgement, Olivia had banished the poor girl from her sight. Chris wondered at how many other Deathsniffer’s assistants there had been for Olivia, which model number he was. Five? Ten? Twenty? However many there were, he knew with absolute certainty they had all reached this exact moment with O. Faraday, Deathsniffer, and they had all done what anyone would.

He’d never be able to say why he didn’t.

“Olivia,” he murmured quietly. And when she didn’t react at all, he repeated himself, louder. “
Olivia
.”

Slowly, she opened her eyes. She turned her face to look at him, like a sickly flower to sunlight. She blinked at him slowly, a furrow appearing between her brows. “I should hate myself,” she repeated, and when he said nothing, she took a deep breath. The very end of it trembled. “You should hate me,” she said, quieter, and he knew that was what she
really
meant.

“I don’t,” he murmured.

Quickly, as if their eye contact had burned her, Olivia turned away from him. Chris thought he’d seen something glimmer in her icy blue eyes…but, of course, he’d lost his eyeglasses, and he couldn’t be certain of what he was seeing at all.

“I almost died today,” Olivia said.

“So did I,” Chris said, and then, with a ghost of a smile touching his lips, added, “We didn’t, though.”

“No,” Olivia replied. “I suppose, somehow, we didn’t.”

For a very long time after that, it was completely quiet.

Chris’s thoughts should have been with his battered family and his uncertain future at the Buckley estate, but somehow, they weren’t. It was as if he and Olivia were wrapped up in a soundshield. It shut out everything beyond the two of them and the hospital bed. Not even the stark white walls, the smell of starched sheets and hard lye soap, the distant sounds of lifeknitters moving through the halls could upset him. The night of the Floating Castle was miles away, and so was everything else. Nothing existed but him and Olivia Faraday, not the past and not the future.

The light faded from the window. Sunset, twilight, and then darkness fell, and the time continued onwards. It seemed to pass like rushing water, there and then gone in an instant. Not a single word was exchanged. Nor did either of them sleep. Their silence was companionship, and into that silence, Chris poured the odd sort of understanding he had for his strange employer. Neither of them were heartreaders. She couldn’t read his affection. He couldn’t read her appreciation. But somehow, he knew they both felt it.

It must have been sometime past midnight when Olivia suddenly and abruptly sat up in bed.

Chris started, looking over and her, and was shocked at the transformation there. The drifting, listless expression she had worn for hours and hours was completely gone. He knew the Olivia he saw now. Her jaw was set, there was a manic little smile on her lips, and her eyes shone with pure determination. “Christopher,” she said sharply, and focused her eyes completely on him, once again the businesslike employer who’d ask whatever she wanted from him. “I need paper. I need pens. I need
data.
”

He knew an order when he heard one. He climbed up from his chair and the room spun only a bit as he hurried out to the nearest nurse’s station. He gathered up a sheaf of paper and a pen and an inkwell, hoping none of them would be missed, and hurried back to Olivia’s room.

She was still sitting up when he entered, and brightened at the sight of him with his prizes. “Ooh!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in delight and then extending them greedily like Rosemary begging for a sweet. “Bring them here! Yes!” There was a tray behind the cupboard. Chris presumed it was for invalids to eat their meals in bed, but he decided to repurpose it. He set it before her and laid the supplies she’d requested before it, and she immediately dipped the pen in the inkwell and began scratching out onto the paper.

Viktor val Daren
, she wrote in the middle, and then immediately crossed the name out. “He died first,” she said. “In his office, with the door looked, with his willy out of his pants. Throat was slit. He was filled with shock and disgust.” She tapped the pen against her chin, looked as though she was going to say more, and then seemed to decide against it. She dipped her pen and began scribbling once again.

She drew a line from the Duke’s name outward, and then wrote at the tip of it
Evelyn val Daren.
“She didn’t kill him, because she died, herself,” Olivia said. “She died in her gardens, shot with a firepistol, and those lacerations…” She shook her head. “I’ll need an autopsy. We’ll come back.”

Another line and another name.
Analaea val Daren.
She crossed it out. “
She
died in her bedroom. Messy. Blood absolutely everywhere. She was screaming as she died, do you remember? With Will? ‘No, no, I don’t understand,’ she was saying while she got herself sliced up.” Again, Olivia tapped the pen against her chin. She stared at the paper with a deeply searching expression, as if desperately hoping it would calmly offer up all the answers she was looking for. “Was it a staff member? Maybe.”

Another line.
Staff,
she wrote. “None of them seemed suspicious. None of them
stood out
. That was a mistake. I need to―I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll sit down with each and every bloody one of them and hear their entire sodding life’s stories until one seems even slightly possible. That’s what I’ll do.” She nodded to herself, and circled the word.

She drew a line from the Duchess’s name.
Traditionalists,
she wrote. “Interesting,” she said. “But nothing to do with the murders.” For the first time since he’d set her tools before her, she looked up at Christopher. “Do you disagree?”

He floundered.
No
, was his instinct, but he looked at it from all angles. The Duchess had been spending the Duke’s money to fund the effort to imprison Doctor Livingston for sabotaging the Floating Castle. Maybe the Duke had found out. Maybe he’d demanded it stop. There were gaps everywhere in the theory, but… “Maybe?” he said helplessly. “I―this isn’t really my―it just seems as possible as anything, at this point.”

“I agree,” Olivia said, nodding. She circled the word
traditionalists
, and then, after seeming to think for a moment, pulled another piece of paper off the bottom of the sheaf and handed it to him. “Take notes,” she said, and without waiting for response, immediately went back to what she’d been doing.

Rayner Kolston,
she wrote after drawing another line out from the Duke’s name. “Kolston was right,” she said. “He definitely had Duke val Frenton killed back in the day, but he’d have to be some sort of legendary bloody idiot to kill Duke val Daren in the exact same way. He doesn’t stand a sodding thing to gain from it. Sure, his clients might remember that case out of fear, but who else remembers it? Just reporters and police officers, that’s who. The last people he’d want attention from. He’d need a bloody death wish.” She tapped below the name. “Still, unlikely as he is, and he is
bloody
unlikely, I’ve seen nothing to completely rule him out. Maybe investigate his alibi more closely. Find something to completely eliminate him.” She didn’t circle
or
cross out his name, simply drew another line and wrote
Vanessa Caldwell.

“This is where it gets interesting,” she said, and then wrote
William Cartwright
in the far corner of the page. She didn’t attach any lines to it at all. “We need to remember everything William saw, because him seeing Vanessa Caldwell at that crime scene when we
know
she isn’t responsible makes
everything
he saw that day interesting.” She began scribbling things down. “Caldwell’s reflection in the magic mirror. The kitchen with the tomatoes. Ana dying―I wish he could have stayed with
that
longer. I’ll bet there were some answers there.” She twirled the pen in her fingers. “What else? Help me, Christopher, you useless arse.”

“Kissing the Duke,” Chris said, feeling as odd as ever remembering that strange second-hand memory.

Olivia nodded, scribbling away. “Walking up the front path,” she said. “The key―she had the key, didn’t she? The antique key, she put it in the lock. I remember. The room.” And her brow furrowed. “That room. You found a drop of blood outside the door. Maris’ grunts found the key. And there was something else in there. “ She tapped the pen furiously against the page, leaving inky black marks. “We took that room apart. We tore it down and put it back together. I remember Will seeing the room. There was a big hump of bloody clothes in the corner, wasn’t there? The place was
plastered
with blood”―
Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap
―“so
why
didn’t we find anything?”

She went to cross off Vanessa Caldwell’s name and frowned when no line came out of the pen. With a sour face, she moved to dip it once more. The edges of the inkwell
clink
ed as she moved her pen about in it. She withdrew the pen, not bothering to tap the ink off the end, and a giant blob of blackness fell onto the edge of her page and splattered in all directions.

Olivia froze.

Chris watched the change come over her face. It was like watching the day dawn, the sun come out from behind the clouds, a pegasus spread its wings and launch into flight. “Oh,” she whispered. She breathed out, a
puff
of air, and then, reverently, she lowered her pen down to the page.

She drew a line from Analaea’s name.

Ethan Grey,
she wrote.

And then she drew a line from that name back down to the Duke’s, thick and wide and purposeful.

“Yes,” she said, looking down at her handiwork while Chris stared and tried to understand, tried not to breathe. “Oh, yes. Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I―”

Suddenly, she was a flurry of movement. She threw the tray to one side, sending ink and papers spraying in all directions. Blackness splattered all over the starched white sheets of her hospital bed, and the inkwell shattered when it hit the ground, creating a black stain like a smashed bug all across the white floor. Papers fluttered about like falling snow.

Olivia launched herself from the bed, pushing Chris to one side as though he was a pesky piece of furniture. While he stumbled and grabbed the cupboard to avoid falling, she seized her crutches and began swinging herself out of the room like a demon out of the hells.

By the time he gathered himself and chased after her, she was halfway down the hall. She was headed towards the foyer with a single-mindedness that rivalled that which Chris had sought out earlier, and even with her crushed leg and crutches, he was out of breath keeping up with her.

“Are you saying,” he panted, “that―that Ethan Grey―”

“Oh, just
wait
until you see!” she crowed. “It’s
elegant
, Christopher. It’s bloody
elegant.
”

There was a single woman in white at the front desk. The previously crowded and buzzing foyer was dark and empty. Olivia fairly threw herself against the desk, causing the girl to jump. Her white uniform didn’t have the three linked circles above her heart, and Chris suspected she was a mere wordweaver, like himself.

“I need to use your bloody mirror,” Olivia said breathlessly.

The girl shot a look behind her into the closed office, her lips parted in surprise and confusion. She turned back to Olivia and Chris with eyes wide, taking in their bed gowns, mussed hair, Olivia’s crutches, and Chris’s stitches. “I…” she said, flustered. She shook her head. “I don’t think…we let patients…”

“
Now
,” Olivia commanded, and the girl scurried down off her chair with a quiet
meep
. She opened the door to the office and Olivia followed after her, graceful as a deer with her three strange legs.

Immediately upon entering the room, Olivia moved to the mirror and seized the mallet, striking the lowest note on the chimes over and over and over. Chris was struck with a sense of déjà vu, and he remembered doing this before, the day they’d idly thought of how little they knew about Mister Grey, what an unknown he was. Olivia had tried to contact an operator to get his frequency, to talk to him about the fight the three of them had had the night of the gallery…

He enjoys the company of other men, which apparently is a very big deal to some people,
Olivia had said. Chris’s heart skipped a beat. No…it couldn’t be…