The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (57 page)

A rough, wild wind whipped his hair against his face, splattering his eyeglasses with large drops of water, and, he realized with a tremble in his heart, sending the blue curtains dancing in the room below him.

His fingers clutched the iron spikes cresting the edge of the roof in both hands. Warm rain poured down his face and dripped off his chin. “Ah,” said Ethan Grey. “I see.”

Chris breathed heavily, and trembled, and waited.

He saw Grey’s head poke out from the room. Then his neck, and his shoulders, and finally, his back. The gun was gripping in his left hand, glowing orange and pulsing, but for the moment, he needed all the power of his arms to pull himself up.

Chris jumped down.

He landed on Grey’s back just as the faceshifter was climbing to his feet. “
Oof
,” he gasped in a rush of surprised air, dropping like a sack. The gun clattered against the slippery shingles, skipping to a halt just by the roof’s edge, dancing from side to side with its grip in the rushing gutter. They rolled.

Chris tried to keep his arms wrapped around the taller man, but their skin was clammy and slippery from the rain. Grey struggled mightily against his grip. Chris wrapped his legs around him, gasping as Grey stumbled to his feet. He
heaved
his weight forward, unbalancing the taller man, forcing him back to his knees. When Grey went to bend forward and use his hands to brace his weight against the roof, he found himself scrabbling at empty air.

Chris’s heart went into his throat. He saw the ground so far below, so far it could have been on the other side of the country. His head spun and his stomach shot up into his throat. In a panic, he threw himself back off Grey, hitting the roof’s surface hard enough to jar every bone in his body. He shook soaking hair out of his eyes. Gods, he couldn’t
see
.

He tore his specs off his face and threw them back into the window behind him, and when he looked back, Grey was standing above him. He had only a moment to process this before the taller man was
on
him, planting knees on either side of him, face close to his, and arms wrapping around his throat.

Chris had only enough time to
gasp
in one final breath before the faceshifter’s thumbs pressed hard against his Adam’s apple. “You should have just given me the sodding money,” Grey hissed. His hot, moist breath was like a kiss of death against Chris’s face.

He struggled to draw in a breath, just one sweet breath of air, but there was a dam in the way. He raised his hands, clawing his nails against Grey’s wrists. He kicked his heels against the shingles. His eyes went wide. His heart thumped blackly in his sinuses.
No air,
his body told him urgently.
No air. Need air.

“You just
had
to keep asking her your
questions
,” Grey spat. “The only person who had all the pieces, and you kept pushing her to put it all together. It could have ended with Viktor! It didn’t
need
to get bloody worse! The Deathsniffer herself left well enough alone! Why did
you
have to keep asking Ana your bloody
questions?
”

There were black spots appearing before his vision. They swam about, popped, and reappeared elsewhere, bigger and flashing blue and yellow and white. Chris’s kicks were growing weaker, his thoughts losing their definition. The edges of everything blurred. He stared up into Ethan’s grey eyes, mouthing words he couldn’t form. Thoughts spiralled down into the blackness beneath thought like birds with broken wings.
No,
he tried to project against Grey.
Let me go. No.
But he couldn’t find the will in him, and Grey’s only reaction was the slight furrowing between his brows.

His face was wet.

Rosemary,
Chris thought as everything dimmed, and then,
Mother…

It seemed only fitting, somehow, that he died here. In a way, this was where he’d been born, coming into the world as if for the first time to the sound of screeching metal and shattering glass and the taste of vomit in his mouth.

From far away, a lifetime away, he heard someone begin to sing.

He could breathe. He gasped in air, coughing and sputtering. Grey’s knee was against his chest, and he was kneeling, his head craned somewhere far away, listening. “What the bloody…?” he murmured, and Chris knew he had only one chance to live instead of die. And he had to live. He had to. Who else would protect Rosemary?

He gathered his will.
MURDERER,
he projected at Grey,
throwing
himself hard to one side at the same time.

“
No,
” Grey gasped. He fell to one side, raising to clutch his chest as if his heart had burst. Chris rolled away. “I loved him. I’d have done
anything
for him to have
noticed
me like he did the
girls
.” He was too weak, too clumsy, too woozy to spring to his feet, and so he pulled himself up with effort. Grey clutched his head in his hands. “I never meant to―I
never
―” He raised it then, glaring at Chris with the ferocity of a wounded animal, his body tensing. “You could
never understand!
”

Chris glanced for the gun and found it gone. It must have fallen, it must have been carried away by the rainfall rushing through the gutters. He didn’t have time to think of a better plan. He threw himself at Grey.

They met in a clash of limbs. Grey’s superiour weight bore them forward, stumbling towards the edge. One of Chris’s socked feet went up to his ankle in water, and the gutter groaned and creaked beneath him. Grey’s teeth were locked together in a terrifying, determined grimace, his jaw clenched, his eyes wild. He forced Chris back, back. They teetered on the edge, high enough for a fall to splatter a head like a burst melon, and he was so much stronger, so much heavier, so much
clumsier
…

Yes.

Chris made his body go limp. Grey’s eyes went wide. They overbalanced, shot forward, and Chris dropped to his knees at the last second. Water splashed all around him; the gutter shrieked. Grey’s arms flailed. His feet tangled in the lines of Miss Albany’s grey skirts. He pitched forward, and as he fell, he screamed, and he screamed, and he screamed, until he―

The gutter snapped.

Chris’s limbs flailed, his hands grasped wildly for purchase, and his heart slammed up against the roof of his mouth. He fell for what seemed like forever and then his fingers barely managed to lock against the edge of the roof. He hung there, suspended in the rain. Grey had fallen to his death and it had been his fault. Water poured from the broken gutter into his upturned face, tasting of mould and dead leaves. He coughed and sputtered but the only other option was to look down. His feet flailed, searching on instinct for somewhere to stand, some solid ground. If he looked down, he’d see Ethan Grey, or whatever remained of him. Did murdering a murderer cancel itself out? He was hanging. His fingers were slipping. The water rushed over him and he was drowning in it.

He wondered if it might be better to simply fall and die and have it done with. He was getting tired of nearly dying.

No,
The warm thought coursed through him like a cloudling’s spark, one moment of perfect clarity in a sea of confusion and chaos.
You need to live. Fight. Live. Help is coming.

And then, moments later, he heard her sweet voice. “
Chris!
”

Her water song was the greatest of them all. It was an ancient song, a binding song, none of its words recognizable anymore as anything but an incantation. Rosemary’s voice was girlish and innocent, and as she sang, a flurry of frothing bubbles and a throaty woman’s chuckle erupted near his ear.

Rosemary’s song guided the turquoise undine with her waving indigo hair. The elemental swirled to the gutter, adding the water from her eternally pouring amphora to the deluge springing forth from the drain. Even as Chris watched, the water took on a life of its own, moving,
thickening
. It formed a translucent, shimmering rope. It looped around his wrist, looping and looping all the way up to his elbow, and then it lifted him.

He found himself on his hands and knees, gasping and trembling, warm rain falling all around him. Two tiny hands touched his cheeks and he opened his eyes to see the undine cradling his face in her fingers, staring into his eyes with her head tilted to one side. Her azure skin glowed faintly and her lips curved in a fey little smile, but the curiosity in her swirling eyes was like nothing human, and Chris felt as though he stared into the depths of a great maelstrom from which there was no escape.

He recoiled as though he’d been burned, and then Rosemary’s song reached its crescendo and the undine popped like a bubble, erased from any sort of existence he understood.

And then his sister was wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face into the curve of his collarbone. “
Chris
,” she sobbed. “Did he hurt you? Are you okay? Where is he?”

For a moment, he could only
be
, resting there on his hands and knees, breathing and
living
, stunned at both. And then he crashed back into himself, and he realized who was here with him. He gathered her up into his arms, burying his face into her limp curls, holding her so tightly she protested and squirmed, but he couldn’t bear to let her go. He couldn’t bear to let her go.

“Rosemary,” he choked out. “Oh, Rosemary. I swear I’ll never let you fall into danger ever again.”

That was all that mattered.

iss Albany clutched a heavy blanket around her body to hide her state of undress from all the police officers, reporters, and photographers scurrying about, but Chris couldn’t help but feel embarrassed on her behalf, seeing how uncomfortable she clearly was. And how miserable. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone look more terrible wet. Her stringy hair clung to her forehead and cheeks and neck like the grasping fingers of a drowned woman, and everything about her seemed to droop like a doused flower.

Still, despite her obvious discomfort and the spots of colour that refused to leave her cheeks, she comported herself with professional calm and clarity as she nodded to Officer Dawson’s pressing questions. “Yes,” she said. “He was wearing the face of Fernand Spencer and separated me from Miss Buckley before subduing and binding me, and then―then removing my gown and wearing it.” Her chin raised slightly in stubborn pride. He had to admire that. His own state of undress was considerably less extensive, and he felt thoroughly naked. “I believe it must have been too difficult for him to shift his face and clothing at the same time.”

“That’s consistent with our records on the breed,” Officer Dawson said, making a face in clear disgust. “He bought Miss Buckley in after that?”

Miss Albany nodded. “We’re very fortunate Mister Buckley managed to somehow overpower him,” she said, and her voice lost a bit of its flintiness. “If he hadn’t thought so quickly…” She glanced over at him, and when she met his eyes, he looked away from her, his
own
cheeks burning. He recalled with a strange flutter and twist at his insides how he’d wrapped his arms around her and kissed her so readily when he’d thought she’d offered herself for it.