Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) (13 page)

“Criminy taught me to project for a crowd,” I said, then choked when I realized I was talking about Crim in the past. “Can you dress me like a Pinky, please? I need to get out of here, and if anyone looks at me sideways, I’ll rip out their liver.”

Blue smirked and stood, her old bones cracking. With a ballerina’s long-standing grace, she walked to one of the dozens of racks and plucked out a bright red dress that matched my current anger. I took it behind a changing screen and violently ripped off the dress I’d been wearing, which I’d rather liked and which was now splattered with daimon blood, formaldehyde from the broken jars, and worse. I couldn’t help thinking about the first costumer I’d met in Sang, when I’d still been
a human woman so certain that she was dreaming
, utterly in ignorance of her powers—and of reality. Mrs. Cleavers, the caravan’s long-dead Bludman costumer, had possessed the face of a vulture and clever gloved fingers that had dressed me like a balky child, long ago. But Blue knew well enough to just toss me all the various parts of my outfit and keep a good distance. I knew my way around a corset and crinoline now, and I was much more likely to bite off her fingers than she was to bite off mine.

“Where do you plan on going?” Blue asked as she sat me down and brushed out my hair.

“I don’t know. Does Buckingham Palace have those funny guard guys in the furry hats?”

Her clawed fingers plucked something nasty from my hair and tossed it away. “No palaces in London. But I can give you the address of a fine milliner, if you’re wanting a new hat.”

“Ugh. No more hats. There’s no changing of the guards if there’s no palace to guard.” I slumped further down on the stool. It was always calming to have my hair done by someone else, but what was the point of getting dressed up if everyone thought I was a human and I wasn’t adventuring with Criminy? Part of me longed for a messy bun, a pair of gray sweatpants with worn-out elastic, and a bowl of ice cream to cry into.

“Look, kid. You can’t do anything about your man. Best thing you can do is go buy yourself a smile somehow. Take care of yourself. Find a treat.”

“I don’t wanna.” The brush ripped through my hair hard, and I jerked upright and growled.

“If you can’t stop being sad, might as well choose anger,” Blue said, her eyes twinkling in an annoying sort of way. “Anger gets things done. Anger has purpose and direction.” She jumped in front of me suddenly, pointed at my face, and shouted, “What do you really want?”

“Criminy.”

“What else do you want?”

“My grandmother.”

The quickness of my answer surprised me. But it was the truth.

Blue smiled, and I did, too.

“So go get her,” she said.

And now I had something useful to do.

Even though I was outfitted
as a Pinky, I was still the wife of Criminy Stain. Back upstairs, I asked Bea and Mel for a moment of privacy, and when they left, I rifled through my husband’s coat for goodies. After six years with him, I still didn’t understand the complicated system he used for keeping the hundreds of pockets in his coats and the dozens of drawers in his desk in order, and whenever I asked about it, he distracted me with kisses. Luckily, I had noticed that he kept certain common magical ingredients in the most obvious, easy-to-reach pockets, including the powder that made cloaking puffs of smoke and the one that made shoe soles silent. And I also knew he kept sheathed knives in both of his boots when we traveled. Maybe I’d turned down a few weapons the last time I’d put on a costume, but without Criminy by my side, I’d take every blade I could carry.

By the time I kissed his cold, dry lips and whispered my love and apologies, I had one knife in my corset and the one in my boot and a reticule stuffed with coins and tiny bags of powder. Focusing on saving my Nana didn’t lessen the pain of seeing Crim like this, of leaving him behind. But Blue had hit the nail on the head. Anger could solve problems, while sadness accomplished nothing. If I didn’t hurry, I might lose the two people I loved most.

I slipped out the back of the cabaret and followed the alleys to a main road, where I hailed a horseless carriage and rode in silence all the way down to the gates of London. The guards gave me no trouble when I showed them my papers; they didn’t care so much who left. Large crowds always milled about down here, at the base of the city, and as a human, I’d been wary of the tinkers, lawyers, vagabonds, and ne’er-do-wells waiting to steal papers or coin. But as a Bludwoman pretending to be a Pinky with somewhere to be, I simply held my umbrella like a weapon and cut through their ranks like a shark in water, headed for the rocky rubble I’d seen in my glance on Mr. Sweeting. The circumference of the London wall had to be hundreds of miles, and yet I knew without a doubt that the particular boulder I was looking for was in this direction and not very far.

What I hadn’t seen, however, was the thief stalking me, the pale sun glinting off his slender blade.

15

Once upon a
time, I would’ve been scared. My heartbeat would’ve ratcheted up, and I’d have looked around for a strong guy in a uniform to cower behind. Or I might have just clutched my keys aggressively and started yelling for help. Oh, but I had changed in the past week. As it was, I continued walking as if I wasn’t aware of him, which a normal human woman very well might not have been. Of course, a normal human woman wouldn’t have dared to leave the orbit of London’s protected gates without the company of a chaperone or, more likely, her man, her knight, her champion.

I was ready to be my own champion.

And I was hungry.

Recognizing the correct boulder up ahead, I stalled, as if messing with my parasol, putting it up to shield my fair skin from the sun. All of a sudden, a gloved hand shot around my mouth, a fillet knife hovering just above my neck, which was protected by the high, stiff collar currently favored by Pinky ladies for this exact reason, among others.

“Not a squeak, sweetums,” the man growled into my ear. “Give me your papers, your money, and your jewelry, and I might let you live.”

“Is that how you sweet-talk all the ladies?” I muttered, grinning.

He smelled of leather and sweat and the pulsing, coppery tang of hot blood. If only the humans knew that a bald man was what most invigorated Bludmen, they’d all take to wearing even sillier hats and higher wigs, instead of bothering with gloves and cravats.

“It ain’t gonner be sweet when I slit your throat and take ’em anyway, Bessie.”

He used the blade to push down my collar, and the metal was a hot line of rage against my throat. I’d had just about enough, and it felt as if I were being taken over completely by a rabid dog, a feral beast intent only on blood and revenge. A wash of red fell over my eyes, and I opened my mouth against his hand and bit down hard on the meat of his fingers. I did not hold back, as a human would.

The blade sliced me, just a little, as he reeled away, his hand dripping precious blood into the dirt. I ran my tongue over my teeth. I could taste London in him, cold stone and coal and waxed newspaper.

“You’re going to pay for that, you are,” he said, head down like a bull about to charge as he flicked the blood away.

His knife drew pictures in the air, flashing and singing in the sunlight, but it didn’t sing like the beast inside me. My beast sang only for his blood. I would write sonnets with his screams and paint masterpieces with whatever I found inside him. When I laughed, low and dark, his smile faltered, and he took a step back in his cheap, patched boots. In the way of all kung fu movies, I held out my flat hand and beckoned him with curling fingers.

Quick as a blink, he had another knife, this one short and stubby as a pit bull, a knife built for punching holes that never closed again. As we circled each other, I drank in the joy of a fight about to happen, as if the world was holding its breath to see who would emerge the victor. Just to be kind, I let him lunge first. Dancing back from the knife’s swipe, I ripped off my gloves and admired the curl of my white claws, much finer weapons than anything a man could make over a forge.

“
Psh
. Shoulda known. Bloody Bludmen,” he said, spitting in the dirt at my feet.

“That’s the idea.”

I launched myself at him, claws outstretched, mouth open, knocking his long, shiny knife into the dirt. He landed hard on his back and tried to stab me with the squat knife, but I pinned that hand down and beat it against a rock until it opened like a flower. Now it was just us, me and my assailant, and my mouth was a thing of smiles and teeth and laughter as I struck for his neck, bit down hard, and yanked.

Only one feeling I know comes close to the ecstasy of the enemy’s blood, and I finally understood why Criminy was such a good lover.

I drank and drank, gulping down hot blood as fast as his body could pump it up through his arteries, and he danced beneath me, bucking and blubbering and blowing bubbles of snot and spit. I had never been so thirsty, and I could almost feel the life flowing from him into me, making me stronger and tougher and infinitely more mad, powering the beast that purred on a dying throne of grubby clothes and hot flesh. The jolt of glancing merged with this river, and I was gratified to see that his life had been a long, unbroken streak of taking from others and giving them only pain and death in return. This? This was a creature who needed to die, and I had fulfilled my duty to the world, destroying a bad seed so that others could live and flourish.

His arms and legs stopped shaking and fighting, and his face went still and white, and I lapped frantically for every last bit of blood I could take in, and then it was all gone and I stood up and threw back my head and laughed and laughed and laughed.

I had never felt so powerful, and now I understood why this act was forbidden. Why the humans dressed as they did, why they built their walls and sifted us out in the dark and carried their weapons. Gazelles who dreamed lion dreams could only shit themselves and die of heart attacks. Bludmen were terrifying and in every way superior, and if I killed a bad guy every day, nothing in the world could stop me from my ambitions.

But.

Slowly, I came back to myself. At first, it was the itch of drying blood on my chin, urging me to reach for my handkerchief. Then it was the way his eyes were open and empty and going dry. Then it was the strangeness of standing alone in a barren wasteland outside a thriving, filthy metropolis, alone with a corpse. It was almost like being peeled apart into two people and left with the more boring, confused one.

That . . . was no good.

“Bother. Now I see why we don’t do this,” I said to no one in particular.

Putting on my gloves and grabbing my assailant under his armpits, I realized that he was bigger than I had assumed when my beast was in charge. It had been six years since I’d had to handle senseless bodies, turning over coma patients to clean and bathe them or helping rehab patients support themselves. But I had never done this with a dead body, never tried to pick one up and move it. And he was all floppy as hell and had no good handles, and I couldn’t help thinking that if there were video cameras in Sang, the whole rigmarole would have ended up on YouTube set to
Benny Hill
music.

I finally got him stashed between some gray boulders and dropped fallen stones and brick chunks and bits of greenery on him until he was mostly camouflaged. I felt as if I needed to say something, because human beings are trained to say things when they stand over dead bodies, but no one had ever trained me for being an almost-vampire who rightly killed her almost-killer.

“You shouldn’t put knives to people’s throats,” I finally said. Before I walked away, I swiped a finger over the blood on his shredded neck.

When I reached the right boulder, I smeared his blood into the pitted stone.

It disappeared, revealing a deep, dark chasm into nowhere.

I did not like deep,
dark chasms.

I did not like walking into my enemy’s lair without backup, without my deadly and delightful husband by my side, squeezing my trembling fingers with his strong ones, flashing that dashing smile framed in fangs.

But I was going to do it anyway.

It was a tunnel meant for walking . . . and also meant to scare people away. Ever so gently sloping downward, it was dry and hewn from solid rock, smelling of dust and age and long-ago rotting. And of all the potions and weapons I had brought, I’d forgotten the one thing I needed most underground: a damn lantern. The boulder behind me reappeared, and I found myself in total and complete darkness that gave me vertigo.

Living with the greatest magician in the country, however, had its perks. For six years, I’d watched him pinch his powders and slur his spells, and that sort of thing starts to sink in after a while. In the world of Sang, magic began with the daimons and skipped over humans entirely, but Bludmen could learn it if they had the knack. And I had no idea if I had that knack, but I had a fantastic memory and a desperate need.

Taking a deep breath, I focused my mind and heart on the fingertips of my right hand. Mimicking Criminy’s accent and tone exactly, I muttered a few words of Sanguine and snapped my fingers.

Nothing happened.

I tried it several more times, my desperation building to a frenzy as the cave closed in around me, and I imagined I heard claws on stone and wet, white cave monsters and heavy breathing, somewhere farther down the tunnel.

There had to be some other secret, something I hadn’t noticed in Criminy’s spell casting. Or maybe I just didn’t have the knack. Maybe my glancing was my only magic.

I put my hands over my eyes and tried not to cry . . . and remembered I was wearing gloves.

Of course.

My hands shook as I took off my right glove, almost as if I were going to glance on someone in the caravan. I stilled, focused, closed my eyes, said the words, and snapped.

A flame flickered from my fingers, bathing the stone walls in cool blue.

I looked up, laughing.

Right into the face of the witch herself.