Copperhead

feet against the cold. The brick wall around the Grimsbys’ back garden had dampened the gale, but here it whisked through the street in full force, blowing dead leaves before it, covering and uncovering the swathes of blue that lined the sidewalks. Tomorrow she would not take the trolley, that’s all. She would take Tam in the car to the Natural History Museum … and oh goodness, Helen, how foolish were you? Supposedly you were doing such a clever job of sneaking out, and now you went and saw your husband’s good friend and made arrangements to take his son out the next day? This is where rash decisions led you. The motive was good but the execution was abysmal.

Relax, she told herself. Alistair has never expressly forbidden you to leave. You are a grown woman, capable of leaving the house on your own. And yet she shook her head, despairing, running through increasingly ridiculous options in her head. She could get Mary to pretend to be Helen. She could ask Mr. Grimsby to lie about her visit.

People trickled into the shelter, waiting for the next trolley to pull up. Gentlemen, mostly, in worn but decent overcoats, copper lapel pins winking in buttonholes. A fellow in a soft cap eyed her and she tugged her own copper necklace out where it was more plainly visible. If she was marked as the wife of a top party member she might as well enjoy its benefits of implied protection. She moved away from him, closer to the dwarvven man, studying the inevitable lineup of posters. Trolley times and fares. A curling one for Painted Ladies Ahoy! that she smoothed out. She realized she had seen it before, and not known till now that the darling ink caricature of the central painted lady was clearly Frye.

“This shelter’s becoming crowded, isn’t it? Perhaps someone should know his place a little better,” said the man in the cap. He was staring at the young dwarvven.

The dwarvven folded his arms and did not budge. He appeared to be in his early twenties—a dangerous age for getting into trouble. “Know it as well as you do.”

“Not really right for your kind to be here with a lady present.”

“By lady I suppose you mean yourself?”

The man in the cap went red and the mood in the shelter suddenly turned much uglier. Helen could feel the overcoated men slowly shifting, moving into a circle to enclose the dwarvven.

The man in the cap bent down as though he were lecturing a child, tapped the dwarvven on the nose. “One people,” he said. “One race.”

The dwarvven was dying to take the first swing, she could tell. He settled for spitting: “You’ve learned your lesson well.”

Just then the trolley pulled up and Helen saw her cue. She tapped on the man with the cap’s sleeve and slid into the circle. “Thank you so kindly for protecting me,” she said to the man in the cap, “and I feel much safer now. We were just going.” She tugged on the dwarvven’s arm and pulled him through the openmouthed circle of men. Everyone was momentarily too stunned to resist, and Helen stepped onto the open trolley, motioning the dwarvven man to follow her.

But what had worked so beautifully with the dwarvven grandmother did not work with this young man.

He growled at her, “Don’t plan to owe a debt to a Copperhead,” and turned away, back into the crowd. The air seemed to crackle with electricity. A knife flicked into his hand, and he crouched, motioning at the men to dare step forward. The overcoated men surrounded him, ringing him, a circle of leering hydras. He was so small compared to them, and yet as he gestured with his knife they backed up a step. “I’m tired of bending over to you lot,” he shouted. “Don’t think you can tell us what to do. Don’t think it’s not going to come back to bite you.” A pile of maple leaves whisked furiously past, uncovering more and more blue on the sidewalk.

“Oh, just go on home to the slums,” shouted one, and then suddenly he caught sight of something over the dwarvven’s shoulder and fell silent. Helen could not see what he saw, but one by one they all went agape, and backed up.

“That’s right,” jeered the dwarvven. “Cold metal will scare you, won’t it? Not so brave now—”

The trolley doors closed in front of her as a sea of blue rose from the surrounding plants and maple tree and sidewalk. The air tingled as the blue surrounded the young dwarvven. He dropped his knife, trying frantically to extricate himself from the tangle of slithery blue.

And then there was a noise she hadn’t heard in five years, a sharp metallic noise.

The explosion of a fey bomb.

Chapter 6 DANCING BACKWARDS

Helen tugged at the trolley doors, certain she should get back out and do something, although she did not know what. But the steel would not budge, and the conductor hurried over and said firmly, “Miss, stop, stop.”

Through the greasy trolley windows she could see that the blue had died away, leaving only a small figure, still and silent upon the ground. The overcoated men were picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, hurriedly backing away from the scene of the accident. The explosion seemed to have been contained by the whirlwind of blue fey that brought it. No one else was hurt. But oh, that poor young man …

“Please sit down, miss. The trolley is starting.”

From a distance she saw someone running. The trolley jerked under her feet, and through the tears standing in her eyes she saw a slight black-clad figure leap over a fence, running toward the man.

Him. The man she had seen twice now—at the Grimsbys’ and on the trolley.

What was he doing here?

As he reached the crumpled form of the dwarvven, he looked at the trolley, and their eyes met. She was sure of it. Just for a second, and then they were pulling away, and she could no longer see anything clearly through the trolley window.

* * *

Helen opted for a long bath instead of Painted Ladies Ahoy! She washed her hair thoroughly, trying to scrub out the imaginary scent of blood and smoke and fey. There was no return telegram from Mr. Rochart yet. And Alistair had not come back—he was probably out with Grimsby, hearing that his wife had been gallivanting around town today. She sank under the water, eyes closed, and wished she could just stay there.

But she couldn’t hold her breath forever. She climbed out and got into her mint green bathrobe and snuggled into her pink chair in front of the fireplace in her rooms. Mary had gotten it well and thoroughly going, and set out more chocolate, and some buttered toast, and a little vase with a red-leafed maple twig. Helen tossed the twig into the fireplace without a second thought.

There was a fashion magazine on the table (SKIRTS! FROM VAREE! it exclaimed) and Helen reached for it to complete her evening of sitting and drinking chocolate and forgetting about everything else (she was going to help Tam tomorrow, surely that was enough?) but instead her treacherous fingers picked up the faded leather journal, and her notepad and pencil, and then there she was, settling in for an evening of work.

“Bah,” muttered Helen. Apparently she was going to see whom she could win over next, now that she had convinced Mrs. Smith. Her mind leapt back to Jane, and, sidetracked, she thought perhaps she should investigate what Mrs. Smith had said about the dwarvven. If Copperhead was anti- dwarvven, then perhaps dwarvven were anti-Copperhead? They had infiltrated a meeting, unbeknownst to anyone. Sure, okay. And then ransacked Jane’s flat … why?

She tapped the pencil against her chin. Start over. Millicent was stuck in fey sleep and Jane was gone, but what if both things were an accident? What if someone had been trying to stop Millicent from running away, and ended up kidnapping Jane so she wouldn’t tell anyone? But no, Millicent hadn’t decided to run until Jane talked her into it. Scratch that. She rolled the pencil back and forth. What if it was an accident in a different way? Grimsby