“Humans?” Helen said sharply.
But Rook just waggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Gallows humor, that’s all,” he said. “If we knew what
“They’re not my Copperhead.”
“Just married in, eh?”
She looked coldly at him.
He put up his hands. “My tongue always takes me too far,” he said.
“Or not as far as you’d like?” she said, which made him laugh and pulled the moment back into something funnier than perhaps it should be. After all, what did he mean by
They started walking again, off the bridge and into Alistair’s neighborhood proper. There were more streetlamps here, and everything was more neatly maintained, making the bits of blue fey particularly jarring, like mold on bread. Her fingers were quite cold in her gloves.
“So you’re half-
Rook looked at the night sky. “I’m always making up,” he told it.
Helen did not know what for, but she knew what sort of a voice that was. That voice of always making up for leaving Charlie, leaving Jane, leaving Mother. Did Jane ever use that voice for leaving her? “To whom?”
“To myself.” He closed those laughing hazel eyes and suddenly no part of him looked lighthearted and fun. With his eyes closed she suddenly saw the worry lines around his eyebrows. Saw the tight way his jaw set, as if it could do hard things. “When you have been willing to kill once, you see,” he said, “it is assumed you will be willing to again.”
She could not say something lighthearted to that, so she said nothing. It was a peculiar moment, to go from a man you had talked to about dancing and theatre to thinking: This man has killed. Is he a different man now? He is the same man, but I know something about his past that casts a long shadow over his future. He will always be a man who has killed.
They were walking up the gaslit street and at the cloud-shrouded moon she said: “The payment to the doctor was so huge, the day so far off … I simply couldn’t ever meet it. I became more and more desperate. More skilled at dividing my life into two pieces. No one must know. I had taken it on to be responsible and important and clever, like Mother and Father and Jane, who were all gone, you see, and I was going to solve it in the same way. By myself. Of course I never was going to be able to meet the payment, and I suppose the doctor must have known that all along. As it drew nearer, he sought me out. Dropped hints of other methods of repayment.…
“I had hoped I could make the payments. But at some point you miss one and then the payments start escalating. I would come up with grand plans—there are always grand plans—for paying it off. I would make dresses for wealthy ladies and sell them. Things I could never accomplish because I would have to have money to buy the fabric in the first place. Or somehow—never quite satisfactorily explained how—I would get a second position, filling in for other nannies and governesses on their days off. But the thought of spending even more time with intolerable, spoilt children was … intolerable.
“For all my grand plans, what ended up happening was I would go down to the tenpence dance hall to drown my misery. Women no charge, you know. And the more you promise and flirt, the more men buy you coffee and pastries and bring you little tokens like scarves and so on. I became very good at promising and flirting. I mean, it’s my natural bent anyway, I suppose. We can’t all have high-minded skills.
“And there I was in a white dress with a green sash and I met Alistair.” She smoothed her lilac gloves over each finger, feeling the outline of the manicured nails below. “I’m always making up for not going into battle,” she said. “For not helping to kill the fey before they killed Charlie, and through him Mother, and nearly destroyed Jane.”
Rook stopped there on the sidewalk. They were half a block from the house, Alistair’s house. The gaslight flickered in the wind. She was watching the unreadable words on his face, so she didn’t notice his hand move until it was there, brushing one copper curl off of her cheek. Then it was gone, leaving her stomach with a funny bottomed-out feeling and the thought that perhaps she had just imagined his hand moving and it was only the wind.
“Never be sorry that you could not kill,” Rook said.
Ice formed on her breath as she stood there, until gold light came on in the windows of her house, and panic rose up. Helen turned from him then, and walked, faster and faster till she was racing up the stairs to her door, wind pulling water from her eyes. She tugged open the front door and hurried in but she had to look back. Rook was still there, a slim black outline in the cold.
Rook. Rook.
And she turned.
Alistair. Alistair.
The foyer was faintly lit with the light from the open door to the games room; the smell of a wood fire drifted down the hall. She closed the front door silently behind her. The air in the tiled foyer was chill and damp. She could try to make it to her room. She could confront him now and get the lecture over with.
Or perhaps she could brazen it out, though her cheeks were red-pink with cold, though the cold rose off her in waves. Still. Why not? She stripped off her coat and outer things, shoved them under the hall table, and glided on stockinged feet down the cherrywood floors of the hall to peek inside his games room.
Alistair was drunk.
He was by the fire, which glinted off his curls. His long legs were propped on the table on a pile of newspapers; his hand hung loose over the leather club chair with a partial glass of whiskey in it.
Just as quietly, Helen began to tiptoe away. But not quietly enough.
“That you, doll?” said Alistair.
Helen crept back in. She was going to brazen it out, wasn’t she? Be a good liar, like Tam had said he was. A lump caught in her throat as she thought of the boy stuck with Grimsby and the men tonight. Was his father even now filling that small head with tales of rage and revenge?
“I wondered if you were still up,” Helen said.
He stared moodily over his glass into the fire. “All white she was. Is. Still,” he said. Yes, very drunk. “But we dragged Grimsby away from there.”
“To get drunk?” she said. The words just slipped out.
Alistair sloshed to his feet, arm over the top of the chair to look at her. “Yes, to get drunk,” he said, making his point with a waving finger. “You wouldn’t deny him that, would you? Course you would, coldhearted witch, no fun at all…”
Helen was stung by this sudden attack. “Don’t I go to all the parties with you?”
Alistair waved this away. “Not what I mean. Your sister, always looking at me as though I weren’t fit to black your shoes. As if I hadn’t rescued you.” He cupped his hands and opened them in an expansive gesture, spilling the rest of the whiskey onto the shining floor. Bitter alcohol scented the fire-warmed air.
Helen did not care to talk about this, and particularly not with this version of Alistair. “You should go to bed,” she said. “I’ll send George in to clean.”
“Bed?” he said. “You don’t tell me when to go to bed. Unless you’re coming.”
“No, thank you,” said Helen. She prepared to make her escape, but his voice rose a level and stopped her.
“You don’t tell me what to clean,” he said, and opened his hand, letting the whiskey glass smash to the floor.
Now Helen did back up a step.
“You should have heard them all last night,” hissed Alistair. “Talking about your sister. My fault for taking her in. My fault for not throwing her on the street immediately. Your connections. Dragging us down.” He advanced. “Insinuating I can’t run my own household.”
Helen’s heart beat wildly. Social drinking she could understand; everyone did it. Sometimes you accidentally drank too much and regretted it the next day. But not these frightening rages—and they had been coming more and more frequently. Her hand felt along the doorframe for something to shield herself, but there was nothing,
