Copperhead

“I did?” said Jane. She looked concerned, then flashed a brilliant smile from that fey-enhanced face. “I must have had a good reason,” she said.

A cold knot began to form in Helen’s belly. Getting the women together was something Jane had ordered them to do when she was supposedly sane. Helen threw out another lead. “Grimsby’s taken Millicent somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“I’m sure it’s someplace safe,” said Jane.

The cold knot tightened. “But she was going to run away from Grimsby.”

Again confusion flashed across Jane’s face and vanished. “Yes, but he would hardly get rid of her in this state,” she said. “Everyone knows. It would be a scandal.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Helen said. Her forehead creased as she stared at Jane and flipped the problem over and over in her mind. “Will you be safe here with Tam? Will he be all right if he wakes up?”

“You’re stalling,” Jane said.

“Perhaps,” said Helen. She wadded the torn and smoky dress into a ball. She hated to just leave it in Rook’s tidy room.

“Put it in here,” Jane said, waving those thin hands at her carpetbag. “And hurry back and tell me everything.”

“All right,” said Helen. She stuffed the dress into Jane’s carpetbag, and then stopped, her eye caught by something in the bottom.

“What is it?” said Jane.

“Oh, just wondering how I’ll ever make it up to Frye,” said Helen. Her fingers shook as she closed the bag, but she tried to keep them steady in front of her sister. “I’ll see you later. Don’t wait up.”

“Not a chance,” promised Jane.

Helen backed out of the door and into the darkness of the tunnel, where she closed her eyes against what she had just seen. Hot tears pricked her eyes, stress and memory shook her bones as she saw again and again what she had seen in Jane’s carpetbag.

Traces of blue and shrapnel.

Just like the fey bomb that had killed her brother, so many years ago.

Chapter 12 OUT PAST CURFEW

Helen found herself hurrying through the tunnels, desperate to get away. Up the stairs to the bookstore, past the woman who actually smiled at her and worriedly said, “Remember curfew—,” but Helen just kept on going, out into the dark and the cold and the whirling snow.

How could Jane be responsible for this? For this ruthless destruction?

The trolley lay there just outside the slums, a twisted pile of metal. Everyone was gone now, but the signs of the tragedy remained. The area around where the trolley had derailed had been stamped and packed into hard, dark-stained snow. The snow had lessened but still it fell, erasing the disaster, sifting a fine layer of clean white over the ice.

The icy air whipped around her bare arms, and then she was walking toward the warehouse. All these things were there, the warehouse, the wreck, the slums, all had converged on this point in time. Whatever else happened, it would be down here, she felt, down near where the statue of Queen Maud held open arms to the river to embrace her people. All people: humans and her beloved dwarvven.

Jane could not have done any such thing.

Unless she had been made to.

Once Helen thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. The thought unfurled in her mind and she knew that, deep inside, it was what she had feared all along and not acknowledged. She was out of ways to explain away Jane’s behavior.

Jane had been taken over.

It was a strange case, clearly. Jane had been protected, back when she had had iron in her face. A fey couldn’t get around that—but a human could. Boarham, she supposed, had stripped Jane of her protection when they kidnapped her.

But more, usually when a fey took someone over—that someone was gone. Vanished. Helen herself did not remember any of the few seconds that a fey had been inside her, except for a horrible erasing feeling. She certainly had not been able to communicate with anyone. Her body was no longer hers.

But Jane seemed to come and go. Sometimes she was rational. She was Jane.

Or a very good imitation?…

Helen pushed that thought down. The Jane she had talked to just now was definitely her sister, fighting for control of her body. She did not know how that was possible, but it was the only thing that made sense with her behavior.

Helen’s eyes filled with grief. Her sister. Her only family. Helen had fought, and she had tried, and Jane was still going to disappear on her in the end.

A black motorcar drove down the road ahead, yellow searchlight sweeping the sides of the street. Curfew. Helen pressed herself into the side of the buildings, into the sheltering shadow. Across from her a new sort of poster caught her eye—this time bloodred, with CURFEW on it in big black letters, and below it, a raft of rules in smaller type. She did not have to move closer to tell that it was signed the same way as the notice in the paper: BY ORDER OF PARLIAMENT AND COPPERHEAD.

She did not want to go back to the dwarvven slums, where Jane was. She did not want to go home, where Alistair was. Not that that really seemed like home anymore. Perhaps it never had been hers; it had only ever been his. Despite her best intentions to find herself a home, she had come adrift, and now there was not one place she could call her own.

She reached for a handkerchief that was not there and her fingers brushed the copper hydra that hung around her throat.

Her necklace. Her hand closed on it and the copper warmed in response. One picture glanced across her vision, a memory of the warehouse. She was inside, hand on Grimsby’s copper box, and she was looking down at a pale still figure on a white daybed.…

Helen walked along the shadowed line of the buildings, walked fast and sure to the warehouse.

* * *

The windows were lit blue, as they had been before. Helen crept around to the window above the slag, looking to see if there was still a way to make it up the snow-covered piles of junk. The high energy was wearing off and she was freezing, but at least the warehouse blocked the sharp wind. She clambered up in her ruffled voile and looked in the smeary window. Her vision was obscured this time. A pile of boxes and bars was pushed in front of the window, where the table had been. But through the clutter she saw figures moving around. She could not easily get in, but perhaps they would not notice if she cracked the window, not with those boxes in front of her.

Carefully Helen pushed the window open, and was treated to a gust of warm air from a vent just above. And there, there below her was the scene she had imagined on the street. Millicent lay on the white daybed, there in the warehouse. Helen’s hand closed on the necklace. Something was strange about that necklace, the back of her brain suddenly told her. Something that she had been unable to see. It almost hurt to think about it.

She made her fingers let go, arched her shoulders so the copper fell away from her skin. Then looked more carefully at the scene in front of her.

Grimsby, one of the snaky funnels in hand, was bending over Millicent.

Helen swallowed hard as she watched him attach the funnel to Millicent’s fey face, her perfect face. It looped behind the head, held on with rubber clips. She remembered Jane standing there in the warehouse, holding the funnel to her face as if breathing in fumes, and she breathed fast, faster. When Grimsby was satisfied he strode back to the copper box in the center of the room and plunged his hands through the bars, grasping the coiling snakes.