direction when Hattersley told me about you.…”
Helen swung around. Her heart seemed to be beating preternaturally still, as though she was a hawk in the instant before it swoops.
Alistair did not have the grace to stumble or look abashed. Glumly he said, “About your bargain with the doctor, of course. Hattersley boasted about how he’d found the perfect girl; all he had to do was rescue her from a doctor friend of his. He couldn’t believe the doctor would try to get balloon payments out of you when a variety of obvious answers were staring him in the face. Hattersley’s a family man at heart, though—he wanted a wife. He was thrilled by the lady-in-distress routine, talked of being your white knight.” Alistair laughed ruefully. “That was his undoing. Of course we all had to troop down to the tenpence dance hall and see you for ourselves.” He looked up at her now, as if seeing her then, a girl in a white dress with a green sash. “Well, perhaps it can be okay again,” he mused. “Served old Hattersley right I got to you first, I always thought.”
“Got to me first,” Helen said. He didn’t see the hawk’s claws closing on him, didn’t know he was only a mouse and she blazed with pure predation.
Alistair sighed. “This is why I didn’t tell you,” he said reasonably. “I knew you would take it the wrong way.”
So many years of splitting herself into private Helen and public Helen left her unable to speak. Unable to say the deep thoughts that came roiling up. She could smile and joke with him and laugh it off as a misunderstanding, except she couldn’t. She did not have the words, only she knew like a gut punch that there was something pathologically inequitable about seeking her out when he already knew she was blindly grasping for any lifeline.
No, she could not speak. All her cleverness had deserted her.
But she could be the hawk, all muscle instinct and focused fury.
“Come on,” Alistair said. “We can still reclaim our place. Just let’s go on home before anyone sees. We’ll meet up with Grimsby later. He’ll make it out okay; he’s like a fox.”
“I am not going home with you,” she said, carefully, precisely. “I am not going to your home ever again.”
The color faded from his face as he saw that she meant it. She registered that in the back of her mind, that she had chosen a life of trouble and chaos and public ordeal … and freedom. It blossomed in her mind that if she made it out of here alive, she would have freedom.
And then, because there seemed only one thing left to do, she moved to the center of the room and picked up the last remaining funnel. She would not be like poor Millicent—she hoped. Because she would be both the source and the wielder of the power.
And she moved to the copper hydra that ran it all, and placed one hand on it, even as she placed the funnel on her face.
She was plunged into that waking dream again. But this time she was moving among it herself. She wondered if poor Millicent had felt that before she vanished, that she was a figure on this alien landscape, as she touched every corner of the city at once and they all fed to her eyes and ears and mind.
She could see the fey that controlled Mr. Grimsby in this maelstrom. The self-styled Fey King. He was out there, and he had pieces of himself all over the city, not just in Mr. Grimsby’s face and her necklace. He was in other fey faces. As Tam said, he was in every single one of those hydra pins and necklaces. Before the advent of the iron masks, he had been able to dip in and out of a handful of well-placed people—and now with the copper pins there were another few hundred he could use as eyepieces to the whole city. It was how he had gained so much power so quickly. How he had risen to prominence and caught the ear of the Prime Minister. He must have planned long ago for this, seeding the clay given to Rochart with bits of himself. He was everywhere.
Helen felt it all, and her thoughts ranged across the city. It was something. But it was not enough. She could not reach out to stop the Fey King, who was moving rapidly, connecting pieces of fey out there into nets that pulled and tensed. She felt what she had before in the warehouse, that sense of the bits of fey trying to coalesce, and as the tension grew stronger and stronger she felt the power growing behind it, a sense of stored energy as the grid of fey that lay all over the city crackled alive, joining together in one massive grid of power.
He was definitely not combining all the fey to destroy them.
She saw all those images as she had before, and she tried to focus to where a particular part of the city was becoming strongly blue.
<<Almost have it,>> she heard, and then the other voice, <<Almost do,>> and it seemed to her now that both voices were the Fey King himself, split apart into so many pieces that he had become schizophrenic with it.
She could see the blue in that part of the city, lying along grass and sidewalk and embankment, and the air around it hummed with electricity, hummed like she was able to hear and see a downed wire from the trolley. A bird flew too close and was zapped, fell to the ground with singed feathers.
Helen froze as she saw what he was doing. What he had been planning to do all along, since he had forced the fey six months ago to split and begin settling over the city, lying in wait until he would be ready to use them all at once. He was pulling all the fey into one massive grid of power that would trap the entire city in a single charge.
He would kill all the humans. Once the net was finished. He had gained enough power from the women he had drained to go everywhere. They would reach out and electrify everyone.
But the women were detached now, and the Fey King hadn’t gotten the entire hundred he wanted, and he was slowing down. Helen saw that, and she saw that he would have to make choices.
And she just needed a little boost.
She dropped the funnel to the floor, because she saw she didn’t need it. It had helped her figure out how to focus, but she was her own power no matter how it came. With her now-free hand she pulled the necklace from her slacks pocket, that had the little bit of the Fey King in it, and touched it to the copper.
The blue wriggled free of the copper hydra. Then melted in.
In the maelstrom, Helen seized the bit of fey before it could find the rest of the Fey King, and rode its tail as it zoomed to him, bouncing around his multiplicity. He was frightening and dense in the imaginary world, strung out across the city, bloated and gathering blue.
But it was only a little boost, and it was not enough. She had control over the machine, but not over him.
Electrified blue she said to the warehouse at large,
And they came.
Of their own free will they came, those few of The Hundred who were left. Frye and Calendula and Alberta and Louisa Mayfew and Agatha Flintwhistle, they all came and put their trust in her, put funnels to their faces, and fed her their power.
Helen pulled on them, pulled just a little, pulled not too much, pulled on them until she was stronger than the Fey King, because each of the little pieces of fey in the women tenuously connected to their own larger selves out there in the grid, and those fey did not like the Fey King either. Those larger bits of fey came, tunneling through to Frye and Calendula and Desiree, six of them, ten, twelve. They came and came and together, together, they were all stronger than the Fey King, and Helen could put out her hand and crush him.
He gathered all his strength, but it was not enough.
Because as the rest of the fey saw Helen’s group massing, they flocked to her, away from the Fey King’s grasp. <<We want to go home,>> she heard, over and over. <<He kept us apart. We want to be whole again.>>
<<You will,>> she promised, and her hand that was not a hand closed on the Fey King.
He whimpered.
He cried, there in the blue, and in the warehouse Mr. Grimsby curled into a ball and sobbed.
Helen stopped, and everything she had ever
If I had gone into battle to save Charlie, perhaps, I, too, would be someone who had killed, she thought. Jane is someone who has killed, and I am the one who stayed with Mother and tended to her while she let herself
