Copperhead

at any minute.

But this was not the battle in her hometown. And that was not Charlie.

And then Alistair shouted, a shout of victory, and as Rook pulled him out of harm’s way she saw the sharp iron spike lodged in Grimsby’s ribs, heard the shriek, felt the universe expand and collapse as the self-styled Fey King inside shredded out and dissolved, obliterated.

He was safe. They were safe. She looked down at Grimsby’s body and wondered how it had felt to be Grimsby, to be slowly eradicated over time. To know, like Jane, what was happening. To not be able to fight your way out. To lose your wife, your son. To vanish.

“Helen,” Rook said quietly.

She turned, heart willing him to be okay. But he was. He was kneeling, and his hands rested quietly on Alistair’s shoulder.

“Alistair,” she said brokenly, and she dropped to her knees on the hard cement beside him, as Rook backed away, one silent shake of his head signaling everything that was already obvious.

The sharpened copper pipe had sliced through his gut. She knew, she remembered from that battle, about belly wounds, and even if she didn’t, only a fool could stand and look and smell and expect something besides what was going to happen.

Alistair breathed faintly, his eyes closed.

Helen took his left hand in her own. Her fingers trembled as she closed around it.

“Rook,” she said then, and looked up at him with anguished eyes.

Rook looked somberly at her for the space of a heartbeat. Then in a low voice, jagged and slow, said, “I will leave you,” and turned, and walked down the long echoing warehouse toward the door. All that work of splitting herself with the blue fire and yet now was when she felt split in two. A piece of her walked out the warehouse door with Rook, into the icy November night, and somehow she knew it wasn’t coming back.

Gently she held her husband’s hand, and listened for his breath.

His eyes flickered, opened halfway. “Did she get out of harm’s way?” said Alistair. His voice was so thin, like wind shaking the dry leaves.

“Who?” said Helen. He was so white, so clammy-pale.

“Jane,” he said. With pauses between the words that grew longer and longer, he said, “I sent her. A warning.”

Helen couldn’t figure out what he meant, but his eyes held hers, pleading for her to understand without further words. The cold damp of the warehouse floor seeped into her knees. Then realization. “The death threat.” Cut from liquor labels.

“To save her,” Alistair said.

Helen crushed his hand between hers, as if by doing so she could keep him from dying before help arrived. “You sent it,” she said.

A little smile. “Not a coward,” he said. “Tried?”

There was a great rushing void of grief inside for this man who had tried to break away from his friends, his vices, after all. Too little, too secretly. But he had done one thing. He had tried to keep Jane from playing into the hands of Grimsby, and starting down this terrible path. A foolish, ridiculous thing.

“You tried,” she said to that taut body, but there was no air in it and he could not hear her. She could see him, past all his vices and depravities, him, Alistair, living on the map of his face. His skin was a hundred years old, but the last bit of life in his body lived right there on it, waiting for Helen to tell him he tried, that it was okay, that he could depart from this world in some sort of peace.

She couldn’t make it okay. Couldn’t make everything he had done or failed to do vanish, like clouds parting in the sky. But she could tell him he tried, for it was true, though sad and touching that at this moment all he could think of for proof was a frightening torn-paper note.

But there was more to credit to his account. Alistair had saved her from her own foolishness once. No matter how he found her, that he might have thought she was easy prey—still. In this moment she could give him the benefit of the doubt and go by the bare cold facts of the matter, which were that he had paid her debt then— and just now he had saved her life.

He had been a terrible husband, would have been a terrible father. But these things he had done.

“You tried,” she said, carefully and clearly, because that much she could say.

He breathed then, and relaxed, as if everything had been waiting for that one benediction. The wrinkles on the map of his face smoothed out, relaxed.

Then he was gone.

Helen released his hand and laid it gently on his body. His wedding ring was tarnished, but still there, on his finger. Gently she tugged her own off and placed it between his fingers.

Perhaps he had loved her after all, in his fashion.

Helen knelt beside the still body and wept for them both.

Epilogue

It was a fine May morning, crisp yet sunny. Helen kneeled on the wooden pine floor, pinning hems in place on a pair of slim-fitting trousers. “A little more ankle,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

The model—Alberta—grinned. “As long as you let me wear this to my gig for the evening. Will I turn heads!”

“Midcalf then,” said Helen. “As long as you’re going to wear slacks, you might as well go whole hog.”

The door jingled and Helen called over her shoulder, “Just a minute!” She bent back to her hem. “Bring it back first thing in the morning and report word for word on what the audience said. I’m thinking this might be a summer hit, for the brave. Of course I’ll have to source more of this twill.…” Helen looked up at Alberta, who was staring over Helen’s shoulder with a peculiar expression. “What?”

Helen turned around and saw, silhouetted against the bright spring light flooding her shop, a lithe man in close-fitting black.

She dropped all the pins.

“I’ll just be off then,” said Alberta, and she vanished behind the curtains that led to the shop’s back door.

Helen hastily bent to pick up the silver pins. “So what brings you here today?” she said over her shoulder. “Looking for something custom?”

“You could say that,” the man said. He moved silently toward her until he passed beyond the sunlight and his face resolved into Rook. Or it would have, had she been looking at him, and not resolutely at the pins, which required a lot of concentration to pick up. “No pleasant greeting for an old friend?”

“I always appreciate it when my old friends come to see me,” Helen said. Her heart pounded, but she would match him coolly, using dry words like pleasant and friend. “Some of them didn’t like it that I opened a shop. Some of them didn’t like it that I went back to my old name.”

“But they weren’t really your friends anyway,” Rook said.

“No. No, I suppose they weren’t.” She smiled up at him then, a smile that threatened to turn warm. “And really they are very few anyway. The Hundred all come, and what The Hundred do, everyone does. And that includes Frye, and she wears my designs onstage, and then they all come. They all have to come, to keep up.” She dropped her pins into a box. “We’re setting fashion here, whether they like it or not. They don’t shape trends anymore. We do. Frye does. The Hundred do, and so many of The Hundred are doing things, you know.”

“I know.”

He was so still in the middle of the room and she could not think what he was doing there. If he wanted to see her, why hadn’t he come six months ago? Why was he here now, to break her routine, her newfound sense of self? But perhaps he had a new girl; he always did, didn’t he? And perhaps that new girl wanted the designs that the fashion-forward were wearing. Helen had seen many men from the old days. Even Hattersley had slunk in