This was not over.
No more weakness. No more giving up.
Of all the options left for me, I had only one that I cared to follow. One that would place the sweet tooth in my sights. Jack the Ripper, vile fiend that he was,
I had no doubt that finding him would lead me to my rival.
I did not even turn to look behind me as I collected Maddie Ruth’s net-launching apparatus and left the shell of my empty house. I found my way to the docks, to turn south once I’d smuggled my way onto a ferry and sank once more below the drift.
If any part of me demanded to cry, a bite of spice-laden opium quelled the urge. There would be no tears shed. Not now, and not for anyone living.
The demands of the dead were already too heavy.
How many more would die before the Ripper could be found?
I made my way to Blackwall, and spent the rest of the afternoon with the Bakers. Once more resolved, the hardest part of this game began. I could not make a move until the Ripper once more played his hand.
I counted down the hours as I waited in brittle impatience from within the pub the Bakers had set up keep. The Fish-Eyed Lady was not known for its fine ale or even for its choice of brews, but the proprietor was the father of a Baker and saw no harm in the protection afforded by becoming a favored establishment.
For the most part, I was left alone. Only Ishmael, arrived shortly after I’d collared a kinchin cove to run a message for me, kept me company.
We did not speak beyond the formalities. “Any word?” I demanded upon his arrival.
“None.”
I thought of Black Lily, and the bloody wound marring her face. “There will be.”
We wiled away the time playing faro. Ishmael won more often than not. I’d never been particularly good with cards.
Food was offered, but I declined. I hadn’t been hungry for days, it seemed. When my head began to pound, I calmed it with the tar Maddie Ruth had given me, and the Bakers looked on and said nothing.
I no longer felt shame. I waited, with a patience I did not recognize, and tried not to think of the fact that I waited for one of two murderers to strike again. To make a mistake, maim another living soul so that I might find him.
I had no surety that the Bakers would be successful, but I had little else to depend upon.
I was held hostage by my rival’s upper hand. I simply chose not to give in.
As the hours dwindled into early evening, the fog thickened outside the papered windows. The men inside the pub doubled, then emptied as they departed on whatever tasks they held important. More came, and stayed this time. We all waited. The stench of Blackwall turned bitter with the peasouper’s encroach.
As I prepared to win only my third hand in as many hours, a Baker bantling burst from the door.
“Communion! Communion!” The boy, red-faced and drenched in sweat, was filthy as a sewer rat and gasping for breath. The men jostled him along, until he staggered into the small space afforded around our table.
Ishmael clapped a hand to him, steadying him on his newspaper-wrapped feet. “Breathe a moment.”
The youth sucked in great gobs of air, but his grimy fist unclenched enough to drop a filthy scrap of parchment on the table.
Ishmael picked it up first. His thick, blunt fingers unfurled the note to find it nearly shorn in half. His eyebrows furrowed deeply, a beetled mask of concern. “A notice.”
I took the note from him and smoothed it out upon the table. “‘Tis Jack the Ripper’s collection notice,” I said, and did not have it in me to worry when my tone was as nonchalant as if we spoke of something much less bloody; what I’d taken to be grime was not.
The bantling heaved in a breath and exclaimed, “Sommat shivved Coventry!”
The curses, growls and shouts this engendered turned far too much attention on me. I scowled. “I was here,” I pointed out, refraining from calling them on their lack of obvious reasoning. “And the collection for him is living, not dead.”
Ishmael leaned forward, resting an elbow on his large knee. Ignoring the crowd now looming around us, he focused instead on the child. “Breathe up, Jim. Where’d the note come from?”
The boy shot me a look from hooded green eyes. One was fiercely red, as if he fussed at it often—a supposition confirmed when the kinchin lifted the back of a dirty hand and scrubbed at the irritated eye before answering. “Was s’posed t’meet Coventry at the foot o’Baker’s Row, so went footin’ it.”
The street was north of the railyard, as I recalled. Nothing to do with the gang, despite the name. Well, save that it seemed Bartholomew Coventry had been enshrined there.
I twitched the collection note, separating the halved fragments until the narrow margin holding them together tore.
It was the original note, all right. Sliced by my blade.
So I was right. The collector was afoot. And he started by killing a man I’d already plucked a notice for. He obviously wasn’t aware of my dealings with the Veil. As far as he knew, if I’d ever hoped to garner that coin, it wouldn’t happen now.
What a right bastard, he was.
“Near broke me arse fallin’ on ‘im,” the boy added. “Stiffer’n a choker at th’ ‘At.”
If he was at all disturbed to have found his mate dead, there was nothing of it about his personage. That was simply a fact of living in London low. A shame, but what irritated me was the point of pride behind his storytelling.
Wasn’t every day that a bantling stumbled upon a big man like Coventry brought low.
“And the note?” I asked.
“Was ‘angin’ from ‘is mouf,” he said to me. “Like he was t’ swallow an’ di’n’t.”
“Good work.” Ishmael clapped him on the shoulder, the way he might another man, and the boy’s thin chest swelled beneath his threadbare, too-small jacket. A palliard, unless I missed my guess. Born to a beggar who was himself born to a beggar. Palliards learned early how to navigate the city, and many knew the secret paths to the mysterious Underground. This kinchin had likely grown up knowing how to make his way unseen through the streets.
I put the two halves of the notice together, lining up the faded text. Nothing had changed, save the blood tingeing the edges—and the remnants of dried saliva and still damp sweat, apparently.
“Wossat say?” shouted a Baker from the far corner.
I ignored the call, leaving Ishmael to deal with the men.
Carefully, I turned the parchment over.
Brown script, still faintly red in places, stained the two halves. I squinted at the cramped, deeply slanted handwriting.
My blood turned to ice.
I stood so sharply, my chair skittered back. “I must go.”
“You know where you’re going?” This from Communion, who had not stood, but still could look me in the eye from his seat.
“I know where.” The phrasing was too familiar. Too obvious.
This was quite obviously a summons, and this time I would not be caught unawares. I bent, lifted the net- launching device from beneath the table I’d stored it under, and shouldered the heavy brass case.
“Right.” Ishmael’s deep voice broke through my grim contemplation. Flattening a large hand atop the table,
