My Lady Quicksilver

“Who were the Havershams?” she asked.

Lynch barely glanced up. “Lord Haversham, his consort Lady Amelia, and their three children. A minor branch of the House of Goethe. They were found on Monday morning by the eldest son, who’d returned from a gaming club. The entire household was torn apart, humans included, and Haversham had shot himself in the head.”

“He tore them apart?”

“We suspect so. There were two quarts of blood in his stomach and his consort had pieces of his skin under her fingernails from where she’d tried to fight. The man’s bloodletting knife was on his person and the blade matches the marks found on the servants and…the children.”

Rosalind absorbed that. The tone of his voice had sounded as though he repeated the facts by rote, but at the end… He didn’t like the part about the children, she thought.

“Why would he do such a thing?” Despite her personal feelings about blue bloods, it was an odd thing. Haversham was a minor lord. No doubt he kept enough thralls to satisfy the bloodlust, unless he was close to the Fade, when a blue blood lost all trace of color and began to evolve into a mindless, blood-driven predator. “It wasn’t the Fade, was it?” The thought unnerved her. She knew what happened when a vampire stalked the city.

Lynch shook his head. “His craving virus levels were holding at sixty percent.”

Not the Fade then. The craving virus made a blue blood what they were, but most of the Echelon kept a careful monitor on their CV levels. It was law. A spate of vampires a century ago had forced the ruling Council of Dukes to make it compulsory. Any blue blood whose levels began to hit seventy-five or even eighty were closely monitored.

Any higher and an ax was sent for.

“Doyle said there’d be children here.” As a child she’d seen enough gruesome sights to consider her nerves steel—indeed, she’d been the cause of some of them. But children…children were always bad.

“Yes,” Lynch said in a deadly soft voice. “Falcone had two. A boy and a girl.” He considered her for a long moment. “If you wish, you can wait outside.”

“That’s not necessary.” She needed to make herself useful to him.

“I won’t think less of you.” The stark gray of his eyes became shadowed with something else, something haunted. “Nobody should have to see children like that.”

“What about your last secretary?”

“That was different. The victim was a grown man, a blood addict. He’d beaten his thrall one too many times and so she cut his throat when he was asleep.”

“Cut his throat? I thought he was decapitated.” A blue blood could heal from almost anything but that.

“She used a large knife,” he replied, “with great force and a considerable amount of times.”

Rosalind considered his words, slowly drawing her own conclusions. She needed to know more about this man—her adversary. Yet she couldn’t deny the slight tingle of genuine curiosity. “Children unnerve you then?”

“You might be surprised to find that I do occasionally display and feel emotion. I’m not a machine.”

He might have been asking if she’d like some tea. Rosalind looked out the window, at the fog-laden streets. She didn’t want to empathize with him. Lynch was the enemy. But she’d heard whispers of how even the Echelon thought him cold and mechanical. A steel heart. Virtually a mech, they laughed.

Evidently he’d heard those rumors too.

“How do you do it?” she asked, despite her intentions. “How do you do this job?”

Lynch lowered the papers into his lap. “Because I’m good at what I do. I’m the best. For every woman I find assaulted, every child murdered, I know that I can find the culprit, perhaps even stop them before they get at someone else.

“And I can…switch it off. It’s a gift I have,” he replied softly. “I try not to think of them as human. They’re gone by the time I get to them. Bodies. Nothing but bodies. All I can do is offer them justice.”

That she certainly understood. Emotion had been burned out of her long ago. It was easy to simply…push it to the side. To not think of it. To focus on her cause.

The mystery of Lynch deepened. Who was this man? He was her opponent, the shadowy entity on the other side of the metaphorical chess game they played. She needed to know him, and yet, each answer humanized him in a way she didn’t like.

He was nothing like the Echelon. Like Lord Balfour.

Not a steel heart, she thought, but steel walls. Built to protect him. And that would be how she would bring him down, she realized. The man was not impervious, which meant he had a weakness. Rosalind simply had to find it.

Lynch’s gaze dropped. “You toy with your gloves. Do I make you nervous?”

Rosalind stopped playing with the fingertip of her glove immediately. “No.” Perhaps. It was that damnable stare of his. She’d faced many an adversary, often at knifepoint, but there was something about Lynch that itched at her skin, along her nerves. It wasn’t fear. She’d killed enough blue bloods to know they weren’t infallible. But…something… She couldn’t yet identify the reason for it. “It’s a habit.”

Folding her hands in her lap, she peered through the window. The streets raced past, an endless tapestry of brick, mortar, and fog. Gas lamps still gleamed on the street corners. And the touch of his gaze was almost a physical pressure. She found herself shifting in her seat and forced her body to still. It had been easier as Mercury, when the mask hid her from him. “Perhaps it’s the thought of what lies ahead. What we’ll see.”

There was a flash of movement in her peripheral vision. Rosalind jerked her hand back as he reached for it.

Lynch froze, his face hardening. “I was only seeking to offer comfort.”

Her left hand. Her iron hand. Rosalind’s heart thundered in her chest. “I’m sorry.” She put it back in her lap. One touch and he might feel the iron, feel the joins. It was only luck that etiquette demanded she keep her gloves on at all times in front of him, except while dining, though she intended to take her repast in private or not at all.

“I don’t like my hands being touched,” she replied. “Anywhere else is fine.”

For a moment his gaze flickered to her decolletage. Then away. It might not have even happened but suddenly her nerves were on fire again.

He’d looked at her as a man would eye a woman. And suddenly Rosalind realized what she’d said. Her mind took a swift detour, imagining those hands on her, and her body reacted, nipples hardening beneath the stiff taffeta of the gown, a shiver of feeling edging its way down her spine.

“I won’t touch you again then,” Lynch replied. “You have my word.”

Rosalind didn’t want to drive him away. She needed to get under his skin, learn his secrets, the manner of man he was. “It’s not personal,” she said, her mind racing through a list of plausible lies and finding one that was almost real. “My father…” She looked down at her lap. “I have a bad association with the gesture.”

Lynch’s stark features softened. “I see. I apologize then.”

The carriage lurched into another corner. Rosalind hung on for dear life. Lynch merely braced himself, his powerful thighs clenching as they cleared the corner. The butter-soft leather of his trousers creaked.

“This is madness,” she said. “We’ll be lucky to arrive at the crime scene alive.”

“I assure you, Perry drives like this all the time. I prefer speed over caution. I need to see what happened before the Echelon’s men step all over my evidence and destroy it.”

Her fist tightened on the carriage strap. “Some of the Echelon will be there?”

“Barrons perhaps, the Duke of Caine’s heir. The summons came from him and he has an inquiring mind.” Lynch picked up his papers again. “And no doubt the prince consort’s Coldrush Guards will be there, to report back to him.”

The place would be swarming with blue bloods. But not Lord Balfour. She breathed a sigh of relief. She was much changed from the child and young woman he’d known, but though he expected her to be dead, he would still recognize her.

“What—”

The world suddenly slammed to a halt, tires squealing and people cursing. Rosalind lost her grip on the carriage strap and plummeted forward.