ordinary folk, though mages claimed they could sense it.
“Likely a spot of indigestion.”
“Hardly.” He stared at my lips. “It tasted of you.”
Now I was going to be sick, hopefully all over his spotless trousers and gleaming boots. “There is no such thing as the netherside or magic.”
“Then why do you rabbit about disenchanting things?” he countered.
“I investigate real crimes, I expose the frauds dressing them up as magic, and I stop good, hardworking people from wasting what little they have on charlatans who do nothing.” I waited a beat. “Like you.”
“I will find out what you were doing at Walsh’s.” He sat back. “Then you and I will have a very long discussion about the consequences for young females who are too headstrong and foolish to stay in their proper place.”
I curled my upper lip. “Where’s that for me, then? In your bed?”
“Such a tedious lack of imagination.” He pitched his cigar out the window before he pulled down the shades. “I have you where I want you now.”
I laughed. “You can’t do anything in here but annoy me.”
“Can’t I?” Dredmore dragged me off the seat and onto his thighs, where he clamped me against his chest. “No, don’t struggle, Charmian. You made the challenge.” He wrapped the chain of my pendant around his fist until it became a noose around my neck. “I am only rising to the occasion.”
I felt a bulge of blunt hardness against my thigh and went still, ducking my head to hide my fear. “You’re pathetic.”
“What happened to annoying?” His lips glanced over my cheekbone. “Lift your chin.”
I stared at the vee of his waistcoat. “Go to the devil.”
He released the chain, took hold of my hair, and gave it a sharp tug, and I jerked up my chin. I made myself stone as he put his mouth over mine, and I kept my teeth clamped together to prevent his tongue any access.
Like all the others, this would not count as my first kiss, I thought as he worked his lips against mine. Another mauling, most definitely, but I wasn’t kissing him. I’d never kiss him. I would never, ever give in to such brute tactics—
And then I was kissing him, my mouth open to his, my tongue curling round the silky glide of his. Dimly I felt him let go of my hair and gather me closer, his fingers at my bodice and then my breast, cupping and squeezing. He ceased that only to reach down, and then I felt my skirts sliding up over my calves and then my knees—
“No.” I wrenched my face to one side, first to drag in breath and then to hold it. My body wanted to do terrible things, and my mind wanted worse, and I could not relent to either. Not here, and not with him.
“What did that feel like, Charmian?” He caught a tendril of hair hanging in my eyes and smoothed it back. “Annoyance, or something deeper? And would you like to feel it all night?”
I would have smashed my brow into his, but all it wanted to do was rest against his shoulder as my shaking hand pushed my skirts back down. “You have to stop doing this to me.”
“Why?”
I straightened and looked into his black, soulless eyes as I let how I felt show on my face.
“So we remain at impasse. Very well.” Carefully he lifted me and placed me back on the opposite seat. Before I could shift back into the corner, he reached out and clamped a black-gloved hand over my wrist. “You will come to me, Charmian. Perhaps not now, but soon. The portents are never wrong.”
He did have the deepest, most commanding voice of any man I’d known. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, hearing the last echo of it humming in my ears as I remembered other times he’d touched and kissed me. If anyone could ever bespell me, it would be Lucien Dredmore.
He dodged my fist and thrust me back, calling out, “Here, Connell.”
The coach came to a swift stop.
I glanced out and saw that I was back in town. “Thank you for the ride, Dredmore. Very decent of you.”
“Charmian.” He watched me climb out.
From there I walked a few blocks to the local fishncrisp to pick up two hot meals for me and Docket. The encounter with Dredmore had killed what appetite I had, so I ordered a pot of bisque and some crackers for myself and a big platter of fried coddles and shoelace-thin crispies for the mech. Since the owner still owed me a massive debt for dispelling all of his fish shops, I’d agreed to take meals in barter.
“Right you are, miss,” the counter boy said as he loaded the meal containers into two round packing cylinders marked with his shop’s brand. “Where to drop?”
I had to go home to freshen up, but I intended to spend a few hours at the office, so I gave him my building and drop numbers. He tagged them on the side of the cylinders in grease pencil, and I lingered long enough to watch him load the meal buckets into the tube.
The shops that sent hot food by bucket around the city were scrupulously honest—their business depended on it—but sometimes too many buckets in the tubes created a backup at the sorting stations, and if so I’d just stop for the meals later on my way to the office myself (and Docket would have his hand delivery.) This time, however, the cylinders shot off directly.
When I left I passed a number of magic shops and tellers, most just opening for night business. While I generally ignored them for the nonsense hope peddlers that they were, Dredmore’s warning and Lady Diana’s strange wounds caused me to glance in a few windows.
Mages, tellers, and other practitioners of the dark arts were a clannish bunch and rarely socialized outside their ranks—Dredmore being one of the few, annoying exceptions, though he had once been titled, which evidently made him less repulsive to the tonners. They invariably lived where they worked, in small cramped lofts above their shops, which offered any and every sort of magic one could desire, from seeings to seekings to special charms.
The latest addition to their industry were warders: specialty mages who charmed wardlings forged of silver that were supposed to cast protective charms over people and homes and even whole buildings to protect them from the netherside and—what else?—ward off harmful or evil spells. One could hardly find a window or threshold in the city that hadn’t been adorned with a wardling.
What was interesting to me was just how many wardlings I saw in the windows and over the doors of the magic shops. Pretty as the inscribed silver disks were, they were as useless as oversize coins. Still, warders had been growing very influential of late, which baffled me to no end. I’d never thought that the other charlatans in their trade would ever believe that manner of foolishness.
I approached an old native shaman, who crouched in front of a neighborhood stable. He’d drawn a circle in the dirt around a white rat that had been tied to a large stone. I looked away as the old man used his blade to nick the rodent’s neck; I knew he’d use the blood to paint some strange design over the threshold of the stable. One of the local’s mounts must have died suddenly; the superstitious natives wouldn’t touch another horse in the same stable until the rat-blood ritual was performed. I had no love for rats, but seeing any creature bled for something so meaningless revolted me.
I didn’t realize I’d stopped in front of a richly decorated window until the middle-aged female proprietor unlocked the shop door, stepped out, and spoke to me. “See your future, miss?”
“I’m not a believer,” I said absently, and nodded toward her window, where she had displayed a row of inscribed silver disks hanging from neck chains. “Are you lot selling wardlings as baubles now?”
Her expression turned shuttered. “Pr’aps you’d best move on, miss. ’Twill be dark soon.” She turned and went back into the shop.
Tellers were the least offensive of mages, so I followed her in. “Hang on,” I called after her. “I changed my mind. I do want a seeing.”
“Sorry, can’t. I’m about to close.” She scampered behind a long counter covered with hundreds of lit candles, vials of colored stones, and large blueglass spirit snuffballs. “There’s another teller four doors down. She’ll see for you. She sees for anyone.”
I’d never patronized a teller before, but I vaguely remembered one of Rina’s gels comparing them to strumpets in that they demanded payment before service was rendered.
