Chapter Thirty-One Patrick
In the first cold squalls of night, Patrick and his father left Bleaker’s Textiles.
They adjusted their coats, their hats, eyes pinched against the cold, and stepped out onto the vacant road, boots sinking as they went. Farther into town, a lone chimney sent curling smoke skyward. Without speaking, they walked in its direction.
Three coppers, Edith had told them. Sent, no doubt, to ensure the post, the police house, and the swank residences weren’t looted. After all, those buildings were Artisan-owned.
“What will you do?” Nina had asked him, watching him pull on warmer attire, no doubt from some dead lad’s wardrobe.
He’d watched the flecks in her eyes distend. “Better I don’t put words to it.”
“You’ll kill them?”
“Yes.”
“I want to come,” she said to John and Patrick both.
Patrick sighed. He could see the hunger pulsing behind her eyes, that yawning gulf in her heart again. The way she clamored to fill it. He had a heart to match.
Riddled through, the both of them.
“Not this time,” he said. He wanted to explain how these coppers would cry and plead and piss themselves.
How they’d reduce to the feeblest creatures.
How the look on their faces as they died would dig themselves into the trenches of her brain, drudged up in dreams a year from now, ten years from now.
“It ain’t your beast to slay,” he said instead.
“But it’s yours?”
“It is,” he said. He was a Colson. The Miners Union was his business.
“I need you to stay with Polly,” he’d said then. Polly had found a desk in the back offices. She was bent over The Stewards’ Testament and a stack of blank parchment.
Edith had given the rest of them blankets and assigned them a corner to keep to. They were handed bowls of stew by a young woman who carried a baby in a sling. She doled out the food with a blank expression, as though they were just more mouths to feed.
Patrick had given his meal to Nina. “Eat mine,” he said, then hesitated, his fingers brushed up against hers, and he felt the charge running over her skin. “Every lord, and every minister,” he reminded her. “They’ll all be beneath the heel of your boot soon.”
Then he left, feeling as though he was shedding one skin and taking on another. Transforming from man to wolf beneath the moon.
The fire Charmers had left the town center untouched, as was their habit. Still, ash stuck to the brick, the sills, the gables. The shingles and gutters were black with it. Through the window of the squat trading post, candlelight flickered.
Patrick and his father came to a standstill before it, puffs of breath beating out, their hands winding into their coats and taking an inventory. Revolver, rope, kerosene.
John shook out his arms like he was shaking off cobwebs. “Let’s see if they bite,” he said.
What most didn’t understand about the wolf was that it stalked the night in a perfunctory way. It mauled for its territory, no matter the neck. It tore flesh from bone without much relish; hardly any meat was taken for itself.
The door kicked off its latch easily, punched into the wall with the sound of a gunshot.
And already, they wailed.
Three coppers, just as Edith promised. All in their navy uniforms, their Belavere emblems, waistcoats unbuttoned and guts overhanging their belts.
They flailed in their chairs. Their limbs, for a moment, taking flight from their bodies.
One fell right off his chair, his mouth holed open, teeth wine-tinged.
Another shouted, scattered the playing cards he was holding. The third had the wherewithal to reach for a vacant holster.
But their guns, all three of them, lay strewn on the oak countertop, where the Crafters would normally line up for an hour or more to give over more than half their stock, their harvest, their textiles.
“Not on your life,” John said as one of the men made to move toward it. John cocked the hammer of his own gun, lifted it lazily by his waist. “Take your seats, boys.”
Slowly, the mush of their brains finding order again, they resumed their seats, bodies turned toward Patrick and John. One of them held his hands up.
“We’re Belavere officers,” another blithered, the last refrains of a desperate man. “You can’t do this! They’ll come for you.”
“That’s the trouble with you coppers,” John said, taking rope from his pocket.
“Got a short fuckin’ memory.” He threw his gun to Patrick, who caught it, moved toward the man closest. “You’re a swank’s guard dog now, but you were born a Crafter.
And just when has the House ever lifted its head to the likes of us, eh?
” He tied the first man’s wrists to his chair.
“One more dead Crafter in the brink don’t mean nothin’ to ’em. ”
“They’ll hang you,” another spat, but his great teeth chattered in his head. “They’ll hang both you bastards!”
“A quick death,” Patrick said in return. “Nothin’ like the ones about to happen here tonight.”
The copper shriveled. John grabbed his wrist, but the man yanked it back and tried to stand.
A shot rang out, blistered the insides of Patrick’s ears, but the bullet sailed where he’d meant it, right into the copper’s shin, and the man fell, squealing and flailing.
“Nowhere to run, boys,” he said. “This is where it ends for you. May as well speak with your God now and make peace with him.”
John pulled the man, crying now, back onto the chair, tied his hands behind his back.
“I always wonder,” Patrick said as the last copper was tied to his chair, “what goes through a man’s head when he walks through his town, sees it burnin’, sees the kids in the street dyin’, and doesn’t lift a finger.”
They all three sat shaking so much that their noses ran, the tendons of their neck seeming to break through the skin.
Patrick went to the copper closest and held a gun between his eyes. “How black is the soul of a man who lets his townspeople burn?”
“Please,” he begged. Always, at the end, they begged.
“Unfortunately for you, boys, I’ve got my own blackened soul.” Patrick stepped back. He put his gun in his coat, took the three from the countertop, and stowed those away, too.
John pulled a canister of kerosene from his pocket and poured the contents over their card table and the floorboards beneath their feet. Patrick struck a match. “For Trent,” Patrick told them. “By dusk, our work is done.”
Patrick did not follow his father back into Bleaker’s Textiles. He knew there would be no sleep for him. It was a kind of penance, he thought, that even bone-deep weariness wasn’t enough to let him rest on nights like this.
He stayed out in the cold, his back against the outer factory wall.
In his mind, he imagined the route from Trent to Sommerland.
From Sommerland to Kenton Hill. He calculated the transit, estimated the number of injured who would die in this factory in the coming days.
He devised plans to get supplies here faster.
He had contacts in Baymouth he could reach out to. He could—
Boots ground into snow, and Patrick looked up to see Nina sneaking out into the night, sliding back the factory door.
Patrick sighed. He couldn’t explain the quiver of relief that burned through him in that moment.
Her eyes fell to his hands, currently pilfering his own pockets to no avail. He hadn’t been aware of it until that moment. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
Snow was catching in her hair, in her eyelashes. “A cigarette.”
She should be sleeping. She’d spent hours in the cold burying corpses.
She’d walked miles and miles underground and almost been buried alive.
Instead, she was assessing him, rose lips slightly parted, slender eyebrows pinched.
She crossed her arms over her chest and dipped her head against the cold. “I should like to take a walk.”
Patrick scoffed tiredly. “No, you shouldn’t.”
But she shrugged, wrapped her borrowed coat tighter around her, and abruptly set off. She looked back over her shoulder at Patrick as she passed him. “Are you coming?”
“Nope.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and marched off into the dark, disappearing around the corner.
“Damn it, woman,” Patrick hissed between his teeth.
He shouldn’t follow. Lord knew he shouldn’t follow.
“Fuck me,” he muttered, shaking his head.
He found her again in a smoker’s hole. Kenton Hill factories didn’t bother with such things, but he supposed in a textile factory, the masters wouldn’t want their fabric stinking of tobacco and ash.
The workers would come to this outer shed in the winter.
It kept out the snow and the wind enough to light a cigarette, though not enough to keep out the chill.
Nina sat on a bench within, discarded newsprint at her side. On it, the headline read Union Trades Alchemist for Earth Charmer’s Clemency. Nina frowned at it.
“I would have, you know,” he said, leaning against the doorframe.
She looked up at him. “Would have what?”
“Traded myself if it meant keepin’ you from the whip.”
Her eyes shone star-bright. “Why?”
He considered his answer carefully. “I’ve seen you bleed enough,” he said, his eyes slipping to her arms. “Don’t think I could watch it again.”
She looked down at her feet. “Are you pretending you can’t stomach the sight of blood?”
“Not yours,” he said observationally. He didn’t look at her as he said it, only stayed leaning against that frame, affecting an air of indifference he didn’t feel. “Some walk,” he quipped.
By way of reply, she held up a single white papered cigarette. “Thought the night called for it,” she said. “Take it.”
Patrick’s head tilted. “And just where did you get your hands on that?”
“In the coat Tamir gave me.” Her other hand opened to reveal a matchbox.
Patrick shook his head and took it from her, but didn’t light it. He sat in the seat beside her, throwing the newsprint to the floor, and their shoulders brushed.
It was dark in the shed, but the smoker’s hole had windows and a wide-open door. The night had turned clear, periwinkle, silent in a way Kenton Hill never was. He now craved the endless rumble of home.