Chapter 13 #3
Faint slivers of light from the gas lamps on the street below appeared along the edges of the roof, along with light from the next building over. I followed the light as I searched for a rooftop ladder down to the street, then every part of the roof as icy rain thoroughly soaked my gown.
There was no ladder, no way to leave the roof except the way we came. I turned back to that rooftop door at a different sound as Kip shouted a warning.
Elias was there and he held Kip with an arm clasped about his neck.
He fought the man, flailing with that club that was grabbed from his hand. Elias looked up. I started toward them.
“I’ll kill him, ye know I will!” he threatened. I stopped.
“It’s not the lad I want.”
It was there all along, from the beginning at the Grassmarket. And before? Was Dory dead because of me?
It was there in that flat, deadly gaze that stared back at me, with Kip held in that death grip, the feathers at the front of his coat flapping wildly about in the wind.
“You don’t know me. You know nothing about me.”
“It doesna matter,” he shouted back. “I don’t ask the reasons.”
For someone else, I realized.
“Who is doing this?” I demanded. “Who sent ye?”
“I don’t ask that either. I don’t want to know who he is as long as he pays. And he has paid well fer ye to die.”
He.
Someone I knew?
“Now, ye will slowly come here, and I will let the boy go.”
I had no reason to believe him, even as I looked at Kip. He was frightened, I could see it in his eyes. In spite of the set of his jaw and the white-knuckled fingers that clawed at Elias’s arm.
“Miss?” he whispered. A question, for which there was only one answer as I slowly walked toward them.
“Aye, that is the way. It’s a shame, it is. Ye are a pretty one, I wouldna mind havin’ a piece of before wot I have to do. ’Tis a shame,” he repeated. “But as I said, for the fee...”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. Nor did I feel the rain that had stung at my face only moments before as I continued to walk toward them.
The light from the open door at the hallway behind them shifted.
“Let him go,” I told Elias in a voice that was both familiar and not. As if someone else spoke the words and continued to walk toward them.
“Wot’s that ye say?”
I saw pure evil as the light that surrounded them expanded, then seemed to splinter into a dozen different shafts of light that surrounded images of things I had been certain were not real but dreams.
They were real. The were like pieces of shattered glass with glimpses of things out of the past—my friend’s body in a pool of blood, a vase of flowers, Munro as he had looked at me with that strange expression on his face.
And the image of Abby in that cold, stone hallway as she had returned to the horror of that place.
The pain of the lash and a woman draped in black standing over me.
Kip, with the look on his face, the way he had stared at me at the Grassmarket.
“Let him go!” I shouted at him once more.
That evil smile was his answer.
The memories and images exploded in a ball of light as if they were glass, showering down over him. He cursed and screamed, flames burning on his face and hands. He let go of Kip, tried to escape across the roof, and screamed as his clothes burst into flames.
I went after him, not with rage, but with a promise. He would never hurt anyone again.
He had reached the edge of the roof and discovered as I had that there was no escape except the way he had come, as I followed. He held his hands up as if to hold back the fire...or perhaps me.
“Wot are ye?” he screamed.
There was more—I didn’t hear the words. Only the screams as the fire roared and engulfed him, and he threw himself over the edge, blue feathers fluttering in the wind like blue flames.
It was terrifying to watch, equally terrifying as heat slowly eased inside me like a dying fire.
When the sky overhead had darkened once more, I fell to the roof, then slowly curled myself into a tight ball against the cold night air that surrounded me.
I couldn't explain what happened. All I knew was that the man who called himself Mr. Elias was gone. He would never hurt anyone again. Yet, there was still someone rich and powerful who wanted me dead and had been willing to have Dory and Old Meggy killed to get to me.
Why? My entire life I was nothing. Something tossed away, left at that Foundling Hospital with no name other than the one a woman I did not know had given me.
Then, left to the streets after I ran away.
I didn’t exist until Dory found me. And then that encounter with Mikaela Forsythe that had changed so many things.
It was as if my life began then. I was finally someone, even if I didn’t know where I had come from, and the tears burned on my cheeks.
A single black crow swept near and perched at the edge of the roof. A messenger some believed—a warning, one for sorrow. For someone I couldn’t protect, yet for the one I was able to save.
Munro was there. He pulled me into his arms.
“I’ve got ye. He’s gone, he willna ever hurt anyone again.”
How much had he seen? Was it even real?
I wasn’t certain that I knew, only that it was over, as a thin, grubby boy pushed his way into my arms.
“Yer alive!” Kip cried through his own tears.
“Aye, lad,” Munro gently replied. “She’s alive.”