5. Lilith
LILITH
Three days of wrong shadows and I am starting to lose my professional composure, which is a problem because my professional composure is the only thing that separates me from the kind of thief who gets caught.
The shadows in Cutler's Alley corrected themselves.
Fine. I filed that under Odd Things Lilith Saw at Four in the Morning and moved on.
Odd Things Lilith Saw at Four in the Morning is a long category.
It includes a man fighting a lamp post, a woman who insisted she was Queen Victoria's chambermaid, and a constable face-down in a horse trough singing hymns.
Shadows that sit funny rated low on the list.
But then the shadow under the bridge on Hanbury Street was too long.
Then the one in the courtyard behind the pawnshop on Brick Lane sat at an angle that doesn't exist when the sun is west of the chimney.
Then the shadow in the stairwell outside my flat—my stairwell, my building, the stairwell I've climbed four thousand times—was three inches wider than it should have been.
I changed my routes. I doubled back. I used every trick the rookeries taught me—false turns, sudden stops, walking into a crowd and walking out a different person, the whole bag.
The shadows adjusted. Not quickly. Subtly.
The way a good locksmith adjusts a mechanism to account for a new key—small changes, patient, intelligent.
Something is learning my patterns.
I don't like being learned.
"This is getting insulting," I tell the shadow in the stairwell on the morning of the third day. It is exactly the right width again. Whatever follows me has started correcting faster, as if it heard my complaints about Cutler's Alley and took notes.
Marcus is watching me from the doorway. "Who are you talking to?"
"The stairs."
"Right." He's got his coat on—the one I bought two sizes too large so he'd grow into it, except he's growing faster than I budgeted for and the sleeves are already above his wrists. "Lil, you've been acting strange."
"I've been acting strange since I was thirteen. Be specific."
"Stranger than usual." He leans against the door frame. Sixteen years old and trying very hard to look like he's not worried. He's worried. "You checked the locks four times last night. You never check them four times. You check them twice. I count."
He counts. Of course he counts. He learned that from me.
Everything useful about Marcus—the counting, the caution, the way he watches a room—he learned from me, and everything dangerous about him—the temper, the recklessness, the belief that he can protect people by throwing himself between them and the problem—he learned from Da.
"There's something in the rookeries," I say, because Marcus has earned honesty and because lying to him takes more energy than I have this morning. "Following me. Watching. I don't know what it is."
"Coppers?"
"Coppers are stupid. This isn't stupid."
"Gang?"
"Gangs are loud. This is quiet."
He's quiet himself for a moment. Thinking. The line of his jaw works the way it does when he's chewing on something he doesn't want to say. "Fae?"
The word lands in my kitchen like a stone in still water. Fae. The obvious answer. The one I've been not-thinking about for three days because thinking about it means admitting that whatever is following me through the rookeries isn't a problem I can solve with a knife and quick feet.
"Maybe," I say.
"Then we should leave."
"Where?"
He opens his mouth. Closes it. There it is—the question that has no answer, the lock with no keyhole. Where do you go when the thing following you lives in every shadow in the city? Where do you run when the darkness is the problem?
"I'll figure it out," I tell him, because that's what I do.
I figure things out. That's the deal—Lilith figures it out, Lilith finds the money, Lilith opens the lock, Lilith keeps them alive.
The fact that I don't know how to figure out shadows that learn is a technical difficulty, not a defeat.
I've faced technical difficulties before.
I faced one at thirteen with a baker's window.
Shaking hands. No experience. I figured it out. They ate.
"Go to school," I say. "Take Elena. Walk Tommy to Mrs. Chen's."
"Lil—"
"Marcus." I put my hand on his shoulder. He's taller than me now, which is a recent development I find personally offensive. "I will figure it out."
He goes. He takes Elena and Tommy. The door closes behind them. The flat is empty. I stand in my kitchen and look at the shadow under the table.
Normal shadow. Table-shaped, floor-bound, correctly sized.
"You'd better be normal," I tell it.
I go to Fat Maisie's.
Fat Maisie runs the closest thing the rookeries have to an intelligence service out of the back room of a gin house on Commercial Street.
The place smells like juniper and spilled beer and the tang of secrets being sold at a markup.
Maisie herself is enormous, shrewd, with a face like a dropped pudding and eyes that miss nothing.
Everything has a price with her. The price is always exactly one penny more than you want to pay.
"Lilith Grey." She doesn't look up from the gin she's watering. "You look like something the cat's debating."
"Charming as always, Maisie. I need information."
"Information costs money."
"Information always costs money. That's why I brought money." I put a silver coin on her table. It's more than I can afford and less than she deserves and we both know it. "Something's in the rookeries. Following me. Shadows that sit wrong. I need to know what."
Maisie looks at the coin. Looks at me. Picks up the coin with fingers like sausages in silk gloves and bites it, because Maisie bites every coin.
It's a point of principle. The tooth she lost to a forged shilling six years back is on a string around her neck—Maisie keeps her own teeth the way other women keep wedding rings.
The shilling is lost to history. The man who handed her the shilling is not, but I've heard his shoes turn up in the Thames every spring like clockwork.
"Fae," she says. "Old one. Powerful. Been seen near the docks and the market and your particular stretch of Spitalfields, which is a coincidence I'm sure.
" She pours gin—the watered kind, for customers; her own is behind the counter and full-strength.
"Something from Shadow Court, if the whispers are right.
And the whispers are always right because I pay the whispers. "
Shadow Court. I know the courts the way everyone in the rookeries knows them—by reputation, by fear, by the tributes their collection agents extract from families who can't afford to refuse.
Thorn Court runs the politics. Frost Court runs the healing trade.
Shadow Court runs—well. Nobody's entirely sure what Shadow Court runs. That's the point.
"What does it want?"
"You, from the look of things." Maisie takes a pull of her full-strength gin. "Word is they're looking for someone. One someone. Specific. Whatever you stole, Lil, you might consider giving it back."
I didn't steal from Shadow Court. I stole from a merchant in the better quarter. The documents were trafficking records. Morrow paid triple. None of that connects to a Fae court that controls shadows.
Except a lock opened before I picked it. And the shadow in the study sat on purpose. And shadows have been following me for three days with a patience and intelligence that isn't human.
"Thanks, Maisie."
"Spend your gratitude somewhere it spends. I take coin."
The streets outside are louder than they should be and brighter than they should be and my mind is doing the rapid, branching thing it does when a job has gone wrong—exits, options, resources, costs.
We could leave Ashworth. Except leaving costs money and the rent is due tomorrow.
We could hide. Except you can't hide from shadows. We could—
A woman with a handcart blocks the crossing and for one stupid, useless second I am standing still in the rookeries with my heart going too fast and my hands, my reliable hands, wanting to shake.
I don't let them.
Home. Bag packed. Marcus gets the news standing in the kitchen: we're moving tonight when the children are in bed. He says "Where?" The answer isn't there. We stand looking at each other and not saying the thing we're both thinking, which is that there might not be a where.
The children go to bed early. Tommy asks why. I say we're having an adventure tomorrow. He believes me because Tommy believes everything, which is the most terrifying and beautiful thing about him.
Elena watches me from her pillow with eyes that are too old for fourteen. "Is it bad?" she asks quietly.
"Nothing I can't handle," I say.
"You always say that."
"That's because I always handle it."
She doesn't look convinced. She rolls over and curls around Tommy and closes her eyes.
I sit on the floor by the door. Packed bag beside me.
Bramah locked. Knife in my hand, the grip warm from my palm.
Three years ago I sat on this floor with a stolen bracelet and a head full of plans for the proceeds.
Tonight I'm sitting on it waiting for a Fae court to come collect me.
The career trajectory is what they call lateral.
The flat smells like the coal we don't have enough of, the dinner I scraped together, Tommy's soap, the scent of sleeping children—which is the best thing I've ever stolen from the world and the thing I'm most afraid of losing.
The flat is dark. The fire is out. The children are breathing.
The night is pressing against the window.
I'm sitting in the dark the way I've sat in the dark a thousand times before, except tonight the dark has a name, a court, a reason for watching.
I don't know the reason yet. That's the part I can't pick.
The lock on my door—the Bramah, seven levers, my hands, my work, the best security I could build—clicks.
Not picked. Not forced. The levers seat themselves one by one, a soft cascade of mechanical surrender, and the bolt slides back without anyone touching it and the door drifts open an inch on its hinges.
My lock. My door. Opening on its own, as if the mechanism decided that whatever is on the other side should be let in.
I grip the knife. My hand is steady. The rest of me isn't. My heart is slamming against my ribs, my mouth is dry, and there's a taste at the back of my tongue—metallic, sharp, like licking a coin. Fear. The animal kind, the kind that bypasses thought and goes straight to the legs and says run.
I don't run. My siblings are behind me.
The dark in the hallway beyond the door is the wrong kind of dark.
Dense. Deliberate. Familiar now, after three days.
And there's that smell again—the one from the merchant's study, dark and mineral, like wet stone deep underground.
Stronger now. Close. It fills the gap where the door has opened.
My skin tightens the way it tightened in the study.
There's a heat along my arms that has no source and no explanation.
Something breathes in it. The breath carries the smell—stone and shadow and something else, something hot underneath the cold, something my body leans toward before my mind can stop it.
The low pull is back—the same one from Cutler's Alley, the heat that gathers between my hips and tightens and has no business being here while something unknown is breathing in my hallway.
My nipples are hard against my chemise and that's the cold, that's only the cold, except the cold has been here all evening and they weren't hard five minutes ago.
I take a step back. Force my weight onto my heels.
Whatever my body thinks it wants from the dark in that hallway, it can want it on its own time, because right now three children are sleeping six feet behind me.
I have a knife. A Bramah lock that just opened itself.
I'm going to be terrified and furious about this, not—not whatever the other thing is. Not that.
"Right," I whisper to the knife, to the door, to the Bramah that just betrayed me. "Right. Here we go."