Chapter 22 Lightning Strikes
LIGHTNING STRIKES
The room was singing with iron, every particle of it tingling against Temple’s fingertips, but he could not use any of it. It was set, no rust. He couldn’t even fashion a blade to hurl through Fordham’s eye.
He didn’t need iron. He would use his hands to kill that man. But what damage would he be able to do to Sybil before Temple got there? Not worth the risk.
Diana took a cautious step toward Fordham.
Temple caught her arm and pulled her back against him. “Not a step closer.”
“I have to,” she said. “It’s me he wants, not Sybil.”
“Absolutely not.” He tried not to waver, but Sybil… Diana… He’d thought he could protect everyone, and now no one he loved was safe.
She reached up and cupped his cheek, and the silk of her palm against his skin was everything he’d ever wanted, all of life’s sweetness in a few square inches, all of life’s goodness in the liquid gold of her eyes.
“I will be fine,” she said. “I promise.”
“He wants to kill you. He tried to kill you.”
Whispers broke out like rain all around them.
Easy to forget you’re not alone when the world had shrunk down to him, his wife, his sister, and the man trying to kill them both.
Now everyone knew, or thought they knew, and before this little drama was over, before someone lay in a pool of blood on the ballroom floor, the sordid tales would be spreading. They already were.
Diana’s hand slipped away from his cheek, and she walked backward, slipping out of his reach.
He had to let her go. God, he had to let her go. There was no other option. He had to trust her, and he had to be ready to do anything.
She continued a steady path toward her cousin.
“Release her,” Diana demanded. “You must.”
“Not until I have you in hand.” Fordham was a skeleton in dirty clothes.
And he was wearing a glamour. Or… some other magic.
Either someone had done an inadequate job glamouring him or he’d taken a potion, and those never lasted.
Certainly not if they were casting an illusion over an entire human.
And Fordham wore an entirely new appearance.
It was the face of a different man that bore a passing resemblance to Fordham.
It could have been the face of a cousin or uncle.
The illusion wore fine silk clothes with gold brocade, gaudy.
It flickered, seemed to… melt off him in places in only a way Temple could see.
For now. Soon, others would be able to see what he hid behind it—a lost man with a sunken face.
Soon, everyone would know. Or they would guess.
Fordham had no control over his talent. Or no talent at all. He was about to ruin himself.
Temple grinned.
Fordham reached out a hand. “Come here now, Diana.”
Diana nodded. And when Temple surged up behind her, his hand sneaking around her waist, she stilled him with a palm to his belly.
Without words, he knew what she wanted. He was to heel.
Like a good lapdog. But he was no one’s lapdog and never had been.
If he was any kind of beast, it was a dragon, a wolf, a griffin, a monster that would rip Fordham’s face off.
The ring on his finger glowed with a warning from Diana but also a reminder—this iron he could bend here and now. He could shape it into a burning brand to mark the other man’s face, to ruin his eyesight, to protect.
When Diana was close, almost within arm’s reach, she hesitated. “You were supposed to be out of town, cousin.”
“And you were supposed to break into the townhouse,” Fordham sneered, “where I have ten rather large brutes waiting to catch you. If you’d brave getting caught to steal a damn dog, I assumed you’d try again under safer circumstances for your other possessions.”
“Release Miss Grant,” Diana demanded again.
Fordham threw his head back and laughed. His face flickered.
“You look poorly, Apollo. Let me take you home. You should res—”
“If I look like death, it’s because of you!”
Diana’s back stiffened. She likely fears what Temple did—that Apollo was about to reveal her secret.
“I’ve been quite worried over you, cuz,” Apollo sneered, “that I’ve taken to drink, I’m afraid.” Gone was the boy of her youth. In his place stood a man she didn’t know—hollowed out and desperate.
Apollo dragged Sybil closer to Diana.
Diana’s head tilted to the side. Temple could not see her expression, but he knew that inquisitive angle. She’d seen her cousin’s glamour slip.
She took a single step toward Apollo. “Let us talk alone. There are many ears here to gather our private dealings. And many eyes, too.”
Was that a hint about his glamour? She was trying to warn him.
Fordham might have interpreted it that way. He looked down. Did he see what Temple did? Wrinkled shirt and trousers flickering beneath fading finery.
Fordham shoved Sybil to the floor, lurched forward, and grabbed Diana by the arm. “Your sister’s a pretty little thing,” he called out, catching Temple’s eye. “You’d better keep a leash on her or she’ll get hurt.”
Sybil jumped to her feet, and with a cry more like a hiss, she launched herself at Fordham, hands like claws ready to scratch.
Diana threw herself between Sybil and Fordham at the same time Temple grabbed Sybil around the waist and jerked her backward, put her behind him.
“Do not punish Sybil because I’ve married her brother,” Diana said.
“I don’t care who you’ve tricked into marrying you, cuz.” Fordham shouldered through the crowd. “Out of my way!” As the crowd parted, he dragged Diana toward the doors that led outside.
Nico appeared at Temple’s elbow and Temple’s father at the other.
“What should we do?” Niko asked.
“Sybil and Jane,” he said to his father, “take them to Nickleby. Nico, stay here. In case I need you.”
Temple’s father took Sybil’s hand without another word, and Jane popped up on toe and kissed her husband’s cheek before they disappeared into the crowd.
Together, he and Nico made for the doors. Nico had once produced weapons for the army, using his silver talent to create bullets that went farther and guns that shot with silent accuracy. He might now spend his days making toys for children, silver wonders of delight, but he knew deadly.
Diana had told Temple to stay back but he couldn’t help it. When she disappeared through those doors, he followed. The night air was thick with the scent of rain. A storm was coming. The sky in the distance grumbled, flashing with anger.
The dark garden had swallowed Diana and Fordham up, left no trail of breadcrumbs to follow them by.
“You go that way.” Temple pointed to the right. “I’ll go this way.” He nodded to the left. That direction… felt right. The ring warmed when he stepped that way. Nico disappeared like a shadow, and Temple ran.
The gravel crunched beneath his feet, and he opened his senses to the soil. More iron out here than inside but all of it in the sort of raw state he could do little with. Wait—
He froze. Something nearby. In the shadows.
He ducked behind the bush and dropped to his knees, searching, searching—aha!
A spade, rusty from being forgotten outside for who knew how long.
It left a window open in the iron, and he slipped through it.
He heated the iron in his blood until his hand glowed, and he used the forge of his own body to fashion the spade anew.
He stood and continued on as he worked, opening his ears to sounds past the gravel, the thunder rumbling in the distance, the wind.
“You don’t have to drag me, Apollo.”
There. Diana. Her voice sharp. That some comfort. If she was fighting, she wasn’t afraid.
Temple followed the sound of her voice.
“You ran last time,” Fordham said. “Are you going to tell me, newly married with a family who loves you, you’re not going to run again?”
“No. I will not run. I want to talk with you.”
He laughed, a guttural rusty sound.
Temple continued fashioning the spade, lengthening it, sharpening its end.
“I do not think,” Diana said softly, “you wanted to kill me. You were mad with grief. You—”
“I slammed your head into a wall, Di, and watched you die.” That last sentence wobbly, like a bird’s call in storm winds.
“And then you dropped to your knees and cried,” Diana countered.
No sound but the wind through the leaves, then.
“If you wanted to kill. Right now. You would have already done it. You would have taken that little golden knife in your hand and plunged it through my heart.”
“Not the heart. Too much muscle and bone to carve through.”
“I’m sure you’d find another way.”
Fordham managed something that sounded like a laugh. Sounded like a sneer, too. “You always were clever, weren’t you.”
“So were you. Use your brain now, Apollo. If the talent can come to me when no one thought it could, then who knows what more there is to discover. We’ll explore it together.”
The wind through the leaves sounded like a wailing.
Temple crept closer. He could see them now.
Fordham’s glamour had disappeared. He was a ruin, the hollowed-out shell of something once beautiful.
Ragged and weary, dead eyed and lean. He’d released Diana to lean like a scarecrow against a tree, his head hanging, his hair long and lank.
Diana pivoted her attention between the house at her back, the path before her that led to freedom, and her cousin.
Her face was like the moon—the kind of thing poets worshiped.
Her expression—pity—softened her beauty.
Temple’s iron blade was too blunt, unrefined.
But it would do. And it was done. He grasped the rounded hilt.
He couldn’t throw it, couldn’t risk his one weapon to bad aim, an ill wind, or a moving body.
He searched for a path to circle them through the bushes, one that would allow him to keep an eye on her.
Diana lifted a hand toward her cousin, then dropped it. “You look horrible, Apollo.”
“Shut up,” he hissed.
“I’m worried about you. What pain are you trying to heal?”