Chapter 29
Present Day
Shadows of quavering branches danced around my feet as I plodded through damp grass and leaves in a fresh, if borrowed, shirtwaist, skirt and coat.
The twilight tasted like snow, riding a night wind that bit my cheeks and pried under my scarf as I led Pretoria and Perry through the university gardens.
The city was silent, now—the silence of indrawn breaths and coming storms, of a hunter taking aim. A strict military curfew had been placed and soldiers patrolled the streets, the tromp of their boots and the occasional fist on a door the only sounds.
No one heard our footsteps, not in the streets, nor now, in the soft, damp grass of the green and its blanket of leaves.
“Please hurry,” Pretoria complained, clutching her scarf about her throat with one hand. The other hovered, concealing us in a bubble of skewed time. “The cold gives me such a headache.”
A few lights peeked out from windowpanes and curtains as we approached Maddeson’s building, but there was no one to question us when Perry swung the front door open.
The building was, to all appearances, empty, and my hope waned.
But if Maddeson was not here, we would look elsewhere before conceding that Baffin had already found him. His home. The museum island.
Pretoria kept her sorcery flowing as we passed by study parlors and closed office doors.
Even if we had not had Pretoria’s magic to conceal us, we did not look out of place on the university grounds.
We were all styled as students, Pretoria and I in skirts, shirtwaists, vests, and trim jackets, and Perry in a tweed suit with a satchel at one hip.
The satchel, rather than containing books, held the bullets, binoculars, lockpicks, and various other tools of his and Pretoria’s trade.
I had a satchel as well, though mine was empty in anticipation of the artifact.
“This is it.” I pointed to Maddeson’s door. Light seeped beneath the barrier and I grinned in satisfaction. “He is here.”
Perry took the lead, resting his fingers on the handle and meeting his wife’s gaze. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she affirmed.
Perry swung the door inwards. Electric light poured around Pretoria’s skirts as she strode into the room, skewing time afresh with an effortless crook of the wrist. I followed next, hands ungloved.
The office looked the same as the last time I had stood here; the shelves packed with books, oddities, and treasures strewn about and the carpet beneath our careless boots depicting a fine Eleshi motif.
But it was not Dr. Maddeson at the desk.
“I assume you are not the professor,” Pretoria said, sounding more than a little disappointed. She dropped her hands and the room sunk back into the proper flow of time.
A gangly young man shot to his feet. His chair toppled and his pen rolled, trailing ink across the paper he had been scrawling. He noticed the pen at the same time as me and lunged forward, snatching it up before it could stain an open book.
“Who—” the young man asked, clutching the pen like a talisman. I recognized him as the one who had brought me tea, on my last visit. “Who are you?”
Pretoria crossed the room slowly. “Someone who is very disappointed to find you instead of Dr. Maddeson.”
Behind us, Perry pulled a pistol from the back of his trousers and rested it pointedly against his thigh.
“I am his research assistant!” The young man reared back into a bookcase, his eyes now flicking between the three of us. His gaze focused on me as I approached the shelves beside him. “I know you. You’re that secretary! Oi—do not touch that!”
“Where is Maddeson’s research on the Entwined?” I demanded, pointing to the newly empty shelves where his notes had been. I looked from him to the rest of the room, but though there were stacks of books and papers in numerous locations, none of them seemed right.
My stomach sank. The answer seemed clear, though I needed confirmation before I accepted it. Baffin had already been here, and he had taken both Maddeson and his research.
“Where is the professor?” I asked.
The boy seemed, at this point, to forget his tongue.
Pretoria sighed, straightening and pulling one of her hatpins free. It proved to be a fine dagger, which left an equally delicate sheath in her hat with its twin.
Pretoria tossed the blade casually into the air and froze it in a skew of time between her and the assistant.
“Hear me, young man. You find yourself in the company of the very finest mages in Harrow. All Adepts, the lot of us. You can see for yourself what I am. The mousy one, she is an Eventide. And that handsome fellow there with the gun? Well, I shall let you learn for yourself what he is.”
“Where is Maddeson?” I repeated. “And his research?”
“Mr. Maddeson went to the museum! The Grand!” the young man rattled out. “With a police detective. Said he needed to identify an artifact of some kind.”
I stilled. “A police detective?”
“Yes!”
“Detective Supford?” I tried, bewildered though I was.
“That’s him.” The assistant lit up, as if I had thrown him a lifeline.
“What artifact was he required to identify?” I pressed.
“A Landsdown Trove artifact,” the young man said. “Of Incarnate stone.”
The gears of my brain shuddered, ground, and began to turn. In chasing the carved box, I had lost sight of the fact that the treasure was not simply the box itself—but its contents.
Could it be that Baffin had the empty box, and the police had somehow found its separate contents?
I laughed. I had to. There was no other response to the strain and absurdity of the situation.
The assistant looked even more perturbed by my laugh.
“What about the professor’s research,” Pretoria prodded. The knife glittered. “Did the police take all that?”
“No, someone came to collect it, not half an hour ago, from the Grand General, I believe. The unrest, and all. Our sponsor: he expressed concerns about the university’s security.
” At this he stared at Pretoria’s knife again, the aptness of his words clearly not lost to him.
“And so he had it moved. I do not know where. They do not tell me things.”
“Did this someone from the Grand General also ask where Dr. Maddeson was?” I asked.
The assistant nodded.
“And you told them.”
Another nod.
“Damn.” I met Pretoria’s gaze. “We need to move quickly.”
Pretoria reclaimed her knife and waved it at the assistant. “Get your coat, dear. You are coming with us.”
We stepped back out into the cool of the night to the sound of distant gunshots, somewhere out in the city. We were a grim but determined procession, hastening through starlight and shadow, back through the university grounds and to a side gate.
Pretoria’s threads began to twine in the starlight. They were gentle, pale things, and seemed to pulse with distant light. She lifted her chin with a satisfied sigh and shook out her shoulders, settling into the increase of power.
When the change in the night came, it was subtle. A whisper and a breath. Pretoria must have felt it too, for her magic faltered for an instant, and then—soldiers.
Six of them stepped from the night. Perry raised his pistol in the same instant as Pretoria threw us into a new skew of time.
One soldier stepped right through it, levelling a rifle right at her face. Pips glistened on the soldier’s collar, above which she wore the same threads as Pretoria. Another Starlight.
Maddeson’s assistant made a strangled sound and raised his arms high over his head.
“Lay down your weapons,” the other Starlight mage demanded.
I barely heard her, because my eyes had landed on the soldier directly before me, his blond hair darkened by the shadows, and his eyes inscrutable hollows beneath the brim of his cap.
Lewis.
I cannot say what possessed me. It was, I think, a momentary madness brought on by recent events, coupled with our need for haste, and an instinctual, desperate need to know whether my erstwhile fiancé, looking at me down the barrel of a rifle, was truly my enemy.
I grasped the barrel of the rifle and pulled it straight out of his hands. He reacted a fraction too late, hands tightening, body lunging. I had already sidestepped. I used his own momentum to throw him into one of his comrades and stepped back with the rifle to my own shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
He opened his mouth to reply. Then his eyes flicked right.
Pretoria had vanished. The soldier next to Lewis dropped like a stone, his legs kicked out from under him, and chaos broke loose.
Perry hurled himself behind the nearest tree.
Several soldiers leapt to intervene. The rest cried out in alarm, moving under the Starlit soldier’s instruction to find Pretoria.
For that scattered moment, at least, they left Lewis and I to our own devices.
I stared at him down the barrel of his rifle. I almost repeated my earlier question, but there was no time for explanations.
“Do you require rescue?” I asked.
He faltered in something between startlement and a desperate laugh. Both were gone in a flash, replaced by a raised hand and a warning, “Patterson, wait—”
I twisted, bringing the rifle to bear just in time as a hand seized the back of my neck.
A thread of my energy evaporated, and my vision blurred. A Silver.
“Leave her!” Lewis shouted.
The hand departed. The contact had been brief enough that my energy returned in a rush, and I took immediate advantage of it.
I cast Lewis one last, imploring look, then bolted. The Silver, Patterson, stepped into my path but I danced neatly aside, the grace of the movement ruined by a pell-mell swing as I shifted the rifle into a club and struck him across the head. He dropped. I hurtled on.
Like Perry I made for the shelter of a tree, and beyond, a hedge. I tumbled through an archway and into the extensive university gardens, where rows of shrouded hedges and winding pathways were speckled with benches and pavilions.