Tarnished (30 page)

I jerked my head, flinching as the band pinched my temples. “Why am I here?” I demanded.

“A better question,” he told me, his beetled eyebrows drawing together. He crossed the floor, the golden disc vanishing into one weathered palm. “You are here because you are your mother’s daughter. With your help, all shall be as it was, isn’t that lovely?” He beamed at me, smiling a toothy thing that looked permanently torn between sunny disposition and the grimace of the deeply unhinged.

“I don’t understand!” I cried, wrenching at my bonds. They clanked, but failed to give.

As if I were merely a precocious child, his chuckle filled the air like a warm fire, cheerful. Deeply . . . disturbing. I’d
heard
that laugh before.

Hadn’t I?

Where?

Every touch, every movement, sent twinges of pain through the wound sucking at that glass tube. I winced. I wasn’t thinking. I needed to stop, I needed to push aside the foggy remnants of the laudanum and
think.

The clues were here.

I stared at him—at the thin hands reaching out for the tubed connector between the tables, at the shape of his thin lips framed in a genteel gray mustache—every nerve, every memory, every fiber of my being screamed that I knew this man.

I wracked my mind. The opium den?

The Menagerie?

Something went
click
. I shook my head, the back of my skull grinding against the hard table, and then gasped as I realized he’d set the cameo into a copper-plated slot in the cabble-ridden fixture set between my table and the one beside me. “There,” he said cheerfully. “Isn’t she lovely?” There was another click as something fell into place, and a faint
hiss
. A pink puff wafted into the air.

My skin turned to ice. “What are you doing?” I demanded. My voice no longer obeyed me; high and shrill, terror thickened my tongue.

“Poor poppet.” Wide gray eyes met mine as he bent over my prone form, and I couldn’t summon the will to flinch as the professor touched my cheek with gentle, oily fingers. “You won’t feel a thing.” And then he frowned, brow furrowing. “That’s your mother,” he said, gesturing to the cameo. “Didn’t you know? She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?”

“But I don’t—”
Remember her.

Only I did. I knew her face, the shape of her cheek. Her mouth. It was mine. Hadn’t everyone said it? I looked just like her, and now I recognized the profile on the wide cameo. So like
me
. I narrowed my eyes at the madman, my fists clenched, glass tube pinching. “Who
are
you?”

He sighed. “Your father, Cherry. We are your parents.”

I could only stare, my mouth falling open.

“And though we’ve been absent from your life for too long,” he said, once more sliding into a frenetic kind of cheer and gesturing manically to the greater lab, “Providence has brought us together again! Never you fear. All shall . . .”

Be what it was.

But he didn’t finish it, frowning as he stared down at my hand. No, the tube. I forced my chin down as far as it could go, peering at the inner bend of my elbow. A droplet floated serenely through the glass, a pink pearl bobbing lazily closer and closer to the raw red hole in my arm.

My teeth clicked together before the scream in my chest found escape through them. “What,” I gritted out, “is this? What are you doing to me?”

His eyes remained on the tube. One hand flattened on my shoulder, pressing my left side to the metal table. All trace of good humor left his tone. “Preparing you, my dear. You are going to be your mother’s salvation. Isn’t that lovely?”

No. No, it was . . . it was madness!

I jerked, struggled to escape the immovable restraints, wrenched at my arm as if I could jostle the glass loose, but I only succeeded in sending waves of pain through my limb. I cried out, and the man who called himself my father took my hand firmly in his. “Shh,” he soothed, as if I were that child he thought he knew once more. “There, there. There—” He stiffened, his fingers tightening around mine, and glared at the musty silhouette. “There’s time,” he snapped, eyebrows drawing together in a wiry gray line over his spectacles. “There’s still—”

Again, he stopped talking, his eyes narrowing.

He let go of my hand. “Be good, poppet,” he added absently. His voice was only half directed at me, I was sure. It was the same tone I often used when Fanny tried to speak to me while I read. Not wholly paying attention. Saying only what one thought was expected.

He left me staring at the innocuous pink droplet as it bobbed and swayed closer to my arm. My skin.

The hole inside it.

Please
, I thought, feeling my eyes widen. Feeling them ache inside their sockets as if I could glare the droplet away.
Please, please, don’t
 . . .

It bounced lightly against the edges of the wound. I couldn’t feel it, but my mind didn’t care about such technicalities. My entire body seized as it rebounded. Hovered for a breath, a wild heartbeat.

And vanished into the wound.

“No!” The word choked as the bend of my arm began to tingle. All at once, another glistening bead dripped from the end of the solid tubing. It danced along the same route, and led another behind it. And then another.

They slipped into my bloodstream one by one, ignoring my cries for help, my desperate pleading. The tingle became a burn, and then a slow, bleeding smolder as the droplets became a ribbon, and the ribbon became a pink stream.

Around me, lights brightened as the professor shuffled from one lantern to another and turned up the wicks. He didn’t have to bother. Where the pink chemicals went, my skin began to glow.

I knew what would happen next.
The drug, as you so called it, weakened the bond between your body and your soul.

The Karakash Veil had told me what the drug did. Told me, and I’d failed to believe.

Now, assaulted by the same pink substance—at the hands of a man claiming to be my own father, no less—and I didn’t have the strength to argue the facts now.

I’d become an experiment in my own father’s laboratory.

I threw back my head and clenched my teeth, waiting for the pain. But it didn’t come. Not as quickly as the last.

“Rest easy, my girl.” St. Croix’s voice drifted across the room like an autumn wind. Too warm to be winter, filled with the promise of dying things. Of empty things. Of long nights by lonely fires.

Oh, God. It was starting.

My stomach clenched as the burn slid into it. Beyond it. And with it, that sense of
other
.

Remember.

I didn’t dare. Along the pink and gold path laid out in my mind were memories I didn’t dare unleash. Memories that beckoned from within the opium-clouded vaults of my own mind; images and sounds and words I’d kept locked away for so long.

Was I imagining them now?

Was the opium within the drug already affecting me?

The first twinge plucked at my stomach. Twisting slowly, like a coiling spring. Too far, and it’d snap. And oh, God, the pain that would accompany it.

“All will be as it was,” the professor said happily as he raised the lantern over me. His eyes gleamed, wicked diamonds in my suddenly too-vibrant sight. His teeth flashed in a smile that sent shockwaves through my head.

My heart.

My girl.

Me? Was I his girl?

He ducked out of sight. I turned my head, feeling as if I had to force myself to do so. I was trapped in honey, thick and sluggish and so sweet it made my bones ache, and my eyes blurred as I stared at the veiled shadow arrayed beside me.

Something creaked from the shadows, something groaned and pinged. I heard it hum—
was that my blood?
—and snap and crackle—
was that my blood in my veins?
—and I heard it explode.

It wasn’t me. Any of me.

You would now be something not dead and not alive. A revenant, enslaved.

A woman. I remembered . . . a woman.

Light erupted into long, blue streamers around me, crawled across the metal rafters I could now see clearly. Electricity snapped and sparked from metal rods soldered into the walls. Snaked across the tubes covering the floor.

My skin prickled, every hair on my body rising as the air crackled.

Rest easy, my girl.

I clenched my eyes shut. Not me. I’d never been his girl. I was loved, of course I was loved—what scientist’s child couldn’t be, when she had so much potential to offer to the St. Croix name?—but he’d called me . . .

He’d called me . . .

My eyes flared wide again.

Poppet.

The table shuddered. I swallowed a scream as pain flared inside my belly, my chest. It knocked. It prowled beneath my skin,
other
and
not other
.

Me and not me.

The room tilted.
I
tilted. The table shook and wobbled, inclined slowly.

My girl.

Me. Not me. The
other
slammed into my chest with so much force, I choked on my own breath. No, not on air, on something thicker. Cold as ice, formless as a fog.

A woman! I remembered her, now! She’d hovered above me in Hawke’s bed.

The table stalled in its incline, its creaking echoes swallowed by the ear-splitting cacophony of so much energy. I was left half upright, bound in a slant. My hair slid over my shoulder, every brush of the fine filaments torturously palpable. I sucked in a shaking breath, clenching my teeth in a world sheened by blue lightning and pink glitter, and looked on the face of Abraham St. Croix.

“I remember you,” I managed between my teeth. “I remember your face, now.”

His eyes were wild as he stared at me. “Do you remember your mother?” he demanded.

No. But I didn’t need to. I knew her face. I bared my teeth. “What does this drug do?” I yelled over the noise. “
What did you do?
”

“I found it,” he told me, but his eyes glittered madly behind his thick lenses. “I found the formula. It only took years, it only took the sacrifice of pretty, pretty women and their so-clean organs, but I did it. I used aether—”

I jerked. “Why?” I demanded.

He paused, and then stared at me like I’d lost my mind. Me, the mad one. Laughable, but I was too angry, too frightened, to laugh. “Only the prettiest for your mother, poppet. That pleasure garden, they keep the women healthy and pretty and safe.”

What logic. What cold, alien logic. “All in the name of an experiment,” I spat.

“No,” he demurred. “Not at all. In the name of love!” He breathed the word. “I harvested the raw aether. Pulled it from the living and distilled it into something no man has ever discovered before . . . Cherry, I have done it. I have discovered the alchemical truth!”

The alchemical truth?

Alchemy
. The man wasn’t talking
magic
, the Karakash Veil was wrong! There wasn’t any such thing as magic, I’d known that. But alchemy . . . Maybe some would call it magic. Rumor, dark rumor, whispered alchemy could do what science alone could not. Strain the borders of humanity itself. Lady Rutledge had asked me about my thoughts on the matter, hadn’t she?

But I had never,
ever
in my life heard rumor that suggested Mad St. Croix dabbled in the dark field.

The light crackled, cast blue shadows over the laboratory and deep into my retinas. I lacked the protective lenses my mad father wore, and each flare of light drove knives into my head. “Papa, please!”

“Soon, Josephine,” he breathed. But he wasn’t looking at me.

Suddenly filled with dread, forcing myself to
think
through the pink ribbon filling my veins, I slowly turned my head. Stared at the figure draped in dingy gray beside me.

A skeleton flashed beneath an arc of virulent blue. Gristle clung to the bones in ghastly shadows of flesh that no longer remained. And I knew.

There
had
been a woman. A ghost. Hawke had said it himself.
Have you been mucking about with the dead?

No. But I knew who had.

Mad St. Croix’s wife rested on a slab beside me. My beautiful mother.

Or what was left of her.

Chapter Eighteen

R
ipples of blue lightning crawled up metal rods. Sparks shattered across wires strung between carefully bolted knobs, popped and sizzled as electricity climbed across the metal rafters like a jagged tide.

The world swam in shades of blue fire, white heat, pink-and-gold
mo-shoe,
and I was helpless beneath it. The drug, sweeter than opium but so reminiscent of it that I swore I tasted it in the back of my throat, left me limp. Aching. Barely cognizant of myself in my own skin.

I bent my right arm, and even that much effort left me feeling as if I were floating in a warm river. Every flex of muscle, every twitch, every breath turned me into something fluid and warm.

Beyond warm.

I was hot. Feverish. The metal bands holding me in place fogged over with condensation, even despite the dry electricity crackling through the air.

I watched my father—watched the madman that I’d once known as my father—as he pulled and shifted and replaced the tubes in the large metal conductor between the tables. Pale pink puffs of air wafted above the cameo as he jimmied and jostled elements into place. The light reflected from his goggles.

Why all the energy? I wasn’t sure, but as my brain danced along the opium- and aether-ridden pathways trapped within my own pounding head, I couldn’t help but draw the parallels. Woolsey’s—that is, Abraham St. Croix’s—exhibit had been about the effect of electricity on dead tissue.

My mother was certainly dead.

The cords and the drug, the alchemical compound, connected me to a corpse. It should have horrified me even worse than it did; I blame the cushioning glow of opium for my grim rationale. Was he attempting to infuse the corpse with electricity to mimic life?

Or to use the leashed power for something else?

My lashes lowered of their own accord. I took a deep breath, felt it shudder all the way to my stomach. I felt as if it were opening me up. Loosening those bonds of spirit and flesh; to think I’d laughed then. Mocked it.

Well, I was a believer now, wasn’t I?

The alchemical concoction shrieked through my body, head to toe, cycling around and around as the equipment popped and sizzled around me. It would consume me. It would force me out; it would devour me.

I forced my eyes open.

Gasped as my gaze crashed into eyes so like mine that for a lurching, sickening second, I felt as if I’d pitched out of my own body. Was I staring at myself?

“Mother,” I whispered. So beautiful. She hovered inches above me, exactly the way I’d always pictured her. Serene and lovely and so much more graceful than I.

Her hair floated in blood red waves around her head. Her lips were curved in a sweet, maternal smile that turned my stomach even as it wrenched at my heart. I had no recollection of this woman, I swore I didn’t, but everything in me yearned for that smile as I stared at her,
through
her.

She shimmered in place, her chest scattering like droplets in water as Abraham reached through her and touched my cheek. “So beautiful,” he whispered.

My lips moved. I
felt
every stretch of my skin, every shudder as I whispered, “Why opium?”

Abraham’s smile stretched like a jester’s across his thin face. “That’s a good girl,” he crowed happily. “Yes, yes, opium. What better compound to act as a carrier? Always so smart, just like your mother. Your mother . . .” The light died from his eyes, faded like a guttered lamp as he groped at something at his waist. A tool belt? An apron pocket. I couldn’t tell.

“Josephine,” he muttered. “So beautiful. My girl.”

Opium.
No wonder. It teased me, it always teased me, so far out of reach even when it rested in my hands. I inhaled deeply, gasped as my chest expanded. Opened, flowered like a rose in bloom. Could he see inside it? Could he seize my heart—
not me
—and hold it in his hands?

My own father?

I cried out as my stomach twisted. “Why?” I demanded. My fingers clenched hard around the band over my shoulder. It dug into my palms, and I felt it.

Felt it more surely than I expected.

I gasped again, my eyes dropping to my own fingers.

They wavered, but I peeled them off the bar. One by one. Wiggled them. They were mine.

Why
were they mine?
Not other,
I thought desperately. Me. Mine.

Why could I focus this time?

Those who eat it for many years must eat more . . .
Hawke had told me. He’d warned me. I’d been given opium all my life; for only the second time in all my twenty years, I
wanted
to shake it off.

Metal clanked to the ground. It slammed through my head like a bell, silvery and sweet. I flinched.
Stay with me, Miss Black.

I didn’t need Micajah Hawke. I was me.

Not me.

I could think!

“Papa,” I cried, hoping to stall him further. “Why are you doing this?”

Abraham’s back straightened so quickly, it was as if I’d snapped a coiled spring with my call. He didn’t look at me, his gaze fixed on the bank of levers in front of him.

Slowly, so slowly I felt I’d die of the pins and needles sweeping across my skin in the interim, I let go of the brass band clamping my shoulder. My fingertips sank into the fall of tangled hair. Groped blindly.

My mouth filled with saliva. My throat with velvet. My heart with pink diamonds.

Focus!
I was so close.

“You were so young,” my father said, his chin sinking to his chest. The electricity arcing across the ceiling glittered wildly in his goggles as he stared at his gloved, clenched fists. “So young. My darling girl.”

I didn’t have it in me to cry. The words slid into my heart, delivered by my father’s unerring thoughtlessness, but he wasn’t mourning me.

Had he ever? Even as a child, had I realized that all his love was for his wife?

I swallowed the thickness in my throat, inhaled sharply through my nose as I strained to reach a hairpin. I shook my head hard, flinching as the bands cut into my forehead. The crook of my arm.

He turned, and I froze, my fingers mere millimeters from the curved joint of the metal pin. I stared at him. Both of him.

All four of him.

No. I squeezed my eyes shut. There was only one madman.

“You were only five,” he said, and the lost waver vanished from his voice. I opened my eyes to find him staring at me, and my heart surged into my throat. “Maybe six.” He propped his hands on his hips, but he didn’t seem to notice my desperate reach for the pin. So close. Closer still. Pain ratcheted down my arm.

Swallowed by a wash of heat. A fevered flush.

“She was sick, you know,” he said, sudden and sharp. “So sick. No doctors could help her. I tried. I took her everywhere. I took you both to every doctor, and then I took it upon myself. I could mend her. I could,” he repeated, this time with an upward arc of intensity that revealed so much more of that madness I’d been accused of inheriting.

I hadn’t. Not like this. If I knew nothing else, I was not my father’s daughter.

How could I be? My fingers closed on the pin and I wrenched my arm down. My hair, tangled in the haft, pulled tightly. Ripped as I let out an angry cry. I remembered. I did. “You . . . you used bodies!”

“Organs,” he corrected, his gray mustache shifting up into a rueful half smile. “Organs, first. I wanted to cure her, so I tested on the organs I purchased.” His smile faded to a tight scowl. “Of course I purchased them, first, but the supply is not infinite. And so many shriveled and died. Withered away, like she was. My Josephine, your darling mother, wasted away with every failed experiment.”

“How did you learn of alchemy?” I demanded, pin held tightly between my trembling fingers. “It’s a myth!”

He waved impatiently at me, and turned back to his bank of levers. “Myth, pah! There are men, poppet. Brilliant men. Alchemy is the key. It’s the secret to life! Life and death. And after death . . .”

I gritted my teeth, fingers cramping as I inverted the hairpin in my palm. “There
is
no after death.”

“There is!” And with that wild pronouncement, Abraham St. Croix yanked a lever down. Gears crunched. The whirr of machines high in the ceiling almost drowned out the crackle of electricity.

Slowly, my hair began to lift. My teeth ached, and it wasn’t pleasant and pink anymore. I bit my tongue, focusing on that pain with everything I had. Desperate to fit the pin into the lock holding the bars in place.

My father’s hair mimicked mine, a gray corona lifting wildly from the charge. He reached up and adjusted the clear goggles over his eyes. “They didn’t like my methods,” he said after a moment. “The Scots, brutal barbarians that they are, they didn’t understand. Their loved ones were
dead!
What use were they rotting in the ground? I gave them
purpose.
”

He darted across the room, skipping over the nest of tubes and copper wires. I glimpsed a manic smile as he sprinted between the tables, reaching for the cameo.

Please, not the laboratory!

The pin slid into the lock. “They burned it down,” I gasped.

Abraham’s hand stilled over the golden disc. It shook. “Yes. They . . . they came with torches, carrying those . . . those implements they use for farming.
Farmers
. And they destroyed everything!”

I twisted the pin. Wiggled it, searching desperately for the tumblers. The air thickened. The flashes seared into my eyes, and I feared they’d sizzle right out of my skull.

“My girl.” I watched as the old man I didn’t recognize as anything more than a ghost reach out his other hand toward the shroud that covered my mother’s skeletal remains. “It’s time. It’s almost time.”

I set my jaw. I had to keep him talking. I had to . . . I had to concentrate. “Papa—”

“I had only just found it,” he said, his trembling hand hovering over the shroud. “Only just found the key that would prolong your mother’s life, at least that much more. That much longer.” His teeth bared. “And then
they
came. Barbarians . . . I had no choice!”

“You left me.” I hadn’t meant to say it. It shouldn’t have mattered. But the words wrenched out of my chest, and I watched his head tilt.

“They took you,” he told me, without once looking at me. “They took you, and I let them. I had no choice. No choice but to take the serum, to assure my life continued so that I could save her . . .”

Always his girl.

Take the serum . . .

“You what?” I gasped.

“But they stole it all,” he said over me, and suddenly, he whipped back to the cameo. His fingers danced over the gilded edge, twisting and pushing tiny knobs. “Stole her life from me!”

The tumblers clicked.

I held my breath.

“And because they destroyed my laboratory,” my father seethed through his teeth, “my girl died.
Died
, frightened and frail. Too weak to eat! Too weak to move. Too weak. Flesh is weak. But you—”

He paused. I watched the planes of his face soften as he turned to me. His eyes were hidden beneath the goggles, but his mouth turned up. Ingratiatingly sweet. “Ah, poppet. You look just like her. But the black . . . the black hair. Clever, girl. I didn’t know it was you until you inhaled the treatment.”

My skin crawled. “What did that matter?”

He stiffened, straightening his shoulders and staring down his nose at me as if I were a student in some lecture hall. I stilled, forcing my hand to bend at a painfully awkward angle to hide the pin projecting from the lock. “Alchemical formulae are exact, Cherry. It should have only worked for Josephine. I had no idea it would work for her daughter, or else I’d have never let you leave that exhibit with that fine fellow. What was his name?” he asked, suddenly all too crafty with his wide, gleeful smile. “Terrible choice of beaus, poppet, you need a thinking man.”

I pushed through the chaotic stream of his words to focus on the topic at hand. “You . . . You knew? You knew what it was doing to me, to your own daughter?” It ended on a high, trembling octave, but I couldn’t believe it.

Or maybe, it was one more thing I had no choice to believe, given the circumstances. My father was truly mad.

“Once I saw the psychoactive compound take effect,” he said happily, “I knew. I knew!”

My chest rose and fell much faster than I wanted, feeling as if it struggled to inhale enough. To breathe deeply enough, fast enough.

I forced myself to slow it down. “Let me go, Papa, and I’ll help you bring her back.”

The devil I would. Dead was dead. And the woman hovering just at the edge of my vision was a hallucination courtesy of opium and aether and God only knew what else.