Chapter 38 – Dregs

The alley smelled of piss and coal ash and something rotten that had been left to fester in the rain.

Alice collapsed against the brick wall, and the word collapsed was doing charitable work. What she did was closer to a controlled fall, her shoulder blades hitting the masonry and her knees folding in the same motion, her body sliding down the damp surface until she was sitting in whatever filth coated the cobblestones. She didn’t care. She had moved beyond caring approximately four minutes ago, when she had vaulted a low garden wall on the far side of the Swan’s ruins, landed badly on her left ankle, and kept running on pure spite until the sirens faded to a thin wail behind her.

She sat in the dark and breathed.

Inventory.

The word surfaced from somewhere disciplined and habitual, a reflex drilled into her during childhood fencing lessons. When you are hurt, you catalogue. When you catalogue, you do not panic.

She started with the head. The left side, above the ear, where Thomas’s hook had connected. The skin was split. She could feel the wet heat of it, the slow seep of blood matting her hair against her skull. The impact had rung her like a bell, and the reverberations were still there, a high, persistent tone lodged behind her left eye that turned the alley walls into something slightly liquid at the edges.

Her ribs. The right side, low, where his body shots had landed. Not broken. She was fairly certain of that, because she had broken a rib once during a sparring accident at twelve and remembered the specific, nauseating wrongness of bone moving where bone should not. This was different. Deep bruising, the kind that would turn purple by morning and make breathing an act of negotiation for a week. She pressed two fingers against the lowest rib and hissed through her teeth.

Her knees were shredded. She could feel it without looking, the raw, stinging heat of skin torn away by broken crockery during that final scramble across the floor. The hip toss had driven her back onto a scatter of shattered plates, and she had felt the ceramic bite through the fabric of her dress as she rolled. Her palms were worse. Glass, mostly. Small, bright points of pain that flared every time she flexed her fingers.

Her sternum ached where his knee had pinned her. A deep, structural throb, like a bruise on the bone itself.

And her jaw. The left side, where she had caught a glancing right cross during the middle exchange. She opened and closed her mouth experimentally. It clicked. It hurt. It worked.

All things considered, Alice thought, tilting her head back against the wall and staring at the narrow strip of smoke-darkened sky visible between the rooftops, you’re alive. Which is more than you deserve, given the quality of your decision-making this evening.

She looked down at her left wrist.

The Vitric Lover was still latched. The obsidian serpent coiled twice around her forearm, its ruby eyes dim, the tiny fangs sunk into the soft skin over her radial artery. She could feel it working, even now. A faint, rhythmic pull, like a second heartbeat layered beneath her own, drawing mana and blood in slow, measured sips. It was the reason she had been able to trade blows with a Tier 5 Inspector and walk away with her skull in one piece. It was the reason her fist had carried enough force to break the cartilage in his nose. It was the reason she had been able to stand in the wreckage with a revolver leveled at his forehead and keep her finger from pulling the trigger, because the Lover didn’t just enhance the body. It soothed the mind. A cool, glassy calm that sat over her thoughts like a pane of ice over a frozen lake, keeping the panic and the rage and the screaming animal terror locked beneath the surface where they couldn’t interfere.

It was also killing her.

She could feel that too. The drain was no longer subtle. Her veins felt thin, hollowed, as though someone had siphoned the density from her blood and left behind something watery and insufficient. The mana reserves she had rebuilt in the Cellar were gone. The reserves beneath those were gone. The Lover was drinking from the dregs now, pulling from a famished well, and the body was paying the tax.

Off. Now.

Alice reached for the serpent’s head with her right hand. Her fingers were clumsy, the fine motor control eroded by exhaustion and glass cuts. She found the triangular skull, pressed her thumb against the hinge of the jaw, and lifted.

The fangs retracted. The coils loosened, the obsidian going slack against her skin, and the serpent uncurled with a wet, organic sound that made her stomach turn. She peeled it off and held it in her open palm.

The calm evaporated.

It didn’t fade. It was ripped away, a sheet torn from a bed, and everything beneath it hit her at once. The pain quadrupled. The headache, which had been a manageable pressure behind her left eye, detonated into a blinding, nauseating pulse that turned her vision white at the edges. Her muscles, which had been operating under the Lover’s augmentation, remembered what they actually were—the overtaxed fibres of a sixteen-year-old girl who had fought too many battles for a single evening—and staged an immediate mutiny. Her arms went heavy. Her legs went numb. A wave of dizziness rolled through her so violently that the alley tilted forty-five degrees and she pitched sideways, her shoulder hitting the cobblestones, the Lover tumbling from her grip.

She lay on the ground for three seconds. Four. Her cheek pressed against the wet stone, the cold of it almost pleasant against the heat of the split skin above her ear.

Get up.

She didn’t want to.

Get up, Alice.

She got up. It was ugly. She planted both palms on the filthy cobblestones, pushed, got one knee under her, and levered herself upright with a sound that was closer to a whimper than she would ever admit to another living soul. The world spun lazily, settled, spun again. She braced herself against the wall, breathing through her nose, waiting for the nausea to pass.

It passed. Mostly.

She picked up the Lover from where it had fallen. The ruby eyes were dark, the obsidian cool and inert. She stuffed it into her satchel with the care of someone handling a venomous snake that was only pretending to sleep. She could feel the absence of it on her wrist. The skin where the fangs had been was smooth, the punctures already sealed by the artifact’s coagulating effect, but the phantom sensation lingered. A pull. A want.

Addictive. The word arrived with clinical certainty. It’s addictive. You put it on and you are more than yourself. You take it off and you are less than you were before. And the distance between the two grows wider every time.

She closed the satchel. She would deal with that later. She would deal with everything later. Later was rapidly becoming the most populated drawer in the cabinet of her mind.

Next.

Her right hand went to her face. The Visage Mask sat against her skin like a second skull, smooth and cool and seamless. She hooked her fingers under the chin and pulled.

The mask resisted. Not physically. There was no latch, no clasp, no mechanism holding it in place. It simply… clung. A reluctance, as though the metal were loath to relinquish the face it had been wearing. Alice pulled harder, and it released with a faint, sucking sound, the air rushing in against her bare skin like a splash of cold water.

She held the mask up.

The featureless metal face stared back at her, empty. Blank. The eyes were hollow. The mouth-slit was a thin, expressionless line. It looked like nothing. It looked like a mirror with the reflection scraped out.

More useful than I thought.

When she had purchased it, the plan had been simple. Anonymity. A new face, a new voice, a way to move through the city without the maître d’s of the world recognizing the Westmere face. That had been the extent of her ambition.

Then the wall of the Lacquered Swan had exploded inward, and ambition had been replaced by survival, and the mask had become something else entirely.

She had put it on in the chaos. Grabbed it from the satchel, pressed it to her face, and felt the cold metal seal against her skin as the first gunshots split the air. A disguise. Nothing more. She hadn’t intended to fight. She had intended to use the confusion to reach the breach and disappear into the street.

But Thomas had been there. Florence’s brother, the oblivious Senior Inspector with the charming smile and the blind spot the size of a cathedral, had been standing in the middle of the kill zone, and the cultists had been closing on him from all sides, and Alice had watched a man with a sawed-off shotgun draw a bead on him while he was mid-air, and she had—

Don’t think about it.

The first mimicry had been Thomas himself. His fighting stance. His guard, his footwork, his combinations, absorbed through the mask’s third function during the brawl, replicated and fed into her muscles like ink into a press. It had worked. His technique was efficient, brutal, built for a larger frame, and the mask had adapted it to her body with an eerie, seamless precision that made her feel less like she was fighting and more like she was being fought through.

But then Thomas had adapted. Had read his own style reflected back at him, found the flaw in the borrowed architecture, and swept her legs out from under her like she was a first-year student who’d wandered onto the sparring floor.

She’d needed something else. Something he couldn’t predict.

Alice stared at the mask. An unease spreading through her.

The second mimicry had been her father.

She hadn’t planned it. The mask had a way of reaching into the deep structure of memory and pulling, and when she’d needed a fighting style that was alien to anything Thomas had trained against, her mind had offered up the only other combatant she had ever watched obsessively, compulsively, for years. Lord Westmere, who had boxed at the Royal Gymnasium in Kingsbury before she was born, who still sparred with his old trainer every Sunday morning in the private gymnasium of the family estate, whose footwork she had memorized from the gallery above without ever meaning to because she was not permitted on the floor.

The mask had taken the memory and worn it.

For thirty seconds, Alice had fought with her father’s hands. His rolling guard. His syncopated rhythm. The looping overhand right that he threw with his whole body, the deceptive feints that made opponents commit to phantoms. She had felt his weight settle into her frame, his confidence filling her limbs, and for a hideous, vertiginous moment she had not been Alice at all. She had been him. The arrogance, the easy authority, the absolute certainty that the body would do what was asked of it because it had never been given a reason to doubt.

Alice shuddered. A full-body convulsion, involuntary, starting in her shoulders and running down her spine.

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Never again.

The persona had clung. Even after she’d switched to the voice mimicry, even after the fighting style had been discarded, there had been a residue. A faint, paternalistic weight behind her thoughts, as if her father were standing just over her shoulder with his hands clasped behind his back, observing. She had hated it with a ferocity that surprised her.

And the voice. The final gamble.

Sheltie.

Alice had used her voice as a last, desperate throw. Pinned beneath Thomas, her pyromancy snuffed the instant it formed, her augmentation fading as the Lover drained the last of her reserves. She had needed one second of hesitation. One moment of confusion to break his grip and land the punch. So she had reached for the most recent voice in her memory—the sharp, clipped vowels of the woman in the porcelain mask who had cornered her in the Cellar—and prayed that a Senior Inspector would recognize his own colleague.

It had worked. Thomas had frozen, his hands going slack, his mind stuttering over the impossibility of hearing his coworker’s voice from behind a stranger’s mask. One second. That was all she’d needed.

Alice turned the mask over in her hands. She could still feel Sheltie in there, somewhere. A faint, acerbic presence lodged in the metal like a stain that wouldn’t quite wash out. The clipped cadence. The lazy superiority. The sense of being amused by everything and impressed by nothing.

I don’t like you, Alice thought at the residue. I don’t like you at all.

She stuffed the mask into the satchel beside the Lover.

Last. The Thieves’ Glove.

She peeled it off her left hand. The leather contracted as it released, returning to its stiff, worn shape. She flexed her bare fingers. The glove had done less than the others. One charge, spent at the critical moment, pulling Thomas’s service revolver from his holster and depositing it into her grip across ten feet of open air while the man stood there clutching nothing and looking, for one deeply satisfying instant, completely bewildered.

Worth every chip.

She put the glove in the satchel. Closed the flap. Buckled it.

The alley was quiet. The sounds of the city filtered in from the street beyond, muffled and distant. Sirens. The low murmur of a gathering crowd. The clatter of carriage wheels on cobblestones as the constabulary mobilized.

Alice leaned against the wall and let the anger come.

It arrived without ceremony. No slow build, no simmering resentment. It was simply there, fully formed, as if it had been waiting behind the door of the Lover’s artifical calm and had walked in the moment the lock was turned.

Damn him.

Thomas Bannerman. Senior Inspector. Florence’s brother. The man she had killed for.

She had put a bullet through a man’s skull to save his life. She had stood in the wreckage of his city’s most prestigious restaurant and bled for him, fought beside him, absorbed blows meant for him. And the very first thing he had done, the very first instinct that fired in that dense, duty-addled brain, was to grab her wrist and try to identify her.

Not thank you. Not are you hurt. Not even who are you, delivered with the basic human decency of someone addressing a person rather than a suspect. He had seized her like a constable collaring a pickpocket, his fingers closing on her wrist with the automatic, proprietary grip of a man who believed that a badge entitled him to any body within reach.

Lucky your sister saved my life, Alice thought, the fury cold and sharp and perfectly articulated.

She exhaled. The breath shook.

Any goodwill she might have harboured for the Department of Arcane Affairs—and there had been some, before today, an acknowledgment that someone needed to police magic and that the institution, however flawed, served a necessary purpose—was gone. Burned to ash and scattered. She had dealt with two of them in a single day. Sheltie, who had puppeteered her into a fight and then cornered her with the predatory charm of a cat toying with a mouse. And Thomas, who had repaid a debt of blood with a fist and an interrogation.

They’re all the same. Every last one of them. Badge and a mandate and the unshakeable conviction that anything they do to you is justified because they’re the law and you’re not.