Cooper Isabel - Legend Of The Highland Dragon

“This is my room,” he said without passion. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re John Smith?”

Stephen held the revolver steady and considered the picture before him. The man wasn’t Ward. He was too short, his hair was almost colorless, and the structure of his face was too even, too round. Also, he looked up at Stephen with neither alarm nor hate.

“I am John Smith,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Have you been hiring men down at the Dog and Moon?”

Smith blinked once. “No.”

It was the wrong question, Stephen realized. The men he’d spoken to had described Ward, or someone like him. In truth, he wouldn’t trust Smith to hire anyone himself.

“Do you receive the messages the barman sends?” he asked. That was the right question, if there was a right question.

Indeed, Smith nodded. Something about him shifted, too. Stephen wasn’t sure what. He couldn’t have placed it in the man’s stance, or even in his eyes. The difference was like the faint smell of smoke on the wind or a sudden chill in the air. It roused the hunting instinct in his blood, the primitive awareness that the moment for action was fast approaching.

“What happens to the letters?” he asked, concentrating on his aim.

“I inform my master of their arrival,” said Smith, as if stating the answer to a mathematical problem. “I take them to our meeting place.”

Master, he’d said. Not employer, not commander. Master. On the back of Stephen’s neck, every hair stood on end.

“How long have you been at this?”

“Forty-eight days.”

Now there was a smell. Faint but sharp, it stung the inside of Stephen’s nose. “What’s that?”

Smith gave him a truly blank look.

Then, a sound. Sizzling. It came from somewhere near Smith’s boots. Stephen took a hasty step backwards. “What in the world is wrong with you, man?”

“Nothing,” said Smith. The sizzling sound was louder now, and the smell was stronger. “I am functioning exactly as designed. Good-bye.”

Stephen lunged toward Smith just before he shattered.

There was no explosion, no grotesque rain of flesh. Instead, cracks ran up and down Smith’s body, covering his hands and face within seconds. Another second widened them. Then there was no more Smith, only a small pile of bits that looked like a thicker eggshell—and a burning cloud of orange gas.

Stephen’s free hand closed around one of the bits of shell. He stuffed it into his coat pocket without thinking, then bolted for the window. The butt of his revolver broke through the glass easily, and cold air rushed inside.

The window was small, though. The wall it faced was high, and the wind coming in blew the gas toward the open door. With every inhalation, the orange cloud poured into Stephen’s lungs, scorching them like no fire ever had. As he ran forward, hand over his face, he felt blood begin pouring from his nose.

Even he wouldn’t survive very long in the building. A mortal man would have been dead already.

Mina was downstairs.

“Fire!” Stephen yelled, and his throat screamed raw agony with the word. He drew a painful breath and shouted again. “Get out of the house!”

None of the doors along the hallway opened; no light came on underneath them. Stephen ran down the hall anyhow, trying one knob after another and getting no answer.

Then, from the bottom of the stairs, he heard Mina calling his name.

He turned from the final door and ran for the stairs. The mist was hazier now, diluted with the extra space. Still reeling from the initial cloud, he wasn’t sure how deadly it remained. Halfway down the stairs, he had to stop and hold on to the banister while he coughed.

“Stephen!” He looked up through the mist to see Mina, holding a handkerchief over her face and ascending the stairs toward him.

“No!” The word came out bloody. Stephen reached forward, half-blind, and grabbed Mina by the shoulder. “You’ll die. Get out.”

“You too,” she said, and now she’d grabbed him, her hand tight on his wrist. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she turned and began pulling him down the stairs. “Mrs. Grant’s next door. She’s called the police.”

“Anyone else?” he managed.

“No. Move.”

Mina dragged him, with considerably more strength than he’d have thought she had, and Stephen aided her as much as his pain-wracked body would allow. Keeping his eyes on her made it easier to stumble onward. He watched the strands of hair that hung down her back and the determined set of her shoulders, and he almost forgot how much effort it took just to put one foot in front of the other.

Then the doorway was in front of them; then Mina was through it, and Stephen staggered through after her, just sensible enough to slam the door shut behind him. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.

“My God,” someone said, “what’s happened to him?”

“Was it a fight?” another voice asked.

And then Mina, blessedly calm and steady and close at hand. “Can’t I take you anywhere?”

* * *

They got back home. Stephen wasn’t entirely sure how. Most of his attention was focused on drawing breath into lungs that felt lined with broken glass.

The voices swirled around his head, exclaiming and questioning. Mina’s rose above them. They faded. Mina spoke again, sharply but unsteadily, with tears in her voice. Stephen tightened his arm around her, squeezing her shoulder with one hand. She was shaking. No wonder. He should do something, he thought. He should at least say something, but the coughing took over again.

“…get a doctor,” said Mina.

Stephen shook his head. “Won’t help. I’ll be all right. Home.”

He saw the carriage as a large, almost formless black shape. He thought briefly and uneasily of legends—the black coach on the Royal Mile, foretelling death or taking souls to Hell—but the elderly dapple-gray horse and the talkative cab driver dispelled that impression quickly enough. Inside, the seats were cracked and badly sprung. Stephen let himself fall back into his as if it had been a featherbed.

Slowly, he stopped coughing and his vision cleared. He saw Mina sitting opposite him. Her lips were a thin line, her eyes fixed on his face. Stephen lifted a hand and felt dried blood on his mouth.

“Sorry, lass,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Mina. She passed him her handkerchief, cold and wet and smelling of tea. “And don’t talk.”

“I can talk,” said Stephen, doing the best he could for his face. Now he could feel the scalded tissues of his throat repairing themselves—a gift from his heritage. “Quietly. Shouldn’t move too much, either. Hope we have no more visitors.”

“Right. Or I’ll have to learn how to use a sword.”

“I’d have to teach you,” said Stephen. The idea had some appeal—guiding her hands on the hilt of a blade, seeing her figure in athletic costume—but his body was not in any state to follow through on it. Absently, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the bit of shell.

Up close, it looked like any bit of pottery. It was about the size of his palm, and one side was mostly flesh-colored. The other glimmered with a shifting green-and-red pattern.

“What’s that?”

“John Smith,” said Stephen, “or part of him.”

Mina grimaced. “He wasn’t human, then.”

“No. I’m not sure what. I’ve heard a rumor or two. Constructed beings. Never anything concrete. As it were.” He laughed, which made him cough. When he’d finished, and Mina was glaring at him, he went on. “This one had a trap inside.”

“I’d say it did. Who could do that?” Mina wrapped her arms around her body. “Make a fake person with a cloud of poison inside? How do you figure that out?”

“Most people don’t,” said Stephen. “We can use that.”

Stephen claimed he was recovering without help. He claimed he could talk. He might have been right. Mina didn’t know much about either poison gas or dragons.

She did know that he was pale, even by the dim light through the cab window, and that he talked at half his normal speed, with frequent pauses to cough. She wanted to sit by him, or at least to keep a hand on his arm and give him what reassurance human touch could provide, but she hung back. Too much attention could just irritate an ill person, and she didn’t want to be one of the fluttering women her brothers had both complained about.

Besides, that was a dangerous path to go down.

Mina kept silent for the rest of the cab ride, and Stephen seemed glad enough to follow her lead. At his house, she passed him into the hands of Baldwin, by way of an aghast-looking James. Baldwin himself kept his emotions well hidden, only a quick exhalation showing that he wasn’t completely used to finding his master in such a state.

As Baldwin and James helped Stephen up the stairs, the older man also cast a sideways glance at Mina. She felt his gaze take in everything about her, from her disarranged hair to her lack of gloves. She said nothing.

Instead, she went upstairs by the back way, conscious of Emily’s startled look as their paths crossed. When the door to her room closed, she leaned against it heavily for a minute, resting her head on the thick wood, then crossed a short distance to sit down on the bed, absently undoing her coat buttons.

She was supposed to be pinning up her hair again. That had been Mina’s plan: make herself look respectable, then go see what she could find in the kitchen. When she undid her coat, though, she sat and stared at her hands. They looked the same as they’d always done: short nails, faint ink stains. The night had left no mark on them—even if she felt that it should have.

Poison gas. Fake people. And Stephen, coughing blood.

She shuddered. Her tears in front of the lodging house hadn’t all been fake. Three near-death experiences in as many weeks were overdoing it even for her nerves.

Someone knocked at the door. Mina sucked in her breath and shrank backwards on the bed. Then her mind reasserted itself, but in no particularly reassuring manner. The other servants almost never sought her out.

“Come in?” she asked, her voice much higher than normal.

The door opened. Of all the people she hadn’t been expecting, Mrs. Baldwin stood in the doorway, her hands clasped behind her back. “I hate to be intruding, Miss Seymour,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ve a great need to talk with you.”

“Do you?” Mina said faintly. “Oh, good.”

“Aye.” Mrs. Baldwin looked at the room over Mina’s shoulder. “You see, his lairdship told my husband that you’re the one with answers about this evening.”

Mina’s eyes hurt. Her head hurt. Her mind hurt, like her legs after a three-hour walk. She cleared her throat. “And why,” she began, in the most clipped tones she’d learned for Carter’s, “do you think you’re entitled to answers?”

“We’re living here,” said Mrs. Baldwin simply. “And we’re none of us blind or deaf or stupid. We may not know what’s been happening the last few weeks, but we all know it’s something odd.” She took a breath. “Clyde and I have been with his lairdship some time now. We know there are often odd things happening around him, around all of his blood, and we haven’t been in the habit of asking many questions. But he hasn’t been in the habit of coming home injured, either.”

“It’s his own neck to risk, isn’t it?”

“Is it, now?” Mrs. Baldwin asked. “Have you ever known a man’s enemies to care much about making sure his servants were safe?”

“Well—” Mina remembered the shadows. And the thieves—had they caught her alone, she wouldn’t have ended the night happily. “No,” she admitted.

Mrs. Baldwin nodded. “Well, then.”

“Maybe you should come in,” said Mina.

With another nod—more polite, this one, and less satisfied—the housekeeper entered and settled herself on the small chair by the window. Mina perched on the edge of the bed and tried to think, to balance fairness with discretion.

“There are some things I can’t tell you or anyone. Lord MacAlasdair might, but they’re his to tell. He does have an enemy. Someone from his past.”

At that, Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes flickered just a little. “Ah. Not someone he can tell the Yard about, then?”

“He says he’s worked with the police a little. But—”

“You can’t be relying on…outsiders…entirely,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “Saving your presence, Miss Seymour.”