Tina Connolly - Copperhead

“Oh, but I haven’t had a chance to tell you everything,” Helen said in a low voice. “Alistair told me Rook was working for Grimsby, and Rook confirmed it. That he was like a double agent or something. And then, tonight, Morse said something about how Rook was going to blow up this compound.”

“Was he very drunk?” said Jane.

“As always,” Helen admitted.

Jane shook her head. “There has to be another explanation. The dwarvven I know are not like that. They’re strict. They’re fair. They love scandalous books and dancing.”

“Rook said they were having one tonight,” said Helen. She smiled ruefully. “I put a dress in your carpetbag just so I could go.”

“You should go meet him there and feel out his motives.”

“Nonsense,” said Helen. “They couldn’t possibly be dancing now. Not after the trolley.”

“Funny people, the dwarvven, ” said Jane. “Nothing stops a celebration when they’ve decided to have one. Not hell, not high water. You’d like them.”

“They wouldn’t want me,” Helen demurred. She felt suddenly shy. Rook had said she was on their good side, she was the offset for Jane. These people liked her.

It could only go downhill from here.

“It’s not a date, it’s sleuthing,” Jane said with some asperity. She rummaged a thin hand through her carpetbag and produced Helen’s go-to dress, none the worse for being shoved in a bag and going through an explosion.

Helen glanced over at the sleeping boy, then quickly stepped out of the ruined peacock blue knit and into the clean apple green voile Jane held, turning so Jane could hook up the side. She felt better already. “If you’re sure you’re all right in here.”

Jane’s fingers moved nimbly up the hooks. “I feel much better,” she said. “I have a lot of thinking to do. Have you made progress with getting the women together?”

“Yes,” said Helen. “Well, I’ve done some, and Frye’s working on it right now. We’ll get them to the waterfront like you said.”

“I did?” said Jane. She looked concerned, then flashed a brilliant smile from that fey-enhanced face. “I must have had a good reason,” she said.

A cold knot began to form in Helen’s belly. Getting the women together was something Jane had ordered them to do when she was supposedly sane. Helen threw out another lead. “Grimsby’s taken Millicent somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“I’m sure it’s someplace safe,” said Jane.

The cold knot tightened. “But she was going to run away from Grimsby.”

Again confusion flashed across Jane’s face and vanished. “Yes, but he would hardly get rid of her in this state,” she said. “Everyone knows. It would be a scandal.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Helen said. Her forehead creased as she stared at Jane and flipped the problem over and over in her mind. “Will you be safe here with Tam? Will he be all right if he wakes up?”

“You’re stalling,” Jane said.

“Perhaps,” said Helen. She wadded the torn and smoky dress into a ball. She hated to just leave it in Rook’s tidy room.

“Put it in here,” Jane said, waving those thin hands at her carpetbag. “And hurry back and tell me everything.”

“All right,” said Helen. She stuffed the dress into Jane’s carpetbag, and then stopped, her eye caught by something in the bottom.

“What is it?” said Jane.

“Oh, just wondering how I’ll ever make it up to Frye,” said Helen. Her fingers shook as she closed the bag, but she tried to keep them steady in front of her sister. “I’ll see you later. Don’t wait up.”

“Not a chance,” promised Jane.

Helen backed out of the door and into the darkness of the tunnel, where she closed her eyes against what she had just seen. Hot tears pricked her eyes, stress and memory shook her bones as she saw again and again what she had seen in Jane’s carpetbag.

Traces of blue and shrapnel.

Just like the fey bomb that had killed her brother, so many years ago.

Helen found herself hurrying through the tunnels, desperate to get away. Up the stairs to the bookstore, past the woman who actually smiled at her and worriedly said, “Remember curfew—,” but Helen just kept on going, out into the dark and the cold and the whirling snow.

How could Jane be responsible for this? For this ruthless destruction?

The trolley lay there just outside the slums, a twisted pile of metal. Everyone was gone now, but the signs of the tragedy remained. The area around where the trolley had derailed had been stamped and packed into hard, dark-stained snow. The snow had lessened but still it fell, erasing the disaster, sifting a fine layer of clean white over the ice.

The icy air whipped around her bare arms, and then she was walking toward the warehouse. All these things were there, the warehouse, the wreck, the slums, all had converged on this point in time. Whatever else happened, it would be down here, she felt, down near where the statue of Queen Maud held open arms to the river to embrace her people. All people: humans and her beloved dwarvven .

Jane could not have done any such thing.

Unless she had been made to.

Once Helen thought it, she couldn’t unthink it. The thought unfurled in her mind and she knew that, deep inside, it was what she had feared all along and not acknowledged. She was out of ways to explain away Jane’s behavior.

Jane had been taken over.

It was a strange case, clearly. Jane had been protected, back when she had had iron in her face. A fey couldn’t get around that—but a human could. Boarham, she supposed, had stripped Jane of her protection when they kidnapped her.

But more, usually when a fey took someone over—that someone was gone. Vanished. Helen herself did not remember any of the few seconds that a fey had been inside her, except for a horrible erasing feeling. She certainly had not been able to communicate with anyone. Her body was no longer hers.

But Jane seemed to come and go. Sometimes she was rational. She was Jane.

Or a very good imitation?…

Helen pushed that thought down. The Jane she had talked to just now was definitely her sister, fighting for control of her body. She did not know how that was possible, but it was the only thing that made sense with her behavior.

Helen’s eyes filled with grief. Her sister. Her only family. Helen had fought, and she had tried, and Jane was still going to disappear on her in the end.

A black motorcar drove down the road ahead, yellow searchlight sweeping the sides of the street. Curfew. Helen pressed herself into the side of the buildings, into the sheltering shadow. Across from her a new sort of poster caught her eye—this time bloodred, with CURFEW on it in big black letters, and below it, a raft of rules in smaller type. She did not have to move closer to tell that it was signed the same way as the notice in the paper: BY ORDER OF PARLIAMENT AND COPPERHEAD.

She did not want to go back to the dwarvven slums, where Jane was. She did not want to go home, where Alistair was. Not that that really seemed like home anymore. Perhaps it never had been hers; it had only ever been his. Despite her best intentions to find herself a home, she had come adrift, and now there was not one place she could call her own.

She reached for a handkerchief that was not there and her fingers brushed the copper hydra that hung around her throat.

Her necklace. Her hand closed on it and the copper warmed in response. One picture glanced across her vision, a memory of the warehouse. She was inside, hand on Grimsby’s copper box, and she was looking down at a pale still figure on a white daybed.…