Tina Connolly - Copperhead

Helen’s eyes widened as she saw that the little girl’s hand had disappeared, replaced by a hand of fey blue.

“Dorie,” said Mr. Rochart with some asperity. “Not now. Come and look at Miss Eliot. Can you lend your talents to study her? She’s not strong enough to resist the Fey King from coming back. We need to keep him out.”

Dorie obediently crossed to Jane, who smiled and hugged her close. Dorie’s hand of misty blue touched Jane, and Jane very obviously tried not to flinch, even as she kept her tight hug on the girl. Dorie shook her head. “Can’t get it out,” she said. “Give her a mask.”

“Is there damage? Is she all right?”

Dorie nodded. “Sure.”

“Please make your hand back into a human hand now,” Jane said patiently. Dorie sighed and obeyed.

Mr. Rochart sighed, an echo of his stubborn little girl. “This is part of what we were doing in the woods,” he said. “Dorie has fey heritage. She’s determined to find out more about what it’s going to mean for her future. We have a fey guide.…”

“And I still say there are safer ways to ‘explore heritage’ than go into that forest,” Jane put in, spots of color rising to her cheeks. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.” It was clear this was an old argument, and Helen briefly wondered if that was part of the reason Jane had refused to talk about Edward lately.

“Fey are dangerous,” said Mr. Rochart. “Capricious, even. But they’re not vicious. Not the mass of them—and most of them aren’t in the forest now, regardless.”

“No, they’re all in the city,” said Helen.

“Without a leader, they prefer just drifting around,” said Mr. Rochart. “The Fey Queen ruled for a thousand years. She molded them into shape. She started the trade with the humans. And she instigated the fey punishment of forcing them to split into pieces whenever they were being punished—the trade literally consisted of bits of fey, you know. Without her, they’d be more like the copperhead hydra—deadly if it strikes, but you can avoid it, or avoid provoking it. It wouldn’t come seek you out.”

“Bad analogy,” murmured Helen irrepressibly. She rose and started cleaning up the bacon grease for something to do. “Mr. Grimsby is very fond of seeking The Hundred out. He’d like to strike us all down.”

“And the fey,” said Jane.

“And the dwarvven, ” said Helen.

“And all women really, and…,” said Jane.

“Wait, Mr. Grimsby?” said Mr. Rochart, interrupting this litany. “I don’t understand why he’d be so set against fey faces. He has one himself.”

Helen looked at him in dead shock.

“If it’s the same Mr. Grimsby,” said Mr. Rochart. “It was quite a while ago, but it was a very different case. Not like most of the clients. He had an unusual given name—Uriah or Ulysses, something like that.”

“There was a name like that in the journal,” Helen said slowly.

“Ulrich,” Jane said quietly. To Rochart she said, “It was only in your notes by the first name.”

“He was a very private man,” Mr. Rochart agreed. “I’m trying to recall the details. There’d been an accident of some sort.…”

“The motorcar accident,” Helen said. She felt all trembly and she sat down hard. “That’s what Mary said. He was in an accident with his wife. He went through the windshield. He … he must have been cut up all over his face. You can still see the scars in his hair, but they stop, just over his ears—” She looked at Mr. Rochart in horror.

“That’s correct,” said Mr. Rochart. “He wanted to look the same again. Not handsome.”

“And then no one ever suspected him of having fey in his face,” said Helen. “Because he’s—”

“Hideous,” said Jane.

“Mary said he changed because he hit a dwarvven, ” Helen said. “That he went mad from guilt.” She shook her head. “But that wasn’t it at all.” She remembered the moment in the attic when he had seemed genuinely sad about Millicent. “It’s just like Jane,” she said. “Sometimes the old Mr. Grimsby comes out. But mostly—”

“He’s been taken over by the Fey King,” Jane finished. She looked quite ill. “The same one who controlled me. But why start Copperhead? They hate the fey.”

But Helen knew these kind of social mind games. You turned on whoever was necessary to rally your circle together, make you come out on top in the end. “It was the best way to get power,” she said. “And it explains so clearly why Copperhead has that weird bent against the dwarvven as well.”

“But you said he destroyed a fey. In front of everyone.”

“What better way to demonstrate his loyalty?” said Mr. Rochart.

Helen nodded. “To get into closed circles, you turn on your dearest, most unfashionable friend, and you destroy her.” She thought back to the warehouse. “But his machine then, the one that your friend Niklas made. Grimsby can’t be planning to destroy all the fey with it. That would be too far.”

“Niklas has gotten quite fanatical,” Jane admitted. “But he wouldn’t have made something to harm humans.”

“No,” said Helen. “But Grimsby’s been making ‘improvements’ to it—so who knows what its real purpose is? Well. Not the real Grimsby, of course. That horrible Fey King, making Mr. Grimsby destroy his own wife. Just like he made you…” The sentence trailed off as Helen saw Jane realize what she had done on the trolley.

Jane went ashen. The horror penetrated her bones, followed a split-second later by the mind-numbing, irrevocable guilt, and Helen felt it all along with her, because of her fey empathy and because it was her sister and she could not bear it.

A bewildered Mr. Rochart was reaching out to comfort Jane, but Helen seized her sister and helped her cry. With wet eyes she looked at Jane’s fiancé and said, “Even if you two wanted to come help us stop Grimsby, you can’t. Jane must stay here. You must stay with Jane.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Rochart. And Helen carefully helped Jane to sit up, and brought her more tea, and watched her looking at nothing as if she was taken by the fey all over again, and felt her heart crack even as she was glad to be the strong one, the one who was there for her sister.

Jane shook her head, trying to turn her thoughts away from what she had been made to do, trying to bear up under the combination of starvation, brainwiping, and anguish. “So long,” she whispered to Helen, and her face was white and red as her empathy for others poured out. “He’s been taken over for so long. His poor son.” Jane looked at Tam, who was playing on the floor with Dorie. Softly said, “His mother gone. His stepmother. And his father—?”

“Has long been dead,” said Helen softly in response. She remembered that moment when Grimsby had wept at Millicent’s side and amended her statement. “Or at least, there’s only a sliver of him left inside. I don’t know if it can come back out.”

The Hundred met on the cobblestoned alley by the warehouse. Well, not quite a hundred. Despite all their best efforts, some of the women simply couldn’t be convinced—and then, of course, there were those who could not be found. Still, there were a lot of them, and they spilled out around the building in hues of violet and buttercup and rose. They were beautiful. They were delicate. They were mad.