LONDON, 1758
I wait for a moment in the darkness at the end of a forbidding hallway. My soaking-wet hood is pulled low over my eyes, a puddle pooling on the rough timber floor around my boots. The leather on the back of my hands is dark, my body seeping river water from every seam, my riding cloak muddy. I try to walk softly, but each footstep rumbles and creaks. Luckily, the noise of my advance is lost under soft, terrible sounds coming from behind closed doors that line the hall.
Small moans and cries. Rough laughter. The scraping of beds against the floor. An occasional human whimper of pain.
The greasy walls and stained floors of this brothel are foul. The long hallway leans out of square, wrong feeling, nauseating. It feels as if a sickness permeates this decrepit building, almost visible in the air, roiling down this cramped corridor like a tendril of oil spreading through drinking water.
Avoiding the front door and its red lantern, I smashed in through a window around the back. The empty stairwell took me to the second floor and this hall. Elena was carried in here minutes ago.
Stopping, I listen for her voice.
The girl believes she no longer needs my protection, but the sight of her futile grip on Hypatia’s devastated body flashes in my mind. Elena was hurt to the quick. My fear of losing her—to Hypatia, to Leizu, or to these monsters—is warming to a hot rage.
The urge to protect her is irresistible. So I give myself to it.
I remember a round copper table in a field tent. A leather map, weighted at the corners, marked with battle lines and bits of colored stone. She studies the plot, a black-haired child, eyes calculating. And around her, in the shadows, warriors loom. We watch her, awaiting orders.
I shake my head to clear it.
The hallway remains empty, lit every few doorways with whale-oil lamps that burn putrid and black. I raise a hand and feel the air on the damp skin of my fingers. My sister is nearby.
The first door I push against is barred from the inside. Vile noises are coming from behind it. Pushing harder, I hear rotten wood splintering. It snaps quietly, the bar thunking to the floor, and I ease the door fully open.
A girl on a stained mattress. A grown man on top. This place is worse than I ever imagined.
Not Elena.
In one lunging step I am upon him, my elbow sliding under the man’s chin. My cheek buried in his curly, flea-infested hair, I stand up and squeeze my bicep until I feel his spine separate from his skull. I drop the warm corpse to the floor while on the bed, a little girl cowers.
A shriek reverberates from down the hall—it is a man’s shout, high-pitched and surprised and cut off almost immediately.
I throw off my hood and dash down the corridor. The door bursts open before I can touch it and a man stumbles out. His filthy hands are wrapped around his own neck, red-black rivulets of blood streaming over his fingers. He opens his mouth to speak and cannot. His teeth are knocked out and broken, throat slit.
I know the small fists that did this.
Up and down the corridor, doors are slamming open. Drunk faces, twisted, confused, and angry. Hair mussed, sweat rolling from soiled creases in their faces, a few half-dressed men are pulling up their trousers, stumbling, craning their necks.
On his knees, the bleeding man tugs at my cloak, tries to mouth the word help.
I push him roughly against the wall and he falls, sliding with his back pressed against the timber. His blood is pooling like spilled ink.
“Oy,” calls a man. “What’s happened to him?”
“Ate a blade,” I say, shrugging.
I casually step over the body and into the narrow room, closing and barring the door behind me.
“I knew you’d come,” says a small voice.
Elena stands on the straw mattress of a sagging bed. Her cloak is wet and singed black, her wig hanging crooked. She is clearly not a human being. Her leather face is washed clean of pigment, dark as alligator skin. Through a tear in her shoulder I can see mechanisms—brass struts and silver-coiled tendons.
Boots shuffle outside the door, concerned voices muffled.
“Everyone stay in your rooms,” shouts a rough voice.
Slam. The door vibrates against my back as someone shoves against it.
“Hey! Come on out,” calls an unconvincing voice.
Slam.
The door rocks on its hinges.
“Elena, there are too many. Cover yourself. We will run.”
“No,” she says, defiant. “We’re not running. Not again.”
Slam.
The girl is taking too long.
“Trust me,” I say, leaning over, intending to swoop her up and carry her out. My arms close on air and I stumble. The hard pressure of a stiletto presses against my throat.
“No,” she says. “You will trust me. I have thought of a use for this place—a way that I can blend in…forever.”
Slam. The wooden door is splintering.
Brushing past me, Elena puts a palm flat on the door. Her lips move as she counts. She is timing the hits.
Slam.
Three, two, one…
Elena yanks the door open and a man plows into the room, off balance. In one quick movement she sticks the stiletto in and out of his lower spine. The momentum of his body dissipates in a heap over the ragged bed. What’s happened registers on the face of the dead fellow’s friend and he lets out a surprised yelp.
“They’re robbing him!” he shouts, pointing. “He’s been stabbed!”
The hallway is a crowd of jostling elbows and fists. I put a hand on Elena’s shoulder and she shrugs it off, stepping right out the open door and into the hallway, her eyes aimed at the floor, standing hunch shouldered, surrounded by cretins.
A dozen grimy faces stare down at Elena in foul-smelling lamplight. Wide eyes and sweat-stained armpits. Grubby hands clutching improvised weapons snatched off floors. A few, the ones in charge of maintaining order, are even wearing light armor.
“Put down those blades, little girl,” says one.
Elena slowly straightens, raising her horrific face to them, a stiletto in each hand. The men collectively take a step back. Someone whimpers.
“By the devil.”
“Her skin ain’t right,” says another.
Demon come the whispers. Witch.
“Let’s begin,” Elena says, and she darts between a pair of legs. The men fall upon her, shouting, swinging weapons and fists.
I draw my khanjali—a simple blade about the length of my forearm. Pushing into the hallway, I plunge my blade into the nearest heart. With my other hand, I lift a man by his throat and pin him against the wall, listening to his glottal struggling. A dagger slips into my side over the hip and something heavy glances off the side of my head and I choose not to react.
Someone shrieks.
Jackknifing my arm, I ignore the injuries and slice into the crowd of perspiring meat that is compressed into the corridor. The neck in my hand snaps. Already, the whoremongers are trying to escape, screaming, squealing like slaughtered pigs, turning and slipping on their own blood, holding their guts in with dirty fingers.
A small black demon flits between them like a lethal toy.
We advance down the hall, following the survivors toward the main stairs. Around us, vermin-infested corners are strewn with broken-necked, mutilated corpses. Elena is dashing ahead, crawling around and between the legs of panicked men toward the end of the hallway. There, she slams shut the door at the top of the stairs, trapping the last few men between us. Ignoring pleas for mercy, Elena and I meet in a grisly dance.
Behind us, a few brave girls are emerging from their rooms. One of them quietly and efficiently slits the throats of fallen men with a scavenged knife. Crouched on scabbed knees, she works emotionlessly, moving from one to the next.
In seconds, the men are dispatched, sprawled grotesquely up and down the hall, collapsed on one another in heaps.
It is done.
Meanwhile, the hallway is filling with girls and young women. Dirty faces and torn gowns. They watch us with cautious glances. The only way out of this hall of horrors is past one of us.
Elena presses an ear against the closed door. After a moment, she yanks it open and the madam of the brothel stumbles out, falling to her knees, breasts spilling from her elaborate corset. She wears stockings, her knees instantly stained red as she crawls over glistening carnage. At the sight of it, her eyes fly open, jaw working soundlessly until she begins to keen.
“Please!” she shouts. “Please!”
Elena puts a hand firmly on the madam’s shoulder and the woman stops shouting, swallowing sobs instead. My sister watches the woman with a blank face, inhuman, skin stained with crimson drops of blood under a wig of disheveled black hair. She is emotionless as she turns to face the hallway.
Women and girls of the brothel stand and crouch, shivering, looking upon Elena’s uncanny countenance with faces frozen in fear or fascination. The madam cowers, locks of her hair spiraling away in corkscrews, hands wavering over her face.
Elena motions to the stairwell door, letting it creak slowly open. When she speaks, I hear her jaw clicking with each word.
“If you are a grown woman, leave,” she says.
Knees dipping, a rush of women grab clothes and personal effects, tiptoeing over the carnage in a controlled scramble to escape, pushing cautiously past Elena and thumping down the stairwell.
Now a hallway full of girls remain, trembling, eyes wide.
“The rest of you go back to your rooms,” Elena says, in a low voice. “This is no longer a brothel. School begins tomorrow.”