Would that I’d minded my words much more clearly. At that bit of revelation, all three men glanced at each other, and then at me. I had no other warning before the talker snarled, “Gotcher.”
I had not intended this moment to go to loggerheads, but it seemed I was unable to avoid it. Once decided, I no longer cared to try. A brawl they wanted, a brawl I would deliver.
After all, I was bleeding invincible.
The beauty of the moment was not lost on me. Mired as I was in the lingering grasp of sweet bliss, I could admire the ease with which they broke into motion. As though time ebbed to a slow, distinct focus, I watched as a bead of sweat pearled on one man’s grimy temple, while the other shoved his hat askew with the force of his movement.
Two of them came at me as one. I noted in the corner of my vision that the ruffler darted back into the street, his shoulders pumping with effort.
I smiled. No fear filled my belly, no anxiety or concern. Given wing by the resin Hawke had fed me, I embraced this moment with all the glee of a pugilist eager for a bout.
Though I was not prepared to square against two larger men than I, at least they hadn’t counted on my skill. There was something about being a woman that tended to put a larger man at greater ease. As if he were convinced that I would be so much less effort than a collector of a different sex.
I took great delight in proving them wrong.
A large fist came for my fog-preventatives, open-handed as if he would tear them off. I simply stepped back, a precise pace that forced him to over-extend his reach. Catching his meaty wrist in my hands, I turned and pulled him hard against my back, then over in a move taught me by a faceless man I sometimes met in my dreams. A memory of the good monsieur’s influence, I think.
Wherever it stemmed from, the maneuver had served me well.
The jack sprawled across the damp street with a grunt—shame, I think, surprise and anger—and allowed me the opportunity to duck the other fist aimed for the back of my head.
I danced to the side, but this took me closer to the second assailant, and this surprised him, as well.
I believe that neither man was used to the concept of a woman fighting with any more skill than claws and words. They ought rather to be grateful I kept my blades sheathed.
I rammed my elbow into his chest, danced around him so gracefully that I briefly entertained a shaft of dreamy amusement that the Society vipers I’d left behind could not see me move with such talent now, and drove my foot into the back of his knee. He pitched forward, cursing with great enthusiasm.
I laughed. I should not have. It was unwarranted, and more than a little mean-spirited of me.
I did not care. Nothing about this moment seemed quite right. I was eager for the fight, itching to spill blood, and that was not the type of collector I had always chosen to be.
Yet here I was, with my booted foot pulled back.
I allowed myself no sympathy. No warning as to what bounds I flirted with. I simply acted.
Crunch. The sole of my grimy shoes found his nose.
Blood gushed, painted black through the yellow lens.
Crack! My vision went white, then double, and I stumbled to my hands and knees as pain wracked through my skull. My respirator unhinged on one side, and I spent precious seconds catching the shaped mouthpiece before I lost it in the scuffle.
“Get ‘er!” shouted a new voice, an angry one, and I heard the raised answer of more as men of several builds, ages and ranks in the canting crew stepped from the shadows like ghosts of the fog made flesh and blood.
Anger undercut the echoes of pain in my head, and I forced myself to my feet.
Hysteria, the likes I had never before entertained, filled me. It was not the screaming kind, or the likes which culminated in tottering laughter.
Violence replaced dreamy amusement. Mockery to rage.
I would not be brought low by a tangle of men.
I unhooked the respirator, jammed it into my belt, and spread my arms wide. “Come on, then,” I taunted, and could not even mark the reasons why. “Take me down, if you dare!”
They dared. What had begun as two against my confident one became three, then five. Then seven. I held my own for a fraction of a moment, blooding more than my fair share, until I stopped caring of the pain in my fists, my cheek, my head. Anger was all that drove me, rage so black I could not understand where it came from.
My knuckles split, and it did not hurt. My lip bled from a gash caught on a grimy nail rather than from impact of another’s fist, and still I did not cry.
My back slammed to the unforgiving ground, wrenching the breath from me.
With every crack of fists on flesh, every gasp driven from my lungs, every boot stomped across the straining slatting of my collector’s corset, I heard the scream of a madman.
Weep for the widowed bride!
I would weep for nothing.
“Enough!”
The bullish roar erupted across the darkened streets, earning such obeisance that I found myself staring up from the street I’d fallen to, transfixed by the frozen tableau of men caught in various preparations of painful brutality.
I ached. Oh, heaven, I ached, but the laughter that spilled from me sounded more the insane mirth of my father than anything I had ever heard from my own lips.
And that was enough to seal the sound behind my clenched teeth.
“Out of the way,” came the deeply voiced command, and the men lowered fists, feet, rocks and bits of pipes.
I do not know how close I came to death that night, but I would wager that Ishmael Communion saved me a very short swim in the rotted Thames.
When the two men who’d begun the struggle were slow to move, a large black hand boxed one ear and shoved the other. They cursed, stumbling away, and I was left looking up into stony disapproval.
He was not pleased with me.
I gave him the hand he reached for. “You have impeccable timing, Ish.” It came more of a groan, for his ears and mine. I could not manage steady on my own.
“You’re out of your fool head,” he growled, but he was gentle as he lifted me to my feet. “What are you about?”
Standing upright proved painful, but not as painful as the beating I’d been spared. I could taste blood on my lip, feel a dull throb in the wrist I’d once hurt deeply enough to require bracing, and my skull would have much to thank me for soon enough, but I was surprisingly hale. Even my palms, where the rope had drawn furrows, did not ache as badly as they should have.
I felt as if I could take them all on again, and damn the consequences.
Quickly calculated, I deemed myself capable of mobility and turned my attention outward.
The Bakers had not left us. They stared, a full dozen in various states of physical description and degrees of outward malice. Hovering at the fringe, the scarred man I’d met earlier. He grinned, laconic and not at all interested in the proceedings, but did not linger with the others.
Among those, I saw the leavings of my own returned brutality. Blood smeared from one man’s nose, another nursing the bollocks I’d tucked a boot in. More than one would wake to a bruised eye or fat lip, and them I glared at with mad conceit.
No man would find me easy prey. Not tonight, when the tar rode high in my blood and body. Certainly not ever again.
Ishmael glowered, his rumbled grunt earning my guilty attention. No malice in that stare, but a great deal of anger. I’d placed him in a damned difficult spot, and I was suddenly very aware.
I could not apologize. Doing so would weaken me beyond measure in their watchful study.
I pointed at the men arrayed around us. “They’re hiding a quarry,” I declared. “Collector notice on your mate Coventry.”