Dead Rick’s shoulders knotted until they ached. That easily, his secret was betrayed. I never should ’ave come here. It’s that bloody sprite’s fault. Now his vulnerability was in the open, for all to see. If anybody took so much as one step toward the box he guarded, Dead Rick would rip their throat out.
But Abd ar-Rashid asked him again, “Is this true?” And there was no way out but to answer.
“Yes,” he snarled, hands cramping with the need to use them. To fight his way free. “Is that what you wants to ’ear? I don’t know none of you. I been Nadrett’s dog for seven fucking years because of that, and the only reason I came ’ere is because I ’oped somebody could put my memories back where they belong. You do that, I tells you where your dead Prince went.”
Everybody’s eyes went past him, to the box. Dead Rick’s lips skinned back in a snarl, and Abd ar-Rashid held up his hands in a calming gesture. “Peace, my friend. No one will harm you. What you’ve said explains a great deal, and we will do what we can to help.”
A furious noise burst from the mortal girl. “After what he did to us?”
“He didn’t have a choice—” Irrith began.
“Peace,” Abd ar-Rashid repeated, quieting them both. “Miss Baker. There is a man in this place—a mortal man, like you—whose duty is to oversee such matters, the affairs between humans and fae. It will be for him to decide what the answer for that crime should be. Until then, we will do what we can to address the matter of memories.”
They were going to give him over to Hodge? Well, he could bargain with the Prince, and run if bargaining failed. After he got his self out of the glass and back into his head.
Sounds behind Dead Rick made him whirl, nerves coming alive once more. The crouched figure that had begun to emerge from behind a bookcase flinched back again, but not before Dead Rick saw him. The half-witted mortal. With the box of his memories so close, it gave him an inspiration.
“Your boy there,” he said to the mortal girl. Miss Baker; Hannah, Cyma had said. Still just empty syllables, without meaning. “I might know what ’appened to ’im.”
“You happened to him,” she said bitterly.
He shook his head. “After me. My mas—the bastard who was my master. ’E’s got some trick with cameras. Used it to steal my memories, and a ghost; might be ’e used it on your boy, too. Took away some part of ’im, and stuck it in glass.”
“Cameras!” She laughed in disbelief, but Feidelm and Abd ar-Rashid came alive with curiosity. “What—are you saying a photograph took Owen’s soul?”
And there it was, laid out in a few simple words. Dead Rick’s mouth sagged open. “That’s exactly what ’e’s doing.”
His memories: he’d thought of them more than once as his self, torn away, so he no longer had any notion of himself. This boy’s mind, mangled as if half gone. The ghost of Galen St. Clair. That was the technique Chrennois had been developing for Nadrett, refining it over the last seven years.
Abd ar-Rashid said, “There have been inquiries of late—”
Cyma, and probably Aspell, too. “Satyr’s bile,” Dead Rick said. The genie nodded. “I’ve been trying to find out what ’e’s up to for a while now. You ’elp me, I tells you what I know.”
Irrith let out her breath in a frustrated sigh. “Dead Rick, stop bargaining. We’re already going to help you.”
Her protestation made him twitch. He couldn’t stop the words bursting out: “Why should you?”
The Goodemeades made identical noises of affront, but Irrith just grinned. “Why? Because I know something you don’t: who you used to be. And I’ll bet you every piece of bread I’ve got that as soon as you get your memories back, you’ll help us in return. Not as trade, but because you want to. Because that’s the kind of fellow you are. Or were, and will be again.”
He couldn’t help looking around to see what the others thought of her declaration. The Goodemeades were nodding, but the one that hit him like a blow to the gut was the mortal girl. She was biting her lip as if fighting something inside. As if she didn’t want to agree with Irrith, but a part of her did anyway.
If he wanted to be any use, he couldn’t wait until his memories were restored. He might have wasted too much time already.
He opened his mouth, and felt the oath he’d sworn to Aspell binding his tongue tight. Dead Rick growled in frustration, then stopped when he realized how carelessly that oath had been worded. “I can’t tell you where to go,” he said, enunciating clearly, so they would understand what he meant. “But if some of you was to follow me… you might see something interesting.” If they were fast enough, they might even get Nadrett himself.
Abd ar-Rashid clapped his hands once, a sharp sound, calling everyone to attention. “Go, and we will follow.”
They left in a rush, shuffling the box somewhere safe, gathering a small war party to accompany the skriker. When they were gone, Eliza fumbled a chair out blindly and sank into it, knees limp as rags.
Dead Rick. There and gone. She’d spent seven years dreaming of the revenge she’d have when she got her hands on him, and now she’d let him go.
“Would you like a cup of tea, dear?”
Eliza abandoned her chair and skittered backward when she realized the question came from Gertrude Goodemeade. Who was now a good two feet shorter than she’d been before, and so was Rosamund. “Ye’re faeries, ye are!”
They had the grace to look apologetic. “With the story you told,” Rosamund said, “we didn’t think you’d take kindly to finding out halfway through that we were brownies.”
Outraged, she turned to Mrs. Chase. “And you—”
“I’m as human as you are,” the old woman said serenely. “And a friend to these sisters since I was a child. My house is built atop theirs, you see.”
None of it was what she’d expected. Eliza couldn’t muster the will to fight when Gertrude took her by the arm and led her back to the chair. “Just rest awhile, my dear; you’ve had a great many shocks today.”
They were the only ones left in the library—the four of them and Owen, who had crept into a corner once more. “I was going to kill him,” Eliza said numbly, staring at the carpeted floor. “Seven years, I planned it. And now—”
Gertrude reached out as if to clasp her hands, but stopped before Eliza could pull back. “I can imagine,” she murmured. “To keep searching for your boy, after all that time—you must have been very angry, and very determined, too. But if you want a target…”
“Then you should look to Nadrett,” her sister finished, in a colder tone than Eliza had yet heard from either of them.
The name had gone by, briefly, in Dead Rick’s rage. Eliza hadn’t been able to follow any of it, dead princes and photography and all the rest. But she was willing to consider including someone else in her anger. “Who is he?”
For all the delicacy with which the Goodemeades phrased their answer, Eliza could read between the lines. Whitechapel had men like that, leaders of gangs who profited off the suffering of others. And they had ways of keeping their followers in line—if nothing so exotic as this.
Stolen memories. It was as if she’d been fumbling around a darkened room, and then someone lit a lamp, showing her in full what she’d only felt the outlines of before now. The blank unfamiliarity in Dead Rick’s eyes, when they took Owen away—if the Goodemeades were right, if they were telling the truth, then nothing that day had been his choice.
Mrs. Chase had fetched tea, and now was coaxing Owen from his corner. Eliza could barely look at him; the sight bid fair to break her heart. More things she didn’t understand. “How could a camera do that to a person?”