outside the gates, the scent faded, mixing with others – petrol and rubber and steel. She’d been picked up, or had a vehicle waiting.
I sniffed again. The scents were so familiar, trying to sort through them was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that was all the same colour. When I finally found all the pieces, they’d faded to almost nothing, and I was certain one of them had to be wrong because the person it belonged to had been lost to me for a very long time. But the other … the other wasn’t really dead at all.
Dede
.
MY SISTER’S KEEPER
Now I had proof the briquette in that coffin wasn’t Dede – not if I could smell her this well. Scent can linger on things – clothing, skin – but not like this. This was full-flesh halvie smell. Living. Breathing.
And gone.
I could tell which direction the motor carriage went, but that was it. Wherever Dede was now it was east of where I stood. I could panic and rage, but neither of those would do me any good. So I made the conscious decision to keep my head firmly on my shoulders and
think
rather than go off on instinct. Trying to guess where Dede might be would be like looking for a goblin claw in a heap of offal – unpleasant, pointless and time-consuming. I’d drive myself absolutely mental chasing shadows all over London. My best option was to start at the places I knew she’d been.
Across the street was a Met station. I hurried down the worn stairs to the platform, where a scuffed oak-panelled train had just stopped, its faded red engine chugging puffs of steam that driftedup and out of the vents cobbleside. The lights were extremely bright down here – a naïve deterrent against goblins. Emergency cases held the standard axes and fire hoses, and then there were the ones that contained huge UV cannons – those might actually keep you alive if one or two goblins came a-hunting. You’d think the aristocracy would outlaw anything that might hurt their own kind, but none of us were safe from goblins, so it was an acceptable risk.
Besides, I could crack the bones of a human forearm in half before they could successfully break that case open, so unless there was a crowd of them already down here, with the cannon at the ready, I wasn’t in much danger. No one paid me much attention anyway. I was a freak as far as humans were concerned, but I was the kind of freak most of them had grown up with. Halvies were part of their cultural lexicography, and aside from the odd wanker, they left us alone so we’d leave them alone.
The air was humid and smelled of wood polish, dirt, human and metal. I hopped on just before the doors slid shut.
I had to transfer at Baker Street for a train that would take me to Whitechapel, where Dede had moved barely six months ago. At the time I thought it was strange – not to mention dangerous – her wanting to live in a predominantly human section of London. Now I wondered if there wasn’t more to it than rebellion and her excuse that her doctor thought she needed to be less dependent on family.
She’d given up living with Avery and me, to get a smaller place in an area that had once been the most notorious rookery in the city. Now it was a trendy neighbourhood of renovated town houses painted bright colours, home to artists, uni students and pretentious bohos. It was lovely, but not what I would call safe for a halvie, and hardly the kind of home befitting the daughter of a duke.
But it made her alone – no one to notice her comings and goings but humans who woke and slept by a different clock, and probably didn’t care about the local “half-breed bastard”, as we were often called.
She would have lived quietly, privately. No one to tell her nosy older sister what she might have been up to. And I was convinced she had been involved in something, because people didn’t go around faking their own death – or having it faked for them – without good reason. Why else would Fee grab a melted, unpawnable ring if
I sniffed again. The scents were so familiar, trying to sort through them was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that was all the same colour. When I finally found all the pieces, they’d faded to almost nothing, and I was certain one of them had to be wrong because the person it belonged to had been lost to me for a very long time. But the other … the other wasn’t really dead at all.
Dede
.
MY SISTER’S KEEPER
Now I had proof the briquette in that coffin wasn’t Dede – not if I could smell her this well. Scent can linger on things – clothing, skin – but not like this. This was full-flesh halvie smell. Living. Breathing.
And gone.
I could tell which direction the motor carriage went, but that was it. Wherever Dede was now it was east of where I stood. I could panic and rage, but neither of those would do me any good. So I made the conscious decision to keep my head firmly on my shoulders and
think
rather than go off on instinct. Trying to guess where Dede might be would be like looking for a goblin claw in a heap of offal – unpleasant, pointless and time-consuming. I’d drive myself absolutely mental chasing shadows all over London. My best option was to start at the places I knew she’d been.
Across the street was a Met station. I hurried down the worn stairs to the platform, where a scuffed oak-panelled train had just stopped, its faded red engine chugging puffs of steam that driftedup and out of the vents cobbleside. The lights were extremely bright down here – a naïve deterrent against goblins. Emergency cases held the standard axes and fire hoses, and then there were the ones that contained huge UV cannons – those might actually keep you alive if one or two goblins came a-hunting. You’d think the aristocracy would outlaw anything that might hurt their own kind, but none of us were safe from goblins, so it was an acceptable risk.
Besides, I could crack the bones of a human forearm in half before they could successfully break that case open, so unless there was a crowd of them already down here, with the cannon at the ready, I wasn’t in much danger. No one paid me much attention anyway. I was a freak as far as humans were concerned, but I was the kind of freak most of them had grown up with. Halvies were part of their cultural lexicography, and aside from the odd wanker, they left us alone so we’d leave them alone.
The air was humid and smelled of wood polish, dirt, human and metal. I hopped on just before the doors slid shut.
I had to transfer at Baker Street for a train that would take me to Whitechapel, where Dede had moved barely six months ago. At the time I thought it was strange – not to mention dangerous – her wanting to live in a predominantly human section of London. Now I wondered if there wasn’t more to it than rebellion and her excuse that her doctor thought she needed to be less dependent on family.
She’d given up living with Avery and me, to get a smaller place in an area that had once been the most notorious rookery in the city. Now it was a trendy neighbourhood of renovated town houses painted bright colours, home to artists, uni students and pretentious bohos. It was lovely, but not what I would call safe for a halvie, and hardly the kind of home befitting the daughter of a duke.
But it made her alone – no one to notice her comings and goings but humans who woke and slept by a different clock, and probably didn’t care about the local “half-breed bastard”, as we were often called.
She would have lived quietly, privately. No one to tell her nosy older sister what she might have been up to. And I was convinced she had been involved in something, because people didn’t go around faking their own death – or having it faked for them – without good reason. Why else would Fee grab a melted, unpawnable ring if
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