Transmuted by Karina Cooper Page B

was a hunched figure of a man, with stringy black hair gone gray from age or coating of heavens knew what, and eyes so pale as to look nearly diamond white in the dark.
    When he laughed—and he laughed often—it was as dull knives scraped over rusted iron.
    He chuckled now as the coal-black smoke pouring out of the tunnel swallowed him. The sound carried back in muffled echoes.
    Sweat dampened my face. No doubt it turned the skin along my forehead and cheeks into a blackened smear. I had not developed the resistance to the fog that them what had been born and bred within it had, and so I often struggled not to clear my throat. Such a sound was as like as declaring one’s self ripe for plucking.
    What I felt at that moment was similar to that of an urge to flee, but worse. Harsher. I couldn’t breathe but for the overwhelming memory of the place.
    I had traversed this very tunnel more than once, but the most recent adventures left my palms stinging with remembered fear.
    Before my time, the tunnel had been used primarily for pedestrians. Cobbles had smoothed the floor, and railings guided them what wanted to stroll from one side of the Thames to the other.
    It had, in the end, fallen into disuse, and then disrepair. What had once been the very gem of engineering—a feat that bore a tunnel below the river without need of bridge or sky ferry— became instead the common haunt of prostitutes, tunnel-thieves and vermin.
    The Metropolitan District Railways now maintained the tunnel only inasmuch as necessary for the trains to pass through on laid track. Lanterns affixed to the wall provided lights to see by at regular, if long, intervals.
    What authorities didn’t know was how the tunnel’s most common—and most secretive— residents preferred the dark.
    My own father had built his laboratory within; a secret I had not been aware of until lured there. I still remembered the path. Opium muddled so much of my past, but this lingered.
    And while much of the terror I’d experienced in that time was softened by the same muddling glow of opium’s caress, even facing the spewing black smoke from the outside of the tunnel was enough to dry my throat, twitch my fingers.
    I could not breathe. It hurt, like a pounding force within my head, numbing my limbs until they felt as lead.
    I wanted that opium again; it was, my senses assured me, the only way that I would emerge unscathed from that what I attempted now.
    Just a bit of the draught, so bitter that even cinnamon wouldn’t soften the sting. Or perhaps a nibble of the tar, sharp and acrid upon the tongue.
    Anything would do.
    I did not know how near I was to folding until a large hand clamped over my eyes. A breath, a shuddered reflex, and that strength my knees lost was suddenly replaced by the bracing prop of a man’s body behind me.
    “Move,” Hawke ordered, a hard sound in my ear. His breath stirred the fine hairs at my temple; it was warm, almost uncomfortably so. His temperature blazed against my skin, even those parts of me covered.
    In the wake of such warmth—neither gentle nor forgiving, but the sort that blistered—my fear dwindled. And with it, the helplessness that had taken the strength from my legs.
    The rational part of my mind understood that among Hawke’s gifts, the art of effortless authority—the will to simply order away one’s demons—counted as his most powerful. A ringmaster did not achieve such agency without the confidence required to ensure it.
    But the part of me that responded to him with such visceral honesty always hoped that it was I and I alone that suffered such sensitivity to his presence.
    Of course, therein was the issue, wasn’t it? I had never been the only fool to fall for the Devil’s tricks.
    “Hurry,” Ashmore called ahead of us. “Our guide won’t wait.”
    A dry, somewhat manic laugh dotted this assertion.
    Hawke said nothing else. He simply uncovered my eyes, stripping away the intimacy achieved by dint of his palm,