New Amsterdam

Garrett's control was legendary. The paper didn't crumple in her fist. It barely trembled. Prince Henry's 'sister' was his sister-in-law, Anne of England. If he was confident enough to send Richard a telegram, even an oblique one, then a sorcerer-midwife had confirmed that the child was healthy and male. If it was born alive, Henry would no longer be his brother's heir.

It changed so many things.

"Oh," she said. "May I keep the telegram?"

Richard nodded. "I thought you might wish to."

She pleated it carefully and tucked it into her neckline, where the paper rustled against her skin. "Is that all?"

He shook his head. "Mayor Eliot is a major shareholder in the Goodwood Patent Shoe Company."

Garrett poured more brandy. His had vanished as unaccountably as her own. "I'll have his finances checked."

* * *

She would have preferred he left by the time Sebastien arrived, but it was not to be. The sun set a little after six. Sebastien's carriage crunched to a halt in the street while twilight still lingered.

At least the Duke's coach was still in evidence at the side of the house. His rival's presence would not take Sebastien by surprise.

He returned the courtesy. Garrett had long granted him liberty of her house, but this time Mary preceded him, bearing a salver upon which rested two visiting cards. One was Sebastien's, the familiar slightly-greasy parchment. The second was crisp white linen-finished cardstock, and read Mr Jonathan Priest, 184 Jardinstraat, New Amsterdam.

Garrett wondered if that was his real name. "Show them in," she said. Mary winked on the side away from Richard, but her frown never broke.

As Garrett had anticipated, she did not approve.

She ushered the new arrivals in, however, and set about fussing with the fireplace, as if the four of them were children or testy dogs who could not be trusted to maintain standards of behavior. But Richard gave her the lie, greeting Sebastien with excruciating politeness, and Sebastien responded with a bow that was well-nigh medieval in its elaborations. He then turned to introduce Mr. Priest—"my assistant."

That minefield navigated, Garrett poured the young man a drink and replenished her own glass. Richard was not yet in need, and Sebastien could stomach no alcohol. Nor anything else but living blood, if it came right down to it.

When the unpleasantries were dispensed with, Garrett cleared her throat and said, "His grace has told me something interesting."

Richard cast her an apprehensive glance, but didn't interrupt. "It seems the Lord Mayor has a financial interest in Goodwood Patent Shoes. And I've learned that the Goodwood Patent Shoe company has blood links to the Fenians." Quickly, she explained about the Sheridan connection.

Sebastien smiled faintly through it, looking directly at Garrett rather than Richard or Mr. Priest. Garrett let the silence linger, shocked at herself. She should not be keeping Mr. Priest's secrets for him.

There were, she temporized, sound reasons why Mr. Priest, as Sebastien's associate, might infiltrate New Amsterdam's Irish underground. And they were not reasons that Richard—as Sebastien's rival or as the Duke of the City in his own character—would be inclined to appreciate.

These things were true. But the fact of the matter was that if Garrett loved Richard—and she had certainly lived the past years of her life in the presumption of that love—she had discovered in those same years that she did not like him much.

How I have fallen, Garrett thought, and held her tongue.

Sebastien, meanwhile, waited until Mr. Priest had gotten himself around the better part of the brandy and Mary had kindled the fire against the spring night's rawness. Garrett's house was without gaslights, and as twilight faded, Garrett took herself about the library, striking lucifers and kindling paraffin lamps. It reminded her of an early night spent in Sebastien's company, and her hand trembled under the flame.

When the room was bright enough for those without a wampyr's advantage and Mary had withdrawn again, Sebastien said, "Jack has learned a little today as well."

The young man in question cupped his glass against his chest, elbows tucked to his ribs. He held his poise, though all eyes were on him. Garrett admired him despite herself.

"Well," he said, "I think the paddereen came in the post. I spoke with Paul Goodwood this morning. He recalled his father receiving a lint-filled envelope, very light, that seemed to disturb him greatly."

"Paddereen?"

"He died holding a rosary bead, your Grace," Garrett explained.

"It seemed to suggest Irish involvement," Mr. Priest said. "Following a hunch, I visited some of the right sort of public houses today."

A dramatic pause, which Garrett did not interrupt. Richard made a soft noise, amplified by his raised glass.

"There is a fair body of rumor," Mr. Priest continued, the picture of insouciance now where before he had been tight-wound, tense, "that suggests Goodwood was laundering money. The people who are talking—which is, I should remind you, not very often the people who know the secret truths—think that if he was murdered, it was by the King's men, begging your pardon, your Grace. At least the lower echelon believes him to have been a loyal son of Ireland. Also, the son, Paul, was born in the Colonies to a Dutch mother. I shouldn't be too certain he knows anything."

Richard seemed to choose his words with care, "Do we assume that the funds for the shoe factory came from the Fenians?"

"I'll put the constabulary on it at once, my lord," Garrett said.

"The City Guard," Richard corrected. "Considering the Lord Mayor's possible role."

"Your grace—"

Richard looked past her, catching Sebastien's eye. "Excuse us," he said. "I need to speak to the Crown Investigator in confidence."

"Of course," Sebastien said, and took Mr. Priest by the elbow to lead him to the hall. When the door was firmly latched, Richard stared at Garrett, and stared away.

"I want Eliot this time, Abby Irene."

The brandy came back up her throat. "Richard—"

But he stopped her with a lifted palm. "He's tried to kill us both," he said. "Last spring, through the French sorcerer. And again six months before that, when his confederates lured us to the Earl of Westchester's country house. Do you honestly believe he's not involved in this, whether we can prove it or not?"

"You're asking me to bear false witness."

"I'm asking you to prove what we already know to be true."

She had no facile answer. An easy case, she thought, bitterly, and swallowed to rid the burning in her throat. She forced one calm breath, another. Like magic: if one could fool the body into acting calm, it could become calm. "I took an oath. If it is not inviolable, then I am useless. If I am not inviolate, my magic is not inviolate."

He was about to say something else. She took the glass from his hand. Two brandy glasses made opening the door awkward. She set them on an end table and gave the cold brass handle one hard jerk. "I'm sure the Duchess is expecting you. Good night."

Sebastien and Mr. Priest were just a little way down the hall. He could have caused a scene, but scenes weren't Richard's métier. Instead, he gave her a look that promised further discussion, nodded to the wampyr and his apprentice, and without another word went to collect his hat.

* * *

"What was that?"

"A private matter." She put a hand on Sebastien's arm and didn't care if Jack Priest saw. "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples," she quoted, "for I am sick of love."

He kissed her on the head. "Will you settle for apple brandy?"

"I've had my share." But she took the glass Mr. Priest handed her, though she did not know if it was her own, or Richard's. Mr. Priest retired to the corner, and she saw him set his back against the paneling and square his shoulders in a silent dare. Go ahead and ask me to leave.

She had her own bravado. She finished the brandy—not apple, but good New Holland grape—and rummaged in her bosom for the telegram. Silently, she gave it to Sebastien, and silently, he read it.

Twice.

"Your prince is in danger?" he asked, when he was done.

"He's hardly my prince."

Sebastien gave her the yellow rectangle, slightly damp from her skin. "You never told me how the murder case ended."

The murder in question had been that of the Lord Mayor's wife. And Garrett, in other circumstances, might have expected the outcome of that case to endear her to the Lord Mayor.

Eliot had gotten something he'd wanted: King Philip's heir, Prince Henry, returned to England in well-concealed disgrace. Duke Richard might have sworn Garrett to secrecy, but the truth was that Henry had killed

Eliot's wife. Sebastien hadn't asked. But then—he wouldn't. However old

he was, if patience hadn't been among his native gifts, the years had taught it to him. And it was a test, too, to see how much she'd give him in front of Mr. Priest.

With sharp certainly, it struck her: she was being invited into the family. If Sebastien and Mr. Priest could be called a family, precisely. Sebastien was offering something. Something she had to rise to.

She wished she hadn't finished the brandy. Or that she'd drunk more. "Henry wanted to confess." She wasn't wearing gloves. She fidgeted her sapphire ring. "And I told him I would abide by his brother's command."

"I recall," Sebastien said gently. He didn't touch her again, but she stood at his side and that was strength enough. He'd been present for the first argument. Not for the second, though. "And then?"

"King Phillip commanded, and I abided," she said, without audible irony. "I swore an oath to serve and obey the Crown."

"You also swore an oath to seek the truth."

"So I did." She turned and ran a stare through him. He stared right back. "Of course, you eavesdropped, just now."

"I overheard." He had the grace not to excuse himself with a shrug. "As one does."

She snorted, familiar with the excellence of his hearing. "As it happens, before I was forced to decide which oath to break, Henry shouldered the burden. He agreed to remain silent, and I was spared." And then she must ask, "And of what you overheard?"

Sebastien neither looked down nor stepped away. "At my age, one loses the conceit that one's actions have a positive effect on the larger world," Sebastien said. "Or that the exigencies of politics are of any lasting import. One is left with the options of withdrawing from the world, or with the conviction that whatever small kindnesses and justices one can accomplish are more useful in the long run than revolution. People will be unhappy no matter what you do, Abby Irene. One helps where one can."

"Unhappy under law, then, or unhappy under anarchy?"

"I have devoted the last several hundred years to catching clever criminals," he said. "Whatever my feelings on the equal inutility of political systems, surely you can have no doubt as to where my allegiance lies."

It wasn't the answer she wanted. She glanced at Mr. Priest, who still stood with folded arms, like an allegorical stature representing obduracy.

"I know a lot of people," he said. "But it doesn't mean I agree with them. I'm not an Irish nationalist, D.C.I., if that's what that glare is asking so eloquently."

"No," she said. She rather suspected he was another kind of revolutionary, entirely. Not unlike Peter Eliot.

* * *

Sebastien and Mr. Priest stayed through supper. Afterwards, during more brandy, Sebastien arranged a convenient absence to take the air. Garrett knew it was a convenient absence, because Sebastien didn't breathe, and the sort of euphemistic accommodations required by wampyr were rather different than those of ordinary humans. "He did that on purpose," Mr. Priest said, when he'd vanished down the corridor toward the back garden.

Garrett toasted him with her glass. "He's leaving us alone to get to know each other, do you think? Matchmaking?"

She was, she admitted, trying to shock him. If she wasn't two and a half times his age, she hadn't a day.

But, "You're of Sebastien's court," Mr. Priest said, with a fine display of unconcern. "It would be easier on him if we didn't throw fits and jealous squabbles." And then he smiled up at her through his lashes, a beautiful golden child.

"I'm difficult," he finished, as if he shared a great secret.

The coquettish flirtation left her uneasy, even as she laughed. But she didn't think of herself as a vampire's courtier. Surely the power in their relationship was shared, not taken. "I'm Sebastien's friend," Garrett corrected.

"Yes. Sebastien is considered something of an eccentric."

"How old is he?"

Mr. Priest stopped, and stared. "He doesn't know."

And that was kind. He could have toyed with her, gloated over knowledge she did not share. Oh? He never told you?

"Roughly?"

"He remembers the Black Death," Mr. Priest said. "He remembers the millennium. He saw Vladimir the Great baptized a Christian in Kyiv. And Evie had already left him, by then, and he says they were together forty years or so—"

"Evie."

The blond boy tipped his head. "The one who gave him his first. . .

taste."

"He's a thousand years old, Mr. Priest?"

"My best guess? I make it about eleven hundred. He sometimes mutters to himself in a particularly incomprehensible dialect of medieval vulgar Latin when he's not pretending to that ridiculous Spanish accent. It might be Galicean. He's Galicean. Or Asturian, rather, if I have the dates right."

"But you're not sure?"

Mr. Priest shrugged. "He says he doesn't remember. He says he starved, during the plague, and forgot a great deal."

"And you believe that?"

He tilted his head. His smile slid from cherublike to conspiratorial. For a moment, they were allies. "I think he wishes to believe it."

* * *

The Lord Mayor's summons arrived in the first morning post, shortly before sunrise. Garrett read it in her nightgown, lingering over tea spiked with lemon, honey, and a trace of brandy. The summons was phrased as an invitation to luncheon; Garrett penned a reply before she moved on to the rest of the mail.

There were the usual assortment of personal notes, invitations, correspondence, and bills; she set the latter aside for Mary's attention and retained the rest. It being Wednesday, she also had both morning papers, the

New Amsterdam Courant and The New World Times, the second of which actually concerned itself with little more than New England, New Holland, and Virginia.

The news was ill. The redcoats and green-jackets she'd noticed the previous afternoon were fresh on ships from Africa, and garrisoned on Manhattan, where they could take what rest they might and also serve to reinforce the city.

Some three hundred were quartered with local householders, and, as might be expected, some of those—but not all—protested. The Lord Mayor demanded the troops be withdrawn or that their hosts be compensated. The Duke welcomed the aid from abroad.

Garrett flipped to the second page and looked for reports of continued skirmishing in the Green Mountains. She found nothing, but that didn't mean there was nothing to find, only that the newspapers were not printing it.

Richard considered his mandate to extend to the suppression of uncomfortable truths.

Garrett had no stomach for the rest of her tea. She pushed the tray away, left the letters on the table, and padded up the stairs to dress with more than her usual care.

* * *

The Lord Mayor's offices opened at nine. Garrett presented herself in the antechamber at precisely half one, squaring her boots on the Persian carpets before the secretary's desk between bongs from the grandfather clock. There was no assistant in evidence, and the desk was clear and dusted. The ink on the blotter was fresh.

Garrett was about to announce herself with a sharp rap on the double doors to the Lord Mayor's private office when the right one swung open. Peter Eliot himself peered around the edge, the flesh of his right hand hammocked between the knots of his knuckles as he twisted the knob back and forth. "You came," he said, blinking like a drunk.

He was red-eyed, but Garrett didn't smell any liquor on him. She strode up crisply, letting her skirts shush about her ankles, and he stepped out of the way. He shut the door; she waited to see if he was likely to shoot the bolt, but there was no thump of the latch. Not that an un-ensorcelled lock could inhibit Garrett when her wand was tucked into her corset.

Apparently, the invitation to dine had been sincere. Several covered salvers and a decanter of wine rested on a round mahogany table before three casement windows. Beyond them, yellow leaves turned in the wind. Garrett waited while Eliot, unspeaking, drew out a chair for her convenience. She permitted him to seat her, the carpet beneath the four legs thick enough that she felt it compress under her weight. The cushions were soft; she might have leaned back on them, but the corset held her up.

Silently, he served her. A green salad, brook trout, and green beans almondine. The wine was an local white, too sweet for Garrett's palate. She wasn't hungry. She buttered tidbits of bread and laid them aside. "Please don't draw it out," she requested, turning her water goblet in her hand.

He laid his fork down. Dining with Sebastien for company could make you forget what a man could eat when he had a will for it, but it seemed to Garrett that the Lord Mayor was no more than picking at his food. He stood and came to his desk, returning shortly with a letter. "You must read this, Crown Investigator."

Silently, she took it. The seal was broken; the address scrawled in a masculine hand. She recognized that writing from an hour on Monday night spent examining Colm Sheridan's desk.

With every appearance of calm, she flipped it open.

It was a plea for help.

"Thank you," she said. "I'll keep this. And authenticate its source, of course."

"Of course," the Lord Mayor said. "May I tell you the rest of the story?"

* * *

It was the sorcerous work of ten minutes to prove it, once she returned home. The letter was genuine, and genuinely sent from Colm Sheridan—or Emmett Goodwood—to Lord Mayor Peter Eliot. She slipped the flattened paper into a glassine envelope and tucked it into her blue velvet carpetbag. And then she summoned a cab and took herself to Sebastien's house, where Mr. Priest met her at the door.

He helped her off with her coat. He would have taken the bag, but she waved him away, and he was wise enough not to insist. "Is Sebastien in?"

"Waiting for you," Mr. Priest said. Garrett had sent a note ahead, to warn of her arrival, mailed from the Lord Mayor's house. As she came into the den she saw it unfolded on the side table. Sebastien sat in a yellow wing chair beside the cold fireplace. He was knitting.

Or, Garrett reassessed, playing with a ball of yarn and the orange cat. Which did not remove the fact that he had been knitting at some point. A sweater, ivory and cabled up the front, sized for a small man. He laid it aside, discomfiting the cat, and stood. Garrett glanced from sweater to wampyr, eyebrow cocked in amusement.

Sebastien shrugged. "I'm not pressed for time."

No, Garrett thought, full of pity again. You wouldn't be. "The days are getting shorter," she answered, and he smiled half-gratefully.

"Just so. I got your message. And one from the Colonial Police. There were, unfortunately, unable to recover the envelope in which Mr. Sheridan was sent the paddereen."

"Pity," Mr. Priest said, with a glance at Garrett's burden. "Could you have traced it back to the sender?"

"Confirmed who sent it, if we had a suspect," she said. She shrugged. "There are other ways."

She laid her things down on a coffee table and knelt before it. Unladylike, creasing her dress, but she managed well enough. She opened the carpetbag and pulled out the envelope, mostly unbattered.

Sebastien took it from her and tilted it toward Mr. Priest, and incidentally the light. The cat rubbed against Garrett's thighs and knees while the two men read, ensuring another scolding from her terrier when she got home. When Sebastien looked up, his forehead over his eyebrows was positively corrugated. "Sheridan was looking for a way out?"

"He was laundering money for the Fenians," Garrett confirmed. "And he wanted to escape their machinations. The Lord Mayor was a personal friend, and—upon receipt of this letter—offered to help him escape both his revolutionary creditors and the scaffold, if he would testify."

"And?" Mr. Priest asked. "Is that illegal?"

"No. It's certainly within his rights as the head of the Colonial Police to deal with informants." Her knees hurt from the floor. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. When she put it down, Mr. Priest placed a glass of cognac in it; she hadn't even seen him fetch the drink. She closed her eyes and inhaled the fumes, but did not yet partake. The aroma did not soothe her twisting stomach, and she set the glass aside.

"Duke Richard would expect you to destroy this letter," Sebastien said, holding it delicately between thumb and forefinger. She pointed to her luggage, and he slipped the envelope inside. "It could clear the Lord Mayor of any prior knowledge of Sheridan's political leanings."

"Indeed," she said. "I can link the Lord Mayor to Sheridan, and Sheridan to the Fenians. Without that"—she waved at the open carpetbag with the corner of envelope peeking clear—"it's all very tidy, don't you think? It almost solves itself."

"There are," Sebastien said dryly, "more easy ones than not."

"What are you going to do?" Mr. Priest, at Garrett's elbow. He extended a hand to help her to her feet, and she accepted.

She twisted her skirts in her fists, feeling more bitterness than wrath or despair. "Mister Priest," she said, "will you obtain for me a list of names?"

* * *

Garrett had expected Mr. Priest to temporize, stall, or otherwise attempt in some way to protect whatever familiar friends he had among the Fenians. Instead, he was at his desk within minutes, writing meticulously with a steel-nibbed pen on a torn half-sheet. The scritch-scritch of his writing complemented the clacking of Sebastien's needles; the wampyr had resumed his knitting, this time in the corner by the door.

Neither sound helped Garrett's uneasy concentration as she paced and attempted to distract herself with a book. She flipped pages almost at random, pausing only at the engraved chapter headers. These she tilted so the light caught on the fibers of the paper, studying them to see if she could make out the indentations caused by the pressure of the plates. She had no attention for the actual pictures.

This killing had turned out to be barely a mystery. Garrett was perfectly confident that Colm Sheridan, in the person of Emmett Goodwood, had been murdered because he meant to expose the Fenian organization and in so doing save and free himself. Almost painfully simple.

But there was still the problem of identifying and capturing the man behind the murder, and of course proving the crimes of the Fenians themselves. If they could manage any of those things.

It was rarely a question who was in charge of organized crime or revolutionary conspiracies. The issue was proving it, and while Garrett could arrest anybody she chose, doing it without proof of a crime would only give Finn's Boys another martyr.

And there was no guarantee she'd get the right man. The paddereen might mean nothing at all. It might, she was forced to admit, not even be linked to the crime.

The orange cat miaowed at the kitchen door to be let out into the garden. Garrett heard Consuela, Sebastien's cook, open it for him and cluck. A click, the clamor of outraged birds, and then silence followed.

She shut the book with a snap. Mr. Priest started, blotting his page, but Sebastien did not so much as drop a stitch. "The envelope," she said. "The dustman comes to that neighborhood on Fridays. The Colonial Police don't have it. The son—unless he's concealing it—doesn't have it."

"So a servant took it away," Sebastien said over the clatter of his needles. He reached the end of a row, and bent in concentration as he reversed. The cabling, Garrett must admit, looked tricky, though she could not herself knit. "Or the killer did."

"Or they're one and the same," she said. "It seems I'll need to have the murder squad round up the servants again, for questioning."

"As soon as I'm done with my list I'll take a message," Mr. Priest said. He had lowered his head again and was writing intently. "Forty-one names. I'm better than half done."

It was less than a quarter-hour before he finished, but to Garrett it felt like eight times the duration. Finally, he set the pen down, stood, and came to Garrett to hand her the list, with an odd little bow. She glanced along it and frowned.

It ran onto the back, and a second half-sheet. "Well," she said with a sigh, "it's a start. And it will give the redcoats something to do."

"Redcoats." She suspected, if they hadn't been indoors, Mr. Priest would have turned his head and spat.

* * *

When Garrett arrived at the Duke's house, she found herself anticipated. Seamus Gallagher—Richard's butler—was there to greet her and help her off with her coat. She kept her carpetbag. "We received your note, Crown

Investigator," he said. "The Duke is out, but I've sent a message."

"Did he say where he was going?" She allowed him to usher her into the study, expecting the headshake before it happened. Seamus was always

discreet. That, and his unfailing efficiency, had ensured his employment with the Duke for longer than Garrett had known either of them.

Seamus hesitated as he was leaving, his hand upon the door. "Can I make your wait more comfortable, D.C.I.?

"Thank you," she answered. "I have everything I need."

He bowed slightly, and seemed about to leave when he hesitated. "Oh. His grace asked if I would return this to you."

He came back across the room and walked around behind the Duke's desk, where he drew an envelope from the cubbyhole secretary against the wall behind it. The niches were filled with paper, paperclips, three colors of ink, fountain pens and quills, lint-padded packets, tape, sealing wax, a rolling blotter, a stub of candle and some lucifers, a tin of candies, and the odds and ends of correspondence, but Seamus unerringly found the right one, and handed it to Garrett with a bow. "His grace said, "A foolish jewel, to desert so beautiful a lady."

Garrett tore the padded envelope open, mindful of scattering lint, and shook a sapphire earring into her palm. She had been missing it.

She didn't need to ask where the Duke had found it, and neither did Seamus. But the butler was in Richard's employ, not the Duchess', and they had relied on his discretion before.

"Thank you," she said, and returned the earring to the packet—her name written on it in Seamus' hand—before tucking it into her carpetbag.

Seamus winked and left her.

The study was cluttered despite its size. The Duke's desk was as big as Garrett's lab table, though not as tall, and the other furniture—bookcases, a reading table, a couch, the chairs—were all to the same heavy standard. Garrett took a position on the edge of a carved maple armchair, beside the Duke's desk and within reach of the afternoon's newspaper, and settled down.

Richard arrived within the half-hour, slightly disheveled and pink-cheeked, still wearing his boots. In the interval, it had begun to rain. Garrett now stood before the window, wondering if the overcast seemed likely enough to hold that Sebastien might venture out by daylight. Maybe he and Mr. Priest would have discovered something useful, on their own or by way of the questioning of the Goodwood's servants, if so. The Colonial Register hung by her lilac silk taffeta skirts, the cheap folio sheets folded open to page three. Her sorcerer's tools were sealed in their bag beside the chair she'd been sitting in.

The Duke shut the door behind himself and shot the bolt unsubtly. He came to Garrett, but when he reached to rest a hand on her shoulder and pull her close, she snapped the paper into his palm. He took it, reflexively, and stepped back. "The Lord Mayor has begun a proxy fight, with the intention of assuming control of Goodwood patent shoes," she said. "What does that suggest to you?"

"That he has something to hide," Richard said, scanning columns of print. "I'll have their financial records pulled."

"I've seen a letter that would tend to clear the Lord Mayor of culpability in either the death or any Fenian money-laundering operation," she said. "Do you care?"

He must have finally read the challenge in her voice. He squared his shoulders, dropped the newspaper on the end table, and fisted his hands inside his pockets. "Does it implicate anyone else?"

"Goodwood—Sheridan—was working for the Fenians," she said. "He wanted out. He wrote to the Lord Mayor to ask for assistance and protection, if Sheridan would testify. The letter"—she hesitated—"is confirmed."

"It sounds," he admitted softly, "the twin of one I received. Do you have it with you?"

One you received, Richard my love, and did not trouble yourself to inform me of? It was his privilege as her lord and master, of course.

She was sure there were a thousand things about Richard, Duke of New Amsterdam, that she had not an inkling of.

"No," she lied, without looking down. Her heart beat so hard she felt it in her fingertips. She couldn't imagine how he didn't see it pounding in her throat.

He didn't drop his gaze either. "Did he name the Fenians he was working with?"

"Also no." And that was truth. "We're working on those names. If I can recover a certain piece of evidence, I'll be closer to an answer. Unless it was burned, somewhere exists the envelope in which the rosary bead was posted. If I can find it, I will know who mailed the thing. Then we have a subject for interrogation."

"Or I could arrest the Lord Mayor," Richard said. He took her hand between his own and pressed his lips to it. She suffered the touch, and permitted him to kiss her cheek. "Abby Irene, I have skirmishing on the borders. I have French ships up the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi. I have the Iroquois Confederacy walking out of conferences. It is only a matter of time until we are overrun, and Peter Eliot is the greatest threat to our unity, and our loyalty to the crown. It won't be home rule he gets us. It will be French rule. I need—"

"I won't," she said, her tone like a cracked bell. Without resonance. She lifted her chin. "Do your worst."

He stopped as if run through, and took a breath, and watched her eyes as he said, "Vampirism is a capital crime in the Colonies."

She hadn't actually believed he was capable of what he threatened. But she read his resolve, and knew he would do as he said. He'd burn Sebastien to make her obey.

She'd always admired his ruthlessness before.

"Richard," she said, bending her knees to collect her bag, "it's time you accepted that things are over between us."

"You have a day to decide," he said, and held open the door.

* * *

Garrett was still shaking with fury as she settled against the hard cushions of a hansom cab and crossed her arms over her carpet bag. She'd never let Henry make her cry, and she wasn't about to grant any greater power over her to Duke Richard. She drew a shaking breath, experimentally, jolted as the driver shook the reins and the horse jerked into a trot. Your first breath as a free woman, she told herself.

It wasn't true, of course. She still owed service to the King. And as long as Richard could extort obedience from her, she had no freedom worth speaking of.

It didn't change the fact that for the first time in years she felt free.

Richard, apparently, had been worse for her than she thought.

It was stupid to go directly to Sebastien's house, but of course she did it anyway, as fast as the rainsoaked driver could get there. Thank God the Lord Mayor had cobbled the streets; just thirty years earlier, they would have been ankle deep in mud already, a death-trap for hurried horses. They were slick, now, and the wheels clicked and squeaked over them, but they were not a mire of earth and refuse.

She made sure to have her money ready when she dismounted the carriage, and paid the miserable cabman while dodging the water that dripped from the brim of his hat. He was eager to be gone; he shook up the reins while she was climbing the three steps to Sebastien's door. Fortunately, there was an awning. She huddled under it, rain spotting her dress, while she fumbled the brass knocker, her carpet bag tucked under her arm.

Silence greeted her. It was Wednesday, the servants' half-day, and she was unhappily reminded of this as she knocked a second time to no reply.

The cab had long since rattled and squeaked out of sight.

"Hell," she muttered, and rattled the door handle. And shockingly, the door swung in.

She stopped it before it opened more than a crack, her pulse—which had subsided a little—thundering again. Surely, the Duke's men could not have come already. Could they have taken Sebastien while she was at Richard's house?

She could still shut the door behind her and leave, walk down the block until she found another cab, go home and let Mary put her into a hot bath. She could lie for Sebastien, do what Richard—do what the Duke demanded of her—and Sebastien would have to forgive her, wouldn't he? She held the power in their relationship. And he had said himself, he was disinterested in human politics.

She could walk away right now, and he would never know what the Duke had threatened. She could keep him—at least, for as long as he would stay.

And give the Duke the opportunity to use Sebastien against her any time she showed the slightest disinclination to play the game the way Richard preferred.

She was already pushing the door open completely when she heard the crash. She swung her heel against the door to make sure it shut behind her, then hurried through the dim entry, slipping her wand from its sleeve, the fingers of her left hand white on the handle of her carpetbag. For a moment, she thought of sneaking—but she was a peace officer, and she held her weapon in her hand. "Sebastien?" she called, "Mr. Priest? It's Abby Irene."

There was no answer, but the orange cat catapulted past her ankles and vanished into the entryway. At lest she wouldn't have to worry about tripping over it in the half-lit rooms.

Gaslights did burn in the den where she'd found Sebastien working newspaper puzzles. They shed a rectangle of warm light through the doorframe. As Garrett slipped forward, she heard another loud thump and the sound of something rolling on carpet.

And a moan.

* * *

Mr. Priest. Garrett did not drop her carpet bag until she had passed through the door and assured herself that Mr. Priest was the only one in the room.

He was. And he was sprawled on his face, one arm outflung and the other flexed beneath his chest, an overturned end-table and pottery vase upset on the floor beside him. He was breathing—she could see his disarrayed hair fluttering against his cheek—and his fingers flexed as she stood, frozen for a moment, assessing the situation.

She went to him and fell to her knees at his side, her carpetbag falling on its side, this-and-that spilling forth unheeded as the latch was knocked askew. His skin was chill; violent shivers wracked his body. His lips were pale, and when she pulled them back with her thumb his gums were too. Even his mouth felt cold, which—coupled with the lack of convulsions or other symptoms—suggested a thaumaturgic rather than a natural poison. His eyelids fluttered as she felt for his pulse. Thready, quick, and she could not pick one heartbeat out from the next.

She rolled him onto his back. His left hand fell clear, and something dropped from his fingers: the paddereen. Which, by Garrett's own investigations, was clear of both malicious sorcery and latent poison. She flicked it away with the tip of her wand, making sure she noted where it came to rest.

In the few brief moments that she had been holding his wrist, Garrett thought Mr. Priest's heartbeat had become more erratic. She had the medical training all sorcerers received, which included emergency treatment of natural and of thaumaturgic poisoning (intentional and unintentional). The first step would be to establish stasis, while Mr. Priest was still drawing breath. It was a spell she carried prepared, hung in charges on her wand—the most basic of self-defense measures.

She released Mr. Priest's wrist, leveled the wand, and the silver tip wavered. He was almost gone. She'd shared Henry, all the years that she and the Prince had been lovers. And she'd shared Richard, too. But a half-minute's delay, no more than the faintest hesitation, and Sebastien would be hers alone.

Except for whoever else he went to, when he must. She had no idea who the rest of his lovers—his court, Abby Irene, use the ugly word when it's the right one—were. But they must exist, five or ten at least, to sustain him without undue risk. And being Sebastien—or whoever he'd been, before he'd forgotten the name—she had no doubt he considered each and every one of them a bosom friend. There was no doubt that Mr. Priest was right. Don Sebastien de Ulloa was, in wampyr terms, a hopeless eccentric.

Mr. Priest's breathing caught. He shivered.

And Garrett leveled her wand and froze him with a gesture, suspended in time. Still alive, on the edge of death.

She was still crouched over him, shuddering—a matter of no more than ninety seconds—when the front door opened again. "Jack?"

"In the den," she called. "He's safe for now—"

She never finished the sentence. Sebastien materialized beside her and dropped on one knee at her left hand, though she'd neither seen nor heard his approach. "What is this?" She couldn't have stopped him when he reached out, but he arrested his own hand before it quite brushed Mr. Priest's cheek.

"Your paddereen, I think," she said, and gestured to where she'd flicked it. "I've put him in a stasis. He isn't dead, Sebastien." Gently, she touched his sleeve. "He's quite safe, for the moment, and we have time to attempt a cure."

This time, he leaned his shoulder on her as if to borrow strength. He rested his hands on his raised knee, fabric dimpling under the tightness of a grip whose ferocity did not color his voice in the slightest. "But you tested the bead. No poison and no sorcery."

"No poison," she echoed. "No, nor any sorcery. But—" She let the tip of her wand rest on the carpet as she thought. "What if you took a spell and cut it in half?"

She could sense his impatience, but he held it in check. "Proceed," he said, tightly.

"It wouldn't be detectable as a spell. No active magical principle, not even a stored dweomer. There'd be. . .no tension on it. So if half the spell were on the paddereen, for example, and the other half—"

Sebastien could not blanch. But his brows drew together and he glanced over his shoulder. "The cat," he said. "When he was out in Sheridan's garden, anyone could have. . ."

She nodded. "It's the only other thing we brought here from Sheridan's house. And when you became exhausted you had been handling both the cat and the bead."

It was at times such as this that she was reminded of just how unhuman Sebastien was. The façades and japery fell away, his almost-perfect counterfeit of a mild-mannered, breathing, human man. A man would have drawn a breath, squared himself, steeled himself. He would have tensed and seemed to enlarge as he filled his lungs.

Sebastien, the predator, simply settled into himself and became profoundly still. "Well," he said, his eyes mad with red glints, "we know a wampyr can survive it. What if he were of the blood?"

Oh, God, Garrett thought. "Would he thank you?"

"He could curse me all his nights," Sebastien said. Garrett glanced down, not wanting to see the curved needle-sharp canines pressing into his pale lower lip. "He'd not be the first."

His voice, the scent of him, the blown pupils in the narrowed eyes—she quailed, as she had never quailed from him before. And somehow, nevertheless, reached out and put a hand on his steely arm.

"Let me try first," she said. "He's safe for a few hours. And I can treat the spell if I can discover the original casting. I need to construct an exact complement, which will absorb and neutralize the malevolent sorcery, and for that I need the spell itself. And better, the sorcerer. Because anyone this clever will have false trails and deceptions worked into the structure."

"Then we're no better situated than we were this morning."

"Did they find the envelope?"

"Since you ask, I'm just back from the Colonial Police. I helped question the servants. Sometimes I notice when people are lying, after all." That wolfish curve of his lips chilled her every time she caught a glimpse of it. "And yes, I have the envelope. It seems my skills were not needed; a downstairs maid had taken it for the paper. Apparently," he said, his voice rich with irony, "she fancies herself something of an artist, and she's covered the back with sketches."

Garrett winced. "That will muddle the correspondence, but I can work through it. Perhaps."

Sebastien glanced at the young man sprawled insensate on the rug. "What about Jack?"

Garrett said, "I'll see to him. Because now I have a spell cast by an unknown sorcerer. And I have a list of names. And that, my dear Sebastien, is all I really need."

He stared. And then he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, his fangs scratching like thorns. "Lioness," he said. "Use whatever you need. I'm going to carry Jack to bed."

"Wait," she said. "There's something I need to tell you."

He did not stop working Mr. Priest's limp body into his arms. "Is it likely to result in our collective deaths in the next five minutes?"

"No," she said, as she collected the spilled contents of her carpet bag and stood. "Not in the next five minutes, no."

* * *