I know the small fists that did this.
Up and down the corridor, doors are slamming open. Drunk faces, twisted, confused, and angry. Hair mussed, sweat rolling from soiled creases in their faces, a few half-dressed men are pulling up their trousers, stumbling, craning their necks.
On his knees, the bleeding man tugs at my cloak, tries to mouth the word help.
I push him roughly against the wall and he falls, sliding with his back pressed against the timber. His blood is pooling like spilled ink.
“Oy,” calls a man. “What’s happened to him?”
“Ate a blade,” I say, shrugging.
I casually step over the body and into the narrow room, closing and barring the door behind me.
“I knew you’d come,” says a small voice.
Elena stands on the straw mattress of a sagging bed. Her cloak is wet and singed black, her wig hanging crooked. She is clearly not a human being. Her leather face is washed clean of pigment, dark as alligator skin. Through a tear in her shoulder I can see mechanisms—brass struts and silver-coiled tendons.
Boots shuffle outside the door, concerned voices muffled.
“Everyone stay in your rooms,” shouts a rough voice.
Slam. The door vibrates against my back as someone shoves against it.
“Hey! Come on out,” calls an unconvincing voice.
Slam.
The door rocks on its hinges.
“Elena, there are too many. Cover yourself. We will run.”
“No,” she says, defiant. “We’re not running. Not again.”
Slam.
The girl is taking too long.
“Trust me,” I say, leaning over, intending to swoop her up and carry her out. My arms close on air and I stumble. The hard pressure of a stiletto presses against my throat.
“No,” she says. “You will trust me. I have thought of a use for this place—a way that I can blend in…forever.”
Slam. The wooden door is splintering.
Brushing past me, Elena puts a palm flat on the door. Her lips move as she counts. She is timing the hits.
Slam.
Three, two, one…
Elena yanks the door open and a man plows into the room, off balance. In one quick movement she sticks the stiletto in and out of his lower spine. The momentum of his body dissipates in a heap over the ragged bed. What’s happened registers on the face of the dead fellow’s friend and he lets out a surprised yelp.
“They’re robbing him!” he shouts, pointing. “He’s been stabbed!”
The hallway is a crowd of jostling elbows and fists. I put a hand on Elena’s shoulder and she shrugs it off, stepping right out the open door and into the hallway, her eyes aimed at the floor, standing hunch shouldered, surrounded by cretins.
A dozen grimy faces stare down at Elena in foul-smelling lamplight. Wide eyes and sweat-stained armpits. Grubby hands clutching improvised weapons snatched off floors. A few, the ones in charge of maintaining order, are even wearing light armor.
“Put down those blades, little girl,” says one.
Elena slowly straightens, raising her horrific face to them, a stiletto in each hand. The men collectively take a step back. Someone whimpers.
“By the devil.”
“Her skin ain’t right,” says another.
Demon come the whispers. Witch.
“Let’s begin,” Elena says, and she darts between a pair of legs. The men fall upon her, shouting, swinging weapons and fists.
I draw my khanjali—a simple blade about the length of my forearm. Pushing into the hallway, I plunge my blade into the nearest heart. With my other hand, I lift a man by his throat and pin him against the wall, listening to his glottal struggling. A dagger slips into my side over the hip and something heavy glances off the side of my head and I choose not to react.
Someone shrieks.
Jackknifing my arm, I ignore the injuries and slice into the crowd of perspiring meat that is compressed into the corridor. The neck in my hand snaps. Already, the whoremongers are trying to escape, screaming, squealing like slaughtered pigs, turning and slipping on their own blood, holding their guts in with dirty fingers.
A small black demon flits between them like a lethal toy.
We advance down the hall, following the survivors toward the main stairs. Around us, vermin-infested corners are strewn with broken-necked, mutilated corpses. Elena is dashing ahead, crawling around and between the legs of panicked men toward the end of the hallway. There, she slams shut the door at the top of the stairs, trapping the last few men between us. Ignoring pleas for mercy, Elena and I meet in a grisly dance.
Behind us, a few brave girls are emerging from their rooms. One of them quietly and efficiently slits the throats of fallen men with a scavenged knife. Crouched on scabbed knees, she works emotionlessly, moving from one to the next.
In seconds, the men are dispatched, sprawled grotesquely up and down the hall, collapsed on one another in heaps.
It is done.
Meanwhile, the hallway is filling with girls and young women. Dirty faces and torn gowns. They watch us with cautious glances. The only way out of this hall of horrors is past one of us.
Elena presses an ear against the closed door. After a moment, she yanks it open and the madam of the brothel stumbles out, falling to her knees, breasts spilling from her elaborate corset. She wears stockings, her knees instantly stained red as she crawls over glistening carnage. At the sight of it, her eyes fly open, jaw working soundlessly until she begins to keen.
“Please!” she shouts. “Please!”
Elena puts a hand firmly on the madam’s shoulder and the woman stops shouting, swallowing sobs instead. My sister watches the woman with a blank face, inhuman, skin stained with crimson drops of blood under a wig of disheveled black hair. She is emotionless as she turns to face the hallway.
Women and girls of the brothel stand and crouch, shivering, looking upon Elena’s uncanny countenance with faces frozen in fear or fascination. The madam cowers, locks of her hair spiraling away in corkscrews, hands wavering over her face.
Elena motions to the stairwell door, letting it creak slowly open. When she speaks, I hear her jaw clicking with each word.
“If you are a grown woman, leave,” she says.
Knees dipping, a rush of women grab clothes and personal effects, tiptoeing over the carnage in a controlled scramble to escape, pushing cautiously past Elena and thumping down the stairwell.
Now a hallway full of girls remain, trembling, eyes wide.
“The rest of you go back to your rooms,” Elena says, in a low voice. “This is no longer a brothel. School begins tomorrow.”
43
LONDON, PRESENT
“Just pretend you are my wife,” says Peter, one arm wrapped around the small of my back. “Follow my lead.”
“Won’t they judge me for being American?” I ask.
“Not if you are as rich as the documents I sent indicate.”