A

Wrath of Sparrows

A LONDON CHARISMATICS NOVELLA

Jacquelyn Benson

VAUGHAN WOODS PUBLISHING

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents described here are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons—living or dead—is coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 by Jacquelyn Benson

Cover design by Sara Argue of Sara Argue Design

Cover copyright © 2021 by Vaughan Woods Publishing

Typeset in Minion Pro and ALS Script by Cathie Plante

All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, photocopying and distribution of this book without permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book for purposes other than reviews, please fill out the contact form at JacquelynBenson.com.

First edition: May 2021

ISBN: 978-1-7345599-8-9

Published by Vaughan Woods Publishing

PO Box 882

Exeter, New Hampshire 03833 U.S.A.

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Content warnings:

Contains violent fights, references to sexual assault and human trafficking, murder, injuries, use of minors in criminal acts.

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The London Charismatics Series

The Magdalene Diggers

Acknowledgments

About the Author

“The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”

Sun Tzu

~

“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

Joseph Campbell

ONE

Sunday, November 15th, 1914

Mid-afternoon

Marylebone, London

THE GRAY SKIES OF London promised a rain they had no intention to deliver.

Lily had buttoned her wool driving coat to the chin to ward off both the cold and the damp as she zipped across the city on her Triumph, gliding through the afternoon traffic.

The season for riding was coming to an end. Lily mourned it more this year than she had before. She had become accustomed to using her motorbike for everyday transport instead of reserving it for those rare and luxurious races through the open countryside beyond the sprawling edges of the city. Returning to a life of trams and underground trains and hackney carriages held a note of tragedy.

A bright spray of golden chrysanthemums was carefully strapped to the luggage rack, their colors bold against the unrelenting dullness of the day. People’s eyes were drawn more to the flowers than to the woman in trousers straddling the vehicle.

That much had changed in the three months since the outbreak of the war. There were far stranger sights in London these days than a woman motorcyclist, like the endless lines of soldiers drilling on the wide greens of Regent’s Park. The marching men blurred along the periphery of Lily’s vision as she turned onto Park Lane. They were arrayed in a ragged assortment of civilian clothes, carrying wooden dummy rifles on their shoulders. The Army’s supplies had not been able to keep up with the flood of volunteers who had answered the call to arms.

Requisitioned lorries lined the circular lane at the heart of the park like the caravan of a utilitarian carnival.

The red, white and blue bunting that had been euphorically strung between the rows of houses in August was now stained with soot. Shops plastered their windows with the latest edition of the newspaper, the vague headlines that made it past the censors lined up against the minuscule print of the lists of the known dead.

The celebratory mood that followed the declaration of war had not endured long against those merciless rows of type.

Lily turned from the park, maneuvering the Triumph down the roads that twisted to the west. She could glimpse the pale ribbon of Regent’s Canal here and there through the gaps between the houses. A small dog barked at her furiously from the end of its lead, the owner hissing a reprove.

Sparrows danced overhead, quick brown rags fluttering against the featureless backdrop of the sky.

She arrived at Kensal Green.

The cemetery sprawled along the banks of the canal, gray mausoleums mingling with pale tilted crosses under the watchful eye of the gasometer that loomed on the far side of the water.

Lily dismounted, chaining her motorbike to the black iron of the gate. She plucked the golden burst of the chrysanthemums from the rack.

She had not been to Kensal Green since the day of the funeral. She still remembered perfectly well which of the many crisscrossing paths she needed to take.

At the end of it, a cluster of somber figures came into view, gathered on a patch of vibrant green lawn.

There was the tall, lanky form of James Cairncross beside plump, trim Miss Bard in her brown tailored suit. Estelle had dressed in gold and black for the occasion, her caftan seeming to billow around her in spite of the lack of any breeze.

Lily, in her driving coat and trousers, her bobbed hair tucked under a cap, joined them by Robert Ash’s tomb.

“Darling,” Estelle noted in greeting, wrapping Lily in a fragrant embrace as though they hadn’t just run into each other in the hall that morning. Lately, it seemed that was all Lily saw of Estelle, just quick exchanges in the hall or at the door as she ran out to one appointment or another.

Estelle’s services had been in particularly high demand for all the terribly obvious reasons since the outbreak of the war . She had added more séances each week, and yet Lily no longer heard the screams and thumps and bleating trumpets through the thin floor of her flat. Estelle’s current clients weren’t thrill-seekers out for a bit of entertainment. They were mothers desperate to connect with the sons who would never return from the mud of Flanders.

Lily could have made more of an effort to spend time with Estelle and Miss Bard, but it was hard when every casual chat was a reminder of what was no longer there.

The glue that bound them all together had dissolved, and Lily did not know how to fill the space it had left behind. She didn’t have words for what she was feeling, and yet pretending everything was fine exhausted her.

It was different with Strangford, where pretenses were impossible and language was irrelevant. With a touch, Lily knew she was understood.

Those moments together were a stolen rarity. The attention of the world had drifted since the outbreak of the war but there were still limits to the time she and Strangford could spend together alone. All of that would change in a month when they were married, at which point she would no longer have to sneak through the garden gate when it all became too much to bear.

At least Strangford had neglected to repair the lock since the afternoon Lily had kicked her way through it into his life.

Strangford would not be joining this gathering. He had been forced to return to Allerhope, the family estate in Northumberland. The Army had issued a requisition order for the estate’s horses, and his mother, Lady Strangford, had her hands full wrangling over which of the animals should be considered essential breeding stock and which would be sacrificed to the war effort.

It would mean some terrible choices. Strangford and his family were under no illusions that any of the horses taken would ever be returned. She did not envy him the errand.

Strangford was not the only one missing. Dr. Gardner, now an officer of the Royal Army Medical Corps, was stationed at a new military hospital opened in a requisitioned girls’ school in Portsmouth. He had managed to dash off a letter or two since his appointment, enough to tell Lily that the flood of wounded men arriving daily from the continent was both horrible and desperate. Gardner would not leave his post while there were lives on the line.

A small brown bird alighted onto one of the nearby headstones, ruffling its feathers against the damp. It reminded Lily of someone else who should have been there. It seemed like Sam Wu was always accompanied by sparrows, his little auxiliaries in whatever mischief he was getting up to. He would set them to monitoring his father or Ash when he was intent on something one or both of them would undoubtedly disapprove of.

The last Lily knew, Sam was at the enormous Army home base in Aldershot completing his basic training. She had written to him every week since he enlisted in August.

There had been no reply.

She told herself he must be terribly busy, but in her heart she knew it was more than that. He had left London in a tangled snarl of anger and grief, torn apart by the death of the man they had come to see today.

“Shall we get on with it, then?” Cairncross gruffly announced. Without waiting for an answer, he turned and crossed the remaining distance to the slab of marble that marked the grave of the man he had called friend for the better part of three decades.

The gasworks rose above the silver line of the canal, iron crowns and blackened bricks and the steady rumble of some secret engine. A barge chugged quietly along the water, loaded with cargo.

A lone gull swung overhead.

Lily looked down at the unremarkable stone engraved with the name of the man who had told her she must become something more, then deserted her to figure out the rest of it alone.

The stone was a farce, of course. Ash didn’t lie in the ground under her worn leather boots. There had been nothing left of him to bury. The gleaming coffin under the ground held only an assortment of objects Cairncross had chosen, quietly and alone. Lily had never asked what it contained. It would have felt like an invasion of some sacred privacy.

She supposed they could have executed this little ceremony anywhere, and it would have made no difference.

If Sam were here, he would have said as much. He had never been one to hold back from speaking the truth, however much trouble it was going to cause.

Lily knew she was being unfair. It didn’t matter that Ash’s physical remains weren’t here in Kensal Green. Estelle would say as much if Lily mentioned it, and she knew death better than anyone. She could almost imagine the response.

It’s not about the bones. It’s about the heart.

Cairncross cleared his throat.

“I have prepared a reading,” he announced. He unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket and began to recite something in a language Lily supposed might be Arabic.

She listened politely until he had finished, his voice roughening with emotion as he reached the end. He tucked the paper back in his pocket.

Miss Bard stepped forward. A folklore scholar, she held a wreath of yew branches, bright with their bell-like red berries. She set it down against the stone.

“I brought a traditional Celtic blessing with me,” she said. “Deep peace of the running wave to you. Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quiet earth to you. And deep peace of the shining stars to you.”

“Is that yew?” Cairncross demanded.

“Yes,” Miss Bard replied, frowning.

“Isn’t that a bit macabre?” Cairncross pushed.

“Only if you ignore the clear symbolic associations with resurrection,” Miss Bard retorted.

“It’s bloody poisonous,” Cairncross complained.

“James,” Estelle warned.

The librarian and the folklorist glared at each other for a moment across the lawn. Miss Bard brushed off her skirt and graciously turned to Lily.

“Go on, Miss Albright. It’s your turn,” she urged.

Lily scooted forward and set down her golden bouquet. The color felt garish. She stepped back again, having nothing more to offer.

Cairncross frowned a little but refrained from saying whatever it was he clearly wanted to say.

Estelle moved forward, the black and gold of her robe dancing around her feet. She crouched gracefully before the stone, running her fine-boned hand across the delicate leaves of the grass.

“Happy birthday, my old friend,” she said softly, and Lily felt a shard of glass twist inside her heart.

Miss Bard was deliberately cheerful as they walked back to the gate, pressing one-word answers out of Cairncross about his new position at a girls’ teaching college in Rotherham. The students, it seemed, were “fine.” The library was “adequate.”

They divided as they reached the gate. Estelle was headed to a private session in the home of a well-off client who had just lost her younger brother to an artillery shell in Ypres. Miss Bard had a meeting of her women’s suffrage group, who were to vote tonight on whether to postpone their next demonstration and instead devote their efforts to raising funds for wounded soldiers.

The two women flagged a hackney. Cairncross lingered on the curb as Lily unlocked her motorbike.

“Would you walk with me for a moment?” he asked bluntly.

Lily, surprised, gave him a nod.

She wheeled the Triumph alongside her as they moved down the pavement.

“I was able to find some information related to the new khárisma you manifested after your . . . fall,” Cairncross finished.

Death, Lily silently corrected him.

After she had drowned in Regent’s Canal and been resurrected on a slab of cement across from the King’s Cross rail yard.

“I believe it has a name,” the librarian continued. “Or at least, it does in one part of the world.”

“What is it?” Lily demanded, stopping.

“Onmyōdō,” Cairncross replied, turning to face her.

The rhythm of the word danced across her skin—onmyōdō.

“It was an institutionalized system of supernatural practice in ancient Japan,” he continued, moving back into their walk, Lily matching his stride beside him. “For a thousand years, its masters held immense influence in the imperial court. They were highly valued for their ability to pinpoint adjustments one needed to make in the present to avoid misfortune in the future. The position of a chair, the birth date of the man who should be offered a promotion. How a palace should be oriented, what route the emperor should take to prayer . . . and for their power to curse the enemies of the dynasty.”

“Curse?” Lily echoed, surprised.

He looked down at her, the wind tugging at the cropped gray hair under his hat.

“Onmyōdō is the art of discerning the path to both good and evil fortune,” he replied. “The way to both balance and imbalance. It was a very elaborate science requiring years of study to master.”

“Nothing about what I do feels scientific,” Lily said.

“Yes. Well,” Cairncross returned. “Perhaps it would be different if you had a proper teacher.”

He sounded tired. He stopped, pausing to look across the canal.

“Mr. Ash . . . Robert,” he corrected himself, the two syllables of Ash’s given name roughed by emotion as they emerged from his throat. “Had a gift for it. An instinct that made up for any lack of experience or longstanding tradition. All I have are books—my own inadequate interpretations of books. I can’t . . . do what he could do, Miss Albright.”

The pain was a lump in her throat. Lily spoke past it.

“Why did you come to study this?” she asked. She did not say what she really meant—to study us. “Was it because you met Ash?”

Cairncross didn’t look at her. His eyes were on the water of the canal and there was a stiffness in his shoulders she had not seen before.

“No,” he replied shortly. He pushed out the rest. “I had an experience with khárisma.”

Lily waited for more. The old soldier beside her didn’t offer it. He shifted as though shaking off some moment of the past he had deemed best forgotten.

“I’ll translate the most relevant passages from the original Japanese for you. It is not my strongest language, so I am afraid it might take me a while.” He glanced over at Lily. “They would call you an onmyōji.”

She wanted to press Cairncross on his secrets, but it was clear that conversation was through. Instead, she let the word soak in: onmyōji. It was a name, an identity . . . though for what, she still wasn’t sure.

She was so far from understanding the strange new power she had brought back with her from the other side of her fall into the canal. It loomed inside of her as both a promise and a threat, a spark of strange and unsettling instinct.

There should have been someone there to guide her through it, to bring her to an understanding of who she was and what she was meant to do.

There wasn’t.

“There’s . . . something else I should tell you,” Cairncross went on, his change in tone sending a warning note through Lily. “I have had an offer to let out The Refuge.”

“You can’t possibly be thinking of accepting it,” Lily blurted.

Cairncross did not flinch. His long face was as serious as Lily had ever seen it.

“There isn’t enough money in the trust,” he said. “I can’t afford to maintain the place. There are already issues with the damp, and I spent the last two weeks fighting an infestation of mice. Buildings do not fare well when they are empty. They slowly crumble into themselves. The rental money would be enough to pay for upkeep and secure an appropriate storage area for the artifacts and the books in the collection.”

“A storage area somewhere else,” Lily filled in, biting out the words.

“They are all just things,” Cairncross replied with some effort. “They can be moved.”

“Not all of them,” Lily shot back. “Not the mural.”

“No,” Cairncross agreed. “Not the mural.”

There would be no moving the last work of Robert Ash’s wife, Evangeline. Her sprawling opus covered every inch of the walls and ceiling of the attic of The Refuge, woven through with symbols and secrets of a woman with the power to perceive fate itself.

“I have thought I could lock it up, or board up the attic door, but it doesn’t feel like enough,” Cairncross admitted. “None of it feels like enough.”

Lily could see the weight of it bowing his shoulders. The retort she had been about to make died on her tongue.

It wasn’t fair for her to rail against Cairncross. He had not created the situation they found themselves in. He had simply been left holding the key to an impossible and heartbreaking responsibility.

She could not reassure him, either. She was not that good a liar.

They had reached the place where Great Western Road crossed the canal. The Westbourne Park station lay on the far side. Lily stopped, knowing this was where they must part ways.

“Thank you for the name,” she said.

Cairncross nodded awkwardly. He turned to go, then paused.

“I hope you’ll call. If you’re ever in Rotherham,” he said.

“Of course,” Lily replied. The words felt wholly inadequate, but no others offered themselves.

He left. She watched his long stride eat up the distance between her and the station, then slipped her leg over the Triumph and spun it into ignition.

She flew back to Bloomsbury. She took the direct route this time instead of the more circuitous path that had become habitual over the last three months. It took her past the tidy green of Bedford Square.

Lily stopped.

From astride her motorbike, she stared at the two white-bricked buildings that stood out so starkly from the staid red facades of their neighbors. The paint on the blue door had not yet begun to flake. The brass plaque that hung on the wall beside it was as-yet untarnished.

The steps had not been swept.

The Refuge did not yet show obvious signs of decay, at least not from the outside. There was still something terribly off about it, something that reminded her of an empty shell—another vacant tomb like the one she had just left on Kensal Green.

The sight of it hurt. It threatened to tear open a wound inside of her that was only scabbed over, not healed.

She spun the Triumph away from it and raced down the road, leaving the memory behind her.

TWO

LILY TURNED THE TRIUMPH into the narrow mews that ran behind March Place. The rattle of the engine died, the echo of its sound fading from the high brick walls of the surrounding buildings. She pushed open the old gate that led into the yard behind her flat and wheeled the motorbike inside.

The yard was an unremarkable patch of cement her landlady, Mrs. Bramble, unironically referred to as “the garden.” The only plants it was ever graced with were the odd weeds that found their way up through the neglected cracks in the pavement.

Lily had made a space for her Triumph inside the tiny, weather-beaten shed in the corner. She slid the motorbike into place between the old rakes and chipped plant pots.

She was distracted. The notion of strangers taking up residence in The Refuge was terrible to her in a way she knew was unreasonable. She could hear Estelle’s infinitely patient voice in her mind and knew what her friend would say to her about it if she were to bring the matter up.

Everything passes, darling.

Would Strangford agree? Lily wasn’t sure. He could discern everything she was hiding inside her heart with a touch, but his own thoughts and feelings were more obscure.

The man she was set to marry was often an enigma to her.

Sam Wu, on the other hand . . . Lily knew exactly what he would think of the choice Cairncross was contemplating.

Sam felt that The Refuge was his home. That his father and grandmother now lived in a lovely little flat in Limehouse would not change that.

She thought of the expression on his face the last time she had seen him, that twisted storm of grief and unresolved anger.

Losing The Refuge would not be good for him.

Lily slipped her key into the lock of the back entrance to her building. Her heart was in such a tumult that the little frisson of warning didn’t register until she had gone through the quick and automatic motion of opening the door.

Then they were upon her.

Rough hands grabbed her arms with the clear intention of yanking her inside.

Lily lacked her usual means of defense. The walking stick she used for her kali, the art of self-defense she had trained in for years, was upstairs in her flat. She reacted in spite of it, twisting her body and throwing the weight of it backwards.

Both she and the man who held her tumbled down the three short steps to the yard. Lily landed hard on the pavement as a dull brown sparrow fluttered wildly out of her way. Her head bounced against the cement, pain blazing through her skull.

She ignored it, rolling free of her attacker and scrambling to her feet. She snatched at a broom that leaned against the brick wall of the garden. Without pausing to think, she whirled it at the stranger, who had also regained his feet and was already coming at her again.

The broom was not her staff. It was a length of cheap pine, made awkward by the weight of the wide brush at the far end. It snapped as it connected with her attacker’s shoulder. The brush fell away and Lily was left with a splintered length of stick a little longer than her arm, jagged at the end.

She would make it work.

The man who had attacked her was tall and thin with cropped ginger hair. He had already recovered from her blow. He swung at her with his left hand. As Lily deflected it, she was conscious of two other strangers leaping down the steps, their faces and figures a blur.

She snapped the broom handle against the ginger-haired man’s wrist, then swung it back into his jaw. His head wrenched to the side and he howled out a curse.

Someone else grabbed her from behind. Lily was prepared for it. She broke his hold with a twist of the broom handle, then jabbed her makeshift weapon back into his gut.

He let out a whoosh of breath at the impact, but it would not slow him for long.

There were too many of them. Even with her walking stick, Lily would have been challenged to overcome three men on her own, and she had started the whole encounter completely off guard. Her mind was still whirling to catch up, her body going through the motions of her defense on instinct.

Lily needed to level the odds. She had to find a way to take at least one of her attackers out of the equation.

The third stranger rushed at her. The jagged end of her broom handle offered itself. Lily spun, aiming the sharp point of it at her assailant’s throat—and then realized that the threat she faced was a boy of no more than fourteen.

She fought against her own momentum. It softened the strike to a mere scratch across his neck, but left her dangerously off-balance.

The ginger-haired man, recovered now, barreled into her from the side. Lily was thrown against the bricks of the garden wall, his weight pinning her arms. His accomplice joined him, shoving her face against the wall as the boy yanked the broom handle from her hands. Lily opened her mouth to scream, conscious of the rows of closed windows on the upper floors of the houses that surrounded her. A wool sleeve was shoved against her teeth, muffling the sound and half choking her. She tried to bite at whoever was holding her but the fabric of his coat was too thick for it to matter.

Her arms were wrenched behind her back and locked there. She kicked out with her feet, landing a blow on a solid shoulder, but then her ankles were securely grabbed. She was hefted from the ground, hauled quickly and efficiently into the dark mouth of the house.

The men forced her into the kitchen and threw her face-first onto Mrs. Bramble’s solid oak worktable.

A rope looped around her wrists, pulling tight. Another secured her ankles.

“Go ahead and bind her to the chair as well, boys,” said a comfortable voice from the other side of the room.

There was a fourth man in this ambush—and Lily had met him before.

As his accomplices shoved her into one of the kitchen chairs, tying her into place with another length of rope, Lily turned her glare to Jack Cannon.

The sandy-haired, middle-aged man in the well-cut suit was the uncrowned criminal lord of Limehouse, and Sam Wu’s former boss. He reclined in the cushioned rocking chair by the stove, his boots crossed lazily in front of him.

Lily stopped fighting. She would not be getting out of this situation by way of physical force.

She kept her eyes on Cannon, knowing perfectly well that it was only Cannon that mattered. He looked much as he had in the brewery in Limehouse three months before, where he had cheerfully encouraged members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to torture Sam to get the answers they wanted out of Lily.

Silently, inwardly, she cursed herself for foolishly letting down her guard. She should have expected that Cannon would turn up at some point after that encounter, which had ended with Lily and Sam staging a spectacular and risky escape. Picking the lock to get inside her building would have been easy for the man who had turned Sam into a consummate housebreaker.

Sam had warned her. When they had first discussed using Cannon to get to the IRB, Sam had promised there would be a price to pay for it.

Lily should have listened.

There were four of them altogether. Now that she was not being actively attacked, Lily could take a moment to assess them. Besides the tall, ginger-haired man who had rushed her at the door, there was a middle-aged man with a thick black beard and solid shoulders. He had the look of a sailor about him.

The boy she had nearly stabbed was thin, his lank dark hair falling into his eyes. There was a scar on his cheek from some sort of burn.

Something else registered as off about the kitchen besides the presence of four attackers. Mrs. Bramble’s work table was normally kept clear of everything save her jar of cookies. Currently, an odd rectangular object sat on the scarred boards, covered by a piece of canvas.

Lily was certain it did not belong to Mrs. Bramble.

The boy was glaring at her. Lily was conscious of the red scratch on his throat she had left with her broomstick. His eyes were hard, as if he would happily have gutted her if Cannon had given him the word.

The yellow of an old bruise marred the boy’s chin.

“You’ve met wee Davy,” Cannon noted. “He’s a replacement for one of his less fortunate colleagues. That boy was foolish enough to get caught. They gave him ten years of hard labor. I doubt he’ll be much use to me when he gets out. It’s a challenge, finding good help these days.”

The lad in front of her was another child taken off the streets and forced into crime to avoid starvation. Sam had never told Lily the details of how Cannon secured the cooperation of such boys, but she could well imagine. Nor did it surprise her that Cannon showed no remorse when the children took the fall for the crimes he himself had organized.

The thought acted as a catalyst on her fear, transforming it into a quiet and potent rage.

The ordinary-looking man in her landlady’s chair used the lives of the weak like pieces on an enormous chessboard. Now he had the gall to assault her in her own home.

He had the upper hand—for the moment. But Lily was conscious of a burning sense of her own power as she looked at him.

“You don’t approve,” Cannon said. “Rather I let the lads starve, then? Work puts food in their bellies and a bit more besides to keep the family. They don’t get that from any school.”

“If charity was your motive, then you wouldn’t force them into committing felonies to provide for themselves,” Lily snapped back.

Cannon leaned in, darkly and uncharacteristically serious for a moment.

“You can’t keep giving from a pot that’s empty,” he said. “There ain’t no one looking out for the people of Limehouse—least of all grand lords like your dad. My people could rot in the street for all they care, and they’d clear the debris for a new housing block. Limehouse must look out for itself, but desperate people will claw each other to pieces for a scrap of bread. It takes a leader to organize them.”

“And you believe yourself to be that leader,” Lily filled in.

Cannon leaned back, spreading his hands comfortably.

“I’m here, ain’t I?”

It painted a tidy picture, but Lily knew better.

“What about the women?” Lily threw back. “You can hardly claim your treatment of them is for their own benefit.”

There was one woman in particular Lily had in mind as she made the challenge—Wu Zhao Min, Sam’s sister, whom Lily knew had been subjected to unimaginable horror at Cannon’s instigation.

“Women are good for baking bread or providing one’s heirs. If she ain’t baking or breeding—well, there’s really only one other use for her. Isn’t that right, boys?”

The cold-eyed adolescent spat onto the floor, his rage at Lily still a palpable force in the room.

“Guessing you ain’t much of a baker. Are you, Miss Albright?”

Cannon’s threat was all the more chilling for how easily he delivered it.

Lily was conscious of her vulnerability, tied to a chair and alone in the house. The red-haired man was regarding her now with a different sort of interest.

She held fast to her anger. It was far more useful than terror.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

Cannon stood. He plucked the poker from the stand by the stove and used it to nudge open the iron door to the firebox. The coals were glowing comfortably. Mrs. Bramble would have filled it before stepping out to run her errands. Lily could feel the soft warmth of the embers. Cannon gave them a little stir and they flared to a brighter orange life.

“Nothing too gutty, love. We just came to conduct a little experiment,” he replied.

“You can hardly expect me to be amenable after assaulting me at the door,” Lily noted.

“I don’t expect you to be amenable at all,” Cannon returned. He left the poker buried in the glowing coals. “But you see, I’ve been puzzling over that show you put on during our little swarry with the Fenians this summer.”

Lily inwardly cursed.

The meeting with the Irish Republicans had not gone as planned. With the situation rapidly veering out of control, Lily had been left with no time and no alternative but to use both her and Sam’s respective powers to bluff their way into an escape. Sam had called on the favor of his rats, and Lily had summoned her own precognitive abilities to intimidate the men in the room into allowing her and Sam to slip away.

She had known it was risky. There were very good reasons for her and her fellow Charismatics to keep their powers secret. By some interpretations, what they did was technically illegal. Estelle lived the most publicly out of them all, using her ability to make a living. There were enough other men and women in London who claimed to communicate with the dead that she could mostly blend in with the crowd. Still, she had been forced to pay a hefty settlement back in September when an unhappy client filed suit against her.

Lily, Sam, Strangford and Dr. Gardner all kept the truth of their abilities very carefully hidden from a world that wouldn’t understand—or the even more dangerous people who would believe it all and wish to exploit it.

When Cannon had returned Lily’s lost staff to the steps of her building last August, she had known it was not the act of a generous spirit. It had been a warning that he knew where to find her.

Now he had decided to make use of that knowledge.

There were two ways she could play this—denial or intimidation. Cannon would not be easily convinced by a denial, which left her with only one option.

Lily summoned her courage, forcing herself to meet his gaze unflinchingly.

“So, then,” she said with a boldness she didn’t quite feel. “Come to find out how you’re going to die?”

The sailor frowned. The ginger-haired man regarded her with a sneer.

The boy gave a blink of surprise.

Deliberately, forcefully, Lily burned toward a connection with her power. It rose up in her as though answering to the simmering call of her rage, and the foresight she had been granted in that brewery three months before flooded back to her.

Lily looked at the sandy-haired man by the stove and recalled how she had foreseen his throat splitting into a wide red smile, the blood spilling down over his chest.

The grace in his movements as he fell to the ground, collapsing before a pair of worn leather boots.

“I will grant you, Miss Albright—that was finely done,” Cannon mused. “Your mother would’ve been proud of that little performance. You’ve a future on the stage if you ever want it. But I didn’t get where I am in the world by taking show for substance, and there weren’t no more substance in what you said than I could’ve had from any two-penny fortune teller on a Saturday evening.”

“Then why are you here?” Lily demanded.

“For the other bit,” Cannon returned. “Davy, would you do the honors?”

The boy took a handful of the canvas covering the rectangular object on the table. He tugged it free, revealing a battered metal cage containing a single thin brown rat.

This was not good.

“You had these little buggers dancing to your tune at the brewery,” Cannon said. “The boys here would like another show.”

Lily consciously kept herself from reacting, though her heart was pounding in time with her sense of threat.

“I’m tied to a chair,” she evenly replied.

“Didn’t stop you before,” Cannon noted.

Lily swallowed thickly.

“It doesn’t work like that,” she lied.

Cannon returned his attention to the stove. He gave the poker another stir, seemingly unperturbed by her refusal.

The boy, Davy, glared at her from across the room, his face utterly lacking any sympathy.

Cannon pulled the poker from the embers and thoughtfully regarded the red-hot tip of it.

“Perhaps we must raise the stakes,” he said.

The words were a blow.

Lily felt them hit and willed herself not to shatter.

The thug by the stove could not possibly know the significance of that phrase, a phrase she had last heard on the lips of someone else.

Someone she had trusted.

Someone who was gone.

We must raise the stakes.

The grief flared up in her, fresh and sharp, with the sight of Robert Ash’s empty grave and the hollow shell of The Refuge still fresh in her mind.

Cannon gave a little wave of his hand. At the signal, the sailor came behind Lily. He took hold of a handful of her hair, using it to force her head back against the bulk of his stomach.

Smoke rose from the tip of the poker.

“Do the trick again, or I’ll burn you . . . right . . . here,” Cannon finished, holding the smoking iron a breath away from Lily’s cheek.

She could feel the heat blistering off of it.

“I am afraid it will leave a mark,” Cannon apologized. “Pity to scar such a pretty face. You’ve a wedding next month, haven’t you? Wonder if your grand lord will still want you if you ain’t so fine-looking anymore.”

To all appearances, there was nothing extraordinary about Jack Cannon. His hair was streaked with a little gray, the lines of his face soft and friendly. He might have been any tradesman or shop owner, a fellow you could easily pass on the street without giving a second look—if you missed the sharp intelligence in his eyes.

So unremarkable, and yet a nexus for such immense suffering.

Sam. Zhao Min. The child glaring at her from across the table and countless unnamed others.

As Cannon stood there in her kitchen with the heat of a brand at her face, Lily was certain he felt not one ounce of misgiving about any of it.

There was one obvious way for Lily to stop him from burning her. She could tell him the truth. She could admit that it was Sam who manipulated the rats.

She’d far rather take the scar.

Lily met Cannon’s gaze, channeling every ounce of her rage and defiance into that look.

Then the front door opened.

The creak of the hinges easily penetrated the quiet tension of the kitchen. Lily heard the shuffle of a coat, the slide of an umbrella into the stand.

“Which will that be, do you think?” Cannon murmured. “The skinny spiritualist? Or the plump little suffragette?”

The horror of it twisted inside of her. Something must have changed with Estelle’s or Miss Bard’s appointments. One of them had come home.

She was conscious of the lean and hungry shadows of the four men in the kitchen, more than enough force to overcome either of her friends.

It was Cannon who had casually suggested to the Fenians that torturing Sam would be a more effective way of forcing Lily to talk than inflicting pain on her directly.

He would make merciless use of whoever was outside.

Lily had to keep him in the kitchen.

There was only one way she could think of to do that.

“I can do it,” she blurted. She spoke as forcefully as she could without raising the volume of her voice above a whisper.

She gave Cannon a look that dared him to contradict her.

His expression was thoughtful, measuring.

He drew back the poker.

“Let’s have a demonstration.”

He spoke graciously, as though he were inviting her to tap out a favorite tune on the pianoforte. At a nod from his boss, the ginger-haired man opened the door to the cage.

For a terrified moment, Lily wondered if perhaps she could find some way to communicate with the rat. If she tried hard enough, could she be momentarily graced with some fragment of Sam’s khárisma? Would the animal listen to her for his sake?

Lily had never had a particularly good relationship with God, but she began to pray as hard as she ever had in her life.

Please, she thought, willing the question at the rat, at the universe, at the forces of fate Robert Ash’s wife had painted onto the attic walls of The Refuge. Please will you listen to me?

No new magic graced her. The room remained as it had been before. The rat sniffed thoughtfully at the opening of the cage, then turned to scrabble at some unseen mark in the corner.

Overhead, the stairs creaked as someone she loved walked by.

“We’re waiting,” Cannon noted.

The panic and despair threatened to overwhelm her. Lily anchored herself against them, refusing to give in.

She could not talk to rats, but she did have another kind of power.

A plan started to take shape. It was a reckless bluff . . . but perhaps it might be just enough to get her out of this.

Lily dug into the heart of her foresight, focusing it on the animal in the cage beside her. She felt the connection catch and spark, forging an electric and unstable link.

The rat would not take her orders, but Lily could still know what it was going to do next.

“Come out of the cage,” she said, making it sound like an order.

Tentatively, carefully sniffing the air around it, the rat approached the open door, then tumbled out onto the surface of the table.

“Turn left,” Lily said.

Following some rodent impulse, the creature whirled to the left.

“Freeze,” she ordered, knowing that the rat would do it as its sensitive ears caught some shuffle of sound in the room.

She paused for what would come next. When the knowledge arrived, it was something less than she might have hoped.

“Just . . . sniff around for a bit,” she said, trying to make the words sound forceful.

The men in the room looked confused.

“But it’s just doing rattish things,” Davy protested. “Can’t you make it do something else?”

Lily lifted her chin defiantly, brazening it out.

“That isn’t how it works,” she retorted. “I can’t make it do something it has no desire to do. It’s more of a . . . nudge.”

“And at the brewery, the rats desired to crawl all over your pretty self,” Cannon cut back slowly. His eyes were sharp and clear in the gloom of the kitchen.

“That’s right,” Lily replied with far more confidence than she was feeling.

Cannon absorbed it thoughtfully as though he weren’t still holding the poker he threatened to scar her with.

“I wonder,” he mused. “How might this little experiment go if we tried it with our old friend Sam Wu?”

It took all her self-control not to react, to refrain from showing the spike of fear Cannon’s words sent through her.

“He was always a curious lad, our Mr. Wu,” Cannon went on. “Uncanny, one might say, how he pulled things off.”

Lily thought of all the myriad ways Sam’s remarkable power casually manifested itself in the world. The clear affection shown to him by Ash’s horses, Pickford and Mary, nudging the back of his head with their noses. The hopeful, excited look he received from every dog he happened to pass in the street. The little brown sparrows that followed him everywhere, his tiny spies and messengers.

The fat black bodies of the ravens, their pebble eyes watching from the bare branches of trees as though waiting for Sam to make them an offer.

The purpose of this little audition in the kitchen became clear to her.

It had never been about Lily. Cannon was simply cleaning up a loose end. His threat to torture her was due diligence.

He had always suspected it was Sam.

Sam would not reveal his secrets easily. He could brazen out a great deal of pain.

Cannon would know perfectly well what Sam couldn’t tolerate.

Lily thought of Sam’s father and grandmother running their prosperous medicine shop in Pennyfields in Limehouse, selling the herbs that Mr. Wu carefully cultivated on a little rented plot in Crouch End. It would be easy enough for Cannon to get hold of either of them.

The thought of Sam’s solemn father or his busy, loving năinai being subject to Cannon’s brutality filled her with horror.

“You can’t reach him,” Lily asserted. “Sam is in the Army now. He belongs to them.”

“It complicates the matter. I’ll grant you that,” Cannon replied. “But there are plenty of Limehouse boys in the Army, Miss Albright. And they’re always happy to do a favor for their old friend Jack Cannon.”

He set the poker back into the rack by the stove.

“I believe our business here is done, gentlemen,” he announced. “And the lady’s face is still intact. A right cordial little exchange. You needn’t get up, my dear. We shall see ourselves out.”

They filed past her. The sailor who had held her while Cannon threatened her with the poker gave her a polite tip of his hat.

The boy spat a vile curse at her feet as he passed, punctuating it with a vicious grin.

Cannon paused at the threshold. He turned back to regard her thoughtfully.

“It weren’t quite of the same caliber,” he mused. “But there is something to that little show you just put on. I can feel it tickling at the back of my brain. Never mind it now. I can always look you up again if it comes to me. His lordship’s abode is in Lancaster Gate, isn’t it? Fine establishment, that is. Look at you moving up in the world.”

Lily’s rage flared up, potent and powerful.

She was not like the women he had abused and dominated in the past. She was capable of things Jack Cannon could not possibly dream of.

If he came for her again, she would relish the opportunity to provide him with a demonstration.

Let him try, she thought, and some wild and dangerous thing inside of her danced with joy at the thought.

Cannon’s gaze shifted from casually taunting to thoughtful in the face of her unflinching glare.

“Good evening, then, Miss Albright,” he said and slipped away into the darkness of the hall.

She heard the click of the lock.

Lily struggled against the ropes. They held fast.

The rat sniffed at the edge of the table, still lingering close to its cage. She would get no help from there.

She contemplated shouting, calling down whoever it was that had returned home upstairs. The thought of the alarm in Miss Bard’s or Estelle’s face when they saw her like this was terrible. No, she would find a way out of this herself.

She looked around for some other advantage. Her eyes fell on the knife block on the counter.

Throwing her weight, she managed to hop the chair a few inches across the floor.

Lily repeated the action, slowly bouncing herself over to the counter. The chair was still far too low for her to reach the knives.

Carefully, painstakingly, she shifted her balance forward onto her toes, lifting the back legs of the chair up off of the floor. She shuffled closer to the counter, fingers reaching toward the knife block.

A key turned in the lock of the back door. It swung open and Mrs. Bramble stepped into the hall, carrying a crate of produce.

Lily’s landlady froze at the sight of her tenant tied to a chair in the kitchen. She blinked with surprise.

Then her gaze moved to the rat on the table.

Cabbage and turnips exploded across the floor as Mrs. Bramble’s scream echoed through the house.

THREE

Monday, November 16th

Early evening

March Place, Bloomsbury

THE GRAY SKY BROUGHT an early gloom to London, catching Lily off guard. It had been an unseasonably warm day, a last fleeing taste of late summer as the dry leaves skittered across the pavement, almost making her forget that autumn was already well advanced toward winter.

That dusk settling in at four in the afternoon set her straight.

Lily loosened some of the buttons on her coat as she slipped into the house. She had just completed a very awkward conversation with Strangford’s sister, Virginia Eversleigh. Virginia had summoned her for tea that afternoon and then carefully inquired whether Lily might consider getting married in a Church of England establishment instead of a Catholic one.

Lily’s wedding with Strangford next month was set to take place at St. Patrick’s in Soho, the Roman church Lily had attended with her mother every Sunday when she was a girl.

Lily’s appearances at Mass were far less regular now, but it had been ground into her from birth that for a Catholic, any wedding that took place outside a Catholic church didn’t count.

Lily had been illegitimate all her life. It had become surprisingly important to her that her wedding feel entirely up to code.

She knew Virginia wasn’t the source of the inquiry. Strangford’s sister was merely playing uncomfortable messenger for her mother, Lady Strangford, whose notions of “up to code” didn’t exactly align with Lily’s own.

For his own part, Strangford was perfectly content with St. Patrick’s. This was not surprising for a man who kept William Blake’s inkpot on his desk.

“I have never thought God cared very much about denominations,” he said. “I would gladly marry you in one of Miss Bard’s pagan field ceremonies if that was what you wanted.”

Lily wondered whether the folklorist had told Strangford the whole story of those pagan field ceremonies. Knowing it herself, Lily could not have referenced it without a significant blush to her cheeks.

Lily had been on guard since Cannon’s attack the night before. As she reached the top of the stairs and set her hand to the door to her attic flat, she paused for a breath to reach out with her power.

A warning instinct flared.

She shifted her hold on her walking stick, balancing it in her right hand.

With her left, she turned the key and then the knob.

Pushing the door open, Lily ran into the flat.

She swung at the tall, shadowy figure she had known would be inside, making a direct hit to his chest.

The wind came out of him with a gasp, but it wasn’t enough. When she moved for another hit, he fluidly deflected her thrust.

Lily pressed her advantage, having quickly assessed there was only one person in the gloom of her parlor. Though alone, unarmed and winded, he was still a threat, naturally parrying her quick blows.

Lily’s rage flared, the events of the day before having substantially shortened her fuse. Her power unfurled in response, and abruptly she knew exactly what her opponent’s next move would be.

The knowledge snapped into focus—how he would grab for her staff, trying to wrench it from her grip.

Lily knew exactly how to turn that to her advantage.

She feinted with the stick as the shadowy figure reached out, then snapped back with a vicious hit against his shoulder.

“Bloody hell—it’s me!” he gasped, and the sound of his voice stopped Lily from making a potentially disabling jab at his face.

“Sam?” she blurted.

“Yes! Now will you please stop trying to kill me?” he pleaded, hands raised. His voice was still raspy from the blow she had struck to his chest.

Lily slipped her staff into the stand by the door. She grabbed the matchbox from the table, her hands shaking a bit. She struck a light and put it to the wick of the lamp.

The room brightened into the familiar space she knew. In the middle of it stood a man who was absolutely not supposed to be there.

It had been three months since she had seen Sam. Already, he looked older. Something had changed in his face, the lines of it growing leaner and more defined. His arms filled out the sleeves of his coat more than they used to.

She was overwhelmed by the urge to draw him into an enormous hug, but she still had not forgiven him for the ambush.

“Why were you lurking in here in the dark?” she demanded.

“It weren’t dark when I got here,” he retorted. “I was having a bit of a palaver with your cat and the gloom snuck up on me.”

Lily noticed the fat, orange form of Cat shedding onto a pile of magazines. He looked not the least bit perturbed by the battle that had just taken place in the parlor.

“Anyway, I didn’t think you’d say ‘what do you know’ by trying to knock my block off,” Sam added.

“You were in my flat!”

“I’m always in places!” he countered, rubbing his bruised ribs. His look shifted, turning thoughtful. “You knew when I was going to grab for your stick, didn’t you?”

“I might’ve,” Lily returned carefully, slipping out of her coat and hanging it on the rack.

“That could be right handy in a scrap,” Sam mused.

Lily didn’t answer. She sat down in the more comfortable of her two chairs and regarded Sam with a frown.

“Cat’s not mine,” she announced. “He came with the house.”

“Ain’t what he says,” Sam replied, taking the other chair. He frowned, shifting uncomfortably. “This chair is horrible.”

“I don’t have many visitors,” Lily noted.

“No bloody wonder.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Aldershot?” she asked, naming the enormous base where the Army had been training thousands of new recruits before sending them to the continent.

“What, ain’t you happy to see me?” Sam asked.

The scare he had given her was still rattling through her. It made her answer a touch less enthusiastic than it might have been.

“You know that I am,” she said. “You haven’t written. Didn’t you receive my letters?”

Sam looked uneasy.

“I got them.”

Lily had not known until then that she was hoping there had been some misdirection. The alternative hurt.

“Why didn’t you write back?” she demanded.

Three months ago, that question would have earned her an insolent shrug. Instead, Sam just looked worn-out.

Things had changed.

“I guess I didn’t know what to say,” he finally answered.

“You might have said anything. What you had for breakfast. How the uniforms itch. I just would have liked to know…”

“Know what?” he pushed when her words trailed off.

Lily didn’t have an answer.

There was an enormous weight hanging over their words, the leaden tangle of everything they had lost.

Of the moment on the Blackfriars rail bridge when Lily dragged Sam away from the bomb Robert Ash held in his hands, pitting her strength against the force of his grief and rage.

She recalled Sam’s face when he surfaced through the ashy water of the Thames, twisted into a howl she could only see, not hear.

Now a war loomed between them, with Sam on one side of it, woven into a uniform. Lily stood safely on the other, cushioned from the shells and mud and death that he would inevitably face.

He rubbed his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he finally announced.

Lily accepted it in silence.

“What are you doing here?” she quietly asked.

“I heard you had a spot of trouble,” Sam replied.

A little brown bird fluttered from the top of her bookcase to Sam’s shoulder. Cat eyed it with lazy interest.

Lily recognized the familiar, mottled brown of an ordinary London sparrow, and the pieces fell into place.

“You were watching me,” she accused.

Sam shifted awkwardly in the uncomfortable chair.

“Not watching,” he said. “More just . . . monitoring your situation.”

“Were you concerned about my situation?”

He met her gaze evenly.

“Thought maybe I should be,” he replied.

Lily sat back.

“You knew he would come for me. Cannon.”

“I knew it was a possibility,” Sam confirmed. “Cannon misses nothing. That little show we put on in the brewery would have caught his attention.”

His mouth set into a grim line.

“It isn’t good to have Cannon’s attention,” he concluded. “You alright?”

There was a weight to the question that made it clear it was more than a casual inquiry.

“Just a few bumps and bruises,” Lily assured him.

His visible relief told her a great deal of how much Sam knew about the threat Cannon could pose.

Her friend was not wearing a uniform. Sam was clad in his usual tweed coat and trousers over a clean white shirt.

“Why aren’t you at Aldershot?” Lily pressed again.

“I’m en route to Dover. I ship out tomorrow. I’m just . . . making a small detour on my way to report in.”

“Ship out?” Lily echoed.

The words twisted inside of her. She thought of Cairncross’s furious expression in the library of The Refuge the day Sam told them he had joined the Army.

You’ll be bloody cannon fodder.

“I’m headed to Gravelines in France,” Sam replied. “The boat leaves at ten in the morning.”

“And from Gravelines?” Lily asked. She kept her tone casual though her heart was hammering in her chest.

“Dunno,” Sam returned. “I don’t have my assignment yet. They said they’d wire my old man if it came through in time. Otherwise, they’ll tell me when I get there. Seems there’s a high demand for mechanics at the moment. Bit of a confab over who gets priority.”

She tried not to let Sam’s announcement that he was headed for the continent terrify her. She deliberately recalled what Dr. Gardner had said after Ash’s funeral.

They’ll not waste a good mechanic on the infantry.

With his skills, Sam would be very valuable to the military. That must count for something.

Lily hated this constant, low-frequency fear she had to feel—for Sam, for Gardner. For all the men she knew who had taken up the uniform when the call to war resounded over England.

Sam stood up, plucking his hat from the table. Lily had forgotten how tall he was.

“I won’t keep you. Just wanted to tell you that you won’t have to worry about Cannon.”

Alarm rang through her.

“Why not?” she demanded.

Sam’s face shifted into that familiar stubborn look.

“I’m going to take care of it, is all,” he replied.

“What does that mean?”

“Best you don’t know the details,” Sam said.

Lily rose from the chair.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she ordered.

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” Sam returned.

“It isn’t necessary. Cannon isn’t interested in me anymore,” Lily pressed.

The lines of Sam’s face grew even more grim.

“Jack Cannon’s never done with you,” he said. The words rang with the flat truth of hard experience.

Something inside of Lily ached at hearing it.

“Even if he comes back, I’m entirely capable of defending myself. He won’t catch me off guard again,” she asserted.

“What about everybody else?” Sam shot back. “You ain’t the only one he’s a threat to. A man like Cannon doesn’t stop until he’s made to.”

“That doesn’t mean it has to be you who stops him,” Lily protested.

“I stood by while Jack Cannon wreaked havoc for eight years. I was his bloody hand for it. You don’t know half the things I done for Cannon.”

He was raw. The words shook with the force of it.

Lily thought of Davy, the child she had nearly murdered in the back garden—the one who had watched with approval as Cannon threatened to sear her face with a burning iron.

It was true. She did not know what Sam had done in the past, what he had been coerced into as a vulnerable boy dependent on Cannon for his life, for the lives of his family.

“I can’t pretend it ain’t my business anymore,” Sam said. It had the weight of a vow. “Not now I know what he did to Jiějie.”

Jiějie—the Mandarin term Sam used for his sister, Zhao Min, summoned the woman’s face back into Lily’s mind. Her image was burned there, sitting across the table of an illegal nightclub, an oasis of perfect control in the middle of a bacchanal.

The gleaming white of her suit.

Strangford crumbling to his knees as she put her long fingers into his bare hand.

He had read Zhao Min’s past in that touch and the pain in it had been potent enough to cripple him.

Lily only knew a fraction of the woman’s history. It was enough. She would not wish what Zhao Min had suffered on her worst enemy.

Sam stood as though the chair was too small to contain the potent storm of emotion coursing through him. Lily couldn’t read him with a touch like Strangford might have, but she knew something of what must be roiling under his skin—guilt, regret, and so much rage it was astonishing he did not come apart at the seams with it.

“There’s no one else,” he said, staring out the window so that Lily could not see his face. “Cannon has half the Limehouse division of the police in his pocket. The rest of the borough is too afraid.”

He looked down at his hands. They were clenched into fists.

He didn’t say the rest, but Lily knew what it would have been. Cannon had used him. He had arranged the rape and enslavement of his sister. Sam had changed so much in the months she had known him, smashing from the last lingering vestiges of boyhood into the soldier who stood before her. The metamorphosis was not yet complete. To burst into the man he wanted to be, he believed he needed this.

She watched Sam wrench back his control. His shoulders shifted, moving from that rigid determination to the casual pose he showed the world.

“Anyway, it’s me who knows where he’s vulnerable,” he asserted. He turned to face her again, leaning against the glass, arms folded across his chest.

“And how is that?” Lily demanded.

“He’s got a secret. Something that would tear his whole empire apart if it came out. I’m going to see that it does in a way Cannon can’t possibly brazen away.”

“How exactly will you do that?”

“I’ll fight him,” Sam said. “He can’t refuse a challenge, not one thrown down in public. It’d make him look weak if he did, and Cannon can’t afford to look weak. When I have him pinned, I’ll force him to admit what he did in front of all his men. There won’t be nothing left of him after that. He’ll be done.”

“What happens if you lose?” Lily pushed, deliberately ruthless. “A man like Cannon doesn’t fight without stakes. What will he demand you put on the table?”

“He’ll want me to desert,” Sam returned flatly. “And go back to work for him.”

The horror of that took the life out of her anger.

“Desertion is a capital offense,” she blurted. “You’d be in hiding for the rest of your days. Jack Cannon would have power of life or death over you.”

“You don’t have to worry about that because it ain’t going to happen.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” Lily snapped.

Her anger was fueled by fear. Sam was going into this fight for all the wrong reasons. He was twisted up with guilt, weighed down by a history of exploitation and helplessness. They were emotions that would make him reckless.

Lily felt certain a man like Cannon would know exactly how to leverage recklessness.

She could see Sam hold back his retort. He knew full well which of them was the one who could see the future.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. The thing’s done,” he said. “The meeting’s set for tonight.”

“And he agreed to it? Just like that? Surely that shows you how clearly he knows he’s going to win.”

Sam didn’t meet her eyes.

“I didn’t exactly tell him the truth of it.”

“Then what did you tell him?” Lily demanded.

“He thinks he’s meeting you,” he said. “I faked a telegram. Pretended you were wiring to offer to show him the truth behind the trick with the rats. Told him he had to bring an audience and made it sound like you wanted to cut a deal. You give him the trick, he agrees not to bother any of us again.”

Fury sparked, caught. It burned through her, hot and fierce. Her next words spilled out before she could consider them.

“This is a childish, foolish, and entirely selfish debacle,” she blazed.

Sam’s eyes narrowed. She could feel his anger, but he held it under an iron control.

“I’m doing it to keep you safe,” he said.

“This has nothing to do with me,” Lily retorted. “This is about you. This is about not being able to forgive yourself for what happened to your sister. You’re trying to make up for how you think you failed her, but it doesn’t work like that. You can’t earn your absolution by sacrificing yourself to Jack Cannon.”

“I ain’t asking for your approval,” Sam snapped. His words were sharp as a whip.

He slammed his hat down onto his head and stalked to the exit. He paused on the threshold.

“See you around,” he bit out, then slammed the door shut behind him.

The sound echoed dully through the cramped space of her little attic parlor. Lily closed her eyes against it, overwhelmed by the whirlwind of those few moments with Sam.

The shock quickly dissipated, leaving behind an urgent sense of purpose.

She raced into the bedroom, tearing off her dress so quickly one of the buttons popped from the wool, spinning across the floor. She threw open the wardrobe and yanked out her trousers. It took her only a few moments to throw on her motorcycling gear.

She strode to the door, pausing only to yank her walking stick from the stand.

Jack Cannon wouldn’t be attending the meeting he expected to tonight—but neither would Sam Wu.

Lily pushed purposefully out into the night.

FOUR

Ten o’clock in the evening

Soho, London

AUTUMN LEAVES SKITTERED ACROSS the ground of Golden Square. Lights blinked on in the windows of the surrounding buildings as the sky overhead shifted to a deep violet. The night was warm for late autumn, and several flats had left their sashes open to enjoy the evening air. Lily could hear families chattering in Yiddish and Italian as she passed by.

A group of old men held court on a ring of benches in the square itself, the thin curls of smoke from their cigars rising up into the night sky. Their laughter echoed off the bricks, comfortable as an old shoe. A stoop-shouldered fellow with a cane made his farewell. He had the medal of some foreign war pinned to his lapel and paused to give Lily a curious glance as he passed by. A woman in trousers lurking next to a parked motorbike wasn’t a common sight in this comfortably middle class neighborhood.

He made her a polite tip of the hat and ambled on to his building.

The bench behind her was empty. Lily didn’t sit on it. She was restless, itching for movement. It was all she could do to refrain from pacing up and down the pavement.

The lamplighter had finished his rounds. Lily could hear the soft hiss of the gas. Time was moving too fast.

Lily tried not to think of what she would do if the person she had summoned to this place failed to turn up.

She had acted on the clue her father had dropped into their conversation in St. John’s Wood four months before.

To arrange a meeting I send a runner to a chip shop in Soho with a note.

After visiting her fifth Soho chop shop that evening, Lily had cause to curse that he hadn’t been more specific.

The sixth was a narrow tiled room sandwiched into the ground floor of a building that also housed a smoke shop. The proprietress was a tall, broad-shouldered Russian woman with a face that was likely once quite pretty before it was marred by a vicious scar from ear to chin. She quietly accepted the folded message Lily presented before dismissing her with a curt jerk of her head.

She paced the edge of the square, the clock striking ten. How much longer should she wait before shrinking back to March Place to wait and see what the morning brought? The notion was intolerable, even though the course of action she had chosen instead barely deserved the name of “plan.”

A black carriage rolled to a stop a few yards away. It was of the same make as half the hackneys that crowded the streets of the city, pulled by a single black gelding, but a closer glance revealed that the vehicle was exceptionally well-kept. The ebony paint gleamed with wax.

Lily gave an equally careful look to the driver. The figure on the box had short dark hair and a sturdy build, clad in the same dull wool coat and trousers you might see on any other London cabby.

But this cabby was a woman.

The woman noted Lily’s scrutiny and made a thoughtful tip of her hat.

The door to the carriage opened and a more obviously feminine figure stepped out. She wore a gown of pale, elegant gray. A neat black feathered cap sat on the coiled pile of her dark hair, a veil falling to obscure her face. She had the look of a lady in half-mourning, of which there were plenty in the city at the moment.

Wu Zhao Min therefore attracted little notice as she sat down on the bench behind Lily’s motorbike.

Lily reined in her restlessness and joined Sam’s sister.

“Why the veil?” Lily asked without preamble.

“I’m grieving,” Zhao Min replied.

The answer surprised Lily.

“For whom?” she said.

Zhao Min paused for a moment before answering, as though deciding how much she was willing to share.

“I pay women for information,” she finally said. “Women who are . . . trapped in intolerable circumstances. When they have earned enough, I help them use it to escape.”

Lily refrained from looking to the driver of the hackney. The woman sat comfortably on her perch, out of earshot of their conversation. She thought also of the Russian with the scar at the chip shop on Greek Street where one could leave messages that would somehow find their way to Wu Zhao Min.

“For some women, escape means removal from the sphere of influence of certain powerful individuals who would prefer that they remain entrapped. It means removal from England,” Zhao Min clarified flatly. “I placed several of those women at an inn I purchased in Dinant. In Belgium.”

Lily began to have an itching notion of where this story was going. It made her queasy.

“The Germans occupied Dinant in August,” Zhao Min continued. “They became convinced that local saboteurs were undermining their efforts to fortify the city. To discourage such insurrection, they executed a series of reprisals against the civilians of the city. The inn was sacked, then burned. Six of the ten women there are now dead.”

Zhao Min’s voice was even, but Lily could see a dark fire blazing in her eyes even through the obfuscation of the veil.

“I’m sorry,” Lily said. The words felt inadequate, but she found that she meant them.

“If men simply chose to kill each other, it would be their own business. But that is never the way of it. To occupy another country is to rape it. So they rape. It is always the women who pay. Their weakness is exploited, and only chance holds the monsters accountable for it.”

Though she continued to sit straight and still on the bench, Zhao Min’s rage was a palpable thing. Lily was shocked she had not noticed it the minute Sam’s sister stepped from the carriage. It rolled off of her skin, an electric current that heightened the atmosphere around them, and yet was ruthlessly controlled.

“But you did not call me here for an exchange of pleasantries,” Zhao Min said.

“No,” Lily confirmed. She knew better than to waste any more of Zhao Min’s time, especially in her current mood. “Sam has arranged a meeting with Jack Cannon in my name tonight. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes,” Zhao Min replied.

Lily’s hands clenched on her knees, the fear and anger racing through her. It took effort to hold them in check.

“Sam plans to force Cannon to admit to some sort of transgression. Something he says will ruin him,” Lily said.

“He is talking about Nathan Vance,” Zhao Min replied.

“Nathan Vance?” Lily echoed.

“Vance was one of Cannon’s top lieutenants. He was younger. Strong. Had the sort of energy people are drawn to. Charisma,” Zhao Min said. She gave Lily a look as she named it. “He was also ambitious.”

“Cannon saw him as a threat,” Lily filled in.

“Vance was a threat,” Zhao Min corrected her. “So Cannon assigned him to punish an importer who had stopped paying his protection money. On the night Vance went to do the job, Cannon tipped off the police. Vance was shot along with three other men.”

Lily put the pieces together.

“Sam plans to force Cannon to admit to betraying Vance, out loud in front of his men.”

“Vance was loved,” Zhao Min continued. “Knowing that Cannon had him killed—and in a way that involved collaborating with the police, no less—would turn many powerful men against him. But Jack Cannon is like a spider in a drain. You might think you have washed him down, but he will always climb back up again. There is only one way to remove the threat of a man like Cannon. If that was what Sam truly wanted, he would not be staging this charade. He would simply set his rats to tearing him to pieces in an alley.”

The image of it horrified Lily. Surely something like that was beyond Sam’s power. She knew he couldn’t force an animal to do something it didn’t want to do. His gift was for charm and communication, not coercion.

“I don’t think the rats would do it,” she blurted, recalling the day she had carried one of them around in her pocket for hours, the warm weight of it dozing happily against her leg.

“There are other ways to kill a man,” Zhao Min replied.

She stood. Her pale gray skirts required no straightening. Everything about her fell neatly into place.

“This is not about taking out Cannon,” she announced coldly. “This is about Xiang’s pride.”

Her voice was hot with contempt as she spoke her brother’s Chinese name.

She began to walk away.

Lily stood, calling out.

“He’s not wrong.”

Zhao Min stopped. Even through the veil, Lily could see the twist of fury in the woman’s features. It was the fury that had driven Zhao Min to leave. She was not a woman accustomed to allowing anyone to see what she was truly feeling.

“Someone has to hold them accountable. The men like Cannon. Not just chance,” Lily declared.

Zhao Min lifted her chin, her dark eyes blazing with challenge.

“Is that what you are offering? To hold them accountable?”

“I just want to stop Sam from making a mistake,” Lily returned.

“You have the power to do far more than that,” Zhao Min snapped.

“You are hardly lacking in power yourself,” Lily shot back. The retort was automatic, the words slipping out before she could think better of them.

They weren’t meant to be a blow, but clearly struck the woman like one. There was so much happening under Zhao Min’s surface, a tumult of pain and rage and determination Lily could not begin to understand. She burned like a star at the verge of the square. Lily wondered what the world would look like if Zhao Min ever let the hot light of it escape her skin and blaze out into the world.

“Tell me where it will be,” Lily begged. “Please.”

“The Poplar Hippodrome,” Zhao Min replied at last, her voice thin with the tension of it. “At eleven o’clock.”

“Thank you,” Lily said.

Eleven o’clock. That was less than an hour from now.

Zhao Min slipped into the gloom of her carriage as Lily took hold of the motorbike. She swung her leg over the saddle, primed the fuel and spun the pedals into igniting the engine. The Triumph roared to life and Lily snapped back the stand. Her tires tore at the pavement as she jerked into motion, tearing out into the November night.

The streets of the East End were still alive with activity. Lily wove through tight-packed clusters of hackneys and carriages, omnibuses and carts. She rode on her Triumph with her walking stick tucked into her belt against her back.

She flew past a cluster of South Asian sailors who laughed as they turned the corner from the docks. The crowd around a sausage cart had spilled into the road, forcing her to swerve.

She watched closely as she rode past a group of men fighting outside a pub, one young tough tossing another across the hood of a parked automobile.

The street widened as she turned onto the East India Dock Road, and Lily opened the throttle, pushing for more speed. Each beat of her heart punctuated a fierce sense of urgency. She could not be late.

She still had no idea what she would do once she arrived.

However she interfered with the events about to unfold at the Poplar Hippodrome, Lily knew with a grim certainty that Sam would not thank her for it.

She was willing to accept that. She would take his rage over losing him to Jack Cannon.

The theater loomed into view.

Lily knew the elaborate art deco facade of the place well. Her actress mother had pointed it out a dozen times when Lily had passed this way as a child. Dierdre Albright’s performance in The Bachelor’s Remorse had catapulted her from the ribald music halls of the East End to the prestigious stages of the West. It was at the Hippodrome that Dierdre transformed into the star who would later dominate the theaters of Shaftsbury Avenue and Covent Garden.

The modern lines of the building were usually illuminated by glaring rows of electric lights. The bulbs were dark as Lily approached, the theater shuttered for the night.

A cluster of men lingered at the back of the building, marked by the pinpoint orange glow of the tips of their cigarettes.

The sight of them was a splash of cold water on her nerves. She had nearly forgotten what Sam had told her of his instructions to Cannon.

Bring an audience.

There were perhaps a dozen men gathered in the alley. She wondered how many more were already inside.

Lily swung the Triumph into a narrow lane just shy of her destination. A stretch of fence heavily overgrown by an unruly rhododendron offered a suitable hiding place for the motorbike. Lily chained it securely.

She tugged the walking stick free of her belt and headed for the theater.

The mood of the crowd gathered by the stage door of the Hippodrome shifted as Lily approached. A casual glance or two multiplied into a murmur of more defined interest, and Lily knew she had been recognized.

The wall of shadowy bodies, bearded faces and lingering tobacco smoke parted to allow her to pass. No one challenged her as she reached the door. The man who had clearly been set to guard the entrance gave her a simple once-over, then swung it open, granting her access to the gloom of the Hippodrome’s backstage.

It should not have surprised her. After all, as far as every man there knew, it was Lily who had called this meeting.

Lily had never been backstage at the Hippodrome, but the space she found herself in was still familiar to her. It had the same smell of sawdust and paint and old cloth she knew so well from other theaters around the city. She had haunted them as a child, following in her mother’s wake, and again as a young woman freshly escaped from finishing school. Lily had swept halls, scraped and painted set pieces, sewn rents in costumes and finally donned them herself, kicking up her legs with a line of sequined chorus girls or allowing herself to be caught in the rings of an illusionist.

It had not been a comfortable life. The expectations for what constituted an evening’s performance had been rapidly and unpleasantly shifting when Lily finally inherited her mother’s trust at the age of 21. It had been nearly four years now since she had walked the boards of a stage—but she remembered all of it.

The occasional paraffin lamp punctuated the gloom, illuminating the scattered bodies that lingered in the hall. Most of them were men, though here and there Lily caught sight of a painted face and ruffled skirts. Some of the few women present were clearly actresses. Others were of a related profession.

The buzz of their conversation dipped as she moved by.

Lily aimed for a deeper rumble of sound. It emanated from the brighter light that spilled across the far end of the hall—the eager hum of a waiting audience.

A short set of stairs led up to the stage. Lily mounted them without hesitating and stepped into the glare of the electric floodlights.

The hum of the audience opened into a roar. The theater was packed. Bodies lounged in the luxury boxes overhead. Others crowded the seats of the orchestra. The stage itself was ringed with men, leaving a broad circle of bare wood in the center of it.

A few of the orange-and-cigarette girls had been called into service. They roamed the aisles, one of them shrieking as a man made a grab at something other than the fruit on her tray.

There were men in evening dress and men in coveralls, men in tweed and men in gold-threaded brocade. Lily spotted one fellow in a British Army uniform in the orchestra. She caught another glimpse of that same unmistakable olive khaki in one of the boxes, a young soldier laughing with a girl on his lap.

The women were fewer in number and more uniform in class, whether they wore the garish colors of whores or the sober dress of a pub mistress.

There were no ladies present.

Jack Cannon stood in the center of the stage. The crowd that filled the Hippodrome was a testament to his empire. It was Cannon who had brought them all together. Every person in the theater was there because they needed him, wanted something from him—or owed something to him. Cannon held just as much authority here as the men Lily’s father mingled with all day in the halls of Parliament, however much he lacked the bloodline or the title.

He was the Lord of Limehouse, and only a fool would fail to recognize how dangerous that made him.

Sam Wu stood among the men lining the back of the stage. His body was rigid with a tension that grew worse as he spotted Lily at the top of the stairs.

His face creased into a frown. He stalked over to where she waited.

He did not bother with a greeting.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

He looked as though he wanted to shake her.

“You’re making a mistake,” Lily retorted.

“If it’s a mistake, it’s already made,” he hissed, glaring at her. “I’m not backing down from it now.”

A murmur of interest rose from the crowd. The men on the opposite end of the stage parted to make way for a slender figure in dove-gray silk.

Zhao Min had done away with the veil.

Sam shifted beside her, the anger Lily had felt radiating off of him mingling with a note of uncertainty.

He had not spoken to his sister since the brief and painful storm of words they exchanged in a wasteland outside a makeshift nightclub in King’s Cross. Lily remembered it well, every phrase burned into her memory.

You are as guilty as the worst of them.

The words were daggers that struck at the heart of Sam’s guilt, that tore open the old wound of how he believed he had failed Zhao Min.

That pain was still raw in him. For a moment, Lily ached to try to comfort it.

He tore his eyes from the estranged sister on the far side of the stage and threw a dagger of his own at the woman beside him.

“I’m doing this,” he snapped. “And you’d bloody well better stay out of it.”

Sam turned for Cannon, but Cannon was already moving. The Lord of Limehouse took the center of the stage, spreading his arms in an expansive welcome, his voice booming through the rafters of the theater.

“Good evening, Miss Albright,” he bellowed cheerfully.

The crowd settled into an anticipatory silence. Lily could hear only the shuffling of cloth as people adjusted to their seats, preparing to watch the show.

“And our own Mr. Wu has decided to join us. What a delightful surprise,” Cannon noted.

His voice was pitched for the space, carrying beautifully across the acoustic curves of the ceiling. A trained thespian could not have done it better.

“I ain’t never been your own, Jack Cannon,” Sam shot back.

The crowd gasped as if at a twist in a play.

Cannon projected his response to the crowd, half-turned to share a conspiratorial look with them like an actor breaking the fourth wall.

“What’s that, Mr. Wu? And me the one who plucked you off the street. Showed you which end of a knife to hold. Got you your first woman.”

He punctuated that with a ribald wink at the crowd, who chimed in with an approving laugh.

“Showed you which end of her to use as well,” Cannon finished.

The chime turned to a roar, a wild note of approval.

It was the casual cruelty of a pantomime, a perfect act of theater, and Cannon played it like a master. He knew exactly how to manipulate the mood of the crowd, acting out the part they wanted to see—that of the ruthless and witty ringmaster.

Lily was capable of recognizing that power. Cannon would feed off their energy, riding it like a wave.

Beside her, Sam seethed with rage, his body taut as a bowstring. His own energy was raw and wild, a feral thing barely kept under rein. It would take almost nothing to break his hold on it and spill it out into the world.

Against Cannon’s mastery, his potent and instinctive control of the room, Sam didn’t stand a chance.

Cannon was going to crush him.

Disaster loomed. Lily felt it with more than mere logic. Her khárisma sang in warning, lifting the hairs at the back of her neck.

She needed to know more of it. She had to find some way to shift the balance.

With a practice that was becoming more natural to her every day, Lily opened herself up to the impossible knowledge that loomed inside of her.

She saw what was coming next.

Time slowed, running like honey. Certain bodies in the crowd bloomed with significance, their colors brighter and deeper than those around them.

The man in the box seat in the uniform of a sergeant, teasing a girl on his lap. Two privates in the orchestra and on the far side of the stage, near Zhao Min, an older man with the double chevrons of a corporal on his shoulder.

Why were they all in uniform? If they were soldiers on leave, like Sam, why had they not worn their civilian clothes?

The moment stretched like rubber—then snapped as the vision washed over her.

Sam attacks.

He shoves past Lily to the center of the stage, meeting Cannon in a clash of fists.

The moves flash at her like slides in a lantern show.

Sam dodges, strikes.

He lands a blow.

An alarm shrieks from across the theater, the cry of a diving hawk. The corporal stands with a whistle to his lips.

Sam’s head snaps back against the force of Cannon’s fist.

The soldiers in the orchestra launch onto the stage.

A private tackles Sam from the side. The second joins him, and Sam is pinned.

The sergeant in the box seat has put on his hat. It blazes with the crowned wreath of a military police badge.

A pair of handcuffs glimmer in the electric lights, swinging from his hand.

Lily dropped back into the present with a sick lurch in her gut.

The crowd jeered. Sam was still beside her, his jaw rigid with the urge to find a comeback that would unsettle Cannon.

The game had been rigged.

Cannon must have known all along that it was Sam, not Lily, who had arranged the night’s meeting. He had gone along with it because he had seen a clear way to turn it to his advantage.

He had warned Lily himself that there were Limehouse men in the Army. That had been no idle bluff. Cannon had summoned them here tonight to put Sam under arrest.

Lily could already see the list of charges—violating leave, disorderly conduct. There would be a court martial. With a dishonorable discharge on his record, Sam would have no chance of finding respectable work in the future. There would be nothing left for him—nothing but Jack Cannon waiting to welcome him back into the fold.

Waiting to make use of the mysterious power he must now be all but certain Sam possessed . . . thanks to Lily.

Sam couldn’t win this. He would never get to finish the fight.

Cannon had set the trap, and Sam—in his guilt and anger and grief—was about to stumble right into it.

Unless Lily could find a way to stop him.

The need washed over her, cold and desperate. This future could not come to pass. There had to be a way to change it.

Lily had the power to find that.

It had been born in her when she had fallen into the cold waters of Regent’s Canal, when she died and split apart and was somehow knit back together again. She had come back with the ability not just to see the future but know the threads that wove it to the present.

She could know what tug, what nudge, would send the whole of fate cascading in another direction.

She had a name for it now. Cairncross had given it to her.

Onmyōji.

It was merely a sound, a tumble of breath, and yet it served as an anchor.

She had no training, no practice. No lessons in what this strange new ability meant or how to use it. The one who should have given her those answers was gone.

Robert Ash couldn’t help her anymore.

Lily was on her own with nothing but a word to guide her.

It would have to be enough.

She felt the challenge rising up in Sam, readying itself to spill from his lips, binding them irrevocably to the terrible outcome she had just foreseen.

Cannon gave a little nod to the corporal, a signal no one but Lily took note of.

In the orchestra, the two privates stood, uniformed bodies quietly working their way toward the stairs that would take them up onto the stage.

The sergeant in the box tapped his hat against his knee.

Lily swallowed her dread and guilt and uncertainty. She drew her will into a single vivid point and focused it on that subtle place inside of her, the silent and secret core where she felt her power live.

She asked it one simple, desperate question.

How do I stop this?

The point hit. Connection arced. The world blazed into daylight. Colors shone, lights dazzling her. The crowd was an agonizing roar in her ears, the crash of an unruly sea. Electricity skittered across her skin and centered itself on the staff of yew she held in her right hand.

It flooded with something like fire, twisting and alive in her grasp.

Dangerous. Powerful.

The answer.

Lily gasped aloud under the force of it, the certainty crashing through her brain. The implications of it terrified her. It was madness. Possibly suicide . . . and without doubt a brutal betrayal of someone she knew trusted her completely.

Her power sang it, and it burned with the call of a siren.

The Poplar Hippodrome slammed back into motion.

She must have made some sound. Sam had turned and looked down at her now with concern.

“Lily?” he asked, and then Cannon’s voice rang out from the center of the stage.

“We done now, Sam Wu?” he drawled cheerfully. “Or have you something more than running your mouth to offer tonight?”

From his place beside her, Lily felt Sam rise to Cannon’s bait, the call to battle ready to spill from his lips.

It didn’t matter. None of it would happen.

Lily was about to rewrite the script. With the knowledge blazing inside of her, she didn’t have any choice.

As Sam opened his mouth to speak, Lily pointed her yew staff at the Lord of Limehouse, the wood pulsing in her hand, and said the words she knew might end their friendship.

“Jack Cannon,” she called out in a voice that rang across the theater, spelling the crowd of the Hippodrome into an abrupt and shocked silence. “I challenge you to a fight.”

FIVE

THE SILENCE HELD FOR the space of a breath after the shock of Lily’s announcement. It broke with a roar.

The men and women filling the seats of the theater knew they had just been promised a show. They leapt from their seats, cheering like spectators at a Roman circus—all but three of them.

Jack Cannon regarded Lily with bemused surprise as though some part of him were pleased to learn he could still be taken off guard.

Behind Cannon, Zhao Min raised a dark eyebrow.

Sam Wu glared down at her with absolute fury.

The palpable force of his rage took her breath away.

Lily had known it must come to this. She had stolen his plan, robbed him of his chance for vengeance. He trusted her and she had turned that on him in what must inevitably feel like a betrayal.

The truth of that tore her apart, but to refuse would condemn him to far worse.

Her onmyōdō gave her no choice. Lily had asked for it and her strange power had answered in a way that was undeniable.

She had to fight Cannon, even if it cost her Sam.

Even if it meant risking her life.

Lily had overcome thugs in the street before. This would be different. Cannon might underestimate her for a moment or two, but he would very quickly recognize that he must treat Lily the same as any other genuine opponent he had faced in his life.

She was quite certain he had faced many of them.

Sam stepped closer, his voice a cawing whisper in her ear.

“This was my fight,” he rasped, the rage seeping off of him.

“Not anymore,” she replied.

“He’s going to flog you,” Sam promised. “He has you by three inches and three stone, and he ain’t some windbag. He will whip you, Lily, and when he does, he’s going to make you pay for it.”

Lily turned to him, refusing to be bowed by his anger.

“Look around you. Look at the uniforms, Sam. There’s a military police sergeant in the box watching every move you make. The minute you swing a fist they’ll be on you. You’ll be discharged, with nothing left for you but Cannon. He was on to you. This whole thing is a trap. You never stood a chance.”

He hated it—every word that came out of her mouth. It added fuel to his fury, turning it to something deeper and wilder, more indiscriminate in its target. It flared out of him, electrifying the atmosphere—all his pent-up rage at Cannon, at Robert Ash. At this world that kept twisting his life into knots.

The force of it broke Lily’s heart.

There was no time to do anything about it. The familiar weight of her staff was a beacon in her hand, calling her forward. Following it, Lily turned from Sam and stepped out onto the stage.

Cannon hadn’t yet spoken. His gaze shifted from surprise to a careful measuring. Lily knew he was making his own attempt to see the future, assessing what he could best gain from this unexpected opportunity that had presented itself.

Lily knew better than to give him too much time to do that.

Thankfully, there was another weapon at her disposal besides her walking stick—the crowd that packed the theater.

Lily had some notion of how to use it.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” she called out boldly. “Afraid of being bested by a woman?”

The words had exactly the result she had anticipated. The crowd roared with approval at the taunt.

Lily knew better than to mistake the cheering for an endorsement. There would be plenty of appetite here to see a woman beaten, but a riled-up audience would not tolerate Cannon putting her off. This was a show they wanted to see, and Lily was banking on Cannon being savvy enough to recognize that.

She was right.

“Name your stakes,” Cannon returned.

There was no time to consider it. Lily shot back the first thing that came into her head.

“If I win, you leave England—and you never come back,” she replied.

Gasps and laughter bounced through the theater. Her demand was audacious, far beyond the usual stakes for a contest like this. Had a man made the same declaration, he would have been derided or refused.

Lily was not a man.

Cannon had no doubt he’d win. The considering look he was giving her had nothing to do with doubt over the outcome of the contest.

He was mulling over what he could best gain from his victory.

Cannon stepped closer, pitching his words for Lily alone instead of the audience.

“And when I trim you, girl, I want your father. You’ll give me something on Lord Torrington that puts him in my pocket for good. If you don’t, I’ll send you back to him one little piece at a time until he provides it himself.”

Her heart felt like a cold weight in her chest. Of course Cannon would want to use this opportunity to gain leverage over one of the most powerful men in England. Though Lily’s father held no official position in Parliament, he wielded immense influence.

Cannon would understand very well how to use that.

Lily didn’t have the information Cannon was looking for. The transgressions she knew her father had committed were more or less public record. His affair with her actress mother was old news. That he had deserted Lily to a boarding school after her mother died was a betrayal to her alone. In the eyes of the world, it had been a perfectly sensible thing to do.

There would be more. Her father lived a complicated life. She did not doubt there were things in his past that could cause a great deal of trouble if they came out, and not just for himself, but potentially for the entire nation.

She could not give Cannon what he was demanding, and yet if she refused the stakes, he could easily refuse the fight. Sam still waited in the wings, all his rage aching for a target.

If Lily didn’t see this through—if she left Sam any sort of opening—she couldn’t say what he might do, even with the military police in the room.

“I accept,” she replied, and the cheers of the crowd battered at her ears.

“Sticks, is it?” Cannon said, noting the presence of her staff.

Lily nodded.

He shrugged out of his coat and waved to an associate among the men ringing the stage. Cannon was solidly in his middle years, but in his shirtsleeves, it was clear he had not let himself go soft with age. He was a solidly built man, and as Sam had pointed out, he both outsized and outweighed Lily. She knew better than to dismiss the significance of that in a fight.

The man Cannon had singled out came forward and handed him a club. The wood was shorter than Lily’s yew staff but thicker and heavier. A well-placed blow from it could easily snap her arm like a twig or crack her skull.

More than her father’s freedom was at stake in this match.

Lily pulled off her own coat. She tossed it at Sam, who caught it more out of instinct than a desire to help. Freedom of movement was far more important to Lily than the impropriety of stripping to her shirt in front of a room of strangers. Thanks to her days as a chorus girl, she had tread the boards of a stage in less.

She tested the balance of the staff. Her hand knew just where to grasp it. The wood she had practiced with for so many years was an extension of her body, as natural to move as her arm or her leg.

Recalling that gave her a brief burst of confidence. Cannon would not find her as easy to take down as he supposed.

His club was heavier, but she had longer reach—and she was fast.

“What do you say, then, lads?” Cannon shouted at the crowd as he stalked back into the open ring at the center of the stage. “Shall I give it to her quick and hard or draw it out for the night?”

The crowd howled with approval at Cannon’s blatant innuendo.

The reality of what she was doing swept over her and Lily felt ill. She fought it back, grasping at a more useful emotion—fury.

Jack Cannon deserved to fall, and Lily was going to do everything she could to bring him down.

Without further warning, he turned and came for her.

Cannon moved quickly. With practiced instinct, he threw the momentum of his body into the blow he aimed at her shoulder.

Lily parried it with her staff, deflecting the energy of his attack as she had trained to do for years. She spun her stick to prepare for the return swing she was almost certain he would make and Cannon’s club slid harmlessly past her side.

She had first picked up this staff on a stage in Covent Garden. She could still recall the sting of wood against her arm as Bay exploited a weakness in her raw technique. The stern East Indian light rigger had engaged in an act of mercy when he decided to teach a skinny English girl how to defend herself. The first time her staff collided with Bay’s, Lily had dropped the stick.

She had quickly learned not to let go.

Cannon circled her, adjusting his approach now that he knew his opponent was not entirely defenseless.

He attacked again. Nothing in his movements spoke of the kind of training Lily had received from Bay. It was all strength and rough experience.

Fast. Brutal.

Blow followed blow. Lily twisted, parried, joints aching from the impact. The faces around her were a blur, fists in the air, the roaring in her ears thirsty for violence. The noise was a barrage. She fought to block it out. She needed everything she had to protect herself from Cannon, even as she recognized that there was something casual in the unrelenting swing of his club.

He was toying with her.

An opening presented itself, brief as a flashbulb. Lily took it, landing a glancing blow on his gut.

The wind of the crowd shifted. The cheer that rose was for Lily. They didn’t care whose blood they saw tonight, so long as someone got hurt.

Rage flickered across Cannon’s features as they circled each other. Lily knew it wasn’t the blow that had done it but the change in the mood of the audience. It represented a loss of control.

Cannon did not like to lose control.

He came at her hard. That vicious playfulness was gone now, his attack all furious intent. Lily struggled to move her staff in front of one of his swings. The club slipped past, striking a glancing blow against her arm.

She deflected most of the momentum but it was still enough to send pain shooting from her fingers to her collarbone.

Shock stole her focus, and Cannon threw his left fist into her cheek.

The force of it snapped her halfway around.

Lily felt warm moisture drip down her face. He had split her skin with that blow.

Cannon paused for a moment, grinning as he preened to the crowd, waving them into an even wilder response. His confidence was back, that unquestioning certainty that he was going to win.

He could not win.

The truth of that swept through her like a gust of wind. He could not win.

In its wake, the steady pulse of her heart slowed, beats stretching out along with the passing of time. Her hands were slick against the wood of the yew staff.

A drop of blood fell gracefully from her cheek to the floor. She could hear the soft sound of it hitting the boards as though the room around her were silent as a church and not screaming with bloodlust.

Her power woke, merging into her bones and flesh and wood.

The connection was complete in a way she had known only once before as she moved like a ghost through the rooms of an abandoned manor on Hampstead Heath, the lingering tendrils of a drug still seeping through her veins.

The future spilled out before her, unrolling like a carpet, and Lily understood that the game had just fundamentally changed.

He would come at her next from the right.

The abrupt swing of his club was intended to take her off guard, a quick diversion from playing to the crowd back to an unrelenting assault. It was to be a disabling blow, one that would send Lily to the floor.

She was ready for it.

She easily parried, then snapped her staff into a backswing that sliced across Cannon’s jaw.

His head snapped to the side, forcing him to stagger a half-step back. His eyes widened with surprise at the blood he wiped from his lip.

Then his eyes darkened with rage.

He came at her like a bull, mercilessly wielding every ounce of his superior weight and size. The strikes were meant to break her, to snap bone and split skin.

It didn’t matter.

Lily was ready for all of it.

She caught the energy of each swing and spun it harmlessly past her. She moved flawlessly into every opening she had already known would be there, her staff striking home again and again.

It felt like fighting a blind man, someone incapable of perceiving that which came so perfectly and obviously to Lily.

A fierce and ruthless joy rose in her, growing stronger with every shivering impact of her yew against his flesh.

The man who fought her thought that he would win. He had attacked her certain of his own superiority—and he had unwittingly stepped into the ring with something he could not possibly comprehend.

Pride had brought him to this. Now he would pay the price for it.

She shifted from defense to attack.

Lily was no longer anticipating and countering his moves. She forced him to react to her own.

It was pathetic. His clumsy attempts to protect himself were clear to her before he had lifted his club. Every deflection was another opportunity she could easily exploit. Every attempt he made to give himself the upper hand exposed a weakness she ruthlessly moved against.

The power raced through her brain with a drunk sort of ecstasy. The crowd fed it, screaming with approval, and the beat of that dark song resonated in the blood pulsing through her veins.

She expanded. She was more.

And she would tear him apart.

A red spray arced across the stage as Lily’s staff blew across Cannon’s face once more. The next opening revealed itself. Lily saw how she would sweep him, sending him plummeting to the ground.

He landed like a sack of grain.

She strode in for the finish. Raising her staff, she could feel how it would thrust down into the soft cavity of his eye, blast through until it struck the hard oak of the stage behind his head.

Victory would be hers. The blood of the man who had dared to oppose her would spill across the ground at her feet.

Lily realized what she was about to do.

The horror of it washed over her like a fever. She stumbled back, fighting the need to vomit.

The crowd was on its feet, howling with savage pleasure at the spectacle she had just provided.

Cannon rolled on the ground, gasping out a curse. His face bled. He held his ribs against some invisible damage Lily had inflicted on his gut.

She had very nearly murdered him.

She would have gloried in it.

She raised her head to the bodies ringing the stage, desperate for some way to anchor herself to the present—to the person she had always thought she was. Her eyes found Sam.

He stared at her with a mixture of horror and awe. Lily wanted to shout to him, to make herself heard over the blistering joy of the crowd.

It wasn’t me!

But it had been.

Behind her, Cannon staggered to his feet. A few of the men on the stage surged forward to help him up. Lily was only vaguely aware of it, her eyes still on Sam, begging him to understand.

His expression shifted, the horror dropping away into the deep concern of a friend as he realized how stricken she was.

In another moment, he would be running to her—and then his glance darted to the right.

“Lily!” he screamed.

Her power was wrung out, collapsed under the tremendous and violent energy it had just expended, but at the sound of his cry it gasped out one last abrupt flash of insight.

It told her which way to lean.

Lily twisted her body and the knife flew past her to embed itself in one of the pillars that lined the stage.

She turned to see Cannon pulling a second blade from his sleeve.

His eyes were murder. His face twisted into a violent outrage.

She stood only ten yards away from him. Her staff was on the floor at his feet. Her power was dry, choked by that last burst of effort.

There was nowhere to hide.

Cannon knew it.

His battered face stretched into a grin. He raised the blade—and a pale white hand flashed out from behind him, slipping across the thick column of his throat.

It left behind a thin, smiling red line that slowly widened into a crevasse.

Blood welled up and spilled over Cannon’s collar.

He dropped gracefully to his knees, revealing Zhao Min standing behind him, a straight razor in her hand.

Cannon tipped to the floor. A red pool spread beneath him, slipping across the boards of the stage. It formed a shore near the tips of Lily’s brown leather riding boots.

Behind Cannon’s corpse, Zhao Min flicked the blood from her blade. She snapped it shut with a practiced twist of her wrist and slipped it back into the pocket of her gown.

There was no roar of approval. The crowd watched in cold and uncomfortable silence.

The murmurs started from the farthest reaches of the hall. Bodies rose, moved furtively toward the exits, slipping out into the night.

The momentum was infectious. The boxes drained, orchestra emptying. The exodus reminded Lily unsettlingly of every other show she had performed in, the low murmur of voices as the audience returned to normal life.

Zhao Min stepped around Cannon’s body and walked sedately from the stage.

No one stopped her. Cannon’s fall had been too shocking, too wildly unexpected. No one had yet dreamed of how to turn it to advantage.

It would not take them long.

Sam’s hand slipped firmly under Lily’s arm.

“Come on,” he ordered and tugged her to the stairs.

She let him pull her into action. They moved quickly through the dark halls backstage, passing odd clusters of men who looked up in distraction from their dice and cigarettes as Lily and Sam passed. Then they returned to their conversations, ignorant of what had just taken place out under the lights.

Sam broke through the door into the alley. Night air washed over Lily like a balm.

He tugged her purposefully around a corner and down a twist of narrow lanes. Finally they came to a gate in a high brick wall.

Sam shoved at it. The lock was broken and the gate gave easily, admitting them into a dark and deserted schoolyard.

He released her, pacing to the skeleton of a swing set.

“What was that?” he demanded. “What you did back there.”

“I just…” Lily started. The words failed her.

“Your khárisma,” he filled in. In Sam’s mouth, Ash’s archaic and musical term sounded like a curse. “That’s what it was. Wasn’t it?”

A hopscotch field was painted onto the tarmac, faded with years and hundreds of small feet. Someone had hung a sign from the brick wall.

Wait your turn, it read.

Lily nodded.

The memory of it was monstrous—the burning pleasure, the bloodlust. She shuddered to think of it. It made her feel like something alien, something she did not know and was not sure she wanted to.

“You looked like…” he started.

“Don’t say it,” she cut in.

They looked at each other across the shadowy sandbox, the frozen silhouette of a see-saw. There was so much in Sam’s face—awe, fear, concern, and the lingering ghost of his rage. She searched for a twist of revulsion and thought she might have seen it.

“That was my fight, Lily.”

It was a plea, the protest of someone who had something taken from him that he very badly needed.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He left. The schoolyard gate swung shut behind him, bouncing against the broken lock with a dull clang.

Lily remained alone in the dark.

SIX

Tuesday, November 17th

Morning

March Place, Bloomsbury

THE RING OF LILY’S alarm was like a blast of water hitting her in the face. She tore herself into wakefulness. Every movement hurt, from the soreness in her arms to the bruises on her face. The events of the night before spilled across her brain, ripping any last vestige of sleep from her body.

The slide of yew under her hands. The dull vibration as it struck flesh.

The terrible joy of it.

The blood pooling at her boots.

Why hadn’t he warned her?

Ash should have known. He should have understood that Lily’s khárisma could potentially take this form. He should have prepared her for it, told her what it must mean . . .

She pushed that useless stream of thought aside. Her stomach, indifferent to moral dilemma, growled, warring with her body over what she needed more—breakfast or another four hours of sleep.

There wasn’t time for any of it. It was already quarter past seven, and there was someplace she needed to be—an errand likely to be as painful as it was necessary.

Ten minutes later she was dressed and standing at her door. She hesitated by the stand that held her walking stick.

Fifty-two inches of polished yew topped by a simple brass orb. The brass was hollow but sturdy enough not to lose its shape when it connected with someone’s arm. There was a knot in the wood two-thirds of the way down, an amber eye. A tiny nick marred the wood just under the orb. It was hard to see, but Lily could always feel it.

She had carried it through the alleys behind theaters and the comfortable respectability of Bloomsbury, into ambushes and the home of her worst enemy. It had saved her from assault or worse, protected her when she had only herself to rely on in the world. It was a companion—something she had trusted—and as she looked at it leaning in against the dull pewter of the stand she could not help but feel as though it had betrayed her.

Of course, that was nonsense. The staff was only wood and brass, a mere object. It was incapable of betrayal. It was Lily who had done that.

She still could not quite bring her hand to draw it from the stand.

She cut across the University of London campus. The grass of the lawn was still vibrantly green, though the students hurried across it, collars turned up against the cutting chill of the breeze. One of them cast a startled look at Lily as she passed, and she knew he had noticed the bruises and scabs that marred her face. She had done nothing to conceal them before leaving the house. There hadn’t been any time.

Someone waited for her on the other side of the square, a slender figure in charcoal silk.

Zhao Min was still in mourning.

She waited patiently for Lily to join her. An exceptionally well-kept hackney carriage was parked discretely on the other side of the road. Lily knew that a closer inspection would reveal the wool-clad driver on the box to be a quiet and fiercely loyal woman.

“How did you know I would come this way?” Lily demanded.

“It is rather obvious where you would be going,” Zhao Min replied. “People are nothing if not predictable. Though you are still capable of some surprises. You surprised me twice last night—first when you challenged him and again when you won.”

The dark-haired woman regarded her carefully, a cool challenge in her eyes.

“What you can do . . . it is rather more than I had suspected.”

Lily remembered the thrill of the knowing, the certain power of staff and flesh and technique.

The glittering confidence that she could tear her enemy apart if she chose.

She closed her eyes against it, her gut twisted with discomfort.

“That wasn’t me,” she protested.

Zhao Min arched a black eyebrow.

“Don’t be a fool,” she retorted. “It was precisely you.”

Lily knew it was true. It drove her unease even deeper.

“I was just doing what I had to do,” she returned, meeting the other woman’s gaze with a confidence she did not feel.

Zhao Min’s eyes drifted to Lily’s empty hand—the hand that should have been wrapped around the wood of her walking stick.

“Well . . . Not entirely,” she replied.

The final moments of the fight raced through Lily’s mind—Cannon prone and battered on the floor, her walking stick raised for the finishing blow.

“I’m not a killer,” Lily retorted, fear lending a hard edge to the words.

“Not killing is a luxury,” Zhao Min replied. “Most of the people who need evil to die lack the power to do it. You possess a great deal of power.”

“I never asked for it,” Lily returned.

“That is hardly relevant.” Zhao Min’s tone was dismissive.

Lily’s hands had clenched into fists at her sides.

“I have no right to decide who lives or dies,” she protested, the words raw.

“Who, then?” Zhao Min demanded. “God? Fate? We call it bàoyìng—that good or evil deeds are repaid in kind. But who does the repaying? Your God has no hands of his own. If those who can refuse to act, what instrument should he use?”

Her words snapped like a flag in the wind, and Lily was thrown back to a carriage ride three months before. She recalled the rain tapping against the windows as they rolled to the funeral of the man who should have been here to give her the answers to those questions.

Remembered how Estelle had calmly delivered a devastating message from the dead.

A key transforms into a weapon.

There will be blood on your hands.

“I don’t want this,” Lily ground out in reply. “I don’t want to be anyone’s instrument.”

“Those who do are likely unqualified for the job.”

Zhao Min’s voice carried a note of weariness, one that deflated Lily’s reflex to defend herself.

This woman had saved her life last night. Lily could not know if that was a victory, or what it had cost her.

“Will there be trouble for you?” she asked.

“I have a great deal of practice being hard to find,” Zhao Min replied.

Lily was struck for the first time by how much Zhao Min resembled her brother. It was so obvious to her now, Lily wondered how she could have been ignorant for so much as a moment that she and Sam were siblings.

The woman in gray turned for her carriage. Pressed by the uncertainty of knowing when—or if—she would ever see Zhao Min again, Lily called after her.

“I’m not the only one with power.”

Zhao Min paused.

“What will you do with yours?” Lily demanded.

Zhao Min looked away—across the city, perhaps beyond it.

“I thought I knew the answer to that question,” she replied. “Now I am not so sure.”

A pair of automobiles slipped past them, engines rumbling comfortably. A paperboy dropped his wares onto the doorsteps of the tidy row houses that lined the road.

In the distance, Lily heard the whistle of a train.

A feeling of strange kinship bloomed in Lily for the woman beside her. It surprised her with its warmth. Lily explored it carefully, far from certain it would be welcome.

“I hope you find out,” she finally said, meaning every word.

“And you as well,” Zhao Min returned. It was both a wish and a challenge.

Lily considered what else she might say—how she might urge this woman to heal at least one of the great wounds of her past, reknit a bond that never should have been rent. She kept those words inside. It was not her place. Zhao Min would make that choice in her own time and her own way, and no one could make that any different.

The woman in gray signaled to her driver and stepped into the shadows of the carriage. The driver perched on the box snapped her reins and the vehicle slipped into the flow of traffic, blending with the countless others that looked almost exactly like it crowding the streets of London.

As it slipped away, Lily became aware of a truth glowing softly inside of her, edged with the familiar hue of her khárisma.

She would see Wu Zhao Min again.

St. Pancras Station had the look of a red-bricked cathedral with its Gothic peaks and tall shining windows. Lily merged with the stream of bodies moving through the doors and passed from the bright glare of the street to the shining womb of glass and steel that was the platform.

She paused to look up at the timetable. The train she wanted would be leaving from Platform 12.

Lily let herself be carried in a whirling current of black-suited businessmen and families hauling traveling trunks. She passed a sailor bidding goodbye to a beautiful woman with a kiss, heedless of the crowd that surrounded them.

She reached the top of the platform and stopped to wait. It was ten minutes to eight.

Two minutes later, Sam arrived.

He was wearing his uniform, the wool a rough olive in hue. A wide leather belt cinched his waist and a khaki rucksack was slung over his shoulder. His dark hair was crowned with the distinctive peaked cap of the British Army.

He was walking with two other figures that were very familiar to her—Mr. Wu and Mrs. Liu, his father and grandmother.

They stopped several yards shy of the platform and Mr. Wu put a hand on his son’s shoulder.

Sam responded with a deep bow of his head. It was a simple movement with a volume of meaning.

Emotion shifted across Mr. Wu’s weathered features. Lily saw a change in the pressure of his hand, and then he was drawing Sam closer.

He pulled his son into an embrace.

Sam’s face fell against his father’s shoulder, and Lily felt a quick note of shame as though she were witnessing something that should have enjoyed the anonymity of happening in a crowd where nobody knows or cares about you.

Sam bent down to hug his năinai, her arms coming around him fully and generously. He held her for a long moment and then straightened, squaring his shoulders and making certain his cap was still in place.

He did not see Lily when he turned away from them, exposing a secret glimpse of his face twisted into an almost childlike sadness. That Lily witnessed it left her feeling even more awkward, but she forced herself to stay, planted in his path to the platform. The purpose she had come here for was more important than her own discomfort.

Sam looked up and saw her.

He stopped, forcing the crowd to shift and part around him. The people moving toward the train barely looked as they made the adjustment. They were all city-dwellers, accustomed to altering the flow of their steps.

Lily went to him.

“Did you get your orders?” she asked, forcing some light into her tone.

“I’ve been transferred,” he replied. His hand moved automatically to the yellow edge of a telegram emerging from his breast pocket. “They’re moving me to the Royal Flying Corps.”

“You’ll be working on airplanes,” Lily filled in. She pushed herself into a smile. “That’s wonderful.”

She did not have to force too hard to put a genuine note of happiness into her voice. It felt right that Sam would be using his skills to take men up into the sky—that he should somehow become even closer to the birds that were always following him around. There was also a relief in it. Airplanes weren’t maintained in the trenches of Ypres. There would be some distance between Sam and the front lines.

And a greater chance he might come back home to England again someday in one piece.

Lily was conscious of the hands of the big station clock, slicing towards the moment at which he would have to leave. There was no time to do anything but say what she had come there to say. She could read his impatience in the straightness of his back, the grim line of his mouth. He was still angry at her. She could not fix that. She knew better than to try. There was something else she had come to set right.

“I need you to know,” she said, looking up to meet his eyes, “That I believe in you. That I will always believe in you, Sam Wu.”

With a quick dart of panic, Lily realized she was dangerously close to starting to cry.

She pulled herself together, but her voice was not as level as she might have hoped as she continued.

“You are capable of so very much . . . bravery and loyalty, intelligence, strength. I never want you to feel that I doubt…”

The words failed, her throat running dry. She closed her eyes, pulling for some way to communicate this truth she so desperately wanted him to know.

“It’s just this blasted thing inside of me. Sometimes it demands so much…” Her voice broke. “I just can’t pretend I don’t know the things that I know,” she spilled out at last.

He was quiet. She reached for more words, for some perfect way to articulate what she was trying to say—the language that would reach into his heart and fix the damage she feared she had wrought there with her actions the night before. She was left with only air.

A hand slipped over her own, took hold of fingers she had not realized were shaking.

She let herself fall against him, her face pressed against the rough wool of his uniform. After a moment, his arms came around her and he held her back.

A wave of sparrows burst from the elegant iron lattice that supported the domed glass roof of the station. They danced overhead in a wild spiral, then rushed out into the clear air of the morning.

Sam released her, self-consciously adjusting the straps of his bag. He gave her a nod. There was something in it that reminded her of the formal gesture he had made to his father a moment before, and her heart twisted.

He didn’t speak. She was left with reading the look in his eyes—both loving and hard at the edges, wrought through with threads of grief.

The bell of the clock echoed through the station. She had run out of time, and of words.

He turned and moved quickly down the steaming length of the waiting train.

Lily stayed where she was and watched him go, the dull green of his uniform visible between the moving bodies of tradesmen and governesses and sailors climbing into the passenger coaches.

There, at the far end of the platform, came the briefest flash of gray silk.

Steam billowed toward the glass roof. The long, soot-darkened line of the train slipped into motion, gliding away from her into the unknown.

Outside St. Pancras, London buzzed with the morning. The newsmen swapped coins for papers while a small boy tugged a puppy along at the end of a lead. A pair of lorry drivers were arguing over a collision as pigeons fluttered out of the way of a passing Daimler.

A few yards down the road, an exceptionally well-kept hackney gleamed where it sat parked at the curb. The driver lounged in her seat, flipping the pages of a magazine.

She was settled in for a wait.

The woman noted Lily’s attention. She tipped her black cap in a meaningful little salute, then returned to her reading.

Lily thought of the flash of gray on the platform.

A return trip to Dover took roughly three hours. The driver would indeed be waiting for a while.

And perhaps on a train steaming its way to the war, an old wound was finally beginning to heal.

~

I hope you’ve enjoyed A Wrath of Sparrows. Lily's adventures continue in Book Three of The Charismatics, Bridge of Ash. Read it now.

Want to stay up-to-date on future releases in The Charismatics series? Sign up for the newsletter. You'll also get your hands on the free prequel novella, The Stolen Apocalypse, featuring characters from both The Charismatics and The Magdalene Diggers.

The London Charismatics Series

Enter a dangerous and arcane Edwardian England.

A boy who speaks to birds. A woman who dreams of the dead. A man who steals secrets with a touch.

The Charismatics are those with the power to know impossible things. With her dark visions of things to come, Lily Albright is one of them. To stop the horrors of the future, she must master her terrible ability—and learn to trust an eclectic group of strangers with everything that matters most to her.

Join The London Charismatics and journey down gaslit streets rife with murder, conspiracy, and supernatural forces.

~

The Fire in the Glass

Book One

Lily’s visions could stop a killer if she’ll trust a reclusive aristocrat with her darkest secret.

The Shadow of Water

Book Two

A dangerous prophecy threatens London.To stop it, Lily must uncover the truth behind her mother’s murder.

A Wrath of Sparrows

A London Charismatics Novella

When an old enemy resurfaces, Lily is forced to choose between friendship and fate.

Bridge of Ash

Book Three

Strangford is accused of murder, plunging Lily into a tangle of espionage and betrayal where the fate of the war hangs in the balance.

What the Ravens Sing

Book Four (Coming in 2022)

In the darkest hour of the Great War, only Lily can stop an ancient and terrible charismatic ability from tearing the world apart.

The Magdalene Diggers

Suffragette and archivist Ellie Mallory takes on the world to protect the secrets of the past.

The world says women can’t be archaeologists. Ellie Mallory is determined to prove them wrong. From the uncharted jungles of British Honduras to the pirate-infested South China Sea, Ellie faces down giant bats, deadly traps and opinionated gentlemen to uncover the powerful mysteries history has lost—and keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

~

The Stolen Apocalypse

A Magdalene Diggers Novella

Ellie Mallory works with the eccentric young heir to the barony of Strangford to uncover the truth behind a daring theft. Can she navigate deadly bell towers and potentially explosive coffins to restore a priceless historical artifact to its rightful place?

The Smoke Hunter

Book One of The Magdalene Diggers

When frustrated suffragette and would-be archaeologist Ellie Mallory stumbles across a map to an ancient city that shouldn’t exist, she’s forced to team up with maverick surveyor Adam Bates. Together, they must face cataracts, angry boar, and an excellent bottle of aged rum to beat a deadly enemy to a prize that could shake the fate of the world.

More to come in 2022

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This little book never should have been. Readers may thank Nicholas Atwater for its existence (and then pop off to enjoy his witty and adventurous Tales of the Iron Rose series). I knew there were a few as-yet-untangled threads of Lily’s story between A Shadow of Water and What the Ravens Sing. It was Nicholas who prompted me that they may actually constitute another book . . . and then this novella fell out of that plot into my lap.

You may also thank Kaitlyn Huwe, Matt Dow, and Anna Brown-Leone for offering helpful suggestions to tighten up the story. Zhui Ning Chan once again put her eagle-eye to the text, and Mike Dunbar slaughtered typos and knocked out word repetition.

Cathie Plante did her magic on the text, turning it into the lovely book you hold before you.

And as always, I thank you, my lovely readers, for your continuing support of Lily and her motley crew of friends and allies. I look forward to crafting you more adventures with The Charismatics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacquelyn Benson writes smart historical thrillers where strong women wrangle with bold men and confront the stranger things that occupy the borders of our world. She once lived in a museum, wrote a master’s thesis on the cultural anthropology of paranormal investigation, and received a gold medal for being clever. She owes a great deal to her elementary school librarian for sagely choosing to acquire the entire Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series.

Her debut novel, The Smoke Hunter, was nominated for Best Historical Fiction by RT Times. When not writing, she enjoys the company of a tall, dark and handsome English teacher and practices unintentional magic.

If you’d like to be friends:

- Join the email list on her website. You'll also get a free download of an exclusive novella, The Stolen Apocalypse.

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The Charismatics Series

The Magdalene Diggers

Acknowledgments

About the Author