Eleven
The next evening, as she stood by the drawing room window and watched night fall over London, Mina was still thinking over what she’d heard from MacAlasdair.
She’d heard about clubs like the Emerald Star, of course. Florrie brought home stories every so often, and other girls in Mina’s boardinghouse gossiped about spiritualists and fortune-tellers. A few gauze-draped mystics had even called on Professor Carter from time to time, after which he’d usually had to have a lie-down and a glass of whiskey. Mina had just thought they were all frauds.
Hearing otherwise had brought on very mixed emotions. On the one hand, the presence of other magicians in London meant other people who could maybe deal with Ward if MacAlasdair really fumbled the matter. On the other hand, in Mina’s experience, you could count on other people to foul things up more than you could count on them to be helpful, and now there was a whole other world of potential accidents—ornotaccidents.
The sound of shattering glass broke through her reflections.
Mina darted back away from the window and was halfway across the floor before she realized that it hadn’t broken. The noise hadn’t come from the drawing room. It had come from the fireplace, but nothing around that was broken, either.
The noise had come down the chimney.
Closing her eyes, Mina pictured the floor above her. The stairs led up from the hall, and the drawing room was on the right side of the lower floor. Retracing her previous exploration, she thought that the noise had come from one of the bedrooms she hadn’t entered.
A bird or a bat had probably flown into the window. Granted, the second floor was a bit low for that and too high for children throwing stones, but stranger things happened.
In London, burglary wasn’t really strange. In the house of a wealthy man who lived alone—who was known to keep few servants and to send those away at regular hours—it wouldn’t be at all unusual.
And while Stephen had said the manes weren’t coming back for a while, Ward could have conjured up other things.
Mina swore under her breath and found that her mouth had gone completely dry.
MacAlasdair was locked away being a dragon for a little while longer. Running to get the police would give the burglars or demons or whatever time to do their work and get away. If they were working for Ward and managed to see Stephen in dragon form, that would be awful. If they weren’t human and caught either Stephen or the rest of the servants by surprise, that would be even worse.
She took the poker from the fireplace. It hadn’t helped much last time, but she wouldn’t be facing a dragon now—at least, not with any luck.
Mina went up the stairs slowly, keeping close to one of the walls and moving as quietly as she could. She wasn’t bad at that. She was no burglar, but shewasa slim woman with a light step, and one who’d spent her life in crowded houses.
Nobody was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. No hand lunged out of the dark hallway to catch her wrist; no chloroform-soaked cloth descended over her nose and mouth.
Not yet, at least.
She snuck down the hallway, passing one closed door after another. No noise came from within any of them so Mina kept going, the poker heavy in her hand.
Then there was a thump at the end of the hall, from a room whose door had been left open just a crack. From what Mina knew about the house and what she’d seen from the servants’ routine, she thought that it was MacAlasdair’s bedroom.
She stepped closer, pressing herself against the wall.
“…anything in there?”
It was a male voice, and the accent was familiar. The speaker might have been any of the men she’d grown up with.
“Lot of fancy clothes,” said another similar voice. “You?”
“Nothing big enough. Couple sets of cuff links, though,” the first man added, clearly pleased by this unexpected development. “Look like gold, they do.”
“Well, don’t ’old out once we get clear of this place.’Eonly cares for one thing, after all.”
Mina had heard enough.
Slowly, she put the poker down, then moved away and into the bedroom next door. Shuttered windows and dust cloths announced that nobody had slept there for some time, but the furniture still remained: a bed with a brass frame, a washstand, and most importantly for Mina’s purposes, a dark wooden desk and a chair to match.
Good thing she was a strong girl.
Even so, when she lifted the chair, she knew she’d pay for it later—and that she wouldn’t have managed it normally. Fear did wonders for the human body.
As she approached MacAlasdair’s room again, one of the men inside spoke.
