The memories and images exploded in a ball of light as if they were glass, showering down over him. He cursed and screamed, flames burning on his face and hands. He let go of Kip, tried to escape across the roof, and screamed as his clothes burst into flames.
I went after him, not with rage, but with a promise. He would never hurt anyone again.
He had reached the edge of the roof and discovered as I had that there was no escape except the way he had come, as I followed. He held his hands up as if to hold back the fire...or perhaps me.
“Wot are ye?” he screamed.
There was more—I didn’t hear the words. Only the screams as the fire roared and engulfed him, and he threw himself over the edge, blue feathers fluttering in the wind like blue flames.
It was terrifying to watch, equally terrifying as heat slowly eased inside me like a dying fire.
When the sky overhead had darkened once more, I fell to the roof, then slowly curled myself into a tight ball against the cold night air that surrounded me.
I couldn't explain what happened. All I knew was that the man who called himself Mr. Elias was gone. He would never hurt anyone again. Yet, there was still someone rich and powerful who wanted me dead and had been willing to have Dory and Old Meggy killed to get to me.
Why? My entire life I was nothing. Something tossed away, left at that Foundling Hospital with no name other than the one a woman I did not know had given me. Then, left to the streets after I ran away. I didn’t exist until Dory found me. And then that encounter with Mikaela Forsythe that had changed so many things.
It was as if my life began then. I was finally someone, even if I didn’t know where I had come from, and the tears burned on my cheeks.
A single black crow swept near and perched at the edge of the roof. A messenger some believed—a warning, one for sorrow. For someone I couldn’t protect, yet for the one I was able to save.
Munro was there. He pulled me into his arms.
“I’ve got ye. He’s gone, he willna ever hurt anyone again.”
How much had he seen? Was it even real?
I wasn’t certain that I knew, only that it was over, as a thin, grubby boy pushed his way into my arms.
“Yer alive!” Kip cried through his own tears.
“Aye, lad,” Munro gently replied. “She’s alive.”
14
Ihad my suspicions about that in the days that followed.
While I remembered what happened on that roof,howit happened was something I struggled with.
Elizabeth insisted that I rest at the flat to recover, as she put it. She refused to hear of my going anywhere else. She also refused to ask any questions about what had happened. I was certain that would come.
“And who would take care of ye?” she had demanded, with a narrow-eyed look at Munro.
There had been the details to attend to. The report he gave Inspector Landry about that night, after he had found a constable on that ride back to Albany Street and ordered him to find the inspector. After what he learned from a woman by the name of Big Kate at a brothel.
I didn’t want to know how he learned of her connection to Mr. Elias, and did not ask.
Mikaela Forsythe once told me there were times it was best not to know some things.
I had provided a statement to Inspector Landry regarding Mr. Elias’s death in the fall from the roof.
“He must have slipped.” I had looked over to Kip, who grinned but said nothing to the contrary.
“Wot of the burn marks on the body?” he had then asked to be thorough.
Kip provided the answer to that question.
“Cigarette.”
