It was early, dawn barely beginning to lighten the sky. Grey usually saw dawn because he'd been up the whole of the night before, rather than waking to greet it. Had he gone drinking last night? What could he have imbibed that would leave him in such a state? He'd never had a hangover like this one.
A knot of people-idlers and children, the sort who slept in doorways-had gathered around one of the doorways off to the right, toward what appeared to be an even larger street. Grey paused, watching them because they were there, trying to get his bearings. Until he knew where near the river he was, he wouldn't know which direction to take for home, or where to find a cab.
Miss Parkin planted herself in front of him. "I use magic to disguise myself, yes," she said. "When I'm not hiding myself altogether. If I were a boy, I'd go to that school. But I'm not, and I can't, and now that my father has died, I need a way out of this place where he's left me. But the only thing I can do is magic, and that will earn me nothing here but a short drop."
Grey firmed his lips to hide the effect her desperation had on his unruly heart. It was too soft by far, usually in what his family deemed inappropriate circumstances. He, and they, would prefer it remain cold and hard at all times, but he could not prevent it from reacting to the oddest things. Like Pearl Parkin's plight.
He watched the gathering crowd, augmented now by people heading off to work with their baskets and carts and tools, who tried to pass and got caught up in whatever was happening.
Pearl clutched at his coat, trying to pull his attention back in her direction. She'd never lost it. His eyes might be turned toward the growing crowd, but all his attention-what he could squeeze past the regiment of drummers beating on his head-was focused on the dainty creature beside him.
"My hiding magic would be perfect for thieves," she whispered, her fingers digging into his forearm. "There's some as 'ave-who have asked me to do it for them. I've put them off. I've hidden from them, but I can't hide all the time. I have to earn my supper, don't I? I can't do that if I'm hidden, if I want to do it honestly, which I do. And if I give in to Nosey, I don't know how long it'll be till he finds out I'm a girl and-"
She shuddered, and Grey's heart twisted. Or maybe the twist was lower, in his gut. He knew someone who had suffered that sort of insult at far too young an age. She'd recovered admirably, but the attack had left deep scars. He wanted to help this girl. But to take her as apprentice?
"Magicians can take female apprentices," she said. "I read the papers. I know about the lady Mr. Tomlinson took as his apprentice, even though he's alchemist and she's wizard. If he can take a girl apprentice, so can you. And if he can climb out of Seven Dials on the back of his magic talent, then so can I."
Grey wanted to help her. He did. But not that way. He didn't take apprentices. He didn't want to be in authority over anyone, hemming them about with rules. He paid no attention to rules himself, except for those immutable ones like gravity and inertia and conservation of magic. How could he be expected to impose rules on others?
"What are they doing there?" He indicated the murmuring crowd, and edged around Miss Parkin to hobble in that direction. Hangovers didn't make you ache so much all over, did they? By the time he reached them, Pearl Parkin at his elbow, he could walk almost normally, or appear so. It still hurt.
"Toby's gone to fetch the bobby," someone said in a confident tone.
Immediately, a good quarter of the crowd melted away, no doubt due to a disinclination for an encounter with London's police representative, and Grey was able to move closer. Though not to shake off Miss Parkin.
" 'Oo are you?" One of the locals turned a suspicious eye on him. " 'Oo's the gent?" she asked the general vicinity.
" 'E's Magister Carteret," Miss Parkin said in her husky, pretend-boy's voice. She pronounced Grey's surname "Carterette," rather than the correct "Carteray." Oh, the woes of Norman French ancestry.
"Magister? Wot's that? Some kind of fancy magistrate?" asked someone else.
"It means I'm head of the conjurer's guild," Grey said, trying to infuse a soupçon of authority into his voice. "And one of the Briganti, the magicians' police. What's happened here?"
And how did Miss Parkin know who he was? That question should have occurred to him much earlier. He would have to ask it later, in the unfortunate event that there was a later with Miss Parkin.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea, exposing a sea of red.
No, not a sea. Not even a pool. Blood covered the murdered man's naked, mangled body, but it had not flowed onto the stones of the street below him. He'd been tossed after his death into the doorway where he lay, like a broken doll.
Grey opened his senses-sight, smell, hearing, touch-and that other sense with many names. The sense that registered the presence of magic. He was a conjurer, attuned to the magical range of spirits, but he was able to sense the deep tones of the alchemist's earth-and-elements magic. He could sometimes pick up the lighter range of a wizard's herbal magic, though it was a strain. In the past few weeks, he'd learned to faintly hear, or feel, or-or taste the thick, coppery cry of the blood magic of sorcery.
He could taste it now. The faraway cry of innocent blood for justice. But overlaying everything else, over the soft booming of the stones beneath their feet, over the faint scent of herbs and talismans worn against illness, over the taste of blood that settled in the back of his throat, Grey could hear the loud, off-key, echoing blare of conjury twisted awry.
Rage surged up in a towering wave, sweeping away his aches, clearing out the lingering fog from his mind. Someone had used this man, his agony as his bones were broken one by one, and then his slow death as he choked on his own blood after the bones of his face were broken-used it in an attempt to call a demon. Spirits were not powerful enough, that this murderer thought he required a demon to do his bidding?
Grey's hands hurt. He realized he'd closed them into fists so tight they began to cramp, the pain worsened by last night's unremembered abuse. He wanted to find the murderer, this stinking smear under society's rock, and inflict the same torture upon him.
"Who is he? Does anyone know? Can you tell?" Grey found his handkerchief miraculously still in his pocket and bent to collect a bit of the dead man's blood. Perhaps the sorceress could do something with it.
There was only one sorceress. In the world, not just in England. Amanusa Greyson was currently in Scotland, taking stock of her sorcerous inheritance as well as enjoying a belated honeymoon with her new husband.
"I fink 'e's Angus Galloway. By the red 'air." Someone pointed a grubby finger, and sure enough, the man did have red hair. Curly. Almost the same color as the blood beginning to dry on his obliterated face.
"Has anyone seen Angus Galloway this morning?" Grey stood to ask.
"I smell magic-" An old woman's voice wavered in a raven's croak over the crowd.
They parted again and she came through. Withered, gnarled, bent so far over that her head came no higher than Grey's waist, she was led by the hand toward the murdered man. She sniffed, turning her blind eyes this way and that. They'd brought out their local witch.
Grey eased back, unnerved by the way those milky eyes seemed to see things not there. He knew better, but she unnerved him nonetheless. She might have some magic ability, but it was untrained. Most likely, she used confidence tricks and the ignorance of the masses to bolster her reputation, until her abilities were more rumor than magic. Still, those eyes disturbed him.
"Dark magic," she croaked. "Black as the depths of hell." She got that much right.
"I smell magic, too." Pearl's whisper startled him, though it shouldn't have. He hadn't been able to shake her yet. "But it doesn't smell dark. It smells . . . like blood."
"Gather it up," Grey murmured.
"How?" She scowled up at him.
"That sense you have that can smell it-reach out and touch the magic with it."
"All right."
Grey watched her, but he couldn't see, or sense, anything. "Have you done it? Can you touch it?"
"I think so." Pearl's forehead creased in adorable effort, just between her eyes. Damn it.
"Grab hold of it." He held up a finger to forestall her speaking, whether question or complaint. "Works differently for different people. Some wrap around it like arms and scoop it in. Some suck it up like a liquid. Some sink their fingers in it like a wad of raw wool and drag it in. Experiment. See what works best for you."
Her hands twitched, but she didn't actually move them as her frown deepened. "Scooping," she said finally. "But it's rather like trying to fill a water bucket with my bare hands."
"Improvement comes with practice." Grey watched the old woman.
She moved around the pitiful twisted body from one side of the door where he lay discarded, to the other, sniffing and peering and finally tasting. She reached out with a shockingly long arm to touch a sticky droplet of blood on the poor man's face and touched it to her tongue.