“I never even loved you, and you ruined everything! And so I waited. I waited until you had everything you’d ever wanted in the palm of your hand, and now I’m taking it back. All of it. Your precious caravan. Your beautiful wife.” She walked over to me and let her boot tip dig into my cheek. “Your unborn child.”
Incredulity washed over me, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. But she went on.
“I’m going to strip them from you as you stripped my greatest dreams from me, and then I’m going to do to you what I did to Phaedro, when he was still great.”
She got very, very close to his beautiful face.
“I’m going to carve you into tiny pieces, scatter them, and laugh.”
20
At first, I was too stunned to process anything she’d said after “unborn child.” I had always assumed that my body on Sang was just as damaged as it had been on Earth, and for six years Criminy and I had enjoyed unprotected sex with no hope of little halfbluds running around the caravan. After the bludding, I told myself it was still impossible, because hoping for something that would never happen hurt too much. Criminy had always dreamed of having children, and it hurt my heart, too. But we had the carnivalleros, we had Demi, and we had a fondness for taking on orphans and outcasts and giving them a better life free from the cities’ oppression.
But hadn’t he told me flat out that I was in season?
Hadn’t I had . . . signs?
Sure, it had only been a few days, but still. Criminy had warned me that I would be more aware of my physicality, and he’d also mentioned that I was highly fertile, as much as I’d denied it.
I’d been drinking blood like crazy, for one thing. Just today, I’d had breakfast, then drained an entire assailant, then had two cups of blood since entering the witch’s lair, but I still felt a little parched. I reached my new senses deep inside me, focusing. Could I feel a new life there? Was a tiny heartbeat beating alongside my own? No, of course not. That was impossible. It couldn’t have been more than a few days along—if so, barely a cluster of cells. And yet . . . I did not feel entirely alone.
I looked to my grandmother, to Ruby. She was watching me fondly, and she must have seen the question in my face, because she smiled and nodded her head. Yes. Whatever she’d seen when she glanced on me, she knew.
And that meant that I had more to fight for than ever.
21
Merissa reached for a scalpel, and I wanted to throw up. Criminy was the most attractive man I’d seen in my entire life spanning two worlds, and he clearly couldn’t stop her from whatever her tiny white hands wanted to do to him. But even on the floor, trapped under a witch, I had my own weapons.
I couldn’t reach either of my knives, as the witch had a knee in my back. But as Merissa inspected her scalpel by the firelight, I feigned a struggle to escape and reached for one of my earbobs. They were cunning things shaped like hummingbirds, a special request I’d begged from Mr. Murdoch. After I’d destroyed several clockworks, all by accident, he had taken on the challenge of giving me metal weapons that I couldn’t accidentally sit on. The hummingbirds were my favorites, dangling prettily from my pierced lobes. The witch on my back was too busy keeping me on the ground and watching Merissa prepare to carve up her nemesis, and it was all too easy to poke her leg with the bird’s long beak and press the button that injected a very potent but not-too-damaging sleeping potion, chosen so that if I were to puncture myself by accident, I wouldn’t be harmed.
“What was that?” Hepzibah said, looking down and catching my wrist in her iron grasp.
I turned my palm up and showed her: nothing. I’d already dropped the bird, and I still couldn’t speak. In fact, every move I made was utterly silent.
“You poked me with something,” she muttered. “A pin? So childish.”
By the time she’d managed to frantically shove her skirts and petticoats aside and fumble with her stockings, she had started to slump over. Soon she was flopping across my back and snoring gently. Merissa hadn’t looked up; she was focused on Criminy. Ruby and Torno watched the scene, rapt, as if they were at the theater. From the ground, all I could see of Merissa were her psychotic smile and the professional detachment in her eyes while she did something horrible to my husband. I didn’t have much time; she could have already disfigured him, but he was still alive, still upright, and no blud yet dripped to the floor.
Hating my silence but grateful for my undesired stealth, I felt for my reticule and fished around inside it for two small bags that I knew by touch. The first held the same invisibility powder Crim had used when we’d journeyed to Manchester so long ago to take on the Magistrate, and the second held spell-breaking powder, a handy little something Criminy kept around for nullifying the minor magic others had put into effect. It was one of the few magical objects that anyone could wield, whether they had the knack or not, and I slipped silently from under the witch’s sleeping form and edged into the shadows.