intervening years he’s learned to use a knife, and that seems to increase his lethality.”
When she spoke, she was as cold-blooded as any copper. Cuan felt as if he should withdraw, find it unseemly. Bitner no doubt would. Instead, it made him easier with her.
When she spoke so, she was just a colleague.
She continued, “He vanished after something very like this—the Crown’s Own blanketed the city, interrupting his every attack. Eventually, he must have given up, his purpose—whatever it might have been—thwarted.”
“So what gave him the idea for the knife, if he only used claws before?”
She shook her head. “It would be natural to blame this on a copy-cat.”
“But you don’t think it is?” He leaned forward on his seat to push aside the curtains and peer out the window. Nothing lay beyond except the city, the press of its streets, and the gloaming. A woman in a ragged dress caught his eye and swung her hips. Cuan bit his lip on a sigh. Even if she knew someone was hunting her, there wasn’t much she could do if she were going to earn a few pennies for her liquor and her bed.
Here at the edge of Whitechapel, theirs was the only carriage in sight. Not even hansom cabs found commerce here.
“I tested the scrapings,” Garrett said. “They weren’t from anything human.”
Cuan let the curtain fall. “Did you say ‘interfered with’?”
“Raped,” she amended dryly.
“No sign of that this time. He’s taking the direct route.”
It fell like a stone into still water between them, Cuan struck dumb while his mind ticked over the implications. Garrett stared back. “DS,” she said, finally, “I do believe you’re right. Do you wish me to inform your supervisor as well as my own?”
“DI Bitner? Yes, if you know what’s going on.”
She reached up to rap on the carriage roof. “I think we can manage that.” She handed Cuan the amulet before leaning out the window to confer briefly with the coachman. By the time she sat down again, Cuan had finished lighting the lantern that would allow them to see each other though the last light faded from the sky. “I think he’s using the—the life force, the generative force—of his female victims to stay manifested in London. I think he needs that anchor, or he falls back into whatever hell he came from. And the Queen’s reign is his gateway. Then, she was young, new to the throne. Now she’s recently widowed. A woman in transition. He connects himself to the Queen’s life-giving energy the same way you sorted the sand from the glass.”
“Because all women share a symbolic continuity,” Cuan said. “Just like all bits of quartz.”
Garrett nodded. “Just like all men.”
Cuan glanced down at the amulet, expecting only more lazy spinning, and had to look back twice to confirm what his eyes registered.
The needle of light pointed west, shivering like a bird dog on point.
He held it up. Garrett, after only a wide-eyed glance, lunged for the window to call out to the coachman again.
***
The coach lurched heavily through packed streets, jostling and slewing so Cuan was obliged to wedge himself in the same corner he’d slept in and cling for dear life to the vertical rail beside the door.
“St. Giles,” Garrett said, as the needle’s course plunged them along the roads that still described the path of London’s ancient walls. “We couldn’t have guessed much more wrong than Whitechapel.”
Cuan gritted his teeth, grateful for missed meals, and held on until the carriage shook to a halt a mere three miles but nearly half an hour later.
“We’re not the first,” Garrett said, pushing the curtain aside. She swung the door open as she stood and kicked the stairs down. One hand extended to whoever waited below, the other burdened with her carpet bag, she descended without regard for the railing. Cuan followed at slightly less breakneck speeds, though still in haste.
As he fell into step beside her, she spoke without looking at him. “I’ve made up my mind to write you a letter of recommendation to Oxford.”
He would have stammered thanks, but she silenced him with a wave. Full dark had fallen while they raced the breadth of the city proper, and the coal-oil stinking yellow fog rolled in. Despite streetlamps and carriage lanterns, everything had acquired an air of indistinctness, or unreality.
However the transfer of information had taken place, five carriages clustered at the base of the pillar marking the intersection called the Seven Dials. Fifteen or twenty men milled among