walking into the trap. Whatever its purpose.
The guard didn’t turn, and Garrett reclosed the door in silence, still clutching the straightened buttonhook underhand. Moving crabwise, sure he could hear the pounding of her heart, she scurried down the hall and around the corner, out of sight.
And where is my carpet-bag? she thought. I need to make it to the road and stop Richard—stop the Duke’s carriage. Damn it!
She chuckled when she realized exactly where her things would be. The Earl’s son was a sorcerer. How could he resist?
She headed for the servants’ stair.
Roderick snored heavily. She heard him from the hallway. He also left his bedroom door unlocked, and she emerged a few moments later, fur still wound tightly around her throat, triumphantly clutching her carpet-bag.
Moonlight and gaslight glittering off the seed pearls on the yoke of her gown, Garrett slipped back into the stairwell.
***
Dawn found the Detective Crown Investigator crouched in a drainage ditch, rainwater matting her faded blonde hair. She ducked as hoofbeats squelched on the muddy road above. Abigail Irene, she thought, would you ever have come to America if you understood how much squatting in filth would be involved?
Listening carefully, she estimated five horses. When they had passed, she sighed and tugged the edge of her wrap higher, hunkering under the soaked grass of the overhang. The water was up to her ankles and rising, cresting the tops of her boots and turning her evening dress into a weighty encumbrance. Straw and sticks shoaled against her calves.
Garrett opened her velvet carpetbag under the cover of her ruined foxfur, propping it on her knee to keep it out of the rising water. She extracted a short, silver-tipped ebony wand and a double-edged, black-handled dagger with a blade outlined in pure elemental silver. The first one she tucked into the cuff of her glove; the second she slipped into her bodice, where she could get at the hilt with a gesture. The bent buttonhook was already thrust into her waistband.
Shutting the bag, she curled back under the embankment, practicing warding cantrips until the horses should be well past, along with a few subtle spells for good fortune. When that fails to further amuse you, Abigail Irene, you can always reminisce about dead lovers.
The wait was long and cold. When she thought it might be safe she crept free of the undercut bank and followed the sickly rivulet downhill, hoping it would lead her to the brook that ran along the roadside.
Hours slid by as miserably as the cold rain sliding under her fur and down the back of her neck. She wished she could risk a spell to warm her hands, but she wasn’t the only sorcerer in Westchester and the other one was hunting her. She satisfied herself with tucking her hands into her armpits as she slogged, crouching, through the ditch. Twice along her painful progress, hoofbeats halted her. One fingertip fretting the smooth tip of her wand inside her glove, she willed herself small and still.
She recognized a voice among the second party. “She can’t have got far. An old woman on foot in this mud—we’ll find her.” Lucky, she thought, and smiled as she made another sign for it.
Garrett concentrated on her wardings and hidings, mumbling blood-slick words at the back of her throat. Old woman, she thought. If I were so old and craftless as you think, you wouldn’t be out here in this mud trying to find me, Roderick, would you? A grim glow of satisfaction warmed her.
“Lord Rod…. Captain, I mean, night is coming.”
“And this is significant how, James?” Cool, questioning. As if the rain wasn’t dripping down the back of his neck, too. A white-hot cramp spiked through the hip Garrett had broken in a tumble from a polo pony more than twenty years before. She clamped her teeth on her tongue, losing her place in the litany of hidings. Above, one of the horses stamped.
“There are rumors, Captain….” James fell silent. Garrett grinned, having heard some of those rumors. Criminals, especially the wealthy ones, never want to believe that their own mistakes are what put them in jail. No, it’s Garrett consorts with demons, Garrett deals in blood sorcery, Garrett’s lovers and partners always seem to messily die….
The grin vanished. Well, there’s a grain of truth to that last one. But not this time. The cramp eased, but she didn’t dare take up her whispered litany of sorcery again. If Roderick hadn’t noticed her stopping, he’d notice her starting