hand, Garrett sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of her black wood bedstead. Her left hand resting on the ornate spiral of a bedpost, she ran through her wards again. At her feet, her ragged patchwork terrier whined into the darkness.
"Hush, Mike. I know."
Nothing. She slipped her revolver back under the pillow and stood, belting a cream lace negligee over her nightgown. Her wand—ebony capped in silver, as long as the span from elbow to fingertip—lay on the nightstand, and this she lifted and touched to the wick of a gnarled beeswax stump. The candle sparked into light and Garrett drew a long, tight breath, trying to ease the clenching in her belly. Thirty years in the service of the Crown, and she had never felt such apprehension.
Setting her wand aside, she crossed rug-scattered tile to the credenza, where she poured herself whisky without water and sipped it slowly. Mike scampered close at her heels. She opened the casement one-handed, rainbeaded glass icy on her fingertips, and leaned out into a gaslamp-jeweled night. Falling water trickled down her neck, washed her face like tears. The woeful exhalation of a late-arriving steamship, packet boat from England
or places more distant, hung on the night. The black stone windowledge gouged a cold furrow across her belly. Mike shoved dustmop paws against
the wall, too small to reach the windowledge. She reached down and ruffled his ears.
When the first inch of liquor warmed the chill from her shoulders, Abigail Irene Garrett straightened from the window, unwound white fingers from her tumbler, and began to dress.
And an understatement. The rain had slowed to a mist, but the flagstoned walk lay puddled under her feet. Her eyes narrowed as she gathered the navy-blue skirts of her walking dress in her hands. She lifted them clear of the bloodstained stoop of a wide-fronted three-story brownstone as she minced up the steps. Stringy, clotted runnels dripped down them like paint.
She glanced at uniformed representatives of the Colonial Police and two of the Duke's city Guard, looking apprehensive and outnumbered. "Who can tell me what happened here?"
A patrolman stepped forward, avoiding the DCI's gaze—and avoided following the direction of it when she turned her back on him, bending toward the body crumpled against the scored wooden door. She couldn't keep her boots out of the clotted blood, but uniformed officers had already walked through it. And a detective or two who should have known better, I warrant, she thought. Well, we're not all cut out to be sorcerers.
She glanced over her shoulder, pinning the hapless patrolman on a needle-pointed gaze, wondering which of her notorieties occupied his attention. Perhaps it's just the scent of blood paling his face. "Well?" Perhaps.
"DCI, I was first on the scene."
"And?" Garrett drew herself upright, ash-laced blonde hair falling in a wing across her forehead. Don't smile at him, Abby Irene, or you'll never get another word of sense out of him, and he might very well piss himself. And you know Division would have something to say about that—disgrace to the uniform and so on. The thought quivered her lips. She fought the smile to a standstill and converted it into an expectant frown.
"He was dead when I arrived, DCI. I heard the screaming. . ."
"I see." She let him see her lean forward to note the number on his shield. "Did you identify the bystanders? At what time?"
He took a half-step back. "Sunrise, ma'am. Perhaps an hour ago. There were no witnesses present when I arrived."
"No-one came to his assistance? You heard screaming—"
The officer trained his gaze on the blood-spattered leaves of a just-budding rose alongside the wrought-iron fence. "It was over quickly. Ma'am. As I arrived, the neighbors began coming out of their houses. I was only around the corner."
"No-one has touched the body since?" Poor lad. He couldn't have been more than fifteen. What was he doing out so early in the rain?
"Officers entered. But they climbed through the window."
She could see that from the footprints. Thankfully they had sense enough not to move the body to open the door. Garrett planned to go inside once she had finished her work with the victim. She was too old to climb through windows in the rain.
I wonder what's become of his spine? She leaned forward to examine the damage. The skull is cracked, and I would wager the poor lad's brains have been scooped out. If a human being could do that, I'd say