Red, White and Blue (Book Two of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty: The Orpheus Trick

Ellini made her way to the Turl Street Music Rooms – not because the Book of Woe had said she was destined to die there, but because there was nowhere else to find comfort. 

Her footsteps were shuffling and numb. There had been pain – and not just the physical kind – but now it had died down to a hazy, empty kind of cold. 

There was no Jack. He had never been what she'd thought he was. She might just as well have made him up. He was no different from Robin, or Carver, or Pandarus and his master. And yet, for some infuriating reason, she still liked it – all of it. She still laughed at his jokes, even when she was bleeding to death through a hole in her chest that he had put there.

She was heartily ashamed of herself – although it had been nice to punch him. She had been wanting to do that just as much as she'd been wanting to kiss him. And now she had done both in the same night. As well as stabbing a gargoyle. She would never have believed it of herself. 

Still, it wouldn't have worked if she hadn't had the brass knuckles – and if Jack hadn't been so disoriented. Had there been pain too? Had he been looking at her as though he loved her in those last, brief seconds between kiss and unconsciousness?

She didn't know. She'd been too angry to look for it. And too frightened that her resolve would weaken if she let him say a word.

She had wanted him to know – she'd wanted him to realise what he'd done and live with it. That was why she'd kissed him. But even then, she couldn't bear the idea that he might die because of it. That was why she'd put the bracelet on him. If he remembered he loved her, and he tried to...

But he wouldn't. He couldn't have loved her much if he'd been able to stab her in the chest. It was just a stupid precaution. She'd thought of it before he'd even stabbed her. She had realised he wasn't going to back down from a fight with the gargoyles, and that the bracelet might be the only way to keep him safe. She had enchanted it in the church, when she'd been kneeling at the altar. 

And the person she had chosen as the one creature in the world who could get through the bracelet's defences – well, that person was gentle as a lamb, and would probably just unfasten the bracelet rather than killing him.

It hadn't been a fool-proof plan to begin with, but, when he had stabbed her through the chest, her mind had put the last, spiteful finishing touches to it. She had decided to kiss him as well – let him live forever with the knowledge of what he'd done – and see what his conscience would make of it.

In truth, his conscience probably wouldn't make that much of it. But she'd been in a lot of pain. It had seemed to her like justice and mercy at the same time, but perhaps that was just the blood-loss talking. It didn't matter. It was done now. 

***

Dr Petrescu drew the needle and tubing out of Danvers's arm a split-second before he tumbled off his chair. A split-second before that, the poor man had been protesting – with increasingly slurred speech – that he was feeling fine, and he could stand to give her just a little more blood.

Sergei bandaged up his arm and arranged him comfortably on the floor – as there wasn't another bed – before sitting down on the chair he had just vacated.

Eve was still gasping and shivering. She had stopped breathing out smoke, but she was still losing blood. She needed more. He wondered whether the rumours about demons feeding on human blood had sprung from how difficult they were to satisfy during the process of transfusion.

Probably not, although it was a nice idea. Almost certainly nicer than the truth, whatever the truth might have been.

He sighed and deftly inserted a new needle into his own arm. To pass the time, he started to count down from ten thousand in his head.