A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty Four: The Circles of Hell

Jack closed the door behind him and crept down the carpeted stairs, his spirits sinking as he descended. 

He would have to go through the morgue to get to Alice. He'd spent the morning studying a plan of the building, when his eyes weren't blurring out of focus with anger or hunger or fatigue – he couldn't tell them apart anymore. So he knew that the mortuary consisted of several descending levels, like the circles of hell. 

He had found Sergei in the coroner's office on the first floor. He now had to go down the central staircase into the entrance hall – which was technically the ground floor, even though you had to climb a set of steps to reach it from the street outside. Then he had to go down another staircase into the morgue, which was level with the street. And then, once he'd got past Ellini's dead body, there would be one more descent, into the basement proper, which was the lair of the she-devil-bitch.

But he would have to face Ellini's body if he wanted to get to her. He would have to see her lying cold and naked on a slab, and know – definitively – that there was no room for any hope. Sam was betting on him being more scared than angry, but Sam had miscalculated, as he so often did. Jack was angrier than he was anything. He was angrier than he was Jack.

Which was why, when he reached the bottom of the stairs, rounded the bannisters and walked, once again, into Danvers's fist, it took him a while to regain his composure.

Oh god, there was always something else, wasn't there? There was always one more layer to be shovelled onto this pile of shit. Now he had to think about Danvers, and all the things Danvers had done that he hadn't done. The man who had stood up for Ellini – albeit in a spluttering, red-faced, ineffectual way – when Alice had smashed her doll. The man who had cared so much about her honour that he'd tried to pick a fight with Jack when he'd seen him kissing Alice Darwin.

It didn't matter that all these honourable displays had been useless, pointless and English to a cringe-worthy degree. In fact, that made it worse. Everything Danvers had done, he could have done better. And everything Danvers had done, he hadn't even thought about.

Jack shut his eyes, trying to clear his head of the memories as much as the punch, and stepped backwards before he could be tempted to hit back.

"You know, you were the one person I was going to leave alone. The one person who was kind to her without also being horrible to me. But you just had to push your luck, didn't you? So honourable that you couldn't possibly mind your own business."

"I won't let you hurt Dr Petrescu," Danvers panted. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He was also holding his fists shakily in front of his face, like a boxer who didn't know what he was doing.

Jack stifled the urge to shout with every muscle in his body. "First of all, I've just come from the doctor's room. If you wanted to be noble, you should have tried to stop me before I went in there."

"Is he – is he dead?" said Danvers, aghast.

"Secondly, the last time you hit me, I beat you into submission without even trying to, remember? What were you hoping to achieve? Then or now?"

"It wasn't his fault!" said Danvers, still looking infuriatingly horrified. "He wouldn't tell you, because he's trying to protect me, but he tried to reverse the effects of the serum. He tried to put it right again. He was afraid he wouldn't be able to...well, at any rate, he sent me to investigate."

He hesitated, as though he was trying to find a way to confess without incriminating anyone else. How very Danvers of him.

"And that's not all," he said at last, lowering his fists. "I found the source of your amnesia. It wasn't chemistry, it was magic, although Mrs Darwin didn't know. And I had the counter-spell in my hand."