Page 74 of The Business of Blood

Hands were on me. Clawing. Lifting. And whatever made me human, a person, fled before an animalian fear so electrifying, rage billowed in to fill the spaces reason had deserted.

A sharp ringing in my ears drowned out the cacophony of their obscene words. My vision blurred, then sharpened. All I could see was my knife. How bright it glinted among their rough and often dirty fingers.

I took a few of those fingers with my blade. Several, in fact, before someone managed to drag me from the coach.

They called me a whore. They called me a cunt. They called me worse than that, and with no reason.

I’d barely marked them.

The blade was like a part of me I’d never learned how to use. A claw that had been retracted until this moment. Whenever it found purchase in flesh, I snarled with a sense of triumph. When blood erupted from a wound, my own sang with glorious ferocity.

I was no longer a lady. A woman. Or Fiona. I was a wild thing.

Perhaps a killer.

I knew not who I cut or where.

I expected to be stabbed, myself, at any moment. Or bludgeoned, punched, kicked, trampled. But when I was finally dragged into the crowd, the sheer press of humanity was both my protector and my enslaver.

I sank into that ocean of bodies. Gulping for air with lungs left no room to inflate. My fingers became talons, clutching my knife, considering whether I could angle it to use against myself.

Despair crushed my throat like a boot heel.

The report of a gunshot echoed from the west, along the river, and a reprise of startled screams created the chorus, followed by a verse of more explosions to the south.

As if of one mind, the throng surged north, toward Westminster Abbey. I was powerless to do anything but ride the motion like a wave, lest I be trampled.

Another shot broke through the discord. This one right next to me, in the middle of it all.

The devastating pressure of bodies against me abated as though it had never been. I stood and inhaled air greedily as people screamed and scrambled like rats from a matron’s broom.

An arm clamped around me from behind. Still a creature of instinct, I stabbed at it. A hand gripped my wrist, popping my fingers open with embarrassingly little pressure against the tendons. My knife clattered to the cobbles.

I’d thought if anyone might rescue me, it would be Inspector Croft. The gunfire surely belonged to the police, didn’t it?

But I could not smell clove smoke and sharp vanilla.

And the color of the hand was all wrong. Too dark.

My wiry struggles proved feeble to the preternatural strength of Aramis Night Horse.

I sagged against him, not knowing whether to be comforted or distressed. My body, apparently, chose relief.

The sounds of pain, of violence, drew my notice, and I looked over to see the Hammer using the butt of his pistol to break a man’s jaw.

Hammer, indeed.

He bared his teeth in an eerie, deceptively calm smile. “Do come along, Fiona.” He beckoned to me as one might invite a friend into his house.

Night Horse’s shoulder became my bulwark against a sea of bodies, and I was happy to tuck myself against his smooth, solid frame. To bury my cheek in his loose hair and let him half-drag, half-carry me along. I liked to think my feet helped, but I couldn’t be sure.

As the crowd surged north, the Hammer cleared a path toward Great College Street by way of punishing brutality.

He was the sort of man crowds parted for.

Had I been religious, I’d have said he was the sort of man theseasparted for.

In that moment, he was my savior, and I would have worshiped him thusly.