I woke up to a murky, drizzling day.

  A thiket of grey clouds coated the sky, occasionally sending scattered pockets of rain down on us. There was a chill in the air that threateo reato the house, which made it perfect for a hot cup of tea.

  Some swore by sunny days and pleasaher. I preferred grey days when a hot cup was that one source of heat that felt like it reignited your blood. Back when my walls had been wood a few sturdy blows away from colpsing. When huddling together for warmth had been a y. When you woke up and the cold had seeped into your boime for tea.

  The walls weren’t anywhere near as thin these days, although the cold had seeped in some. But I’d waited for our two guests to arrive for my tea. Some things could keep my cold blood warm without warm liquid to aid it.

  Ao this mess was definitely one of them.

  They came in separate coaches from different ends of the street. Lady Karsin’s took slightly loo make it to the house. It had to navigate through the spread-out rubble still left after her brethren’s raid on the house.

  Workers hired by Voltar were going to take it away. Ohe priests he’d hired had finished, making sure me throwing Diabolism around hadn’t birthed something truly nasty in the wreckage.

  Nothing had shown up yet, which….well, Diabolism corruption took the forms of the loud and fshy. The ck of that boded ill, but it was a worry for aime.

  Both coaches made it to the front of the house and both their passengers exited after the ary waiting time to see who would actually leave their carriage first.

  They’d dressed modestly. Not really here to attend a social event, so a simple suit for the Lord, and a pin dress for the Lady,

  They probably also didn’t want to be seen having e to this house. Good luck with that. The threat of a torrential downpour had dotle to dissuade the usual crowd of watchers on Voltar’s street. Far too many people were ied in keeping track of his movements for that to end.

  Lord Montague looked angry, and he certainly ewing some words that I doubted were kind as he moved towards Lady Karsin.

  In trast, she kept a smile on her face, but not some serene look. There was a manic edge to that smile as she respoo Lord Montague’s words. They seemed lost in their own versation, which wouldn’t do.

  I tapped on the gss of the window, hitting the thick gss with my knuckles loud enough to be heard outside.

  Both their faces turo stare up at me. I pointed down at the door, then mimed looking at a pocket watch. Smile and gre both deepened, but I’d already started walking to the tea table itself. Someone else would get the door for the two guests, and they’d be instructed to e inside.

  No deying the iable at this stage.

  ***

  I and Voltar of us were sitting when the pair of them ehe door, being lead in by a disguised Tagashin. Dr. Dawes was currently with both of uests, helping watch over them and to make sure no agent of their parents tried to kidnap them back.

  Those parents had barely made it through the doorway when I flung a stick at Lady Karsin. The simple piece of wood tumbled end over end, on a collision course with her face.

  Her hand intercepted it in mid-air, sending it flying to the side, but not before the physical tact discharged the wand’s magic right into her hand.

  New fingers poked out all around the surface of her hand, wriggling stubby digits that tore skin, revealing pulsating muscle and tendons underh. Her regur fingers merged together, shrinking down to where the sed knuckle would have been, while new digits yered on top of each other from sheer numbers.

  “Really?” Lady Karsin asked, looking at her wriggling hand, smile fading to a frown. “Was that necessary?”

  “Just a final bit of firmation, Lady Karsin,” Voltar said. “I apologize for the invenience, but we figured we should be sure of your case. Thank you for the effort put into not making it too fshy, Miss Harrow. You should make a marketable ohat be mass-produced. It would be worth quite a Pound iimes.”

  I shrugged, leaning ba my chair. “Not really worth it. I had to share it with the Watd no one gossips quite like a copper. And the fuals aren’t too difficult to uand. Holy, anything with a bit of life-energy might be enough, although I doubt healing potions-”

  “Enough of this nonsense,” Lord Montague yelled, pulling a revolver from his pocket and leveling it at my face. “Where is my son?”

  Shoulders tense, face sched up, eyes narrowed, his iy only matched by how much his aim wavered.

  I stared down the barrel impassively as it jittered about. “Currently? Seeing people much better than you would have brought in. Now, unless you want to lose that arm, drop the gun.”

  Montague turned his attention to Voltar, face reddened with anger. “Voltar, are you going to let your little pet talk to me this way? After she ruined my son’s cure and ended up f me int uhis one!”

  I swallowed my anger even as I felt the overwhelming urge to grab Montague’s arm ahe rotten remnants off at the elbow. Instead, I focused on where he ointing.

  His fiabbed across the air at dy Karsin, shaking even more than the revolver aimed at me. Lady Karsin seemed more bemused than anything else at Lord Montague’s accusation and throwing her uhe bus. I snorted, already predig where Lord Montague was heading with this. I’d discussed it with the others. There wasn’t much hard evideo disprove Lord Montague if he cimed to be coerced.

  I’d had a long argument with both Malstein and Voltar over it, as well as one elderly gentleman from the Watch who’d overseen one of my torture sessions.

  Unless he gave himself away here, he wasn’t being brought in.

  “Miss Harris is a trusted associate, Lord Montague,” Voltar replied calmly. “Quite unlike what I would sider you. Please lower your pistol, or we’ll be forced to take it from you.”

  Montague's eyes widened as his gaze drifted from me. It would be so easy to just lunge forward and touch, watch that arrogant face shrivel in on itself as flesh decayed and burst.

  He regained his bluster swiftly and his gaze snapped back to gre at me. Survival instinct or just fog on the person in the room he hated the most?

  “If the Foulhorn ys a single finger on me, you’ll pay Voltar. It’s bad enough your schemes have ended with me maniputed by her and this one, but you dare speak down to me?”

  “If you keep on blustering, it’ll be more than a finger,” I replied, matg his gaze with an even expression.

  Voltar was about to speak, when someone else spoke up first. Lady Karsin.

  “His Lordship speaks the truth,” she said after finishing a sip from the cup. “I have been c him this eime since our brief frontation in his manor.”

  I swallowed a rising sense of disappoi. She was helping to protect him, but why?

  An answer we’d arrived at the night before immediately rose in my head. The other shape-gers, whose identities we didn’t know and who couldn’t be tracked down. When half your race had been cut down or captured in so short a time, who wouldn’t trade some things to keep them protected?

  The real ahere was how Lord Montague was threatening them. Their current identities maybe, which depending on how much they’d been built up, might be enough to Lady Karsin. After all, everything was all but firmed ing here, and now fully firmed with the little stick of life energy she’d touched. A little head start to her patriots?

  They could shape ge. What could he have?

  “I am ultimately a victim, pulled to one side or another by forces I have barely uood,” Lord Montague growled. “I’d already been made a puppet long before that thing made it clear they would hunt every member of my family down if I didn’t obey her every and. I have witnesses, people who she was willing to let live, who attest to this. More, if that one hadn’t murdered my bodyguard st night!”

  I sipped my tea again, eyes flig to Voltar. Had he spotted something I hadn’t? Because the longer Lord Montague talked, the more I felt an unease building in my chest. Doubt. The assumption that he’d been the one leading this strange certed effort between his house and the shape-gers had been mine. Some facts were born out by it, but I still doubted the shape-ger at the party would have been trying to kill Gregory without some influence or dire from his father.

  But how much of that was influenstead of trol? Perhaps just a boossed in to keep a puppet from the point of cutting its strings, even if it no longer moved afterward?

  “You cim to have been pletely under Lady Karsin’s thumb for everything after the party at your manor?” Voltar asked.

  “Yes!” Montague excimed, nearly bursting from his chair. “Arranging that tea party, signing those passes into the archives, all at their insisterying to get ahold of those notes, although she would ell me why!”

  The mention of the notes knocked something loose in my brain. Right. Timing.

  “The same notes you’d viewed days beforehand, without telling me or Voltar?” I interjected. “The ones you looked at, despite the fact that you couldn’t even look at those without a member of the royal family present? Shortly before your party had a suspiciously x sense of security for a man knowing his party would bee a trap? Those notes?”

  I seemed to have unbanced his lordship, who seemed about to snap off a quick retort but seemed to thier of it. After a few seds of thinking about his answer and then he spoke up.

  “I was uain if I could share the information,” he said. “The royal member ith me values his privacy, and asked to be stri from the records books.”

  “Weak,” Voltar noted.

  “Are your accusations aer, Voltar?” Montague snapped back. “Or do you pn to have the little Foulhor more of your questions for you?”

  “They aren’t his questions,” I said. “And your behavior at the party is most suspicious, your lordship. Or will you deny that I warned you about several security issues you then chose to ignore?”

  Montague ignored me, like a gut in my stomach as he tirying to address Voltar.

  “I will provide eyewitestimony, as well as hard evidehat everything I’ve done has been at her bidding,” he said. “That she has had metaphorical knives against my throat this eime, till you killed enough of her minions that she couldn’t keep one arou all times.”

  “By all means, keep throwing me uhe carriage, darling,” Lady Karsin observed irritably. “It’s not like they don’t have the evidehey need for me. Unlike you.”

  That caused Montague to pause, ending his tirade. A limit there to how much she was willing to be his fall girl?

  “There is some truth in that,” Voltar said. “While I have it on excellent authority that Lord Montague’s authority over the Imperial Archives has been revoked-”

  Lord Montague released what could only be described as a squawk, followed by a roar of anger.

  “They wouldn’t dare. My family has had it for nearly two turies. You will cease this, aurn to me my so-”

  Okay, I’d had enough. I lunged forward, and Lord Montague tried to aim his revolver.

  My tail ed around his wrist, bashing it against the table till he dropped the revolver. Meanwhile, my ha around his throat.

  “Thank you, Miss Harrow.”

  “Not a problem,” I answered, tightening my grip, the threat of rot clear enough to the noble below. “Lady Karsin, we do have some questions for you. You will be answering them.”