Page 15 of Time's Fool

That sort of thing wouldn’t normally have bothered me, as I could fight off a thief. But chaos gave opportunities to other people, and today, I had a feeling I couldn’t shake. And it was getting stronger.

It was one I knew all too well, from sometimes being stalked by the very thing that I was hunting. I didn’t just take commissions on revenants, although they were my bread and butter. I went after anything that paid enough, from out-of-control Weres attacking villages, to regular vamps who’d broken the law but weren’t important enough for the Senate to worry about, to dark magic workers doing God knew what.

And some of them tried to hunt me right back.

That was especially true of the magic users, which was why I doubled my fee when dealing with a witch or wizard. And because bought magic, no matter how good it was, didn’t always compensate for not having your own. As had been proven last night, when I’d had my arse handed to me by a damned witch.

One who probably wanted her ring back.

So, I’d been glancing over my shoulder all day, with my eyes flicking here and there, and seeing exactly nothing. Except for the dark tunnel of wood that the bridge had turned into, because people kept building their houses higher and higher. And needed to buttress them to keep the sometimes six story tall edifices from toppling into the drink.

The result had been wooden extensions and passageways from the houses on one side of the bridge to those on the other, which had become so numerous as to form a sort of roof over most of the path. It cut down on the sunlight, deepened the shadows, and made just so many good places for an ambush. If I was stalking someone, that was where I’d be, and I was very good at my job.

I hadn’t even wanted to go over the damned thing, but we couldn’t portal directly into the city. The Circle had declared both it and their other main base of operations at Stratford to be off limits for magical short cuts, and disobedience would bring a bunch of angry war mages down on our heads in seconds. Mircea could have probably talked his way out of that—he was on Senate business, after all, and even the mages didn’t like to tussle with those ancient bastards. But he would have been expected to explain why we were here.

And he had most definitely not wanted to do that.

Because the Circle weren’t the only magic workers in England and we were going to see the other group.

Or we were, if Mircea ever finished poking at a blank wall, as if searching for something. Which I guessed he found, since he stepped through the bricks a second later, gone between one eye blink and another. And when I tried to follow, I hit only hard stone, scraping my hands and cursing.

I cursed again as I started smacking my palms down everywhere, trying to find the hidden entrance. We had a witch on our tail, I knew we did, and the fact that we were going to see more witches didn’t change that. Who knew which ones had grabbed him?

And if I lost him, I didn’t get paid!

But then a hand emerged out of solid stone and—

God’s Bones!

I didn’t even have a chance to put up a fight before I was dragged through a door I couldn’t see and ended up sprawled on a dirty wooden floor. I looked up, a knife in my hand and a snarl on my lips, and saw a small group of people looking at me quizzically. One of whom was the vamp, who sighed.

The others were a woman behind a rough wooden counter and three people who looked to be her customers. Because this was a shop, wasn’t it? An herbalist’s shop, I realized, as a bevy of strong smells hit my nose.

I glanced around, still looking for a threat. But all I saw were dried bunches of flowers and plants hanging from the rafters, fresh greenery spilling out of baskets on tables, and various concoctions in clay pots behind the counter on rows of shelves. And Mircea, looking at me impatiently.

“Dory,” he murmured, making me frown. He had a bad habit of using my first name, and the diminutive form of it, too. It was annoying, but it wasn’t like I could correct him.

It was the only one I had.

I got up carefully, my eyes double checking things on the way. If the door had been concealed, what else might be? Or who.

Damn it, I could feel her!

The vampire shot me a warning look, and I smiled at the other patrons and shook out my skirts.

The sailor’s trousers that I regularly wore for freedom of movement had had to be left behind in Lancashire. In the port towns I typically worked out of, the trousers along with a with a thick leather jerkin, boots and a cap to conceal my hair let me pass as a boy. And anytime it didn’t, people quickly discovered how bad it was to assume that I was prey.

Likewise, in the English countryside, nobody had seemed to notice me much. Or perhaps they just didn’t want to get into it with a wild looking woman surrounded by a few dozen huge, well-armed men. Either way, I hadn’t had a problem.

But London was different. And I hadn’t wanted to end up like Dorothy Clayton, a prostitute who had taken to wearing men’s clothes several decades back, and ended up in prison for her trouble. I had therefore exchanged my leathers for a gray-blue, linsey-woolsey dress that I’d bought off one of the innkeeper’s daughters.

I fully intended to add it to my fee, since I was never wearing this damned thing again. It was lumpy, constricting and slightly too long, and kept tripping me up. I decided to blame my undignified sprawl on the dress, and the fact that the floorboards were slightly wonky, like everything else in here.

Including the proprietress’s face, which appeared to drag slightly on one side. She was a pretty young woman otherwise, with big brown eyes and a few wisps of matching hair escaping from under her cap, but half of her face simply didn’t move. She gave her customer a lopsided smile and handed her a small package.

“Now, that’s yer red sage and pennyroyal. Add it to salt and water to make a brine and have himself soak his feet in it every morning. After that, he needs to walk on the foot a bit, to help with the blood flow—”

“He won’t like that,” the other woman said. “Says it hurts to put weight on it.”

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