Page 5 of Once a Villain
There was a flurry behind them. Joan turned just in time to see a redheaded man sprinting south, maybe hoping to get past the cross building and jump off the bridge. Joan shuddered; if that was his plan, then that plan was death. No one could survive that jump. Old London Bridge was nothing like the bridges of Joan’s own London. Below, the water boiled in violent rapids.
Red coats converged, though, and within seconds, the man had been caught. He’d barely made it twenty paces.
“It’s not sunset yet!” the man said desperately. “I’m not breaking curfew! I’m—” The word was cut off by a punch to his gut. He retched.
“Joan!” Ruth whispered urgently.
The crowd surged, pushing Joan forward. Up ahead, the guard was waving her through impatiently. “Come through!” he told her, his white gloves bright.
Behind Joan, fists and boots thudded against flesh. Joan forced her attention back to the road, forced herself to walk.After a reluctant second, she heard Nick following.
Halt!she imagined the guard shouting.Show your ID!
Instead, he said impatiently: “Move on, move on!” He waved them through. “Don’t hold people up! Keep walking!”
Joan didn’t breathe again until they were past the arch. Until they were down the road and around the corner, and the bridge was out of sight. Then she sucked in air with a shudder, the horror of the last few minutes catching up to her.
Ruth bent double, as if she’d just run a race. “My hair’s gray now, isn’t it? I went gray in the last two minutes.”
Joan pushed a dark curl from Ruth’s face, trying to ignore the shake in her own hand. “Yeah, completely gray.” She couldn’t believe they were still alive. That they’d actually made it to safe territory.
If anywhere in this world could still be considered safe.
They’d ended up on a gloomy street of tall buildings in a style that struck Joan as not quite Victorian: narrow terraces in charcoal brick, with small prisonlike windows. The Liu house had to be somewhere around here—they just had to find it.
“We might have a problem,” Jamie said. There was a strange note in his voice.
“A problem?” Joan followed his gaze to an innocuous-looking bronze disk embedded in the pavement. It was etched with a splayed tree, leafless and withered. “That’s a burnt elm,” she said slowly. “The Argent sigil.” Ahead, she spotted another disk—about five paces away. And then another and another, all the way to the end of the street. “I thought this was Liu territory.”
“It’s supposed to be.” Jamie sounded unnerved. “I guess the territories have shifted....”
Joan saw the dawning realization on all their faces then. They didn’t know this city anymore.
“New world. New rules,” Aaron murmured.
A shard of the lowering sun streaked the windows above. The sun was setting. Joan pictured guards roaming the streets, searching for humans out after curfew, and a thread of ice slid down her spine.
They’d need to figure out the new rulesfastif they were going to survive.
Two
Under the stormy sky, the buildings were funereal. The only real color came from red roses planted in dusty vases on windowsills. Back on the bridge, people had worn outfits from almost every era. Here, though, clothes were drab. Aside from the odd Georgian suit and Roman tunic, most people were in gray or black wool, paired with a lightweight gauzy fabric that Joan didn’t recognize.
If Joan hadn’t just walked up from the Thames, she would have been lost. There was nothing familiar here—not the architecture; not the street signs with their Argent sigils.
Aaron backed up under the thin lip of an eave and grimaced at his dampening suit. “We need to find an inn.”
“My family will help us,” Jamie said. “We just have to find them.”
“We can look for them tomorrow,” Aaron said. “Right now, wehaveto get off the streets. It’ll be dark soon.” He didn’t have to say the rest. Joan and Nick were already breaking that stupid curfew.
It wasn’t particularly cold, but the sky soon opened into drenching rain. Nick walked silently, hands in his pockets, his dark hair flattened, shirt plastered to his chest. He hadn’t said much sincethey’d left those men on the bridge. He was blaming himself for what was happening to them, Joan knew. For choosing to create this world instead of letting her die.
She tried to catch his gaze, but his eyes stayed firmly on the ground. She folded her arms around herself. The distance between them was starting to feel like a physical thing, a tightness in her chest that she couldn’t shake.
The rain emptied the streets. Every now and then, someone would hurry past, shielding their heads with coats and bags. Mostly, though, there was no one around.
“What do you think happens to humans out after curfew?” Joan asked. The others blinked at her, and she realized it was the first thing anyone had said in a while. “Because on the bridge, it seemed like that man was ready to die rather than get caught.” The horror of that bridge hit her again. “Eleanor put those heads on the turrets. She—”
