Chapter 2
And how did I end up here?
The question was philosophical, rhetorical, and, in the grand scheme of things, completely useless. This equation had no solution, and the variables were unknown. A wormhole, a karmic boomerang, a glitch in the matrix, or a cruel joke by a bored demiurge—what the hell did it matter? The clinical fact remained a fact: I was here. In the body of a teenage killer, in the middle of a Victorian mansion whose walls were soaked in the smell of burnt gunpowder and fresh blood.
Rose was still clinging to me with the death grip of a drowning person. Her red hair crawled into my nose, and my new, monstrously sharpened sense of smell broke her scent down into molecules: cheap lavender soap, the salt of tears, and the sharp musky tang of a girl's fear. She was shaking hard, and that tremor passed into me, irritating nerves that were already wound tight to the breaking point.
And a couple of meters away, my newly acquired mother was howling over Father's body.
Howling. Not crying. It was a horrific, inhuman sound that came from somewhere deep inside—a she-wolf caught in a trap. It cut into my sensitive ears.
Inside me, somewhere in my solar plexus, an hysterical, inappropriate chuckle bubbled up. I forced it down with willpower. The situation was so grotesque it felt like a scene from a theater of the absurd.
Look at this, Sasha, my inner voice commented with the bite of an old cynic. Welcome to your new world. Scene one: "The Monster's Compassion." Two sobbing women, two cooling corpses, and you—a small blood-soaked psychopath who doesn't know what to do with hands that have claws. If any of my old colleagues saw this staging, they'd inject me with haloperidol and write me off as disabled on the spot.
But laughing was not an option. Laughter now would look like psychosis, and I needed to be the pillar of cold reason in this madhouse. Someone had to take control.
"Rose…" I said softly but firmly, peeling her off me despite her resistance.
My hands—now smooth, without bony blades, but still sticky with drying blood—settled on her fragile shoulders. I gave her a small shake, forcing her to focus.
"Enough. Stop hysterics. Listen to me carefully. The worst is already behind us. We're alive. You're breathing. Your heart is beating. Life goes on, whether you like it or not."
She stared at me, blinking fast through eyes swollen from tears. In her gaze flickered a shadow of childish hurt and confusion, as if I'd taken her favorite plush toy away. Her personal shoulder to cry on—her weak, sickly James—had suddenly started speaking with the voice of a hard, commanding man, and that metamorphosis scared her almost as much as the bodies.
"James?.." she squeaked, and there was so much doubt in that sound.
"Later, Redhead. Questions later," I cut her off in a tone that allowed no argument, and straightened to my full height.
A quick look over the scene.
An oil painting. Total chaos. A wrecked drawing room, furniture smashed to splinters, the window Dog had jumped through, and the smell… that thick, sweet, metallic reek of slaughter. I'd only felt it in an operating room before. Now it hung in the air like dense fog, and I could taste iron at the back of my tongue.
Time to take charge. Time to switch on head-of-department mode in an emergency.
What assets did we have? Rose—seventeen, a servant, deep shock, affective state. Useless. Dead weight. Mother… Elizabeth Howlett. The only nominal adult in the room.
I grimaced without meaning to. James's memories, surfacing in my head in cloudy, painful slides, painted quite a portrait. A hysteric, a perpetual victim living in gothic novels and opium tincture. A woman who had ignored her younger son's existence for years. But there was no choice. She was the mistress of the estate. She was the adult who had to be brought back to reality before the constables arrived and saw this slaughterhouse.
I walked to her. She sat on the floor, hunched over John's body, whispering something to him quickly and feverishly, rocking side to side like the pendulum of a broken clock. Her expensive silk dress had soaked up her husband's blood, turning heavy and black.
I forced myself to look at John Howlett's face.
And something pricked me.
Not in my head—in my heart. Aleksandr Petrovich didn't know this man, but James… to James he had been the center of the universe. And now that the boundary between us had blurred, I looked at John's ruined chest and felt real grief—deep, corrosive grief. He'd been a good man. Strict, capable, loving in spite of everything. Real.
We're one whole now, kid, I accepted at last. Your pain is my pain. Your parents are mine. And your problems are mine, too.
I shook my head, driving away sentimentality. Tears wouldn't help. What we needed now was hardness.
I reached out and carefully, without sudden movements, touched her trembling shoulder.
"Mother…" The word came with difficulty, scraping my throat. "He's dead. He can't be brought back. Look at me. We need to decide what to do next. The police will come soon…"
She stopped instantly, as if I'd pressed a mute button.
Slowly—unnaturally slowly—she turned her head. Her face was a white, frozen mask, black streams of smeared mascara running down it. Her lips trembled.
I tensed inside.
She wasn't looking at me. She was looking through me. There was no recognition in her eyes, no widow's grief. There was icy emptiness, and at the bottom of it a spark of madness was beginning to glow.
"So, monster…" Her whisper hissed like a venomous snake. "Happy? Happy it turned out this way?!"
"Mother, listen, I—"
"Don't you dare call me that!" Her voice snapped into a shriek that made my ears ring.
She sprang to her feet with an agility I wouldn't have expected from her build and loomed over me.
"You… You creature! Freak! How could I give birth to this?!" She jabbed a finger at me, long manicured nail gleaming. "From my womb… the devil crawled out! This is punishment!"
She began to shake all over. This wasn't grief anymore. It was acute psychosis. Clinical.
"You killed him! You! Cursed seed! Murderer! Monster!" she screamed, spitting saliva, her face twisted with hatred, fingers clawing as if she wanted to scratch my eyes out. "You should've died in childbirth! Why did God take John and leave you?! Why?!"
Every word was a whip crack across an open wound.
Inside me, resentment boiled—childish, bitter, all-consuming resentment of little James who had begged his whole life for a drop of love and got only coldness. And fear. Wild animal fear of rejection by the closest person. I wanted to curl up, cover my head with my hands, run into the woods and vanish.
No! the surgeon's reason barked, drowning out the child's sob inside. Stand down. This is affect. The patient is not herself. Disoriented, aggressive. The episode must be stopped. Immediately.
I clenched my fists hard enough to make the joints crack.
Sharp pain speared my palms. Something warm ran along my fingers. I looked down—my nails had pierced my skin, and heavy ruby drops of blood fell onto the parquet.
The pain sobered me. It dragged me back to reality. I wasn't a crying boy being scolded by his mother. I was a doctor in a disaster zone, and in front of me was a patient dangerous to herself and others.
I stepped in, closing the distance, and without drawing back, struck her cheek with my open palm—short, hard, clinical.
SMACK.
In the dead silence, the slap sounded like a pistol shot. Elizabeth's head snapped aside.
She cut off mid-word. Her mouth shut with teeth clicking. Her eyes widened, her pupils tightened, and meaning began to return—shock, pain, and limitless disbelief.
She slowly raised a trembling hand to her burning cheek. Touched the skin. Then looked at her fingers.
A red wet smear remained on them. My blood. The monster's blood.
"Please. Enough," I said quietly, but firmly. I pressed authority into every word, refusing to let her tumble back into madness. "I'm scared too. Rose is terrified. Stop it. You're an adult woman. Father can't be helped anymore, but we still have to live. Be a normal mother for once in your life, damn it!"
I drilled her with a heavy, unblinking stare, ready to strike again if I had to bring her back. I could see the gears turning, trying to process what had happened.
But a second round of therapy wasn't needed.
Elizabeth blinked once, twice. Her shoulders dropped. It was as if all the air left her, all the angry energy that had kept her standing. The madness drained from her eyes, replaced by something strange, frightening, doomed and clear. Coldness returned.
"You're right, James…" she whispered, barely audible, eyes fixed on her bloodstained palm. "Forgive me. I… I am a mother."
And then she made a gesture that made the hair on the back of my neck rise as if from static.
She placed the hand—stained with my blood and her husband's—on her belly. And stroked it. Gently. Carefully. With a blissful, utterly misplaced Madonna smile.
I froze. My inner diagnostician, who had just been marking psychotic symptoms, choked.
"I didn't even have time to tell your father…" Her voice turned quiet, dreamy, velvet. It sounded blasphemous beside the cooling corpse of that father. "That he was finally going to be a father again."
A silent vacuum bomb went off in my head, sucking all the oxygen out.
Unbelievable… The thought was too small for the catastrophe's scale.
Pregnant? Now? At the exact moment her husband was dead, her son had become a mutant killer, and her lover had been killed by that same son?
The irony was so black it begged for a standing ovation. Whoever wrote this life had cynicism to spare. Death and Life in one bloody vial. The universe balancing itself: one John gone, another—maybe—already on the way, dividing cells in her womb while we stood in pools of blood.
"You're… pregnant?" I repeated dully, mechanically, feeling reality crack at the seams.
She didn't answer. She simply nodded to her own secret thoughts, turned on her heel, and carefully stepped over the dark red stream toward Father's study. Her gait had changed—smooth, even, mechanical.
I listened, pushing my hearing to the limit. Through the ringing in my ears and the pounding of my own heart, the sounds from the study came through.
The rustle of a skirt. The squeak of a telephone dial. Clicks. Long rings.
"Hello? Central? Connect me to the Edmonton police… And send a doctor. Immediately. Something… monstrous has happened at the Howlett estate."
She spoke dryly, briskly, clipping every word. The hysteric was gone without a trace. In her place stood a cold, calculating widow guarding her nest. Survival instinct and maternal instinct fused into armor.
A couple minutes later she returned. She stood in the doorway, pale and majestic, looking over my head like a statue.
"I reached them. They'll be here soon. Police, doctor, coroner. The full set."
I only nodded, feeling grave-cold creep into my bones.
Well, Aleksandr Petrovich, I thought, staring at my palms where the punctures from claws were already almost gone. Build your story. The exam will be brutal. And there won't be a retake.
"Mother, how much time do we have?" I asked, making my voice as even and adult as possible. In my head a plan for the inevitable performance was already assembling. Alibi. Evidence. Motive.
She didn't even turn. Elizabeth stared into the dark, gaping window where the killer's son had vanished, and answered with chilling indifference:
"Three hours at least. Edmonton is more than twenty kilometers away, and the roads are mud after the rain. The horses will go slow."
Three hours. An eternity for someone bleeding out, and a blink for someone trying to hide the traces of a strange murder.
"Good," I exhaled, deciding. "We have time."
I swept my gaze over the wrecked drawing room. My new unnaturally sharp vision scanned the space for a tool—something that could rewrite the ending of this bloody drama. Hide evidence that nineteenth-century science couldn't explain.
And I found it.
By the far wall, thrown aside in the fight, lay a shotgun.
I picked it up. Its pleasant predatory weight settled into my hands. Not a crude piece of work, but a true work of оружейное art, worthy of an English lord. Holland & Holland, or something similar. The stock of dark polished walnut held someone's warmth, and the long Damascus-steel barrels shimmered with noble blue. The engraving on the breech—a fine weave of vines and a foxhunt scene—looked like a cruel joke in these surroundings.
I ran a finger along cold metal.
"Hardly Thomas's," I muttered. "This is Father's gun."
A beautiful thing for the ugliest work.
With a привычный motion I broke the barrels. The mechanism moved softly with an oily click of perfectly fitted parts. The left barrel was empty, the chamber clean—the spent shell lay somewhere on the carpet. But the right chamber flashed dull brass.
A cartridge was still there. Large buckshot. For зверь.
"Perfect," I nodded at my own thoughts and snapped the gun shut. The sound was short and dry, like the period at the end of a death sentence.
Careful not to step in the sticky dark-red pools, I walked to Thomas's body.
He lay like a broken doll. But his face… what my claws had done was too clear an answer. Three deep parallel grooves gouged through facial bone, torn edges, a missing eye. Any investigator—even a half-literate local cop—would ask: what kind of зверь leaves such geometrically perfect marks? And where did it go?
I didn't need questions. I needed a story made of reinforced concrete.
I stood over the corpse. Braced the stock to my shoulder and angled the barrels down.
Straight into what was left of Thomas's face. Distance—thirty centimeters.
"James?" the servant girl's voice trembled upward with horror. "What are you doing?"
"Saving us from unnecessary questions," I answered flatly. "Postmortem reconstruction."
I pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
In the closed room the shot hammered my ears like a blacksmith's mallet. A muzzle flash lit the room in hellish light for an instant, and the stock punched my shoulder—hard, vicious.
Thomas's face stopped existing.
At that range, buckshot is more страшный than any butcher-surgeon, turning bone, cartilage, and soft tissue into shapeless bloody mush. Rough. Dirty. Radical.
But now there were no traces. No claws. Just a point-blank shot in self-defense. An accident. A struggle for the weapon. Anything except the truth.
Rose whimpered, covering her face, curling into a ball as if she could vanish.
"Why?" she whispered through choking tears. "God, James, why? It's… it's not Christian…"
I broke the gun open. The ejector flicked out the smoking shell with a click; it rang against the parquet and rolled. The sharp sulfur stink of burnt powder mixed with the heavy sweet reek of fresh blood and scorched flesh into a nauseating bouquet.
"Because people fear what they don't understand, Rose," I said tiredly, dropping the now useless gun to the floor. "The police see claw holes, they start hunting a monster. Me. Is that what you want? Want them to lock me in a cage?"
She fell silent, staring at me with wide eyes. Understanding slowly surfaced in them—thick with horror at what I'd become.
"He did everything right," Elizabeth's voice cut in suddenly. Cold as river ice.
She stood in the shadows, straight as a string, and looked at her lover's mutilated corpse with terrifying calm.
"That man doesn't deserve to be buried with a face," she said, final and flat. "He killed my husband. Let him rot in a closed coffin."
I didn't answer. I had no strength left to argue or recoil.
My legs, filled with lead, betrayed me. I slid down slowly onto the floor beside Rose, leaning a shoulder against the cold wall. The girl immediately pressed into me by instinct, seeking protection from this insane world, and I automatically wrapped an arm around her.
The performance was prepared. The props were placed. The actors were in position.
Now all that remained was to wait.
The silence in the house became dense, tangible, like a ватное blanket. Only the steady indifferent ticking of the huge grandfather clock in the hall counted off the seconds of my new life. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Each swing of the pendulum drove a nail into the coffin of my past.
I closed my eyes, breathed deep, and let cold, cynical reason rise over the boiling emotions.
So. What did we have, in dry residue?
It was the end of the nineteenth century. More precisely, 1892. I—James Howlett—was twelve years old. I was weak, sickly, and until today I'd been known as a houseplant. But inside this frail оболочка now sat the experience of a fifty-five-year-old surgeon, a veteran of wars, a man who had seen the underside of the world in all its ugliness.
And also…
James's memory, helpful as a trained clerk, fed facts that my mind immediately sorted.
We weren't just rich. We were elite. Local aristocracy, even without titles.
Land. Endless hectares of fertile soil and forest around the estate, stretching beyond the horizon. Here, in Canada, land is the only real, unshakable capital. Currency can collapse, banks can fail, but land remains. We leased plots to tenant farmers, kept huge cattle herds. That was power. The status of a major landowner made the Howletts uncrowned kings of the county. Father wasn't just a businessman—he was a pillar of society: a magistrate, a patron, the man people came to for advice, money, and protection.
And the forests. And the roads.
I remembered fragments of Father's conversations with partners in his smoke-filled study. Lumber exports and building materials were a gold vein in a rapidly growing country. And railroads… Father had invested foresightfully in laying track through Alberta. In the late nineteenth century, owning railroad shares was like owning a printing press in your basement. It was the bloodstream of the economy, and we sat on one of the main arteries.
"Not a bad starting capital," I whispered, tasting the words. "Money, influence, land. Administrative power."
John Howlett had left me more than an inheritance. He'd left an empire. And now I—a twelve-year-old boy with a killer's eyes and an old man's mind—had to keep it in my hands. Not let Mother, floating in opium fantasies and religious delirium, piss it away. Not let guardian vultures and competitors tear the fortune apart.
I looked at my hands. The blood on them had already dried, pulling the skin into a brown cracked crust.
I'll manage. I had what kind John didn't—absolute surgical ruthlessness, and the knowledge that people are just bones, meat, and selfish motives. I know how to cut to save. And if I have to cut off a couple heads to keep this empire—my hand won't shake.
Time crawled, thick as pine resin. Rose, drained by hysteria, dozed on my shoulder, whimpering in her sleep. Elizabeth stood at the window, turned into a marble statue of grief staring into emptiness.
When the heavy clatter of hooves and anxious horse whinnies finally broke through the wind and rain tapping the glass, I was already ready.
"They're here," I said quietly, rising and shaking off numbness. "It's started."
---
Those few hours before dawn, when the cavalry finally burst into the estate, blurred in my memory into a surreal chain of events, like a fever dream.
The Edmonton police arrived when the sky had begun to fill with lead-gray dawn. They stormed the house with boot thuds, weapon clatter, and shouted orders, ready for a shootout with a gang of raiders—and found only a wrecked drawing room, two women terrified to death, a boy with an empty absent stare, and two disfigured corpses.
Everything went удивительно smoothly. Too smoothly. My cover story—reinforced by a barbaric but effective shotgun blast—worked perfectly.
The local coroner, a fat wheezing man with a red nose and a stink of booze, only grimaced as he examined the bloody mess that used to be Thomas's head.
"Jesus Christ…" he muttered, wiping sticky hands with a big checked handkerchief. "Point-blank. Buckshot for bears… There's nothing to identify. The skull is completely destroyed. What the devil happened here?"
He lifted a heavy questioning gaze toward me. I sat on the sofa wrapped in a blanket, shivering—playing shock was easy, the body itself helped after the adrenaline crash.
"Accident during a struggle?" the coroner suggested, glancing at the sheriff. "Or self-defense?"
"He killed my husband," Elizabeth cut in, her tone icy and ringing.
She sat in a high-backed chair, straight as a stake, pale but regal, like an exiled queen. Her voice did not shake.
"That man… that drunken madman broke in. He shot John. Then he attacked the children. My son… James… defended us. He grabbed John's gun. He only wanted to stop him."
The sheriff, a mustached man with tired eyes, removed his hat and nodded.
"I understand, ma'am. Terrible business. But your boy… he's a hero. If not for him, who knows what that lunatic would've done to you."
And the questions ended. The policemen—simple rough men used to chasing drunks out of saloons and catching horse thieves—were too shocked by the sight of the respected Mr. Howlett's blown-open chest and the faceless corpse of the gardener. The details wouldn't satisfy a twenty-first-century crime lab, but here, in 1892, the picture was clear.
The story that the gardener snapped from drink, shot his master, then caught buckshot from the frightened heir satisfied everyone. It was logical. Tragic. It closed the case.
"And what about the boy?" one deputy asked, returning from the garden. "The killer's son? Tracks lead into the woods. Window broken. Blood on the frame."
I tensed under the blanket. This was the only thin spot.
"He was with him," I said quietly but clearly, eyes down. "Dog. He helped his father. And when I fired… he got scared and ran."
The sheriff waved it off.
"We'll put out a search as an accomplice. But in this weather, wounded… he won't get far. Wolves or cold will take him."
Dog was written off. Case closed. We were left alone in the ruins of our lives, but we were free—for now.
---
That was yesterday.
Now I sat at the head of a long table in a huge echoing dining hall and drank my second mug of coffee with pure pleasure. It was divine—thick, oily, with a noble Arabica acidity and real aroma. In my previous life of shifts, stress, and instant machine sludge, I could only dream of this. Here, in 1892, coffee was brewed like a magical potion—slowly, in a copper pot, over live fire.
In front of me on the starched tablecloth lay a stack of fresh newspapers. News reached this backwater late, but the headlines screamed as if the ink was still wet and staining fingers with blood.
I picked up the Vancouver Sun, unfolded the crisp pages, and immediately ran into what I'd been looking for. Or rather—what I'd feared.
The front-page headline was set in bold dancing gothic type, as if meant to scare impressionable housewives into fits:
BLOODY NIGHT AT HOWLETT ESTATE!
A special correspondent from Alberta reports chilling details of the tragedy at the home of the respected Mr. John Howlett!
On Saturday night, while good Christians slept peacefully in their beds, the ancient family nest turned into a scene from Dante's Hell. A mad servant, as if possessed by the devil himself, raised his hand against his benefactor! The respected Mr. Howlett, a pillar of our society and a patron of the arts, was brutally murdered in his own home before his stunned wife and young heir.
Police sources report a true slaughter. Blood drenched the Persian carpets and the drawing-room walls. However, Providence did not abandon the family in its hour of need! Young James Howlett, displaying wonders of courage and composure quite unexpected for his tender age and fragile health, managed to stop the maniac with a well-aimed shot from his father's gun. Meanwhile the killer's son, known in the district for his violent temperament, vanished into the night like a wild beast. The residents of Cold Lake are in panic, bolting doors and raising prayers! A curse upon the Howlett line—or a tragic accident? Read more on page 4!
"Vultures…" I muttered, tossing the paper aside with disgust.
Tender age, wonders of courage… Journalists are the same in the nineteenth century as in the twenty-first. They want drama. A hero. A villain. If they knew the truth—that this tender boy had gutted a killer minutes before with bony knives bursting from his hands—the headline would've been much more interesting. And shorter.
But for them it was money. Sensation to tickle a reader's nerves over morning toast and jam. They didn't care we had to live with it. They didn't care the hero was twelve.
I took a big gulp of coffee, washing down the sour taste of yellow press, and reached for the next sheet. I needed to shift my mind onto something less personal.
Page three of the Edmonton Bulletin was far better. The headline was odd, almost romantic, out of step with the gore:
GALLANT GHOSTS: ANOTHER ROBBERY WITHOUT A SINGLE SHOT!
Police in Vancouver and surrounding areas have reached a dead end. A gang of daring raiders has committed its third robbery this month, this time targeting a postal station in the suburbs. And again—not a single shot fired, not a drop of blood spilled.
Witnesses, postmaster Mr. O'Riley and his assistant, describe the robbers as "men of exceptional politeness and manners." They entered masked, politely asked that the safe be opened, and even apologized for the inconvenience. Moreover, when an elderly gentleman who happened to be present suffered a heart attack from fright, one of the robbers personally rendered first aid, giving him smelling salts and seating him in a chair while his accomplices packed the money.
"They acted like ghosts," Sergeant MacGregor stated, shrugging. "They walked in, took the money, and dissolved into the morning fog. No tracks, no witnesses. As if they evaporated." Damages total three thousand dollars, though the only injury appears to be the pride of local police.
I snorted, feeling my lips curl into a crooked, approving smile.
"Interesting people," I whispered, skimming. "Professionals. No blood, clean work, surgical precision, and a touch of humanity. In this wild era where people will cut a throat for a dollar, that's rare."
The police wouldn't catch them. That much was obvious even to me. Those ghosts knew the system better than the people guarding it. They were playing chess while the sheriff played skittles.
I finished my coffee, savoring the last hot drops, and set the cup down. The thin ring of porcelain sounded like a gong. Heavy reality settled on my shoulders the moment I set the papers aside.
The house was silent. Echoing, dead, ringing silence of an enormous mansion where life had left.
Father had dismissed the servants for a holiday in Cold Lake that day—a generous gesture that became a fatal mistake. But when they returned and saw police, broken windows, smashed doors, and brown stains on carpets, their enthusiasm vanished. Rumors spread faster than a forest fire. Cursed house. The devil moved in. The mark of Cain. Country folk are superstitious to the bone. By the next evening, almost everyone asked for their wages and left. Maids, grooms, footmen—scattered like rats. Only Rose remained—she had nowhere to go, an orphan—and the old cook Martha, who no longer cared where she died as long as she was paid and not beaten.
"And where do I find new ones?" I asked the empty cup. "Good staff in this backwater are worth their weight in gold. And with our new reputation as a horror house, only desperate drifters or thieves will come—people who'll rob us the first night."
My gaze dropped to the classifieds.
Seeking a governess… A pedigree stallion for sale… Room to let…
"Hm." I tapped the polished oak with a finger. "That's an idea. Place an advertisement in major papers. Vancouver, Toronto, maybe even Montreal. In big cities people don't care about village gossip about devils if you pay well. And I can pay. Father's money is mine now."
Done. I'd handle it right after—
My expression hardened.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow was the funeral.
First the service at Cold Lake church, where we would stand under the sticky crossfire of the whole district's stares, performing grief—though I wouldn't need to perform, nausea was real enough to cramp my stomach. Then the family vault. Cold stone, damp, incense, and a father I'd known for minutes but whose memory burned like napalm.
But the funeral was only half the trouble. It was ritual.
I could feel it with my gut, with my new звериное sense: tomorrow the vultures would arrive, and they would be far more dangerous than journalists.
Business partners with oily smiles offering to help the poor widow manage assets, meaning to steal them. Distant relatives we hadn't heard from in years, suddenly aflame with love for an orphaned nephew. Creditors real and imagined, waving papers. Lawyers like sharks in expensive suits.
They thought the Howletts were weak. A mad, pregnant widow on opium, and a twelve-year-old snot-nosed boy. Easy prey. A wounded deer in a forest full of wolves.
I clenched my fist under the table. My knuckles whitened, skin tightening, ready to split, but I held the claws back by force of will. Not here. Not now.
"Go on," I said softly into the empty hall. "Come, little birds. We'll see who pecks whom."
The problem was simple and serious: I really was small. My mind could calculate moves like a grandmaster, but my body… no one would take me seriously. Legally I was nobody. A minor. Incapable. My signature wasn't worth the ink.
I needed a guardian. A regent. Someone who could speak in my name while I pulled strings from the shadows. A screen.
Mother? Impossible. Absolutely. She was unstable enough to sign everything over to the first con man who said a kind word or promised to pray for John's soul. She was the weak link.
"Alright, think," I muttered, rising from the table and tugging straight the coat that hung a bit too large on me. "I'll buy a hat. A top hat."
No concrete ideas yet, but instinct told me tomorrow wouldn't be goodbye to the past. It would be round one of the fight for the future.
And losing wasn't an option.