THE VELVET SYNDICATE

SONG RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS CHAPTER - NEVER FELT SO ALONE~LABYRINTH The driver died first….. Lucian Ravensworth did not hear the shot. He heard the glass go, and then the soft, wet sound of a man who had been paid very well to be careful being no longer careful, and then the Bentley was sliding sideways through the Blackfriars underpass with a dead man at the wheel and its headlights painting the tiles white, then black, then white again. He was brushing a speck of ash from his sleeve when it stopped. " Annoying" he said to the empty back seat. It was a very good coat. The car lights went out, and not by accident. That was the first thing he noticed. It was tidy. Somebody had gone to the trouble of making the tunnel dark, because they knew exactly what he was. Sinclair, then. He had thought so at dinner, watching Victoria Sterling raise a glass to the Thames Accord with that pleasant, lifeless smile. Victoria never smiled at a man she did not already have a plan for. He opened the door and stepped out into the black. The cold was immediate, and so was the shape of the thing that came for him: a figure in grey, moving in sharp, stuttering jumps, there, then three feet closer, then closer again,skipping seconds like a scratched film. A Time-slip. They had brought a Sinclair Gift to a Ravensworth fight. How very flattering!!! The blade came from his left, in a second that was not supposed to exist yet. Lucian turned his head an inch and let it pass by his ear. "Do try the face",he said pleasantly."It's the only part of me worth the effort." Then he called the dark,it came the way it always came, like smoke from under a door, cold and obedient. It folded around his hand and slid up his arm and into the tunnel itself . The shadows leapt from the walls and caught the stuttering man by the ankles, and with each stutter it dragged him back to where he had been, until he was no longer skipping anywhere at all. Lucian felt the Gift's price tick down as it always did: a coin spent, a little more taken. He searched for the sting of it, and found a flat, quiet nothing, like reaching for a step that was not there…..He had stopped being able to tell what it cost him around the age of nineteen. Two more came out of the black, then three, guns raised. He moved through them like a man crossing a ballroom, fluid and unhurried and very, very cruel. The first he disarmed. The second he threw into the wall with a hand of pure shadow. The third shot him.The bullet went in under his ribs, and then another high in the shoulder, and the world flared white. Lucian looked down at his ruined shirt. "Oh, for God's sake,"he said,"That was Savile Row." He waited for the fear. He waited for the pain, for the cold sweat, for the shake in his hands that every other man in the tunnel would have had. Nothing came. He could see the blood quite clearly, in a distant, interested way, as if it belonged to a stranger. The shooter stared at him in horror. "Why won't you fall?" "I've been wondering that for years,"said Lucian, and put out a hand..... The tunnel exploded with headlights. A black car came out of the dark at seventy, no brakes, no warning, and it hit the grey man square before he had time to finish his sentence. There was a scream of metal and glass. The car skidded sideways across the tunnel and stopped an inch from Lucian's knees,engine growling, one headlight dead. The driver's door flew open. She was small, furious and soaked to the skin, with copper hair plastered across her face and a leather jacket that had seen several wars. She looked at the wreck she had made,then at the two men still on their feet, then at Lucian. She looked at him for a very long time. "Ravensworth,"she said, with the flat precision of a woman reading a sentence off a gravestone. "I'm afraid so".Lucian answered "I'd love to leave you here,Then you've an odd way of going about it." She hit one of the remaining men with the car door. He went down. The other one ran. The silver band around her left wrist, a thin ring of old script that glowed like a wire in the dark, flared once, and she hissed through her teeth and clutched at it. "Get in,"she said,"before I change my mind and ignore the Oath." Lucian glanced at the band, at her, at his own blood spreading in a dark, glittering stain across the tarmac. "Delighted," he said, and got in the car. Scarlett Hayes drove like the road had insulted her mother. She took the Embankment at ninety with the headlights off , one hand on the wheel and the other pressed hard against the silver band burning on her wrist. In the passenger seat,a man she had spent three years planning to ruin bled quietly into expensive leather. "Y ou're getting blood on my upholstery,"she said. "I'll have it cleaned." "It's stolen." "Then I'll have it cleaned and confessed to a priest." She did not laugh. She would sooner have driven into the Thames…. Six nights ago she had signed the Oath in a drawing room in Mayfair, with an old woman's glowing Mark as witness and her brother Danny's life as the price. Keep my grandson alive for one year. Stay within a mile of him. Do not harm him. The silver had burned itself into her skin the instant her name touched the page, and it had been burning on and off ever since. When Lucian was in danger, it flared. When she thought of leaving, it tightened. Last night she had stood at the end of the street for a full ten minutes to see how far she could get, and had learned precisely how much a human wrist could hurt. She checked the mirror. Two black cars were behind her now, gaining. "Sinclair,"said Lucian, without turning his head. "Naturally." "How many?" "Six or seven. Victoria is thorough." He shifted in his seat, winced slightly, and examined the hole in his shoulder as if it were a poorly cut button. "They'll have another of those Time-slippers. Mind the road when it blinks." "When it what?" The road blinked. The street ahead of her flickered like a bad signal, and the lamp-posts jumped forward three metres, and the car on her left was suddenly beside her where it had been twenty yards behind a heartbeat ago. A gun came out of its window. Scarlett did not think. She stamped on the brake, spun the wheel, and slammed the nose of her car into the other one so hard the whole street shuddered. Glass burst. Metal screamed. The Sinclair car swung wide, struck a lamp-post and flipped. She was already moving again. "Blinks,my ass!" she said through her teeth. "Lovely. Wonderful." A bullet came through the rear window and passed between their two heads, so close that she felt the heat of it on her cheek. Lucian did not flinch. She did. Her whole body jerked, her pulse hammering in her ears, and she looked across at him in disbelief . He was watching the hole in the windscreen with the faint, polite interest of a man reading a menu. "That," he said,"was rather close." " Are you mad? That almost went through your head." "Yes, it did." "Doesn't that scare you? Anything?" He turned to look at her. His grey eyes were calm, steady and entirely empty, like a window onto a very large, very quiet room. "No," he said." "Should it?" Scarlett's hands tightened on the wheel until her knuckles went white. She had spent years imagining this man as a monster. Cruel, certainly; arrogant, obviously; alive, in the satisfying, hateful way of someone who knew exactly what he had done. She had not imagined he would be hollow. That was worse. That was so much worse. A monster she could have hated cleanly. "Three years ago," she heard herself say, "a crew was wiped out on the Isle of Dogs. The Hayes crew. One night, one order, one signature. Yours." The car behind them closed to within twenty feet. Lucian considered this. "I sign a great many orders." "My father was on that list. My brother was taken." A beat. "I'm afraid I don't recall,"said Lucian, with something that on any other face would have been regret. "I'm sorry. I expect I should." She hit the accelerator so hard the engine screamed. "I'm afraid I don't recall"…!!. Three years of hatred, three years of rehearsing what she would say, and the man had not so much as flinched. It had gone through him like water through a sieve. Behind her ribs, something went cold and very quiet. "Right," said Scarlett." "Fine. Hold on to something." "What are you——-" She threw the car off the road and down the ramp of a sealed Tube station, through a rusted barrier, into the dark. The Sinclair cars followed. She heard tyres skid on old tile, then a long, ringing crash in the black behind her as they met a wall that had no business being there. Silence. The engine ticked. Scarlett sat with her forehead against the wheel, breathing hard, her wrist throbbing. "That," said Lucian after a moment, "was remarkable." "Shut up." "It was. I should like you to know that I mean it." "Shut up," said Scarlett, and drove him to Highgate. The clinic beneath Highgate Cemetery had no sign, no name and no patience for fools. Eleanor Whitmore had been awake for thirty-one hours when the green door crashed open, and she looked up from the instrument tray with the particular calm of a woman who had stopped being surprised by Ravensworths. "Dr Whitmore." It was the girl with the copper hair, wet, white-faced, holding up a man who was holding up his own coat. "He's been shot. Twice. He's being charming about it." "Table," said Eleanor. "Now. Not that one, the one with the lamp." They got him there. He tried to lie down elegantly and failed halfway through, which she noted with quiet satisfaction. Eleanor was twenty-five, small and steady, with a long brown plait over one shoulder and an expression that people usually found themselves confiding in. She had a Gift she did not talk about, a stethoscope she did, and absolutely no intention of being impressed by the heir to House Ravensworth. She cut his shirt away and went still. Two wounds. Neither should have let him walk, let alone drive, let alone spend a quarter of an hour in a car with a woman who plainly wanted to murder him. "You should be dead, Mr Ravensworth,"she said. "So I keep hearing." His voice was thin but polished. "I'm a very difficult patient.Do forgive the inconvenience." "I'm told You're a very ordinary patient," said Eleanor, rinsing her hands. "You have a hole in you and a high opinion of yourself . I've treated men who could throw me through that wall.You're not special." The girl by the door made a short, shocked noise that might have been a laugh. Lucian's mouth quirked, and for an instant the cold, bored mask slipped sideways. "Does it hurt?" asked Eleanor. "Not particularly." She looked up. She could always hear it: the thing underneath. The words said not particularly. But below them, in the place where the Ley carried the truth of things, there was a single low note that had been struck long ago and never allowed to fade. It was not pain. It was what remained after a man had stopped letting himself feel pain for so long that he had forgotten the difference. He isn't lying, she thought. That's the terrible part. He doesn't know. Then she heard the second sound: a sharp, bright, hurting thread from the other side of the room. The girl by the door was gripping her left wrist, and the silver there pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Eleanor glanced at it, then at the girl, then at the man on the table. Oh, she thought. Oh, Lady Margaret. What have you done? She said nothing. She laid her palm flat against his side, just above the wound, and let her own Gift answer: the faint, golden warmth she had never been able to explain and long ago stopped trying to. The torn flesh began to knit beneath her hand. Lucian drew a sharp breath. "That," he said, faintly, "is unexpected." "What is?" "I felt it." Her hand stilled. Behind her, the copper-haired girl had gone completely silent. The only sound in the room was the rain on the cemetery roof and the soft, steady hum of the Ley, climbing now, rising like a held breath. "What did you feel?" Eleanor asked, very quietly. Lucian looked at her for a long moment. The mask he wore so well, the cruelty, the careless charm, the mirror-bright smile, slipped by half a second and showed a man staring at something he did not understand. "Warm," he said at last. "I think it was warm." Across the room, Scarlett Hayes made a sound under her breath. It was not quite a word. The lantern above the door flickered. Far beneath the clinic, deeper than the foundations,deeper than the old Tube tunnels and the sealed stations and the secrets of five Houses, something in the Ley turned over in its sleep. Eleanor heard it. No one else did. It was a whisper, soft as a hand at the back of the neck, and it said only one word. Mine. ...…."The Oath and the Orchid."