Dreadfully Ever After Read online

  Nezu nodded solemnly. “That is progress. You’re right. It should not matter how it was achieved.”

  He gave Kitty a long look that made her suspect—or perhaps merely hope—that it did matter. To him, anyway. As they carried on back to the Shevington residence, only Mr. Bennet and Lizzy continued talking, debating in low tones how best to steer Sir Angus toward a tour of Bethlem Royal Hospital, while Kitty and Nezu strolled with an abstracted air, saying nothing.

  Upon reaching the house, they found to their surprise that Mary hadn’t yet returned from the mysterious errand she’d slipped off to attend to that morning. Twilight was fast approaching, and the graying horizon was striped black here and there by ominous columns of dark smoke. They waited for Mary for a time in the drawing room, but at last Mr. Bennet could sit still no longer. He hopped from his chair and began pacing around the room.

  “Perhaps your afternoon would have been better spent searching for Mary rather than spying on us,” he barked at Nezu.

  It had been years since Kitty had seen her father so much as cock an eyebrow when she and her sisters charged in to battle hordes of the undead. Yet he seemed shaken now. Perhaps it was because Mary had chosen her own battle, for once.

  “I did not think it necessary to look for your daughter,” Nezu said. “She would not have left the area unobserved or unescorted.”

  “In other words, you had someone spying on her, too,” Lizzy said.

  “Watching the house, yes. With orders to accompany any of you who struck off on your own.”

  “ ‘Accompany,’ ” Mr. Bennet snorted. “You mean follow. Your trust in us is truly an inspiration, Nezu.”

  “It is not necessarily a sign of mistrust to take precautions.”

  “No. Not necessarily,” Mr. Bennet replied. “Just usually.”

  “Nezu,” Lizzy said, “if you’ve had someone watching us, then surely you know where Mary disappeared to yesterday. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that she went back there today?”

  “Indeed, it would … except that apparently she went nowhere. According to my agent—”

  “Spy,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “—Miss Bennet simply visited a book shop and then spent the rest of the day aimlessly wandering the streets of One North.”

  “Indeed?” Lizzy said. “That doesn’t sound like Mary.”

  “Oh? Who knows what she’s capable of now?” Mr. Bennet muttered. “I should have known that Wellstonecroft woman’s ramblings would lead her astray.”

  “Wollstonecraft,” Lizzy corrected.

  “Yes, of course. How could I forget, after hearing the wretched bore quoted ten times an hour for the past year? I tell you, I’d have rather seen Mary turn her mind to mush, like Kitty with her novels and fashion plates, than convince herself a young lady has the right to go charging off without so much as—”

  “And you accuse me of talking too much!” Kitty cried, leaping off the divan. “Come! Let’s go look for her!”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Bennet said.

  Kitty was already headed for the door. “Lizzy, you and Papa work north from here. Nezu and I will cover the south.”

  “Why in—?” Lizzy began.

  Kitty was ready for the question, or at least the question she imagined it to be.

  “We can’t have ladies the likes of Miss Shevington and Mrs. Bromhead seen roaming the streets alone,” she said. “Bad enough that their houseguest ‘Miss Millstone’ has been doing it! Now come along, Nezu. If my sister is still meandering about through One North, I’d like to find her before midnight.”

  Kitty didn’t look back to see if anyone was following her. She was afraid to. She just went striding out of the room and across the hall toward the front door, which Nezu reached first, sliding quickly by her in smooth Shinobi silence.

  “Might I suggest you wear your cloak, Miss? London nights can be chilly.”

  He’d already taken the liberty of grabbing her long fur-trimmed wrap, and as he helped Kitty slip into it, she felt the reassuring weight of the throwing stars, nunchucks, and sai knives sewn into the lining. Once Nezu had shrugged into his own great coat—capacious enough to conceal a small cannon—they left the house together, with Lizzy and a grumbling Mr. Bennet at their heels.

  “Happy hunting,” Kitty said as they separated.

  “And to you,” Lizzy replied, giving her sister a queer look. She appeared troubled yet strangely amused, and Kitty was glad that by then it was too dark for Lizzy to see the flush she felt rise to her cheeks.

  “This man you had following Mary yesterday,” she said to Nezu. “Did he mention where, exactly, she did her rambling?”

  “Mostly along Upper Street.”

  “Perfect. That’s just ahead, is it not? We’ll take it toward the gateway to … what’s the section just south of here?”

  “Eleven Central.”

  “So we’ll follow Upper Street down to Eleven Central, and then, if we still haven’t run across Mary, we can come back up that other big street. What-Have-You Lane.”

  “Liverpool Road?”

  “Well, don’t ask me. You’re the one who’s supposed to know everything. Isn’t that why Her Ladyship put us under your thumb? Too bad you let one of us wriggle free. Don’t worry, though. I won’t tell the lady. Not so long as we find Mary safe and sound, and I can’t imagine we won’t. Don’t let on that I said so, but I think she might be the most skilled killer of us all. Perhaps that’s just because she’s always soooooo serious. I mean, just listen to me prattle on. You’d hardly think I’d mastered three hundred and sixty-seven ways of dealing death, would you? All you might guess is that I could talk a man to death. La!”

  Nezu didn’t laugh along, of course. When Kitty glanced his way, she found him watching her intently, his brow so furrowed he might have been making a study of the Rosetta Stone.

  “What?” Kitty said.

  Nezu looked away.

  “What?”

  “I was just noting how very right you are,” Nezu said. “I can hardly believe that you’ve mastered the deadly arts.”

  “Yet you know very well that I have,” Kitty snapped back, stung. “For how else could I have bested you in the attic last night?”

  “You did not best me.”

  “Why, you arrogant little—!”

  “You matched me,” Nezu went on, still perfectly calm. “Quite perfectly. Which is what confuses me. I cannot understand how someone who lives so close to death can remain so …”

  Nezu searched for the right word.

  Kitty braced herself.

  Would he choose “frivolous”? “superficial”? “sallow”? Or her father’s favorite: “silly”? Whichever it would be, Kitty had her answer ready.

  “I see! So you would presume to pronounce me frivolous/superficial/shallow/silly merely because I smile and laugh and maybe talk a little too much,” she would say. “Yet, as you have seen, I can do everything a warrior does. I have gone to every dark place a warrior can go. I am a warrior! Perhaps my mistake is that I do not frown and sneer and feign world weary self-seriousness. This leads some, I suppose, to take me for a fool, and nothing more. If so, then the question is, Who is more frivolous/superficial/shallow/silly—them or me?”

  She wouldn’t add that she was one of those who sometimes assumed she was a fool. It would hardly bolster her argument.

  “… so …,” Nezu repeated, “human.”

  “I see! So you would presume to pronounce me—” Kitty gaped at Nezu. “ ‘Human’?”

  Nezu grimaced. “I have said too much. Let us direct ourselves to the task at hand.”

  “We can look for Mary and talk, too. She’s not a dog. We don’t have to walk around calling for her.”

  “All the same …”

  Nezu pointedly began scanning the opposite side of the street.

  “You’re just afraid to let yourself be human, too,” Kitty said.

  Nezu still looked away.

  “Perhaps we should try calling
for her,” he mused.

  “Oh, don’t stop now, Nezu. You made such a good start. Talk to me.”

  “And I wonder if searching in pairs is really such a good idea,” Nezu said, still speaking as if to himself. “We could cover ground twice as quickly if we separated.”

  “Perhaps. But what fun would that be?”

  “We are not here to have fun.”

  “No, but we’re not here to be miserable either.”

  “Misery and happiness are two sides of the same delusion. All that is real is duty.”

  “La! That’s the kind of twaddle they write on dojo walls.”

  “It is something my father once told me.”

  “Well, far be it for me to speak ill of your father, but he sounds like a dismal little killjoy.”

  “He was.” An embittered flintiness came over Nezu’s face even as his eyes seemed to lose their focus. “Yet he was my father.” He shook his head, and his expression was once again impassive, blank. “I thought I’d ended this conversation,” he said.

  “Oh, you’ll have to try harder than that with me!”

  Hissing whispers and quick footfalls echoed from somewhere up ahead. When Kitty turned toward the sound, she found a middle-aged couple hurrying around the corner from Upper Street. They were huddled close together, speaking in low yet harsh tones that made it obvious they were taking umbrage at something. Everything about them—the well-tailored yet unstylish clothes, the fleshy builds of the stolidly prosperous, the looks of disgust on their round faces—seemed to tell Kitty that these were just the sorts who would object most vociferously to a young lady out late in the company of an Asiatic man.

  Kitty slipped a hand under her cloak and gripped the hilt of a dagger. She wasn’t going to use it on the busybodies—probably—yet she found the feel of it soothing.

  “Imagine,” she heard the man say. “In One North. It’s unheard of.”

  Kitty’s fingers tightened around the dagger.

  “What are all the walls for if the horrid things can just go wherever they please?” the woman replied. Then she looked up and seemed to notice Kitty and Nezu for the first time. “I do hope you don’t have reservations at La Langoustine Rouge. We were just there, and the scene is simply appalling.”

  “Scene?” Kitty said.

  There was no need for the woman to explain, it turned out, for the “scene” was following them.

  More than a dozen dreadfuls came lurching along on Upper Street. Most had blood and blobs of poorly masticated viscera ringing their gaping mouths. One was trying to gnaw through the shell of a lobster that had clamped its claws to its right hand. Another had, unaccountably, what appeared to be a fillet of sole on its head. And still another glanced to the left and saw fresh meat—Kitty and the others—and howled.

  The whole pack wheeled around and charged.

  “Oh!” the woman cried.

  “That’s it,” her husband harrumphed as he hustled her into a run. “We’re moving to Three East.”

  Nezu drew Fukushuu from under his coat.

  “It appears we will have to postpone our conversation after all.”

  “Oh, Nezu,” Kitty said. “Have you not come to know me better than that?”

  She paused a moment to ready a fistful of throwing stars and study the creatures rushing toward her. Many of the unmentionables were skeletally thin, and they all had the sallow skin and dark-ringed eyes of plague victims, as had the zombie family they’d encountered that morning.

  Somewhere in the city, Pestilence was raising an army for its fellow horseman, Death.

  “When you say I’ve remained ‘human,’ you don’t mean ‘soft,’ do you?” Kitty said, and she began flicking star after star with perfect precision.

  The five nearest dreadfuls were instantly blinded by the triangular blades sunk deep into their eyeballs.

  Nezu dived past them into the middle of the approaching pack, rolled to his feet, took off the next four zombies’ heads with two quick swings, and then back-flipped out of grabbing-and-biting-and-disemboweling range.

  “I meant ‘alive,’ ” he said. “Your spirit has not been deadened by what we do.”

  “Ah.” Now that the unmentionables were near, Kitty took to hurling daggers, aiming for the knees. The heavy knives brought down three more in quick succession. “So it is my joie de vivre that confounds you.”

  A withered and screeching she-hag of an unmentionable threw itself at Nezu. He calmly impaled it, flipping his katana around as the zombress flailed upon it. With a mighty jerk, he brought the blade up through the belly, up through the neck, and finally up through the skull itself. The neatly halved brain plopped out onto the street like a pair of soggy hot-cross buns.

  “I suppose you could put it like that,” he said.

  Kitty was busy using her nunchucks to fend off a small group of zombies that had surrounded her.

  “Well, I can see why you’d be … Thank you.”

  Nezu had beheaded the most nettlesome of the dreadfuls, and Kitty could now concentrate on braining those that remained.

  “I can see why you’d be envious,” she began again. “You ninjas seem to know nothing but misère de mort.”

  “Envious?” Nezu ducked under an especially tall zombie’s swipe of the arm and then cut the unmentionable down to size by sending Fukushuu through its thighs. “What makes you think I’m envious?”

  “Well, what word would you prefer?”

  Only one dreadful was still able to walk and see, and Kitty had her nunchucks wrapped around its neck. With all her might she whipped the growling, thrashing ghoul first one way, then another.

  “Intrigued? Admiring?”

  At last the thing’s head tore free, and the rest of the body went stumbling off into the street a few steps before collapsing and lying still.

  “Infatuated?” Kitty said.

  By now, Nezu was mopping up, coolly dispatching all the maimed and moaning dreadfuls that ringed them. There were so many loose heads bouncing around, the street looked like a monstrous billiards table.

  “You used the word ‘confound’ a moment ago,” he said. “That comes closest, I think.”

  Kitty retrieved one of her daggers from a zombie’s leg and then plunged it into the top of the creature’s skull, as if she were planting a flag.

  With that, the “un” was removed from the last of the undead.

  “So you admit you are confused,” she said. “Perhaps I can clarify things for you.”

  She stalked over to Nezu, grabbed him by the lapels of his great coat, and pulled him into a kiss.

  It was by far the most impetuous, scandalous thing she’d ever done. Which made the day quite notable, as the second most scandalous thing—letting Bunny MacFarquhar probe her gums—was but a few hours old.

  “Mmph!” Nezu said.

  It was interesting to learn that it was indeed possible to take the man by surprise. Even more interesting: He was a good kisser. Not that Kitty had much to judge by. But after a stunned moment just standing there stiffly, Nezu bent in toward Kitty and pressed his lips more firmly to hers and wrapped one arm around her back and it was heaven … even if she was standing in the spilled innards of a disemboweled dreadful.

  Nezu started to raise his other arm, as if to complete his embrace. He was still holding his sword, though, and at the last second he seemed to realize he couldn’t wrap his arms around Kitty without driving Fukushuu through her.

  He broke off the kiss and jerked away.

  “I will continue the search to the south, as planned,” he said. “You should return to the house. It would not do for you to be seen in public.”

  “But—”

  Nezu sheathed Fukushuu and glanced down at Kitty’s blood-splattered cloak and gown.

  “IT WAS HEAVEN … EVEN IF SHE WAS STANDING IN THE SPILLED INNARDS OF A DISEMBOWELED DREADFUL.”

  “You are soiled,” he said, and he spun on his heel and marched alone into the night.

  “Nez
u, wait. Nezu!”

  If he’d looked back at Kitty—and he did not—he would have seen this: a slowly scuttling shape trying to make its escape into the storm drain behind her.

  As Kitty’s eyes filled with the tears a warrior was never supposed to shed, the lobster crawled over the grate, pulled itself into the inlet, and tumbled into the sewer below. It splashed into water mixed with blood and brain and sewage. But it was water, which was all that mattered. Crustaceans are incapable of sighs of relief, yet this one came as close as such things can.

  A second later, a hand, the skin hanging from it in green strips, stabbed into the muck, wrapped itself around the lobster, and raised it to broken yellow teeth that were already smeared with a film of minced flesh.

  CHAPTER 31

  Dr. Sleaford let his pet dreadful nip at Hawksworth for a while, but after his sixth “And what if your friend were to be bitten here?” Mary realized it was all for show. Subject Seven wasn’t going to sink its teeth into anybody, anywhere. Not yet.

  She returned her attention to a matter of real concern.

  “You remain admirably composed,” she said to the man she’d known until minutes before as “Mr. Quayle.”

  He hadn’t so much as glanced at the snapping skull as it was pushed within biting range again and again. He merely lay on the cart to which he’d been strapped, staring either at the stain-splattered ceiling or, from time to time, at Mary.

  “When last I saw you,” she continued, “you seemed to find dreadfuls … unsettling.”

  “You are generous with your choice of words,” Hawksworth said. At the moment, he was in one of his ceiling phases. “Others might have said that I fled like a craven coward, abandoning you and your family to certain death.”

  “Others have said that.”

  “They were right to do so.” Hawksworth looked into Mary’s eyes. “It is true.”

  Dr. Sleaford cleared his throat. “I said, ‘And what if your friend were to be—?’ ”

  “My friend,” Mary said, still holding Hawksworth’s gaze, “is not going to be bitten anywhere until Sir Angus MacFarquhar has had a chance to interrogate us. No doubt your master will want the same power over us that you feign, and you could hardly spoil that for him by dooming us before he’s even arrived.”