I woke up to a murky, drizzling day.

A thick blanket of grey clouds coated the sky, occasionally sending scattered pockets of rain down on us. There was a chill in the air that threatened to reach into the house, which made it perfect for a hot cup of tea.

Some swore by sunny days and pleasant weather. I preferred grey days when a hot cup was that one source of heat that felt like it reignited your blood. Back when my walls had been wood a few sturdy blows away from collapsing. When huddling together for warmth had been a necessity. When you woke up and the cold had seeped into your bones? Time for tea.

The walls weren’t anywhere near as thin these days, although the cold had seeped in some. But I’d waited for our two guests to arrive for my tea. Some things could keep my cold blood warm without warm liquid to aid it.

An end to this mess was definitely one of them.

They came in separate coaches from different ends of the street. Lady Karsin’s took slightly longer to make it to the house. It had to navigate through the spread-out rubble still left after her brethren’s raid on the house.

Workers hired by Voltar were going to take it away. Once the priests he’d hired had finished, making sure me throwing Diabolism around hadn’t birthed something truly nasty in the wreckage.

Nothing had shown up yet, which….well, Diabolism corruption took the forms of the loud and flashy. The lack of that boded ill, but it was a worry for another time.

Both coaches made it to the front of the house and both their passengers exited after the customary waiting time to see who would actually leave their carriage first.

They’d dressed modestly. Not really here to attend a social event, so a simple suit for the Lord, and a plain dress for the Lady,

They probably also didn’t want to be seen having come to this house. Good luck with that. The threat of a torrential downpour had done little to dissuade the usual crowd of watchers on Voltar’s street. Far too many people were interested in keeping track of his movements for that to end.

Lord Montague looked angry, and he certainly was spewing some words that I doubted were kind as he moved towards Lady Karsin.

In contrast, she kept a smile on her face, but not some serene look. There was a manic edge to that smile as she responded to Lord Montague’s words. They seemed lost in their own conversation, which wouldn’t do.

I tapped on the glass of the window, hitting the thick glass with my knuckles loud enough to be heard outside.

Both their faces turned to stare up at me. I pointed down at the door, then mimed looking at a pocket watch. Smile and glare both deepened, but I’d already started walking to the tea table itself. Someone else would get the door for the two guests, and they’d be instructed to come inside.

No delaying the inevitable at this stage.

***

I and Voltar of us were sitting when the pair of them entered the door, being lead in by a disguised Tagashin. Dr. Dawes was currently with both of our guests, helping watch over them and to make sure no agent of their parents tried to kidnap them back.

Those parents had barely made it through the doorway when I flung a stick at Lady Karsin. The simple piece of wood tumbled end over end, on a collision course with her face.

Her hand intercepted it in mid-air, sending it flying to the side, but not before the physical contact discharged the wand’s magic right into her hand.

New fingers poked out all around the surface of her hand, wriggling stubby digits that tore skin, revealing pulsating muscle and tendons underneath. Her regular fingers merged together, shrinking down to where the second knuckle would have been, while new digits layered on top of each other from sheer numbers.

“Really?” Lady Karsin asked, looking at her wriggling hand, smile fading to a frown. “Was that necessary?”

“Just a final bit of confirmation, Lady Karsin,” Voltar said. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but we figured we should be sure of your case. Thank you for the effort put into not making it too flashy, Miss Harrow. You should make a marketable one that can be mass-produced. It would be worth quite a Pound in these times.”

I shrugged, leaning back in my chair. “Not really worth it. I had to share it with the Watch and no one gossips quite like a copper. And the fundamentals aren’t too difficult to understand. Honestly, anything with a bit of life-energy might be enough, although I doubt healing potions-”

“Enough of this nonsense,” Lord Montague yelled, pulling a revolver from his pocket and leveling it at my face. “Where is my son?”

Shoulders tense, face scrunched up, eyes narrowed, his intensity only matched by how much his aim wavered.

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I stared down the barrel impassively as it jittered about. “Currently? Seeing people much better than you would have brought in. Now, unless you want to lose that arm, drop the gun.”

Montague turned his attention to Voltar, face reddened with anger. “Voltar, are you going to let your little pet talk to me this way? After she ruined my son’s cure and ended up forcing me into working under this one!”

I swallowed my anger even as I felt the overwhelming urge to grab Montague’s arm and tear the rotten remnants off at the elbow. Instead, I focused on where he was pointing.

His finger stabbed across the air at lady Karsin, shaking even more than the revolver aimed at me. Lady Karsin seemed more bemused than anything else at Lord Montague’s accusation and throwing her under the bus. I snorted, already predicting where Lord Montague was heading with this. I’d discussed it with the others. There wasn’t much hard evidence to disprove Lord Montague if he claimed to be coerced.

I’d had a long argument with both Malstein and Voltar over it, as well as one elderly gentleman from the Watch who’d overseen one of my torture sessions.

Unless he gave himself away here, he wasn’t being brought in.

“Miss Harris is a trusted associate, Lord Montague,” Voltar replied calmly. “Quite unlike what I would consider you. Please lower your pistol, or we’ll be forced to take it from you.”

Montague's eyes widened as his gaze drifted from me. It would be so easy to just lunge forward and touch, watch that arrogant face shrivel in on itself as flesh decayed and burst.

He regained his bluster swiftly and his gaze snapped back to glare at me. Survival instinct or just focusing on the person in the room he hated the most?

“If the Foulhorn lays a single finger on me, you’ll pay Voltar. It’s bad enough your schemes have ended with me manipulated by her and this one, but you dare speak down to me?”

“If you keep on blustering, it’ll be more than a finger,” I replied, matching his gaze with an even expression.

Voltar was about to speak, when someone else spoke up first. Lady Karsin.

“His Lordship speaks the truth,” she said after finishing a sip from the cup. “I have been coercing him this entire time since our brief confrontation in his manor.”

I swallowed a rising sense of disappointment. She was helping to protect him, but why?

An answer we’d arrived at the night before immediately rose in my head. The other shape-changers, whose identities we didn’t know and who couldn’t be tracked down. When half your race had been cut down or captured in so short a time, who wouldn’t trade some things to keep them protected?

The real answer there was how Lord Montague was threatening them. Their current identities maybe, which depending on how much they’d been built up, might be enough to Lady Karsin. After all, everything was all but confirmed coming here, and now fully confirmed with the little stick of life energy she’d touched. A little head start to her compatriots?

They could shape change. What could he have?

“I am ultimately a victim, pulled to one side or another by forces I have barely understood,” Lord Montague growled. “I’d already been made a puppet long before that thing made it clear they would hunt every member of my family down if I didn’t obey her every command. I have witnesses, people who she was willing to let live, who can attest to this. More, if that one hadn’t murdered my bodyguard last night!”

I sipped my tea again, eyes flicking to Voltar. Had he spotted something I hadn’t? Because the longer Lord Montague talked, the more I felt an unease building in my chest. Doubt. The assumption that he’d been the one leading this strange concerted effort between his house and the shape-changers had been mine. Some facts were born out by it, but I still doubted the shape-changer at the party would have been trying to kill Gregory without some influence or direction from his father.

But how much of that was influence instead of control? Perhaps just a bone tossed in to keep a puppet from the point of cutting its strings, even if it no longer moved afterward?

“You claim to have been completely under Lady Karsin’s thumb for everything after the party at your manor?” Voltar asked.

“Yes!” Montague exclaimed, nearly bursting from his chair. “Arranging that tea party, signing those passes into the archives, all at their insistence! Trying to get ahold of those notes, although she would never tell me why!”

The mention of the notes knocked something loose in my brain. Right. Timing.

“The same notes you’d viewed days beforehand, without telling me or Voltar?” I interjected. “The ones you looked at, despite the fact that you couldn’t even look at those without a member of the royal family present? Shortly before your party had a suspiciously lax sense of security for a man knowing his party would become a trap? Those notes?”

I seemed to have unbalanced his lordship, who seemed about to snap off a quick retort but seemed to think better of it. After a few seconds of thinking about his answer and then he spoke up.

“I was uncertain if I could share the information,” he said. “The royal member who was with me values his privacy, and asked to be stricken from the records books.”

“Weak,” Voltar noted.

“Are your accusations any better, Voltar?” Montague snapped back. “Or do you plan to have the little Foulhorn repeat more of your questions for you?”

“They aren’t his questions,” I said. “And your behavior at the party is most suspicious, your lordship. Or will you deny that I warned you about several security issues you then chose to ignore?”

Montague ignored me, like a gut in my stomach as he continued trying to address Voltar.

“I will provide eyewitness testimony, as well as hard evidence, that everything I’ve done has been at her bidding,” he said. “That she has had metaphorical knives against my throat this entire time, till you killed enough of her minions that she couldn’t keep one around me at all times.”

“By all means, keep throwing me under the carriage, darling,” Lady Karsin observed irritably. “It’s not like they don’t have the evidence they need for me. Unlike you.”

That caused Montague to pause, ending his tirade. A limit there to how much she was willing to be his fall girl?

“There is some truth in that,” Voltar said. “While I have it on excellent authority that Lord Montague’s authority over the Imperial Archives has been revoked-”

Lord Montague released what could only be described as a squawk, followed by a roar of anger.

“They wouldn’t dare. My family has had it for nearly two centuries. You will cease this, and return to me my so-”

Okay, I’d had enough. I lunged forward, and Lord Montague tried to aim his revolver.

My tail wrapped around his wrist, bashing it against the table till he dropped the revolver. Meanwhile, my hand went around his throat.

“Thank you, Miss Harrow.”

“Not a problem,” I answered, tightening my grip, the threat of rot clear enough to the noble below. “Lady Karsin, we do have some questions for you. You will be answering them.”