Page 10 of Shadowed

I go to Fat Maisie's.

Fat Maisie runs the closest thing the rookeries have to an intelligence service out of the back room of a gin house on Commercial Street. The place smells like juniper and spilled beer and the tang of secrets being sold at a markup. Maisie herself is enormous, shrewd, with a face like a dropped pudding and eyes that miss nothing. Everything has a price with her. The price is always exactly one penny more than you want to pay.

"Lilith Grey." She doesn't look up from the gin she's watering. "You look like something the cat's debating."

"Charming as always, Maisie. I need information."

"Information costs money."

"Information always costs money. That's why I brought money." I put a silver coin on her table. It's more than I can afford and less than she deserves and we both know it. "Something's in the rookeries. Following me. Shadows that sit wrong. I need to know what."

Maisie looks at the coin. Looks at me. Picks up the coin with fingers like sausages in silk gloves and bites it, because Maisie bites every coin. It's a point of principle. The tooth she lost to a forged shilling six years back is on a string around her neck—Maisie keeps her own teeth the way other women keep wedding rings. The shilling is lost to history. The man who handed her the shilling is not, but I've heard his shoes turn up in the Thames every spring like clockwork.

"Fae," she says. "Old one. Powerful. Been seen near the docks and the market and your particular stretch of Spitalfields, which is a coincidence I'm sure." She pours gin—the watered kind,for customers; her own is behind the counter and full-strength. "Something from Shadow Court, if the whispers are right. And the whispers are always right because I pay the whispers."

Shadow Court. I know the courts the way everyone in the rookeries knows them—by reputation, by fear, by the tributes their collection agents extract from families who can't afford to refuse. Thorn Court runs the politics. Frost Court runs the healing trade. Shadow Court runs—well. Nobody's entirely sure what Shadow Court runs. That's the point.

"What does it want?"

"You, from the look of things." Maisie takes a pull of her full-strength gin. "Word is they're looking for someone. One someone. Specific. Whatever you stole, Lil, you might consider giving it back."

I didn't steal from Shadow Court. I stole from a merchant in the better quarter. The documents were trafficking records. Morrow paid triple. None of that connects to a Fae court that controls shadows.

Except a lock opened before I picked it. And the shadow in the study sat on purpose. And shadows have been following me for three days with a patience and intelligence that isn't human.

"Thanks, Maisie."

"Spend your gratitude somewhere it spends. I take coin."

The streets outside are louder than they should be and brighter than they should be and my mind is doing the rapid, branching thing it does when a job has gone wrong—exits, options, resources, costs. We could leave Ashworth. Except leaving costs money and the rent is due tomorrow. We could hide. Except you can't hide from shadows. We could?—

A woman with a handcart blocks the crossing and for one stupid, useless second I am standing still in the rookeries with my heart going too fast and my hands, my reliable hands, wanting to shake.

I don't let them.

Home. Bag packed. Marcus gets the news standing in the kitchen: we're moving tonight when the children are in bed. He says "Where?" The answer isn't there. We stand looking at each other and not saying the thing we're both thinking, which is that there might not be a where.

The children go to bed early. Tommy asks why. I say we're having an adventure tomorrow. He believes me because Tommy believes everything, which is the most terrifying and beautiful thing about him.

Elena watches me from her pillow with eyes that are too old for fourteen. "Is it bad?" she asks quietly.

"Nothing I can't handle," I say.

"You always say that."

"That's because I always handle it."

She doesn't look convinced. She rolls over and curls around Tommy and closes her eyes.

I sit on the floor by the door. Packed bag beside me. Bramah locked. Knife in my hand, the grip warm from my palm. Three years ago I sat on this floor with a stolen bracelet and a head full of plans for the proceeds. Tonight I'm sitting on it waiting for a Fae court to come collect me. The career trajectory is what they call lateral.

The flat smells like the coal we don't have enough of, the dinner I scraped together, Tommy's soap, the scent of sleeping children—which is the best thing I've ever stolen from the world and the thing I'm most afraid of losing.

The flat is dark. The fire is out. The children are breathing. The night is pressing against the window. I'm sitting in the dark the way I've sat in the dark a thousand times before, except tonight the dark has a name, a court, a reason for watching. I don't know the reason yet. That's the part I can't pick.

The lock on my door—the Bramah, seven levers, my hands, my work, the best security I could build—clicks.

Not picked. Not forced. The levers seat themselves one by one, a soft cascade of mechanical surrender, and the bolt slides back without anyone touching it and the door drifts open an inch on its hinges.