Jin sighed and rose, glancing back over his shoulder when he hearda sound at the door to the schoolroom, instinctively concerned Arthie had found him. But Arthie had her ways, and Jin knew all of them. He glanced over his shoulder again.
Almost all of them, anyway.
The fright returned to the courier’s face, nothing compared to the ugliness thrashing inside Jin. A writhing thing of rage and pain, betrayal and the need to dosomething. He picked up his umbrella, twirled it. He waited. One beat, two. Coll remained silent.
Jin slammed the umbrella into Coll’s foot.
There was a sickening crunch before the courier screamed.
He could very nearly hear Flick’s gasp.That was positively diabolical!she would say if she were here, but she wasn’t here to keep him tame. And Coll worked for the EJC, the shipping conglomerate working side by side with the empire, stealing land, resources, and artifacts, uncaring for the ruin they left in their wake.
Pity was hard to scrounge.
Jin bent to meet Coll’s eyes. “I heard this was the same foot you used to kick your daughter when she didn’t dance to your tune. Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’m a Casimir, Coll. Can’t expect me not to know. Is that why you’re back with Mummy? Because your wife had enough?” He moved his umbrella to the man’s other foot, resting the point over his laces. “Care for another?”
It was a question he would ask patrons in Spindrift with a pot of tea in his hand.
“No! Please, no, Mr. Casimir!” Coll shouted. “After the woman didn’t show, I took the package to the address myself, and it was empty, yeah? Completely empty. A big old warehouse with nothing in it? I thought, hmm, that’s bonkers. It looked like they left in a hurry too. Rubbish everywhere. But I wanted to get paid, so I looked around and just when I gave up, I found a scrap of paper on the floor with another address.”
To empty out an entire warehouse and move locationswasstrange, unless one was in danger of being caught, unless…the ledger, the Ram’s personal agenda where she recorded her every move, from names to transactions. It was missing for far longer than Jin and the others had taken possession of it. Of course she would be making strides to change locations and distract from whatever her own notes might reveal.
Jin could only hope that didn’t extend to his parents.
“And?” he asked.
“It was the address to their new place. They’re—they’re doing something in there. Something bad.”
Jin paused. “In where?”
“I heard crying. No, no. What’s the word—keening? I heard keening,” he continued, gasping along the way. “Like the people inside were in pain. That’s how I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
The missing vampires? Jin didn’t know, so he glanced to his right before he caught himself. He had been looking for Arthie. To share a glance in which they would have an entire, wordless conversation.
He ignored the pang in his chest.
“Was it a laboratory?” Jin asked.
Coll shook his head in tiny spasms. “It was a—an EJC shipping warehouse.”
Jin’s hope spiraled again. He forced his thoughts afloat to keep them from drowning.
Shipping warehouses didn’t store, they shipped. There wasn’t room for storage when White Roaring’s ports were so busy, cargo moving in and out within days, sometimes hours.
If Coll delivered liquid silver to a shipping warehouse, that meant… that meant it was being sentoutof White Roaring.
“Are you certain it was a shipping warehouse?” Jin asked.
Coll nodded. “I saw them loading a container and coming back with empty carts. They were shipping all right.”
Jin bit the inside of his cheek. It was no wonder he hadn’t found his parents. They weren’t evenhere. Ettenia might not have been large, but he could count on one hand the number of times he’d left White Roaring.
“Where are the goods being shipped? What city?” Jin asked.
The courier was rocking back and forth as tears streaked down his freckled face. There was a time when a sight like this would stir pity and sympathy. That was before Spindrift was burned to the ground, before he’d seen death sweep across a room, before he’d woken up in a pool of his own blood and the streets had turned angry.
Jin set the umbrella on the man’s foot once again.
“I don’t know where! Delivering the silver was the extent of my job, a’right?”
