Copperhead by Tina Connolly Read Free Book Online

face, leaving her skin exposed to the warmed air of the vehicle.
    She blinked at him, and she thought then that perhaps her face would calm him, that he would turn and see how lovely she was, and give in. Maybe smile and call her his pet, like he used to do.
    But he thrust his fingers through the eyehole of the mask he held and said, “Yes, this is much better, isn’t it? Much better for us both.” He patted her silk-skirted leg and then hurried from the car, her iron mask dangling from his canary-gloved fingertips as he hurried back into the house.
    Silence passed, and at length Adam said, “Home, miss?”
    As if she had a choice.
    “Yes,” Helen managed, and turned her trembling lips away from his sightline, looked out the window into the icy night.
    Adam turned out of the drive. She could feel his worry like a palpable presence. That was the way it was since Rochart replaced her old face with the fey version—she seemed to have a sixth sense of what people wanted, what they felt. Now Adam was trying to help her make things better, help her show a stiff upper lip. “Those oranges cheered my mum right up, I’ll tell you.”
    “Good,” said Helen. The gaslights cast strange shadows through the mists of fey. “I’ll send over some more.”
    Her eyes closed against the fey, against the night, thinking about poor Millicent. Without Jane’s fey power keeping Millicent protected and under thrall, no one could survive a process like the facelift. How long would Millicent stay in the fey sleep? Jane herself was no fey—her power was not that vast. If Helen did not find Jane soon … she was very afraid Millicent would waste away and die, as Mr. Grimsby seemed to want to believe already. Millicent was on death’s door because of what Jane had done, but it wasn’t Jane’s fault, it was that horrid Mr. Grimsby and his machine. How would she make those men believe that?
    And what would they do to Jane once they found her? It would be Jane against Copperhead, and Helen didn’t give a fig for those chances. She had to find her sister before they did. She closed her eyes, in that moment hating herself for the blithe way she had seen Millicent’s escape, for the casual way she had set up Jane to help Millicent. As if it were all a game. “I didn’t mean it,” she whispered fiercely. “Jane, come home.”
    “What’s that, ma’am?”
    “Stop here,” she said, before she knew what she was saying.
    Adam pulled to the side, looking dubiously at the strip of storefronts lining the wide thoroughfare. “Probably all closed, ma’am.” She heard in the cautious sentence all the things he couldn’t say, both: Don’t get yourself into trouble, and, equally, Don’t make me lose my position.
    She seized Jane’s carpetbag. “I’ve got to find my sister,” she said. “She’s my family .”
    He nodded slowly, thinking this over.
    “Please don’t tell my husband when you pick him up,” she said. “I’ll—I don’t know. Take a cab or the trolley or something. If he finds out … I’ll swear to him I left from home and you know nothing about it.”
    “Do you have money?”
    Of course she didn’t. “Oh, Adam, why am I such a wreck?”
    “You’re not a wreck, ma’am,” he said in his stoic way, and handed her some coins from his pocket. “I’d watch out for the trolley, though. Full of malcontent dwarvven causing trouble, they say.”
    “I’ll be careful,” Helen said, and promised, “I’ll pay you back tomorrow morning.”
    “I know you will, ma’am.” He opened the door for her and looked dubiously down at her unprotected face.
    No mask. No iron.
    She almost flung herself back in the safety of his car. But she had to find Jane. She had to save Millicent.
    Adam’s grey-black eyebrows knitted. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”
    He couldn’t order her to stay home and be safe the way Alistair could. It was as close as he could come to asking if she was certain she wasn’t mad. She supposed