Wicked as She Wants by Delilah S. Dawson Read Free Book Online Page B

tan dress and dark brown corset went together like a steamer trunk; the little brass hooks up the front heightened the resemblance. Everything was so plain, so worn. There were no frills, no lace, no jewels, no clever wink of golden thread to glitter as I walked. I was no longer a princess. Not even a person. A thing.
    “I am a portmanteau.”
    “You are beautiful, princess.”
    “My eyes are the only thing left of me.”
    “Ah, yes.” She tsk ed. “We can’t have that.”
    She tossed a hat at me and perched a pair of dark glassesover my nose. The hat was a smallish topper that buckled under the chin, rough canvas, more tan with gray plumes. I tried to fasten it on correctly, but with my fingers entombed in gloves, it was hopeless. She snatched it from me and arranged everything.
    “You’ll learn how to do all of this yourself.” She canted the hat at a slight angle, nearly choking me. “Casper has worked in a caravan. He can help you.”
    “I told him that if he touched me again, I would see his head on a platter.”
    “I know a man who once devised a platter for just such occasions,” she mused with a little smile. “It had an elegantly barbed spike in the middle and an outside trough to catch the blood. Like a moat.”
    “I’d like his address, please,” I said without a trace of humor. And then I remembered my secondary plot. “And I need your help deciphering this note. Have you paper and pen?”
    She provided them, and I struggled to write in the damnable gloves. Four years of disuse combined with an annoying amount of kidskin between my fingers meant that my handwriting was barely legible, but she understood almost instantly.
    “The tasseinist on Ruby Lane. Mr. Sweeting. You cannot go there. He is a fiend.”
    “But what is a tasseinist?”
    Her skin rippled into mottled shades of lavender and sea green and brown. I’d seen a similar configuration when I’d found a long-dead Pinky on a hunt once. Bruise and rot. Whatever a tasseinist was, it scared her.
    “It is horrid, what a tasseinist does. How do you say it? Like a taxidermist but for people.”
    “Who would want such things?”
    “Scientists. Loved ones who can’t let go. Sadists. Those who would preserve the flesh with hopes of reanimating it. It is a dark place, indeed. He is a daimon like me, but a very bad one who feeds on the basest of emotions. Do not go there. And where did you find this address?”
    “I saw it somewhere,” I said lightly.
    If I told her that it was my body’s original destination, I’d never find a way to get there. As it was, I barely had the stomach for it. But I knew that I needed whatever answers Mr. Sweeting might hold before I went up against the formidable Ravenna. And I had a disguise now, so my only concern was getting to Ruby Lane before Casper returned.
    “I have work to do,” Reve said. “Please make yourself at home. Keen has some blood for you in the sitting room, I believe.”
    She waved me toward another door, and I realized just how hungry I was. Growing up in the palace, I had never known hunger. It was difficult for a Bludman to grow fat, and my mother had always insisted that I be dainty and refined in my drinking and my killing. But the draining had left me utterly insatiable. I smacked my lips when I saw Keen standing by a bookshelf in the sitting room, her short hair showing a strip of her tender neck to delicious advantage.
    “I’ve got only two vials for you.” She laid them on a table. “And there’s no cup, so you won’t be able to stick your scaly pinkie in the air.”
    I watched her as I uncorked a vial and downed it in three gulps. It was clear that she hated me, whether because I was a Bludman, a rich Bludman, or just someone she was forced to talk to. But I wasn’t about to broach that topic.
    “Can you read?” I asked instead, seeing her glove brush the line of book spines.
    She jerked her hand away guiltily. “ ’Course I can. But nobody gives books to