Page 67 of Her Majesty's Necromancer
"You have others?"
"Yes."
"Then what does it matter?"
Seth sat down again with a sigh. "How do you do that, anyway?"
"Do what?"
"I was about to come up and fetch you, but you saved me the trouble. Somehow you always seem to appear when you're needed."
"Not always," Lincoln said darkly.
Seth's observation triggered a thought that was lodged in the back of my mind. I couldn't extract it from the fog shrouding most of last night, however, no matter how hard I tried.
Lincoln fetched himself a bowl from the cupboard and filled it with broth then sat next to me. "How did you sleep?"
"Deeply." I struggled to recall how we'd parted the night before. Had he been angry? I didn't think any harsh words had been spoken between us, but there were just too many holes in my memory for me to be certain of anything. He could have told me he loved me and I wouldn't remember.
No, that wasn't true. I would certainly remember that.
"The coat and gloves went to the boy Mr. Lee sent to fetch me. Er, I mean you. He was very cold, the poor lad, and he'd walked a long way in the night. I couldn't send him out again in nothing but his thin shirt."
"There you go, Seth," Gus said, grinning. "You did a good turn, for once. Never thought you'd be the charitable sort."
Seth grunted and returned to his position of repose in the chair. "May we change the subject? What happened at Lee's?"
Gus raised a hand. "First of all, how did Cook cut his thumb?"
"I startled him as he was cleaning knives."
Gus and Seth both chuckled. "Afraid of girls now, is he?" Gus said.
Seth snorted. "It'll be fun to tease him when he returns."
Lincoln lowered his spoon and regarded me. "I understand you saw the captain at Lee's."
I watched him carefully for any signs that he was about to admonish me for not waiting for him, but he seemed perfectly calm. Perhaps he got all his anger out last night, but in my dazed state, I'd not realized. "I did. He wasn't a particularly distinctive fellow, but I would recognize him if I saw him again."
"He won't go back to Lee's now," Gus said.
I bit my lip and concentrated on my broth. "I know. I'm sorry I didn't stop him or find out more about him."
"Shut up, Gus," Seth hissed. "You didn't do anything different to what I would've done, Charlie."
It wasn't quite the comfort he'd intended to be. If Lincoln had said it, on the other hand…
He simply finished his broth in calm silence. It was maddening.
"I do know the captain was holding a syringe full of blood," I said. "He was either about to inject it into the man on the bed, or was extracting it out of him."
"Before or after his death?" Lincoln asked.
"Before. The captain is also a doctor, I'm quite sure. He had a medical bag." That I remembered. I'd thought the captain was going to hurt me for trying to look inside it.
"Definitely another Frankenstein." Gus shifted his crossed arms higher on his chest and pulled a face. "That's all we need."
"He didn't cut up the bodies," Seth said, holding up a thumb. "He's not searching for a necromancer." His forefinger joined the thumb then a third finger popped up. "And he wasn't injecting electrical currents into the bodies. He's nothing like Frankenstein. Now who's the dolt, eh?"
