Threadbound, p.5
Threadbound, page 5
“Jamie,” she said, in a sing-songy tone so cheerful Jamie had to shove his hands into the pockets of his chinos to keep from strangling her, “you’ve got time for a tour, right?” She beamed at the guy. “You’re in luck! Jamie’s one of the smartest guides we have. He can answer anything.”
“Is that so?” the gorgeous man asked, his voice thick with a Scottish burr that sounded less Edinburgh and more Highlands, at least to Jamie’s admittedly unpracticed ears.
“Oh, absolutely,” Trixie went on. “He’d be happy to.” She turned her predatory smile on Jamie. “Wouldn’t you, Jamie?”
Jamie forced himself to swallow, part hoping the guy would agree to it and part hoping that the minute his Tennessee accent came out, the man would politely decline. Because then it would at least definitively end whatever was wrong with him and let him move on with his currently-nonexistent love life. “Of course,” he managed.
The man studied him with slightly too-large eyes that were a shade of mossy green that Jamie had never seen in a person’s eyes before. “Verra well,” came the answer, and Jamie struggled to force his heart back down out of his throat and into his chest where it belonged.
The guy paid Trixie, then allowed Jamie to hold the door for him, the top of his dark head passing just at Jamie’s shoulder level. It threw him for a second, because as tiny as the guy seemed up close, his presence felt a lot bigger.
Or maybe you’re just thinking with the wrong head, Jamie, he told himself.
A half hour later, Jamie had relaxed, and was happily talking about the history of early eighteenth century anatomization and medical theaters. A lot of people who had taken his tours found the subject morbid, but this guy didn’t seem at all bothered by it, instead occasionally asking a clever question, like the one he’d just asked.
“But decomposition begins verra quickly after death, so wouldn’t they have run into the problem that things were—”
“Falling apart on them as they worked?” Jamie finished with a slightly lopsided smile. “Yes. It’s also one of the reasons people believed that the pituitary gland was the seat of the soul—since it was one of the first parts of the brain to break down.”
The man looked thoughtful.
“Where is that, precisely? The pituitary gland?” he asked.
Jamie touched the side of his head. “Right in the middle, under all of the rest of the brain. It’s right up against the brain stem, basically.”
The guy hummed softly. “And what does it do?”
“Produces hormones,” Jamie answered, then flushed. Stupid hormones. “Ah… stress hormones. Growth. Other… things.” God, I’m such a dork.
Jamie swore that he saw the man’s nostrils flare slightly.
Yeah, those hormones. It was definitely time for a new topic.
“But you’re right that decomposition essentially slowed down scientific progress for a long time,” he plowed on, needing to regain his composure. “Because it was hard to get actual fresh bodies, so they had to settle for recently buried or executed bodies.”
“That seems… limiting,” the smaller man observed, his tone a little dry.
“Well, that’s where Burke and Hare came in,” Jamie replied, grateful that his cheeks were cooling. Nothing like murder to take your mind off sex. In theory, anyway. Because even talking about dismemberment and decomposition wasn’t completely distracting Jamie’s mind from thoughts that were decidedly sexual in nature and had nothing at all to do with murder or surgical practices. “They made a living for almost a year selling fresh bodies to anatomists here in Edinburgh—they were highly sought-after because they had a, ah, better product than most Resurrectionists.”
“A better product?” the guy repeated.
“A fresher product,” Jamie clarified.
“Killing people to sell the corpses, were they?”
Jamie grinned. “Exactly. But they did it without causing significant physical trauma in order to avoid suspicion.”
The man’s eyes—they really were an astonishing shade of green—sparkled. “Used suffocation, did they?” he asked.
Jamie nodded. “Manual suffocation, yes.” Maybe he should have been more disturbed by the fact that this beautiful stranger seemed to be very quick on the uptake about things like strangulation and cutting up bodies, but Jamie couldn’t quite bring himself to be put off by it. In his defense, this was what he studied, and he’d never actually contemplated killing anyone.
The man put his hand on his own throat, his long fingers able to wrap surprisingly far around his slender neck. “Like this?”
Jamie shook his head, still staring at those elegant fingers and trying desperately not to think about what, precisely, he would like them wrapped around. “That would, ah, be strangulation, not suffocation. Burking—because the method was named after its inventor—was being able to put a hand completely over both the nose and mouth, cutting off the airway that way.”
“Put a hand around the back of the head, and that wouldna be too difficult,” the man mused. Then he must have realized that one might take that the wrong way and offered Jamie a tiny smile that made Jamie’s heart beat faster.
What is wrong with me that I get excited by a guy smiling at me when he’s talking about Burking someone?
“That was idea, yeah,” Jamie replied. “And it worked sixteen times, at least.”
“Only sixteen?”
“That was the point at which some of Hare’s lodgers discovered one of the bodies.”
The man’s eyebrows went up.
“Police convinced Hare to turn on Burke, who was convicted and sentenced to death. His body was given to Alexander Monro”—here, Jamie pointed at a print of Monro’s portrait—“who conducted the autopsy at the Old College, which is now the law school.” Jamie grinned. “It was so popular that they sold tickets and students who couldn’t get in staged a riot.”
“Over the dissection of a murderer?”
Jamie was used to people sounding incredulous, but his current listener sounded curious and interested.
“Yeah,” Jamie replied. “It was settled when they agreed to bring groups through to see Burke’s already-dissected body after the autopsy.”
The man made a soft noise of interest.
Jamie smiled. “Would you like to see him?”
“Burke?” There was an edge of excitement to the question.
Jamie nodded. “Burke.”
“You… have him?”
“We’ve got a book bound in his skin and his death mask.”
“Oh, aye. That I’d like to see.”
Jamie couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Follow me.”
Chapter
Seven
Darach mac Craobh-na-Beatha, King of the Sidhe, Lord of the Sunlit Court, reclined against the living wood of the Sidhe throne, his moss-green eyes piercing as he glared at the creature standing in front of him. Thin, blue-grey skinned with dripping, tangled hair that looked like kelp, the fuath had her head bowed down, her broad-featured face pointed toward the floor, where water dripped and pooled around her bent knees.
Another Sidhe, the fuath was one of his better agents, although many such had already failed in accomplishing the task he had set them.
“Tell me you have found Cairn’s youngest child.”
“I have not, my lord,” she whispered, her voice made low by fear.
Darach frowned, the dark mottled skin of his forehead twisting with the expression.
“And why not?” Although it was a question, his voice didn’t rise in pitch at the end.
“I believe, my lord, that he is not currently near water.”
It was a limitation of the fuath—while they could move between bodies of water at will, passing from Elfhame to Dunehame and back as they wished, anything on dry land was painful and difficult.
Including the fuath’s visit to the Sidhe court.
He could, of course, have given her a river or pool to ease the difficulty.
He had not.
“Then find me someone who does not require water,” he growled.
“Of course, my lord.”
She half-rose, then slunk out of the throne room, leaving a wet trail behind her.
A gesture from one long-fingered hand, each digit tipped with a pointed nail of polished wood, and a handful of urisks scurried about, hooves clicking off the stone floor as their helpful hearth-magic soaked up the water. Just as quickly as they’d appeared out of the stone, they returned to it, the only trace of their passage the occasional scuff from a tiny hoof.
Darach drew in a long, measured breath, the movement slow and even, like the breathing of the world.
He had ruled here for longer than most fae could remember. Longer even than most of the Wyrthings who cast the Fates and spun the threads of life. The Bean Nighe claimed to remember a day when he had not sat atop the Living Throne, but the Bean Nighe did not always remember things in the order in which they happened.
He had never visited her with a wish, and she had not spoken to him of his death.
He liked to think that if he did, she would not be able to.
The rumors held that he was afraid that if he did, she would happily tell him otherwise.
But Darach did not give credence to those rumors, although he paid careful attention to who shared them.
One did not stay the King of the Sidhe for as long as he had by allowing rumors to circulate freely.
Chapter
Eight
“What do you mean you didn’t get his name?” Trixie demanded, making Jamie wince.
“I didn’t ask. We don’t ever ask tourists for their names, Trixie.” The fact that he’d been half-terrified and half-turned-on the whole time had nothing to do with it, of course.
“James Weaver, what is wrong with you? You ask me to take you out to find a date, you refuse every single one, and then when this bloke struts in through the doors, again, you practically drool all over him, and you don’t get his name?”
“You’ve made your point, Trix.” Jamie sighed, spinning his apple core between his fingers.
He and Trixie were sitting out in the courtyard eating their lunches—Jamie’s usual container of veggies, hummus, cheese, and an apple, Trixie’s turkey and chutney on white bread—after an unusually busy morning that had kept them both running tours non-stop since opening. It was a Friday in summer, but still.
“If he comes back—” she started, but Jamie cut her off.
“He’s not going to come back,” he said, sounding a good deal more depressed about that fact than he’d expected. “He didn’t get a tour the first time, and now he’s had one, so that’s that.”
“Unless he didn’t come back for the tour…” Trixie suggested, wiggling her eyebrows.
Jamie rolled his eyes. “Nice try, Trix.”
“You’re an attractive bloke, Jamie.”
“Gee, thanks.” He knew she was half-teasing him—Trixie knew he wasn’t interested in women—but he blushed anyway.
“I’m just saying, that it’s possible he came back to see the nice piece of man-meat who worked in the museum again.”
“Who’s a nice piece of man-meat?” came Rob’s cheerful voice.
Jamie bent over his knees and put his face in his hands.
“Besides me, I mean,” Rob joked.
“Jamie, obviously,” Trixie replied.
“Well, sure. Who’s asking?” Rob wanted to know.
“No one,” Jamie answered, lifting his head, then standing and gathering up his empty lunch containers.
“A charmingly elegant gentleman with dark hair and lovely pale skin,” Trixie answered.
“Asking about Jamie?” Rob was clearly as interested in this conversation as Jamie was not.
“No,” Jamie answered emphatically. “He was not.”
“But he did take Jamie’s tour,” Trixie pointed out.
“Because you practically made him,” Jamie retorted.
“As though you didn’t want me to!”
Since he kind of had, Jamie didn’t have a good response to that, so he rolled his eyes and headed back inside, leaving Trixie to embellish whatever details about the man and his non-relationship with Jamie that she wanted.
After stuffing his things back into his cubby, Jamie headed back onto the museum floor, this time, over in the Anatomy and Pathology wing. The Halls were still fairly crowded, so he moved through the visitors, making sure they noticed his official shirt and name tag, just in case they had questions.
After several hours of explaining medical oddities and discussing the finer points of how formaldehyde preservation produced discoloration of tissues over time, Jamie’s feet were aching. He decided to give this side of the hall one more loop—once upstairs through the balconies, once on the main floor—before heading back to see what needed cleaning or packing up for the day.
As he rounded the far end of the hall, he stopped abruptly when he noticed a familiar figure bending down to examine some preserved amputated limbs from Waterloo.
Jamie’s first thought was… Well, it wasn’t so much a thought as an instinctive panic reaction. His second thought—which was an actual thought—was that he was really glad Trixie wasn’t on this side of the Halls this afternoon because whatever she would have done would have probably embarrassed the hell out of him.
And then the man turned, as though he could sense Jamie’s scrutiny from across the Hall with its thousands upon thousands of jars of pathological samples.
There were at least a couple dozen tourists still milling around, but as far as Jamie was concerned, they might as well have ceased to exist. All he could see were those dark emerald green eyes with long lashes set into porcelain-fine skin.
“Excuse me?” A woman’s voice jerked Jamie’s attention away from the man and back to his immediate surroundings.
“I’m sorry. How can I help you?” he asked the woman, who looked to be in her mid-twenties.
She smiled, a little nervously—which was normal, Jamie knew. A lot of people were unsettled by being surrounded by human remains. At least the ones who were smart enough to realize that the pathology museum had actual human remains in it and not plastic replicas, which he’d had to explain three whole times that day. Always to Americans, it seemed.
This woman sounded English, though, so hopefully he wasn’t about to have to explain it for the fourth time.
“Can you tell us more about the Edinburgh Seven?” she asked, and Jamie saw that she had two other friends with her, also both women.
Jamie smiled. “Of course,” he answered cheerfully, launching into his prepped lecture on the seven women who had passed their entrance exams and begun studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869, and whose legal battle with the courts ensured that women were able to pursue medical careers thanks to the UK Medical Act of 1876.
The small group was as enthusiastic as Jamie about the subject, and when they finally thanked him and moved on, it was nearly closing time.
The mysterious man had once again disappeared.
In the pub, Rob frowned, dark skin drawing together over his nose. “Should we be worried?” he asked. “D’you have a stalker, you think?”
“Oh, posh,” Trixie put in, taking a sip from her fruity drink. “Even if he were a stalker, Jamie’s like twice his size.”
Rob looked startled. “Is he really?”
“Not quite twice,” Jamie muttered, not looking up from his beer.
“Practically,” Trixie replied. “He’s a little thing.”
“He comes up to my shoulder,” Jamie argued. “He’s taller than you.”
Trixie laughed. “Everyone’s taller than me, James. Besides, he’s not that much taller than me.”
“And pretty, you said?” Rob wanted to know.
“Yes,” Trixie answered, at the same time that Jamie said, “No.”
Rob blinked.
“Not pretty,” Jamie mumbled, feeling his cheeks heat up.
“He’s pretty,” Trixie insisted. “Dark hair, green eyes. Skin like bloody milk.”
Jamie made a face. It didn’t matter than he knew ‘bloody’ wasn’t a descriptor, he still imagined the milk with blood in it.
“Sounds like a vampire,” was Rob’s response, making Jamie snort. “So he’s what, a goth type?”
This time both Jamie and Trixie agreed on the no.
“He’s not a type,” Jamie said, not really sure what he meant by that, although it had sounded right in his head.
“He’s the type that’s easy to look at, though,” Trixie quipped, nudging Jamie’s arm with her elbow.
He rolled his eyes and ignored her.
“C’mon, James. You’d take him out, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled into his beer, taking a deep drink of the golden liquid to counteract the blush heating his cheeks. “But it’s not going to happen.”
It was Trixie’s turn to roll blue eyes. “He came back a third time, Jamie. Clearly there’s something he’s interested in.”
“Yeah,” Jamie replied. “The history of medicine. He knows his stuff, too.” He took another drink.
“Does he?” Trixie sounded a little impressed. “All the more reason that if he comes back you need to ask him out.”
“I dunno, Trix,” Rob sounded hesitant. “He knows about medical history and comes to a medical history museum? Three times? Are we sure he isn’t a stalker?”
Because that’s totally what I need in my life, Jamie thought. A stalker who’s into murder. Although he hadn’t gotten a ‘stalker’ vibe from the guy… not that Jamie’d ever had a stalker, so he wasn’t really sure what a stalker vibe would feel like.
“He’s not a stalker,” Trixie insisted. “He thinks Jamie’s hot.”
Jamie rolled his eyes again. “Now you’re just making shit up,” he said.
“Why else would he keep coming back?” she asked.
“Because he’s interested in medical history?” Jamie suggested again.
“Or he’s a stalker,” Rob pointed out, flipping a loose loc behind his shoulder and leaning back.
Clearly, they weren’t getting anywhere.
