The dry, crisp parchment clamped to the iron board gave off a faint, fluttering rattle in the cold draft flowing between the doorposts.
Len Vey stood frozen in the damp coal dust, his boots anchored to the flat stone slabs three paces from the workbench. His right hand remained jammed inside his waistcoat pocket. His fingers were locked around the heavy brass key ring taken from Magistrate Pell’s conservatory desk. Every pulse in his wrist sent a throb of heat into his palm. But his skin felt numb, gooseflesh rising along his neck as he stared into the unblinking gray eyes of the creature standing on the doorstep.
The resemblance to Doma Reel was total, down to the shape of her chin, the slight crook in the bridge of her nose. The small mole on her left collarbone. Yet the absence of humanity was total.
Living skin in Rookvale carried the marks of twelve years under the copper sky: the gray, sallow tint of chronic sunlight deprivation. The tiny, spider-web scars left on knuckles by cold-water lye soap. The permanent yellow staining around the fingernails from sulfur fumes and turnip peelings. This creature possessed none of them. Its hands, resting lightly upon the blackened iron frame of the clipboard, were smooth, pale, delicately veined with clear blue vessels. The thumb that held the paper in place had never held an iron ladle over a boiling cooking pot. It had never felt the skin tear against an Acme screw-jack in four…
