Whitechapel Gods Read Free

visible through the blackened air: the Stack, home to the gods and to the man who had betrayed his country and his kin to serve them.
    Yes, things would happen quickly, one way or the other. If all went well, the means to reclaim Whitechapel might be in Bailey’s hands by dawn. If all did not go well, he and all the agents of the crown might soon be lying in oily graves.
    Aaron had gone tonight to steal a weapon.
    He was two hours overdue.
     
    “You know what the real problem is, Ollie?”
    Fighting his irritation, Oliver pulled his eyes off the street and glanced over his shoulder. Tommy crouched behind him in the filthy alley, a madcap grin flowering on his rectangular face.
    Then Tommy stabbed himself in the heart with a knife. “People don’t properly die in this town,” he said with a smirk. Oil welled up around the blade, staining his shirt.
    Oliver scowled. “We’re on mission, Tom.”
    “I never tire of the look on your face, Chief,” Tom said, and yanked the knife out with a flourish. He licked it clean. “Tastes like honey and brown sugar.”
    “Vile,” Oliver said, turning back to the street. “Absolutely vile.”
    “I swear it isn’t so. You want a taste?”
    “I need your attention on the mission, Tom,” Oliver said, eyes darting about the street.
    “Always the responsible leader, eh?” said Tommy. “A regular John Bull, if you’re a cove.”
    Oliver couldn’t help but smirk. “And yet I still thump you at Heckler’s card game.”
    “Ah, but you do it so seriously …”
    “Quiet.”
    A crowd poured out of the pub three buildings down towards Aldgate Common: a group of middle-aged men fancied up in bowler hats and suits, carrying canes they couldn’t possibly need and all of them three sheets to the wind. Traitors. Collaborators. The baron’s business partners and secular employees, selling out their fellows for a few shillings and the privileges of good food and running water.
    Oliver’s eyes jumped from face to face, until they settled on a handlebar moustache to rival the worst American aristocrat.
    Oliver stiffened. “That’s him. Get ready.”
    With a grunt and no small manner of squealing from his joints, Tommy lifted himself to his full height. He always seemed to be fighting his weight; he lurched like a rhinoceros trying to stand on its hind legs.
    Tom took a few clanking steps forward. Oliver glanced back, teeth clenched and a grimace on his face.
    “I doubt anyone will notice the difference,” said Tommy. He gestured vaguely upward at the ceiling, where, beyond the steel crossbeams and braces that supported the next floor, some unseen factory or mechanism chunked and chugged away. The noise echoed everywhere through the concourse.
    Oliver grunted, but couldn’t argue.
    Tommy noisily hunkered down behind him, peering over Oliver’s shoulder at their comrade across the street.
    An instant before, Missy had been another invisible passerby, clad in drab grey and camouflaged against the soot-stained streets and thick air, but her pale skin popped to life as she stepped into the lamplight. With one subtle manipulation of her arms, her short coat fell open at the shoulders, revealing a blouse slightly too large for her frame. It hung just low enough to reveal a scintillating hint of neck, while looking for all the world like an innocent mistake of the wardrobe; a fault of the shirt, somehow.
    Tommy whistled behind him. “Good Lord, she is a peach.”
    Her lips came together, pursed in a perfect, pinched look of utter disdain, a shock of red in a world of greys and gaslight.
    She’s a professional.
    Missy cast one glance towards their hiding place, her lips cracking into the barest hint of a smile. She adjusted the silk ribbons on her hat and smoothed her skirt, fingered her sandy hair where wisps of it crept down over her ears. Then the distant look returned and she whirled pointedly towards her quarry.
    She’s even working us, Oliver marveled.
    “Get ready,” he