FF (March 2013) Jess Faraday - The Left Hand of Justice.epub

Starvation and disease haunt the streets of 1820s Paris, while supernatural terror stalks the night. The once-famous police force is a shambles, its elite Bureau of Supernatural Investigations disbanded. Only Detective Inspector Elise Corbeau remains, spared by a shadowy protector for a purpose not even she knows.

When charismatic cult leader Hermine Boucher is kidnapped, all fingers point to her ex-lover, inventor Maria Kalderash. But the further Inspector Corbeau investigates, the more suspects she turns up, until finally, the finger is pointing right back at the Paris Police.

Navigating a web of betrayal, hidden agendas, and shifting alliances, Corbeau must protect the innocent, bring the corrupt to justice, and escape the ever-growing list of people who want to see her at the bottom of the Seine. If she can do it, she just might save her job. And she may even find true love.

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Sample

Chapter One

“Inspector!”
The little boy’s voice at her door pulled Inspector Elise Corbeau back from warm, dreamless sleep—back into the biting bone-chill of the Paris night. The boy, Joseph, was her eyes and ears in the slums of the Montagne Ste. Geneviève. When things went bump in the night, he was the one who came to fetch her.
And since the new chief inspector had shut down the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations, a lot of things had been going bump.
“Inspector, open up!”
“It’s still dark,” she muttered, throwing off the covers. Her head was thick with sleep. But at least she’d slept a good few hours, and at least the night had sent Joseph and not another of Ugly Jacques’s men.
Joseph began to batter the door with the end of his wooden leg.
“Peace, child. I’m coming.”
Corbeau reached for the lamp on the wobbly bedside table and gave it a shake. Finding it nearly empty, she set it back down without lighting it. Her room was as spare as a monk’s and less than eight long paces across. She’d save the oil for when she really needed it.
Gingerly, she pulled herself upright, cradling her head in her hands. Her skull felt like an eggshell. A woolen dress lay crumpled at the foot of the bed. She pulled it over her nightshirt and cinched a thick leather belt around her waist. Then she slid the strap of a rectangular bag over her head and one shoulder. It contained the tools issued to every Bureau agent: bottles of iron filings, holy water, and salt—the dearest of the three and the lowest in supply. The bag also contained a rosary and a small, fat book of prayers in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. She pulled a box from under the bed and added half a dozen of the pills she had compounded the week before. The original recipe, a mild sedative, had come from her mother, a healer. Over time Corbeau had used her own knowledge and experience to refine it into an invaluable tool for subduing the natural and supernatural alike.
She tied back her stringy blond hair and stretched her neck and shoulders. Her left arm ached where Ugly Jacques’s collector had tried to separate it from her body earlier that night. With any luck, the next one wouldn’t find her before she received her miserable pay at the beginning of the month. But just in case, she pulled her truncheon from its place between the bed and the wall and tucked it into her belt as well.
She dragged herself across cold, bare wood to the door. Rattling open the locks, she blinked down at Joseph through bleary eyes. The darkness was so deep she could only make out the edges of his shape. But she didn’t need flickering paraffin light to know what she would see: a pinched, white face with light-brown eyes, brown hair the texture of straw sticking out from under a brown cloth cap, and some other child’s cast-off clothes hanging like rags from his birdlike limbs. As he shifted from side to side, she heard the unmistakable squeak of new boot-leather. Who had bought him shoes?
“Another one?” she asked, pushing back a yawn.
“’Fraid so, Inspector.”
“That makes three, then.”
Three supernatural disturbances in the slum that week. Michel Bertrand was the first—a stout young man with the whiff of the stables about him, half-insane from nightmares he insisted were coming true. Then there was Claudine Fournier, a surprisingly refined young woman, given the broken-down rooming house where Corbeau had found her. Mademoiselle Fournier, too, was troubled by nightmares—only her nightmares were manifesting themselves in this world through spontaneous fires and glass objects bursting from no other cause than Mademoiselle looking at them. Corbeau had subdued the nightmares but left with singed hair and fingertips. Corbeau had managed to settle Bertrand and Fournier before the gossipmongers who made their living selling rumors to the scandal sheets had caught wind of them, but if things kept going like this, it would only be a matter of time before they did.
During her tenure with the now-defunct Bureau of Supernatural Investigations—before the new chief inspector had demoted her to fetching coffee and filing papers—Detective Inspector Elise Corbeau had answered such calls as a matter of course. Only a handful of incidents had necessitated actual spiritual intervention. But the recent incidents were different. Corbeau hadn’t been able to trace these disturbances to whistling wind or seeping damp. And she no longer had the support of the Bureau, her fellow agents, or their leader and mentor, Eugène Vidocq.
The floorboards felt like ice beneath her feet. Corbeau glanced longingly back at her narrow bed piled high with covers rapidly losing their warmth.
“It’s in our building this time,” Joseph said, sensing her hesitation. Ugly Jacques wasn’t the only one Corbeau owed. Joseph’s mother would be sending for Corbeau every time something went bump in her night for the rest of her life.
And Corbeau would have to drop everything and go.
Corbeau sighed. “Let me get my coat.”
She pulled on stockings, laced up her boots, and ushered the boy back into the tight blackness of the hallway. She buttoned her coat as they felt their way down the hall. She had candle stubs and a tinderbox in her pocket, but she wouldn’t squander them on the stairwell that she knew better in darkness than in daylight. Seconds later she and Joseph had wound their way down three cramped and creaky flights of stairs and stood shivering on the street in the weak light of an unreliably maintained streetlamp.
“Hard night?” Joseph asked.
“Hmm? Oh.” Her hand went to her face, fingers probing the tender, swelling cheek that throbbed in the early November chill. No doubt the skin was already turning an impressive shade of purple. “Something like that.”
“Ugly Jacques?”
She threw him a rueful glance. No nine-year-old should know the name of Paris’s most notorious moneylender. Less still should he know about Corbeau’s own financial difficulties. The Saint Christopher medal she’d given him glinted from the band of his cap.
“A little excessive for two weeks’ pay,” she muttered, abandoning the pretense of protecting him. “Of course the way prices are rising, he probably wants to get his money while it’s still worth something.”
“I bet you taught his man a lesson, though,” Joseph said with a smirk.
Corbeau grinned, and winced as pain shot through her head. She had left the bastard unconscious on the floor of Oubliette in a pool of broken glass and cheap wine. It had been a shameful waste of wine.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got cab fare, then,” Joseph said.
Corbeau’s eyes went to his wooden leg. She didn’t know how he’d gotten to her building, but he probably couldn’t walk all the way back home. Although he certainly seemed sprightly that night. She looked again.
“Where’s your crutch?”
Joseph usually limped along on a wooden post strapped to his leg just below the knee. Having had the apparatus since he was six, he’d become adept enough to become a useful messenger, provided he could catch a ride now and then. Without the crutch, though, he had a slow, lurching gait, like a drunkard.
But just now he’d scrambled down the stairs in front of her, unassisted and as nimble as a goat. She peered closer at his new boots. Two of them.
“You’ve got a foot under there,” Corbeau said.
He grinned. “A proper one, with hinges on the ankle and toes.”
“You steal it?”
“Naw,” he said, with mock offense. “It was payment for a job well done. The shoes, too.”
“What kind of job?”
“Now, Inspector, how could I get the kind of work that pays in shoes if I went around running my mouth to the police?”
She narrowed her eyes.
“We’ll talk about this later.”
He followed her long strides down the street, around the corner into an alley, where a man was snoring under a blanket on the front bench of an open cart. She’d thought to let Victor go home to his wife when he’d dropped her off earlier, but a little voice had told her she’d need him later. She was glad she’d listened. Corbeau laid her hand over the nose of the sturdy piebald harnessed to the front of the cart and whispered a few words of encouragement before giving the wheel a kick.
“Up, Victor!” she said sharply. “We’ve work to do!”
She wasn’t the only one in Paris who owed someone a favor. From the man’s grumbling, Corbeau guessed he was probably wishing he’d sold the blasted horse to the knacker. The animal hadn’t been possessed, as Victor had thought, but lack of it would have relieved him of the ability to take Corbeau around at all hours. And he wouldn’t owe her for having settled the matter.
“Where to now, Inspector?” he grunted after Corbeau and Joseph had settled themselves on the thin covering of straw in the cart bed.
“Montagne Ste. Geneviève,” Joseph said.
Victor turned around gruffly at the impertinent little voice. A sudden clap of thunder shook the air.
“As the boy says.”
“All right, then,” Victor said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Chapter Two

Half an hour later, Victor’s cart skidded to a stop on the slick cobblestones before Joseph’s building, a tumbledown rooming house owned by his mother, the widow Bernard. A fat droplet of rain burst on Corbeau’s cheek as the widow stepped out of the shadows of the front door to meet them.
“Thank you for coming, Inspector,” she said, holding up a sputtering candle as Corbeau swung her leg over the side of the cart.
A sudden crash shook the house behind them. Victor’s horse started, and Corbeau barely had time to lift Joseph clear before the animal dashed off down the road, the cart careering wildly in its wake.
Gripping Joseph firmly by the hand, Corbeau followed the widow through the small crowd that had gathered. Women huddled beneath moth-eaten blankets. Sleepy-eyed men stamped feet rag-wrapped against the cold. Despite the hour, the cutting chill, and the tingle of the impending downpour in the air, their expressions made it clear that they’d rather take their chances on the dark, dirty street than inside.
“What is it, Inspector?” someone asked. Another cold drip fell on Corbeau’s face.
“A noisy spirit?”
“The devil himself?”
Corbeau kept walking. If she stopped to explain her theory—and that she’d seldom encountered either spirits or demons in her many, many years of investigating these kinds of disturbances—she’d be there arguing with them all night while some poor soul suffered.
Inside, the rooming house was all peeling paint and dark corners, the air thick with the mingled odors of sweat and burning coal. It was no palace, but thanks to Corbeau’s continued payments, the widow was close to owning it outright. Joseph’s mother might work until her fingers bled, but she and her children would never starve. That had to be worth something—perhaps even the right foot of a six-year-old boy.
As they crept up the stairs, Joseph clumping along at their heels, Madame Bernard’s tallow candle guttered and spat, emitting more black smoke than light. The widow was probably about Corbeau’s age, approaching thirty, with similar traces of early responsibility etched around her mouth and eyes, and a sprinkling of gray in her dark hair. Her thin build hid a stout heart; she hadn’t summoned Corbeau lightly—which made Corbeau even more wary of what she would find.
Suspicion prickled up Corbeau’s spine as they ascended the stairs together. When the air around them began to vibrate, Corbeau stopped. The sound was so low that probably only her trained ear recognized it as sound; others would sense only an inexplicable feeling of menace. It was a sensation Corbeau would always associate with the one true demonic possession she had witnessed. That had been her first year with the Bureau—long enough in the past that most days she could pretend she’d imagined the whole thing. But at times like this, she realized the terror of that day was permanently etched onto her heart.
“Has this been going on long?” she asked.
“An hour, maybe two.”
“Am I the only one you called?”
“Yes, Inspector.”
“No priests?”
“No, Inspector. No police, either. Only you.”
Given the one-time competition between Bureau agents and His Holiness’s exorcists, and the uncomfortably close relationship His Majesty was forging with the Church, the last thing Corbeau wanted to encounter at the scene was a priest. Except, perhaps, for a fellow Sûreté agent. Though intervention from the prefect’s office had kept Vautrin from sacking her with the rest of her colleagues, Corbeau wasn’t at all certain her benefactor would continue to protect her if she was discovered violating the chief inspector’s order to leave supernatural matters to the Church.
On the second-floor landing, the widow Bernard paused to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. Corbeau rubbed her hands together. The temperature had dropped noticeably between the ground and second floors. Shivering—and not entirely from the chill—she laid a hand on her truncheon and followed Madame Bernard to a door at the end of the hall.
“Right here, number four.”
Corbeau tensed as something crashed against the door. She swallowed.
“When you’re ready,” she said.
With a determined nod, the widow chose a key from the ring chained to the waistband of her skirt.
The air inside the apartment thrummed with the menace Corbeau had felt in the stairwell, only here it was strong enough to rattle their bones. Objects—a tin cup, a chamber pot, a Bible—floated through the air, describing wobbly orbits around the room’s perimeter. No wind had been blowing when Corbeau arrived, but on the opposite wall, grimy curtains whipped in and out of an open window. A shirtless, sweating man stood at the center of the chaos. He was younger than Corbeau, but tall and athletically formed, with curly dark hair recently trimmed and thick, dark chin stubble. His large, dark eyes twitched toward them, then rolled back into his skull as he shuddered violently.
The hair stood up on Corbeau’s arms—an irrational response. She had to get ahold of herself. Nothing more than an atavistic fear of insanity shared by peoples across time and space. That’s what Vidocq had taught them, and in most cases, it was enough to put panic in its place. To Corbeau’s experience, undiscovered spiritual talents were often at the root of the disturbances the academically minded described as insanity, and which the superstitious interpreted as demonic possession.
Still, it paid to be cautious.
“Bell, book, and candle, if you please, Madame,” she said, without looking away. “And take your son with you.”
The widow Bernard didn’t question why a police inspector was asking for a priest’s tools. She simply seemed happy to be dismissed. Normally, that would have been the point. Familiar-sounding objects and rites comforted the superstitious and kept them out of the way. In the past, people had been more comfortable thinking there was a demoniac in their midst—an evil they already believed in and could understand—than hearing about uncontrolled spiritual energies erupting from unsuspecting individuals. But with the waves of religious hysteria traveling through the areas recently, would that continue to be the case?
“Hello,” Corbeau called. The man’s head jerked toward her. His upper lip curled, and he let out a low, rumbling snarl like a dog. Corbeau sucked in her breath and straightened. “That’s enough. You