Demon Blood

impressions of character before arriving at a scene, but Mina had no solid ones to give. “No.”
    She’d eaten lunch at Trahaearn’s feet, however. Near the Whitehall police station, an iron statue of the duke had been erected at the center of Anglesey square. At twenty feet tall, that statue did not offer a good angle to judge his features. Mina knew from the caricatures in the news sheets that he had a square jaw, a hawkish nose, and heavy brows that darkened his piercing stare into a glower. The effect was altogether strong and handsome, but Mina suspected that the artists were trying to dress up England’s Savior like her mother lighting candles in the parlor.
    Perhaps all of him had been dressed up. The news sheets speculated that his ancestors had been Welsh gentry and that he’d been taken from them as a baby, but nothing was truly known of his family. Quite possibly, his father had pulverizing hammers for legs, his mother fitted with drills instead of arms, and he’d been born in a coal mine nine months after a Frenzy, squatted out in a dusty bin before his mother returned to work.
    Twenty years ago, however, his name had first been recorded in Captain Braxton’s log on HMS Indomitable . Trahaearn, aged sixteen, had been aboard a slave ship bound for the Americas, and was pressed with the crew into the British navy. Within two years he’d transferred from Indomitable to another British ship, Unity , a fifth-rate frigate patrolling the trade routes in the South Seas. Before they’d reached Australia, Trahaearn had led a mutiny, taken over the ship as its captain, renamed the frigate Marco’s Terror , and embarked on an eight-year run of piracy. No trade route, no nation, no merchant had been safe from him. Even in London, where the Horde suppressed any news that suggested a weakness in their defenses, word of Trahaearn’s piracy had seeped into conversations. Several times, the news sheets claimed the Horde had him close to capture. He’d been declared dead twice.
    Perhaps that was why the Horde hadn’t anticipated him sailing Marco’s Terror up the Thames and blowing up their tower.
    “Is he enhanced?”
    Mina almost smiled. Even shouting, Newberry didn’t unbend enough to use “bugger.” Enhanced had become the polite term for living with millions of microscopic machines in each of their bodies. Bugger had been an insult once—and still was in parts of the New World. Only the bounders seemed to care about that, however. After two hundred years, not a single bugger that Mina knew took offense at the name.
    Of course, if Newberry called her by the name the Horde had used for them— zum bi , the soulless—she’d knock his enhanced teeth out.
    “He is,” she confirmed.
    “How did he do it?” When Mina frowned, certain she’d missed part of the question, Newberry clarified in a shout, “The tower!”
    He wasn’t the first to ask. The Horde had created a short-range signal around their tower, preventing buggers from approaching it. Trahaearn had been infected, but he hadn’t been paralyzed when he’d entered the broadcast area. Mina’s father theorized that the frequency had changed from the time that Trahaearn had lived in Britain as a child, and so he hadn’t been affected on his return. She’d heard the same theory echoed by other buggers, but bounders preferred to think he hadn’t been infected with nanoagents at the time—despite the Iron Duke himself confirming that he’d carried the bugs since he was a boy.
    Her father’s theory seemed to Mina as sound as any. “Frequencies!”
    Newberry looked doubtful, but nodded.
    Frequencies or not—it didn’t matter to Mina, or to any other bugger. Thanks to the Iron Duke, the nanoagents no longer controlled them, but assisted them. The Horde no longer constantly suppressed their emotions—violence, lust, ambition—or, when the darga wanted them to breed, whip them into a frenzy.
    After nine years, many who’d been raised under Horde rule were still learning to control strong emotions, to fight violent impulses. Not everyone succeeded, and that was when Mina often stepped in.
    With luck, this murder would be the same: an unchecked impulse, easily traceable—and the murderer easy to hold accountable.
    And with more luck, the murderer wouldn’t be the Iron Duke. No one would be held accountable then. He was too beloved—beloved enough that all of Britain ignored his history of raping, thieving, and murdering. Beloved enough