Disclaimer: Yay, disclaimer time! Kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it? I don't own any of the good stuff.
Hey peoples! Some of you may remember a series of mine called "The Highly Irregulars of Baker Street" that was up here ages ago. This is my attempt at rewriting that series; hopefully it's going to be a bit better than last time. Anyways, it's very different to last time. Please read and review, and be as harsh as possible in said reviews.
PROLOGUE
The morning after, there's dried blood on the floor. It's brown on the old grey floorboards and I bend down and touch it and I think, Shit, it shows up awful dark — but in a numb, cold kind of way that doesn't have any feeling behind it. I've done my crying; all the tears and screaming against the blanket, they've all gone now and I can look at the blood on the floor and touch it and it means nothing.
The sky is showing blue through the hole in the roof. I stare at it, craning my neck back until it aches and my eyes water. My hands shake. I pull the torn edges of my blouse together and think of knives in the dark, of fire glaring up into the sky, of the crack a hanged man's neck makes when they drop the trap door.
The wind blows through the roof and down the chimney with a moan like a train whistle. I keep expecting the blood on the floor to have gone, to have sunk through the boards and dipped onto the beds of the people down below, but every time I look, it's still there.
Wiggins' hand is a sudden weight on my shoulder, making me jump like a spooked horse.
"Kit," he says.
I turn all the way around, stiffly, like an old and weary stage dancer. There's blood on Wiggins' face, dried and cracked from his eyebrow to his chin, and it's the same colour as the blood on the floor.
"Kit," he says again, then stops, and I know it's because if he says anything, if he lets any thoughts come out of his mouth as words, he's scared of what I might do.
So he says nothing and I understand him anyway. He makes as though to take my hand, but I recoil away from him and, with my heart thudding in my chest, reach for the door. Wiggins straightens his King's-man and follows me out, and we leave the boarding house together.
A "King's-man" was a scarf worn by costermongers.