Free Seven for a Secret by Lyndsay Faye

hacksman must have driven close to blind despite his lamps, for the snowfall formed an arctic curtain of bitter lace. More than one bone-snapping bump sent Mrs. Adams’s hand clutching for the strap handle.
    But she said nothing. And comfort unasked for is often comfort unwanted. So we listened to the whistling gusts until the driver reined his horse, cab wheels skidding dangerously and the half-frozen creature whimpering with nerves. Prince Street was drowning in white. After paying the driver his two bits with a few pennies extra to wait for us, I could scarce find the neat brick station house’s door.
    Inside, the fireplace crackled hotly behind the hinged pine countertop with the quill and inkstand where my brother was meant to be presiding. Granted, according to my pocket watch, his shift had just ended. We’d passed nine o’clock at night by then. But the station felt oddly abandoned, for the roundsmen were freezing their eyebrows off trudging in circles and their captain was nowhere to be seen.
    I gestured at the bench. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll just check the office.”
    Mr. Piest commenced a slipshod but kindly meant tale of the formation of the copper stars to the hollowed-out Mrs. Adams as I set off. Halfway down the hall, I paused. A muffled scraping noise met my ears. Then a chirping birdlike giggle. I threw open the office door.
    My brother Valentine was seated in a wide oak desk chair. So was a ravishing girl of about twenty. Plump everywhere that mattered, red-gold hair falling about her bare shoulders, with her back to Val’s chest and her left arm crooked up around his neck. Laughing as if the fact of his palm cupped inside the swell of her canary-yellow corset was more amusing than anything else she could think of.
    Maybe she was right, and she couldn’t. But I didn’t have time to talk it over.
    “Jesus Christ, Val,” I growled. “In the
station house
?”
    “Timothy!” Val waved a friendly cigar at me with his free hand. Not bothering to desist from any activities being performed by the other. “Tim, meet Miss Kelly Quirk. Kelly, this is my brother—as plumb a pin basket as they come.”
    After those few seconds, I understood the following pieces of truly disturbing news.
    First, from the languor of his towering frame and the constricted pupils within the vivid green circles of his eyes, my brother had just indulged in the usual evening recreation: sipping enough morphine tonic to float a barge down the Hudson. Second, from
plumb pin basket—
which loosely translates from flash into
good little brother—
the upswing of an absolutely soaring state of loose-limbed euphoria was gaining momentum. I can force sobriety on the man during the downward spiral, but not before. That would require divine intervention, and God doesn’t indulge me on that particular front. Last, he’d been scraping his fingertips through his dark blond hair, sending the tip of his widow’s peak up in a boyish scruff, which meant that a hefty dose of ether had also been involved.
    Ether makes Val tactile. Before he starts seeing things, that is.
    Of the six substances Valentine combines with morphine that I’ve documented, ether is trickiest to navigate. I loathe the stuff. Literally anything could happen to him—from loss of consciousness to winning an impromptu boxing match to deciding that wearing clothing is a hypocritical act. If I’d been anxious before over our mission, now a spoiled lemon had magically appeared in my gut.
    “Miss Quirk here was nabbed on suspicion of stargazing.” The near-scarlike bags beneath Val’s eyes quivered with amusement. “She’s explaining why she’s no bat, and I think she’s got a nacky argument. Where’s the whoring if it’s for free sport and not a little hard cole clinking in the pocket?”
    Kelly Quirk nodded sagely, then emitted a happy squeal that presumably had something to do with my brother’s whalebone-obscured right hand. I wasn’t eager to