About Malachite: The Year Without Summer
by Kate Cotoner
52 pages / 13900 words
ISBN: 978-1-61040-172-2
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A murderer is loose in London's most notorious rookery, and now his evil is spreading to the upper classes. Constable Nicholas Green is sent undercover to investigate, armed only with his wit and a malachite talisman, a gift from his mother. At the multiple crossroads of Seven Dials, Nicholas meets Kristian, a mysterious gentleman who claims to know the identity and motivation of the Rookery Murderer.
Kristian is searching for a companion to help him defeat the dangerous, charismatic Lord Winter. He thinks he's found his man in Nicholas, and together they plunge into an underground world of occult and esoteric worship. The malachite talisman protects Nicholas from the evil that threatens to engulf the city, but only great sacrifice can ensure London's safety...
Sample
Two in the morning, and the night felt stale. Constable Nicholas Green shoved his hands into threadbare pockets and wished he'd thought to wear a pair of gloves. Though only late September, the air had the callous bite of January. A raw, white ache of cold nipped at his fingers and toes, and he shuddered, hunching further into his thin jacket. The scarf that wrapped around his neck and muffled the lower part of his face did nothing to warm him. It smelled of pipe smoke and fried onions, and Nicholas reminded himself never to borrow items of apparel from Sergeant Ross ever again.
The cobbles rang with his footsteps as Nicholas walked up Mercer Street towards Seven Dials. He kept to the centre of the street, gaze sweeping every shadow, every narrow passage or doorway, watching for an assailant. No sensible man entered the St Giles rookery alone during daylight; only a madman--or a desperate man--would dare wander here after dark.
Nicholas considered himself neither desperate nor mad. He was here for a reason, one that chilled his soul. In his few years at Bow Street he'd seen all manner of crimes committed by one human being against another, but the recent murders had stunned even the most cynical and stalwart of Her Imperial Majesty's Metropolitan Police.
The shadows deepened and crawled. Nicholas slowed his pace, flexing his frozen fingers. Though slender and slight, he knew how to bring down a man twice his size. Bow Street tutored its constables in the lowest forms of fighting, and more than once Nicholas had had cause to thank his teachers. In the squalid surrounds of the rookeries, the haunt of hundreds if not thousands of thieves, whores, beggars, and the angry dispossessed, life was cheap. It wasn't even worth a ha'penny, and Nicholas valued himself more highly than that.
The blackened tenements rose tall on either side. Few windows showed even a crack of light, but from behind the blank facades came sounds of life and violence. Nicholas paused to listen to the course of an argument, voices rising and falling, the crash of bottle-glass and the heavy thud of a body against wooden shutters. A baby wailed; a woman screamed. Outside, in sharp response, dogs barked. Just another night in the rookery. Nicholas moved on.
He glanced up as he walked. Through the churning fog he caught glimpses of one of the Health Board's dirigibles, its fragile skin silvery in the searchlights and lashed around with thick black ropes. In more affluent parts of London, the dirigibles pumped out hot air to force the thick, green-tinged fog to lift and dissipate. Over the rookeries, the airships were less numerous and sprayed a dry ice mixture into the fog, encouraging rainfall. The idea was to sluice out the filth of the poorest parts of the capital; Crown-controlled rains washing the waste into great drains that emptied into the Thames estuary.
A marvellous idea in principle, but difficult to work in practice. The hot air pumps worked only sporadically, while the dry ice spray resulted in almost day after day of unrelenting rain across the whole of London. People spoke of it as the year without summer, and Nicholas couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the sun.