Ambush or Adore: A Delightfully Deadly Novel Read online

  Ambush or Adore

  A DELIGHTFULLY DEADLY NOVEL

  Gail Carriger

  Contents

  A Note on Chronology

  Author’s Opening Remarks

  The Beginning Ends

  1. No One Forgets Their First Vampire

  2. Swath Cutting and Other Concerns

  3. Explosive Décolletage

  4. How Not To Crash a Dirigible

  5. The End of Evil

  6. Coming Out After Midnight

  7. Ministrations of an Academic

  8. The Art of Vanishing

  9. The Language of Loss

  10. Wedding Season

  11. Mulled Wine Reunion

  12. A Very Mature Affaire

  Epilogue

  How to Marry a Werewolf Sample

  Author’s Note

  More Gail Carriger?

  About the Writerbeast

  Acknowledgments

  AMBUSH OR ADORE

  Gail Carriger

  Wait, what am I reading?

  New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger brings you an aching story of independence, promises, and decades-long pining set in her popular Parasolverse. Agatha is a spy compelled to travel who has always stuck to the shadows, invisible and alone, with one glaring exception. Pillover is a grumpy academic stuck in Oxford, a homebody with nothing to recommend him and no interest in changing his ornery ways. He is so absentminded he keeps misplacing the love of his life, again and again.

  Can two lonely souls reconcile passion with patience when free will is on the line?

  A note on chronology

  This story technically follows Defy or Defend, but does not have to be consumed in that order. In fact, it interweaves, spans, and references characters and occurrences from many of Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse stories. This is a fan service piece and as such it is best enjoyed if you’ve read (or are at least familiar with events chronicled in) the Finishing School series and the Custard Protocol series (specifically Reticence).

  Confused by Parasolverse chronology?

  Gail has a fun, silly newsletter full of gossip, sneak peeks, giveaways, and answers to many questions including chronology. Join the Chirrup

  Author’s Opening Remarks

  I thought you might like to know, Gentle Reader, before we get started, how it might have happened…*

  Agatha and Pillover, after a tempestuous courtship of over a decade, which they both thoroughly enjoyed, finally married. He made her happy, although she never gave up practicing espionage. Agatha made him slightly less miserable than any other wife would have, which, for Pillover, was as close to bliss as he could get. Agatha’s father, having died before he could disapprove the match, left Agatha an heiress of modest means. Pillover thus achieved status as a Malevolent Fortune Hunter, which was the closest he came to Evil Genius. He carved a career for himself as an Oxford don, teaching Latin and terrorizing undergraduates.

  * This is an excerpt from the original (unpublished) ending for the Finishing School series, written in 2015 before I decided to torture you.

  That was how it could have gone, but it didn’t. And now for the torture…

  The Beginning Ends

  Soggy Top Hats

  Spring 1896 ~ Hyde Park, London

  Pillover Plumleigh-Teignmott’s biggest problem was that he met the love of his life when he was twelve years of age and then spent the rest of that life misplacing her.

  Or more to the point, she kept intentionally misplacing herself.

  If Pillover were to give love advice to anyone (which he wouldn’t, because his expertise was in obscure ancient languages and certainly not love or, heaven forfend, romance) he’d tell them not to fall in love with a spy. Plays hell with one’s heart, not to mention one’s wardrobe and peace of mind.

  Trying to hold onto an intelligencer was like grabbing for soap in a bathtub – very slippery and always causing a great deal of emotional splashing about that got everything wet and messy, but didn’t ever really affect the soap. And one couldn’t very well blame the soap, could one? After all, it’s in its nature to slip away, again and again.

  Pillover had thought this thought for the very first time years ago, when he’d swished his skirts around uncomfortably at a school for evil geniuses. At the time, he’d been tasked with providing a distraction, and very effective those skirts turned out to be, if he did say so himself. And he thought this thought again over forty years later, when he went to meet a dirigible in the middle of a rainstorm on the off chance that his lady-love might, just maybe, be aboard.

  This last time Pillover had misplaced her for well over a year (longer than ever before). He worried maybe he’d missed the chance to tell her the stupid, tiny, insignificant detail of his heart being caught up in her red hair like a floundering fish in a net. Because that was the other thing about spies – sometimes when they disappeared, they disappeared forever.

  It’s possible that Pillover had never told Agatha of his love because his metaphors were pants and he was no poet to know the right words. But it would, in fact, be beyond silly to have held his reserve for decades only to have her die on him, misplaced forever. That would be worse than careless. That would be sloppy.

  Back to the fact that being in love with a spy was slippery and hell on the wardrobe.

  It was raining, hard. Pillover’s top hat was soggy and collapsing slightly on one side. His suit was made of that kind of fabric (his sister would know the name) that showed every single drop as a dark stain, with no greatcoat to protect him. He’d forgotten it somewhere. Because who would have thought it might rain in early spring in London? (Everyone but Pillover, naturally.) Consequently, he didn’t look as he ought, waiting for the light of his life with the certain knowledge that he had, in order to save her, also betrayed her trust. He wasn’t sure why he was there at all. Simply to see her again as soon as possible? To beg forgiveness?

  Regardless, he did not make a very prepossessing figure, which was probably a good thing. Agatha never liked a scene. It was unlikely she wanted him there at all, especially after he’d shared the photograph. Plus she hated being noticed. Which meant she preferred it when he faded into the background, too. Pillover was only tolerably good at that, an unfortunate accident of genetics having made him rather more handsome than he was comfortable with.

  There had been a phase, once, when ladies found his sulky air combined with dark good looks appealing. That inevitably passed when he responded with little to no conversation or encouragement. Now, while most of his hair was still holding on valiantly, it was going grey. His shoulders were stooped from bending over manuscripts, his face wrinkled from squinting in weak lighting. He had to wear spectacles all the time instead of just for reading. He looked, in fact, exactly as he was, an Oxford don of middling teaching capacity but good reputation, well published and set in his ways – a confirmed bachelor. His sulky air was now deemed grumpy and eccentric. His lack of a wife termed a crying shame and regarded by the artistic set with raised eyebrows. His continued occupancy of a cozy cottage alone in Oxford was thought slightly suspicious. Why did an Oxford man of Pillover’s tenure and disposition need to keep a house alone? And what need had he to visit London when there were no symposia on offer? What secrets did he keep that led him to pursue such a solitary lifestyle, and did they involve mistresses or molly houses or something more sinister?

  On a landing green in Hyde Park, in the pouring rain, did Pillover look like a man waiting for the love of his life? As he had always waited. As he’d probably continue to wait even if she had misplaced herself permanently.

  It was worse, he thought,
to be the one who waited than the one who went away. She always knew what was happening to her when it was happening. He had to guess and imagine and hope she returned. Perhaps some of the curve in his shoulders and the grey in his hair was payment paid to the consequences of misplaced affection.

  Pillover had never attained the rank of Evil Genius. He’d only gotten as far as Reprobate Genius, but when it came to Agatha he sometimes thought even the genius part was a misnomer. He, who had translated Catullus. He, who had his research on Roman linguistic variance as relates to Linear B accepted for publication by no fewer than six academic societies. He, Pillover, could not fathom or comprehend one redheaded female. And he never had.

  Spring 1896 ~ Spotted Custard dirigible, somewhere in the aetherosphere en route back to London

  Agatha never bothered to ask the Spotted Custard’s crew how Sophronia knew where to direct them to find her. She figured there were coils within coils and if one needed to track an intelligencer then the smartest choice was to find another intelligencer to do so. Sophronia, being Sophronia, had delegated. The end result was that Agatha, who had never needed nor asked for anyone’s help, had been pulled out of the soup by the most eccentric crew of misfits she’d ever encountered in her life. And she’d been a spy for fully four decades.

  Suffice it to say, ordinarily Miss Agatha Woosmoss would certainly not have required their assistance. Ordinarily they wouldn’t have been able to find her, either. Agatha was usually good at covering any traces of her presence. However, when someone else got hold of her, they were not so good at hiding it.

  That had happened too many times on this particular run. First in India, then in Singapore, and then in the Paper City. A terrible string of bad luck plus the necessary destruction of her only means of escape, and Agatha had ended up having to take shelter with the very creatures she’d come to Japan to find – fox shifters. She was convinced Lord Akeldama would never forgive her for it, but was also tolerably certain she didn’t care anymore for the vampire’s good opinion. She’d taken a certain visceral pleasure in the company of the kitsune. They were creatures of power and connection. They were bossy women making trickster choices with crafty intent. They reminded her in many ways of her dearest friends, Sophronia, Dimity, Sidheag, and Vieve. Not as they were now, but their schoolgirl selves. As if there were an element of childish whimsy to fox shifters, although kitsune were reputed to be some of the oldest shifters on earth.

  Maybe Agatha had stayed a little too long with them because of this. And maybe that was part of it – around kitsune one lost track of time.

  Yet what Sophronia chose to send and pull Agatha out of Japan with was, quite frankly, ridiculous. A fancy modernized pleasure dirigible that looked like a massive ladybug captained by Lord Akeldama’s spoiled adopted daughter and crewed by her ridiculous friends? The audacity of it all! Agatha identified Vieve’s son and one of Vieve’s assets in the boiler room. There was Preshea’s daughter in the swoon room. Not to mention a set of twins who were somehow related to Sophronia. And of course, there was another of Lord Akeldama’s spies aboard already. He would never let his daughter out of his sight for long without a watcher. The ship was crawling with legacy intelligencers. Blundering, awkward, untrained, unsubtle children, so far as Agatha was concerned. But who was she to judge the exhausting representatives of new youth?

  Of course she judged. Spying was her only passion and her entire business.

  They’d created a rollicking mess, of course. Exposed her, her position, and the kitsune in the process. Even started a mini-revolution and certainly instigated massive civil unrest, because Prudence Akeldama was not an asset, she was a blunt instrument of chaos. Agatha thought it mildly unfair of Lord Akeldama to have unleashed her on the world. Not to mention Sophronia’s activating her. What she failed to realize was that someone else had activated Sophronia.

  Still, Agatha was unexpectedly happy to be heading home. It was a sensation she so rarely enjoyed, and it was colored by a certain confidence in two things – that she was going to leave her patron and that she was about to take a whole new kind of risk.

  It made her, on the grey shrouded deck of a fancy dirigible coasting the aether currents with deceptive speed, oddly nostalgic.

  1

  No One Forgets Their First Vampire

  1848 ~ London

  Agatha Woosmoss was ten years old when she met her first vampire. He would not be her last. But he would be the most important for the rest of her life.

  She was to learn during the course of their association that Lord Akeldama was like that. And she had to learn how to forgive him for being fabulous and somehow vital in her life despite her best efforts to the contrary. Vampire fangs were the fulcrum upon which society pivoted. Lord Akeldama’s fangs were sharper and more present than most.

  When he’d first found her, she’d been hiding. That alone would have told her he was different, special. Normally when Agatha was hiding, no one could find her. No one wanted to. But the strange vampire turned out to be important and perceptive in a way that other grownups normally were not. The way he moved was unusual, too. It was as if his body knew that it could (and should) go faster than it did, all the time, but was muffling itself. As if his whole gorgeous, brazen appearance was actually a physical whisper – subverted so as not to be a threat.

  Agatha, age ten, was very good at identifying threats.

  “What are you doing here, little girl child?” he asked, sliding behind the curtain next to her.

  With which action he went from being the center of everyone’s focus to being lost and invisible, just like her. Agatha was deeply impressed, and she wanted to know how he did it.

  “I’m watching, sir.”

  “Are you, indeed, little button? And what have you learned?”

  “I will tell you if you will tell me how you knew I was here.”

  The flash of his fangs was a surprise to both of them. “Bargaining already? Very well. Some of us only watch the shadows – the light can take care of itself.”

  She nodded. It was one of those adult non-answers. She was accustomed to those. But she could play them back at him, if he wanted that kind of music.

  “I have seen two possible affaires of the heart, a missing diamond ring, the one who drinks too much, and the one who drinks too little. I have seen the fire of too much avarice and the pride of too little consequence. It is the same as all of Papa’s other parties, and yet not, because you are here with your fancy men – all flash and bother and trained to see everything. Do you wish to compare notes?” She was proud of her barbs.

  Agatha thought, if he let himself, the vampire might look impressed. “How old are you, toggles?”

  “Old enough to know I should look for the unsaid things first.”

  He tilted his head and eyed her neck but not, she thought, with real interest. Vampires did not recruit children. It was one of their most sacred rules. She thought maybe he was wondering if she were worth raising up to adulthood, like livestock. So he might recruit her when she was grown. She wondered if she would end up a cow for him to milk, or veal pie?

  “Do you have a patron?” he asked.

  Agatha actually laughed at him. Then quickly suppressed the sound. She wanted to stay hidden even if she must share the shadows.

  “I am only ten, my lord.”

  “Only that? Still an infant, then. I am terrible at guessing human ages. You all look young to me. What’s your name, baby bean?”

  “Agatha Woosmoss, sir.”

  “Of course it is. How would you like to do this forever?”

  “Do what, exactly?”

  “Hide and watch.”

  Agatha thought it sounded nice, but two years ago she had enjoyed playing with a porcelain goose doll dressed like a strawberry. Tastes changed. “Does anyone know, at ten, what they want to do for the rest of their life?”

  “I don’t understand how humans think. You only have one short life to live. Why not spend it on somethin
g you’re actually good at?”

  Agatha frowned and considered. “I want to be free. Can you give me that?” She gestured at the party with all its games of society, and marriage, and restrictions – the tiny, boring life offered to girls like her.

  “You would be trapped by me. But everyone else, no.”

  Agatha wondered if trading freedom futures was something vampires did regularly. Probably. “But you are bound by your own code, are you not?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  Agatha thought about her mild-mannered mother, plain and round and quietly bruised. She had lived a life in timidity and fear and died the same way. No ghost came from her. Her soul had been squeezed dry by a life of insignificance until she’d had nothing left worth leaving behind.

  Agatha was old enough to realize how young she really was, but she knew one thing for certain – she did not want to live a life of inconsequence and neglect.

  Of course, she did not know then that she was trading that future for one where she intentionally neglected the world instead. As if, in an effort not to be worthless, she would withdraw from everything, even reality. She would turn everything that had made her mother weak into her own strengths.