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the gallows.
    And it’s all my fault.
    More to the point, Jake realized, whatever information Derek might have about his father would be lost unless he could figure out a way to save the warrior’s neck.
    Jake suddenly realized he was in danger of being arrested himself as the bobbies on the other side of the wall discussed spreading out to comb the area.
    Besides that, his so-called uncle’s henchmen were still out there somewhere, looking for him. They could be lurking anywhere right now, he thought uneasily. Derek had warned him they would just keep coming after him until they had finished him off, and Jake believed him. Better hide.
    Ducking back into the maze of alleys, he brushed off the thought of trying his luck at that mansion Derek had ordered him to go to—Beacon House. No boy of the streets who had lived by his wits for as long as Jake had was about to go and blindly trust himself to strangers. He had seen the place before, a great, hulking, old mansion on the river, but he wasn’t sure who owned it or what went on in there.
    He prowled through the back alleys until he came to the Strand and spied on the place from across the street for about ten minutes. But he didn’t go in. No, he needed to think carefully about all this before deciding his next move.
    Recalling Dani’s promise to meet him with the potpie at his hideaway, he picked up his pace to return to the only place he thought of as home. It wasn’t much, but his uncle’s minions wouldn’t find him there.
    Nobody would.
    It was a safe place. A hidden place.
    Where freaks like him belonged.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    Dani O’Dell
     
    Dani O’Dell headed home to the rookery, back to the rough, grimy world she hated. But she only stayed long enough to put her apple-cart away. As she angled it into the ground floor apartment in the tenement house where the O’Dells lived squashed into two small rooms, she dreamed of a day when she might be respectable and live in a nice home, where everything was pretty and clean, orderly and quiet. Where no one was drunk or crude-mannered, and a dirty word bellowed at the top of a person’s lungs would have been unthinkable.
    In her neighborhood, such things passed for normal conversation. On the other hand, rookery life had made her tougher than she looked. The world saw a poor-but-decent girl, small for her age, but when provoked, Daniela Catherine O’Dell had all the Irish fight as her pack of brawling elder brothers.
    Fortunately, they weren’t at home right now; otherwise, Jake would not have seen his mincemeat pie again. “Come on, Teddy.” She let her dog out of the sack, secured his leash, then retrieved the potpie off the lower shelf of her cart and concealed it under her dark woolen cloak. “Let’s get out of here before anyone comes,” she whispered to her dog.
    With that, she left the apartment, locked and bolted the door, then set out with a businesslike stride for Jake’s hideaway. Teddy trotted along by her heels.
    Though she was nervous about carrying Jake’s stolen contraband for him, it was her self-appointed role in life to manage that stubborn blockhead.
    Somebody had to do it, and he didn’t have a mother. They had that in common, but at least Dani had known her sainted Ma before she died. She still had all the mementoes and the single precious photograph of her that Da had set up on the mantel as a sort of shrine. Poor Jake knew nothing of his parents and she knew he ached about it, though he’d never say so.
    From the first time she had laid eyes on him three years ago, being pushed around and bullied by her brothers, Dani had realized she had found herself an ally in the harsh rookery world. Her brothers did that sort of thing to her all the time, shoving her this way and that like a football, having fun at her expense. She had shrieked at them like a banshee the day she had found them jovially beating the poor young stranger to a pulp—just to toughen him up, they said, as if they