The Fire in the Glass

by Jacquelyn Benson

The black bird on the oak turned, fixing her in its dark, unblinking stare.

  Lily refused to flinch from that penetrating, alien gaze.

  “Tell him that I am here. That I need help. Please. Whatever your price is, I will pay it. Just tell him . . .” Her voice caught. She swallowed thickly, pressed on. “Tell him that we are here.”

  “Oy, enough of that, now. Get out of the bloody window,” Gibbs snapped from within.

  “The boy in Bloomsbury who talks to birds,” Lily repeated urgently as the raven continued to gaze at her. “Please.”

  Rough hands grabbed her arms, pulling her inside. The glass slammed shut, hard enough to rattle the panes in their frames. Outside the window, startled black birds flapped into the air again, circling over the yard.

  All except for one, who continued to stare through the window, dark eyes glittering.

  Hartwell returned. With a glance, he swept in Lily’s position on the floor where Gibbs had tossed her.

  “Put her back in her room.”

  Gibbs grabbed her arm, yanking her to her feet. Lily pulled against him, resisting, turning to Hartwell.

  “Do we have a bargain?”

  Gibbs tugged.

  “Come on, you stupid bint.”

  She dug her heels in, compelling Hartwell to answer her.

  “Do we have a bargain?”

  “I am considering it,” he snapped in reply.

  Gibbs tucked his shoulder into her stomach and lifted her. He hauled her down the hallway, his bones digging into her with every step back to room 109, where he tossed her unceremoniously on the floor.

  The door slammed shut. It was heavy, closing with a solid clang. The lock thudded into place.

  Lily went to the window. The sun was nearly gone, the shadows thickening outside the steel-grated glass. She could barely see the dark form of the oak tree sprawling across the grand front lawn of the derelict estate.

  Its branches were empty.

  Gloom settled over the heath, the sun all but vanished behind the trees. Lily sat on the cold, bare floor, trying not to let the fear tear her to pieces.

  She had exposed herself, shared her most intimate secret with a monster, hoping to wrest a promise from him to release Estelle.

  It was a promise he would certainly break. Her best hope was that she had sparked enough interest in him to divert his attention from Estelle for a little while, perhaps long enough for some form of help to arrive.

  Who was she fooling? Help wasn’t arriving. Her only chance of that lay in a conversation with a bird, which had been decidedly one-sided.

  Hartwell would take Estelle’s blood as soon as he found a compatible and trustworthy recipient. The delay of securing that might buy her a few days, but nothing more.

  Lily had been committed. As Mrs. Amanda Church, Hartwell could use her over and over again for as long as he liked, just as he had Mariah Reznik.

  And there were no oil lamps here.

  The despair threatened to choke her, thick enough to make her dizzy.

  Her skin hummed, arms tingling with a low warning.

  They were coming. She knew it, yet the knowledge meant nothing because there was nowhere she could run. Nowhere to hide.

  A moment later, the door opened. Northcote and Gibbs came in.

  “I’ll need her coat removed.”

  Hartwell’s voice floated casually from the hall.

  The men grabbed her. Rough hands forced her onto her stomach on the floor. They tugged off her coat, her face grinding against the rough boards.

  She saw Hartwell’s boots as he walked into the room. He set a black medical case down on the floor beside her, flipping the latches and opening it to reveal two rows of tidy glass jars and the long needle of a syringe.

  “Hold her securely and give me her left arm.”

  Northcote pinned her legs. Gibbs tugged her right hand up against her back, then knelt on it, the pressure threatening to crack her ribs. He wrenched her left arm up, twisting it until her shoulder screamed. He held it steadily.

  Hartwell plucked one of the jars from his case. He screwed it onto the syringe.

  She felt his fingers on her arm. They were light, gentle. He unbuttoned and rolled back the sleeve of her shirt, pushing it up past her elbow.

  He took a rubber strap from the case and tied it around her triceps, snugly, then tapped at the sensitive skin inside her elbow.

  “You may feel a slight prick,” he said, his tone as even and detached as it would be during some routine exam.

  The needle pierced her. The pain was small compared to the blazing tension in her shoulder, but it was constant. She felt the tip of the needle wiggle as Hartwell turned some lever on the syringe. He turned it back a moment later, and after another uncomfortable jiggle, he set the little vial down on the floor by her face.

  It was full of blood.

  He took a clean vial from the case, screwing it into place. Another twist of the lever.

  Her body screamed. Gibbs’s knee crushed her fingers, her ribs aching. Her cheek scraped against the cold floor.

  Another vial joined the first. A third left the case.

  Northcote shifted his weight on her legs and her knee twisted, sending pain shooting up her thigh.

  The needle wiggled in her arm.

  Finally, a third jar joined the others on the floor.

  “That should be enough for testing,” Hartwell announced as though to some unseen audience hovering at the edge of the room.

  He tugged the needle neatly from her arm. She felt the pressure of his hand on the place where it had been.

  Hartwell neatly, carefully wrapped a length of gauze around her arm. He secured it with a pin. Then he screwed lids onto each of the three vials, tightening them securely.

  They were labeled A. Church, Room 109.

  He set them neatly in their places in the medical case, then snapped it shut and stood.

  At some unseen sign, the men let go. Lily rolled onto her side, then to her knees, hugging her aching arms to her chest. She didn’t trust herself to stand, her legs tingling as the blood flowed back into them.

  “See that she has something to eat. I don’t want her weakened,” Hartwell ordered. Then he left, taking the case with him.

  Northcote tipped his cap to her as though apologizing for a mild inconvenience. Gibbs simply looked away, slamming the door shut behind him.

  She braced one foot against the floor, pushed, and staggered painfully to her feet.

  She was shaking, but not with terror, though threads of that still lingered, wrapping cold fibers around her heart.

  It was rage. Pure, explosive rage.

  He would not get away with this.

  It didn’t matter that she was locked away—alone, unarmed, with no hope of a rescue.

  She was unarmed, but she was not powerless. She had never been powerless.

  She reached inside, stretched herself fully and intentionally toward that strange instinct, the one that warned her when stairs were about to collapse or that danger was coming to the door. The same instinct that, years before, had always known when the housekeeper was going to knock a vase from the table, or that the tall, dashing earl who was her father was about to pay a call.

  The part of herself she had spent so much of her life trying to run from.

  The cold receded, and the pain, the walls of the room growing wider until they simply crumbled, dissolving into a space of unimaginable vastness.

  Lily stood in the heart of it.

  Knowledge hummed around her. Inside of her.

  For decades, when she had felt that knowing, she had flinched away from it, tried to bury it as deep and far as possible. Knowing meant pain, meant a sense of responsibility she didn’t feel capable of living up to.

  In the middle of the flowing crowd on Tottenham Court Road, Robert Ash had told her that there was more than one role she might play—that success and failure weren’t always so black and white. That sometimes to simply stand up and fi
ght was enough, no matter the outcome of the battle.

  She felt her power buzzing with life. This time, instead of running from it, she extended her mind to touch it . . .

  . . . and it answered.

  THIRTY-THREE

  LILY SAT IN THE center of the floor of the narrow room and waited.

  She held her connection to her power, focusing her mind and the stillness of her body on maintaining it. It was less than perfectly steady. She could feel it flicker as though the lingering effect of the Wine of Jurema was already beginning to fade.

  She would worry about that later. It was strong enough, now, for what she needed.

  There.

  Awareness hummed. Someone was coming.

  Lily rose. She stepped behind the door, pushing her back against the wall. Her timing needed to be perfect. A moment too soon or too late and she would fail.

  She held herself silent and ready.

  Footsteps thudded down the hall. They stopped at her door. There was a heavy clang as the lock turned.

  The door began to open.

  Lily waited for a precise moment. Then, pressing her shoulders back against the wall, she lifted both of her legs and kicked with all her strength at the solid oak panel of the door.

  It slammed into Northcote, catching him on the shoulder and throwing him into the far side of the frame. The bowl he was carrying crashed to the floor and shattered.

  Lily didn’t hesitate. If he had even a moment to recover, her chance would be lost. As soon as her feet returned to the floor, she grabbed him by the coat, extended her leg, and yanked him over it.

  He tripped, falling into the room. Lily kicked him swiftly in the gut. Northcote groaned, pulling his legs up to protect his middle from another blow.

  It didn’t come. The reaction was enough to get him fully clear of the door. Lily leapt past him, grabbed the knob and slammed it shut behind her.

  She threw the lock.

  The hallway was empty. Numbered doors marched in either direction, illuminated by the harsh electric light.

  She knew now why they seemed familiar. They reminded her of another hall, extending to an impossible distance, lined with infinite doors resonating with unimaginable potential.

  In her hand she held the key, the power to choose from infinite possibilities of what might be . . .

  The lingering hum of the vision shattered as Northcote began pounding violently on the door.

  She ran for the staircase.

  Halfway down the hall, the hum of awareness sang at her again. Someone was coming.

  She grabbed a knob and ducked through the nearest door, closing it carefully and quietly behind her.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs. They hurried down the hallway, echoing past her hiding place.

  She waited until they had just begun to slow, then darted into the hall.

  Gibbs stood in front of the open door to Room 109. Both he and Northcote turned as she appeared and bolted for the stairs.

  She heard them come after her as she entered the landing.

  Every ounce of logic screamed to go down, a ground floor door or window offering her best chance of escape. She hesitated. This wing was renovated and was intended to be part of an asylum. Though she wasn’t sure how far along the repairs to the ground floor had gone, if it was anywhere near complete, there would be no way out down there.

  She thought back to the office Hartwell had claimed for himself. It had lain at the edges of the renovated wing of the building. Beyond it was the part of the old manor that faced the road, which she remembered looking entirely abandoned when she passed it on her ride a few weeks before.

  If she had a chance of escaping this place, that was where she would find it.

  She tore herself away from the desperate desire to descend and instead bolted up the staircase.

  She reached the top and raced past another procession of horribly regular doors.

  The painter’s cloth still hung at the far end of the hall, as she remembered it.

  She could hear Gibbs and Northcote hit the hallway behind her, their feet thundering on the floorboards.

  She blasted past the cloth and found herself at the edge of a ballroom shrouded in gloom and decay.

  There were no electric lights here. The high ceiling was hung with cobwebs and shadows. Mouse-eaten curtains trailed over the windows, pale squares on the wallpaper showing where paintings had once been displayed. It smelled of pigeon droppings and earth, the space bare save for a pile of smashed wooden chairs in a corner.

  She didn’t hesitate, sprinting into the room as the last rays of the setting sun faded against the filthy glass of the tall windows.

  On the far side, she slid into the mouth of a midnight-dark hall.

  Doors lined it, leading into rooms of furniture shrouded in rotting dust cloths, wallpaper peeling like flayed skin, plaster bubbling and splitting along the ceilings. The hallway twisted and turned, branching unpredictably. Lily dodged along it blindly, making random turns, throwing herself deeper into the bowels of the ruin.

  She dashed down a once-grand staircase, now draped with rotting shreds of an old carpet runner.

  Footsteps thundered behind her, coming closer.

  Knowing she was running out of hallway, she picked a room at random and dodged inside.

  Once, it must have been elegant. Now, only the crooked frame of a four-poster bed remained, stripped of mattress and hangings. The closet door was ajar, windows shuttered, save for one that hung precariously from its hinges.

  Nothing else. Nowhere she could hide—save for that closet itself, which was as good as a trap if anyone came to look. And they would certainly look.

  She heard the steps slow, voices drifting to her down the short length of hallway that separated her from her pursuers.

  “Which way did she go?” Gibbs demanded.

  “I don’t know. I can’t bloody see.”

  “Weren’t you listening for her?”

  “I couldn’t hear her over your blasted racket.”

  “She’s in one of the rooms. Check them.”

  Her heart pounded against her chest as she surveyed the room once more, panic growing. Where could she hide?

  The answer came to her. It was mad. It was also her only option.

  Taking a deep breath, willing herself to calm, she reached for her power once again.

  It was less steady than it had been back in Room 109. Perhaps what she had done already had drained it. It felt more distant and ephemeral.

  Fear quickened. She forced it back. She could do this—she would do this.

  The connection settled, grew stronger . . . and she knew.

  What would come in a few moments was clearer to her than what had just passed, more real and substantial, complete to the last detail.

  She put her back to the wall beside the door, maintaining that awareness steadily. Then, as she had known he would, Gibbs entered the room.

  Now.

  Instinct prompted her. She glided neatly, silently into place behind him, then took another half-step to the right as he turned and looked at the place where she had been.

  Left.

  She moved. Gibbs swung around to pull back the door, peering into that darker corner of the room, as Lily watched calmly, quietly from behind him.

  Right again. Forward.

  She was a shadow dancing behind him, the knowledge of where he would go coming just a moment before he moved. That brief space was all the time she needed to choose her own reaction, time it perfectly—a quick step to the side as he turned to examine the closet, ducking inside. Slipping behind him as he reversed and made his way back into the center of the room.

  She knew when he would stop. Knew that he would rub his hand along the back of his neck as though sensing her eyes there. He would turn, abruptly, but she was already ahead of him, already moving to keep her body just out of his line of sight so that all he saw, as he whirled, was the empty room.

  He studied it suspiciousl
y, then muttered under his breath.

  “Bloody ghosts.”

  As Lily watched him from the center of the room he had just thoroughly searched, he walked away.

  The knowing flickered, sputtered. She felt the connection thin, then snap, worn through by the effort she had just demanded of it.

  She reached for it again, desperately. What answered her was only a fragment, an echo of what she had felt before.

  The sense of loss, sharp and painful, surprised her.

  Whatever shortcut she had taken to find that place inside herself was broken. To return there again, she would have to take the long road—the road Ash had described, made up of practice and training and discipline.

  But if she did choose that road . . . she had a hint, now, of what might be waiting for her at the end of it.

  Evangeline Ash’s voice echoed through her mind.

  You have no idea what you are capable of.

  Discovering what she meant would have to wait. Right now, Lily needed to determine how she was going to get out of this place alive.

  She moved to the window and peered out the opening made by the half-fallen shutter.

  She had descended to the first floor. An ancient, twisted wisteria vine climbed up the exterior of this side of the manor. She could reach the trunk of it from the window. It would offer easy means of scaling her way down to the leaf-strewn, cracked stones of the patio.

  From there, she could head for the road in hopes of flagging a passing car or carriage. There was also the farmhouse where she’d had her leg stitched up a few weeks before. She could run there and tell them to send for help, help that could come barreling through the doors to save Estelle.

  Except Estelle wouldn’t be there anymore. If Hartwell knew Lily had escaped, he would move his other research subject or simply dispose of her before the authorities could arrive. They would find only a renowned physician in a half-renovated building, inconvenienced by a raving woman in trousers who was at best a housebreaker and at worst, an escaped lunatic to be remanded back to Hartwell’s care.

  No. She couldn’t run. Not without Estelle.

  She thought back to the long, glaring hallways of doors. Estelle might be behind any one of them. She could hardly hope that Gibbs and Northcote would stay distracted in the ruined part of the manor long enough for her to try them all, and there was still Hartwell himself to consider.