by K Childs
Had I misread the evidence again? Perhaps the Duke was in no more danger than any random citizen. His mother, unpleasant as she was, didn’t strike me the sort to dabble in Oneirology.
I aimed to find out.
By the time we left the restaurant it was too late for the Duke to get a taxi home. I frowned, unsure what we could do with this conundrum.
“Your Grace, would you like to stay at my house?” Ben offered.
“I wouldn’t want to impose. How about your digs, Rose?”
The question threw me for a long moment. I stared at him, agape.
Ben saved me. “Rose lives in a women’s apartment. No men allowed.” And then he threw me under the bus. “Although I’m sure Mrs. Davies would allow it for one night.”
The Duke slid his arm around mine. “It is close. Let us go and ask, shall we?”
“Of course.” I was going to kill Ben.
We walked in a polite silence back to the apartments.
Mrs. Davies opened the front door and beamed at me. “A good evening?”
“Patently,” I replied dryly.
“Might I impose on the couch in the downstairs guestroom, Chelsea?” Darrien asked.
I stiffened. No one called Mrs. Davies by her first name. She was a hardened old school principal with a stiff iron rod on hand even nowadays.
“Of course, it’s too late for a taxi, now isn’t it?” She ushered us in. “And any friend of Miss Beaumont’s.”
Damnation.
We found ourselves in the downstairs drawing room. It was well stocked and neat, although a little too feminine for my tastes. Mrs. Davies brought us some sherry and went to make the guestroom.
I eyed the Duke, wondering if he and Ben had colluded on this scheme together while I used the powder room.
“So, you’re a Detective Inspector…”
I nodded. “I made rank with the Gakki case a few months ago.”
“You might be the first woman to make the rank,” he said.
“Yes.” I sipped my sherry. “Your aunt was one of the first women to join the police force.”
He nodded. “My family is rather progressive in that way. What about yours?”
“Unamused, I am afraid. My father insisted on education and Mother still blames him for my career.”
“I take it that he approves.”
I chuckled. “Not particularly.”
It was easy talking to him. His relaxed voice made my nervousness melt away, and after a while I forgot about his rank.
He had a light-touch to his words, and that damn smile was definitely working with the wine.
“Tell me about this case that made your career.”
“You know about the oriental trade, yes?”
“Yes, of course. I like silk and china as much as the next man.”
“We also get a few exotic imports and goods from Japan. That includes diplomats and merchants. Sometimes however, we receive folk coming from overseas with their own imports.”
“These Gakki?”
“Yes indeed. Hungry dead. They are similar to the Irish ghosts; insubstantial during daylight but as solid as any man at night. They will eat anything. I mean anything. A few immigrant families lost their source of income, lost their homes, no money, no food. They starved in the streets. Their corpses turned into the undead.”
“How thrilling. Does it happen to all Asians?”
“No. The Japanese. They were infected with something in the Dreamscape. A creature of Ether that attaches to a human mind.”
“Like a virus?”
“Indeed.”
“So, a foreign infection?”
“The War might be over, but tourism is a war on our Dreamscape, I’m afraid. Most beings from the Ether are hostile or downright unsafe for us mere mortals.”
“Possession?”
“Possession of a corpse. We lost one constable entirely, the other lost a leg. Tore it right off him.”
I had the Duke’s undivided attention.
“You’re joking?”
“Not at all.”
“And you managed to solve this?”
“We burned their physical bodies. I burned the beasts in the Ether.”
“How does that work, per se?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Ether is what Oneirology deems to be the fabric of the Dreamscape… you’d be better asking a professor if you want a strong explanation.”
“You seem to do just fine. However curmudgeonly you are with explaining.” There was a teasing tone in his voice.
I stood and headed for the door. “Thank you. I am awfully tired. Might we resume this discussion at a later time?”
“Please, humour me a little longer.”
I sighed, dramatically, and leaned against the door. “Ether is magic. You call it Anima, the Tenebrologists call it Shade. I think it is just the same thing, from a purely outside opinion.”
“Oh.”
“Now might I retire? I have a killer to catch.”
He chuckled. “Good night, Detective Inspector Beaumont. Sweet dreams.”
“What are you two doing?” Darrien asked.
Lord Howard’s butler had kindly fetched a ladder and Ben balanced on the top step, charcoal in hand and charm booklet open to my specific instruction.
I glanced at the Duke over his bed. “We’re inscribing a very particular set of wards on your ceiling and floor. This should help prevent the beast from getting to you. Although Lady Howard was kind enough to provide rooms for Sergeant Wallace and myself, so we will be nearby if anything does manage to get through.”
Ben finished his outer rim and began a circle.
“No, Ben, the four corners first, then the circle.” I corrected. We were mixing a few different rituals from a hodgepodge of ancient traditions. Modern Oneirology, a mixture of rituals stolen from small island natives, Native Americans, and the little of ancient Celtic and Greek tradition the British empire had inherited.
Ben dabbed at the ceiling, smearing the charcoal into a grey mess with his shirt sleeve and then started again. His coat was over the Howards’ butler’s arm, saved from ending as a mess on the floor.
“Will this work? The other wards were destroyed, you said it yourself.”
We’d had an unfruitful day sorting witness statements and clarifying comments from the nobility. No one could give me more than Darrien had supplied yesterday. A big shadow, claws. I spent the morning exhausting the Foreign Office archives, the Magical Management archives, and a list of only partially translated Assyrian, mostly extinct, fairy tales. Fruitless. Or, rather, I had plenty of clawed beasts—too many to poke a stick at. None impressed me with power.
Darrien had been a shadow on me the whole day.
I rolled my lips. “The other wards were to keep things in the Ether. These are to keep you out.”
Specific wards always worked better than generic. I didn’t know what was targeting him precisely, so it was better to operate with what I could control. The Duke. If he was cut off from the Ether, nothing in it would catch him. Well, nothing outside of the house.
Ben finished and climbed back down. I’d already crawled under the Duke’s bed and placed the sister markings for the ones on the ceiling. “All good. I’m in the next room and I’ll be ready for anything that might try to get in.”
“This seems like an awful lot of precaution if you are not even sure it is after me. Besides, wouldn’t it be better to just stay awake the whole night?”
Ben and I shared a look. “You can’t.”
“I beg to differ.”
“No, I don’t mean it is impossible, but how much sleep have you had, Darrien? You put up a good face, but you’re exhausted. You will start to micro-sleep and that is dangerous. You’ll be slipping into the Dreamscape directly then. Uncontrolled, untrained.”
Micro-sleep was the quickest way to a messy death when a hungry ghost walked by.
He raised a
n eyebrow, the typical Animancer arrogance slipping in, his expression begging: ‘How hard could it be?’ I answered that look with my own hardened glare. “Your—Darrien, your Anima won’t last without a chance to recharge. I beg your indulgence and trust on this issue.”
Ben whistled under his breath; damn diplomatic of me.
Darrien made a small noise and nodded. “Well then, do I need to do anything?”
“No, the wards are already active. Stay on the bed while you sleep, and you should be fine.” I had no idea if the Duke was a sleep walker.
He chuckled.
Ben chuckled. His daughter Edwina sleep walked.
We bid the Duke a good night and retired to our rooms. I was glad that Lady Howard had allowed us to stay, but perhaps it made her feel safer to have the police in the house after her husband’s murder. She was a sensible woman by all accounts.
I undressed and fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down in the foreign bed. My body ached from running and fighting, and I had experienced a significant shock. Last night’s patrol was one thing; I was running on four days straight of night patrols. Eventually some part of me would give if I didn’t take a break.
The Dreamscape rolled in through a hazy mist. The All-Seeing Eye once sculpted the landscape around his house into a tower. Shock ran down my spine when I emerged from the mist and found myself in rubble.
The Dreamscape was infinitely malleable, but I had always believed that the Eye’s tower was a stabilizing point. He would stand at the top of the tower and watch for nightmares and Ethereal intrusions.
I moved around, finding Ben sifting through the rubble.
“I want to rebuild it, but I don’t think I can.”
“Creations of that scale are beyond either of us, Ben.” I placed a hand on his shoulder.
He stood, dropping the bricks, pointing. “Lady Howard.”
She had conjured herself a bucket and was wearing a full mourning dress. The widow used a small shovel to take cement from the bucket, spread it over the rubble and place a brick back, one at a time.
It would take a very long time to finish reconstructing like that. Brick by brick.
I didn’t interrupt her. Neither did Ben.
The Ether swirled about us, a green fog laying over the city. The empty black sky held no stars. The landscape vanished into the London forest, houses and trees twisting and fighting for dominance. An inky black river roared through it all, twisting and twining at the whim of dreamers. The river was to the east one moment and the west the next. Fixed directions in the Dreamscape were not.
Other Oneironauts wandered the landscape. Fortune-tellers looked for portents, the Agency looked for wrongdoing. Children stumbled in and out of the landscape, being chased by nightmares, hunting for pirate treasure or dancing with fairies. We did not have the manpower to keep everyone safe. Too many things lurked in between our world. Most dreamers would be fine. Most.
There was a vast maze of black thorns through which folk would lurch, searching for the centre in which sunlight and pretty things dwelt.
Classrooms sat open, filling with faceless visages as bank managers tried to give speeches to them clothed in their birthday suit.
London’s Dreamscape was a surreal pattern and tapestry of life. Nothing out of the ordinary.
We found the anchors for Darrien under a chunk of wall. The wards glowed a healthy white and silver, shimmering. The charcoal was slightly wobbly on top, but it was functioning.
“What do you think we’re dealing with, Rose?”
“I don’t know. I thought the Lideric made the most sense. Her hands turned into claws. I was wrong.”
“She wasn’t missing fingers? Maybe there is another Lideric with five claws?” Ben asked.
“Claws and talons make different marks. Serrated edges on the cuts on Charlie and the Eye. The Lideric wasn’t missing fingers, either, Ben. No, even a male Lideric wouldn’t have claws the size of the marks we found on the bodies—wrong shape and…”
“Wrong monster?” he finished for me.
“She was feeding on the old man’s anima, not his blood. And the way she said she hadn’t eaten… it struck true.”
“Why kill without being hungry?”
“Exactly. She was fresh off the ship. I doubt she would have strayed too far from the East end,” I said.
We played cards, ate biscuits made of nostalgic memories and brainstormed monsters. Time wasn’t different in the Dreamscape, but the perception of it vanished. A good moment could stretch for eternity, a bad moment could repeat itself until you woke up screaming.
We were conjuring chairs to sit in—I opted for an armchair. The green mist around us began to stir and swirl. The Ether became choppy and sinister.
“What the devil?” Ben dropped his chair and conjured a sword. Good reaction.
The mist surged and grew into a behemoth. Shadows clung about it, masking the creature in the Dreamscape as it manifested. Eerie green lanterns lit up in the sky—glowing eyes. It was bigger than the tower, an awesome titan in the Dreamscape, wreathed in shadow and mist that clung to a bestial form.
The shadow opened a huge, fanged mouth and roared.
Lady Howard, building her wall, fell back, vanishing, as she no doubt woke with that thunderous echo reverberating in her mind.
I lost the sword I had conjured, my body gone numb from the sound washing over me. I’d never felt anything like it. My vision wavered in the Dreamscape, threatening to spill me into waking. I closed my eyes and concentrated, fell to my knees.
Ben kept his wits and leapt forward, slicing at the manifestation.
His sword passed right through it, and the behemoth moved an arm and five black talons descended toward him.
Ben rolled out of the way of the gouging attack at the last second. He began to conjure something a little bigger.
I pulled a pistol from the Ether. Aiming was little needed with a target so enormous and I fired. The shot bounced. The ring of metal hitting metal rose to my disbelieving ears. Immaterial to sword, impenetrable to projectiles.
The shadow behemoth tore through the Dreamscape, swiping at the glowing protections we were guarding.
The ward circle crumbled under the onslaught. The wards in the Duke’s room would be blasted, just like the others. Sheer power, the like I’d never seen.
“Ben! I’m waking up!”
Ben nodded and I dropped through the Dreamscape, leaving him alone to fight the beast. I needed to get to the Duke.
I woke with a jolt. My body must have been tense and I hit the bed with a falling sensation in my gut.
I blinked for half a second and then threw myself into action, leaping out of bed and wrenching the door to my room open and crossing to Darrien’s.
I turned the handle open in a precious heartbeat and flew inside. The wards blasted away, Ether crept into the shadows of the room—a hideous green light tore through into reality and focused on Darrien’s sleeping body.
I flung out the Ether with a furious blunt-force wave of magic. Unlike the Lideric’s precise, almost surgical approach, this beast tore through Ether to connect to the physical world. The ceiling vanished, and I could see the Dreamscape over the Duke’s bed. Something huge and scaled gazed at him with glowing green eyes. My magic forced the Ether to close—tent flaps smoothing back into nothingness.
The room rippled and rolled back into a dark, moonlight-kissed bedroom. Darrien’s window was partially open, and his curtains stirred in a faint breeze, bringing with it the kiss of rain dripping down on the world outside.
The Duke woke with my arrival and sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes. “Wha—what is it?”
His voice had that husky, sleepy quality that at any other moment might have made me conscious I was only wearing a nightdress.
Ben came in a second or two later, holding his bleeding arm. “Did you catch it?”
“Are you alright?” I rolled my shoulders bac
k, looking around the room. Nothing had dropped out of the Dreamscape into the room. Relief eased my tense shoulders and I shook my head, answering the question. “No, I threw the Ether out before it could manifest.”
Ben swore. Blood was dripping down his shoulder; painting his own nightshirt red.
“What happened?” The Duke demanded.
“The beast came for you.” I examined Ben’s injury, a glancing blow. He would survive; the skin had been torn but it wasn’t too deep, “Ben, go and clean yourself up.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I thought your defacing of the ceiling was supposed to prevent that.”
“To a certain extent, Your Grace.”
Lady Howard appeared in her nightgown and shawl, holding a candle. “Inspector, what is under my roof?”
I pursed my lips.
“One of your guests is a dragon.”
I returned to my room, dressed quickly, then met Lady Howard, Ben and the Duke in the kitchen where they kept the medical supplies.
The butler had been roused by Ben and sat bandaging the sergeant’s arm while I made coffee.
Ben’s fob-watch told us it was three in the morning. I doubted any of us would be going back to sleep.
“There hasn’t been a recorded dragon sighting since 1298. They were wiped out during Edward the First’s reign.”
I nodded. I had not considered a dragon; six hundred and thirty years of extinction was pretty good grounds to exclude one from the list of suspects.
“Shapeshifter?” Ben asked.
The kitchen shared a shiver.
“I still believe it is in a human skin.” I took a sip of coffee. “Who else is in the house?”
“Duchess Montagu, Ladies Innsford and Winchester, the Earl Alston, my good friend Eleanor Bruce, and Robert Carfax, the writer.”
“And who was not here yesterday?” Ben asked.
The Duke’s eyes widened. “Surely you don’t mean…?”
“Only someone in the house would have been able to get through those wards, dragon or not.” I looked down.
