by Beth Cato
“I’m coming to help you, Lee. I’ll do all I can, but . . . God. The qilin said your life will always be in danger.” She shook her head. “I suppose that’s true for any of us, but for you . . . what does it mean? I save you now, but you’ll be dodging armies and assassins for the rest of your days? What kind of life is that?”
A life he had chosen. He’d been a child when he had faced that dilemma, true, but his eyes were wide open, even then. He’d seen what the Chinese endured in California. He heard the mutters all around. He knew he needed to do his part. If he hadn’t been the emperor’s son, if he hadn’t been graced by the qilin’s visits, he still would have fought as a soldier. His life was set to be one of hardship, no matter his path.
“And thank you, qilin. I don’t think I adequately expressed my appreciation for your help. I am, as you note, very human. I suppose I can only apologize for that so much.”
She set the plaque aside and rubbed both legs in turn, flinching at the contact with her sensitive skin. Looking for any kind of distraction, she focused on the sylphs in their cot above, and her heart raced in sudden alarm. She lurched to stand, tottering against the opposite bunk to keep her balance.
The sylphs’ presence felt diminished, their buzz at half its normal volume.
Had she accidentally left sylphs behind in Bakersfield? Her return to the Bug had been such an anxious blur, with Fenris sick, Mr. Augustus adjusting aboard, and the need to check over the ship to make sure nothing was gone or left behind to spy on them.
She listened with her ears for a moment, ensuring that Mr. Augustus was still sound asleep, and hobbled to the pantry. The sylphs read her intent and followed without coaxing.
Ingrid sucked in a breath. Their number was halved. She held out a jamu-pan on her flattened palm, the way one would feed a horse. The sylphs swarmed, pecking away at the pastry. In a matter of seconds, it was gone.
“Where are the other sylphs?” she murmured.
They flashed a profound sense of satisfaction at her. gone! Their emotions didn’t convey any sort of alarm or regret. If they’d felt anything of that sort on the return to the Bug, she would have noticed it. Instead, they were as happy as ever.
“Did they go . . . home?” she whispered, sparing some of her energy to portray snowcapped mountains for them. She had to imagine the Cascades, as she had only seen the Sierras close up in pictures.
yes! they said with buoyant enthusiasm.
She couldn’t help but feel sad. If only they’d told her of their intent! She would have expressed her deep gratitude, and fortified them with more baked goods for their journey.
Ingrid sat on her cot and watched the remaining sylphs flutter back toward their bunk. She bit into a jamu-pan of her own. These rolls weren’t as good; the baker hadn’t even punched a divot in the top, so they didn’t even look right to her way of thinking. But at least the strawberry jam inside was delicious.
“Fed the sylphs?” Cy softly called.
“Yes.” She debated returning to the cabin to talk to Cy, but he’d continue to mull over the qilin’s words, and she didn’t want to do that right now. She wanted . . . she didn’t even know what she wanted. Peace for her, for Lee, for Cy, for all of them, but that was impossible. Not even heavenly beings could make such things happen.
“Goddamn it!” she spat. She punched the mattress, causing it to emit a squeak of protest.
Nearby privacy curtains rattled as they were pulled aside. “Is something wrong?”
Ingrid flushed as she faced Cy’s father. “Everything’s fine, sir. I’m sorry if I woke you by accident.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Ma’am, I was married over thirty years. Declaring everything to be ‘fine’ is like trying to sell me a lame horse.”
“Well then, sir, let me say that I’m incredibly frustrated, but I don’t feel comfortable discussing the matter.”
“That’s fair,” said Mr. Augustus. “I can’t expect you to confess to me as if I’m some priest.”
“Honestly, a frock would make a confession even less likely, sir.”
He guffawed at that, then quieted as she motioned above and pressed a finger to her lips. “I daresay, I agree with you on that.” He sat up and straightened his clothing, then stood to grab his jacket from the hook. “Can’t bear to be too undressed in your presence. It’s just not right.”
She thought of her men’s cotton drawers with yearning; she certainly couldn’t wear those with Mr. Augustus aboard. “You should be comfortable, sir. Of course, I say that with my feet and ankles scandalously bared before you.”
His soft snort reminded her of Cy. “Pardon my saying this, but I never understood why feet are judged so differently for men and women. As children, we all gamboled about as barefoot as hares.”
As he shrugged on his jacket, his shadow glanced over her, dousing her senses like a bucket of melting ice. She couldn’t continue to ignore this strangeness, not when it could be a threat to them.
“Mr. Augustus, sir—”
“If we’re doing away with formalities, please, call me George.” He sat again on the jutted edge of the lower bunk.
“I’d like for you to call me by my first name, but I’m afraid to say my own name aloud right now.” She gave him a rueful shrug. “George, have you noticed a kind of . . . coldness around you?” She winced at her awkward choice of words.
He arched both eyebrows. “Have you noted such a coldness around me?”
“I have, sir. Sorry—George. Cy said you figured out that I’m a deviant geomancer. I am . . . particularly deviant, I suppose. I can also sense the magic of nearby fantastics. They feel warm to me. This coldness . . . I have never felt the like before.”
His expression was thoughtful. “I have felt an odd chill around me since the quake, but I ascribed it to my injury and my recovery. I still would rather attribute the sensation to that, until I find evidence otherwise.”
“You’re a man of science.”
“I am, and when you say you find something odd about my shadow, well . . . it strains belief. I say that with respect for you, however. I do believe that you’re sensitive to a range of energy that I can’t perceive. But this . . . this is like asking me to believe I’m being haunted.”
Ingrid sat straighter. “You were surrounded by a lot of death during the earthquake.”
“So were you,” he retorted gently. “Why would a ghost attach itself to me?”
“Because you were there when he died. Because he is a man with a mission to complete.” She stared at the shadow at George’s feet. Was Captain Sutcliff here? Blum had said ghosts required a resilient personality. Sutcliff certainly had that.
“Oh no. No. The captain couldn’t have—no. Ghosts don’t exist.”
“You know souls can exist separately from bodies. Think about tales of kitsune. They can steal a body once every century as a new tail completes its growth. The soul is left errant. Death can leave a soul errant, too. Why is it hard to believe such a spirit might attach itself to a person or place?” She made an effort to keep her voice low. Fenris tossed about in the rack above her.
“I do believe in souls, as I try to redeem my own. And now Maggie’s.” His face briefly sagged with grief. “I believe in magic, too, as a finite energy source. Fantastics are fantastic because they have the capacity to carry magic.” He mulled his own words for a moment. “I suppose I believe in ghosts, then. As supernatural energy left adrift.”
“Sometimes, reality defies tidy classifications.” She leaned toward the shadow at George’s feet, fingers grazing the tatami, and imagined the strings of life that she had seen tugged on by Reiki and lingqi doctors. She could not see colors as they did, but by God, she found coldness. She seized it, willing it corporeal.
Her fingers went numb as a harsh chill traveled up her arm and caused her to shiver. Her leg muscles clenched slightly in response. The coldness gained weight like that of a feather pillow, almost nothing yet still substantial. She rose to her feet as sh
e dragged the chilliness up and out of George’s shadow. The entity had slackness and heft, and she kept pulling upward. A strange sensation rose with it—the feeling of presence. The way you know someone stands behind you, even though they haven’t made a sound. There was no malevolence to it, nor did the sylphs react with any kind of alarm.
Ingrid’s hand rose over her own head. Only then did she feel that the full volume of the shadow had been revealed.
Captain Sutcliff stood in the corridor.
Chapter 17
Captain Sutcliff was transparent, his colors muted in a way that reminded her of old photographs colored by hand. He wore his Army & Airship Corps Unified Pacific uniform with its double row of buttons down the chest and neat pinstripes down the legs. Everything about him smacked of military precision, just as in his living days. He showed none of the injuries that caused his death, thank God.
He stared at her, then glanced around as he took a step back, taking in his environs. Finally, he plucked off his slouch hat to grant her an abbreviated bow. “Miss, whose last name I dare not state for reasons of safety.” His words drifted over her face like a puff of arctic wind.
“Oh, good heavens.” She hastily stepped back.
“Ingrid?” George stood. “What—”
“You don’t hear him? You don’t see him?” She tried not to sound hysterical. She had met so many powerful and strange entities of late, but none of them had been a dead man—the particular dead man who had made her life a living hell in those hours and days after the Cordilleran Auxiliary had exploded.
“He cannot. I’ve tried to converse with him for weeks,” said Captain Sutcliff with an apologetic tilt of his head. “I hoped he might come across you again, but I didn’t think we would be able to speak. I had no idea that you were so . . . attuned to the magical and spiritual. All I knew was that you would continue to pursue justice for Mr. Sakaguchi in regard to the kermanite. Our goal is the same.”
Ingrid tried to take in all of that as she looked at George. “Captain Sutcliff’s ghost is standing beside you right now.”
George glanced every which way. “I see nothing different than before.”
“Is it all right if we . . . attempt to touch your spectral form?” she asked Sutcliff. Once upon a time, she would have rolled her eyes if she’d read such a line in a dime novel.
“I can feel nothing as I once did. I will take no offense.”
Ingrid held out her hand. Her fingertips passed through his arm as if she probed the interior of an icebox.
George followed her example, frowning. “The coldness could be from the ventilation system aboard.” He gestured to a vent above.
“Miss, if you would, please tell Mr. Augustus that I regret that I won’t get to enjoy a bottle of Red Hollow Kentucky bourbon with him again.”
She repeated what Sutcliff said. George’s face drained of all color, leaving him almost like a ghost himself.
“Oh, dear Lord,” he whispered. “I told him I’d have a bottle sent his way. I didn’t—I didn’t mention bourbon before.”
“No. You only mentioned nihonshu. Sit, George. Please.” She hoped Fenris was using beeswax to plug his ears. It was a wonder he hadn’t pulled open the curtain to grouse at them.
George shakily sat. “Why is he here? Why with me?”
“What can you tell us, Captain? Have you heard us all this while . . . ?” she asked. She realized that speaking with him was like any conversation, and didn’t draw away any of her energy.
“I hear everything said around George, and an inhuman range beyond.” He considered Ingrid. His manners seemed radically different than before. Softer. More thoughtful. Death apparently changed a man; but perhaps many of those changes had begun during his final night of life.
Captain Sutcliff cast his gaze downward as if ashamed. “As I died, I sensed that . . . a good place did not await me. I knew many regrets in those moments. I despaired for you, miss. I desperately wished I could have investigated the Thuggees. I raged that the kitsune had stolen that opportunity from me, that the city was being destroyed because I hadn’t heeded your warning. I dreaded that the ambassador would recover the kermanite and use it as she wished. And so, I willed my spirit to stay on this realm.”
She noted that he had adopted her avoidance of speaking Blum’s name aloud. That was telling. “I’m sorry that you were in anguish at the end.” All too recently, she had hated this man, hated the events he set in motion. Now, she realized, her hatred had been replaced by a deep sense of sadness. Sutcliff had been yet another of Blum’s game pieces, and he’d lost everything as a result. Everything except this second chance as a ghost.
“Please apologize to Mr. Augustus for me. I have haunted him out of necessity. If I wander far from the familiar, I find that I begin to lose my sense of self. I become very confused.”
Ingrid relayed the message. “I’m not aggrieved,” George said. “He can linger with me as long as he needs to. He gave me my life. The least I can do is help him achieve his mission.”
“What is your mission?” she asked Sutcliff. “If you can hear beyond a normal range, you know what Ambassador Roosevelt said to me.”
“Yes. The recovery of the kermanite does not grant me the peace it would have when I was alive. I know more now.” He dipped his head. “The kitsune cannot possess it. I cannot bear for it to be used to energize a machine of war that could later be used against us.”
“You sound like Roosevelt,” she said.
He smiled, and she realized it might have been the first time she had seen him do so. “I take that as high praise. My goal as an officer was to perhaps work beneath his direction one day. I welcome the chance to do so even after death.” His expression sobered. “If the kermanite cannot be used for the sole benefit of the United States, it should be destroyed.”
Destroyed. The very suggestion felt blasphemous, and yet . . . “That wouldn’t be difficult to do, with how kermanite naturally fragments . . . but the shards would be incredibly dangerous.” She paused. “I could destroy it in a more internal, controlled manner, though my close contact with such immense energy would bring a different kind of peril.”
George arched an eyebrow. “I do believe I’m gathering enough of the gist of this conversation to state, emphatically, that such destruction is not a good idea if it places you in that much danger. I’m quite sure Barty would agree.”
“Shattering kermanite and creating a wide radius of shrapnel is a poor idea as well,” she said. “I knew an apprentice who once lost an eye after he dropped an average piece of kermanite.” She held up her fist for size comparison. “But this dilemma is too inconceivable to dwell on right now. We don’t know how we can even access Excalibur at this point.”
Sutcliff cast his gaze downward. “Much of what has happened still feels inconceivable to me, even the reality of my own death.” He took in a rattling, pointless breath. “I must use this opportunity to apologize to you for the aggressiveness of my investigation against you and Mr. Sakaguchi. I made crude insinuations about your relationship and assumed the worst of your motivations. There’s a great deal that I didn’t understand, and likely never will, but I know I was a cad and a fool. I am sorry.” He offered her a bow, his hat over his heart.
“I . . . I don’t hate you like I did back in San Francisco,” she said, conscious of how that sounded in front of George. “But I can’t say I fully forgive you either. I don’t want to lie to you, not about something that important.”
“I respect that, and you.” He repeated his bow.
George stared toward the ghost. “I wish I could see him for myself. Or hear him, at least, so that we could palaver again.”
“I wish you could, too,” Ingrid said, voice thick. “The past month has been one surprise after another. I used to be a simple secretary for the Cordilleran Auxiliary, you know.”
George offered a sympathetic smile. “I can’t even imagine all you’ve endured, but I doubt you were ever a ‘simple secret
ary.’”
She shook her head ruefully at that, conceding the point.
“Ingrid?” Cy called down the corridor. “We’re coming into Los Angeles.”
“I’ll retreat for now. I don’t want my presence to be bothersome to you.” Captain Sutcliff shrank, his figure dwindling and thinning like smoke until it vanished completely. Ingrid shivered, even though she didn’t feel any of his chill.
“The captain has returned to your shadow for now,” she said, motioning to George, who remained in place.
“I’ll follow momentarily,” he said, his expression thoughtful.
Using the walls for balance, she walked to the control cabin, where Cy greeted her with a tired yet warm smile.
“Thought I heard you talking with my father.”
“Yes. And another unexpected passenger on board,” she said.
“Did the qilin return?” He sounded puzzled.
“I sensed something strange about your father’s shadow. He’s being haunted by Captain Sutcliff—”
“What?” That single word contained an ocean of panic. He began working a series of toggles on the dash. Ingrid reached to grip his elbow.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. You don’t need to rush back there.”
“But Sutcliff—”
“I know. Trust me, I know. And you might also remember that Sutcliff saved your father’s life in San Francisco, and died because of it,” she said, and Cy’s tension abated some. “Sutcliff has been clinging to him ever since. I’m apparently the only person who can speak to him or see him.”
“My father is being haunted by a ghost.” His brow furrowed, and he began to adjust the toggles again.
“This isn’t like something out of a gothic novel. Sutcliff is on a quest for redemption. He needs to stop the stolen kermanite from being used by Japan.”
“Do you believe that’s truly his aim?”
She considered that for a moment. “Even when he was alive, he never came across as a liar. What he believed, he believed with absolute conviction, no matter the folly. Now he thinks divine intervention has brought him here so he can help me and right the wrongs he did. He’s lost everything but his soul, and if he errs now, he’s very aware he’ll lose that as well. So yes, I believe him.”
