Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  My heart slammed against the fragile cage of my ribs, as though it might tear itself out.

  I closed my eyes, black upon black, and sweat bloomed upon my skin as the blissful fingers of the Chinese smoke combed through me like a sweet summer wind.

  I shuddered. No. Had I not worked so hard?

  Had I not promised?

  Let go, sweet girl. The voice did not speak, for my ears did not hear it in the shroud of smoke. It did not ring, or purr, or sing.

  Yet I felt it within me, a lilting voice, feminine and soft. Comforting.

  Won’t you let me in?

  Was it me? Was that my voice, begging myself for something? It did not sound like it, but dreams were devilish things and I could not grasp my reason. I made as though to turn, but the dream held fast, and my limbs twisted oddly. I looked down at myself.

  I wore the blue gown stolen from my mother’s closet, yet its fit was that of perfection. Without seeing it, I knew that a choker clasped about my neck, a cameo upon it in delicate filigree. Thick curls slid over my shoulder, artful decoration to the loose twist the rest had been made into.

  I knew all this without seeing it for sure, in the way one knows the events of a dream without knowing why.

  I struggled, but to no avail.

  Cherry.

  The smoke drifted. A thin gleam of red glinted through the black. I made as though to gasp, yet still I had no voice.

  Within my heart, terror bloomed.

  Red strands clung to my wrists and upper arms, skeins of bloody thread wrapped so tight the skin beneath turned white.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, panic rooted in my spirit, and I wrenched at the bonds that seemed so fragile to look at.

  The flesh at my arm parted. I jolted with the expectance of pain, but I felt none; only horror as blood welled thick and crimson from beneath the ruby threads and slid like red ink down my arm.

  You’re such a good girl, murmured the voice I could not be sure was not mine. Such a sweet girl.

  I looked up, clamped my teeth over my lip as the threads tightened at my wrists.

  If it sliced through the skin there, if it severed the veins pale and blue beneath such fragile flesh, would I die in this dream?

  I took another breath, intent upon demanding my freedom, and the smoke once more filled my lungs.

  My head.

  I closed my eyes again.

  Give me everything.

  Terror eased. My blood splashed to the black floor, perfect droplets that did not splatter as they should but remained sweet and succulent; cherries scattered like glass marbles in the smoke.

  I could see it as clearly as though I watched from overhead.

  I could feel it, though it was not pain I felt.

  I could hear it.

  I was promised everything.

  Sympathy overwhelmed fear. My chin lowered, the curls at my ears skimming over my jaw.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and this was the sound that sheared through smoke and shadow.

  The woman I heard, the voice I felt as though it came from myself, laughed. I knew the resonance, though I could not recall from where it echoed.

  It slid through my heart, my mind, and in my dreaming, I felt arms wrap around me in the dark. A subtle fragrance cut through the emptiness I stood in; a whisper of lilies that forced my nose to twitch in remembered response.

  Sleep, she whispered. I will show you what you yearn for.

  Because I knew what it was to want everything, to be denied all that the heart and soul craved, I obeyed.

  My hand lifted of its own volition, tugged upwards by skeins of red. Some snapped, trailing listlessly in the dark, and beads of my own blood rolled down them.

  I watched, fascinated, as my own fingers sketched a T into the air. The lines it formed shimmered pale and gray, as ethereal as moonlight.

  Trina, the voice whispered.

  My hand, independent of my thoughts, drew a circle around the whole. “Trina,” I repeated dreamily, and all turned to black.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I awoke without warning or sound.

  I was not asleep in Ashmore’s bed. I had not been moved to my own, or ensconced before the fire. I was not wrapped in black and smoke, as I’d dreamed.

  I didn’t know where I was.

  My eyes, used to the void of my dream, adjusted quickly. Shadows gathered so thick they stole the oxygen from the air, and the graceful sway of cobwebs shimmered in the faintest ream of light from a source I could not locate.

  I looked down at myself, at the shift I did not recall putting on and the lavender wrapper belted around it.

  I stood in the midst of an unfamiliar room, clad in my nightclothes as some heroine out of a penny dreadful, and could not remember how I’d gotten here.

  The air was cold, dusty. It smelled abandoned—that musty fragrance associated with the slow rot of paper and wood—and as I turned, the movement displaced currents of air, sending puffs of dust motes to skate across the gloom.

  The light trickling from beyond brightened.

  “Welcome to Siristine’s infamous laboratory, my love.”

  The voice, sweet and musical, reached out as though it might wrap me in soft comfort. Startled, I turned again, then was forced to slap a hand over my nose as my quick movement shot dust into the air around me. At the same time, a wash of fatigue rolled over me. Coughing, blinking hard to combat the grit, I waved the other hand before my face to clear it.

  Exhaustion wrenched my senses into disarray, which only served to make her appearance all the more surreal. She stepped from the dark like a ghost; that sad woman in white I’d imagined might stem from the Gothic romances, though it was not white she wore.

  Josephine St. Croix was not a woman who favored the color.

  All thoughts froze to crystalline shock.

  “Mother?” That voice was mine, though it came little more than a rasp from a dry throat.

  When she smiled, she did so with same serene curve I’d seen in that painting above the library mantel. Her eyes, as green as mine but sharper with an intellect beyond any that I might have attributed to myself, sparkled with warmth and welcome.

  She wore a gown in a shade of yellow so bright as to turn her hair to shining red. Her skin glowed with a luminescence that seemed to come from within her, turning her figure to the source of white light radiating out over the room we stood in.

  Unlike mine, her hair was unbound, and the soft curls flowed like melted jewels in a breeze I did not feel. She wore no gloves, earning an immediate sense of kinship, and if her feet bore any shoes, I could not see it, for the hem of her gown seemed unduly sheer, as though she floated upon mist.

  She was so beautiful, my heart ached.

  She held her hands to me. “Oh, my sweet girl, how lovely you’ve become.”

  I did not reach for her; I took a step back, my hands twining into my wrapper—into her wrapper, rather.

  Her smile wilted. “Please don’t fear me.”

  “Mother?” This came with less a rasp, though I could not strain the disbelief from it. I wanted to tear my gaze away, to search instead for a way out of this surreal trap, but it remained fixed upon her face. I could not get enough of it.

  This was the face of my mother. My face, though I was somewhat more round in the cheek, plainer by comparison and a head shorter than she. Still, it was uncanny enough that I could not decide if I was still dreaming it, applying my face on the ghost of my mother.

  “Yes,” she told me, and reached out again. She did not walk to me so much as drift, her hair tugged in that wind I could not feel. “Yes, ’tis your mother. I’ve waited all this time for you.”

  “How can this be?”

  Her smile returned, but sadly. “Only a temporary reprieve. The call will fade, and with it, the gateway will close, severing me from you until next Trina opens the way.”

  I blinked at her. “Trina?” My lessons returned to me. “The Queen of the Ghostworld. I called upo
n the triple path?”

  Josephine’s smile could charm the birds out of song. “You did,” she said, with such approval that something heretofore unknown in my heart took root. “My sweet girl, you allowed us to meet after so, so long.” A tear drop spilled from her lashes, crystalline and perfect.

  I did not know if I was supposed to reach out to her, to offer her a handkerchief I did not have, to say that it would be all right—I knew nothing more than what I saw, and what I saw was my mother.

  My dead mother.

  I sank to my knees, a shudder seizing me. “I don’t understand,” I whispered hoarsely. “I don’t—Did I call you forth? Did I pull you from heaven?”

  When Josephine eased to the floor beside me, it was with such grace that I could not believe she was anything more than light and air. Her hands came to rest over my shoulders, but I did not feel flesh—only cold, bone-chilling ice.

  “I’m so sorry, my sweet,” she crooned, though tears now fell like silver rain upon her luminescent cheeks. “It was not my choice to leave you. I clung with all my might to the hope that you might one day learn the very tools so that I might speak with you. Even once,” she wept. “Just once was all I craved.”

  My eyes stung. I lifted a shaking hand, intent upon touching the mirage before me, but such sorrow gripped her features that my fingers froze just over what I imagined was the smooth skin of her cheek. “You aren’t here, are you?” I asked, torn between anger, disappointment and yearning. “You aren’t real.”

  “I am here,” she replied, “but I am not flesh. I am not as you are.” The hands lifted from my shoulders, easing the chill but still I shuddered. A kernel of ice remained curled within me. “Oh, Cherry, how much I’ve longed for this day.”

  “Mother,” I said again, tasting the word upon my tongue as though for the first time. When her gaze lit, joy raw and unabashed within it, my tears spilled over. “Mother.”

  She cupped my cheek, and it was as if I laid flesh against ice and snow. “There,” she crooned. “My lovely girl, you’ll ruin your complexion if you keep up like this.”

  I sniffled a laugh that was as watery as it was embarrassed, but I did make an effort to bank the tears I cried.

  She stroked my hair, trails of cold in her wake, and though it caused pain within my head, I did not pull away. “We won’t have much time, for the moon is waning and the aether cannot fuel the door for very long.”

  I sat upright, eyes wide. “You’ll leave me again?”

  “No, sweeting.” As she knelt beside me, her hair a dark claret shroud floating about her head, she smiled so beautifully into my eyes that my heart eased its wild thump. “Not for very long, I hope.”

  “What can I do?” I asked. “Must I call upon Trina again?”

  “No,” she said quickly, lifting her hand to hover over mine clenched upon my lap. “No, please do not be so hasty. The Trumps must be learned in order, for each is more powerful and requires more resolve than the last. To leap ahead will put you at risk.”

  Ashmore had not told me that, but then again, he had not revealed the power of the Trumps until just earlier.

  I was only just coming to terms with the concept of the cosmos as a naturo-philosophic term for the elements of this world. I could not imagine utilizing that what I learned to…

  Well, to converse with ghosts.

  “You only managed this with my help,” she told me. “I cannot cross the boundaries of the spirit to do it again, and I fear another attempt so soon will only harm you.”

  I slumped when the full meaning of her words became clear. “So I cannot talk to you again?”

  Josephine rose, an act reminiscent of a current rather than flesh and blood lumbering into position. “Do not be so quick to give up,” she said, her tone that of a gentle scolding. “Are you not my daughter? Do you not bear the power of the cosmos in your hands?”

  I looked at my hands, sickly pale in the light radiating from my mother, and turned them palm up. “I don’t know.”

  “That is not the answer I seek.” A bit of a lash crept into the ghostly voice, and I found her looking rather more stern than gentle. “Am I doomed to be disappointed in death, as well as life?”

  I cried out as she turned away, reaching for her elegant back. “No! I can do anything asked of me, I simply don’t know what must be done.”

  She did not stop, but beckoned with a graceful hand. The light she cast slid over the floor, stone where I expected hard wood and rugs. The edge of a table slipped into stark relief, only to vanish again into shadow as she passed it.

  She did not walk, her head did not rise and fall. She glided, the trailing edges of her skirts disturbing nothing at all.

  Unlike me, who cast dust in my wake.

  “We shall only have one chance at this,” my mother warned, but gone was the severity. She smiled at me over her shoulder, and I realized that I could see through her form.

  Had I really called the ghost of my mother?

  Sorrow gripped my heart, and the fierce surge of wanting I had never known I carried. Always, I’d fought against the comparisons Society made between myself and my late mother. I’d despised coming up short in every challenge.

  When my father had thought to sacrifice me for her, I had in some way accepted it as part of the pattern five years of London’s uppercrust arenas had taught me.

  I had never imagined that I would come face to face, flesh to spirit, with the mother I’d told myself I didn’t need. How different would my life have been if it had been Josephine who raised me and not stern Fanny? Would I have chosen my path differently?

  The images that assailed me were no less fanciful than the looming malignance of the house that had once been hers, that would have been mine if I hadn’t failed so abysmally. I imagined us seated together on the piano, our brightly hued heads together, picking out keys amidst laughter and harmonic delight. I imagined that we walked arm in arm, as mother and daughter, along the fancy bridges connecting London’s upper platforms to each other.

  Would she have welcomed Earl Compton?

  Would his mother have hated me less if Josephine had been there to soften the meeting?

  Heaven help me, it hurt to think that my father might have been so different if she had only lived.

  I froze in place, rooted to the floor.

  My father. Abraham St. Croix had attempted to kill me. He’d chosen alchemy as his tool, a means to raise my mother from the grave—an effort far beyond a lofty ambition far beyond the scope of the brilliance that earned him the moniker Mad St. Croix.

  Did she know?

  Dare I tell her?

  She did not float far before drawing up beside a stone wall, its wooden girders gray with the combined efforts of her radiant light and the cobwebs wrapped about them. Beside her, a switch thrust out from the tangled nest of dust and spider’s thread.

  When she turned to find me, motionless, her head cocked. Her hair slid like a ruby ribbon over her cheek. “What is wrong, my love?”

  “Father—” My voice broke on that word, for I had difficulty giving to him the appellation. My memory was not so perfect that I knew all of what he’d said to me, but I did know he’d thought to replace me with this vision now floating before me.

  Her expression fell, so heartbreaking that my own shuddered as though it were fragile glass. “I know,” she whispered, and even that maintained a lilt that seemed to float upon the stagnant air. “We both left you so very young. I am so sorry.”

  “No, I—” I hesitated. It was obvious she did not know of my father’s machinations; clearer still that she thought him the man she’d married. I did not know what sort of man that was, but I could not find it in me to betray that faith.

  “’Tis all right,” I said instead, approaching the switch she stood beside. “It wasn’t your fault. You were ill. He was only trying to help you.”

  “He has always been determined,” she said with a sad smile. “You have inherited that trait.”

/>   “Ashmore says ’tis your determination I inherited,” I said, and watched her eyes widen. Then narrow quickly.

  Her hands came to settle upon her waist, the faint clash of her gown beneath her transparent fingers jarring. “You are learning from Oliver Ashmore?”

  “I am.”

  “And is he treating you well?”

  I looked not at her, but the switch before us, weighing my answer as quickly as I dared. I could not very well admit to my mother that I’d gone to the bed of her father’s young associate, could I?

  Ghost she might be—dream this all might turn out to become—but I refused to confess such things to my mother.

  I’d rather face Fanny’s certain disapproval than the uncertainties of Josephine’s judgment.

  I nodded. “He is the reason why I am studying so hard,” I said simply.

  Her expression remained clouded. “Has he…Has Oliver given you any gifts?”

  I did not like the clench I felt in my belly when she used his given name in lieu of any other. I shook my head. “Nothing more than teaching.” Even as I said it, I remembered the alchemical draught he’d given me to prevent the conception of a child.

  Color bloomed in my cheeks.

  “Nothing at all?” my mother asked, her gaze level upon my face.

  “A book,” I said quickly. “He did give me one of your father’s journals.”

  She did not appear surprised, but her expression did clear some. “Good.”

  “But why?”

  “I will explain shortly. Throw this switch, then,” she continued, “and be prepared to see that what you were searching for.”

  I did as directed, shuddering some when the cobwebs clung to my fingers. I saw no spiders to crawl among them. I steeled myself, plunged my bare hand through ephemeral skeins of clinging threads and grasped the switch. It wrenched easily up into position.

  Somewhere in the dark, a mechanism engaged. Dust rained from the wall we stood beside as a long pole I’d thought inset into the stone shifted, rotating once and rising to the ceiling.

  Josephine’s gaze lit up in nostalgic delight as metal groaned, and the strident screech of old hinges tore through the black. Her smile widened, anticipatory, and I took my cue to follow her gaze.