Eterna and Omega
Page 14
Carried by the finest of white horses in an open gilt-trimmed, mahogany calash, its accordion roof back on this fine, brighter-than-usual London day, the queen, stately and dourly round-faced in her lavish black layers of eternal mourning accented by white lace, was seated alone. The queen’s guards walked at either side of the tall, golden-rimmed wheels.
Spire’s attention was captured by an intake of breath on the other side of Black. A wave of confusion and terror crossed Lord Denbury’s face, like he’d seen a ghost. There was wild fear in his strikingly bright eyes.
Spire was just about to ask if he was feeling well, when Denbury turned to Black.
“Milord … this … city…” Denbury said, his voice slow and thick with dread. “There are so many auras … I know this must sound utterly mad, but you must believe me, this city has a grave problem. There are demons at work.”
“How can you know?” Lord Black asked. “By aura? What shade do you see?”
The young man’s haunted face twisted further, a grotesque masque of horror. “Oh … oh no…” he wailed softly. “I can’t let this stand. Not from her … We’re doomed. Doomed!” With shaking hands, he withdrew a small pistol from his breast pocket and aimed it at the queen.
Moving purely on instinct, Spire dove across Black to tackle the young man to the ground. Moving with alacrity, Black wrested the gun from Denbury’s hand, pressing the safety and pocketing it. The crowd around them cried out at being jostled, but it seemed no one saw the gun.
Spire kept the nobleman pinned to the ground, but he gave no struggle. Black leaned down to exclaim angrily in his ear, “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s her … she has the aura of the demons,” Denbury said, looking up from the ground, tears streaming from his striking eyes, his pain and distress palpable. “Lord Black, I promise you, I don’t know why or how, but our queen is dealing with the devil!”
Spire helped the young man back to his feet but did not release a grip on one wrist. Glancing about, he was grateful that the throng was mesmerized by a particularly ostentatious presentation of carriages. Only a few concerned female faces, pinched in disapproval, were looking their way. He scowled back at them, and they turned away in a collective huff.
Denbury began pleading, “I am not wrong. You must ascertain why Her Majesty is thusly tainted. It is a matter of English life or death, milord. If the Society yet lives … Heaven help us all.” He stared from Black to Spire, squinting at them. “The two of you remain clean and clear in your reads, neutral light. So whatever the queen has been involved with, it so far has not tainted you. But you’ll become a target nonetheless for doing the queen’s bidding. She’s let something very dark near, perhaps into the palace itself. Root it out. Promise me.” Denbury reached up with his free hand to shake Black’s shoulder. “Promise me you won’t take this lightly.”
“I promise,” Black replied. “Truly.”
With a nod, Black indicated Spire should release the young lord’s wrist.
The crowd shifted about them and, in a rustle of movement, a warm-toned woman with brown curls under a straw bonnet with ribbon and floral trims sidled up next to Spire. He paid no attention until she turned and light brown eyes stared right into his.
“You might want to tell me how much of your government is involved with something that drove an honorable man like Lord Denbury to such a length as attempted assassination,” the woman stated quietly in Spire’s ear, to his shock.
He tried to keep his expression calm, sure that if she made a dangerous move he could stop her with the knife he kept strapped to a forearm band.
The woman seemed to know he was considering his options, for she added, “Before you make a rash move, gentlemen … Lord Denbury here might have trained a pistol on the queen, but I’ve two trained on you, inside these dainty little pockets of mine. And yes, I am a good shot.”
“Who are you?” Spire said quietly. That she was American was clear from her accent.
“Not all I seem,” she replied matter-of-factly. She wasn’t coy, she was on a mission.
“Do you work for the American Eterna Commission?” Spire asked softly, trying to memorize the pattern of freckles dusted across her face so he could later describe them to a sketch artist.
“Did your Omega department just send spies to New York?” she countered.
“Why did the Eterna Commission steal the bodies of British scientists?”
“Why does Omega think America had anything to do with that?” she scoffed. “There was no American plot against your scientists. Why did your operative steal property from the Eterna site?”
Spire frowned. “That operative acts on his own accord.”
“I know you investigated Apex, but I’ve been looking deeper for names and holdings, speaking to those who are hired and discarded, used and manipulated, the possessed and puppets, the coworkers of the murdered, the chaff of your world,” she said with a venom that spoke of personal investment.
The woman and Spire stared at one another. Lord Black, evidently captivated by the whole exchange, didn’t say a word. Lord Denbury was squinting at the lady.
“Her aura is pure, gentlemen,” the young noble said. “She doesn’t work for the devil, that’s for certain.” His eerily ice-blue eyes clouded with concern as he leaned toward the interloper. “I see pain in your aura, my lady, having to do with you not being all that you seem. But a good soul lies within, that’s clear.”
The woman’s expression softened for a moment at his kind tone, but she quickly recovered her steel.
“I’d find out what her aura portends,” she said, indicating the queen, who had taken her place in the reviewing stand. “Then, if you want to play nice with America and sort this all out, I’ve been instructed to say you should. You’re going to need our help.”
The men had turned as one to look at their sovereign as the crowd cheered. When they turned back, the American was gone.
* * *
Effie Bixby enjoyed working on an international scope, though she was glad Senator Bishop had wired a handsome sum of money, because the information she had begun to discover—as if she were a grave robber with coffins yawning open before her—would generate some hearty telegrams. At nearly a dollar a word, given the exchange rate, these would be pricey communiqués.
Swift as they might be in these days of efficient steamers, she couldn’t wait for the mail packets, not when so much of London, and perhaps New York, was like a powder keg in the basement of Parliament set to strike off a deadly explosion of horror.
From what Effie could see from poking about the hellish rabbit hole that was the Apex Corporation, it seemed their sole export and import was terror. They exploited the disenfranchised of London and New York—in addition to a few other industrial cities across America—to keep it all quiet.
Her gauge of Black, Spire, and the presence of Lord Denbury, whose case files she had read last year in New York, was comforting, at least. She didn’t think they wanted the world that the Master’s Society or Apex had in mind. She thought her team might even like them, and they hers.
The key would be in determining who did want a world turned inside out, if these men would fight the good fight, and if her country would do the same.
* * *
While Lord Black found it difficult securing an audience with the queen, he could not in good faith continue in her service without confronting her. So he pressed his estimable charm to the hilt and won a very grudging few moments in an anterior receiving room.
Scowling and angry, the diminutive regent swept into view.
“Make this quick, Lord Black. I’ve not had time to recover from my appearance,” she barked.
“Your Majesty, I have it on solid opinion that there is something very wrong. Not necessarily with you … but something around you is evil,” Lord Black said carefully. At times like this he was very grateful for his famous neutrality, which kept him well liked in all spaces and class s
ettings.
“Oh?” Her anger shifted to wary curiosity. “Whose opinion might that be?”
“A few of my psychics,” he said, hedging his bets and protecting Denbury. “I believe there is something you have not told me, Your Majesty. I think it has something to do with that organization that Tourney ascribed to and with the execution of Beauregard Moriel, two years ago.”
The queen looked uncomfortable.
“Ah. Yes. Well.” The rustling of the queen’s lavish black taffeta gown was suddenly loud in the strained silence as she attempted to find the right words. “I likely should have told you, the time line of that execution was … different to what everyone imagined. I did keep the man alive for a time.”
Lord Black stared at her. “For a time?” he asked, incredulous.
“Well, he’s no longer alive now; he was found torn to bits,” she said, her petite frame shuddering, “just like Tourney.”
Black swallowed hard. “But before that … he’d been alive this whole time. Where?”
“A secret cell. I thought he could shed light on immortality. That was the point of the stay of execution. I had his entire ring wiped out. At least I thought.”
Lord Black curled his toes in his boots to keep from clenching his hands into fists. How long had the Society’s operations continued due to that wretch’s continued despicable presence upon this globe? It was all he could do to hold his tongue. There were things about him, his life, his heart, which the Master’s Society would seek to destroy. As much as they threatened the world, they also threatened him. He strove to remember that his greatest strength was his unflappable calm, and so he sought it.
“Did you think you could not trust me with this information, Your Majesty?” He spoke gently, allowing concern to edge into his voice.
The regent sighed. “I haven’t really known what to do this whole time. England has a responsibility, to her Empire, to be at the fore of every new development. How could I not see Moriel as a chance to turn an evil seed into something good for the Empire?” She stared up at him, an empress looking a bit helpless—not something Black wanted to see.
Denbury hadn’t been wrong, seeing the reflection of evil in the queen’s aura. The poor woman was guilty by association. He could not think she’d meant genuine harm in keeping Moriel alive, but harm had been done nonetheless. He had been lied to outright, and he needed full leave to erase the damage.
A man of hope, deep in his heart, Black knew he could not ask a man like Spire to continue on in such a compromised atmosphere; he’d have a fit about the Moriel business. Denbury would be beside himself, possibly moved to new violence. The question was, would he tell them? Should he? He had to. They deserved the truth.
“You’ve proof of Moriel’s death, Your Majesty?” Black asked.
“I saw firsthand. The gore…” She shuddered and turned as white as the lace around her neck.
“You weren’t shielded from such horror, Your Majesty?”
“I had to be sure it was him,” she insisted. “I wasn’t proud of keeping him alive any more than you are. I had to take responsibility, I had to know.…”
“Understood, your highness.” Black took a careful breath and continued, “With all due respect, you’re sure it was Moriel?”
The queen was aghast at being questioned. “Who else could it be?”
“These men—Moriel, Tourney, and any of those associated with them—are terribly crafty. They stop at nothing; no human life besides their own is of value. One cannot tell what they might do, in time of need,” Black explained.
The queen seemed unsure how to respond.
Black pressed her. “Did you have anyone see to the scene of Moriel’s corpse?”
“I had the horror entirely cleaned up, of course,” she replied, as if there had been no other option. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Spire would have punched something if he had been present, Black was sure. The queen would make a terrible policeman.
“No one is supposed to know he was alive to begin with,” the queen said. “The entire country would be up in arms.” She looked at him steadily, but he heard the weakness in her voice—she was justifying her actions to herself as much as to him. “You know I did not believe in his ideology. I merely thought some of his science might make use of his evil in a way.”
“His ideology was woven into every way he sought to bend ‘science’ to his will, Your Majesty,” Black responded. “If it were up to him, we’d lose any progress humanity has made in the past centuries and exist literally in the Dark Ages. Moriel and other unnoble nobles would hold the world on its knees.”
As a nobleman, that nobility should be respected was a principle by which Lord Black most certainly lived, one that he benefited from. That Moriel and his like should live as feudalistic dictators was nothing short of laughable. That the queen had indulged this man’s lunacy … It was inconceivable.
The queen’s evident discomfort and embarrassment gave him all the permission he needed to continue his work with his team as he saw fit.
“Fix whatever it is that has been broken, Lord Black,” she demanded. “And let’s get back to a more positive task with greater hope.”
“Greater hope, and less evil, indeed. Good day, Your Majesty.”
* * *
Lord Black went straight to Spire’s office at Omega headquarters, where he found Lord Denbury concluding the tale of his own entanglement with the Master’s Society. The two men were a good deal into Spire’s decanter of scotch and bowed their heads to Lord Black as he entered.
“My mother rejected Moriel as a suitor in their youth,” Denbury explained, “so he swore a vendetta on my family. I admit that I and my associates dealing with the attacks all thought the Society business more a personal grudge than grand plan.”
The fear of a larger web was evident on the young man’s handsome face.
As Black came farther into the room, he could see Spire examining his expression, and without a word he got up and poured them all a drink.
“Out with it, milord, if you please,” Spire stated, handing the nobleman his glass. Black took a stiff swig.
“Moriel was never executed,” Black stated. He watched, pained for the boy, as the statement hit Lord Denbury like a bullet. “He died only recently, in the same manner as Tourney. At least, according to the queen. Whether she can be believed is certainly why you saw that aura, Lord Denbury, and for this news I am grievously sorry.”
Lord Denbury, whom Black knew to be a scholar and a doctor, a young man who had devoted his life to helping others, looked utterly murderous. It grieved Black to see, as there was nothing so tragic to his mind as a kind, beautiful man driven to desperation. Like his dear Francis …
“Never. Executed…” Denbury’s words were knife sharp. It seemed to take everything in his being not to hurl the snifter at the wall or crush it with his fist.
“I make no excuse for Her Majesty,” Black continued. “She said she had hoped Moriel could shed light on immortality. I told her that knowledge from a source so polluted by evil is without virtue.”
“Lord Black,” Denbury said, seething, “if you wish me not to commit or commission gross acts of treason upon she who holds the scepter, please tell me you will fix this damnable error immediately and set the fumbling queen to rights.”
Black stared into the man’s arresting eyes.
“I pledge my life to it, Lord Denbury,” he said firmly. “I truly do. If anything is left of the Master’s Society, it will be done for once and for all.”
Black turned to Spire. “To hell with anything but this directive, Mr. Spire.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Spire said, lifting his glass. He turned to Lord Denbury. “For what it’s worth, I, too, pledge my life to it, milord.”
“Your pledge may not be a mere toast, gentlemen,” Denbury said coldly. “It might be a promise heaven needs come collect, lest there be hell on earth.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
To be safe, after what had happened to the Eterna researchers, she shouldn’t have any such elements in her home, lest they summon the forces that had turned the tide so horrifically on those men. She comforted herself with the fact the senator’s house had not been made a ready path for evil—unlike the laboratory where Louis and his companions had met their fate—and was carefully Warded. Still, she told herself, these things should be stored at the office and she readied for her day.
Bishop had not been home, nor had he left a note or message with their housekeeper. Clara was still wondering what he was up to when she arrived at the office, bobbing her head once in greeting to Lavinia, who seemed utterly aghast, lost in the pages of a penny dreadful and could afford her friend only a little black-lace-gloved wave.
The guards were always so silent she nearly forgot about them sitting sentry near the door, but as she rounded the stairs she looked back to them, content to see that they were not interested in anything but exterior threats, their focus out the glass panes of the front windows.
Again, she nearly found herself bound up in rope but was able to disable the trip wire via a gas lamp fixture at the top of the office stairs before it was too late.
A telegram awaited her upstairs, lying on her desk atop the files all at different angles. Her stomach dropped as she read it, realizing that Rupert wouldn’t soon be home or at the desk opposite her in the commission’s office—one he had rarely occupied until lately. She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she’d enjoyed having him across the room.…
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