Of Andre, Knight, Mrs. Wilson, and Blakely there was no sign. Clara hoped this meant they remained free, pursuing their Warding work at the Omega offices. Perhaps, she prayed, Louis would be called to her side to offer insight and then to warn and alert the others. However, as the spirit world was unreliable and operated on its own time, she could not count on this.
As she approached the manor, Clara’s heart gave a sharp thump. She knew this place, had seen it in visions, of fire and chalices, shadows and earthquakes, broken justice and iterations of lives.… Her jaw sagged and she spun toward Rose, only to find Rose already staring at her, her face expressing equal shock. The visions or dreams must have been shared between them.
* * *
Was this it? Rose wondered. Would they, prophetically, betray one another right here in this very place? In trying so dearly to avoid it, would they fall catastrophically right into the very traps they wished not to? Rose was confident that Clara did not mean her any more harm than she did in converse. But what good would that be if they were compelled by forces beyond the average human will?
The house was fairly dark, save for an odd, disembodied glow that cast a deep bloodred light over the building’s rough-hewn red sandstone exterior. One garish swath of moonlight illuminated the peaks of the estate’s turrets.
The unnatural, ungodly stage, where unimaginable horrors would undoubtedly unfold, caused a pit of dread to yawn open in Rose’s stomach. She glanced at Harold Spire. He was white as any ghost he did not believe in.
The British and the Americans were callously “escorted” down the hall by black-eyed, possessed footmen and ushered into a long, grand dining room.
A table was set for them. A last supper entirely spoiled, with more than a few insects having quite a time of the feast of turned turkey, spoiled jellies, fruits, and moldy puddings. This seemed representative of the Society’s inversions of faith and power. Rose couldn’t be sure when it had been left there, or if it was for them or for some other poor unfortunates, but it was disgusting nonetheless, and a sign Rosecrest had been in darker hands for longer than they knew.
A network of metal tubes crept up the walls and across the ceiling, culminating in what looked like vast metal showerheads. There was a sulfuric scent upon the air, under the smell of rotting food.
To Rose, their fate seemed very clear.
They would be gassed, collectively, a group execution. A death much like their teams’ scientists, a horrid irony these dark forces seemed so fond of.
* * *
The guards shoved each person into a tall, velvet-backed seat and bound them to their chairs.
“Do have some supper before midnight,” one of the guards said with a chuckle, his voice disembodied, low and animalistic in its growling, wet affect.
Clara stared at the moldering cutlet that had one bite out of it from the last poor individual placed here before their sacrifice. A small insect crawled out from under the meat before miring itself in stale gravy. The dining knives were very dull. Not much use even if she could shift her chair to grab one.
Looking around, Clara watched her colleagues take stock of the room, looking for weapons and vulnerabilities. They would have to be crafty and clever in order to outwit those who had traded their souls for the darkest of powers.
A great deal could be done, but nothing that would be faster than a bullet, and each of the guards appeared to be armed. Where was Brinkman when they needed him?
The man of the hour himself soon joined them, and the fury on Evelyn and Denbury’s faces meant this was, again, quite personal. Surely this was the man who was meant to have been executed.
Beauregard Moriel was short and balding, with beady eyes, fleshy fingers, and pale, pasty skin. He strode about the room, a caricature of regal comportment in a sash and grand vestments of arcane lineage.
Clara was sickened and fascinated. Her instincts were whirring at top speed, trying to hit upon a Spiritualist linchpin that could put a wrench in the grim proceeding’s gears.
“Ah, my foils and foes,” he began grandly. “It’s been amusing having you poke about my enterprises. I thrive on opposition and conflict, but you’re now getting in my way and I can’t have that, not when the restoration is about to begin. I don’t know what you managed to do inside Parliament today—I’m sure you tried to undermine me—but any loss I would have suffered I will now gain. Having you here further powers my engines at Vieuxhelles. By your very blood, life energy, and bones.
“In retrospect,” Moriel continued, “all of you titled folk have caused me far too much effort. Years ago I should have sailed my ship entirely on the dead backs of steerage. Cargo, really. The world breaks down into first class and cargo, don’t you think, Lord Black?” he asked in a conspiratorial tone,
“I could hardly disagree more, you mad wretch,” Black fumed.
Moriel sighed. “Mad,” he said with a snort. “How could a madman amass all that I have?”
“Now that I do want to know,” Lord Black grumbled. “How you infiltrated two countries.”
“You take so much for granted, you know,” Moriel said, as if he were talking to a child. “Do you ever pause to think about the companies that provide you with basic services and goods? Really? About where they are, what they do, how they conduct business? You don’t. That’s how I’ve gained ground. I have, before your blind eyes and from under your upturned noses, created an industrial web, and now you and New York are mere flies to harvest.”
“You can’t have the loyalty you think you do,” Spire spat, wresting against his bindings.
Moriel clucked his tongue and began a lap around the table. “It’s amazing what opiates to the people can accomplish. Chemicals have been critical to overtaking dull minds of ordinary folk. Where that has failed, rending the soul from the body efficiently creates my dear drones. I have, as you know, many methods by which I craft compliance. Why, if I had time, I’d have you all painted on my wall of souls!”
Moriel whipped back a curtain Clara had not noticed before in the room’s dimness. The wall thus revealed was hung with at least thirty oval portraits, each about half a foot wide. These were not mere images; Clara could feel that they were souls, banished into the frames. Their life force was undeniable to her heightened sensitivities. Undoubtedly, the Society’s dark magic had given the victims’ bodies over to those coal-black shadows.
This assault by the darkest arts pressed in on Clara, testing her limits. She felt the first trickle of symptoms of her condition, far off still but enough to be worrying, an itch between the connective tissues of her muscles and a slight shift of her vision. Pressing her eyes closed, Clara took a deep breath through her nose, catching a whiff of rotting food, which turned her stomach but grounded her firmly in her body. She mustered her will: She would not seize. She would not seize.
As if she had been touched, she opened her eyes to find Rose staring at her. The comforting, anchoring presence that had helped her weather City Hall Park again bolstered her here. Her muscles unclenched, and she allowed her soul sister to share in the burden with a knowing, appreciative look.
“It’s a shame I won’t be able to have you in portraiture for my coronation ceremony,” Moriel stated. “But your bodies will do better service as sources for good parts with which to make up reanimated corpses. I want at least twenty for my procession to Parliament’s doors. You’ll tie nicely to the wires.” He whirled to face Evelyn, adding, “The gifted ones especially do.”
She spat at him and he spat right back with a delighted laugh. He looked around and sighed in contentment.
“I must go home, there are preparations to complete. Ah, but this place”—he sneered at Lord Denbury—“this dear, sweet, vulnerable, all too perfect place.…”
Moriel smiled with the kind of patronizing confidence that should have summoned hubris to strike him down like in tales of old, but no hand of God showed itself.
“You see, if a goodly place is twice overtaken,” Moriel sai
d, holding court at the head of the putrefying table, so joyous in having an audience for his horror, “hallowed, then sullied, then hallowed and then sullied again … why, it’s twice as powerful a conduit!”
“Only because you’ve trapped all the good of the place,” Denbury hissed. “Even the ghosts of my ancestral home cannot cross over this tainted threshold.”
“Indeed,” Moriel said delightedly. “No matter what happens here, this place serves as a feeding ground for what I’ve wrought at Vieuxhelles. If this place flourishes, or should it burn again, it all feeds the greater battery of my home estate. Death feeding my new life there, tied in the darkest of ley lines, from your home to mine,” he sneered at Denbury.
It was horribly ingenious, Clara thought, the idea of one furnace of malevolent energy lighting and fueling the fires of a second, these dual crucibles of hell.
“The good of this place is banished outside,” Moriel snarled. “I was able to Ward this house to my purposes, not your pathetic little solutions, because you failed the first time!” He snorted. “You all failed. I grew. I flourished in hiding. All my former colleagues are dead, their spirits added to my multitudes, enriching my energy and purpose by each death. There is always a displaced aristocrat ready to take up what he feels is his rightful mantle, and all of them will serve me. Eventually even the queen will have to bow.”
“I’d not be so confident—” Lord Black nearly shouted, cut off when Moriel backhanded him. The fair nobleman’s face went red with the strike, then redder with fury.
“I will be confident in what I already know to be true,” Moriel insisted. “She is easily persuaded when her interests are served and her appetites are whetted. I will take advantage of any weakness and exploit it.” His smile was a ghastly thing. “I am only allowing the true and right course of the world to unfold as it should, the Summoned shall pour forth.” Here he turned to Lord Black to relish the man’s discomfort. “And my triumph will culminate in demons tearing apart your cherished Parliament itself, that abomination ‘of the people,’ brick by rabble-rousing brick. A shame your living eyes won’t see the glory of it.”
He turned to the armed guard. “At the witching hour, close the shutters and turn on the pipes.” The lackey nodded.
Moriel strode away, calling, “Now which of my slaves wants the honor of returning me to Vieuxhelles? I wish to feel its prowess surge with such fresh fuel.”
* * *
The Guard of Six had been called, by their powers, to a formidable Gothic home in Greenwich. Arriving on horseback, cloaks and greatcoats whipping behind them, this secret cavalry of three men and three women slowed their thundering horses to a trot and then a huffing, shuffling, stamping mass a field away. In the air above, a large raven was hovering, squawking down at the company in a particular rhythm.
The tallest of The Guard, a fierce, brooding man all in black, dismounted and gestured for the others to do the same, tethering the whinnying, shifting beasts to nearby branches of the towering pines that marked the borders of the property. Horses easily spooked at the presence of the spectral world, and the Guard did not wish to have their transportation vanish while they dealt with it.
Between the moon and the ghosts, everything was eerily lit.
The Six strode up the winding slate walk, examining the scene that lay before them. The raven descended to perch on the shoulder of the most severe of the assembled women, tapping his beak upon her shoulder.
“Thank you, Frederic,” the woman replied to the large black bird that bore one luminous blue feather upon its breast.
There were ghosts everywhere, concentric phalanxes of them, outside a looming castle-like manor that looked as if it had been built to be haunted.
Seven specters hovered directly before the house, luminous and gray, all bobbing and swooshing forward as if trying to get in. But each came up abruptly short, as if striking an unseen barrier. These actions repeated themselves as the Guard moved in careful steps closer to the edifice.
“Something is keeping those ghosts out,” the man said, in a low rumble that carried farther than it should have given its volume. “That, my fellows, is odd.”
Generally, in The Guard’s experience, ghosts moved freely, wherever they wished. So to see a haunted house keep its ghosts out in the cold … that was unprecedented in their nearly fifteen years as secret arbiters of the spirit world.
It was The Guard’s purview, granted them by an ancient, unquestionable force, to monitor the actions of the unquiet dead. When those spirits wished too actively to disrupt the living, it was duty to put them in their rightful place, unbeknownst to society.
“It would seem this place is having quite the party!” said a thin, flaxen-haired man in fine clothes who planted himself beside the group’s leader.
A brute of a man charged toward them from the deep shadows near the estate’s front portico.
“You haven’t been invited,” the brute snarled. “Who are you?”
The sharp-nosed blond held up a hand. The dim, burly man froze and stood, dazed, in his tracks.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” the well-dressed man said. “People always want to know. Nosy bastards. We should be on retainer from Her Majesty,” he added, “given how much we do for England—”
“Hush, Withersby,” Alexi said with a slight growl. “Do your job.”
“I did! It isn’t as though he’ll remember anything I say,” Withersby insisted. The man still stood there, dark eyes blinking strangely. “You’re a stubborn one aren’t you,” he added. “Move along now.” He waved his hand again before the man’s face, more insistently. The man growled.
“There’s something quite wrong with him,” said a man in a cleric’s collar who crossed himself and murmured a quiet benediction.
“Look, he’s now walking away,” Withersby replied, reassured. “Though it does make me wonder what’s going on in there. Can’t be good if there’s a guard at the door. That was no footman…”
“No matter,” Alexi stated sharply. “To the Grand Work!” He raised his hands. A strange blue glow emanated from his palms. The gentle breeze coalesced into a wind.
As one, the seven ghosts shifted to face the man with the glowing hands and started gesturing wildly. The expressions on their grayscale faces changed from terror to anger to distress and back again. Some wore servants’ uniforms; at the crest of the group was a beautiful woman in a fine gown. All alternately pointed to the house and clasped their hands together. Their mouths moved, but no one in the six knew what they were trying to say.
On the other side of Alexi, the intense woman spoke with crisp efficiency. “I do wish we could hear them after all these years of service. However, it seems clear they do not wish to depart and that something quite upsetting is happening in that house. Look at how desperate they are. Frederic has informed me there are a number of people trapped inside.”
The company approached the house, surrounded by the ghosts. Occasionally, a specter swooped completely through a member of The Guard, causing unfortunate bouts of chills and a few French curses from the lovely brunette at the rear of the company.
The spirits directed the livings’ attention to the beveled-glass windows of the dining room. The Frenchwoman clucked her tongue. “Well, that doesn’t seem very nice. They’re all tied up.”
“The ghosts must want to help them, don’t you think, Headmistress?” The priest asked the second-in-command.
The headmistress nodded in agreement. “But they are blocked. Is there some kind of Ward or spell keeping them out?”
Alexi made a face. “We don’t deal in spells.”
“Oh, no, we’re powered by ancient holy fire and all sorts of entirely magical stuffs but, no, spells, that’s right out,” Withersby muttered.
The Frenchwoman, who seemed particularly attuned to him, elbowed him. “Some of them look familiar. Look, there.” The headmistress pointed to one side of the room, where a scowling, broad-shouldered man was seated next to a grim-
looking, lighter-haired woman, with an elegant blond man to their right. “Haven’t we seen them before, Alexi?”
The leader nodded. “Government.”
“Oh! I must be related to that one,” the nobleman Withersby stated.
“The blond in colorful fashion?” the Frenchwoman asked.
“Who else?”
“That one! He’s the man who is obsessed with us,” the headmistress stated, nodding in the direction of said colorful blond. “That’s Lord Black. He’s been on the hunt for us for years now. As I recall, he’s got special permission from Her Majesty to look into the ‘paranormal.’”
“The dear man,” Withersby cooed. “Should we tell him the truth about us?”
There was a chorus of “no” as the Frenchwoman drove a second elbow into his side.
“But truly, Alexi, what do we do now?” the vicar asked. “We can’t leave them in this state. The ghosts are having fits.”
Alexi frowned. “I hate to say this, but … I do not believe this falls under our jurisdiction.”
“It seems to be under the ghosts’ jurisdiction, and by their engagement, must we not be as well?” the blond Irishwoman asked.
“Yes,” the leader responded in a low, stern tone, “but the ghosts seem to want to help. In such cases, we always let helpful ghosts be, as the very action of their service will generally set them entirely to rest. Helping the living…” Alexi frowned. “While this is likely a matter of importance to mortal London, we have been told not to interfere in such matters.”
“We should call the police,” the headmistress said. Frederic the raven squawked once more and returned to the air.
“Ah.” Alexi rubbed his chin. “Why, yes. Yes, we can do that. The police. Good idea. Let’s send them by.”
One particularly insistent spirit, the woman in the fine gown, perhaps a former lady of the house, was gesturing at the priest, toward his jacket, as if trying to reach an incorporeal hand into his pocket. The priest tried to shoo her away for a moment before making an exclamation of understanding.
Eterna and Omega Page 24
