by Jerico Lenk
Music burst through the quiet, prancing along unaware of the tension. Rich, bewitching song, doleful Vivaldi. Cain snatched the scarf and the knife and shouted, “Clement!”
“What?” Clement cried, frantic. Then he seemed to remember the gun in his hand. “Oh!”
All at once, Cain tossed the scarf over Dorland’s face as Clement readied the derringer—lifted it and pulled the trigger.
A throbbing crack! split through the room. Somewhere, a mirror exploded, raining glass upon the floor. Dorland let loose an awful cry, but Clement had missed. With the derringer’s only shot sacrificed, he swung to box Dorland across the face with the gun itself.
Dorland lumbered back, flailing to catch himself against the broken mirror. He held his bloodied mouth as a low, angry sound rattled out of him.
Clement swerved away to drag me from the room with him, but I dug my heels in, hitting at his helpful arm. “We’re not leaving Cain here with him! We—”
Crack!
Another mirror near us hit the floor, bursting into fat shards. Dorland had found his revolver again.
“Damn it!” Clement hissed as we dropped to hands and knees. “Will, Kingsley can handle this, I swear to you!”
Still standing by the armchair in the center of the room, Cain uttered a low, chilling laugh. And from under Clement’s protective arm, I watched in maddened disbelief as he pushed up his sleeve and cut a shallow line along his own bare wrist with the point of Clement’s knife.
Hoarsely, he cried, “Dmitri, come!”
Throb of my pulse in my ears. The Vivaldi. Dorland fumbling with his gun. Clement’s breath, over my shoulder. A long black leg extended from a mirror in the far corner.
Panic coiled and snapped in me like a whip as I pressed back against Clement, who pressed back against the wall himself.
With an otherworldly grace, just as my mother had in my dream, or vision, or whatever it had been, a lithe, ghastly pale gentleman in a nice broadcloth suit stepped through the glass and into the attic room.
Missing.
Yes, ears ringing. Hair on end. The figure was obviously not of the living. But it …
A slow little trickle of blood rolled like a saintly tea from Cain’s bad eye, down his cheek.
“Cain!” I gasped, but Clement quickly covered my mouth. I sent him a wild glance only to be taken aback by the reverent nervousness knotting his brow.
Diabolical mark … Cain had said that day in the vestibule.
The bewildering phantom flickered from the mirror to Cain without ever seeming to have moved at all. Cain tipped his head back and peered up at the thing, fully manifested as it was with crackling energy and splendorous detail. A pallid but portrait-beautiful young man, with eyes the colour of blood clots and a smile so full of adoration it was almost sinister.
My heart stopped.
I’d seen this thing before. In the hall, the day I met Cain. Without a doubt, it was the same apparition that had been watching us as it faded away into the darkness of the corridor. Soft face, even stare, all black suit, and—
“The Kingsley daemon!” Dorland wheezed in deplorable delight.
The thing swooped to bended knee and took Cain’s hand to dust its pale lips along his knuckles, and then it closed its eager mouth on his bleeding wrist. Not a drop of blood hit the floor. The Missing man … drank it.
Cain shivered and looked down at the thing and said, “Kill Dorland.”
The Missing man burst into shadows.
Every flame of every candle flickered; the shadows of the room seemed to scrape and caw like ravens. Cain closed his arms around himself tight and sank down into the armchair with a weary sigh.
The Missing man shimmered and shifted from spot to spot like rain on the wind. Dorland stood amidst a bit of broken glass, heaving great, excited breaths as he struggled to follow the ghostly gentleman with his eyes.
The thing gathered itself from the fringes of the room, emerging from a dark corner to peer at Dorland in ever shortening patience.
“Daemon!” Dorland cried, ecstatic. “Daemon, be still! Ah, it’s true—the rumours are true!”
All the candles went out in one grand breath as the Missing thing descended upon Dorland like a rook to silver.
Everything, grey and smoky. The looming shapes of mirrors. Cain in the chair. The wailing phonograph. Black cloth over the window. Dorland’s shadow in the far corner, and a figure wrapped in darkness.
Cain’s daemon.
Dorland uttered the strangled shout of a man being restrained or physically forced. His silhouette writhed, twisted … lifted suddenly, as though some unseen hand pried him up off his feet. Slowly, and purposefully, to hold him hovering there twitching and trembling in its clutch. The Missing thing shivered back into vivid detail before him, just peering at him curiously. Dorland dropped the revolver with a dreadful clatter, and his gagging gasps curdled into sounds of anguish.
With every step the thing took forth, Dorland listed back, his toes dragging on the floor, as if carried by the thing’s gaze. It reached for the black covering over the slanted window, pulling it easily to the floor and flooding the smoky room with the bruised light of a wintry dusk. Silky ribbons of bluish grey still unfurled from all the candles. And Dorland hung there in the air before the handsome, blood-eyed daemon. It merely looked at him and he gave an awful shudder. Blood bloomed in one of his eyes, before suddenly they both began to circle—twist, within their sockets, into his head and then back around again. Blood streamed down his face, staining his beard, from his nose and his ears and his tongue. Parts of him began to jerk with a sickening rosary of crunching bone.
The stiff latches of the window jerked up without being touched; rust fell in tiny pieces to the floor. With a gentle brush of the fingers, the daemon pushed the window open.
Down below was Mansfield Street. The smell of frost and snow swirled in from the rooftops and the merry sound of carolers echoed up into the attic, prancing around with the Vivaldi.
Dorland’s flushed, straining face contorted and his fingers wiggled stiffly. The daemon stretched out a hand, long bone-white fingers winding through the cold air. As his eyes finally rolled up to white and stayed, Dorland uttered one last gurgling, choking sound that may or may not have been futile resistance, and then just before bursting into a swirl of fleeing shadows, disappearing again like it had never been there in the first place, the Missing thing gave Dorland a push.
He fell limply out the window to crack and flop off the roof, then plummet fast to the pavement just outside his own front door.
Shrieks struck up down on the street in an instant. The violins and flutes of the Vivaldi record squealed to a halt but the record continued turning, Dorland’s ugly voice jumping along the wax:
“The Kingsley daemon … the Kingsley daemon … the Kingsley daemon … ”
I wrenched free of Clement’s arms, leapt to my feet and staggered into the opposite room—no pail, no wash basin. Nails scraping along old paint, I wrestled the window open there and leaned out in time to get sick onto the snowy back roof, away from the sight of the street. And then I just crumpled down to sit, buried my face in my arms, and began to sob in relief.
***
Clement and Cain let me cry. I was thankful for that. But it didn’t satisfy me.
“God … oh God,” I whispered, once I could speak again, or even think at all. Drying my face carelessly, I scrambled up and across the attic, stamping on blood and glass to peek out the window at Dorland’s body down below, sprawled broken and bloody on the walk as people on the street either ran, screaming, or swarmed like ants to a spilled treat.
“He’s gone,” Cain whispered. “Don’t worry.”
“Yes, he’s gone,” I said, my voice ragged. “He’s dead.”
“No.” As if on the throne of some hellish rule, Cain still sat in the velvet chair to which I’d been bound. “I meant the daemon.”
The legs of the chair scraped upon the floor as I shot over
and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“What was that?” I entreated, nerves alight, though I felt horrifyingly hollow inside. “What happened? What did you do, Cain?”
He was alabaster pale, face set in a grim frown, and the blood that flaked like rust under his scarred eye made him seem a corpse come to life again, Ligeia in the flesh.
“We all have our secrets, Willow,” he whispered.
I reared back as if he’d struck me. Never mind that it was not a time in which Willow was right, it was just I … had never disclosed that name to him.
“What is that supposed to mean, you awful boy?” I hissed in desperate bewilderment. I turned to Clement, who sat against the wall quite dazed and disheveled. “What does that mean?”
Cain twisted around to cut Clement his own damning look. “I told you it wasn’t safe to see Dorland alone.”
“How was I to know he’d want to kill him, too?” Clement cried, voice strained and weak, as though his last thread of sanity were fit to snap. Dark red bloomed on his sleeve, just off the shoulder.
Blast. I hurried over to him. “Clement, you’re bleeding.”
“Ouch,” he grunted once I got my hands on his upper arm. There was a rip in his sleeve, blackened at the tear. A gash along the flesh beneath.
“Did you take a bullet?” I gasped.
“Nearly, I suppose,” he muttered, picking a small sliver of mirror glass from his palm before swatting my hands away to inspect his own arm. “Seems it only grazed the flesh.”
His face pinched as he glanced up without lifting his head.
“Could you two please explain ‘Willow’ to me?” he begged. “That’s a girl’s name.” His brow knotted. “Are you a girl, Will?”
“Not at the moment,” I said bitterly as Cain grumbled, “Sometimes he is.”
Clement slouched, staring at me in a diluted sort of shock, as if my ambiguous gender were a harder truth to swallow than Cain Kingsley being in possession of a daemon.
I couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, as Cain wouldn’t meet mine. My face burned in shame. Failure. Dread. I would fall short; Clement’s thoughts of me would change. And everything would be ruined.
Clement cleared his throat and tore his gaze away. “Did Dorland know?” he husked.
“He knew my mother,” I said instead.
The quiet in the room hung heavy on my shoulders.
I rubbed at my neck; it ached so deeply from however long I’d been in that chair. My hands would not stop shaking. “That’s why he wanted me. She’d worked with him. He killed her.”
The brittle quiet in the attic sharpened to a point.
Clement stood slowly, holding his arm. “Will, I’m so sorry … ”
I shook my head. “She was mad. Criminal. She committed despicable acts at Dorland’s side, and it hurts, but it’s not as though I really knew her. Thus, it doesn’t deal quite the blow it might have. I’m glad I didn’t know her.”
From the velvet chair, Cain peered at me in that unnervingly penetrative way of his. “That is why you are so interested in the locked files. Isn’t it?”
Clement shuffled over and swung the back of his hand out against Cain’s shoulder. “How did you know Will was a girl?” he demanded, notes of betrayal in his voice.
“I’m sometimes a girl,” I corrected tersely.
Cain’s face dimpled somewhere between a wince and a scowl. “I just knew. I had a feeling.”
“Lies! Your little daemon told you, didn’t he?”
Aghast, I threw Cain a sharp look. I didn’t even have to ask aloud.
“I’m sorry, Will,” Cain said glumly. “I know ‘Willow’ is not the name true to you—and I never intended to speak it aloud just now, but he’s been whispering it and whispering it since I asked him where you were.”
“That thing,” I guessed. My voice was barely there. “From the mirror. It told you my name. It knew where I was.”
“I asked him to keep watch on you until you’d met with Dorland.”
“Keep watch on me?”
“Yes,” Cain said through his teeth. “And I’m sorry the blasted fiend didn’t tell me Dorland took you until I asked.”
I fixed on him a look of horrified betrayal of which I was not entirely proud. A chill wound through me, fast and piercing. Innocent ghosts were uncomfortable, yes, but it was something altogether more disturbing, more violating, to think something like that Missing thing, that daemon, something I had not sensed or even known at all, had been there with me and somehow without my knowing.
“I’m a witch, Will.” Cain’s mismatched eyes hung on me grave as a painted saint’s. “And Dmitri is my family’s familiar.”
I backed away with a crunch of glass underfoot.
No small wonder the file on the Kingsleys was locked, or that the world said what it did about them. No wonder he wanted to know. But my mother … and if Cain was a witch …
He stood, gracefully, as if stretching his legs. Somehow, his wrist had not bled out. In fact, it already seemed a bit healed. Impossible. Or perhaps not, for a witch. I hadn’t any idea. I hadn’t any idea about far too many things suddenly, I realised.
Cain drifted over to the window where the early evening wind blew slush in from the roof. There he turned to face me with a wicked regality, and for the first time I was truly cowed by how imposing he was. Such intellect and eerie elegance condensed down into such a small young man. This was his darker side, and it called for full attention.
“Spectral gifts are generally solitary gifts,” he said. “Occasionally, however, they are inherited. And that is what makes a witch. Not cackling, ugly old hags who live alone in the forest, boiling up brews of baby brains and dead toads, frolicking with the Devil. No. A bloodline of gifts, forever in tune with the phantasmal. Your mother was a witch, Will? Then it is witches’ blood that courses through your veins, same as it’s witches’ blood that courses through Kingsley veins.”
A bloodline with you, too … he’d said, what felt like so long ago.
“Dmitri.” Cain looked away. “Or, the red-eyed fellow with whom you’ve just made acquaintance. He’s my family’s familiar. I am the heir chosen to bear his company. I offer a bit of blood for the spell, and he’s bound to do my bidding.”
“Witches’ blood,” I repeated, shrinking further back against the wall with a tiny, hollow laugh. “No, Cain, I am not a witch.”
“Yes,” he whispered, looking so much more human than he had when he’d entered the attic and practically begging me with his big owl eyes not to hate him. “You are.”
Panic cinched my heart. Oh God, all my father had feared had come to be. I’d gotten tangled up in everything my mother had done—everything—and I couldn’t deny what I’d seen. That spectral gentleman had walked right out of the mirror, no normal Missing, and Cain had called it a name and it had tipped Dorland out the window at Cain’s demand and …
“Dorland’s dead,” I said again, staring blankly. “And I feel nothing. You seem to feel nothing. What kind of men are we … ?”
“Would we be any better had we allowed him to continue his atrocities?” Cain countered, thickly, almost impatiently.
“We killed him.”
“We did not kill him.”
“Yes, we just let that thing kill him—”
“Would you rather him be alive?” Cain barked, then immediately appeared to regret it, looking away.
“No,” I hissed, eyes narrowed. “Of course not!”
“We work too closely with life and death,” Clement offered in a husk of his usual voice, trying to defuse the two of us. But he didn’t need to; I wilted, empty again. I was out of feelings, it seemed. Nothing left with which to weigh good deeds and necessary evils. What Cain said was true. We’d done nothing to the man, ourselves.
We all have our secrets.
I looked to Clement, but he had nothing additional to offer. It was obvious he’d known all along about Cain and the Kingsley daemon, the reasons for which Cain was
desperate to see the criminal witchcraft files. He had known. Neither of them had told me. That made me feel very small and helpless, and … alone again.
“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Cain murmured.
Clement studied me with a soft look of frustration and guilt.
“Clement,” I snapped, “if you don’t stop looking at me as if you don’t know me anymore, I swear—it’s really not that complicated.”
Clement cleared his throat and, with a flutter of lashes, his hazel eyes darted off elsewhere.
“Do you resent me?” Cain asked. I looked back to him quickly, brow knotted. All the darkness had flown from him, leaving him bloody and faint. He stared at me with wide, haunted eyes, ready to shoulder my condemnation. Just as I’d said to him before, at that party on Cheyne Walk. Don’t hate me for it …
Did I resent him for being a witch? For having a pet daemon which invaded his friends’ privacy. That slew men at his mere call. The betrayal of morality was staggering—I had good reason to resent him—to fear him.
But I didn’t.
Witches’ blood.
I swallowed, throat raw. “We all have our secrets,” I replied in a whisper.
More distraught voices echoed up from the street, sharp and fragile in the cold. “All the blood, all the blood … don’t look! Fetch a doctor! What the blazes happened?”
Glass crunched under Cain’s feet as he grabbed a piece of rope from my restraints and hurried to cinch Clement’s bleeding arm. Clement waved him away, wincing as he struggled to tear a piece of his own sleeve off.
“Come here, Will,” he husked, and struggled to wrap with the linen the bruised place of my arm—one or two little puncture marks, like rusty-coloured freckles in the center of the bruises, along my vein. Through his teeth, he said, “He must have monitored your consciousness with morphine, then.”
“What time is it?” I whispered.
“Nearly six o’clock. You’ve been here since last night.” Cain pulled Clement over again, who finally allowed him to tend to his injury.
Clement sighed weakly. “Well,” he said. “I’ve tasted heroism, and it’s not my cup of tea. What about you two?”
