Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Well, then. Nothing traditional at all but Christmas crackers. After, we’ll go to the panto.” He grinned. “I’ll lay odds you’ve never been, and it will take your mind off everything.”

  “I—I think I would like that,” she faltered. “Very much.”

  “Capital!” And so I lay siege to the castle. “Shall I see you home? It’s no trouble, I need to tootle round to the club and plot with Alderscroft.”

  She managed a ghost of a smile. “I’d be very grateful.”

  He kept up a steady stream of conversation the entire way to her boarding house—some just prattle, some recollections of past conflicts with rogue magicians or the nastier sorts of Elementals, and just a bit about Maya and her Peter. She listened to it all attentively, and he found that encouraging.

  They said goodnight in his auto, rather than on the steps of the boarding house. She ran up to the door, and when she got there, looked briefly over her shoulder and gave him a little wave. He saluted her with two fingers, and once she was inside, he drove off.

  He spent the rest of the evening researching his notes and everything in his library concerning necromancers—and wished devoutly that the Old Lion had managed to find the way into that secret room at Whitestone Hall to get whatever books Richard had been studying. Richard was more powerful than any necromancer he had ever encountered before.

  Then again, when that happened, the Old Lion would probably burn them all on the spot, and Peter wasn’t sure he could blame him. The last thing anyone would want would be to recreate what Richard Whitestone had done. Mind, it might take a war to do so . . . Peter was beginning to think that what was happening on the battlefields of France was causing the equivalent of a veritable flood of energy to anything that was practicing magic on the Dark side of the Path. For a moment, as he thought about that hell-on-earth that was the Front, his cozy study became unreal to him. He felt, for a moment, that he must still be there, and this place was nothing but a dream of a time that would never come again, that all the world would become the vast, gray slaughterhouse, mired in mud, giving life only to rats, lice, and frogs.

  Eventually he went to bed, but his dreams were full of horrors, and he was glad of morning when it came.

  The sitting room was warm and aromatic with cinnamon and clove. An evergreen garland draped the mantle, adding to the fragrance, and a holly wreath hung in one window. Peter had overruled the idea of a Christmas tree, however small, but other festive touches in the form of more holly, a big bowl of apples, and a few enormous red velvet bows made it clear that there was no lack of Christmas spirit here. “Garrick, you have outdone yourself,” Peter said gratefully. “And thank you, Mary. Susanne likes you, and having you here will make things—”

  “—look less like you’re trying to seduce the girl?” Mary Shackle-ford said with a laugh. Her blue eyes glistened with amusement, as she leaned back into the comfort of the big wing chair and held her feet toward the fire on the grate. “Oh, don’t bother to deny it. If you didn’t care about her, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to make everything proper.”

  Peter lifted an eyebrow at her. The Mary he knew had never cared a jot about what people said or did. When had she gotten so shrewd? Or interested enough in people to pay attention to them? “I knew you were discernin’ with paint, but I never suspected you were that observant about real people.”

  “Pish!” she waved a hand at him from the depths of his wing chair—the other hand being occupied with a glass of sherry. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. One of these days I’ll carry you off to one of my Socialist meetings. You’d probably enjoy it, because they’ll be yapping at your heels because you’re a peer, because you’re rich, and you’re an army officer. They won’t give you a minute’s rest. You have a good chance of meeting Shaw there. Or Wells. Or both.”

  “You terrify me. I’d rather face a necromancer than Shaw. The necromancer can only have his liches tear me to bits; Shaw can eviscerate me with his tongue, then use me as a comic figure in a play.” The doorbell sounded at that moment, and Garrick went to answer it. “I believe our guest has arrived.”

  Garrick ushered Susanne into the room, and her face lit up when she saw Mary. There was a flurry of happy greetings, then Garrick cleared his throat and announced dinner, and all of them retreated to the tiny dining room of the flat.

  Like the sitting room, the dining room had been decked out festively. Since Peter often had guests for dinner—he really preferred not to dine at one of his clubs—this was a practical room, well suited to leisurely dining and lingering over coffee or brandy. More evergreen and holly garlanded the mantel, surrounded the candlesticks on the table—Peter preferred candles on the table, even though the flat had electrics and gas laid on. Though once again, Peter had a pang of guilt, looking at the feast spread out over the white linen cloth and thinking about the men in the trenches, who might or might not have packets from home, who probably would be eating bully beef and that ever present plum-and-apple jam, and who certainly would be cold, wet, and weary.

  Peter insisted that Garrick—who had done all of the work, bringing the feast up from the cookshop, setting the table, and so forth—sit down and eat with them. “Not standing on ceremony today, old man,” he said firmly, so Garrick (a little reluctantly) took his place in the fourth chair at the table, and with great merriment, Peter insisted that Garrick play the part of the “father” at the table.

  With evident amusement now, Garrick did just that, carving the beef and sending around the various courses so they could all help themselves, as if they were a real family. Peter had opted for a fine roast, Yorkshire pudding for Susanne, and all the trimmings of a fine Christmas dinner. Mary kept up most of the conversation, telling them all what she had done since her escape from France, peppering the narrative with anecdotes about her Socialist and Bohemian friends, and drawing Susanne out to describe what her fellows were like at her boarding house. There were no allusions to the war, to the hospital, to the Kerridges, or to Susanne’s father.

  Peter was intensely grateful to her.

  There were Christmas crackers of course. It would hardly be Christmas without them. They all put on the paper hats from the crackers, and read the silly mottos. Peter’s was “What runs but never walks? Water!” which was uncannily apt considering his Element. Susanne’s was “Why can’t a bicycle stand up by itself? Because it’s two-tyred!” which elicited a groan. Mary’s was “What’s the best thing to eat in the bath? Sponge cake!” which triggered what turned out to be a truly funny story about a mishap she had involving a sponge cake and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. And Garrick’s was “On which side do chickens have the most feathers? The outside!” Bad jokes and puns were the tradition of Christmas crackers, but Peter wondered if Garrick had managed to suss out just which ones did not contain sentimental love notes before he purchased them. If so, well done to him.

  Then again, Peter had never actually ever purchased Christmas crackers himself. For all I know, they come in “joke assortment” and “love note assortment.”

  There were no presents; Peter knew that Mary wouldn’t have thought to bring anything, and Susanne had had much more pressing matters on her mind. But everyone had fun with the trinkets in the crackers, Mary (much to her amusement) got the wedding ring in her slice of plum pudding, and then it was time to bundle up in the coats and go to the panto.

  Garrick drove the auto; he firmly told Peter that he had seen quite enough panto as a youngster, and he would much prefer to wait with the chauffeurs at the pub nearby. So they tumbled out of the auto and made their way inside the Hammersmith Odeon, ready for the delights of childhood.

  Panto—short for “pantomime,” even though there was precious little miming involved—was a tradition at Christmas all across the length and breadth of England. It was ostensibly a children’s play, although the “play” was buried in layers and layers of ballet dancers and music-hall acts, and indeed, many music-hall troupes and individual artis
ts changed up their usual performances to do panto at this time of year. London panto was—well—spectacle. The Hippodrome boasted camels and an elephant this year. And every panto, no matter what the story, always had the same things that never failed, much to the delight of the children. There was always a charming little actress playing the Principle Boy. The hero’s mother was played by a man in a dress. The Principle Girl was always some sort of fairy or princess or both. There was always a clown, in this case, Aladdin’s brother, Wishee-Washee, who made mischief, ate prodigious quantities of sausage, beat all and sundry with a slapstick club, and generally wreaked havoc. There was an amazing amount of double entendre, presumably for the entertainment of the adults in the audience. And the audience was not only encouraged to participate, it was practically required.

  The panto they were coming to see was Aladdin, set, as according to tradition, in an entirely fanciful China that bore no resemblance to the real thing, and they all acted like the children that surrounded them. The children were rambunctiously pleased to see the three adults acting just like them. “My favorite panto is Aladdin ,” the little girl sitting next to Susanne said, before the curtain came up. “Which is yours?”

  “I don’t have one,” Susanne confessed in a stage whisper. “I’ve never been before.”

  Never been before? The children on that side of the row were all astonished, and took it upon themselves to coach Susanne as to what was expected. She watched them for her cues, and when the villain was sneaking up on Aladdin, she was able to shout “Look behind you!” with the same gusto as any of them. She laughed at the clown eating a never-ending string of sausages, chuckled at the antics of the dancing pantomime horse, watched entranced at the ballet of the jewels and the dance of the Slave of the Ring and the Genie of the Lamp, gasped when Aladdin fought a dozen of his evil uncle’s guards at once, all of them popping up and down on the stage by means of trap doors, sighed over the grace of the pretty singer playing the princess, and applauded wildly when Aladdin finally married her.

  Of course, that was only the middle of the panto, because there was all the excitement of the wicked uncle stealing princess and palace and all and Aladdin having to rescue her.

  But there was one moment when she went suddenly silent. This version of Aladdin featured a stunning pair of twin girls as the principal boys—plural—and the producer used that to his advantage. Not only did that make appearing and vanishing stage-magic much easier, but Aladdin was able to dupe his evil uncle into fighting his shadow while Aladdin himself escaped with the princess, newly freed from her chains, and ran off with the lamp.

  And that was the moment that Susanne went silent and very thoughtful.

  She’s thought of something! Peter realized. And from the look on her face, it was something very important.

  She went back to simply enjoying herself after that, but it was with a gusto that was quite unrestrained, and that made him itch to question her.

  He didn’t get a chance, though.

  Garrick brought the auto around, and they all got into it. “Oh, and to think all my friends wanted me to go to a ballet with them!” Mary laughed, as she deposited herself in the middle of the back seat.

  “Wasn’t that a ballet? It said ‘ballet’ in the program,” Susanne asked innocently.

  That kept Mary busy explaining the difference between a ‘real’ ballet and a panto ballet, which did indeed have some ballet dancers in it, which then required more explanation. And before Peter could ask what had aroused Susanne’s attention, they were at the boarding house. He hadn’t had the heart to interrupt. Mary was unusually jolly, keeping them all laughing with a steady stream of stories and very comic explanation, right up until Garrick pulled up to Susanne’s door.

  “Are you sure you won’t come back for cake and some tea?” Peter asked, putting on his most entreating expression.

  “Oh, do,” Mary urged, with a sly glance at Peter. “We likely won’t get a bang-up evening like this again, and we should make it last!”

  “I’ll be moving closer to the new hospital tomorrow,” she said with a look of apology. “I need to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Thank you, Lord Peter! I don’t think I have ever had a better time, or laughed more.”

  And then she was gone, and he knew that however impatient he might feel, she was not going to tell him anything until she was ready to.

  “Well, I tried,” Mary said, settling back into the seat.

  “So you did,” Peter replied. “And for that, you shall have cake.”

  The moment Susanne saw the double Aladdins, she knew how she was going to handle her father—at least, in part. But first, she had to make certain she still possessed the key element. She ran up the stairs to her room and reopened the first box she had packed, certain she would never need anything in it. She hoped, fervently, that she hadn’t lost the thing in her race from Whitestone to Branwell, from Branwell to the Ardennes, from the Ardennes to the Front, and then to London again. Granted, she could make another, but it would be time-consuming, and more to the point, it would not hold that “essence of blissful ignorance” that she’d had when she made the first one—

  As she reached into the box, she felt the object she wanted “reaching” for her, and she fished the little bundle out with a smile of triumph.

  It was wrapped in her old apron—tucked into the front pocket for extra safety, in fact. If there was one thing that Robin had driven home to her, over and over again, it was that a magician should never, ever allow something this personal to fall into the hands of anyone else. She’d not had the time nor the opportunity to properly unmake it—you couldn’t simply burn something as personal as this little packet was. You had to unmake it, destroy any tie that it had to you, and only then could you set fire to it as the final act of dissolution.

  Such a tiny thing to hold such potential—both potential to aid her and potential to destroy her.

  She cradled the small packet, now gray and dirty, but even more potent for having been with her all this time. So innocuous; a clean, white handkerchief, a scrap of the dress she had been wearing, snipped from an inside seam, a little earth moistened with her own blood, a single hair, an appleseed.

  And now . . . it could be a weapon.

  22

  RICHARD Whitestone crossed the Channel on January fifteenth.

  He had been something less than careful, which told Peter that he was either very desperate or very confident. He had not taken passage on the sort of vessel where he might, possibly, have been able to conceal his movements—one of the great commercial steamers of riveted iron and steel. No, he had paid a very great deal of money (where had he gotten it? Peter was afraid to speculate at this point) to a small fishing boat to take him back over. He had actually put one foot in the water while getting into the vessel.

  The selkies had his scent at that instant, and they trailed him all the way to the English coast, despite the fact that his shielding was very, very good. They’d linked the scent of corruption, which would never leave him, to the scent of the boat. They had, of course, alerted the other Water Elementals, who had come straight to Peter as soon as they had him and knew in general where he was going.

  Peter had, by contrast, been extremely careful and clever. It had occurred to him that although Richard Whitestone was diabolically clever when it came to magic, he was not nearly so clever when it came to living with the modern world.

  Peter had placed a private detective near the likeliest docks, in an office with a telephone; it helped to be a Peer of the Realm in this case, as Customs was reasonably willing to help him in this as long as Ben didn’t get in the way. Ben Landers was armed with a description and a sketch of Richard Whitestone and the knowledge that there would be a substantial bonus for keeping track of the man. As soon as Peter knew which port the fishing vessel was bound to—Gravesend—he had rung up Landers, and told him where to go and what to look for. Then he settled back and waited.

  As he had expe
cted, as soon as the boat docked, the Water Elementals lost all trace of Whitestone. It was very clear that on land, the man could vanish from the ken of anyone and anything he cared to, magically speaking. The only question was, could he vanish from the sight of someone who was as good at following as Whitestone was at vanishing?

  Around about midnight, Landers called again. “Your man has taken a room in the Granby Hotel in Gravesend,” he said. “Shall I stay with him?”

  “Don’t let him out of your sight,” Peter replied immediately. “Bring in another man or two to watch round the clock.”

  Well. He went straight for the bait. Susanne was assigned as a nursing student at Gravesend Hospital.

  “Garrick,” he called. “Rouse up, old man, the Hunt is up.”

  Again, by Peter’s planning, Susanne had resources that Richard would not have expected. She was not in a modest boarding house anymore. She was in the best hotel in Gravesend, and fine hotels had telephones, desk clerks, and concierges who were employed to take messages to the guests, among other things. Peter put in a call to the front desk.

  “This is Lord Peter Almsley. I’d like a message taken to Susanne Whitestone please,” he said, when the call went through. “Yes, immediately, she is expecting this message, and it is worth disturbing her. Please tell her that her relative has arrived and is at the Granby. Yes, please call me back if there is an answer.”

  Poor old Garrick. He must not have gone to sleep either. “M’lord?” he said, coming into the room still completely dressed.

  Peter hung up the phone. “Whitestone landed. He’s taken a room at the Granby in Gravesend. My man is watching him.”

  “Very good, m’lord. We’ll be moving to the Royal Dartford then, will we, sir? I have your bags all packed.” Once again, Peter thanked his stars for Garrick; Garrick had taken care of every tiny detail.