Grim Shadows (Roaring Twenties)

by Jenn Bennett

  Lowe groaned. “I’m just saying I think there might be the chance that what I once thought was just lust could be something more. Maybe. Possibly.”

  “You think? Listen, you either have feelings or you don’t.”

  He ran a hand over his face and rubbed the heel of his palm over a brow. “I just advanced a florist one hundred dollars.”

  “Are you mad? That was—”

  “Stupid.”

  “Most definitely stupid.”

  Lowe’s shoulders slumped. “It really was.” Then again, he had a long history of making stupid mistakes. Maybe this was nothing out of the ordinary.

  • • •

  Hadley rarely made stupid mistakes, so she had to assume that her inability to add simple numbers and use the telephone without accidentally hanging up on the caller were indirectly related to the time spent on Lowe’s lap. And her newfound stupidity continued to hobble her throughout her workday. The other curators squinted at her like there was dirt smeared on her face. George asked why she was smiling to herself. Her father—blind, at that—suspected illness and suggested she go home and rest.

  Rest was the last thing she needed. She was wound tighter than a cheap watch, bursting at the seams with an antsy sort of elation.

  But as the hours passed, all that elation shifted into a nervous anticipation that created a dull fog over her brain. When five o’clock finally came, and she was on her way out of the office, she found herself standing at the front desk while Miss Tilly slowly repeated what she’d already said twice, looking at Hadley as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

  She stared at the secretary’s hand in disbelief, her insides jumping with glee. “For me?” she said dumbly, finally catching on to what the woman was telling her.

  “I know. I thought the same thing,” Miss Tilly said before glancing up at Hadley’s irritated reaction. “Oh, no—I didn’t mean that no one would ever send you flowers, it’s just that no one has.”

  “Yes, I’m quite aware, but thank you for the reminder,” Hadley said dryly. “Who brought it into the building?”

  “A delivery boy. He was sort of handsome,” the secretary said, flouncing her too-perfect strawberry hair. “Anyway, he said I could expect to see him a lot, because the gentleman who ordered it paid for daily delivery.” Daily? “Every kind of lily they can get their hands on, a different one each day.” She handed Hadley the single oriental lily, snowy white and smelling both sweet and spicy. On its long stem, a brilliant purple ribbon was tied in a bow. “Terribly romantic, don’t you think?”

  Hadley had no experience with which to judge such a thing, but her heart was beating so fast, she feared she might break down and do something embarrassing, like laugh inappropriately or twirl in circles. It was all she could do to squeeze out a disinterested, “Mmm.”

  “Is it from Mr. Ginn?” Miss Tilly whispered, wide eyes blinking with interest.

  “Probably,” Hadley lied. She knew exactly whom it was from, and why no card was provided. After all, her father couldn’t find out they were working together.

  She bid the secretary good night and stepped out into the parking lot. Should she call Lowe? They didn’t make plans after Mrs. Wentworth walked in on their erotic tête-à-tête last night. And though Hadley expected to find the woman’s resignation when she got home, she was more concerned about what to expect from Lowe. He said a lot of things that pointed to something of substance between them, but her mind still tugged her back to his casual “I’ll just call Ruby” speech from their trip to Lawndale. And though he’d flat-out told her he wasn’t interested in Ruby or any other girl, doubt lingered.

  Because if she let herself believe in the possibility that he meant everything he said in her apartment, a dark fear whispered that she’d be setting herself up for disappointment.

  Normal women probably didn’t have these obsessive reservations. And if Hadley wanted a shot at being normal, she reckoned she’d better shake off the fear and figure out what she wanted from Lowe. She sniffed the lily and pictured his muscled chest and arms.

  I stroke myself to sleep every night thinking of you.

  She glanced around guiltily, as if passersby could hear her thoughts.

  All the tumbling joy and the nervous anticipation and the heavy fog swirled around her head like a mad game of musical chairs. If she wasn’t careful, she might trip over her own feet. So she pushed his words from her thoughts and focused on heading to the spot her usual taxicab sat every day at five. Standing on the sidewalk between her and the waiting yellow car was Oliver Ginn.

  “Pretty flower,” he said, hands shoved in his pockets.

  “Hello, Oliver.”

  “Who gave it to you? That Magnusson fellow? He seemed awfully territorial that night at the Flood Mansion party. I would’ve thought you preferred brains over brawn.”

  She brushed off the insult. “If you wanted to send me flowers, nothing was stopping you. Instead, you send me strange books.”

  A wounded look flashed over his face. “I thought you liked books.”

  “I do,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t make her feel so guilty. “Where did you find it? No author was listed.”

  “It’s something from my family’s library. Did the passage strike a chord?”

  “How did you see what you claimed to see at the Flood Mansion party and associate it with that particular myth?”

  He exhaled heavily. “If you want to know the truth, I’ve seen them before.”

  The muscles in Hadley’s neck tightened. “Where?”

  “Someone I used to know,” he said, removing his hat. “Someone I used to care about. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but I’ve since learned things. And I can help you, I promise. If you give me a chance, there are so many things I could teach you. So much I could show you.”

  He sounded so sincere, and if it were any other matter but this, she might give him the benefit of the doubt. “I’ve never even heard of another person plagued by such a thing. And yet, you’ve somehow met two of us?”

  “When I first came into town, I heard rumors from other curators about strange things happening in the de Young Museum. All of those rumors seemed to lead me to you.”

  Anger swelled. The edges of her vision darkened. “You courted me under false pretenses?”

  “No! I was curious, of course, but when I saw you, everything changed. My entire world opened up. Look at you—brilliant and strong. A scholar who’s not afraid to make her mark in a man’s world. Just like your mother.”

  “My mother?”

  “I know you say you don’t remember her, but surely you’ve read about her achievements. That photograph of her standing in front of the temple at Karnak with your father was printed in a dozen publications—you look just like her. It’s uncanny.”

  Yes, her father had often said the same thing when he was feeling sentimental. But when Hadley looked at her mother’s image, all she saw was the woman who had paid her nanny.

  “Everyone said your father stood upon her genius, and you have that same spark,” Oliver insisted, his hand reaching out for her face. “And so much more.”

  She drew back sharply. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not my mother’s daughter. Nor am I some curiosity to be studied.”

  His dark brows knitted. “Of course you aren’t. And I can’t apologize enough for not telling you sooner that I knew about your gift. It’s just that I wanted to make sure the rumors were true, and I wanted you to trust me. I’m not interested in you as a curiosity or a whim. I truly believe fate brought you into my life. Fate brought us together,” he insisted, reaching out unexpectedly to trace her jaw with the tips of his gloved fingers. “You’re not cursed, Hadley. You’re blessed. Let me into your life, and I’ll prove it.”

  His hand curled around the back of her neck. He leaned in before she
could pull away. Cool lips pressed against hers, unyielding and insistent. Tobacco and the strong scent of bay rum smothered her senses as a keening anxiety turned her muscles to stone.

  Everything inside her screamed no! And that was enough to tear her out of her panic. She shoved at his chest and stumbled backward, wiping her mouth on her coat sleeve. Good God. If she ever had any doubt about the lack of spark between them, she certainly didn’t now.

  Wrong man. Absolutely the wrong man.

  Jaw slack, he blinked as if dazed for several moments. His chest heaved with labored breath. Then his mouth warred with a manic smile. “Oh, Hadley. My darling—”

  “I’m late for an appointment.” She brushed by him and headed toward the waiting cab.

  “If you give me a chance, I will give you the world,” he called out behind her. “And instead of suppressing your gift, you can be what you were born to be.”

  What exactly he thought that was, she didn’t bother to ask.

  • • •

  Lowe followed Dr. Bacall’s butler through a drafty Russian Hill mansion. The old man sat in a wheelchair on a closed-in porch that overlooked a sizable backyard for this part of the city, and, in the distance, San Francisco Bay, shrouded in dusk. A fine view, no doubt, but the blind man couldn’t see it. And yet he faced a large window as if he could still picture it all, a plaid blanket over his lap and a cup of steaming tea in his hands.

  The servant announced Lowe.

  “How are you, m’boy?” Bacall said, seemingly glad for the company.

  “I’m sorry to bother you right when you’ve just gotten home from your workday, but I was hoping you might have a minute to answer some questions.”

  “Sit,” the man said. “I’ll be glad to help however I can. Tell me about the search while you’re at it. Do you have good news?”

  Lowe pulled a wicker chair closer to Bacall and tossed a glance toward the door to ensure servants weren’t lingering. “I’ve found the second crossbar.”

  “Indeed?” Bacall grinned. “That’s marvelous!”

  “Yes, but I’m a little worried about looking for a third piece.” Lowe set his hat on his lap. “Someone nearly killed me. I’m being tracked, and not in the usual manner. Someone’s using a very specific kind of magic to try to steal the crossbars.”

  The man stilled. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone who has the power to manifest mythical Egyptian chimera.”

  The surface of the tea inside Dr. Bacall’s cup wobbled, but he didn’t answer.

  “When my sister-in-law channeled your wife, her spirit warned me to keep the amulet away from Noel. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume this is your old excavation partner.”

  Bacall nodded. “Noel Irving.”

  “Perhaps it’s time for me to know exactly why you want the amulet so badly and what it has to do with this man.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Won’t I? I was nearly burned alive by an Egyptian fire goddess. And before that, a griffin tried to peck my eyes out. So maybe you’d better tell me who I’m dealing with so I have a better idea about what kind of magic I’m up against.”

  After using one hand to find a side table by touch, Bacall set his tea down with shaky fingers. “Tell me, Mr. Magnusson. Do you believe a woman can be in love with two men at the same time?”

  Lowe’s jaw tightened. “No, I don’t.”

  “I once shared that sentiment.” Bacall sighed deeply and leaned back in the wheelchair. “But I suppose I should start from the beginning. Back when Noel and I were still friends, in the late eighteen hundreds, he was terribly interested in the occult, and dabbled in magic to mixed success. Little spells to increase our luck in finding treasure, or to create light in a dark tunnel—nothing extraordinary. Though, looking back years later, I often wondered if he used a love spell to coerce my wife into sleeping with him. Or maybe that’s just my pride talking.”

  Lowe shifted in his seat, feeling extremely uncomfortable. “I’m sorry.”

  “You and me both. But they were lovers for several years. I suspected, but didn’t know for sure until 1898. I left Noel to watch over Vera in Cairo while I traveled for a month. When I came back, I found them both seriously ill with a local infectious disease. They needed Western medicine but were too weak to get out of bed, much less travel. The local doctor said they had days to live, if not hours. Noel begged me to fetch a witch he’d met on our previous trip.”

  “And you did?” Lowe asked in a quiet voice.

  “I felt I had no choice. Vera was several months pregnant with Hadley. If she died, I’d lose them both.”

  “Christ.”

  Bacall shifted in his wheelchair. “So I tracked the witch down. She said she could save them from death, but there would be consequences. You don’t upset the natural order of things without paying a price.”

  “There’s always a catch,” Lowe murmured.

  “Indeed. And this one was eight years,” Dr. Bacall said. “Eight extra years of life, then they’d die. That was the curse. What could I do? Watch them die in front of me? Lose my unborn daughter? I was out of my mind with grief—over their betrayal, over the loss of my innocence and trust in the two people I cared most about in the world.”

  Bacall shook his head, remembering, then sighed deeply and continued.

  “The witch pulled them both back from death’s grip and saved Hadley in the process. I was elated for a time. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the true nature of that magic and what had gone wrong. Because the spell, you see, was intended to make the recipient deathless.”

  “Deathless?”

  “Indestructible. For eight years, anyway. And I saw it with my own eyes. Death wouldn’t touch Noel. He would not bleed out from a stabbing, nor die from a bullet. Disease and poison had no effect. I pushed him off a cliff in 1901. He fell several hundred feet, brushed himself off, and walked away.”

  Dear God.

  “Terribly inconvenient for me, as the more I learned about the length of their affair, and how much my wife still cared for him, I was rather sorry I saved him. The only thing I wanted in those ensuing years was to bury the bastard—and it was the one thing I couldn’t do.”

  “And your wife had this same advantage? This deathlessness?”

  “No.” The blind man felt around the table for his tea and took a sip. “My wife seemed perfectly normal. Human. And Hadley was born healthy. Nothing was amiss. I began to hope perhaps she got lucky, and that since Noel got the curse’s blessing, he’d also be the one to pay its price after eight years—that Vera would live a normal life.”

  The old man shook his head and continued.

  “But eight years is a long time when you’re young. And spell or no spell, Vera just would not give Noel up. She insisted she loved us both equally, but would leave both Hadley and me if I forced her to end the affair. I couldn’t risk that. If she wouldn’t leave him, I figured I’d just take him off the playing field. So, two years into the curse, I began searching for a way to kill a man who can’t die.”

  “The amulet,” Lowe whispered.

  Bacall nodded. “If it were assembled, I could call up a door and Noel would be claimed. Maybe it would be enough to pay the ferryman, so to speak. Or, if nothing else, Vera might borrow Noel’s extra years once he was out of the picture.”

  “So you searched for the amulet and found the crossbars, but you couldn’t find the base.”

  “Exactly. I sent them home, hoping to keep them hidden from Vera. But she was smart. And she couldn’t bear to lose Noel, which is why she hid the crossbars when she realized what I was planning on using them to do. She couldn’t let me kill him.”

  Lowe remembered Vera’s words during the channeling, warning Hadley to keep the amulet out of both men’s hands. “But after she hid the crossbars, the earthquake hit.
”

  “Exactly eight years to the day that the witch had cast the curse on them,” Bacall said. “I arrived home from England an hour before the earthquake struck.” Unseeing eyes blinked away tears. He shook his head and composed himself. “As you can see, this house survived both the quake and the Great Fire. But Vera was not so lucky.”

  He leaned toward Lowe, as if he could see him. “You see, the spell was meant for one person—not two. And because it was cast on both Vera and Noel at the same time, the magic split. My partner got the advantageous part of the spell—the immunity from death. And my wife’s soul was dragged into the underworld, harvested by dark reapers.”

  Hadley’s Mori.

  “And as if that weren’t enough,” Bacall continued, “not only did these reapers take my wife’s life, they somehow got passed along to my daughter. I suppose it’s because Vera was pregnant with Hadley when the original spell was cast, because after my wife died, the spirits started appearing to my daughter.”

  Christ. Mummy’s curse, he’d told Hadley all these years.

  Anger tinted Bacall’s voice. “You can’t fathom how shocked I was to see them again after they’d taken Vera’s life. I thought they’d come to take Hadley, too. But no. They were just attached to her, appearing for short times, then disappearing. It was as if she was being haunted by ghosts—ghosts that never seemed to scare her, even when she was a child.”

  “Did she see her mother taken by them?”

  “No, and I never told her. You can’t imagine how terrifying it was to watch them following my daughter around like hellhounds. They are a plague. Nasty, evil creatures. They’d taken my wife, and for eight years after Vera’s death, I was terrified they’d take Hadley, too. I prepared for the worst, waiting for them to turn on her.”

  “But they didn’t,” Lowe said quietly.

  Bacall shook his head. “They seem to be merely bound to her without purpose. I’ve come to believe they are still hanging around because of Noel. He tricked death. That spell should’ve taken his life, too—not just Vera’s. But as long as he’s alive, Hadley bears the burden of the specters.”