Persephone gasped. The woman …
“It’s me.”
It wasn’t her, exactly; she was watching a young mortal. But the woman looked very much like her—like what she saw when she looked at herself. Flesh entirely devoid of color. Pearlescent hair, blanched skin, eerie, ice-cap eyes with faint slivers of blue—it was as if she were watching a younger self in a mirror, her hand upon the shoulder of a magnetically beautiful man who looked very familiar.
“And it’s him!” Persephone breathed. “That boy. Grown. It’s Alexi.”
The vision’s subjects did not speak, only stared at each other, enraptured. The young woman’s lips parted in a silent sigh. Her opalescent eyes drank in her dance partner, her gaze a glorious surrender.
If Persephone was not mistaken, the man was equally smitten. His stoic expression was betrayed by the way his dark eyes glittered; his sculpted lips curved slightly whenever she sighed. This was the start of something wonderful.
Persephone whispered in delight, “An unchaperoned waltz by moonlight? Scandalous for the mores of your age!”
Yet who could have denied them this simple dance, this pair holding each other at a decorous if fond distance, this luminous girl lit by moonlight, this ghostly, eerie goddess—
“I’ll be you,” Persephone cried.
The vision bled into another, where the two dancers waltzed once more. Alexi was again in all black, the same as when she’d first glimpsed him, as a young man. This time, however, the strangely beautiful girl wore a finer dress. Something else about her was older, too; not years but experience.
Their waltzing bodies stood close. No longer decorous, this was the dance of two lovers. A silver ring glimmered on the girl’s finger, a silver band on his, too.
“Oh, Alexi, how your wife will stare at you,” Persephone breathed.
His face was transformed by adoration. Yet there remained a hint of wild desperation along with the new softness. Why? she wondered. He had her, so what was to fear?
A third vision appeared, a blaze of blue fire. The two were now bent over the Athens seal; there was a key and an explosion. The foyer was suddenly awash with ghosts. Not just any ghosts, either. Ghosts of the Guard. Persephone recognized them all. Here were all the Guard that had ever been, from every city, every age. All were taking up arms at this academy and—
Persephone gasped. “My army! It’s true, we must bring the army here.”
Why was the Liminal showing her this? Seeing the way the hands of its clock trembled, this future couldn’t be certain. If Persephone knew the Liminal, it was showing her a future it wanted—for these two mortals, for her, for what she could become … But this was no fait accompli.
She saw the girl again, a mirror of herself, and for the first time in eons Persephone saw herself reflected in another’s eyes … and beloved.
Alexi held the girl. Blue fire erupted around and through him, cascaded over the bricks and left Athens awash. So he was the Leader of the Guard after all in this vision, despite Phoenix’s earlier concern. What would happen to Beatrice? Alexi was a glorious conduit, Persephone admitted. This was where the battle would come to pass, and he looked ready. Where else should they fight but at the source of their power, where she had buried her Phoenix?
“I’ll pledge the whole of my fading light to this future,” she vowed.
Her declaration made the Liminal crackle. Persephone felt a wind sucking inward, into the Whisper-world, beckoning her to return. To begin. The visions had faded.
Indeed, there was no time to waste. She had work to do. Painful work. But rather than bleeding herself recklessly, as she had the first time, she would wield her magic carefully, methodically. And to keep herself from despair, she would think of people who made her smile. She would remember the comfort she’d felt in Dmitri’s embrace, recall the vision of a grown boy whom she only knew as Alexi, twirling her embodiment around this very foyer. If she could hold on to these signs of hope, all would fall into place. Finally, she had something worth fighting for.
But, could she do what the vision wanted? Could she take the form of a colorless mortal girl with the mind and heart of a goddess? Yes, she would come into that black-haired boy’s life with all her power and glory, with all her collected knowledge and wisdom, and she would make things right. Gloriously right.
“Hold on to Light, my love,” Phoenix’s ghost called out, a trail of fire coursing out from the seal, out and around her body. It was warm and tender. “Face the shadows knowing the house of Darkness will come crashing down. As long as you hold to your core principle, the hope you are made of, Darkness cannot overtake you. You must now plant seeds that will sprout and flower.”
“I’ll begin anon,” Persephone murmured, moving to the Liminal edge. She paused only a moment before stepping through.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Beatrice had been in pain for days. It was not the Pull. It was not the increasingly exquisite agony of being so near and yet so far from Ibrahim. This was something else. It was good that she generally wore gloves as a lady must, for they lessened the sting. It felt as if patches of her skin were peeling away.
She was startled by a luminous and colorful appearance in her boudoir. The newcomer appeared worried. The goddess was awful at hiding emotion. Beatrice imagined this artlessness was something her ancient lover found attractive, but she found it troubling. It didn’t seem proper, to so blatantly wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. That was something one trained out of a child.
“What is it?” Beatrice asked.
“The game has altered.”
“Game?” Beatrice echoed. “Please don’t say our lives are a game to you, that we are your mortal pawns. I don’t suppose you could tell me why parts of me feel on fire. It tests my ability to be polite.”
“By ‘game’ I mean the struggle in which we are all caught up,” the goddess exclaimed. “The king of the Whisper-world has captured every Guard spirit that ever was, save for the original set. They were so long ago, before we thought to build the field…”
Beatrice blinked.
“There’s a field,” Persephone explained, clearly wistful. “Gorgeous, built by consensus. You can’t spend eternity surrounded by gloom. But it’s gone, washed away by Darkness. I was forced to move the remains of Phoenix from their rightful resting place to untried ground. This is an unprecedented action for an unprecedented time. Unless we take a stand, you’ll never be free of hell. Something entirely new must be undertaken for your eternal safety—yours, and that of every Guard.”
“Hell.” Beatrice set her jaw. “That’s lovely.”
The goddess gestured. “Pack your bags. You’re leaving for London.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where the remains of Phoenix burn on, transferred from the Whisper-world to mortal soil. That’s likely why you’re in pain. I’m sorry to hear that, but a Leader’s never been so far from the hearth of their fire.”
Beatrice shook her head. “Why London?”
“Why not?”
“Why not here, where we, your chosen Guard, were planted?”
“Because in the coming years the Power must be in London. That simply is so. The source of the Grand Work now lies near the banks of the Thames, and you must go to it.”
Beatrice fought a wave of anger. She was already tired of having her life uprooted by the whims of the eternal. “By whose omnipotent authority has this been done?”
Persephone lifted prismatic hands. “I never said I was omnipotent. I had to move my beloved to a safer location. Why London? Because I was told that’s the place to bring the war!” Her hands began to shake, and she wrung them. “The Fates decide. The Liminal decided. And it is because someone is already there, someone who will prove critical.”
Beatrice tried to sort through this new information. “Persephone, you cannot expect to overturn mortal lives whenever you wish. For us to simply pack bags, leave home, blindly follow danger … All withou
t answers! We live in a gilded age of science. ‘The Fates decide’ is naught but an incitement to riot.”
Persephone gave her a hard and unflinching look—the first Beatrice had ever seen from her. “All creatures must adapt and change tactics to survive. Even I know that. Shall you tell your fellows about London or shall I?”
Beatrice sighed. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help the goddess, to do her duty, but the burden had grown so in the weeks she had now carried it.…
“I’ll call the meeting, but this is your doing,” Beatrice said pointedly. “You must tell them. And what the hell is the Liminal?”
Persephone glanced at her. “The place from which all blessings flow. And curses, I suppose. It depends on the soul doing the asking.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll make the announcement, not to worry.”
The prismatic creature vanished, leaving Beatrice swimming in mounting anxiety. Interpersonal dynamics and itchy skin paled in comparison to moving six unlikely companions across the world. She doused her irritated hands in cool water for the thousandth time and cursed supernatural whim.
* * *
It was not pleasant, but Persephone returned to shadow. She had to, though he wouldn’t have noticed yet that she was missing. Time was indeed different in the Whisper-world. But Darkness would eventually require her presence. She would have to act as if he had won, as if he had cowed her at last. And he would believe it.
He would be unbearable, lording over her in his perceived triumph. Not until she discovered how to claim that colorless mortal body of her visions could she manage a prolonged absence.
Persephone knew vaguely where the seals were, the pins that held the worlds apart. Those seals, formed of stone and spirit, had existed since the Whisper-world had separated from the mortal, back when civilizations were new. Though the seals were set deep in the Whisper-world’s murk, those attuned to the mortal world could sense warmer, fresher air in their vicinity. The flowers she created took longer to die near the seals; they fully bloomed before curling and giving way to putrefaction.
But this was not the only marker. In case anyone might gain hope at these crossroads, Darkness had made sure to deter them with a font of despair, rerouting the more horrid underground currents of the Whisper-world to surround the pins with the acrid vapors of suicide and slaughter. They burned Persephone’s nostrils.
Stepping into shallow water that nipped at her toes with tiny teeth, the goddess allowed a sliver of her light to illuminate the alcove of gray stone before her. A thin golden ring was visible, glimmering against the wall, its circumference a few feet wide.
Persephone plucked a particularly sharp briar from the flowers that grew at her feet and watched the rose harden into death. Using the thorn to prick her thumb, she hissed as her blood, thinner in these dark depths, flowed freely. She placed droplets upon each of the stones, ran it in a circle around the golden band. Only when met by phoenix fire would it open the world. Through blood and fire her army would be free. In time.
In the distance came the sound of hissing. Persephone hurried away. The last thing she wanted was to be seen by a spy. Sour pomegranate juice was always at the back of her throat in these dread corridors, so to mask her activity, Persephone spat. The Gorgon would assume she’d had one of her frequent spells of sickness and be none the wiser.
She glided back to the great stone dais, wincing as she ignored the weeping pleas of the Whisper-world’s denizens, unable to spare any light. Her power must be saved for a ghostly girl and the man she loved. Those ice-pale eyes confirmed that Alexi was the one she’d been waiting for. Suddenly she was no longer afraid of becoming mortal. Not if her beloved could be there in that magnificent, incarnate form.
Stopping at the moat’s edge, she scowled at the bold bulb of crimson. It was always jarring to see that distressingly beautiful red rose at the dais. Persephone assumed he rested in such a manner to mock all the dead flowers at her feet.
The petals peeled back one by one to reveal a naked man. He was beautiful; then he was a skeleton. Then again flesh. He stood, and those crimson robes hovered around him in glorious folds, as if he were imitating a painting of Christ; the color scarlet representing a certain carnality, reminding the viewer that the depicted was a mortal savior. But Christ had been a human of light. Darkness was inhuman shadow, ticking away life and light, second by second, flesh into bone and back again, savior of nothing.
“Back. So. Soon? I thought you’d run off and punish me.” His voice was like wet gravel.
“I came to check on my beloveds.”
“Wasting away, as should all who exist here.” He wagged a skeletal finger. “Exceptions are not fair.”
There had always been an unlit stone tower behind the dais, a column of moist slate growing like a vast tree trunk with no leaves or life. Persephone hadn’t thought much of it, never dreamed it would become a prison. Now Darkness gestured to it, and Persephone moved closer, spying a door sealed with a long hanging chain and a thick padlock. A hefty, dull silver key with a slender ring stood in the lock. Persephone moved to snatch it.
Darkness batted her away. “Ah, ah, ah.”
He alternately clucked his tongue, then clicked his jaw. Removing the key, he glanced down at his breastbone. When it was bone, he slid the ring about his sternum. It was visible when he was bone, then hidden under flesh when he was man.
“It’s fitting, you know, this.” He gestured to the key as it flashed into sight. “You cry your silver tears here on my stones. Sometimes I collect them, make them into useful things. You have imprisoned your friends yourself. This very key, made from your tears.”
Persephone balled her fists at his cruel taunt. It took every ounce of control not to slap him with a burst of light, to level declamations and threats, to use every last bit of her power to crack open the prison gates and flee with them all. But such an act would be fruitless. If she did that, she’d tear herself in two, and Darkness would simply round the Guard up again. There was no escape. Not this way.
Shaking her head, she said, “Pity and hatred. It’s all you’ll ever know from me. It’s a shame. You could know love.”
“I have others who bow to me, who love me,” Darkness countered.
“But do you love them in return? What do you know of love’s equality?”
“I love you.”
Persephone laughed hollowly. “Hardly. You can’t fathom the quality. You seek to possess me. You act as a petulant child, as a prison guard and torturer, nothing more. The ingredients you are made of are absent love. And that deficit will one day destroy you.”
She fled, hearing Darkness grind his teeth behind her, and concealed herself in a side corridor, waiting to see if he would follow. He did not. A small light flickered, like a firefly, a short distance ahead. When she followed, it led her to the Liminal edge. Apparently it was ready to assist her once again.
* * *
A Guard meeting was called. Beatrice and her fellows descended to their sacred space, where the goddess awaited them.
“I’ve a mission for you, friends,” she said, anxiety in her eternally youthful voice, “on a distant shore. For some of you it will be a homecoming of sorts.” She looked at George and Beatrice. “For the rest, an adventure. The source of your power has been relocated due to … an emergency.”
“You’re asking us to abandon our homes?” Ibrahim asked. “To leave Cairo?”
Persephone sighed. “You understand the basic principle of the Grand Work, do you not?” she asked. “That Darkness feeds upon mortal misery and sends his restless dead to collect it. You—the Guard—have been starving him for ages. Eventually, however, you six must all die. You are mortal, if what you host is not.
“I must tell you that this is now your fight more than ever. Darkness has taken the spirits of every Guard that ever was and locked them away.” She opened her arms to show them.
Her gesture lifted a window onto endlessly miserable Whisper-world. At the center of this lifele
ss purgatory sat a vast, huge tower, from which the sounds of weeping could be heard. “All the Guard that have ever been are trapped in that prison,” the goddess declared.
An exhilarated but mad look in her eyes, she continued, almost ranting. “You fight for me and my beloved, and all of your kind. Oh, my darlings, this age of yours! Such books will be written, such love stories, such letters and poetry … Mine is a tale for the ages and I need you to make it beautiful. Tell not only my trials but my triumph! For I will triumph over Darkness at last. I’ve begun my greatest task. We shall prevail.”
The Guard stared at her, frightened both by Persephone’s sudden madness and the fate that awaited them.
The goddess spoke again, more evenly. “You’ll go to London by sea. No one will question you, not when Belle casts her magic. Pack your things; there’s a ship leaving in the morning. I’ll see you soon.”
The reply she received was silence.
“If nothing else, do it for your Leader. While she has not complained, stoic as she may be, I know that she is in pain. The remains of Phoenix have, for the first time, been moved into the mortal world. Into safety far away. But that separation wounds Beatrice in the meantime. To London, my loves. To London. That will solve all.” And then she was gone.
The Guard stood staring after the goddess long after her shifting colors had vanished into the shadows. They then turned to Beatrice, concerned, and she grimaced, sure they were all left with the same thought.
“An adventure!” George cried, surprising her.
Ibrahim looked at Ahmed and Verena, then addressed the Europeans. “We’re not posing as your help.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking,” Beatrice snapped. Were their worlds truly so impossible to bridge?
Verena moved close. “I’m sorry for your pain,” she whispered, placing a glowing hand upon Beatrice’s closed fist.
“Thank you.” The physical pain eased slightly. The rest would remain.
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