One more.
At the last seal, Persephone cast aside the sharp thorn that she had used to reopen her tender wounds. Moaning in pain, she watched her blood drip onto the stones, a familiar ritual at this point.
“You’re such a weakling,” the Gorgon hissed, coming into view around the corner of a corridor.
Persephone heaved and expelled a mixture of blood, bile, and pomegranate to mask her purpose. She hoped she appeared to be having merely one of her fits, as she’d had for centuries.
“You’re such a pest,” the goddess countered, wiping her mouth with her begrimed robes.
“You know, he’d never know the difference if one day you just completely fell apart. Surely I could convince him of its inevitability. So why don’t I help you? Allow me to put you out of your misery. You want to die; you’ve been trying to kill yourself for so long. Let me help.”
As the Gorgon drew close, her head of snakes hissed and snapped. Two serpents stretched, long and limber, to wrap tightly around Persephone’s wrists, breaking her delicate skin.
The goddess spat in the Gorgon’s face. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
Luce hissed in pain, scalded by the goddess. Her grip weakened and Persephone broke free, her forearms slippery with blood. The snakes’ tongues lapped at her injuries, but Persephone batted them away.
The Gorgon growled and snapped long fingers. A command.
Behind her, the dog began to bark, countless red eyes blazing. It pounced, its body first one then a hundred mongrels, and Persephone screamed in pain and terror as a rain of teeth scored her flesh. Focusing her energy, the goddess created a slap of white light that threw the protean canine off and sent the snakes hissing and reeling backward.
She tried to flee, to move toward the beckoning Liminal light she spied down another corridor, but the Gorgon blocked her path, lashing out with all her fury, hatred, and jealousy. Those base emotions were magnified by the Whisper-world, giving monsters the upper hand. Serpents wrapped around Persephone, driving their fangs and forked tongues deep into her wounds, tasting how weak she was.
Persephone screamed in genuine agony and heard every restless ghost take up her cry. The very ground of the Whisper-world shuddered. Rocks began to fall, and the sound was deafening. The Groundskeeper would be appalled to see all his stonework and bone sculptures tumbling down, the poor wretch.
Struggling, Persephone tried to muster her strength. She had to get away, to complete the final phase of the plan. When the dog pounced again, she felt her consciousness slip and her light flicker, dangerously close to being put out for good.
This was not how she was supposed to end …
* * *
The Pull brought Alexi and his Guard to a grand inn outside the city proper, a stone edifice ringed with lush rosebushes and a tended lawn. The storm was merciless, rain soaking them as they worked. Alexi wound fire around the irascible spirit of a man who’d died in one of London’s last legal duels, his spirit holding on to bitter vengeance.
The sky was lit with a horde of luminous dead, all swaying, mouths open. Not that the Guard could hear their wailing cries, but the heavens seemed to take up the cause of unrest.
“Alexi,” Rebecca called in alarm. Standing under a portico with an open notebook, she furiously scribbled down every particular of the situation, as was her custom.
“Yes?”
She pointed to the stone foundations lined with red rosebushes. “The roses.”
“What about them?”
Her face was ashen. “They were white. When we arrived, these roses were all white.”
Throwing a definitive punch of blue fire to stun the duelist’s spirit into submission, Alexi bent to touch the deep crimson colored blossoms. They were wet. He brought his fingers to his nose, sniffed, and took a startled step back. The whole bed of roses was covered in blood.
Josephine, the Artist, cried out. “Is this a sign of Prophecy?”
Alexi set his jaw. “Everything in our age is a sign of Prophecy.”
He touched his blue fire–kissed palm to the open bloom, and the crimson began to roll away as if repelled. Too oily to be human, the gore dripped to the earth, revealing still white petals.
“So shall we heal the world,” Michael intoned, staring at the subtle miracle. “Through blood and fire.”
“So long as the world is not too awash in blood,” Alexi retorted. “Every power has its limits and we’re ill equipped for a flood.”
He glanced at the sky filled with clustered dead and wondered at the Guard’s ability to maintain balance. With such omens, he couldn’t be sure of long-term success, even though the duelist’s spirit appeared mollified at long last.
With what energy he had left, he used his cerulean fire to kiss clean the sullied bushes.
Michael drew close. “‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’”
The quote echoed exactly Alexi’s thoughts, so he responded in kind. “‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’” Though he considered himself full of Horatio’s rationality, Hamlet’s line seemed fitting. The Grand Work forced him to be both skeptic and believer. The leading player in a drama with no end in sight.
He twisted a rose petal between his fingertips. “Perhaps the gods battle in some unseen place. If so, I wager the blood on these roses is hardly the half of it.”
* * *
“What. Is. Happening?”
The walls of the Whisper-world, wet with blood and echoing with Persephone’s agony, amplified Darkness’s bellowing cry. Rocks, silt, and Whisper-world muck went flying.
A whistle ten times that of the largest steam train sounded, and the dog yelped and whined, withdrawing its teeth from the goddess’s hair and flesh. Luce the Gorgon grumbled but called back her snakes.
Persephone collapsed onto the blood-drenched stones. Barely alive, she prayed she had enough strength to crawl to the Liminal edge and slip through.
“She was trying to kill herself again,” Luce muttered to the regal, red-eyed shadows seething at the mouth of the corridor.
“No. She tried to kill me,” Persephone gasped in rebuttal, her hands slipping in her own gore as she struggled to lift herself. It was the truth, and if she was to live, she needed his help.
Luce pouted as the shadows drew close. “You believe her?”
The Lord of Shadow stared at them, Luce standing upright, Persephone groaning in pain as she once more faltered to her knees upon the stones. “By the look of her. Yes. She could not have done this to herself.”
Darkness’s eyes, when he had them, regarded Persephone in horror. She must look a sight indeed. Luce began to creep backward, in obvious fear of Darkness’s wrath. His bone fingers seized a cluster of her snakes and yanked. Hard. It was Luce’s turn to shriek. Snakeskins, scales, and blackened blood slid down her face, her hair writhing and hissing.
The dog whimpered, its tails between its legs. Darkness whipped the shadows with a long, sharp lash that seared its chimerical hides.
While Darkness was administering these punishments, Persephone mustered all her strength and dignity and managed to stand upright before him, swaying and shaking.
“Th-thank you, my lord,” she gasped, blood pouring from her wounds. “If you’ll permit me…”
“Go,” he said, his voice like gravel. His beautiful face—then skull, then face—was tortured.
“It will take … some time away this time. This is the worst it’s ever—”
“I. Realize,” he said.
She bowed her head and turned away, trying to move without collapsing.
This was the window of time she needed. He’d not come looking for a while. She would be a mortal woman come of age when he would think to call her back. The Gorgon unwittingly helped her plan.
Persephone stumbled away, supporting herself on the Whisper-world’s gray walls.
The Liminal grew in her si
ght as she left Darkness behind. Blue fire surged forward, all that could be spared from the thick of a Guard fight; it came tearing up, wrapped blue cords around her, loving and trying to heal her. Phoenix come to help her failing body. She basked in his warmth.
One of Luce’s snakes, sheared verily in half, slithered along at Persephone’s feet. The head and first third of it were fleshy, the latter part torn and skeletal. It extended its bloody forked tongue at the flowers struggling to blossom at her feet.
“I’ll see you again soon,” the snake hissed. “And when I do, I’ll finish what I started.”
“I know you’ll try, Luce,” Persephone said. With a delirious surge, she struggled to the swirling, misty Liminal wall. Emboldened by the fire of her love and the sparking Liminal light, she cried, before tumbling through: “But I’ll prove love’s the greater power and settle the score.”
* * *
With a horrible roar of thunder, the black maw of a portal spat the goddess onto the foot of Beatrice’s bed. Beatrice cried out in alarm at the sight of the dripping, gory mess. Persephone’s bloodstained face was lovely as ever, but it was full of a ferocity Beatrice had never seen before.
She couldn’t help but rush to the goddess’s side, to ease her into a more comfortable position on the bed. Beatrice felt thick, warm blood course over her hands, and she bit back a gasp and stilled a disgusted shudder.
“No, no,” Persephone protested. “I can’t lie down. We’ve work to do and only a bit of—”
“My Lady, what happened? You’re in dire need of attention, so I’ll find that blonde, Jane, the Healer—”
“No, no, we’ve no time! I must offer my last energies to my new form, I can’t afford to convalesce—”
“My Lady, you’re half dead.”
“I’ll be better off if you help me!” The goddess had clearly come from a fight and was ready to begin another. “It’s time,” she continued, breathing deeply.
Moment by moment, the blood and gore seemed to vanish, the sickly sweet scent of sour pomegranate lessened. The mortal world did this creature such good.
“I need your help now and in the coming months. Will you come?” the goddess rasped. “I must speak to the point, Beatrice. Since you were so angry before, I need to know your choice now: Do you accept the dangers that may yet come if you follow and aid me?”
Beatrice was too moved by the terrible sight of her to refuse. “I accept.”
Ibrahim had abandoned her, but the goddess needed her. The fire of purpose flowed through her veins.
“I understand now,” Beatrice said sympathetically, “how you can lose all sense of time. When you lose a person who had begun to define you … you just float. Like a ghost.”
The goddess nodded. While the blood on her gown had faded and its torn layers had mended themselves, Persephone’s lungs still rattled. She frowned and placed a hand on Beatrice’s blood-soaked bedding, turning the duvet entirely into red silk. “I’d give anything to spare you that hollow existence, Beatrice.”
Beatrice shook her head. “The solution is not in your power, and I’d not take such charity if it were. It would be wrong to make someone love me who chose to forsake me with an unsubstantiated explanation—”
“Ibrahim?” interrupted the goddess. “Why?”
“Something about a nightmare.”
Persephone sighed. “He senses the danger you are about to face. There are trials ahead. I dearly trust and truly need you, but I also respect mortal choice. If you refuse me, I will try to make do. If you choose to help me, your willing mortal choice will strengthen and empower all that I ask.”
Danger felt so much better than numbness. “You once told me we were chosen because we would say yes,” Beatrice stated. “What do we do now?”
The goddess smiled, grateful. As she got to her feet, she swayed, and Beatrice steadied her. “We must go. I’m sorry about the bedclothes. I know you hate that garish color of silk.”
Beatrice couldn’t help but chuckle at such a mundane concern. “Lead on, my Lady.”
Persephone opened her hands; Beatrice’s stomach dropped and her head spun in a dizzy whirl. Suddenly they stood on a precipice high over a darkened London, lashed by a freezing wind. The divinity’s robes that had cleaned themselves were again bloodied and dripping.
The goddess steadied Beatrice and herself on the great frame of a wide void that looked out onto the mortal world.
“The Liminal edge must help me find the girl I’m to become in order to finally be done with this form. You, Beatrice, are one of few mortals ever to see this threshold, which has proved the doom and salvation of countless numbers of your kind. This is the place from which fate’s greatest commissions are wrought.”
A flicker of familiar blue fire coursed round the edge of the Liminal frame and kissed Persephone’s cheek before the tendril floated to touch Beatrice’s hand in deference.
“My love,” Persephone murmured to the fire. She breathed a sigh of happiness. “Are you here to watch me find her?”
“Indeed,” rumbled the voice of Phoenix. Beatrice marveled at it, the rich baritone that had so rarely brushed her ear. “I want to be with you when you go.”
Persephone addressed the Liminal. “Tell me what you want. I shall go where you bid. Tell me what sacrifice I must give.”
Beatrice shivered. What could such an awesome threshold ask? Hadn’t this goddess, and everyone who suffered with the Grand Work, made sacrifice enough?
A torrent of images played over the great space like pictures cast upon a canvas, villages and towns along northeastern England. A clock high above them whirred. When the blur of images stilled, the barrel of numbers above hovered between 1875 and 1878.
The scene revealed a little girl, with white hair and skin and ice-pale eyes, alone in a brick courtyard, staring up at a ghost in Elizabethan garb. Perhaps all of seven years old, she spoke timidly: “Gregory, why do I see you and speak to you if others can’t?”
“Because thou art special, my girl,” the spirit replied.
“I’m not special. I am a … freak. That’s what the novices say when they think I can’t hear them.”
“You mustn’t listen.”
“I can’t help it. It hurts. I’m so scared. I see things. Terrible things I don’t understand. Reverend Mother says I’m not to speak to any one of them.”
“And thou shouldst not, dear girl. The world, I fear, shall not understand thee.”
“It doesn’t. But you do.” The girl reached out her arms. Gregory, chuckling, tried and failed to enclose her in his incorporeal arms.
“I love you, Gregory, but I wish you could give me a real embrace. I want so badly to be touched,” she said, displaying a quiet mournfulness far beyond her years.
“Someday, my girl, thou shalt gain a beloved. I swear this upon my buried bones.”
The eerie girl looked at him from beneath her wide-brimmed hat and smiled a hopeful, lovely smile that could make flowers grow. The Liminal shifted, showing them the exterior of the convent before its vast surface went dark.
“I … I won’t take a young woman’s body,” Persephone breathed, seeming to have gleaned more than Beatrice, who remained confused, “but be born again. Born as a timid girl who doesn’t remember who she is. That’s why I couldn’t say ‘I’ when declaring Prophecy! She doesn’t remember a thing. She’s all alone with ghosts, never touched … How is the life of a mortal freak any different from my life now?” she cried, clenching her fists. “Why can’t I simply take a mortal body as I am; blaze down upon the Earth in glory, without a further lifetime of trial?”
Beatrice watched her. This was clearly new and heartbreaking knowledge.
“It is as I feared,” Phoenix murmured.
Persephone whirled, droplets of blood flying everywhere. “As you feared?”
“Yes, but you must make this change, beloved, or you’ll end up with nothing. Choose life while you still can. Before you’re all bled out and nothing is left. Go
. You must, there’s no turning back.”
The goddess shook with terror. The Liminal registered and amplified her anxiety; its glassy portal shuddered and shed sparks at its edges. Lightning streaked across it, illuminating their surroundings, revealing pillars made of skulls marching deep into the Whisper-world. The shadows scurried and hissed. This was not a place Beatrice wanted to linger.
“I don’t want to die!” Persephone cried. Her colors shifted and whirled, dizzying. Beatrice had never seen her so addled or unhinged. It was terrifying.
“You won’t die,” Phoenix assured her. “You’ll live on, you’ve seen—”
“But I won’t remember. It will be as if I never existed.”
“Tell me the alternative!” Phoenix bellowed and Beatrice winced, terrified by the sudden desperate tone of the Balance himself. “Living like this? How long before you’re nothing but rot, memory, and misery? How many times have we yearned for peace, since you first spilled your blood on these stones? First we must free our Guard, and then we can perhaps at last earn the Great Beyond!”
Persephone balled her fists, her prismatic eyes going onyx. Beatrice’s blood ran cold. This was not a look for a goddess of beauty, hope, and life; this was a harrowing look the Whisper-world had fashioned. Beatrice wanted to weep for this great decaying force that had been reduced to near madness, a husk of herself.
The shadows lengthened and more lightning forked across the Liminal. Its glassy surface practically went convex, as if reaching out for them. Behind them was a dank, dark labyrinth. Beatrice had stood in the shadow of death often enough to know it in her bones. Ahead, she saw possibility.
“My Lady, we must go,” Beatrice pleaded. “If Darkness comes to this place—”
“Give me time,” Persephone barked.
“You don’t have it,” Beatrice hissed. “Time isn’t yours anymore. You’re weak, and your immortality is fading.” She dared grab hold of the goddess, squeezing her arms. “This is what you have prepared for, whether you knew everything or not.”
Persephone seemed to come to her senses. Snapping from misery’s stranglehold, the Whisper-world’s poison, she importuned Phoenix, “What will it feel like?”
Perilous Prophecy Page 24
