“I wouldn’t know,” Spire replied. “I’d like to liaise with your New York police chief. I advise you to be as on the level with them as is wise. The queen withheld things from me, the Metropolitan, Lord Black, and it cost lives.”
Clara couldn’t withhold a snuff of disdain. “While I understand and agree with you in theory, you’ll be confronted with the newly promoted Chief Patt. And for that I wish you good luck. It is my hope he will help and not obstruct. He doesn’t believe a whit in the supernatural and he doesn’t like working women, so be aware and stand your ground,” Clara said, looking pointedly at Rose.
“The Chief Constable and I will get on swimmingly in the former regard; in the latter, I’ll take him to task. But I’ll get some men out of him to run industrial inspections one way or another,” Spire said. “One would hope for brotherhood between precincts but I’ve been sorely disappointed on that count.”
“Mosley spoke of a source abomination,” Rose said. “Perhaps akin to what we saw in the London chemical factory or what Spire and I saw in Tourney’s basement.
“If what Mosley showed us was a ‘booster’ of the evil, I can only imagine that the source mimics a dynamo, and while I’ve no wish to see what horror that might be, I’d hate for the average policeman on beat to find it first.”
“That is extremely wise, Miss Everhart,” Spire stated. “The average patrolman ruins the details of a crime scene. The ‘source,’ if there is one, should be under our purview. Hopefully Mosley can find it.”
The three discussed what other industries might face similar perversions—hopefully Spire could convince the city’s police to inspect their factories—not forgetting telegraph companies, considering what Rose and Clara had seen upon the line at sea. Clara advised them about the upcoming Veil wedding and the double duty it would serve, and they agreed to help.
The group agreed to return to Evelyn’s the following afternoon for high tea. The medium still felt the need to play hostess, to balance Lord Black’s previous generosity. After an exchange of fond pleasantries, Rose and Spire were soon on their way and Clara wanted to return home.
Hopefully Bishop would be there by nightfall and they could reconnect and resume their usual rituals in a space they could Ward together.
A thrill worked up her spine at the thought. What would they do when home, alone, together?
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Madame Celeste Chagny, Lady Tantagenet, glanced into the opulent mirror and made a minute adjustment to the position of her feathered hat. Angling her head, she pouted, a practiced expression that had gotten her nearly everything she’d ever wanted, and felt a weight behind her.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw her husband loitering outside her boudoir. “Carlton, why do you lurk there? Come, give us a kiss.”
“I … never know whether or not to disturb you when you’re … readying yourself. You’ve been cross, before.”
“You are wise to treat a lady’s dressing room as a sacrosanct space. Lucky for you I am ready. Are you interested in escorting me to the lecture?”
“Yes, I am interested in everything you are, dear.”
“The very idea of a static picture, moving. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard.”
At the Art Institute, a lecturer from France was to discuss new advances in photography and present a moving carousel of images. She had a vested interest in this; if she liked what she saw, she’d hire the man to do a larger display.
Carlton made a small query that was a very big mistake.
“The little boxes you sent out?” he asked quietly. “What is in them?”
“Gifts,” she replied honestly. “I’m sending gifts to every stockholder in the companies I wish to invest in, as if I were sending calling cards.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“You don’t believe me?” She pouted.
“I want to know if I married a murderer,” he replied, sweating visibly.
Celeste’s eyes widened. “That is a bold statement.”
“There’s work you don’t want me to see and I think it’s … something horrid.”
“You know what happens when your imagination gets the better of you,” she cooed softly. “You and all your fanciful thoughts.”
The body parts in the black boxes were retrieved by paid grave robbers and men who pulled bodies from the river when they came to the surface. Columbia students cut up bodies for science and she paid the university for a steady flow of what she needed to create her gifts.
After Moriel’s attempt at murdering her, Celeste had given the majority of her instructions via coded letters, which the recipients would burn after reading. Only her few errand runners ever saw her, and they didn’t last long—though they never died by her hand.
She wasn’t sure what would satisfy her suddenly curious, meddlesome husband, whom she thought she’d made progress on poisoning into submission.
“Not that I am a murderer, dear,” Lady Tantagenet began, “but for the sake of entertainment, what would you do if I were?”
He blinked at her, not clever enough for this game. To be fair, he was in failing health. Poor thing.
“I’d … turn you in,” he murmured.
“No you wouldn’t.” She scoffed. “You’d inevitably be an accessory. So don’t even think about it. Wherever your mind is going, just stop.”
She’d have to rework her enchantments and mesmerism and increase the levels of arsenic in his tea. Soon to be a murderer indeed, and no one would know any better. She smiled at the thought.
The black, beaded bombazine mourning dress waiting in her closet was to die for.
“Now, about that moving picture…”
She thrilled at the thought of seeing her former lover again, and what might happen when she did. Moriel always wanted to be immortal and she’d try to make his dream come true at last.
CHAPTER
NINE
Harper, Clara and Rupert’s housekeeper, was working on a meal when Clara arrived, and she felt suitably, a bit maddeningly, fussed over for as long as she could stand and finally ascended the stairs to her room with a weary laugh.
“Has Rupert indicated when he might return this evening?” Clara asked from the top landing.
“No, dear. I’ll tell you if I receive any word and I’ll fuss twice as hard over him!”
At this, Clara laughed more heartily. “Thank you.”
She had just lain down for a brief meditation when a sharp rapping sound startled her.
Another strike—a small rock colliding with her window. She rose and moved toward the sill, then looked down into the tiny, sun-choked garden behind the town house.
Jack Mosley stared up at her. With a sudden horror she wondered if he had indeed found the “source” power of that evil extension and had come to give her a private tour. She would have to defer. But how did he get back behind her house? He was looking up at her with a curious expression that chilled her to the bone.
Just staring wasn’t going to solve anything. She opened her window.
“Mr. Mosley … what are you doing out there?”
“I was trying to help you,” he said. His youthful appearance was betrayed by his eyes. The tell of an older soul was always in the eyes. “I’ve more to say than just about what’s going on at the Edison plant. Did the others tell you about it?”
“They did. Nasty business. Did you find the source?”
“The dynamo of the evil? No, not yet. But I will. I think its signal might be hidden by the plant itself. I’ll keep looking. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Go on.”
“There’s quite a field about your house. About you.” He gestured to the air, not to the ground. He didn’t mean a field of grass or flowers.
“A field … Our house is not electrified, Mr. Mosley. Nor is next door.”
“I know. Yet there is a magnetic field about this place. And it’s louder, more powerful now, as if something is being rou
ted your way. To you. To this home. I can feel where all the currents are going, Miss Templeton. There’s no direct line coming here. But I feel the power.”
He smiled partially, a disjointed expression that was deeply unnerving. She wanted to like him but he literally made the smallest of hairs on her body stand straight and it wasn’t a comforting sensation. Decorum said she should invite him in for refreshment, but Bishop was not here and her instincts warned against hospitality. He didn’t seem to mind or to have any expectation of it.
“Your signature is a note in the air,” he continued, and hummed a high, soft note. It rung strangely in Clara’s ears, an echo. She cocked her head as if to hear it better. “But this note—” He hummed something low and growling. “—is the signature of a line routing right under your very door. That’s where I hear it flow.”
Clara shuddered. “What then, if it’s not electrical?”
Mosley shrugged. “I’m a director of direct current. You’re the expert on all the other stuff. Keep sharp. Listen. You’ve the ear for it now, you just have to really listen amidst the cacophony. Listen before it’s too late.”
With that, he took two steps toward the lawyers’ offices adjacent and retreated down a hole in the ground she hadn’t noticed before, replacing a metal circle back over his head. A service shaft for the parts of this block that were electrified—that was how he’d gotten in, coming and going along the ever-expanding grid and the networks underground utilized in Edison’s district.
After he left, she considered that patch of faltering green, which seemed dimmer for his absence. Did the green struggle so badly because nothing around it was natural, kindred? Because it could not access sunlight when human towers and constantly climbing stories blackened the sky?
Was electricity in these shadowed spaces created by human interference inevitable? Did they need it? Rumor had it that J. P. Morgan’s carpets were browned and his furnishings singed by his own private generator outside his home. It seemed as though electricity lay in wait for disaster. Who wanted unnatural light under false pretenses when it courted such danger?
Lines. Surely he meant ley lines, yes? But that low, growling note, that wasn’t what she heard on the ship, or along Fifth Avenue, it was an antithetical note to that of vibrant life. And if it wasn’t an electrical line …
Were there ley lines that weren’t positive? Could there be a ley counterpoint line that was neither positive nor industrially created, and that was what was routing her way? A third kind of line? Heaven forbid, one that devils traveled?
That back “courtyard” saddened her; a feature of her own home—of so many New York town houses—she’d nearly forgotten about. So many buildings had these little ghosts of yards, huddling in rear eaves and standing in for alley shadows, scraps of the old world hiding behind brownstone but away from the cobbles.
She’d always wanted to cultivate a small garden there, mirroring the one she had dim memories of helping her mother tend back when she was a little girl in the wider lands of southern Brooklyn. But the light was insufficient, and the layer of soot, dust, coal, ash, and smoke that coated so much of the spaces of the city had choked out the one rosebush she’d tried valiantly to plant.
This was why she spent so much time after her parents’ death in Green-Wood Cemetery; wide open, clean, well tended, sunny in parts, gloriously sacred. So much of the city proper seemed dead and dying, she’d always thought it was the greatest irony to go to such a rejuvenating place that was so alive and vibrant, yet New York’s most beautiful city of the dead.…
She resolved to bring fresh flowers to her family mausoleum. Roses. Part of Lord Black’s Warding idea; she’d love it if all of New York were covered in nothing but. She’d suggest roses as the state flower once that plan was instituted.
And she resolved to find a plant that would survive a coal dusting out back. If nothing else to cleanse the sobering thought of people coming and going around her by tunnels, having access to her in the dark in ways she could not see or predict. Tunnels were for rats, and, it would seem, for warnings.
She thought of the Summoned shadows that had floated along the transatlantic cable, and a terrible thought occurred to her. What if the Summoned didn’t need to be placed along industrial lines anymore? What if that was a sort of stepping-stone? What if the kind of dark works that Mosley had shown Rose and Spire were actually freeing up hellish forces to go wherever they liked, unbidden, without rite or direct invitation as had been done before, drawn to snuff out the greatest of life forces with their darknesses? As the electrical grid grew, with dark forces augmenting it, perhaps the Summoned were creating their own grid and drawing their own lines …
Darting down the stairs, out onto Pearl Street, she had to ask Mosley this. Gazing about, squinting in the shadows, she walked toward the Edison dynamos, thinking perhaps Mosley would keep close.
There was something compelling about him. Not in a way that made her attracted. Just his field was … well, magnetic. Just as hers was, she supposed. He seemed drawn to her similarly. Likely why he’d paused to stare at her before, in those early days before their fates would ever be entwined. Knowing she was something different. Sensing that unique song of her particular wiring.
If she could gain a true understanding of electricity, perhaps it could help her seizures. From what she understood about electrocution, it was not much different-looking than a seizure. Ugly convulsing … As she was thinking this, the hairs on the back of her neck rose. There was a slow, building whine in the air. A voice spoke from the shadows of a nearby building.
“Can you hear it, Miss Templeton?” Mosley asked quietly, his voice carrying, despite the busy, noisy, windy city, for no other reason but his preternatural exception. “The sound it makes?”
“The electricity? Yes. Sometimes the whine of it. The hum. I have to separate it from the rest of the noise.”
“Yes, it takes a while to sort it out. As I explained to your Omega friends, each voltage is its own song. Each has a note that sings down wires. It has always been beautiful…” Mosley closed his eyes for a moment in rapture, as if he were communing with the Holy Spirit in a revival tent. But he frowned suddenly, his God under attack. “But this new energy, trailing along, makes it a dissonant chord.”
“What if the dark energies the Society has amassed, especially with this new brand of fetish set along steel and industry, what if the shadows are creating their own grid? What if that’s what you’re sensing flowing toward me?” She quaked at the thought.
“Perhaps,” the man murmured. “I’m not sure. The Summoned still seem to abide by certain laws, and properties. I am of the opinion that you, a wielder of energy yourself, could counter the fouled notes with your own and block the signature out completely; an alternate harmonic to cancel out the note. Think on it. Train your ear, your pulse, your skin. Feel it. And, ultimately, rise above it.”
He turned around the side of the building and was gone again as mysteriously as he was ever there. All that was left was the whir, whine, spin, and hum of the dynamos down the street.
Rise above it.…
The organic, the inorganic, and the deadly. The delicate and the steel, and she was the one in between fighting off the darkness.
A figure ahead made her heart leap with joy and relief.
She smiled, seeing Bishop emerge from the redbrick carriage house three doors down from their town house. He saw her approaching at a run and waited for her, then offered his arm.
“My dear night owl,” he exclaimed to Clara, “what brings you out at dusk?”
The slight admonishment in his tone reflected his dislike of seeing her out alone after dusk. “Mr. Mosley came to visit with a warning about the energies,” she explained. “I was trying to get further answers out of him when he vanished. I ran after,” Clara said, sliding her arm through his as they ascended their stoop. Bishop raised an eyebrow.
“Mosley. The electrical … aberration?”
Clara winced
.
“Odd as the man is,” she replied, “I don’t like that tone or term for him, Rupert. He is a human being.”
Clara was sensitive to anyone with a gift being considered a “freak.” Anyone.
“Noted,” Bishop replied.
They entered, bid Harper good evening, and kept talking.
“What of Mr. Mosley’s warning, then?” Bishop prompted, moving with Clara to the parlor, where he took the liberty of sitting next to Clara on the parlor divan, rather than sitting in his usual Queen Anne chair adjacent. A new routine, this closeness, and Clara almost forgot what she was going to say.
“He wanted to warn me of a certain power routing here. He can feel and hear it, magnetically. I want to believe it’s ley-line energy routing here; that we, as powerful people, Sensitives and forces of nature in our own right, are creating our own sort of spiritual current. But I fear that it’s also attracting the darker energies that the Society have so continuously utilized. They know our scent by now, the Summoned, and I fear they’re making their own grid, aided by whatever Society holdout is still making hell on earth…”
Clara then explained what Mosley had shown Spire and Rose on the bridge.
“Will horrors never cease,” he muttered. “How, then, do we fight this?”
“He suggested canceling out any discordant notes. While the buzz of electricity is audible to most, he hears it like a symphony.”
“So he suggests fighting energies tonally? Audibly?” Bishop asked, intrigued.
“I believe so, something like a bell, or vibrating at a pitch that might nullify the dissonance and have only the current flowing, not any parasite laid upon it, continuing down the line.” Clara spoke quickly as she processed these new ideas. “Perhaps a carillon bell could be stationed various places, disrupting negative currents. The noise could be explained as just a new alert system in testing mode.”
The Eterna Solution Page 12
