Behind them entered two Capitol Police officers, summoned at some point during the fray and concern, staring wide-eyed at all the blood in the room.
“The wretch has gone to ground,” Evelyn declared, pointing to the service door. “Keep your compass together,” she said to Bishop and Spire. “I’ll come with you, gentlemen, as she is armed and has … unconventional tricks up her sleeve.”
“No.” Clara grabbed Evelyn’s arm, her voice clear and calm, almost otherworldly to her own pained ear. “I’ll need you. All of you, to help me.”
“We’ll find the woman,” the officers assured.
“You’ll need more than two of you,” Knight cautioned. The officers paled, glancing at Clara and back at all the blood in the room, then ran out to ask for additional help.
Clara’s head pounded in pain with every heartbeat, but, as one could lose a fair amount of blood before unconsciousness, the temporary fix the visitor had afforded her would hold for one battle, Clara surmised, choosing to remain clinical lest she panic. The amount of energy she was wielding crackled around her, and she was sure it was the only thing superseding a seizure. She had to act while this state held.
“I have the ley lines with me now,” Clara said to Bishop.
“I see,” he said, breathless with wonder. “Your eyes are glowing. You are the eldest magic embodied; tell me what I may do to magnify you,” he begged.
The clarion song of the eldest forces was loud and sweet in her ear, especially in her injured one, a balm and salve to get her through.
There were screams from the outside lobby. Voices were heard shouting about devils and the work of evil, that Satan had taken the sky as his own …
Clara gestured onward. “We have to act while the tide is high. The enemy has created a storm and we have to fight from the center of it outward.”
Spire seemed nearly as struck by her as Bishop was, bloody mess and all. She had assumed a heightened otherworldly command and none questioned it.
“Lead on,” he bid.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
From the screams of the tourists and employees of the District, Clara could only assume the worst of the sky outside.
As she stepped out into the hall toward the front lobby, people took one look at her and screamed anew, running from her bloodied figure. She was flanked by Bishop on one side and Rose on the other, with Spire and Knight keeping pace.
“Do I look that much a fright?” Clara asked Rose, pausing before she stepped fully out into the lobby beyond.
“It’s a wonder you’re still standing,” Rose said. “Whatever is happening, whatever you are wielding, it turned the tide.”
“We all did,” Clara countered. “Each one of us is doing our part, we are all fighting and all of it counts.”
“I tried to root around in her mind for her next step,” Knight said, shaking her arms as if fully clearing the poison. “She blocked me at every turn,” she continued, tapping her temple in frustration, “but I did get a sense of taking something to a great height.”
Evelyn had dashed to the coat check and returned with the cloak she’d procured for Clara after her seizures in New York, a deep green cloak with a hood. Seeing it again made Clara think of her ancient self that had appeared out in the Trinity lot to help her. Might all her souls be with her now, she pleaded.
“Here you go, my brave darling,” Evelyn said, placing the cloak over her with care, and squeezed gently. Clara smiled warmly at the medium, who was clearly shaken to the core by Clara’s injury. “Let’s not have you out in the field looking so vulnerable,” Evelyn said, blinking back tears. “I know there’s no stopping you but you must tell us when you flag.”
“If I do, that wretch will win,” Clara said simply. At this, everyone straightened and stiffened, a simple call to arms. “I saw you trying to communicate with the spirit world, Evelyn, I hope they were useful.”
“The spirits kept repeating Washington, which I thought at first was a bit redundant and obvious,” Evelyn said. “But perhaps they mean—”
“The monument,” Clara exclaimed. “It’s an obelisk.” She turned to Knight. “At a great height. She’ll use that to magnify her power!”
She rushed forward and her phalanx followed.
“That’s one monument Brown made a point to Ward,” Bishop stated. “As a Mason, he knows full well the ceremonial and mystical power of an obelisk as a needle to the heavens. I can only hope his efforts stem the dreadful tide.”
Anyone in the way promptly dove out of it as their grim-faced group descended the front stair, coats and skirts flaring in the wind of crackling energy and surging powers, Clara’s cloak buffeted like wings of a swooping bird.
Outside, in any direction that there were people, they were running to take shelter from the darkening sky, hands on hats, parasols and walking sticks all akimbo, pleasant strolls turned into harried displays of terror.
She looked up and swallowed hard.
There were black clouds in the sky, roiling, in intersecting lines. A star, Celeste had said. The inky clouds formed in the vague hazy shape of a stretched, thin, inverted pentagram, one arm reaching directly up over the Willard, tethered now, by her own sacrifice.
But of course it wasn’t dark clouds that had taken up the sky but Summoned forms.
A celestial horror.
“And we’re going into the center of the star…” Rose murmured, as if by stating just how mad it sounded they might make some other choice. Clara simply took her hand and they walked forward across the lawn with their company.
“She said she wanted to foul a pentagram,” Clara said to Spire. “I assume boxes with parts are hidden below each of these points. My own included,” she said, pointing to the shadows unfurling above the hotel and referencing her bandaged ear. At this, Spire stared at her in horror. “I saw, when psychically reaching out to you,” Clara continued, “a pyramid below the mansion. I assume there’s another offering below the Capitol building, a point at the monument, and the furthest wing?”
“Likely one of the main train stations,” Spire replied.
“The police need to be alerted to each,” Rose urged.
“I believe we may already have tapped the limited manpower of the Capitol Police just by calling upon them to help Blessing and Black with the Executive basement. Hopefully the sergeant I spoke with wired for reinforcements.”
Bishop had to mesmerize two carriage drivers to take them near to the monument and even then, they refused to go out onto the Mall proper. The senator even had to calm the horses with his gift before they began, Clara helping by reaching out a hand to each forehead. The creatures must have felt the gentle but unmistakable hum within her as they settled, still stamping but no longer rearing.
In the mile it took, their compass four traveling together, Clara closed her eyes to feel precisely where Washington’s ley line might be. It seemed to be ahead of her, right along the Mall itself; no wonder the planners felt the need to secure green space there.
“Did Masons build the District to correspond with ley lines?” Clara asked.
“There is endless supposition about the nature of the layout,” Bishop replied, “but, like everything else in Washington, it’s a bit haphazard. Some say there’s a pentacle that can be laid atop the grid, but as Brown has told me time and again, pentacles aren’t Masonic, that isn’t their symbol, so I don’t understand what this woman thinks she’s perverting, other than playing into satanic fears.”
“The pentagram itself is a general sign of protection,” Clara stated.
“She wants to make every area feel it has none,” Rose replied. “This feeds the kind of power she’s clearly addicted to.”
Clara descended from the carriage carefully with Bishop’s help; any hard jostling was agony on her ear, despite the warming hum of the lines she tried to keep stoking within her. The group stepped out onto the gravel path, and the carriages were off again with a start and shrill whinnies.
> They were left to the Washington Monument section of the green; from what they could see from here to the Capitol, the area appeared cleared of anyone but them.
Clara stepped onto the grass, giving herself clearance of a good number of yards away from the base, looking up at the unfinished top of the monument, the needle pointing to heaven not yet complete, open to the elements in jagged stone.
A line of Summoned forms floated above the monument’s uneven mouth as if a sequence of pitch-black flags were unfurled from a pole. The silhouettes did not touch down as close to the monument as they had seemed to over the Willard, or even over the Capitol, where the Summoned seemed to cluster around the top of the white dome as if ready to pounce.
She credited the distance to the Warding done on the monument. Lady C wouldn’t necessarily know to look for them, as she’d have demanded they revoke the ones on their person when she attacked them if she knew to disarm them.
“Now what?” Spire asked, grimacing up at the roiling sky, the pitch of the figures swarming. That the man remained undaunted was a credit to his heart and soul. “Shall I search the monument?”
“Please stay within sight,” Clara replied, gesturing to Bishop and Rose as the compass points near her, knowing she had to let the policeman do something useful, as he couldn’t be one to help with the magnification of psychic transmission. He nodded and moved away from them to inspect the base of the obelisk for foul tokens.
Clara lowered herself to her knees. Her company folded in around her in an instinctive, protective circle.
She placed her palms flush down on the earth, never minding the roaring pain that a bent head caused her ear, murmuring simple prayers taught in Quaker youth, focusing on the pleas for peace that her congregation had championed during the Civil War years.
“Let me magnify your power, as much as you will let me,” Clara murmured to the ley line below her hands, humming the note Marlowe had put into her ear.
The line hummed back. Sang. Nearly shouted a tone, as if screaming a hallelujah. In that moment, she felt almost like she’d discovered a soul that had been lost, imprisoned, and given up for dead. The line seemed to be so eager to be recognized. To be given a voice again in a world that had seemed to have moved on without it. All the exterior noise, dread, pain, and confusion was wiped away; there was only a blissful I am here.
The androgynous self of Clara’s past lives, likely of druidic clergy, peeled away from Clara, without her even having to make the extension. The form wafted before her like a ghost, but in full colors. That body did as she did, bent to the ground and placed hands flush upon the grass and laughed a joyous laugh.
“It is good to hear you, too, old friend…” the old soul murmured to the earth.
Clara beamed, suddenly unaware of anything but this joy, and even if no one could sense or see what she was seeing, all seemed very aware that she was in the midst of a transcendent state.
From this place, she hummed the song of the lines, and her compatriots picked it up. So even did the wind around them. The air around their circle was distinctly brighter than the air outside of it.
Out of the corner of her eye there came a speeding, inky cloud rolling toward them, a misty, wispy black ball that smacked against the base of the obelisk and vanished in a large explosion of smoke. Spire, who had been examining the exterior base of the pedestal, rocked back as if he was shoved by unseen hands.
The countermeasure, the fouled lines, sang back, a grating response to what Clara had woken from the ground. It was almost as if the cloud approaching the obelisk was a renewed jolt of the dark power and there was an aftershock of the impact. Clara stood and wobbled on her feet, steadied by the strength of her compass.
“There is bound to be pushing and shoving out here, a war of the currents indeed,” Clara said. “We must stand our ground. Feel the ley harmony, the resolved note, within you,” Clara said to those inclined, and unfolded her selves, the act of doing so easier every time.
Her lives took up the note in turn, and she shuddered a convulsion of refreshed energy from the sacred line, rolling off her not in seizure waves but in what felt like a burst of angel song. Her compatriots focused on the note, too, humming lightly, ignoring the dread press of the Summoned as they floated lower and lower, as if seeking to blanket the earth in dread.
Distantly, across the Mall and beyond the tree line, a bell tolled. Off from their note, but resonant into the air. It kept ringing. It didn’t seem possible, but to Clara’s augmented ear, it grew louder.
Then, some streets away, in another direction, behind them, another tolled. Others took up the ringing. And with each new bell, Clara chose not to hear cacophony but willed the echo to tune to a resolved note. She pushed against the air, physically lifting her hands up. The pitch rose just slightly from reverberate off-tune to amplifying the resolved note of the ley song.
“Do you hear that?” Clara murmured. Glancing at Evelyn, she saw that the woman was crying, saying thank you and wiping her eyes.
Evelyn caught Clara’s gaze and she quietly explained, as if not wanting to disturb the reverberate bells. “I asked every ghost that could possibly hear me, I begged them to help us.…”
“And they are…” Clara murmured. “This is working, my dears, keep this up.…”
As the bells crested, rung by phantom hands, holding and vibrating the ley note so well it almost drowned out the fouled whine, a figure approached them from the shaded lane beyond at a trot, wiping perspiration off his close-shorn graying hair and from his face with a handkerchief.
Reverend Blessing was on his way to them, his vestments smeared with soot and tar, Lord Black at a dash behind him, glancing up at the sky with a grimace, trying to get closer to the reverend as if to be next to him meant protection.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Blessing intoned approaching his fellows, arms wide as if welcoming congregants into a chapel.
“I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me,” Evelyn replied.
“How fares the mansion?” Bishop asked.
Blessing gestured at the distance behind him. “See the line of smoke? A private bonfire in the back garden, carefully monitored. I will bless the ashes when I return. Brown is overseeing it now.”
Clara squinted past the smoke and tried to see if the Executive Mansion arm of the Summoned star was mitigated. It appeared to be so, but they needed to keep pushing until the sky was clear. The shadows were like an infection, and they had to be eliminated, along with their puppeteer.
Two Capitol officers galloped up on horseback, dismounting at the tree line and making straight for the obelisk. Spire stepped up to greet them. “Did you see the woman? She was heading right here,” said one of them, exasperated.
“We have not seen her,” Spire countered. “I’ve personally been inspecting the site. She may have entered ahead of us.”
The men opened the door to the interior, gesturing to Spire. “Well, come on then, you’re a man of the law, let’s stop this monster.”
Spire looked uncomfortable, glancing at Clara and Rose. “I can’t.”
“Beg your pardon?” the other officer asked, hand on his pistol.
“Go ahead, Mr. Spire,” Clara said watching the proceedings as she examined the brightening sky. “Our bond will hold provided you stay open to us, and listen if we call.”
He bowed his head and followed the officers into the structure.
There was a loud, explosive pop from the Capitol building, and all the electrical lights that had been turned on as the sky had become so preternaturally dark now exploded. From the distance near the monument, Clara couldn’t see much but a flash of light. Several Summoned forms in the cluster over the Capitol dome wafted away as if cut from a lifeline, washing down a stream to vanish.
“That has to be a good sign,” Lord Black declared. He took in the sight of Clara, the blood on her sleeve, and his eyes widened.
“I’ll be all right,” Clara mu
rmured to him. “But help me magnify the ley lines, you understand them, too.” The nobleman nodded, and rummaged in his pocket, pulling out small flower buds.
“Gathered these along the way. Here. For healing,” he insisted, tucking a small white bud into the bloodstained lace of her collar.
From far above them there was the sound of a scuffle, a roar and a scream. Clara and her compatriots cried out as a head was seen hanging over the top of the open obelisk. Then came a garish horror. A gush of scarlet blood splattered down the white stone and kept running in thin rivulets toward the base. The Summoned forms wafted closer, freshly encouraged by the ghastly sight.
“Harold!” Rose cried. There was a sharp tattoo, gunshots. A high-pitched scream of fury from above. The Summoned that had thinned fleshed out their ranks once more.
Clara returned to her knees. Her lives knelt with her. She couldn’t get too distracted, even for the sake of Mr. Spire; the best thing she could do to help him was to keep extending the line.
“Tell the ghosts to keep up their aid,” Clara begged Evelyn, who was staring up above in horror. Even if a swarm of ghosts threatened to shift Clara toward a seizure, she knew if there wasn’t another push, they’d lose any ground they’d gained.
Blessing began circling their group reciting the exorcism liturgy, Evelyn falling in as his second, renouncing the dark forces above.
Rose ran to the base of the obelisk and called for Spire once more. There was a growl in response, echoing down the stone. Knight followed, raising her chemical pistol at the open door.
Clara fought for the note again; the bells had grown faint, only one nearby carillon still keeping unconventional mass with them.
Rose screamed as a roiling cloud of black mist tumbled out from the door of the obelisk, snarling and fighting forms, scrabbling limbs visible in a tangle within.
Clara dug her nails into the grass and pulled, as if she were reaching into the earth and dragging up an actual rope.
“Come fight with me, old friend, louder, harder, I desperately need you, here in the valley of the shadow of death,” she murmured to the ley force. It answered.
The Eterna Solution Page 26