The Eterna Files Page 15

  He eyed her. “Why should I tell you? Are you a spy?”

  She smiled, revealing dimples in both cheeks. “I know for certain that he is,” she said, gesturing toward the current bane of Andre’s existence. “And that he’s tracking you. I boarded at your last stop upriver because I’m tracking him, wondering what a British agent is up to on a leisurely, southbound riverboat cruise. So if he’s interested in you, then so am I.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “That accent of yours.” She spoke with a charming air. “You’re trying to put Northern on it, but you’re Southern.” She leaned closer. “Louisiana, if I’m good, and I’m very good.”

  Andre raised a brow. “How’d you get so good?”

  “You want the truth or a lie?” She smiled disarmingly again. “Usually no one gets a choice, but I’m in a particularly gamesome mood.”

  Andre smiled despite himself, allowing a bit more drawl to seep into his voice, now that he was found out. “The truth, of course.”

  “The basement of my home was a stop on a certain railroad to freedom,” she began, her voice suddenly haunted. “So I heard every dialect the South had to offer. I grew up scared of everyone and everything. But I hardened, as we have to, and I am not scared of you.”

  They stared at each other, deeply. “You could pass for white, you know,” Andre murmured, giving weight to his words.

  “I do,” she replied, with the same hushed heaviness. “So could you.”

  “I do, outside of home. French heritage lends advantage,” he said sharply.

  “So here we are. A woman and her target, with grandparents of a darker color who somehow drop off the face of the Earth … and we go on without them, towards better pastures.” Her words were evenly clipped.

  “Something like that, I suppose. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

  “You’re the one who needs to worry about your status,” she retorted. “Not me.”

  Andre looked her up and down, nodding as she leaned more suggestively toward him, implying with her posture that their conversation was about something else entirely. He felt his muscles stiffen as tension swept through his body. “Are you here to arrest me or something?” he asked. “Do they have lady cops now in New York? I know the big city is full of surprises.…”

  “I could have you arrested,” the woman murmured, “but I’d rather you tell me why that man finds you interesting.”

  “I imagine that’s fairly classified.”

  “Listen,” she continued, “at some point that man is going to try to force you off this ship. Where he’d take you then, God only knows.” She paused and touched him lightly, keeping up the masquerade. “Where are you attempting to go, though?”

  “Home,” he said, enraptured by this intrigue, despite his brother’s chill whisper in his ear.

  “Don’t tell her about Eterna. I don’t know if we can trust her.” Andre tried not to look in the specter’s direction. The woman shuddered as the air around them dropped in temperature drastically. “But I like her far better than the Brit,” Louis added.

  Home. Who was he kidding? Andre and his albatross of a ghostly brother … Some New Orleaneans wanted both of them dead, though for very different reasons. The fact that Louis was already dead wouldn’t stop them from trying to exact revenge.

  The woman continued. “Come under our protection.” She glanced briefly at her target before her gaze flickered toward the shore and her voice became even softer. “If we get separated, and it’s a very good idea that we do, remember Sixty-one Pearl Street. Manhattan. Third floor.”

  Andre stared at her, trying not to reveal that he knew that address already. Louis, surprisingly, said nothing, indeed, he seemed to have floated off. Ghosts were maddeningly unreliable.

  The woman searched Andre’s face. “Do you understand?” He nodded. She bowed her bonneted head. Nimble fingers slipped something into his pocket. His hand dipped in once hers withdrew: money. “To get you on your way,” she murmured. “My job with you is done.” She swept off in a bounce of calico and lace.

  Andre thought of his belongings in his cabin—nothing he couldn’t replace. On his person was money and the dagger. He looked after the woman, then swept his gaze around the deck. The British watcher had not moved, yet somehow seemed closer and more dangerous. Andre considered the speed of the boat. Studied the distant shoreline.

  A chill breeze swept past him as Louis, brilliantly, gave him a gift; managing, with whatever strength a ghost could muster, to tip a passing tray of champagne onto the spy’s lap.

  Andre dove overboard.

  * * *

  Clara stared at the building on the middle of West Tenth Street. A home, once. Then, a lab. Now?

  It looked sick. The shuttered windows seemed to seep, a dark substance oozing around their frames, discoloring the bricks, as if the eyes of the house wept dark kohl down its face.

  The sight of the place made all the tiny hairs on Clara’s body stand straight up.

  She would not have much time at all, if this was how she felt outside. She catalogued her symptoms, what might come next, and considered a timeline.

  Considering the magnitude of the oppressive energy the building exuded, a sense that had only increased since the first visit, she gave herself three minutes. Not a lot of time to find whatever she had missed before.

  She descended the ground-floor stairwell and turned the key in the lock.

  Three minutes.

  Nearly immediately, the first symptom: the dim light of the entrance hall shifted and her vision swam, the corridor lengthening, then regaining perspective.

  The out-of-place thing was on the second floor. She tore up the stairs. Something about the carpet. The corner.

  She ran to the room’s north wall and opened the shutters, despite the choking dust flying about, choking her.

  Streaming sunlight barely enticed color from the worn, sad, floral-patterned carpets that covered nearly every inch of the wooden floor. If this had been Goldberg’s house, before the team moved in, why was it so terribly bare? Did he know he was going to die?

  Her breath was shorter than it should be, as if a hand was pressing directly on her lungs. Two minutes.

  The flap of carpet she’d noticed on her first quick perusal was still upturned, something carved on the wooden board below. She knelt and found herself looking at a picture of an eye.

  She lifted the carpet.

  And stifled a cry of shock.

  There was writing on every inch of the floor, screaming, apocalyptic text. She lifted another carpet.

  More.

  The words were etched into wood and filled in with either a dark, coppery-scented substance or thick black ooze. Blood and tar.

  Countless quotes from the Book of Revelations screamed up from the floor in a shaking knife’s hand, writ beside damning words from other faiths. Some words were written backward; there were phrases in Hebrew, in what looked like Arabic and probably in other ancient tongues, even pictograms in iterations of blood and tar. What she understood damned the faithful of every past age, the present, and times to come, lifting up demons as the only sources of power worthy of worship.

  She felt a roaring in her ears, as if she could hear the coursing of her blood in her veins.

  One minute.

  She lifted the last carpets, confirming that the whole floor was covered with writings of end times. Dancing around the bits of text were hieroglyphs, runes, talismanic symbols, and numbers, numbers everywhere.

  In one drawing a huge dragon tore at an eagle; in another, an inverted pentagram pierced the heart of a crudely depicted naked woman. This would be too much to take in even for someone who had no psychic inclination whatsoever. For Clara, it was an assault almost beyond measure. She didn’t need to scream—the room was screaming for her.

  With a sick lurch, she realized that what she was looking at was terribly similar to an old case of hers, and if that sort of dark, twisted, sick magic was somehow wrapp
ed up in the Eterna Commission, God help them all. If immortality were to be gained on these counts, it would be lived out in a vicious hell.

  Whoever had converted this house into a literal book of death had invited the disaster across its threshold.

  Thirty seconds.

  She backed away, nearly tripping on the folds of carpet, her boot heel sticking in tar and dried blood. She did not think whose blood it was.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Her eyes began blinking rapidly as everything took on a hazy glow. She stumbled on the second-floor landing and her feet nearly went out from under her, tearing at her petticoat hem. She almost threw herself down the stairs, focusing her strength in her arms as those always failed her last, and half-slid to the first floor, where she hurled herself at the front door.

  One second.

  Clinging to the doorknob, balancing her strength and attention on her hand, grasping the metal ball, she desperately heaved the heavy door open. Whether she hurtled forward or the house expelled her, Clara could not tell. She dragged her rebellious body up the stairs to the sidewalk, where she collapsed, half on the pavement, half on the steps. The slam of the door behind her was simultaneous with her desperate gasp for breath, knowing that if she lost herself now, she would convulse with no one to keep her from further injury.

  Breathe, breathe, she commanded.

  She did. Gasping, wrenching breaths.

  She was trembling, but shaking was not convulsing, though it was so close. Far too close.

  “Miss, are you…” A passerby, an elderly woman with a parasol, was staring down at her.

  “Fine,” she said. “I … lost my balance for a moment. Please, leave me be, and don’t ever come near this house.” Her tone brooked no argument and the frightened woman scurried away. Clara would do the same as soon as she could stand.

  She would run very far from that place indeed.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Rose Everhart had watched the bullet strike her father’s back, pierce his dress uniform, and continue through his body and into her mother, whom he was embracing. He had just received a medal honoring his outstanding naval service. The regal Buckingham appointment room had filled with screams.

  That one small bullet took two lives, her father’s immediately and her mother’s after a scant week.

  It would have been the biggest scandal of the age if the truth were told; Everhart being a heroic general and the marquis who shot him being barking mad.… It wasn’t the hush of it all she hated as much as the soft murmurs of pity that still haunted the halls of Parliament where she worked in the same kind of secrecy that shrouded her parents’ murders.

  When she’d been asked what she wanted to keep her quiet those eight years ago, she asked to lose herself in “distinct matters of Parliamentary government.” Her family was proud and she enjoyed the idea of earning rather than being given charity. The merchant who had been courting Rose at the time, for whom she’d have settled to please—and silence—her mother, found this request amoral. They forgot each other swiftly.

  Lord Black had stepped in to handle the whole affair, already pegged, from his first term in the House of Lords, as the foremost man for delicate matters.

  The rest of the Everhart family was never told the truth about her parents’ deaths, fobbed off with a tale of a swift mutual illness. Lord Black counseled Rose not to say otherwise, and she obeyed, though the guilt and lies ate at her for some years.

  She had quickly settled in to work. From the first, she had loved her job and enjoyed her quiet life alone with her cousin, victim of yet another tragedy. They did well enough on her earnings and were pleasantly established in a house provided by the government.

  The Tourney case had struck this old nerve. She’d had her fill of mad, overprivileged murderers. Yet she would not turn away. Neither, she knew, would Spire. Lord Black had given her information about Spire’s past that Rose was certain Spire would not wish her—or anyone—to know. His life’s trajectory was not dissimilar to hers, yet she could say nothing to him about that.

  Weary of waking with the assassination in her mind, Rose resolved to pray with her parish priest about her nightmare, to see if such mental scars could be healed or the images replaced with more pleasant memories. Could anything of peace erase such horror? Negativity and sorrow held a weight that joy did not. How could something less traumatic balance upon the scale?

  If only her twin hadn’t died, she’d have someone to share the burden with. She’d always wondered what happened to the soul of that stillborn sister and what her life would have been like had they both lived.

  As she stepped onto the otherwise unoccupied Millbank office, a familiar clicking whirr sounded. A telegraph machine had been installed, as Lord Black had promised, along with a desk stocked with paper, envelopes, and writing implements. Rose opened the thin cipher book that was always on her person—every dress she owned had an adapted pocket for it sewn into the bodice—and went to work on the message.

  Lord Black entered almost silently while Rose worked and soon presented her with a cup of tea with a hint of sugar, just how she liked it. She was too engrossed in her task to thank him.

  There were two messages. The first was not good news. The latter was terrible news from her most reliable news desk contact, whom she regularly appraised on matters she wanted immediately brought to her attention. It took every ounce of Rose’s willpower not to cry out or shudder in revulsion at the information. She tucked the message deep into the pocketed fold next to her code book.

  Rose heard the front door open and shut and footsteps on the iron stairs.

  Black was staring at her from beside the tea trolley, where he was preparing another cup. She would have to say something.

  “Brinkman lost his target,” she stated finally.

  “What about Brinkman?” Spire asked, striding into the room.

  Lord Black handed Spire his tea and Rose took advantage of the pause in conversation to pick up her own cup. “You’re welcome,” Black said with a pout.

  “What?” Rose and Spire both asked, befuddled.

  “For the tea,” Black muttered. “I’m a lord, I’m not supposed to serve. I was being nice.”

  They blinked at him; Rose wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, she knew there was an important vote on in the joint houses.

  “What happened?” Spire asked.

  “Whatever Brinkman was following, he lost it,” Rose said. “He pledges to regain the target and to send us materials from the disaster site.” Rose turned to Black. “Do you have another contact in America we might use, milord?”

  Black shrugged. “Not that I know of, but the government has many operatives I don’t know about.” He grinned. “I can enlist Omega to find the ones I’m dying to meet!”

  Rose sighed. “Lord Black, please don’t send any of us out on another wild goose chase after those people, they don’t exist.”

  Spire stared from one to the other, eyebrow quirked in that way that Rose already knew indicated curiosity.

  “Ghosts, Mr. Spire,” Lord Black explained. “The ghosts of this age elude me. I’ve been told by Her Majesty that specters are handled by another department.”

  “Ghosts? Another department?” Spire’s vague contempt at this idea was thinly veiled.

  “It’s the strangest thing;” Black continued. “Her Majesty spoke about it falteringly, as if searching for a missing memory. It’s a terrible mystery. Of course London has ghost stories,” he added, lounging on a nearby stool in a position that made the chair look more comfortable than it was. “And séances have their time and place, but something else is going on, I just know it. So keep your eyes out, Spire, for this other department. I must meet them!”

  “I’ll be sure to send them your way,” Spire stated dryly.

  “Yes, but today—new scientists!” Black cried. “Profiles are waiting in your office, Mr. Spire. I’m off to Parliament! I
should make an appearance for a vote now and then.” He swept to the door. “Tell that wily Brinkman to hurry everything up!” With iron-echoing footsteps, Black proceeded out the front door.

  Spire turned away, stalking to his office. Rose thought about running after him to tell him the unfortunate news she’d concealed from Black, but if the rest of the team came in and saw her emerge from Spire’s office … it would appear wrong. The Omega team were hardly the arbiters of propriety, but Rose had to be careful not to allow anything to become too casual. Such would only hurt her and her reputation, of which she must take great care if she was to retain her position.

  Propriety was most inconvenient because it was about what was seen and how it might be construed; never about the simple truth. Spire was able to overlook the fact that she was a woman for the sake of the greater task at hand; Tourney—and then Lord Black—forced them together and in less-than-usual circumstances. But Spire didn’t have to consider the same things she did. As a man, he wouldn’t receive the same scrutiny, needn’t be as circumspect.

  Her superiors could never have any reason to think her immodest. Honor and absence of scandal was critical.

  Miss Knight entered, looking distracted, in a shimmering, bustled turquoise gown. She gave Rose a brief nod before gliding to the desk she’d taken for her own, where she perused a letter she drew from her reticule. The Wilsons walked in quietly and took seats in the rear of the room.

  Spire stalked out of his office, carrying a stack of papers—likely the profiles Lord Black had mentioned. Rose tried to catch his eye, so he’d see there was something she needed to say, but he was engrossed.

  Spire spoke as he distributed materials to the team. “We need to know everything about the new scientists, their habits, what to be suspicious about. Wilsons…” As he called them, they stood. “Inspect homes, habits, family. It looks like these men are all bachelors. Learn everything; make note of everyone who goes near them. We must be able to immediately recognize something out of place or added. Considering the unknown fate of the previous scientists, we can’t lose more. Remember to keep a low profile.” The Wilsons nodded, folded the papers out of sight, and exited as if dismissed from rank and file in a military operation.