Eterna and Omega Read online

  Pure but misplaced instinct had Rose on the brink of rushing forward when Miss Knight clamped a vise grip on her shoulder and pointed to a nearly invisible gap in the flaps of the tent. Rose glimpsed the glisten of an eye and the barrel of a rifle—pointed toward the crowd and roving as if ready for any excuse to fire.

  She leaned back on her heels with a curse that was most unladylike.

  Tearing her gaze away from the awful display to survey the crowd, she found herself staring a familiar face.

  No. She didn’t know that woman at all.

  Yet she looked very familiar.

  Her heart suddenly, inexplicably ached, as if she were staring at a lost relative found, a beloved misplaced item returned.

  The woman across the tent was dark blond and angular, grand in her qualities despite being dressed in similar station to Rose. A working or traveling woman’s charcoal linen dress with black piping accentuated the woman’s tall lines topped at a distinct angle by a small straw hat with black ribbon pinned to upswept braids.

  “Oh my,” Knight said, following Rose’s sight line. Knowing Knight’s proclivities, at first Rose assumed her companion was attracted to the other woman, but the gravity of Knight’s next words indicated otherwise. “She’s the one.”

  “The one?” Rose asked, turning to Knight.

  “The one I warned you about. The one who will be the death of you. It’s her. She came to visit me outside the tent earlier, for a reading. I could tell she was trying to determine if I was legitimate. She gave me a name that I knew wasn’t hers but shielded her real one from me. She’s gifted.”

  * * *

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the young man warbled, addressing the crowd as wires sparked around him. His voice displaying his frayed nerves, he spoke in monotone, as if scripted, but was a poor actor ill suited for the stage. “I am Mr.… Jack Mosley … I am very special. I am here on behalf of my”—he looked around nervously—“masters … to tell you … that you cannot avoid the coming monsters.…”

  Rose felt sick, for her dead countrymen being made a display of, and Mosley, odd as he was, treated like a sideshow freak, and the unknown fate of their dear Mr. Wilson.

  Continuing to sweat a flood, his eyes bulged out of his sockets as he cried, “Behold.”

  Mosley closed his eyes, and there was a buzzing surge through the wires.

  The bodies before him shuddered and then, in a wretched and unnatural lurch, sat up. The crowd screamed. Women fainted. Men made declamatory statements. Rose and Knight froze, looking on in abject horror.

  The woman Miss Knight had made infamous wore the exact expression Rose herself felt. There was a kinship there, undoubtedly, a mutual pain, as if the world should never have come to this. Tourney’s cellar of horrors should not have been the presage for this kind of public display, and the woman in question seemed to hold a similar weight of responsibility and deeply personal conviction about the matter.

  Yet isn’t that just what the Ciphers had banked upon themselves, the comfort of theater to mask true intent? Were they any better for their ploys to lure the American team out into the open?

  But what were they to do? Rose was now confident this wasn’t the American team’s doing, for this to have been a trick cooked up to mirror Tourney was a stretch. The character of the American team just didn’t seem capable of so dark an act. She didn’t know which, if any, of the American press would have gotten wind of the Tourney killings, as she and Spire had fought to keep the horrific mess from the sideshow-spectacle hands of the modern journalist. Yet here they were in quite the spectacle.

  Who on earth could know, in this age of cunning sham spiritualists and gifted prestidigitators, that this was anything but a magic show? To the unwitting crowd, this was theater, not terror. The comfort of the former made the reality of the latter all the more pervasive and effective. Stage magic had made great innovative strides in craft and technology of prestige, and once this crowd learned the trick was on them, the whipping lash of fear would bind them up.…

  What those putting on this kind of display wanted out of this she couldn’t guess. Demonstration of power, certainly, drawing all operatives together.

  The wires, the carved bodies—this was Master’s Society inspired, of Tourney’s like and the predecessor Moriel. It was tied into a greater picture. In the case of these scientists, Apex was involved, so it had grown from personal, private, and perverse ritual, fetish, and ungodly experiment for “science” into a corporate level of reach.

  It had begun; the battering ram to the castle doors of civilization had struck. They were witness to it and at present helpless to stop it. If materials like what Apex shipped here went out to other port towns, how many of these displays might be happening in parks around America? England?

  She doubted there were many Mosleys in the world, but with the increasing advent of electricity in many cities, who else might find themselves strangely adaptive to it, a new sense developing like one of Darwin’s wonders as the species hurtled on toward the possibilities of its intelligent design?

  Once the bodies sat fully upright from the surging force, their mouths sagged open, and in the instant, the world exploded in sensory assault. The resulting sound issuing from their black, swollen maws was an unholy scream like a steam engine, a boat’s foghorn, and a thousand human voices shrieking all at once. It was the most terrible sound Rose could possibly imagine, and the entire assembled crowd winced and ducked, clapped hands to ears, and cried out in response.

  Hands to her ears, when Rose fully opened her eyes again, she saw the world as she’d seen things when doubled. In visions awake and asleep since the accident and her losing consciousness, there was a second layer of sight upon the normal sense. She saw Mosley, still tethered in electrical currents to the bodies via the wires, but he was staring, mirroring the horror of his own audience, at the air around the four dead researchers, and in this shifted vision, Rose saw glimmering, transparent forms that had been made manifest in this display by the onset of the current and the waking, shuddering, animating bodies.

  “My God, are those…”

  “Ghosts? Yes, those are,” Miss Knight murmured. “There isn’t a more ghastly way to treat the dead than this.…”

  Spirits, then, vaguely human forms that were luminous and transparent, wavering like heat from a horizon, an entire entourage of ghosts floated shackled to the bodies of their scientists. To have pitted such a display next to their tent could not be mere happenstance.

  “I was a fool to think what I saw in Tourney’s basement,” Rose said numbly, grappling as the crowd was, with just what she was seeing, “with only the carved and wired bodies, was the worst of it … To see them wake … It undoes the mind.…”

  “And I think that’s rather the point,” Miss Knight replied ruefully.

  The woman whom Rose had been so fixed upon, the one destined to be connected to her for better or worse, seemed deeply affected in a way different from those in the crowd with the stomach to keep watching, as if what was happening was having a dire physical effect upon her body. She seemed responsive more to the floating, phantasmagorical presences than to the hateful noise or sight of dead bodies shuddering to life. She was horrified in a different way, as if the ghosts were making her ill, and she rushed out of the tent. Rose wanted to follow, but Knight had a hand clamped upon her shoulder.

  The crowd was quite truly beside itself, not knowing whether to stare or flee, many had fainted or run, many stood paralyzed.

  “Enough!” Mosley cried in misery. “I can and will end this!” In a desperate, graceless move, he flapped his arms and shook the wires free, blood spurting from where the “plugs” had been latched into his arms.

  Disconnected, the bodies of the scientists collapsed, thudding, sickly moist, against the metal tables. The hellish screaming of their yawning, blackened mouths stopped.

  Mosley himself shrieked then, in agony and anger, arms flailing as if to set the tempo of a frenetic orch
estra. A distinctly different whine tuned in the air, a threatening, cresting noise culminating as the corpses burst into roaring flame. Undoubtedly treated with something that accelerated flammability, they disintegrated rapidly. By the time the flames died down, most members of the audience had rightly fled the obscene spectacle.

  Watching between the flames, through the smoke and the wavering heat, Rose saw Mosley turn toward the ghosts. He waved his arms once more, an unholy conductor drawing forth the first notes of a thundering overture. There was a cracking sound like that of a bullwhip, a surge of power and current. The spectral forms all blinked out in the same instant.

  For a moment, Rose was glad that Spire was not present. He’d have been furious at all the ruckus and grotesque theatricality, especially considering his father. Whether or not he would have seen the ghosts, or believed that she had seen them, she couldn’t know. Having freed himself with brute current, Mosley ran from the tent.

  Compulsively, Rose took off after him, Knight behind her. Outside, Rose immediately noticed the blond woman steadying herself, one gloved hand gripping the back of a bench and another against a nearby tree, her breath heaving in difficult gasps. Rose rushed past her, Mosley in their sights ahead, and she soon lost track of Knight in the tumultuous throng behind her.

  Suddenly, the blonde ran up beside and then ahead of her, still gasping but trying to reach out, crying out to the fleeing young man. “Wait, I know you! From Pearl Street! The surges there, please let me help you … My partners mean you no harm.”

  Partners … Perhaps the blonde was with the Eterna Commission. That would follow. Maybe this was even Clara Templeton herself—the files had contained no image of Eterna’s leading lady. Considering this woman’s age and particulars, she very well could be.

  Rose was within arm’s length of the woman now, preparing to call out to her, all cautions about her own health and safety—and prophecy—tossed aside. Clara Templeton—if this was she—was the missing piece. Allegiances between their two sides would serve them better, that’s what the mysterious Miss Marlowe urged as she carried the pervasive whiff of the future with her in her mysterious rounds.

  Hope of connection was interrupted by a threat—two men whom Rose spotted out of the corner of her eye. One wore plain work clothes and a fisherman’s cap and carried a rifle, making him likely the gunman who had been keeping watch on the crowd. He fired at Mosley.

  The slight man screamed and stumbled. Red blood bloomed on one shirtsleeve. In a raging fury, he flung the wounded arm up in the air. An arc of electricity soared from his hand, striking the rifle and zapping the gunman, who collapsed into a sizzling, singed heap on blood-spattered flagstones. Rose flinched at this, remembering what had happened to Mr. Wilson, pausing to pray that he might be all right. Had that been an attack or accident?

  Mosley cried out again, and with a spurt of bright blood and a fresh smell of singed flesh, the bullet clattered onto the plaza stones, having been ejected by Mosley’s self-current. He raced away, nearly getting run over by a trolley car before disappearing beyond Park Row’s many newspaper buildings now buzzing with the activity of the day.

  Rose and the blond woman stopped running, trying to catch their breath and staring after him. They turned to one another almost as if choreographed.

  Before either could speak, long arms and black-gloved hands clamped over each woman’s mouth and shoved them together, shoulder to shoulder.

  A man’s voice spoke close to Rose’s ear in an upper-class London dialect. “Don’t scream if either of you value your lives. Miss Templeton knows I do not make idle threats.” It was her, Rose thought as their captor released his grip.

  Both women whirled to face the man, who was clad all in black with a wide-rimmed black hat shielding his face, a man of shadow even in bright light.

  “You,” Clara Templeton spat hatefully. “If it isn’t the abductor. What do you want now?”

  “Mosley, of course. I’m sure he’s heading home to Pearl Street. All he wants is to be left well enough alone.

  “Call on him there,” he said, addressing Miss Everhart, then rattled off the address, ending with, “Yes, I know who you are, I know who all of you are.”

  “You’re Brinkman,” Rose exclaimed. Clara whirled at the sound of her voice.

  “You’re English! From the British offices searching for Eterna,” Clara exclaimed, looking at Rose warily.

  “Did your Eterna Commission have anything to do with our scientists laid out like that, for a show? Injuring one of our agents?” Rose asked.

  “We had nothing to do with these acts today,” Clara retorted. “I was invited to the Cipher show by a direct invitation to my office.”

  “Ladies, please,” the double agent said. “You’ve been pitted against each other by another foe, and while it would once have been advisable to make it appear that New York and London were still at odds, that theater is now pointless. Focus now on the Master’s Society, an insidious organization bent on overturning the world order entirely, horror by horror. Those unfortunate researchers were killed in the Greenwich property where they’d been working. Killed by possessed society operatives, shipped here with the intent to have Mosley reanimate them. I merely engineered where, so you both could see for yourselves. The events will happen regardless; what we can do is try to use them to our advantage,” the spy stated.

  “How much of England supports the Master’s Society? Is that what’s been after our commission all along?”

  “Not in the least—” Rose sputtered.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Brinkman growled. “Both of you will need to exorcise your respective governments of this nonsense lest they get lured—or forced—in. You will have to work together.” Taking note of their obvious wariness, he added, “I’ve been planting the seeds of this for more than two years and in that time have survived more than two dozen attempts on my life. That I need you to do as I say is an understatement, and I don’t mind punctuating it with gunfire.”

  “As if you give us any choice,” Rose said. She turned to Clara. “Regardless of threats, and friend or no, I will say this, Miss Templeton, and at great risk.” She lowered her voice. “You don’t know me and have no reason whatsoever to trust me. But if you don’t trust me, you may be the death of me.”

  The blonde blinked and looked concerned. “Well, that certainly has my attention. By what authority is this so?”

  “By clairvoyance,” Rose replied, keeping things deliberately vague.

  “Your directive, Miss Everhart,” Brinkman interjected icily before Clara could dig deeper in regard to sensitives, “is to get that dynamo on our side.” He nodded after Mosley.

  “Presuming we could possibly get him to trust us, what would we do with him?” Rose countered, fighting to keep her tone level, trying not to worry for Mr. Wilson. “My team is untrained to deal with someone of … such a nature. One of our operatives may have been killed by the display of his current, and I must return to my colleagues to assess the damage.”

  “He’s more inclined to trust us than those who forced him into today’s display. Appeal to his British heart. Offer protections against the Society. Remember, your enemies are the demons, but don’t let the demons think you’re building an army against them, lest they turn theirs against you before you’re ready to fight.”

  As Rose shuddered at his use of “demon,” the unpredictable operative turned and fired a gun into a nearby tree, sending two ravens squawking angrily into the air and causing a wave of screams. Men and women ducked, parasols and top hats flying. The confusion made excellent cover for his disappearance. In the wake of his departure, the two women stared at one another, baffled.

  “Will you sit with me a moment, Miss Everhart? I am unfortunately unwell,” Clara asked, dazed. A wave of nausea must have struck the young woman, as she had to steady herself on Rose’s shoulder.

  “Yes, Miss Templeton.” Rose led her to a small iron bench beneath a tall sycamore near the Federal-styl
e City Hall, its Beaux-Arts detail and lovely white dome a more delicate architectural bastion amid surrounding sooty brownstones and cast-iron industrial facades.

  “I suffer from epilepsy,” Templeton explained. “And do call me Clara. When there are too many ghosts nearby, my body responds to their amassed sparks of life with a seizure. I’ve been fighting off a fit for the past hour. Thankfully, that Mosley fellow seemed to have driven off the tethered dead, but there’s a bit of an after-effect.”

  Rose remembered her darting from the tent and read the struggle in her body now, saw the tension in her muscles and the occasional shudder as she tried to unknot them, causing rippling shivers all the way from the ribbons of her small straw hat down to the black trim of her skirts.

  “Funny thing about you, though,” Clara stated, breathing deep between words. “Your presence helps. It’s as if I can breathe easier. Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.”

  Rose shrugged. “I’m not doing a thing that I know of. But do call me Rose.”

  “Well … then, Rose. Where do we even begin?” Clara asked, trying to master a body fighting against her. “You say I may do you harm, but I tell you that is not in my nature,” she said with a weary but engaging smile.

  Rose took a deep breath. “Let me first say, Clara, that our aims on your shores are simple: to recover the bodies of our scientists and lay hands on Mr. Mosley, a British citizen. I did not imagine those tasks would be entwined in such a terrible way.”

  “Those poor folk who are now reduced to ash—they were your team searching for immortality?” Clara asked. Rose nodded. “Our pursuits of the same yielded too similar a result…” She trailed off, seeming overcome with emotion.

  Rose felt similarly moved, somehow at ease in tumultuous sentiments. She was scared by what had happened, grieving for her wounded colleague, and overwhelmed, but she did not feel judged, as if she sat beside a long lost family member who knew her well. How could that be? There was no connection between her and Miss Templeton.

  “You cannot trust me yet any more than I can trust you. And I want to, despite the warnings,” Rose stated.