The Eterna Files Page 26

  As Rose reached for the case, something flew at her from the alley directly behind the meeting place. Something slammed into her. She felt a shock wave of pain; a fistful of dread pummeled her gut and everything faded to black.

  Spire watched Everhart approach the carriage, which had appeared precisely on time. While he did not relax, he was reassured that all was going according to plan.

  Time seemed to slow as a figure appeared as if from nowhere and knocked Miss Everhart to the ground. Two of his armed agents rushed forward, one attempting to untangle the two tumbling figures, the other at the carriage, battling for the case.

  In the instant, Spire understood why the Wilsons had requested a high vantage point. Two lithe, masked persons in tight breeches and form-fitting frock coats rappeled down from an upper balcony, landing effortlessly on the roof of the carriage. Spire assumed it was Mr. Wilson who nimbly tossed himself beside the driver, who looked to be preparing to jump from the vehicle, and held him in place.

  The smaller one, likely Mrs. Wilson, went after a black shape that had flung itself from the opposite side of the carriage cab and was running down an alley.

  How could they have been compromised? And by whom?

  Fury seethed in his veins as his mission unraveled like a thread pulled by a speeding bullet. If anyone died because he hadn’t taken his duties seriously enough … He ran to Grange, who was bent over Everhart.

  “Give her to me,” Spire said. Her limp form was transferred into his arms.

  Glancing up, Spire saw a flurry of motion around the larger Wilson and the immobilized driver, as if they were being covered by a great piece of thick black fabric, or as if something was preventing the light of the sun from reaching them. Spire thought of the strange moment in Tourney’s cellar when the shadow had left the chained body.

  In the next instant, the darkness lifted, Mr. Wilson was thrown off the carriage, and the driver slumped, unconscious. The horse screamed and stamped, bridle clattering, but miraculously did not bolt. Phyfe, who was masterful with beasts, was standing before the mare, being stern and soothing all at the same time.

  “Secure the vehicle,” Spire barked, shifting Everhart so he could hold her more comfortably. A glance into the cabin through the broken window revealed a dead body. But there had only been one person inside the carriage—so what was Mrs. Wilson chasing?

  The carriage was still. Spire risked a closer glance. The body was that of a well-dressed gentleman with a look of horror on his face. His mouth was hanging open, and his general expression reminded Spire all too forcefully of the look of the dead children when that dread shadow had passed over them.

  An odd, sparking light could be seen within the carriage, emanating from an object of indeterminate nature on the seat beside the dead man. At the sight of that strange, greenish-yellow hue, instinct surged within Spire.

  “Run!” he barked to his men and suited the action to the word, holding Miss Everhart close to shield her from what he suddenly knew was about to happen.

  The explosion was most unusual. An odd burst of fire, a whip of sickly colored, yellow-green flame that reeked terribly of sulfur. Acrid smoke filled the air; Spire could feel the back of his scalp burn where the vapor kissed it, smell his burnt hair. He dashed around a corner, away from the offending gas.

  Sulfur … the report documenting the Eterna incident had mentioned sulfur.… Spire stumbled farther down the alley before slumping against the bricks and coughing, trying not to drop Miss Everhart into the puddle of indiscernible liquid at his feet. Thankfully she was not heavy and Spire was not weak, though the scent and air around him made him feel unbalanced.

  He managed to walk a few paces farther into the alley, avoiding the thickening, brick-bordered shadows, and found a rear stair landing. Here, he set Rose down, then sat next to her, keeping her limp arm around his neck to steady her. Her eyes were fluttering madly.

  A black-clad figure rounded the corner of the alley. Spire drew his pistol from his pocket before recognizing Blakely, who was dressed in his least flamboyant attire, save for the bright turquoise kerchief he held over his mouth and nose. Spire lowered his weapon.

  “I’m fine,” Spire said, “and I think she’s just stunned.” He coughed. “What the bloody hell was that?”

  “It would seem we were intercepted, sir,” Blakely replied, pulling down his protective kerchief.

  “I am quite aware of that, but by whom?” Spire narrowed his eyes. “Blakely. That whole scene, the explosion, seemed an awful lot like something of yours.”

  “Sir, I’d never! I swear, Mr. Spire, I will see the day when you trust us!” There was fervor in the man’s voice.

  Spire clenched his jaw. “How are my men?”

  Blakely turned to look back into the haze. “Examining the wreckage.”

  Shifting Rose’s weight, Spire rose. “Stay here. If she worsens, shout,” Spire commanded, and strode toward the scene of the incident.

  As he stepped out from the alley, his nostrils stung from the still-acrid air. He whipped his own handkerchief from his breast pocket—a white, embroidered piece given to him by his father as a birthday present—though it arrived in the wrong month—and placed it over his face. His scalp was still tingling and he hoped the smoke wouldn’t cause him to lose any hair.

  He walked over to look again at the bodies. The driver appeared asphyxiated. His Metropolitan partners were pacing about the scene.

  “Grange,” Spire barked. “How was this man killed?”

  “The two in black from on high. They were yours, right?” his friend asked. Spire nodded. “Well, one landed nearly upon the driver, but didn’t choke him. Dunno what did.”

  “One person was seen running off, correct?” Spire stated. “But I only saw one figure in the carriage, and that man is dead, too, so who ran away?”

  “Your folks in black went after whoever left the carriage,” Phyfe replied. “Is the lady—”

  “Alive. Keep quiet about this or I will have your heads. Until we know the nature of the explosion and what caused it, if the newspapers leap to paranormal conclusions, I swear, it’s your heads that shall roll.”

  “Understood, sir,” Grange replied. “We are aware that your operations of late are covert.”

  Spire held his breath as he looked into the carriage, for the sulfur scent was strongest there. He reached gingerly past the broken glass of the window to open the latch of the door, then leaned into the vehicle to examine the scene more closely.

  On the seat opposite the open-mouthed body lay a crushed glass vial surrounded by a spray of fine powder. The sample. Compromised and likely of no use. Not that Spire believed it was of consequence anyway. Yet the substance had done something, so he couldn’t dismiss it outright as an utter waste of breath. Unless all was a staged distraction …

  “Well, bollocks to immortality, eh?” Grange said, invading the space beside Spire. “Mortality compound, this.”

  Unless there had been a secondary explosion, one that was meant to destroy the sample. That was perhaps the more likely explanation. He examined the burn marks, the way the leather of the carriage seat was pocked around the shattered vial.

  “Who did this?” Phyfe called from his position beside the body of the driver.

  Spire and Grange answered at the same time, “The Americans.”

  “Why?” Phyfe demanded.

  “Because we had something of their work,” Spire replied. “And I would imagine they didn’t want us to have it, whatever it even was. Who else would care but those responsible for its provenance?”

  Phyfe shrugged. “We can’t be the only ones curious about immortality.”

  “Just the only ones stupid enough to give it any resources,” Spire muttered. “Give me everything around this carriage. Don’t let it move. I want tracks, I want the whole of this area mapped out and every last detail catalogued, please. Better records than they’re used to keeping over at headquarters, if you don’t mind.” His colleagues nodd
ed.

  He took off after the direction of his aerialists and soon found the Wilsons, still masked and hooded for anonymity, where the alley opened up into a dank brick courtyard that hardly caught any of the light of day. Mrs. Wilson was bending over her seemingly unconscious husband. All this fuss for what was supposed to be a simple handover of material?

  “I don’t know what happened,” Mrs. Wilson said when Spire approached. “I thought we were chasing a man but then it seemed as if the figure vanished, leaving only shadow. We went into some kind of disorienting black fog. I got dizzy but Reginald was in the thickest part.”

  “We’ll get him to a doctor. Miss Everhart was injured as well.”

  Where the hell was Knight with the doctor who was supposed to be on hand in case something went wrong? Why couldn’t anything simply go smoothly in this department?

  “This seems hardly government work,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Did the Americans sabotage the handoff? Perhaps to avenge the séance our operative forced on them?”

  Spire shrugged. “Blakely needs to assess the shadow; see if there was something manufactured about it. Like whatever the hell he puts into those damn hoods of his.”

  Blakely appeared at the entrance to the alley. “Zhavia’s here.”

  Spire returned to Everhart to find Knight and a wizardly looking man who Spire assumed was Zhavia, hovering over her. About bloody time. He didn’t have the energy to rail at them. Once further medical personnel were on the scene and Spire felt confident his Metropolitan associates were keeping the carriage well tended, he withdrew. As he so often did while on a case, he looked up at the sky, replaying the incident in his mind, trying to see things in the moment that he hadn’t seen before. But the scene remained stubbornly diffuse; his usual keen investigative eye was cloudy.

  “Dear God,” he murmured. “Not liking my appointed post is one thing, but if it has rendered me useless of talent, God save me from this purgatory and swiftly grant me haven in different pastures. I am ill-suited for this expanse.”

  * * *

  The knowledge that Rose was in pain was surpassed by the roiling potency of the dream world in which she found herself; a shockingly rich, spectacularly horrific mindscape.

  She stood in a long, vaulted stone corridor with pillars marching into shadow; a diffuse gray light filtered in through Gothic pointed arches. Between each arch she saw a cloaked figure, opaque and black. Shapes and shadows, the height of a person, with what seemed a head and shoulders, they flickered strangely if she looked too hard at them, as if they were not solid but human-shaped voids cut into the fabric of this reality, cold nothingness.…

  At the end of the hall appeared a lithe, elegant woman in a white, shimmering, gossamer ball gown. Dark blond hair trailed in waves past her broad but slender shoulders; her face was pale, her features obscured by the golden light that seemed to surround her. She was a welcome brightness in this place of dimness.

  The woman walked slowly, painstakingly slowly, carrying a large golden chalice in each hand. Rose heard a soft breeze echo through the seemingly limitless corridor … perhaps it wasn’t a breeze at all but whispers that vibrated from the black, disconcerting semblances of human form?

  The warm light stretched back along the woman’s path; Rose noticed that in the woman’s wake trailed thin, translucent images of herself in endless iteration, as if the woman shed a ghostly echo of herself every few steps. But each image was slightly different—different styles of dress and hair, different, dimly glimpsed faces. All felt familiar to Rose, as did the whole place in which she found herself, though she could not say how or why.

  Focusing on the bronze-haired creature who led the procession, Rose realized that the woman was blindfolded. As the woman drew closer, Rose tried to take a step back but found she could not.

  Thankfully the cup-bearer stopped a few paces away. Rose studied the woman, trying to engrave the image in her memories. The figure—and each of her iterations—bore a sword at her waist. Arms spread wider than her hips, she cradled the bowl of each chalice in one palm; the stems descended below her hands and ended in carved bases.

  The cups were etched in beautiful, curling script and bordered in intricate filigree. One word upon each.

  Mortality.

  Immortality.

  The woman’s arms began to shift slightly, almost imperceptibly, up and down. When one arm raised, the other lowered. Rose put the imagery together: Blind justice with her sword; the chalices in each hand represented the scales.

  One cup began to drift higher with each movement, and to curve toward the woman’s face.

  Mortality.

  The breeze, no, it was clearly murmuring voices, grew louder.

  Rose wanted to speak but though she could feel the movement of her mouth, no sound emerged.

  The cup neared the woman’s lips, then fell away, then returned, closer than before. A sad, terrible inevitability gripped Rose and she felt tears stream down her face.

  Something Knight had said about her long-lost sister suddenly rattled through her mind: “She may be the death of you.”

  The cup of mortality was at the fair woman’s lips.

  Her arms flailed out, sending the chalices flying, spilling their black, liquid contents. When the goblets hit the ground, they shattered as if made of glass and fine golden dust exploded into the air. The sword fell from the woman’s side, landing with a terrible, echoing clatter.

  Justice—if it was she—burst into flame.

  The women in her wake did as well, a procession of immolation, instantly becoming an inferno as if made of dead, dry wood.

  They screamed, their many voices united in agony.

  Rose wailed as the luminous figures were transformed to ashes in seconds, kept screaming—hearing herself, now—as the cinders swirled in the air like gray snow.

  She writhed, trying desperately to shift her feet, but stood as if rooted. She closed her eyes against the filthy air, choking on tears and ash.

  When she opened them again, the black, empty forms swarmed upon her and the world was bathed in an unearthly, terrifying, deafening darkness.

  Rose came to consciousness with a start in a blindingly white room furnished only with her bed, one wooden chair, and a small metal table bearing medicinal jars and a water basin.

  “Where am I?” she asked as she sat bolt upright; the small room swam around her sickeningly and she collapsed back onto the bed. The surface of her skull seemed bathed in burning pain.

  A white-capped nurse, dressed in a starched white apron over a plain gray dress, entered through the open door. She must have heard Rose from outside the room.

  “You’re at Saint George’s, ma’am, on a private floor,” the nurse said. Rose was shocked. She was at one of the finer London hospitals, mere paces away from Lord Black’s home at the corner of Hyde Park.

  Those treated here were often aristocracy or members of the government: MPs and lords for the most part. Suspecting the prime minister and Lord Black had ensured her place, she was grateful they were so good to her.

  The young nurse checking her scalp bandage was likely a student of Florence Nightingale’s legacy. Miss Nightingale was Rose’s great hero, though she deemed herself too shy for the great social reforms the groundbreaking woman had created. Rose hoped she would someday grow brave enough to open the doors of business and politics for female clerks, operatives, investigators, and advisers, as Miss Nightingale had done for women in medicine.

  She became aware of a tingling on her head as the nurse pressed a fresh bandage to a sore spot on her scalp. She reached careful fingers to the side of her head, then drew them away holding a clump of hair. Her small noise of alarm roused a calm smile from the nurse.

  “Yes, my dear, you suffered a burn on part of your head. Smelled a bit like sulfur. I am sure it will all grow back in time,” she said reassuringly, though Rose was not convinced. Lovely. Losing her hair before it had even gone gray. She prayed to God that if he let her keep her h
air, she wouldn’t curse him any longer for the few gray hairs she’d found near her temple.

  “Once we’re sure you’re rested and remain without infection you can go,” the nurse said. “We found nothing else wrong with you, though I’m sure you’ve got quite the headache.”

  Headache indeed, Rose thought, but was relieved nothing else was wrong. Being fussed over made her nervous. As the nurse continued to tend to her, Rose distracted herself by trying to remember the last things she had seen and done before darkness took her under like a wave.

  Just as she had reached for the case, she felt herself fly through the air. Her vision had become blurred and full of stars. A gargoyle-like face loomed over her, staring at her so intently that it seemed, in that dreadful moment, that it would suck the very life out of her. Shadows surrounded it, black silhouettes shaped like people—like the figures from her dream, dark and menacing. She remembered hearing murmurs: “Destroy their work. Lest it be the death of you…”

  What had she seen—a man or a monster? Or had it merely been the effect of her head colliding with the cobblestones? As much as her rational mind was sure it was fancy, her gut instinct, which was rarely wrong, told her otherwise.

  A figure at the door made her stomach drop.

  Harold Spire stood at the threshold, hat in hand, looking tired. He bowed his head to the nurse. “I’m … with the police,” he said quietly. The nurse looked to Rose, who nodded, and the young woman exited with a small curtsey to Spire.

  “Hello, Mr. Spire.” She forced herself into a sitting position, glad they’d left her in her clothes—or perhaps had put them back on after examination—so that she was still presentable, though soot-stained as she was. “They said as soon as I’m no longer dizzy, I can go home. Thank goodness. I hate hospitals. Not that I’ve ever been in one as a patient until now. What did I miss?” she asked.

  Spire entered the room and explained what he’d seen.

  “Do we think the Americans are responsible?” Rose asked.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he replied with a sigh. “We couldn’t apprehend anyone. The dead driver and his passenger remain unidentified and there’s no eyewitness accounts due to the smokescreen that seemed to cover the whole area.