Eterna and Omega Read online

  “Ah, no, no,” Moriel reassured. “We all have needs. I took this from a paramour I left once … her kiss still tastes sweet upon my tongue, coppery, as I’d left her with a small stiletto blade slipped through corset bones to remember me by.”

  O’Rourke withheld another shudder as he escorted the Majesty to the waiting carriage beyond.

  Majesty Moriel took a deep breath and stared up at what was unmistakably a glorious night sky, smoke of London’s various industries and home fires wafting up into the atmosphere.

  “England,” he murmured in a quiet reverie. “America. Beyond. It’s time for your tables to turn. Everyone has their time and season. I think that’s biblical.”

  “It is, Majesty.”

  “I was musing. I wasn’t asking, O’Rourke.”

  “I’m sorry, Majesty.”

  “You should be, interrupting a regent in reverie. Goodness.”

  “It won’t happen again, sir.”

  “Good. The Society will need you. Unfortunately, I’ve been running low on deputies—they’re dropping like proverbial flies—so you’ll be promoted. On with you, come to Vieuxhelles tomorrow midnight for the next indoctrinations.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty…” O’Rourke vanished quickly.

  * * *

  Rose was in one of her dream states. These strange, hazy incidents had begun after an attempt to recover a sample of the Eterna Compound. She had been knocked unconscious and for some days had felt drained of life. Since then, she had several times found herself gripped by visions.

  Today she woke to see a woman sitting at the foot of her bed—the same Lizzie Marlowe who had visited the Omega division offices. Her light red hair was in a braid down her shoulder, and her searing gaze was fixed on Rose, who bolted upright. The interloper wore no hat or gloves, but clasped about the waist of her burgundy riding habit was a belt hung with strange instruments.

  “The timetable,” she said. “I sped up your timetable. Well, I didn’t accelerate, I stay constant. The timetable itself sped, I am merely reacting to save my hide and yours.”

  Rose stared in silence.

  “I was attempting to let the power of suggestion, and potent dreams, do the trick,” the woman—Miss Marlowe—explained. “It usually does wonders. But I can’t risk it.”

  “Who are you?”

  The woman did not reply directly but gestured toward Rose’s wrist. “I am sorry for the physical effects. I was going for more of a ‘prophetic dream’ result, but you and Clara both have such wild imaginations.”

  Rose gaped. “You mean you were the ‘vampire’?”

  The woman made a face. “You jumped to that conclusion. She shook her fair head with a laugh. “This silly, histrionic age. At least you have expanded your consciousness, and there are things you deem possible now that you hadn’t previously. The world needs such minds now.” She glanced at Rose’s carpetbags against the wall. “You are going to New York, yes?”

  “Not another word until you tell me who you are, whom you work for, and what all this is about,” Rose declared, folding her arms.

  The woman sighed. “I told you. I’m Lizzie Marlowe. Miss Templeton likes to call me the visitor, although I rather like ‘Captain Marlowe,’ assuming I live to tell that tale.

  “Don’t let your department become something it’s not. You and Clara must stand up for what is right. A steadfast partnership. You’ll see. She’s been warned about you. Be warned about her. Wariness makes for good sisters.”

  In the next moment, Rose found herself alone. How that happened, she couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  The trip was long and Moriel was quite tired. Drawing out the Summoned took a great deal of concentration and life force. They were draining creatures, those black silhouettes, the absence of color, the vacuum of hope.

  The sight of Vieuxhelles, his rightful home, cured all.

  It was a crisp, bright night when His Majesty Beauregard Moriel entered his looming, sprawling, ivy-covered estate with a sigh, noting sadly that his palace was a bit worse for wear. Admittedly, the staff had been greatly reduced while he was “dead.” He nearly jumped from the carriage and darted up the marble steps to the brass door knocker.

  In response to the knocker’s reverberate thunderclap, his steadfast butler opened the great door. An ancient creature, James had been with the Moriels since long before His Majesty was born.

  “Good evening and welcome home, Your Majesty,” James said with a familiar soft deference. “The estate has been prepared for you.”

  The butler escorted Moriel through the dusty, dark, cavernous foyer into the warmly lit grand sitting room, a sumptuous room that had always been his favorite. He basked in the glow of the golden objects that lined the walls and the luxurious furnishings. James lifted a golden crown from an ornate box and approached the waiting regent, the circlet trembling in his shaking hands.

  Before Moriel’s unfortunate stint in prison, this had been their daily routine; resuming the ritual was such a comfort. Moriel felt the gold settle into place on his brow. James had seated it perfectly. Crossing to a tall rosewood wardrobe, the eternal butler withdrew a fur-lined robe that he presented with the same slow ceremony, sliding it about Moriel’s body.

  This coronation had begun in his youth, and it always filled him with the same rush, both freeing and invigorating. He’d recommend it as a tonic for virility, were he not so loath to share the secrets of the diadem.

  From the arched window, Moriel looked out over his land lit by the kind of moonlight that made wolves howl in delight. His beautiful land. His familial acreage, back in rightful hands.

  Their estate had been taken, and the sin was Moriel’s earliest life’s mission to make right. A distant familial dispute two generations prior had escalated into an ugly affair that had disenfranchised the Moriel family from what was rightly theirs. The estate had been renamed Harcourt Hall, seized by the Wicke family and the Moriels erased from heraldry.

  This had taken the gravest of tolls on his father, and Moriel vowed to make the usurpers pay. The whole ordeal nearly killed the entire disputed Moriel line, but Beauregard had won his hard-fought battle. The estate and holdings, all again in the hands it should be. If the seat of his kingdom hadn’t passed down to him, would he not have become one of the wretched spirits his work bound to patchwork corpses, desperate specters built to undo the sanity of any commoner who looked upon them? He would have haunted the world forever if he did not have his rightful home.

  There was one convenient, fated aspect to the usurpation that had so grieved his family. On all accounts and records, there was no Moriel, no Vieuxhelles, only a nondescript Harcourt Hall that was not for sale, and the owner remained unknown. The larger picture that titles, logbooks, and property records failed to show, due to a careful and thorough wiping of the Wicke line from the Empire, was that there were no Wickes anymore either … Moriel had made painstakingly sure of that, having plotted since the age of ten various acts of poison, accidents and “unfortunate disappearances” that so plagued and cursed the usurping family.

  So Vieuxhelles was conveniently off the proverbial map for the time being, and that suited Moriel’s purpose grandly during this time of preparation.

  There was of course the next conquest: lineage. He had tried valiantly to find a wife and an heir, but that, too, had been foiled by still further usurpers—that damned Denbury—but once his plans had unfurled, he would take as many wives as necessary until the line was assured.

  “Tell me, James,” Moriel said softly as he sipped tea, “whose house this is.”

  “It is your house, Your Majesty.”

  “And what will I do for this house?”

  “You will find clever ways to annihilate anyone who tries to take this house from your family line, just as you did the traitors to your family.”

  “Thank you, James. Would you sit with me in a game of chess?”

  “I shall do whatever you wish, Master.”

 
James fetched a golden box. “I know, it’s dusty,” he said, brushing off the container, “but the last maid ran off screaming, claiming some kind of witchcraft was here.”

  “Truly, good help is impossible to find anymore,” Moriel muttered mordantly. “Slavery or indentured servitude is far more efficient and reliable.”

  With shaking hands, the set was laid upon a marble-topped table at the divan, and Moriel launched into ode and reverie, his favorite music to accompany a good game of strategy.

  “The systematic destruction of this age’s industrial progress and the classes and uppity humans it created is ready to commence, James,” Moriel stated. “Most of the products are in place.”

  “Very good, My Lord.”

  The contacts he had cultivated and coerced throughout the years had built a subtle set of detonation points across two continents. Once put into motion, they would inevitably change the course of the future and redistribute power back into the hands of those who should always have held it—the rulers and the aristocracies of old.

  Never mind his line had been questioned, withered, beleaguered, set upon. He would restore lineage as power and, in doing so, set right so much of what had gone wrong when the barriers of society had been tumbled, creating a muddy sea of the unwashed. What had been termed the Industrial Revolution was, to Moriel, a heinous crime. He hated revolutions. They were messy, rabble-roused affairs.

  However, in order to return the world to its natural order, he would have to host a thorough counterrevolution, wreck the spinning top of an unborn future to preserve a more perfect past. He had enlisted the Summoned to help him in this cause, for this sort of rerouting of the human experience was impossible without the aid of the inhuman.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried asking for divine intervention. In his youth, he’d prayed to God to dismantle the injustice that was Parliament, a shouting, obnoxious group rule that accomplished nothing, a boorish, uncivilized mess. But despite Moriel’s ardent prayer, God had not acted. The demons, in contrast, were on his side. They had such sense, those dear shadows.

  “If I could only have the opportunity to lecture,” he said somewhat dreamily, sitting back in the leather chair, sipping the finest of spiced teas flecked with a bit of gold leaf, relishing the taste of grandeur in his mouth. Surely the right kind of people would easily see his point of view. There were only two kinds of persons in this world: the common and the kingly. He’d appeal to the latter and demolish the former.

  “Are my missives in order and has the corporation secured its holdings?”

  “Yes, sir, but there have been so many deaths, sir…” James said worriedly.

  “You’ve known Death to be my handmaiden since my youth, James.” Moriel clucked disappointment.

  “Of course, Your Majesty, I only say so because it leaves me unclear on who is your second-in-command now?”

  Moriel thought for a moment. “Good question, James. I will have to appoint one.”

  He knocked over a rook with a wooden clunk and suddenly missed his improvised chessboard made from a rat he had disarticulated while in prison. The sound of striking bone on bone was a particular music to his ear. He contented himself he’d hear symphonies of the sort in the year to come.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Connecting the dead to the living as if she were a telegraph wire was not the sort of errand Evelyn Northe-Stewart thought she’d be doing when she began the day. But the past few years had turned that way, with ever more paranormal threads woven into her daily experience so that they were now a seamless part of her life’s fabric.

  She alighted from her cab on Eleventh Street, instructed the driver to wait there, and walked down Fifth Avenue with a dark blond lock of hair dangling limply in her hand as if it were a dead rabbit hanging from the mouth of a dog.

  Turning right onto Tenth Street, just a few doors in, distaste swept over Evelyn at the sight and the feel of the particular redbrick town house she paused in front of.

  The exterior brownstone detailing around the windows had weathered poorly against the brick, discoloring the facade. It was as if a substance had oozed from the windows, the eyes of the house. It cried against its own mortar. The basement-level door was a shadowed maw under a plain arched portico, distinctly darker than the rest of the sunny, dappled lane to either side. To her senses, the address reeked of death and horror.

  The metal door creaked open slowly when she turned the key, an agonizing sound that made her wince. Cautiously, the medium poked her head into the deep shadows of the interior hallway. After a long moment, she felt a cold draft on the back of her neck. She narrowed her eyes.

  “Don’t rush me, Mr. Dupris,” Evelyn cautioned. “I don’t take spaces like this lightly. You of all people should know better than to push.”

  “Many apologies,” the ghost replied earnestly. “I am still learning to keep a civil distance between the living and the dead. Caught up in the currents of the spirit world, I bump quite accidentally into the solidity of the living.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve any ability to protect me in here? Are there malevolent presences within? I can still reach out to my dear exorcist friend Reverend Blessing.…”

  “The place is no longer directly violent ground, though it holds a terrible echo of pain and cannot be endured for long periods,” Louis explained.

  “Clara said there were carvings on the second floor, something insidious. There is a chance the negative and malevolent energies of the house have increased.”

  “In which case,” Louis said calmly, “I’ll not ask you to stay longer than the moment of placing Clara’s token upon my final corporeal resting place. Don’t worry,” he rushed a reassurance, “no remains are left to distress you. We were turned entirely to dust. I don’t remember the event; I just appeared on the other side. God was kind to me in that regard. This will all be over soon.”

  Evelyn shuddered as she slipped into the house, keeping her boots quiet on the floor. Just because no one seemed to be there didn’t mean presences were not, in fact, present. And if there was one thing she truly did not wish to wake, it was that which she thought she’d put to bed two years prior.

  The residence had been fitted with gaslight, but the fixtures in the front entrance landing did not respond to Evelyn’s touch. Reaching into the beaded reticule that was attached to her bodice, she withdrew a box of matches and stepped through the open pocket doors of the main parlor. A lantern hung on a peg beside the well-scorched fireplace, and she moved quickly to it and lit the wick.

  The gifted Spiritualist attempted to study the room, holding the lantern at differing levels. Even the mirrored panel that brightened the lantern’s light could not illuminate the room enough to relieve the gloom. An attempt to open the dark wood shutters revealed them to be nailed shut.

  “Goldberg had grown paranoid about our work,” Louis explained, “and sealed the windows to keep out any intruding gaze. He’d gone mad, really. We should have stopped him earlier, but he was always a quirky man. With such a kind heart as his, something, some force rotted his mind, as he’d never have sabotaged us willingly,” he added with sad certainty.

  “Explain to me what you need me to see here and where you need me to leave the lock,” Evelyn urged.

  “Ah, yes, the hair, Clara, right, yes, that’s why … See, distract. I grow distract…” Louis said mournfully.

  “Keep heart, brave spirit,” Evelyn said gently. “Stay with me and this moment.” She could feel the cool draft of the specter warm slightly. If there was one thing she knew about interactions with the dead, it was that firm encouragement produced results.

  Evelyn examined the vague makeshift laboratory, stopping dead at the carved outline of a door upon the wall. The uneven gouge had been painted in a dark, rusted color … blood, surely.

  “I know this after all,” Evelyn murmured. “I know this hellacious magic. Damn it all, it did not die with that wretch Moriel. How does one kill a demon bent on
misery? Woe to us all if this magic has grown.…” She tore out of the main room and raced up the stairs, swinging her lantern out before her.

  On the second floor, rugs were pulled back in several places, revealing screaming inscriptions carved into the floorboards. Likely this was from Clara’s inspection. The brave girl.

  “Yes. This. It is as we feared.” Evelyn’s words were thick with worry, her body shaking. “The Master’s Society was at work here.” Panic nipped at her throat, threatened to cleave her stomach, but she pulled herself together. “At least the enemy is familiar. Is this England’s doing? Their commission built to counter ours? Have they invited the devil in?”

  “I know nothing of these particular black matters,” Louis replied, “but the powers behind it stem not from man but from monsters, truly malevolent forces.”

  “Where did you fall, Mr. Dupris, if I may?”

  “The last I can recall, I was on the ground floor,” the ghost replied. “Trying to get to the door as I gasped my last breaths. I passed out, or so I thought, and then found myself running behind my brother Andre. I did not truly understand the change in my circumstances and corporeality until I realized could not feel the ground beneath my feet.”

  As Evelyn descended the stairs, she felt a weight growing about her feet, as if suddenly she were encased in stone.

  She looked down and swallowed hard. There was a blackened spot upon the floor, as if flesh and bone had fused to the wood, turned coal black in the conflagration, and then vanished. The shape didn’t even have the form of a man; Evelyn had walked past it without notice when entering the house.

  To her horror, she realized that all the surfaces about her were finely coated with ash and dust. The idea that she was breathing in the poor men made her want to flee, but she owed it to them—to Louis—to be stronger than they’d have expected her sex to be.

  “I suppose that is where it happened,” the ghost replied with a slightly detached air. Evelyn attributed this to his profession. A scientist must, she thought, be able to set aside personal responses in order to facilitate his studies. “This is my grave site,” Louis said musingly, sounding as though he stood directly above the charred mark.