Accursed (31 page)

His flesh was tinged green and yellow, and there were strange diamond patterns on that rough, scaly skin, like some exotic serpent. His hair had fallen out in clumps, and lay strewn across his pillow. His hands were oddly twisted, his face malformed . . . he looked nothing like himself.

The face and form of a demon,
the bishop had said.

The duchess shook her head slowly, staggering back until she collided with the window frame and could retreat no farther. A loud rushing filled her ears, like the sound of a great waterfall. Richard was shouting something, but she could not tell what it was. Darkness seemed to float at the edges of her vision.

She could not breathe.

A long, forked tongue slid out from between the demon’s lips.

Then the monstrous thing that had once been her husband opened gleaming, sickly yellow eyes, and it looked at her.

And Anna Wickham began to scream.

W
ILLIAM AROSE FAR
later than he had planned, for after the events of the previous day, he had found it difficult to get to sleep.

Whatever had really happened with Haversham, he felt the weight of the blame upon his own shoulders. His sister was grieving, yet he had convinced her to see Haversham simply to further the ends of their investigation. So as late as it was, he was determined to allow her to sleep to nearly noon.

Upon Tamara’s waking, William learned of her odd exchange with Oblis. As slim as it was, it was still a lead in their investigation.

As she recounted the information the demon had provided, Tamara seemed ill at ease. William found it odd that Oblis would offer anything that might aid them, yet his sister seemed determined to pursue this line of inquiry. William could only take this to mean that Tamara had given Oblis something in return. Yet she offered no clue as to what it might have been.

The more he thought about it, the more the idea haunted him. What had she sacrificed? What little piece of his sister might have been offered up to the monster?

William dared not ask her. There had been enough tension between them of late, and he felt guilty for that. She had chosen the high road this morning and behaved as though all was well between them. He had no desire to disrupt that peace.

And what vengeance could he take on Oblis, after all? He could not murder his own father, and even if he did, it would not destroy the demon, only free it to torture some other innocent, and seek new victims.

No, he decided instead to focus on the crisis that was developing in London. To that end, the Swift siblings retreated early in the afternoon to their grandfather’s rooms to search Sir Ludlow’s records and journals for references to the Protector of Bharath.

Queen Bodicea had returned with news that she had “inadvertently” killed David Carstairs . . . or at least the monster Carstairs had become. William had hoped Carstairs might still provide some further lead in their investigation, so he had been angry at first. But as the circumstances of Carstairs’s death came to light, he could not find fault with what Bodicea had done.

Lord Nelson’s inquiries in the spirit world had produced news that the curse was, in fact, spreading at an alarming rate among the poverty-stricken lower classes in Shadwell, and Wapping in the East End, near the Thames. Indian immigrants, lost in the secrecy of their shared culture and ignored by even the other residents of those dingy districts, had been among the first afflicted by these horrors. But because of the closed, secretive nature of the immigrant subculture, word had been slow to spread, and had in fact been suppressed by the few who were aware. The plague had been hidden even from the eyes of the ghosts.

The evil festering in London town had remained unknown until it touched the upper classes, until it reached a party at the bishop of Manchester’s home and transformed the earl of Claridge. Even the Protectors of Albion had been in the dark until Frederick Martin’s visit. How many had been twisted by this evil curse? For curse was what William felt certain it was. How many women had been split open by the darkness yearning to be born, by the iniquity bursting from their wombs? How many men had been robbed of their humanity, infected with malevolence, and turned into monsters?

“How many could we have saved?” William whispered under his breath.

He started as he realized he had spoken aloud. In the gray late-afternoon light that filtered in through the windows of their grandfather’s room, he glanced around to find Tamara seated at the writing desk, the same desk at which she sat to put pen to paper for her lurid penny-dreadful tales. There were journals stacked to her left, and she had one open before her as she scratched notes on a separate sheet of paper.

At the sound of his voice, however, she turned, frowning, to look at him.

“William, are you quite all right?”

A hollow bravado filled him and he sat up straight in his chair. “Of course I am. I’m just . . .” With a sigh, he hung his head. “No. The truth is, I’m not all right at all. Too little sleep, I suppose.”

He glanced at the papers strewn on the table in front of him. It wasn’t a proper table, of course, but the Egyptian sarcophagus that Ludlow had so often used in his stage magic. The old man would have himself locked into the dreadful thing, and then when his assistant opened it, he would have disappeared. Audiences had loved the trick. How much more amazed would they have been to learn that it was real magic, translocation at work, and not some conjurer’s game?

William shook his head and looked up at Tamara again. His back hurt from having spent more than two hours straight bent over the sarcophagus. The French mahogany chair he had dragged over beside it was elegant, but hardly comfortable for such a long stretch.

“What is it?” Tamara asked.

“I can’t escape the feeling that Colonel Dunstan was correct, and we’ve been terribly remiss. It’s
all
of Albion we’re supposed to protect, not only the nobility. The aristocrats hardly need our help at all, in any case. It’s those who cannot help themselves who need us the most, and they seem to have remained almost beneath our notice.”

His sister set her pen down and turned in the chair to face him, smoothing her skirts. “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think? Dunstan is a ghost, and has not the duties of the living. He has focused only on those who are his concern. After all, he might’ve come to us when he first learned that something was amiss there. And we hadn’t heard of the trouble in Limehouse—”

“Not Limehouse. Wapping and Shadwell.”

Tamara nodded. “All right. But the point is, we can’t be expected to solve a problem that we don’t know exists, to fight a threat that has snuck in under our noses.”

“But it shouldn’t have been possible, Tam, don’t you see that?” William rapped his knuckles on the sarcophagus. “We’re taking these artifacts from museums and private collectors . . . from cultural thieves, to be honest. Most of the things were smuggled out of India illegally. But from the sound of it, this curse has been spreading among the Indians who live in the filthiest areas, and it has been for as long as two weeks, yet we had no idea. Aren’t we supposed to
sense
these things?

“We’ve got a small army of ghosts out there, acting as our eyes and ears, on the watch for supernatural threats, but either they did not know about the infestation, or they did not think it was the sort of threat they ought to bring to our attention. The impression Nelson got from Dunstan was that they thought we simply would not care.”

Tamara stood, and strode toward the nearest window. She slid it open a few inches before turning to regard him thoughtfully. “I’ve no idea why they would think such a thing, unless, perhaps . . .”

“What, Tam? Unless what?”

“I shouldn’t like to think it of him, but the only reason for the ghosts to presume we wouldn’t care is if they’d come to expect it through experience.”

William knitted his brow. “Experience with Grandfather, you mean? You’re suggesting he might have ignored some evil prowling London if it confined itself to the slums?”

Tamara shivered. “Otherwise it means the ghosts have judged
us
as uncaring, Will, and I don’t think we’ve given them any reason. How else are we to interpret this?”

“I prefer to think the wandering spirits were simply unaware of this new horror until now.”

Tamara nodded. “As do I,” she said, but her eyes were distant, her mind preoccupied now, likely with thoughts of their grandfather, and the duties they had inherited from him.

“Even so, I believe the responsibility lies with us, not with the ghosts,” William said. “If we don’t care enough—”

“We
would
have cared, William. We’ll make that clear to them. We
do
care. I applaud your sentiment, I truly do. Frankly, I’m pleased to see you thinking so much about the poorer classes. But we would be trying to unravel this mystery regardless of who had been touched by this dark magic. The earl of Claridge is no more a human being than a beggar in the street, and no less. We are to protect Albion from evil, no matter where it strikes.”

William felt a fist of ice clenching in his gut. “Then why didn’t we know, Tam?”

“For Heaven’s sake, we can’t be everywhere,” Tamara said, hands on her hips. “I feel as horrible as you that so many have suffered already. And we must get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. But we cannot defend the whole of England at every instant.”

“No,” William agreed. “Only the places we bother to look.”

A long silence descended upon the room. Tamara took a deep breath and reached up to push a stray lock of hair behind her ear. That sweet, lopsided smile appeared on her face, but there was a sadness to it, as well.

William pushed back the torturous French mahogany chair and stood up, both hands on his lower back as he stretched. His bones popped loudly, and some of the stiffness departed.

“Right, then,” he said. “Have you found anything useful?”

Tamara began to pace the room. How often she had lingered here as a child, listening to their grandfather’s wild stories and trying to learn his magic tricks. She hadn’t had the dexterity for it, though. How ironic, William thought, that she had become so adept instead at the true magic they had inherited from the man.

“It is all connected,” she said. “That much is obvious. The common thread is that each person possessed stolen artifacts from India. And those afflicted in the East End are almost exclusively Indian. The demons sighted are Rakshasa, also from Indian folklore. The one idol we’ve been able to identify represents the image of Kali. Or one of the goddess’s facets. Even the mysterious girl mentioned by Colonel Dunstan appears to be Indian.”

William threw up his hands. “Ye-yes—the more we gather these pieces of the puzzle, the more it’s clear that they share an Indian origin. But we still can’t seem to find the connection that linked the idols with the plague in the slums. We are wasting our time with these journals. We need to go to the East End, where all of this started. I believe that is where we’ll find the connection we seek. It’s also where this mysterious girl has been sighted. I’ve no idea what role she plays in all this, but I doubt her sudden appearance is coincidental. So we’ll visit the East End and—”

“Yes,” Tamara interrupted, pursing her lips and arching an eyebrow. “But not yet.”

She strode back to the writing desk and picked up the paper she had been scribbling upon. “Bharath is, I’ve discovered, the soul of India, just as Albion is the soul of England. According to his journals, Grandfather came into contact with the Protector of Bharath several times. His name is Tipu Gupta.”

Her skin flushed crimson and she glanced downward, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Whatever our feelings about Oblis, his clue seems to have been genuine, if maddeningly vague. Before we delve any farther into this horror, we’d be well advised to seek out the expertise of a man intimately familiar with the culture and magic of India.” Tamara crossed her arms. “We must find the Protector of Bharath, and win him to our cause.”

William nodded. He cast a quick glance at the books that lay upon the sarcophagus, glad to be shed of them and to be taking action at last. “Very well. Is there any hint as to where we ought to begin?”

Tamara smiled. “Nigel was still Grandfather’s apprentice when last the Protectors of Albion and Bharath met. If anyone would know how to find Tipu Gupta, it would be our Mr. Townsend.”

“Our . . . well, he’s not
my
Mr. Townsend,” William sniffed.

His sister didn’t reply. Instead she just folded the paper upon which she had written her notes and slipped it inside her sleeve. Then she took William’s hand.

“Shall we?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. Translocation always made his stomach hurt. Nevertheless, he clutched her fingers, and together they recited the spell that had become almost second nature to them.

“Under the same sky, under the same moon, like a fallen leaf, let the spirit wind carry me to my destination.”