Accursed (54 page)

She set her jaw, her body swaying, and raised her arms.

That golden light began to flow from her, enveloping first her hands, then her arms, and finally sheathing her entire body. In the chaos of combat her hair had been coming unpinned. It was entirely unbound now and flew wildly around her in a wind Nigel could not feel, and waves of other colors went through the magic womb she had created for herself.

Her eyes were unfocused. She turned her palms upward and began to chant.

“Vieo viscus cum animus,”
Tamara said, rocking with the words.

She chanted them again and again, and then, suddenly, she flinched as though she had been stabbed again. Gritting her teeth, she continued the chant. The agony was writ in her every movement and expression. In the midst of that incantation she let out a cry of pain that was like the roar of something wild. And perhaps it was.

She took up the words again, and as she did a kind of red mist began to ooze from her wounds. It wasn’t blood, but something brighter, twisting in the air as though fighting her magic. Nigel knew this was the poison Priya’s attack had left in her.

The mist rose from her wounds and began to evaporate, burning up in the shimmering light that surrounded Tamara.

“Vieo viscus cum animus,”
she continued, but her voice had more power now, more strength, and she held her head higher as she invoked the magic of Albion.

The wound on her shoulder was hidden within the folds of her clothing, but the one in her abdomen was so large and the dress torn enough that he could see the flesh begin to knit itself together.

“Fantastic,” John Haversham muttered, and Nigel was sure the young man wasn’t aware he had spoken aloud.

Tamara stood up, her legs wavering a bit even though her gaze did not.

“Where is Priya Gupta?”

“There was more fighting ’round the front. I heard it as I came down the road,” Haversham revealed.

Tamara nodded. “Of course. She thinks she’s done with me. She’s going to try to destroy her father and William now, then go right in through the gates.”

Her smile both thrilled and unnerved Nigel.

“If that’s where the real battle is taking place,” she said, “then that is where we shall go.”

“F
or Albion!”

Tamara let loose that rallying cry as she raced along the base of the northern wall of Buckingham Palace and rounded the corner that brought her to the front. Her hands churned with the golden light of her magic, spheres of power that rippled around her fists and made her skin prickle with pleasure and heat. Nigel was on her left and John Haversham on her right. The vampire seemed to have recovered entirely from his earlier encounter with Dunstan. The fog had thinned a bit, some of it burning off at contact with her magic, and with the arrival of the ghosts.

Above her, Bodicea and Horatio took up the cry. Regal and commanding, they led a charge of spirits too numerous to count. The specters flitted through the fog above, and others sped along the ground nearby, mere silhouettes in the night and the mist. Tamara heard the hissing of Kali’s Children out there in the dark, but the ghosts made short work of them.

As she came around to the front of the palace, she nearly faltered. There were misshapen, reptilian corpses littering the ground, with Rakshasa scattered among them. The mist rolled slowly over the bodies, filling every crevice, as though it truly were a death shroud.

But what almost brought her to a halt was the sheer number of horrors that still loped and staggered toward the palace gates. Even with the street and the park beyond draped in fog, she made out at least half a dozen Rakshasa and forty or fifty of the Children of Kali, and she was not yet close enough to see the gates through the veil of mist. Dark figures moved all through the gray, filthy blanket that lay over the city. Far, far more than Tamara had ever imagined.

“So many of them,” she said as she began to run again.

“Do not worry,” Nigel growled in the dark beside her. “Our allies are legion!”

Heartened by the strength of his voice, she nodded and ran on. Above her she heard Bodicea and Nelson shouting orders, and a moment later the ghosts who had dedicated themselves to Albion’s cause darted ahead, rippling the fog as they descended upon the poor, accursed souls Priya Gupta had twisted to her own ends. The shouts of angry phantoms and the shrieking of hideous men filled the air.

“William!” Tamara shouted. “Farris!”

Yet there was no reply from within the fog. They were supposed to have been guarding the front of the palace, but thus far she had seen only monsters. Still they had not reached the gates. A tremor of dread passed through her.

A hiss filled the air and John Haversham grabbed her arm. Tamara let him pull her to a stop even as Nigel also halted. Just ahead, several of the Children of Kali were crawling
up
the outside of the palace wall, their talons dug into stone.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Tamara grunted, and she raised both hands. She muttered a single word, burning two of the vermin off the wall with an arc of flame that erupted from her palms.

A new sound reached her, of something lumbering across the ground, and she turned just in time to see a pair of Rakshasa rushing toward her through the gloom. John began to work a spell, his fingers contorted, muttering in German as he weaved something out of the energy that already existed in the air. Being an ordinary spellcaster, he had no innate magic.

Nevertheless, a streak of silver light leaped from the ground right in front of him and speared the Rakshasa’s chest, impaling the thing. It let out a roar of fury that disintegrated into that high, barking, hyena laugh. For a moment it was lifted off the ground on the spike of magic that had impaled it, and then it roared again and shook itself free, dropping to the ground in a crouch.

Its eyes gleamed that sickly, filthy yellow as it glared up at John and then lunged for him.

Tamara was about to intervene when Nigel leaped past her and threw himself directly at the demon, driving it back and onto the ground, where he began to scuffle with it. Ghosts swept down from the shroud of fog and began to tear at the other Rakshasa. Two of them grabbed hold of the powerful beast and a third slashed a spectral dagger across its eyes, blinding the demon. Then they began to tear it apart.

“Well done!” Tamara shouted, spinning to peer at the palace wall again, where several of the accursed men were still climbing. The tide had most certainly turned. The ghosts would swarm the demons and overwhelm them. But it would be up to her to make certain that none of the monsters got inside the palace before it was all over. It only required one for their mission to end in failure.

Even as she looked up, however, she saw a ghost sweep down out of the fog, laughing perversely. It was Byron, in that foppish velvet shirt of his. He seemed to be having a sadistically wonderful time as he grabbed hold of one of Kali’s Children and tore the horror right off the wall, then began to fly higher. The spectral poet rose up and up and up, and then he simply dropped the monster. It fell like a stone, vanishing and reappearing in the roiling fog, until it struck the street with a wet crack and lay still.

“Right, then. Things are well in hand. Let’s get to the gates and find William and Farris.”

“Lead on,” John replied.

Together they ran alongside the wall. They had gone no more than a dozen feet when the muffled boom of a gunshot filled the night. Tamara quickened her pace and saw several dark shapes resolving themselves in the billowing gray ahead. Her heart thundered in her chest and she held her breath as she forged on.

The wind gusted, parting curtains of fog ahead, and she saw the gates of the palace.

Farris stood before the gates, alone, one of those pepperbox guns clutched in his left hand and his saber in the other. Dark silhouettes emerged from the mist as Children of Kali. One of them wore the clothes of a nobleman; two others were dressed in rough, dirty fabric. Here there were no classes, no caste system. The very wealthy and the very poor had met the same horrid fate.

As Tamara ran toward Farris, summoning the magic that crackled around her fists, that courageous man raised his pepperbox and fired at the nearest creature, the bullet obliterating the monster’s face and bursting out through the back of its skull. He swung the thick, revolving barrel toward the next and pulled the trigger, but it fell on an empty chamber.

Farris tossed the useless weapon aside and changed his stance, holding his saber at the ready and preparing for an onslaught.

“Take heart, my friend!” Tamara called to him. “You are not alone!”

She paused to steady herself, carved through the air with contorted fingers, and magic coursed through her body and burst from her fingertips. The ground rumbled beneath her feet and she could feel the connection between herself and the earth, then, through the spell she had cast. It felt as though the land were an extension of her being, her muscle and bone.

The street buckled and ruptured as enormous tree roots thrust from the soil of Albion and wrapped themselves around the accursed monstrosities that were lunging at Farris. The roots twined about their limbs and bodies, cracking bone and pulping flesh as the creatures were pulled down into the earth, dragged under the street. An arm was sheared off one of them before it disappeared into the ground, and then they were gone.

Farris turned and gaped at her, awe and perhaps a bit of fear there in his gaze. “Mistress Tamara, that was . . . it was simply . . .”

Then his eyes went wide.

“Watch yourself!” he cried as he ran toward her with his saber held high.

Tamara turned to see that she had nearly forgotten John Haversham, some yards back. And in that moment of her forgetfulness, something terrible had happened.

For John had fallen to his knees in the street and was staring at her with forlorn eyes that were growing darker by the moment. The fog swirled around him, but it was plain to see that his flesh had begun to take on a greenish-yellow hue, as though his entire body were bruised. His face was adopting the rough texture of scales.

“Oh, John, no!” she cried, and she raced back toward him.

Farris shouted at her to stop, to stay back, but she could not. This man had come to her and given her the gift of truth, had apologized for embarrassing her, had hinted at feelings far deeper than what he had previously allowed. He was an ally and a friend, and within her heart and the yearning center of her, she knew he might one day be something more. Or he might have been, for the memory of Frederick Martin’s transformation was still fresh in her mind and she recalled the revulsion with which she had recoiled at his filthy touch.

“No,” she whispered into the fog.

But she stopped a few feet away, knowing it would be foolish to get too close. The curse was taking him over. Soon he would be one of Priya’s creatures, if he was not already.

“John, how?” she asked.

The grief in his eyes tore at her heart. “I . . . I was a clumsy thief,” he stammered. “One of the idols . . . my protection . . . faltered and . . .”

He shuddered and groaned with the pain of transformation. Tamara racked her brain.
There must be some way to help him,
she thought.
Some way to stop the curse.
But she knew that once the transformation was complete, his humanity would be gone.
I need time to research, time to . . .

There was only one way. She would have to somehow arrest the process, freeze John in the moment to buy the time that she needed.

Before she could act, however, her brother’s voice cut through the fog, echoing all around her. He was calling her name.

Tamara spun, searching for William, but through the fog and the darkness she could not find him. There was chaos all around the front of the palace. Byron and other ghosts were plucking Kali’s Children from the walls. With an unsettling savagery, Bodicea was hacking a Rakshasa to pieces in front of the palace gates with her spectral sword. Tamara could hear Nelson somewhere above her, in the shrouded sky, shouting commands as though he were back on the deck of the
Agamemnon.
And Farris was running toward her, both guns discarded and his saber raised. He had seemed bent upon the murder of John Haversham a moment ago, but he had heard William’s voice, as well, for now he slowed and began to search the night for her brother.

Once again, she heard William call her name. This time, though, it was more distinct. She peered to the east, where just the edge of St. James’s Park was visible through the fog, and there among a group of Kali’s Children, she saw him.

Priya Gupta was wrapped around William from behind, riding him like a child. Her legs twined around his waist, and her left arm was hooked over his shoulder. The upstart, the cruel witch, held a gleaming silver dagger against his throat. The streamers of pure crimson magic she had manifested earlier now seemed to stream from her sides, though the way she was pressed against William it was difficult to know for certain. They caressed him, those razor-sharp ribbons, and where they touched him he was cut. His clothes were dark, but blood streaked his white shirt, and Tamara thought she could smell the copper tang of it on the air.