Blackwood (25 page)

  She should cringe in fear. She shouldn't provoke him. She had to remember Sara, unconscious. They had no way to wake her that didn't rely on Dee's assistance.

  And yet, Miranda would have considered alchemy as a career choice if it meant the ability to send this devil back to whatever hell he'd been hiding in for the past four hundred years. He'd scared her
dog.

  "Wrong girl," she said. "I'm Miranda."

Phillips knew he should make some effort to hide his shock, but the scene in the house Miranda had raced into was not something anyone could expect. No matter how weird their last few days had been.

  A bunch of women were sewing – yes, sewing – or, rather, they'd stopped sewing to watch the drama in front of them. Miranda rose from a crouch next to Sidekick. Her father stood opposite her, a sympathetic expression on his face.

  
John Dee's expression, Mr Blackwood's body,
Phillips reminded himself. What surprised him was that the sympathy the man radiated seemed… sincere.

  "I would never hurt your pet," Dee said. "Animals are more sensitive than most humans–" he looked over Miranda's shoulder at Phillips with curiosity "–and can sense when the forces of nature are in flux."

  Miranda gaped at John Dee in her dad. She was clearly furious. And Phillips didn't want her talking to him when anger was in control.

  He didn't believe Miranda had shot his mom on purpose, no matter what she'd said. He was still on her side, even though he had no idea what his gram would say about that. Protecting the island should come first according to her letter. Thankfully, the whispers of the spirits – and they
were
whispering – had quieted so he barely heard them. If his gram was among them, he couldn't hear her.

  "You're Dr John Dee, then?" Phillips asked.

  Sidekick gave a couple of quick thumps of his tail in acknowledgement that Phillips had joined them, but even the dog seemed nervous.

  Bone had stopped next to Phillips, still cradling his mom's body. Roswell pushed past his son to get to John Dee. "I'll do the introductions–" Roswell started, but Dee sidestepped the doc without a hint of interest in him.

  "I had no idea Virginia Dare had survived," Dee said, wonder and disdain mixing. "She was a seed of a thing, and the natives were… What's the expression? Restless. Owing to you." He focused the accusation on Miranda, whose only reaction was to continue to scowl at him. Finally he turned to Phillips, and then he frowned. "Why have you bound the hands of Virginia Dare's descendant? Why is he here at all? The child is not one of mine. Her parents are."

  
I'm
Virginia Dare's
descendant?
The first English child born in the Americas and, based on this and his gram's letter, the head of a line of psychic soldiers. He hadn't made the connection.

  "I'm not one of yours either," Miranda pointed out, but Dee only looked at her again.

  Phillips needed to distract him. He held up his tied hands, jerked his head toward Bone. "I'd like to take my mother now, please."

  Dee reached into the pocket of the jacket he wore. When his hand emerged, long fingers held the handle of a short, sharp knife. Dee moved forward smooth as a shark, and sliced through the ropes that bound Phillips.

  The thick cords fell away.
A single cut shouldn't have done it.

  Dee untrussed Miranda with the same quick motion. She backed away from him.

  Despite that, Dee appeared to be pleased. Phillips watched the way he studied his hand with approval, before returning the knife to his pocket.

  "Getting comfortable in there?" Phillips asked.

  Dee considered Phillips. "It's a process. Like all transmutations, one does not simply achieve success in a moment. After being in the starless void for so long, I find I am in no rush. Each sensation is a new discovery."

  The adoration Roswell managed to cram into his murmur of approval turned Phillips' stomach. How had he ever trusted that guy?

  Miranda was edging slowly further into the house with Sidekick. Phillips didn't know where she was headed, but he could keep Dee occupied a little longer. Hands free, he accepted his mother's weight from Bone.

  "What's wrong with her?" Phillips asked him.

  Dee reached out with his borrowed fingers, his glove of another man's skin, and touched the side of her chalked face. Tenderly.

  "She is unaffiliated," he said, "which means I can aid her, if you wish." He turned to Roswell then, and the professor squinted liked the sun was shining his eyes. Like he was seeing something holy. "You have the invention?" Dee asked him, sounding irritated.

  "Of course." Roswell snapped open his leather valise and produced the bundle eagerly. He'd wrapped the heavy metal weapon in a fusty afghan throw.

  "Remove the cloth," Dee ordered, long nose wrinkling.

  Exposed, the gun lay flat against the nubby plaid throw. It was a dream made in metal.
This
man's dream.

  One of the sewing women got up and walked to Dee's side. She wore a summer dress, long and flowing, small sandals that seemed out of place with such a stiff gait. The gun must have been difficult for her to ignore, but she did.

  "Master," she said, "I will need to go now or he will suspect."

  "Of course." He raised his voice. "Any of you whose vessels possess family should go to them now. You can return here tomorrow."

  "I would rather not go back there," said a woman who couldn't have been older than her mid-twenties.

  "I understand what I ask you is not easy, but one more day and then such concerns will leave us."

  The woman nodded, and all but two of the others also left through the front door. They'd draped the materials they were working on over the chair backs, turning them into cloth gravestones.

  Dee gestured for Phillips to follow him. "Bring her this way."

  Phillips couldn't believe he was taking this guy's orders. He couldn't believe Dee was being so calm and rational. He'd expected fiery, beyond-the-grave menace.
Don't trust,
the voices inside his head said,
don't
and
trust
repeating. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the other voices in his head and his own.

  As they passed the kitchen, Phillips saw three donut boxes – nothing but a few crumbs of frosting left inside – on the counter. No donuts in the starless void, then.

  "Eleanor," Dee called, his voice carrying through the silent house, "keep an eye on my M… Miranda, please."

  Eleanor? As in Eleanor Dare, his ancestor Virginia's mother? But that wasn't what he really wanted to know. What he really wanted to know was why Dee thought Miranda belonged to him.

  A woman answered from a room at the far end of the hall. "Of course, she's right here," she said.

  Satisfied, Dee motioned Phillips through a nearby door. Inside the room, he laid his mom down on the bed. He straightened her legs on the pink bedspread, wished again that she wasn't caught in this.

  Dee eased down onto the side of the bed beside his mother and touched her face again. The bedside lamp's light gave the white mask she wore hollows and shadows.

  Phillips said, "Miranda shot me with your gun, too. It coated me with black dust, but that was all. Why didn't this happen to me?"

  Dee turned and caught Roswell lingering in the door. "Leave us," Dee said.

  Phillips watched the doctor swallow his protest. He left the room. Bone must be hanging out with the women who'd stayed. He probably wasn't much for sewing, though.

  "She shot you?" Dee asked, his pupils large and black. "Of course, she did."

  Phillips noted the moony quality that crossed Dee's face when he was talking about Miranda. All traces of it vanished as he went on.

  "You were never in danger because Virginia declined her invitation to follow her parents through the veil, into the void. She stayed behind. Too young for a decision, so the decision was made by her inability. You share her blood… with a curiously strong tie given the years that separate you. Regardless, it protected you."

  "Her parents just left her?"

  "Mortality is fleeting. Immortality is a promise of the eternal, pure as light itself."

  Phillips imagined a tiny girl on a huge beach, a wilderness surrounding her. They'd have assumed she would die in minutes, hours, days. A funny idea of light and purity.

  "But my mother – she hasn't chosen?" Phillips was solving the riddle. "You said you can help her because she's unaffiliated."

  Dee said nothing. He watched as Phillips put one together with the other.

  "You can help her if you offer her a choice. If she chooses you." Phillips drew in a shaky breath. "You can only help her if she becomes one of yours."

  Dee stroked his mother's chalky skin. She was so pale, a ghost, fading fast into nothing.

  "Yes," Dee said.

Miranda found Polly. She was in her room, sitting on the bed and bent over a long swathe of fabric like the women in the outer room.

  Polly cursed, her lips pinched in a universal "ouch."

  Sidekick stayed so close to Miranda she felt him cringe at the word. She wished she'd been better at protecting what she loved, better at understanding that her circumstances were not of her own making. Or of her father's. She wished she could have seen all this coming early enough to stop it.

  Polly had angled the shade of the lamp to give herself as much light as possible, but it clearly wasn't enough. She didn't appear to notice Miranda's presence until Dee's voice – her father's but deeper and more commanding, with a clipped accent – called out. He called the name Eleanor. And Polly's familiar face looked up, exhaustion painting it, and confirmed that Miranda was with her.

  "You knew I was here," Miranda said.

  "This body has excellent hearing."

  Polly jammed the needle through the fabric she held, cursed again as she stuck herself. It was the most inept attempt at sewing Miranda had ever seen.

  "You came in here because you didn't want the others to see how much you suck at this," Miranda said.

  "Perceptive," Polly said. "I was not a housewife or a tailor or anything but my father's protégée. Of those of us who traveled to make the New London, to bring about the great transformation, I was the most skilled next to Master Dee."

  Miranda was close enough to see the tips of Polly's fingers were coated with red where she'd repeatedly stabbed herself. She knew Eleanor Dare – a speaking part, not a footnote – was inside that injured skin, but somehow that didn't matter. It was Polly's body.

  "Let me," Miranda said, taking the fabric before the woman could protest.

  She sat on the bed and held out her hand for the needle and thread. She started to ask what they were making, but then realised, with a stroke over the cloth, that she knew. She remembered the returned people in the square, arms drifting through the air, reunited with flesh and each other after so many years.

  Cloaks. They were sewing the cloaks she'd seen in her dream.

  After a moment's hesitation Polly handed over the needle, the rough red of her fingertips painful to look at.

  Miranda accepted the needle and fitted it through the cloth again and again. She'd helped out the costumers enough on similar pieces that it was old habit. Sidekick lay down at her feet, letting gravity pull his eyes closed. Polly watched her with a puzzled expression.

  "Why are you helping me? Your friend is not in here. She is in the void."

  "My friend," Miranda said, focusing on the easy motion of the needle, the satisfying push through the fabric, "still exists. That's enough."

  If only it was true.

24

Places, Everyone

Miranda bit the thread loose and tied it, held up the garment. The fabric billowed like a storm cloud in miniature when she shook out the cloth. It was about the best a sinister gray cloak could be in her opinion.

  Polly plucked the cloak from her fingers and swept it around her own shoulders. She hooked a wide loop over a button she must have struggled to sew on. Miranda hadn't done it.

  "Very Salem," Miranda said.

  "There is much to complete before tomorrow evening," Polly said. "Will you do another?"

  Miranda found her head nodding yes before she remembered this wasn't the real Polly. This wasn't the person she usually helped without thinking, the person who let her have a stageside view every show.

  The cape fluttered behind Polly as she left the room, before Miranda could take back the yes. What was tomorrow evening? And where had Phillips gotten to?

  Before she could wonder the same thing about her father's body and its make-nice hitchhiker, he materialised in the doorway with a bolt of gray fabric. He raised his brows skeptically. "Eleanor said you asked for this."

  Sidekick woke from sleep and scooted behind Miranda's legs. She should have known a visit from Dee was coming.

  She stared at the floor. "I agreed to sew another for Polly's sake."

  Why did she feel this need to provoke him?
This guy came back from the grave. You wouldn't like him when he's angry.
But the insult of having to deal with her father's form was too fresh. She refused to look at him.

  "Who actually killed him?" she asked, keeping her eyes down. "Was it you or Roswell? Or was it the ship?"

  Dee laid the bolt of cloth on the bed beside her. He was too close. She didn't move.

  He backed off, settling into a wooden chair near the foot of the bed. Miranda resisted the urge to put more distance between them.

  "What if I told you it was none of those? That it was the curse he bore."

  Miranda picked up the cloth, shook it into position. The snake on her cheek felt like it crawled. "Then that means you. You or your ship. It's
your
curse."

  She unspooled a bit of thread – filched from the costume department, without a doubt – and threaded her needle. The fabric flowed before her, a gray flood. She wouldn't look at him.