Eterna and Omega (23 page)

“If what you say is true,” Blakely said bitterly, “could he not harm you like he did our dear Reggie?”

Knight moved behind Blakely's chair to kiss the nerve-racked man on his perspiring forehead.

“Trust me, darling. It's hardly the first time I've diffused a danger. We'll bring back results and make an ally out of a threat,” Knight stated.

“Tend to Adira,” Rose added. Blakely nodded obediently. “She needs comfort and safety, and make whatever arrangements need be made. Telegraph Mr. Spire and alert him to what happened.”

“I shall.”

“I should not tell Adira where we've gone, as the man we're to see is ostensibly responsible for her husband's death,” Rose added.

Blakely nodded and the two women were off.

“Can you tell me what
you
saw in that tent, Miss Knight?” Rose asked as they walked toward the Pearl Street address, oddly, not far, she thought, from the Eterna offices. “I've never been one for second sight. But I believe I saw … spirits. Subtle forms somehow
attached
to the bodies of the dead scientists. Am I correct, or should Zhavia inspect me for further damage upon our return to England?”

“What you saw was entirely so,” Miss Knight confirmed. “The bodies and spirits were bound to each other against the will of both dead parties. In effect, the bodies became banshees, magnifying the screams of tortured, enslaved spirits. Resulting in a weapon, a way to control a crowd by fear and sensory onslaught.”

“Yes.” Rose shuddered. “But Mosley banished the specters, yes? One moment they were hovering around the bodies, the next moment they blinked into nothingness.”

“I cannot help but find that fascinating,” Miss Knight said. “I have heard theories that ghosts are particularly able to affect electricity—and to be affected by it. I think Mosley sent a higher pulse of current that untethered the spirits, and I doubt he did that on command. I think he did that to free himself.”

They did not bother to knock at the door of Mr. Mosley's modest town house—Miss Knight picked the lock of the wooden front door instead. The two women stood in the front hall, not far from the door, and called his name.

Disturbed to see that the back arch window was a gaping, broken hole, Rose could see they were not the first to have broken in.…

Waiting for a reply, Rose noticed that the house's carved wood paneling needed to be dusted and polished, and the carpet runner in the entrance foyer was worn and dirty.

“Why are you people following me?” shouted an anguished voice from upstairs. “Am I at long last affecting Manhattan's patch-work electrical system to the point where you cannot ignore me any longer?”

“We don't want to hurt you,” Knight called gently. “We saw what happened today, and as fellow British citizens, we would like to offer you another option.”

Mosley sighed, a growling sound, poking his head down from around the banister. “I didn't choose to go down that path today. I was kidnapped and forced to send electricity into those … bodies. It was terrible.”

“We know, truly we do,” Rose added. “Those who forced you into that dread deed are whom we want to stop, believe us.”

He peered at them. “You're not law enforcement.…”

“Who would send women and psychics to speak with you unless we understood just how special you were?” Rose offered.

“As if I should trust anyone, or anything…”

Miss Knight sighed. “Mr. Mosley, please.” She walked down the entrance foyer toward him, looking at him on the stair above her. “Your heart is full of anger and bitterness—”

“What do you know of my heart?” he barked.

Miss Knight offered a half smile and stared into his eyes. “Enough to understand what it is like to live in this world entirely misunderstood. An aberration. A
freak.
”

At the banister, she reached up and laid a gentle hand on his cheek.

“Don't—” He shrank away but could not evade her. At her touch, he fell silent and still.

Miss Knight's dark eyes fluttered. When concentrating, her eyes shifted to nearly black, frightening even to those who were intrigued by her gifts. She winced, then spoke with quiet gravity.

“I know you and your brother … Jack … were treated terribly. You took on his name out of deference … And I know what happened to your father. It wasn't a fireplace poker that did the damage. I'd have done the same thing in your shoes had I been there.”

Mosley looked down at her in a mixture of awe and abject fear as he murmured, “How do you…”

Knight's black eyes flashed, showing a pain that Rose had only guessed at.

“Because I, too, am a freak, Mr. Mosley,” she whispered. “That's how.”

There was a long and uncomfortable silence.

“We are, honestly, here to help you,” Rose began gently. “We do have ties to Her Majesty's government, but we do not work with the forces that you fear. We are tasked with rooting out the inexplicable. Help us help you.”

“To do what? I won't be a sideshow trophy and I won't be your weapon,” Mosley said angrily, pulling away from Knight and standing up. Rose could feel the hairs on her neck rise as the young man's charge electrified the room. “Too many people have been after me for that. I look out for myself, a lone agent of the lightning gods. I demand autonomy and respect.”

“We respect that you could kill us right here and now,” Miss Knight said, her moment of vulnerable commiseration gone. “But you won't, because for the first time in your entire life, you see in my eyes that I am telling you the truth. Because you can see that I do not wish to hurt, arraign, or experiment upon you. Whatever others have wanted to do to or with you, the Society will do worse.”

“We've seen bodies and wires like that before,” Rose added, “in a dreadful English crime scene. Mechanical generation cannot compare with your power, so those who used you today would use you again.” She leaned in to emphasize the point. “You'd power a thousand dead corpses attached to ten thousand dead spirits.”

Mosley shuddered at this.

“With you living so close to Edison's dynamos, you are an ongoing risk and disaster—”

“You flatter me,” Mosley sneered.

“Come home to England, Mr. Mosley,” Rose offered. “Our offices will erase whatever past you please. But if you accept this help, help us in turn by rooting out your attackers wherever they may lurk. Protect the force your body claims as your own. It is for light, not for harm, and not for reviving the dead.”

He stood on the front stair, facing them. “Indeed.”

“Protect yourself against those who took advantage of you today,” Miss Knight said with an edge. “Because of them, one of our operatives was killed today.”

“I'm … sorry for your loss,” Mosley said haltingly, as if empathy were entirely new to him.

“Thank you. We strange, sensitive, burdened, gifted persons have to look out for one another, do we not?” she said softly. It was the first time Rose thought that her colleague might have had a more difficult life than she'd ever let on.

“I … never thought so,” Mosley said, “before.” There was a long, pained pause. “How can I get home?”

“Papers will be under your door by midnight,” Rose replied, “along with a steamer ticket and directions to a safe house in North London. Should you not report there, we will have cause to come find you.”

“Indeed,” he murmured. “Well, then, ladies. Do see yourselves out.…” With that, he withdrew up the stairs. Only then did the charge of the current dissipate and the small hairs all over Rose's body return to rest.

“Good day,” Rose stated, and she and Knight quickly took their leave lest they be driven out by a surge.

 

CHAPTER

NINE

Utterly drained after her strained, strange day, Clara went home to await Rupert, as he never traveled to speak with colleagues for longer than three days, and his stabilizing presence would be helpful in returning her still clenched body to peace after so near a seizure.

Awaiting him in the parlor, she allowed herself to drift off on the divan. Her unsteady rest was filled with dark, vision-like dreams of epic proportions. Perhaps Lady Denbury had left a bit of her dream prophecy gift behind after her last visit.

In this scene, she stood alone at the center of the Bowling Green, the apex of Manhattan Island's fraught, violent history, the heart of its colonized commerce. Ghosts of the Lenape tribe, brutally driven from the land first by the Dutch, floated about the perimeter of the park where she stood with a candle in one hand and a Ward in a glass vial in the other. Louis was not with her, though she heard the faint murmuring of spirits. Shadows moved at a distance. Closer.

The shadows began to march. First one or two, floating down Broadway. Then more, pouring from the side streets onto that angled old thoroughfare like floating rats, silent and entirely opaque, cut out of purest darkness and bleak lifelessness.

Back in the first days of researching Louis's death, she'd seen a host of shadowy silhouettes in the disaster site. She'd mistaken them for the ghosts of the dead scientists, and when they told her to destroy the files, she didn't realize they were the enemy.

They'd been trying to trick her all along, and now they were coming for her.

She stood all alone at the tip of one of the most powerful islands of the world, with no power but herself, with a dread horde making its way toward her. The shadows stopped just outside the green's wrought-iron fence, a spiked perimeter dating to the Revolutionary War. In those days, the king's crowns had been ripped from the tops of the finials; their iron pickets were still jagged, a century later.

The darkness hovered. The spirits wafted back, terrified of violence anew. Clara held tight to her light. The presences threatened to close in but were held back by one lit candle, one glass vial of personal protection, and one small prayer of hope.

How long could her own magic, or anyone who hoped to build and maintain a Ward, hold back this wretched, teeming horde?

The sound of the front door opening and closing roused her from her nightmare. She opened her eyes to see the senator standing on the parlor threshold. The room was dark; the sun had set, and she'd slept longer than she intended.

Clara groggily blinked up at Bishop. “You're late.”

“Did we have an engagement?” he asked blankly.

“You're usually home by this hour on a day you return,” Clara said wearily, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“I didn't wire—”

“You're never gone on meetings longer than three days. You have encouraged me to stay aware of your patterns so I can remind you when you work too hard. I know these are extenuating circumstances, but still.”

The senator smiled. “So I have, and asked you to remind me of it when I bristle at being questioned. I'm sorry I'm late.”

“So? Tell me, then. What kept you?”

He examined her as he crossed the room. “You look tired. Care to share why?” Bishop asked, moving to the samovar and pouring a cup of tea. Clara realized that during his journey from door to table, he had picked up her cup, which he was now refilling. He returned her cup and took a seat on the settee.

“It was a day that tried faith,” she began, then, distracted, said, “I don't even know where to start. This city is in grave danger, and you look as if you've taken healing waters. What different states we are in…”

Their quiet housekeeper moved about the room, setting out a plate of small sandwiches and a snifter of liquor at the senator's disposal. He thanked her warmly before turning back to Clara.

“I am particularly invigorated after a talk with young Spiritualists being raised in the tradition,” Bishop began eagerly. “Flexible senses, grade-schoolers, what a thrill. Nothing like a mind that hasn't had all its doors hammered shut with the nails of limitation nor the foundations of its imagination poured over with the tar of complacency.”

Wishing she could see past the dark visions that had beset her, she pushed back. “How can you look into youthful eyes and tell those souls to hope and dream, to feel, to be a
sensitive
when the insensitive world will do its best to swallow them up? If not swallowed whole, then the darkening world will nip up parts of them, one by one, their flexible brains and bodies will harden to loss and pain and being told they cannot do, or be, or want, due to what they look like, their sex, their class, their hearts…”

“Clara, where is this coming from?” he asked softly. “I've known you to have melancholic tendencies, but you're not usually so bleak—”

“Today I saw the dead come back to life. Dead bodies, electrocuted, it was terrible…”

“Where did this happen?”

“City Hall Park, in a ‘demonstration' by Master's Society operatives rising from the dead to haunt our world. Rupert … seeing a body shudder like that, convulse…” She stared up at him, overwhelmed. “Is that how I look when I seize? It's so horrid.”

Bishop moved to sit next to her. He placed a tentative hand on her knee and, when she did not draw away, squeezed it in comfort. He was ever careful and gentlemanly when he touched her.

“I wouldn't know,” he replied. “I focus on trying to keep you safe, not what you look like during the episode,” he added warmly. She smiled as if this were a particular balm. “Did you seize today?”

“Nearly so. It seems impossible to describe this surreal day. I saw a man become a dynamo, the man I've seen cause the Pearl Street disturbances. During the event I met a soul sister whom I might endanger by no fault of my own. Her friend may have died during the incident. Tonight in dreams I saw a world where human dignity and imagination will be aborted, snuffed out by a lightless, sightless cloud.”