The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (9 page)

I went back out into the tunnel between trains and climbed onto the platform at the Holborn station. A man and woman in evening wear were the only ones to notice me. They stared and then in true British fashion pointedly looked away, carrying on a conversation about the production of
Doctor Faustus
they’d just seen. I’ve always liked Marlowe, so I was tempted to stop and explain to them the play was partly biographical and based on moments of Marlowe’s life. But then I would have had to explain he wasn’t a spy in addition to being a scholar, as the common myths went, but was instead a demon hunter in addition to being a scholar. Not the sort of conversation you wanted to have with people when you were trying to maintain a low profile in the country. Especially if you’d just been seen climbing out of a Tube tunnel. I kept my knowledge to myself and got on the next train. The well-dressed couple waited for me to board before choosing a different car.

I switched lines at random for an hour, in case there was any pursuit I hadn’t noticed, and tried to remember my London geography. I got off at the Archway station and made my way to the Highgate Cemetery a few blocks away. I walked along the fence until I found a lamp post with a burned-out light. I stepped into the shadows and climbed the fence and dropped into the shrubbery on the other side. Although shrubbery may be too polite a word. The bushes swallowed me up, scratching and gouging me with thorns and sharp branches as I came down, and looming over my head like deformed trees when I’d landed. The cemetery was one of those rare places in England where the caretakers allowed plants to grow wild rather than cultivating and grooming them. It was wonderfully atmospheric and all, but it did make skulking about a little more difficult.

I moved through the undergrowth in a random direction. I didn’t have a destination in mind, although I’d been here many times before. I’d visited Karl Marx’s grave a few times to read him the latest news from the papers, until it got too crowded with students and their bottles of cheap wine—and the news grew too unpleasant for Marx’s taste. I’d brought a few bottles of wine myself to the grave of Adam Worth, a criminal artist I’d once worked with. Yes, artist—there’s no other way of describing him. I don’t know if the rumours that Conan Doyle modelled his Professor Moriarty on him are true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Worth wasn’t much of a criminal sort these days—death has a way of mellowing out most people—but he still had plenty of stories to tell from his younger days. And he had fewer visitors than Marx, partially because he’d been buried in a pauper’s grave, under a pseudonym. Such is the legacy we leave.

This time, though, I wasn’t looking for any of my old friends. Instead, I was searching for someone entirely different, someone I didn’t even know. But I’d know her when I found her.

Something crashed through the undergrowth ahead of me as I moved, and I paused to see what direction it took. In addition to the usual ghosts and ghouls and assorted creatures you find around graveyards, Highgate has a few unusual residents. The Highgate Vampire is a myth—vampires
detest
England, for reasons too lengthy to get into here, so it’s rare indeed to find one on the island—but some of the other supernatural sightings in the area have more truth than ale to them. Whatever it was moved away from me, and I proceeded on, only tripping and falling over gravestones a couple of times. I wondered if anyone even remembered these dead out here, lost in the overgrowth. Ah well, to some a battlefield or a watery grave, to others a forgotten coffin in a patch of London soil. What did it matter?

Besides, the forgotten dead were what I was after. And I found what I was seeking a few minutes later: a mausoleum covered in vines and moss and cradled in the roots and branches of the trees around it. A woman’s name I didn’t recognize, and which I won’t repeat here to respect her privacy, chiselled above the rotted wooden doors. I opened those doors with a touch of my hand and a breath of grace and, hoping no one heard the squeal of the rusted hinges, went inside.

It was a simple stone tomb, with benches along the walls and shelves with dead, petrified flowers in stone vases. There was a stone coffin in the centre of the room, which I pushed the lid off of to reveal the desiccated corpse of a woman. Let’s call her Eurydice. Her funeral dress was little more than rags now, and the locket she held in her clasped hands was dull and in need of a polish. I took it from her and opened it, even though I already knew what it contained: a lock of hair. It was always a lock of hair in these older places. I put it back in her hands.

Most people think raising the dead is actually that: bringing a dead body back to life. But it’s a little more complex than that—I’m living proof. When you raise the dead, you not only bring a body back to life, you also have to put a soul back into the body. Sometimes the soul wants to come, other times it doesn’t. It all depends where it is now. So it can be a relatively straightforward procedure—for the likes of me, anyway—or it can be a little more arduous.

But here’s a trick of the trade: You don’t have to put a soul into the body that originally held it. You can put a soul in any body.

Which is why I was here, lifting this stranger’s corpse into my arms and out of its resting place. I needed a vessel for the soul I wanted.

I bent my head and kissed the corpse on the lips, breathing more grace than I wanted to let go into her. Then I slumped to the floor with her and tried not to think about the emptiness welling inside me again at the loss of the grace. I tried not to think about what I had just done, because it was all a bit personal. I distracted myself by composing a few lines of poetry in my head while I waited. It seemed a moment fitting for poetry. I didn’t bother writing them down though. The best poetry is always the poetry that never gets written down.

Eurydice gasped and I looked down at her again. Her flesh was lively once more, pale but with the flush of blood in her cheeks now. Her cheeks that weren’t sunken anymore. Her breasts heaved as her body remembered how to breathe again. I pulled her into a sitting position and untangled her hair as best I could, then brushed the dust off her clothing. She wasn’t exactly presentable, but sometimes you just have to make do.

I opened her eyes and looked into her to make sure there was nothing there, that her original soul hadn’t been called back to her during the resurrection, or hadn’t been hiding in her all these centuries. It happens sometimes. But there was nothing in her. She was as empty as a mannequin. So I called the soul I wanted and waited.

You have to be careful about the order of these things. If you bind a soul into a body without resurrecting the body first, you wind up with a zombie. Which, to be honest, frightens them more than you. The things you learn from trial and error over the years.

No matter what you do, though, the dead are always shocked to return. It’s not a natural state of affairs for most people. Especially when they’re brought back into someone else’s body. But there was no helping it in this case—the body of the soul I was calling was far from here, and under heavy guard. The Royal Family looked after their own, even in death.

But it was a member of the Royal Family I needed. If Mona Lisa had disappeared while a guest of the Queen, whatever that meant, then maybe a Royal would know what had happened.

The woman in my arms blinked a couple of times and then her eyes focused. She took a deep breath and sat up. She looked around the tomb, then at me. I tried to smile as warmly as I could.

“Hello, Princess,” I said.

It was Diana, of course. Princess of Wales. Or maybe former princess of Wales. I’m not sure if that family keeps their honorifics after death. I called her because she was the only one of the Royals who would ever deign to converse with me, unless you counted threats of evisceration as conversation.

She finally looked down at herself. And then she screamed.

I slapped my hand over her mouth. It was the middle of the night in a cemetery, but I’d left the door to the tomb open. And it
was
the middle of the night in a cemetery. If passersby on the street outside the walls didn’t hear her, something else might.

She glared at me over my fingers and struggled to break free of my arms. She even bit me hard enough to draw blood. Not the first time someone has done that to me though.

“I know it’s not your body,” I told her. “But I can’t exactly get to your body and I need to talk to you. I have some questions.”

She narrowed her eyes at me and then nodded. I removed my hand from her mouth and helped her to her feet.

“I have a few questions of my own,” she said. She looked down at her clothing and adjusted it, blowing some more dust out of the seams. “Starting with why you chose to resurrect me in such a form.”

“I’m sorry, Princess,” I said. “I’ve fallen on hard times, or I would have made certain you awoke in proper attire.”

She gave me that look of hers. “When have you not been a victim of hard times?” she asked.

Then she noticed the locket she was still holding and opened it.

“It came with the body,” I said.

“I gathered,” she said, tossing the locket into a corner of the tomb. She glanced around again and sighed.

“You could have at least raised me someplace a little nicer,” she said. “The last time I was raised was in a spa. There were fresh berries, tea and baths. A little more appropriate, I would think.”

I refrained from asking who had raised her last. You have to remember your manners around royalty, especially royalty you’ve just raised from the dead. And don’t ask them what it’s like being dead. In fact, don’t ask anyone who’s been raised about what death is like. Just trust me on this.

She went to the door of the tomb and gazed out into the night. She sniffed the air a few times.

“We are in England,” she said.

I didn’t ask how she could tell. A royal secret, no doubt.

“Highgate Cemetery,” I said.

“I trust this body is of proper standing then,” she said. “That’s something, at least.” She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Unless it’s some former flame of yours.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, then added, with a straight face, “But I can’t remember them all.”

She smiled a little. “As roguish as ever, I see,” she said.

I shrugged. “I am what the world makes me,” I said.

“I should like to see this world again, I think,” she said, turning to the outside again.

I came up beside her and offered her my arm. “I would be happy to be your escort,” I said.

“Of course you would,” she said.

We left the tomb and, because she was a princess, we strolled down one of the walkways rather than struggle through the underbrush. The night sky was bright enough from the city we could make out the grave markers lining our way, and she stopped every now and then to check the names.

“I had no idea he was dead,” she murmured, inspecting one of them. “I’ll have to look him up.”

I didn’t bother with the names myself. I was too busy keeping an eye on the bushes around us, and the angels perched on gravestones here and there. They looked like they were just statues, but I wasn’t taking any chances right now. Nothing came out of the night to bother us though. I guess no one wanted to mess with the son of God and a resurrected princess of the Royal Family.

I opened the gate at the end of the walkway and we left the cemetery and went down the street. We passed some drunks sitting in a bus shelter and a few couples walking arm in arm, but no one paid us any attention, other than a few glances at Diana’s dress. It was London, after all. They’d probably seen stranger.

I didn’t say anything for a while, giving her time to get used to being alive again. I knew from personal experience how disorienting that could be sometimes.

“I would like to see the river,” Diana said after a time, so I hailed a passing taxi and had him drive us down to the Thames. Diana stared out the windows as we drove.

“What year is it anyway?” she asked.

I told her and she nodded, and the taxi driver only glanced at us once in the mirror before looking back at the road. I gave him a good tip for not asking any questions when we got out but not so good that he’d remember our faces.

We walked along the Thames and I told her all the news I could think of since she’d died, skipping the minor wars and sticking to the European sphere. I wasn’t going to keep her alive long enough to cover it all. I offered to tell her what I knew of the Royal Family but she just smiled and shook her head.

“I get regular updates,” she said, and I bowed my head and said nothing else on the subject.

We stopped on the Millennium pedestrian bridge, which she murmured approving words about, and watched the sky turn from charcoal to a lighter shade of grey.

“So why exactly have you called on me, Cross?” she asked, gazing at a tug pulling some barges down the river. “Or have you offended so many people you’re forced to turn to the dead for companionship now?”

“I don’t think I’d fare any better with them,” I said, and she laughed.

“No, I don’t imagine you would,” she said.

I looked up at the sky, watching planes rise from Heathrow to disappear into the clouds overhead.

“It’s a personal matter,” I said. “But I am unable to manage it on my own.”

“I believe they have medication for that sort of thing now,” she said.

“If I am guilty of roguishness, it may have something to do with the company I keep,” I said.

“Yes, yes, get on with it,” she said, smiling a little.

“I need to know what the Queen was doing with Mona Lisa,” I said.

I give her credit—she didn’t even blink.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “The Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.”

“The real Mona Lisa,” I said. “The one that disappeared in the fire at Windsor Castle. The gorgon.”

“So you
have
been talking to the family,” she said. “How ever did you manage a rapprochement?”

“I haven’t been in touch with them,” I said, “as you can see by the fact I still have all my limbs.”