The Strangely Beautiful Tale Of Miss Percy Parker (21 page)

Alexi was watching her. “And where did you just go, Percy?”

“I was on horseback, speeding away from London as if pursued. Something is…” She shivered violently. The distant barking had reached a crescendo and then fallen silent; it had not been silent in days. The temperature in the room dropped an immediate, drastic number of degrees. The hairs on the back of her neck rose and froze. There was a distant echoing sound, like glass shattering, though no glass rained down upon her. “Pursued,” she repeated, suddenly terrified.

A shadowy form rose slowly from behind Percy’s chair, a
pulsating black silhouette with the head of a huge, crimsoneyed, bloody-fanged dog. The form flickered and became a collection of canine bodies fused together, one head shifting into three, into ten, into forty. One dog or a hundred, they were all from hell. And this familiar foe rose over Percy, chilling Alexi to the bone.

“Alexi, is it just my imagination, or did the room just turn very cold?” she asked, and if her flesh could have gone a shade paler, it would have.

Alexi’s mind spun at great speeds. “Percy, listen carefully. Close your eyes. Don’t question me, just do as I say.”

“Why? What—”

“Do as I say!”

Percy closed her eyes and trembled.

Alexi stood with silent ferocity, staring down the vapourous animal opposite him. Blue fire appeared along his hands, and he locked the creature in a battle of wills. It sniffed Percy, and she whimpered.

“Alexi, what in God’s name is behind me?”

“Quiet! Rise slowly and keep your eyes closed. Swing widely to your right and run to the door. Run down to the stables, and get a boy to ready my horse and bring him to the portico where I shall attend you. Percy, you
must
do as I say.” They would trust in her vision, if she had the courage to obey him.

Unsteadily, she rose to her feet, her eyes still closed as he’d instructed. But when the monster’s strange, bestial growl erupted beside her, she cried out. “Alexi!”

“Do as I say!”

Percy ran to the door and disappeared, but not before she shouted, “I’ll wait for you. Come quickly!”

The beast growled, swiping angrily at the air where Percy had been. Its gruesome maw shifted from flickering cloud into a more tangible mass, a single, horrific hound’s head, and that snarled, preparing to strike.

Alexi called upon all the inner forces that had made him
more than mortal for years. Each subsequent beat of his heart fortified a separate particular anger. Facing this beast alone, he felt an ancient rage not entirely his own, and this tore out of him, fiery and defensive; it was an old wound, an old score yet to be settled.

From his lips thundered a powerful command. For a moment the canine nightmare seemed frozen, deflated. Gritting his teeth, Alexi felt lightning course through his veins. A wind swept the room, scattering papers and whipping his black hair across his forehead. Halos of fire surrounded Alexi’s outstretched hands, crackling to be released.

The abomination leaned back on pulsing haunches and tilted a vague head, knowing that it had been commanded. Fire burst from Alexi’s fingertips, and it yelped and retreated. Then, in a burst of frantic barking, the form shifted into a hundred doglike forms that disappeared like roaches from light, snorting as they vanished through the walls. Only barking lingered in the air.

Alexi bolted out the door as howls rang across the sky like inclement weather. The beast was not destroyed but merely regrouping, as it had done many times before.

Once the door to Alexi’s office echoed closed behind her, the journey to the stables tucked behind Athene Hall was a blur. Without pause, Percy flung open the doors to find a boy asleep on a chair. Nearly hysterical, she shook him. “Please, sir,” she begged. “A horse. I need Professor Rychman’s horse. It’s an emergency!”

The boy woke to quite a fright, thinking Percy a spirit. He fell out of his chair and scrambled backward.

“Please, sir, there is danger. I need help. Oh! No! I am not a ghost, I promise you, see?” Percy reached for his hand and squeezed it. The boy cried out. “Please, forgive my appearance, but I am flesh and blood! Professor Rychman is in danger and must get away! You must help me ready his horse!”

Seeing the tears in her eyes, the young man groggily acquiesced. He began to ready a beautiful black stallion whose huge dark eyes were fiercely alert and intelligent. Of course such an impressive, elegant, onyx creature would be Alexi’s horse, Percy thought. The beast seemed to be well aware of the danger, too.

Percy anxiously waited at the portico, where the stable boy had been all too happy to leave her standing, reins of Alexi’s large dark steed in her ghost white hands. Assuming telling the guard at the door that there was a demon on the second floor would get her sent off to the histrionic ward, she invented a medical emergency to dissuade the man from sending her to her room. The entire night watch seemed too spooked by her to care one way or the other, and they left Percy well enough alone.

A billowing storm of black fabric rounded the corner at top speed, and her heart leaped. “Alexi! Thank God you’re not harmed!” Percy cried.

Without a word, he grabbed her roughly by the arm just as the barking began again above them. He mounted his horse and swept her up in front of him.

“Dearest Alexi, what was—Oh, dear God!” Percy had looked over his shoulder, pressing her cheek to his, and just above the gargoyles that guarded the front entrance of the academy, she saw a huge, fanged dog with eyes like burning coals. Its head flickered into three heads, then ten, then more; it opened countless salivating jaws in a roar. The beast perched above their only escape route.

Percy screamed and tucked her head into Alexi’s bosom. He loosed a powerful shout, and spurred his horse forward. A paw swiped down toward their heads, but at the same moment a shield of blue flame burst forth. Alexi’s horse reared and leaped past, tore off down a narrow alley.

Percy could not get her bearings. A dark mist enfolded her brain, a dread filled her body and damnations were murmured in her ears. She screamed as her sleeve was torn by
something she could not see, the something that had likely pursued them.

Alexi roared a word, a command to desist in a tongue Percy had never heard yet still understood. There was a crackling of blue lightning, and then a cloud lifted from around them. That nebulous mass of whirling bestial forms rose into the night sky, but all Percy could make out were hundreds of teeth. And then there was only London. The nightmare vanished and the barking quieted.

“Are you all right, dear girl?” Alexi asked above the din of his horse’s hooves upon the cobblestones.

Percy’s shaking arms desperately clutched his chest. “I…believe so. What in God’s name was that?”

Alexi sighed. “That, in
hell’s
name, was something I never saw until recently. Running rampant through London, it is, and I can’t help but think it’s looking for something.”

Percy shrank, catching his meaning. “Not…me?”

“What you just saw was the terror of Whitechapel. I don’t know for sure why it came here, but…”

“Oh, God have mercy!” Percy cried. “You’re certain that is the Ripper?”

“I only wish I wasn’t.”

Percy thought about her splintered heavens and wondered if, before this night, something had been in place to protect her. She looked upward, afraid what she might see, but low, thick clouds were her only celestial view. “Am I in great danger, then?”

“Fear not, dear heart,” Alexi declared.

“I was terrified to leave you!”

“Indeed,” he replied. “I was hardly overjoyed to be left. But there are times when expert direction must be followed, no matter the fear.”

Percy dared look up into his resolute face. “Oh, Alexi. Whatever that was, whatever is happening…I need you.”

He smiled and met her gaze. “Good.”

Their faces were so close, the heat of their cheeks and the
parting of their mouths so inviting…Alexi forced himself to look away, but Percy could see the battle in his eyes.

Percy, held captive by the moment, by the kiss that should have been, put a hand to her forehead to quell the dizzying effects of desire. “What did you do, just then?” she asked, avoiding the magnetism of his eyes. “Did that fire erupt from the beast…or from you?”

“Many things will surprise you in the days to come,” was Alexi’s cryptic reply.

“I have no doubt of that. But where—”

“I told you, I have never seen that creature until lately. As for the fire…that was mine.”

“Goodness!” Percy breathed, clutching him tightly. “You are magical, then.”

“Mortal—at least mostly. With a few tricks. But, think no more of it. Think only of holding on. I beg you.”

“I would do anything for you, Alexi. Do you realize that?” she murmured.

He cleared his throat. “Careful with your words, Miss Parker. You belie your pride—and your modesty.”

“Oh, Alexi, I—”

“Say no more, Percy, please. Not now.”

She pressed fully against him. “We cannot unclasp our hearts in the least?”

He shuddered beneath her, clearly tempted. “It would hardly be proper.”

“Then tell me something of what you do, Alexi, or what we are running from. Else I shall go mad!” she cried, leaning against his shoulder. That she had been ignorant for so long seemed a travesty in itself.

Alexi sighed. “To tell you a mere ‘something’ may be even more maddening. All I can say is this: The living need protection from supernatural forces they cannot comprehend. There is a group charged with maintaining the relative peace of day-to-day mortality, protecting it from the dead by a mix of their own mortal talents and a few…special forces.”

Percy pursed her lips. “That could not be more vague, Alexi.”

“Oh,” he laughed, “it most certainly could.”

“Are you one of these individuals?”

“Sometimes
vague
is all one has to go on, Percy.”

“Go on? Toward what?”

“The undiscovered country, my dear. But now I’ve said too much.”

“Ah,” Percy muttered. “Well, I’m not any less maddened, my melancholy professor of Denmark. Quite illuminating indeed.”

“Ride with me, then, into the mouth of madness.”

“Do I have any choice?”

“Of course. But shall I leave you at the roadside until that creature returns? That, of course, is your alternative. My dear Miss Parker, you’re riding upon Prospero, the finest horse in all of England, and you’re in the arms of a most accomplished professor. What more could a young lady hope for? It’s almost like an opera, itself.”

Percy couldn’t help but chuckle and relax against his powerful frame. Alexi gave her a flickering smirk, clasping her hand in his.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a short distance.

“Out of the city limits. We must put distance between you and that thing. I would take you to my home but…my estate has not always been safe from spectral disturbance,” he remarked. She thought she heard pain in his voice. “Also, trouble often follows The Guard, so I cannot take you to our collective command. Not yet.”

“‘The Guard’? That’s your little club?”

Alexi smiled briefly. “I can only hope I’m not leaving them to another fight on their own…”

Storefronts and darkened flats of North London sped past Percy’s watering eyes. The spirits of the city parted hastily, some bowing, some darting into the bricks of townhomes
but keeping one protruding eye trained on the mortals’ hasty flight. These ghosts seemed as nervous as she, who was terrified that every gust of wind might be the breath of that ghastly canine presence who was “clearly looking for something.”

Outside the city, north of his estate and the surrounding expanse of spirit-ridden heath, Alexi took in the open air and sensed its quality. “Safe. For now,” he said.

Percy felt Prospero slow, and she broke from silence again, hungry for knowledge.

“Tell me
something
of yourself. I know so little of you outside your classroom.”

“If I tell you, will you remain rapt in my presence? Dare I break the enigma, the mystery of my person?”

Percy laughed, nervous. “Has my fascination been so obvious?”

Alexi’s eyes clouded as he glanced over his shoulder. “Father moved the family from Berlin to our London estate when I was very young, and came to London in pursuit of a great medical career. They left me there, with the property to myself and my sister, at sixteen, and returned to Berlin.”

“They left you? So young? Whatever for?” Percy breathed.

“Because they were terrified of me,” Alexi replied, his eyes and tone harsh.

Percy could not help but shudder and there lapsed an uncomfortable silence.

Alexi spoke again, cool and casual. “I was apprenticed to a secretly renowned and brilliant alchemist, a friend of my father’s who, noticing my penchant for mixing powders and devouring old texts, took me under his tutelage. Alchemy was increasingly considered arcane, but thankfully Athens still held interest in its basic principles—provided I coupled those with mathematics.”

“How did you come to teach there?”

“My dear friend Rebecca.”

“Headmistress Thompson?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I always thought the two of you were—”

“Friends, Percy, and have been for ages. We’ve worked closely together under incredibly trying circumstances. She, like I, was groomed for an academic setting since childhood. I can’t say I recall exactly how she came to run the school. I suppose I was so caught up in my research at the time…” He trailed off, as if trying to access a memory he could not locate. “At any rate, the academy was founded in the Quaker model, so Rebecca could, as a woman, serve as administrator.” He eyed her. “We continued thus until, one day, a ghostly young woman who was barely competent in my class unsettled my life.”

Percy made a face. “You lie, sir. I? Unsettle the inimitable Professor Rychman?”

“Always,” he replied, echoing her earlier sentiment as such.

Percy hid her flushed face in his chest, unable to hold back a giggle or stop her lips from pressing against his cloak in a phantom kiss. “But Professor, that is a rather large leap. Nothing happened between the start of your teaching career and my entrance into it?”