Unnatural Issue (52 page)

Gone. All gone. She felt as if a bomb had dropped beside her, and she had lost a limb but hadn’t quite realized it yet.

Another Fae appeared, this time from the side, wearing a yellow summer dress.
“Don’t try to deny it! You never cared for me, for myself, you only loved the reflection of yourself in my eyes. I loved you, Richard, but I cannot love this monster you have become!”

A third Fae appeared, on the left, this one in a winter cape.
“You are reeking with the stench of death! You would house my soul in a rotting, walking corpse! You say you love me, but you would murder the child
I
loved, the child I gave up my life for, and force me into endless pain and living death! You are not even a beast, Richard Whitestone! You are worse than the evil things
you
used to hunt!”

Now more and more Fae crowded around him, hissing, weeping, fiercely accusing him of all the horrors he had tried to hide. And Susanne stood there, locked in the paralysis of shock.

All she wanted to do was collapse on the ground and scream, weep, howl for the deaths of her
real
family.

With a supreme effort of will, she wrenched herself out of her shock. She could not afford to mourn, not now—now she had to stop her father, as only she could.

As the Fae encircled him, he backed up, step by step, eyes darting from one to another of them. She forced herself to move, forced herself to edge around him, to get to that circle he had built to protect himself. Armed with the knowledge that Peter had given her, she took a deep breath, forced herself to be calm and steady and then—

Then it all sprang into focus. She could see the circle, but she also saw, clearly, just
how
he had built it. And he had been careless. Anyone of his bloodline could alter it.

While he was occupied, she redrew the glyphs, repurposed the energies, and called on the living rock beneath the dirt floor of the warehouse to answer her. Just as he broke free of the Fae, shouting incoherently, she felt the rock respond to her.

He dashed into his circle, running past her without really seeing her.

And she closed the trap.

He stopped, quite literally, in his tracks, his feet suddenly unable to move, held in place by the power of the earth itself. He tried to wrench them free and found he could not, and before he could see her, the Fae pounced, interposing themselves between him and Susanne, resuming their accusations and recriminations.

Suddenly, he made a terrible sound, a cross between a wail and a scream, and collapsed into a fetal curl on the ground.

Then, without warning, the Front came to England.

All those months had honed her instincts, and when she heard the faint, familiar whistle above her, she instinctively flung herself to the side onto the floor and covered her head.

And the world blew apart around her.

The walking dead all, suddenly and without warning, froze in place.

Susanne!
Peter thought exultantly, but neither he nor the others stopped to congratulate themselves. At any moment, the liches might start to move again.

Peter and Aldercroft stepped forward, side by side, their hands glowing—and in Alderscroft’s case, on fire—with the respective Elemental powers. Peter fixed his gaze on what appeared to be the leader of the trolls—a huge, ugly creature with greenish, warty skin, its primitive clothing encrusted with dirt and stains.

“Flee,” he said, sternly. “Go now, and you will not be pur—

There had been an odd sound approaching for some time; it sounded like an aeroplane, but it was moving very slowly. Some part of Peter was wondering just what an aeroplane was doing up at night, when he heard a far too familiar whistling sound.

“Get down!”
he shouted, flinging himself sideways and taking Maya and Peter Scott down with him.

And the graveyard exploded around them.

He’d never been that close to a bomb bursting before, and he never wanted to be again. There was a moment of blankness, then he came to himself and shook his head, hard. His ears were ringing. He looked around; the others were covered in bits of corpse and dirt and snow, but they seemed to be all right.

He couldn’t hear, at least not well. He thought he heard Maya shouting something, but it was all muffled.

Zeppelins. They must have been bombed by zeppelins. Nothing else had the range to get across the Channel.
Alderscroft’s circle of fire,
he realized.
It might just as well have been a target.

Five hundred yards away, there was the flash of another explosion—all his damaged ears heard was a muffled
thud.
But this one had hit something more substantial than a graveyard; it must have hit a building, because there were flames shooting up into the sky.

Susanne couldn’t hear, and she felt muzzy-headed, but she knew she had to get out of there. That mutated into something a great deal more urgent when a burning beam fell between her and her father, who was still in his fetal curl on the floor. Robin and the Fae were nowhere to be seen—they must have vanished as soon as the bomb hit.

Perhaps she might have tried to get to him and get him out as well before that chunk of flaming wood landed close enough to make the hem of her skirt smolder, but there was no way she could get to him now.

Incendiaries. They’re dropping incendiaries.
She’d seen the men, hideously burned by the hellish bombs and shells, but she had never seen one herself. She never wanted to again. Already the roof of the building was fully engulfed, and bits of flaming debris raining down on her. In another moment, she wouldn’t be able to get out herself.

Fear galvanized her. She scrambled to her feet, hauled up her skirts, and sprinted for the door. She managed to wrench it open, even though the incredible heat had started to warp the frame, and paused for a quick glance back.

Richard Whitestone was still curled on the floor. And as she darted out into the cold air and freedom and safety, the roof above him gave way and buried him beneath a pile of burning wood and shingles.

She staggered out the door just in time to see the flash of another explosion, farther away. It couldn’t be aeroplanes—

It must be zeppelins.

She strained her eyes toward the sky; the clouds were incredibly low, but she thought she could make out three dark shapes, too regular to be cloud formations. There were three more explosions just beneath them, confirming her guess.

Peter! Peter and the others!
Thank goodness Peter and Garrick had been on the Front, and they knew what bombs sounded like—

But she ran for the cemetery where she had left them, more fear flooding through her. Had they managed to hold off her father’s creatures? Had any of the bombs struck near them?

She met them staggering out of the cemetery, Garrick and Peter supporting Lord Alderscroft between them.

By now, the town was roused—and her hearing was coming back. She heard the bells and sirens of the fire brigade, heard people screaming, and heard the distant explosions of still more bombs, turning the night into horror for everyone in Gravesend.

When Peter saw her, he dropped Alderscroft’s arm and ran toward her, catching her in a frantic embrace that she was in no mood to shake off. He took her face in both his hands after a moment. “Are you all right? Richard—”

“Dead,” she said, and all her energy ran out. “A bomb dropped on the building we were in.” Her knees wobbled and threatened to give way. She kept herself standing by holding onto him.

“Dear Lord.” He held her up.

“Almsley, the best thing we can do right now is get away from here,” Lord Alderscroft rumbled as he pulled away from Garrick. “There is nothing we can do to help, and there are too many questions we cannot answer.”

“The hotel is close,” Peter replied. “And my automobile is closer. You’re right. There is nothing we can do here.”

The six of them staggered to where Peter had left the auto, and crammed into it, Susanne between Peter and Garrick in the front, the others in the back, as they had on the journey to the cemetery. Garrick took the wheel, and Peter did not object. Instead, he put his head against the doorpost, and closed his eyes.

Garrick drove in silence for a while. The bombardment seemed to have stopped, but the night was alive with alarms and Black Marias and fire engines racing to the rescue. Finally, just as they pulled up to the hotel, Peter spoke.

“You’re wrong, Old Lion,” he said, his eyes still closed. “That bomb is going to explain quite well why there is a carpet of cadaver parts strewn all over that part of the graveyard.”

“So it is,” Alderscroft replied after a moment.

When Susanne tried to get out of the auto, she nearly fell. Her legs, inexplicably, would not hold her up. Peter solved the problem by picking her up and carrying her in himself, and she was getting so muzzy-headed that she was not inclined to argue with him. She recognized the symptoms though—

“Con-cussion,” she said thickly. “I’m con-cussed.”

“Without a doubt,” he replied, and then they were in the door, into the light and warmth of the lobby, and the hotel staff fell upon them with cries of concern.

Peter would not allow anyone to carry her but himself; he asked for the hotel physician, and brought her to her room, only leaving her there and allowing others to take him off to be tended when a maid and the doctor were in the room.

After that, things were blurred together in a vague dreamlike way. The maid undressed her and put her properly into bed, bathing her face and hands and combing bits of debris out of her hair. The doctor examined her and ordered monitoring and rest. They all left—and that was all she remembered until she woke, and her windows streamed with winter sunlight.

Susanne stood just outside Charles’ room and watched as his fiancé Rose comforted him. There was no doubt that her father had had something to do with his memory loss—perhaps trying to make him an easy victim that could not defend himself against a second attack. His memory came back to him all at once about the same time that Richard Whitestone had died.

Including what must have been the horror of the attack. He had recognized some of the faces of the dead that had come at him—and had been forced to “kill” them a second time. He had been buried under a pile of bodies and body parts to the point where he’d had to be dug out. Small wonder he needed to be comforted.

But not by her. He had barely greeted her—and had instead turned to Rose to weep unashamedly in her arms. To her credit, Rose had not lorded it over her defeated rival; she had been too concerned with Charles.

The elder Kerridges had been civil to her and even thanked her, but it was clear that they wanted to see the last of her. They had already arranged for Charles’ transfer to a hospital Maya recommended in Yorkshire. It was very clear that his nerves were utterly shattered, and he would be a very long time recovering. Military doctors were not very sympathetic to men with these symptoms; the Kerridges were going to find someone who would be.