Gaslamp Gothic Box Set

by Kat Ross

  Far ahead, a spark of light bobbed unsteadily in the darkness.

  “John,” she hissed. “I see her.”

  “Watch your footing,” he warned from somewhere off to the right. “It’s squishy.”

  As if to confirm this statement, she heard a wet sucking sound.

  “Damn,” John muttered. “I think I just lost my shoe.”

  Harry took a step and felt her feet slide on some slick, slightly curved surface. She windmilled her arms like a drunken tightrope walker. One of them struck John, who gave a soft grunt of surprise.

  “What are we standing on?” she whispered once she’d regained her balance. “It feels strange.”

  “Logs, I think,” he replied in a low voice. “Must be the foundation of the building. Try to stay on top of them, the stuff beneath is worse.”

  Their voices sounded very small in the cavernous blackness.

  “What is this place?”

  “I don’t know, Harry.” He groped for her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Poor Mr. Lawrence,” she said bitterly.

  John was silent for a moment. “He’d want us to go on. To get the amulet back.”

  “I know.” Harry squeezed his hand back. “Let’s keep going then.”

  The great logs made for treacherous walking. Some were planted firmly in the mud of what must once have been Collect Pond, but others had a tendency to shift when one put weight on them. Several times, Harry nearly sprained an ankle when her foot slipped into the cracks between the logs. With the water up to her knees, the going was slow. But she had the satisfaction of knowing that Mary faced similar difficulties. Every so often, the glow of the amulet would suddenly dip down and she would hear a muffled curse.

  I hope she breaks a leg, Harry thought darkly.

  The walls receded into pitch darkness, but Harry realized she could see the rough outlines of things. Stone pillars rose out of the muck, slimy and dark with age. Around them swirled a thick white mist. It had swallowed Mary without a trace.

  “We’re losing her, John,” Harry hissed.

  She tried to go faster and immediately slipped on a patch of rotten wood. Harry threw out a hand to catch her fall, but she still cracked her knee on the trunk. Pain lanced through the joint.

  “Drat,” she muttered, tears stinging her eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, but I’ll live.” Harry clenched her teeth and used John’s offered hand to pull herself up.

  They continued on. The mist grew denser, brushing chill tendrils along her cheeks.

  “Mary Elizabeth Wickes!” John shouted.

  The rough stone walls threw his voice back in mocking echoes. Harry thought she heard a faint peal of laughter from somewhere ahead in the mists. She didn’t wish to go a single step further, but she knew John would never turn back now. He’d always had a surplus of physical courage—the result of growing up with four rowdy brothers—but it wasn’t just that. John had an innate decency that wouldn’t permit him to let someone like Mary run loose in the world. And, Harry thought with a mental sigh, she supposed she did too.

  As they moved forward, the mists parted slightly, revealing patches of dark, still water. Harry began to have the unpleasant sensation of being in two places superimposed one over the other. The pillars stood sentinel over the cavern like a forest of petrified trees. But at the very edge of vision she glimpsed another, even stranger landscape. Colorless reeds swayed in an invisible current. She turned her head and they vanished like distant stars, but part of her felt certain she stood on an abyssal plane that stretched into dimness in all directions. Her inner ear tilted dizzyingly.

  “Do you feel it, John?” she whispered.

  He nodded. “Keep your eyes straight ahead. It seems to help.”

  They kept going, picking their way across the platform of decaying logs. The water rose to Harry’s waist. She couldn’t see the surface at all now through the layer of mist, which only contributed to the creepy-crawly feeling that unseen things moved in the subterranean pond.

  “What is that, John?” Harry whispered.

  At first it was just a dark blur. But then the outline resolved itself into two vertical wooden beams connected by a crosspiece. A noose dangled from the center of the scaffold. Mary sat on a small platform beneath. Water lapped at its edges, making hollow echoing sounds that immediately made Harry think of the raft at her grandmother’s lake house in the Catskills. Harry used to swim out to it and bask like a turtle when they visited in the summers.

  “It’s pretty Mr. Weston,” Mary said in a sing-song voice. “Come to watch me swing?”

  The bizarre tableaux stopped them in their tracks. Harry wondered if it was truly real, but she could see the grain of the wood, smell the fresh sawdust. A bit of Mary’s skirt had caught on a nail that hadn’t been pounded in all the way.

  “Or perhaps it will be you who takes the final step into air,” Mary said. “The abyss is always waiting for the unwary.”

  She stared at Harry as she said this, her eyes dark and unknowable.

  “It’s not too late, Mary.” John took a step forward. “Don’t let that creature use you. It’s not your master unless you allow it to be.”

  Mary turned the amulet in her hands. It glowed with a sickly green light. The wet nightgown clung to her thin body. Harry could see the tendons in her neck, taut as bowstrings.

  “I told you the dead will walk,” she said, her feet swinging back and forth, heels drumming on the platform. “My dear little angels will come back to their Mary. Would you like to meet them?”

  She paused as if awaiting an answer. Harry felt ill. A shiver worked its way up from deep in her bones. She could barely remember a time when she’d felt warm and dry. It seemed another lifetime.

  “I’ve always liked children.” Mary scratched her lank hair. “Don’t know why I did it. The excitement, I suppose. Poor, unloved creatures. If their parents had cared, I might have spared them, but no one did, not really. No one but me. I always held them as they crossed over. The fluttering heart. The little sigh. It was a lovely thing.”

  She studied the gallows above her head. “This would have been my end if the master hadn’t come. A cruel fate. But if I serve him faithfully, I need never die. Not ever.”

  “He promised the same to Araminta Sabelline,” Harry said quietly. “Before he killed her.”

  Mary frowned, turning the amulet over and over in her hands.

  “You wanted to make amends,” John said. “That’s why you wrote to Julius Sabelline.”

  A tic contorted her face. “It was a mistake. But that Mary is gone now. She was always weak and timid. I made her take a dose of her own medicine.” She gave a sly smile. “Would you like a nice cup of hot chocolate, Mr. Weston? I’ll put cinnamon in it. No one makes hot chocolate like Mary does.”

  “No games.” He’d been steadily moving towards her. “Give me back the amulet and we’ll help you. You said your everlasting soul couldn’t be saved, but it’s not true. You can still end this before it’s too late.”

  “But it is, Mr. Weston.” She smiled sweetly. “The gate is already open, you see.”

  The mist shivered like a candle guttering in a draft of air. The undulating reeds in the corners of Harry’s vision grew more solid. More real. This was the sea of her dream, she realized. The Dominion. Not hellfire but someplace cold and dark.

  Mary tilted her head. “They’re coming.” She grinned, but there was an uncertain edge to it. “They loved their Mary. You’ll see.”

  “John,” Harry hissed. “I think we should….”

  She trailed off as the mist slowly peeled away from the gallows. Little ripples marred the still surface of the pond. The air thickened. An oppressive feeling of dread stole over Harry, as paralyzing as the night terrors. Mary seemed to feel it too, for her gaze darted around.

  Something was moving under the water. Harry couldn’t see it, but she felt faint pressure as it brushed against her skirts. The
temperature dropped sharply. Mary’s breath streamed out in white bursts. Her eyes grew huge in her face.

  “The master promised,” she muttered. “He promised. The children can’t be angry at Mary. She was only helping them.” She clutched her belly, as if at a sudden pain. “Mustn’t hold a grudge now. Mary’s let you out of the cold place. She knows how hungry the poor dears must be. She’ll feed you well. Help you grow strong again.”

  Harry gave a little shriek as a white face flashed in the depths, there and gone in an instant.

  Mary swallowed. She raised a trembling hand to head. It came away with a hank of hair. She examined it blankly for a moment. “Perhaps best to close the gate,” she whispered. “I promised the master, but—”

  She started to scoot backward from the edge of the gallows when a small, pale fist closed around her ankle. It had dirty black nails shaped like fishhooks. They dug into the skin. Mary’s eyes bugged out as a thin line of blood trickled down her foot.

  Harry’s tongue froze to the roof of her mouth. Her legs felt numb. She watched, transfixed, as more hands seized hold of Mary’s skirts, dragging her into the water. Mary clung to the edge, nails raking the wood, hoarse cries coming from her throat. The amulet fell from her hand.

  John lurched forward, trying to catch it, but he was too far away. The moment the talisman touched the water, suffocating blackness fell on the cavern.

  Mary screamed a final time. It became a watery gurgle as her head went under.

  Then all was still.

  27

  Vivienne backed out of the cell, her attention fixed on Alec Lawrence.

  Except it wasn’t Alec. Not anymore.

  How foolish she’d been to think the bond protected them. Maybe the daemon hadn’t taken him on the tower in Oxford because it didn’t have sufficient time. She’d interrupted it. Or maybe it was simply playing its own game. Either way, they’d made a fatal miscalculation. Now she faced something new.

  A daēva with a daemon inside.

  She could feel it leaking through their bond like a sickness. An ancient, evil intelligence. Vivienne’s skin crawled. If Alec was there, she couldn’t find him. But she refused to admit he was dead. If she did, she knew it would break her.

  The daemon grinned with Alec’s mouth and Vivienne felt a hatred so pure, it was like freedom.

  Fight filthy. There aren’t rules anymore. All that’s done now.

  So Vivienne did something she’d never done in all the years they were bonded. Something she’d never even contemplated because it was so morally indefensible. She sent a white-hot lance of pain through the cuff.

  Only the human of the pair had the power to do that. It was the way one administered punishment to a disobedient daēva and it should have knocked Alec to his knees. Sent him writhing on the ground in agony. But his face remained smooth. Unreadable.

  Not possible.

  “You can’t hurt us,” he said. Wet hair was plastered across his forehead in dark clumps. His face looked the same, yet the lines of it were alien somehow. “Well, I suppose you can hurt him. But your tricks won’t work with me.”

  The sound of his voice was a knife in her heart. Still well-educated, faintly accented but with no definable nationality. A voice made for laughter and poetry and bad jokes.

  “What is it you want?” she snarled, backing away to give herself room.

  Alec’s eyes tracked her, a leopard stalking a mouse.

  “We want our power back,” he said.

  She snorted. “Do you take me for a complete idiot?”

  “It’s ours.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s his.”

  The power belonged to Alec. It had always belonged to Alec. The cuffs themselves were a remnant of a dark period in human history when the daēvas had been forced recruits in a war with the undead. Now Vivienne was just grateful she still held his leash. Alec was stronger and faster, but at least he couldn’t tear her apart with air or make her blood boil.

  She backed down the corridor, empty, locked cells to either side. The gas jets flickered fitfully. She wondered how long it would be before they failed.

  Daēvas could see in the darkness like cats.

  “We always loved you,” Alec said, slowly approaching as Vivienne backed away. His arms hung at his sides, deceptively loose. She knew he could strike faster than she could blink. “But you know that, don’t you?”

  “There is no we,” she said. “You’re just some dead thing that won’t admit it’s dead.”

  “We were your faithful hound and you kicked us in the ribs.”

  “Shut the bloody hell up!”

  Vivienne switched the sword to her left hand and wiped cold sweat from her palm on her dress. She switched it back to her right hand. The daemon had her over a barrel and they both knew it. Even if she miraculously found an opening, she couldn’t kill him. She’d be killing Alec. Maybe Alec was already dead, but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe there still was a way to save him. She didn’t know. And as long as there was any chance at all, she wouldn’t risk it. A hopeless situation.

  “Poor crippled hound,” he said, fingers trailing along the bars.

  “Alec was never a cripple.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion. I feel his pain, Tijah. Or should I call you Vivienne now?”

  “I don’t give a toss what you call me.”

  “Oh, I think you do.” He grinned. “You hurt us. Took a piece of us and trapped it in the cuffs. What does that make you, Tijah?”

  Vivienne said nothing. She was watching the daemon’s hands.

  It’s an interesting thing to fight at a man’s side for centuries. You learn all his secrets. All his tells. And she knew Alec’s left ring finger would twitch just before he attacked.

  “Is he alive?” she asked, to buy time. She didn’t expect an honest answer.

  “Oh, he’s here somewhere.” As if Alec was a misplaced sock. “I have his memories. All the way back to the day you camped with Alexander’s army on the shores of the lake in Bactria. You ran from him. Do you remember that, Tijah?”

  She did. Alec—Achaemenes then—had healed her. He’d also wanted her desperately and she’d almost lost herself in that desire. It wasn’t a memory she cared to dredge up.

  “Who knew the undead could be so feckin’ tedious?” she asked.

  Alec’s expression darkened. He removed his jacket and threw it to the side. Another familiar gesture she’d seen a thousand times. Vivienne kept her face smooth but her gut tightened.

  She couldn’t kill Alec, but the daemon wanted her dead. Needed her dead. That was the only way to break the cuffs. To free Alec’s elemental power. And while Vivienne would never succumb to old age or disease, she could die from violence—just like her bonded.

  She stopped, poised on the balls of her feet. “You know my true name, daemon. It’s only fair you tell me yours.”

  Alec stopped too, leaving ten feet between them. Despite the taunting, he was wary of her.

  Now he laughed softly. “Proper introductions before you die, is that what you’re after?”

  The tone was wry, sardonic. Vintage Alec Lawrence. She realized with dreamy horror that it was already assuming his personality. Sifting through two thousand years of memories, learning the man inside and out. If she hadn’t seen Alec taken with her own eyes, if she didn’t feel the wrongness of him through the bond, Vivienne had no doubt this thing could have fooled her into believing he was Alec.

  “You’re nothing but a parasite. A bloody great tapeworm.”

  “Catherine doesn’t think so.” His lips curled in an amused smile. The cat that devoured the canary in one savage bite.

  Oh, it knows where the soft bits are, Vivienne thought. The unguarded belly. Bastard.

  She lunged forward, testing his defenses, hoping against hope the thing inside Alec would be even a hair slower. The sword whistled through air as he slipped easily out of reach.

  “All you do is lie, daemon.”

  “Am I lying
when I say he’s half in love with her but won’t admit it, even to himself?”

  Vivienne stayed silent.

  “An intriguing woman, Catherine de Mornay. A whore, but our gallant Mr. Lawrence doesn’t care.” He stared at her. “She likes to comb his hair before she spreads her legs for him. Did you know that?”

  Vivienne watched him move. The limp was still there though he tried to conceal it. Alec’s infirmity was her only advantage. She needed to hamstring him. Hurt him badly enough that he’d stay down. For a normal person, a few broken bones would put them into shock. Not Alec Lawrence. He could absorb an ocean of pain with no discernable effect. She’d seen it hundreds of times. Thousands.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting our lovely Catherine.” His eyes grew flat. Reptilian. “I wonder how she’ll look with her womb on the outside.”

  Alec’s ring finger twitched.

  Before he moved, she was already pivoting on her right foot. Without that split second head start, Vivienne knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she would have been dead. She spun and landed a ferocious kick to the side of his bad knee, then followed it with a punch to the ribs just as he’d done to her in the sparring room at St. James. The punch might have cracked a rib or two, but it was the blow to the knee that brought him down. His leg buckled like an unstrung puppet. The backwash of pain through the bond made her gag.

  It was the first time she’d ever exploited Alec’s infirmity.

  Alec screamed and she kicked him in the face. Now he lay on his back, the tip of her sword drawing a pinprick of blood at the juncture of throat and jaw. One quick thrust and she’d lay open his carotid artery. Vivienne’s heart hammered in her chest. Their eyes locked.

  “Please,” Alec whispered. “Viv….”

  “Shut up.” Her teeth ground so hard they creaked.

  “It’s me, Vivienne. I just can’t—”

  “Feck!” She increased the pressure by a fraction. A line of blood ran into his collar.