Stranger

by Zoë Archer

  Then she was running again, fighting to keep pace with Catullus’s long legs. But he knew she couldn’t match him for speed and maneuverability, and kept beside her. They entered the second room from the end on the right—someone’s office, it appeared—and spotted metal spiral stairs twisting up to another floor.

  She struggled not to feel dizzy from racing up the twisting stairs. When they reached the top, she and Catullus found themselves at one end of a much larger hallway than anything else they’d gone through before. This was not a decorative space, but the thickly timbered walls and ceiling revealed a far more martial purpose. At the other end of the passage stood a broad door studded with bolts. A fortress’s door.

  “The Primal Source must be on the other side of that,” said Catullus. He glanced around with a scowl. “If we can make it down this gauntlet.”

  Whatever the Heirs had been anticipating as far as a siege, they had not counted on fire. Edgeworth’s blaze had spread, so that the wooden walls of the passage rippled with flame. Fire licked along the timbers lining the ceiling, an architecture of flame that groaned as it was consumed.

  Wasting no time, Gemma and Catullus ran down the passage. The structure quaked from the expanding fire. She and Catullus staggered as the building shook. Smoke filled the hallway, and Gemma bent over, coughing. As she did so, something overhead rumbled.

  “Back, Gemma!” Catullus bellowed.

  She stumbled backward just as a burning beam fell.

  Throwing up an arm to shield herself from a rain of cinders, Gemma felt the blistering heat of the beam as it crashed down. Between her and Catullus. A portion of the ceiling smashed down with it, sputtering flame. She reared back from the fire. The flames from the beam and collapsed ceiling stretched up, forming a barrier she couldn’t traverse.

  Catullus stared at her from across the blaze. Lurid light reflected in the glass of his spectacles. He moved to breach the fire to reach her, but it held him off.

  “Go back,” he shouted to her. “Down the stairs and get the hell out of here.”

  She wouldn’t abandon him. “But—”

  “Do it,” he snarled. “I’ll get the Primal Source. Get yourself to safety.”

  Her throat ached, and she wanted to argue. It wasn’t smoke that made her eyes brim and burn.

  More groaning overhead. She flung herself away just before another section of ceiling collapsed. Coughing, staggering to her feet, she saw that she was now trapped between two barriers of flame. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back.

  She exhausted her repertoire of curse words, trying to figure a way out. Everything around her was heat and smoke and fire. She could barely make out Catullus as he lunged and fell back and lunged again, trying to reach her. He roared his frustration, a sound more terrifying than the noise of the burning building, hissing and moaning as fire scored its walls.

  God, oh God. She truly, truly didn’t want to burn to death. It ranked right up there as one of the least pleasant ways to die. But she’d be damned if Catullus burned with her. “Go!” she shouted above the din. “Get the Primal Source! Before this whole place turns to ashes!”

  “I’m not bloody leaving you!” he bellowed.

  Fine words from a man who was perfectly willing to let her abandon him.

  He went still. Gemma couldn’t tell for certain, but it looked as if he’d closed his eyes in concentration. What the hell was he doing? He needed to run, to complete the mission, not stand there, waiting to go up in flame.

  Her eyes streamed, and she rubbed fruitlessly at them. What she saw made her dig her knuckles into her eyes again. Catullus had disappeared.

  Her heart pitched down, even as she felt grateful that he’d stopped trying to rescue her and saved himself.

  Suddenly, strong arms wrapped around her waist from behind. Gemma gasped, then coughed from inhaling smoke. She writhed in the tight grip. It had to be Edgeworth, appearing out of the fire. She fought, kicking and throwing punches, trying to land a knee in Edgeworth’s groin, until a wonderfully familiar voice said in her ear, “My love, if you aren’t careful, we will never have children together.”

  “Catullus,” she rasped. Gemma twisted around to see that, yes, somehow he’d crossed through the fire to reach her. But she hadn’t seen him, unless the flames and smoke were too thick. “How …?”

  “Like this,” he said. He closed his eyes.

  She lost her breath once again. One moment, they were trapped between two burning barriers, and the next, they stood where Catullus had been seconds before. Free of her fiery prison.

  She spun to stare up at him. “How did you do that?” “I used the magic you gave me.” Soot streaked his face and surcoat, yet to her he appeared a stainless knight. “But it only works on doors.”

  “Not just physical doors. It opens doors in space. If I concentrate, and can see the place, I can travel there.” He smiled faintly, amazed at his own discovery. “Thusly.” He closed his eyes in concentration.

  They appeared suddenly in front of the door at the end of the burning hallway, dozens of yards from where they had stood. Her head spun from the quick movement.

  “I didn’t know the magic could do that,” she breathed.

  “I didn’t either.” He smiled at her, wry. “Until I was properly motivated.” His smile faded, replaced by a look of such intensity, it put the fire to shame.

  They stared up at the massive door. On the other side of the door, the Primal Source was held captive. The object of their long journey. The greatest magical power known. Close. They were so close.

  For anyone else, such a huge, heavy door would prove an impossible, impassable barrier. The door, as Day had said, was enchanted, opening only for Heirs.

  But she and Catullus never acknowledged barriers.

  “Shall we, Miss Murphy?” Catullus asked. He placed a hand on the door.

  She mimicked his polite British tone as she, too, put her hand on the door. “With the greatest of pleasure, Mr. Graves.”

  It swung inward, opening. They stepped into a large chamber, two stories high. It resembled a library, with a gallery running around its perimeter with another spiral stair connecting the ground floor with the gallery. Narrow, barred windows were set high in the walls. Instead of books, glass cases lined the shelves on the ground floor and balcony. In each case was an object. Some ornate, like elaborate crowns or jewelry, some simple, such as roughly carved wooden figurines or battered metal trinkets. She was no expert, but Gemma could tell that the objects came from around the globe. They came from Africa, Asia, Europe, even the lands of the American Indians.

  There was something so forlorn about seeing all these objects locked within their glass cases, taken from the living, breathing world to be shut away in airless prisons. They were throneless monarchs, removed from context and stripped of dignity to become curiosities.

  Catullus seemed to share her feelings. He took in all of the objects in their cases, frowning, troubled.

  “Never seen so many Sources in one place before,” he murmured. “Strange. I can feel their power, but it all seems … muted. Bleak. Like lions at the zoo.”

  “Day said the Primal Source should be here.”

  He pointed to a case on the balcony, directly across from the door. She squinted, trying to see what the case contained, and started when she realized that it held just a single, ordinary rock. It was reddish in color, roughly the size of a human fist. Other than its color, there was nothing extraordinary or even slightly noteworthy about it.

  “Are you sure that’s it?”

  “I have not actually seen it with my own eyes,” he admitted. “But Astrid is very familiar with the Primal Source, and she described it in detail to me. That is most definitively it.”

  “Then let’s go get the Primal Source.”

  They stepped fully into the chamber. The door slammed shut behind them, locking itself.

  Gemma hadn’t seen the small stove in a corner of the room until it burst open, spew
ing flame. From the fire, a maddeningly recognizable figure emerged and strode to the center of the chamber. Flames trailed behind him, like the path of a slug. “This is where you will die,” Edgeworth sneered. “Fitting—surrounded by the precious Sources you tried to cosset, and they will do nothing to help you.”

  “This chamber is a tomb,” Catullus answered. “But not ours.”

  He and Edgeworth stared at one another. The moment drew out, tense to the point of breaking. Gemma’s heart pumped, aching in its intensity, as she looked back and forth between the two men. They could not be more dissimilar. Not simply in their appearance, but in the quality of their souls. The darkness swamping Edgeworth choked away all joy, all life, wanting only dominance and subjugation. Catullus wasn’t a perfect paragon—he had the fears and needs of any man—but he shone all the brighter because of those flaws. He used the gift of his mind selflessly, wanting a better world not just for himself, but for everyone, regardless of nationality, sex, or color. He represented everything Edgeworth despised and wished to destroy.

  These antitheses gazed at one another, taking each other’s measure, testing mettle. Catullus’s hand draped over the grip of his sword. Edgeworth stood like a gunfighter, ready to unleash his fire at the slightest excuse.

  Then, a blur of movement. Catullus materialized at the base of the staircase that led to the gallery. Edgeworth spun around, shocked, then shot a bolt of fire at Catullus.

  Catullus disappeared, reappearing at the top of the stairs, but the flames had already caught him across his shoulder, burning through his surcoat and tunic to the skin beneath. He made no noise, even though the pain had to be tremendous.

  Edgeworth launched himself up the stairs, moving with tremendous speed. Seeing that Catullus approached the Primal Source, Edgeworth threw a fireball at him. Catullus managed to deflect it with his sword, but he stumbled and the sword clattered from his grip, falling down to the floor below. He turned to the Primal Source, but before he could materialize beside it, Edgeworth knocked him down with a jet of flame. Catullus rolled, trying to douse the fire on his back.

  Seizing this momentary distraction, Edgeworth leapt over Catullus’s prone form. Any moment now, Edgeworth would reach the Primal Source. What he might do once he got there, she didn’t know. It wouldn’t be good, that she could assume.

  Gemma forced herself to concentrate, staring at the place next to the case holding the Primal Source. She envisioned the doors within space itself, the planes of distance and depth, and herself, opening the doors.

  She felt herself wink out like a candle. And then flicker back. She glanced around, momentarily disoriented. She stood on the gallery, right beside the case holding the Primal Source.

  Her brief sense of triumph disappeared when she saw Edgeworth coming closer. He started when he spotted her.

  “No manners,” she said. “Ladies … well, women first.” She reached for the case beside her. No doubt it would be locked, and this wasn’t a problem.

  A wall of heat slammed into her, throwing her back against a shelf. The shelf caught fire almost at once. If Catullus hadn’t rammed himself into Edgeworth, throwing off his aim, Gemma would have been nothing but ashes and red hair. She pushed herself upright.

  Edgeworth and Catullus now thrashed each other. Flames blocked her path to Catullus.

  “Transport yourself away,” she shouted to Catullus.

  He dodged Edgeworth’s fist and swung his own. “Can’t. Bloody. Concentrate.”

  The men fought to reach the Primal Source first. They pummeled one another mercilessly. She’d seen men brawl before, but never like this. Every punch, every blow, was intended to kill. She thought herself inured to most violence, but it was one thing to watch two boxers or fur trappers exchange blows, quite another when one of the combatants was the man she loved.

  Catullus didn’t fight like a scientist or scholar. In the narrow space of the gallery he fought brutally, lethally. It was almost beautiful, if it wasn’t so awful. In the fray, he lost his spectacles. Glass from the broken lenses cut his cheek. He didn’t notice. He rained punches down on Edgeworth, and the smaller man couldn’t match him. Catullus had the advantage, and hope flared in Gemma.

  Edgeworth’s hands suddenly blazed. They scorched Catullus, pushing him back just enough for Edgeworth to wriggle away and reach the case.

  Gemma grabbed her dagger and flung herself through the flames at him, trying to keep him from opening the case. He kicked her away, winding her as she hit the railing at the edge of the gallery. Her knife fell from her hand.

  Edgeworth, grinning, opened the case. His hand closed around the Primal Source.

  Hell broke loose.

  Light enveloped Edgeworth. The radiance blinded, yet Gemma couldn’t look away. She and Catullus stared, appalled, as fire completely engulfed the Heir, turning him from a man into a living torch. All of his limbs blazed, throwing off oppressive heat, and he gazed down at himself, laughing.

  “Who needs Arthur?” he cried. He held up the Primal Source. “This has given me more power than any trifling king. England will rally to me.”

  Gemma pulled her pistol, Catullus his shotgun. They both unleashed a furious barrage on Edgeworth, but the bullets melted in the heat around him.

  Drunk on his new power, Edgeworth occupied himself by touching anything flammable and setting them alight. He did not care that the Heirs’ headquarters would be a charred ruin; all that mattered was displaying his might. He ran along the gallery, starting fires.

  As the blaze began to spread, and with Edgeworth on the opposite side of the gallery, Gemma grabbed her knife and crawled to Catullus. Smoke burned her eyes and stung in her nostrils. “There was a fire in London,” she coughed, “a big fire.”

  “In 1666,” he answered. He tore a strip of fabric from his surcoat and pressed it to her nose and mouth, then did the same for himself. “Burned for four days. Nearly destroyed everything within the city walls.”

  She tried to breathe through the fabric. “There was one in Chicago, too. Huge sections of the city were leveled. Both fires will be church barbecues compared to what Edgeworth could do.”

  His eyes narrowed, and she knew he was thinking furiously about what they could do to stop Edgeworth. Bullets were useless, and Gemma’s supply was almost gone. Neither of them could get close enough to take the Primal Source from Edgeworth. They’d be burned to charcoal in seconds. He scanned the room, searching for an answer.

  “Maybe you could invent something to put out fires,” she joked weakly.

  He froze in his assessment. Though his eyes were reddened from the smoke, she couldn’t mistake the light of inspiration within them. He glanced around the chamber again, and what he saw must have met whatever criterion he needed fulfilled.

  “Tell me what I can do to help,” she said at once.

  Thank God he didn’t try to talk her out of helping. Instead, he said in a clipped, commanding voice, “Close the windows. Make sure they’re shut tight.”

  Gemma glanced at the barred windows lining the chamber. Most of them were open, allowing smoke to waft out and bringing in a bit of welcome air. “We’ll suffocate.”

  “It’s not us I’m trying to smother.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll keep him distracted.”

  Smoke and rebellion made her cough. Edgeworth, deep in his madness, drew patterns of fire along the floor. He caught sight of Catullus and Gemma huddled together and smirked. Between his hands, flames wove into knots, ready to trap them in a burning snare.

  “No,” she said. “He’ll kill you.”

  “He won’t,” Catullus answered. He leaned forward and kissed her, hard and fierce, before springing to his feet. “You look like a flaming pudding,” he called across the chamber to Edgeworth.

  The Heir took the bait. From the other side of the room, he directed a blast of flame at Catullus, who disappeared. The wooden pedestal Catullus had been standing in front of caught fire.

&nb
sp; Catullus reappeared at the foot of the spiral stairs. “Down here, Guy Fawkes.”

  Edgeworth threw another ball of fire at Catullus, who dematerialized just before being struck.

  Gemma didn’t have much time. She jumped up and, darting around the flames now surrounding her, ran to the nearest window. She slammed it shut. Testing the frame, she ensured the window’s tight seal.

  She glanced toward the ground floor of the chamber. Catullus now stood near one of the shelves close to the door.

  Edgeworth ran to the top of the spiral staircase. He grabbed the metal railings. Within seconds the whole metal structure glowed red-hot. The stair buckled as it grew molten. Bellowing, Edgeworth tore the stair from its anchors in the floor and shoved it toward where Catullus had just materialized. The structure toppled. Catullus barely managed to disappear before being crushed by the glowing hot metal.

  Infuriated, Edgeworth leapt down from the gallery and landed on the ground floor in a crouch.

  With the gallery cleared of Edgeworth’s presence, Gemma sprinted to the windows. She banged them shut, even as she desperately craved the smokeless air.

  At the noise she created, Edgeworth turned to see what she was about. He started to raise his hands to launch a burst of fire at her. A chair, miraculously intact and un-burned, flew at him, thrown by Catullus. Though the chair turned to smoldering splinters before it could touch Edgeworth, it provided enough of a distraction for Edgeworth, allowing Gemma to continue with her task.

  She wouldn’t allow herself to look down from the gallery, knowing that if she watched Catullus risking his life for her, all concentration and intent would be lost. So she hurried about her work, coughing, darting around localized fires.

  One half of the windows were sealed tightly. She moved down the gallery, heading toward the other half of the room, when the fires blazed higher, blocking her path. Damn!