by Kim Lenox
Chink. Chink. Chink.
Suspicion and fear twisted in her throat, and deeper, into her chest, but she swallowed it away. The sounds she heard were likely created by the cemetery workers doing their final bit of work for the day.
Chink. Chink.
Her lip throbbed where she bit into her flesh. What task could possibly require such repetitive and insistent blows? Warily, she approached the catacomb where her father’s coffin was to have been deposited. The metal door featured a small, square opening, scored with iron bars.
Shuffling sounds came from within.
Chink.
Fear that her secret would be discovered surpassed any fear of what might be inside making the noise. She launched herself onto the tips of her toes and grasped the edge of the window. In the darkness, she perceived the dim outline of numerous coffins, stacked on shelves and blanketed in dust. The flowers she’d arranged yesterday atop her mother’s coffin lay discarded on the floor.
A shadow moved.
“You there,” she called.
The shadow merged with the darkness, making her question whether she’d seen anything at all.
She dropped from the window and grasped the thick metal handle. She tugged, to no avail. The door was locked.
She had seen something. And she’d heard something too.
Wood splintered.
She whirled, racing to the edge of the circle, searching for any worker, any guest, to whom she could shout out her accusations of desecration. She saw no one. Wind twisted her skirts. The whispers returned, filling her ears. Again she returned to the door, pressing her fingertips against her mouth, suppressing the urge to scream. Having no other recourse, she twisted the ball clasp on her bag and snatched out her pistol.
“I’m warning you. Come out of there!” she challenged, her voice reverberating in the silence.
Wood crashed.
She thrust her arm between the metal bars, gun in hand. She would fire a warning shot, and flush the person out—at least then she would know with whom she dealt.
A large stone hurtled from the darkness to slam against the door beside her head.
Mina stared. A shadow grew distinct. Became larger.
Bronze eyes blinked . . . glowed.
She screamed. The creature roared, hurtling toward her.
She fired.
Mark crouched in the darkness, silent in his rage.
He closed his eyes, and breathed deeply through his nostrils. He focused on the wound, working to disintegrate the bullet and repair his shattered shoulder blade. The intensity of the pain ebbed, but did not cease.
A clatter of footsteps approached, and an inquiry of voices. He opened his eyes. A key turned in the lock, its metallic rotation echoing through the narrow vault. The door groaned inward. An aged groundsman in rolled shirtsleeves, sagging vest and dirt-caked trousers lifted a lantern to illuminate the interior. His searching gaze passed directly through Mark.
“Ain’t no one ’ere, miss.”
“That can’t be.” Miss Limpett appeared in the doorway, her face luminous against the backdrop of shadows.
Fear and excitement shone bright in her eyes. Was it possible she’d grown lovelier since he’d last seen her? His eyes narrowed. Perhaps it was simply the fact that she’d shot him. He’d always admired women who handled their weaponry confidently, and well.
Her uncle appeared beside her. In his hand he clasped her pistol, barrel pointed to the floor. He too peered inward, his high silk top hat reflecting the lantern’s orange glow.
“Are you certain you saw someone?” he prodded gently.
Miss Limpett’s hard, glassy stare settled on the sturdy wooden shelf where her father’s casket had been placed. Fortunately for her, Mark had released the lid so the weighty panel fell into its original alignment.
Her secret was kept.
The caretaker ventured inward, crouching low. The toe of his muddied work boot struck several of the rivets Mark had pried loose. The ping ping ping of metal as they struck the stone wall echoed through the crypt.
“What was that?” his lordship inquired, angling for a better look, but not going so far as to enter.
The caretaker lowered the lantern and examined the floor. Seeing the rivets, the old man’s eyes widened. He swung the light toward the coffins in their niches. Fear slackened his features, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Nothing, your lordship. Nothing at all.”
He retreated backward, as if afraid to turn his back to the darkness. Despite his pain, Mark grinned in predato rial delight.
“We best be on our way now,” he whispered. “They’ll be lockin’ the gates soon.”
“He’s right, Willomina.” His lordship attempted to gently draw her away, but her gloved hands gripped the stone edge of the doorway.
“Dear girl, you’re overwrought,” he surmised. “Your grief plays tricks on you, making you see phantoms where there are none.”
She nodded, still staring inside. “You’re right, of course, I am . . . overwrought.”
“Let us go on to the house,” her uncle urged. “You can rest a bit there, and soon we’ll be away from here.”
“One moment . . .” She pushed inward and bent to retrieve a length of greenery twisted with white flowers. Grasping the lengthy mass with both hands, she draped it over two coffins, her father’s and the one beside it, which he assumed to be her mother’s.
Turning on her heel, she froze.
Mark followed her line of vision to the floor where her gaze fixed upon the stone he’d hurled at her at the height of his fury.
He couldn’t resist the temptation. He reached out and, after allowing himself one illicit brush of his fingertips against the lace hem of her petticoat, gave her silk outer skirt a stiff pull. Miss Limpett yelped.
Mark heaved up—
Male voices exclaimed from the door.
She whirled about to stare at nothing.
To stare directly at him. Nose to nose, breath to breath.
Oh, yes . . . she was pretty.
Miss Limpett was a picture of lustrous skin, rosy lips and gleaming chestnut hair, perfectly twisted into a simple coil at her nape. Even in the midst of his anger over finding nothing but rocks and stale air in the casket, he was what he was. He’d always enjoyed the ladies, especially adventuresome ones with secrets.
The heels of her narrow black shoes tapped against the floor as she backed away.
“What is it?” her uncle demanded.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “Just my nerves.”
The door slammed. A subsequent roll of metal signaled the turn of the lock. Through the tiny window, the lantern light ebbed to nothing. Their footsteps faded. He stood, surrounded by dust and darkness, and the scent of moldering wood, flesh and bones. His mood quickly returned to foul.
Damn rock-filled coffin. Mina Limpett had deceived him, and everyone else. Odd how he hadn’t sensed her lies. Was she so good at telling them? He rubbed his shoulder. The pain had dulled to almost nothing. The only outward evidence of the gunshot was the lingering scent of discharged gunpowder, and the destroyed sleeve of his garments beneath, which his mind, even now, worked to repair. How he despised sewing.
They are with Father.
Realization swept through him. He hadn’t sensed her lies, because she hadn’t lied to him. Not really. She’d spoken the truth, and with a few frantic miscues, allowed him to make his own assumptions. The scrolls were with her father.
The professor wasn’t dead, though clearly, he and his daughter had undertaken some elaborate scheme to make everyone believe he was. Three months before, Mark had been so close. He’d tracked them across the earth and across the ocean with all stealth, certain they had no knowledge of his pursuit.
His blood pounded in his head like a clock ticking off time. He had no time for intrigues. The very fact that he’d resisted the deterioration of Transcension this long was a testament to his strength as an immortal warrior, and the centuries of stringent
mental training as a Guard. How much longer would he last?
Worse yet, the manner in which Miss Limpett had wielded the gun revealed she had anticipated danger, raising the question in his mind. . . .
Who else wanted the scrolls? Apparently he had competition, which was no surprise, given mortal society’s interest in metaphysical subjects, life beyond the grave and immortality. There were all sorts of silly cults and secret societies with shadowy rules, funny robes and ceremonies, all striving to discover the truth about life and life beyond. Some of them were not so nice, and intended darker purposes. Perhaps one of those organizations sought possession of the scrolls.
One thing for certain, he wasn’t finished with the prickly Miss Limpett. Six months ago, while working toward the Reclamation of Jack the Ripper, he’d stood in the small, shabby drawing room of her father’s Manchester house, his features transformed into those of Mr. Matthews, assistant director of the British Museum. He had interrogated her on the whereabouts of her father and an ancient cuneiform tablet that had gone missing from the secret underground archives. The tablet recorded the dark history and even darker prophesies of the Tantalytes—an ancient chthonic cult that worshiped the wicked, immortal Tantalus, the Dark Ancient, forever entombed by the Shadow Guards in the underground realm of Tartarus.
Without the tablet, Mark, Lord Black and his twin sister, Selene, had been forced to make do with a poor duplicate—a badly fragmented scroll. Mark, an expert in ancient languages, had been tasked with the translation of the relic.
The scroll preserved the history and prophesies of this chthonic cult. The papyrus had also contained a series of numerical coordinates, which when translated, coincided with all manner of horrific events throughout time, and leading into the present. Murders. Blights. Plagues. Natural disasters. Most recently, the violent eruption of the Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa, in 1883. It was through these occurrences that Tantalus conveyed, via currents of invisible energy, communications from his eternal underworld prison in an effort to rouse his sleeping army of brotoi followers. Through observation, the Guards had determined that brotoi were nearly identical to the evil, deteriorated souls they were already tasked with Reclaiming.
Yet unlike Transcending souls who sought solitude for their wicked deeds, brotoi displayed an unfortunate inclination to join forces and organize toward the ultimate demise of civilization—not only mortal civilization, but also that of the Amaranthines and their protected paradise, the Inner Realm.
But most important to Mark now was that in its closing, the scroll had mentioned the existence of two sister scrolls that would contain details about the location and use of a powerful conduit of immortality. The unidentified conduit was his only hope of reversing the dark state of Transcension presently at work inside his mind.
The sooner he persuaded Miss Limpett to divulge the whereabouts of her father and the scrolls, the sooner he could reclaim his derailed destiny and his place of honor amongst the Amaranthine Shadow Guards. Remembering her eyes and her lips, and the enthralling fit of her austere mourning garments, he regretted there was no time for a gentle seduction.
A warm breeze swept through the open window of the carriage, sending the curtains fluttering rearward like the wings of a great night moth. The dark, sumptuous interior, combined with the vibration of the wheels on the roadway, and months of exhaustion . . .
Evangeline’s head lolled onto Mina’s shoulder. A faint snore staggered from her lips.
Mina wished she could do the same. She was so tired. The funeral was supposed to put an end to the running, the hiding and the fear. She had hoped that at last, tonight, she could find peace in sleep.
Astrid sat on the other side of Evangeline. Across from her, Lady Trafford frowned, appearing tangled in her own thoughts. On the far end of the bench from his wife, Trafford stared out the solitary open window. Mina had been so appreciative when he’d thrust the shuttered panel out, dispersing the dizzying miasma of perfume that had accumulated inside.
She, for her part, sat rigid in her seat, trying to rationalize everything she’d seen and heard at the crypt. It was, of course, as Trafford suggested. She had been overwrought and imagining things.
The glowing eyes had most certainly belonged to a monstrously large cemetery rat. The stone that struck the door—obviously it was a chunk fallen from the ceiling of an aging and shifting crypt, dislodged by her yanking on the handle. The chinking and splintering and roaring were all likely due to the activities of the aforementioned sepulchre rat and an unexplained anomaly of wind and echo. She blinked into the darkness . . . almost believing herself.
Lord Alexander. She recalled his blue eyes, so uncommon, and the way they’d focused so intently on her. Was he one of them? The men she’d come to fear? Her imagination twisted sharply, transforming his striking blue eyes into impenetrable bronze. Men didn’t have glowing bronze eyes, but her mind balked at any notion of the supernatural. Her father might believe in all that nonsense, but her feet and her suspicions remained firmly grounded in reality.
Everyone who was anyone in the world of archaic languages knew her father possessed the two Akkadian scrolls. The scrolls themselves weren’t Akkadian, of course, but ancient still, and exact copies of Akkadian cuneiform tablets, which had long ago been destroyed or had dissolved to dust. She, herself, had been present at the time of their purchase in a nomad’s dark desert tent, eighteen months before. They had been missing their scroll rods, but were otherwise remarkably well preserved.
At the close of the expedition, she had done as had become customary. She’d organized her father’s notes and penned an academic account that only as a brief aside made mention of the acquisition. At the time, they hadn’t even been certain of the artifacts’ authenticity. She’d submitted the paper under her father’s name to the Royal Geographical Society.
Yet with the publication of that paper, their world had gone mad.
Across from her, Lord Trafford went rigid in his seat. He twisted, his vision fixed on something on the side of the road. Hoisting his cane out the open window, he rapped against the carriage roof. The driver shouted out and amidst a jangling of harnesses, the carriage jerked and slowed.
Lucinda blinked. “What is it, Trafford?”
Evangeline jerked upright. She muttered sleepily, “Why are we stopping?”
Crouching, Trafford opened the door. Without waiting for the footman or the stairs, he clambered down onto the grass, cane in hand.
“I thought that was you,” he chuckled, speaking genially into the darkness. “Having a bit of horse trouble?”
The carriage side lamps illuminated a broad circle of gravel and grass, littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Carriages and wagons clattered past, the road into London just as busy at this hour as during daylight.
A figure emerged from the shadows, the upper half of his face obscured by the brim of his top hat. A long black overcoat descended to midcalf and rippled in the wind. He held a pair of reins, and a dark, gleaming horse lumbered along behind. The unidentified gentleman’s lips pressed together in a grim smile.
Mina’s eyes widened, and her heartbeat thundered in her ears. She recognized those lips. She recognized everything from the masculine outline of his shoulders to his towering height and confident stance.
Lord Alexander removed his hat and tapped it brusquely against his thigh, sending out a faint cloud of road dust.
Lucinda shoved back into her seat, her shoulders very straight, her face a pale moon in the darkness. The girls edged toward the windows, straining past Mina for a better look.
“Indeed.” His lordship lifted a horseshoe. “I rummaged in the grass until I found it. Might you have a farrier’s kit I could borrow?”
“Even better.” Trafford pointed his cane in the direction of the road. “We’ve a farrier.”
A brief moment later, the servant—one of two who had followed on horseback—came round on foot. He extended his gloved hand for the shoe.
Her unc
le said, “Why don’t you ride to the house with the family? Mr. McAlister will bring your animal along once the repair has been made.”
Lord Alexander lifted a gloved hand. “Thank you, Trafford, but I suspect your family, and in particular your niece, must be exhausted and desire their privacy.”
Through the shadows, his gaze captured Mina’s. She dropped the curtain and shrank into the shadows.
Lord Trafford countered, “My dear niece tells me you knew her father. I can’t imagine she would want a family friend stranded on a dark night street. Isn’t that right, Miss Limpett?”
She heard the crunch of her uncle’s shoes on the gravel, just outside the window. Evangeline jabbed an elbow into her side.
Every muscle in her body shrank by at least an inch. Mina called out from behind the curtain, “Do, please . . . ride along with the family, Lord Alexander.”
Chapter Three
A moment later, and he was settled amongst them.
Elegant and long of limb, he occupied the corner opposite Mina, his top hat on his lap. The carriage lurched, then rolled onto the road, and soon they coursed along at their previous speed. Gas lamps flashed intermittent light across his features. The wind coaxed a lock of his hair over one eye, an eye that, like its brilliant match, rested on her far too often for peace of mind.
Trafford sat beside his lordship. “I saw you at the cemetery, but didn’t get over to speak to you in time. Earlier, I had commented to her ladyship how long it’s been since I’ve seen you at the club.”
Lord Alexander adjusted his legs, sliding his booted foot alongside Mina’s smaller one. Not touching, but almost. “I’ve been abroad for the past several months, and only returned to London yesterday.”
“Where did you go?” Lucinda whispered.
“Pardon?” Alexander leaned forward a few inches to peer at the countess around Trafford.