by A. W. Exley
I glanced at him, standing by my side, and then my attention returned to the note. While brief, it was to the point and most certainly intended for me.
Eleanor, come save her if you dare.
Elizabeth.
10
Someone blew out the candle in my head. One puff and everything went black. I couldn't think, speak, or react. I existed, blind, in a dark void where those five little words repeated in my mind. Over and over, I heard her haughty tone.
Come save her if you dare.
"Bloody Hell," someone muttered.
I shook my head to clear Elizabeth's voice. Air returned to my lungs, the coughs and rustles of soldiers rushed over my ears, and my vision returned to normal. Apparently my pigeons had come home to roost. I almost wished Alice were dead rather than in Elizabeth's clutches. Poor girl. I would bet she was chained up and being made to scrub some cave clean.
"Well, that answers our question about whether or not Elizabeth has established a hive," Seth said.
"She has Alice. I knew she was alive." Frank's gaze turned hard and he ground his jaw.
"Is she?" In a quiet tone, Seth gave voice to my nightmare. "What if this is all a cruel trick by Elizabeth? We have no proof that Alice has not been bitten or scratched. All we have is a hanky and a short, shaky note."
I dug my fingernails into my palm. I had to believe she was alive, even as a little voice asked how long could she stay that way. "I will not abandon my friend. I will believe she is alive until I see proof otherwise."
Alice really did possess extraordinary powers of persuasion if she remained untouched in the vermin hive. She was wasted as a maid; we should get her into politics. Wooing a crowd of people would be easy compared to her current predicament; men would vote her in as prime minister before they even realised what they had done.
Before I pushed Alice forward as a future member of parliament, I first had to rescue her. "So polite of Elizabeth to invite us to her court. It would be rude to refuse."
From that point, it took less than ten minutes for the argument to erupt between me and Frank.
"I'm going just as soon as I grab a weapon," Frank declared.
"No, you're not. This is slayer's work, not to mention she's my step-mother." I didn't need Frank underfoot while I was working.
"If you think you're running off on some damn suicide mission to rescue my girl while I'm expected to sit here and knit socks, just think again!" Frank was rather het up. His arms made circles in the air as though he were a windmill.
My mood lifted to see him beside himself with grief, worry, and guilt. I had half a mind to poke him with my sword and add to his problems. Or I could use knitting needles instead, that would give him something to knit socks on while he waited.
"She's my friend, and rescuing her is my responsibility," I yelled back at him.
Frank stepped toward me, as if his extra height would intimidate me into submission. A quick slash to his Achilles tendon would bring him to his knees and make sure he crawled back to his workshop.
Seth stepped into the middle, one hand raised to each of us as though he was the referee at a boxing match. "Let's take this one step at a time, shall we?"
His steady gaze went from first me and then to Frank. The other man narrowed his eyes, as though he was about to lunge and start the next round. Oh, he could try, and he would find out what a small and scrappy fighter could do.
"Frank." Seth poked his chest. "Calm down or I'll have the lads lock you in the cellar to cool off."
Ha! All his noise was for nothing. He could knit those socks while I rescued the maiden in distress and slayed the evil dragon. There was no need for anyone else to tag along. I crossed my arms.
"The note was for me. It wasn't an invitation for the entire Serenity House party."
Seth turned to stare me down. "But that is exactly what Elizabeth will get. You do not fight alone, Ella."
I sucked in my bottom lip, about to blurt out my protest. I had always worked as a slayer alone. But something in Seth's eyes made me swallow my words. A reminder that I no longer carried my burden alone.
His gaze softened and he lowered his tone as tempers calmed. "You, me, Frank, and the twins. We've all seen one hive, Ella. You'll not walk into another on your own."
The twins. Jack and Jake, with an eerie connection to each other. "Because the twins are good in tight spots?"
Seth's devastating smile melted my arguments. "Exactly. We will undertake a recon mission and Lieutenant Bain will be on standby with the rest of the troops."
I guess I didn't mind if they all tagged along as backup, and Seth's flamethrower patrol would make short work of mop up. There was just one small detail that we needed to nail down.
"We have our invite. Now we just need directions to the party." Where did we begin to look and what would we find? Vermin wandering the countryside were enough of an issue to dispatch, but in infecting Elizabeth I had created a monstrous problem. Vermin consumed by evil plans. An enemy who kidnapped your friend to dangle before you as live bait.
How many ways could I destroy that woman? Finding her would be like looking for a misplaced vermin hand amongst a field of haystacks. They could be anywhere in the county, assuming she hadn't left Somerset.
Seth's arms wrapped around my middle and I leaned back against him. He whispered by my ear, "We will find Alice and rescue her from Elizabeth's clutches."
He sounded so sure. I wished I shared his confidence. "You mean like I rescued you from Louise's clutches?"
There was an unpleasant thought, a drooling vermin Louise making another play for Seth. I imagined her lips falling off and still pursuing him, shuffling along the ground behind him like fat caterpillars.
Seth kissed the top of my ear. "The extraction process may not be dissimilar. Now let's get to work and figure out where our new queen is establishing her empire. We have work to do."
Seth ordered the vermin locked up in a disused ice cellar. While it had no conversation or information to assist, we might figure out a way to use it later. Then we reconvened in the office to tackle our maps with a renewed focus.
Warrens kept us supplied with tea and hot scones, but they weren't helping. After two futile hours, I let out a frustrated sigh and stared at the map with its scattering of coloured pins. I wanted to charge off and rescue Alice, but I had no idea what direction to take. We assumed Elizabeth wouldn't have gone too far, but to date, there had been no trace of her.
"We must be missing something, some clue as to her whereabouts. Elizabeth's game would need to be played out before her. She can't have intended to keep Alice and herself hidden; otherwise, why send the note? There will be a piece of wool that leads back to her, we just have to find the end and unravel it." I munched buttered scone and scowled at the map, willing it to give up my step-mother's secrets.
I started to regret that between me and the army boys, the region had been nearly cleaned out. We encountered few vermin these days, and certainly not enough to plot all their apparent directions to reveal the new queen. I never thought I would wish more of them crawled over our fields and hills. In making our corner of Somerset safe, we provided the perfect cover for Elizabeth to thrive undetected.
"She must have a sparsely populated hive, there's so few of them moving around the countryside. And it's not as though they can fly or travel under the ground." Elizabeth and Louise did love an audience; how disappointed they must be in the lack of recruits in the area. I imagined Elizabeth would want to sit on a throne with legions of vermin at her feet. How anticlimactic her ascension to monarch would be if only Louise and a couple of badly decomposed vermin witnessed it.
"Underground!" Seth exclaimed, and jumped to his feet. He grabbed my face in his hands and kissed me most soundly. Luckily I had swallowed my scone, but our kiss tasted of salted butter. "You are a genius. What if they are travelling underground?"
I was still coming to terms with the concept of death roads, and now they had a way of
travelling undetected beneath the earth?
"That's just not cricket," Frank murmured. Now that we knew Alice was alive, he refused to leave the room. He also had bloodshot eyes and at least three days’ growth stuck to his chin. He scratched at the beard as he stepped forward to stare at the map. A ripe odour wafted from him. I hoped he changed clothes and shaved before we were stuck in tight quarters somewhere.
I agreed with him about one thing. It wasn't cricket that the vermin kept evolving and changing the rules on us. I should have known Elizabeth would use some underhand method to move her minions around the countryside.
"But how are they travelling underground?" I asked, scowling at the map. I struggled to think what they could be using. Somerset had mining communities, but none directly around us. I supposed there could be long-unused coal veins around us, but as children we had never discovered a collapsed tunnel.
"What if she found the lost catacombs?" Seth asked.
"No. That's a local fairytale." I whispered the words while my mind ran away with me. The gruesome legend spoke of catacombs dug by Britons under Roman rule. Numerous dead were buried in the subterranean world, but its exact location was lost over the centuries. By medieval times it was just a rumour, and locals regarded it as a ghost story told to scare children. Thousands of bones lying somewhere under our feet.
Seth spread his arms over the map. "Not when you consider it with what we already know of the death roads. The path the funerary processions walked to place their dead in the catacombs. It makes sense, otherwise where were they taking their dead?"
My mind raced along the path Seth’s ideas started. The word catacomb fired new connections, and ideas exploded in my head. Everything started to draw together and made a horrible kind of sense. "Catacombs are just like honeycombs. All those little cells to house larvae, or vermin."
Frank let out a low whistle. "Human-sized bees all snug in their hive. But we'd still need to find them. A local legend is one thing, but we need an actual location."
Assuming the catacombs did exist, how would Elizabeth have found them? Did the queen blood coursing through her veins enable her to perceive the death roads that were trod so many centuries ago? Was it all mere coincidence or was there a far larger mystical explanation that combined death roads, fae paths and ley lines?
Seth began to pace, and he rubbed the back of his neck as he sorted through his ideas. "But we have access to someone who was keenly interested in the lost catacombs. Someone who made it a personal mission to discern truth from legend during her lifetime."
"Who?" I really needed to learn when to shut up. A shiver across my skin told me I didn't want to know.
He turned to face me. "Millicent deMage."
Ice water ran down my spine. "No."
Nightmares multiplied in my mind. Elizabeth alone was horrible enough to confront. Combine her with Millicent, throw in whispers of witchcraft and killing husbands, and I wanted to run and hide in a cushion fort in the parlour. Millicent's portrait was burned into my mind, the black stare so like Mrs Linton's or Elizabeth's when the queen's blood had taken control of her body. My mind murmured of a connection between the vermin plague and Seth's ancestor.
I glanced at Seth. The man I loved, even if I hadn't said the words to him yet. There wasn't an evil bone in his body—surely there couldn't be a connection between his family and the horror multiplying around the globe. Imagination ran away with me and it was nothing more than that. A woman couldn't reach out through the centuries and have an impact on worldwide events in the twentieth century. Could she?
What if a known Satanist like Aleister Crowley had called to her across time? I rubbed a hand up my arm to dispel the chill. Ridiculous, Ella. I chided myself. Scientists would find the origin any day now in their laboratories and test tubes, not in runes or smoke-filled rites.
"We have Millicent's diaries, and I believe they may shed some light." Seth set off with Warrens to dig through forgotten corners of his library for musty old books.
I studied the map again, looking for a pattern within the coloured markers and strands of cotton. Another hour passed and I decided I was more of an action girl than an academic. Seth and Warrens came back with their arms filled and nearly buried us under old journals belonging to the first Duchess of Leithfield. Voices in my head screamed at me to draw my sword, chop the pages into tiny pieces, and throw them on a bonfire. Or even better, pile them up and go mad with a flamethrower, coating the lot in cleansing fire.
"Whatever is wrong?" Seth dropped a dusty journal in front of me, and I recoiled.
I couldn't command my hand to reach out and touch the worn red leather cover. A journal was so intimate, a window directly into her soul. One look at her portrait had me running scared. I would rather face Elizabeth and hundreds of her disciples than spend five minutes alone with that painting. How could I open the book and dive into the witch's mind and soak in her horrible thoughts?
"This isn't right."
Seth slid the book closer. I could make out the swooping MdM embossed on the cover in faded gold. "Millicent had a certain reputation and some believed her to be a witch. If she gleaned anything about the lost catacombs and possibly fae paths, I'm hoping she may have mentioned it in her journals."
We were grasping at straws, but we desperately needed such information without the hypothesised vermin ability to see the death roads and know what path to take. If only we had a tracker dog that could follow their scent—
"The vermin!" My mind came up with the answer but my mouth was slower to get the words out. I jumped up so fast my chair crashed to the ground. "The one that bought the note. We still have it, correct?"
Seth nodded. "Yes. It's holed up in a secure outbuilding. Why?"
I finally had an idea, and it didn't involve getting inside Millicent's head. That was a trip I might never return from, even if I could satisfy my curiosity about the fate of the first duke. It wasn't worth finding out she murdered her husband if I lost myself in her thoughts. "That Turned is our strand of wool, but we don't need to unravel it to find Elizabeth. Rather, we need to wind this strand up."
Seth stared at me as he caught my meaning. "Let the creature go, and like a homing pigeon, it will return to its hive. We simply follow it back to Elizabeth."
I didn't like this new catch-and-release policy, but I would do anything to save Alice. I already planned to take the creature's head off once we found the catacombs. I would show no mercy to the undead that dared touch my family.
"You'd do anything to get out of reading Millicent's journals." Seth laughed.
But he was right. I might not be able to sense death roads or ley lines, but there was something soaked into the books Millicent had touched that I didn't want staining my soul. A voice crooned from deep inside my mind, murmuring that everything was connected—Millicent, Elizabeth, Aleister Crowley, and the vermin plague. While I shied away from knowing how, the day fast approached when I would have to find out the answer to that question.
I glanced out the window. Dusk fell faster as we approached autumn, and it was too late to do anything today. It didn't pay to tackle a hive at night, when they had the advantage.
I glanced from man to man. "We mount our rescue tomorrow, first thing in the morning."
Hang on, Alice. We're coming.
11
We planned all afternoon until the light faded at the window, and Warrens snuck in and turned on the new electric lights. We detailed what we would need for our expedition, then we said our goodnights and I rode home. At least I had good news to share this time—Alice was alive. Wasn't she?
Dinner was lively; an undercurrent of expectation ran through every comment. Or every glance, in the case of Henry. I loved these people and their unshakable belief that I would rescue Alice. But I feared disappointing them. I struggled to imagine Elizabeth keeping Alice alive, and I steeled myself in case we found only a vermin version of my best friend. I still couldn't sleep, but this time energy bubbled throug
h me as though I were a shaken bottle of champagne. Sleep came in snatches, creeping up on me unaware, but at last morning dawned.
Magda forced me to eat breakfast, declaring I couldn't charge off on a rescue mission on an empty stomach. It did no good to tell her of the nausea that gripped me, wondering what we would find. Was I ready to face Elizabeth? A tiny voice inside me whispered no, but then my hand tightened on my sword and I knew I would remedy my mistake.
At Serenity House, Seth rallied the troops and gave out orders, and soon our little group was ready. Frank had bloodshot eyes, and I took some comfort in knowing I wasn't the only one unable to sleep. As I gazed around the courtyard, I thought we looked like a medieval mob, out to scour the countryside for witches. We lacked pitchforks and lit torches, but thanks to modern advancements, we could slay these demons with flamethrowers.
Since we were going to track the vermin across countryside, we decided it would be best to have a mounted patrol. Each rider was armed with their choice of blade and a rifle.
Lieutenant Bain would follow in the truck with more soldiers and more weaponry than I had ever seen. Frank and Seth had cooked up another batch of Greek fire and loaded up the flamethrowers. I hated the idea of using fire in a confined underground space. What if we couldn't get out? Then there were crates containing machine guns, grenades, and lanterns. Lots and lots of lanterns, enough to bring light to whatever dark corners our prey occupied.
The lieutenant and three men dragged out our trussed and snarling tracker dog from its cage. The men encircled it with bayonets affixed to their rifles. They exchanged glances; no one liked the idea of letting it go.
"What now?" Bain asked.
Good question. I suspected as soon as we cut its ropes, it would attack. If we had to lop its limbs off to stop it attacking, it would then take days to crawl back to Elizabeth. Days we, or Alice, didn't have. Which meant we needed to reduce numbers around it before setting it free.