Ghosts of Albion: Accursed

by Amber Benson

  Unconscious, she flinched.

  “Tamara! Wake up, damn your eyes!”

  He slapped her a second time, then a third.

  Her eyelids fluttered open, brows knitting in pain. “Nigel?”

  “Wake up!” he snapped again. “Listen to me, girl. You will not surrender to this, do you understand me? You are the Protector of Albion and the granddaughter of Ludlow Swift. Your wounds are not beyond your power to heal. The magic flows through your veins, sweats from your very skin. Remember the way the Rakshasa could sense it before, because it was seeping from you? It’s a part of you, girl. Seize it!”

  Tamara shook her head, ever so slightly, eyes closing again. “I . . . I cannot, Nigel. I don’t feel it now. I feel . . . nothing.”

  “Then by the gods I shall make you feel something!” he snarled, and he plunged a finger into the wound in her shoulder, twisting it around.

  Tamara went rigid, eyes flying open wide, and she let out a scream that echoed through the fog and all the way up Constitution Hill. A stream of filthy invective the likes of which he had never heard from such a proper girl spilled from her mouth, and she snarled at him like an animal.

  “You son of a whore!” she gasped as she completed her cursing of him.

  Nigel smiled. “That’s a story for another day, pet. Now you listen to me. You will heal your wounds. If not for yourself or for Albion, then for your brother. You are a far greater magician than William can ever hope to be. If Priya has made such short work of you, what will she do to him?”

  He saw the fear appear in her eyes, but still there was no fire there. “It is more than the wound. Her magic has poisoned me, somehow. I can feel it burning in me, tainting me.”

  “Then flush it out!”

  Her eyes went wide, but she was staring past him.

  The Children of Kali had come. Byron was fighting them to the west, near the garden, but these came south from the hill. Nigel swore and leaped to his feet. He glanced around wildly as more and more of them emerged from the fog, closing in on him and Tamara. He counted no less than a dozen, probably more.

  “Tamara,” he warned. “I may have to leave you alone again.”

  But even as he spoke the words the air shimmered all around him, the fog shifting and shuddering as though battered by a hundred errant breezes. A sound like wind chimes filled the night, and then they were there.

  The ghosts of Albion.

  Like a wave they materialized, one after the other. Some he recognized but most he did not. Soldiers and playwrights, teachers and carpenters, men and women who had nothing in common during their lives, and yet shared one vital trait in death . . . they were all, now, soldiers in the war against the darkness.

  “Take them broadside, my friends, and give no quarter!” cried a voice from above, a voice Nigel had never been happier to hear.

  He glanced up and saw the fog shifting around the phantom form of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. The man could be a fool at times, with his priggishness and arrogance, but in war he commanded nothing less than awe. And he was not alone.

  With a battle cry that made even the animal within Nigel cringe, Queen Bodicea appeared from the fog, her spear clutched in one hand and a small ax in the other. As always, her face and nude body were painted for war, and her scream curdled his blood. Nelson was courageous and brilliant, Bodicea cunning and savage, and the ghosts of Albion were their army tonight.

  The Children of Kali began to die.

  And then the sound of hoofbeats and the clatter of a carriage reached them, and a hansom cab rattled out of the fog. It had left the street and was coming across the grounds outside the palace, rushing at them, right into the midst of the fray. Only one man was inside, and the horses neighed as he reined them to a stop.

  He leaped from the cab.

  “Tamara!”

  Nigel prepared to kill him. “Who the hell are you?”

  But then he saw Tamara’s face. There was confusion there, but also a tenderness that was surprising.

  “John?” she said.

  Nigel narrowed his eyes. “John? That Haversham bastard? I’ve heard about you. What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve heard about you as well, Mr. Townsend. I’m here to help if I can. When William left the Algernon Club, we all suspected there was something amiss, but never imagined . . .”

  He settled down beside Tamara in the very spot Nigel had just vacated, and gazed upon her kindly. “They sent me after him, Tamara. But I would’ve come anyway, if I could.”

  With the poison magic of Priya Gupta in her system and her wounds still bleeding, she barely had the strength to gaze at him, but she managed. “I . . . I don’t understand. The . . . the club?”

  “William hasn’t told you?”

  “Told us what?” Nigel demanded, though he glanced about as he said it, eager to rejoin the battle, listening to the sounds of monsters dying in the fog.

  John was examining Tamara’s wounds, and now he shot a dark look at Nigel.

  “There isn’t time.” He looked back at Tamara. “What’s important is that we know who and what you are. Both of you. And we’ve been trying to help. The idols that were stolen . . . we were trying to gather them up so no one else would be infected. I was the primary thief.”

  He bent lower then, holding Tamara’s hand tightly, and though he whispered so low that no human ears could have heard him . . . Nigel was not human.

  “They assigned me to you, do you understand? To discover the identity of the new Protector. That’s why I reacted to your . . . enticement the way that I did. I hated the idea that you and I might have shared such intimacy under false pretenses.”

  He bent to kiss her forehead, and Tamara reached her hand up to caress his face, ever so weakly.

  “It seems you’re too late,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” Haversham replied. “I can help you. The meager magic I have at my disposal is a pale shade of yours, but perhaps I can bolster—”

  “No.”

  Nigel flinched. He heard Byron shouting something, but wasn’t sure what it was. His attention was split between the war and Tamara’s condition.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” the vampire asked, incredulous. “Don’t let your pride destroy you, Tamara. Don’t be a fool. Not with so much in the balance. If the man can help you—”

  “I don’t need help,” she snarled.

  Face etched with pain, she forced herself to her knees. Blood had soaked her dress in bizarre patterns. When she glanced up at Nigel and John, her eyes were alight with life; golden sparks flickered at their edges, danced around her fingers.

  “I am the Protector of blessed Albion, gentlemen. The power and the duty are mine.”

  She set her jaw, her body swaying, and raised her arms.

  That golden light began to flow from her, enveloping first her hands, then her arms, and finally sheathing her entire body. In the chaos of combat her hair had been coming unpinned. It was entirely unbound now and flew wildly around her in a wind Nigel could not feel, and waves of other colors went through the magic womb she had created for herself.

  Her eyes were unfocused. She turned her palms upward and began to chant.

  “Vieo viscus cum animus,” Tamara said, rocking with the words.

  She chanted them again and again, and then, suddenly, she flinched as though she had been stabbed again. Gritting her teeth, she continued the chant. The agony was writ in her every movement and expression. In the midst of that incantation she let out a cry of pain that was like the roar of something wild. And perhaps it was.

  She took up the words again, and as she did a kind of red mist began to ooze from her wounds. It wasn’t blood, but something brighter, twisting in the air as though fighting her magic. Nigel knew this was the poison Priya’s attack had left in her.

  The mist rose from her wounds and began to evaporate, burning up in the shimmering light that surrounded Tamara.

  “Vieo viscus cum animus,” she continued, b
ut her voice had more power now, more strength, and she held her head higher as she invoked the magic of Albion.

  The wound on her shoulder was hidden within the folds of her clothing, but the one in her abdomen was so large and the dress torn enough that he could see the flesh begin to knit itself together.

  “Fantastic,” John Haversham muttered, and Nigel was sure the young man wasn’t aware he had spoken aloud.

  Tamara stood up, her legs wavering a bit even though her gaze did not.

  “Where is Priya Gupta?”

  “There was more fighting ’round the front. I heard it as I came down the road,” Haversham revealed.

  Tamara nodded. “Of course. She thinks she’s done with me. She’s going to try to destroy her father and William now, then go right in through the gates.”

  Her smile both thrilled and unnerved Nigel.

  “If that’s where the real battle is taking place,” she said, “then that is where we shall go.”

  “For Albion!”

  Tamara let loose that rallying cry as she raced along the base of the northern wall of Buckingham Palace and rounded the corner that brought her to the front. Her hands churned with the golden light of her magic, spheres of power that rippled around her fists and made her skin prickle with pleasure and heat. Nigel was on her left and John Haversham on her right. The vampire seemed to have recovered entirely from his earlier encounter with Dunstan. The fog had thinned a bit, some of it burning off at contact with her magic, and with the arrival of the ghosts.

  Above her, Bodicea and Horatio took up the cry. Regal and commanding, they led a charge of spirits too numerous to count. The specters flitted through the fog above, and others sped along the ground nearby, mere silhouettes in the night and the mist. Tamara heard the hissing of Kali’s Children out there in the dark, but the ghosts made short work of them.

  As she came around to the front of the palace, she nearly faltered. There were misshapen, reptilian corpses littering the ground, with Rakshasa scattered among them. The mist rolled slowly over the bodies, filling every crevice, as though it truly were a death shroud.

  But what almost brought her to a halt was the sheer number of horrors that still loped and staggered toward the palace gates. Even with the street and the park beyond draped in fog, she made out at least half a dozen Rakshasa and forty or fifty of the Children of Kali, and she was not yet close enough to see the gates through the veil of mist. Dark figures moved all through the gray, filthy blanket that lay over the city. Far, far more than Tamara had ever imagined.

  “So many of them,” she said as she began to run again.

  “Do not worry,” Nigel growled in the dark beside her. “Our allies are legion!”

  Heartened by the strength of his voice, she nodded and ran on. Above her she heard Bodicea and Nelson shouting orders, and a moment later the ghosts who had dedicated themselves to Albion’s cause darted ahead, rippling the fog as they descended upon the poor, accursed souls Priya Gupta had twisted to her own ends. The shouts of angry phantoms and the shrieking of hideous men filled the air.

  “William!” Tamara shouted. “Farris!”

  Yet there was no reply from within the fog. They were supposed to have been guarding the front of the palace, but thus far she had seen only monsters. Still they had not reached the gates. A tremor of dread passed through her.

  A hiss filled the air and John Haversham grabbed her arm. Tamara let him pull her to a stop even as Nigel also halted. Just ahead, several of the Children of Kali were crawling up the outside of the palace wall, their talons dug into stone.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Tamara grunted, and she raised both hands. She muttered a single word, burning two of the vermin off the wall with an arc of flame that erupted from her palms.

  A new sound reached her, of something lumbering across the ground, and she turned just in time to see a pair of Rakshasa rushing toward her through the gloom. John began to work a spell, his fingers contorted, muttering in German as he weaved something out of the energy that already existed in the air. Being an ordinary spellcaster, he had no innate magic.

  Nevertheless, a streak of silver light leaped from the ground right in front of him and speared the Rakshasa’s chest, impaling the thing. It let out a roar of fury that disintegrated into that high, barking, hyena laugh. For a moment it was lifted off the ground on the spike of magic that had impaled it, and then it roared again and shook itself free, dropping to the ground in a crouch.

  Its eyes gleamed that sickly, filthy yellow as it glared up at John and then lunged for him.

  Tamara was about to intervene when Nigel leaped past her and threw himself directly at the demon, driving it back and onto the ground, where he began to scuffle with it. Ghosts swept down from the shroud of fog and began to tear at the other Rakshasa. Two of them grabbed hold of the powerful beast and a third slashed a spectral dagger across its eyes, blinding the demon. Then they began to tear it apart.

  “Well done!” Tamara shouted, spinning to peer at the palace wall again, where several of the accursed men were still climbing. The tide had most certainly turned. The ghosts would swarm the demons and overwhelm them. But it would be up to her to make certain that none of the monsters got inside the palace before it was all over. It only required one for their mission to end in failure.

  Even as she looked up, however, she saw a ghost sweep down out of the fog, laughing perversely. It was Byron, in that foppish velvet shirt of his. He seemed to be having a sadistically wonderful time as he grabbed hold of one of Kali’s Children and tore the horror right off the wall, then began to fly higher. The spectral poet rose up and up and up, and then he simply dropped the monster. It fell like a stone, vanishing and reappearing in the roiling fog, until it struck the street with a wet crack and lay still.

  “Right, then. Things are well in hand. Let’s get to the gates and find William and Farris.”

  “Lead on,” John replied.

  Together they ran alongside the wall. They had gone no more than a dozen feet when the muffled boom of a gunshot filled the night. Tamara quickened her pace and saw several dark shapes resolving themselves in the billowing gray ahead. Her heart thundered in her chest and she held her breath as she forged on.

  The wind gusted, parting curtains of fog ahead, and she saw the gates of the palace.

  Farris stood before the gates, alone, one of those pepperbox guns clutched in his left hand and his saber in the other. Dark silhouettes emerged from the mist as Children of Kali. One of them wore the clothes of a nobleman; two others were dressed in rough, dirty fabric. Here there were no classes, no caste system. The very wealthy and the very poor had met the same horrid fate.

  As Tamara ran toward Farris, summoning the magic that crackled around her fists, that courageous man raised his pepperbox and fired at the nearest creature, the bullet obliterating the monster’s face and bursting out through the back of its skull. He swung the thick, revolving barrel toward the next and pulled the trigger, but it fell on an empty chamber.

  Farris tossed the useless weapon aside and changed his stance, holding his saber at the ready and preparing for an onslaught.

  “Take heart, my friend!” Tamara called to him. “You are not alone!”

  She paused to steady herself, carved through the air with contorted fingers, and magic coursed through her body and burst from her fingertips. The ground rumbled beneath her feet and she could feel the connection between herself and the earth, then, through the spell she had cast. It felt as though the land were an extension of her being, her muscle and bone.

  The street buckled and ruptured as enormous tree roots thrust from the soil of Albion and wrapped themselves around the accursed monstrosities that were lunging at Farris. The roots twined about their limbs and bodies, cracking bone and pulping flesh as the creatures were pulled down into the earth, dragged under the street. An arm was sheared off one of them before it disappeared into the ground, and then they were gone.

  Farris turned
and gaped at her, awe and perhaps a bit of fear there in his gaze. “Mistress Tamara, that was . . . it was simply . . .”

  Then his eyes went wide.

  “Watch yourself!” he cried as he ran toward her with his saber held high.

  Tamara turned to see that she had nearly forgotten John Haversham, some yards back. And in that moment of her forgetfulness, something terrible had happened.

  For John had fallen to his knees in the street and was staring at her with forlorn eyes that were growing darker by the moment. The fog swirled around him, but it was plain to see that his flesh had begun to take on a greenish-yellow hue, as though his entire body were bruised. His face was adopting the rough texture of scales.

  “Oh, John, no!” she cried, and she raced back toward him.

  Farris shouted at her to stop, to stay back, but she could not. This man had come to her and given her the gift of truth, had apologized for embarrassing her, had hinted at feelings far deeper than what he had previously allowed. He was an ally and a friend, and within her heart and the yearning center of her, she knew he might one day be something more. Or he might have been, for the memory of Frederick Martin’s transformation was still fresh in her mind and she recalled the revulsion with which she had recoiled at his filthy touch.

  “No,” she whispered into the fog.

  But she stopped a few feet away, knowing it would be foolish to get too close. The curse was taking him over. Soon he would be one of Priya’s creatures, if he was not already.

  “John, how?” she asked.

  The grief in his eyes tore at her heart. “I . . . I was a clumsy thief,” he stammered. “One of the idols . . . my protection . . . faltered and . . .”

  He shuddered and groaned with the pain of transformation. Tamara racked her brain. There must be some way to help him, she thought. Some way to stop the curse. But she knew that once the transformation was complete, his humanity would be gone. I need time to research, time to . . .

  There was only one way. She would have to somehow arrest the process, freeze John in the moment to buy the time that she needed.