Exeter braced himself against his worktable. “What Qadesh gifted you with was a massive energy source.” Absently, he picked through broken glass beakers. “And now they’ve taken the stone . . .”
“I dislike the term they,” Phaeton complained. “It’s not specific enough. Have you an idea who they might be?”
Exeter’s stare narrowed. “Gaspar Sinclair would be first on my list of suspects.”
“Mine as well.” Phaeton turned to America. “Are you up for more adventure or shall we drop you at the flat?”
“I’m not tired in the least.” America checked the watch pinned to the waistcoat of her dress. “In fact, I’m more than curious as to what is taking place here in London. Correct me if I’m wrong, doctor, but there appears to be an assortment of horrid creatures about.” An unexpected smile brightened her face. “And I should like to call on Julian Ping—if he’s about.”
Exeter raised a brow and Phaeton stared at her. “Ping told you about Gaspar?”
“Mr. Ping and I got on very well, the night you and the doctor were off at the British Museum after the jackal-head Anubis.”
Phaeton straightened. “Right. Cab’s waiting—shall we go get the damn egg?”
Phaeton pulled America onto his lap to make room for the doctor. “Comfortable, darling?” The driver snapped the reins and turned the hansom down Piccadilly, rocking them all side to side. At this rate the trip to Limehouse wouldn’t take long.
“Did you tell the driver to avoid Covent Garden?” America asked.
Exeter slipped his finger into a waistcoat pocket and fished out his watch. “It’s nearly midnight, there won’t be much theater traffic.”
“For argument’s sake”—Phaeton tilted his head—“mind telling me why it’s so important we retain possession of Pandora’s. . . whatever?”
“Shall we give it a nineteenth century moniker—say, Phaeton’s Orb?” Exeter asked.
He glanced out the window. A drizzle of rain caused the paths along Green Park to glisten under lamplight. “I prefer . . . Moonstone.”
“Moonstone.” America echoed in a soft faraway voice.
“Rather romantic of you, Phaeton.” The doctor grinned.
“Bugger off.”
“As long as Miss Jones approves.” Exeter chuckled. “Moonstone it is.”
America nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yes, it’s a lovely name.”
Phaeton turned to the man sitting beside him on the bench. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“The Moonstone’s exact powers remain a mystery, and very much in demand it would seem.” Exeter shrugged. “Tell me, what brought you to London so suddenly?”
Exeter had neatly evaded his question. Again. “Did I just fall down a rabbit hole?” Exasperation flooded through Phaeton. He clenched his teeth to control his temper. “I was shanghaied in . . .”—he rolled his eyes and exhaled—“in Shanghai.” The joke had definitely lost its luster. “Abducted might be a more accurate description. At any rate, the crew seemed eager enough to get me back to London and collect their ransom.”
Exeter’s inquiring gaze moved to America. “I was able to track his ship back to London.”
“She arrived just hours after me—quite a crafty bit of seamanship.”
Phaeton exhaled. He may indeed have been taken against his will, but he had also abandoned America. The thought gave him pause as his musings conjured a sultry night in Polynesia. They had dropped anchor in Cook’s Bay and the crew had gone ashore . . .
America sang a Polynesian tune and danced about the deck. She had worn a thin cotton nightshift, her body silhouetted by moonlight. She hadn’t known he was watching—not at first. A panoply of erotic images swept through his mind. He untied a pale blue ribbon and slipped the nightgown off her shoulder. His tongue circled the tip of her breast. They had made love in the widow’s net under the bowsprit. Afterward, she had lain in his arms, her leg curled around his thigh. He remembered the sound of gentle waves lapped against the hull.
America’s jab in the side jolted him back to the present. “We’re here, Phaeton.” He dipped his head to look out the cab. A carriage wheel splashed through a pothole as they entered Pennyfields. At two in the morning, the party was just getting started on High Street.
Exeter opened the trapdoor and paid the driver. “Drop us off near the Silver Lion.”
Out on the street, Phaeton inhaled a mélange of pungent scents, burning opium layered with joss-sticks and tobacco. The sidewalk bustled with a crush of West Enders diverting themselves in the East End.
The doctor grimaced. “One can always find something morally reprehensible and unhealthy to do in Pennyfields.”
“Do you have an entertainment in mind?” Phaeton lifted a brow along with a lopsided grin. “Or would you like me to suggest something?”
America spoke up. “I must say I’m suddenly rather thirsty.”
Exeter studied the street scene. “No hurry I suppose. The world is quite safe for the time being. Whoever has the stone can’t do much with it. There is only one person in the entire world who can unlock the powers inside the Moonstone.”
A prickly tremor moved through Phaeton’s body. His eyes rolled upward in a moment of silent prayer. “And that person would be—please don’t say—”
Exeter’s smile was radiant. In fact, he had never seen the man look more pleased with himself. “You, Phaeton.”
Chapter Six
“SHALL WE HAVE A PINT AT THE SILVER LION?” America noted the look exchanged by Phaeton and Exeter. “Must I remind you, gentlemen, I’ve hauled crew out of the lowest, scum-ridden sinkholes of humanity?”
Phaeton swept her away from a tottering drunk. “Might be worthwhile to formulate a strategy before we meet with Gaspar.” A colorful assortment of soiled doves draped themselves against the doorway of Madame Chaing’s, a brothel famous for its exotic whores and accomplished flagellators. A rouged-up doxy gave a wink. “Have a good swish, sir—half a crown.”
“Another evening, love.” Phaeton steered them down the narrow row. Looking back, America rolled her eyes. Doctor Exeter trailed behind for one last ogle at the imported prostitute. A motley collection of foreign scents and sounds greeted them—two Orientals deep in argument. The acrid stink of lime and ash wafted out of a Chinese laundry. She twitched her nose.
“About this Moonstone legacy . . .” Phaeton wove a path through a crowd of pleasure seekers. “Assure me this is nothing more than a theory of yours, Jason.” He shook his head. “I examined the Moonstone extensively—to little or no effect.”
Exeter caught up in a few long strides. “Think back, Phaeton, to the day we packed our Egyptian gods into the sarcophagus. I thought Qadesh’s message was—”
“Cryptic.” Phaeton muttered.
Exeter raised a brow. “She could hardly have been more clear.”
Slowed by the ever-present gawkers surrounding the British and Foreign Medicine Shop, they sidestepped their way through the milling onlookers. The strangely respectable storefront was a popular East End freak show. The doctor craned his neck for a look through the murky, multi-paned windows. “The usual apothecary jars stuffed with an assortment of horrors. Nothing new—the two-headed fetus of course,” Exeter reported back, “as well as the small dragon excised from the bowels of a sailor.”
America waited with Phaeton to one side of the crowd. “I could have sworn it was vice versa, a miniature sailor taken from the innards of a dragon.” Amused, Phaeton nodded to the tall gray-haired man in the doorway clad in a loose chinoiserie dressing gown and silk opera hat. The proprietor’s name was Magister Swinbourne. The man exuded fakery.
Exeter harrumphed. “Wax figures, suspended in mineral oil.” The wily Swinbourne pointed his long stemmed opium pipe at them. “Dare ye to come in and have a look—I did most of these extractions myself.”
“Not bloody likely,” Exeter scoffed, as Phaeton grabbed hold of the doctor’s arm and headed them all down the cobbled lane.
Away from Swinbourne’s ghastly shop of horrors, Phaeton confessed. “The last time I looked in that window, I’d had a bit of pipe. All those specimens opened their eyes and began to speak.”
America shuddered at the thought. Her overactive imagination made a sudden inexplicable shift to the pea in the pod. She experienced a fleeting vision of Phaeton in conversation with the unborn child. Phaeton was intuitive in the extreme, he would sense the life inside her. She squeezed his arm to steady herself.
“Here we are.” Phaeton hesitated at the entry to the pub. “All right, love?”
America nodded. “Nothing a bit of refreshment can’t cure.” She wondered, frankly, how long she would be able to keep the child from . . . talking . . . so to speak. Or better yet, how she might break the news to him.
A favorite of sailors and dockworkers alike, the Silver Lion was as much a casino as a public house, featuring a variety of entertainments that could make a Portuguese sailor blush. For years America had half listened to a string of colorful stories told about the pub, and she was rather curious. It appeared the proprietors had converted the private dining rooms into a gambling hall, with a small space adjoining known as Cat’s Meat Shop.
Phaeton gave a nod to the backroom. “Peep shows, two a penny, featuring photographs of a depraved and indecent character.” He pulled out a chair for her. “Leastwise that was what the arresting officer reported to the Manchester Guardian the last time the shop was raided.” Phaeton leaned close and whispered, “Nothing you and I haven’t tried once or twice, darling.”
A shiver curved down her neck and spine. Suddenly it was as if they were alone in the casino. Her whole body, every nerve ending, tingled. She sensed his arousal spark to life. This mutual excitation they experienced had always been mystifying. It was as if they each felt the other’s pleasure as their own.
“What’ll it be?” Exeter cleared his throat and waited.
Phaeton broke the spell. “A pint for me.”
“Ginger ale,” she breathed, her words barely loud enough to hear.
The doctor went off to procure their drinks, and Phaeton settled in to watch two young women dance on mirrored tabletops. The clatter of coins on the looking glass encouraged the dancers’ skirts to rise ever higher.
“Seems like a great deal of money to get a peek at a girl’s quim,” America huffed.
“Actually, my dove, it’s more of a disappearing act.” Just as Phaeton spoke, a well dressed West Ender positioned a bottle right side up beneath the dancer. America tried to keep the blush away but heat flooded her cheeks.
Phaeton stretched his legs out and scanned the smoke-filled room. “Something isn’t right.” He nodded to a darkened corner and shifted his line of sight. He was concentrating on his peripheral vision—exactly as he had taught her to do on board the Topaz.
America concentrated as well, and a figure emerged from the shadows. A hooded entity stood like a sentry. Might there be more? She thought so, but couldn’t be sure. Human life forms, at least partially so, but what were they waiting for?
The clink of whiskey glasses returned her attention to the table. Exeter set down a bottle and two pints. “I sense four of them,” the doctor warned. “Two more, possibly, in the back.” He nodded to the gaming room behind their table. He uncorked the ginger ale and poured a glass.
“I find it oddly comforting that you see them as well, doctor.” America drank thirstily.
Exeter grinned. “So, you’ve both been practicing?”
Phaeton sipped his bitters. “My life has been idyllically unadventurous these last few months, leastwise with regard to the extramundane.”
Scanning the corners again, America caught a flicker of light—a glint in the shadows. A familiar feeling licked up her spine and unsettled her stomach. Terror. Phaeton had lived with these kinds of apparitions since he was a child. Growing up, he’d faced down any number of wily phantoms and snarling trolls. She marveled at his composure, as even now he paid little heed to the hooded figures lurking in the corners.
“They know that we know.” Phaeton flicked an eye roll toward a corner.
Exeter studied him for a moment. “Well then, shall we let the scenario play out?” The doctor angled his chair so that they could each cover two corners and the entrance.
Two pints and four shots later, Phaeton appeared well on his way to a state of blissful intoxication. America turned to Exeter. “We both sense . . . a different energy about in the city. Perhaps you might bring us up to date?”
“Since you’ve been gone, there have been . . . disturbances.” The doctor leaned across the table. “Attacks by strange entities, as well as missing persons—abductions perhaps—are popping up all over London. According to reports in the Weekly Dispatch and the Guardian, packs of strange, ungodly creatures roam the streets at night.” Exeter referred to newspapers popular with the lower classes. The papers often published wildly speculative stories, which included grisly reports of violence written in lurid detail. The doctor drained the last of his pint. “The entire East End is in a hysteria over it.”
Indeed, even here in the Silver Lion things were slightly askew. She sensed a giddy sort of madness among dancers and patrons alike. The laughs were louder, the women wilder—and though she couldn’t be sure, even the whiskey appeared more intoxicating. But perhaps the strangest counterpoint to all this heightened merrymaking was the pall that hung heavy in the air, as thick as a black fog.
Exeter related a few of the yellow press reports which included skeletal-like creatures sighted rummaging in dustbins, and various other unspeakable abominations carrying off living beings wrapped in rags—like mummies in the British Museum.
America’s eyes widened. “The Skeezick.”
Phaeton and Exeter both rocked their chairs forward. “The what?”
That horrid creature I told you about—the one that attacked me in the hansom. He called himself Skeezick.” Nervously, America moistened her lips. “Skeletal body, bulbous, nearly hairless, head with beady gray eyes that . . .” America twirled her index fingers in opposite directions.
Phaeton drained his glass. “One eye is on London while the other is winking at Paris?”
Exeter grinned. “The medical term is extropia.”
America sighed. “The thing implied there are many more like him.”
The doctor spoke in a low tone as he scanned the room. “I don’t believe the city has ever experienced a metaphysical assault of this magnitude, at least in recent history.”
Phaeton rubbed the stubble of new beard on his chin. “I’m sensing something older. Who might have recorded such things in the ancient past?”
Exeter poured another dram. “We might consult the runes of druids.”
Absently, America turned the base of her empty glass and stole another glance at the wickedly provocative table dancers. She experienced a touch of vertigo as both young women widened their stance and flung their arms out to their sides.
Phaeton sat up straight. “Is it my state of inebriety, or is the room moving?”
Exeter, as well, readied himself for what none of them could fathom—yet.
Yes, she was quite sure of it. The room expanded and contracted, as though it was trying to breathe or collapse. An eerie cacophony of moans and whispers blew open the doors like gale winds, and swept through the pub. Terrified patrons fled or hid under tables. A chorus of hisses hovered just outside in the street. The rustle of leaves, or the rattle of serpents?
“Shall we retreat now, rather than later?” Exeter stood and backed away from the table. Phaeton reached for her hand. The doctor nodded toward the entrance. “Harpies?”
Phaeton shook his head. “More like . . . snakes. Fiver it’s a Gorgon.”
Exeter checked the gaming room behind them. “Place a wager with the house, perhaps?” They all fell back into the gambler’s den where they found a reasonably defensive position and waited. Phaeton’s arm went around her waist. Calming, even though th
e quiet meant the storm was surely coming.
A second blast of whispers and shrieks swept drinks off tables and rocked a few stragglers out of their chairs. Phaeton lunged forward to rescue a rolling whiskey bottle.
Amid fearful shrieks and a jostle of retreating customers, balls of light—a swarm of them—flew through the pub’s doors and into the hall. As the hovering globes traveled farther inside, the orbs appeared to grow tentacles. The elongated, rope-like snakes crawled over and under tables, stopping now and then to examine a bleary-eyed rummy.
Mesmerized, America observed a number of delicate filaments—feelers of sorts, stretched out from the ends of each serpentine appendage. The slightest twitch from the slender threads caused a vibration in the air already crackling with the aether of the supernatural.
Phaeton took a last swig and tossed the empty bottle.
A worm-like tentacle slithered across a vingt-et-un table, stretching its antennae in Phaeton’s direction. The closer the appendage came, the farther he withdrew.
Fay-ton.
America distinctly heard Qadesh speak. Fay-ton you have returned my husband to me. She recalled a strangely beautiful goddess with blood red lips and kohl black eyes. The troublesome goddess had wreaked havoc all over London before Phaeton and Exeter had restored Anubis and reunited the love-starved couple. Yes, she was quite sure the voice was the Egyptian consort of Anubis. But that was impossible. All this had happened months ago. Phaeton and Doctor Exeter had seen the two powerful gods safely ensconced in their roomy stone sarcophagus for an eternity. The coffin had been buried under the sands outside Alexandria. Phaeton had seen to the services, personally.
“Do you hear her?” America whispered.
Both Phaeton and Exeter nodded.
What was this strange voice of Qadesh that they all heard in their head? I leave you a gift, Fay-ton. Entrust its power only to those who would never abuse it.
The Moonstone and Miss Jones Page 5