A Midwinter Fantasy

by Leanna Renee Hieber; L. J. McDonald; Helen Scott Taylor

  A second spirit bobbed through the wall, a once-lovely girl now cast in a ghostly greyscale, her clothing dated decades prior, her spectral curls weightless in a phantom breeze. Percy’s eerie eyes widened. “Oh, Constance!” she cried, rushing joyfully forward. The ghost moved to embrace her with a cold gust of air. Percy closed her eyes and waited out the chill, as if this were a perfectly normal greeting—and for a girl who was born seeing spirits and calling them friends, it likely was.

  “How I’ve missed you, Constance,” she said. “Are you well and at peace?”

  The female spirit spoke as animatedly as the boy, but she seemed to be offering reassurances. She turned to the urchin and they both nodded—glancing again, Michael noted uncomfortably, at him.

  “I think it’s a lovely idea!” Percy exclaimed.

  “What is?” the ex-Guard chorused.

  Percy turned to them with a mysterious smile, her eyes lingering on Michael in a way that made him even more uneasy. “Oh, nothing, just a bit of a Christmas present these spirits have in mind.” She looked demurely at the company. “Pardon me, Michael, but might the spirits and I discuss matters in the adjoining sitting room? I feel it is rude for me to carry on a conversation none of you is privy to and”—excitement played across her lips—“that I’m not at liberty to relay, it being private business.”

  Her husband scowled in clear displeasure at being left out. Percy dotingly stroked his black hair but offered no apology.

  Michael gestured to the next room. Percy moved into it, the spectral boy close on her heels. Constance wafted to follow, offering Alexi a curtsey on the way out. Michael recalled having seen her at Athens Academy, too.

  Alexi addressed her. “It is good to see you, Constance,” he called as the spirit moved to pursue Percy. She stopped at the sound of her name. His scowl eased though his schoolmaster tone remained. “I owe you a bit of credit for making it quite clear, despite my inability to hear you, that I should teach my then-pupil to waltz. That thrilling lesson began our downfall; your friend is now my wife. As I didn’t see you haunting our wedding, I assume the news might please you.”

  Constance’s gaunt face brightened into a delighted smile that lit her whole transparent being, and she clapped her hands soundlessly in delight.

  Percy poked her head out from the next room. “Constance, are—?”

  The ghost said something, grinning, bobbing in the air.

  Percy blushed. “Oh, yes, the professor and I are married. Isn’t it wonderful?” She stared at her husband with renewed excitement, as if she could still hardly believe her good fortune, and Alexi’s scowl was again vanquished by his earnest wife. A moment later, the spirits and Percy disappeared also, to discuss their mysterious business.

  Percy. They’d found her so late in the course of their Grand Work, she’d been with them for such a short time before their powers were taken back, that Michael wondered what more they might have accomplished had she spent her entire life with them. Then again, she was only nineteen, and had he known her as a child it would have been awkward for Alexi to up and marry her. But true love overcame all obstacles, despite needing to await its time. Michael supposed if an immortal incarnation of Rebecca had taken up residence in one of his young parishioners and sought him out at an appropriate juncture, he’d think about her age a bit differently, too. As for its time . . . he had certainly awaited love long enough.

  Elijah and Alexi fell to quarreling, filling up the silence with familiar chatter. Withersby demanded Alexi be present for his and Josephine’s imminent wedding, but Alexi was set upon taking immediate time away. Each demanded theirs was the more important event, and neither budged. The debate then progressed to who, in truth, was the more difficult man in the realm of cohabitation. Josephine steered clear of a vote.

  The two men whirled on Michael at the same time, both clearly expecting his acquiescence.

  “You’ll take care of the Athens particulars I delineate?” Alexi barked.

  “You’ll arrange the wedding?” Elijah insisted.

  Michael took a breath and called upon the one gift that thankfully had not left him: his patience. He took a sip of mulled wine and examined his anxious compatriots. “Professor, you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere I’d rather be than at Athens Academy, to help the headmistress,” he said. “And Withersby, anything to get you into a church—may the Lord forgive me or bless my efforts.” He smiled. “Perhaps it’s best if Alexi and you aren’t both under one sacred roof, though. I fear other guests might be harmed by chastising lightning bolts from Heaven should you quarrel so in His house.”

  Percy breezed back into the room. The spirits were gone. Alexi stared at her expectantly. She kissed her husband on the head, beaming. “I love Christmas!” she exclaimed, and took her empty teacup into the kitchen. If any of the former Guard were waiting for an explanation, they received none.

  Michael picked up his tankard and followed her. As they both set their cups down upon a side table near the washbasin, the two turned to look at each other. “Truly, how are you?” they both asked at once. Percy smiled. Michael chuckled.

  “You first,” Michael prompted. “As I’m not sure I want to know what those spirits said, do tell me of your recent life. Be honest.”

  Percy’s moonbeam eyes sparkled. “I’m very well . . . though I’m often reminding Alexi that he’s just as impressive as he’s always been, that he’s just as important. The world needs mathematicians as much as it needs ghost hunters. More perhaps.” She chuckled. “My, how he does like being in charge.”

  “Just think, my dear Percy, how long he’s been in relative control of everything. He was tasked with directing our little group from the start. That control first slipped when we fumbled over Prophecy, when we met you, and it’s been sorely tried ever since. He’s had little opportunity to impress you, to show you our work when it was humming with maximum efficiency under his leadership. There was a time we were like machines in a divine factory,” Michael promised her with a smile. “And he does so love to impress you.”

  Percy blushed. “But he already did, long before I ever knew about the Grand Work or The Guard. I’m waiting for him to trust me that I fell in love with him as a professor, not leader of a force against the supernatural.”

  “It will take time for him to adjust,” Michael said. “In the meantime, I assume he’d like to orchestrate your every move? Though I must say, you handle him brilliantly.”

  Percy shared his half smirk. “Alexi’s restrained himself from giving me direct orders, but takes great care to make sure I’m always comfortable, always provided for and always supported. I cannot say I mind. It’s rather sweet to have a man like him doting. Especially in my condition,” she said, brushing her abdomen. “Now, your turn. You’ll not play the counselor and avoid being counseled.”

  Michael clenched his jaw, not wanting to speak of it. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Percy knowingly shook her head. “But you two have already begun.” She’d been the one to encourage him to confess his feelings to Rebecca in the first place, there in that darkened Athens foyer. Percy had been directly invested in this matter since she was first aware of it.

  “Have we? Begun, I mean? It was a desperate time. We’ve not seen one another since we laid Jane to rest, all of us fiddling and making uncomfortable small talk, stifled by grief . . . It’s been like none of us knows each other anymore.”

  “Alexi and Elijah were at each other again. I’d say life’s returning to normal.”

  Michael bit his lip and gave in to temptation. “All right, I can’t bear it. What did the spirits say about me?”

  Percy smiled. “Are you a fan of Dickens?”

  Michael blinked. “Of course. I’d have liked to have recruited him for The Guard, were we around forty-odd years ago. Who isn’t a fan of Dickens?”

  “Oh, Alexi, for one,” Percy laughed. “He claims the man a consummate fraud in ghostly matters, but I think dear Charles is r
ather to the point. I suppose the poor man could have used a Guard to relieve him of his three plaguing spirits, but then we’d never have such a wonderful story.”

  Michael nodded, then paused, eyeing her. “But wait . . . What are you aiming at?” Dickens? Christmas? Ghosts? His uneasiness mounted.

  Percy continued. “It would seem that spirits are interested in turning the tide. Reversing the roles. Rather than corralling spirits, as you used to do, they’ll corral you. For a time.”

  Michael furrowed his brow. “Turn the tide? Whose tide?”

  “Why, yours of course. They want to see you happy.”

  “Do they?”

  “Oh, yes. My friend, Constance, she understands this situation all too well. I’ve missed her desperately.” Percy offered a tiny, sad laugh. “The danger of having spirits for friends. You wish them peace but then, when they find it, you’re terribly lonely without them.”

  Michael’s heart swelled. It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered if she was a guardian angel as well as a mortal young woman; kindness and goodness incarnate.

  She took his hand and returned his fond expression, her white face all the more radiant. “There’s a journey ahead. Await its coming.”

  Michael raised an eyebrow. “Expect three spirits? Before the bell tolls one?”

  Percy shrugged. “Alas, while I maintain I deem Master Dickens insightful, I doubt this will play out just like his Carol, Mr. Carroll, so I can’t be sure of the time.”

  A thought occurred to him, and Michael felt his smile fade. “Percy . . . will it be dangerous? Will I be the only one—”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no, it’s really more for the headmistress than for you—”

  “Is it dangerous?” he pressed, even more forcefully.

  A shadow crossed Percy’s face. “While your experience has taught you to not trust every spirit, I do trust these,” she replied. Her voice was too careful for him to feel reassured. “And . . . I shall be on guard,” she added.

  “But your husband wants to whisk you away.”

  “Your long-overdue merry Christmas is more important,” Percy stated, stretching up to kiss him softly on the cheek. “I will find a way to remain. For safety’s sake.”

  Without another word she returned to the dining table. Michael followed, puzzling over this new development.

  Elijah was insisting that Alexi would look much better in a verdant green than in his constant black, and Alexi was regarding him—and the notion—with disgust. “Yes, yes,” Michael interrupted. “All your bickering must be attended in good time, and your various requests. But for now leave a vicar in peace, will you?”

  His friends made their farewells, some of them eyeing him with surprise. Michael shut the door Elijah couldn’t manage to shut for himself, returned to his table and sat. The tumult was out of his house. “Good riddance,” he murmured. Then he stood back up. He went for his wine cup. It needed refilling.

  He stared at his empty home. It was too bare. While never the lavish sort, he wanted something just a bit grander, as he could never imagine Rebecca Thompson in anything less than a well-appointed town house with windows and fireplaces in every room. It embarrassed him to dream of making a home with her here: how could he even presume? And it was terribly hard to entertain guests in so small a space. And he enjoyed nothing so much as guests.

  His grumbling was a show; he’d delighted in company. Always a social creature; he was, after all, the Heart of the group. Or at least he had been. Yet for all the activity, the one person he wanted present was off somewhere else, likely tucked away at the top of Athens Academy in her small and cozy attic apartments, possibly pondering the same questions as he: Could they start anew? What would come next?

  Pouring the last of his batch of mulled wine into his tankard, he sat with a common book of prayer, hoping a bit of Gospel could set his soul at ease. Tomorrow he would call upon her, right after his rounds. It was a man’s duty to call upon a woman. They’d indulged for years in behaviours hardly common, excusing themselves each breach of etiquette, always allowing the Grand Work to take precedence over custom, but it was high time they began acting like the upstanding citizens of the Queen’s great England that he wondered if they could ever become.

  His hands shook slightly, so he set down the book of prayer and placed them on the table. The fleshy edges of his palms vibrated against the wood. He was a man in his late thirties, and he wasn’t any surer of how to address a woman than he’d been at fifteen, when he’d first wanted to tell Rebecca Thompson how lovely and interesting she was. His tongue had been shackled then, and two decades had done nothing to unlock it. And, what opportunity would there be? It wasn’t as though The Guard had seen one another every day, back when they’d had their powers, but Rebecca’s recent absence worried him. There was no Pull to bring them all together, no spiritual call to arms that would assure him of seeing his beloved and thus being fed on her presence for yet another day.

  Her presence. He’d subsisted on that meagre portion for just over twenty years, so how could he now ask for more? What was to be done about it, and what if he did something wrong? She was so tender, so raw and so utterly not in love with him. He was paralyzed with fear, and the feeling was unprecedented. For years he’d been the great Heart, so named by the goddess on that first day the Grand Work brought them together. Now he was a mortal man, a simple vicar. And a doubting one, at that.

  He did not believe that heaven would cater precisely to his whims, so he prayed that whatever Percy and the spirits intended would indeed help. He could no longer open locked doors, and one heart had always remained shut to him, even when he could. Thus, though it went against years of instinct, Michael would accept a bit of ghostly intervention.

  Chapter Two

  Headmistress Rebecca Thompson sat curled upon her bed, hugging her long and slight frame and stroking Marlowe, Jane’s familiar, a white cat as sullen as she. She peered into the beast’s green eyes, hoping to see the luminous quality that once resided there, a sign of an otherworldly power. But that luminosity had vanished when the cat’s mistress breathed her last, when the possessing spirits of The Guard vacated them all in a rush of wind leaving only a searing emptiness. The resultant vacuum felt wrong, and Rebecca regretted that she’d ever taken the Grand Work for granted.

  She’d had a familiar as well: Frederic, a raven. He was nowhere to be seen, and Rebecca ached for him. She’d no idea how comforting it was simply to have that black bird outside on a windowsill, something that was hers, an ever-present companion. Poe had been ungrateful in his prose. Now that her bird had quit her chamber, Rebecca Thompson had never felt so alone.

  Lit dimly in gaslight, a dark London night past her drawn window, she was caught between utter terror, incapacitating grief and a slight frisson of possibility. She had supped upon bland soup, tried to read, considered rearranging Athens Academy curriculum for the new year, reorganized her small pantry, changed the direction of her Persian rugs and nearly paced holes in them before at last curling up with Marlowe, her trembling hands gliding haphazardly over his fur, staring at her apartments, bewildered.

  When the board of Athens Academy sent her a letter asking her to apprentice as headmistress at the tender age of sixteen, an act she assumed came from Prophecy rather than from her proficiency, she didn’t dare say no. Their sacred space and the heart of the Grand Work centred around Athens and so it was fate that placed her in this building. But she’d wanted, as the rest of them had, her own space not so tied to the Grand Work. She wanted to retire separately, to a place neutral. But alas, she had been and perhaps would always be defined by the academy in her waking and sleeping hours.

  Craning her head toward the window, she watched snow-flakes begin to fall. As much as she may have wished to be elsewhere, she hadn’t gained the courage to leave the apartment for days. Her thoughts were murky as she contemplated her broken state. She should have been the one to die, not Jane. For all her mistakes, Rebecca mused
with sullen surety, it should have been she.

  As early as she could remember, she had striven to be a woman both accomplished and reliable, gifted and strong. Once, she had been all those things. For years she had performed her duty to The Guard with aplomb, had been their Intuition. Then she’d nearly caused Prophecy to fail. She was a Judas. She was weak. She should never have been spared. Even saving the lives of her students and helping to prevent warring spirits from tearing up London brick by brick could not diminish her guilt.

  She had no idea where her friends were on this cool winter night. Usually she could sense them, but since the forces previously driving their destinies were gone, the group was disconnected. She spared a moment of pity for the world at large, people who’d never known what it was like to be tethered in some direct way to loved ones, but then that passed. Her bond was now sundered. Perhaps the rest of the world was better off ignorant of such a thing.

  Because she did not know where to find her friends, she was hesitant to go out into the night and search for them. Her melancholy did her the disservice of supposing them assembled and having a grand time without her. Not that the party could ever again be complete. Not without Jane, their modest Healer, their keen judge of character and quiet recluse, The Guard’s steadfast hope and Rebecca’s dearest friend.

  “What is wrong with you, Headmistress?” she chided herself. “Pull yourself together; you’ve an institution to run. You’ve never been unable to perform that venerable duty. Oh, but for the grief and these nerves . . .”

  There was just so much to feel—something she’d attempted for years to avoid. She needed help sorting out the guilt-ridden, lonely, excitable and confused mess that was her present state of mind. But, to this end, she had no idea where to turn. She would once have gone to Jane, to sensible, stalwart Jane, since she most certainly couldn’t have turned to Alexi, both her friend and her greatest agony. But Jane had gone to the angels, to be eternally by the side of the man she loved; she had no further time for the sorry human lots of those back in London.