Lord of the Last Heartbeat

by May Peterson

  “And yet—” The incubus’s smile widened, like insect wings spreading. “You have enough respect to bring me a gift.”

  The boy was tugging at the chain. He sobbed, gasping for air. The instinct to draw breath never quite died. We all stood there, ignoring him, unable to play any roles except those the curse gave us to play.

  The incubus drew nearer, fondling the boy’s corpse with an expression that might have been love.

  This was where I came in.

  When I had died, it became like everything was on fire. I’d started feeling the sun rising through four layers of walls, like some luminous mold that would permeate the air I breathed. This, if nothing else, had taught me why people called the power of the Deep “the holy darkness.” Because after the first few months of wanting to tear my skin off—which literally happened each time I bear-shaped—the icebox darkness of my cellar felt pretty fucking holy.

  And it beat inside me, like something that had lodged within when I was resurrected. A space, thrumming with its own voice. The voice of the bear-soul, remembering its primordial winters.

  I opened that space like jaws. The darkness boiled in me, holy and deep.

  The incubus’s fingers were dissolving, seeping into the corpse like a carnal infection. Eirlys brought new souls to the altar to draw it out, test her blade again, but that gave the incubus the chance of a body. Fresh from the moment of death, the incubus could be born into a cambion, a possessed body that lived with no soul, only the incubus’s scavenged consciousness. And the dead had no defense against it.

  Except me, blazing silver inside, the bear spirit in my belly hungry to devour its corruption. If I never got free, I’d still never let the incubus have a body.

  Moonlight erupted across the corpse’s skin. The boy, in spirit, gasped and covered his eyes. The incubus recoiled. The wail of the souls through the gate accompanied the growing darkness in me. As the moonlight waxed, the incubus shrank back. I snarled, a sound more animal than human, and held the body close.

  If only this silver could burn it out of existence. If only I could fucking eat it, emptiness and ambition all, digesting it into the darkness. But this was the only gate I could keep closed—between spirit and flesh. And I set that gate on fire, until the boy’s corpse might have been silver itself.

  The light faded. He was hallowed, and no force could possess his dead flesh now. Eirlys watched me, echoes of the silver in her eyes. As if she understood. As if she were counting on this.

  Only wisps of moonlight remained, flecking the incubus’s imitation skin. Pale fire shot spiderweb cracks through it. It looked up at me with hollow, empty eyes.

  “My lord.” Cecilio sounded breathless, as if he were warning or begging or praising, but my brain assigned no meaning to his words. He simply repeated, “My lord.”

  I held the incubus’s gaze. “You’ve had your fun. Get the fuck out of my foyer.”

  It stood, slowly, and shook the flames from itself. The gut-twisting smile returned. “You will give up, eventually. Your heart will die, and in time no power will be able to restore it. Do you know why I am certain?” It yanked on the chain, drawing a yelp from the boy. The eyes traced a knife’s path over me, over Eirlys. “Because it’s what you do. Every soul she attempts to save is brought to me by her hand. And you let her do it. You bury her quarries, one by one, and hide that they were ever here. What’s a few vagabonds and war orphans that no one wanted around anyway?”

  The chain tensed. The boy tried to fight the pull with everything his beaten will could muster. But it dragged him, mercilessly, feet whispering over the floor, into the rest of the lost souls. I looked away as his mewling was lost in the din.

  “I doubt you even want this to end.” The incubus’s voice was softer now, as if he were thinking out loud. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be a long-suffering hero anymore. You would just be the sinner that caused it all.”

  The chain snarled, its whip crack grabbing my attention. Eirlys had seized the boy by the ankle. He was caught between her and the chain. If he had been flesh and blood, it would have been enough to tear him in two. His cries became screams, blurred with the song of the Deep. Ice congealed around Eirlys’s feet to keep her from being dragged with him. She tried to take hold of his chain.

  And in an instant, he was snapped from her grip. The void had him.

  The incubus bowed. “I’ll take what belongs to me. It seems I’m no longer welcome here today.”

  It dissolved into vapor. The Verge’s doors slammed closed, faster than they had appeared. A bang rocked the house, and when my vision cleared, the doors were already fading.

  Rosemary dropped to her knees. All I could see was Eirlys, still standing with her hand outstretched, ice crystallized around her feet.

  A moment passed in which none of us moved. Then Eirlys threw her head back and howled. It wasn’t the kind of sound any living thing could make. It was thunder, without light or heat, shattering the glass on the sideboard, knocking open the windows.

  Then, just like the incubus, she faded. And the snow continued to fall.

  * * *

  Cecilio plopped down the decanter of whiskey next to me on the floor without a word.

  The crystal was cool against my burning palms. Eirlys hadn’t shattered this one. Maybe that was her version of a small mercy. “Cecilio, may every god, of every religion, save you.” I tipped it back and sucked straight from the neck. The first gulp hurt, bad, going down. But I needed that. “Have I told you lately that you are the best valet a man could ever have asked for?”

  He sighed. “I question the value of that, my lord, if it comes to this.” He offered me a light.

  Oh God, yes. I still had cigarillos. Couldn’t make it without those. My hands shook as I lit, took a puff. This was as much of an after-battle ritual as we had. Cecilio and Rosemary knew how to bandage my particular wounds.

  As the snow thinned, I left them to their own self-treatment. Cecilio tidied up the ice and broken glass, and Rosemary pulled the body onto the rug, examining it. Ghosts had peculiar sets of needs—as much as one wondered what it was like not to need to eat or sleep, they seemed to have their own forms of upkeep, quirks and rituals that served some emotional purpose.

  The unspoken agreement was that this was not the time to cry. They knew I did, when they weren’t around. But it was awkward to watch one’s former employer in such a state. And it was selfish to fall apart even further in front of them. This damnation had been dealt to them more unfairly, exacted more completely. So I drank until my eyes burned and waited for sensation to return.

  No one had bothered closing the front door, but it helped to work against the cold. Getting the chill out seemed like one of those obvious steps. Like burying the body.

  Rosemary hummed to herself. “He had classic signs of malnutrition. The clothes are threadbare, mismatched.” A grim smile hardened her face. “Sadly, but luckily, the...incubus is right. It’s unlikely that anyone will come searching for him.”

  I sighed. “I’ll bury him later. Before it gets much warmer. I want to clean his wound.”

  “Very good, my lord. I’ll check him for silver.” She did that for me, stripping buttons, coins, knives, any bits of silver the dead may have carried. Rosemary had excellent resilience to the stuff, for a ghost. Spared me from having to handle it.

  The virtue of hallowing was the gift of my bear spirit, shrouding what I anointed with my blood against any invasion of the Deep. I wished I could oust the incubus with it. But only purifying the curse that had spawned it would do that, and my supernatural gifts hadn’t been successful in that endeavor.

  Rosemary lifted a chunk of ice from the floor. It hadn’t melted; if not for the encroaching day, it might remain solid forever in her heatless grip. “It’s amazing.” A pale smile turned her lips. “This had to have pierced the artery instantly. It couldn’t have been mor
e than minutes until I found him, dead. Her Ladyship strikes with such precision. Almost as if...” A shrug.

  Cecilio, floating by a window, hissed out a sound that was the closest I’d ever heard to an audible sneer. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing. It’s a curse. It controls her behavior. The same reason I can’t leave His Lordship to his messes, even if I wanted to. And at this rate, I just may start.” The remaining glass dropped out of the window frame, prompting a flinch from him. “We’re going to have to go back into town, my lord.”

  All ghosts entered afterlife with their own individual curses, the chains that fettered them to the world of their life. Rosemary’s tethered her to the house, and Cecilio’s bound him to keep serving me. I tried to balance letting him satisfy that urge with making the work as easy on him as possible. Sometimes I looked at him and chewed on whether I was getting it right.

  “I know it’s a curse.” Rosemary set the ice back down. “It’s just...like she’s trying to kill them quickly. Minimize suffering. I’ve seen the difference between soldiers that kill in a haze, firing wildly, and those who count every death. She’s like the latter. And yet she still kills, every time. We’ve never had a survivor.”

  I pressed the decanter to my forehead. It was hard to bite back the response I wanted to give. It’s part of her revenge against me. But then why fight for each resulting ghost so passionately? “You’re aware of your curse, even when it limits you, yes? I think that’s what makes it hell. She’s just trying to make hell a little more bearable.”

  The ghosts glanced at one another. Was it hell for them? Or was the knowledge of being spared the chains a comfort enough to soften things?

  “Why—” Rosemary paused, as if considering. “Why do you think it keeps trying? If it knows you can keep it out of the bodies.”

  Cecilio looked up, caterpillar brows arching, and dusted glass from his hands. “I should think you would find it obvious, tethered to this house. The boredom alone. It’s God’s own grace I haven’t started murdering people myself.” It was an attempt at mood lightening, which misfired. Rosemary pursed her lips, and he cleared this throat. “I. Am. Very sorry.”

  I scrounged up a weak laugh. “We’d know if you were mass murdering, because all your victims would have been strangled with overly tight cravats.” Slowly, I found my feet, grumbling at the sudden lack of whiskey. “It tries because I can’t keep it out. Not forever. And... I don’t think it’s tethered to the house.”

  Rosemary’s face fell. “You have found signs of the curse spreading. Oh, God in Heaven. If it gets into the city, if her Ladyship follows...”

  I’d thought the same. Eirlys’s fetters didn’t force her to remain near the house, as far as I knew, and her afterlife had given her terrible powers. Even as a more typical ghost, simply able to materialize and dematerialize at will, she would have been capable of great harm, unchecked. But I didn’t have room in my head to borrow any more trouble.

  I raised a hand to forestall her. “Stop. No panicking. I don’t know what I’ve found. It’s just—”

  “It spoke as if it had lured that boy here.” Cecilio scanned the hall again, as if to see if it were listening. But we all knew it was always listening. “From outside.”

  Yes. It had. “That might just mean he came too close to the gate, and it felt him. Lied to him.” And the lies were worse than swords, than bullet wounds. You bled faster out of the holes they left. “But it’s getting smarter. More self-aware. Each new soul seems to enhance its consciousness, making it stronger. I have no idea how much time we have left. In theory any moon-soul should have been able to purify the curse, yet here we are.”

  I’d tried. Strength of spirit was what fueled our power of curse purification—partly why it was called the power of virtue. Passion and devotion meant a strong virtue, and I apparently didn’t have enough of either to best the incubus. And it might decide it was better to cannibalize Cecilio and Rosemary rather than dangle them over my head. We stood there in the persistent chill, not looking at each other. This was what it came down to. A war of attrition would inevitably be won by the incubus.

  “What I do know—” I rustled around in my pocket for another cigarillo “—is that sitting here trying to starve it isn’t working.”

  My fingers crinkled something. That damn note. I pulled it out, held it up to the light.

  All right, you little lemon drop. What do you want me to stop you from? Eating too many cannoli and getting a tummy ache? Or ending up like this poor pup here?

  Rosemary leaned in. “Don’t tell me you’ve received another letter from an admirer. It’s absurd what a haunted manor can do for one’s image.”

  “No. Not exactly.” I revealed the wine-stained message. “Mio Gianbellicci.”

  The name had come to me like an epiphany in a dream, once I’d stopped trying to place his face and voice. Why he’d been in service livery at a festival celebration was beyond me, but it only made his message that much stranger.

  Cecilio arched a brow. “My lord, I realize that Portian is not your first language, but that’s not what this says.”

  “Sure it is.” I finally produced the other smoke, and went to close the door. “The name eluded me, but I’ve heard him sing half a dozen times. All he had to do was speak. You want to know how I know? Castrating boys is illegal in this country.”

  Cecilio stepped back, eyes blowing wide. “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’s a castrato. Natural born. The only one you’ll find on a stage in Vermagna today. Which means I know just where to find him. Your role will be simple. I’ll bury this and then it’s naptime. You just set out a white tie and my Fourniers, the patent leather.” I waggled my eyebrows. “I’m going to the opera.”

  Well, lemon drop, your bait is hooked.

  It may be too risky a play, but I was in now. And those elusively melancholy eyes would haunt me as surely as my ghosts if I didn’t let myself be reeled in.

  Chapter Three

  MIO

  I was eleven. A woman in a powdery gray uniform sat across from me.

  She looked as though she’d been trained to imitate stone. Stolid expression, no movement, eyes softly focused on my chest. No eye contact.

  We sat in the middle of Mamma’s study, the bronzed light of evening softening boundaries in the room. This lady had walked in and taken a seat at one of the two chairs placed before Mamma’s desk.

  “Take your time, Mio.” Mamma’s voice from her desk was gentle, but intent. “Tell me what she feels. Or thinks. Something you couldn’t normally tell.”

  Stripes of sleepy sunlight cast bars over Mamma’s face, but I could almost feel the earnest pressure of that red eye, glinting out of the shadows. She was willing to be patient. But this was a test nonetheless.

  I’d been afraid of my voice changing for years. For all the haphazard internal trials I was told to expect from boyhood. Maybe it still would, young as I was—but a different change had already begun. The place that opened in me, like a jeweled window that admitted in strange new lights and colors. The first time it’d been unveiled had been terrifying. Feelings, images, slipping through my skin. It had been in public. Like someone had dipped me in a sea of other people’s heads, hearts, the roiling deluge of their souls. I’d been almost lost in panic for two days, and had hoped Mamma with all her witchcraft would produce a cunning magical remedy for me.

  She hadn’t been interested in remedies. But she had been so happy that day, even as she held me and whispered that it would end soon, that I would be myself again eventually. And that one day I’d be able to master that very experience.

  It was confirmed—she finally had a child with magic.

  The answer came quickly, that my voice was what could uncover that window. The reason why seemed to be a mystery. I understood that magic manifested differently for almost every mage, and that much of witchcraft was learn
ing to plumb those peculiarities, turn them into resources. For some mages, thinking of their powers in words could translate into weaving magic into phrases. Some used pictures to train their serpents; still others developed myriad new theurgies, as long as they did not hold on too tightly to controlling them. For me, speaking sometimes lit up my powers, which riddled every public conversation with new fears, a yawning sense of vulnerability. But singing did the trick best.

  This helped Mamma convince me to hone my magic more than anything. I couldn’t give up singing. It would be like giving up food, or sunsets, or quiet walks by myself. Everything that made the texture of life bearable. If I was to sing without drowning in alien emotions ever again, I would have to learn how to control the flow of light through that inner window.

  I waited in vain for the woman to look at me, then decided just to begin. I used no more than a simple tune, a string of classic verse. The song I sang seemed to not matter, at least all the time. My new sensitivity could roar to life from merely humming. The way a song made me feel seemed to impact it more than the melody itself.

  I sang for a few minutes, looping the chorus, and felt...just a stirring. I concentrated on the woman, as Mamma had taught me to do. As if I were singing to her, embedding the song with personal significance. It was hard when I knew nothing about her beyond her statue mimicry and unfamiliarity. But Mamma had said that was the point. The less I knew, the more would emerge to flush the blanks, teaching me to grasp details from the contact.

  Maybe it wouldn’t open all the way this time.

  But then, as if I were a flower spreading petals to the sun, the stirring mounted. It became a current of sensations, impressions. It was like listening to someone talk to themselves and not quite being able to make out words, an uneven emotional pulse without apparent form.

  I skipped a beat, took a breath, and kept singing. Mamma would have noticed by now. No turning back.