Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Indeed we shall. Get the auto, would you?”

  “Very good, m’lord.” Garrick vanished briefly, then returned, bundled in his overcoat and headed out, his bag and Peter’s in hand.

  The phone rang. Peter answered it. “Miss Whitestone’s compliments and thanks, my lord. She asks if you would join her here for breakfast.”

  “I shall indeed, after spending what remains of the night in one of your excellent suites,” Peter replied. “I trust you have one available?”

  After the call, Susanne couldn’t sleep. She got dressed, bundled up in a coat and made her way downstairs. She nodded at the clerk at the front desk, then thought better of her plan and approached him. “I just cannot sleep, I am afraid,” she said, with a little grimace of apology. “I thought a little walk might help.”

  “The gardens are still lighted at night, miss,” the clerk, a remarkably dignified old gent, replied. “I don’t know how long we’ll be allowed to do that—some say that the Huns have flying machines that can cross the Channel, and we’ll have to stop all outside illumination. So you’d better make use of it while you can.” He nodded at a little glass door she had never yet made use of; she smiled at him.

  “Thank you very much,” she said with warmth. “Lord Peter’s message has me rather excited.” Now there was an understatement.

  “I’ll have a nice pot of hot cocoa sent up to your room, miss,” the clerk called softly after her. “That will be just the thing to send you off.”

  She was both amused and bemused. Living here at a fine hotel could not have presented a greater contrast to her life as a servant or that at the Front. Lord Peter had represented her as a cousin, and although there had been some initial eyebrow raising, and probably speculation about her morals (or lack of them), the fact that although he was paying the bill, he had not shown so much as the tip of his aristocratic nose, had laid those rumors to rest. She in her turn had been careful to dress modestly when she was not in her nursing uniform, had always spoken of him respectfully and as “Lord Peter,” and had made sure never to make any demands on the staff. One of the maids ventured a few mild questions; Susanne had answered them by saying that her cousin did not really trust the safety of the boarding houses near the hospital (correctly, as it turned out) and had insisted on putting her here, himself, until she should be granted the title of “nurse” and sent off to France. The nursing uniform and her destination won her respect, her attitude won her acceptance. Whatever they were telling each other now, it was not tales of Lord Peter’s mistress.

  Once in the gardens, she found that they were, indeed, nicely illuminated by gaslights, which reflected off the unmarked snow on either side of the carefully shoveled paths. She walked until she could no longer see the door, or be seen through it, and stood in the dark between the lights, breath steaming out in the bitter air. “Robin?” she called, softly.

  She’d had the feeling he had been waiting for her to call. He materialized out of the shadows of some topiary, walking over the snow without leaving a mark on it. “So, Daughter of Eve. He is come, I marked his passage by the blankness on the Earth.”

  “You did?” she blinked. “How clever, I never would have thought of that, nor did Peter. He hired a detective.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Robin burst out with laughter. “Oh, that was well done. It is the last thing your father would have considered.” Then Robin sobered. “He has been hard at work; he is full of dark power, and the Dark Court and fell Elementals gather about him, bringing him what he needs.”

  “And your Fae?” she asked.

  He paused. “I fear . . . he has chosen his ground, and it is not a good one for us.” His tone had turned somber, even—even a little apprehensive.

  “But the Fae, can they spin illusion?” she persisted. “Or rather, can you choose those who can?”

  His eyes gleamed in the gaslight. “You have a clever plan?”

  Hers glinted back. “And do you remember exactly what my mother looked like?”

  “As if it were yesterday,” he replied, and he showed a ghost of a smile. “You do have a clever plan!”

  “I certainly hope so,” she said. And she told him what she wanted him, and his Fae, to do.

  Lord Peter put down his fork and stared at Susanne, allowing the truly excellent omelet to lie neglected on his plate. Every time he thought that he had seen the best of her, she surprised him yet again. He refused to think of the possible dire consequences; his own imagination was going to supply all of the worst possibilities when he was alone. Instead, he allowed his admiration to show plain in his expression.

  “My dear Susanne,” he said fervently. “If this works, you will be the stuff of legend.”

  “And if it doesn’t—” she shivered. “Well, Robin has promised that one way or another, I won’t be in my father’s hands for long.”

  Her words stopped the enthusiastic reply in his throat, as his imagination supplied exactly what that meant. She was right, of course, on many counts. Right, that she was the only magician they had that could do this, and right that it was incredibly risky. She would have no one there to battle her father but Robin Goodfellow, and depending on just how much Richard understood about the Puck, even Robin could be forced to retreat.

  Especially if Richard had somehow bargained for aid from the Dark Fae. Even the Puck couldn’t hold out against something like the Winter Queen, and this was her season. Peter felt his heart growing cold with fear inside him.

  He wanted to tell her that she couldn’t do this—but he knew that if he did, he would lose her. Not that he actually had her at the moment, but he would certainly lose any hope he had of winning her over. Perhaps when she had first been driven to Branwell Hall, he might have been able to say something like that to her. Not now. She had been through too much, seen too much, grown too much. She was no longer the isolated, naïve young Yorkshire country lass she had once been.

  “Please be careful,” he said instead. “If things look grim, run. We can’t replace you, you know.”

  He thought for a moment that she might retort, but she didn’t. At least not at once. She ate a few bites of her grilled kidneys, then looked up and said, wryly, “Better a live dog than a dead lion?”

  “The dead lion won’t get a second chance; the dog will certainly learn from his defeat and come back with a pack,” Peter pointed out. Then, despite his best intentions, his emotions got the better of him. He put down his fork and captured her free hand. “Please, please be careful and be wise,” he said, with an intensity that made her eyes widen. “I . . . care for you, you know.”

  He quickly took his hand away, before she could pull back, and attempted to pull a mask over his raw emotions. He was rather good at that. He had had a lot of practice. “I did have a notion that we might be able to lure Richard out, make the bait so tempting that he can’t resist it, even though he might not be ready. I think that matches with your own plan. If we do that, we can make him come to us.”

  “How would we do that?” she asked, though he thought she looked and sounded affected by what he had revealed.

  “You’ll apparently go to the last place he would think that you would, making regular visits every night. A graveyard.” Peter took a map of Gravesend out of his breast pocket, and spread it out between them. “This one, here,” he said, pointing to it. “He doesn’t have to know why you would do such a thing, but if you appear to be there two or three nights in a row and stay there for about an hour, I don’t think he’ll be able to withstand the temptation to call up another of his armies of the dead before he’s quite ready. He’ll think he can simply raise up everything in the graveyard. As strong as he is—a lot of those things that attacked Charles in France weren’t his usual slaves. They were just animated bodies, without spirits bound into them. It’s harder to do things that way, if I understand this foul magic correctly, but it means he can put together a large force quicklyl”

  She looked from the map into his
eyes and back again. “And you have something to stop him from doing so?”

  “Sow as much of the graveyard as we can with blessed salt,” he replied instantly. “The sort used at christenings. I know a padre, you see. Even if he manages to get hold of . . . bits . . . to do his usual binding, the dead can’t rise in the presence of blessed salt. Even if we only manage a patch, that patch will be a protected spot.”

  She nodded, slowly. “All right. Shall we start tonight?”

  He wanted, so badly, to say no. He wanted, once again, to whisk her up, carry her off to a ship, and take her far away, where she would be safe. But there was too much at stake. “Yes,” he said. “I think we should.”

  For the third night in a row, Susanne sat on a stone bench beside the new graves of several of the Tommys from the hospital where she now was a nursing student. Every day four of the five guarding her now had managed to sow a bit more of the graveyard with the blessed salt—starting with those very graves. Only Alderscroft had not participated in the salting since his time was at a premium, and he had the magical side of the war effort to conduct. They had covered less ground than anyone liked; it was a bit difficult to go strewing salt about by day, in a graveyard that was surprisingly busy, and by night they were either guarding Susanne or trying to thaw out and get some sleep afterward.

  Well, they were guarding something that looked like Susanne and, to all magical senses, was identical with Susanne. But it was, in fact, an illusion, built on a tiny packet of grimy linen sitting right in the middle of that stone bench. The illusion breathed, moved slightly, and in general would fool just about anyone, even from quite close. And since it incorporated blood and hair from the living girl herself, it felt like her to anyone looking for her magically. Especially since, once she placed that packet on the bench, the living, breathing Susanne immediately hid herself behind intricate layers of shielding.

  The first two nights had been uneventful, but tonight there was something in the air that felt portentous, ominous. The atmosphere felt heavy, and an aura of despair hung about the graveyard. It only got worse as the hour progressed. Peter was nearly on fire with the feeling that he had to leave, and leave now. He couldn’t tell if it was the same for the others in their various places of concealment, and maybe this was only his nerves, but—

  He came instantly and completely alert as a freezing chill closed down over the place, and with the chill came a stench he knew only too well.

  He’s taken the bait!

  He paused just a moment to remove a vial of water from his pocket and smash it on the ground. An identical vial in Michael Kerridge’s possession would have shattered at the same instant, alerting the family that the attack had begun. Then all five of them burst out of whatever cover they had chosen and raced for the bench. And not a moment too soon.

  From all over the graveyard, everywhere they hadn’t spread their preventive salt, the earth heaved under the snow and burst upward, and the graves disgorged their unquiet dead.

  “We really need to stop meeting like this, Peter,” said Doctor Maya Scott, as she and her husband Peter Scott went back-to-back with Lord Alderscroft and Garrick. “I’d much prefer the theater, or even a nice little tea shop. I’d even put up with that wretched excuse for a club of yours.”

  It was much too cold for most of her familiars; granted, they were occasionally the Avatars of Hindu gods, but when they weren’t briefly filled with demidivinity, the frigid cold would likely have killed the delicate parrot and Hanuman ape, and it would not have done the Asian owl and falcon any favors either. The peacock was too large to bring out to the graveyard from London. But the two mongooses were quite habituated to London winters, and they swarmed out of her coat and down into the snow at her feet to dance their angry little hackles-raised mongoose dance.

  “Perhaps I should see to having the Visiting Ladies parlor brought up to date. Almsley wouldn’t be caught dead in a tea shop. And why would you prefer the theater to excitement like this?” the Old Lion rumbled, bringing his walking-stick up into a guard position and throwing a ring of fire around all of them. The flames danced on the snow without needing conventional fuel. Peter suspected they might actually be salamanders.

  The liches paused for a moment, as if waiting for orders. They probably are, Peter thought. As he had suspected, these were not bound to unwilling spirits; they could only follow orders. The stench was horrific, almost as horrific as the sight of the long-dead cadavers ringing them. Alderscroft’s fires showed them only too plainly.

  Then the “generals” of the army appeared—at least six enormous trolls, their ugly faces transfixed with grins, and a swarm of goblins, the latter weaving in and around the legs of the cadavers too quickly to be able to count them.

  “Well, it is warmer for one thing,” Maya replied—and then there was no time for more words, for the horde of walking dead, led by the wave of massive trolls and goblins descended on them.

  As soon as Susanne, hidden in the doorway of a crypt, smelled the stench of corruption, she knew her father had not been able to withstand the temptation she had presented and had finally struck. She did not wait to see the horror that was coming; instead she retreated, swiftly but stealthily, out of the graveyard proper. A stretch of waste ground—part of the graveyard that had not been used as yet—provided a clean, uncontaminated space she could use. There, she cast down Robin’s token, and waited.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Robin appeared, with at least a dozen lesser Fae.

  She started when she saw them and stifled a cry with her hands; to be honest, they almost looked like liches themselves, clothed in tattered gray gowns and shrouded with cobwebby veils.

  But she didn’t have time to say a word; Robin’s head came up, and he sniffed the air like a dog, then seized her wrist and pulled her along after him as he went off at a fast trot.

  Behind him, the other Fae faded away. She knew why; they had only appeared to reassure her that they had come in the first place. It was all they could do to maintain their forms in the middle of a mortal town like this, and they would have to save their strength for the action to come.

  She almost resisted him, almost went back to try to help the others. But that was not part of the plan, her plan, and if it was to have any chance of succeeding, she had to follow it exactly.

  They moved quickly along the street that led to the graveyard. The street was utterly deserted, the buildings on both sides dark and locked up for the night, and an ice-fog descended out of nowhere, laden with sorrow, despair, and a hint of fear.

  She couldn’t help it; she shivered uncontrollably, with fear as much as with cold. They didn’t go far. Robin stopped, suddenly, as the stench of corruption welled up all around them. By now the fog had closed in so thickly that the only thing she could make out was the vague form of a building in front of them.

  She knew, then; she could feel it too, feel the Earth itself rejecting this thing that walked upon it, this bringer of unlife.

  Richard was here, in or near that building, directing his army of the dead against her friends.

  Robin held up his hand, and a faint glow came from it, illuminating both their faces in the fog. “Time to go,” he whispered, his eyes, too, glowing, with an unearthly, cold rage.

  She nodded.

  Steeling herself, she felt her way to the building; ran her hands along it until she came to a door, and opened it.

  And the darkness inside billowed up and swallowed her.

  “I thought blessed salt would hold them at bay!” Lord Alderscroft didn’t have to shout to be heard; the dead fought in unnerving silence, with only the occasional snap of jaws as one got close enough to the party to try for a bite. And the trolls and goblins weren’t making any noises either. The only sounds were those of weapons on bodies, or the shattering of brittle old bones.

  “It does—” said Peter, dodging a troll’s immense club, and countering with a vicious blast of ice-shards at the creature’s face. Alderscroft ma
de the fire encircling them flare up, buying them a little breathing space, but the goblins were not deterred, sending sharp flints at their heads from their slings.

  “But we had to sow it on snow,” Peter continued, “Except right around this bench—” A flint gashed his forehead before Maya could deflect it, and he cursed at the pain. “I think some of it blew or was brushed away—”

  The mongooses were too fast even for the goblins to catch; they dashed in and out of the horde, severing what was left of the tendons of ankles and knees and getting in bites on the goblins when they could; the liches collapsed but kept coming. Peter knew from past experience that nothing would stop them but having their heads and hands severed from the rest of the body. Alderscroft was doing just that to any of them that got within reach of the sword that had been in his cane, and Garrick was doing likewise, wielding a pole-arm that had decorated the mirror above the bar of the “Owl and Mirror” pub until three days ago. Garrick and Peter Scott each had pole-arms; Scott had been a ship’s captain and was using a boathook with deadly accuracy in grim silence.

  “This isn’t going well,” Alderscroft growled, as the simulacrum of Susanne cowered on the bench in their midst. “We’re going to have to break for it in a moment.”

  Despite the sweat pouring out of every pore, Peter went cold. The moment they retreated from the bench, the ruse would be exposed. The illusion had only two modes—contemplation and cowering. The illusion would break as soon as they touched the spell-bundle; they couldn’t retreat “with” Susanne, and they did not dare leave the spell bundle, so intimately connected to Susanne, behind.

  So one of them would snatch up the bundle, the illusion would break, and Richard Whitestone would know at that moment that Susanne was elsewhere. And only the Good Lord—or perhaps the Devil himself—knew what he would do when that happened.