“Just a scratch,” he told her.
“Hurts,” she moaned thickly. Her voice sounded masculine. He didn’t think she could say anything without the low rumble in her chest. Even with the wulfsyl, her speech was rough and broken.
“You’re very delicate for a werewolf.”
“I am not! That knife was as long as my claw.”
“Hardly.” He lifted the cloth. The wound had bled profusely, but the blood was already drying and crusting around the hole. “It’s practically healed already. So is your shoulder.”
That made her smile, baring her sharp teeth.
Malcolm turned back to Mansfield. “Where’s the box?” The ambassador clutched his shattered leg, crying and moaning. Malcolm strode over and stepped on the man’s bloody knee, eliciting a horrific scream. “Where is the box?”
Mansfield snarled through his twisted, bloodless lips. “I smashed it.”
“I smell ashes on him,” Charlotte offered. Malcolm caught Mansfield’s frenzied glance toward the empty hearth.
“Watch him,” he told Charlotte.
“Can I eat him?” Charlotte growled, and licked her lips. Mansfield went silent and pale.
“Not yet.” Malcolm went to investigate the hearth. There was nothing but cold ashes in the stone maw of the fireplace. He ducked down and looked up into the cavernous chimney. Reaching his hand up, he searched the dark flue. He stretched his fingers, sliding them through grime and cold embers along the damper ledge. He touched a smooth carved surface. With a tug he produced the ebony box. It was intact. “We need to get this to Simon.”
A loud roar came from outside. Malcolm ran for the door and saw the square steeple of St. Mary disappear below the surrounding rooftops. Charlotte came up beside him and whined.
“Are we too late?” she asked, pushing her large head past Malcolm.
“No,” he told her firmly. He took a step forward.
Charlotte grabbed the box from Malcolm’s hands and jumped away to land in a crouch. Her wound spurted again from even that small exertion.
“You’re still wounded,” he protested.
“I’m faster than you.” And she was gone, racing toward the collapsing house of God.
The Skin of Ra buried Ash in a layer of flashing linen. Simon and Kate fought to reach the necromancer, to do something, but a barrier of cloth whipped through the air. Time and again, the hardened linen slashed at them, raising welts and slicing skin. Kate had depleted her cache of vials. Meanwhile, Hogarth tended to Penny, who lay covered in blood from wicked gashes on her head and shoulder, barely conscious. Finally, the newly re-formed mummy of Ra sent its ruined tentacles out to grasp the skeleton of the poor church. It lifted itself above the sanctuary and began to crawl away.
“Where’s it going?” Kate gasped, wiping dust from her eyes.
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “But if it ate Ash’s magic, it may be even more unstoppable. I want you to get clear while I—”
“You cannot be serious starting that sentence,” she replied with a flash of anger. “I will beat the self-sacrifice out of you if I must.”
Simon raised his eyebrow and gasped out a weak laugh.
Suddenly a howl filled the church. Simon spied Charlotte as she leapt over the jagged wall around them. The ebony box dangled from her jaws. Hope flared inside Simon until the mummy suddenly stopped in its perch high above the ruin. Without shifting position, it struck out at the young werewolf. Charlotte bounded off crumbling walls, cracked marble, and smashed pews with glowing tentacles in pursuit. She pivoted and spun in a miraculous spectacle of agility, hurdling through coils of living, smoldering flaming linen. The Skin of Ra gathered its mass and flung itself at her, tendrils snapping out and missing her by scant inches.
Then Charlotte favored her side and faltered. A tendril seized her left thigh and lifted her up. Charlotte took the box from her teeth with a clawed hand that was already transforming back to human. She flung the ebony case with the last of her unnatural strength. It sailed end over end through a grasping coil of linen into Kate’s waiting hands.
She quickly studied the hieroglyphs on the box and began to recite loudly in ancient Egyptian. She was the only one with a decent chance at reading the spell properly.
At the sound of Kate’s chanting voice, Charlotte let out a whoop of girlish delight before she was flung to the side. Hogarth caught the child in his massive arms, slamming against the pile of rock. He set her on her feet and slipped his tattered shirt off to cover the now-naked girl. Charlotte smiled broadly at him despite holding her side, which dripped with red blood.
The mummy shuddered as Kate’s voice rang like singing crystal carefully pronouncing each word. The air around St. Mary changed from damp London to rolling waves of desert heat. The linen flew toward Kate, smashing Simon aside. It wrapped around her. Simon struggled to his feet and dug his fingers into the linen as she continued reading, desperate to complete the spell. He fought to drag the cloth away from Kate’s body but it was immovable. Yards of cloth swirled around her legs and torso and pinned her hands to the box. Then strips covered her mouth, cutting off her oration, as well as her breath. She struggled against it, but she was trapped. Her green eyes darted wildly to Simon. He tried to tear the charred fabric from her mouth and nose, but the cloth refused to yield. Suddenly Hogarth was beside him, fighting the linen as well, frenzied to save his mistress. Even his incredible strength was not enough to tear the skin of a god.
Simon then attempted to pull the box from Kate’s hands, anything to make the linen release her, make it attack him instead. Again, he spoke aloud a runic phrase out of instinct, but without result. There was no way to extract the ebony case from her bound hands. Her eyes bulged from lack of breath in her lungs. Then she stopped struggling and fell limp.
Terror filled Simon and he yelled. There was only one chance to get the linen off Kate. He would give Ra what it wanted: limitless power. He ran across the church. Hogarth looked at him in astonishment, unable to comprehend why Simon would leave Kate to her death.
Simon leapt onto the shattered remnants of the altar. He raised a glittering object and repeated the word his mother had taught him, praying the device still worked. The gold key flared. The air above him swirled a vast hole in the fabric of space and the map of the world with its portals appeared. Somehow it had remained untouched by the linen, perhaps because it wasn’t active.
The mummy froze. All the madness of its tendrils stopped. The linen released the limp Kate into Hogarth’s arms. The Skin of Ra sped toward Simon like a slithering nest of serpents.
“Kate!” Simon shouted.
Hogarth tried to rouse Kate, slapping at her face. Simon was now at the center of the coiling linen. Tentacles held Simon fast while other tendrils of cloth stabbed deep into the portal. Several of the markers on the shimmering map suddenly winked out. Unearthly lightning crackled around them. Violent energy cascaded over Simon’s flesh, searing him with its fiery touch. Limitless aether flowed around him, but he couldn’t gather any of it. Instead, it passed over him to surge into the linen. The Skin of Ra grew, rising high above the jagged walls of the church. Simon’s eyes began to roll up in his head as the tendril about his throat tightened.
A dark shape passed Hogarth and Kate in a blur. Malcolm vaulted wreckage and dove into the aether storm surrounding Simon. The Scotsman was immediately blown off his feet. He shook his head and fought back onto his knees. Tendrils of linen wavered near him but seemed to take relatively little interest given the feast of power it was enjoying.
The quivering map was losing its vigor and becoming translucent. More portal dots disappeared. Calcutta. New Orleans. Batavia.
Malcolm dragged himself, inch by inch, onto the altar, where Simon was suspended in a linen web. He climbed, staring into the slack face of Simon, then he turned away.
The map continued to vanish. City markers blinked away. Cairo. Paris. London. Warden Abbey. The map flickered as the linen drove several more ten
drils into the faint swirl in space. It was a mere whisper of energy now. The last spot on the ghostly map was Hartley Hall. That dot started to vanish.
Malcolm reached out and clasped the hand in which Simon held the key. He felt cold metal. “Marthsyl!” he shouted.
The map spun and shrank to a spot in the air. Then it vanished.
The strips of linen that had been inserted into the portal were cut. The Skin of Ra shuddered as if in surprise. Then it shook itself with an explosion of pain that threw Malcolm and Simon against the walls with enough force to break bones. The mass of linen roiled in a cataclysm, slamming itself in throes of agony. Huge stones and deadly shafts of timber flew like cannonballs.
Kate finally stirred, eyelids flickering as she heard Simon scream in pain. She staggered to her feet with the aid of Hogarth.
Simon rose on one arm, and shouted, “Finish it!”
Hogarth had found the box behind Kate, and she snatched it from his hands. Her desperate voice rang through the church as she uttered the final words of the spell. The box in her hands snapped open. The very air filled with sand. A howling wind swept across the Skin of Ra. The linen was trapped in the whirling storm and dragged back toward Kate. The body of Barnes slipped free of the cloth and fell heavily to the ground, nothing but a decayed husk. The linen flew into the ebony box in a seemingly endless trail. When the final yard of cloth slid inside, the lid shut and locked on its own, sealing the Skin of Ra inside once again. Silence yawned in the wrecked patch of London that had been a church.
Kate gasped once in the eerie silence. Hogarth took the box from her stiff grip. She ran for Simon, who staggered up in time to gather her in a weakened embrace.
“Good work,” he said to her through hisses of pain. His left arm hung limp. “And you’re right, watching someone you love die is a horrible thing. Never again for either of us.”
Kate kissed him hard. He relished the feel of her in his arms. She was alive. That’s what mattered. The terror that had gripped his heart when her breathing stopped was the worst he had ever experienced. He let his head rest against hers.
“I’m fine too,” came a creaky brogue from a pile of rubble. Malcolm pushed himself free, trailing a stream of dust. “In case you were wondering. But just go about your business. Don’t mind me.”
Simon helped him up with a slap on the shoulder. He then turned to find the rest of the group. Hogarth and Charlotte were tending a badly beaten Penny. The engineer turned her head, blood dripping down her bruised face. She winked, then fell back in unconsciousness. They were all still alive although the blood and agony were plentiful. Malcolm tossed Charlotte his long coat, which she donned with a broad grin, wrapping herself up in its warmth.
Simon squeezed Kate hard with a grunt of pain, then released her. They both looked down at the desiccated body of Barnes. It was a crumbling wreck now, with no animation. Simon prodded it with his foot and the jaw fell loose to the floor.
Kate asked, “What’s became of Ash?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps she managed to abandon Barnes’s body in time, or perhaps the Skin of Ra ate her. Given her centuries of survival, we can safely assume she has slipped back into the shadows again.”
“If she’s alive, don’t you think she’ll come after us?”
Simon put his arm around her shoulder. “Who isn’t coming after us?”
He felt something cold in the palm of his hand and looked down at the key. It felt different. He spoke the ancient word for miracle, but there was no response. The magic was gone.
The same could be said for himself. They were all alive. After such a battle, he should be laughing, enfolded in aether intoxication. There was only a hush from the realm of aether. He wanted to touch it, but it was not there. Not even a ghostly whisper of it.
Kate turned to Simon and he kept smiling although inside he was petrified.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Jane Somerset sat quietly in the small front parlor. The only sound was the click of her knitting needles. She paid little attention to the work; she had done it so much it required none. The mere activity, the constructive repetition, gave her solace. Creation of those little objects satisfied some need in Jane. It was as if she felt the warmth they would give a poor, cold soul.
Her father sat in a chair near her turning the pages of the newspaper. He didn’t truly read much of it, but the act of turning pages made him feel productive and knowledgeable. He was still a part of society if he sat with the news every day, even if he had no memory a few hours later of what he had just read.
The sound of the door knocker surprised Jane. She heard Mrs. Cummings pass by, heading for the door. The old clock read 9:00 in the evening. It was late for visitors.
Except perhaps Mr. MacFarlane.
Jane fussed with her frock to tidy the simple lace and puff the sleeves. She put her knitting aside. Then she snatched it up again. Best to look industrious rather than just staring off into space.
Mrs. Cummings appeared at the parlor door with a strange look on her face. She seemed both surprised and judgmental of Jane’s frivolous new society of late-night guests. “You have visitors, Miss Jane.”
“Visitors?” she stressed the plural. Jane glanced at her father who seemed so focused on his mission flipping the paper that he had no time for interruptions. She again put down her yarn. “I’ll see them in the hall to avoid bothering Father.”
Jane endured another dose of Mrs. Cummings’s wary gaze as she passed with a calm smile. As she turned from the parlor toward the front door, she received a shock. In the tiny foyer stood two men and a woman. Her eyes were immediately drawn to a large man in a long coat. He wasn’t fat, simply massive. If Mr. MacFarlane was a sleek black warhorse, this man was a powerful draft horse that exuded strength. His hair was long and stark white and he wore a full beard. It was odd to see a man with a beard in this day and age, but he wore it naturally, as if he was a relic of an earlier era. The man’s face was leathered dark, but his age was still indeterminable. He was like a mountain or a great tree, rather than a man.
The second visitor was a bit more normal, in a way, but more disturbing. His posture was less assured; he seemed to twitch even when still. His eyes were deep-set and his copper red hair was wild and unrestrained. Worn clothes draped on him, badly mismatched and fashionable a generation earlier at least. He had a look that Jane had seen many times, a man who felt begrudged by the world and could barely contain his outrage. That, or he was insane.
The woman wore a long cloak that covered her completely except for her head. She had a cold visage. She held herself aloof, as a noblewoman, but her peculiarity was more than that. She seemed to Jane to be more machine than person, built to observe rather than engage in the world around her. Her hair was silver although she was not elderly, and her eyes were ice blue and distant.
The woman visitor studied the house around her while both men regarded Jane as if they had heard of her and were trying to blend knowledge with truth.
The massive man bowed. “Miss Somerset, thank you for seeing me. I realize the hour is late.”
Jane stopped several feet from the trio. She was fascinated by the older man and distressed by the others. “Do I know you?”
“You do not. I am a doctor of geology and divinity, originally from Rome. And this is my colleague from Dublin, Mr. O’Malley, and my companion, the Baroness Conrad.”
Jane nodded to the Irishman and gave a poor curtsy to the baroness. “I would ask you in, but my father is not well.”
The white-haired doctor replied. “I will be brief, for now. I am forearmed with knowledge of you, Miss Somerset. I have taken the liberty of inquiring in the parish after you and your father.”
Jane tilted her head in suspicion. “Have you indeed?”
He continued, “I am a man of science and have come here to offer you an opportunity that is both rare and precious.”
“Yes?”
“All I spoke to in the parish claimed that you ca
re deeply for others. You give of yourself totally. I am a man of means, Miss Somerset, yet I appreciate the work of those who feel suffering. I want to help you do that work in ways you never imagined possible.” The man stretched out his thick hands, which looked as if they could crush rock. “I want to make a substantial subscription to your soup kitchen so that you may expand its reach far beyond its current ability.”
“I thank you.” Jane’s heart began to beat at the thought of such a windfall. Certainly she had encountered men of charity who had come to faith late in life and needed to unburden themselves by giving to others. However, this white-haired man seemed different. He didn’t have the aura of a gouty lord or sickening squire trying to pay his way into heaven. “Perhaps you should speak to the parish officials who manage the kitchen rather than to me.”
“No. You are the one who matters. I admire you immensely. To that point, I intend to help you and your father so that you may do even more for those who need you. I know your family has fallen on difficult financial times, and the noble gentleman, your father, suffers from some mental ague. I will do all I can for him and, at the very least, I promise he will live in all the ease and comfort he deserves.”
Jane tried to suppress the elation she felt at his words. “Why, sir, are you making such promises, if I may ask?”
He stared at her as if he would burst into insulted outrage that his largesse was being questioned. Instead, he clasped his hands together. “I have a vision, Miss Somerset. I want to bring the power of Heaven to change the face of this world. I want to bring the hand of God to Earth. But, as you know, the Earth must be properly prepared to accept such power. I need you to seed this land so that the will of God can be well and truly felt. I know how to make this happen, but I need you.”
The thunder of his words rolled through Jane. Her knees grew weak and she had to take hold of the staircase banister. The doctor glowed like an Old Testament prophet. She recognized the fire of mission in the man. It was a fire she understood and respected.
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