George opened his pack to pull out a small paper-wrapped rectangle. “Well, this is a right bloody mess,” he grunted, ripping the paper to reveal a small canvas in a wooden frame.
Beatrice was already present and had her hands full, literally. Cords of blue fire were attached to the legs of litters and to the wheels of chariots in an attempt to rein in the items and those spirits running about with them. It looked as if she were holding handfuls of absurd kites. Ibrahim almost wanted to laugh along with Ahmed, who was doing so freely, but watching Beatrice he was stilled. Struck.
She wore an elegant taffeta evening gown, likely having come from some sort of university function she’d attended with her father. The plunging neckline of the rich plum-colored dress showed far too much skin. Western fashion. In the struggle, her hairpins had come undone and a few dark blond waves fell down past her shoulders. Her piercing blue eyes, which sparkled in any light, were ferocious sapphires, reflecting blue fire. Ibrahim felt the button at his collar poke into his throat.
“Could you enlighten us, please, sir Intuition? Or do you plan to stand there staring?” Beatrice called.
Ibrahim cleared his throat, loosened his collar, touched his temple, and suddenly spouted a set of old city rules about where public assembly was appropriate and when. A few cowed spirits vanished, even in death terrified by the prospect of law enforcement.
Belle was busy directing traffic and removing the considerable crowd of gawking bystanders. Verena was attending the bruises and scrapes caused by the melee. George shrugged and hung his picture, a winged and glorious form that compelled the viewer to dream of angels, in front of a plaque commemorating some military victory no one remembered.
“Lookie!” he cried. The spirits slowly did, one by one lowering their resistance enough for Beatrice to give them a swat of blue fire that caused their flight. At last they had all relinquished their purloined goods and fled.
George gathered up the wreckage. Ibrahim helped with the heavier items, so that the street was soon passable. Slowly but surely the lane was emptied.
Beatrice stepped up onto the walk, off the cobblestones, and leaned against a stone archway intricately carved with geometric arabesques. She breathed heavily, patting the sweat on her brow with a delicate handkerchief embroidered with butterflies. Ibrahim, knowing she had been chosen as a warrior, young, female and all, was intrigued to see she had not discarded what she’d been before. He found such antitheses fascinating. They had even factored into several recent reveries.
Ahmed moved close to Beatrice and bestowed his gift, staring into her eyes. The smile she gave him, wide and clearly heartfelt, changed her still-fierce expression into something relieved, befitting undone tresses and glimmering eyes. The effect was as beautiful as the painting of Athena that Ibrahim’s father so treasured, a woman in armor who smiled gently, considering a bouquet of flowers. To his surprise, Ibrahim found himself wanting Beatrice to turn her consideration upon him.
She was always sharp and full of business when interacting with him, exactly as he was with her. It was best that way, of course. He had neither the heart nor the effusive power of Ahmed. He could not summon such a smile from a creature like this; it wouldn’t be proper for either of them.
Why did that thought cause a sudden sorrow?
* * *
There was a particular weight to Ibrahim’s gaze tonight that Beatrice had never before experienced. The way it touched her, as if it were a lasso, gently but firmly reeling her in—she could not ignore it. She tried.
“Good work, friends,” she said. Everyone nodded, wiping their brows and shuffling their feet.
The thought of them going their separate ways, six separate heartbeats spread out throughout the great city, gave Beatrice a sudden pang. Life no longer made sense without the company of these friends. While at first she’d needed solitude and distance to think, she now needed them to survive. Whether or not it was a natural progression, it was the truth.
“Come,” she said, “the night is cool, refreshing and finally peaceful. Take some tea or coffee with me; my home lies just up the street.”
“Tell me you’ve liquor,” George said.
“I’m sure my father has a cabinet full,” Beatrice said with a smirk. “Whatever poison suits you.”
“Huzzah!” the English youth cried. He held out his arm for Belle, who took it without hesitation. Ahmed gestured for Verena to walk beside him at a close but respectful distance. Beatrice strode toward home, needing no man’s arm.
Mr. Smith was asleep in the tall chair of his study, and Belle made a shushing sound in his direction to make sure that remained the case. The Guard took to the main room, making themselves comfortable on poufs and a divan, or, in the case of George, after gulping the brandy Beatrice handed him, lying flat on the floor.
“So. Tired,” he groaned.
“I daresay our leader did most of the work tonight,” Ibrahim commented.
Beatrice stiffened at hearing this, preparing tea at a standing tray, but her lips curved into a small smile, and a sensation of pride and pleasure gripped her stomach.
“Art is exhausting!” George insisted, splaying his body out further.
Belle and Verena chatted so quietly that Beatrice couldn’t determine the subject, but the French girl blushed, and her gaze flickered to George. Beatrice had to admit he was quite a sight, in formfitting breeches and with undone shirtsleeves, his body supine, facedown upon a pillow.
Ibrahim went to the bookshelves that took up the entire north wall, his impassive face as engaged as she’d ever seen as he studied the spines of the volumes that filled each shelf. Beatrice moved to his side, offering him a cup of tea.
He took it with a polite nod and pointed to a row of Jane Austen’s titles. “I assume those are yours?”
Beatrice blushed. “Well…”
“They’re not bad. But I like Dickens better.”
She was about to express surprise that he should have read popular English writers, but she remembered the English name he honored … and that showing surprise that any intelligent person had read something not native to them was rather condescending. Instead she offered, “I’ve noticed most men do.”
“I’ll look at his A Christmas Carol quite differently now, I suppose, working with ghosts and all.”
“I look at everything differently now.”
Ibrahim nodded. “Pride and Prejudice?”
“What?”
“Your favorite?”
Beatrice shrugged, then nodded. “I suppose I’d say so.”
“I’ve noticed most women do.”
Beatrice raised an eyebrow. “You’ve asked them, have you?”
Ibrahim smirked. “No, not a one. It’s simply the best known, so one assumes.” He gazed at the wall. “James had countless books and papers. All kinds, from all cultures. They were my best friends. Counting the characters, I had thousands of friends. It isn’t often a man can say he has thousands of friends, can he?” His eyes were warm despite the melancholy in his tone. “All those friends died in a fire.”
Beatrice bit her lip, her sympathies going out to him. He took the offered tea and exited onto the arched, pillared balcony, which was decorated with intricate arabesques of birds. She keenly understood loss, considering her mother so long ago, though she felt guilty that she did not miss her, or Jean, more. The loss of her mother already seemed a lifetime away, and Jean had joined that distance. If the loss had been her father, things would be different.
Oh, how she, a precocious and lonely child deemed too intelligent for her own good, understood how one’s friends could be in books. Oh, how she understood being raised by only a father, with no maternal warmth in the home. She wanted to extend more than courtesy to Ibrahim, and staring at the vast bookshelf, she knew there was something she could offer.
Joining him on the balcony, she said, “Please, take some of these volumes with you, whichever you like. Old friends, perhaps … or make new ones.”
<
br /> She hated how her voice sounded more like that of the lonely child she once was than the woman she wished to be. But the fact remained she was young, despite how the Grand Work had aged them. Yes. Still young. And still lonely, despite her new friends.
Ibrahim stared at her a moment, his dark eyes like gleaming onyx, entrancing in the moonlight. “Thank you,” he said. “I would enjoy that.”
He turned to stare out at the city. “My house was there,” he stated, pointing east, his eyes narrowed. “I would like to think the whole of the city my home. Alas, our thoughts, like ghosts, haunt one mere building, unimportant in the grand scheme … and yet, everything to that person.”
Beatrice wanted desperately to say something clever, something as effortlessly poetic as he. But her throat was dry.
He sipped his tea, then grimaced. “I wax melancholy, unfit for company.”
She shrugged. “I know loss well. You lost your home and your guardian. We were thrust suddenly into bearing the weight of the city’s very sanity on our shoulders, by unthinkable means. Do you think I have no capability to empathize? We’re quite the pair.”
“We are not a pair,” Ibrahim replied.
Beatrice blinked. Goodness. Did he have any idea how cold he sounded? “Of course we aren’t,” she replied. Her sharp tone made her seem too defensive. “I didn’t mean it in a … in a coupled sense. Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Ibrahim exhaled. After a moment he said, “It would seem fate has placed my life at the mercy of the English. I’m in no way objecting to that circumstance; however, it does leave me at a loss, at times, as to touchstones for my soul.” He added quietly, turning away. “Thank you for the tea. And very much for the books.”
He moved back in toward the bookshelf. Beatrice was left to stare up at the stars and then back at the place in the distance where James Tipton had died.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Persephone paced the third floor of what she had decided to boldly name Athens Academy, trying to calm her desperate, careening thoughts. How could she free the spirits of her Guard? Not only did she have to unlock the prison gates Darkness had fashioned, she had to find some way to give them the advantage in battle. She needed an army.
They needed to be somehow reminded of what they once were. As long as they could access the phoenix fire, they could work together, echoes of past greatness. They could win a great victory over Darkness. Perhaps they could do so here in Athens.
“Could that be so, love?” she asked, gazing down at the seal in the floor. “Shall these bricks prove the conduit?”
“Bring the precipice here,” the Power and the Light murmured in her ear. “Bring the depths of the Whisper-world to me and let me bathe it in fire. It’s time for a war. On our terms. With the army we have gathered. There are enough Guard spirits to best him and his agents of misery.”
“But, my love, the danger! The whole point was always to keep the Whisper-world safely shut away.” Persephone’s heart pounded wildly. “To bring it upon the mortals … It undoes the very purpose of the Guard, does it not?”
“Limit the fight to Athens alone, contain it. I shall bless these bricks with fire, and from here we’ll end the vendetta. Darkness can’t help but be drawn in when worlds collide.”
“Knitting the worlds,” Persephone mused. “Do I dare?”
“Reckless as you were, you must remember how it was done,” Phoenix said. “I hope this time you will be more careful.”
Persephone looked down, and a silver tear splashed onto the brass seal.
“Not that you have to relive those moments, darling,” her beloved cautioned, but it was too late. She was lost to the memory of a painful, vital revelation.
* * *
It was a time, earlier in this same century, when the dread press of the Whisper-world so choked her soul of light that ending her existence seemed the only choice. Her form was not human, nor did her body operate on human principles, and so she doubted she could throw herself on some funeral bier like Juliet did over her Romeo.
She had plucked a hearty rose briar that had been born and died at her feet, the thorn strong and sharp. She dug it into her own skin, winced, wept, and bled. Bled and bled. That blood had poured onto the dank Whisper-world stones, gathering in eddies, surging in rivulets toward the Whisper-world barriers, where it began to dissolve the stones. Her blood wanted out. It wanted free of this place. She had collapsed.
Her beloved had felt the shift in her, caught the scent of her draining life force. The part of his fire in the Leader of the Guard had immediately reacted, abandoning its human host to rush unencumbered to her, streaks of blue fire flashing through the Whisper-world’s darkness. When Phoenix’s flame touched the pools of her blood, light began to shine through from beyond. The two of them were creating tiny windows, merging the two worlds.
At those holes gathered the restless dead, both inside the Whisper-world and on Earth. They stared into each other’s worlds, stared down upon the struggling body of that goddess of shifting colors. Small flowers grew and died at her feet and fingertips; she evoked a thousand tiny cycles as she wept for a life she could never regain.
The dead—even those she’d have deemed hopeless—cupped their hands and gathered her blood, trying to return it to her. They gathered around her and lifted her body, cradled her, stroked her face. Even the spirits of murderers and fiends lent aid, struck by the plight of a falling angel.
“We need and love you,” crooned the spirits on the mortal side, staring in from flowering fields or busy streets. Those standing in dank black corners within the Whisper-world mourned, “Don’t fall. Don’t give up. Not like this…”
Traces of phoenix fire raced over her body, his ghost doing what he could to rouse her. “My love,” he whispered. “Why this? Isn’t there another way to find release? Why this instead of becoming mortal? Why this instead of attempting a new form?”
Persephone’s eyelids drooped, and she fumbled for words. “I … I’m scared. Being divine has been … hard. I doubt mortality is any easier. And I’m tired.” She gave a slow shake of her head, then noticed the shadows around her faltering form had lengthened. Him.
“Go,” she begged Phoenix. “He’s coming; hide.”
The ghost of her beloved knew to pick his battles. His cerulean fire retreated and dimmed, but he watched from a distance as the assembled crowd of spirits whirled to face the tall, regal shadows and bowed to their master.
“She wants out,” they said.
Darkness stood like an ebon tower, red eyes in a black silhouette. Sometimes he was beautiful. At that moment he was not. He growled. His shadows bent like a huge claw, clutched Persephone’s wilting body, and threw her toward one of the windows her blood had opened. Phoenix’s ghost encased her in an embrace of fire as she hurtled forth.
A familiar, dark maw opened at the last moment, saving her from being cast out into some deserted space: the portal used by the Guard. The dark rectangular door led to the Guard’s sacred space, and Persephone landed in its center, Phoenix’s ghost slowing her fall with an embrace of fire.
She heard Darkness grunt. “I’ll drag her back again once she’s recovered. We’ve done this before…” He was already working furiously to seal the shadows behind her, hissing at the light that discomfited him as much as the flowers that grew in her wake. All life was extinguished in his realm, life and light. Only decay remained.
She was scooped into the strong arms of the Leader, Dmitri Sergeyevna. At the time, the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Grand Work had been operating in Russia.
The Guard gasped to see their herald, their Lady, so humbled. She looked up with tears in her eyes, blood pouring from her arms, robes splayed around her, at a tall, black-haired stable boy–turned-demigod.
“I don’t know how much longer I can hold on,” she murmured to him, allowing him to hold her, to rock her, to say everything would be all right. Their Healer was soon at her side, his glowing hands
offering a tingling release as her flesh was once again made whole.
Dmitri and his Guard, like every Guard before, were aware of the vendetta for which they fought. They believed it, and each Guard had seen how much their Lady struggled to maintain Light. As Russians, they embraced the firebird and easily made him their own.
“My Lady,” Dmitri murmured, his voice rich and low against her ear, very much like the voice of Phoenix himself. “Don’t let the shadows take you. We wish we could shelter you here with us always. Could you not take pains to join us?”
“It is good to be with friends,” Persephone replied, not answering that question but instead relaxing further into his embrace. He stroked her hair and held her tight, and for a moment she almost believed that she was again with her beloved. In the light of the Russian Guard’s sacred space she was healed. More important, because her blood had opened such porous portals between mortal and spirit world, she’d inadvertently gained knowledge that altered the game.
* * *
“I’ll bleed the worlds together!” she declared, dragging her mind again to the present, her feet bare and cool upon the marble floor of the Athens foyer. It occurred to her that the scene she’d relived hadn’t been very long ago in mortal time. She wasn’t terribly adept at tracking mortal years, but she believed her mounting desperation and volatility had been entirely contained within their nineteenth century. She had apparently reached a breaking point in this age.
Padding slowly about the grand space, gazing through its windows at the darkening London sky, she felt her determination grow. Speaking to the seal, this time she stated it more firmly: “I’ll knit the worlds with my blood.”
A sparking tendril of blue fire offered agreement, and her words became a vow.
She heard a tearing sound. Behind her was the Liminal edge, open and lit. The vast metal hands of its overhead clock shook and shuddered, meaning the vision it projected was not certain; this future was not set in stone.
The vision took place on a dark night in the very room in which she stood. A tall, striking man dressed all in black swept a young woman across the floor in a delicate waltz. The pair was alone, and the moonlight magical.
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