“We’ll address it when next we see our Lady,” Beatrice said. “Perhaps the Balance has indeed changed.”
“I wonder that a Guard may be less powerful when supplanted from their homes,” said Ibrahim. “If, historically, we are tied to great cities and their residents, I can’t imagine there’s ever been an immigrant Guard.”
“That may very well be true,” Beatrice allowed. “Alas, we are thrown into an ‘unprecedented time.’ I’m sure that will have its consequences.”
* * *
They had to wait a week to get any satisfaction. In the midst of a meeting in the sacred space, Beatrice called upon the Power and the Light. A portal formed, and Persephone staggered out, a gaping wound in her upper arm.
Everyone gasped. George, closest to her, dove and caught her falling body. He eased her to the floor and Verena was immediately at her side.
“Hello, friends,” she breathed. There came a deep, knocking rattle from her lungs.
“What on earth?” Beatrice knelt beside her.
“Knitting the worlds,” Persephone mumbled, her eyelids fluttering. “Preparing for a fight. It’ll take time, surely, but once everything is ready I can take her body. We’ll start anew.”
The Guard all looked at one another. They had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re bleeding,” Belle said.
“Yes, it’s part of the process,” the divinity replied. “What to do…? I came here to do something. Ah, yes.” She stared sadly at all of them. “My memory seems to be going. It comes and goes so much this century. Can you help me up?”
George and Verena did so, Verena steadying the goddess with a glowing hand. None of the others said a word.
“Part of the preparation is in maintaining this building,” Persephone remarked. “A shield for safekeeping. Beatrice, will you come with me? I need to kindle a bit of fire and could use your help. The rest of you can stay where you are.”
Up several flights of stairs they ascended, the goddess, gliding otherworldly, her step birthing flowers, scented and lovely, that faded into ghostly traces of perfume as she passed. Beatrice felt each heavy tread of her own inelegant boot. While her carriage could never compare to Persephone’s, she straightened herself and felt the rejuvenating rush of phoenix fire in her veins. She’d never prove a goddess, but she would prove herself a wise choice for power.
In the third-floor foyer, atop the seal of Athens with its great golden eagle, the goddess placed her hand upon Beatrice’s shoulder, drawing out her fire.
“I give my breath and my light to these stones,” Persephone vowed. “I declare these stones safe haven.”
There was a reaction in the air, sparkling and shimmering, a gauzy layer of light ascending like thin fabric cast high in a wind. A shield in the air. The goddess looked up, pleased, before her lovely face shifted with pain.
She turned her head and coughed, an ugly, terrible sound. Deep crimson fluid burst from her lips, smelling of copper, dried flowers, and distinctly of soured pomegranate. Landing on the flowing, diaphanous sleeve of her robe, the matter transformed and became smooth, gorgeous crimson silk.
Beatrice stared with horrified fascination. “Wondrous, how terrible things can be made lovely,” she murmured.
The goddess smiled and was suddenly radiant, the circles under her rainbow eyes less dark and deep. “I do believe that’s what I’m here to do. A certain alchemy—strange into beautiful.
“This world heals me. But it can’t heal me entirely. I don’t suppose it would shock you to learn I’m falling apart, Beatrice. I think you all can see that now. It seems I need to take a body and live, as the Muses live in the Guard. This will come to pass, and here in London. But I don’t know when. The timing is off, I’m off … We need to bring things together. Have patience with me, will you?”
Beatrice considered the goddess a moment, taken aback by the vulnerability of this great unpredictable force and trying to summon the right response. “I’ll try. But patience is not my strong point.”
“It never is, for Leaders,” Persephone mused.
“I thought you said we were all individuals.”
“You are, but all Leaders share certain distinct qualities. You are of a kind, and all would love or hate one another if you were all trapped in the same room. Oh!” Her face fell. “You are all in a room together. All the Guard that ever were, now in prison. Darkness made a key for his dungeon. Made it from my tears.” Her eyes narrowed, her beautiful face turned a terrible scowl.
“Terrible, terrible.” In the next instant, she smiled and clapped her hands. “But let’s take a look at the new sky we just fashioned as a protection! I’ve never done this in the mortal world; let’s see how it turned out!”
Beatrice shook her head, not understanding most of what Persephone said and reeling from the shifts of the goddess’s mood. The only thing consistent in Persephone’s chimerical nature was that every action was underpinned with a sense of her love.
Outside, they found the sky changed indeed, gaining a layered, shimmering quality. The thick clouds were quick to cover the changes, blanketing all London in gray.
The goddess seemed satisfied, however. “My spell took! I’m rather pleased. Now. Back to the pitch and the murk. Be well,” she called, threw her hand forward, her arm shuddering with effort, creating a black rectangle in the air, and she was again gone, leaving Beatrice full of dread in her wake.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
There was no longer any question; the Grand Work was more difficult away from home. This was doubly frustrating for Beatrice, who had felt such pain in Cairo when the phoenix fire was ripped from the Whisper-world and transplanted. She’d assumed when she got to London she’d be twice the Leader for being near its source. Would that were so.
The work continued. Exorcisms in squalid rooms, chasing poltergeists down narrow streets, battling veritable spirit gangs that clogged alleys and arteries of the city, all of it took more time, energy, repetition, and brute force than it had in Cairo. Weeks felt like years.
There was a certain comfort in having most of her Guard at the ready there in the newly renamed Promethe Hall, in the upstairs sets of fine wood-paneled apartments. Never mind that Ibrahim had his quarters just down the hall or that they all parted whenever the work was through.
The academy was a bustling place, workers finishing up with spare yet elegant final touches. Now and then Beatrice spied the Quaker headmaster, Richard Thompson, and his niece, Rebecca, striding about the place with pride, joy, and admirable efficiency.
While Belle’s gifts had made the Guard rather invisible to the goings-on around them, there was one exception.
Whenever Beatrice found herself in the path of Rebecca Thompson, the girl stared at her, narrowing her eyes as if struggling to place her. A powerful mind churned behind those young blue-gray eyes, and Beatrice wondered about what the goddess and Ibrahim had said. Did Intuitions know their own? Would there be a changing of the Guard here in London? What did that mean for Beatrice and her company?
With the Pull almost always in play, at times Beatrice would go out alone to do the Grand Work, if the disturbance was faint enough. Usually the correction would be simple, the admonishment of a spirit with a smack of blue fire.
Tonight, something wasn’t right, and Beatrice knew it. So did Ibrahim, apparently, for he appeared at her side as she headed for Athens’s great front doors. Without a second glance or a word of greeting between them, they had a cab brought round and set out in pursuit of the Pull.
“Highgate,” Beatrice said to the driver. Then, to Ibrahim, “Shall I call the others? It isn’t much.”
Ibrahim blinked. “It may not be much, but we’re not very good these days.”
“Not here we aren’t. You’re right, we need all the help we can muster.”
She closed her eyes and felt Ibrahim doing the same, reaching out. She allowed the Pull to take over her body and felt it ripple, the sensation unifyin
g all six. The others would follow the call if her message could find its way through the thick London fog.
“How long can we—?”
Ibrahim finished her thought. “I daresay, if it’s always this difficult on this shore, the Grand Work will kill us.”
It was uncanny. For one who seemed so indifferent to her, he had an odd way of knowing her thoughts. She pretended to stare out the window, hiding her agitation, as questions of intimacy flooded her mind. Suddenly she wasn’t worried about how long their little coterie could withstand the forces of the Whisper-world; she wondered if he had been granted psychic abilities that he hadn’t told her about. He was so quick to finish her sentences; was he as quick to know her secrets? That she often thought of him in quiet, private hours, when she lay in lacy robes mere meters away from his rooms?
She was a fool. Unknown horrors were afoot, and she was worried that a man who cared nothing for her might have some preternatural sense that she felt quite differently toward him? Absurd.
Straightening her posture, Beatrice recalled herself to the conversation. “The Work will kill us, you say? That’s grim of you. We’re not in tip-top form here in London, but we’re not utterly outclassed.”
“Don’t you feel a great storm coming? Increasing havoc of the gods wreaked upon their pawns below?”
“Oh, I always feel a great storm coming.” Beatrice chuckled. “It’s my doom. I’m falling back into melancholic patterns of my childhood. Once a Hamlet, always a Hamlet.”
“This is hardly about woman’s frailty, Miss Smith,” he argued. “Or Shakespearean hubris.”
Beatrice grimaced at his words and tone, her eyes wide and her nostrils flared. “Must you have no humor in you whatsoever?”
“I’m talking of grave danger. My Intuition continues to feel it as it has since Cairo. You remember my trepidations. They have not lessened. You might make light of me, but you don’t feel what I do. I lie with worry pressing like a demon down upon my chest, compressing the air in my lungs—”
“But what you intuit remains unclear! I do not deal in abstractions, Mr. Wasil-Tipton. Corporeal or incorporeal, I deal in what stares me down face-to-face. Until you give me more than ‘a feeling in your bones of inclement weather,’ I cannot sit entertaining your apocalypse-mongering.
“And you!” She turned her fury out the window to the mad-eyed ghost of a highwayman who rode alongside their carriage, brandishing a phantom knife he once used to relieve travelers of their purses or lives. “Find another maiden to frighten; you’ll not get a rise out of me.” She blasted the specter with blue fire, and his ghost horse reared and charged away. For a moment she regretted the action, but the carriage driver seemed not to notice anything amiss.
She hopped down from the conveyance when it jolted to a stop outside a great gate and, lifting her skirts, ran into the middle of Highgate Cemetery, tripping past eerily lit mausoleums, obelisks, and angels, a place lit in part by marble reflecting moonlight upon surrounding sandstone. However, the true lamps of the necropolis were the cluster of luminous gray dead who swayed and flapped their sagging mouths at a crossroads of cemetery paths.
“I’m sure these poor souls would agree with my sentiments, were we able to hear them,” Ibrahim said mildly, catching up. Then he admonished the ghosts with a Buddhist proverb about detachment, addressing in particular those spirits clinging too tightly to specific monuments. They were likely attached to their bodies in the same way.
Beatrice ignored him, knowing her anger and frustration came from helplessness. Instead she worked her fire to best advantage. It was not enough.
The rest soon arrived. The ritual remained bogged down; they had a bit of trouble corralling their energy and focusing it, and it was as if they chanted their cantus from a faraway canyon where an echo muddied the effect. Still, while it was not perfect, they were able to get the task accomplished.
When the ghostly crowd had been thinned to a few floating specters who were scattered or who would prove quiet enough not to attract mortal attention when living family members came to grieve and lay flowers, Beatrice gestured her companions back to their carriages.
Mopping her brow with a kerchief, she resumed her conversation with Ibrahim, saying, “I will grant you, I agree that a Guard likely fights best in the city it calls home, not transplanted elsewhere. One always fights harder for one’s home, does one not?”
“You’d consider Cairo your home, then?” He sounded surprised. “The city first in your heart, though it is not of your people?”
“Indeed. A golden home of richest beauty,” she said earnestly, staring at him.
Ibrahim’s generally inexpressive face showed subtle pride and distinct pleasure, making him even more handsome.
Staring out the window, not long after their carriage left from Highgate, Beatrice espied a grand estate, set back from the road a distance, its uppermost eaves silhouetted against the moonlit sky. It seemed uninhabited, with no lanterns lit at the gate or blazing at the doorstep. No curtains were drawn and the shutters were open, windows revealing a wide emptiness within. No. Not entirely empty. Something lent illumination. Beatrice called sharply to the driver, who halted at the edge of the estate’s gravel walk.
“What is it?” Ibrahim asked.
“That house is calling us,” Beatrice replied. “Something’s inside; look at the light.” She hopped down from the carriage and walked quickly toward building, seeing eerie, changing colors emanating from within.
* * *
Persephone had been at the messy business of pins again and now stumbled, dizzy and bleeding, into the mortal world, landing on the floor of an empty house. The regal structure appeared to have just been finished or renovated. Out the front windows she saw an impressive heath. Behind, a small grove of trees and a stable.
With no idea where she was, she assumed the Liminal had brought her here for a reason. To heal, surely, but for some other reason, too. The sky looked like England. The air tasted so. She allowed herself a moment of pleasure. This country had become as much a home as any place ever, because it was where hope lived.
Her head and heart heavy, she lay on the floor and allowed the miasma of Whisper-world despair to drain away. The strain of leaving her blood in such deep, dark places felt ugly and hopeless. Only faith in her visions kept her from entirely losing her mind to shadow, and the best way to cleanse the tainted air in her lungs was through weeping. She felt warmth course down her cheeks; quicksilver pooled in her palm.
Her tears formed a ring. A small, delicate silver ring in the shape of a feather, its quill meeting its tip.
“Oh,” she murmured. “That’s quite nice…”
Then she curled up on the floor to recover.
* * *
“Wait here,” Ibrahim instructed the driver.
He caught up to Beatrice at the door as she lifted the heavy knocker and let it fall. No answer. Trying the lock, she found it open and stepped through. The inside of the home proved empty, but there was light down the hall.
The two made their way toward it. At the end of the corridor they found Persephone lying huddled upon the parlor floor, her eyes pouring strange, reflective tears. It was her ever-changing light that filled the room with different colors.
“My Lady.” Beatrice stepped closer.
The goddess looked up, startled, then relaxed again. “Hello, Beatrice, Ibrahim, how good of you to come,” she said in a small voice.
“What … what are you doing here?”
“I don’t rightly know. But I feel this is a special house. I’d like to live here. I want to be here. I care so very much about the mortal world and what happens here. I keep seeing a mortal in my visions, someone who is not a member of my Guard. I don’t know who he is. I’ve seen him, I know his first name, but he’s not here. There are so many things I don’t know. Don’t mind me; pouring my warm blood onto cold stones is so very taxing. I need to rest.”
She curled up and closed her eyes, loosing an ugly,
rattling cough into her arm. Apart from the maturity of her body, she looked like a helpless, gorgeous child.
“My Lady.” Beatrice bent and reached out as if to press comfortingly upon her shoulder. The goddess held up a hand to halt her.
“Please. I … I simply need to rest. I can only heal in this world. Do not worry. Please go.”
Not knowing what else to do, Beatrice walked away. Ibrahim silently followed, closing the door behind them. He hadn’t said a single word, so when she turned to him, she was shocked to find tears in his eyes.
He cleared his throat. “To see an angel so distracted and broken … It shakes a man to the core. If a being so lost is what protects the afterlife of mortals, the Guard in particular, then what have we to look forward to?”
Beatrice set her jaw. “She’s right. She needs to take her next step, do something different, take another form. She needs to do it before she has no mind or energy left. I just hope she knows how.”
* * *
Persephone had no sense of how long she’d been on the floor of this beautiful dwelling, empty, waiting. When she roused and found herself still there, she begged for a sign. Since the Liminal had been taking unprecedented interest in and care of her of late, she hoped it might answer. If not the Liminal, then perhaps her own visionary gifts might channel help …
Her eyes clouded as a vision filled her. The night was suddenly day, and there was a man at the door, looking out at the garden. Tall and sharp-featured, with a mop of black hair and a black frock coat, she knew him: the man her mysterious Alexi would become.
So this grand house was—or would be—his? His eyes were dark, but they sparkled fondly, a contrast to his set jaw and pursed lips. This brooding man had found joy in something.
He stepped onto the veranda. Persephone saw herself in the garden. Well, not herself. Bright white, colorless, eerie; that self she saw only with her own eyes. But that mirrored self was smiling. She was deliriously happy as she ran to him.
The vision made her weep: Alexi embracing a porcelain creature that the world would undoubtedly deem strange and suspect. But to him she clearly was perfection, as he drew back to kiss her passionately. Persephone’s body ached with a fire her ghostly beloved could not quench, a need that had not been tended for millennia. She wanted to be touched again, kissed again. Like that.
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