The Eterna Solution

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  * * *

  Evelyn Northe-Stewart had kept Rachel Horowitz’s letters in a black lacquered box as ominous in looks as its contents. Ensconced in the den that had originally been the purview of her first husband, Peter, Harold Spire carefully reviewed each one, looking for ties between the woman they’d seen today, that eerie, black-clad figure he’d chased, and the woman Horowitz had warned them about. When Evelyn came to see what progress he’d made, politely ignoring the cloud of cigar smoke that floated through the room, he was pleased to share his thoughts.

  “This young woman, through contact with you, your family, and the Society,” Spire began, “began to wrestle with the idea that the written word, the power of the name, was the oldest magic of all. Now don’t get me wrong, I do not believe in magic, but there is something gratifying to me about moving away from the idea of old crones standing around pots stirring and cursing in meter.”

  Evelyn nodded in agreement. “Indeed, Mr. Spire. The power of the name isn’t like a thunderclap sent from a magic wand, but it does focus energy, coalesces meaning and determination, for better or worse, and that in and of itself has practical effects.”

  Spire looked at the material Miss Horowitz had gathered as haphazard evidence, splayed before him across a gilded writing desk. One note caught his eye, in careful, looping script:

  Messages revealed as an invocation ritual were found written in code at a slaughterhouse site. As an associate was attempting to decipher, the spirits told me to burn the note immediately; that devils would come through. I grabbed the note and put it into the lantern, to the detective’s chagrin, and the invocation was ruined forever.

  Spire looked up, showing Evelyn the note that gave him pause.

  “What then about those letters from today?” he asked. “The ones that Rose took?”

  “An invocation ritual by which devils would come through…” Evelyn murmured. She looked at him and her color paled. “A summoning spell.”

  When the words sank in, Spire felt ill.

  Summoning spell.

  Spire jumped up. “Rose is decoding the letters now…”

  Evelyn followed him as he rushed out of the study. “Dear God…”

  Rose would bring the devils right to her. Not that Spire believed in ghosts or demons, but Rose had been a target before. She was known to the perpetrators and he would take no chances. The Summoned he had seen with his own skeptical eyes, and as much as he’d tried to pretend it was just the power of suggestion, he felt their evil press upon his skin, his heart, his mind. He prayed—if there was a God, something else he was not sure of—that Rose would survive this night unharmed.

  He ran out the door, his hostess calling after him.

  “Gather everyone you can,” he called back over his shoulder at her front door. “Our safe house may no longer be so. Regroup the team at the Eterna offices.”

  He was already down the block and up on a horse he untethered from a nearby post by the time Mrs. Northe-Stewart flung open her front door to follow. He’d return the animal once he was certain Rose was safe. It occurred to him that nothing else in the world mattered—had ever mattered—so much as this.

  * * *

  Rose was so focused on the letters she didn’t notice the fog rising in the room. Working through the phrases, she’d slowly puzzled out the hidden messages in the texts. Long ago she’d learned not to read for meaning when decoding. Instead, she would record the deciphered symbols in order, avoiding drawing conclusions that might prompt an incorrect letter or number. Only when she read the entire phrase did the whole of the exercise fall into terrifying place.

  “I summon you from the depths of time. I draw you from human misery and manifest you now. By blood you will take elemental form. Shadows, come to darken mortal skies.”

  Rose’s throat constricted as the air grew thin. Coughing, she recalled that terrible moment back in London when dark shadows accosted her and she was knocked unconscious. This felt the same.

  She stared at her writing, a dark spell working terrible magic. The paper rustled slightly in a wind that could not be present in her sealed room, yet was.

  Between her unadorned wooden desk and the blank wall of the safe house, a dim speck hovering in midair expanded into a shimmering portal, through which she could see dark shadows darting along a gray corridor.

  At the other end, barely glimpsed beyond the undefined shapes, was a spot of light. And in it, Clara.

  Feeling desperate, Rose opened her mouth to ask for help … only then realizing that across these walks of life and death, her soul sister was also under attack.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  Clara lay back in her bed, taking passionate thoughts with her, eager for the time when she and Bishop could truly give over to one another. She could not sleep.

  Ever since she’d said good-bye to Rose she felt something was off in the air, an odd ringing in her ears, and she hoped that was not a new epileptic symptom. Once she’d begun making connections to ley-line energy and discerning the difference of a co-opted industrial hum, she had to make sure she wasn’t hearing things just by thinking of them, a psychosomatic paranormal response.

  Mosley’s words echoed in her mind; a great power was routing itself to her. And it wasn’t electrical. The hum was, truly, undeniable, and as the strange man with that precarious relationship to the current predicted, the sound was rising. Surging. She shuddered to think what floated along the crest.

  A beacon in reverse, the absence of light wanted her luminosity. Now that she could wield certain powers directly, shift time and energy with her lives and the lines, she was all the more visible to all parts of the spirit world, across the spectrum of intent.

  Thinking of Rose, as she sat up suddenly, stock-still, unable to relax, she could feel her reaching out in the most basic of human impulses: a hand reaching for another hand.

  Rose was nearby, Clara could feel her, but there was a cloud. Something of friction and interference.

  Glancing worriedly at her writing desk, she noticed there were two spent Wards in small, decorative glass bottles upon her desk. They’d used so many and it was impossible to keep up with the demand. Could she relight them with any effect? Perhaps the material she’d worn like a poultice for the wedding … she’d placed it on her nightstand.

  With a muttered curse she jumped up to remedy the vulnerability, grabbing the fabric and placing it under her robe, but with a sickening certainty she realized she was too late. At this point, the Summoned didn’t need an invitation; they knew right where to find her.

  The temperature dropped drastically as a shudder raced down her spine and her hair stood on end—but only on her right side. With one hand on a lit taper, moving to relight the cold Wards, she slowly turned her head, looking to her right.

  A Summoned shadow lurked in the corner of her room. A cold black silhouette against the warm, cherry-paneled walls. Behind it, a vague rectangle began to shimmer, reminding her of the portal she’d seen in London, and the dark rectangles seen in the air when her lives had spread out before her. She was standing between worlds.

  Staring into this seemingly endless, incorporate shaft, she understood with growing wonder that when facing death, it wasn’t that your life flashed before your eyes; instead, it appeared as a series of frozen moments framed within. You crossed the threshold toward death and looked back on life. But she wasn’t ready to die.

  What would close the corridor? How could she hold to this world, this life?

  Without Rose, without Bishop or Spire, could she be the whole of the compass? That was the only thing she had seen defeat this manifestation before. She had to be. No knight in shining armor was coming to rescue her.

  For all that there was of import about the team, those precious dynamics as a part of a web of love-spun magic, at the end of the day, in the solitude of single consciousness, the human mind was alone. Even psychics were sole souls, for all their talk of interconnectivity.

 
; Anything alone was an easier prey.

  This is likely what the shadows had wanted all along: to separate them, to make them feel alone. Helpless. Then pick them off one by one.

  The shadow in her room wafted closer, and the lightless silhouettes within the corridor took note of the movement.

  Dimly down that corridor, Clara thought she saw Rose, also surrounded by shadows. A protective, sisterly rage bubbled up within her and what would have been the early countdown to a seizure was delayed by the emotional and energetic response.

  Just as the transatlantic cable carried messages between continents, Clara’s spiritual lines connected her to Rose and Rose to her. They were tied, no matter the distance. She murmured Rose’s name and felt that sisterly press upon her palm, there when she called for it, just as she’d asked, desperate.

  Clara watched as the echoes of her previous selves marched out around her, folding out from her in that peculiar accordion stretch of lives and time, each of them wafting just to the edge of that perilous portal but stopping, her ship captain self drifting to stare directly into the eyeless void that was the Summoned sentry.

  “I renounce thee…” she exclaimed. This kept the shadow in the room and the others at the mouth of the corridor back, but the portal remained open.

  Fumbling, trying to take advantage of the time her lives were buying her, she turned, in a slow, aching swivel, to her desk and grasped one of the cold Wards in a shaking hand. At her touch it smoked, reacting to her energy. She had to close that portal. If she did not, shadows would spill out all over her, then the city. She had to do something.

  Trying to listen for the positive hum of Manhattan’s natural ley line, she deemed it too faint against this dread press; even though it was easier to feel at the tip of the island, she could not seem to magnify it beyond the light note in her own ear.

  On her desk was a small box containing treasures she pored over at least once a month: a small cross; a flower from her mother’s grave, pressed in glass; an old letter from Mary Todd Lincoln, thanking twelve-year-old Clara for services rendered, bringing messages from her dead loved ones. Her psychic imprint was rich upon those small things.

  She gathered up meaningful things, those symbols of life everlasting, and lifted the neatly trimmed gas lamp from the desktop, realizing only as she touched it that the base of the lamp was burning hot. The hiss of pain sucked through her teeth sounded like an amplified pit of vipers to her own ear, agony returning her to herself.

  Her lives echoed her renunciation of the devils in a whisper through time.

  Grounded by the compass field of her lives, jarred into focus by the pain of the burn, she used what strength she had in this suspended state—a netherworld that did not operate in the same laws of physics that governed everyday moments.

  Again crying the exorcism liturgy of renouncement, thinking of Mr. Spire casting lit Wards at Moriel, she heaved everything at the portal. The Ward, the objects of meaning, and the lamp all passed through the foreground demon in a burst of multicolored light before hitting the flocked wallpaper and clattering to the floor.

  Time, weight, and gravity returned to normal as the corner of her room burst into an immediate bonfire. Only now did she notice the tar-like pitch oozing from the portal threshold, fuel to the fire. Her lives slammed back into her with a pummeling blow and she flung open her door with a cry.

  She ran into the hall. Harper was darting up the stairs toward her.

  “Clara—”

  “Fire! Get out, now,” Clara shouted, rushing past the older woman, knowing she was racing not just the flames but now a seizure. Somewhere in the chaos one of the first symptoms must have started. She had only a few minutes.

  Her legs were trembling even as she ran; tremors set her teeth clattering against her tongue. The taste of blood then blank warmth, taste gone—the first of her senses disappearing like a wire snipped from connection with one of Edison’s dynamos.

  Flinging open the front door of her home, Clara fled onto the street, feeling the cool night air penetrating her robe for an instant before the sensation vanished. There went touch. Smoke was acrid in her nose, near to choking her. Then the scent disappeared, though she kept coughing.

  Extending what was left of her consciousness, she tried to feel Rose, to find Bishop; she couldn’t tell what or who she connected to, but she found something—an infusion of strength that bought her enough time to reach the Eterna offices up the block. Giving a look back over her shoulder, she saw Harper standing out in front of the house, directing neighbors who had come to help, waiting for the fire brigade whose bells Clara could hear—for the moment.

  Sight remained, along with a desperate desire to reach sanctuary—the office, where she could lie down and let the seizure happen in a safe, quiet place.… Sight allowed her to see people staring at a woman running down the street in her nightdress. Clara did not care.

  When Bishop had guards installed in the Eterna offices, he’d required them to be there at all hours. Both were dozing as Clara crashed against the door to fumble with the knobs. The sound jarred them awake and they ran to help. When they opened the door she fell inward and to her knees.

  Her vision was beginning to tunnel. Someone grabbed her from behind, lifting her. She had no capacity to scream.

  Into her peripheral vision she saw Rose, thrust against her. Swimming into her other eye, her sight having trouble focusing, was Harold Spire, looking as pale as the ghosts he refused to believe in. He and the guards helped carry both lethargic bodies up to Clara’s office.

  Thank goodness intuition had told her not to set the trip wire when she last left the office, so their pass up the stairs went unimpeded.

  Spire deposited them squarely in the middle of the room upon a fine Persian rug and sat close between, his eyes wide with anxious concern. Dimly she registered golden light behind Spire’s head, coming in from the office window. The fire. It surely had grown.

  “You’re all right, my dear ladies,” he murmured. “You’ll be all right,” he insisted. His were the last words—accented by fire bells—that she registered before hearing failed.

  Sight remaining with her unto the end, Clara could see that Rose was neither dead nor bleeding, but fading. She lay back, reaching out to clasp Clara’s hand as Spire placed his hands on both their shoulders protectively, part of their compass connecting. Something of this act allowed Clara to let the seizure come, now overdue but as safe as it could be.

  While sensation was numbed, she could see her body go rigid as though she were turning to stone, her muscles prickling, burning, and clenching in shuddering spasms.

  The spirit world was thick in her mind, the weight of purgatorial corridors heavy and close as if she were buried in sand; the sixth sense always the last to go. The creeping tendrils of shadow were the last things Clara felt as she faded to seizure black.

  * * *

  Clara woke up not in stages but in a rush, as if she had been doused with water. Everything hurt. She was lying on a floor. Where was she? A searing panic had her sitting up, the immediate wooziness had her lying back down.

  She could smell smoke and see an orange glow outside.

  Her memory came back in a wild rush and she began to cry, turning away from the window. Her house was gone. All her books, a few treasures from her family, everything she possessed, gone. It wasn’t fair, but then again, very little was, especially for people in her line of work. At least she was alive. Be grateful, she thought, trying to rally herself.

  Rose was lying still and peaceful next to her. Asleep or unconscious, Clara could not tell. Harold Spire was still on the floor with them, having backed up to sit against the wall, dozing.

  The sickening feeling that something was off, not right, had not left her mind or body. Generally a seizure resolved the sense of dread. Here it was heightened. As she listened to Rose breathing, Clara gauged the shadows of the room. The hairs on her whole body rose in a slow, subtle wave.

  A low, o
minous bell rang downstairs.

  In Lavinia’s nook hung three bells. When Lavinia judged a visitor, she’d ring to signal their intentions: friendly, neutral, or dangerous. The dangerous bell—the deepest of the three—had never been rung by Lavinia in all their years together. Now it was clanging wildly.

  Lavinia was not here.

  Yet something was ringing danger.

  Clara wanted to scream. Would the horrors give her no peace? A moment’s respite?

  Rose began to rouse. Spire was up and alert thanks to the ghost-rung bell, bending over them both.

  “Hello, ladies, welcome back,” he murmured with relief, peering at them both before looking toward the stairs. “But why is that bloody bell clanging on?” He darted downstairs to see what all the racket was about.

  “Rose,” Clara mumbled, her tongue thick, her mind ahead of her body. She was in desperate need of water but it was a floor away. “Wake up. Rose, I’m not well, can you…”

  The Englishwoman blinked up at Clara. “Where am I?”

  “At the Eterna offices, but something’s wrong. Maybe an intruder,” she said quietly. Wouldn’t she have heard an intruder? A living one, yes, but …

  The remaining glow of the fire outside cast a frightening orange pall over the room, over their faces.

  She tried again to lift Rose at least to a sitting position, one of her buttons catching the edge of the rug and tugging on it as she propped Rose up.

  Her eye caught on something on the floorboard. A word stared up at her.

  HELL

  Carved into the floorboards … Clara lifted the carpet higher.

  HELL IS HERE

  She turned her head, bile suddenly churning with a violent lurch.

  No. Not her offices.

  “Rose,” Clara gasped.

  She could feel an unprecedented second seizure about to start.

  Her offices were tainted.