The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker

by Leanna Renee Hieber

  The cloud congealed into the form of a single-headed canine. That head then multiplied, and the beast stalked forward and began to circle her chair. From its feet, which hovered a good six inches from the ground, blood appeared to drip. Blood culled from Whitechapel. Blood drawn from single, unaccompanied women…

  The monster opened a hellacious maw and growled: the whispers of a thousand damnations. It sniffed her then struck. Jane screamed as blood poured from a deep rent across her forearm, and a shriek flew from her lips as she pressed back hard against her chair. The incantation worked, if only for a moment; the abomination jumped back as if scalded.

  “What do you want?” Jane demanded, as the infuriated beast slashed her curtains. “Damned Ripper. What are ye looking for?”

  The monster turned and its invisible force lashed out. A shallow wound began in each of Jane’s cheeks, drawing downward, stinging and creating tearlike trails of blood. Like the Ripper’s other victims, Jane would die ignominiously, cloven and torn. She prepared herself, knowing that wars always had casualties. She had just expected to remain safe, a healer—

  Her front door suddenly burst open and the back of her library exploded in flame. The beast turned, startled. Alexi Rychman, voice like thunder, chanting in an ancient tongue rich and beautiful, entered the room. A whirlwind surrounded him, and his dark eyes were blazing; with a wave of his hand, he extinguished the fire.

  “Impeccable timing, my friends,” Jane murmured—and promptly fainted.

  “Non, non, ne nous quittez pas. None of us have your hands to heal, cherie.” Josephine rushed in. Ripping fabric from her dress and winding it around her friend’s arm, she massaged Jane’s temple.

  “Hello again, you filthy creature of hell!” Alexi growled. He unflinchingly stared the beast down.

  Rebecca appeared. A keening note rose from her throat, a call for The Guard to unite in their attack. It was a noise sweet and ancient, as if the wind were singing. The room filled with whispers, the beating of a thousand wings. A current of air circled above, and forked blue lightning.

  Alexi’s arms rose, his hands deftly flicking forward as if conducting violins to lift their bows to a symphony’s seminal note. Ringlets of blue flame danced across his fingertips. Threads of lightning arced forward, sought to bind their foe and neutralize it. The abomination writhed, groaning like a sinking ship and spitting like a rainstorm.

  Josephine, tending to Jane, was suddenly knocked to the ground. She rose up, hand to her forehead, and stared deeply into the center of the vapourous beast. Whatever she saw, it was a vast nothingness too terrible to comprehend, and she was transfixed by the spear of madness itself. But Elijah called out her name, and Josephine felt something warm wash over her, as if her veins were caressed from the inside out. She stepped back and into her lover’s arms. “Merci, mon cher. That was needed.”

  As Josephine refocused on her half-conscious charge, Jane’s head lolled to the side. “Ah, ah, none of that!” Josie snapped. Her friend’s eyelids drooped. “Lucretia Marie O’Shannon Connor!” Jane’s eyes shot open. “Good. Now, look.” Josephine pulled a golden locket from around her neck, opened it and held out the shimmering image of an angel. The rest would take care of itself.

  “Rebecca, dear, could you enlighten us a bit?” Alexi asked with mild strain. He did not want his companions to worry, but this creature was like nothing he’d ever contained. Anger, built up through countering the sheer evil of this monster, was getting the better of him.

  Rebecca searched the library of her mind. As last she cried out, “‘How you have fallen from Heaven, bright morning star, felled to the Earth, sprawling helpless across the nations! You thought in your own mind, I will scale the heavens…Yet shall you be brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Abyss!’” When in doubt, the King James Bible often sufficed.

  Alexi applauded as the creature snapped its many jaws and howled. “Well said, Rebecca! The puppy does not care for the word of God. Now, my friends, I think it goes without saying that all shows must eventually let down their curtains. Cantus of Extinction!” Clearing his throat as if preparing a lecture, he peered into the contracting form of their enemy and confided, “You should feel privileged, we’ve never had to sing this one.”

  Music rose in the room, an overture from the night sky, every star an instrument. However, just as the cantus swelled, their foe writhed from the grasp of Alexi’s blue flame and burst out the window. “NO!” Alexi shrieked. Jagged shards of glass rained down on The Guard, and once again the creature was gone but not destroyed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Percy stood at the center of her room in a long nightgown of filmy white fabric. It swished around her as she rocked from side to side, humming softly. Absently fingering the contours of the phoenix pendant between her breasts, she hardly noticed how warm it felt. One sensation obliterated all else: the firm press of Professor Rychman’s hand upon her waist. That memory was euphoria.

  The obsession was silly, of course. Percy hated it. She had a powerful mind capable of numerous, divergent trains of thought, and this was mental slavery. She had prayed the rosary repeatedly to try and derail her fixation, but she remained in solitary study, in abject adoration. This passion outmatched her. Her very blood was restless.

  A spirit drifted by her window but did not stop to say hello. Percy felt the draft, cooling the moisture upon her skin, but all she could think was, “Oh, my dear professor, you must have given me quite a fever…”

  She lay back on her bed. The more she tried to fight her daydreams, the more scorching they became. She imagined him bent over her, easing her onto her pillow as carnality consumed them. Her back arched upward, and as she pressed herself into his covetous, illicit, imaginary embrace, the phoenix pendant slid up her body and rested upon her sternum.

  “We demand Prophecy now!”

  In their chapel, the voices of The Guard rose like the blowing sands of a thousand years. A hazy door burst through the air, swinging open at the altar. The Guard descended, formed a circle, hands clasped and heads held high, responding in otherworldly liturgy as instinctive as their breath. Rebecca and Josephine continued to sing.

  “In darkness, a door. In bound souls, a circle of fire. Immortal force in mortal hearts. Six to calm the restless dead. Six to shield the restless living.”

  A ring of blue flame leaped from nothing into being, harmlessly licking their ankles.

  “Great spirit of The Grand Work, we are here because we’re weak!” Alexi cried. “Since childhood we’ve looked for you, beautiful creature, to return and guide us. Be silent no longer! Give us the friend you promised. Seven to calm the restless dead. Seven to shield the restless living.”

  He lifted his head to the image topping the altar. “Great One, let your feathers unfurl. Your wisdom!” A disembodied burst of music sounded. “Your power!” The music grew louder. “Your light!” A shaft of ruby orange fire leaped from the center of the floor to illuminate a burning heart in the white stained-glass bird above.

  “We demand Prophecy! We cannot wait! Where is she?”

  Someone was screaming, burning, his body encased in bloodred flames. A divine force was splintering before her eyes. Lying back upon her bed, Percy cried out in empathy, arching upward, the terrible vision like hot oil upon her eyes.

  There was a piercing, burning pain just below her throat. She looked down in horror, bending forward to see that her pendant was glowing red. Her ivory skin was sizzling. Percy quickly unclasped the necklace and hurled it to the floor, where its glow extinguished, but upon her skin, just above and between her breasts, was now a perfect imprint of a phoenix. Blood welled at its edges.

  Her breath hissed through her teeth as she rushed to the lavatory, and she stared into the large mirror at her white form in her white gown, now marked with this blood-lined stamp of symbolic rebirth. She dipped a cloth into a basin of cool water and pressed it to her chest, moaning.

  “Such strange things! Mother, why did y
ou leave me this bird, my only inheritance? Why won’t you guide me now? Why aren’t you a spirit that will speak to me when I see so many others? Why am I left in the dark? Please, tell me something.”

  Her stinging skin was her only response.

  “Please, tell us something,” Alexi begged.

  Warm, vibrating power coursed through The Guard, making hearths of their veins, but the only sound was the hum of their combined power, a lingering note of music. No goddess appeared to help them.

  His shoulders fell slightly but Alexi steeled himself; he would not show the others his defeat. While they had not received an answer, the ring of blue fire still surrounding them, a hazy beam of light dancing from each host’s heart to the hearts of the others, linking them all in a misty, dimensional star, giving them a sense of hope, however silent.

  Alexi’s mind wandered as he held Rebecca’s and Michael’s hands. For a moment he thought he heard a feminine gasp, something familiar. But then he shook his head and turned. “Silence. Still.”

  “Yet we are renewed,” Jane murmured, rejuvenated enough to place her hands on her wounded cheeks and heal them once more. “We are recharged, and that has ever been the purpose of this sacred space.”

  The circle of blue flame died, and the beams between the hearts of The Guard dissipated. The shaft of light illuminating the stained-glass dove slowly faded.

  “‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’?” Michael asked.

  Alexi nodded, fearing to say more. He had always grieved when his goddess declined to appear at their meetings, but tonight he had begged and still she was silent. He had never before begged. He had always dreamed that she would pay him heed. But perhaps—his heart quickened—it was because she was no longer the same and could not come to him in such a vision. Perhaps it was because she now wore skin of snow and had forgotten her lineage. If this was so, it was dangerous, the form she had chosen—or what might have been chosen for her—and his hand was still checked, awaiting a sign only she could give. If she even knew how.

  The Guard broke into conversation as they ascended to the nave of the chapel. Michael remembered a pun he’d heard in the pub earlier that day, and he was quite desperate to tell it to Elijah who would surely denounce it as the stupidest thing he had ever heard. Jane, still a bit weak, discussed with Josephine through a minor coughing fit the romanticism of becoming a consumptive invalid and wondered if the scars on her cheeks gave her character.

  Alexi’s mind wandered to a moonlit foyer that had doubled as a ballroom. He could feel Rebecca looking at him, so he placed a hand absently upon the small of her back, guiding her up the stairs. This sent a tangible shiver up her spine and brought him back to himself, and he retrieved his hand.

  Still, all Alexi could think of was waltzing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As Percy crept into the professor’s office for her usual tutorial, so close on the heels of Saturday’s revelry, he was standing by the stained-glass window. Shafts of coloured light fell in patches upon his distinguished face. His expression was blank but Percy felt his pull upon her blood, drawing her near. He had said nothing about the gala night during their class today. And she couldn’t have expected him to; a dimly lit dance without a chaperone was the talk of paramours, not professors.

  “Good evening, Miss Parker,” he murmured without looking at her. A thrill raced up her spine. The winglike sleeves of his robe quivered as he, arms across his chest, tapped a finger upon his forearm.

  “Good evening, Professor,” Percy replied, unwrapping her scarf, removing her glasses and placing them on the table. Unconsciously she swept a few locks of pearlescent hair forward to cover the burn now visible above the bustline of her dress.

  “And how are you this evening?”

  “Well, thank you.” There was a long pause. “And you?”

  “There is a strange feeling in the air, Miss Parker. Forces are at work.”

  Percy gasped. “You’ve noticed it, too?”

  The professor turned, raising an eyebrow. Her outburst had clearly startled them both, and she spun to stare into the small fire in the hearth at the side of the room. “You are a curious one, Miss Parker.”

  “Am I?” she asked, only afterward realizing the coy manner in which she replied. She bit her lip and looked at him, hoping he would not be disgusted.

  He was not. The sparkle in his eye did not go unnoticed, nor did his flickering smile as he moved to take his seat. Percy’s nerves forced a tiny giggle from her lips as he prompted, “You have work for me?”

  “Indeed,” Percy said, sliding a paper across the desk. Her fingertips brushed his and her temperature rose. She wondered at the volatile nature of her blood—or at the preternatural effect of his presence upon her.

  He spoke, breaking the tense silence. “What think you of the new geometrics in the last chapter?”

  Percy bit her lip. “Well, to be perfectly honest…I would rather it were a waltz,” she replied. When he eyed her, she hastily added, “Sir.”

  The professor gave her a sideways glance and his small smile ignited fires all across her body. “Indeed. Our sessions would be less painful if I were your professor of dance.” Then he stared down at her paper and said, “Actually, Miss Parker…you may be improving. A few of these are correct. Or perhaps my standards are lowering.”

  Percy grimaced, wishing he could see her excel at something. She debated asking his opinion of a burning pendant, but thought better of it at the last moment.

  The professor rose and walked to a crystal bowl near the phonograph. His expression was inscrutable. After a small pause he said, “I’ve a test of a different sort today, Miss Parker. May I offer you a piece of fruit?” He picked up something Percy could not see and kept it cupped behind his back as he returned.

  Percy fought back confusion. “I…suppose so. Thank you, sir.”

  “For you.” The professor held out a half-peeled, waxenskinned, orange-red fruit with seeds like rubies. A pomegranate. The smell overcame her. Immediately Percy leaped from her chair and began to choke, reeling backward.

  The professor, clearly unprepared for such a reaction, cast the fruit aside and rushed forward. “Miss Parker, my apologies! I had no idea you would react so violently. Please—”

  “That horrid smell! Those horrid seeds!” Percy cried, struggling against his grip, gagging. “It’s like that vision!”

  He held her safe in his arms. “Forgive me! I had to test my theory…Persephone.”

  She stared at him, startled, so he continued: “Am I wrong? You bade me guess your name. Is it not strange that a mere namesake should have had such a vision in this office—and such a reaction to that fruit? Persephone, Greek goddess, bound to the underworld after digesting pomegranate seeds offered her by Hades…Why, Miss Persephone Parker, there must be more to your story than you know yourself.”

  She had quieted somewhat, especially after hearing the sound of her full name spoken in his delectably sonorous voice. When she could once more breathe, she became aware of the protective nature of his embrace—and that again made her gasp. A violent cough racked her, and she lurched forward, her hair falling aside.

  “My God, what is happening to me?” she wheezed.

  But the professor’s eyes were drawn to her chest where it was pressed against his arm, to the swell of her bosom smooth and white against the black fabric of his sleeve. “What is this mark upon you?”

  Suddenly and keenly aware of his fixation upon a rather personal part of her anatomy, her eyes flickered upward. Every inch of her flushed. “Oh! That—Well, it is a burn. From my pendant.” Embarrassed, she again covered the mark with her hair. “I…I cannot explain it, Professor.”

  “Try.”

  Percy gave a laugh of weary hysteria. “Well, Professor, the strangest things have happened all my life. I’ve grown accustomed to them.”

  His eyes bored into her. “Yes, and?”

  “I’ve worn this against my skin all my l
ife,” she remarked, pulling the chain from inside her dress and showing him her pendant, which glittered in the candlelight. “It has grown warm before, periodically. I thought nothing of it, and it is the only thing my mother left me, so I did not want to remove it. But as I lay dreaming…it burned me.” She looked up at him helplessly as his brow furrowed, and wrung her hands. “And now you think I’m raving at last. Oh, Professor, why do you ask such questions when my answers will only appear mad?”

  “When did it scald you?” he asked.

  “After the gala…I suppose it was after midnight. I did not hear bells, for there was singing in my mind. Don’t you see? Madness!”

  “Singing?” The professor’s eyes were wide.

  Percy sighed. “In one voice, there were two. One spoke an ancient language I’ve never heard, and one our native tongue.”

  “What were the words?”

  “Why do you ask? Surely you do not care what—”

  “I care very much!”

  Baffled and rattled by his urgency, Percy began to recite what she remembered. Her eyes closed in a moment of exquisite pain. “‘In darkness, a door. In bound souls…a circle of fire. Immortal force in mortal hearts. Six to calm the restless dead. Six to shield the restless living.’ Angelic voices sang. It was how I always dreamed a mother’s lullaby would sound: the most beautiful music…”