Whisper the Dead

by Alyxandra Harvey

  They only managed to release a few more Keepers before the next wave of Rovers closed in. They stood in the gardens, blocking escape and throwing more torches into the house. Moira and Gretchen continued to dispense the potion as quickly as they could.

  The first few Keepers went out the broken windows to fight off the Rovers. Disoriented witches woke to a house filled with fire. Smoke hung from the ceiling and the yellow-and-orange light flickered violently. Shouts and the clash of swords and daggers drifted in from outside. The First Legate dispatched more people to fight or find water. “And a way out,” he snapped. “For God’s sake, clear a path.”

  “We need to find the linking spell,” Tobias said as the chaos of guests trying to escape the fire reached a crescendo. “We have to break the connection so Sophie can’t feed on the sacrifice.”

  “Get everyone out first,” he ordered. “Start with her.” He gestured at his daughter.

  Daphne shook her head, even as a cough racked through her. “I can help you find the spell.”

  “Don’t argue with me, girl,” her father shouted. “Get outside!” A Keeper picked her up around the waist and tossed her over his shoulder.

  Gretchen had used up the last of her potion, and there were only a few more people in the ballroom and the various servants of the house to release with the remains of the second bottle. The real danger now was the panicked jostling and the inexorable smoke, impossible to fight. The windows in the conservatory were being broken as an escape route. She saw a grandmother hoisting a candlestick like a club to use against the Rovers. She looked keen to bash someone’s head in.

  “The Keepers are getting the last people out.” Tobias handed Gretchen a wet strip of tablecloth to tie over her nose. “Run!”

  The dark of the smoke pressing in on them and the brutal flashes of fire made it feel like they would never get out. The screaming gave way to choking and coughing and stifled sobs as people tried to feel their way out. Gretchen brushed against a metal door handle, branding a vicious welt into her arm. Burning debris rained from the ceiling, and Tobias bent over her, using his body as a shield.

  They crawled through the jagged window, the door secured shut from the outside by a Rover. The air was sweet and clean and Gretchen gulped it down like a dessert ice.

  Daphne shoved through the frantic crowd toward them. “I’m better with a pendulum than anyone else here,” she insisted. She unclasped the opal pendant from around her neck. “No matter what my father thinks, I can help.”

  She dangled her necklace like a pendulum with her right hand, letting it swing over her witch knot. “Is the connection spell anchored in Grace House?”

  The pendulum circled clockwise.

  “Is it in the ballroom?” Daphne asked.

  The pendulum circled in the opposite direction.

  “Grace House must have twenty bedrooms alone,” Gretchen said. “This could take hours.”

  “Then don’t interrupt,” Daphne snapped. “You’ll only make it worse.” She went back to staring intently at the pendulum. “Is the connection spell in the library? The kitchens? The attic?”

  The pendulum circled both ways, then swung side to side, confused.

  “Try the roof,” Moira interjected, soot on her face. “Where else would it be safe long enough to be used while everyone and everything burns?”

  Daphne opened her mouth to object to being ordered about by a Madcap, then shut it with a snap. “It does make sense,” she said grudgingly. “Is the pendulum on the rooftop?”

  The pendulum made wide clockwise circles.

  Moira nodded. “Right. I’ll go.”

  “Let me,” Tobias said. “It could be dangerous.”

  Moira snorted disdainfully. “A Greybeard balancing on a ridge pole? You’d fall on your pretty head. No, this is what Madcaps do, remember?”

  “Help Greybeards?” Gretchen said with a commiserating smile.

  “Don’t tell the others,” Moira retorted before tightening her cravat securely over her nose again.

  Fire shot through the house windows like dragon tongues licking the sky. The light pulsed hungrily. The neighbors evacuated their own houses for fear the fire would jump from building to building. Most of the guests were running out into the road to find their carriages. The Rovers, outnumbered, had run off.

  Gretchen should have felt relief.

  She felt only a deeper, colder fear.

  “Has anyone seen Emma?”

  “She wasn’t here,” Tobias replied, soot marks in his hair. His shirt was pockmarked with burns.

  “And Penelope?”

  Daphne looked at Gretchen. “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Lucius Beauregard did this to us,” she replied. “He mesmerized us all somehow. And when he told us to, we became music-box dolls, stuck in a pattern.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Tobias ground out, his blue eyes turning arctic. “I didn’t see him activate the spell. And he was just made an honorary Keeper. Who else has he hypnotized?”

  “He took Penelope,” Daphne said.

  Gretchen turned to go without a word, the broken glass from the conservatory windows crunching under her shoes.

  “Gretchen, wait,” Daphne called out. She pulled the poppet they’d made of Sophie from her reticule. “I took this from my father’s pocket,” she said, tossing it to her. “You’ll need it.”

  Penelope fell into Lucius’s memories. As always, they were out of order, and she spun through them like a kaleidoscope, all colors and patterns that made sense only for a brief moment.

  He hurried down an underground tunnel. He had to hunch over in order not to hit his head on the damp stone. The old mines of Paris had been converted into catacombs for the dead during the French Revolution. The cemeteries were emptied to make space for buildings and houses. A river of bones had decanted down into the mine tunnels. Knights, cheesemakers, wine sellers, dancing masters, merchants, and old kings all gathered here, heedless of titles and wealth.

  More importantly, so did the bones of those who’d died in the riots at la Place de Grève, and those who’d laid down for “Madame la Guillotine.”

  Seraphine, one of the Seven Sisters, had died in Paris during the Revolution.

  It took Lucius a full year to find the right gatekeepers and street urchins to mesmerize into helping him, and then another to explore the catacombs.

  The burble of water from the aqueducts and springs was his ever-constant companion. Fossils gleamed in the wet limestone before it opened up into the catacombs. He passed walls made of leg bones, skulls lined along the top. Finger bones and cracked jaws made patterns delicate as lacework. He barely noticed. Finally, finally, he had what he needed.

  Seraphine’s finger bone was tucked safely inside his coat pocket. He wasn’t able to find anyone to read the bones, but three bone-singers assured him that her ghost lingered, hungry and desolate. “You’ll be with your sisters soon enough,” he murmured, his voice echoing in the tunnel as he climbed back up to the city streets. “And I’ll be with my love.”

  It took another year to navigate the Channel, made too dangerous to cross by the war and Napoleon. He missed home. He missed the green hills, the silver rain, the yellow fog of London.

  He missed her.

  The colors smeared on the palette in her mind, and Penelope tumbled and bounced between memories.

  Lucius was told of an old man who lived in the alley behind la Place de Grève. He talked to himself all day and night, laughing and offering wine to the empty air. Lucius knew a bone-singer when he saw one. His faded eyes tracked movement Lucius couldn’t see. Lucius crouched down beside him, ignoring the pungent smell of unwashed cloth and hair. He placed a jug of wine and a basket of cheese, grapes, and sausages in front of him. “J’ai besoin de ton aide.”

  The man looked at the food, then squinted up at Lucius. “Va-t’en, salaud.”

  He wasn’t friendly or willing. It didn’t matter.

  H
e’d looked into Lucius’s eyes.

  Lucius smiled, his witch knot flaring. He grabbed his left hand, pressing their witch knots together. “You’ll do as I say, old man.”

  Even knowing she couldn’t change the outcome, Penelope tried to warn the old man, but the memory was already changing.

  The ring slipped on his finger, put there by a girl with tears on her cheeks. Not just any girl.

  Sophie.

  She smiled up at Lucius, lower lip trembling. “This way we’ll always be together. I’ll wait for you.”

  He gathered her close, already missing her. “I’ll find the bones,” he murmured in her hair, which always smelled like lavender. “We’ll bring her back.”

  “I love you,” she said, rising on her toes to kiss him. “Come home soon.”

  Penelope opened her eyes, seething.

  “You toad-spotted varlet.”

  • • •

  “Don’t try and stop me,” Gretchen snapped as Tobias loped by her side.

  “Give me a little credit,” he said quietly. “I can track her, remember?” His nostrils flared as he catalogued scents she couldn’t smell. She felt the loss of her wolf again, sharply.

  “What the hell does Lucius have to do with any of this?” She ground her teeth. “I can usually tell when someone is hiding that big of a lie.”

  “You’re still learning how to use your gifts,” Tobias pointed out. “It’s as new to you as wearing the wolf is to me.”

  She shook her head. “Still, I …” She thought about each time she’d seen Lucius. At the musicale when he’d spilled wine on Penelope’s gloves, at the goblin markets, outside of Gunter’s when she’d heard the warning buzz but had assumed it was a reaction to the dropped stitch on Penelope’s reticule. “It was him all along.” Frustration boiled inside her. “What does he want with her?” she asked. “Or Sophie? And where’s Emma?”

  “We’ll find them,” Tobias promised her. “This way.”

  Tobias’s tracking led them to Greymalkin House. It was as dilapidated as ever. Even the ivy clinging to the walls looked gray. It tainted the very air, all dust and cobwebs and darkness.

  Lucius was outside the gate, holding Penelope’s arm behind her back. Keepers stood on either side with blank expressions. Gretchen didn’t think; she just grabbed the nearest object and lobbed it at Lucius’s head. The stone glanced his cheek. It took him by surprise, but not long enough for Penelope to dash away. He yanked her back and she yelped in pain.

  And then Sophie emerged from a waiting carriage. The roof was thick with sparrows and pigeons. She wore a pale yellow muslin dress with a row of topaz buttons. She floated with all the grace of a debutante, her smile politely bland. She wore a necklace of pearls and diamonds that glimmered prettily. Gretchen looked closer. It wasn’t just pearls she wore. Godric’s locket gave her the ability to see what was really chained around her neck, and it wasn’t pretty stones. The pearls glowed blue and violet, unfurling chains of light that stretched out behind her.

  Leashed to that virulent light were the ghosts of the people she’d murdered and whose bones she’d stolen.

  Gretchen recognized Margaret York, Sophie’s first victim. She still wore her silk ball gown, stained with blood.

  Beside her, Alice the seamstress with her pinpricked fingertips and plain homespun dress.

  Lilybeth, with her sad, surprised eyes, clutching at the leash that burned around her wrist.

  Strawberry was there as well, though not chained. The whips of light snapped at her like serpents, but she fought their pull. Her edges were smeared, nebulous. Sophie hadn’t managed to steal her bones before Moira burned them in the funeral boat. Godric was there too in his striped waistcoat and pale hair. The whips slashed hungrily and impatiently.

  “We are still here.”

  Gretchen stopped breathing.

  “You killed him,” she finally croaked, swaying as her vision went red. Tobias’s hand on her arm kept her from shattering into pieces. She wondered if she hadn’t fully shifted out of wolf form, because all she could hear was desperate howling.

  “It was meant to keep you distracted,” Lucius said. “We did warn you, but you reversed the poppet curse onto us. It had to go somewhere, didn’t it?”

  “What’s she doing here?” Sophie asked Lucius. “She’s the worst of them. I thought we agreed to keep them occupied and separated.”

  “Why?” Gretchen asked flatly.

  “To keep you out of the way,” she snapped. “You and your cousins ruined it all for me. And I won’t fail again. I can’t.”

  “So raising the dead is an excuse for killing my brother?” she spat. “For killing all of those girls?” She was dimly aware of Tobias holding her back, mostly because every time she surged forward, Lucius’s hold on Penelope tightened painfully. His hand was around her neck now, immobilizing her. There were hawthorn petals in her dark hair.

  “What do you mean, Godric’s dead?” Penelope asked, her cheeks going pale.

  “Alas, no witch’s rhyme to turn back time; only a warlock’s spell unrings the bell. To rise up those that fell, court thee the Seven Sisters well,” Gretchen quoted.

  Tobias forgot that he was preventing Gretchen from attacking Sophie and took a step forward himself. “You can’t be serious. You could never control all Seven Sisters.”

  “I’ve been gathering power, or haven’t you noticed? I can do anything.”

  “Ignore him, love,” Lucius said softly. “He doesn’t understand. He never will.”

  “But you courted me,” Penelope whispered. “You said you loved me.”

  “He loves me,” Sophie broke in savagely. “Me.”

  “Lucius, let the Lady Penelope go,” Tobias said softly. “Or I can guarantee it will end badly for you.”

  “You can’t do anything to me without doing it to her as well,” he said. “She’s mine now.”

  “Oh, I really don’t think so,” Gretchen said. “You’re as mad as Sophie is. And you’ll be equally dead if anything happens to Penelope.”

  “I’m not mad,” Sophie insisted. The ghosts of her victims floated behind her. Frost clung to the cobblestones. “And I am sorry, you know. But I’m doing this for love.”

  “Love?” Gretchen spat. “For a man who courted my cousin?”

  Her eyes glittered. “My sister died of a fever when I was twelve years old. She was only ten. And I couldn’t heal her. Me, with my healing gifts. But at least I can bring her back now.”

  “That’s who I saw in the vision,” Penelope realized softly.

  “My brother for your sister?” Gretchen seethed. “By sacrificing a house full of witches?”

  “By sacrificing anyone. Anything,” she replied acidly. “That’s what family is. Can you honestly tell me you wouldn’t do the same? For your brother? For your cousins?”

  “Where’s Emma?” Gretchen and Penelope demanded in unison. Penelope’s voice was more of a rasp.

  “She’ll be along,” Sophie said. “The Sisters are fetching her even now.”

  “But why? Why the Sisters again?” Penelope asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Who cares?” Gretchen said. “She’s selfish and insane. Someone punch her in the eye already.” Instantly, her knee flared with pain. She felt the bruise forming, just as she had when she was seven years old and had fallen from her pony. A gash opened on her arm, blood seeping into her sleeve. There was a rush of dizziness and a headache burst in her left temple. She’d hurt herself in this exact way falling from a horse.

  “Oh dear, it looks as though you were rather clumsy as a child,” Sophie said. “You’ll find that regrettable.”

  “What are you doing to her?” Penelope struggled. Lucius tightened his fingers and she stilled, going pale. “Gretchen, get out of here!”

  Tobias half stepped in front of her, but it didn’t stop Sophie’s magic. Gretchen grit her teeth against the aches and stabs assaulting her like a swarm of invisible hornets. She remembered Sophie’s
poppet tucked into the pocket of her borrowed trousers, but she had no pins. And no breath left as her body remembered exactly what it felt like to fall out of an apple tree in the family orchard.

  “Don’t you remember?” Sophie explained with her pretty debutante smile. “I can revisit all of your past illnesses and injuries upon you. It’s much more useful than healing them, I can assure you. And once Emma is here to open the gate, this will all be over.” She watched Gretchen’s struggle, amused. “You might think you’re strong enough to ignore the pain, but when all of those injuries hit you at once, you’ll do what everyone does. You’ll faint.”

  “I never faint,” Gretchen replied, tasting copper and lemon balm.

  “But what do you need with me?” Penelope croaked, trying to distract Sophie. “I can’t bring back the dead.”

  “No, but you can tell me which are the bones of the Sisters in the Greymalkin ossuary. Lucius found Seraphine in Paris, but the others are in this house. I need them if they’re going to be more than mere spirits.”

  “The Shakespeare book,” Penelope realized.

  “I had to be sure your powers were strong enough,” Lucius said quietly, his breath stirring the hair on her neck.

  “Spilling the wine on my gloves that night was no accident either.” She bit back tears. “How can you do this, Lucius?”

  “You’re a romantic girl, Penelope. Surely you understand doing anything for love.”

  “Not this,” she said. “Not murder.”

  “I spent years searching for Seraphine’s bones, separated from Sophie. All to ease her grief. If this were one of your books, you’d call me the hero.”

  “I’d call you a—” His thumb dug into her windpipe, cutting off her voice just as the First Legate arrived with a small unit of ash-and-soot–stained Keepers. They carried jet-inlaid wheel pendants, iron daggers, and spell bundles.

  It wouldn’t be enough.

  Other Keepers came out of the shadows to join Lucius. They stared straight ahead, weapons ready. They had the advantage, by being completely indifferent to fighting their brothers. The others paused, confused. They were forbidden to fight each other. But Lucius’s Keepers weren’t bound by those laws anymore. And there were more of them.