Elemental Magic: All-New Tales of the Elemental Masters (22 page)

“Miss Harris! Miss Harris, are you hurt?”

“Captain Williams?” She lowered her arms and stared up at flecks of red disappearing from pale eyes. It took heat to boil liquor. Easy enough ciphering for her father’s daughter. “You’re the Fire Master.”

Concern turned to astonishment so quickly she couldn’t prevent a giggle. “Sorry. I don’t usually . . .” She sat carefully. The sailor’s legs protruded from behind a gravestone, but she could hear his wet breathing so assumed he was fine. Or as fine as she cared about. “Dr. Evans said there was a Fire Master at the garrison.”

“And Dr. Evans . . .”

“Is an Earth Master. Like my father.”

“I see.” He rubbed a tanned hand across his forehead. “And you are?”

“I . . .” Why not? Just because her father didn’t believe her. “I speak to the dead. More than speak, really, I help them move on. My mother’s shade taught me.”

“That explains your fascination with cemeteries.”

“It’s not a fascination.” She paused as he carefully shook broken glass off her skirts, then allowed him to help her up. “Dr. Evans and my father believe the grave-robbing means necromancy. If I can find out where and when, they can stop it.” They’d said they were merely going to protect their own, but surely if they
knew 
. . .

“And they know you’re here? Risking yourself?”

Pulling her hat up by the ribbons, she shook her head. “No. My father doesn’t believe in my abilities,” she continued hurriedly, recognizing his expression as one likely to have her immediately removed from the cemetery. “People could . . .
will
get hurt if we don’t stop this. Arietty Brown has the answers we need. And since she’s the reason I fell . . .” Turning back to the grave, Ellie snapped, “She owes me!”

“I owes you nothing!” Responding to the challenge, Arietty Brown appeared. She was dressed in black, middle-aged, dumpy, angry . . . and familiar. When Ellie gasped, Arietty’s narrow lips curled into a nasty smirk. “You see it, don’t you girl? You’re like me, you are. See the dead. Be the dead. No rest for the wicked is there?”

“Is she talking to you?” Captain Williams stood so close she could feel the air warm between them. “What’s she saying about the necromancers?”

“The pretty, pretty man wants to know about necromancers. He doesn’t care that you know the dead, but he will.” Her eyes went black and she glared past Ellie at the captain. “They care. They leave!”

“He’s none of your business! Tell me of the necromancers?”

“A newborn babe. An untouched woman. An aged man. The noose’s child. One of power. With what they’ve gathered, they deconsecrate and summon Darkness. Darkness creeps through windows and under doors and steals the breath from young and old and uses death to open the passage.”

“Open the passage for what?”

“For a greater Darkness. Darkness whispers to me always. Send me the dead. Send me the dead.” She clapped her hands over her ears. “STOP IT!”

The shriek distorted Arietty’s face and drove Ellie back against the captain’s chest. Before he could react, she straightened and stepped toward the shade. She wondered if the dark shade in Gray Friars had been one of them as well only even further gone. The edges of Arietty Brown felt much the same. “It’s long past time you continued your journey.” Her voice shook only a little. “Come.”

“To you?” Arietty scoffed.

“Through me.” Taking a deep breath, Ellie opened herself to the light as her mother’s shade had taught her.

“No . . .”

“Yes.” Ellie took the shade’s hand, able to touch her for just this moment and draw her forward. But she’d never tried to save a shade so old. Or one who hadn’t been searching for what she offered. She dragged Arietty toward the light one . . . step . . . at . . . a . . .

“They’ve locked the door,” the shade whispered as the light began to take her. “Only the dead can open it. You’ll fai—”

Done.

Ellie staggered as she released the light and once again found herself leaning against the captain’s chest. This time, she lingered for a moment, one hand clutching his uniform, her legs shaking.

“Miss Harris . . . Ealasaid? Are you all right?”

“She didn’t want to go, but she’d been twisted by unhappiness and pain and she was already listening to the Darkness. I couldn’t let her stay and become something to fear.”

Ellie felt his chest rise and fall, his breathing matched to hers. “You opened a gate?”

“I am the gate.” His hold on her shoulders changed.
“They care. They leave!”
Fingers trembling, she pushed herself away. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? That was amazing.” He smiled, and she couldn’t help but return it.

Then she remembered. “Tomorrow is the dark of the moon! I have to tell my father!”

“Tell him what? That it’s necromancy? You said he knew. I suspected as much; it was why I was here.”

“We know two things more.” Ellie poked a strand of hair back into its knot. “One of the bodies taken belonged to a man of power. If we can find out who he was, his shade can help us.” She frowned. “But I need his name. He’ll need a sense of self to help, and I’ll have to return that to him.”

Captain Williams frowned as well. “And the second thing we know?”

“That they deconsecrate and summon Darkness.”

“Deconsecrate? They must be in a church!” He grabbed her shoulders again, blushed, released her and stepped back. “A church where they have no fear of interruption . . .” He frowned again. “A church without a pastor?”

“Temporarily closed for some reason.”

“For repairs!”

“Still consecrated!”

“Can you find it? By tomorrow night?”

“Halifax isn’t Edinburgh, Miss Harris. I can find it.” He tucked her hand in his arm and led her toward the cemetery gate. “You find out who the man of power is, I’ll find the church.”

*   *   *

“But Papa—”

“No! Enough, Ealasaid!” He pushed his hand back through his hair. “You’re too old to be continuing this fantasy. Your mother’s ghost did not come to you to grant me absolution in the matter of her death!”

“This isn’t about—”

“Stop it! It isn’t enough you’re sneaking off to meet young men—”

“Papa!”

“—but you have to bring your mother into it? You will not leave this house tomorrow, Ealasaid.” The finger he pointed at her trembled. “You will . . . You look . . .” He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, turned on his heel and headed for the back garden.

“I never mentioned Mama,” Ellie whispered as the door slammed behind him. She climbed the stairs to her room and held the lamp close enough to the round mirror over her bureau to see her reflection clearly. She knew she looked like her mother. Even Dr. Evans had seen it. The shape of her face. Her hair. Her eyes. Her father’s heartbreak. That was all he saw when he looked at her.

*   *   *

When she tried to speak to him the next morning, he cut her off, told her again she was to stay in the house, and left. Ellie stared at the closed door for a long moment, stamped her foot because she was far too old to throw things, then headed for the kitchen and the pile of old newspapers.

It turned out there were multiple newspapers in Halifax, not merely the one her father subscribed to, and the previous occupants of their house had kept all of them. Ellie moved them to the sitting room and settled down to read. By noon when Mrs. Dixon brought luncheon in, the papers were spread out around her over the floor and the furniture like a flock of gulls. The housekeeper raised a brow, but said nothing.

By two, Ellie had the newspapers stacked again, and was pacing the length of the room. A cup of tea at three barely calmed her, and, at four fifteen, when she heard a buggy stop out front, she ran for the door.

“We’re a body short,” she said, pulling Captain Williams into the house. “Four bodies from Camp Hill Cemetery and one from the Old Burying Ground, but the last taken from Camp Hill was sixteen-year-old Maria Campbell and today’s newspaper says they found her body down by the water. I think she was supposed to be untouched but wasn’t and that’s why they went for DeChampes. Dr. Evans said she was a saint. And the noose’s child was an accident. It really was a child, caught up in a loop at the rope works. Archie Tern was ninety-three but, unless he was also the man of power . . .”

“We’re a body short,” Captain Williams repeated.

“That,” said a quiet voice from the other end of the hall, “is because what happens in colored cemeteries never gets reported in white newspapers.”

They turned together, Ellie still clutching Captain Williams’ arm, to find Mrs. Dixon standing by the kitchen door, drying her hands on her apron.

“My brother-in-law, Tom Byers, he had the shine about him,” the housekeeper continued. “He’d talk to the wind and the wind talked back.”

“An Air Master,” Ellie breathed.

Mrs. Dixon smiled. “Don’t know he was a Master of anything, but that’s what Colonel Briant said you folks would call him. He was one too, an Air Master.” When both Ellie and Captain Williams continued to stare, although Ellie at least had managed to close her mouth, she shook her head. “When this is done, you lot on this side of the water should maybe start talking to each other,” she sighed. “Make a new life, stop wallowing in the loss of the old. But here and now, our Tom died two months ago, his body taken from the grave. His was the first.”

“Is there a chance they killed him?” Ellie asked. “Once they had a man of power, it would be easy enough to get the others,” she explained when the captain turned toward her.

“He was crushed under a slipped load, down on the docks. The net gave way . . .” Mrs. Dixon’s voice trailed off. “It was called an accident,” she finished at last, but she sounded uncertain.

A convenient accident,
Ellie thought as Captain Williams stepped away from her.

“They’ve set up in a small church on Bedford Row. It was damaged in a fire, and has been sitting empty for almost four years but it’s never been deconsecrated.”

“A lot of small empty churches in this town,” Mrs. Dixon noted. “Folks always trying to save sailors who don’t want to be saved.”

“But only one with dark wards,” the captain pointed out. “Your father and Dr. Evans . . .”

“Don’t believe us.”
Don’t believe me.

“But then . . .”

“Then we stop it. You and I.” She tucked an escaped curl behind her ear. “I deal with the dead, you deal with the living.”

He stared at her, biting his lower lip in a way that made him look
much
too young for his rank. Finally he nodded, “All right.”

Ellie expected Mrs. Dixon to try and stop them, but all she said was, “Be careful.”

*   *   *

“We have to go by Dr. Evans’ house,” Ellie told him as he helped her into the buggy. “Arietty said they’ve locked the door, and only the dead can open it. I only know one shade in Halifax not tied to a cemetery.”

Anna was thrilled to go for a late afternoon ride, although Ellie possibly lied a little about Lieutenant Marshal being at the end of it. The problem, once she’d slipped away from her mother and sister and was in the buggy, was how to speak to the shade of her dead twin about necromancy and the coming Darkness without terrifying Anna out of her wits. By the time they’d reached Spring Garden Road, with Captain Williams making faces at her over Anna’s head, Ellie still hadn’t come up with a workable plan. And they were running out of time. She took a deep breath, turned and took Anna’s hand, looked past her shoulder at the barely visible shade—three of them on a seat meant for two left little room for a fourth no matter how insubstantial—and said, “One or more necromancers are going to try and open a door to Darkness tonight. The Darkness will feed on death, and a greater Darkness will follow. We have to stop them.”

“Ellie, what are you talking about?” Anna’s fingers were hot around her wrist.

Ellie ignored her. “We need your help. They’ve locked the door, and only the dead can open it.”

“You’re frightening me.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“Miss Harris, I don’t think—”

“Not now, Captain.” Gaze locked with the shade, Ellie opened herself, just a little, to the light.

The shade’s eyes widened, and then she disappeared.

“Oh, no.” Ellie knew she hadn’t opened far enough to make a gate. Barely a peephole! She hadn’t meant to drive the shade into hiding, only to make a point. Then she realized that Anna’s fingers were icy cold, and it wasn’t Anna looking out of Anna’s eyes.

“No one . . .” Anna’s dead twin sounded excited “. . . has ever asked me for anything.”

The chestnut bucked as Captain Williams jerked the reigns. A cabbie swore, a pair of boys pointed and laughed, and Ellie said, “Will you help?”

“Of course.”

“Is Miss Evans all right?”

The shade turned Anna’s body toward the captain. “I’m Miss Evans. Miss Alice Evans. I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced, Captain Williams.”

“You died.”

“As we were born, but I think it’s rude to bring that up now, don’t you?”

Bedford Row was on the edge of Sailortown, only a few short blocks away from the Old Burying Ground but no longer respectable enough for a decent young woman.

“You’re dead,” Ellie reminded Alice when she pointed that out.

“Anna isn’t.”

“Don’t worry, Miss Evans . . .” Captain Williams helped her down from the buggy and barely flinched at the temperature of her fingers. “. . . I will do everything in my power to keep you—both of you—and Miss Harris safe.”

Alice flushed and giggled.

Only a small wooden cross by the door identified the boarded-up building as a church. Three steps took them from the sidewalk to a small concrete pad. When Ellie reached toward the door, Captain William caught her hand and pulled it back.

“The wards will kill anyone who touches the door. And I think . . .” He frowned. “. . . I think they’re keeping the dead locked in.”

“But not out?”

“Why would they?”

“Alice?”

“I think if she passes through the wards, she’ll destroy them.”

Her father would have
known
, but her father wasn’t here.

“I’ll come back for Anna,” Alice said softly, and stepped forward as Anna collapsed. Captain Williams caught her before she hit the ground.