Eterna and Omega (2 page)

In a world that chided—if not hated—her for being a powerful woman and gifted Sensitive, finding a man like Gareth, who wanted her to be nothing more or less than her whole self, was a treasure worth more than the fortune her dear—similarly awestruck—late husband had left her. She had been lucky enough to procure one forward-minded husband, let alone a second, and she was as grateful of this as she was desirous for her sex to be afforded equality.

“Yes, dear,” he replied, responding warmly to a broken reverie. Gareth was a peaceful soul; however, spirits unsettled his quietude.

“Don't you think you'd love a cigar in your study? I'm getting a … premonition. And it doesn't seem to want company.”

Gareth Stewart rose slowly, his fair face paling against his auburn beard. “Indeed…” He never knew what to say in cases such as this, so he simply left a room when it cooled degrees and the day turned from normal to paranormal. To each their worlds.

Once he exited, Evelyn gestured impatiently as she spoke. “I know you're here. Out with it!”

The ghost must have floated closer to her, for the feathers of the fascinator pinned into her coiffure wafted in the breeze of his spectral presence, tendrils kissing her forehead. The flames of the crystal-globed gas lamps on a small mahogany table beside her velvet settee flickered subtly.

“I need your help,” the ghost said.

While pleading and desperate, after all she'd seen and weathered, she was a wisely wary woman, and suppliant tones alone were not enough to enlist her.

“You need help,” she repeated, staring in his direction, changing the focus of her eyes in an attempt to see any differentiation in the line of flocked wallpaper, anything that might give an indication of his form. “Spirits always do.”

“It's a matter of grave importance,” he insisted. “I wouldn't bother you with trivialities, not after all we've been through. You might remember me…”

“Ah. Yes.” She set her jaw and turned away from the spectral voice. “The twin. No wonder I can hear you so clearly, Mr. Dupris. You maintained the channel.”

“Yes,” he admitted ruefully. “I had to.”

Her shoulder twitched beneath tailored layers of satin. “You know, that is hardly comfortable for us,” she said through clenched teeth. “When you keep the channel open, it's like a cut on our skin never healed and is continuously exposed to the elements.”

“No. I didn't know. I'm sorry. Truly.” The spirit did seem contrite. At least this one was eloquent enough to comprehend in more than sentence fragments. Either she was gaining greater talents, or the ever mysterious spirit world was empowering this individual above all previous. “But I need any access I can afford,” the ghost insisted. “You, Madame Medium, are at the core of all those who are important and critical in the times to come.”

At this, the medium's eyes flashed a fierce warning. “If you want something of Clara—”

“I do,” the ghost she knew to be Louis Dupris, Clara's secret lover, exclaimed, wafting before her face in a chill gust, and she turned, unwilling to truly face him, whether he was visible to her or not. Extended ghostly exposure was exhausting and made Evelyn feel plucked at as if she were a series of string instruments being played all at once.

The ghost would not be deterred. “You need to help me contact her.”

“I will do nothing to upset her,” Evelyn declared.

“This is beyond her,” Louis countered. “You and she
must
understand what happened at the Eterna site on the terrible day I died. I am beginning to unravel what sabotaged us in that house. We were not alone when the disaster happened. I need someone to listen.”

“I'm here now,” Evelyn declared, exasperated. “We've a strong channel, don't squander it—”

“Our laboratory was invaded, Madame, by multiple
presences.
As my chemist partner Barnard and I combined the Eterna materials on that fateful day, our material must have been threatening to outside forces. One of our colleagues was courting something terrible. We didn't know…”

There was a long and terrible pause. Evelyn felt queasy. Such prolonged contact, with such clarity, was unprecedented. She now understood Clara's overwhelmed nature when it came to contact with the dead. Whatever she could take and save Clara from the brunt, she had to do. “More,” she said quietly, gesturing toward the sound of his voice. “Tell me as much as you can.”

Louis continued, his haunting voice deepening in sadness. “I didn't notice it until I returned to the brownstone after death, to find clues, trying to remember. The site had been a home, once, but Goldberg had gone mad, emptied the place of everything but our work. He was so odd, muttering things we could not understand…”

“Such as?” Evelyn closed her eyes. Perhaps she could focus on him better if she didn't try to look at the place she thought he occupied, just felt his draft.

“It was a language I didn't understand,” Louis replied, frustration underpinning his every word. “We thought it was Yiddish, but now I'm not sure. I remembered having seen something very odd, right before everything went wrong. In the wall, carved in, was the outline of a door. And it sort of became one—a blank space, a void where there should have been substance. Dark entities stepped through. Shadow-like, devoid of light, the opposite … As if summoned. It happened right as the Eterna Compound turned into a noxious gas. I remember nothing after that.”

“Entities. From a door. Carved in a wall…” Evelyn murmured. The room spun, and she could feel all the color drain from her cheeks. “My God…”

“What?” Louis countered in wary concern.

“It never really ended, did it?!” the medium said, her words a rasp, as if scrabbling for purchase in her throat. “The Society just went deeper underground … The network broader … Good God, we could've nipped it in the bud then, but now…”

She jumped to her feet and began to pace, looking down at the dark whorl of her plum skirts around the rich mahogany furnishings, the sumptuous deep tones of Tiffany sconces casting mottled, bruise-like patches of colored light onto her pale skin as she passed beneath them. For all her love of deep colors and magnetic shadows, at the moment she longed for blinding brightness to cast off any hint of darkness.

“You have … experience in such dealings?” Louis asked cautiously.

“Two years ago a demon tried to kill my friends,” the medium replied gravely. “Part of an insane plot, something hellish and mad, and surely too similar to what you've described to be coincidence. And if so … then it would have made that whole dread business mere child's play. An exercise. A drill. A test for a coming apocalypse…”

“Whatever it is,” the ghost insisted, “we have to stop the shadows before they wake.”

“They've always been awake, Mr. Dupris,” Evelyn snapped. “Devils never sleep. The trouble is that now, it seems they've multiplied.”

“So will you help connect me to Clara?” Louis begged. “We've no time to waste. The devils are patient, but when moved, they seem to act with horrific, swift aptitude. They came upon my team the instant our work crested unto glory. We had wrought something of hope and honor when we were quashed by darkness.”

Evelyn sighed and quit pacing. The dark satin whorl stilled and silenced. “I've no choice but to help. We'll need all hands on the proverbial spiritual deck.”

“Thank you. There is an odd clarity in death that sharpens the grayscale of human morality. In the moments when I can keep focus, a feat itself, I see more clearly what's most valuable.”

The medium turned again toward the direction of his voice. “What do you need from Clara?”

“As you know from the séance you were forced to undergo, there remains a block between Clara and me. I cannot speak to her directly. Yet she alone understands the heart of the Eterna Commission and its properties enough to see it to a solution. Those shadows were threatened by what we made. It was a mortal protection, and they killed us for it.”

“Clara's block is there to protect her. You know of her vulnerabilities, the senator guards her—”

“Of course I know that!” Louis cried. “One spirit alone does not overwhelm her, only when they cluster. I do
know
her, knew her”—Evelyn heard wrenching sorrow in his voice—“
well,
Mrs. Northe-Stewart. I knew her well and loved her with my whole heart.”

The medium pursed her lips. “Then why did no one know?”

“Would I, a man with a most particular heritage, have been allowed to ask for her hand?” Louis countered bitterly. “Not to mention that Senator Bishop prohibited the Eterna researchers from contacting his ward.”

“I am aware of the senator's rules,” the medium said. “How did you meet, then?”

“At a soiree, early in my employment, before any trouble began. From first meeting in a quiet alcove, I was lost. Our rendezvous infrequent as we were both so careful … My heart was noble, I assure you, and a gentleman's boundaries were maintained. But all that is history. What I believe we created in that house was a Ward … Not a ward in need of a guardian but a Ward, in old magical terms—”

“A Ward of protection, yes, I am aware of the concept,” Evelyn asserted.

“Someone, some
thing,
didn't want us to have it, and we need to know why. So now I beg you—obtain a lock of hair from my darling Clara,” the spirit said, his chill directly at her ear, as if he didn't want her to miss one word of the vital details, “and take it to where I died. Localized magic is about connecting organic materials of life and death, and since I don't have a grave, I can only hope that the disaster site will serve, and that from there, I will be able to tell Clara more about the Warding.”

“I hope you're right, Mr. Dupris.” She was brilliantly conversant with him, but she couldn't be sure if that was instinct or literal translation from his plane to hers. “But I shan't be visiting your haunted house, or Clara, past midnight. This is the stuff of the morning, for safety's sake. Now leave me be lest you drive me to nightmares. Good night, Mr. Dupris, and I'll deal with you tomorrow. You can … waft yourself out.” With a curt nod of her head, she exited the parlor.

Louis bowed after her, a formality even if she couldn't see him, calling a good night and thanks, and then, with what focus he had left, floated back onto dark Fifth Avenue, praying for dawn.

*   *   *

When Clara awoke the morning after any seizure, it was a sequence of putting herself back together, sense by sense, like restacking a deck of cards that had been thrown onto the floor and scattered.

For a woman who prized herself on relative control of her vast emotional and metaphysical scope, the loss of control in an epileptic seizure was the worst fate that she could imagine. She'd had to endure it since a séance she'd attended just as she was beginning to blossom into womanhood. Clara had expected that becoming an adult would change her abilities somehow but had not anticipated that becoming more sensitive would make her more susceptible to fits. Since the age of thirteen, vastly greater care had to be taken lest she be overtaxed and overtaken, as she had been at midnight in Trinity's sacred plot.

Every muscle of her body was screaming in pain. The clenching part of the seizure was always brutal and lingered on like a beating. Thankfully, this time she hadn't bitten off a chunk of her tongue; the cheek was bad enough.

When the thorough aches sharpened her senses enough to grasp the whole of herself, she noted was in her own bed, in the elegant little upstairs room that had been hers since she moved into the town house after her parents' deaths. Rupert Bishop had been a congressman then; now he was senator. But even then, he had made sure that his young ward had lacked nothing. He had seen to her education and given her leave to be and to express herself, to expand her mind. Most of all, to become the Spiritualist she and Bishop both felt she was born to be.

When she was only twelve years of age, it was her vision as expressed to grieving widow Mary Todd Lincoln that led to the creation of the Eterna Commission. Now, seventeen years later, she would have to be the one to end it, somehow. Too many people—not least her beloved Louis—had already died.

Lavinia. Thin memories returned like pale mist creeping over a dark expanse. Darling Vin had been her hero. That's how she'd gotten home. She didn't remember being helped into bed, but she must have put her in this muslin nightdress, as her best friend knew Clara would be mortified if Bishop had had to do it … What about Bishop…?

As the last of the mists that enveloped her mind cleared, Clara realized her guardian was staring down at her, tall and imposing in fine charcoal shades of dress, his silver hair mussed, his elegant, noble face with its oft-furrowed brow knit more harshly than usual.

“Hello, Rupert…” she said cautiously. Did he know she'd stolen out to bury Eterna evidence in the Trinity Church graveyard? Clara decided playing innocent was the best tack. “What happened?” she said, widening her eyes and reaching for her guardian's hand.

“You've been asleep awhile. Longer than usual. I didn't see the seizure, but…” Bishop was about to step forward and grasp her outstretched hand when they were interrupted.

“There was quite an event,” came a familiar female voice from the hall. The talented medium, Mrs. Evelyn Northe-Stewart, entered the room.

She was tall and striking, her once blond hair had gained streaks of classic silver, matching her with Bishop, her contemporary, ever dressed in the most magnificent finery straight from Paris's fashionably innovative minds.

Clara had long ago taken on Evelyn's style as inspiration, both in fashion and in furnishings, sure to tell her guardian that she, too, preferred her dresses Parisian and her surroundings entirely of the new Tiffany firm's provenance, seeing as the studio had just redecorated the White House.