Eterna and Omega (3 page)

Drinking in Evelyn's latest fashion was one of Clara's favorite pastimes, and today she did not disappoint in a champagne-colored bombazine day dress with a matching capped-sleeve jacket trimmed and accented with thin black ribbon.

“May we have a moment?” the medium said, turning to the senator. “Clara and I?”

“I … she … Clara just woke up,” Bishop replied. The hesitation was unlike him, and while relations between her and her guardian had been strained of late, Clara's heart swelled that no discord could outweigh his infallible care for her.

“It's a personal matter, Rupert,” Evelyn insisted, keeping her tone warm out of deference to his protective instincts. “I received a message that concerns her.”

The senator's brow knit further. Giving Clara a worried look, he reluctantly left the room.

The medium turned to Clara gravely. “I had a visit from your Louis…” she began.

Clara swallowed hard.

Louis had awakened aspects of herself—mind, body, and heart—she had not experienced before. She had loved him truly for who he was, a passionate and energetic man of visions and spiritual gifts. Rupert Bishop held an old sway over her heart, one she never dared indulge, but Louis had helped her live more fully than she'd ever allowed. His death had been a hard and unexpected blow; that he still had a connection to her was a bittersweet comfort and a pang.

Evelyn, ever attentive and empathic, waited for Clara to meet her gaze again before continuing. “Louis was very insistent on gaining access to you. To talk to you.”

The memory was sharp enough to make Clara close her eyes. Louis had often said if he could do only one thing in the world, it would be just to sit and talk to her. They both believed in Eterna's mission. Louis's commitment to Eterna was shaped at least in part by his desire to make his principles of spirituality and his Vodoun faith something science could champion.

She could not help but think back to their passionate discussions, often conducted while lounging about on the bed of his tiny flat near Union Square. Clara was all too willing to find reasons to excuse herself from work and dart uptown for a secret rendezvous. The weight of Evelyn's stare drew her away from the memories of her dead paramour.

Clara's body felt suddenly restless and caged by her condition. She shifted to sit upright, wincing as her arm and back muscles clenched again in a painful vise, but she refused Evelyn's help, as she needed her own movement to unlock them again. She cleared her throat and began cautiously.

“Louis wishes to speak to me … about us? Or was it … something of Eterna?”

“Eterna,” Evelyn was quick to reply, moving closer to Clara and sitting on the edge of the bed. “He is learning, in the spectral realm, about what may have gone wrong at the site. Dark forces are afoot, having been granted entry by human avarice.”

Clara thought of the disaster site and shuddered. “That would stand to reason, if reason can even apply there.”

“Devilry has a peculiar reason to it, and a twisted logic. Louis believes dark presences that invaded the room treated the Eterna Compound as a threat.”

When Clara had, daringly, visited the site of Louis's death, she had a terrible vision of looming beings … Perhaps the same presences Louis referred to. She had thought they were ghosts, but her time there had been so short, it was possible she had not perceived them as the threats they were. Her head wasn't nearly as clear as it needed to be, hadn't been since Louis's death.

She shook herself out of self-pity and stared at her dear friend and mentor with a ready ferocity.

“I said I would do this only with your permission,” the regal woman stated. Clara nodded, hoping perceptive Evelyn would both note and trust her freshly steeled mettle.

“There is indeed more at work here than mere sentiment,” Clara murmured. “I honestly don't know what I'm meant to do, with the commission, the research, the information … Perhaps Louis can help be my spiritual guide through the mess.” She stared up at Evelyn plaintively. “I just hope I hold up. I have to. I can't let my condition get in the way. I wanted to be there for him, in life, to work with him.” She clenched her fists. “I'll take what time with him I can get.”

Shifting out of bed, swinging her legs down slowly, and then rising at a bent angle that made her feel older than her age, Clara winced again. Evelyn moved to assist her, but she waved her off. “No, thank you, I have to move eventually, and on my own, otherwise I can't shake loose what still wishes to clench and seize.”

Clara moved to her vanity and withdrew a pair of small silver scissors from a top drawer. She looked into the mirror, her green-golden eyes staring past her somewhat haunted reflection, and snipped a lock of deep blond hair from her unkempt tresses. With a rough pull, she wrenched the clump free from the confines of her messy braid, looking alternately at the long streamer of hair in her hand and her somewhat mad-looking reflection.

Plucking a box of matches from her nightstand, Clara lit a taper, removed the candle from its holder, and tipped it above one end of the lock of her hair. Droplets of wax fell, sealing the hairs together.

Sitting back on the edge of the rumpled bed, Clara divided the strands and wove a thin braid, then sealed the second end. She blew out the candle and stared into the wisps of smoke for a moment as if she was hoping to read a message there.

“I hope this works,” Clara said, and the tone in her own voice surprised her. Eterna had aged her beyond her twenty-nine years.

Evelyn nodded. “I can feel the tide of the city will darken, waking up old, terrible cases we thought we'd put to rest. We need to avail ourselves of any and all information. Thank you, Clara, for being willing—”

“It's the least I can do for his life,” she murmured, worrying the end of the braid between her fingertips before finally passing it over to her mother figure and mentor. “I was never honest about him, I might as well attempt to honor him.”

“I will try to do right by you both,” Evelyn promised. The two Spiritualists held each other's weighty gaze.

“You'll find the key to that house in our offices,” Clara stated. “In the top drawer of my desk. Thank you, Evelyn. Truly.”

“Don't thank me yet,” the elder woman said gravely. “We may yet be dragged through hell and back.” She stood and walked toward the door.

Clara stopped her with a plea. “Don't tell Rupert about Louis, please? About this return? It's a…”

Evelyn lifted a hand that fluttered in a gesture of understanding. “Sensitive subject, yes. But don't leave the poor man entirely in the dark,” she insisted. Clara looked away, guilt twisting within her. The medium pressed a bit further, coming back into the room, close to Clara to take on a gentler tone. “You could have gone to Rupert with your love, Clara. Did it really have to be a secret? Do you not owe him more than that?” A look from Clara gave Evelyn pause. “I won't tell Rupert unless circumstances of safety require the knowledge. But I am telling you now that you
cannot
fight this fight without him.”

“I will tell him, I promise.”

Evelyn reached out and took Clara's hand. “You know I've always considered you family. Remember that. Brace yourself, Clara. You are strong, you mustn't forget it. Don't let your condition ever tell you otherwise, it's undermined your agency and your confidence for years. Get that back at all costs. What we're up against, if it's anything like what I've unfortunately been inured to, Lord help us all. The meek shall not inherit the earth unless we, the loud and bold, stop an onslaught of devilry.”

Clara nodded. “I promise that, too. Strength. Now more than ever.”

Evelyn squeezed her hand hard, then let go and exited the room with the calm grace uniquely hers. Clara hoped she would embody the same qualities as she aged. She wondered when to expect Louis and what their new connection might be like.

If Mrs. Northe-Stewart was successful, a new aspect of the Eterna Commission would unfold, along with a new stage in her relationship with Louis.

She'd buried everything in the Trinity Church graveyard because she did not know what else to do, but she had to do
something.
Having dug a grave for all the Eterna material she had—all Louis's papers, all his mystical and imaginative work on talismanic, localized magic, and personal power tied to one's place on this earth—she had buried half her heart in that hole as well.

After loving him, feeling responsible for his death, being misled that he might actually be alive, only to find out he remained a spirit after all, could she bear this next shift to a kind of relationship she could hardly have predicted? She steeled herself just like she had done with feelings for Rupert Bishop so long ago, reinforcing the mausoleum doors of her emotions.

Sentiment cooled and hardened like a winter's grave. There was no time for a star-crossed love between forbidden planes of existence when preparing for further supernatural woe. Friend or foe was impossible to determine, British or American, living or dead. Clara hoped the spirit realm could make some sense out of whom to trust and what next to attend to.

 

CHAPTER

TWO

London, 1882

Harold Spire stared at paperwork. He despised paperwork.

Director of the Omega department of the secret new Special Branches of government, Spire was looking at shipping manifests that were innocuous at first glance. He and his coworker, Rose Everhart, pored over them in silence, looking for a specific listing. This was tedious cleric's work, and they were doing it in a book-filled, file-laden closet.

This tiny space, literally tucked away inside the walls of Parliament, was Everhart's hidden office, which she still maintained even though Omega had its own facilities elsewhere in London. There were times when the raucous nature of other members of Omega made both Spire and Everhart yearn for quiet, and this was one of them.

They should, Spire thought, be investigating the blood-drenched compatriots of the late aristocrat, Mr. Francis Tourney, who had committed ritualistic murders. But as Spire was no longer a member of the Metropolitan Police and could not prove a connection between Tourney's infamy and the unnatural matters with which Omega was tasked, he and Miss Everhart had been consistently denied access to the case.

There had been nothing in the papers, either. That was for the best, Spire thought, as ridiculous, sensationalistic journalism would do nothing to help the police with their inquiries. Later in the day, Spire would meet with his old friend and partner, Captain Stuart Grange, to find out more.

He had to know. The horrors that Spire, Everhart, and Grange had seen in Tourney's basement: children's bodies, carved and marked, drained of blood and attached to strange wires; a woman's corpse hung in hideous mockery of faith and humanity … Tourney had not acted alone, that much was clear.

That Tourney was said to have been found reduced to pulp in his prison cell, the stone walls turned entirely crimson with his blood, was a great comfort to Spire, though it presented the police with no confession and little evidence to flush out the greater ring of insidious terror that Tourney represented.

There was real devilry in the world.

Why had the queen and Spire's direct supervisor, Lord Black, set him on this quest to find out when a handful of British corpses had been shipped to America? Why look for the dead when murderers sought the living?

Still, he preferred examining ledgers to the other task of the day: investigating a histrionic report of a headless horsemen outside London. The tedious tales of America's Washington Irving were not considered high art, far from it, more a childish, insecure need to overdramatically attribute an empire's worth of history to a sprawling, provincial, and unorganized country. It was an insult that an American legend had wormed its silly way into some old hag's mind out in Hampstead, where she should've been more worried about the ghosts of old highwaymen. If there were such things as ghosts.

Spire was grateful to be well clear of such nonsense. Mostly clear, rather.

For the dead men—British men of science—had been searching for immortality when they met an unknown end.

Harold Spire had been hired by Her Majesty herself to oversee the safety and administration of a select group of theorists, doctors, and scientists charged with investigating the cure for death on behalf of the Crown and before the Americans. All of which, Spire thought, was as probable as ghosts and headless horsemen.

He missed his job as a rising officer of note in the ranks of the city's Metropolitan Police.

Dressed in a simple gray wool riding habit best suited for work, Rose Everhart slid a ledger toward him across the small wooden desk. She was a bloodhound with papers, ciphers, and patterns. A quiet, deep respect had grown between them in the weeks they'd worked together. She was the one reasonable, amenable thing in his damnable job.

“I inquired about the general height and build of the five scientists,” Rose said quietly. “To general calculation, their weight would, roughly, collectively match the kilos and grams of these five rectangular cargo bins, which were accounted and stowed under the heading of “dry goods.” Miss Everhart pointed out the entry, then handed Spire a separate paper where she had noted the approximate measures.

“Well done indeed, Miss Everhart. Now the question remains…”

“Who put the bodies of the scientists on that ship when no one from any of our departments knew a thing about where they'd gone?”

“This is our task for the day.” Spire squinted at the ledger. “
Ax.
That's who stowed the bodies, that's the company monogram to ascertain.”

“Should I check in at the Omega offices?” Everhart offered.

“They ought to be doing what I told them to,” Spire countered, “preparing for New York City. Let them be. We're going to the dockyards.”