The Dark Remains (18 page)

But you’ve known all along, Grace
.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a business card. It was more gray than white now, smudged and torn, but she could still read it:

She had kept the card with her for so long, ever since that night in late October when Hadrian Farr had given it to her. Who else could she go to for help if not them?

You should ask Travis
.

But even as she thought this, she headed for the door and the nearest pay phone.

Deirdre Falling Hawk sat in a corner of the dim Soho pub, staring at the glass of clear green liquid on the table before her. On a plate next to the glass was a cube of sugar and a silver spoon. Although they were hard to make out in the gloom of the pub, there were words etched into the surface of the spoon:
Drink and Forget
.

If only it were really that simple. But wasn’t that why she was here? The board that hung outside the peeling door of the pub read Crumbe’s Cupboard. And the occasional
tourist or businessman who stumbled inside found only sticky tables, warm glasses of Bass Ale, and cold fish and chips. But from her visits to London, Deirdre knew that to the locals this place was known as The Sign of the Green Fairy. And they came here for something else.

Quickly, as if afraid she might change her mind, she placed the sugar cube on the spoon and lowered it into the glass. Then she raised the glass and took a long sip of the green liquid. It was sweet and powerfully bitter. The licorice-like taste of anise coated her tongue, and the pungent esters of wormwood rose in her head, an emerald mist to shroud her brain.

As Deirdre lowered the glass, an old-fashioned lithograph on the opposite wall caught her eye. It depicted a young man in Victorian suit coat and cravat, sitting at a table and scribbling madly with a quill pen on a paper before him. Behind him, tangling slender fingers through the writer’s hair, was a woman clad in a flowing gown. No, not just a woman. Wings of gossamer sprouted from her back, and her gown trailed away in a comet’s tail of leaves and stars. A fairy, then. Her eyes were closed, and the smile on her inhumanly beautiful face was both serene and cruel.

Deirdre didn’t know who the man in the picture was supposed to be. Wilde, or perhaps Tennyson. It didn’t matter. They had all drunk absinthe, hadn’t they? Half the artists of the time had been addicted to the bitter green liqueur. They had drunk it for inspiration, to gain artistic vision. And then after that, when the visions faded, they had kept on drinking, trying to forget their commercial failures, their debtors, their persecution. Their demons.

She clenched her jaw, then downed the rest of the absinthe.

Deirdre leaned back, letting her head hit the wall behind her. Why had she come to London? She hated
London. For the last three months she had been trying to forget the past. But the past was everywhere in this city, a thing constantly on display.

Not that anyone seemed to see it. Slack-eyed tourists shuffled through the Tower of London in pink-plastic sandals and Anne Boleyn T-shirts like blood had never flowed over those stones. Hansom cabs bearing giddy brides and grooms clattered down cobblestone streets where thousands of corpses had once sprawled, dead from plague and alive with flies. Cheerful gardens covered plots blasted bare of buildings and people in the Blitz. Around every corner, down every lane, from the gray Thames to Hyde Park to the slowly melting obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle, history lingered like smoke. Didn’t anyone else see it?

Or was that the point? The past weighed so heavily on this place that it would crush people if they let it. Maybe there were really only two things anyone could do in London; maybe that was the reason she had come here. To drink. And forget.

Just over two months ago, the spontaneous immolations plaguing two continents had ceased as suddenly as they had begun. And, not long after that, so had Deirdre’s desire to be a Seeker.

How could she have been so blind to their arrogance? They thought they knew so much, that their eyes were open to mysteries that mundane people never dreamed existed. But what had their musty files, their secret surveillance networks, their vast rooms of computers revealed to them? Nothing that those same mundane people hadn’t been able to read in the morning newspaper: People were burning, and no one had the slightest fucking clue why.

There had been ripples of panic for a time. People had begun to mutter that the turning of the millennium had been only a test run, that this was the real beginning of the end. True, most of them had been cultists, tabloid
devotees, militia members. Then again, some were suburbanites, avid churchgoers, telephone salesmen. In the United States, where the majority of the immolations had occurred, the government had quietly mobilized a portion of the National Guard.

Then, just when the ripples had been ready to coalesce into a tidal wave of outright fear—just when the graphs compiled by the Centers for Disease Control predicted that the number burnt was about to leap from the hundreds to the thousands—the immolations had ceased.

For a moment the world had stood still, like a ball balanced on the edge of a chasm. Then all of humanity had let out a collective sigh, and the ball had rolled back. In a week, the news had returned to the usual parade of wars, political scandals, and celebrity-lifestyle pieces. Sure, there was the occasional businessman-turned-cultist who walked around with a placard, face stained with ashes. And most days there was a small article tucked in the back of the newspaper’s A section, telling how a remote Brazilian rain forest settlement had just been discovered, burnt to the ground, or how tests had shown that the DNA of one American burn victim demonstrated affinities with some Mediterranean populations—an incongruity given the victim’s Asian ancestry. However, all in all, it seemed the world was only too happy to forget what had happened.

So why can’t you, Deirdre Falling Hawk?

For a time she had. Working on Black Death 2.0 had left her no time to eat, to sleep—to think. Theories ricocheting across the Internet had blamed the deaths on a government-engineered chemical-warfare agent, or an alien virus, or the wrath of God. But from their own tests, the Seekers had confirmed their early suspicions. Compound residues found with several of the burn victims had chemical signatures identical to those recovered from sites of confirmed Class One Encounters. Without doubt, the plague was otherworldly in origin. Nor was
there doubt about which world it had come from. AU-3. The world called Eldh. Grace Beckett and Travis Wilder’s world.

Although the Castle County coroner had presumed Travis dead in the explosion at the Mine Shaft Saloon, the Seekers’ analyses had shown otherwise. Remains of four separate individuals were found in the ruin of the Mine Shaft. None of the samples had matched Travis’s DNA—which they had on file thanks to a small skin sample he had never noticed Deirdre taking.

It was just one of the many ways she had used him. And while the madness of the new Black Death had occupied her, now there was nothing to keep the memories from creeping back—memories of what she had done to her friend.

So, is that your shadow self, Deirdre? The one that can lie?

She would never forget the sound of his voice when he spoke those words. It had been so soft, yet it had damned her more surely than a ringing chorus of anger. He had thought her a friend, and she had deceived him, manipulated him for her own ends. No matter the reason, how right it had seemed at the time. Deirdre had never believed the end justified the means; at least she had always thought so. Yet in order to serve the Seekers, she had betrayed her friend. And for that she would never forgive them.

Not long after the immolations ceased, she had simply stopped showing up at the Manhattan Charterhouse where Hadrian Farr had been directing their research. She had ignored the phone calls, the e-mails, the pager beeps. Damn the Seekers, but couldn’t they ever do anything in person? Then, without really thinking about it, she had gotten on a plane and had put an ocean behind her. At first she had thought she was going to Ireland. The years when, as a girl, she had lived with her grandmother outside of Cork, listening to old songs and first learning to play
music, still lingered in her mind. But the plane had touched down at Heathrow, and the muted grays of London had shrouded her in a soft dullness that, if she didn’t think about it too much, could almost be mistaken for comfort.

Deirdre clutched the empty absinthe glass, willing it to fill again, to help her forget if not forgive. All hail Our Green Lady of Oblivion. But the glass remained empty.

“Hello, sweetie,” said a woman with a mop of orange hair as she slid onto the bench next to Deirdre.

She was long and lanky, curved as a willow, her limbs seal-sleek in clinging black vinyl. The face she turned toward Deirdre was stark white, and her eyes were lost amid dark circles of kohl. It was hard to tell through the smoky, clove-scented air of the pub, but beneath the garish makeup her features might have been exquisite.

The woman coiled a thin arm around Deirdre’s neck. “You look dangerous
and
yummy.”

Deirdre did not smile. “Just the first one.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. There was a listlessness to them, a dullness, yet a hunger as well. She bit a lip colored the deep purple of a bruise. “That’ll do.”

The woman shifted closer, vinyl creaking. Deirdre felt her heat through the plastic. In a way she was tempted. It might not be such a bad thing to lose herself with another—a different sort of oblivion. Her work with the Seekers had left little time to take a lover. It had been a while since she had been with a man—or a woman. However, there was something about the haziness in the other’s eyes, the languor of her motions, that sickened Deirdre even as she envied it.

“I’m not in the mood,” she said.

“Then I’ll help you get into it, sweetie.”

The woman pushed something onto the table, then lifted a strangely long hand to uncover a pair of purple pills, each marked with a white lightning bolt. So that was the source of the haze in the other’s eyes.

The woman took one of the pills between thumb and
finger and slowly, as if it were something delectable, took it between her lips. She nudged the other pill. “Now you, sweetie.”

“I don’t touch Electria.”

The woman frowned at Deirdre’s empty glass. “What? You’ll drink that nasty old shit, but you won’t take something new and clean? What’s wrong with you?”

Where should I start?
However, at that moment a gigantic, bald-headed man clad in tight black-leather pants made an angry gesture at the woman.

“Get back over here, Glinda.”

The orange-haired woman flicked her eyes at the man. The muscles of his arms were hugely swollen, and his clean-shaven chest was shirtless and massive beneath an open leather vest. A goatee framed a thin, angry mouth.

“I said get over here.”

“But I
want
her, Leo,” the woman said.

The man bared silver teeth. “I’ll tell you what you want.” He shook a small, plastic bottle. “Now come on.”

The woman hesitated. She started to rise from the bench. Then, in what seemed a furtive motion, she leaned close and licked Deirdre’s ear, probing with a warm, moist tongue.

“Save me,” the woman whispered.

Before Deirdre could respond, the woman gripped her hand, then slid from the booth and sauntered over to the bald man. She leaned her head on the expansive slope of his shoulder and ran her hands over the mountains and valleys of his chest. Yet the entire time her eyes were on Deirdre. The man grimaced, adjusting his crotch, then led Glinda away, into the back of the pub and darkness.

Deirdre almost considered going after them.
Save me
, Glinda had said. But from what? That hulk of a man? The Electria? However, as she started to rise, she realized there was something in her hand—the hand the woman had squeezed. At first she thought it was simply a British
pound coin. But it was silver and too large, about the size of three American quarters stacked together. The drawings on it were unrecognizable in the gloom. She started to bend closer to make them out.

“So they were right,” said a smooth, masculine voice. “You
are
here. I had thought surely they must be mistaken.”

Deirdre closed her hand on the coin, then looked up. “What? You’re actually admitting the Seekers can make mistakes?”

Hadrian Farr sat across from her and folded his hands on the table. “All the time, I’m afraid,” he said with a crooked-toothed smile.

Deirdre winced. Farr’s smile was so damned charming; she hated it. It was that smile that had lured her into his bed the night they met in Glasgow three years ago. It was that smile that had enchanted her the next morning over tea as he spoke of the mysteries the Seekers sought to understand. The expression was so secret, so inviting, like he was just about to tell you the deepest wonders of the universe. Only he never did.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I think you can rather imagine.”

Deirdre did not answer. Farr leaned across the table, darkly handsome as always: square jaw clean-shaven, lips full, eyes deep-set and well spaced. His faded jeans and black T-shirt accented his slender but muscular frame. She wondered when he found the time to work out. Wasn’t he always busy harassing otherworldly travelers?

“You’ve not come to a Charterhouse in over a month, Deirdre. You have not responded to our missives, you have ignored our summons. Have you forgotten the Vow?”

Deirdre fingered her empty glass. “No, but let’s give it a few more minutes and see.”

Farr frowned. “I would have thought better of you,
Deirdre. You know there’s no magic in absinthe. It’s just a cheap trick. And, until recently, quite illegal.”

Deirdre laughed, a sound every bit as bitter as the absinthe had been. “So is bugging people.”

She tucked the odd coin into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out something else, and shoved it across the table toward Farr. It was a small transistor, smashed, glittering in a stray beam of light.