The Double Life of Incorporate Things (Magic Most Foul) (35 page)

It was all very personal, in the end, this Mister Moriel’s targeting of the Denbury family. To reanimate the corpse of the woman who rejected him? How tasteless. But wars are waged over trivial matters.

People live and die over personal matters, not global ones.

And that’s perhaps why Miss Stewart and Lord Denbury won, in the end. They too made it personal. Faith is personal. Resilience is personal. And the pasts, the energies, the ghosts and the angels we carry with us. Those are very personal indeed.

I have asked to interview Miss Stewart—once she’s Lady Denbury—and glean from her a specialized wisdom this sort of trauma creates. I’ve been considered gifted for so long, I need to be challenged, else I’ll become a bore to myself.

I need to make everything personal. That’s the only way forward in all that I seek.

I have enclosed a letter from Lady Denbury responding to my request for a further interview, along with a package that I am humbled to have received. And I’m certainly up for this challenge.

Dear Miss Templeton
,

I received your request for an interview along with the gift of the silver platter Senator Bishop sent as a wedding present. It’s lovely and very generous of you both.

I have just returned from honeymooning in Paris, which was transcendently romantic. If you’ve never been, I insist everyone should go there with someone they love.

I’d rather not, at the moment, talk about what I’ve been through. Jonathon and I are determined to live our lives out from those dread shadows. We were so relieved to hear, just as we began moving into our Greenwich Village townhouse, that the wretch Moriel has been sentenced to death. The Society operatives have been rounded up and may face the same. Their radical madness is ended at last.

I wish we had received confirmation from Mr. Brinkman that his son has been returned to him. However, as he is a government operative, I am sure the man’s details will forever be withheld from us. I must content myself with the surety that they are reunited. However, I would encourage persons in such an office as yours to keep vigilant.

Since I have refused an interview, I will grant you something more comprehensive, in the interest of making sure no one ever has to go through the sorts of things we have gone through. I have enclosed my diary for your perusal. These pages detail my first encounters with Societal magic and what we did to save my husband’s soul.

However, as you are a lady, I ask you, please skip past all the kissing bits. And please return it to me as soon as you’re finished. I never intended for the diary to become a novel for others to read, but it would seem it has become one. Let it be a lesson to keep faith and believe in love above all else.

Sincerely,

Natalie Stewart Whitby, Lady Denbury

OF THE MAGIC MOST FOUL SAGA

More of Clara Templeton, Senator Bishop,

Mister Brinkman, and British Counterparts,

featuring appearances from Magic Most Foul

and Strangely Beautiful characters, in:

THE ETERNA FILES

Summer 2014 from Tor / Macmillan

&

The award-winning, nationally bestselling, acclaimed

STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL SAGA
:

New, revised editions, coming 2014 from Tor / Macmillan

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Thanks to Marcos and to the Hieber family for unconditional support of me and my work. Thanks to the readers who donated to the serialization of this project along the way, I cannot thank you enough for helping to sustain the venture. Thank you Perseus and Draco LePage for sharing my work so constantly and generously, that’s only one of the ways in which you are Angels, Treasures and Family. Thank you to my fabulous editor Haleigh Rucinski for coming on board with this whole madness and being such a help and a dear along the way, I couldn’t have done this without you. Thank you to my critique partner Cassandra Johnstone for fielding some of this half-cooked madness. With wine. Thank you Stephen Segal for the amazing cover and your services, you are a hero. Thank you to Melissa Singer, my upcoming Tor editor, for encouraging me to serialize this novel, it’s been an amazing and fulfilling experiment and I cannot wait for our next adventures.

To my readers, you are why I do this. To God and the Angels, I promise to do my best in your honour.