Unnatural Issue (48 page)

“We’re completely dependent on Richard Whitestone’s whims, Lord Peter,” Michael said, with a bit of frost in his voice. “I don’t see how you letting him know where to find the girl is going to help us any.”

“It doesn’t
hurt
us any either,” Peter snapped. “If I might venture to point out that it was only a matter of time before he discovered that Charles lived through the attack and had been sent back to England? At least now we control
when
he learns that, and at the same time, he will learn that Susanne is again within his reach. He missed Halloween for his plans for Susanne, and he’ll miss Winter Solstice as well. I’ll wait until we have all our Water Elementals alerted and watching for him to cross, and we’ll know when he comes back. He cannot go undetected, not when he is on the water; the selkies can detect corruption a hundred miles away. Once he’s across, it won’t be long before he attacks. He might be able to vanish from the sight of our Elementals once he reaches land, but once he reaches land he will know where Susanne is, because we’ll allow his damned kobolds to find her. And once he knows where Susanne is, Charles becomes much less interesting for him. I very much doubt that he’ll make even a token effort to go after Charles. We’ll want you to guard him, of course, but frankly, the man wants Susanne for his mad scheme. In my opinion, the only reason he pursued Charles was for revenge, thinking Susanne was out of reach, as we had intended her to be.”

“Tha’d be worse off, if I’d gone to Colonies,” Susanne said, her accent back. “I can be bait in tha’ trap now. And this bait has teeth.” She raised her chin and looked defiantly at both Elizabeth and Michael, who were taken aback by the fierce anger in her eyes.

“Well . . .” Michael began.

Rose Mainwright interrupted him. “I think it’s only fair for her to lure the wretch in. You and Elizabeth and Charles defended her once, now she can pay that back.” Rose spoke with cool and calm that gave no sign of animosity, but Peter was momentarily amused, because it was quite clear that Rose knew very well about Susanne’s attachment, and she was having none of it.

Susanne couldn’t very well retort at this point, since she had already volunteered, but Peter guessed by the flash of her eyes that she was no more impressed by her rival than Rose was impressed with her.

“All right,” Michael agreed. “But what if he gets the chance to come after both of them?”

“I already thought of that,” Susanne replied. “Peter made arrangements for me.”

“Susanne is being transferred to a teaching hospital for nurse training,” Peter explained. “In four days, in fact, after Christmas, on Boxing Day. Once she’s settled there and we’ve done what we can to secure the ground, she will stop concealing herself from Earth powers, and I will make use of some neutral Elementals who will think they are bartering valuable information to Richard Whitestone.” He made a crooked smile. “It’s sometimes as useful to know who cannot be trusted as it is to know who can.”

“I see.” Although Rose didn’t lose a bit of her cool hostility, Elizabeth and Michael both relaxed, and their attitude shifted subtly. “It seems you’ve thought of everything.”

“Everything except how to get a full Hunting Party together,” Peter replied, a bit grimly. “The war, and the season both, are conspiring against us. It will be me, Maya and her husband, Garrick, Alderscroft, and possibly one or two others.”

He didn’t mention Robin Goodfellow. There was no telling what kind of help they’d be getting from the Fair Folk, nor how strong it would be. Robin might not have any trouble with Cold Iron or church bells, but that didn’t mean the other Fair Folk could be as cavalier about such things. The most logical place for Richard to attack would be in London and its suburbs; like the battlefield in France, in places here the ground was literally soaked in centuries of blood. The water was polluted, the air poisoned, and the ground dead. Perfect for his purposes. Then add in the many, many graveyards, marked and unmarked, that he could rob for his armies . . . well, their best case would be that he would get impatient and attack before he actually had a large force of revenants and liches. The longer he delayed to build that force, the worse it would be for them.

And London itself would likely weaken any Fair Folk that ventured within it.

Michael and Elizabeth nodded, but neither volunteered, nor offered anyone else’s name who might be willing to be part of the Hunting Party.

Peter cursed his ability to see both sides. He should be angry at them, but he could also understand their point of view. They had taken in a stranger, arranged for her magical education, and become targets of something far more powerful than they could face. They weren’t going to throw that stranger to the wolves, but they also had their own son, and their own people, to protect. In that hierarchy, Susanne came a very distant third. No, it wasn’t Susanne’s fault that her father had decided to take revenge on Charles. But if they had never sheltered her, they would even now be blissfully unaware that the necromancer even existed. And Charles would not have come so close to death.

“That, however, is not your problem,” he continued smoothly, betraying neither his irritation nor his sympathy. “Your problem is to defend and protect Charles when Richard Whitestone strikes. And I need to think of a way to alert you instantly when he does.”

“It’s a pity there aren’t telephones everywhere,” Michael replied, rubbing his temple a little. “Much as I loathe them, they’re damned useful. Once you’re out of the countryside, Earth Elementals are bloody well useless as messengers.”

“Michael, language,” Elizabeth chided gently.

“I’ll contrive something,” Peter said, vaguely. He wasn’t sure what . . . maybe he could rig some kind of signal. Make a vial of water burst? Something, anyway. Anything that would get their attention.

“Well,” said Rose, crisply. “I think we have covered everything. Don’t you, Elizabeth?”

Charles’ mother nodded. “It’s probably better not to lay out too detailed a plan. Plans never last long anyway, when you are dealing with someone as unpredictable as Richard Whitestone.”

“Ah, but that’s where tha’rt wrong,” interjected Susanne. “He may be mad, but he’s right predictable. He’ll go through anything to get his hands on
me.”

With that uncomfortable thought hanging in the air, the Kerridge party made some awkward goodbyes, leaving Peter, Garrick, and Susanne alone.

Peter cleared his throat. “Please say you’ll come here for Christmas Day,” he said plaintively. “Otherwise I’ll be forced to listen to Garrick murder carols alone.”

Susanne hesitated, then nodded. “There’s Christmas breakfast at the boarding house instead of Christmas dinner. I’ll come after that.”

She was probably thinking that she wished she could spend the day at Charles’ side, but Rose would certainly make sure that didn’t happen. Peter was very happy with Mistress Rose at the moment. “Capital. Is there anything you would particularly like or loathe for dinner?”

“Ah . . . I don’t know, really,” she said, startled. “The only Christmases I’ve ever had were ‘downstairs’ sorts, and to be honest, there often wasn’t anyone there but me and the housekeeper for dinner. Everyone who had family went to them after church.”

“Well, then. Nothing traditional at all but Christmas crackers. After, we’ll go to the panto.” He grinned. “I’ll lay odds you’ve never been, and it will take your mind off everything.”

“I—I think I would like that,” she faltered. “Very much.”

“Capital!”
And so I lay siege to the castle.
“Shall I see you home? It’s no trouble, I need to tootle round to the club and plot with Alderscroft.”

She managed a ghost of a smile. “I’d be very grateful.”

He kept up a steady stream of conversation the entire way to her boarding house—some just prattle, some recollections of past conflicts with rogue magicians or the nastier sorts of Elementals, and just a bit about Maya and
her
Peter. She listened to it all attentively, and he found that encouraging.

They said goodnight in his auto, rather than on the steps of the boarding house. She ran up to the door, and when she got there, looked briefly over her shoulder and gave him a little wave. He saluted her with two fingers, and once she was inside, he drove off.

He spent the rest of the evening researching his notes and everything in his library concerning necromancers—and wished devoutly that the Old Lion had managed to find the way into that secret room at Whitestone Hall to get whatever books Richard had been studying. Richard was more powerful than any necromancer he had ever encountered before.

Then again, when that happened, the Old Lion would probably burn them all on the spot, and Peter wasn’t sure he could blame him. The last thing anyone would want would be to recreate what Richard Whitestone had done. Mind, it might take a war to do so . . . Peter was beginning to think that what was happening on the battlefields of France was causing the equivalent of a veritable flood of energy to anything that was practicing magic on the Dark side of the Path. For a moment, as he thought about that hell-on-earth that was the Front, his cozy study became unreal to him. He felt, for a moment, that he must still be there, and this place was nothing but a dream of a time that would never come again, that all the world would become the vast, gray slaughterhouse, mired in mud, giving life only to rats, lice, and frogs.

Eventually he went to bed, but his dreams were full of horrors, and he was glad of morning when it came.

 

The sitting room was warm and aromatic with cinnamon and clove. An evergreen garland draped the mantle, adding to the fragrance, and a holly wreath hung in one window. Peter had overruled the idea of a Christmas tree, however small, but other festive touches in the form of more holly, a big bowl of apples, and a few enormous red velvet bows made it clear that there was no lack of Christmas spirit here. “Garrick, you have outdone yourself,” Peter said gratefully. “And thank you, Mary. Susanne likes you, and having you here will make things—”

“—look less like you’re trying to seduce the girl?” Mary Shackle-ford said with a laugh. Her blue eyes glistened with amusement, as she leaned back into the comfort of the big wing chair and held her feet toward the fire on the grate. “Oh, don’t bother to deny it. If you didn’t care about her, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to make everything proper.”

Peter lifted an eyebrow at her. The Mary
he
knew had never cared a jot about what people said or did. When had she gotten so shrewd? Or interested enough in people to pay attention to them? “I knew you were discernin’ with paint, but I never suspected you were that observant about real people.”

“Pish!” she waved a hand at him from the depths of his wing chair—the other hand being occupied with a glass of sherry. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. One of these days I’ll carry you off to one of my Socialist meetings. You’d probably enjoy it, because they’ll be yapping at your heels because you’re a peer, because you’re rich,
and
you’re an army officer. They won’t give you a minute’s rest. You have a good chance of meeting Shaw there. Or Wells. Or both.”

“You terrify me. I’d rather face a necromancer than Shaw. The necromancer can only have his liches tear me to bits; Shaw can eviscerate me with his tongue, then use me as a comic figure in a play.” The doorbell sounded at that moment, and Garrick went to answer it. “I believe our guest has arrived.”

Garrick ushered Susanne into the room, and her face lit up when she saw Mary. There was a flurry of happy greetings, then Garrick cleared his throat and announced dinner, and all of them retreated to the tiny dining room of the flat.

Like the sitting room, the dining room had been decked out festively. Since Peter often had guests for dinner—he really preferred not to dine at one of his clubs—this was a practical room, well suited to leisurely dining and lingering over coffee or brandy. More evergreen and holly garlanded the mantel, surrounded the candlesticks on the table—Peter preferred candles on the table, even though the flat had electrics
and
gas laid on. Though once again, Peter had a pang of guilt, looking at the feast spread out over the white linen cloth and thinking about the men in the trenches, who might or might not have packets from home, who probably would be eating bully beef and that ever present plum-and-apple jam, and who certainly would be cold, wet, and weary.

Peter insisted that Garrick—who had done all of the work, bringing the feast up from the cookshop, setting the table, and so forth—sit down and eat with them. “Not standing on ceremony today, old man,” he said firmly, so Garrick (a little reluctantly) took his place in the fourth chair at the table, and with great merriment, Peter insisted that Garrick play the part of the “father” at the table.

With evident amusement now, Garrick did just that, carving the beef and sending around the various courses so they could all help themselves, as if they were a real family. Peter had opted for a fine roast, Yorkshire pudding for Susanne, and all the trimmings of a fine Christmas dinner. Mary kept up most of the conversation, telling them all what she had done since her escape from France, peppering the narrative with anecdotes about her Socialist and Bohemian friends, and drawing Susanne out to describe what her fellows were like at her boarding house. There were no allusions to the war, to the hospital, to the Kerridges, or to Susanne’s father.

Peter was intensely grateful to her.

There were Christmas crackers of course. It would hardly be Christmas without them. They all put on the paper hats from the crackers, and read the silly mottos. Peter’s was
“What runs but never walks? Water!”
which was uncannily apt considering his Element. Susanne’s was
“Why can’t a bicycle stand up by itself? Because it’s two-tyred!”
which elicited a groan. Mary’s was
“What’s the best thing to eat in the bath? Sponge cake!”
which triggered what turned out to be a truly funny story about a mishap she had involving a sponge cake and the Bishop of Bath and Wells. And Garrick’s was
“On which side do chickens have the most feathers? The outside!”
Bad jokes and puns were the tradition of Christmas crackers, but Peter wondered if Garrick had managed to suss out just which ones did
not
contain sentimental love notes before he purchased them. If so, well done to him.