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Authors: Katie M John

Beautiful Freaks

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BEAUTIFUL FREAKS

 

By

 

Katie M. John

 

Little Bird Publishing House

 

First published in Great Britain in 20
12

by

Little Bird Publishing House

Copyright © 2012
by Katie M John

 

e
-Book EDITION

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-
book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e
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the hard work of this author.

 

 

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

All rights reserved.

The right of Katie M John to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover than that which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

 

CONTENTS

 

1.   LONDON 1899

2.   DARK TIMES

ALICIA: THE ICE QUEEN

3.   BIRTHDAYS & MYSTERIES

4.   OAK GROVE

SYLVANI
A: FAIRY WINGS

5.   EVIDENCE

6.   SUPPERTIME

7.   EVANGELINE

8.   BURNING

9.   THE GARDEN OF EDEN

10. THE QUEEN OF CLUBS

11.  PLAYING WITH FIRE

SERAPHINA: THE FIRE ANGEL

12.   MORGUE

13.  ADDICTION

14
.  FALL
INTO TEMPTATION

15.  FORTUNE

16.  SECRETS

EVANGELINE VALENTINE
: ROSE RED

17.  DECREASING CIRCLES

18.  WEAPONS OF TRUTH

19.  THE NET CLOSES

20.  KNOWLEDGE

21.  POWER

EPILOGUE

 

 

1

L
ONDON
1899

 

BOTH the century and its Queen were dying. The winds of change rattled through the streets of the metropolis, leaving its citizens fearful of the coming times. Uncertainty bred suspicion, causing the people to
re
turn to th
e old ways. Mystics and fortune-
teller
s swarmed out of the city mists and filled
the billbo
ards of the now sober dancehalls.
Nobody felt like dancing anymore. Gypsies hawked silver charms and lucky heather, and iron-faced preacher-men stood at every corner shouting warnings of
damnation. It was a grey world,
full of shadows.

The city
was a
landscape of monsters
,
both of flesh and brick.
Chimneys from a thousand slave fa
ctories belched out black smoke;
stealing the breath from the lungs and the light from the sky.
Workhouses swallowed the poor, asylums the insane. It was amongst this labyrinth of sorrow that Kaspian Blackthorne walked.

He was approaching his eighteenth birthday, although
he
felt he had been an adult for most of his life. His patron,
Professor
Heartlock, was making arrangements for a small
private
engagement in celebration of the boy’s coming of age. It would be an interesting evening, although not a very exciting one.

Heartlock was a paranormal investigator –
had
been a paranormal investigator –
he was
now
mostly housebound. For the past three years,
the doctor
ha
d been confined to a wheelchair
following a serious accident whilst in pursuit
of a notorious serial killer. That was the official story. In truth, the doctor had broken his back falling from the roof of a church in pursuit of a werewolf.

Doctor Heartlock
had once been a fascinating man to a younger Kaspian, but now
his fantastical
tales
had
faded
into the
sad ramblings of a man full of regret about losing his youth.
When he told his tales, the
lines between reality and fantasy
increasingly
blurred,
to the point Kaspian worried the old man was losing his genius mind.

Kaspian had been just a baby when his mother and father were brutally murdered by an escaped Bedlam lunatic. The madman had believed that William and Eliza Blackthorne were evil demons disguised as respectable people. He’d followed them for
months, skulking in the shadows, before striking one night on their return from the opera. Despite
there
being several witnesses to the violent attack, the murderer still managed to dispose of their bodies so that they were never found. The whole case had been riddled with inexplicable circumstances and so quickly became a national news sensation. The murderer made no attempt to hide or escape; he maintained he was working for the glory of God. Regardless of his belief, they hanged him in front of a large cheering crowd.

With no other relatives, Kaspian had been destined for the workhouse orphanage until Heartlock came to his rescue.

Heartlock
had been a good patron, although perhaps a little lacking in
his
understanding of
children and childhood
. As such
,
Kaspian’s nursery had been a study
.
H
is playthings, strange scientific apparatus
es
;
and his childhood stories
,
great leather-bound texts on religion and the supernatural. It
sometimes
seemed
that
Heartlock
had been
set on raising a protégé to carry on his life’s work rather than a young man.
As a result, although
Kaspian’s upbringing hadn’t been cruel
,
it had been serious
; and
although showered in fondness and attention, it had lacked love.

Kaspian pondered his eighteen years as he walked through the evening gloom of the London streets. The rain had forced most people inside, creating the impression that the great metropolis had turned into a ghost town. Kaspian liked walking through the streets at times like this. It made him feel as if he were walking through his own misty and silent empire.

He’d been on an errand for his patron and was now returning, laden down with books. His cargo didn’t stop him skipping over the puddles with a childlike joy, or humming to himself. He was happy and free.

Then he saw her.

S
he was standing under the streetlight, a newspaper held out in front of her as if she were reading it. Kaspian thought it obvious
that she wasn’t; s
he was watching the church on the other side of the cobbled street.
He stopped midstride and pulled himself behind a tree; spied on her as she took a pocket-watch from her pocket and flipped open the lid. She cradled it in the palm of her hand and raised it until it was level with her eyes before studying it carefully. This struck Kaspian as an odd way to read the time, most people just looked down with a quick glance, and it led him to believe that the device she held was not a watch at all, but another form of apparatus.

He looked over to the church she was watching. It looked empty and he couldn’t fathom what could possibly be of interest.
The lights were out, the door locked
,
and the whole place had the impression of sleeping.
He turned his attention back to the woman. She was tall and slender
;
striking in a slightly over-powerful way. Despite wearing a full
,
black silk skirt, the fitted waistcoat and black necktie were
more
manly
in dress than ladylike.
He’d
never seen a woman like her, although he had heard of

her sort’
as Heartlock’s companions would say.

Kaspian took advantage of her intense concentration to move his head around the tree and peer at her more closely. H
e could see she wore a monocle in her left eye and was at least ten years younger than he’d guessed from the
first impression;
she was about twenty-one.
She must have sensed him looking at her because sh
e turned towards him and smiled at the rather ludicrous sight of him poking out from behind the tree. Kaspian was already precariously balanced on the tip of his toes and in an attempt to dash back behind the tree he stumbled straight into her line of vision. 

He bent down and pretended that he’d been about to tie his shoelaces, trying to mask his clumsiness. As he looked up at her from under his hair, he saw that she was still smiling at him; a strange reaction to the discovery that someone was spying on you. The boldness of her action
unsettled Kaspian
in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on
.
When he was sure she had returned to her own secret observations, he scuttled past her and almost ran to the safety of home.

By the time he pushed open the imposing front door, Kaspian carried the strangest sense that something deep within him had changed and
that
things would never be quite as before.

“Good evening, Kaspian,” Heartlock said, greeting the boy in the hallway. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, Sir,” he answered, dropping the small pile of books onto the hall table.

“Did you manage to get all I requested?”


Yes, a
ll
of them apart from
the Valentine book
. Mr. Foxglove said he was sure he would have it by the end of the
week
.”

Mr. Foxglove was one of Heartlock’s oldest acquaintances. He ran a bookshop situated in one of Soho’s shadier alleyways. The sign above the door read,
‘Rare and Precious Books’
which made it sound almost respectab
le. In truth, the great leather-
bound books of poetry and Shakespeare folios
were a front for the back room;
the place that held real interest for its rather darker clientele.

Although
the shop had a small, narrow front, it
had a seemingly endless body,
which always gave Kaspian the unnerving
impression
that he was
being swallowed by a
giant
snake. Right at its tail was the occult section.
Not only did Mr. Foxglove sell occult books, but there were also shelves of other strange and curious objects that might appeal to the amateur alchemist or necromancer; glass jars of preserved reptiles, grinning skulls, and black candles were amongst some of the more identifiable items.

BOOK: Beautiful Freaks
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ads

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