Beneath a Waning Moon: A Duo of Gothic Romances (18 page)

She tortured him with these weekly visits to her father's grave.
 
Pulled from the opposite side of the sprawling cemetery as if by a lodestone, he sensed her presence the moment she passed through the entrance archway. Coves of hanging ivy and the shadows cast by crypts kept him hidden from view as he admired her profile and listened to the easy pitch of her voice.

She conversed with her father at each visit as if he were standing before her, his eyes bright with the avid curiosity he'd passed on to his only child.
 
Nathaniel could have told her that Arthur's spirit didn't linger the way some did, that it had crossed the ethereal barrier; the body beneath the bricks had been an empty vessel at burial.
 
Nathaniel was not, however, a cruel man.
 
He recognized her need to hold onto some remnant of her loved one, to accept her sorrow and gradually let it go.
 
Other mourners did the same.
 
The difference was he didn't eavesdrop on their conversations with the dearly departed.

Many might say he breached every form of courtesy in listening to her one-sided conversations with her father.
 
He invaded her privacy, but he couldn't stop or bring himself to feel any shame.
 
He'd thought his love for Lenore Kenward had been ripped out of him along with his humanity.
 
His first glimpse of her at her father's graveside had re-ignited emotions once lost in the hazy memories of a distant life.
 
Seeing her again had been an ecstasy.
 
Knowing she was forever out of his reach an agony.
 
He concentrated on her words and closed his eyes as a wave of homesickness washed over him.

"I visited with Nettie today, Papa.
 
She sends her regards.
 
The
Pollux
will be in port at Maldon for a few more days, then Nettie is taking her out.
 
I'm to understand she will act as escort for the
Andromeda
.
 
They will face the Redan."

The Redan.
 
The dimensional fissure.
 
Images flashed behind Nathaniel's closed lids.

He'd never get used to seeing it, never lose the terror that churned his guts and sucked the air from his lungs.
 
The black tide of roiling clouds pounded the protective barrier, searching—always searching—for the one weakness that would allow it to breach the wards woven by Her Majesty’s best guild mages and rip the fissure even wider.

The nebula writhed and twisted, illuminated by flashes of sour yellow lightning that revealed the monstrous things surfing its waves—colossal maws baring teeth the length of cathedral spires, segmented legs of insectile abominations bristling with spiky black fur, and slick tentacles that whipped from the fissure to tongue the wards with a barbed stroke.

Wind, flecked with ice crystals and smelling of ozone, blasted across the
Pollux's
gun batteries and glazed the
empyrean
-loaded carronades in a thin sheet of ice.

The gunnery crew shouted as one when a tentacle lashed out of the obscuring cloud, the curving claws stretched across its underside extending and retracting as it reached for the
Pollux
.
 
The ship dove, narrowly avoiding the shredding appendage.
 
The tentacle retreated into the miasma.

"Steady, men," he called out to the other gunners.

"Look sharp, lads."
 
Nettie's command traveled through the speaking tube, as bracing as the wind threatening to freeze his hands to the battery shield.

Despite the numbing cold, sweat trickled down his ribs beneath his heavy woolens.
 
The fissure contorted and labored as if trying to whelp the unearthly life squirming within it.

Three tentacles burst out of the nebula and struck the ship.

"Fire!" he roared into the link.
 
"Fire!"

Crimson light filled his vision as the carronades belched
empyrean
from their barrels.
 
An explosion deafened him.
 
The
Pollux
squealed and yawed hard to starboard.
 
Wood shrapnel and broken tether lines exploded into the air.
 
A wash of heat splattered his face.
 
Blinded, he wiped at his eyes and came away with a glove smeared in blood.
 
Something heavy struck his shoulder and bounced across the gunnery deck—an arm, shredded at the shoulder joint, and no body attached to it.

The
Pollux
suddenly pitched back on her rudder, sending him careening into the nearest cannon.
 
His tether cable jerked taut, smashing his stomach against his backbone.
 
Scorched wool filled his nostrils.
 
He clutched at a broken railing to stay upright.
 
Hot metal burned through his glove, searing his palm.
 
He gritted his teeth against the pain and held on.
 
The agonized screams of men rent to pieces filled his ears.

He looked up—far, far up to the boiling sky where an arching nightmare laced with curving white claws hurtled toward the wounded
Pollux
.
 
The deck bucked hard beneath his feet.
 
He lost his grip on the railing and jittered across the slick surface like a marionette dancing to the tune of the shuddering ship...

...the shuddering ship.

Nathaniel's eyes snapped open.
 
He inhaled a strangled breath.
 
A voice, achingly familiar, cut short its casual monologue.

"Who's there?"

He blinked, desperate to clear his mind of the images that seized and held him fast in frozen horror.

"Who's there?"
 
The sharp tones of Lenore's repeated question, didn't quite disguise her fear.
 
She peered into the ivy shielding him from view, poised to take flight at the slightest motion, her brown eyes wide in her pale face.

Nathaniel breathed deep, willing away the terror, the memory of the churning nebula, the whipping tentacle.

...the shuddering ship.

"Forgive me, miss," he said in a smooth voice and stepped from the ivy's concealment.
 
"I didn't mean to frighten you."

Despite his knowledge of her character, he still expected to her run.
 
She didn't.
 
Instead, she wilted, her stiff shoulders relaxing in obvious relief.
 
It was a first for him in this new incarnation.
 
Guardians weren't persecuted outright, but they were shunned and feared.
 
Most people avoided them as if they were plague-ridden.
 
Lenore wasn't most people.

She drew closer, head tilted.
 
“The Guardian.”

He acknowledged her designation with a low bow but said no more.

Her somber features softened a little, and her eyes warmed.
 
“You’ve done a fine job taking care of Highgate’s citizens.”
 
She gestured to Arthur’s grave.
 
“Not a brick moved.
 
Even the flowers I placed here last time are as they lay.”
 
She bent to trace the discolored edge of a wilted white rose with one fingertip.
 
It had taken all of Nathaniel’s willpower not to claim the small bouquet for himself or at least the ribbon that bound it together.

“It isn’t safe to be here alone, miss.
 
Have you no companion?”
 
Some things never changed.
 
The one time he’d remarked on Lenore’s penchant for taking solitary jaunts, she’d arched an eyebrow at him and tipped her chin in such way that he braced himself for a setdown.
 
She wore the exact same expression now.

“This isn’t Whitechapel, sir, and we’re in broad daylight with many perfectly respectable people nearby taking the air.”
 
She shrugged.
 
“Besides, had I a maid or companion with me, she would no doubt have abandoned me to my fate the moment you made an appearance.”
 
The eyebrow lowered, and she offered a faint smile.

He tipped his head.
 
“While I might argue the wisdom of taking the air of London, I cannot refute the last.
 
Guardians aren’t sought after for their charming wit and illuminating conversation.”

“True, but there is a difference between avoidance and fear.”
 
A puzzled line creased the smooth skin of her forehead.
 
“People flee when they see Guardians, as though their lives are in immediate danger if they so much as glimpse you, yet I’ve never heard of a Guardian doing harm to anyone.”

That was because he and his brethren made certain there was nothing to investigate or report when they did away with resurrectionists.
 
The only evidence left of the ones Nathaniel had immolated were soot marks on the grass, and those had washed away with the next inevitable rain.
 
All but one body thief’s soul had crossed the Veil, and Nathaniel ignored that ghostly voice which joined the chorus of others.
 
He admitted none of this to Lenore.

“We’re frightful sights to look upon, and our choice of employment far too macabre to discuss over tea.”

Her mouth tightened, a sure sign she was settling in for an argument.
 
“Those aren’t adequate reasons to flee as if the Dartmoor Hound were snapping at your coat or dress hem.”

“For some, those are perfectly acceptable reasons.”
 
He suspected people would be more inclined to linger and stare if they saw the Hound.
 
It was a creature far removed from themselves in every way.
 
He, on the other hand, was still a little too similar for comfort.
 
After Harvel’s experiment, and with
gehenna-
tainted blood in his veins, he was no more human than the Hound and a hundred times more terrifying.
 
Like those fearful folk, he’d once been an ordinary person.
 
Now he represented the horrors that might have happened to any one of them but by the grace of God had not.
 
In his observations, people feared the
almost
far more than the
what if.

The ever-present pall over London deepened.
 
Clouds, heavy with rain, lowered even more.
 
Drizzle that had threatened all afternoon finally fell to beat an arrhythmic tattoo on High Gate’s crypts and verdant landscape.

Lenore snapped open the umbrella looped on her wrist and swung it over her head.
 
She raised an eyebrow.
 
“Improper or not, it seems hardly fair that you become drenched while I remain dry.
 
I’m willing to share.”

Nathaniel smiled a little, as charmed by her offer cloaked in challenge as he was by the memory of her subduing a belligerent pack of butchers boys on a Camberwell street with the same umbrella.

Rain didn’t bother him.
 
He acted as sentinel here in all weather, had even survived a lightning strike once with only the acrid smell of burned hair to mark the event.
 
Still, her offer tempted him beyond words.
 
To be close to her once more, breathing in her scent of bergamot and lemon water and hearing the gentle rise and fall of her breathing...

“Your offer of shelter is kind, miss, but it’s only water.
 
Everything dries in time.”
 
He noted the continually darkening sky.
 
Once the rain stopped, the fog would roll in, blotting out what little light still remained and turning the city into a murky sea.
 
“You should return home.
 
Even the hardiest person doesn’t stroll through a pea-souper if they can help it.”
 
He frowned.
 
“And it isn’t safe for those alone, even when you aren’t in Whitechapel.”

A soft whirring sound overhead forestalled her reply.
 
Nathaniel followed her gaze to watch one of the many airships dotting London’s sky drift past them.
 
It flew low under the cloud ceiling, the whirring noise that of the two rotating disks that spun around its girth at bow and stern.
 
Nathaniel recognized the ship; so did Lenore.

“After the
Pollux
, my father was always partial to the
Merope
.
 
Her design made it easy to retrofit her engines for adiabatic demagnitization.”
 
Her smile was wistful.
 
“He was almost as proud to see her inaugural flight after the upgrade as he was to watch the
Pollux
after retrofit.”

Rain sheeted off the ship’s sleek exterior as it glided past them.
 
Nathaniel had sailed on the
Merope
once years ago when Nettie brought him with her to inspect the gun batteries for ideas on how to improve upon her own ship’s arsenal.
 
He’d come away unimpressed.
 
The engines were indeed a marvel, no longer subject to overheating from the volatile
empyrean
used to fuel them, but the
Pollux
’s firepower remained superior.
 
The
Merope
was built for transport, the
Pollux
for war, and their designs reflected their different purposes.