The Eterna Files (31 page)

“Ah,” he said.

He looked around the floor once more for other markings. He climbed the second floor and saw the thrown-back carpets.

“There's the madness. So. One of the scientists was turned,” he stated, descending the stairs. “I don't like that I didn't know that. Or who poisoned him.”

If he couldn't control the ebb and flow of operations, he didn't know how he could continue on. If the scale was greater than he could fathom, at any point he could be ripped from the equation and the soul that depended on him would be lost forever. He forced back a wave of frightened despair.

As he reached the landing of the entrance hall, the jaundiced light filtering in through the shuttered windows was immediately extinguished, as was his lantern. Brinkman took a long breath and withdrew a box of matches from a deep pocket that held a number of useful items and small weapons. Striking a match, he saw six silhouettes blocking the door. Roughly human sized and shaped, not entirely touching the floor.

Brinkman smiled. “Hello again, old friends.”

He wished he didn't understand who and what he was dealing with, the forces driving him, constraining him to make concessions to England for the sake of an innocent life.….

The air around him sighed with a low hiss that ebbed and flowed with something of the feeling of language, the temperature plummeted. His next exhalation caused a cloud of vapor.

“If you are trying to communicate with me, I do not understand you. But allegiances are very clear and you've nothing to fear from me. I am going to be on my way and leave you to your unfolding destiny. May I pass?”

One silhouette shifted, giving him a narrow path of exit.

He crossed between the shadowy forms, every hair on end, moving slowly out of the building, casting not a single glance behind him. He did not slam the door but allowed it to shut behind him slowly. He did not race up the steps to the sidewalk, though he wanted to run fast, hard, and far. He thought about what was clanking in his bag as he moved stiffly toward Fifth Avenue.

Those poor sots in those messy, unorganized, inconsequential New York and London departments had no idea what they were in for. There was no way for all this to end but in war. And no one was the wiser. Not yet. None of them would be until it was much too late.

*   *   *

Andre's penchant for fistfights had come in handy there in the dark. He could feel the chill presence of his dead brother freezing the already cold sweat on his skin.

“Thank you, Louis, for saving me,” Andre said as he ran. If not for Louis, Andre would likely have been carted back to England to face Lord Black and the many powerful people Andre had angered and offended in that delicious city.

“You're welcome,” the ghost replied. “Now you must do something for me.”

“Something more?” Andre cried.

“What you left in Smith's office was only part of the work,” Louis explained urgently. “His spirit came to me, in the perilous half sleep that happens in this purgatory I'm in. He hid some of his chemical compounds from me. They went into our final mixture but were ingredients I had not recorded. Smith also concealed some of Goldberg's material from before he went mad.

“He did not wish the entire compound to ever be listed in a single document. Leave Clara a note to go back to Smith's office. There's more to find there.”

“What about the material at Allen's?” André asked.

“Old files with work from previous theorists who long abandoned the project,” the spirit replied. “If England knows about those tests, so be it. We have to throw them something to scrabble over, like vultures. Clara is the only one I trust, not even Bishop, no one else. There must be more power in my work than I even know, to have gotten this much attention—”

“That's what those numbers were about? Her safe? I nearly blurted them out. But Louis, I need to hide—we need to hide!”

“We have time for this, Andre. You've the advantage here, you must do this.”

Andre spied a healthy mare tied to a post near a sort of gentlemen's club where the men were dressed well and the women were barely so. He grabbed the horse from its hitch and took off at a gallop despite cries of protest and a shout of “thief!”

He drove the horse hard, nearly running over pedestrians and almost crashing the poor beast into an oncoming carriage. Pearl Street was won in a surprisingly swift bout and Andre leaped off the animal and ran to the front door.

He tried with his pick to unlatch the lock but his nerves only jammed the knob, so in his haste he broke the pane of the front door with his elbow, reaching through the jagged glass to unlock it. Before bounding up the stairs, he paused for an instant to consider the redheaded doorkeeper slumped in her chair. Andre hoped she wasn't dead but knew he didn't have time to find out.

As Andre ascended, the grayscale draft of his brother gave instructions. “The material is in Smith's office fireplace, up the chimney. Tell her only she must know!”

“Always with the fire.” Andre chuckled despite himself, writing out what Louis requested.

“Now to the safe,” Louis continued, “below her desk, below the carpeting.”

“How do you know the combination?” Andre asked, genuinely curious.

“I watched her, place an item of mine—the only one she had left of me—in that safe. In that moment, because she held something that had belonged to me, I could get close, though I could not speak, couldn't move anything to let her know I was there.” Louis's voice was plaintive. He recited the combination and Andre opened the safe.

It was the work of mere moments to toss the paper within, close the safe and conceal it once more, then flee.

Finding himself conveniently near the tip of Manhattan Island, Andre hurriedly planned his further escape. Used to having to escape at a moment's notice due to angry wives, husbands, or creditors, he tended to have money sewn into his clothing and hidden in his accoutrements.

He stowed onto a cargo clipper making a night run across the river, desperate for constant movement. Not sleeping, he barely ate or breathed, unable to relax until the train he boarded in New Jersey had cleared Ohio and he was confident none of his pursuers were following.

Andre still intended to return to New Orleans, to put to rest some of the dust that his dead brother had unwittingly kicked up, but he wondered now if he wasn't being chased by more than British spies.

Something else had been going on in the house where he and the others had been held that night. Something had been lurking in the shadows. He'd sensed it before, in Goldberg's home, and before then, back home, in Lafayette Cemetery. He'd found his brother there at dawn, drenched in blood and unable to remember what had happened to him during the night. Louis had always been a bit haunted, and paranormal things loved clinging to him. He was, Andre supposed, a bit magical. But that hadn't saved his life. His precious
mystères
hadn't intervened, then or now.

Andre had set sail for London the day after he found his brother in the graveyard and years had passed with no contact between the twins, until he was dragged back into his brother's sphere by England itself. That he had been under the thumb of England was laughable anyway—that damn, fool, uptight, moralizing, hypocritical country. He longed for the days when a libertine might be left well enough alone. Well, they were, if they were well-placed enough. That was the trick, wasn't it: placement. How you were born.
Who
you were born.

“What have we gotten ourselves into, brother?” he asked the cold patch of air beside him as he sat in the back of a train car full of sleeping people, hat low over his olive-toned face.

“I'm not entirely sure,” came Louis's whisper. “Whatever it is, it's just gotten worse. Something is afoot in this country that wasn't here before. The priestess back home knew it. She and her colleagues were trying to warn me, trying to create new prayers, new wards, demand of the spirits some answers. She said that something ugly had ‘opened up' in this country, and if we weren't careful, we'd be slaves to it. All of us.”

Andre shuddered.

“I'm going to go back to New York, Andre,” Louis said, his ghostly form receding. “I need to watch over Clara. Good-bye, brother, take care of yourself.”

In the next breath, before Andre could say good-bye, Louis vanished.

Andre felt hollow, and terribly alone.

Out of the corner of his eye, Andre could have sworn he saw what looked like an entirely opaque, man-shaped shadow standing at the head of the carriage. But that was surely a figment of his weary imagination. Andre was tired. Dead tired.

*   *   *

“Do you promise me you're not putting on a show of being all right?” Bishop asked Clara as the hired carriage turned onto Pearl Street.

“I'll be fine, Rupert,” she said. “I'm tired. Abductions are so exhausting,” she added, trying for a light tone.

“Would you tell me even if you did need help?” he asked sadly.

“I would. I will, Rupert,” she said, staring into his eyes. “I don't want to keep things from you. It wasn't fair.…”

Her guardian was inscrutable as he helped her out of the carriage, taking care of her wrists. They'd gone to the offices to see if Louis's diary and the other papers were still in the file cabinet. It would be a few moments' walk home after that.

Walking up the steps, Clara noticed the broken glass at the door.

“Lavinia!” Clara whirled back to the senator. “She was drugged by the bastard. In the tumult, I forgot.”

Flinging the door open they rushed in to find her crumpled at her post in a splay of black fabric, red hair tangled in the beads of a fascinator whose feathers were now broken. Oh, Lavinia's rage would be palpable when she woke and saw her accessories had been sundered. Bishop straightened her in her chair, trying to rouse her.

“Wait here with Lavinia, I'd like to fetch one of my talismans,” Clara said, her feet already on the stairs. In her office, she lit the candle in a mirrored lantern with shaking hands, then whirled around the room to make sure nothing lurked in what had previously been shadow.

Closing and locking the door behind her—she did not care to replay her abduction—she darted to her desk. In an instant she had opened the safe, using the so-familiar combination Evelyn had picked up from Louis.

A piece of paper. Like magic, like a ghost; suddenly and unexpectedly there, lying atop the precious bit of fabric that had once belonged to her Louis.

She snatched it up and read the words, seeing the difference now between this handwriting and Louis's. It was up to her and her alone to gather more of the Eterna files. Louis didn't want England—or whoever was behind their abduction—to know about this. Not Bishop either.

She memorized the information, trying to calm her racing thoughts. As for the Eterna Commission … she should have tried to stop it long ago, before the project had become steeped in death. Irony, when it was a search for life.

Unsure she could convince Bishop to understand why this mad pursuit had to end, she deemed it best to take certain matters into her own hands.

In that moment Clara decided she would destroy and bury the whole lot, everything she had, including Louis's cravat. There was no body left to bury, but she would honor him as if there were.

Whatever Eterna had done to them, it wouldn't ever happen again, so help her God.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Deep within the Royal Courts of Justice, Moriel's pet lieutenant made sure the other guard—there were only two—had left before drawing close to the narrow bars to deliver a message.

“Interrogation of American operatives was successful,” the large guard murmured to the small, balding man curled in the shadows. “Too easy, even.”

The Majesty clucked his tongue, a fervor cresting as he spoke. “People are easy to best. What concerns me is the
material
. Our summoned were blocked from gaining further ground even though they were directly invited in by the Jew scientist I had poisoned and thusly turned. So my chief concern now is if there is a ward in play. There may well be. And you know, my friend, that a ward is
unacceptable
.” Moriel seethed, pacing his cell.

“That's what must be stopped, the trail thrown cold as ice. Neither team can gain such a shield. Are samples from the site en route as ordered?”

“Yes, Majesty; three vials in secret, to our royal seat, where augury will determine the precise nature of the incident, and if a ward was indeed present or no. One vial will be sent to England's governmental division.”

“Make sure the one is intercepted. In detonating, change the sample's properties to be unrecognizable,” the Majesty said firmly. “The American and British teams will be at each other's throats, each of them thinking the other is responsible for all ill deeds done. Make sure someone targets one of England's team—throw them off the trail, derail them toward other magics, away from ours. Understood?”

O'Rourke nodded. “Understood.”

“Go, out with you,” Moriel shooed him.

“Yes, sir.” The guard scurried away.

Moriel turned to his immaculate cell. He'd cleaned up the rat; his little game of bones. It was a childhood comfort and it soothed in such a place as this. But as he'd find a way out of this dank pit soon, such behavior wouldn't stand in high society. He would soon have to sacrifice his indulgences and instead regain the sort of subtle, gentlemanly grandeur expected of his status.

As he ascended, he'd need to leave gore to others; his predilections would have to carry on without his direct hand in the entrails. He smoothed his prison garb, lifted his hands and brought them down upon his head, feeling the weight of a future crown he'd wear forever.

*   *   *