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Anchors Across the Pond

Image Place holder  of - 46Written by Leanna Renee Hieber

When I envisioned The Eterna Files series, I couldn’t pick one shore, one great, historic city as a setting. So I chose two.

I have a soul-deep connection to London. I love that incredible metropolis more than I have words for and have spent many weeks through the years exploring the city streets and historic sites, researching my Strangely Beautiful and Eterna Files series.

However, my life as a New Yorker, a licensed New York City tour guide at that, has given me too many incredible historical details to omit this great behemoth from an expansive, wild, tumultuous, Gothic, historical, dark fantasy. New York, my inimitable, grand diva, would not be ignored.

Each city is so rich in culture and complications, sins and triumphs, and spectacular, strange histories. Their histories I sometimes tweak or their strangeness I exacerbate, but the base of The Eterna Files is a “realistic” 1882 in which paranormal things happen. The fight on both shores meant I could double my time in two of my favorite places on the planet. I’ve been writing books set in the 1880s since I was a pre-teen, so I’ve been writing in this era and about these cities for the bulk of my life. They’re family.

The Eterna Files stars a large cast embroiled in large spectacles; fitting for cities that in and of themselves are such enormous characters. Having been a student of history in each, I have always been struck by each place’s personality. While writing, I focused on how each one felt to me, and how that might impact my characters. I breathed in their respective quirks, trying to connect with an elder, sootier, gaslit time. I often liken myself to a medium channeling spirits, page by page. Sometimes my characters take that quite literally.

It should be noted that while London and New York have always had differences, by the 19th Century they were considered very much to be sister cities and kept up with one another’s innovations. Great works on either shore often involved their cousins across the pond. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 on Queen Victoria’s birthday (angering the many Irish workers who had built it and felt disregarded). Earlier, the first trans-Atlantic cable was sent from New York to Buckingham. In some ways New York’s and London’s fates also seem entwined; what befalls one city often befalls the other—and their Phoenix resilience is similarly matched. Both cities have been targets for terrorists and in war. Both cities are fiercely beloved and contain multitudes. No single narrative dominates either place; the stories of these cities are as complex as their citizenry.

In The Eterna Files, what begins in book one as a rivalry and antagonism between two Paranormally focused offices becomes a joint operation when the Eterna Commission (founded under early Secret Service initiatives in the US) and the Omega Department (created as part of the Special Branch in London), realize that they’ve been led to become enemies by a vile magical force targeting both groups.

The biggest change of heart and demolition of preconceived notions from one shore to the other comes from my stalwart London Metropolitan policeman, Harold Spire. A dour skeptic, he shifts from complete disbelief to begrudging acceptance of spectral matters. His assumptions about New Yorkers, and even his fellow Brits, are blown wide open. His New York counterpart, Clara Templeton, faces down her own worst critic, herself, to seize transformative natural power. What binds the teams together is their dogged determination, shared respect for differences, their fierce work ethic, and of course, the fight for survival against an unpredictable foe.

The character arcs I find the most fulfilling are about coming to terms with one’s own powers and limitations, and about learning to love those around one for their own quirks and unique gifts. The same goes for each city going through their respective battles and struggles towards peace with the help of localized magic. The heartbeat of the cities amplifies the heart and soul of my characters. They each inform each other.

Through the series I delve into the ideas of Ley Lines; an ancient and varied belief that the earth’s “magic” and potent life-force runs along certain meridians. I wanted to work with the idea that a Ley Line could be not only geographical, but spiritual and bound to hearts and minds. The energy and attitude of each city throbs in each heart. I expand on the idea of localized magic as also being able to travel in a heart and soul, for stationary places to be alive within us all.

My found family become Ley Lines for each other, making an invisible force tactile as these residents of London and New York travel to their opposite shores to help protect the other side in time of need. The bonds of my characters surpass the boundaries of family of origin, race, creed, socio-economic conditions and other would-be walls in these restrictive 19th century society cities. None of the attitudes my characters espouse are unrealistic demands on history, their attitudes reflect many prominent schools of thought that promoted equality and forward-thinking ideals, especially in large cities. My characters find grounding in hope, in progress and unconditional respect, bound to people and places they put their lives on the line to save. Their cities can then amplify these ideals as they continue to pledge to keep peace.

My characters and the cities they call home: scrappy, determined fighters striving to achieve a loving peace, to be anchors for each other rather than competitors. I’m more interested in building bridges of hope and family than I am in reinforcing walls and separation. I hope you’ll join my quirky family and come fight the good fight.

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Follow Leanna Renee Hieber on Twitter, Facebook, and on her website.

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Fantasy Firsts Sweepstakes

It’s November, which means we are entering the last month of our Fantasy Firsts program. We wanted to say thank you with a special sweepstakes, featuring ALL the titles we highlighted this past year. That’s 40 fantastic reads from 40 different series to add to your TBR stack! Plus, we’re including an added bonus: two sandblasted book dragon mugs, so you can enjoy your coffee or tea in style while you read.

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  1. HOW TO ENTER: The entry period for the Sweepstakes begins at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 and continues through 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, November 19, 2017 (the “Entry Period“). No purchase is necessary. Any entrant who is under 18 years of age or otherwise under the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which the entrant resides (a “Minor“) must obtain permission to enter from his or her parent or legal guardian, and the agreement of the parent or legal guardian to these Official Rules, prior to entry. To enter the Sweepstakes, during the Entry Period, entrants must access, complete and submit the Sweepstakes entry form (which will require entrant to submit his or her e-mail address and such other information as Sponsor may require), found in entrant’s Facebook newsfeed or alternatively by visiting Sponsor’s website located at https://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/11/01/fantasy-firsts-sweepstakes-15/ (the “Website”) and following the on screen entry instructions. The Facebook entry form may be pre-filled with information provided by the Facebook platform. There is a limit of one entry per person and per email address. All entries must be completed and received by Sponsor prior to the conclusion of the Entry Period. Entry times will be determined using Sponsor’s computer, which will be the official clock for the Sweepstakes. Normal time rates, if any, charged by the entrant’s Internet or mobile service provider will apply. All entries are subject to verification at any time. Proof of submission does not constitute proof of entry. Sponsor will have the right, in its discretion, to require proof of identity and/or eligibility in a form acceptable to Sponsor (including, without limitation, government-issued photo identification). Failure to provide such proof to the satisfaction of Sponsor in a timely manner may result in disqualification.
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  1. GENERAL RULES: Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to modify these Official Rules (including without limitation by adjusting any of the dates and/or timeframes stipulated in these Official Rules) and to cancel, modify or suspend this Sweepstakes at any time in its discretion, including without limitation if a virus, bug, technical problem, entrant fraud or misconduct, or other cause beyond the control of the Sponsor corrupts the administration, integrity, security or proper operation of the Sweepstakes or if for any other reason Sponsor is not able to conduct the Sweepstakes as planned (including without limitation in the event the Sweepstakes is interfered with by any fire, flood, epidemic, earthquake, explosion, labor dispute or strike, act of God or of public enemy, communications failure, riot or civil disturbance, war (declared or undeclared), terrorist threat or activity, federal, state or local law, order or regulation or court order) or in the event of any change to the terms governing the use of Facebook or the application or interpretation of such terms. In the event of termination of the Sweepstakes, a notice will be posted on the Website or Sponsor’s Facebook page and a random drawing will be conducted to award the prize from among all eligible entries received prior to the time of termination. Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify or prohibit from participating in the Sweepstakes any individual who, in Sponsor’s discretion, Sponsor determines or believes (i) has tampered with the entry process or has undermined the legitimate operation of the Website or the Sweepstakes by cheating, hacking, deception or other unfair practices, (ii) has engaged in conduct that annoys, abuses, threatens or harasses any other entrant or any representative of Sponsor or (iii) has attempted or intends to attempt any of the foregoing. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE ANY WEBSITE OR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM ASSOCIATED WITH THIS SWEEPSTAKES OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THIS SWEEPSTAKES IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAW. SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, SPONSOR HAS THE RIGHT TO SEEK DAMAGES (INCLUDING ATTORNEYS’ FEES) FROM ANY PERSON INVOLVED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. The use of agents or automated devices, programs or methods to submit entries is prohibited and Sponsor has the right, in its sole discretion, to disqualify any entry that it believes may have been submitted using such an agent or automated device, program or method. In the event of a dispute regarding who submitted an entry, the entry will be deemed to have been submitted by the authorized account holder of the email address submitted at the time of entry. “Authorized account holder” means the person who is assigned an email address by an internet provider, online service provider or other organization (e.g., business, educational institute, etc.) that is responsible for assigning email addresses for the domain associated with the submitted email address. An entrant may be required to provide proof (in a form acceptable to Sponsor, including, without limitation, government-issued photo identification) that he or she is the authorized account holder of the email address associated with the entry in question. All federal, state, provincial, territorial and local laws and regulations apply. All entries become the property of Sponsor and will not be verified or returned. By participating in this Sweepstakes, entrants on behalf of themselves, and to the extent permitted by law on behalf of the Entrant Parties agree to be bound by these Official Rules and the decisions of Sponsor, which are final and binding in all respects. These Official Rules may not be reprinted or republished in any way without the prior written consent of Sponsor.
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© 2017 Macmillan. All rights reserved.





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It’s Not a Costume, It’s My Day Job

Image Placeholder of - 3Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from Leanna Renee Hieber, the author of The Eterna Filesabout how a day job can be a gift for the writer. The third installment in the series, The Eterna Solutionwill be available November 14th.

Written by Leanna Renee Hieber

I’m asked often if my being a professional actress helps me as a writer. It entirely does, in more ways than I likely understand about my own process at any one given moment. Being an actress is a holistic aspect of how I see the world and operate as an artistic professional.

One of the most often complimented aspects of my work is my ability to create atmosphere and ‘set the stage’ for my novels. This is most certainly due to a life on the boards. My penchant for diving deep into character, reveling in the intricacies of dialogue and inner monologue, comes from professional theatre and playwrighting training, novel writing coming to me as a professional venture after I’d established myself in the former.

I set my books in the late 19th century because it’s the era that birthed the entirety of our understanding of modernity and is thusly somewhat recognizable to us and yet, the Victorians are rife with conflict and hypocrisy that it is a source of dramatic tension and conflict in and of itself.

Leanna Renee Hieber as Lucy in Dracula
Leanna as Lucy in Dracula for the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, photo: Rich Sofranko

One of the most important factors in differentiating the daily life of a modern character from that of any historical character is their clothing. This is especially important for women, whose fashion has changed far more radically and comprehensively than basic men’s clothing through the years. We wear, on average far fewer layers (and pounds) of clothing in the 21st century than the 19th.

Another important gift the theatre gave my historical novels is a tactile reality and personal experience ‘existing’ in other time periods with which I can paint details. How we move in our clothes and interact with our world is something we take for granted, but as a writer, I can’t; not if I’m writing strong, empowered women who, while they may chafe against the restrictive society roles and mores around them, still remain influenced by and bound to the fashion of the age. Knowing what it is like to move, sit, prepare food, lift, climb stairs, walk, trot, run, seize, weep, and collapse in a restrictive corset, bodice, bustle, petticoat, hat, layers, gloves, and other accessories—all of which I’ve been personally subjected to in various historical plays and presentations I’ve acted in—is vitally important to taking the reader physically as well as visually and emotionally through what my characters are experiencing.

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Photo: C. Johnstone

I write fantasy, so I hardly operate off the ‘write what you know’ principle, but knowing from personal experience some of those intimate details—like the precise unease of chafing corset bones against your skin—helps me consider my heroic ladies of The Eterna Files that much more impressive in all the crazed antics I set them to.

Overcoming restrictions is a big theme in my work. That a restrictive society further enclosed its women in cages of undergarments and elaborate systems of outerwear is too important a factor of world-building not to have at the core, and I hope it sets a vital tone for how readers can feel my work as well as read it.

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Follow Leanna on Twitter at @Leannarenee, on Facebook, or visit her website.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on February 2nd, 2015.)

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The Eterna Files: Prologue and Chapters 1-3

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Image Placeholder of - 49Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we’re featuring an extended excerpt from The Eterna Files, a gaslamp fantasy about the quest to find the secret to immortality. The final book in the series, The Eterna Solution, will be available November 14th.

London, 1882: Queen Victoria appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and persons. Spire, a skeptic driven to protect the helpless and see justice done, is the perfect man to lead the department, which employs scholars and scientists, assassins and con men, and a traveling circus. Spire’s chief researcher is Rose Everhart, who believes fervently that there is more to the world than can be seen by mortal eyes.

Their first mission: find the Eterna Compound, which grants immortality. Catastrophe destroyed the hidden laboratory in New York City where Eterna was developed, but the Queen is convinced someone escaped—and has a sample of Eterna.

Also searching for Eterna is an American, Clara Templeton, who helped start the project after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln nearly destroyed her nation. Haunted by the ghost of her beloved, she is determined that the Eterna Compound—and the immortality it will convey—will be controlled by the United States, not Great Britain.

PROLOGUE

The White House, April 16, 1865

The sanity of a bloodied nation hung by a precarious thread. Hundreds of thousands of bodies rotted in mass graves. Mountains of arms and legs lay just beneath the earth in countless pits of appendages. Thousands of young men had been torn into wingless birds, stunned, harrowed, and half whole. No one had gone untouched by the war; everyone was haunted.

A gunshot in a theater tipped the straining scales and the nation’s battered, broken heart faltered and stopped.

This was the world in which twelve-year-old Clara Templeton grieved. She wept for her land with the kind of passion only a young, gifted sensitive could offer. When she was called to the side of the first lady, she did not hesitate.

Clad in a black taffeta mourning gown, Clara stood in a dimly candlelit hallway outside the first lady’s rooms, awaiting admittance alongside her guardian, Congressman Rupert Bishop, aged twenty-five—though his prematurely silver hair gave one pause as to his age. He’d been silver-haired as long as she’d known him. When she’d asked about it with a child’s tactlessness, he’d simply responded with a wink and a smile: “It’s the fault of the ghosts.” Soon after, Bishop took her to her first séance and Clara began to understand just how dangerous the thrall of ghosts could be.…

A red-eyed maid opened the door and gestured them in.

Inside the small but well-appointed room, a low fire mitigated a cool draft and cast most of the light in the room. Mary Todd Lincoln sat on a chair in the shadows, staring out a small window, her bell-sleeved, black crepe dress spilling out in all directions. Only the ticking of a fine clock on the mantel and the occasional sniff from the weeping maid broke the silence. The congressman beckoned Clara forward, into the firelight. Her step creaked upon the floorboards as her petite body cast a long shadow behind her.

Finally the first lady spoke in a quiet tremor. “Do you know why I called you here, Miss Templeton?”

“I’ve a supposition,” Clara replied quietly, nervously moving forward another step. “But first, Mrs. Lincoln, my deepest sympathies—”

“When your guardian here first brought you to visit the White House two years ago, you ran up to me, a perfect stranger, and gave me an embrace from my William. My dead William.”

“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln,” Clara murmured, “I remember—”

“I need you now, Miss Templeton,” the first lady began with a slightly wild look in her eyes, “to give me an embrace from my dead husband.”

Alarmed, Clara looked at Bishop, her eyes wide. The tall, elegantly handsome man lifted a calming, gloved hand and Clara attempted to gather herself

“I … well,” she stammered, “I’m unsure my gifts can work on command, Mrs.—”

“Try!” the grieving widow wailed, turning to face the girl, her face drawn and hollowed. Clara rushed over and fell to her knees beside the first lady, removing her kid gloves to take Mary’s shaking, bare hands into hers.

“I know that he is with you,” Clara murmured, tears falling from her bright green-gold eyes. “The president is with all who mourn him—”

“Prove it,” Mary Todd murmured. She snapped her head toward the door. “Rupert. You’re a spiritualist, have you not trained Miss Templeton since she became your ward?”

“Only charlatans cue up the dead precisely when the grieving want them, Mary, you know that,” Bishop said gently. “And this is far too vulnerable a time to try.” He shivered suddenly. “Too many things want in. We risk inviting malevolence, not comfort.”

“No one should ever have to suffer what I have—” the first lady choked out.

“No, they shouldn’t,” Clara replied. “Never.”

“The country can bear no more,” Bishop added quietly, his fine black mourning coat making him almost invisible in the shadows by the door. “We must guard against the basest evils grasping for purchase—”

“What could be more evil than what I have endured?” the first lady exclaimed.

The last two years had taught Clara that Rupert Bishop coddled no one, even the grieving. She spoke before he could offer another example of his oft-sobering perspective. “Such a powerful seat needs protection,” Clara exclaimed, squeezing the widow’s shaking hands with innocent, sure strength. “Such a man should never have fallen. He deserved to have been made immortal!”

“Why … yes, child!” Mary Lincoln exclaimed, a sudden light in her eyes. “Do we not have resources, researchers, scientists, theorists? Should we not have granted a man like the president eternal protection while he bore the nation on his shoulders? My dear Congressman Bishop…”

The small woman rose to her feet and began to pace the room, skirts swishing and sweeping with renewed determination.

“I charge you,” she said, bright gaze fastened on Bishop. “If you’ll not bring my husband back to me in spirit or form, then you must do this. Take Clara’s idea. For this bled-dry country. For the seat cloaked in immense power. Do this, Congressman, so no other wife in this dreadful house might go through such agony again.…”

“Do what, Mary?” he pressed.

She stared at him with steely ferocity. “Find a cure for death.”

 

Seventeen Years Later, New York City, 1882

“It was born of good intentions,” Clara insisted in a choking murmur.

She sat on a bench in Central Park on a mild June day, beneath a willow tree, looking out over the southeastern pond. She could not move. Her breath was shallow against the double stays of corset and buttoned bodice; soft ivory lace and muslin ruffles trembled around her throat. Tendrils of dark blond hair, blown free from braids beneath a fanciful straw feathered hat, tickled around her streaming eyes. Her world was again cracking open.

“Wake up,” she heard a voice calling. “Wake up.” It was not a human voice but that of some ancient, cosmic force.

She had known there was something different about her since the age of nine, since she’d awakened in the middle of the night to see a wild-haired woman in a cloak sitting at the foot of her bed.

“You’re special,” was all the woman said before vanishing.

The next day, Clara’s father, a prominent doctor to Washington lawmakers, died of tuberculosis. Her mother soon followed. They were buried in a Greenwood Cemetery mausoleum in their native Brooklyn. Clara was the marble sepulcher’s most frequent haunt. The Templetons’ will ensured that Clara would be educated at fine institutions and looked after by prominent figures.

Rupert Bishop, then a talented young New York lawyer, frequented the same Washington and spiritualist circles as the Templetons. A beloved family friend, he stepped in to graciously provide for the girl left behind. Bitterly estranged from their Southern families after the war, the Templetons hoped Clara’s manifest spiritual talents would blossom under Bishop’s care and guidance. She indeed flourished, until her gifts turned physically dangerous and had to be carefully monitored.

The visitor returned the night Bishop brought Clara to the White House the first time; Clara saw the creature watching her from the shadows. She had not seen the strange herald since, not even after that fateful second encounter with the first lady, a meeting that had set an unlikely destiny in motion.

Paperwork left on the slain president’s desk established a “Secret Service” to investigate counterfeit currency. A tiny cabal, headed by Bishop, supposed the service might also, in some unnamed office, investigate immortality. Bishop assembled a team of occultists, mystics, and chemists and set them to work in a secret location.

Once Clara completed finishing school, Bishop gave her a key to a nondescript office on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. A county clerk’s record office on the first floor served as a front. Clara’s offices—and those of the colleagues she and Bishop hired—took up the top floor. Congressman Bishop became Senator Bishop. A quiet era of investigation and theorizing followed.

In 1880, Eterna theorist Louis Dupris secretly told Clara that he’d made a breakthrough in localized magic. The world had suddenly seemed full of possibility. But now …

The Eterna Compound had been born out of grief. At this moment Clara wondered if it should never have been born at all, for now it bore grief of its own.

“Something’s wrong,” Clara murmured, wanting to cry but feeling wholly paralyzed. “I can feel it.…” All of Clara that had ever been could feel it; a love torn from her like layers of skin.

Before her eyes, in layers of concentric circles stretching out like mirrors reflecting mirrors in dizzying multiplication, she saw lives. Her lives, those she’d had before. She was twenty-nine years old … with a soul a thousand years older.

Pried open in a painful awakening, she knew her life was far more than the boundaries and limitations of her current flesh, but at present she felt the pain of all those centuries all at once, things done and undone. The sheer, heavy press of it all was staggering.

A mockingbird alighted on a branch above Clara’s head. It squawked and stared at her, then made the sounds of a police whistle, a bicycle bell, and some roaring, whooshing thing: the sound of something tearing.

And then there was a woman next to her. The visitor.

Though she couldn’t turn her head, in her peripheral vision Clara saw skirts, gloves, and long hair that was scandalously unbound. The presence of the visitor confirmed what she was feeling; something terrible was happening. Clara tried to move again, to fight the gravity lashing her to the bench, wishing tears, something, anything could be set free.

“What is it this time?” Clara gasped.

“Hello, Clara,” the visitor said quietly. One didn’t mistake an ordinary person for the visitor, for it brought with it the weight of time itself. “It’s been awhile.” The visitor smoothed the skirts of its long, plain, black, uniform-like dress, something a boarding school girl might wear. “Have you been waiting?” the visitor asked.

“I’m not one who likes waiting,” Clara replied.

“That’s why I trust you,” the visitor said, pleasure in its voice. “I last saw you when you impetuously gave the first lady an embrace from her dead son.”

The mockingbird gave a raucous trill from the limb above them. The woman adjusted what Clara thought was a hat—she still couldn’t get a good look. The mockingbird had flown across the path and alighted on a limb at her eye line, trilling accompaniment to their conversation.

“You presage terrible things but I never know what,” Clara growled.

“You’ve always been gifted,” the visitor replied. “Sensitive.”

“And we see what good sensitivity has done me.” Clara choked out her words. “I’m a freak of nature. My ‘fits’ render any hope I might have had for a normal life or a place in society laughable. I curse my gifts for all the misfortune they bring.” Embarrassing, traumatic memories paraded through her mind, her past lives staring on in pity. Clara hated pity. Perhaps it was best, then, that the visitor had none.

“Don’t be ungrateful, child,” the visitor chided. “You’ve two friends in a world of loneliness, you had a lover when many never know such pleasure, you’ve worked when hordes seek pay, you’ve had a guardian who dotes on you when countless orphans have no one, and you’ve money and a fine house in a city that denies both to thousands of its denizens.”

Clara wanted to lash out at the creature. But it was right, which only sharpened her pain.

“Something terrible has happened, hasn’t it? To the Eterna team?” she whispered, her throat raw as if from screaming even though she had loosed no such sound. “To my Louis? My love is among them.…”

An amulet of protection, tucked beneath her corset stays, was a knot against her shaking breaths. The amulet had been given to her by Louis, an item charged and blessed by his mother. Clara never felt she had the right to it, and now, he, who needed protection, lacked it

“I am very sorry for your loss,” the visitor said solemnly.

“I must go,” Clara insisted, trying to fight free but failing. “Maybe I can help the team—”

The visitor held up a hand. “It’s no use. They’re gone.”

“Why can’t you stop terrible things if you’re aware of them?” Clara demanded. “Why can’t I?”

“Not in our skill set,” the visitor replied. “You’ve taken too much ownership of something that is not your responsibility, Templeton. What is your responsibility, is to—”

“‘Wake up?’ Yes, I hear it, on the wind. In my bones. What does it mean?”

The woman gestured before her, to Clara’s iterations. “You see the lives, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Clara swallowed hard. “Do you?”

“Of course I do,” the visitor replied. “I’m here to tell you that a great storm is coming. It will break across two continents; two great cities, the hearts of empires. Your team is gone and storms are coming. Weather them, find special souls and shield them. Second-guess your enemy. Find the missing link between the lives you see. Do this for yourself. And for your country.”

Clara snorted bitterly. “Do I hear patriotism?”

The visitor shook its head. “I owe allegiance to no land.”

“Then what are you here for?” Clara begged.

The visitor’s voice grew warm. “I care about certain people.”

“Why me?”

Show me why you, Templeton,” the visitor proclaimed. “You’re at the center of the storm. Be worthy of the squall.”

The mockingbird made the strange, roaring sound again and the woman was gone.

Clara’s hands shook. The people she had been in her many lives turned and looked at her, male, female, all with certain similar qualities that she recognized as uniquely hers. Curiosity. Hunger. Restlessness. Intensity. Independence. A desperate desire for noble purpose. And lonely.

She was awake. But Eterna had died, taking with it the lover no one knew she had.

 

CHAPTER ONE

London, 1882

Harold Spire had been pacing until first light, crawling out of his skin to close his God-forsaken case. The moment the tentative sun poked over the chimney tops of Lambeth—though it did not successfully permeate London’s sooty haze—he raced out the door to meet his appointed contact.

Conveniently, there was a fine black hansom just outside his door. Spire shouted his destination at the driver as he threw open the door and launched himself into the carriage. He was startled to find that the cab already had an occupant: a short, balding man, immaculately but distinctly dressed; as one might expect of a royal footman.

“Hello, Mr. Spire,” the man said calmly.

Spire’s stomach dropped; his right hand hovered over his left wrist, where he kept a small, sharp knife in a simple cuff. Surely this was one of Tourney’s henchmen; the villain was well connected and would do anything to save his desperate hide.

“Do not be alarmed, sir,” the stranger said. “We are en route to Buckingham Palace on orders of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.”

“Is there a problem?” Spire asked, maintaining a calm tone, relaxing his hand but offering up a silent prayer to whatever God was decent and good that the queen would not have interceded on the wretch’s behalf.…

“No, sir. You are being considered for an appointment. I can say nothing more.”

“An … appointment.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m afraid I cannot attend to this great honor at present, sir.”

The man arched a preened brow. “Beg your pardon?”

“With all due respect,” Spire continued, not bothering to hide the earnest desperation he felt, “I am a policeman at a critical juncture, awaiting receipt of vital material without which a vicious criminal might walk free—”

“And what shall I tell Her Majesty? That you’re too busy for her?”

Spire set his jaw, looking anxiously out the window, seeing that they were heading in the opposite direction from where he needed to be at precisely seven. “Please tell Her Majesty that I’m about to stop a ring of child murderers and resurrectionists. Burkes and Hares. Body snatchers—”

“That will have to wait. Mere police work does not come before Her Majesty.”

“I think highly enough of Her Majesty to think she’d deem this important.”

“I am under orders to take you to the palace regardless of prevarication—”

“I wouldn’t dare lie about a thing like this!”

“Once Her Majesty has determined your suitability, you’ll be returned to your duties.”

“You’ll have to give the empress my sincere regrets. She may be able to live with one more child dead in her realm but I, sir, cannot.”

With that, Spire opened the door of the moving carriage and cast himself onto flagstones slick with the foul mixture of the London streets. His heel turned slightly under him and he came down painfully; his elbow jarred against stone and his forearm cut against the brace that held his knife sheath. He jumped to his feet and ran—with a slight limp—veering onto a bridge across the busy, teeming, brown Thames and onward to a life-or-death rendezvous.

He’d likely be arrested for his evasion, but his conscience was utterly clear.

#  #  #

Spire’s right hand hovered over his left forearm as he entered the damp brick alley, which was lit sporadically by gas jets whose light was dim behind blackened lantern glass. Even though the world was brightening with the gray of morning, sunlight didn’t penetrate into these drear, winding halls of sooty brick, London having its labyrinthine qualities. He made his tread soundless on the cobblestones, his eyes aware of every shadow and shape, his ears alert, his nostrils flared.

While he doubted his informant was dangerous—it was all bookkeeping, really, he imagined the source was a bank clerk or the like—what the ledgers revealed was something else entirely. The proof itself was dangerous and many men would kill with far less provocation. If “Gazelle” proved trustworthy, Spire would recruit the man for his department.

He palmed the key Gazelle had left in the drop location at Cleopatra’s Needle. If all had gone according to plan, Gazelle would have left enough evidence at this bookstore to prove without a shadow of a doubt that Francis Tourney was bankrupting charitable societies in a speculation racket that would make any betting man blush. That he was also involved in a child-trafficking ring of both living and dead young bodies was harder to prove, but far more damning.

The key opened the rear-alley door of the bookshop. A small lantern was lit somewhere within, casting a wan yellow light over stacks of spines. Spire knocked on the wooden door frame: three taps, a pause, and two more.

A quiet rap in response, from somewhere within the maze of books, confirmed that his informant was waiting. Spire edged his way through boxes and stacks—one stray limb could cause the whole precarious haphazard system to tumble—toward the source of the light.

He turned a corner of books and stopped dead in his tracks. There sat a woman who had gotten him into a good bit of trouble—the prime minister’s best-kept secret, his bookkeeper, one Miss Rose Everhart. Poised as ever, seated at a long wooden table; the lit lantern cast her scowl of concentration into sharp relief as layered bell sleeves spilled over a stack of thin spines. One ledger lay, open, under her hand; she ran ungloved fingertips over the pages.

She wasn’t stunning, but unique; her full mouth, set now in a frown, gave her a gravitas offset by the few loose brown curls around her cheeks, an almost whimsical contrast to her fastidious expression. When she looked up at Spire, the intensity and razor-sharp focus of her large blue eyes made her intriguing, magnetic.

“You’re surprised to see a woman,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yes.” Spire spoke very carefully. “Especially one I recognize.” At this, she smiled, a prim, self-satisfied smile. “You made quite an impression, Miss Everhart. A cloaked female figure glimpsed wandering the halls of Parliament, only to disappear into a wall? I didn’t buy the story that you were a specter.”

“The too-curious Westminster policeman. So we meet again,” she said with an edge. “The eager dog sniffing out a fox. My employers, who were granting me the easiest access to my job while hoping to avoid any national outcry, were not fond of you. And I confess, nor was I. It was bad enough to have to sneak about, then to be thought suspect for it when I am a patriot? Horrible.”

“Yes, I was quite chastised about that by your superior, Lord Black,” Spire muttered, “so you needn’t pile on.” He wondered with sudden fear if that’s why the queen wished to see him: more scolding. Spire’s purview was Westminster and its immediate environs. When he’d stumbled upon Miss Everhart, he’d merely been doing his job. Tourney’s speculation ring involved members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, so it was perhaps not surprising that Spire had thought that the prime minister’s bookkeeper had access others did not.

At the mention of Lord Black, Miss Everhart smiled and warmed. She stood suddenly, as if on ceremony, gesturing for Spire to sit at the bench opposite. While she was primly buttoned in dour blues and grays, her skirts and bodice were tailored in unique lines and accented with the occasional bauble that made Spire think a subtle bohemian lived somewhere deep beneath her proper corset laces.

“We have enough on the racketeering for a compelling case,” she said, handing several ledgers across the table.

“Good,” he said, nodding.

“But it’s this that will deliver the decisive blow,” she murmured, and shuddered. She passed him a narrow, thin black book that she didn’t seem eager to touch. The cover said, “Registry.”

“What’s this? Did you collect this from the banks?”

“No. From Tourney’s study.” At Spire’s raised eyebrow, Miss Everhart clarified, “After I showed him the numbers, Lord Black arranged for Sir Tourney to attend some sort of speculators’ gala. Black stamped a warrant and found this.”

“Himself?” Spire asked, incredulous.

“Lord Black had been feted at the Tourney estate, so sending him in was the most efficient. He knew to look for anything out of the ordinary. And this is hardly ordinary.”

Shocked by a lord’s unorthodox method but impressed by the man’s initiative, Spire opened the book. Small, dark marks and round smudges marched down the pages in boxes made up of thin graphite lines. A few letters—initials, Spire guessed—were penciled above each dot.

On one side of the page, the dots were dark red. On the other side, the small marks were black. At the top of each page was a single large letter: “L” above the red marks and “D” above the black.

Horror dawned, slow and sick, as Spire stared at the lines of dots and initials. Dots the size of a child’s fingertip.

“Living.” Spire’s finger hovered over the “L.”

Then he moved to the “D.” “Deceased”

Oh, God. They were children’s fingerprints. Swabbed in their blood. Or, if their bodies had been stolen when dead, their fingers dipped in ink and pressed to the page.

A registry of stolen children.

Used for God knows what.

“I…” Spire stared at Miss Everhart, whose face was unreadable. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”

Her jaw tensed, pursed lips pressed thinner. “I am thirty and unmarried. I doubt I’ll ever have children, so I do whatever I can. I owe it to those poor children not to flinch.”

Spire nodded. He hadn’t thought to place any women assets in his police force. But women could keep secrets, tell lies, deceive, and connive with an aptitude that frightened him. Women made bloody good spies. He knew that well enough.

Spire rose, sliding the ledger, breakdown, and “registry” into his briefcase. “Thank you, Miss Everhart. Please give Lord Black my regards, I was unaware he was involved. I’m not wasting any time on the arrest.”

“I didn’t imagine you would.” Everhart rose and wove expertly through the labyrinth of books. As she disappeared, she called back to him. “Go on. I’ll alert your squadron. I doubt you should go there alone.”

He stared after her a moment, resentful of initiative taken without his orders … but it would save him valuable time.

#  #  #

Spire and his squad descended upon the decadent Tourney estate; a hideous, sprawling mansion faced in ostentatious pink marble, hoarding a generous swath of land in North London.

His best men at his side, Stuart Grange and Gregory Phyfe, Spire stormed Tourney’s front door, blowing past a startled footman.

The despicable creature was having breakfast in a fine parlor. The son of a Marquis, descended of a withering line, seemed quite shocked to see the police; his surprised expression validated Spire’s existence.

Spire was tempted to strike the man across the jaw on principle but became distracted by the thin maid, in a tattered black dress and a besmeared white linen apron, who cowered in the corner of the parlor. Entirely ignored by the rest of the force, she was shaking, unable to look anyone in the eye. Her condition was a stark contrast to her fine surroundings, which valued possessions higher than humanity.…

Shaking his head, Spire instructed his colleagues to secure Tourney in the wagon.

“I’ve all kinds of connections,” the bloated, balding man cried as he was dragged away. “Would you like me to list the names of the powerful who will help me?”

“I think you’re in too deep for anyone but the devil to come to your aid, Mr. Tourney,” Spire called as the door was shut between them. Silence fell and he turned to the woman in the corner.

At his approach, the gaunt, frail maid began murmuring through cracked lips, “Please, please, please.” She lifted a bony arm and the cuff of her uniform slid back, revealing a grisly series of scars on her arm. Burns. Signs of binding and torture.

“Please what, Miss?” Spire asked gently, not touching her.

“S—secret door … Get them … out.…” She pointed at the opposite wall.

A chill went down Spire’s spine. He studied the wall for a long time before noticing the line in the carved wooden paneling. Crossing the room, he ran his hand along the molding, pressing until something gave. The hidden door swung open and a horrific stench met his nostrils.

The maid loosed a wretched noise and sunk to her knees, rocking back and forth. Spire raised his voice, calling to his partner and friend, a stalwart man who played all things carefully and whom Spire trusted implicitly, “Grange, I think there may be a … situation down here.”

Without waiting for a reply, Spire was through the door and descending a brick stairwell, fumbling in his pocket for a box of matches. A lantern hung at the base of the stair; he lit the wick and set it back upon the crook. The flame, magnified by mirrors, cast a wan light over the small, windowless brick room.

It was everything Spire could do to keep from screaming in horror.

Six small tables, three on each side of the room. Each bore the body of a child clothed in a bloodstained tunic. Spire could not determine their genders due to their unkempt hair, pallor, and emaciated bodies. Strange wires seemed to be attached to the children.

Nothing in his investigation, even that dread register, had prepared him for this: these poor, innocent souls, helpless victims of a powerful man who was viciously mad.

He raised his gaze from the children to an even greater horror, if a worse nightmare could be imagined. An auburn-haired woman in a thin chemise and petticoat was lashed to a crosslike apparatus, arms stretched out and sleeves torn away. Streams of dried blood from numerous puncture wounds stained her clothes, the cross, and the walls and floor. Below each of her lashed arms sat large bronze chalices, there was a basin at her feet. Spire knew in a glance that these were to collect the woman’s blood. What horrific sacrifice was this?

Spire turned his head to the side and retched. His mind scrambled to block out the image of who that woman reminded him of, the reason he’d become a police officer. The trauma of his childhood sprang back to haunt him at the sight of that ghastly visage in a blow to the mind, heart, and stomach. How could the world be endured if such a thing as this had come to pass? He’d asked the same question when the victim had been his mother. Nothing answered him, then or now, but sorrow.

“I never believed much in the devil,” came a soft, familiar voice near his ear, “or hell, but if I did, it would be this.” Spire spun to see a cloaked figure at his side, the solitary lantern casting a shallow beam of light upon the face of Rose Everhart.

“Miss Everhart, you should not be here. I don’t know how you got past my men,” Spire murmured, thinking it an additional horror that she should see this. “This is hardly the place—”

“For a lady? Even for the lady who handed you the critical evidence needed to arrest Tourney? Do I not wish to see him marched to the gallows as much as you do?” she replied vehemently. “Don’t I have a right to see my work completed? Don’t try my patience with references to ‘women’s delicate sensibilities.’ I’ve seen more death and tragedy than I care to relate. But, admittedly … never like this. Never like this.” She raised a handkerchief to her nose.

Spire suddenly wondered whether she had heard or seen him retch. It would be embarrassing if so.

“What are those wires?” she asked. “What are they for? Is this some sort of terrible experiment or workshop? Ritualistic, yes, but…”

Spire stepped forward, preparing however reluctantly to examine the bodies, when something lurched out of the darkness behind him with a clatter of chains and an inhuman growl. It grabbed him around the neck, grunted as it tightened its grip, and dragged him backward.

“Grange!” Rose shouted as Spire gasped for air and struggled to reach his knife. “If you’re a victim, we don’t want to hurt you,” she called in a softer tone, lifting her lantern and directing its light toward the scuffle. “Let the officer go, he’s with the police, here to help—”

Officer Grange tore down the stairs, arriving in the hellhole just as Spire managed to grasp his weapon and cut at the arm holding him. There was a wretched sound of pain from his captor and Spire felt a warm liquid trickle over his hand. Released, he staggered away and fell to his knees. Grange fired, the report of the gunshot exploding loudly in the low stone space. Spire’s assailant recoiled with a shriek. Stumbling back against the wall, it shuddered before collapsing.

Grange stood at the base of the stair with his gun raised. Rose stepped forward so the light from her lantern reached the back wall. Still gasping for air, Spire turned to view his attacker: a gaunt, muscular man with chunks of dark hair sprouting in uneven patches upon a scratched pate. The man’s skin was carved with strange markings, his eyes black and oddly reflective. Blood pumped thick and dark from the bullet wound in his shoulder, looking old and half-congealed though the injury was fresh. One arm was shackled to the wall. A guard, then, but not one to be trusted freely.

With a strange gurgling noise, a convulsion, and a wave of foul stench, the creature’s mouth sagged open and the thing expired. It then seemed as though an obscuring shadow rose from the body, then spread across the room as if it were a dark, heavy storm cloud, precipitous with dread terror.

Turning to look after the miasma as it passed, Grange, Spire, and Rose took in a startled breath at the same time. Grange cursed.

The mouths of the dead children, previously shut, were suddenly open.

As if screaming.

Silent, terrible moments passed before Spire, trying not to breathe the fetid air, stepped toward the tables, peering closer at the small, lifeless bodies. “From what I know of the telegraph and those new electric wires,” he stated, clearing his raw throat, “it seems similar. Something to convey a … transmission or charge.”

“But where do the wires lead?” Grange asked, looking at the ceiling, where the wires formed a latticework grid on the low timber-beamed ceiling. Many hung loose in gossamer metallic strands. “It seems they don’t continue on to the upper floors.”

“Go and see,” Spire commanded. Grange nodded and trotted back up the stairs.

Rose was writing upon a small pad of paper. This commonsense act—usually the first thing Spire himself did upon entering a crime scene—recalled him to himself. For an instant he was flushed with shame that this unprecedented discovery had caused him to falter in his work. He forced himself back under control; he would not allow the dead woman across the room—and what she represented—to derail him.

Though the room was cool, perspiration coated Spire and he could smell his own tension. He took out his notepad, replaced the lantern on the hook at the base of the stairs where he’d found it, and set to work. Each child’s wrists had puncture marks. Each arm bore odd carvings. He’d have to get one of the department sketch artists to accurately reproduce the markings. He wished a daguerreotype was possible, not that he wanted to subject more people to these horrors but only for the purpose of detail.

They held the man responsible, but Spire knew Tourney was not operating alone. The sheer gruesome spectacle of this would be enough, the policeman hoped, to indict any of the influential people Tourney worked with in this ghastly enterprise.

Spire turned his attention toward the woman at the back. His head swam. His mind was filled with the sounds and sights of his childhood trauma; the images superimposed over the present moment like a screen lowered before his eyes. He had to steady himself on one of the tables, hand fumbling over a small, cold foot.

A sloppily painted symbol on the woman’s tunic appeared to be a crest: red and gold with dragons. He couldn’t look at her face. He was already haunted enough by the vision of a beautiful, auburn-haired woman being bled before his eyes.

He felt more than saw the movement as Rose folded her cloak back over her head and disappeared upstairs.

Hearing voices calling his name, Spire mounted the stairs and stumbled into the light; his fellows took one look at his face and blanched.

“What’s down there?” a young patrolman asked.

“Hell,” Spire replied. “Don’t anyone move a thing until all details have been recorded. I want more than my notes to refer to. Get Phyfe down there, I want records of everything. Every single terrible detail.”

Spire sat in the fine chair Tourney had been using and continued making notes. The poor maid had been laid out on a nearby sofa; a nervous elder officer stared down at her as if afraid that if he turned his head, she’d stop breathing.

“Is there any other staff?” Spire asked.

“None that we’ve seen,” the officer replied.

He did not know how long he sat there, recording his impressions of the horrors below, before a voice startled him out of his morbid reverie.

“Harold Spire, come with me.” He snapped his head up to behold the same well-heeled footman who had been at his doorstep that morning.

“Ah, yes…” Spire rose and numbly walked to the door. “The queen’s man. Are you here to arrest me?”

“No, sir. While I had a mind to do so, Her Majesty is gracious and commends your commitment to English citizens. But you will come with me now.”

“Ah. Well. Yes. Lead on, sir.”

During the ride, Spire could think of nothing but what he had seen in that hidden cellar and what it reminded him of. He was not surprised to realize that his hands were shaking; his stomach cramped and growled, though the mere thought of food was enough to make him want to retch again.

Buckingham Palace soon loomed ahead, gradually taking up the entire view out his carriage window. The hansom drew up to a rear door and Harold Spire found himself led by the stern footman through a concealed entrance, along a gilded hall, and into a tiny white room that contained only a single item: one fine chair.

The space had no windows, only a door with a panel at eye level. The footman closed the door firmly, leaving Spire alone in the cupboard of a room. “Would someone mind giving me even a partial clue as to what’s going on?” Spire called, glad he had restrained from cursing when answer came, as the voice was a familiar one.

“Hello, Mr. Spire,” was the reply from the other side of the wall.

Lord Black.

Spire wanted to spill all the information about the case, as Black had been critical to its culmination, but would hardly do so across a wall.

“Give me a moment, Mr. Spire, if you please.” Spire then heard two voices beyond the threshold, talking about him. Neither man bothered to lower his voice; obviously they did not care if they were overheard.

#  #  #

“Humble thanks, my dear Lord Denbury,” Lord Black said, bowing his blond head to the handsome young man with eerie blue eyes seated next to him in the lavish palace receiving room. The immaculately dressed gentlemen each held a snifter of the finest brandy. “Firstly, for the use of your Greenwich estate. Her Majesty is most grateful to have a place where her scientists and doctors may be safe and undisturbed as they study the mysteries of life and death.”

“Provided your aim is always the health of humankind rather than personal gain, you shall have my support, milord,” the young man said, bowing his black-haired head in return. “That house has … too many memories,” he added. “I love my New York mansion far more.”

“Ah, yes!” Lord Black leaned forward with great interest. “New York…”

“My wife is a consummate New Yorker, born and raised,” Denbury said with a smile. “I see the city as I see her: bold, opinionated, and beautiful. I love it. You should visit.”

Black nodded. “I plan to. Secondly, I must thank you for coming here on vague bidding.”

“I hate secrets,” the young man said in a cautious tone. “After all I’ve been through.”

“Of course.” Lord Black spoke with quiet gravity. “So let me be direct with you now. I need a chief of security services for those scientists and doctors and I’d like your … expertise in determining character. I understand you … see it like none other.”

Lord Denbury sighed wearily but nodded. Both men rose; Lord Black opened the eye-level panel in the door and bade the other look through.

“His name is Harold Spire,” Black said. “What do you make of him?”

The man in question, seated on the velvet chair in the white room, wore a modest black suit. Scowling, he rested his hands in his lap. His green cravat gave the impression of having been hastily tied; it was rumpled and a bit askew. There were smudges upon his suit as if he’d encountered dust or soot and there was a dark stain on his cuff. At a median British height with light brown hair, Spire’s average appearance might be gamesome, possibly even handsome, if the scowl didn’t make him somewhat of a bulldog.

“What do you see?” Black murmured to his companion.

“Well,” Lord Denbury began matter-of-factly. “He’s had a terrible day by the look of him. He bears a general white aura with hints of blue, which represents that he means well and is at heart a good man, untroubled and unbiased by exterior forces. He will do the right and moral thing. Provided that is what you want, Lord Black, you and he should not be at cross purposes.”

Lord Black smiled as he shut the observation panel. “I assure you, my friend, that I want what is moral, just, and fair.”

“I see the same light about you,” the dark-haired man replied. “But should those colors change, you’ll no longer have my friendship. I’m sorry if that seems harsh, but the trials of the last two years have inured me to niceties.

“Is that all, milord? I’ve left my dear wife anxiously awaiting her surprise: a trip to Paris. She’s impossible when she’s impatient … and she’s never patient,” he added with a smile that spoke of the throes of young love.

Black chuckled. “Indeed, you are released and I cannot thank you enough. Safe travels to you and yours.”

Denbury bowed his head and strode away, escorted by an immaculately clad footman.

Black turned to his aide. “Tell Her Majesty that Mr. Spire passed the test.”

Lord Black hadn’t told Lord Denbury that the scientists and doctors stationed at Rosecrest, the Denbury estate, had recently gone missing, along with the security chief assigned to them. If the cable he’d received from a contact in America was to be believed, the Americans weren’t having a good time of it either. He had to wonder if the incidents were related, somehow. Impossible as that seemed.

He turned as a rustle of skirts heralded the formidable presence coming his way.

“Ah, Your Majesty.” Lord Black bowed low to the diminutive sovereign. Her stern face with its round cheeks was framed in white lace while the rest of her was engulfed in black taffeta, dripping beads of Whitby jet. “Spire has been cleared.”

#  #  #

Spire waited, not entirely patiently, for several minutes before Lord Black opened the door and gestured for him to leave the tiny, plain room. Eager to bring the handsome, slender, fine-featured blonde up to date, Spire began, “Tourney, Lord Black—it’s done. But what I found—”

Black held up a hand. His tense smile flexed the scar that ran from above his right eyebrow down into his cheek. Spire often wondered about the origin of that scar, but never asked. “Good work, Spire. The queen awaits you. But first…”

The sour-faced footman stepped up with a black suit coat in hand. “You look as though you’ve traversed every layer of Dante’s inferno,” the man said.

“Oh, just come right out and say I look like hell,” Spire muttered, staring at Lord Black. “I saw hell. It’s worse than anything you could have imagined.”

The footman grabbed his sooty coat and slid it off his arms, then muscled on the fresh jacket though it in no way fit. Spire feared he’d split the seams with the least shift of his shoulders, which were far too broad for the fine fabric. The too-short sleeves didn’t entirely hide the patch of blood on his shirt cuff. Shuddering at the memory of where he’d acquired the stain, Spire tried to tuck it out of sight. Black nodded Spire toward the receiving room.

He was shown in wordlessly; the door closed quietly behind him.

The surreality of Harold Spire’s day was heightened by the lavish setting of Buckingham Palace, worlds away from his life and laughable when compared to the horror of his morning duties. He’d passed around the outside of the building during parades and once had visited the main foyer, but never before had he gained entrance to one of the receiving rooms. It was full of things; lacquered things, mirrored and crystalline things, tasseled and brocaded things. Strains of music wafted into the tall, bright room, perhaps from a ballroom: a string quartet playing Bach. Spire preferred dark-paneled rooms filled with books. And good whiskey. And Chopin. And a coat that fit.

“Your Highness,” Spire said, paying due deference to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, who stood facing away from him, hand upon the crest of a large armchair, turned toward a tall window with lace curtains partly drawn. Spire stepped forward, noticing that the marble-topped writing desk beside the queen was covered with maps of New York City and schematics for an ocean liner. A telegraph machine sat silent on the desktop, gleaming in the sunlight.

“Mr. Spire,” she began without turning to look at him, speaking in a grand way that left no room for interruption, “I have called you here to give you an appointment. You rose quickly through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police. I’ve been assured you are fair and just, keen to recognize patterns and aberrations that catch criminals, swift and smooth with your decisions. But perhaps too quick to spy.”

Spire felt heat rise in his face; he glanced into the golden-framed mirror on the wall next to him and saw his fair skin had colored all the way up to the roots of his light brown hair.

“I was afraid that’s what this was about. Please, your Highness, I’ve personally apologized to the prime minister and to Miss Everhart. A cloaked female utilizing secret passages within a subsection of Parliament does seem suspicious, surely—” He hoped he didn’t sound whiny.

“As you know, that was to hide the fact that the P.M. had employed a lady as his chief bookkeeper. Imagine the outcry. But this isn’t about the prime minister or his employees. You come highly recommended by Lord Black.” She turned around at last. Her eyes were shrouded by dark lenses connected by a curving filigree bridge. He must have looked quizzical, because she paused and said, “Lenses cut from a scrying glass, in hopes I’ll see the dead.”

When Spire simply nodded, the queen cocked her head. “Not him, necessarily,” she scoffed. “I know what you’re thinking.”

That the queen still dressed in mourning for her husband, Prince Albert, many years deceased, and entertained all sorts of ideas of how to contact him—not to mention sleeping beside a picture of him and placing out his fresh clothes each day—had become a quiet joke in the realm.

“What am I thinking, Your Majesty?” Spire asked innocently.

“Oh, come now”—she batted her hand in irritation—“it’s as if you all think I go about dragging his coffin behind me everywhere I go.”

“I thought I saw parallel scratches on the wooden floor,” Spire said, gesturing down the hall. “That explains it.” He smiled.

The queen tried to scowl but instead coughed a laugh. She removed her glasses, piercing him with a stare. The short, plump-cheeked woman was downright disconcerting when she deployed her steely gaze. She was Empress, after all.

“What is wrong with you, Mr. Spire? You look dreadful and you need a better tailor.”

“I came direct from a crime scene, Your Majesty, my apologies. I thought your gentleman explained—”

“Ah, yes, yes, Tourney and the resurrectionist ring. Tell me, how large of an operation do you deem it?”

“Between the financial speculation and the body snatching, I imagine it may be a wide net. The ledger we found will condemn the ring, though there was a…” He trailed off, unsure how much of the dreadful scene to speak of. The Queen simply stared at him expectantly. At last he swallowed back a wave of sour saliva and continued, “A peculiar crest was discovered.… Well, it all had a ring of … ritual to it, Your Majesty.”

The queen snapped her head to the side and it was only then that Spire noticed Black had slipped into the room behind him. “Ascertain that crest,” she snarled. “If it remains from Moriel’s tenure, I want them all to hang.” Lord Black nodded reassuringly. Spire was pleased the queen was taking the matter as seriously as she should.

“Mr. Spire,” the queen said, “I am about to tell you a state secret known only to a few. The Eterna Compound was first sought in America after the assassination of President Lincoln. A bold idea, born of grief. I well understand Mrs. Lincoln’s woes. A small team of theorists made no progress in their research until two years ago. But now there is a fresh impasse. As I have full faith in my realm, I believe we can fix the Americans’ mistakes and make the compound viable.”

“May I ask what the Eterna Compound is, Your Majesty?”

“A cure for death. A drug that confers immortality. I’ve had a team compiling information and studying the idea for years.”

Spire kept his face unreadable, his skepticism hidden. “And do we? Have the cure for death?”

The queen shook her head. “Our plant within the operation has not reported as scheduled. We hope to retrieve information and material from New York; material that you, Mr. Spire, will safeguard. Other Special Branches of investigation and prosecution will counter various political threats. Your division, Omega, will counter the greatest threat of all: a nation that could make its leader immortal. We cannot allow America to gain the upper hand in immortality. I empathize with Mrs. Lincoln but have no desire to confront an utterly impervious American president.”

Lord Black stepped forward and spoke carefully. “The British operation is … paused. Our facility was recently compromised. You will safeguard fresh intelligence and a new team, in offices that are presently being prepared. You must focus on life and death in a whole new way, Mr. Spire. All other matters of mundane police work must be cast off to the fellows you leave behind at the Metropolitan Police.”

Spire reeled. This appointment was a nightmare. The queen had the wrong man. Spire didn’t believe a word of any of this. A cure for death? How could he manage an operation he couldn’t take seriously? He broached the only comfort he could cling to, the resolution of the horror he’d faced.

“But today’s findings were hardly mundane; the work not of mere Burkes and Hares but something even more insidious.…” Panic threatened to overtake him as the images rose in his mind.

Lord Black stepped close and flashed Spire a look of warning as he poured whiskey from a crystal decanter into a pair of matching snifters. “Material and information will arrive from New York,” Black said smoothly as he handed Spire a glass, “and your focus must be upon it, Mr. Spire. I will personally see to it that the Metropolitan follows every Tourney lead.” From the flash of fury in the man’s eyes, Spire knew Black meant what he said and recalled it was Black himself who had obtained the ledger Miss Everhart had given him. More than he’d ever have expected of an aristocrat in the House of Lords.

Spire fought the urge to drain the snifter as the queen delicately lifted a cup and saucer of tea. Then she stung him.

“That you have suffered grave loss and then been betrayed by love, and in such a way as to cost state secrets may be something a man might be ashamed of,” the queen began, “but I look upon it as a gift. Your cautious care, a healthy ability to second-guess, a lack of trust, this will all be very valuable. Trust no one. Not at first.”

Spire swallowed hard. The queen had most certainly read up on him. His mother’s death had been a bit of a media circus at the time, and his father had done nothing to calm the frothing “journalists.” Then, Alice. He’d been too naive to have imagined that an officer like him, assigned at that time around the Houses of Parliament and surrounding neighborhoods, would have been of interest to French agents. He’d never dreamed they’d employ a lady—and Alice Helms, now Madame Lourie, had easily taken advantage of him. He had been a fool and women were a source of woe.

“And so I look at the whole of your history and see the sort of solid man I can depend on, one who has been scarred in all the right places. One must build up scars in war. And we are engaged in a most unusual war here, Mr. Spire. I need you scarred. Sane. And unafraid.”

Spire nodded.

“As we speak, all your belongings are being transferred to rooms in Westminster; Rochester Street, lovely accommodations unregistered and unlisted, a vast improvement from your current subsistence,” the queen continued casually. “Bertram will give you the keys. You will share your address only with the most trusted members of your assigned team, and only once you have ascertained their loyalty.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Spire bristled but managed to keep his tone level. He was a private man. That persons had been in his home and uprooted his possessions made him clench his fists.

“Lord Black will see to your new offices. Tell your Metropolitan fellows nothing save that you’ve been transferred. You’ll liaise further with a contact at the British Museum.”

“With all due respect, Your Majesty,” Spire offered quietly, “I cannot in good faith abandon the Tourney case.”

“I insist that you do,” she replied stridently.

Spire swallowed hard. He would not disobey the queen. Not to her face. Instead he changed the subject.

“Your Majesty, I’m sorry, I have to ask, considering the bent of this commission … Did my father put you up to this?”

The queen arched a brow. She was not amused. “Victor Spire?” She scoffed. “Author of penny dreadfuls, Gothic novels, and sensationalist plays? Have audience with Her Majesty the Queen?”

“Ah, no, of course not. Forgive me for bringing him up,” Spire said, mustering sincerity, biting back the urge to say that he knew firsthand she had secretly attended his father’s latest show; after all, his men had seen to her protection. “But a race for immortality. It sounds like something he’d serialize in Dickens’ magazine.”

The regent stiffened. “Dare you imply, Mr. Spire, that this position is not to be taken seriously?”

“Of course not, Your Majesty, pardon me,” Spire said, bowing his head. “Unlike my father, I have retained appreciation only for the concrete, tactile, apprehendable, and solvable.”

“Apply those very principles going forward, Mr. Spire.” The queen clapped her hands once. Her serious, jowled face grew even more intense. “Tell your father his last novel was dreadful.”

“You read it, Your Majesty?”

“Every word,” she said with exaggerated disdain. “Truly dreadful stuff.”

“Agreed, Your Majesty.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Spire. Good luck and do good work.”

Spire bowed his head as the regent swept away amid the clicking of beads and the swishing of silk. The sour-faced footman showed him out a different door, first retrieving the excellent, though too small, coat and, with a curled lip, handing over Spire’s soot-stained jacket as well as a brass key with a number on the fob.

Stuffing the key to a whole new existence into the pocket of his long, black, velvet-trimmed, fitted coat, Spire couldn’t deny he was curious. He could go examine the place, test the walls, see if they’d granted him hidden compartments and revolving bookcases. Hopefully there was a wine cellar.

To leaven his darkening mood Spire lost himself as he loved to do: in the smoky, sooty, horse-befouled, hustling chaos of London proper, reveling in the onslaught of sensory input that drowned out all concerns, doubts, and anxiety. The crashing, audible waves of London always trumped the drumming of the mind; the roaring aorta churning the very heart of the world won out every time over one’s own racing pulse. He let the chaos of London in like a man might smoke an opium pipe, allowing the high to carry him about the city on a cloud of stimuli.

Spire trailed a nervous man in a brown greatcoat for two miles simply for the sake of proving he could do so unnoticed. He chose his subject after overhearing him lie to a pretty girl leaning out the window of a brougham—narrowing in on one conversation out of the melee, it was as though Spire could hear a single, subtle line of dissonance in a rollicking symphony. The young man sent the blushing, giggling girl off, saying he was going west. Instead he took off east, stuffing his hands in his pockets, a sheen of moisture over his lip.

It wasn’t that Spire assumed everyone was guilty of something, but years of honing perceptions, translating body language, reading movement and expression, ascertaining habits, casting judgments, all made him suspicious of nearly everyone at first glance. Trust no one, the queen had said. Spire had abided by that edict for years, ever since Alice … Since her, he hardly trusted himself.

Now he was being entrusted with state secrets coming from the highest channels. Ridiculous ones at that. Should he have said outright that he didn’t believe in the supernatural? Skepticism had its uses. If the queen needed him to be a believer, she should have asked him.

That the man in the brown coat went into a jewelry shop and came out with an engagement ring—Spire had leaned against the shop window on Farringdon Road to eavesdrop upon the conversation with the clerk—filled him with a certain joy. He loved to be proven wrong. It didn’t happen often enough. And if he didn’t treasure those instances when the brighter side of humanity showed its face, he’d have to throw himself in the Thames.

He doubted the sights of that basement would ever leave his thoughts, and offered something of a prayer upward, toward an entity he regarded with as much skepticism as he did anything outside his own mind and body, hoping something about his new appointment might make for the ability to seek out further answers. For what could drive creatures to do such horrific things if they were not possessed, maddened, by the intrigue of life and death?

Regardless of motive or madness, to the point of risking treason, he’d hardly abandon the case.

 

CHAPTER TWO

New York City, 1882

The tumult of New York harbor was deafening. There was confusion, concern, even panic on the docks at the tip of Manhattan Island. Ahead of Clara, as she looked out past schooners and ferry boats, lay the first tier of the pedestal that would eventually host Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty … if New York could ever pay for her. Clara thought with a profound sadness that perhaps Liberty would never lift her lamp high over the water, not if all those warships meant anything.

A fleet of Britain’s warships, the Union Jack flying high and proud upon every mast: the world’s greatest navy, amassing at the tip of America’s greatest city. A dread chill coursed through Clara’s veins and she clutched her shawl tighter around her neck.

England would make America theirs after all. A colony it simply could not let go.

The act of a monarchy that could never die.

Never die.

“Wake up!”

Clara’s eyes shot open as she bolted upright. The ruffles of her nightdress, which she’d bunched up around her neck during her nightmare, fell back down in a splay of fine layered lace.

Given the words that had roused her, Clara Templeton expected the visitor to be sitting at the foot of the wide bed she had once hoped to share with Louis Dupris. But the visionary young chemist and theorist had died yesterday, and the voice was not the visitor’s but a renewed urging from beyond. More was being asked of her than mere living.

She had returned from the park to the Pearl Street town house she shared with her guardian, Senator Rupert Bishop. Having written a note stating her instinctual certainty that something terrible had happened to the team, Clara slid the sheet of paper under the door of Bishop’s study and locked herself in her room. She’d have ignored his orders that she never visit the laboratory site if she’d thought anything could’ve been done. But the visitor had confirmed her instincts. Whatever the disaster—a fire, an explosion, an unexpected reaction of any kind—she prayed they had not suffered.

The senator kept late hours and traveled often, his schedule changing on a dime, so despite her best efforts to know his calendar, Clara wasn’t sure when he’d see her note. But as the secrecy of the commission couldn’t be broached by sending policemen to the laboratory, she needed him to decide on their next steps.

Sunlight streamed in through the exquisite craftsmanship of the Tiffany glass window of Clara’s bedroom, through glowing, textured milky magnolia petals that cast pale yellowish spots upon her white satin bedclothes. Turning to one side, Clara stared into the mirror of her rosewood vanity, meeting her own terrified gaze. Waves of dark-blond hair framed her oval face in a wild mane. With wide eyes that were more eerily golden than they were green, and her mouth open, she looked like a mad Pre-Raphaelite painting, Ophelia just before the drowning.

In her hand, a saffron-colored strip of fabric.

A fine silk cravat.

Louis Dupris had left it behind after one of their harried tumbles of lips and hands and she’d been too fond of him to return it, instead secreting it away in a compartment of her jewelry box. The amulet he had bequeathed to her and this cravat was all she had of him; she’d fallen restlessly asleep clutching it.

She rose and went to her wardrobe to begin the feminine ritual of donning innumerable layers. She opened her bedroom door for a moment to listen for sounds from elsewhere in the house, but all was silent. That was for the best, lest she spill everything to the senator in one look.

Rupert Bishop gave her everything she needed; he was her mentor and her joy. He’d taught her everything she knew and remained her spiritual counselor. Her relationship with him was complicated and nearly impossible to describe. Once he might have been her Great Love. Epic, sweeping, and all-consuming. But was that this life? She doubted so. Once she’d asked him if he felt whole.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” he’d mused. “This life is full of fragments. We’re all torn apart.”

It was not an answer, but it told her enough: she was not what he was missing. She buried her feelings. “Do you feel whole, then?” he asked her in turn.

She shook her head. But until she understood the exact shape of the puzzle-piece holes within, she did not dare pinpoint exactly what might fill them. With Rupert she had to take immaculate care. When all her school and society friends abandoned her at age thirteen, when her seizures started—none wanted to be seen or associated with such an unfortunate—Rupert was all she had. She dared not do a single thing to jeopardize that. Even calling him Rupert often felt too familiar, an intimacy she relished but one that frightened her. And so, as everyone else called him either Bishop or Senator, so did Clara, pressing love for him so deep into the recesses of her heart that it had fossilized.

Who did the visitor mean by her “missing link?”

Clara had toyed once with channeling some of her overwhelming sentiment into something productive. A novel. A memoir. She still felt with that ardor that, at twelve years of age, had had her blurting impossible things to powerful people. But when she tried to put her thoughts into words, the result was unwieldy and read like the scribblings of a naive schoolgirl. No reader would believe the intensity of her feelings; none would understand that she was a soul with every nerve ending accessible. Perhaps in childhood, all souls were similarly exposed. But grown persons were calloused; keeping a fragile heart was physically and psychically dangerous. The bounds of human flesh were finite. After all, when dead, the heart was mere flesh. Clara’s material world was small, but her spirit was as vast as the sky.

So Clara did not write. Instead, she went to work. Good, honest, busy work; the salve to both emotional deficits and oversensitivities.

In the Pearl Street offices she balanced the books on the Eterna teams’ expenses, ensuring fresh supplies of basic chemicals and minerals, the most modern medical manuals and textbooks of interest, with a budget left over for items of “spiritual” interest.

When it came to matters “paranormal,” she was more directly involved. She interviewed those who reported strange phenomena, then filed the results at the office. She and Senator Bishop kept an eye on theatrical psychics and other spiritualist charlatans, warning them when they went too far in taking advantage of the grieving or bored.

Clara occasionally accompanied the senator on campaigns. She volunteered for New York City’s ASPCA, a cause the Templeton clan had long championed as friends of the organization’s inimitable founder, Henry Bergh. She visited her parents’ mausoleum in gorgeous Greenwood weekly, taking the trolley to the Gothic gates and passing the day in lavishly carved stone shade. What company could be more beautiful than those stone angels? She kept herself occupied. She needed no lovers or close friends.

Until Louis Dupris came along as the capstone to the Eterna research team and upended her entire, prematurely spinsterish, calcified universe.

They had met at a soiree at the infamous Vanderbilt mansion. The details were emblazoned in her memory. She had stepped into a shadowy alcove, deliberately out of Bishop’s line of sight, when suddenly an exceedingly handsome, olive-skinned man in a fitted black suit blocked her path.

Clara took a moment to psychically evaluate him and determined she was in no physical danger. His piercing hazel eyes bored into her with thrilling intensity. “You’re in my way, sir,” she said quietly.

“So I am. I’ve been instructed not to introduce myself,” the man began, in a rich, deep voice. “And while I do value my new job as my life, that life would be forfeit if I did not at least tell you that you are, by far, the most interesting creature in this entire room, if not this entire city. Save, perhaps, your guardian, my employer, who insisted you were quite off-limits. This would make any woman all the more fascinating were you not so utterly time-stopping on your own. I understand now why the senator is so protective of you.”

Clara laughed. “Did my dear Bishop employ you merely for flattery?”

“No, my lady, he employed me for theory and faith. How I might apply spiritual concepts and principles into the quest of immortality as pursued by your department.”

“Ah, you’re one of ours!” she commented brightly. “You’re new. Where do you hail from? Your accent is distinct.”

“New Orleans, my lady, a distinct city indeed.” He bowed. “Louis Dupris, at your service, Miss Templeton. I hope my overtures do not offend. It may be that I never speak with you again, as I value my work and the senator deeply. But there are times when a man must speak or forever regret the chance, and you evoke that prescient timeliness.”

She cocked her head to the side gamesomely, the plumes of her fascinator rustling. “You should come to call, Mr. Dupris.”

“I couldn’t … I can’t.”

“But you should,” she insisted sweetly. He looked uncomfortable. She chuckled. “In secret, then, if you’re so worried about the senator’s wrath.” She batted her silk-gloved hand. “Come stroll with me on Tuesday, through the Greek and Roman relics at our glorious Metropolitan Museum. At two. Tell me about spiritual disciplines I know little of.”

And then she’d had a seizure. Right in middle of the Vanderbilts’ home.

Whenever too many ghostly voices or psychic phenomena pressed in upon her at once, Clara had an “episode.” Generally her body gave her an aura of warning and she would exit a place before any damage was done. Distracted by the party, by Louis, by all the glamour and finery, she’d missed the telltale signs. She hadn’t had a “fit” in years and was more mortified than ever by the condition she’d been fighting since the age of thirteen. While she knew she had nothing to be ashamed of, the world wasn’t so generous. Especially not at a Vanderbilt party.

Bishop had taken her home immediately and Clara had assumed she had seen the last of Louis Dupris. That she had gone to the museum on Tuesday spoke of her essentially optimistic nature—and her fondness for the museum’s marble halls.

To her great surprise, Mr. Dupris was entirely undeterred by her ignominious departure from the Vanderbilts’. He met her at the museum at the appointed time, and at every place and time they could find after that. Happily, the great city abounded with secluded spaces. Cemeteries became their collective haunt as they mused on life and death. Clara sensed that her soul and Louis’s had gone round together at least once in the past. He hadn’t betrayed or brutalized her then, so why not indulge the blossoming bond in this life?

Louis found her seizures, the aura she saw, the way her senses abandoned her and returned in pieces, entirely fascinating. His acceptance won her trust. He taught her how to block out the spiritual press, lessons born from his own studies of spiritual and theological matters. She had, after his tutelage, been fit-free for two years.

He was her visionary, insatiably curious and confidently ambitious. No matter what other matters called to his attention, he remained enthralled with Clara, and she with him. Now he was dead and she had no way to quantify the grief she felt, no way to show it, for she and Louis Dupris had never even met, as far as the outside world was concerned.

She would have to, she realized, live her current life denied of many things. Her heart hardened. It had to. While she knew, as a spiritualist, that the spirit lived on, death had made her cold. She thought of Greenwood’s stone angels and wanted to become one of them.

The Eterna team was dead. Did anyone know, other than Clara?

She tucked the saffron cravat into her corset, against her bosom, and set off to be the center of the presaged storm.

#  #  #

“It was as I feared,” said Louis Dupris as he trailed his brother Andre through downtown Manhattan at the crack of dawn, floating a foot off the ground.

Andre tore down Broadway, surely appearing mad talking to thin air; thin, cold air in the shape of his twin.… He shuddered. He could not begin to process the horror he’d seen.

“Don’t tell me you predicted that hell that took you?” Andre growled at the ghost, a gray-shaded, near-transparent image of his brother. “Your whole team? I can’t begin to understand—”

Something was in that house. We were not alone. But what it was, or why our compounds made it come alive, I can’t understand. Perhaps, in death,” Louis continued excitedly, “I can learn more! Perhaps here I can do more good, in this state—”

“I’d rather you were alive,” Andre said mordantly. “That we’d traded places.”

“Don’t say that, brother,” Louis exclaimed earnestly.

Perhaps Louis would have agreed to the switch if he knew the whole truth; that for many months, Andre had been spying on Eterna on behalf of England.

“Perhaps your partner Malachi’s rabid paranoia was founded,” Andre muttered. “You’re right, you were not alone there. You were certainly being watched, and not only by me.”

In a fit of overwhelming paranoia, one of the researchers had ordered the Eterna theorists to move their laboratory into his eerily empty town house. They humored him to keep a fragile peace. Louis had Andre store his most precious notes and research in another location, trust swiftly eroding between the once-filial team. Disaster struck the very next day.

Andre would never be able to purge the memories of the Eterna researchers falling to the floor, suffocated by strange, creeping tendrils of smoke, by a presence that Andre didn’t wait around to experience for himself. No, Andre did what he’d always done as the black sheep no one spoke about—he ran. But lest he go to his own grave an utter coward, he would do his best to help his brother find peace.

“Today we begin to set things right,” Andre declared, brandishing a small envelope. He moved at a harried clip that was not unusual for New York, though his anxiety trumped the speed of the average pedestrian out at such an early hour. “I’ll turn this over, then return that damned dagger you stole to New Orleans, praying to all your mystères for protection along the way.”

“Don’t mock the mystères, brother,” Louis scolded.

“I’ll believe in them if they protect me against one very angry woman,” Andre retorted. “Of all the people you crossed coming to New York, it had to be a Laveau protégée? Bon dieu! I suppose it’s only fitting penance I be the one to see this through.”

“You’re not the irredeemable sinner you think, Andre—”

“But I am!” Andre insisted in a coarse whisper. “I lied to you, Louis! I wasn’t interested in Eterna because of you, but for my own interests. You gave me secret refuge and I squandered it. Trust me, I’ve a lot to answer for. Slates must be cleaned. Yours and mine. But someone should know what happened to you, Louis,” Andre stated. “Your sweetheart, perhaps? You adored her, that woman deserves answers—”

“Keep Clara out of it,” Louis warned, an icy whisper in Andre’s ear, “with her condition, I shouldn’t—”

“I’ll leave the key. If they’re as clever as you say, they can figure out what it belongs to without incriminating me. And then I’ll be on my way home, none the wiser for my presence.”

Louis’s anxiety was unassuaged. “You hid my papers as I asked, didn’t you?”

“I left what you gave me at the college,” Andre assured. Whether or not he’d be telling his employers about the materials or the disaster, he had yet to decide. He wanted to wash his hands of all of it, be done with spying. But survival first. Strategy second.

Andre stared up at the Romanesque edifice, dark and looming in the early light. Louis’s presence was a cold draft at his neck. The living man shifted the envelope from one hand to the other, considering his task. The door was locked. Andre flipped back the thick cuff of his sleeve to reveal several thin metal implements. In mere moments the lock had been picked and the door swung wide.

“Do I want to know where you learned that?” spectral Louis murmured.

“The bad egg survives,” Andre muttered.

Charging up to the third floor, Andre threw wide a wooden door to reveal a long dark room whose decor looked more a lady’s parlor than an office. Depositing the envelope conspicuously in an empty tray, he sped out again. “Onward toward resolution,” he rallied. “And vanishing from the record.”

He darted out onto Pearl Street, tipped a wide-brimmed hat lower over his brow and turned back to see Louis floating in front of the building, his grayscale form immeasurably eerie in the misty, waterfront dawn. After a moment, he wafted to Andre’s side.

“There’s so much Clara and I should have shared,” Louis murmured.

Andre shifted on his feet. “You never told her about me, did you?”

“No,” Louis insisted. “You came to me in trouble. I never told her I had a twin or betrayed your confidence.”

“And I never deserved a brother so good, loyal, and true,” Andre said bitterly, for the first time feeling tears well up. He wouldn’t tell England another word, he decided.

In the tumultuous, heaving throng, the sheer, maddening bustle that was New York Harbor, Andre made his way through a deep maze of wood and steel, planks, ropes, and sail. One small leather pack slung over his back, a precious ceremonial dagger well-hidden on his person, he wove swiftly to the docks. Louis floating beside him, traveling right through anyone in his way … persons who would think him nothing but a breath of cool breeze.

Despite Andre’s speed and twisting path, he noticed that a particular face was never far from him in the throng. Even crowded onto the ship that should have carried him safely away, his desire to vanish was thwarted. The follower spoke to the captain in a soft, upper-class British accent. And stared right at Andre where he stood among the massed humanity on deck.

“Damn you, Lord Black, and your spies,” Andre muttered. “Damn you all to hell.”

#  #  #

Franklin Fordham lived alone in the stately, Federal-style Brooklyn Heights house the rest of his family had abandoned after his brother’s death in the war, his mother having found it impossible not to be haunted by the place. Franklin bore his own suffering like a pebble in his shoe that he never removed. His brother was dead and Franklin hadn’t been there, fighting at his side, due to a bad leg. Living in the home they had once shared was a form of penance.

At a sharp rap, he opened the town house door to a most lovely, welcome sight.

There, framed by dappled sunlight filtering through the growing trees behind her, beneath a rose lace parasol, was the woman who had once cut through darkness and saved Franklin’s mind, like an angel descending through storm clouds.

Clara Templeton was dressed beguilingly as ever, today all in burgundy; a black-buttoned jacket with fitted sleeves over gathered, doubled skirts, a small black riding hat with a burgundy ribbon set at a jaunty angle on her head. Despite her broad shoulders, she was slight in girth, yet Franklin knew she was capable of great strength. As he looked at a face more suited to a classic painting of an infamous woman from history than to this era’s praised softness, he noted that she seemed unusually drawn. The oft-mischievous slant of her pursed lips seemed strained and her luminous green-gold eyes were hidden behind small, tinted glasses.

Not for the first time, Franklin thought that Clara was a magical creature. It wasn’t that she was beautiful, though an argument could be made for her unusual beauty, it was that she was lit from within by an indomitable fire, both terrifying and wonderful.

“Miss Templeton,” he greeted her with a smile. “To what do I owe this pleasure on a day off?”

“They’re dead, Franklin,” she said quietly, each word like the faraway toll of a bell. “The whole team is dead.”

Franklin stared at her. “What? How? How do you know?”

“I simply know that they are gone,” she continued in a deadened tone. “And this morning I had a dream that in the near future the English would invade.”

“Well then,” Franklin said, turning to the wardrobe by the door to withdraw a lightweight brown frock coat, hat, gloves, and an eagle-topped walking stick. Clara’s dreams and instincts were serious business he’d learned not to trifle with.

When he was properly attired and had exited the house, she took his proffered arm; he noticed she leaned upon it more than usual.

“We must do whatever we can not to embolden them, as their Empire seeks ever to expand,” Clara declared.

“And what would so embolden Her Majesty Queen Victoria as to take on such an ally in trade, finance, goods, and culture?” Franklin asked. “We’ve never had so cordial a relationship.”

“If she thought she could live forever,” Clara muttered.

“Aye.” Franklin sighed. “That’s the crux. Eterna is … eternal.”

“Perhaps,” Clara murmured.

Franklin wished he understood the pain in her voice. Though she undoubtedly would mourn the death of any person, she didn’t know the Eterna researchers personally. Why then, was her grief so apparent?

“I don’t suppose you’ve your office key?” she asked. “I’m a bit … distracted.” Franklin fished in his pocket, making a jingling sound. Clara offered a weak smile. “Always prepared,” she said approvingly. “I adore that about you.”

Franklin contemplated myriad things he could have replied, but said none. They set off down the picturesque, cobblestone street where young trees, planted within the past few years, were flourishing and fine new town houses were being built. The residents proudly loved their separate city of Brooklyn. When they looked across the water at behemoth, monstrous Manhattan, many thanked their stars for their few blocks of haven.

Clara and Franklin strolled toward the Fulton Ferry landing, beside the vast stone trunks of the nearly completed Brooklyn Bridge. Its Gothic arches towered in the sky—it was the tallest man-made structure on this side of the world, its spiderweb of cables catching dreams and hearts and possibilities in its wire-bound frame. The bridge was scheduled to open next year, on Queen Victoria’s birthday, funnily enough—to the chagrin of those countless Irish laborers who built it. The structure would unite two thriving cities with distinctly different identities but perhaps similar obsessions.

The skyline of Manhattan was growing like a brick-and-mortar weed, ever vertically, ever uptown, like a sprawling cobblestone flower over which thousands of ship insects docked and buzzed, dipping into its jagged petals and sailing off again along the choppy harbor currents.

Clara broke the silence. “It’s my fault they died.”

Franklin shook his head. “You can’t think like that.”

“I’ve been trying to convince myself that the government, if it wanted to safeguard its leaders, would have come to this eventually. But Eterna was my idea. I am responsible, at least in part. The child in me wants to hide. But if I do, we may find things stolen out from under us.”

They boarded the steam ferry, jostling for a place near the captain’s cabin so they wouldn’t be pressed shoulder to shoulder. Franklin didn’t like to be by the edge and wasn’t terribly fond of ships. Clara stared down at the churning East River currents while Franklin looked at the masts of passing ships that cluttered one of the world’s busiest harbors.

“Miss Templeton,” he began carefully, about to pose the age-old question she wouldn’t answer. “Will you tell me?”

Her nostrils flared. “Really?” she said through clenched teeth. “Now, Franklin?”

“You promised that when it was truly important, you’d tell me how you found me in that mental ward years ago. The team is dead and I don’t understand,” Franklin insisted. “All the research we’ve compiled and still, little to nothing makes sense, I’m at a breaking point—”

“What I know of you won’t solve life’s confusion,” she countered bitterly, “and the team will still be dead!”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you how you found me,” Franklin murmured, tapping his walking stick nervously on the wooden deck, “but it matters to me.”

“Of course it matters how I find the important people in my life!” Clara snapped. She sighed, lowering her voice when ferry passengers in plumes, ribbons, and top hats turned toward her agitated tone. “But often telling them kills something inside me, some mystery I’ve kept alive.”

“You like the mystery,” Franklin argued. “I don’t.”

The haunted look bloomed on her face again; Franklin hated seeing it, for it made her seem a thousand years old. She had an air of gravity far beyond her years, much like her guardian the senator; it unnerved him when displayed so plainly.

“You’ll learn to enjoy mystery one day, Franklin,” Clara murmured. “Treasure it, even. When there’s mystery, you might still be wrong. I’ve been right about too many sad things.”

“Your mysteries changed my life for the better and I yearn to know why,” he pleaded. “Out of all the people who need help in this world, why me?”

“You still feel you don’t deserve it,” Clara said sadly. “Because of your brother.”

Franklin looked away and shrugged. “I doubt Ed would’ve wanted me to feel guilty.”

Clara looked around her with a heavy sigh. “And on a ship, no less,” she muttered, and took a deep breath. “There’s a recurring dream where you’re always in a storm, on a ship, dangling from a rope, and you’re afraid no one can hear you screaming?”

Franklin’s eyes widened. “Yes, how did you—”

“Think for a moment about the ship. Do you remember a flag?”

“Yes. White,” Franklin said excitedly. “With yellow. A crest. Yellow fleur-de-lis?”

“The standard of the King of France.” Clara stared at him and he could feel her piercing gaze even from behind tinted glass. “You were the bosun on that ship and I was your captain. I heard you against the horrid gale; I hoisted you back on deck and you were suitably grateful.”

Franklin stared at her; as always, she spoke in an unflinching way about a previous life. She hadn’t shared many of them, but the ones she had, Franklin didn’t dare question, though he wondered how she could recall details he was unaware of.

“I sometimes visited with Mrs. Lincoln, after Eterna was underway,” Clara continued, “and she would ask for news around the country, of those still grieving their dead, of fellow broken souls. Her soul and mind were so wounded, commiseration made her feel more whole. A servant brought in your picture, with a letter explaining how your mind had been wrecked by the loss of your brother in the war. I recognized your picture, because that recurring dream haunted me, too. When I saw your image, I knew that I had kept that dream so that I’d remember to find you in this life.”

“And again rescue me from a storm,” Franklin murmured mournfully. “This time a storm of my mind. I wish I wasn’t the one who always needed saving.” The ferry docked and passengers began spreading like ink onto the shore and up into the veins of narrow, curving Manhattan streets. They followed the current. “Maybe I can save you someday.”

“Maybe that’s what this life is for!” Clara said with a hollow laugh, hoisting up her skirts and jumping from the deck onto the dock, never letting feminine finery get in the way of an active spirit no matter how much the fashion of the age tried to limit her sex. He stared after her for a moment, then took a few quick strides, limping slightly on his bad leg, to catch up with her.

“If you’ll let anyone,” he said as they turned onto Pearl Street.

“Beg your pardon?” Clara said, climbing the brownstone stoop of their building.

“If you’ll let anyone save you. I’ve never met a more independent soul in all my life, Miss Templeton. It’s like you don’t need family, friends, a lover—” Franklin fell silent as Clara scowled at him, snatching the keys from his hand and opening the door, blowing past the first two floors where the Manhattan County Clerk kept records.

Franklin in her wake, she stormed upstairs and threw wide the double doors to her offices. She froze on the threshold. The wide, long office, which might heretofore have been mistaken for a hoarder’s den or art museum vault, was very clean.

Tall, sturdy wooden file cabinets now stood between her beloved floor lamps of cutting-edge Tiffany studios provenance, their stained-glass domes lighting controversial Pre-Raphaelite-style paintings upon maroon-painted walls above dark mahogany paneling. Metal sorting trays sat upon the three hefty wooden desks in the room, their plain rectangularity a sharp contrast with the curves of the lily pad and peacock-feather desk lamps; more Tiffany.

“Franklin…” Clara began, with a rising pitch to her voice as if panic were barely being held at bay. “An eclectic, lived-in, meaningful office makes me feel safe and protected. How can I find anything with everything put away?”

“I organized,” Franklin assured her. “Nothing’s gone, merely sorted. You know what mess does to me. I assure you everything is safe. Safer than it was when your towers of paperwork leaned perilously close to the flames of your beloved stained-glass gas lamps. The whole place could’ve gone up in a minute.”

“Where are my window talismans?” she said slowly, stepping into the room and gesturing to the clean, empty panes of her curving bay window where pendants, amulets, gems, crystals, dream catchers, and leaded-glass icons had all floated behind her wide leather desk chair. “I told you not to touch them. They are of extreme spiritual importance and are there because of my … condition.”

“They were collecting considerable dust,” he replied gently, as if afraid to wake a dragon. “And several of them fell, all at once. We can put them back up,” he said reassuringly.

“When?” Her voice had grown even more shrill. “When did they fall?”

“Yesterday,” Franklin answered quietly, aware of the significance of his answer.

“When the team died…” she said with a choking hitch in her voice. “Perhaps it’s best, then, that this place is clean.”

Her frown deepened as she went to her desk, a great carved rosewood beast at the center of the office. Behind her was the bay window in which she often curled up to take a nap, or read, or simply stare down at Pearl Street; Franklin wondering all the while what was going on in that uncharted mind of hers.

Fishing in a small beaded reticule hanging from a ribbon at her waist, her gloved fingers plucked out a small silver key. Unlocking her center desk drawer, she withdrew a file and set it on her blotter. Her gaze, still hidden behind the small tinted frames, fell upon something further inside and Franklin had the sudden impression of an arrested engine.

Slowly, she sank into the high-backed, thronelike leather chair. A shaking hand pulled out a small, white bit of paper as her shoulders hunched forward, curving slightly over the open drawer, unable to contract more than her corset would allow. She held the folded paper, hands pressed as if in prayer, brought her steepled fingers to her lips, and bowed her head.

“Pardon me, Miss Templeton,” Franklin murmured in the strained silence, desperate to say something. “What I said before was too bold, about your life, I don’t—”

“Know what’s gotten into the polite, soft-spoken partner I once knew?” she retorted sharply. “I don’t either. Please go find that man and return him to this office.”

“Yes, Miss Templeton. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind being told I’m independent,” she continued vehemently. “I am. But when mankind thinks there’s something wrong with that, I chafe.”

“There isn’t anything wrong,” Franklin said, eager to diffuse her anger, but she bowled over him with a mounting fury.

“You say I act as if I don’t need friends or family, are you not my friend? Is the senator not family? And just because I don’t talk about a lover doesn’t mean I haven’t had one.” Her fingers reached up beneath her glasses—was she crying? That would be a first for Franklin to see. “Ugh. Sentiment.” She tossed the mysterious note back into her desk, closed and locked the drawer.

Franklin had never seen her as anything but a composed coworker; compiling literature on any reference to curing death, chatting with extraordinary—if not oft unhinged—persons, scanning communications, sending ears into the field, keeping an eye out for promising discoveries and innovators. He’d not seen anything truly affect her—not visibly. He knew she trusted very few and kept mostly to herself. For a sensitive, Franklin was surprised at how very steeled she seemed. Perhaps there were infinitely more layers to her than he could have imagined; lifetimes of lessons deepening the magnetic nature of her old soul.

“There now. Am I more human to you?” Clara asked with a bitter smile. “Surely my tears make me more a woman. Quick. Go tell all the men who have ever insulted me, they’ll be so pleased.”

“Miss Templeton.” Franklin looked at the floor again. “I’d never delight in your pain.”

He chided himself for pressing her. Clara Templeton liked clever gentlemen with whom she could verbally fence, generally best, and leave staring after her. He’d watched her flirt with countless gentlemen if it suited her cause, and he’d once wondered if she was capable of anything beyond that arch distance. Perhaps that note, whatever it was, proved differently.

“Stop pouting, Franklin,” Clara said with a laugh. Her bite never lasted long, a quality that he appreciated deeply. “I know you want to play the rescuing hero to all the world. In due time, surely.” She squinted at something that suddenly caught her eye. “Franklin, are we not the only ones with keys to this floor?”

“We are,” Franklin replied, following her gaze.

“Then what, pray tell, is that?”

Across the room, jutting from a metal tray that was commonly used for incoming correspondence, was a yellow envelope that she was sure had not been there before.

Clara crossed the room, picked up the envelope, and carried it to Franklin’s desk. Seizing the engraved letter opener from the fine desk set his mother had proudly given him upon his appointment to “government work,” Clara swiftly slit open the envelope, which was bulky at the base.

Glancing inside, in the next instant Clara gasped sharply and dropped both letter opener and envelope. She took a step back as the items clattered onto the wooden surface of the desk. Franklin could now see that the envelope held a key. A dark smear marred the metal surface.

Blood.

Franklin reached for the key.

“Franklin,” Clara cautioned. “Don’t touch it.”

“I’d like to feel useful for a moment,” he declared, just before the soiled, black iron key disappeared into his fist.

He closed his eyes, feeling the metal heat up in his palm and the familiar pain flare at the back of his skull. He saw a plain, redbrick town house with brownstone details. A number: fourteen. He heard screaming. He saw plumes of odd-colored smoke from beneath the garden-level door. A man in a black suit came tearing out, holding a kerchief over his mouth, and ran away. Smoke lifted, curling as a dark substance pooled out from under the door and dribbled down onto the landing.

Franklin opened his eyes. He could see that Clara had already guessed where the key had come from. Franklin nodded. “I know where they died.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

When Spire hopped into the hired hansom that arrived at the designated hour, he was startled to find Miss Everhart already seated inside.

“Don’t be surprised again, Mr. Spire, please, it will grow quite tedious,” she stated. “I’ve a good eye for numbers, research, codes, and ciphers. I’ll be useful to your team—”

“I am aware of your talents, Miss Everhart,” Spire replied cautiously. “Your Parliamentary employers took great pains to ensure you could do your work without bother. I don’t think they’d take kindly to your abandoning it.”

“Who said anything about abandoning it?” she replied sharply. “We’re all doing the work of the British state, Mr. Spire.”

“But not all work is meant to be shared. Especially work as dangerous as this.”

“I survived thus far.” Her tone was steel. “Why else do you think Lord Black put me on as Gazelle but to prove myself to you?”

“Have you been appointed to the Eterna team, then?” Spire asked directly. She nodded. “You’d truly want to work for the man who spied on you?”

She pursed her lips. “At least I know you’d keep track of me.”

Spire loosed a humorless chuckle.

He couldn’t let the memory of Alice cloud everything, everyone—a whole gender. He’d need someone like Everhart; detail oriented, dogged, persistent, loyal, selfless. Fond of work. He hated to think they’d actually have a great deal in common; he’d set himself up to despise her for the trouble her presence at Westminster had caused.

“Today we meet Mr. and Mrs. Blakely at the British Museum,” Miss Everhart said. “They’ve been consulting on the Eterna project for a while now. You’ll inherit some ‘staff,’ as it were, but Lord Black will flesh out your full brigade and provide new researchers.”

Spire narrowed his eyes. “Whatever happened to the previous ones, then?”

Miss Everhart swallowed and looked away, clearly uncomfortable. “No one knows. They disappeared—all four researchers and their security adviser.”

“Lovely,” Spire muttered. “The queen could’ve mentioned that. Any leads?”

Everhart frowned. “None.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “How is Rochester Street?” she asked finally.

“Does it matter?” he replied with a shrug. “I doubt the crown would accommodate me if I complained. I’d have liked a bit of warning, though. And to have taken my piano.”

“They moved me, too,” she offered. “My cousin and I were fond of our old place and haven’t settled in yet. The trick is not to feel like property, or like a pawn, as they shuffle you about.”

“And how is that coming along for you?”

“I demanded they bring me a piano.” She smiled briefly. “And I’m slightly happier.”

At this, Spire chuckled gruffly and the silence that followed was not tense until the museum loomed before them.

#  #  #

The British Museum, large and cluttered with treasures collected—stolen—from around the Empire, was a squat, square, colonnaded edifice that was no gem of architecture. The real beauty, Rose knew, lay inside, in its ever-growing cache of artifacts. Spire helped her out of the carriage, their gloved palms and arms stiff against each other.

“East wing,” she instructed as she crossed the open plaza, passing among strolling tourists and locals. Comparing herself with other ladies who walked about beneath parasols, in floral shawls and frilly hats, she noticed her dark muslin layers trimmed in mauve and black didn’t match the warm, bright day. She always stood out so, never quite in season, never on top of a trend. She could care less.

Spire caught up to her as she reached the building. He opened the door for her and she allowed him the courtesy. “Downstairs. Two levels. Prepare yourself,” she said, and kept a smile to herself. She didn’t have to be psychic to know she would see a few more raised eyebrows from Spire in the following moments.

“For what?” he asked.

“A medium. And her consort.”

Spire set his jaw and followed.

On the lower floor, Rose led the way down a shadowed, chilly hall; she rapped upon an unmarked door in a specific sequence, pressed a lever, and a door opened, revealing a cavernous room filled with wall-to-wall tapestries from all around the globe. She had been there before; it was, in fact, one of her favorite places. Though she’d have added a large bay window where she could sit bathed in light, imagining herself strolling through each woven scene, experiencing the many worlds they represented, from religious icons to court scenes to theatrical presentations.

Art was a poultice that soothed her ache to travel. But unmarried women did not travel unaccompanied. Married women might travel with their husbands, but they most certainly did not work, so years ago she made her choice and shoved other longings into the corners of her steel-trap mind.

A round table took up the center of the room, wooden chairs spaced around its circumference. “Mrs. Blakely” sat there, facing the door, her eyes closed. Dressed in royal blue satin and baring more bosom than was appropriate for the hour of the day, her brown-black curls were up in an artful coiffure, a faint rouge was visible on her cheeks. Though she sat in the basement of the British Museum, the woman seemed ready for a ball. Rose had encountered the Blakeleys only a few times and had never seen them dressed in anything less than high-dramatic style.

Mr. Blakely stood nearby, a short, sharp-featured man in a black-and-white-striped linen suit and a blue cravat with a too-large bow, his fingers fluttering constantly. His ticks were offset by an engaging, near-constant smile.

“Mr. Spire, I presume? Hello, Miss Everhart,” the woman at the table said, without opening her eyes.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Blakely,” Spire said, bowing his head even though Mrs. Blakely’s kohl-rimmed eyes remained closed.

“Hello, Miss Knight,” Rose said quietly. At the different name, Spire stared at her.

“Spire,” the striking woman at the table said, “I sense you’re a man who doesn’t like to waste his time, particularly not on pleasantries. Good. So let’s get a few things entirely clear.” Her lined lids snapped open, revealing large, piercing, dark eyes. She almost looked like a doll but her appearance was off-putting, as if the soul of some wizened old regent had been thrust into a young woman’s body and was still getting used to the adjustment.

“I am not legally married to Mr. Blakely,” she began. “Thus I am not Mrs. Tobias Blakely. Not to you. Within our operations, you may call me Miss Knight. However, I prefer just ‘Knight.’”

Spire nodded, taking in the information. “Good then. I go by Spire and prefer this precedent. Keeps us from becoming too familiar.”

“Ah. Then on that count, should you possibly spy upon me like you did Miss Everhart, let me make something quite clear. I prefer the company of women in every way. And while kissing a woman may be part of an operation, it is also how I might spend an evening on my own time and should not be a subject of concern or censure. Establishing one’s predilections when surrounded by spies saves us all from awkward misunderstandings. You may lower your eyebrows now, Mr. Spire.”

Spire did as he was told, donning his characteristic frown. Rose withheld a chuckle. Not a single Victorian soul spoke like Marguerite Knight did in mixed company. At least, no one Rose had ever met or even heard of. Mr. Blakely didn’t bother to hide his grin. It was entertaining, Rose had to admit, to see a bulwark like Spire so thrown off guard. And the surprises were only beginning.

“I appreciate your honesty, Knight,” Spire said without affect. “Am I to assume you’ll be the one giving the orders for our operations?”

Knight waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, no, that’s entirely on your head. I find giving orders terribly boring. I’ll do as I please and assume it corresponds with our mutual directives.” She smiled without showing teeth. “And I’ll never undermine you unless you undermine me. So let’s not cross each other. Because I’ll see it coming.” She tapped her temple.

“Well, be sure to tell me,” Spire retorted, “just what it is I’ll be up to. Free will is so … boring.” While Spire’s tone may have been sharp, there was a certain light in his eyes, the look of a duelist ready for swordplay. Knight laughed and Rose heard delight in the sound.

“I would guess you’re not used to people like us, Mr. Spire, eccentric and scandalous,” Knight began nonchalantly, “you’re used to policemen. And Miss Everhart, you’re used to clerks and officials, and so if we offend you, well—well, I’m not sorry, but I do believe we can all find common ground. It’s not that I think the world should be like me. I’d rather the world not insist I should be like them.”

Spire held up his hands, offering no argument. It was Rose’s turn to take exception.

“You’re talking to a woman, Miss Knight, who managed to gain secret passage into the Palace of Westminster to go to work,” Rose said primly.

“And have I ever toasted your accomplishment? I should. I honestly meant to.” Knight clapped her hands. “Champagne. My house. I’ve calling hours on Tuesdays. And don’t worry, if it’s a concern, I don’t seduce coworkers.” She flashed a winning smile. Rose opened her mouth and closed it again. “Indeed,” Knight added, gesturing. “Often the best thing to do when confronted with someone who says shocking things is to keep silent.”

“In this crowd will I ever again utter a word?” Spire muttered. Knight laughed again. “I will say,” he continued, “I deem scandal relative and find this age too preoccupied with ‘sin’ while having a profoundly hypocritical relationship with vice.…” He trailed off, and Rose noticed how his determined face went haunted, as if some terrible memory took hold of him.

“Agreed!” Mr. Blakely responded enthusiastically.

Looking closely at their new leader, Knight narrowed her eyes suddenly. “You haven’t told your father you’ve moved or that you’ve a new position,” she scolded. “You’ll need to tend to that, lest he write a play about it.” Spire opened his mouth and then closed it again as Rose had done. “I am clairvoyant, Mr. Spire. I pick up on things. There go your eyebrows again.”

“Get out of my mind,” Spire growled, seeming genuinely unsettled. He whirled on Rose. “Did you tell her about my father?”

“You haven’t said a thing to me about your father, what business would that be of mine?” Rose said defensively. Spire scowled.

Miss Knight shifted forward suddenly and said; “Pardon me, friends, duty calls and I must leave you. There’s a mummy requiring my attention on the next floor. His spirit is in the throes of anger.”

In a rustle of shimmering sapphire skirts and trailing bell sleeves she was out the door. Rose wished she could collect on the number of raised eyebrows she’d seen from Spire since the moment they’d met.

She assumed he’d learn to mask his skepticism entirely, as she had, and become unreadable. She’d certainly felt spun round roughly when Black began training her for espionage above bookkeeping. She’d enjoyed being an excellent clerk; thorough paperwork was gratifying in its precise predictability, a comfort so unlike life itself. Being bid to look at life through a scrying-glass darkly, this was hardly comfortable for her. She knew in her heart where her priorities lay, and she hoped her instincts wouldn’t get her into trouble.

There was a cry down the hall in some foreign tongue. Rose managed not to snigger when she saw Spire’s jaw muscles clench as he valiantly tried to restore his blank expression.

Mr. Blakely nodded nonchalantly toward the noise. “That would be Sepulcher B3. Troublesome. The prince rearranges the artifacts. We keep telling the curator the funerary items are arranged in the wrong order, I mean, the prince should know, it’s his grave, but the museum won’t listen. The missus tries to explain to His Majesty that the curators mean no disrespect, but still, it’s very disrespectful,” Mr. Blakely said woefully.

“What was she speaking?” Spire asked.

“Egyptian,” Rose and Mr. Blakely chorused.

“What is she doing out there?” Spire asked Blakely, choosing his words with care. “Does she think she’s setting it to rest? Calming it down?”

Mr. Blakely shook his head. “She is a confidante when it comes to spirits. She doesn’t see them, only senses particularly anxious presences. She can’t set spirits to rest, exorcise, or banish them. I understand that’s a different department. But the missus’s true talents are prediction and reading. She gets a read on people right quick,” Blakely said with simple admiration.

Rose wondered if he had fallen in love with his faux wife, despite her predilections for the female sex. Perhaps if he couldn’t have a real marriage, he’d take a fake one instead. Rose hoped that wasn’t the case, for that story was a bit too tragic for her tastes.

In her mind, unrequited love was a pointless waste. Either love was present or it wasn’t. Her schoolgirl friends had chastised her for practicality, but she’d aced her classes, healthy and safe in a dry bed when they’d failed exams after throwing themselves into rainstorms after being rejected. Hardened differed from practical. The former was full of sorrow but the latter left hope for something to arrive worth wasting time on.

Curious about the “couple,” Rose took an opportunity; “How did you meet?”

A wide grin burst over Blakely’s face like a beam of light. “Marguerite was in Bath, persuading her elderly relatives to leave thousands of pounds to worthy causes such as, well, herself. My … show came into town.” Blakely turned to Spire. “I’m a performer, you see.”

“You don’t say,” Spire replied in a monotone.

“As fate would have it,” Blakely continued, “she had procured the money but was worried about reprisals once her relations awoke from her persuasive spell. She needed a place to hide; I needed another act. She joined my troupe as a psychic and told me to marry her—on the condition that we wouldn’t actually marry. She does love a good show,” he said, grinning again as if he’d lost all the bats in his already questionable belfry. “Eventually Lord Black, who is fond not only of a good act but of the genuinely psychically talented, found us and made us respectable.”

Spire clenched his jaw at the word “respectable.” “I understand you were consultants to the previous, now missing, Omega team,” he stated.

“Yes, but we worked from here,” Blakely stated, “poring over anything of supernatural or immortal interest to add to the Queen’s Vault. Lord Black tells me we’re to have new offices now that you’re with us.”

There was a shriek and a crash from well down the hall and more cries in Egyptian.

“As the museum won’t do at all, really,” Blakely added.

On that note, Spire and Rose departed. At the door of the museum, Rose stopped her director before he walked off into the heart of Bloomsbury.

“Mr. Spire, would you kindly come by Westminster at your leisure later today?” she asked. “We have things to discuss.”

Spire clenched his jaw. “Your parliament office, in the place that ought to have no offices?”

“The very one,” Rose replied with a prim smile. He nodded.

There, in the safety of her tiny, contained universe, she would put her new director to a different sort of test; one of loyalties and personal conviction. She would see if they were indeed two creatures of the same mind or destined to be at odds.

#  #  #

The Majesty—He would always call himself Majesty no matter what the rest called him—shifted on his small, uncomfortable pallet.

He was hidden away in an isolated, dreary, windowless cell within London’s Royal Courts of Justice. Only three people knew the space existed; the guard, who was his ear and mouthpiece to the external world; himself, and Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, who was impressively inscrutable. He harbored hope that she would come to embrace his cause, for surely she could see the damage the rise of the unwashed was doing to his beloved England.

A woman’s voice from beyond the narrow set of bars startled him from his lovely reverie of a fiefdom reclaimed.

“Mr. Moriel,” uttered in a biting, disapproving tone, signaled the arrival of Her Majesty, who swept into the dim light, her elaborate, expensive mourning garb overwhelming the space. “It has come to my attention that a certain Frances Tourney was running a heinous operation fit for hell, one that seemed to bear your crest of devilry. You were granted a stay of execution, Mr. Moriel, not a pardon. You assured me all your society operatives had been turned in.”

“They … were. Tourney was never a member. He’s a dilettante and an ass—pardon me, Your Majesty. Privations such as this do not make for subtle or couth conversation. You’re not telling me he actually did something?”

“I’m not going to tell you what he did because it does not befit a lady’s lips to speak of. You should have been more careful and given me the names of any and all persons who might have had even a passing interest in your little secret society.”

“If I am allowed a writing implement and paper, Your Majesty, I will be happy to set down any and all names that come to mind.”

“I’m not interested in vendettas and personal grudges; you seem to have too many of those. Only those who might be capable of the true, unmitigated horror you were so known for in New York and other cities, such as this newly disrupted resurrectionist ring that despoiled the bodies of dead children. Along with other sundry brutal murders.”

“Tourney?” Moriel said in disbelief.

“Others were involved, surely. But financed, and housed, by Tourney. I want to know the entire chain or else this most gracious stay of execution comes to an end and you will be hung in this dreadful little chamber until you are as dead as everyone in my government already assumes you to be.”

“But then where lies your vital, noble search for immortality, Your Highness?” he asked softly.

“We’ve many resources, Moriel. You’re hardly our only asset in our search for the answers to life and death; you’re merely the most sickening, a disgrace to the noble line you descend from,” the queen said, finality in her voice. She turned without another word and walked away, the sweep of her black crepe gown against the stone covering the sound of her footfalls. Her instructions to the guard echoed in the narrow stone hall. “The prisoner is to have no food for six days.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” the guard replied.

The queen, exiting, didn’t see the guard’s wink to Moriel, who smiled sweetly as he was left alone again.

“My upheaval shall unfold in due time,” Moriel murmured to the stone walls as if they were listening. “For now, I’ve pawns to pit against one another.”

He shifted the small cot he’d been afforded, revealing a checkerboard square beneath that he’d etched into the corner of the dank floor with a rock. The greasy bones of a rat he’d caught in his cell, peeled open and disarticulated, all with his bare hands, sat in a relative chess formation. He slid a claw toward a femur and knocked it aside with a contented sigh.

#  #  #

A small, withered-looking clerk sat inside the door Miss Everhart had instructed Spire to enter. The man narrowed his eyes at Spire while waving him on, as if he didn’t like the fact that anyone without a title had clearance to pass him. Though surely the clerk himself lacked a title, the man’s disapproving expression had Spire instinctively straightening his striped cravat and smoothing his gray vest and deeper gray frock coat.

Spire strode deeper into the wing of the House of Lords where everything was gilded and red fabrics were seen everywhere in the furnishings and hangings—as opposed to the carved but unvarnished stone of the House of Commons, where all was trimmed in green. He passed the enormous statue of Queen Victoria, a loving tribute from Prince Albert that Spire found a bit ostentatious and perhaps indicative of a bit of magisterial insecurity. As he trod the fine red carpeting and traversed narrow passages of dark, polished wood carved in regal Gothic form, Spire wondered what Guy Fawkes would have thought of the splendor of Westminster today.

At the end of the passage, Spire stopped to look at the note that Everhart had slid into his palm as they’d left the museum the day prior:

House of Lords. Before the “not content” lobby reaches the peers’ lobby, there is a small door set within a Gothic arch. Press down on the brass plate that looks like it was meant for a keyhole. Try to do so when no one is looking. The narrow passage beyond will lead you to my tiny fiefdom.

Spire did as instructed. The narrow, nondescript door, which was paneled like the rest of the corridor and almost unnoticeable if one was not looking for it, granted him entry into a stone-floored, undecorated passage that led into a tiny fiefdom indeed. One special room that was no one else’s.

He was soon seated in one of the two chairs in his associate’s small, cramped, but immaculately organized Westminster office. The members of the House of Lords did not have offices, or clerks for that matter, yet this small room was secretly reserved for Miss Everhart. If it could be called a room. It was really more a closet. Supposedly the prime minister had access to this room by some other hidden passage, but Miss Everhart had not illuminated Spire on that point.

This alcove was the origin of the misunderstanding that had gained Spire the attention of the queen. A great deal of fuss over a space barely large enough to hold two people. Spire knew that Lord Black spent a deal of time in Everhart’s office. He wondered how the space managed to contain his Lordship’s expansive presence.

The lower five feet of the walls were paneled in dark mahogany; the upper portions were papered in the red of the House of Lords. In addition to the visitor’s chair, the room was appointed with a tall wooden file cabinet, a fine writing desk, a leather chair, and an ornate gas lamp. A line of trays marched up the wall at one point, all filled with papers. A richly colored Persian rug was laid over the tile floor; fine writing implements lay upon the desk. Was Rose a member of the aristocracy herself? Spire wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Spire’s first examination of the room provided him with more questions than answers, chief among them, where was she?

Then he noticed the note upon the blotter upon her desk, written on the back of a used envelope.

H. S.—Am out for a delivery—await me. We have several things to discuss. R. E.

In her absence, Spire continued to peruse Rose’s office with the eye of a detective. What little space she had was meticulously organized, but he saw no tea service, which rankled as he wanted a cup of tea. He’d expected no luxuries in the House of Commons but he thought surely the House of Lords might have some amenities.…

One shelf sported dictionaries and countless books about codes. There was a telegraph close to hand—and something upon the tape. Spire rose, intent on examining it. A noise behind had him turning to behold a cloaked figure he assumed was Miss Everhart, arms full of books and files.

Spire kept his expression unreadable while he prayed all those papers were not for him. She set everything on her desk and steadied the stack before she turned to him, gloved hands pulling back her thin cloak. Her hair was done up tightly, her black dress was simple and utilitarian but still elegant, matching the black of the cloak.

“A little light reading, Mr. Spire,” the woman said with a smile. She hung her cloak on an interior hook and gestured to him to be seated. As he lowered himself once again into his chair, he nearly struck his temple on the protruding handle of a card catalogue that took up nearly half the space.

“On what topic?” he asked.

“Immortality. I can give you the highlights, if you like, as they relate to the facts going forward.”

“I would appreciate that, Miss Everhart, because if my studies include Varney the Vampire I might throw the lot through the window, where it would undoubtedly hit some poor pedestrian on the head and the poor sot could pray for immortality himself.” If there was a window, Spire thought.

Rose chuckled as she placed files into drawers of the wooden cabinet that was as tall as she was. “I understand your skepticism, Mr. Spire, truly, but everything in the vault may have its uses for reference.” She took a seat, perching upon the lip of the desk with marvelous skill, somehow managing to shift the trapping of bustle that was increasingly prominent in today’s ladies’ fashion to the side, as if a mere act of sitting were an equestrian event.

“Vault?” Spire furrowed his brow. “What vault?”

“The vault contains our information on all the possible scientific theories on the extension of life,” Rose explained. “The Americans didn’t invent the search for immortality, of course, but it seems they may have come the closest.”

“Did they, though? It sounds like their team may have disappeared like ours did. And who’s to blame?”

“The Americans were on to something. Obviously not the right thing, but further than us. For a long time we thought the Americans were solely interested in research, not development. But our embedded contact alluded to several wild, inventive experiments in New York that have far surpassed attempts by our former team. It appears we British were stymied by the more spiritual aspects. Hence these texts, meant to expand the mind.” She gestured to the cabinets. “I’ll transfer this newly complied material within the week. The vault was moved to the cellar of Kensington Palace after one of our early researchers defected to America.”

“America.” Spire frowned. “You know, it sounds like we are at war.”

“In a way, we never stopped being at war,” Everhart countered with a shrug. “But we’ll never act like it. America and England will always posture against each other. We share more common interests now than ever before, but those interests shall remain peaceable only if our developments in science and industry progress at the same rate.”

“You make a mad quest sound almost sensible,” Spire said with a slight growl. “But in all honesty, Miss Everhart, when there’s more important work to be done, I find this whole commission difficult to swallow.”

His colleague flashed him an intense look as she handed him an envelope and placed a finger to her lips. Spire opened the envelope, curiosity piqued, and his heart leaped.

The interior paper read: Further Tourney contacts for investigation. While the Metropolitan’s investigation had been extensive, this list of places, persons, and information was new to him. Privileged persons that high society wouldn’t want associated with such deeds, whose reputations afforded them more safety and less scrutiny than the average man.

He stared up at her, an excitement matching the particular, engaged light in her prominent eyes. She tapped her ear and glanced behind her toward the wall, gesturing that he keep quiet.

Grabbing the paper and turning it over, he took a long and careful moment to write a question coded in the simplest of ciphers, asking if she would help the case continue in secret. She read, decoded the cipher in her mind, and nodded. The day had improved infinitely and Spire offered Rose the genuine smile that resulted in his turn of providence.

But suddenly the queen’s warning to not trust anyone, and Spire’s past, darkened him immediately.

He added, in the same simple cipher, a question, holding up the paper to her: How can I trust you?

She stared at him and spoke quietly. “You and I have things in common, Mr. Spire. We are passionate about our work. I love what I do here. And I am honored by my new appointment. Why on earth would I ever put that in jeopardy?”

She took the paper and swiftly scribbled an addition: For the right cause I will.

Spire stared at her. A woman. A fairly unparalleled one at that. One he’d have to trust, despite his history and all his discomfort.

He noticed Miss Everhart’s eye fall upon the telegraph machine. She plucked a volume from her shelf of code books, flipped to a page marked by a ribbon, then turned the book upside down. She drew the message tape toward herself. For several minutes the little room was silent save for the sound of a pencil scribbling upon her notepad as she looked between book, message, and paper. At last she finished, lifting her head to gaze at Spire.

“Our overseas agent, Brinkman, is on a riverboat southbound, possibly to New Orleans. Either he found one of the scientists from that Manhattan team or he’s tailing our spy who was embedded directly in the project.”

Spire stood and went to the door. “I’ll go share this news with Lord Black and see what else he can tell me about Brinkman.” He tucked the file Miss Everhart had given him beneath his arm. Spire paused at the door. “Do you know where I might find his Lordship?”

“At his club. Here.” She slid her hand into one of the cubbies of her desk and passed Spire a white card bearing a simple script address. “Give this to Foley at the door. Be persistent.” She handed him the decrypted message to proffer to their superior. “If our embedded contact fails us, Brinkman is our key to the entire next step.”

“I’ll find a safe place for everything,” Spire said carefully, patting the Tourney file.

“Please do, Mr. Spire,” his colleague replied, weight to her words.

They stared at each other a moment, a great responsibility balancing on a perilous line between two relative strangers. He nodded and exited the same way he’d come.

It took all Spire’s willpower not to immediately descend upon every contact the woman had given him. But instead he made his winding way out from Parliament’s shadows, through the heart of London proper, to a post box that only he and his trusted Stuart Grange knew of.

Spire didn’t mind that his newly appointed lodgings on narrow Rochester Street were bare, it was that anything he did or had on the premises could be watched or seized. So he fingered his key in his pocket as he bowed his head to the balding postal clerk who always seemed to be on duty at this spot. Despite the fact that Spire had used this location for years, he and the clerk never exchanged more than a nod. Still, Spire liked to imagine the man knew he was a part of something important.

Spire opened the box, dropped in the envelope, and returned the box to its cubby, thinking about all the evidence, secrets, and items vital to past cases that he’d kept there at times, far from meddling fingers. But nothing so precious to him now as that list, and Spire planned to be grand inquisitor to all.

But first, a bite of lunch at one of his old, cozy pub haunts. Then, onward to a club where he could never afford the food.

#  #  #

Spire had argued heartily for a good several minutes with the dour Foley—through the shuttered club door—before the ancient man admitted him. Spire entered, noting the doorkeeper’s fine coat and tails and his vicious scowl, which Spire coveted for its sheer ferocity. Foley pointed with one crooked finger toward the heart of the building.

“He likes the mezzanine level, Mr. Spire,” Foley said.

“Thank you, Foley.”

“I didn’t give you permission to call me Foley,” the man said sharply.

“What would you have me call you?” Spire responded wearily.

“‘Sir.’ Foley comes with time and privilege.”

“Yes, sir,” Spire said through clenched teeth, striving to project respect for the little Napoleon of his club kingdom.

The rich red carpets beneath Spire’s feet stood in stark contrast to the building’s entirely white walls. Spire headed up a grand staircase that led into a small, private mezzanine-level chamber filled with aromatic smoke from the sort of fine cigars Spire had only read of. As he walked, Spire tried to shed his irritation in regards to his commission, capped by Foley’s initial denial of admittance. It seemed “unclassified business” didn’t open doors. Couldn’t he have a badge or something that deemed him important?

“Spire! Hello, good sir.” Lord Black looked up but did not rise from a large leather armchair in what was clearly his section of the exclusive setting; the area around him was strewn with paper, tea leaves, and tobacco droppings.

To his Lordship’s right, a deep green frock coat and matching top hat hung from gilded hooks. He sported a black waistcoat with green buttons, billowing cream silk shirt cuffs matched a generous cravat of the same lush fabric pinned with a House of Lords insignia, gemstones glittering faintly in the soft gaslight issuing from cut-crystal wall sconces. The green pinstripe of Lord Black’s perfectly tailored trousers indicated a large wardrobe rich in color and pattern.

The average man, Spire thought, had to consider practicality in clothing. Lord Black did not. Spire was well aware of his own modest, dark wardrobe in far heartier fabrics than nobility’s silks or satins.

Spire tried to mitigate his biases, as Lord Black seemed to be genuinely interested in his line of work, which was unusual for a member of the aristocracy. He wanted to like the man. After all, to have a friend in the House of Lords was hardly a bad thing, whether Lord Spiritual or Temporal.

Given Spire’s new appointment, he wondered if those labels would take on whole new meanings. The spiritual and the temporal: for Spire, these had always been at odds. A desperate desire to believe in the spiritual had led to temporal disappointment too many times for him not to declare empirical evidence weighted against the spiritual. But somehow, Lord Black seemed to manage the two with a certain amount of baffling joy.

The lord’s fair hair looked even more blond in the yellowish light, almost angelic, and his bright eyes pinned Spire upon his approach. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Spire?”

“After a valiant fight with the vulture at the door—”

“Ah, good Foley.” Black smiled, revealing one angled tooth. “We’d be lost without our gatekeeper.”

“I am here, Lord Black, to ascertain what you believe to be my foremost objective within the scope of my operations, and to deliver a message.”

“The queen wants England to have immortality before the Americans do,” Lord Black stated. “I thought that was very obvious. America’s Eterna Compound is incomplete. Whatever they missed, we must find it first. They were barking up every odd tree. Where they’ve sniffed, so must we. I am currently vetting new researchers. But our investigators and security services had best be well versed in the realms of the inexplicable. It’s why we have our vault. There are many types of science, Spire.”

“Only mystics say that. You’re a lord. Sir.”

“A mystical lord…” Black said dreamily, gazing toward the mezzanine’s arched beveled window bedecked with stained-glass royal crests.

Spire ignored this. “I need more information about your American operative. Will he return? How embedded is he?” Black shrugged. “Does the man even receive orders,” Spire pressed, “much less obey them?” Black shrugged again. Spire cleared his throat, managing to keep his tone level. “You do realize, Lord Black, this vagary makes me uneasy.”

“I’m sure it does.” The lord smiled. “You’re a man who hates uncertainty. But I, my good man, thrive on it!” he exclaimed, lifting one hand in a flourish. “I love losing myself in everything I don’t know. Curiosity, Spire! That’s what will keep us alive; immortal. Curiosity!

Spire remained unmoved by Black’s enthusiasm and handed over the decrypted message. “Miss Everhart is excellent with codes,” he blurted, unable to hide how impressed he’d been.

“Our veritable wizard with ciphers. Blakely is too, in his way.” Black smiled mysteriously. “I’ll soon prove the full talents of your team to you.” Unsettled, Spire opened his mouth. Black continued with a scoff; “I can read you like a book, Spire. You don’t discount Miss Everhart because her intelligence is so obvious. You deem the others lunatics.” Black finally read the message and frowned. “Oh. One of America’s team survived after all and is being trailed.”

The nobleman looked up at Spire. “With this news, I don’t know when our man will resurface again. He’s slippery, with a mind of his own. He gets us what we need, so he’s worth the headache.”

“Known aliases?” Spire asked.

“He sports variants of what may be his actual name, Gabriel Brinkman, though can we really ever be sure?” Lord Black smiled again, fondly, as if taken up by the romance of a spy’s life. “Ask Miss Knight if her gifts offer us a sense of where he’s gone off to.”

“If my job is security services, sir, with all due respect, I truly doubt a medium is my foremost weapon. A weapon, rather, would be my foremost weapon.”

Black laughed, though Spire had not intended to be amusing. “Mr. Spire, let me make something quite clear to you. The nature of your job is multifold. Sometimes you’ll have to be a policeman. Sometimes a spy. Sometimes a diplomat. Sometimes a liar and cheat in the name of England. Sometimes a soldier. And sometimes you’ll have to be a believer. You’re an extremely capable and talented man, but it is becoming increasingly clear that believing is the one thing you cannot do. And that’s a task worth working on.”

“I will do my job, sir,” Spire said, careful to keep a level tone. “Please give me details, names, operatives, everything about Eterna on all clearance levels and precisely what you expect of me. I can do nothing with phantoms, whether I believe in them or not. Good day, milord.”

Without a further word, he turned on his heel and strode away. “Try to enjoy your appointment, Mr. Spire,” Black called after him amiably.

Spire nodded without turning around. For Spire, there was nothing enjoyable about work at cross purposes with logic, but Black’s enthusiasm was something to marvel at.

As Spire stepped out from under the arches of the club, leaving Foley’s scowl behind, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man in a somewhat theatrical cloak approach quickly on the cobblestones. He had a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face and his suit was too tight, revealing lines of a muscular body. Spire shifted to evade him but the stranger seemed determined to collide with him.

Spire moved quickly to his right, but not before something landed over his head—a hood, something made of fabric anyway, dark and full of smoke. Spire struck out and felt a satisfying punch land somewhere in the central body mass of the caped man, but someone else dragged him back against the Parliament bricks. He gasped involuntarily and whatever acrid scent was in the hood overwhelmed him and he sank to his knees as everything faded to black.

Copyright © 2015 by Leanna Renee Hieber

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Welcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we’re offering the chance to win these fantastic titles on Goodreads! For details on how to enter, please click on the cover image of the book you are interested in.

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber

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London, 1882: Queen Victoria appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and persons. Spire, a skeptic driven to protect the helpless and see justice done, is the perfect man to lead the department, which employs scholars and scientists, assassins and con men, and a traveling circus. Spire’s chief researcher is Rose Everhart, who believes fervently that there is more to the world than can be seen by mortal eyes.

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Camellia’s adopted mother wants Cam to grow up to be just like her. Problem is, Mom’s a seriously wicked witch.

Savvy Cam has tons of practice thwarting the witch’s crazy schemes. But when the witch summons a demon to control the city, he gets loose—and into the cute new boy in Tenth Grade. Now Cam’s determined to stop the demon before he destroys the new boy’s soul. Which means she might have to try a spell of her own. But if she’s willing to work spells like the witch. . .will it mean she’s wicked too? With the demon squashing pixies, girls becoming zombies, and the school one spell away from exploding in phoenix flame, Cam has to realize that wicked doesn’t lie in your abilities, but in your choices.

The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

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Julius Caesar is dead, assassinated on the senate floor, and the glory that is Rome has been torn in two. Octavian, Caesar’s ambitious great-nephew and adopted son, vies with Marc Antony and Cleopatra for control of Caesar’s legacy. As civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may shape the course of history.

Juba, Numidian prince and adopted brother of Octavian, has embarked on a ruthless quest for the Shards of Heaven, lost treasures said to possess the very power of the gods—or the one God. Driven by vengeance, Juba has already attained the fabled Trident of Poseidon, which may also be the staff once wielded by Moses. Now he will stop at nothing to obtain the other Shards, even if it means burning the entire world to the ground.

Truthwitch by Susan Dennard

Truthwitch by Susan DennardOn a continent ruled by three empires, everyone is born with a “witchery,” a magical skill that sets them apart from others. Now, as the Twenty Year Truce in a centuries long war is about to end, the balance of power-and the failing health of all magic-will fall on the shoulders of a mythical pair called the Cahr Awen.

 

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings by Brandon SandersonIn The Way of Kings, #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson introduces readers to the fascinating world of Roshar, a world of stone and storms.

It has been centuries since the fall of the Knights Radiant, but their mystical swords and armor remain, transforming ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for them. Wars are fought for them and won by them.

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The Spark by Leanna Renee Hieber

The Spark by Leanna Renee Hieber

Presenting The Spark, a brand new novella from Leanna Renee Hieber, set in the world of her gaslamp fantasy series, The Eterna Files. Leanna’s latest novel, Eterna and Omega, will be available August 9th.

Chapter One

Louis Dupris stole the small, precious dagger, wet with his own blood, from the priestess, tears streaming down his olive-toned cheek.

He ran.

He knew her cries would haunt him until death. And beyond. First was the pained shriek of betrayal. Then the shout of anger. Then the bellowed curses as he fled the bonfire at the banks of the Mississippi. It was a terrible sound that he wished he could trade for a cry of joyful victory.

He ran towards masts of ships gathered from around the world, past innumerable lines of sugar sheds—squat structures inhabited by saccharine mountains made from life-threatening hard work and rivers of sweat; past mountains of cotton bales waiting for the terrifying black jaws of monster presses. Louis dashed between spires of industrial fire and smoke, one step away from the maws of myriad hells on earth, racing toward the beckoning, charming gaslight of the French Quarter, that curious metropolitan mosaic of culture and rich, diverse history.

He knew he had likely condemned himself in a dire way that would only reveal itself in time.

But it was all done for love. Deep, passionate, soul-rending love.

Love of the spirit.

And of science.

He would make the complex and oft misunderstood beliefs of his Creole blood into venerated theorems in the halls of great institutions. The rulers of this still war-ravaged nation—where the term “reconstruction” meant very different things to the powerful and the powerless—would bow their heads at that which had heretofore terrified them.

Vodun would no longer be considered witchcraft. It would be vindicated. Validated. No longer a subject of fear, fetish, and persecution.

But the priestess to whom he had been beholden would not understand. He could not make her understand. He had been sworn to secrecy by another. He prayed that the priestess’s powerful and just soul would forgive the unforgivable, in time.

He prayed to the great Bondye and to the canon of intercessor Mystères, asking that they collectively empathize, advise, and guard him.

If his theories held the promise he thought they did, they’d have all the time in the world. Literally.

 

Senator Rupert Bishop had been skulking around New Orleans in an exceedingly fine new frock coat for the past two weeks. He wanted to be sure that the range of psychic powers he possessed walked about well clad. Attractive to the eye. Apparent to any who might be looking.

He descended the stairs of the fine inn, happy to be spending these days and nights visiting one of his favorite cities, a place of magic and unpredictable characters, where the veil between the tactile and spirit world was perhaps at its most thin. Where everything could and did happen. The Senator was on the hunt…and using himself as bait.

Unfortunately, nothing yet had bit, though he wondered if he hadn’t narrowly avoided a vampire the previous Thursday. If he’d been one for whores, by now he’d have been drowning in naked women or contracted some sort of disease. But no. Carnal desire wasn’t what he had traveled to this inimitable city for. No, he’d pinned his hopes on finding a new operative for his ventures in this marvelous place.

There had been a promising lead last night, but the poor lad had fled. Frightened.

Or so he had thought.

To the Senator’s surprise, the young man in question was standing across the street, in front of the old convent.

Bishop studied the fellow from his vantage point on the veranda of the inn. He ran his fingers over the intricate, black, wrought-iron rail which captured slivers of gaslight, making the whole balcony seem like it was exquisitely carved, burning coal. Was that a knife glinting in the man’s hand, flashing in display to catch his attention?

Oh, well, that made things more complicated, didn’t it….

Sometimes Rupert Bishop wished his work was more mundane.

Senator Bishop doubted the cure for death could ever be found, but goodness did he enjoy trying to find it. That had been his commission since soon after Lincoln’s assassination and while he didn’t believe that the desired result would ever be achieved, the search itself was important.

He strolled out under the eaves and waited for a team of horses towing a wagonload of haphazardly stacked coffins to pass before crossing the street. The flickering gas lamp of the nearby textile shop only partly illuminated the fellow—Dupris, Bishop recalled—who had had sense enough to thankfully conceal the ceremonial blade.

Bishop tipped his top hat to Dupris, taking in the younger man’s overall appearance. Dupris’ olive-skinned brow bore a sheen of sweat; his white shirt sleeves were rolled up and his vest was undone and a bit muddy, as if he’d run up from the banks of the Mississippi.

“So. Changed your mind then, Mister Dupris?” Bishop asked casually.

“I did. I have. I’ll come with you to New York and join your commission,” the other said quietly. Bishop stared at him for a long moment, as always taking delight in how his piercing stare seemed to make everyone slightly uncomfortable, until the man added, “I simply didn’t believe you.”

“What changed your mind, then?”

“Shall we go indoors to discuss it?” Dupris asked, glancing behind him as if afraid of pursuit, a notion that did not sit well with Bishop. The Senator glanced around at the relatively unpopulated gas-lit street and decided to stand his ground. He knew nothing was seeking him at the moment.

“I find trees and bricks better company than people crowding about me in a bar.”

Dupris chuckled. “How do you manage business in Manhattan?”

“Carefully. Now. Tell me, before you waste any more of my time, what changed your mind?”

Dupris lifted his head and straightened his shoulders; nearly Bishop’s height, he spoke with distinct pride. “The hope that I can bring dignity and scientific proof to that which my mother practiced. I’d like to make the average American think twice before they curse what they deem as ‘black’ magic.”

“A noble goal,” Bishop said with a partial smile that soon faded. “No disrespect to your extended family, Mister Dupris, but your city and mine are two different worlds. Both metropolitan, both thronged with diverse cultures, both centers of commerce and culture, but vast attitudes and prejudices apart. The North is a curiously cold and double-talking creature when it comes to one’s… background. Let not the aims of the Union lull you into expecting an unconditional welcome. Having been raised Creole, you may face trials in New York that will be foreign to you.”

Bishop watched a painful, complex sweep of emotions flutter through the man’s hazel eyes and over his smooth, barely dusky skin before vanishing behind a cool mask.

“During some of my travels I have passed for white,” Dupris said carefully. “I suppose I may find it advantageous to do so again. But I appreciate that you acknowledge the blood from which I come, blood I do not deny, as one should associate no shame with it. Here in New Orleans we have our class, as you know, and we are proud, we are ascendant. Should I find it advantageous to pass, let me never hear one word against my line or the like.”

“Indeed, Mister Dupris. Make no mistake; I’d hire you regardless. I come from a fierce line of abolitionists and activists who have lived and died for the sake of equality for all men and between the sexes. In an often cruel city, I’ve others in my employ who have made that same choice, though I would never ask it. As a champion for all people, I wish institutional injustices were otherwise, and I will fight them as I have done all my life; as a Quaker, a friend to President Lincoln, and a man fiercely loyal to progressive Republican ideals. I pledge to you what I pledge to my female ward, that your struggles for rights will not go without allies.”

“That is heartening to hear, Senator. As for an oft two-faced North, my family always wanted what was easiest for me, most beneficial.” Dupris ground out the last word as if it were beneath a chemists’ pestle. “They won’t know any better, as they’ll never know the truth of where I’ve gone, will they, Senator?”

“Our work must remain secret and there will be no further contact. You do not have to imply your death, however, that choice tends to make things less complicated.” Bishop didn’t like how matter-of-fact he sounded, but he’d held this commission long enough that the speech was simply standard.

Louis stared at Bishop with increasing pain. He slightly lifted the hilt of the dagger he still held at his side and murmured, “This ensured that I’m dead to them all.”

“You didn’t have to go that far, you know,” Bishop said with a frown. He did not like curses coming along with his recruits. Unnecessary detritus getting in the way, dark business, all of which he could sense like invisible luggage floating along behind the man, dense, troublesome cargo. He would have to actively separate it from himself and his home, making sure nothing followed across his own threshold. Nothing could get close to her.

“This item may be of use in my work.” Dupris replied.

“Be sure it doesn’t become our problem. Keep what you’ve done and its ramifications to yourself. The commission asks nothing of you but your talents; it does not ask for your soul. That’s between you and whatever God, or lack thereof, you acknowledge. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir. This responsibility I take on wholly myself.”

“See that you do, or I’ll not hesitate to send you back into that priestess’s arms.”

Bishop saw the small tick in Dupris expression as he wondered how Bishop knew where the blade came from. The Senator enjoyed planting the idea that he was not to be trifled with; that ultimately, his power had nothing to do with the government position he’d managed to hold longer than any of the colleagues with whom he’d started.

“You will join the team already assembled in Manhattan. We will not travel together. Your residence will be provided, noted on your itinerary,” he said, reciting another rote speech.

“Have you made progress, then, on a cure for death?”

The Senator looked around for spies or listening ears, then shook his head. “We are… at an impasse. Science has not kept up with our imagination.”

Louis smiled. “You have to bend science, then, to imagination. Force theory into law.”

Bishop returned his smile. “Your confidence and passion, young man, is why you intrigue me and I think you’ll bring just the right… spark to our stalled crew.”

“How many?”

“Four men from differing background, supported by a small research staff that looks into improbable things, whatever may relate to the principle of immortality.”

“Your ‘Eterna’ commission, as you mentioned last night,” Dupris clarified. The Senator nodded.

They’d met the night prior in a fine absinthe parlor not far from where they now stood, Bishop’s instincts having drawn him in after spotting the man on the street. For an hour, Bishop waited patiently, noting that the man took no drink, just watched the crowd with a scientist’s eye. When he’d gone for a breath of fresh air, Bishop had followed. They’d struck up a conversation on the upper balcony, gloved palms resting solidly upon the wrought iron railing as they stared at New Orleans below and spoke of human nature.

“What were you about to do to me before I ran out, last night?” Louis asked. “You leaned forward about to take my hand. And I know you’re not of that persuasion, so what was that about?”

A smirk tugged at the Senator’s sculpted lip. “I’ve a few tricks, Mister Dupris. I didn’t want you remembering what I’d said to you. I sensed you were about to run, and I couldn’t have you darting about this delicious city with such sensitive material in your head.”

“You were going to affect my memory?” Louis asked eagerly. “How?”

“Need to know basis, Mister Dupris. For now, memory doesn’t have to do with immortality, and until it does, keep focused on the tasks I lay before you. You’ll be my guest at a ball the night you arrive. Do you have fine dress?”

“I do, sir.”

“Good. Dress sharp, then. And you’ll only speak to those you’re introduced to.”

“Are there dangers I should be aware of?”

The Senator’s defined lip curled downwards. “Everywhere and everyone.”

 

Louis bit back a grin, feeling what he thought his twin must feel when undertaking his various affairs; a surge of wicked excitement. Though for Louis’ part, it was about intrigue, not conquest. Which is why Bishop’s next caution caught him off guard.

“And, as I tell every one of my new employees, my ward is off limits. She will be in attendance. You will not be introduced.”

“Is she very pretty, then?”

“Yes.” Bishop said matter-of-factly. Louis thought he glimpsed a slight clench of the older man’s jaw. Devastatingly pretty, then.

“May I ask how old she is, that she must be so protected?”

“Twenty-seven.”

Louis blinked a moment. “Too old to remain a ward.”

Bishop lifted a finger. “Too pretty and clever not to.”

Louis smiled. “Do you pique all your employees’ interests so?”

At this, Bishop turned away and Louis could see that the heretofore gamesome and enigmatic gentleman’s closest nerve had been struck.

“Forgive me,” Louis said earnestly. “I did not mean to—”

“See that you don’t mean to, Mister Dupris,” Bishop said sharply, his charismatic warmth gone.

They walked in silence, at a quick clip, to the Rue Royale, where Bishop stopped across the street from the Dupris home. Louis was unnerved that Bishop seemed to know far more about him than he should after such short acquaintance.

But there was no turning back. He’d left a woman cursing his life and death upon the river bank. He had no choice but to make his new bed in Yankee territory. New England. A new world. When he’d been so comfortable in the old ….

Panic seized him. Was he doing the right thing or had he damned not just this body, but his eternal soul?

“You will take the 9 AM train, Mister Dupris,” Bishop said, reaching into an interior pocket of his fine coat and withdrawing a small sealed envelope which he handed to his new hire. “Here are your train tickets, the addresses to which you are to report, and a key for the doors. Please commit the location to memory and discard the information.”

Louis took the envelope and tucked it carefully into the pocket of his coat, which, though well tailored and made of good fabric, was less fine than the Senator’s.

“Thank you, sir.” He began to cross the street, then turned back and asked, “Will I see you on that train, Senator?”

“I try never to travel with my employees. I’ll fetch you before the party so I can advise you on the pit of vipers I’ll be sending you into.”

Louis allowed a partial smile. “I don’t mind snakes, sir. They may be of medicinal use.”

The Senator grinned. “Ah, if I thought of the party that way I’d enjoy it far more. Look for me at your door by eight. I’ll escort you to the mansion.”

Louis nodded. “I look forward to it. Thank you again.”

The Senator proffered a tip of his top hat and vanished around the corner with impressive, near liquid speed. Behind him, as if it were a force in his wake, a breeze rustled fallen leaves along the golden, gas-lit street.

It was a beautiful night in New Orleans; alive, awake, rich with sounds, smells and excitement swirling hot and spicy in the food and the cultural milieu. His last night in his beloved birthplace.

That night, Louis’ regular diet of wild and verdant dreams was supplemented by a keen pain in his chest, something carving, splitting his flesh and burrowing into his spirit, something desperate to pry his soul from his body and devour the space between….

Chapter Two

Clara Templeton sat surrounded by precarious towers of paperwork. This was unwise in her gas-lit office, where she liked to keep her prized, brand-new, Tiffany gas lamps trimmed high. That way it was easier to marvel at the bright, exquisite colors and the stunning textures and effects the artistic genius and his workers wrought on lamp-shades and sconces. Nevermind the fact that the whole place could burst into flame with the least tip of a stack of paper; Clara never felt happier than when she was entirely surrounded by interesting things.

Curiouser and curiouser were Clara’s general states of mind. This hadn’t wavered much since childhood, and now at the age of twenty-seven, working in a career that was entirely unheard of, especially for one of her sex, she felt the quality was her most vital asset.

Franklin, her partner in the Eterna Commission office, would have thrown a fit if he’d seen how she was keeping the place, but he wasn’t there. She had taken the liberty of spending the entire day giddily abandoning his fastidious principles of organization.

Clara was infamous for collecting everything, throwing nothing away, and making an ornate mess of things. To her credit, she knew where every item within the mess was, and could find anything in impressively short amount of time, if asked. Eccentric flair notwithstanding, she had an eye for décor, so even though the place looked a bit mad, it maintained a distinct style.

Her taste in art was cutting-edge; her gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite paintings, lit by the Tiffany lamps, made the place a treasury of rich colors and bold, iconic sentiment that nicely offset the dark mahogany of the office paneling.

Talismans of luck and power resided in an overflowing curio cabinet near her desk. If she felt in particular need of protection, she would hang up a number of the pendants and icons, tacking them to the window behind her desk. Today was one of those days. Something was “in the air,” so she guarded her delicate, sensitive’s sensibilities with care.

Early in their work together, the impeccably neat Franklin had knocked over yet another of Clara’s carefully stacked piles in a maze of notebooks and papers and burst out with, “May I ask, Miss Templeton, why you keep everything that comes into your hands? I try to keep our office from falling into the state of an unmanageable hoarder’s den, but it’s hard to keep up the pretense, let alone some kind of cataloguing system.”

She remembered blinking up at him from behind a precarious stack of ledgers topped by a small stone gargoyle that looked out in scowling protest of his surroundings. In an earnest, childlike voice, she replied; “because all of this means something to one of them. I… don’t know how to let go of any of it.”

Clara had an uncanny sense of how many times her individual soul had made its rounds about the world and through time. And while she tried not to let her current life get too busy with all the others, sometimes the past selves were terribly sentimental. She simply had to honor the things that reminded her, variously, of home. She was her own living graveyard. While others might find that morbid, Clara found it endearing.

“What are we missing?” she asked the room, the papers, the items scattered atop her desk, the gargoyle, her army of talismans, all her various and sundry tokens of ritual and meaning.

It was her passionate belief that something would finally tip the scales; a powerful object, an important tract, an infused pendant. At some point she would reach critical mass. If she could only gather enough interesting things in one space, like spontaneous combustion, inspiration would simply coalesce, in a roaring fire of world-altering truth.

“We’re missing the spark for the fire,” she said aloud. She had long ago felt the room listened when she spoke—she was fond of viewing buildings as entities and she imbued them with identities. “We’ve lost spirit. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Spirit? How can we seek to gain the right of immortality without addressing spirit? The body is one thing, but the spirit… that’s got to be the ticket…spirit. Spirits?

“Thoughts?” she asked, turning the little gargoyle atop the spire of ledgers to face her. He gave no answer save his continued, open-mouthed scowl of protestat. No winds of change took to the room at her query—which was for the best, considering what mess would be made of her labyrinthine stacks of papers if they had.

While Clara, due to certain health concerns, was not as practiced a medium as some of her friends, she had followed interesting leads from the beyond down proverbial rabbit holes. She had the distinct sensation that however much she knew about the world, there was always something more. For a soul that had gone around as many times as hers, this was like the fountain of youth. Curiosity. Learning. The chase of discovery.

Maybe that was something to include in the Eterna Commission. Could death be staved off by a ravenously hungry mind?

“The Thirst for Knowledge,” Clara scribbled in her idea book, a leather-bound volume which contained more doodles than complete sentences. A few gems stood out as she flipped through past musings: thoughts on emergent technologies such as electricity; on elder curiosities like the fountain of youth; on ethics associated with historic and present-day blood-drinking, and examples of same; and on the balance between the corporeal and the spiritual.

The Eterna Commission was something Clara Templeton took quite personally.

After all, it had been her idea.

Well, as much of an idea as an excitable twelve year old could muster in the presence of a grieving first lady. That single meeting had birthed an entire government office.

Mrs. Lincoln had asked for Spiritualist counsel after the assassination of her husband. Senator Rupert Bishop was well-known to be an open practitioner, and he had brought Clara with him on that fateful visit. The girl had suggested that perhaps persons in an elected office such as the presidency should be given some kind of cure or protection that would ensure no one could so cruelly remove them from their hallowed positions.

Clara’s parents had died one directly after the other; her father, a doctor, had simply faded once her mother had gone. It was terribly romantic in its way, but left young Clara somewhat bitter, abandoned as she was. There was no question that she would end up in the care of the family’s dear friend, Rupert Bishop, then a young Congressman from New York. As she grew, her psychic gifts blossomed, but unfortunately, so did her ailments.

Thus, out of a widow’s—and a nation’s—grief, out of the words of a child who was already no innocent, a commission was created. Bishop was at the helm, and Clara was widely considered, by those few who knew of Eterna’s existence, to be a figurehead. Women of good breeding did not work. However, per the Quaker principles of the Bishop and Templeton households, Clara was highly educated, and the Senator, as he now was, knew of and honored her desire to be useful and independent despite periodic ills that rendered her entirely helpless in seizure.

Bishop deemed it vital for Spiritualists to maintain the core of the search for death’s cure, for the simple and singular reason that Spiritualists believed in the continuation of the spirit. They were living proof of life beyond death; they communicated with it, they looked at the body as merely one form of a living thing. Who better than Spiritualists to ask such questions and to take on such tasks? They did not need a cure for death, not in the same desperate sense as a terrified person panicked that the end of this incarnate life was the end of all things, that once one’s coffin was laid in the ground, all was lost.

The hope was that Spiritualists would keep a balance and keep the Eterna Commission on task; maintaining the union of the Union. Not for personal gain, not for indefinite immortality, but as a matter of national sanity and security for a president’s terms.

It was a grave, grey area, but one Senator Bishop held absolutely firm. Clara respected immeasurably that all his influence and insight had not made him greedy. If anything, he had become all the more cautious. He made her feel a great many things, but most of all, safe. She did not dare put this in jeopardy, so whatever her feelings for her guardian, she did little to affect their status quo.

At long last Clara Templeton found herself back home, having quickly traversed the few blocks of quiet downtown Pearl Street, where gas-lamps flickered at the entrances of fine buildings, both offices and residence.

She slipped in and, knowing where to step on each wooden stair so as not to make it creak, made her way up to the second floor of the townhouse she shared with the Senator. Their housekeeper knew never to wait up for either of them but would nonetheless scold Clara for her late hours in the morning.

Alone in her room of burnished cherry paneling and rose colored walls, Clara donned a night-dress layered to utter absurdity with lace and frills. Her dresses for the office were neatly-tailored, simple, and efficient, but at night she indulged her inner, pampered—perhaps spoiled—aristocrat; a mercurial and treacherous emotional beast.

She decided that she would write out, in her diary, a list of things that wearied her and spoke aloud as she wrote:

I am tired of knowing things I can’t see.

I weary of seeing all the iterations of my soul’s past paths and incarnations in pristine detail and not being able to, for the lives of me, see this present one clearly.

I wish the dead, when I hear them, would deign to tell me something useful, give me perspective about my own existence. Instead, all I hear are their needy cries for resolution of their past affairs. Ghosts are so terribly self-absorbed.

I am tired of being self-absorbed.

I wish Rupert would come home from New Orleans.

I hate that I so often wish for space from him, then, when he’s gone, I wish him home.

Do be careful not to whine.

Clara looked at the list and tossed the lined notebook upon her bed.

Rupert Bishop had always respected her and given her everything she wanted or needed. He sought ways to challenge her and employed her in ways that made her feel useful. She knew she was loved but Bishop never made her feel that he had any designs upon her. Now, at the age of twenty-seven, she sometimes wished he would. At least she thought she did.

She picked up the notebook once more and scribbled:

I believe I am on the cusp of something wonderful or terrible and I’m not sure I’ll know which until it’s too late to reverse course.

Where is the value of lives lived before except in lessons I can use in this one?

What if I tried to live a moderately normal life for a woman my age… Perhaps went to a soiree. A nice gown might do wonders for my excitable nerves…

Clara looked up in alarm.

“Saturday! The ball!” she exclaimed. “Lord, what in the world shall I wear…”

She looked back down at her journal and wrote:

Furthermore; a new hat.

There were matters weighing upon Clara of grave, potentially world-changing, psychological and spiritual import, but sometimes it was a relief to be suddenly seized by the throes of fashion.

Chapter Three

Louis took to the speeding system of rails that would whisk him north with the scream of steam. He stared out the window and pondered all he’d left behind as the chug of the finely appointed train, with its polished brass, etched glass, and dark, smooth wood ushered in his new era.

His trunk was stowed above his seat in the small sleeper car. He didn’t realize how tightly he was clutching the papers that would instruct him on the matters of his new world until they made a sound of protest, creased and crumpled in his tightening palm. He hadn’t known how much he’d miss home until he was watching it roll away from him. But then, what was home without any family left to call it such?

For a time the Dupris family had moved fluidly in and out of society, depending on what captivated the quixotic Helene Dupris, a stunning woman who drank deeply of this world and who passed out of it while painfully young and beautiful. Andre had never recovered, taking a rakish turn, while Louis waxed more poetic. He looked forward to seeing dear mama again in some far away place, where she would be surrounded by the finest French fashion and an endless retinue of angelic admirers.

Francois Dupris had taken on Helene initially just as a lover, without intention of marrying her, a woman of the most beautiful Creole stock. But there was no denying that woman anything. Soon he had given Helene his name, his fortune, which had been earned in the silk trade, the world and more. And enjoy it she did, until consumption took her, fading her unto the spirit lands with a morbidly romantic, slow snuff of her candle. The Dupris fortune had suffered from her extravagance and from the attentions of the many doctors Francois had enlisted to try to save her. The fact Helene had given him handsome twin sons with skin lighter than hers had been recompense enough, at first, but after her death, Francois Dupris found the boys reminded him too much of their dear, dead mama, and once they were old enough to fend for themselves, he returned to Paris, leaving them behind in the Crescent City.

Andre had taken on their mother’s penchant for excess, Louis her inner passions and secretive spiritual practices. That she had been what northerners would mistakenly call a witch was something only known to Louis for most of the twins’ childhood. Once Andre found out, he demanded spells for fortune and luck. Helene denied him, saying he was not old enough to wield such tools wisely, and he had never forgiven her. After Helene’s death, Louis had pursued her practices with careful reverence, well away from Andre’s notice.

Louis’ desire to elevate his mother’s beliefs to the privileged halls of science was his loving epitaph. He hoped Helene—and the heavens and all the ancestors—would forgive and understand what he’d had to do to get there.

For much of the journey Louis was happy to give himself over to the rocking lull of the speeding train, often nodding off, only to awake to a new wonder. He felt he was flying north, cutting in and out of mountains and along river banks, crossing forest and plain, hill and valley, the great, tumultuous landscapes America offered in vast variety. All were laid bare along the rails, a catapulting buffet of riches, state by state. His few transfers took place in arched, echoing stations he was too groggy to fully appreciate.

Once the train left Philadelphia and the last leg of the trip was upon him, presented as a series of dramatic hills and tunnels, Louis felt as though threads of lightning were reaching out to him, throbbing with the pulse of the country, drawing him ever closer to the economic machine at the base of the Empire State. That great heartbeat whispered down the rails as cities grew, as open space was obliterated by brick mortar, green was forsaken for wall and spire, and iron and industry rose.

New Orleans had its own inimitable character and bustled with trade from around the world, so Louis was hardly daunted by a large metropolis.

But here, in the colder, greyer northern light, New York City appeared far more dangerous; a sprawling leviathan, a thumping, clattering, churning system of cogs and wheels powered by countless bodies. All orbiting around one sliver of an island; a centrifugal beast from which all manner of art, industry, and aesthetic and cultural mélange spat forth. Entering this maelstrom via a speeding train, Louis felt magnetized to the core, terrified and exhilarated.

Attending a Manhattan ball would suit Andre far better than Louis, but Andre was gone to London on some sort of sordid business. Louis was unsure what kind of party he was attending; glancing at Bishop’s itinerary, ‎he quailed at the word Vanderbilt. But he tried to look at it like his mother might, that only someone who had truly drunk deeply of the well of life dared wield any sway over death. He had to pursue all things with the wide, hungry eyes of a child.

He made his way, via train, ferry, trolley, and finally on foot, each mode of transport showing him different aspects of the city and its wide range of pulsing life. The address to which he had been directed was a basement-level set of rooms near garment factories, adjacent to the famed Union Square. No one awaited him and the building was neither squalid nor grand, merely entirely nondescript brick on an inconspicuous block. The small silver key Bishop had given him unlocked the windowless wooden front door and allowed him entry into an unlit front hall.

Louis fumbled for matches in his pocket and struck one, then saw a lantern upon a hook near the front door. The building was gas-lit, he discovered, not a uniform convenience in any city but one he was glad for. He turned the key to the simple sconces, revealing a tiny receiving parlor, an alcove of a kitchen, and a back bedroom with a small window that looked out onto struggling greenery of an unkempt patch of garden.

It didn’t take long for Louis to unpack his single suitcase. He hung up his one fine suit, frowning as he noticed the creases. Hoping they would work themselves out by evening, he placed his few shirts, trousers, and waistcoats in the modest wardrobe and his toiletries in the small restroom. Adequate plumbing was an additional, much appreciated luxury.

Unwrapping a few small icons and two candles from a soft silk scarf with great care, he made a small ledge in the bedroom into a modest personal altar, hoping that time would adorn it further.

His labor done, Louis took a few moments to sit upon the edge of the bed, trying not to regret what he’d left behind. He’d traveled with such speed that he assumed any curse would take a while to catch up. In the meantime, surely he could reverse it by the nature of his work, by his good-hearted prayers, by channeling the Mystères….

Pressing the protective talisman he wore on a cord around his neck hard against his sternum, Louis roused himself from worry and put on that fine suit. The thrill of embarking upon new ventures gripped him for a moment. Then, as he tucked away the pendant, a stone carved into a bird his mother had given him, and inspected himself in the mirror, he saw a wide-eyed man who had a lot to gain and a lot to hide, and sank again to the mattress.

A potent memory took him; his mother insisting that all his interests in faith be used for good and transcendent purpose, speaking as though she had foreseen this very moment. Louis knew he was not hungry for power; he wished only to honor tradition. Yet here he was, far from home, far from tradition…. The shrill ring of a bell startled him from his reverie.

‎            Senator Bishop stood at the door, looking dapper and suave, his silver hair gleaming in the flickering gas lamp at the stoop. His presence bolstered Louis and reminded him that he was here for reasons beyond himself. Without a word Bishop ushered Louis towards the large black carriage waiting in the street.

Once both men were seated with the door closed, Bishop spoke.

“We are meeting at the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man who has been consolidating railroads, for a party celebrating his industry. This ignominious tycoon stands at the pinnacle of a twisted mess of rails that he grabbed as if his was the wrathful hand of God, wrenching and bending the companies to his will by oft questionable means. This is the fete of a king crowning himself, a party of pure vanity.

“New York’s economy has taken a horrific tumble these past few years, but men like Vanderbilt remain unscathed. Those in attendance tonight will either be those who answer to him or those he hopes to assert himself over. I’m planning our arrival to occur after the Commodore has made his little speech, once the dancing has begun and the champagne has started flowing.”

“May I ask why we are to attend?”

“‎I attend as a mediator; a man of peace, reason, and persuasion. Some of Vanderbilt’s underlings are some of my colleagues’ staunchest supporters. None of us, for various reasons, can afford make an enemy of the man. Thusly, I must keep glasses of champagne from being launched in the fellow’s disagreeable face.”

Louis smiled. “I admire your diplomacy , Senator.”

“Don’t admire me too soon,” Bishop replied wearily. “It’ll be very hard for me not to launch a glass myself. It’s good you’ll be there, Dupris. Keep me accountable. And just so you’re aware, simply nod and smile no matter how I introduce you, and don’t be offended if I don’t.”

“Fine, as long I’m not introduced as your servant,” Louis retorted, “else I’ll launch champagne in your face.”

The Senator laughed. “Fair enough. I appreciate your assertiveness, my friend, and would have it no other way. And now, are you ready for pure pretention in all its insidious splendor?”

Louis chuckled. “Do I have any choice?”

The Vanderbilt Mansion on Fifth Avenue was large, unavoidable, and indomitable, lording over nearly two entire city blocks.

A footman took charge of the Senator’s carriage; Bishop watched it go with a pained expression on his face, as if he expected he would next see it in some lot for resale. Dupris had heard tales of ruthless Commodore Vanderbilt, but he hoped carriage stealing wasn’t among the man’s list of abominable business practices.

The pointed eaves of the building jutted high into the evening sky. Far more windows were lit across the span of the building than Louis felt were needed for a soiree, undoubtedly another of Vanderbilt’s countless displays of immense privilege.

The Senator had timed their arrival just right. There was loud music playing and the imposing Commodore, whose likeness Louis had seen many times in the northern papers, was holding court with paunchy men in a corner of the ballroom.

Louis and his sponsor were soon surrounded by a throng of tired, irritated men who seemed mighty glad to see Rupert Bishop and didn’t give a whit who he, Louis, was. That was just fine with Louis; as per the Senator’s warning, he was not introduced. A flurry of political talk commenced, the nuance of which eluded Louis, as the New York political landscape was as foreign to him as New Orleans was to the rest of the country. He imagined he’d soon understand the lay of the proverbial land if these gentlemen were always so loose-lipped.

When there was a momentary lull, the Senator grabbed glasses of brandy off a tray offered by a passing maid and handed one to Louis. As the Senator absently toasted his glass, Louis dared offer an observation:

“You’re a very prominent man, Senator Bishop,” Louis murmured, “for someone who heads a covert government office.”

“I’m not one for skulking in the shadows, Mister Dupris,” Bishop stated. “Unsavory characters might linger there. Sycophants. Lobbyists. When one is out in the open, it is assumed one has nothing to hide. What one guards,” he said, indicating a woman across the room whose back was turned to them, presumably his ward, before continuing, “is different than what one hides. It’s a distinct difference you’d do well to understand.”

“Yes, sir…” Louis replied. Bishop gave a curt not as if he felt himself sufficiently heard and strode off to shake the hand of a mustachioed man in an ostentatiously striped suit.

Louis wasn’t sure if he was jealous of or inspired by the senator. He supposed he could be by both. He was most certainly compelled by him. Then, as he turned back towards a confection table for something with which to busy himself, she turned into full view.

She was a painting come to life. A muse. A gallery treasure.

She lit the chandeliers and sent music swirling through the air.

She was all angles, with sharp collarbones and distinct features, a classic face, one he’d seen at the Louvre in many iterations. She was dressed in the modern fashion, a pale green dress gathered and bustled in beautiful proportions, with a generous helping of smooth fair décolletage in view, her bust-line accented by starched lace and a pendant glimmering from a dark ribbon. Looking at her, Louis knew in that instant that contemporary style notwithstanding, she was an old thing.

Yes. In fact, on that count… she was terrifying. He’d never seen another woman with that kind of air, one that transcended time itself. He couldn’t help but notice that the men who regarded her did so with clear apprehension. Even if they did not know what they sensed, they obviously felt something; they didn’t stay away out of mere fear of the Senator’s wrath if they approached the woman he, Louis, had been instructed to keep quite clear of.

In a rare moment of passionate compulsion, he resolved that he had to talk with her. He waited until the Senator was engrossed in heavy conversation—about money, campaigning, and “the scourge of Tammany Democrats”—leaving Louis rightly ignored.

The woman had drifted away from other party guests; she turned, scowling, toward a corner of the ballroom that was entirely shadowed… a perfect place to make an entrance…

 

Clara was used to balls, fetes, soirees, premieres, speeches, inaugurations, to all manner of pomp and circumstance. She had been at the right hand of a powerful, persuasive Senator since she was a young child. She rather enjoyed the social rituals of state.

But something about tonight felt different. After numerous attempts to ask the right questions, she believed something was about to answer. That prospect was far more interesting to her than appearing in society, especially here.

Clara didn’t like the Vanderbilts any more than her guardian did. While the daughters were interesting, they didn’t redeem the father in her eyes; a dour, selfish, self-righteous noveau riche of the most heinous stripe, one that forged ahead and pulled drawbridges up behind him. None could forge further or compete; the man had created a monopoly that threatened the very principles upon which American society’s financial and opportune fabric was supposedly based. And during New York’s present financial woes, a party like this made Clara feel ashamed, as if she were condoning that which she could not abide. She caught herself frowning and turned away from the room.

It would seem the spirit world wasn’t any more fond of the Vanderbilts than Clara was; she could feel a press of anxiety, a certain negativity oozing through the air. In this place, too much good will had been squandered, too much entitlement displayed without graciousness. The atmosphere was so riddled by unsettled ghostly energies that it might trigger an episode if she wasn’t especially careful.

In making her rounds of the ballroom earlier, she’d passed an alcove that would shield her from the view of the public. Barely had she sought refuge there when a shadow moved and her breath caught in her throat. A handsome, olive-skinned man in a fitted black suit suddenly blocked her path.

A man moving in so close might have constituted a threat, but she sensed genuine warmth in his regard despite the chill of ghosts in his wake. Clara didn’t like to overestimate her gifts, but she could often ascertain whether a person wished her well or ill. She was in no danger. Not physically.

His piercing hazel eyes bored into her with more intensity and mystery than she had heretofore experienced. She was taken aback in a welcome way.

“You’re in my path, sir…” she said quietly.

“So I am, Mademoiselle, and forgive me. If you are who I believe you must be, I’ve been instructed not to introduce myself,” the man began, in a rich, deep voice. “And while I do value my new job with my life, my life would be forfeit if I did not at least tell you that you are, by far, the most interesting creature in this entire room, if not this entire city. Save, perhaps, your guardian, my employer, who insisted you were quite off-limits. This would make any woman all the more fascinating. You are so utterly time-stopping, I now understand why the Senator is so protective of you.”

She laughed. “Did my dear Bishop employ you merely for flattery?”

“No, my lady, he employed me for theory and faith. How I might apply spiritual concepts and principles to the quest for immortality as pursued by your department.”

“Ah, you’re one of ours!” she commented brightly. The fact that she was expressly forbidden by Bishop from talking to Eterna researchers made her want to all the more. She was flooded with thrills at this covert encounter and checked the angle of the alcove to be sure they could continue to speak  unseen. “You’re new. Where do you hail from? Your accent is distinct.”

“New Orleans, my lady, a distinct city indeed.” He bowed. “Louis Dupris, at your service, Miss Templeton. I hope my overtures do not offend. I doubt I can ever speak with you again, as I value my work—and the Senator—deeply. But there are times when a man must speak or forever regret the lost chance, and you evoke that prescient timeliness.”

Something about this man spoke of a turning of tables and a long needed change. She could feel her past selves, all those whom she had asked for help, leaning in. Would she make the first move in this new game? She would. Her boldness was a newfound delight. Cocking her head to the side, the plumes of her fascinator rustling, she laid down the gauntlet.

“You should come to call, Mister Dupris.”

He stared at her and she watched as desire and fear collided on his face.

“I… couldn’t,” he insisted as if convincing himself. He set his jaw. “I can’t, my dear Mademoiselle.”

“But you should,” she insisted sweetly. He looked increasingly conflicted. She chuckled. “In secret, then, if you’re worried about the Senator’s wrath.” She batted one silk-gloved hand, enjoying this new distraction more every moment, secrecy making it all the more important and vital. “Come stroll with me through Greek and Roman relics at our glorious Metropolitan Museum. Tuesday, at two. Tell me about spiritual disciplines I know little of.”

With that, she swept off, as she prided herself on never overstaying her welcome. Besides, she needed to be near an exit, should the symptoms of an episode become more clear. As the strains of a waltz filled the air, she saw Senator Bishop take the hand of the widow, renowned psychic, and personal friend of the family, Evelyn Northe. Clara felt her warm face cool into the masque of indifference she presented to the world whenever those two danced together. Evelyn was aunt, surrogate mother, and unwitting rival all at once. Clara cursed herself as shame and fury rose within her. The temperature around her plummeted, as if whatever spirits might be present were drawn to her inner embarrassment.

“It’s complicated and always has been,” she murmured to herself, desperate to understand the nuances of her own heart. Seeing the weight of the stare between Northe and Bishop, she was reminded that they had participated in hundreds of séances together over the course of the last two decades. She had been excluded due to her “condition.”

Thanks to her keen senses and the irrepressible memories of her past lives, usually Clara felt ancient, not twenty-seven. But when she looked at Rupert and Evelyn dancing, she felt very young and small.

And a bit dizzy.

Horror of horrors, everything spun and she lost control. She hadn’t been paying enough attention to her symptoms. The floor was hard when she hit it.

 

The elegant woman dancing with the Senator noticed before he did; her gaze whipped toward the other side of the room just in time to see Miss Templeton crash to the ground. With the slow, agonizing grace that horror can bring, almost as if it was a new step in their dance, she and Bishop broke apart and rushed toward the younger woman.

“Clara,” Bishop barked, catching her as her head lolled back. Evelyn Northe darted to the confection table, seized a spoon, and rushed to place it in the chattering mouth of the woman who, a moment ago, had been lithe and lovely.

What a woeful transformation, Louis thought from his position in the alcove; a body that could easily be prized for its nymph-like qualities suddenly compromised, shuddering and seizing. Louis’ heart lurched with a pity he was sure she’d despise.

His every instinct was to rush to Miss Templeton’s side, but the Senator’s threats froze him in the shadows, feeling suddenly guilty for having directly disobeyed orders on his first night in the city. Andre must have been rubbing off on him, even in absentia. Did twins become more alike through the passage of time? Heaven forbid….

The Senator gazed around the room in an accusatory fashion, as if looking to pin Miss Templeton’s collapse on an external factor. Louis doubted he’d find cause, as far as he knew, this was the kind of condition one merely had to endure.

But, perhaps there was more to it… Some kind of a spell? He’d seen religion-driven “fits” in his day. More, all the hairs on the back of his neck were on end and it was now drastically cold in the room, though the temperature had been perfectly pleasant moments before… He shifted further into the shadows and said a prayer of protection over the beautiful woman who had so captured his interest.

 

The Senator closed the carriage door and offered Clara the blank, patrician stare he gave to everyone he respected.

“Clara. You mustn’t be—”

“Mortified? How couldn’t I be?” She held his gaze for a moment before looking out the window at broad, fine Fifth Avenue in all its grand shadows and gas-lit glow. The carriage moved off, the Vanderbilt mansion quickly fading into vague pointed spires against a darker sky. Tears streamed unchecked down her sickly-pale face and ran into her bodice, splotching the light green fabric with dark pools of moisture. She pressed her warm forehead to the cool glass, letting her head swivel and vibrate along with the clip of hooves. “Just when I thought I could go out in society again… Is it my fault? Did I bring it upon myself?”

“It’s always been related to your gifts,” Bishop replied gently. “Did you sense anything before you went under?”

She’d been looking at him and Evelyn. Before that, the compelling Mister Dupris… None of which she should mention. “No…”

“I felt a chill. Someone may have brought uninvited ghosts along.”

“Perhaps. The Vanderbilts themselves have earned little good will among the dead.”

“Then I too ignored my instincts,” Bishop said ruefully. “I thought it just the living people who were ill at ease with the man. I’m sorry, Clara, I should have alerted—”

“It’s my responsibility, not yours,” Clara snapped. “I should have left.”

Society would be loathe to soon see her trotted out into it again. Perhaps that was for the best. Clara didn’t like being scrutinized or gossiped about, and she was sure this little paroxysm would be the talk of the town for some time to come. Dear God. Dupris. He would’ve seen it too; her quaking like a mad creature, helpless and pathetic. Her cheeks burned bright.

“While you were under, did you receive any messages?” Bishop asked.

When she’d first begun attending séances, she’d quiver when receiving a message. Due to her Quaker upbringing, this was at first considered a connection to God. But her physical reaction grew more violent through the years, while the spiritual information lost clarity.

Clara shook her head. “Not a thing. Darkness. Nothing useful,” she said. “A painful fit, if vision could be gained, is one thing. For nothing but mortifying embarrassment? It’s infuriating.”

Not to mention it was terrifying to be open and vulnerable to all manner of things. She prayed this did not herald more frequent paroxysms in the future.

She thought of the way Mister Dupris had looked at her from the shadows, the way his handsome face became more handsome when he smiled, the glint in his eye that showed she had affected him. Her heart lurched again.

Did she dare meet him as planned?

No. Her true nature had shown itself, warding all eligible bachelors off.

Far too many—even educated persons—thought people who seized as she did were not only defective physically, but spiritually and mentally; plagued not only in body, but by, God help her, the devil.

Maybe this latest “fit” was as much punishment as it was anything else. A lady wouldn’t arrange to meet a stranger in secret. She was growing tired of secrets; her whole life had been filled with them. The fabric of her reality was shackled. She and Bishop were tangled in bindings of good intentions on behalf of poor, grieving Mrs. Lincoln.

“I know I cannot take away how mortifying it was, Clara, but I hope you won’t take it too hard,” Bishop said, helping her out of the carriage and nodding to the driver before escorting her up the stoop to the townhouse.

Clara shrugged, inconsolable, imagining what people saw when they looked at her in that state; conjuring before her mind’s eye their expressions of disgust, pity, discomfort, and other unpleasant emotions.

 

They were night owls, the Senator and his ward. Their housekeeper railed at their wasteful natures, but orders were to keep all lamps trimmed, no matter the hour. That way they wouldn’t bump into things as they drifted like ghosts through their home. It was in this vein, torn between twin urges to hide and to seek company, that Clara, some hours later, decided to wander the house.

Clara often heard the Senator talking in his study, generally rehearsing a speech he’d soon give on the senate floor or perfecting a few talking points he’d offer on the election circuit. Now and then it seemed she heard him speaking with a ghost. Sometimes the conversation might be with none other than himself.

This night, she crept to the threshold of the study and peered past the door frame, spotting the Senator at the window. Bishop’s frock coat was off and had been tossed over the back of his desk chair, revealing his long black satin waistcoat, large black buttons cinching the back snugly against his tall, lean torso. The bright white of the moon practically glowed upon his tousled head of hair, which had gone wholly silver oddly early in his youth. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his forearms tense as he pressed down upon the window ledge as if his hands were talons. Tonight, he was talking to the city.

“Sleep, New York”, he murmured. “My nets are all cast. Advice given. Poultices applied. Plots afoot. Courses corrected. Purposes set in their various motions. Who keeps watch, then, if I lay me down to sleep? Who keeps awake to see all your many, mighty troubles…?”

Clara found herself fighting the urge to raise her hand as if she were in class, ready for him to call upon her, suddenly wishing to make him very proud of her indeed after all the care he’d taken to help raise her. “I am awake, Rupert,” she murmured quietly, not knowing if he would hear her. “Rest. I shall watch over all you have wrought.”

His head tilted slightly, though he did not turn to face her. When he spoke, it was with great care, hitting consonants as if he were sifting through a great tome in his mind before spitting out carefully curated words.

“Why, so you are, Miss Clara. Awake. Awake. Good.” Still without looking at her, he moved to the narrow archway between two bookcases that led to his bedroom and disappeared.

Whenever the Senator felt the weight of the world upon his shoulders, his usual tender kindness would vanish, replaced by a cool distance. Accustomed to these shifts, Clara usually knew better than to take them personally, but after tonight’s episode, she assumed she was simply another burden to him. Perhaps it would be better for him if she moved out, set up her own household somewhere.

Perhaps Louis Dupris could be her way out. It was a rare man who caught her eye, after all…and hadn’t she felt she was on the cusp of something? The way Monsieur Dupris spoke about his work, she felt s if the very world was cracking open.

No. He’d seen her collapse and flail like a dying fish. No man would take on such a pariah. Women like her could be found in institutions all around the great city.

Clara had to hope differently, and pray for further unfolding of her life’s purpose.  While she doubted Monsieur Dupris would come for her, she had to put fate to the test.

Chapter Four

Louis arrived at the Eterna research building at his appointed time, easily strolling the few blocks west from his home. In his breast pocket, wrapped in soft cheesecloth, bulged the small dagger.

Near one of Manhattan’s westerly industrial areas, the building’s grand arched façade was cast-iron, pressed from a mold and tacked to a brick frame. The neighboring storefronts were similarly fancifully decorated. But where they were open for business, the ground floor of the building Louis sought to enter had been made to look abandoned, windows dark and shuttered.

After entering and locking the door behind him, Louis crossed the dim entrance hall, drawn to an open back room by the sound of men’s voices. There he found two other men, both wearing long, black, tunic-like vestments, concentrating intently on the contents of a glass flask that they slowly swirled before them.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Louis offered. “I’m here to join your coterie.”

“Bishop’s new recruit, eh? said one in a German accent. “Come, look at what Barney merged. These two solutions have never bonded like this before. Isn’t it beautiful?” he said rapturously.

Other than those remarks, the men ignored Louis entirely, so he turned his attention to the room itself. His fellow commission members were seated at a large table. That table and the stools around it were the room’s only furnishings, save for a few bookshelves which held random items that Louis had could not identify at first glance. Intrigued, he approached the shelves.

Barney called after him gruffly, “If you’re placing an item of import on the ‘in progress’ shelf, label it, please. Don’t touch our things, we won’t touch yours.” The man placed a lit match into a glass tube and sighed in contentment, watching it burn.

“Understood,” Louis replied, and set the wrapped dagger in an empty wooden box on a waist-level shelf. Noticing a stack of small cards and a pencil nearby and assuming these were for anyone’s use, he wrote, “Property of Louis Dupris in honour of the City of New Orleans,” on a card and placed it atop the box.

The shelf above held a number of large, beautiful leather-bound tomes, some bearing titles familiar to Louis. Seeing that they were otherwise unlabeled, he assumed anyone could examine them, so he took down a 17th century manuscript on the occult that he’d never had the pleasure of reading. One of the bay windows had a window-seat; he ensconsed himself there, where just enough light to read by came through the thick shutters, and lost himself in theory.

A few days passed in a similar manner; a mix of contemplation, sporadic chatter, deep silence, reading, writing, and transcendent reverie. Louis pored over reams of equations and notes, discussing them at length with Malachi Goldberg, who was somewhat of a wizard in botany, and Barnard “Barney” Smith, an American-born chemist. He learned that two other teammates were traveling on research.

It was a rare blessing, Louis mused, to be solely engaged in the employment of thought. He believed passionately that spirit and science were not at cross purposes but were two distinct dialects of the same language. Bridges were meant to be built, just like that gorgeous Brooklyn behemoth that was rising, stone by stone, to unite two great cities.

Absorbed by ideas so big they threatened to split his whirring mind in twain, Louis nearly lost track of the passage of time. He never was sure what made him suddenly realize it was Tuesday, but he shot up from his perch upon the shuttered window-seat, terrified that he was going to be late.

A good shave and freshly laundered clothing were in order, for he had a secret rendezvous alongside carved stone gods. Feeling full of life and possibility, he was confident those icons of ancient power would look upon him with fond favor. Whether the woman would deign to keep the appointment was anyone’s guess….

She was a woman of her word.

Louis found her among the Greek and Roman statuary in the city’s new Metropolitan Museum. She wore an elegant burgundy dress with black piping; cocked at a sporting angle upon her shining hair was a small black hat that supported a veil and feathers. A parasol with a sharp tip leaned against a pedestal. Miss Templeton seemed to be staring at one of the museum’s descriptive plates; Louis watched as she took a pencil from the beaded bag hanging from cords looped around her wrist, crossed out the description, and began writing new text below the old.

At the sound of Louis’ footfalls, she paused. Without turning around, she said;

“It’s wrong. I am doing my moral duty as a patron of the arts to correct it.”

“And how do you know it is incorrect, Mademoiselle?” Louis asked.

Miss Templeton turned around and was visibly surprised to see him in the instant before she smiled.

“A spirit of the Hellenic era told me so. The museum really should employ me. Spirits can’t bear to see their history mistaken and thankfully the ghosts treat me very gently while I correct it for them. Hello, Mister Dupris. I confess I did not expect you to come.”

“Why ever not?”

She stiffened and raised her head proudly. “I assume you saw what… happened at the soiree.”

“I did. Why should that dissuade me from a rendezvous with the most interesting woman I’ve met in a very long time? Mind you, I’m from New Orleans, where everyone is interesting.”

She smiled again, the angles of her face softening, and gestured for him to walk with her. The tip of her parasol clicked along the stone as they passed below faces and body parts that once stood whole and proud, now mere fragments of elder glories. The ruins made Louis melancholy. Much like that spirit correcting its relic via a talented, gifted woman, he wanted to make sure history would tell the story of his arts and interests without bias, the beautiful truths untainted.

“What makes you special, Mister Dupris? What do you bring to the Commission?” She put it to him gamesomely, but he could tell she truly wanted to know and expected him to be confident in his answer.

“My areas of interest lie in the spirit realms,” he replied. “As I mentioned, I want certain spiritual practices, currently upheld primarily in New Orleans, to not be exotic and misunderstood to outsiders, but to be made as legitimate as any branch of the sciences, arts, or humanities.”

“Lovely. My talents also lie in the spirit realms, though at times I pay quite a cost.”

“I make up for raw talent by respect and adoration of tradition. These past few days with the commission theorists have been wondrous,” Louis said excitedly. “You’d surely adore our conversations, Miss Templeton, and I’m sure you could add to them—”

She turned away and Louis feared he’d somehow said something wrong. He knew theirs was a man’s sphere…but she was obviously capable…

“I am not allowed,” she said.

“Why is the Senator so protective of you?” he asked quietly.

Her pale cheek flushed with red shame. “He is protective of situations that might trigger my… incidents.”

“Ah. I’m sorry,” Louis offered gently. “I didn’t understand what you meant by ‘cost’.”

“We don’t, entirely, either,” she said mordantly. “The seizures aren’t regular, nor are they easy to predict. It seems that various psychic or paranormal phenomena can trigger them. As much as I have an aptitude for a séance, attending and or conducting one is quite a hazard for me. A single ghost, I can take. If I open myself up for anything and everything that might want to communicate, it’s a grave danger.”

“That must be so difficult, to have your health and your talent at such cross purposes,” Louis said earnestly. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

She looked up at him, her golden eyes warm. “Thank you for understanding. It is a rare person who does.”

Another turn. Another promenade through broken limbs.

In that soft silence of footfalls upon marble, it wasn’t that Louis felt awkward or at a loss, he simply didn’t want these moments to end. There was a gravity between them, a magnetism that threatened to drag him off a ledge.

“May we make a habit of this, Miss Templeton?” Louis dared ask, biting back his own nerves to do so. “Of a stroll through a forest of bodily stone?”

“I have been instructed never to make a habit of anything, Mister Dupris, save for virtuous discipline and hard work,” she replied coolly. “Those in my office and those in yours would be wise never to engage in a predictable routine.”

“I would like to see you again. Must I leave it to chance?” he pressed. He couldn’t let her go. She was the spark to a certain fire. “Or may I construct a science in order to better my odds at a favorable outcome?”

While this beautiful woman didn’t look at him, he thought he could see her smile.

“I believe in chance as much as I do science, Mister Dupris,” she said, artfully coy. “We’ll have to see which wins.”

She looked up at him with a sparkling, mischievous grin, then turned quickly and walked through a shadowed archway. When he followed, he found himself in an unfamiliar hall and quite alone. Miss Templeton was nowhere to be seen.

There were several doors ahead of him, all closed, which he assumed led into various areas of the museum. He chose one at random, but found no sign of Miss Templeton beyond it. Louis wandered farther through the halls, eventually finding a stair that let him out a side door, into the glory that was Central Park. But the living goddess who had strolled with him amidst stone idols was gone.

Compelling work, plus a lovely face and a keen mind to quicken his heart, Louis thought, as he took to the busy streets for a seemingly endless walk downtown, his mind’s eye focused on her golden gaze. Could a man ask for anything more? Purpose and desire. The scales of an exciting life in perfect balance.

If fate was to eventually punish him, he would enjoy the treasures placed in his path while he could.

 

 

Louis and Clara found ways to meet, purposefully lost in a bustling city easy to hide in. Their burgeoning passion seemed to escape Bishop’s notice, despite the Senator’s perceptive nature. Perhaps this was no accident—he had, after all, taught Clara well, making her expert at hiding her thoughts and emotions when she wanted or had reason to. Or, if he did suspect something, he chose not to confront her.

Sometimes when the lovers could not contain themselves, they made their way to Louis’ basement apartment, where they indulged—intelligently and carefully—in forms of pleasure that would not get Clara into any sort of trouble. Marriage, even if desired, would have been impossible. Questioning and curious as always, they explored many types of pleasure and sensation.

Beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery, where Clara’s parents had been laid to rest in a modest mausoleum, was a favourite haunt for the pair. Once, a unexpected confluence of spiritual forces around a recent interment brought Clara’s nightmare to the fore and she was taken by a seizure.

Louis dealt with her admirably, duplicating what he’d seen Bishop do: he calmed her, soothed her, made sure she did not bite her tongue, choke, or hurt herself. Once she recovered, he acted as though nothing had happened and continued their walk and conversation, though with slightly less focus on the spiritual and spectral. She was grateful for his tact. He did not make her feel like an invalid or a mistake of nature and so her greatest fear was allayed, as all other men who had orbited her sphere seemed to pause at this “defect.”

Louis was more forthcoming about the fact that the Eterna theorists seemed to have stalled with Clara than he was with Bishop or any colleague. With Clara, he could be honest and share his frustration that they were all wasting their time, that they could not develop immortality any more than they could wrestle spiritual matters into the constraints of scientific methods.

Chapter Five

There came a knock at what would be the front door of the Eterna research offices if they used that and not a side entrance so as to attract less notice. All the Eterna researchers whirled toward the sound at once. No one should know where to find them, save for Senator Bishop, who hadn’t been to check on them in some time—and if Louis recalled correctly, he was out of town, campaigning.

Malachi Goldberg scurried to the door and opened a panel in the shutter. With an indeterminate noise of irritation, he slammed the panel back against the pane, slid closed the pocket doors that separated the front rooms from the dark, narrow, entrance foyer and scurried to Louis’ table with wide eyes.

“Mister Dupris, there is a man outside the door who looks exactly like you,” Malachi said warily before he quickly, nervously returned to whatever leaves he was turning into a stew at his work station.

Louis hid his surprise, guessing who it must be, as he strode towards the hefty front door and opened it to reveal none other than his twin brother, Andre, looking rather sheepish on the front stoop.

“What on earth…” Louis murmured, ushering him quickly in and glancing out to see if anyone else noticed his arrival. New York was the perfect city for minding one’s own business.

“Hello, brother,” Andre replied, stepping into the building and standing stock still in the shadow of the closed front door.

While the two men looked identical—close shorn brown hair, olive skin, bright hazel eyes that had been the ruination of many involved with Andre—their style and manner were vastly different. Louis was dressed in work clothes—shirtsleeves, suspenders and black pants—but his usual attire wasn’t much more elaborate save for the necessary layers of waistcoat, frock coat, and top-hat, generally in black or deepest blue. Andre fully embraced the colorful character of New Orleans and seemed presently to be playing at his French surname, as his finely tailored ensemble in beige wool with some flocking in blue was offset with a rather loud, silken ascot bearing golden fleur de lis.

“How did you know where to find me?” Louis hissed. He did not invite his brother further inside, instead blocking him at the mouth of the hall.

Andre smirked. “A very angry woman, missing a very precious little blade, had a very clear vision of you. She is an all-seeing eye, brother. You’re such a nice boy, why did you have to infuriate an acolyte of Queen Laveau? Glad it’s not me she cursed.”

“You bring plenty of curses on yourself,” Louis grumbled.

“She said if I returned the dagger, she’d forgive all,” Andre said eagerly.

Louis rolled his eyes. “But you don’t believe in her ways.”

Andre made a face. “At this point, I’ll try anything.”

“I’m not returning the dagger,” Louis growled. “I tried to explain it to her. I’m trying to elevate the discourse, allow for greater tolerance and cross-cultural understanding—”

Andre waved his hand as if bored. “If you’re not returning the dagger, then you’ll have to house me.”

“What? I can’t,” Louis cried. “I’m in hiding.”

“That makes two of us. Brilliant.” Andre leaned against the wall, resting an elbow on the ledge of the wooden paneling of the hall. “Tell whoever is hiding you whatever you need to in order to keep you, and me, safe. As long as none of them are British.”

“Why,” Louis asked warily. “Who in London did you offend?”

Andre looked sheepish again. “England.”

Louis set his jaw. “The whole of England.”

Andre smiled. “In a way, yes.”

“It is a wonder you’re not dead.” Louis sighed and ushered Andre down the carpeted hall toward the research space at the rear. “Whatever we decide to do with you, you know nothing about any of what we do here. You’ll not offer your opinion, what I say is law, and you’ll not be ruining my life.”

Andre shrugged. “Do what you will, brother.”

Louis reluctantly introduced him to his fellows, who just as reluctantly greeted him, but no one objected to Andre taking a room for himself in the empty upstairs.

“Thank you gentlemen,” he said humbly. “I’ll stay out of your way. I’ve no interest in your magical oddities,” he continued, gesturing around at the contents of the lab. “I’m just asking for a home. I can’t return to my darling New Orleans, much as I’d like to. So finding a home has become all the magic I need.”

Louis’ eyes lit up suddenly. “Home… magic… Andre, take off your shoes.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

He did. Louis took a scalpel and scraped dirt out from between the creases of his boot, cupping the silt in his hand. Next he yanked an errant thread from Andre’s jacket cuff, then a hair from his head, causing a yelp.

Louis rushed over to a table where a glass tube awaited, with one of his compounds-in-progress inside. The vial contained several items of his own person: hair, skin, threads from a favorite item of clothing. He sprinkled in the new ingredients: a bit of earth from their native land, a bit of his twin’s base matter.

“Localized magic isn’t theoretical, it’s literal,” Louis said excitedly. “You can never go home again but home might be brought to you, and when it is… it can be welcomed as transformative.” He gestured at the vial. A soft glow illuminated the seemingly lifeless vial of liquid and detritus. “Reaction.”

Malachi and Barney clapped,, then began furiously writing notes and studying the properties of the changed material.

“I wish I understood you, brother,” Andre said earnestly. To Louis’ mind, Andre had never wanted nor tried to understand him; perhaps that would change now due to Andre’s forced circumstances, necessity being in this case the mother of fraternity. Louis knew he had to be careful not to expect too much of a brother who had so often proved not even a friend, let alone brethren.

“I don’t expect you to understand what I aim to do,” Louis replied carefully. “But you must respect it.”

“I’ll do anything you say, provided I can stay within your sphere, safely.”

“Of course, brother. It is as it has always been,” Louis said patiently, and Andre turned away.

But the air around them was changing. Louis could feel it. Magic was pressing in. Closer and closer. For better and worse. He needed to make further progress before it darkened beyond a comfortable shade and turned dangerous. Perhaps deadly.

Chapter Six

Louis spent nearly every waking hour of the next many months in the Fifth Avenue laboratory. Andre would hide and sleep there during the day, before lurking about the city at night. Louis felt he’d given safe haven to some kind of vampire, but it was better than leaving his brother for dead. If Louis lived under a curse because his priestess didn’t understand how he wished to elevate his ancestry, he’d do right by what family he had left.

Andre managed to keep well out of the way in an upstairs corner that the researchers didn’t need, and while he didn’t ask many questions or make his presence much known, he kept them all in fresh supply of tea, coffee, and alcohol from stores Louis didn’t dare ask the source of.

Their relationship remained guarded as it always had been, with little in common other than an identical face. But they were friendly enough, a vast improvement on their past antagonism, and that, for Louis, felt like he was honoring their mother.

The team continued to make small discoveries that built on what Louis had realized by adding Andre’s base material to his own. Tethers to the tactile realities of one’s world, along with spiritual and talismanic import, imbued with meaning in the right quantities, seemed to have an effect worth continued exploration.

The researcher Feizer remained on leave for far longer than expected and the team heard nothing from him. They feared something terrible had happened. Louis wanted to talk to Bishop about it, but since Andre’s arrival and the burgeoning of his forbidden relationship with Clara, he felt avoiding the Senator entirely was best. In any case, he had little opportunity to worry about the missing mentalist. His work with Barney was at too critical a juncture.

But Malachi… Malachi was a growing concern.

There had been a change in the nervous, fastidious man. Even Andre, who was oblivious to the moods of others—or if not oblivious, frankly didn’t care—noticed the shift from nervous to darkly paranoid. After months of increasing unease, Malachi insisted that the team move their laboratory from the Fifth Avenue townhouse into his own home on West 10th Street. This, the man claimed, was neutral territory and well-guarded, where no government could find them.

Louis bid Andre keep even clearer of Malachi than before, so Andre stayed on in the old laboratory, with instructions to let them know if any government operatives put in an appearance.

What had begun as endless possibility in terms of what Eterna could bring them all had begun to turn a bit sour. Barney was increasingly setting things on fire. Louis’ localized vials were having less and less effect, especially in Malachi’s home, which, while it had been cleared of belongings and character, felt, to Louis, soulless and cold. Like something was wrong with the building itself.

Louis bid Andre begin hiding some of Louis and Barney’s work in various locations lest Malachi, who had taken to wrecking things in the laboratory if his experiments didn’t yield a specific result, destroy their work too.

The only consistent light and joy in Louis life came from Clara.

 

Clara began to consider her stolen moments with Louis the cherished prize of her days even as she continued gathering paranormal material.

He often waxed rhapsodic as he held her in a jumble of their disheveled clothes, and his musings began to shape his further understanding of personal, specific, local magic, of safeties and Wards, of the sacred made tactile between two hearts in a given space.

“Humans and ghosts are tied to things and places of meaning. Therein lies huge, untapped power,” Louis said, kissing Clara’s collarbone around the open lace of her blouse while her body responded with heated shudders. He had unbuttoned her while discussing metaphysical balance. “It is thrilling. So much is waking up. So much is possible…”

“Alongside unseen dangers in the shadows,” Clara added. “Sometimes I receive dark premonitions, Louis, in dreams and on the vague whispers of ghosts before I have to shut them out lest they cause me a fit. Promise me that you’ll continue to take care.”

“I will. Wherever there is progress, all kinds of unseen and unknowable things notice. Like spectral predators sensing blood, various energies and forces might be on the prowl. You must take exquisite care yourself, Clara, in turn. While you appear too brave to be daunted by danger, you must not be blind to it.”

“I’m not. I protect myself.” She smiled. “I’ve been taught by the best. Rupert has given me many tools.” Her gaze flickered to his as she swiftly added, ““And thanks to your instruction in shielding, too… I’m stronger than ever.”

“Danger loves to take advantage of pride,” Louis cautioned. “I’ll not be responsible for another of your fits. I cannot bear to see you suffer one wince of pain or vulnerability.”

Clara smiled and suddenly blurted; “I… love you.”

Louis gave her a look that was pained, a look that made him seem a stranger. She knew his dreams and his thrills, she didn’t truly know his heart…

“You say that you love me,” he replied gently. “And yet I wonder if I’m merely exotic and exciting to you, and you mistake that for love—”

“No, truly not,” Clara said, indignant. “I respect all that you are. Your lineage and your spiritual mission—”

Louis continued. “Secondly, I wonder if this sudden declaration of love is, in fact, simply rebellion against the Senator. I think about him often. I avoid him, because of you, but I wonder… there is such fondness there. Him, of you, and you, of him. It’s a rare conversation with either of you where the other is not mentioned.”‎

Clara stared at Louis, wide-eyed. She knew she should say something but she was so surprised by his statement that she was speechless. Louis had posed a question she wasn’t sure she could answer. Her emotions regarding Rupert were a complex knot with no beginning nor end.

If Louis was upset by her stunned silence, he didn’t show it; his face was as elegant and gentle as always. He continued, a man ever on mission.

“I have to leave soon, Clara. I have to get back to the lab. We are at a precipice. I’ve a compound in the vials that might be a new breakthrough.”

“In city sovereignty?” Clara asked eagerly, having long supported his ideas and postulates on localized magic.

“Indeed, but I have to keep it out of the hands of Malachi. He just doesn’t seem to take to any thing or any idea anymore. In the beginning, he was so vivacious; these days, utterly skittish. He simply is not himself. Did I mention we moved the laboratory into his home? He cleared everything out of the place. It’s eerie, really, to have an empty parlor as a laboratory.”

“Was not your last building a former home? I know the commission tried to make sure your spaces fit into neighborhoods, that no one would suspect there were laboratories in their midst.”

“I suppose,” Louis nodded. “But this building hardly feels right. Whatever feeling of home it once held for Malachi, now it’s cold and lifeless, while we’re supposed to be dealing in extending life.”

“Is he still paranoid? How long has this change been upon him?” Clara asked with grave concern.

“It’s been a month now. We agreed to shift into his home as a temporary solution. To shut him up, basically.”

“Please take care of yourself,” Clara said, caressing Louis’ smooth cheek. “As you always tell me, shield your heart and soul, my dear.”

“I shall. And I’ll see you very soon. Take care and keep heart, ma Cherie. Each day, ever closer to new ideas and truths, is as precious as you.”

Her dazzling smile was an image he’d put into a locket if he had one.

With a soft parting kiss, he was off, remembering to button his shirtsleeves as he strode along on that cloudy day, pausing at one point to straighten his cravat and attend to other tell-tale signs of a man vigorously alive in the throes of love.

 

Perhaps Louis should have turned about and exited the makeshift laboratory that fateful day the moment he entered it. He could taste a change in the air—a sourness, a touch of something sulfuric, but dismissed it as residue from one of his colleagues’ experiments.

Indeed, when Barney handed over the note from fellow researcher Feizer, Louis should have taken his dear friend by the arm and quietly left the place, never to return to it, or their work, again.

Malachi’s mental descent seemed to have worsened since the previous day. The man sat in a shadowed corner of the room, staring blankly at a book. Even at this distance, Louis could tell that the volume appeared to be written in Hebrew…and that Malachi was holding it upside down.

As Barney came up to him, Louis thought had never seen the man look so fearful. His generally gamesome, fair face was grey and pallid, his hands trembling as he offered Louis a folded sheet of paper.

“This was left for me at the college,” Barney said. He had left his post at Columbia after the death of his daughter. The base principles of what Eterna had been founded on was too great a lure for him to ignore.

“My Dear Gentlemen,

“I have been advised not to return to the Eterna Commission. Study and practice in France has quite engaged me. Portents and divinations that directly defy the sciences to which I have devoted myself have made themselves known to me and I have made a promise to my superstitious loved ones that I will heed the warnings and omens cast my way. Every best luck to you and may God be with you.”

Feizer had signed it in shaking script.

“What do you make of that?” Barney asked. Louis didn’t know what to say or do, so after a moment’s hesitation, he shrugged.

In a rare moment of helpless anger, Barney crumpled the note and tossed it into the fireplace, where the embers from one of his ongoing, low-burning experiments ignited the unsatisfactory and unnerving resignation. Malachi did not look up or react in any way to the conversation or the snap of the flames.

In awkward silence, Louis and Barney turned to the worktable they shared.There, sets of small glass tubes were filled with items that had been sent to them from around the country, tidbits of import from various locales specific to American history. Louis had created the lists, requesting soil, air, and water samples and items of local pride or note. It was time to see if, when put to fire, the resulting compound had the qualities of patriotism and pride that might extend the life of a vital politician entrusted with the nation’s care, per Eterna’s directive.

Each vial was marked with a different city; New Orleans, New York, Salem, Washington D.C., and more. All were locations filled with rich, powerful spirits, places that could rightly be called alive. Barney readied a box of matches and pulled cork stoppers from each of the tubes.

Malachi was murmuring in the corner, behind his upside down book. Was he rocking slightly? Louis feared the man had finally lost his last marble.

“Goldberg,” Barney barked at him, “do try to hold it together. I don’t want to have to tell the government you so fear – which, might I remind you, we happen to work for – about your condition.”

The unkempt man stared at them with wide, dark, glassy eyes. In a detached tone, as Barney dropped lit matches one by one into the vials, Malachi said;

“No need, gentlemen. No need for anything anymore. This is the beginning of the end, anyway. Let it come.”

Louis shuddered at these words, said in a voice that wasn’t entirely Malachi’s. The shadows of the dim room seemed to move, as if in response, and acrid tendrils of smoke began to rise from each tube. His lungs constricted and he gasped for breath.

The choking sound of Barney’s cough nearly drowned out his own. The room was filling with smoke and shadow, and all of it seemed intent on the researchers’ throats. The whole space seemed alive with threat, as if it desired to to snuff out the idea of life and liberty that the men’s experiments represented. More haze than should have been possible, given the tiny amount of flammable material in the glass tubes, grew thick.

Louis turned away from the worktable with a shuddering step and saw Malachi, convulsing—and yet managing to reach for a wide black rectangle seemed to have suddenly been cut into the paneling. The gaping maw of vacuous darkness felt like a hole in reality itself. Instinctively, Louis reached for the precious talisman that he had so long worn against his neck, remembering when his fingers closed on nothing that he had given his mother’s gift to Clara, to protect her. Remembering how he’d last seen it, nestled between his lover’s breasts—the thought of her revived him for a moment.

He stumbled away from Malachi’s darkened parlor-made-laboratory, struggling toward the front door, which was swinging open, offering a bright escape from the horrific reaction their experiment was evoking.

When his dazzled, clouded vision cleared for a moment, he found himself looking into the horrified eyes of his brother. Andre began backing away even as Louis felt his knees give out from under him. The floor was cold and unforgiving. Louis extended a desperate hand that was not met with help. And all the rest was silence.

At least, for an interminable moment of black, suspended darkness, there was silence. Louis felt, saw, heard, nothing save for a faint sensation of being. When entirely deprived of sensory input, it is hard to have any proof of being, yet for that moment, Louis was entirely aware that he was. That he existed.

This insistence upon existence became tantamount to the sun breaking over the horizon. A glimmer of light formed in tiny, piercing beams, as profound as that most quoted line of scripture; and then there was light.

Louis found himself in a long, dim corridor. It became clear that he stood at the crossroads between two possibilities: light, ahead, and life, behind.

At one end of the corridor, the brightening star of the first light of all creation.

At the other, familiarity. Earth. Murmuring voices and busy, flickering images. He saw countless events at once, unfolding before him as a moving quilt, images of people he loved and cared for.

In this transitory state, he was now an observer in a way he had not been before. He was struck by the fact that he could see many points of his dear ones’ lives at once. The certainty that he could see and understand things his former self could not was an enervating surge through what Louis did not feel as a body but as a set of phantom limbs and traces of flesh’s limitations.

The images now appeared as if seen through windows; the squares were flanked by dark silhouettes, each leaning towards the frames with clearly malicious intent, much like the vague forms that had rustled beyond the smoke in Louis’s now-vanished laboratory.

Life itself was laid out before him, frame by frame He saw his mother, father, Andre, Clara, friends from New Orleans, beautiful glimpses of the New York he had come to care for, Barney, even Malachi. The windows had become more formally framed, surrounded by carved wood; each frame bore a label identifying the occupant. Louis was present with a panoply of those who were Most Important to or of greatest influence on him, all labeled and categorized much like the vials of localized magic that he and Barney had been using in their experiments.

They had been on to something, Barney and he. And something, it seemed, had been onto them.

The moving shadows closing in on those bright vibrant moments; it became crystal clear to Louis that he had to stand in their way. He had to warn those he loved who lived and breathed, had to somehow protect those who were gone but whose lives unfurled before him as if they still walked the planet’s surface. The corridor did not discriminate between the living or the dead, all were precious.

Perhaps that’s what this was all about, really; shielding against the encroaching darkness those shadows represented.

Grasping his new purpose firmly, Louis felt a surge of energy, like one of Barney’s struck matches flaring from its phosphorous into flame. He blinked back into the world, accompanied by a small tearing sound. He gained no sense of ground, nor feet to stand on, but became aware of familiar sights and sounds, of the motion of air, and of an unnerving weightlessness.

Louis floated in the middle of West 10th Street, a bit off the ground, and watched his brother run down the street of this fine, genteel neighborhood. Acrid tendrils of smoke wafted from below the front door of the building where Louis’s body lay in whatever state it had fallen. He did not seek to investigate further. Ashes to ashes.

There was no time for grief. The choice to remain had been clear. If nothing else, for the sake of science.

Bondye,” he murmured to heaven, “Help me be the spirit you wish me to be. Show me this grey path and let thy will be done.”

It was noble, this choice to remain in shade, Louis thought, in that echoing space of musing where more solid thoughts had once sung their songs of science and faith. If this fate was a curse due to the choices he’d made during his corporeal life, then he bid the Mystères, as fellow spirit guides, provide a map for his new journey.

In seeking proof of spirit, Eterna had actualized him into what he had wished, a truth now layered with the drive to solve what had become of him and why. He could do more good from here, he assured himself, and floated out into the busy New York day to haunt up answers to life’s unending questions, queries that did not stop with the cessation of heart and breath.

The secret to eternal life was as simple as the quest for knowledge. With that, was there anything to fear? With that, was there anything to stop him? He set off after his fleeing, misguided twin, a heart that tethered him, for there were lives yet to live and souls to shield from shadow.

Copyright © 2016 by Leanna Renee Hieber

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Sneak Peek: Eterna and Omega by Leanna Renee Hieber

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Eterna and Omega by Leanna Renee HieberLeanna Renee Hieber’s gaslamp fantasy series continues and the action ramps up in Eterna and Omega.

In New York City, fearing the dangers of the Eterna Compound–supposedly the key to immortality–Clara Templeton buries information vital to its creation. The ghost of her clandestine lover is desperate to tell her she is wrong, but though she is a clairvoyant, she cannot hear him.

In London, Harold Spire plans to send his team of assassins, magicians, mediums, and other rogue talents to New York City, in an attempt to obtain Eterna for Her Royal Majesty, Queen Victoria. He stays behind to help Scotland Yard track down a network of body snatchers and occultists, but he’ll miss his second-in-command, Rose Everhart, whose gentle exterior masks a steel spine.

Rose’s skepticism about the supernatural has been shattered since she joined Spire’s Omega Branch. Meeting Clara is like looking into a strange mirror: both women are orphans, each is concealing a paranormal ability, and each has a powerful and attractive guardian who has secrets of his own.

The hidden occult power that menaces both England and America continues to grow. Far from being dangerous, Eterna may hold the key to humanity’s salvation.

Eterna and Omega  will be available August 9th. Please enjoy this excerpt. 

CHAPTER

ONE

New York City, 1882

The scene inside the Trinity Church graveyard in downtown Manhattan Island on this witching hour was dire, no matter if one could see the myriad ghosts gathered therein or not. A living woman shook on the ground, surrounded by a dead horde.

Louis Dupris, his phantom form floating beside the shaking body of his lover, Clara Templeton, was screaming at her, alongside the spectral spectrum of Manhattan. Not because she’d done anything wrong, but because she was unwittingly drawn into a far more dangerous situation than she could possibly have known. The ghosts were unable to impress this idea upon her, certainly not in her state.

An unkindness of ravens had gathered to add to the cacophony from the tops of a nearby tree that arched over Trinity’s brownstone Gothic eaves and overlooked the graves. Everything dead and living lifted keening protest; wailing and squawking, these ravens as much harbingers as they were scavengers.

A dread power was about to unleash itself over England and America. This was dawning on those in the spirit world who remained attuned to the living. The two countries were woefully unprepared for the black tide that would rise like a biblical plague. Only in this case, the surge would be sent from devils, not from God.

But Clara, a Sensitive—a gifted, empathic medium—wasn’t in any state to help the spirits or herself, seeing as her ability came with the unfortunate side effect of seizures. Her dark blond waves of hair had shaken free of their pins, the cloak she’d worn over her black linen dress seemed to catch most of the dirt her limbs would be battering against, her high cheekbones and distinct angles were tense and taut, her chattering teeth had bitten the inside of her cheek during the seizing, and blood dribbled down her fair chin.

Thankfully, a friend who had been told to mind her business didn’t. Lavinia Kent, one of Clara’s coworkers at the Eterna Commission, launched herself into the Trinity Church graveyard and, not seeing Louis or the ghostly retinue around her, rushed to Clara. She turned her on her side, taking her head in her hands and carefully slipping a fold of fabric from her skirt into Clara’s chattering teeth, never minding the blood on her black gown.

Louis Dupris and the other spectral compatriots attempting to alert Clara were suddenly attuned to a new distraction.

Down Pearl Street, from the site of the Edison company’s vast electricity-producing dynamos, came a terrible whine, a buzzing, terrifying roar. This electrical disturbance disrupted the plane of the dead; the subtle currents upon which they flowed and the various modern conveniences they could interrupt were trumped in a way they’d never experienced. The mild spark of a spirit was nothing compared to the surge of a great turbine.

Louis had noticed, in his fascinating new existence as a ghost, that sometimes he and his fellows could generate electricity—and that sometimes a current could put them out instead.

Clara roused to explosions of lightbulbs along one of Manhattan’s most influential, wealthy streets. Coming to, she slowly focused on Lavinia. Louis, ever attentive to Clara’s eyes from their various amorous encounters during his life, could see her senses returning. He knew they always came back in pieces.

“Vin … what … I…” Clara’s tongue seemed thick and unwieldy.

“You’re all right,” her friend said gently. “I assume this place is too haunted for you to be in here for too long. Come, let’s get you back home. I don’t suppose you’ll actually tell me what you were doing in here?”

“Official business,” she mumbled and said no more, allowing Lavinia to help her up and gingerly walk with her as her body slowly began to respond normally to her mind’s instructions. Louis knew, from having seen her through more than one of these episodes, that her mind would remain hazy and she’d collapse into a deep and deathlike sleep until morning.

But as he watched Lavinia supporting Clara’s drooping weight and clumsy steps, Louis felt comforted that she would indeed be all right. Both women shuddered as he reached out to try to touch Clara’s hair. At this, he was saddened, as it was likely from his own chill.

He floated away, feeling as lonely as a sentience could. If the loneliness of life was unbearable at times, the isolation of death was the stuff that drove specters to haunt the living for centuries. It was the sharpest of pains, impossible for his theorist’s mind to quantify.

“I have to get through…” the ghost murmured to the night, wafting up a side street speckled with the occasional gas lamp. The constraints of the spirit world were chafing against his desire for clarity and forward motion, lulling him toward the stasis of a mere haunt. He was between worlds, a dangerous place for a man to be recalled to a mission.

“I know leaving her be, that’s for the best, considering her condition, but I need to talk to her,” Louis said anxiously, darting his translucent form back up Broadway. “The files, my work, is a safeguard. Not a danger, but a help, a breakthrough in localized magic. It wasn’t the creation of the compound that was the killer, but the presences that came in after. Clara must understand. Surely something personal can connect us. Clara, love, I need you, and you need me more dead than alive to sort this all out.…” A gruesome but brilliant solution presented itself. “Something tactile. A tactile remembrance where I died … Her hair … Beautiful hair … To connect us…”

In his ghostly state, a helpful idea literally illuminated his grayscale form, and he blazed like a candle for a moment before returning to a ghostly default ofeisengrau, the color behind one’s eyes, a gray the epitome of that purgatorial space between awake and asleep.

“The medium!” he gasped, and thought hard about where he could find the specific woman who had communicated with him before. Unfortunately for them both, the moment in question had happened by force. Mediums and spirits were best met by welcoming relations.

He doubted she’d be happy to see him. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get through. But he had to try. Using a strange new sense that had come to him only in death, he tried reaching out a tendril of association, knowledge, and remembrance. Once a medium and a spirit spoke, an indelible channel connected them, a sluice one could slip through again if given the chance.

Floating amid the wind, time was as amorphous as his body in this state, a serious danger when time was of the essence and he was only essence at all.…

Fifth Avenue, finally. A fine stone town house with the most modern of Tiffany glass panels on either side of the carved wooden front door. There she was. He could sense the medium’s radiance even from outside. He floated through beautifully leaded wisteria.

She was in the parlor having an evening cordial, but hardly relaxed as one would hope at such a late hour, though Louis was relieved he wouldn’t have to wake her. Sitting stiffly in plum-colored satin and starched lace, she remained alert and wary, as gifted as she was mysterious and elegant. He read her posture like a line of dialogue in a play.

With such chaos downtown, if she truly was as talented as those who had kidnapped her and forced that unfortunate séance had indicated, she likely knew the air was off, that New York was an unsettled creature awaking to find itself under threat of being caged …

Tall with dark brown–blond hair streaked with distinct swaths of gray, a woman in her mid-forties as striking as if she were in the bloom of youth, so did she command a space with imperious presence matched only by a glimmering vivacity. She outshone all the crystal in her home and the glass-beaded folds of her double-skirted Parisian gown, the rich plum color doing her fair skin fair service. While she commanded attention like a colonel an army, what Louis needed was hers.

That Louis’s twin brother Andre had fled New York yet again was most inconvenient, the coward. While Andre had sworn he would tend to unsettled matters in New Orleans, the city of their birth, Louis knew all too well that Andre’s reputation was for trouble, not reconciliation, so it may have been ill-advised. If he had remained in the city, Louis could make use of him, for his twin could hearand see him, even in his current state. The ability of both, due to their twin blood tie, proved a rare and useful talent.

“Hello…” Louis said feebly before chiding himself; this was no time for hesitancy. “Good Madame Medium. I know this is hardly custom in regard to communication, but it is an emergency,” Louis stated.

The medium turned toward him, though she did not look in his eyes or at his person, but past and through him. While she could perhaps sense his presence, she did not fix upon him. All he needed was for her to hear him, and to help.

 

Mrs. Evelyn Northe-Stewart was relaxing after a late dinner with her husband in their mahogany-paneled parlor filled with exotic, mystical souvenirs from around the world when the ghost first came to call. They were night people, she and Gareth, Mr. Stewart having to keep the hours of artists and the leisure classes, associated as he was with the new Metropolitan Museum of Art. For Evelyn’s part, when one often convened with the dead—whether invited or not—one was relegated to the clock of an owl.

She wasn’t one to “see” ghosts, and not always hear them either. But she never failed to feel them, and she felt this one first as a gust of cool breezes. Then came a strange twisting in her abdomen and an odd radiating vibration outward. The strength of it meant she had encountered this particular spirit before, that she was a previously established channel.

“Gareth, darling,” she said to the mild-mannered man staring at her appreciatively, as he often did. She knew he still marveled that he had convinced her to marry him.

In a world that chided—if not hated—her for being a powerful woman and gifted Sensitive, finding a man like Gareth, who wanted her to be nothing more or less than her whole self, was a treasure worth more than the fortune her dear—similarly awestruck—late husband had left her. She had been lucky enough to procure one forward-minded husband, let alone a second, and she was as grateful of this as she was desirous for her sex to be afforded equality.

“Yes, dear,” he replied, responding warmly to a broken reverie. Gareth was a peaceful soul; however, spirits unsettled his quietude.

“Don’t you think you’d love a cigar in your study? I’m getting a … premonition. And it doesn’t seem to want company.”

Gareth Stewart rose slowly, his fair face paling against his auburn beard. “Indeed…” He never knew what to say in cases such as this, so he simply left a room when it cooled degrees and the day turned from normal to paranormal. To each their worlds.

Once he exited, Evelyn gestured impatiently as she spoke. “I know you’re here. Out with it!”

The ghost must have floated closer to her, for the feathers of the fascinator pinned into her coiffure wafted in the breeze of his spectral presence, tendrils kissing her forehead. The flames of the crystal-globed gas lamps on a small mahogany table beside her velvet settee flickered subtly.

“I need your help,” the ghost said.

While pleading and desperate, after all she’d seen and weathered, she was a wisely wary woman, and suppliant tones alone were not enough to enlist her.

“You need help,” she repeated, staring in his direction, changing the focus of her eyes in an attempt to see any differentiation in the line of flocked wallpaper, anything that might give an indication of his form. “Spirits always do.”

“It’s a matter of grave importance,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t bother you with trivialities, not after all we’ve been through. You might remember me…”

“Ah. Yes.” She set her jaw and turned away from the spectral voice. “The twin. No wonder I can hear you so clearly, Mr. Dupris. You maintained the channel.”

“Yes,” he admitted ruefully. “I had to.”

Her shoulder twitched beneath tailored layers of satin. “You know, that is hardly comfortable for us,” she said through clenched teeth. “When you keep the channel open, it’s like a cut on our skin never healed and is continuously exposed to the elements.”

“No. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Truly.” The spirit did seem contrite. At least this one was eloquent enough to comprehend in more than sentence fragments. Either she was gaining greater talents, or the ever mysterious spirit world was empowering this individual above all previous. “But I need any access I can afford,” the ghost insisted. “You, Madame Medium, are at the core of all those who are important and critical in the times to come.”

At this, the medium’s eyes flashed a fierce warning. “If you want something of Clara—”

“I do,” the ghost she knew to be Louis Dupris, Clara’s secret lover, exclaimed, wafting before her face in a chill gust, and she turned, unwilling to truly face him, whether he was visible to her or not. Extended ghostly exposure was exhausting and made Evelyn feel plucked at as if she were a series of string instruments being played all at once.

The ghost would not be deterred. “You need to help me contact her.”

“I will do nothing to upset her,” Evelyn declared.

“This is beyond her,” Louis countered. “You and she must understand what happened at the Eterna site on the terrible day I died. I am beginning to unravel what sabotaged us in that house. We were not alone when the disaster happened. I need someone to listen.”

“I’m here now,” Evelyn declared, exasperated. “We’ve a strong channel, don’t squander it—”

“Our laboratory was invaded, Madame, by multiple presences. As my chemist partner Barnard and I combined the Eterna materials on that fateful day, our material must have been threatening to outside forces. One of our colleagues was courting something terrible. We didn’t know…”

There was a long and terrible pause. Evelyn felt queasy. Such prolonged contact, with such clarity, was unprecedented. She now understood Clara’s overwhelmed nature when it came to contact with the dead. Whatever she could take and save Clara from the brunt, she had to do. “More,” she said quietly, gesturing toward the sound of his voice. “Tell me as much as you can.”

Louis continued, his haunting voice deepening in sadness. “I didn’t notice it until I returned to the brownstone after death, to find clues, trying to remember. The site had been a home, once, but Goldberg had gone mad, emptied the place of everything but our work. He was so odd, muttering things we could not understand…”

“Such as?” Evelyn closed her eyes. Perhaps she could focus on him better if she didn’t try to look at the place she thought he occupied, just felt his draft.

“It was a language I didn’t understand,” Louis replied, frustration underpinning his every word. “We thought it was Yiddish, but now I’m not sure. I remembered having seen something very odd, right before everything went wrong. In the wall, carved in, was the outline of a door. And it sort of became one—a blank space, a void where there should have been substance. Dark entities stepped through. Shadow-like, devoid of light, the opposite … As if summoned. It happened right as the Eterna Compound turned into a noxious gas. I remember nothing after that.”

“Entities. From a door. Carved in a wall…” Evelyn murmured. The room spun, and she could feel all the color drain from her cheeks. “My God…”

“What?” Louis countered in wary concern.

“It never really ended, did it?!” the medium said, her words a rasp, as if scrabbling for purchase in her throat. “The Society just went deeper underground … The network broader … Good God, we could’ve nipped it in the bud then, but now…”

She jumped to her feet and began to pace, looking down at the dark whorl of her plum skirts around the rich mahogany furnishings, the sumptuous deep tones of Tiffany sconces casting mottled, bruise-like patches of colored light onto her pale skin as she passed beneath them. For all her love of deep colors and magnetic shadows, at the moment she longed for blinding brightness to cast off any hint of darkness.

“You have … experience in such dealings?” Louis asked cautiously.

“Two years ago a demon tried to kill my friends,” the medium replied gravely. “Part of an insane plot, something hellish and mad, and surely too similar to what you’ve described to be coincidence. And if so … then it would have made that whole dread business mere child’s play. An exercise. A drill. A test for a coming apocalypse…”

“Whatever it is,” the ghost insisted, “we have to stop the shadows before they wake.”

“They’ve always been awake, Mr. Dupris,” Evelyn snapped. “Devils never sleep. The trouble is that now, it seems they’ve multiplied.”

“So will you help connect me to Clara?” Louis begged. “We’ve no time to waste. The devils are patient, but when moved, they seem to act with horrific, swift aptitude. They came upon my team the instant our work crested unto glory. We had wrought something of hope and honor when we were quashed by darkness.”

Evelyn sighed and quit pacing. The dark satin whorl stilled and silenced. “I’ve no choice but to help. We’ll need all hands on the proverbial spiritual deck.”

“Thank you. There is an odd clarity in death that sharpens the grayscale of human morality. In the moments when I can keep focus, a feat itself, I see more clearly what’s most valuable.”

The medium turned again toward the direction of his voice. “What do you need from Clara?”

“As you know from the séance you were forced to undergo, there remains a block between Clara and me. I cannot speak to her directly. Yet she alone understands the heart of the Eterna Commission and its properties enough to see it to a solution. Those shadows were threatened by what we made. It was a mortal protection, and they killed us for it.”

“Clara’s block is there to protect her. You know of her vulnerabilities, the senator guards her—”

“Of course I know that!” Louis cried. “One spirit alone does not overwhelm her, only when they cluster. I do know her, knew her”—Evelyn heard wrenching sorrow in his voice—“well, Mrs. Northe-Stewart. I knew her well and loved her with my whole heart.”

The medium pursed her lips. “Then why did no one know?”

“Would I, a man with a most particular heritage, have been allowed to ask for her hand?” Louis countered bitterly. “Not to mention that Senator Bishop prohibited the Eterna researchers from contacting his ward.”

“I am aware of the senator’s rules,” the medium said. “How did you meet, then?”

“At a soiree, early in my employment, before any trouble began. From first meeting in a quiet alcove, I was lost. Our rendezvous infrequent as we were both so careful … My heart was noble, I assure you, and a gentleman’s boundaries were maintained. But all that is history. What I believe we created in that house was a Ward … Not a ward in need of a guardian but a Ward, in old magical terms—”

“A Ward of protection, yes, I am aware of the concept,” Evelyn asserted.

“Someone, something, didn’t want us to have it, and we need to know why. So now I beg you—obtain a lock of hair from my darling Clara,” the spirit said, his chill directly at her ear, as if he didn’t want her to miss one word of the vital details, “and take it to where I died. Localized magic is about connecting organic materials of life and death, and since I don’t have a grave, I can only hope that the disaster site will serve, and that from there, I will be able to tell Clara more about the Warding.”

“I hope you’re right, Mr. Dupris.” She was brilliantly conversant with him, but she couldn’t be sure if that was instinct or literal translation from his plane to hers. “But I shan’t be visiting your haunted house, or Clara, past midnight. This is the stuff of the morning, for safety’s sake. Now leave me be lest you drive me to nightmares. Good night, Mr. Dupris, and I’ll deal with you tomorrow. You can … waft yourself out.” With a curt nod of her head, she exited the parlor.

Louis bowed after her, a formality even if she couldn’t see him, calling a good night and thanks, and then, with what focus he had left, floated back onto dark Fifth Avenue, praying for dawn.

 

When Clara awoke the morning after any seizure, it was a sequence of putting herself back together, sense by sense, like restacking a deck of cards that had been thrown onto the floor and scattered.

For a woman who prized herself on relative control of her vast emotional and metaphysical scope, the loss of control in an epileptic seizure was the worst fate that she could imagine. She’d had to endure it since a séance she’d attended just as she was beginning to blossom into womanhood. Clara had expected that becoming an adult would change her abilities somehow but had not anticipated that becoming more sensitive would make her more susceptible to fits. Since the age of thirteen, vastly greater care had to be taken lest she be overtaxed and overtaken, as she had been at midnight in Trinity’s sacred plot.

Every muscle of her body was screaming in pain. The clenching part of the seizure was always brutal and lingered on like a beating. Thankfully, this time she hadn’t bitten off a chunk of her tongue; the cheek was bad enough.

When the thorough aches sharpened her senses enough to grasp the whole of herself, she noted was in her own bed, in the elegant little upstairs room that had been hers since she moved into the town house after her parents’ deaths. Rupert Bishop had been a congressman then; now he was senator. But even then, he had made sure that his young ward had lacked nothing. He had seen to her education and given her leave to be and to express herself, to expand her mind. Most of all, to become the Spiritualist she and Bishop both felt she was born to be.

When she was only twelve years of age, it was her vision as expressed to grieving widow Mary Todd Lincoln that led to the creation of the Eterna Commission. Now, seventeen years later, she would have to be the one to end it, somehow. Too many people—not least her beloved Louis—had already died.

Lavinia. Thin memories returned like pale mist creeping over a dark expanse. Darling Vin had been her hero. That’s how she’d gotten home. She didn’t remember being helped into bed, but she must have put her in this muslin nightdress, as her best friend knew Clara would be mortified if Bishop had had to do it … What about Bishop…?

As the last of the mists that enveloped her mind cleared, Clara realized her guardian was staring down at her, tall and imposing in fine charcoal shades of dress, his silver hair mussed, his elegant, noble face with its oft-furrowed brow knit more harshly than usual.

“Hello, Rupert…” she said cautiously. Did he know she’d stolen out to bury Eterna evidence in the Trinity Church graveyard? Clara decided playing innocent was the best tack. “What happened?” she said, widening her eyes and reaching for her guardian’s hand.

“You’ve been asleep awhile. Longer than usual. I didn’t see the seizure, but…” Bishop was about to step forward and grasp her outstretched hand when they were interrupted.

“There was quite an event,” came a familiar female voice from the hall. The talented medium, Mrs. Evelyn Northe-Stewart, entered the room.

She was tall and striking, her once blond hair had gained streaks of classic silver, matching her with Bishop, her contemporary, ever dressed in the most magnificent finery straight from Paris’s fashionably innovative minds.

Clara had long ago taken on Evelyn’s style as inspiration, both in fashion and in furnishings, sure to tell her guardian that she, too, preferred her dresses Parisian and her surroundings entirely of the new Tiffany firm’s provenance, seeing as the studio had just redecorated the White House.

Drinking in Evelyn’s latest fashion was one of Clara’s favorite pastimes, and today she did not disappoint in a champagne-colored bombazine day dress with a matching capped-sleeve jacket trimmed and accented with thin black ribbon.

“May we have a moment?” the medium said, turning to the senator. “Clara and I?”

“I … she … Clara just woke up,” Bishop replied. The hesitation was unlike him, and while relations between her and her guardian had been strained of late, Clara’s heart swelled that no discord could outweigh his infallible care for her.

“It’s a personal matter, Rupert,” Evelyn insisted, keeping her tone warm out of deference to his protective instincts. “I received a message that concerns her.”

The senator’s brow knit further. Giving Clara a worried look, he reluctantly left the room.

The medium turned to Clara gravely. “I had a visit from your Louis…” she began.

Clara swallowed hard.

Louis had awakened aspects of herself—mind, body, and heart—she had not experienced before. She had loved him truly for who he was, a passionate and energetic man of visions and spiritual gifts. Rupert Bishop held an old sway over her heart, one she never dared indulge, but Louis had helped her live more fully than she’d ever allowed. His death had been a hard and unexpected blow; that he still had a connection to her was a bittersweet comfort and a pang.

Evelyn, ever attentive and empathic, waited for Clara to meet her gaze again before continuing. “Louis was very insistent on gaining access to you. To talk to you.”

The memory was sharp enough to make Clara close her eyes. Louis had often said if he could do only one thing in the world, it would be just to sit and talk to her. They both believed in Eterna’s mission. Louis’s commitment to Eterna was shaped at least in part by his desire to make his principles of spirituality and his Vodoun faith something science could champion.

She could not help but think back to their passionate discussions, often conducted while lounging about on the bed of his tiny flat near Union Square. Clara was all too willing to find reasons to excuse herself from work and dart uptown for a secret rendezvous. The weight of Evelyn’s stare drew her away from the memories of her dead paramour.

Clara’s body felt suddenly restless and caged by her condition. She shifted to sit upright, wincing as her arm and back muscles clenched again in a painful vise, but she refused Evelyn’s help, as she needed her own movement to unlock them again. She cleared her throat and began cautiously.

“Louis wishes to speak to me … about us? Or was it … something of Eterna?”

“Eterna,” Evelyn was quick to reply, moving closer to Clara and sitting on the edge of the bed. “He is learning, in the spectral realm, about what may have gone wrong at the site. Dark forces are afoot, having been granted entry by human avarice.”

Clara thought of the disaster site and shuddered. “That would stand to reason, if reason can even apply there.”

“Devilry has a peculiar reason to it, and a twisted logic. Louis believes dark presences that invaded the room treated the Eterna Compound as a threat.”

When Clara had, daringly, visited the site of Louis’s death, she had a terrible vision of looming beings … Perhaps the same presences Louis referred to. She had thought they were ghosts, but her time there had been so short, it was possible she had not perceived them as the threats they were. Her head wasn’t nearly as clear as it needed to be, hadn’t been since Louis’s death.

She shook herself out of self-pity and stared at her dear friend and mentor with a ready ferocity.

“I said I would do this only with your permission,” the regal woman stated. Clara nodded, hoping perceptive Evelyn would both note and trust her freshly steeled mettle.

“There is indeed more at work here than mere sentiment,” Clara murmured. “I honestly don’t know what I’m meant to do, with the commission, the research, the information … Perhaps Louis can help be my spiritual guide through the mess.” She stared up at Evelyn plaintively. “I just hope I hold up. I have to. I can’t let my condition get in the way. I wanted to be there for him, in life, to work with him.” She clenched her fists. “I’ll take what time with him I can get.”

Shifting out of bed, swinging her legs down slowly, and then rising at a bent angle that made her feel older than her age, Clara winced again. Evelyn moved to assist her, but she waved her off. “No, thank you, I have to move eventually, and on my own, otherwise I can’t shake loose what still wishes to clench and seize.”

Clara moved to her vanity and withdrew a pair of small silver scissors from a top drawer. She looked into the mirror, her green-golden eyes staring past her somewhat haunted reflection, and snipped a lock of deep blond hair from her unkempt tresses. With a rough pull, she wrenched the clump free from the confines of her messy braid, looking alternately at the long streamer of hair in her hand and her somewhat mad-looking reflection.

Plucking a box of matches from her nightstand, Clara lit a taper, removed the candle from its holder, and tipped it above one end of the lock of her hair. Droplets of wax fell, sealing the hairs together.

Sitting back on the edge of the rumpled bed, Clara divided the strands and wove a thin braid, then sealed the second end. She blew out the candle and stared into the wisps of smoke for a moment as if she was hoping to read a message there.

“I hope this works,” Clara said, and the tone in her own voice surprised her. Eterna had aged her beyond her twenty-nine years.

Evelyn nodded. “I can feel the tide of the city will darken, waking up old, terrible cases we thought we’d put to rest. We need to avail ourselves of any and all information. Thank you, Clara, for being willing—”

“It’s the least I can do for his life,” she murmured, worrying the end of the braid between her fingertips before finally passing it over to her mother figure and mentor. “I was never honest about him, I might as well attempt to honor him.”

“I will try to do right by you both,” Evelyn promised. The two Spiritualists held each other’s weighty gaze.

“You’ll find the key to that house in our offices,” Clara stated. “In the top drawer of my desk. Thank you, Evelyn. Truly.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” the elder woman said gravely. “We may yet be dragged through hell and back.” She stood and walked toward the door.

Clara stopped her with a plea. “Don’t tell Rupert about Louis, please? About this return? It’s a…”

Evelyn lifted a hand that fluttered in a gesture of understanding. “Sensitive subject, yes. But don’t leave the poor man entirely in the dark,” she insisted. Clara looked away, guilt twisting within her. The medium pressed a bit further, coming back into the room, close to Clara to take on a gentler tone. “You could have gone to Rupert with your love, Clara. Did it really have to be a secret? Do you not owe him more than that?” A look from Clara gave Evelyn pause. “I won’t tell Rupert unless circumstances of safety require the knowledge. But I am telling you now that you cannot fight this fight without him.”

“I will tell him, I promise.”

Evelyn reached out and took Clara’s hand. “You know I’ve always considered you family. Remember that. Brace yourself, Clara. You are strong, you mustn’t forget it. Don’t let your condition ever tell you otherwise, it’s undermined your agency and your confidence for years. Get that back at all costs. What we’re up against, if it’s anything like what I’ve unfortunately been inured to, Lord help us all. The meek shall not inherit the earth unless we, the loud and bold, stop an onslaught of devilry.”

Clara nodded. “I promise that, too. Strength. Now more than ever.”

Evelyn squeezed her hand hard, then let go and exited the room with the calm grace uniquely hers. Clara hoped she would embody the same qualities as she aged. She wondered when to expect Louis and what their new connection might be like.

If Mrs. Northe-Stewart was successful, a new aspect of the Eterna Commission would unfold, along with a new stage in her relationship with Louis.

She’d buried everything in the Trinity Church graveyard because she did not know what else to do, but she had to do something. Having dug a grave for all the Eterna material she had—all Louis’s papers, all his mystical and imaginative work on talismanic, localized magic, and personal power tied to one’s place on this earth—she had buried half her heart in that hole as well.

After loving him, feeling responsible for his death, being misled that he might actually be alive, only to find out he remained a spirit after all, could she bear this next shift to a kind of relationship she could hardly have predicted? She steeled herself just like she had done with feelings for Rupert Bishop so long ago, reinforcing the mausoleum doors of her emotions.

Sentiment cooled and hardened like a winter’s grave. There was no time for a star-crossed love between forbidden planes of existence when preparing for further supernatural woe. Friend or foe was impossible to determine, British or American, living or dead. Clara hoped the spirit realm could make some sense out of whom to trust and what next to attend to.

Copyright © 2016 by Leanna Renee Hieber

Buy Eterna and Omega here:

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New Releases: 2/2/16

Here’s what went on sale today!

Pirate’s Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson

Pathfinder Tales: Pirate's Prophecy by Chris A. Jackson Paizo Publishing is the award-winning publisher of fantasy role playing games, accessories, and board games. Pathfinder Tales: Pirate’s Prophecy is the continuation of their popular novel series.

Captain Torius Vin and the crew of the Stargazer have given up the pirate life, instead becoming abolitionist privateers bent on capturing slave ships and setting their prisoners free. But when rumors surface of a new secret weapon in devil-ruled Cheliax, are the Stargazers willing to go up against a navy backed by Hell itself?

A Voice from the Field by Neal Griffin

A Voice from the Field by Neal Griffin Gunther Kane and his white supremacist group are using forced prostitution to finance the purchase of automatic weapons. Kane snatches young women off the streets and sells them to hundreds of men. When a victim is used up, she’s killed and dumped. After all, there are always more where she came from.

Physically recovered from being shot but struggling with PTSD, Tia Suarez almost doesn’t believe her eyes when she glimpses a Hispanic teenager bound and gagged in the back of Kane’s van. The look of terror on the woman’s face makes Tia desperate to rescue her.

Kane’s in the crosshairs of the FBI, who don’t want a small-town Wisconsin detective messing up their big gun bust.

NOW IN PAPERBACK:

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber London, 1882: Queen Victoria appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and persons. Spire, a skeptic driven to protect the helpless and see justice done, is the perfect man to lead the department, which employs scholars and scientists, assassins and con men, and a traveling circus. Spire’s chief researcher is Rose Everhart, who believes fervently that there is more to the world than can be seen by mortal eyes.

Their first mission: find the Eterna Compound, which grants immortality. Catastrophe destroyed the hidden laboratory in New York City where Eterna was developed, but the Queen is convinced someone escaped—and has a sample of Eterna.

Flash by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Flash by L.E. Modesitt Jr. Ten years ago, Jonat deVrai was a rising star in the Marines. But he shocked his superiors by walking away from the Corps after witnessing atrocity and hypocrisy. Starting his life over, he established himself as the world’s expert on the effectiveness of “prod”– product placement, the only advertising which viewers will allow through the sophisticated filters they all use against unwanted intrusions on their electronic link networks. Prod, reinforced with sublims and the “res”– resonant frequencies, a form of sonic branding — is the wave of the future. Then Jonat’s comfortable world is upset when the Centre for Societal Research approaches him to study the effects of res and prod on political campaigns. After a res-heavy political rally for Laborite Republican Senatorial candidate Juan Carlismo, armed thugs jump deVrai in a parking garage. A day later, a sniper ambushes him. What looked like a safe, lucrative contract has suddenly turned dangerous. With his life on the line, deVrai must sort flash from fact before it’s too late.

Murdock’s Law and City of Widows by Loren D. Estleman

Murdock's Law and City of Widows by Loren D. Estleman Two westerns in the Loren D. Estleman’s critically acclaimed Page Murdock Series, now in one volume

In Murdock’s Law, Special U.S. Deputy Page Murdock rides into Breen, Montana, on the trail of a menacing and elusive outlaw. Before he can scout the saloons for his man, he is made town marshal in a territory heating up for the ugliest range war this side of hell. The big ranchers want a gunslinger marshal, and the small ranchers have their own hired gun. But the badge on Murdock’s chest means law, and he’ll enforce it the best way he knows…with a gun.

In City of Widows, Page Murdock has been sent to the tough New Mexico of 1881 to track down a man and bring him to justice. Murdock soon finds himself on a desperate odyssey, for in the Southwest a friend can turn out to be one’s cruelest enemy and an enemy one’s finest friend.

Of Irish Blood by Mary Pat Kelly

Of Irish Blood by Mary Pat Kelly It’s 1903. Nora Kelly, twenty-four, is talented, outspoken, progressive, and climbing the ladder of opportunity, until she falls for an attractive but dangerous man who sends her running back to the Old World her family had fled. Nora takes on Paris, mixing with couturiers, artists, and “les femmes Americaines” of the Left Bank such as Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach. But when she stumbles into the centuries-old Collège des Irlandais, a good-looking scholar, an unconventional priest, and Ireland’s revolutionary women challenge Nora to honor her Irish blood and join the struggle to free Ireland.

Seventh Son and Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card

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Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan

Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan Devoted readers of Lady Trent’s earlier memoirs, A Natural History of Dragons and The Tropic of Serpents, may believe themselves already acquainted with the particulars of her historic voyage aboard the Royal Survey Ship Basilisk, but the true story of that illuminating, harrowing, and scandalous journey has never been revealed—until now.

Six years after her perilous exploits in Eriga, Isabella embarks on her most ambitious expedition yet: a two-year trip around the world to study all manner of dragons in every place they might be found. From feathered serpents sunning themselves in the ruins of a fallen civilization to the mighty sea serpents of the tropics, these creatures are a source of both endless fascination and frequent peril. Accompanying her is not only her young son, Jake, but a chivalrous foreign archaeologist whose interests converge with Isabella’s in ways both professional and personal.

When the Heavens Fall by Marc Turner

When the Heavens Fall by Marc Turner If you pick a fight with Shroud, Lord of the Dead, you had better ensure your victory, else death will mark only the beginning of your suffering.

A book giving its wielder power over the dead has been stolen from a fellowship of mages that has kept the powerful relic dormant for centuries. The thief, a crafty, power-hungry necromancer, intends to use the Book of Lost Souls to resurrect an ancient race and challenge Shroud for dominion of the underworld. Shroud counters by sending his most formidable servants to seize the artifact at all cost.

NEW IN MANGA:

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Paperback Spotlight: The Eterna Files

The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee HieberOnce a month, we’re spotlighting a Tor/Forge book that will soon become available in paperback. Today, we’re featuring The Eterna Files by Leanna Renee Hieber, coming out in paperback February 2, 2016.

In The Eterna Files, Queen Victoria appoints Harold Spire of the Metropolitan Police to Special Branch Division Omega. Omega is to secretly investigate paranormal and supernatural events and persons.

His first mission: find the Eterna Compound, which grants immortality. Catastrophe destroyed the hidden laboratory in New York City where Eterna was developed, but the Queen is convinced someone escaped—and has a sample of Eterna.

Clara Templeton, an American, is also searching for the Eterna. Haunted by the ghost of her beloved, she is determined that the Eterna Compound—and the immortality it will convey—will be controlled by the United States, not Great Britain. Please enjoy this excerpt of The Eterna Files.

CHAPTER ONE

London, 1882

Harold Spire had been pacing until first light, crawling out of his skin to close his God-forsaken case. The moment the tentative sun poked over the chimney tops of Lambeth—though it did not successfully permeate London’s sooty haze—he raced out the door to meet his appointed contact.

Conveniently, there was a fine black hansom just outside his door. Spire shouted his destination at the driver as he threw open the door and launched himself into the carriage. He was startled to find that the cab already had an occupant: a short, balding man, immaculately but distinctly dressed; as one might expect of a royal footman.

“Hello, Mr. Spire,” the man said calmly.

Spire’s stomach dropped; his right hand hovered over his left wrist, where he kept a small, sharp knife in a simple cuff. Surely this was one of Tourney’s henchmen; the villain was well connected and would do anything to save his desperate hide.

“Do not be alarmed, sir,” the stranger said. “We are en route to Buckingham Palace on orders of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.”

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