Eterna and Omega (37 page)

“Odd, but of little matter to us,” the vicar said, standing at her side, a jovial-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a cleric's collar.

“Ah. But
that
is…” Alexi said, squinting ahead.

The raven familiar that followed them on their rounds was again circling their number from above, and at the sight of the oncoming light he gave up quite a cry.

Behind the heraldic pennants was a long stretch of metal carts, upon which bodies lay, with an odd gossamer glimmering around their forms. The Guard, watching, hoped that the stillness of the bodies was that of sleep rather than death. As the march drew closer, they could see that glitter was a vast network of wires. The filaments were connected to several taller carts that carried lines of turbines being hand-cranked by bent-shouldered laborers.

On either side of these supine forms floated a retinue of specters. Most of their transparent faces looked ashamed or horrified. Some seemed to be trying desperately to pull away from the procession.

“Damnable parades,” Alexi muttered, glowering. His onyx stallion stamped, apparently echoing his sentiment. “Always kicking up spectral dust, inciting the ghostly rabble all over the city…” As he spoke, an ethereal blue fire, an offset of bright light against all his black layers, leaped into his hand as if summoned from above to land in his palm.

“What's all this for?” asked the Irish healer.

“By the look of it, it seems something to have to do with electricity,” the Frenchwoman stated. “Look at those wagons.”

“Anything for a stunt and a chance to make money,” Alexi grumbled.

They heard a sudden, angry shout. “No, this cannot be,” came an anguished voice. “This will. Not. Be!” shrieked someone in the crowd.

A small man with mousy hair that stood up around his head like a static-ridden halo, whose eyes were wild with light that seemed sparked from within, dashed out of the shadows. He ran right into the procession, nearly floated as it seemed his small feet barely touched the ground between two of the turbine wagons. Several burly guards on either side of the conveyances lunged toward him, only to be repelled when they got within a foot of him. There was a resounding smack like the crack of a whip and a fire started on one of the men's coats.

The Guard as a whole stopped and stared.

The turbines on each cart crackled with spun lightning. At first onlookers made noises of amazement and appreciation, but when the whine of the engines grew loud and shrill, when the collective hairs of the entire crowd rose into the air, they began to murmur in fear.

“No. More!” the young man shouted and flung his arms wide.

The sky was filled with a sudden arc of lightning, and everything that had been glowing went dark. Frederic the raven dove towards his mistress as silvery light threaded out in all directions. She held out her gloved forearm for him and once landed, seemed all too happy to tuck in against her.

The processional bodies shuddered violently on their platforms, then stilled. The turbines smoked, their belts and rotors turned to veritable dust. Smoke lifted into the air from singed clothes, from flesh and the rigging of the corpses.

In the stillness, The Guard looked for the strange young man, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“
That's
why we can't trust electricity,” Alexi stated with satisfaction.

“But look,” Withersby countered, “it rather did our job for us. Look. The ghosts are gone. They vanished with that surging strike.”

“And people are left injured,” said the Irishwoman, her hand lit with a soft white light of a powerful healer. “Let me go—”

“Not our purview, Jane,” Alexi said softly. “I'm sorry, but we can't interfere further.”

The healer folded her arms angrily.

“Come, let's course farther down the parade route and make sure all has been put suitably to rest,” the leader said, spurring his horse onward, faster now that the procession had stopped.

The headmistress turned to gather the others and follow, only to find Withersby toying with a couple of men who had stepped toward them out of the crowd. Two familiar faces, governmental operatives, the ones who had been in such trouble so recently.

“Lord Withersby, you stop that right now,” she said as the nobleman made a man they knew to be Harold Spire raise his hands in the air and wave them about; Lord Black was frozen in place beside him, mouth open.

“Look, Rebecca, it's the government officials we saw held prisoner the other day! Hallo, old friends!” Withersby said, as if this assessment somehow justified his making the shorter of the two into a marionette.

“All the more reason
not
to muck about with them, Elijah,” scolded the vicar.

“None of you have any sense of humor,” Withersby pouted. “Very well, then. On your way.” The snide, lean man wiped a hand over the faces of both men before him and darted off to catch up with his team, which had begun moving up the street, searching for ghostly residue.

They had not gone far when the quality of the day's light began to change, as if a bright dawn was coming toward them at breakneck speed and from all directions at once.…

*   *   *

Clara had been spared a seizure thanks to Mosley's arcs of lightning cutting the ghosts free from the dead bodies before she was overcome, and the tether of Rose's hand helped her stay cogent. She gasped anew from her vantage point at the speeding, brightening aurora ahead.…

As the wondrous light expanded and began to become more detailed, she noticed that the oncoming cloud was in fact individual spirits. But they were so bright, colorful, even. Brighter than the grayscale she'd grown accustomed to in Louis.

The luminous mob descended and swarmed toward the head of the parade, toward all the dull, dim-looking people carrying the antiquated crests. As the iridescent human forms reached those sleepwalking bodies, an odd separation began to happen. Something dark and cloudy peeled out and down from the bodies, slinking off onto the Embankment stones as if tar or oil were sliding off them onto the street to vanish or dissipating like smoke. The bright forms slid into the bodies as if putting on clothes.

“My God,” Rose murmured.

“Evelyn must be successful, right at this moment,” Clara gasped. “These are
living
souls reunited with bodies! The paintings must have been destroyed and the souls are returning to find their rightful homes. That's why all the forms aren't the grayscale color like my poor Louis … Oh, blessed, dear Evelyn…”

One by one, bright soul light snapped into place, like magnets connecting, and once whole again, each body began convulsing, doubling over, but after coughing or retching they came to, disoriented, and looking around for something familiar in an unfamiliar scenario.

For the most part, the souls found their bodies and began helping one another up. The Metropolitan officers, seeing them now to be persons in need of aid rather than a potential threatening mob, stepped in and began getting people to their feet, and a few families of dispossessed actually reunited, which allowed a few more bodies to regroup.

Clara and Rose, their own souls having already been reunited, stared with tears streaming down their faces at this moving display.

*   *   *

Rebecca explained to her important coterie what must be occurring, turning to Alexi. “My God, these are
living
souls and
living
bodies reuniting. They've been possessed, all of them, look at the pitch-black shadows oozing away.
What
kind of rite has gone on here on such a scale to have created this massive display?”

“Human interference like we've never seen,” the imperious leader replied. “Our Pull didn't activate, meaning this was wholly human doing, not ghostly. There is no spirit here that wants to misbehave. They all want to stay alive in their rightful bodies and find their respective peace,” Alexi stated.

His group nodded, feeling the truth of it in their interconnected hearts and the spiritual barometer that was their unique power. They watched in awe as egregious mortal wrong righted itself, soul by soul.

But there was one lost girl, small and slight, her body crumpled up to the side of the crowd near an Embankment parapet that shielded her from view of most of the crowd, but her soul was bobbing about, lost and confused.

Jane, the healer, broke free from the throng, and despite Alexi trying to keep her from interfering, she rushed forward to grab the unconscious body and placed the limp form across her lap. Lifting her lit healing hand, she slammed a jolt right onto the girl's heart. She stared up at the spirit separated from its body that seemed too confused to return and held out her other hand, reaching for the hem of the golden, transparent dress of the girl, even though her fingertips wafted right through the soul.

Jane turned her attention back to the corporeal body and bid it come back to itself with another jolt to the heart. The soul of the girl whipped her head around at last, as if seeing herself for the first time, and dove back into her body in a shimmering shudder of light. The girl convulsed once, coughed, and in a panic stumbled to her feet, leaning on Jane with a soft thank-you before turning to see her weeping mother, who flung herself into an embrace with her revived child.

The Guard beamed at their healer as she returned.

“All right then,
now
we can go,” Jane murmured, shy as ever, but with a pleased, proud grin on her face that was exemplary of the reason they heeded their difficult calling day in, day out, entirely unknown and unappreciated by anyone but the forces that summoned them from ancient times.

*   *   *

After a long moment, Spire and Black shook their heads, as if fending off drowsiness.

“Mr. Spire,” Black said slowly, “why are we across the street from our station?”

“I … I'm not sure, milord. What were we even on about?” Spire asked.

“I've no idea; perhaps some of that toxin got in our system. Let's not waste a moment more. Do I seem myself?” Lord Black asked, smoothing his light hair back in place.

“Yes. Do I?” Spire asked slowly.

Black inspected him. “Are you … generally irritated at the world?”

“Generally, yes, especially during parades,” Spire replied.

“Do you think all our paranormal mumbo-jumbo is entirely that?”

“Yes. Entirely.”

“All right, then, you're yourself,” Black assured with a dazed smile.

“Where is our…” Spire looked around. He spotted the needle and the platform around it. “Ah, yes, that's right…” They turned toward their post, then took advantage of a slight break in the procession to rush back to the assembled company.

“Oh, thank God, there you are, we thought you must have gotten trapped by Mosley's arcs of lightning!” Rose cried the moment Spire was within earshot below.

“The what?” Black asked.

“Did you see what happened with souls and bodies reuniting?” Clara exclaimed excitedly as Black climbed up to join them.

“No … I…” Spire scratched his head, remaining below, scowling. “No.”

“No matter, come.” Rose gestured to Spire. “We're just about to signal the lighting of the Wards. There's a lull, but we fear it's the calm before the storm, hurry!”

“I'm going to stay on the ground with the senator for his protection,” Spire stated. “Give me a shout from your view.”

The finale approached.…

What looked like nearly two hundred possessed bodies marched in rows surrounding a vast banner that bore the Master's Society crest—dragons eating themselves, rampant on red and gold. The red of the banner was too dark, likely blood in the paint. Clara assumed that Moriel, in whatever conveyance he had chosen, was behind that banner.

The procession stopped, and the possessed ones all turned at once to face the assembled spectators. In the fading dusk and tallow gaslight of the Embankment's lamps, the host of glimmering, tar-black inhuman eyes was enough to strain the resolve of any onlooker. The crowd, which had been stunned into silence by the electric display, began murmuring in refreshed fear.

The dread march was truly something to behold, and Clara was sure she and everyone near her would never forget the sight for as long as they lived.

From behind the banner, a phalanx of Summoned shadows poured into the air like ink in water. The crowd gasped, transfixed in horror at the sight of the roiling black cloud of vaguely humanoid forms. Coalesced malevolence floated toward them in the direction of Parliament's eaves.

There was another low, resounding note from an unseen instrument.

“London, you are ours,” chorused the collected voices of the possessed.

The banner dropped and Moriel was revealed in an ostentatious robe and crown, standing on a golden calash like the one the queen had used in her recent parade. Guards stood on his every side.

“London, you are mine and I have come to collect your crown!” he cried, raising a dripping, blood-tipped sword in one hand. Clara surmised that fresh blood was needed in such dark rites as this, and enough of the guards wore bloodstains on their clothes that it could have come from any of them.

“For all that is right and good, hold your light aloft!” Bishop cried from within the crowd, affecting a common British accent. Moriel seemed surprised—and indeed offended—by this interruption.

“For London!” Black cried from atop their crow's nest, setting his Ward alight with a lit match into the vial, a shimmering light bubbling up from its contents, holding it up as if he was the embodiment of Lady Liberty's lamp, even though only the hand of that grand gift had been raised in Madison Square Park thus far. In this moment, Lord Black magnified just such a beacon of hope, and Clara's heart swelled afresh.

“For London!” The crowd lifted Wards high in a cascading ripple of light.