Strange and Ever After
Read Strange and Ever After Online
Authors: Susan Dennard
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #United States, #19th Century, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Love & Romance
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EDICATION
For Sarah J. Maas, who taught me to seek out my darkest fears and to write them with courage
ONTENTS
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HAPTER
O
NE
I was not supposed to be here. Oliver would be furious.
Joseph even more so. This dock was the no-man’s-land between realms. It was a place for ghosts.
But my mother was dead.
And I, Eleanor, intended to find her.
Wood groaned beneath my feet as I shifted my weight. A soft, golden glow pulsed behind me. It was the curtain, a door back into the world of the living. I could almost catch a few sounds from that earthly realm—low voices and the hum of an airship engine—but the dark, lapping water beneath the dock was louder.
I took a single step forward. The curtain throbbed brighter, flickering in the corners of my vision. Then it pulled back—taking the sounds from earth with it.
Another step—the wood creaked again. At least this time I wore boots, unlike my last trip here. I’d been barefoot then, sleeping on a ship bound for France. At that time I had thought I merely dreamed this empty expanse of black water, with its driftwood dock and still air. Now I knew that this place was a barrier and that I ought to turn back—I ought to leave this world before the Hell Hounds came.
Those giant, monstrous Hounds, guardians of the spirit realm. They kept the Dead on their side of the curtain . . . and the living on theirs.
But let the Hell Hounds come. Let them blast me far beyond this dock and the spirit world. Let them send my soul straight to the final afterlife.
For at this moment I
truly
did not care.
I glanced down and found I wore exactly what I had fallen asleep in: Daniel’s loose shirt, tucked into a pair of his trousers and rolled up to expose my hands. I flexed my fingers before me. Everything about me looked hazy, as if my body were layered in fog.
All except for my right hand. My spirit hand.
That
was clear and crisp.
I examined it more closely. This hand had been amputated—cut off after a Hungry Dead had shredded it beyond repair. Though I had been without it for only three months before my demon, Oliver, had returned the hand to me. He had bound the
ghost
of my amputated hand in the earthly realm, leaving me with this phantom limb.
So perhaps my right hand appeared more real than any
other part of me because it was the only part of me that actually belonged in the spirit world.
With a deep breath, I lowered my arm and set off at a steady walk down the dock. I was here to find Mama, so that was what I would do.
Mama. Is dead. Mama. Is dead
. The thought had not stopped pounding in my brain, beating in time to my heart.
Allison Wilcox had been the one to tell me, only a few hours ago. It felt like years. Or maybe only minutes . . .
It had been a beautiful, sunny morning in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris. The sort of sunny day that had made it impossible to believe I’d barely escaped the previous night with my life.
The Spirit-Hunters had come to Paris to stop a surge in walking corpses, only to learn too late that the source of
les Morts
was actually a demon—
Marcus’s
demon.
Yet the Spirit-Hunters, Oliver, and I had done our jobs well. We’d killed the demon named Madame Marineaux and saved the City of Light from hundreds of rabid Hungry Dead.
The following morning, Daniel’s huge, egg-shaped balloon had creaked and swayed in the wind off the river Seine. Its shadow had drifted over me . . . then away . . . then over me once more. The long gondola hanging below gave it the look of a white-sailed ship with a wooden ladder dropping down to earth.
“Hurry, Eleanor,” a voice had called. I glanced up and found Joseph’s head poking from the gondola thirty feet overhead. A bandage wrapped around his head; his black skin was sickly and puffy with exhaustion.
Madame Marineaux had cut off Joseph’s ear in a blood sacrifice.
“There is no time to waste,” Joseph added, with a final scratch at his bandages.
I nodded and tiredly grabbed at the first rung. The Spirit-Hunters and I were traveling south today—racing a train bound for Marseille that had departed the evening before with Marcus on board.
And with Jie on board too. He had taken her from us, so now
we
would take her back.
Then we would make the bastard pay for everything he’d done.
Yet the instant my boot hit the first rung to Daniel’s airship, a new voice called, “Eleanor!
Eleanor!
” and my stomach plummeted.
I recognized that shrill pitch—and God, I’d so desperately prayed I would not have to hear it.
Allison Wilcox.
I had known she was coming from Philadelphia . . . but now?
Already
? It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning, and nothing good could have brought her all the way to Paris.
Last I had seen her, only a few weeks before, I had confessed to her that my brother had killed
her
brother. Yet despite that awful truth, Allison had still helped me reach the Philadelphia wharf when I needed to get to Paris—though she had also promised to call in the debt one day.
This
day, it would seem, when speed was needed above all else to rescue Jie.
I slowly twisted away from the airship ladder. Allison stalked toward me, dressed in black. In mourning. Though she certainly looked healthier than she had a few weeks before, she was still a bony, angled version of herself.
“Why weren’t you in the hotel?” she demanded, stomping across the gravel and swinging her parasol. “I
told
you,” she continued, “that I would arrive this morning, yet when I read the letter at the front desk, I learned you are leaving the city!” Her gaze raked over me, her nose wrinkling up. “What the dickens are you wearing, Eleanor? And . . . is that a hand? How did you get your hand back?”
“Allison,” I said, forcing a smile onto my lips. It felt more like a wince. “I apologize for leaving town, but I must do so immediately.” I motioned up, to the airship.
She followed my finger and started—as if she hadn’t yet noticed the enormous balloon.
“So,” I continued, in the proper tone that etiquette demanded though my brain
shrieked
at me to make haste, “if you will please excuse me, I must go. Good day.” I turned back to the first rung.
“Is this some sort of joke?” She stomped quickly to my side. The feather on her hat bobbed in the breeze. “You cannot possibly leave! Do you realize how far I have come?”
“I am truly sorry.” I was not sorry at all. “But I cannot stay—”
“Then bring me with you,” she blurted.
At those words I froze. It was such an absurd, unexpected request. And so impossible—even
she
had to realize that.
“Please,” she begged, her harshness shifting to desperation
“Do not leave me here, Eleanor. I have traveled all the way from Philadelphia to see you because I bear news that I
must
give.”
“Then tell me your news.” My words sounded distant beneath the growing boom of blood in my ears. “And then return to the hotel.”
Allison’s lips suddenly pressed tight. She shook her head.
“Allison, tell me what happened so that I may go.” Another headshake, and this time, tears shone in her eyes.
I leaned closer, and the world seemed to slow. Her feathers left black trails in my vision. “Who is it, Allison? Who
died
?”
She still would not reply. “Who is it, Allison?” Horrified by my violence yet unable to stop it, I grabbed her arms and shook. “
Who
? Tell me!”
“Eleanor!” Joseph’s voice crashed down from above. “Control yourself!”
But I could not. All control had slipped through my fingers as quickly as the splintered hole in my gut had opened.
I knew
exactly
who had died—and with her death, there was no one left for me in Philadelphia.
“Your mother,” Allison rasped. “Just like Clarence. Just like the other boys.” Her chest shuddered. “Eleanor, your mother was murdered. Decapitated.”
“Ah.” I released Allison.
De-cap-i-tated.
Such a strange word. It knocked around meaninglessly in my skull. . . . And in a cold, slow clench, everything went numb.
No thoughts. No sounds. No pain.
I twisted back to the ladder, and I climbed. Allison shouted
after me, but it was gibberish. All I saw was the next rung. All I heard was my heartbeat. When I reached the open gondola hatch, Joseph tried to speak to me—Daniel too. But it was all still gibberish.
A quick scan of the airship showed a metal room the size of my bedroom back in Philadelphia. It was crammed with sandbags and pulleys, with familiar crates that held Daniel’s latest inventions—and presumably supplies.
A cargo hold,
I thought vaguely, aiming straight ahead, toward a narrow hallway of wood-plank walls.
“Empress.” Daniel’s hand reached for me. “Talk to me.”
But I couldn’t even look at him as I walked past.
My feet reached the hall. Doors hung open on either side, spaced close together, while at the end of the hall was a glass-walled room with an enormous steering wheel. The pilothouse.
“Please,” Daniel called after me. I remained silent. All I needed was a moment alone, to remember who I was—and to remember what I was doing. . . .
I drifted past open doors. On the left, a tiny galley. An even tinier washroom. A cabin with two bunks. On the right, three more cabins . . . and then finally, a fourth with only one bunk inside.
I stumbled in, my fingers brushing against the doorframe, against the left wall. I gaped at the tiny porthole opposite me. The buildings of Paris were just visible outside, their beige fronts and gray roofs melting together. I looked down at the wooden floor instead. But it looked equally as fuzzy. It did not help that
the gondola listed and swayed with the wind.
I felt sick.
Footsteps pounded in the hall outside. “Empress. Eleanor.
Please
—”