This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author makes no claims to, but instead acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the word marks mentioned in this work of fiction.

Copyright © 2017 by Jerico Lenk

THE MISSING by Jerico Lenk

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by Month9Books, LLC.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-946700-56-8

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9968904-7-2

ePub ISBN: 978-1-945107-22-1

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-945107-23-8

Published by Month9Books, Raleigh, NC 27609

Cover design by Najla Qamber Designs

For everyone waiting to be found.

Dear Reader,

THE MISSING by Jerico Lenk is one of the richest and most honest stories I have had the pleasure of reading and considering for acquisition by Month9Books. On the surface, it is quintessential Month9Books. It is spooky, alive with the kind of writing you wish you’d written yourself, and dark, and foreboding, and layered.

Will Winchester lives in a time when the word “transgender” wasn’t even a possibility. You were either male or female. And those who were “other” hid in the shadows, afraid and alone, much like Will, who was born as Willow Winchester.

As a publisher, it was important to me that I support Will’s story and invite you to join his journey of self-discovery, while growing up in a house of ill repute for wealthy patrons, keeping some of the most personal and private of secrets. His relationship with his father is at the center of the story as much as it is with that of his dead mother.

Will is one of the most complex and yet simple characters I have come across in YA, and yet, there is something so familiar about his struggles, something so recognizable in his plight. Of course, we had to balance this historical account with what we know today about transgender people, so, please be sensitive to that when reading. I hope you find the Curious Cases of Will Winchester and the Black Cross to be as engaging and electric as I did. A haunting good old fashioned ghost story can be found in THE MISSING, but just beneath is something much deeper and undeniably real.

Happy reading,

Georgia McBride, Publisher

LONDON, 1890

Making my usual rounds through the townhouse, I weaved in and out between the front and back drawing rooms, carrying a silver serving tray of brandy and gin slings and ready smoking pipes.

“Look at you, boy, all dapper. But your collar’s turned down … ”

Mr. Shelby, editor for a rather popular serial magazine and one of the night’s guests, stretched from his chair to right my collar for me. “Thank you, sir,” I said, pausing just long enough to accept the kindness before passing a cock-tail his way.

Near the mantle, the chemist, Dr. Lowells, noticed my approach and smiled. He parted the gentlemen with whom he mingled so I might slip by, balancing the serving tray propped against my side. One of Dr. Lowells’ conversation partners, a gentleman with a mustache alarmingly liken to a chimney brush, and quite clearly a first-time visitor here, snatched a pipe from the tray with a twitched smile.

“And what is this?” A jolly-looking older man with a pink silk necktie lit up with a grin as I swung by his little group at the armchairs. Miss Calico sat perched on his knee as if she were his daughter—and we all knew she was not his daughter, especially by the way his hand rested comfortably at her hip.

“Oh,” I said, slowing to a stop. The man seemed familiar to me for some reason. “Me, sir? Another refreshment?”

“Yes, you!” His eyes shone brandy-bright. “You were at the planchettist party last week. You’ll call at the next get-together, won’t you? The planchettist said you were an interesting little fellow I’d be keen to acknowledge.”

Miss Calico sent me a knowing look from the corner of her eye. Ah, yes. That was why I felt I recognised him. Blushing, I waved my free hand hard, not because I cared if the man’s cabaret hosted another planchettist party like the one in Mayfair last week, but because I did not want my father or Miss Valérie overhearing and making inferences about just how often I snuck away to such Spiritualist events.

The gentleman’s smile fell away and he looked at me anew, bushy brow furrowing. “But what the devil has you here, boy?”

Miss Calico sighed, nuzzling her nose into the man’s temple. “Darling,” she said, dismissing me with a twirl of her hand, “young Mr. Winchester is presently at work, himself, so you mustn’t busy him with your own boring business talk.”

I left a drink for the man, for when Miss Calico was through distracting him. She was right, after all; I was at home, but I was indeed at work.

My father ran an accommodation house for respectable mistresses and their respectable partners colloquially nicknamed Julien’s-off-the-Strand after himself, never mind the distance between Belgravia and the Strand. Throughout the week, under the guise of stylish after-dinner parties, it was a clean, sophisticated maison right out of our 18 Winston Crescent townhouse—certainly not a place for children.

But I was sixteen, hardly a child anymore. And, even knowing the secrets beyond the townhouse’s closed doors—some of them, secrets of my own—playing waiter at my father’s parties was certainly better than some vocations with which other ’teens were faced.

My father’s guests never complained for the absence of real domestic hands. The outrageousness of me, a sprite of a server, a Julien in training, wandering about with sweets and hard liquor, was apparently just part of the establishment’s draw, equal to that of my father’s girls in their lacy, low-cut dresses and scandalous black knee stockings.

Long after a large, hot dinner by now, the townhouse was full of guests and tobacco smoke. A Berliner in the rear drawing room spewed forth a frolicking, lighthearted German opera; the clatter of a table tennis game echoed from the downstairs reception room. Voices and laughter sloshed together like champagne in glistening stemware.

My father found it greatly distasteful when others referred to his girls as “prostitutes.” They weren’t, he always clarified, and adamantly; they were companions of matching class, generally adhering to the most virtuous of womanly beauty. Mistresses of married men, solitary men, bachelors, bankers, barristers, barons. Everyone knew the importance, for virtue and for health, of outlets for the masculine appetite both before marriage and after marriage. Such vigour was admirable, but it required regulation. Thus … respectable establishments such as that of my father’s.

At least, that was the narrative I’d overheard. I thought it a very forgiving comment on the sort of oppression, repression, depression or humdrum Hyde Park persuasion which drove men to pay such an awful lot of money for one evening with one my father’s ladies.

And I was certainly not exempt from eyes which, at times, followed me around the place more than they followed any of the ladies—like tonight, those of a man with hair so slick with hair wax, one might mistake it for polished wood in the light. I caught him twice staring, but he looked quickly away as soon as I did. The third time, his hand twitched, and I knew he was soon to wave me over for refreshment, so I turned sharp on my heel and marched back to the other room before he could do so.

“Oh—Will!”

Miss Agatha, one of my father’s girls, waved at me from the corner where she and her most regular gentleman visitor lingered at an open window.

“I want one of those cakes, John,” she said, looking so pretty and young with her long dark hair falling casually down the back of her lavender gown. Her regular, Mr. John, plucked some sweet things from the tray as I drifted to a stop with the two of them, glad for a short break. I liked when Mr. John called. He was no rake; he always treated Agatha so nicely. Not that my father allowed his girls to be treated any other way, but John’s niceness was different—as if Agatha were a lady whom he truly wished to court. She came alive when he visited, the two of them always exchanging playful glances and secretive laughter, teasing and elbowing like old friends.

“Why, Will, what’s the matter? Your eyes are like a stormy sky,” Mr. John remarked suddenly. His faint new mustache danced around a sip of Brandywine.

Agatha reached out, affectionately finger-combing the hair around my ears. “Oh, he always wears that look in the wake of his father’s neglect.”

“What look?” I echoed, brow knotting. “Father’s neglect?”

Agatha gave a dramatic sigh. “A stormy sky, he says. How poetic for brown eyes! Why can’t the man be as poetic about my eyes? My eyes are plain, then?”

Mr. John laughed and hooked an arm around Agatha’s tiny waist, leaning forward against her even as she smiled but avoided his kisses. “Your eyes,” he said, “your eyes, sweet dove, are finer than the Crown Jewels.”

Miss Nina strode up beside us then, prodding me in the side with her closed hand-fan. Leaning close, she whispered, “She’s giving you that look again.”

She meant Miss Valérie. I turned a little, casting a glance around the rest of the drawing room.

Yes, with her feet in their bejeweled slippers tucked up beside her, elegant Miss Valérie lounged on the floral-print loveseat, the usual spot in which she spent most every party smiling and watching through hooded eyes.

Of the six ladies employed by my father, Miss Valérie was the oldest and his obvious favourite. She’d retired from the profession before the parties had ever really begun, playing head mistress now, the unofficial manager of the others.

“A longtime friend!” my father always said. “A business partner!”

But she could have been my stepmother if there were any papers to say so, and she surely didn’t pay a shilling of room and board since she’d moved in.

I knew the look Nina meant. It was Miss Valérie’s sharply observant face, at once soft but cold, lofty and attentive. Her gaze lingered on me a moment longer after I met it, brow gently arced as though she meant to say, Yes, I am looking at you. After a few uncomfortable seconds, she was greeted by a barrister friend of my father’s, and back she went to her carefully sociable character, releasing me from her scrutiny to accept the kisses he rained upon her ringed hand.

“She hates me.” I turned around again with a sigh, raising my brows. If I hadn’t won her affection when I was small, I wouldn’t now.

Mr. John raised his drink as if to toast. “Well!” he said. “One day this will all be yours, you lucky little chap; and you’ll breathe easy.”

Thump!

I leaned to the side quickly, looking down the hall into the other drawing room. Someone had tripped, perhaps, or conversation was getting rowdy. Yet no one else seemed to have heard the sound at all.

“What do you mean?” I asked Mr. John.

“You’ll inherit all this, won’t you?” He swept his hand around the expanse of the lively room. “You could send Lady Valérie off for good!”

“I suppose … ” I shrugged. As if the solution to my problems were so easily attained. I certainly did not covet such a business.

Thump, thump-thump.

I bristled. There was that odd sound again.

Agatha must have heard it as well. She tipped her head just slightly in the direction of the noise, then suddenly flashed me a pointed look around Mr. John’s shoulder.

Thump-thump-shuffle, thump-thump-thump!

The ruckus came from upstairs—like children played tag or chased hoops in the attic room just overhead. Which also happened to be my room.

My heart sank. I knew what it was.

“Blast,” I muttered, plenty flustered. I needed to stop the ruckus before anyone else noticed, especially my father. This was how it always went.

I pushed my silver serving tray at a spirited Mr. John, who took it in tipsy confusion, and struck off as smartly but casually as I could so as not to draw much attention. But once I reached the main stairs, I took off running in the direction of the noise.

The attic floor was closed to visitors, bearing just a handful of small bedrooms—mine, Daphne and Agatha’s, the cook’s, and Miss Zelda the housekeeper’s. The door to my room, a bit crooked on its hinges as it was, remained closed.

Thump-thump-thump!

Hand curling on the high brass knob, I pressed my ear to the door to listen.

Patter of feet. Hollow giggles.

The doorknob clicked as I turned it slowly, deliberately, then edged the door open with a gentle creak.

I saw them instantly in the mirror across the room, felt the gust of air and throb of fast footsteps as little Charlie and Colette dashed to-and-fro before me, playing some game all around the loft room.

“Charlie, you cheater!” Colette whined. But she should have known better because Charlie always cheated.

Outside the mirror, the room was empty.

Quickly, I stepped inside and closed the door.

“Hey!” I interrupted, quiet but stern. The children had moved beyond the scope of the mirror, but I could feel them looking at me in guilt. “Could you both kindly hush up?” I pressed. The sound of the party echoed up through the house as their play had echoed down. “You’re rather loud, and you know we can’t have my father’s company hear you.”

“Sorry,” the two of them chorused, voices tiny and warped. Then, like candles blown out in the wind, they were gone.

Charlie and Colette were dead, after all—there in my attic room, but also dead—murdered by a friend of their scoundrel brother back in 1861. They were still here because the clothes in which they’d died lay hidden beneath the floorboards. My mother and father hadn’t known as much when they acquired the townhouse, but I surely was not about to remove the clothes. One night two years ago, Charlie and Colette had roped me into a game of Hot Boiled Beans, whispering excitably, “Warmer, warmer—hot!” until I had the slat of wood wedged upwards and could see in the candlelight a blue dress and shirt collar, both bloody and crumpled up in the dust and dirt below. Since then, Charlie and Colette had been yet another secret of mine to keep safe.

My room was still again. I breathed a short sigh, relieved.

I felt as though, somehow, I’d become their caregiver. The fact of the matter was that I often felt responsible for them, because for as long as I could recall, it had been my unique curse to see and hear the Missing, a sensitivity normal men and women didn’t generally possess.

The Missing. Ghosts. Spirits, phantoms, the dead. Nobody else called them that—missing—but I did, as they quite clearly weren’t completely gone, just caught somewhere between mostly unseen and generally unnoticed. Never mind why I saw and noticed them, or that they saw and noticed me.

“Hello!” Charlie had chirped the first time I met him and his sister, their two little, foggy, grey faces peeping at me from the door of what used to be my playroom. I’d been quite small, too small to understand the significance of their differences from me. If I think deeply enough, I can remember a lady in the nursery with me then, perched in the window seat across the room, her dark hair swept up in a loose bun and the back of her neck soft and white in the sunlight like her dancing dress. Turning. Waving for me. Laughing. My mother.

“Guardian angels,” she’d said.

I didn’t see Charlie and Colette again until she was gone. Perhaps they’d worried I was lonely without her, or maybe they finally felt permitted to find a playmate in me. And they were certainly my playmates for a while, I suppose. They weren’t always around, just suddenly there now and again to pet my hair or insist they could not play marbles because the marbles went through their ghostly fingers.

Of course, I mentioned them to everyone. “The child just wants attention,” Miss Valérie said, after she’d shown up and effectively stepped into my mother’s shadow.

“Well, we’ll leave these imaginary friends at home and go to the zoo, then!” my father said, swinging me up to hold on his hip. The zoo, the carousel, the park, the toyshop. “See now?” he’d cry. “You shouldn’t be lonesome! You have Miss Valérie and I, and Miss Zelda, of course … ”

I don’t recall exactly how old I’d been—it was just before the mistress business started—but it was a Christmas Eve telling ghost stories together in the front drawing room that it finally sank into me what Charlie and Colette were. I burned my mouth on hot chocolate and sputtered from the pillows stacked on the loveseat, “Daddy, they’re not guardian angels, they’re dead! Ghosts come from dead people!”

“Well, yes, they do, darling.” My father had chuckled, exchanging a glance with Miss Valérie.

Afterwards, aiming to assert some sort of authority as the living one, I boasted to Charlie and Colette, “I should be afraid of you, but I’m not.”

But, inevitably, I outgrew them as playmates, and grew quite irritated that blame always fell to me for their occasional puckishness even when it was impossible for me to have moved this or that item while never in the room, or slammed a door downstairs all the way from my playroom, or made a mysterious ruckus on the wide old staircase while I sat with my primer and tutor.

The business of respectable mistresses for respectable men began slowly. Acquaintances of Miss Valérie came for dinner, pretty ladies and young women who cooed and fussed over me as if it were some contest in affectionate nature, until their gentlemanly friends arrived, and Zelda toted me off to bed. At times, I was sent off without dinner, like the evening on which I adamantly explained that I had not made my first real human friends cry—the son and daughter of a hired woman to whom my father let out an empty loft room—but Charlie had, after pulling their hair and stamping around, furious they couldn’t see him like I could.

“There are no ghosts in this house,” my father reproved, appalled. “There are no ghosts anywhere, at all!”

I told Charlie and Colette to leave the others alone, but the lady and her children still quit the place not long after. I got older, the parties lost their illusions, and the way my father looked at me … began to change. As though I were a troublesome, mischievous thing. As though I’d committed some crimes against him.

As though he were slightly afraid of me.

A few times, gentlemen refused to return because someone had grabbed at their ankles from under a bed, or thrown open doors on rooms in which they’d sought privacy with a companion. Naturally, ladies came and went as employees, but in as many years four girls who’d boarded with us fled in straits.

“Frightened,” the other girls said after Miss Valérie turned up her nose and demanded I ask what concerns they’d expressed to her. As if to shame me for already knowing, being in her eyes the one at fault. “The house is haunted.”

“Haunted!” My father coughed out the word in contempt. “You are far too old to be keeping up this nonsense. Are you jealous, then? Do you think it noble to drive out mine and Miss Valérie’s friends?”

It was a game, I convinced Charlie and Colette. “Only the three of us may know about one another,” I said, sitting with them in the rear drawing room one afternoon. “I’ll be helping Daddy with his parties now, and you must be good while I am. If someone notices you, you’ve lost the game.”

They listened to me, of course. Most of the time. They’re children; it can’t be helped.

“We know.” Miss Daphne had peeked into my room one night with a candle in hand and Agatha wide-eyed behind her, shortly after the two of them had taken up board down the hall from me. “There’s something ghostly in the house and we know you’re aware of it.”

I had just nodded, gawking at them from my bed feeling quite guilty and sad, as if it really were my fault Charlie and Colette were there in the first place. Now when anything out of the ordinary happened, Daphne or Agatha came to me to put a stop to it. Nobody questioned why. They just … knew that I could and I would.

It wasn’t Charlie or Colette for which my father scorned me anymore; he was in deep denial of them, I’d swear it. Now it was just my interest in the metaphysical he hated.

“Rubbish!” he chastised. “All penny dreadfuls and parlour tricks!”

Miss Zelda, the longtime family housekeeper and thus as good as my governess over the years, didn’t lecture me, but when she caught me with books on Spiritualism and the occult, or found me slipping out with Daphne to see West End spirit photography and ghost conjuring galas, the worried shadow on her face was enough to guilt me into obedience.

“I don’t even engage,” I insisted. Not as much as I wished to, anyway. Daphne and I would simply watch from the background, from the safer shadows against the wall.

“Too dangerous,” Zelda always said, and I could never figure out if she believed in Charlie and Colette, or not. “Please. Listen to your father.”

But … how could I not be interested in it all? It was my ghastly cross to bear, though for what sins, I was never totally positive.

In my bedroom, I sighed and leaned back against the door.

“Be good and don’t cause any more ruckus tonight,” I said to Charlie and Colette, if they were even there to listen anymore. “I mean it.”

Voices muffled and thin, as though they hid somewhere full of mischief yet, they chimed, “Yes, Will!”

“What’s the matter, Will?” my father asked as I came down from the attic.

“Nothing, of course,” I said, letting him tousle my hair and give a loving pat to my shoulder, reminders of fatherly affection that came easily to him after a few drinks but were never enough to distract from his duties as business host and man of the house.

He went off towards the front drawing room and I hurried back to where I’d left Agatha and the others—but just as I stepped through the doorway, a hand closed on my arm. I halted, looking around in dismay. God, but if it was that spying man from earlier …

It was only Miss Athena, another of my father’s girls—sweet, baby-faced Athena. Something wasn’t right.

Her lower lip quivered and a veneer of tears made her eyes shine like crystal. The last time she’d looked at me like that, confused and cold, Charlie had chased her down the stairs sometime after midnight, laughing and tugging at the ribbons on her dress.

Yet somehow, I knew even before she opened her mouth that it had nothing to do with ghostly children’s pranks.

“It’s Daphne,” she said. “Daphne’s left, Will! She said she’s really through with it all, can’t even bear the rest of the night, and she’s off to Waterloo, I’m sure—”

My heart dropped fast.

I shook loose of Athena’s grip so suddenly, I almost knocked the cigarette out of some gentleman’s hand as he passed by.

“She really means it tonight?” I demanded, so very tired of fearing the worst.

“I watched her leave.” Athena struggled against the tears. “Will, I don’t think she’s coming back!”

As I shoved my way out of the party, hardly even noticing those with whom I collided, Miss Calico simpered from where she had been eavesdropping nearby, “There he goes, little Romeo, after his precious Juliet … ”

But she did not understand. Daphne was my best friend. She was my favourite, to be honest. Daphne, who tip-toed to my room on the quiet nights to read Fun and Tales of the Dead. Daphne, who was like a sister to me—who never complained and never said bad things about others, and who hid a terrible aching sadness behind her lovely smile. In Miss Daphne, I wanted to trust not just my petty secrets, but my real secrets, because she trusted me with hers, too.

I didn’t think to grab my coat. I just flew out the door with Athena on my heels, and the temporary attention of the house’s crowd rippling in our wake.

Daphne was about to do something unspeakable, and I couldn’t let her. So, it was straight to the Strand with Athena’s clammy hand tight in mine as we darted up the sidewalk and stole a hansom cab from a group of distracted gentlemen, apologising around the side as we rattled off.

My heart was a glass prism waiting to shatter into a million pieces if Daphne really were to jump from the bridge tonight.

“I can’t!” Athena moaned as the cab shuddered to a stop at the great arch of Waterloo Bridge, which was particularly inhospitable and glum in the night’s thick fog, almost enough to wholly shroud the occasional coughing passerby or jerking coach.

“I’m scared, Will!” Athena said. “Haven’t you heard about the Wraith at Waterloo?”

Of course, I’d heard the gossip of a ghost haunting the bridge. Who hadn’t? It was some of the most popular Spiritualist parlour talk. All through the night, a white figure wandering the bridge, following pedestrians, there and gone again in the blink of an eye. But even if I weren’t already well-acquainted with the dead, my fear of Daphne’s demise was greater than the fear of some paltry, rumoured specter.

“It’s all right, Athena,” I promised, already out and on the road. “You wait here for me. I’ll be back with Daphne.”

I hoped.

Athena stayed with the cab as I hurried up the bridge, which was strangely vacant, except for a few men in overcoats huddled under a streetlamp. The slap of water and the nighttime fog distorted the echo of the city around me. Horses, music, voices, so far away, it felt.

“Daphne!” I called. “Daphne!”

“I’m sorry!” The distant sound of Athena sobbing bounced off the stone of the bridge. “I’m sorry I told him when I promised not to, Daphne, but I couldn’t let you do it, I couldn’t!”

There she was—Daphne, just a silhouette, leaning at the side of the bridge. The burst of relief left me numb. She hadn’t jumped. Thank God, she hadn’t even climbed up yet. She just stood looking down into the water, courting unthinkable things.

I staggered to a halt.

No … there she was, on the other side of the road. Up on the ledge peeking down at the Thames below. Midnight wind tugged and yanked at her thin coat. Had she not heard us cry out for her?

I dashed forth. I’d never forgive myself if I watched her jump, too late to grab her.

“Bloody—”

My foot caught against a tightly-stretched twine and I hit the cobbles hard with a choke of a gasp, whilst a series of bells, apparently attached to the string, rang to announce my gracelessness.

Palms raw and cheek burning from the bite of the stone, I scraped myself up off the pavement. A whole web of strings and bells on little rods caught lamplight in pale sparks through the fog. What was this about … ?

Daphne.

I looked up, panicked. Daphne was still on the ledge, skirts dancing about her naked ankles. Her slippers sat discarded at the base of the lamppost.

Bells ringing shrilly, I stamped down twine to clear my path and bounded across the bridge. My face throbbed; blood stained my sleeve as I wiped at the apple of my cheek. God knew how badly I’d scraped it.

I pulled Daphne off the ledge by the wind-chilled wrist, tumbling down with her all flaring petticoat and pearls to hit the ground a second time.

“Oh!” she gasped, wrestling against me not to break free but to meet me face-to-face, wide-eyed with shock as if I’d yanked her from some sleepwalking dream. And then a dark sort of guilt eclipsed her, stubborn and unapologetic.

“Will!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing?” I retorted.

Daphne’s eyes jumped around; her face pinched. “I … ” She wriggled again, trembling hands pressed to the cobbles as she sat up on her own. “I almost did it,” she said, in a daze.

“But you didn’t,” I said, “and you’re coming home with Athena and me now!”

Perhaps it was selfish to feel so wounded, so angry beyond the relief. But it was unfair, that she might have gone to end her life without saying good-bye to me. How could someone smile and laugh so freely but still be so unhappy?

“Will, your face! What happened to your face?” Daphne’s fingers drifted along my cheek.

“Damn it, Daphne—”

The men who’d been clustered a few lampposts down suddenly hovered over us, two of them casting scowls and the other pair looking torn between curiosity and obligation amid the crisis.

“You’re interfering with our inspection!” one of them roared, a baby of a bachelor with messy hair and a tetchy countenance that ruined his handsome face.

“Are you two all right? That was quite the fall!” sputtered another, this one about my size and probably not much older, and I would have answered him had I not been immediately distracted by the two different colours of his eyes. One a lovely clear blue; the other, grey and clouded like there was no colour to it at all. Something about him felt rather familiar, but then some people just possessed such charisma.

How utterly humiliating, for these strangers to have witnessed the entire thing.

“You ruined all our bells!” the angry one went on. “Do you know how long it took to set those up?”

“Clement, the ambience compass is going wild.” The third man was all worked up and out of breath, a nervous-looking thing with a knapsack and prominent ears, and that awkward course of motion that befell long gangly people.

The last—a taller, more muscular fellow whose square jaw and sharp mutton chops made him look what I imagine it might if a wolf were a man, still fierce even with tiny spectacles perched atop his head—helped Daphne and me off the ground. He met my eyes and held them, unperturbed.

“Be a gentleman,” he instructed. “Take your lady home now that she’s safe. We’re in the middle of something.”

“All our bells, God damn it!”

“Please, go,” the bespectacled man urged again, gruffly. “You’re only in the way now, boy.”

Boy.

“Daphne!” Athena called from the junction archway in a ragged sob of relief. Daphne pulled away from me and dashed down the bridge, colliding with her in a tangle of tears and messy curls.

My head spun. “You set up those bells?” I blurted. Daphne was safe. The panic should have retreated. But it just coiled in on itself and sharpened into fury. Real gentlemen wouldn’t have dared turn someone else’s almost-crisis into a slight on their behalf. But maybe they weren’t real gentlemen. Not that my impression of gentlemen wasn’t perhaps a bit skewed by my father’s line of work.

I hissed, “Those wires could kill a man who doesn’t know they’re there. I tripped on them!”

“Well, you’re not dead, are you?” The petulant one uttered a sound somewhere between scoff and laugh.

“Clement, the ambience compass … ”

“Oh, did you know you’re bleeding?” the one my size interjected, face dimpled in concern. But the look he shot at their irascible associate was surprisingly feisty. “Quinn, tell Clement to let it alone. It is our fault, after all.”

Somewhere beyond, noise echoed from crepuscular crowds. The hair rose on the back of my neck and a faint ringing shivered in my ears. The silhouette of the other girl was there again, only a few lamps up the bridge. Staring at us, it seemed. Well, weren’t we putting on quite the show?

Ah, but …

That peculiar ladylike shadow was not alive. It was the Wraith at Waterloo.

There was something deeply unsettling about running into ghosts outside my attic. I backed away from the arguing men, brow knotting. “There’s something here,” I blurted, flustered and uneasy. Never mind the quarrel. I’d see myself off with Daphne and Athena. “I’m sorry, I … well, you know, you’ve heard the tales, I’m sure, about … ”

I didn’t have a chance to explain and they didn’t have a chance to question me, because up from the ground sprang that ghostly silhouette, right there between us and blocking my view of the loudmouthed one the other men had called Clement.

Wide-eyed, fixed stare and sunken cheeks, hair flowing about her face as lusciously and unnaturally as a drop of ink in water, the Missing woman looked right into my eyes, curiously, ominously, as if I had trespassed somehow. A wave of dread rolled through me. I wanted off this bridge. I wanted away from this thing. Why did they always come to me?

A horrid wheezing sound brushed up against my ear—she was to speak, perhaps.

But the apparition just suddenly slunk away as fast as it had come and left me staring right at that Clement fellow, who gawked back at me equally as stunned.

Had they witnessed it, too, then? Or did I seem a madman, distracted by things unseen to them?

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered, mouth chalky with the taste of embarrassment. “I’ll be going—”

A freezing gust that reeked of the Thames struck me hard and dissolved into fingers around my neck. I staggered back, coughing with the blow as if I’d been punched in the throat.

The whole world veered violently to one side, seemed to blur all together into only colours and lights. I couldn’t breathe. My throat and chest were full of water. Oh God, I thought, I’ve fallen into the river! Sadness and fear crashed heavy through me, but quite unfamiliar, as if the weight of them came from beyond my own body. And then everything just … stopped.

***

I pried my eyes open and found myself seated on a crooked bed in a dingy, cluttered room.

Others spoke nearby, beyond the closed door. I could hear them, but the conversation was incomprehensible and warped as though I were small again, submerged in bath water and listening to my mother and Zelda have words somewhere above my head. Count how long I hold my breath, Mamma!

I must have fainted, I decided, and been brought somewhere by the dubious foursome on the bridge to recover. And yet … somehow, I knew that was not so.

It wasn’t so, as I wasn’t me anymore.

There was a smudged little looking-glass on a wash stand not far away. I forced myself to look. Not at my reflection, no …

Her reflection.

It was the Wraith’s, and her name was Kitty. But how did I know that … ?

In some inharmonious rush of colours and smells and muffled sounds, this was Kitty’s life. And I knew because I was Kitty.

Hunger. Poverty. Too many siblings and not enough love. Mother pitied me. Father despised me. Shiver of cold desperation slicing through my … her soul. Forget the factories. Squalid street after street, man after man, and the business of the bed, lying flat on my back, the air cold on bare skin. The business of the bed, why always the business of the bed? Every sane bit of me wailed for release. No, no, no, this was a nightmare! What was this? Where was this, and how was I to escape—

Darcy James and his morphine dreams. Darcy James’ touch made my heart swell as Kitty’s heart swelled. As Kitty vomited everything she ate into a rusty pail in the corner, I vomited everything I ate into that same rusty pail. Help! I tried to scream, but it hurt; my voice was trapped in my throat and went nowhere, and there was such a pressure in my head, I feared it might burst … Bethnal Green, dress houses, Darcy James, whore, whore, whore!

The stone of Waterloo Bridge, icy and slick below my bare feet. I leaned out until there was nothing to hold me, and I fell into the Thames, taking deep breaths of the dirty water because I wanted to die, because Darcy James stopped coming because he was married now. He’d moved to the suburbs. There were so many voices, buzzing, whispering, closing in on me.

The towering wolf-man the strangers on the bridge called Quinn slapped me across the face, and the trance-like stream of visions careened to a halt.

I sucked in a stuttering breath, eyes rolling open to the fog and the startling glow of a streetlamp overhead.

Thin wire spectacles dropped to his nose, the Quinn fellow hovered beside me. I didn’t really care that he’d hit me; I clutched his thick arm as I struggled against shocked tears and the lingering feel of cold, filthy ghost water in my throat.

But I was again myself—I was real, and I was safe.

I lifted a shaking hand to my freshly throbbing cheek, the one without the scrape, and croaked, “Well, at least you’ve evened things out for me, haven’t you?”

“What did you see?” The nervous-looking one was far too spirited for my comfort, words bobbing and dipping with his Irish accent as he crowded me impatiently, clutching a scrap of paper as though he wished to write down what I said. I shrank away, face twisted.

“O’Brien!” the one my age hissed. “Give him some room, man, for Christ’s sake.”

Daphne. Athena. They needed to get home. And Kitty …

“Where’s Kitty?” I choked out, turning roughly against Quinn’s hard shoulder. “Where’d the bloody wench go?”

O’Brien’s face pinched. “Kitty?” he said.

“The Wraith,” I snapped, as if they could have known that. “The Wraith at Waterloo.”

“Yes!” Clement cried, then seemed to realise his genuine smile and promptly shook it off as I wrenched free of Quinn’s hands. Stumbling over Daphne’s shoes, I threw myself against the stone to vomit off the side of the bridge.

The foul, black water gawked back up at me. I spit once, twice, until the unpleasant tang of vomit was mostly gone.

What did they think of me, these unfortunate strangers, after an episode like that? That I was mentally unwell, surely, suffering from neurosis or a rare but obvious hysteria. Kitty. Her memories. That eerie gust of wind and hellish loss of control. Dreaming while still awake, it had felt. Or a … collision of realities. And yet the nervous one had asked, What did you see? as they all looked at me, as though they knew something I did not.

They did, though, didn’t they? I turned slowly around, eyes wide and cold with the weak tears that sprang up when one became ill.

“What was that … just now?” I asked.

“A mild possession,” Quinn muttered.

A possession. Like a ghost conjurer, or a medium. I squinted at him, incredulously and not entirely kindly. Clement’s eyes blazed into me. “What was her full name? Could you discern the year? Recall any details whatsoever?”

“Mild possession?” I repeated, eyes darting from Clement to Quinn and back.

Clement uttered a tart sigh. “Yes, reliving the spirit’s memories.”

The Missing could change the feel of an empty room. Move things that ought to remain stationary. Open and close doors, blow out candles, let their voices and footsteps echo cool and bodiless, but never in my life had I even imagined it was possible to experience their … memories.

“You’re Spiritualists?” I whispered, in a daze.

Yes, dazed, or breathlessly bewitched.

“What did you see?” Clement tried again.

“Kittredge Ann McGowell,” I reported hoarsely, and the most frightening part was that I hadn’t had to think about it. Wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve one last time, I just knew the name. And I felt so very violated by the knowledge. “From Bethnal Green. I saw it all. She jumped.”

“Suicides.” Quinn nodded. “Malevolent echo. The ambience compass is going mad, you see?”

My eyes veered off to this ambience compass in which they were so interested. In Quinn’s big hand, it looked like a regular compass, but its little arrow stuttered and jerked as if North were constantly on the move.

Never mind that. They believed me.

“What’s going on?” I asked again, warily. “You saw her? The ghost?”

Quinn’s hand closed on my shoulder as he ordered, “You’re staying until we collect your testimony.”

“What?” I sputtered. “Testimony? I can’t—I must get Daphne and Athena home. Are you from the press?”

“Kingsley shall return them home.” Clement gestured to the young man about my age. “Won’t you, Kingsley?”

Kingsley’s face pinched. “Ah, I suppose … ”

“A malevolent enigma,” O’Brien said to himself as he wrote it down.

“Malevolent echo,” Quinn corrected gruffly.

They’d seen the spirit. Mild possession. They spoke as though they’d been searching for it. “Excuse me … ” I almost swallowed my question at all their curt glances. “What does that mean?”

“It’s the type of haunt,” Kingsley answered as Quinn ignored me once again and Clement’s lip curled at my partisan ignorance.

Oh, I knew different ghosts behaved in different ways. But a classification?

“Of course it’s a malevolent echo. Just my favourite.” Clement heaved a dissatisfied sigh.

“What are we to do?” owl-eyed Kingsley urged as a miserable coach rattled by. “Mr. Zayne’s, Clement?”

“Yes. Zayne’s it is.”

“Stop!” I cried.

All four of them halted and looked at me as though they’d briefly forgotten I was there. I was shaking. But I was also terribly turned on to the whole affair. What were they doing? How did they know all of this?

I met Clement’s narrowed eyes, standing my ground. My heart thundered to be so bold but I was loath to leave.

“I must insist I will not be giving you any testimony, whatever you need it for, unless you take me along to see what you’re doing,” I said. I wanted to know. I needed to know. “Oh.” My brow knotted. “But first I must return Daphne and Athena home safely.”

The other three all looked to Clement. Clement gawked at me. Then his jaw tightened and, clearly resentful of my unnegotiable conditions, he conceded, “Fine. Shall we go, then?”

I thought they’d part ways with Daphne, Athena, and me the moment we weren’t looking, but the men from Waterloo truly did follow us back to Julien’s-off-the-Strand. The night’s reception still spun along as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at all.

“Will, what are you doing?” Daphne hissed as I returned her shoes to her on the stoop. There was a strange wide-eyed calmness about her now, as though she were at peace with almost fulfilling her threats. Almost jumping. Almost dying. “Your father will not be happy. You don’t know those men. You can’t … ”

“You don’t understand,” I said, urging her and Athena to the door. “This is something I must do for myself.”

“But Will—”

“I think you owe it to me after tonight, don’t you, Daphne?”

Daphne’s face hardened. Curls all broken up and windblown about her brow, she said, “Abandon your high horse, Will Winchester. We all have our demons.”

What was I to do or say? That finally I saw the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Spiritualists who might believe what I said, who seemed more truth than fraud? A chance to discover others who bore witness to the dead, and what might become of someone with a curse like that?

I didn’t even know if I could speak those words with the dreadful lump in my throat.

“What am I to tell your father, then?” Daphne asked wearily, shivering and looking far too fragile for my liking.

“Tell him nothing.” I shrugged. I kissed her cold cheek. And then I strode briskly down the block to where the men from the bridge waited with a coach.

***

It was off to Fleet Street, apparently.

Once seated, Quinn offered me a splash of cognac from an ornate silver flask to calm my nerves.

“So, you’re Will,” said Assistant O’Brien, the gangly one, after my delayed introduction, his face bright and eyes brighter as the coach rattled on. The one my size was Inspector Cain Kingsley, young Earl of the old Kingsley family.

“Oh—yes!” I’d sputtered sheepishly as if I’d remembered Cain all along. I knew of the large noble family; no wonder he’d felt vaguely familiar to me. The Kingsleys were notorious around London for all sorts of glamour and sensation. A small handful of them were deep into London’s Spiritualist scene, too.

And now that I could think a bit straighter, I realised with a hot blush to be in Kingsley’s company in such an embarrassingly unpresentable state that I’d even seen him not very long ago, when Daphne and I had slipped out to that planchettist party. How could I not have remembered the moment I saw the milky lack of pigment scarring his left eye, the same that I’d noticed it through shoulders and elbows in the moving crowd of the ghost conjuring party, Daphne’s hand in mine, as Kingsley had sat surrounded by companions not on a chair, but perched gracefully on the edge of a billiards table, a real center of conversation as everyone waited for the private medium to arrive with her jewels and crystal ball?

“Still can’t believe he’s been decorated Earl before he’s even twenty-one,” Daphne had whispered. And then we’d both forgotten all about it, fading into the audience as in the candlelight the medium called on this spirit or another.

I leaned forward to shake O’Brien’s reaching hand, offering a poor excuse of a smile and too flustered to meet Kingsley’s gaze in the dark of the coach.

“You must be shaken, still,” O’Brien murmured. “Apologies again for all this mess—Lord, you’re so young, too.”

“I’m not terribly young,” I assured him, hesitantly. For just a breath or two, I doubted the whole thing. But then the words came tumbling forth. “I’m not terribly shaken, either. I’m actually rather impatient to see what comes next because I’ve observed them, myself, when others couldn’t all my life. The dead. Spirits. So … ”

“I knew it by the look in your eyes.” A small but triumphant smile broke across Kingsley’s face. “You possess the talent.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it talent.” Quinn took the words right out of my mouth, in that rough baritone of his, cramped in a shadowy corner of the cab. I felt very small next to him, never mind the cold, curt glances of appraisal he thought I didn’t notice.

“Don’t mind Quinn,” Kingsley insisted with a gentle smirk that made half-moons out of his eyes. “He wants you to believe he’s frightening—old habits die hard for a former Yard detective—but he’s our gentle giant now.”

Quinn sighed.

It was just after midnight and Fleet Street was the usual circus. Clement waved me on impatiently as I followed O’Brien out of the coach. “Come on then, if you’re so bent on being involved.”

The four of them strode down past a cabman’s shelter towards what appeared to be a menagerist’s shop, but in the streaked front windows, easily missed between lurid displays of stuffed alligator heads and off-kilter bird skeletons in rusty cages, an unassertive sign read: STYGIAN SOCIETY – WEST LONDON BURIAL CLUB.

“This can’t be open now, can it?” I protested weakly. Nobody seemed to hear.

The doorstep bowed underfoot; the place was thick with the odour of chemicals, smoke, and mould. To my surprise, a group of men was situated inside with gin and cigarettes. I could hardly see them at first for lack of light and looming mountains of acquired … stuff.

All manner of objects from the curious to the funereal piled around. Books, furniture, dusty graphoscopes, broken mirrors, bottled specimens parading alongside bizarre taxidermy displays. An ancient magic lantern sat squat and bulky, draped half in grimy velvet; forests of fat old candles were planted in heaps of wax atop stacked coffins.

We’d walked in on something of a party. The men were in the middle of charades, one of them wearing a ridiculous feather boa and a bejeweled belt surely snatched from some playhouse. They recognised their visitors almost immediately, and startled laughter trickled round the room until the man in the fabulous garb cried:

“Clement! Good to see you. You look in a bind, per usual.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, Zayne,” Clement grumbled. “Now, listen, this is urgent.”

“It’s always urgent with you! You never call just to chat anymore, chum. Always expecting favours and never paying your gratitude … ” Mr. Zayne affected an injured frown. Rough, suggestive laughter chorused from his companions.

Clement looked far from amused. “You’ll be paid, and handsomely. You know that, Zayne.”

“Ah, hold on, now! Is that a threat or a promise? Come now, my man; won’t you honour me with dinner first?”

Mr. Zayne gave a saucy wink and there was another eruption of laughter. My man, this scruffy fellow in the feather boa called Clement, puffing on his cigarette and looking maybe one drink too far into that bottle of gin.

“We’ve got work for you.” The ghost of a smirk waited at Clement’s mouth as if for the moment to be right.

“And what’s that?” Mr. Zayne countered, tapping cigarette ash into one of the other men’s drinks. The other man didn’t notice.

“You know,” Clement said.

The tension in the air sharpened to a point; the men at the table quieted. Mr. Zayne discarded the obnoxious studded belt and peered at Clement with round, bright eyes, either drastically serious or deeply thrilled. Maybe both.

“A body?” Mr. Zayne raised his brows. He didn’t wait for confirmation. He climbed over an examination table, which apparently served as a front desk of sorts, and then he began digging through a cabinet with a pitch pine infant-sized casket on its highest shelf.

I looked to O’Brien, and then Quinn, and then Kingsley. None offered any explanation. Only Kingsley at least returned the glance.

“Who’s the newest pretty boy?” one of Mr. Zayne’s grubbier company called from the back of the table, eyeing me with a gin grin.

“A witness.” Clement didn’t miss a beat. It might have been mildly protective. Or maybe he was just exasperated.

“Where the hell’d you grab the likes of him? Cleveland Street?”

There was another uproar amongst Mr. Zayne’s men with the pounding of fists on the table and peals of laughter. A scrawnier man lit a pipe.

Last year on Cleveland Street, in Fitzrovia, there had been discovered a brothel which served as part-time work for a number of boys also employed by the London Central Telegraph Office. The place had received solicitations mainly from aristocrats; most scandalous of all was the mention of Prince Albert Victor in association. My neck was hot under my collar. And in my state of uncertainty, the paths became all crossed in me between wit and simple spite as I sputtered, “Oh, I see! As though I am a telegraph boy. How perfectly clever. While you certainly don’t look the type to be more intimate than I with the whole Cleveland Street event last year, I’m sure—”

“That’s enough, gentlemen!” Clement had moved off deeper into the shop to loom expectantly over the exam table with Mr. Zayne, who finally discovered what he’d been rummaging for: a massive, swollen, stained and mouldering book, through which he presently thumbed at a rapid pace. Clement threw me a sharp glance, though he still addressed the others. “As you might see, it has been a hell of a night.”

Mr. Zayne’s men glared at me, and I glared back at them. After I shrank behind Quinn a bit, of course.

A small collection of clocks ticked away, off rhythm with one another. Clement spoke in a tiny humming tone with Mr. Zayne as Mr. Zayne pushed aside the book to search a second just like it. I peeked around Quinn’s side. The pages were crammed corner to corner with faded handwritten lines, in some vague semblance of order.

“McGowell!” Mr. Zayne finally cried with a jab of the finger to the book. “See, here. Miss Kittredge Ann McGowell. From the Green. Cause of death, ‘drowned, suicide.’ Born 1829, died 1852. Ah, lucky you, Clement! She just barely missed the Stiffs’ Express!”

Kitty.

“Amazing,” Clement murmured. He slid me a glance that only lasted long enough for him to realise I’d seen it. Then he crossed his arms on the exam table and grinned up at his friend Mr. Zayne.

“So,” he said, “where is she buried, then?”

***

The churchyard of the parish to which Kitty McGowell had once belonged was not exactly the kind of late-night stop I’d ever be wont to make, but the streets felt vaguely familiar to me. I didn’t recognise them; it was just a shimmering, lingering sense of having walked them before. Sordid alleys, beggars and jakesmen, rattling shutters. Lanterns bobbed in the wind. St. Matthew loomed against the nighttime sky.

With the ambience compass out, Quinn and O’Brien manoeuvred through what crumbling monument stones were left above ground in the cramped cemetery. The parish watch house was dark. No one in these parts seemed to care about trespassers.

“I hope we won’t have to dig more than twice,” Clement grumbled, holding a lamp outstretched before us as Kingsley and I followed him through the nippy dark.

“She’s a very active one,” Kingsley muttered back. “The compass won’t have any trouble finding her.”

“Here,” Quinn said suddenly, and not very enthusiastically. With their spades and shovels, Mr. Zayne and his men swarmed the small stretch of ground to which he pointed, and apparently to which their odd little compass had led.

Clement heaved a sigh. “We’ll see,” he said to Kingsley.

Peeking around the edge of the pit as Quinn directed Mr. Zayne and his men to dig, the sight of disintegrated coffins and not-so-freshly-buried corpses probably should have been more disturbing to me. But it was a very mortal thing to be so engrossed by the morbid, I’d been thinking lately.

“Don’t worry about that light, now!” eccentric Mr. Zayne called from the shallow hole. “We’ve done this plenty of times in pitch dark, my man!”

Maybe Mr. Zayne and his crew were body snatchers, then. Crunch! Soft, worm-filled coffin wood gave way under the blade of a shovel. Instead of a name, it was marked with a number that matched the one for Kitty McGowell in Mr. Zayne’s mouldy index of burials.

How terrible, to be discarded as a number when you died.

I regretted not having grabbed my coat earlier; the night was just chilly enough to make me grit my teeth against their chattering, fingers tingling and shoulders bunched up—

Fwump.

Clement draped his patchwork coat about my shoulders, a bit large but warm from his body. I looked his way, perplexed, feeling quite the nuisance now.

“Brisk tonight, isn’t it?” Clement remarked to Kingsley, rubbing his hands together. Kingsley’s eyes slid from Clement to me, and then back to Clement, his brows just gently raised.

Bashful—but thankful, of course—I wiggled around to poke my arms into the long sleeves of Clement’s coat.

O’Brien rummaged through his knapsack for two small glass flasks and a few tied leather bags as big as coin purses … all of which he handed to Clement. Mr. Zayne and his men, under Quinn’s curt instruction, knocked the wood away from the top of Kitty’s coffin to uncover her remains.

It felt as though my heart fell right through my chest to look at the dirty grey bones and calico, the mud and the sawdust. Beetles, nested in the wiry mass of dead, unkempt hair. A skull seemed remarkably more grotesque when one knew to whom it belonged.

Clement splashed the contents of the flasks over the rotted remains. He dug into the tiny bags O’Brien had given him, following up with some sort of powder. Quinn struck a match and threw it down into the mix. Little flames slithered fast along the bones and rags, as Kitty’s remains went up in smoke.

Crossing himself, Clement spoke flatly, below his breath.

“… Deus, in nomine, tuo salvum me fac … et non proposuerunt Deum ante conspectum suum … ”

I backed away, lest the other stinking, broken coffins catch fire in turn.

But the fire was confined to Kitty’s crooked casket and Kitty’s alone, like some unseen boundary had fallen to keep it contained.

“… Deus, exaudi orationem meam … drive away from the places you are sprinkled every apparition, villainy, and turn of devilish deceit … the living and the dead, amen … ”

Clement watched the remains burn in a half-bored, half-distracted way, it seemed, the hot glow of the fire softening his face a little. Now and again his hooded eyes caught a flicker of the flames. Maybe the fire danced in my eyes, too, wide as they were as we stood over the burning corpse.

“What is this, sir?” I whispered, mouth dry.

Clement glanced my way. But before he could reply, a horrendous gust drove down through the little churchyard, carrying on its back a low, hellish moaning distinctly more human and less of the night. Mr. Zayne and his men and I all clutched at our collars and winced against it. It was as though the wind had aimed for us. Meant to tug and drag at us. Stank of the Thames.

Swiftly, the moaning thinned into a rattling, whistling sound like distant screaming. The flames leapt higher from the coffin, and up from the middle of the fire sprang Kitty.

Somehow the apparition had been summoned from the bridge. But there was scarce enough time to recognise that before it dissolved into a writhing mass of shadows and whirled off into the smoke as the flames died away.

Save for the blackbirds cawing from the nearby belfry, the churchyard was quiet once more. And the night felt empty.

Mr. Zayne whistled long in relief. Then he and his men went to work piling dirt atop the broken coffin.

Clement returned to my question. “We with the Black Cross Spectral Department inspect hauntings in the Greater London area. This is the end of the case. We ascertain the phantom’s identity—well, your mild possession did tonight—and … ” He held up the flasks and the little leather bags. “Holy water. Chancel oil and kerosene, blessed salt. Burn the bones and that’s all, fin. Kitty McGowell’s spirit has been freed. No longer here and shall never be again.”

“Like an exorcism, then?” I asked.

“Ah … in a sense, I suppose.” He paused. Then he muttered, “Please, don’t call me ‘sir.’ I go by Inspector Clement.”

The Black Cross. Where had I heard that before? A séance party, some time ago. The lecturer had been introduced as a member of the Black Cross … Order of Mysteries, or something?

They were Spiritualists, then.

I gawked at Clement, fingers curling in the ends of his coat sleeves as I struggled to wrap my mind around such a concept. No longer here and shall never be again. The cause and effect was conceivable enough, yes, but for some reason, it had never occurred to me quite in that light, whether the place in between living and dead was permanent, or even preferable. I’d just thought the Missing were—well, dead. Or perhaps, naïvely, I just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

And these Spiritualists not only believed in it all, they desired to do something about it.

With the grave filled in, Mr. Zayne and his men bid us good-bye; we squeezed into a coach and I directed the way to Julien’s-off-the-Strand. Quinn took my testimony as we rode, O’Brien jotting it all down. Clement bemoaned to no one in particular, “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to simply implement a biannual inspection of the bridge? Instead of building case after case … not to mention reconnaissance … Do you know how many jump from there each year? O’Brien? Quinn?”

We came to a stop at the junction of Winston Crescent. Clement walked me to the townhouse stoop; I returned his coat to him. The West End was still alive and merry, and would be nearly into dawn. But the townhouse had quieted down a bit. The coach’s horses stamped and snorted. A bicyclist wavered past, spraying muck at nearby foot-passengers. And standing there where the glow from the townhouse pooled on the walkway, I dreaded going inside. Suddenly all the warmth and the lights felt deader and more despairing than the cool dark outside, Waterloo in the fog, the wind in the cemetery and the blaze of some fire going up in me …

My brow knotted. With a scrape of my heel, I turned around and beseeched Mr. Inspector Clement from the stoop.

“Tonight … ” I ventured demurely. I was still rather dazed by it all, yes, but hopelessly stirred up. “You perform these inspections routinely?”

Clement nodded and shrugged, avoiding my eyes. He was quiet for a moment. Then he finally looked at me and said, in a soft and secretive way, “Do you really wish to know?”

I nodded mutely.

Out of the breast pocket of his waistcoat, Clement plucked a small, ornate cigarette case, and from the case, he pulled a visiting card—a crisp little rectangle, thick white parchment with neat letters below a gold-embossed crest.

I took it as he bid me good-night and climbed back into the coach. Hands cold and still a bit shaky from the adventure, the card slipped from my fingers and fluttered down to my feet, glowing like a dull pearl in the spill of streetlamps. So small, so seemingly insignificant. Waiting to be stepped on, or kicked off somewhere never to be rediscovered, simple as that.

I crouched down and snatched it up, framed between both sets of thumb and forefinger to read in the dim light:

BLACK CROSS ORDER OF OCCULT OCCURRENCES

PRETERNATURAL INVESTIGATION

NO. 98 ½ PORTLAND PLACE

It was as fate would have it.

Snip—snip, snip.

The last little damp tendrils of hair fell to the floor of Zelda’s room as she brushed them away with the towel on my shoulders.

“Handsome thing, you are,” she muttered, sharing the reflection in the looking glass. Her fading blonde braid fell over one shoulder; the creases of a smile cradled her sensitive brown eyes. Pride and sadness made for an interesting tone of voice.

“It’s a real shame,” she lamented, taking a comb to my clean hair. “Long, flowing locks, and you could dress up with petals and pearls like your father’s girls. Except not like your father’s girls, a bit more respectable.”

She made a face and I laughed a little. But something in my chest tightened, just for a moment. “That wouldn’t fit me, Zelda,” I murmured, shrugging off the towel and carefully folding it near the wash bowl. “You know that.”

“Still, Willow.” Zelda turned away as if I wouldn’t know what she thought. “To keep this up for your father … ”

Willow.

The name felt so foreign to me sometimes, although it wasn’t rare from Zelda’s mouth. Today it didn’t necessarily feel wrong. Biting idly at my lower lip, I took the comb from her for the last of my cowlicks. Nothing I might truly tame with sweet-scented styling pomatums or wax; my hair fell of its own accord, a stubborn, tousled laurel of hair framing my ears and the nape of my neck.

“Well,” I sighed. “If my mother hadn’t run off before I was even reading, my father wouldn’t have had to face the decision of how to raise a daughter himself, hmm?”

I hadn’t meant to sound so bitter; the words just thickened in my throat on their way off my tongue. Raise a daughter himself. Not entirely himself. There hadn’t been too long an interim between my mother and Miss Valérie, but it was obvious from the start even my father was far more inclined to parent than she. Zelda’s gaze roamed me through the mirror from head to toe—inspecting the hair she’d just trimmed and the trouser braces hanging limply from my narrow waist, then the locket that had slipped from hiding under my shirts where it always danced safely over the bandages there that kept me bound.

I was, after all, contrary to the way I appeared and oftentimes felt, a sixteen-year-old girl when it came to anatomy. But only Zelda and my father knew me as anything but Will, son of Julien Cavanaugh Winchester II.

I couldn’t recall exactly when or how my mother left.

No one ever divulged to me if she’d been one of my father’s ladies or born into something better. I never asked. I certainly didn’t ask if she died or just took her leave of us, either. One day, she was there. The next she was gone like she’d never been there at all. My father sat me down on the floor of his library some night after and just stared at me, deep in rumination. Second guessing his aptitude as a parent, perhaps. He’d said quietly, to himself, pre-grey mustache of his younger years barely moving around the words, “We shall do this together, shan’t we? We will manage.” And I climbed to sit on his knee, wondering why someone might cry and smile at the same time.

He’d had Zelda cut my hair. No more little dresses, only knickerbockers and sailor suits, and I’d been publicly Will instead of Willow every day and night since then.

“Poor little boy blue!” my father’s different girls had said over the years when they heard of my mother’s desertion. The occasional room-renters spoiled me each in their own ways, I think because they knew they didn’t have very good chances at families of their own, but … it was nice to be worth something to them, however sad and unspoken the significance was.

My father’s unorthodox strategy was selfish. Yet at the time, perhaps he hadn’t thought through its immense potential to become problematic. He never told me why he chose it; that was easily the better or the worse of his decisions, somehow. I’d concluded by now that it was the only way he felt he could manage single fatherhood—as even my father wished to be a father once, it seemed—and succeed at protecting me in a world that swallowed innocent young girls whole. I only had to look around his business to know that much.

Whatever his reasoning, it didn’t seem to bother him in a different way than it didn’t bother me, but clearly it bothered Zelda quite a lot yet.

It’s a shame, Willow, she’d said, as though she feared I’d become a character instead of my own self and had to remind me of who I really was.

But this is me.

I was not confused by the whole thing, as Zelda seemed to dread. There had been confusing moments, of course. Bodies are all rather the same up to a point, and it wasn’t as though I’d had any ordinary female friends to whom I might contrast or compare myself. I didn’t really form any ideas of my own about it at all until I’d woken one night and thought I was dying thanks to my anatomy, and Zelda explained and I sat there in the candlelight with her feeling as though the world were both very different yet exactly the same.

Truthfully, like Charlie and Colette were both dead but alive in a particular sense, I felt both a young lady and a young man. Not at the same time—sometimes, Will; other times, Willow. And despite how it sounds, it all felt very normal to me. My normal. A kind of bi-genderness, something fluid between the two. Simple as that.

But nobody could know that part of me, especially now. Even it did not exempt me from the dangers that awaited a young lady—a young man—on their own. Beyond that, though, how might anyone know how to treat me? I wouldn’t ever be taken seriously again. Deformity, sexual inversion, deception was all anyone would see. Worse yet, perhaps betrayal.

At times, I wondered about being the type who liked wearing dresses and had long hair through which boys could run their fingers or which their mother might pin up in little curls.

But there was something sort of wicked and liberating about no one knowing whom you really were, so I was thankful for now. Zelda always said one must find something for which to be thankful in every day; I was lucky to have many things. An upbringing, even untraditional, that provided everything and left me wanting for little. The kind of independence not generally reserved for those who more strictly fit the gender role that accompanied a girl’s anatomy. Laughter over Turkish coffee and English biscuits or late-night reading of serials and penny dreadfuls with Daphne and Agatha. And Zelda herself, who loved me like a family maid and governess irrevocably loves the children they raise whether they wore dresses or not. If I only had a clue as to how, I would come out and tell her about my queerness.

For now, though, I was content with the way things were.

Zelda clucked her tongue. “Pretty face,” she hummed, trying to lighten the mood. She pinched me gently at the chin so my mouth pursed in a little pout as she had me observe myself in our shared reflection, then shook her head in half-teasing disapproval of my scraped cheek and bruised jaw. “And you treat it so terribly!” she scolded. “Don’t tell me what happened here last night … I don’t know that I could handle it … a scuffle, you rascal? Boxing matches?”

I laughed. Me, boxing? Preposterous. I was a bit impetuous, but I unquestionably lacked the stature or the nerve for that sort of thing.

She knew I’d gone after Daphne. Everyone knew.

Smiling sheepishly, I tried to wiggle free of her arms, debating whether I should tell her about my wild night with the Black Cross inspectors and how long I’d turned the calling card over and over in my hands before finally going to sleep.

Suddenly Zelda cried out, slipping into French, her fast and melodic first tongue, as she tugged down my collar to inspect the dance of bruises on my throat. My eyes widened. I’d known they were there; I’d been gravely disturbed to find them this morning upon waking. And then I’d completely forgotten to hide them from her—

Judging by the look on her face, Zelda did not suspect the faint pink and purple came from fingers. She thought the marks left by someone’s mouth.

“Oh!” I shook off her arms and clapped both hands over the bruises, blushing and uttering a short, frantic laugh. “It’s not that!”

She kept haranguing me in and out of English, swatting as if at a pesky cat at the kitchen door. Imagine, me in such a position with another person. Imagine, she was imagining I had been, and I wasn’t sure which was the more flustering.

“No, not at all!” I insisted, embarrassed but so overwhelmingly relieved. What could I have said to help my case if she hadn’t misunderstood? “I promise it’s not that, Zelda.”

The only possible source for the marks was Kitty’s ghost cruelly grabbing me on the bridge. Which meant that everything last night had been real. The dimensions of it all still felt so beyond my grasp, the meaning of what we’d done in that churchyard in the grand scheme of things.

It terrified me. Yet, even looking at the bruises another time now, I wanted to do it again.

“Shoo! You unbelievable thing, all my good upbringing for naught thanks to your father.” She ushered me away with a flap of the hands. “He’s waiting for you, and now I send you down to him in such an unpresentable state!”

I caught her by one hand and cleared the way to peck a kiss on her wrinkled cheek, extra sweetly, before hurrying on towards the door. She shook her head as she hobbled over to her corner chair.

“You’ve worn me out, now … ” she muttered.

I flashed her a repentant smile as I swung out the door into the hall. Thank God, to be escaping that mishap.

But I was not quite as jovial as I played. My father wanted to see me. And my father was not happy.

With a long, nervous breath, I trudged downstairs, past my mother’s locked room, to the humble office that served as his library, where he waited.

His leather wingchair was turned away from the mahogany desk and backed against the window, which was opened just a crack for the late afternoon air. He sat with bags under his eyes and a greyness to him that spoke of the toll his business had begun to take. Never mind that by the time tonight’s scheduled affair started, he’d be replenished and ready to go again. How much longer before it took more than a day’s hangover to revitalise him?

“That was quite the event last night,” he greeted me. “Your leaving so abruptly and rather inconsiderately.”

I frowned, closing the thick walnut door behind me. “Daddy … ”

“You left with no explanation!” he cried. “How could I know you’d be safe, wherever you were off to? Look at your face, first of all! And abandoning our guests in such a way—can’t you grasp how poorly such actions reflect upon the business? How ill-mannered you’ve presented yourself before those to whom impression is all?”

I stood on the old tiger-skin rug in the center of the cramped, cluttered library, hands twisting together behind my back as if I were a guilty child again. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t regret or feel guilty. I felt gravely misunderstood. I’d felt gravely misunderstood for a long time, and suddenly it was not something I could brush off.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean for any disregard.”

“I won’t accommodate such carelessness any longer. Do you hear me, Willow? Do you understand?”

My jaw tightened. Unlike with Zelda, it was a guessing game with him for which name he might speak. Force of habit, and all. “I understand.”

He softened then, slouched in his chair. He shook his head. “Where did you go?” he murmured, sounding truly worried. I softened a little, too.

“Waterloo Bridge.”

“Why the devil there?”

I avoided his frown, looking instead around the dark, smoky room with all its untouched books and trinket collections from travels made before my father had become a family man.

“To save Daphne,” I said. I didn’t know if it was right to tell him or not, but if nothing else he deserved to be aware of the moral states of his working girls. “She was going to jump, Daddy—”

My father heaved a sigh to interrupt, pushing out of his chair as if it were a great effort, to pour himself a small glass of brandy from the sideboard decanter. He turned just halfway, eyes lingering on my battered cheek. “You know she’s always seeking attention through pity,” he said flatly. “If it’s not a threat to drink the whole bottle of Daffey’s, it’s a promise to press a blade to her wrist, dash out before a speeding coach or eat the paint from the walls.”

My heart went hollow for a moment. “How can you be so flippant?” I demanded, in disbelief. “She’s one of your girls. One of your best girls.”

“I’ve already saved her, from Mile End. She wasn’t even a virgin when I bought her—though the brokers were trying to sell her off to Belgium as one, the conmen.”

I reared back, appalled.

“Why am I to be accountable for the penalties of her chosen profession?” Any previous kindliness had withered away; now my father just looked cold and disinterested.

Daphne and I hadn’t talked yet of what she’d almost done. She’d just been wandering about all dreamy and distracted like a quaint little Miss Havisham, her hair loose and her feet bare, as everyone else aimed to avoid her as if the self-despair were catching.

But how could he say such things? Didn’t he care whether she lived or died—not because of her situation, but because she was also a human being?

“Don’t look at me like that, darling,” my father murmured, voice gravelly but still tender as he reached out to stroke the hair off my brow. I’d clearly drained him, as all impertinent children were wont to do, according to Miss Valérie. “It was good of you to bring Miss Daphne back. You try so very hard. But, Willow, you’ll learn soon enough you can’t save others from their own demons. It isn’t your responsibility to save anyone at all.” His eyes were dark as he held his other hand out, gestured expectantly to the edge of his desk. I retrieved his pipe and tobacco for him.

Picking at the packet of tobacco, he said, “Now that we’ve remedied the matter of your running around uncivilised … ”

Again, his glance flickered to my scrapes; I hunched my shoulders up a little, begging he did not see the bruises, too.

“And the matter of your troublesome goodness,” he went on, “is everything else all right?”

Oh, wouldn’t it be a simple life to ignore things as easily as he? Then again, that seemed a miserable thing.

“Daddy,” I said, before I could really think about it, “you’ve had members of the Society for Psychical Research to dinner before.”

“I have,” my father confirmed as he lit his pipe.

“And members from the old Metaphysical Society, too,” I reminded. “But … what about the Black Cross?”

He tensed, briefly, then scowled at his smouldering pipe. In a thick voice, he said, “The Black Cross is a fraternity bent on glorifying the irrational, whereas the other two groups exemplify scientific explanation and have proven good reputation to invite on certain nights.”

I frowned, looking over at him without lifting my head. “I don’t really believe that,” I said quietly.

Weary anger flared on his face. “And why not?”

I bristled. I knew very well what types of arguments and lectures my brazen disobedience on this matter procured. But I couldn’t stop my tongue.

“Daddy, last night I encountered men from the Black Cross. They were at Waterloo, investigating the wraith everyone’s been talking about, and once I saw Athena and Daphne home, I went along with them to exorcise the spirit and … ”

I neglected to mention the mild possession part. In the past, he’d disparaged anything I’d said about the Missing; certainly, my playing a physical part in a Spiritualist activity would sit even less well with him.

“And it seems to me the Black Cross is just as scientific as the others,” I finished.

My father stormed to his wingchair, paced a moment before turning sharply and waving his pipe at me. “I do not approve of your associating with those charlatans,” he sneered through clenched teeth, eyes flashing. “They merely take advantage of the lost and confused, Willow. They did it to your mother and I will not permit they take you from me, as well!”

My mother … ?

I stared at him, dumbstruck. She’d known of the Black Cross? Feeling suddenly very small and helpless, I pressed, “They did what to Mamma?”

My father went rigid as if turned to stone. Finally, he pointed at me again with his pipe, clutching it so tight his knuckles bulged. “She is no ‘mamma’ to you,” he said, but the disapproval in his voice fiercely contradicted the mournful pinch to his face. “If she were such a devoted and family-oriented creature, she would not have disappeared.”

That belittling remark stung me far less than his words about Daphne. The fire under the library mantle crackled and sighed with a crumble of glowing embers.

“Never mind it anymore,” my father hissed. “I won’t hear another word about these so-called inspectors, or Spiritualism, or your mother. Stay here with me in the real world, Will, not the nightmares of yesterday or the fantasies of tomorrow.”

Something inside me gave a firm snap.

“That’s unfair,” I argued. “How can you object when you and Miss Valérie host séance parties now and again? How can you—”

“Parlour tricks and silly games to entertain guests!” He waved my protest away and cast his eyes elsewhere.

“Is it because you don’t believe? Or is it solely because you presume they took Mamma from us?”

A strange look twisted his face. “You will abandon these insolent fancies the moment you leave this room!” he roared. “Do you understand?”

“No.” The urge to cry tightened in my throat. There was a plain, undeniable division between us. We looked out at the world through very different windows; there was no changing that. And it was his fault if he could not see his forbiddance only deepened the chasm.

Voice pitching like my temper, I said, “I’m going to visit the Black Cross, at the least to understand, seeing as you won’t tell me! You never tell me anything even though I deserve to know. And well, you can’t keep me prisoner here forever, you know, I’m not your employee, I’m your child—”

Slap!

The back of his hand sent me reeling, shuffling away only to trip over the flat, snarling head of the tiger-skin rug and fall in a shocked tangle to the floor. One of his silver rings scraped against my already-tender cheek; the shock of the hit stung first, then throbbed fierce enough to make my head spin.

I gawked up at him, holding my face. He stared back at me, eyes wide as though he hadn’t expected it, either—but dark, impenetrable, like the coke of his library fire.

If he was afraid for me, he had a horrid way of showing it.

“Darling,” he said, brow furrowing.

“No!” I’d never tasted so much hatred for him in my life. Father’s neglect, Agatha had teased the night before. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way. I held on to little things like his smiles over the desk while I played card games with myself on the rug before the fire, the fantastic stories he still told about adventurers in faraway jungles and arid deserts, the way it had made me smile when I was smaller to hear his laughter fill a room, how safe I’d felt against his shoulder when, instead of Zelda, he’d carried me off to bed.

But suddenly, I felt the fool for that. I had never felt so much smarter than him, so different … so much more like a burden than a beloved child.

Livid, I jumped up and shoved out of the library. My father followed, at least at first. Perhaps to apologise, perhaps with cruel things yet to say. But I left him behind fast, pounding up the stairs past Zelda, past Agatha, and past Miss Valérie who had emerged from the morning room concerned in a meddlesome way.

They’d all heard us.

Of what was my father so afraid I should know or be? Myself? My mother?

I spun around on the attic stairs, trembling, and howled so hard it left me breathless, “You can’t stop fate, you know!”

All I found was Miss Valérie peeking up after me, light glinting off the brooch at her throat. Distantly, my father shouted for others to ignore me, to refrain from encouraging my emotional outburst.

And Miss Valérie stood there, regal and unruffled, eyes hooded. Smiling, I swear it. As though she’d been waiting for something like this to happen, some irreparable fracture between my father and me. She wished me gone. I was the last tie to my father’s former life, after all—to husbandry, to parenthood, to remorse and responsibility. And she had never liked that.

I flew up into my room and slammed the door, then kicked it for good measure. It rattled satisfactorily but my foot was not quite as pleased. Daylight bled dim through the dusty skylights as I sagged down to the cold floorboards and burst into tears.

It was hard to breathe, frantic as I was. I fumbled with my waistcoat and shirt, the undershirt beneath, loosening the bandages from my chest to cry hot, dry, and furious, like a miserable little fool, arms wrapped tightly about myself.

My mind was already made up. I wasn’t sure anymore what I’d expected, broaching that cursed subject with my father. Perhaps I’d simply needed a final injustice to prove I wasn’t wrong. He believed in the Missing, too, I was sure of it! But something he wouldn’t speak seemed to haunt him, drove him to preach against it, insist against it, keep my mother’s old room locked up even as he struggled to erase her everywhere else.

But it didn’t matter what he refused to say, did it? I had a calling card for the Black Cross.

You can’t stop fate.

The tears stopped almost as soon as they’d come, leaving my face raw and red, my nose sore. I curled up in the old armchair and picked at its seams as I watched the chimneypots of tiled roofs around ours belch their thick, grey smoke, and I did not stop Charlie and Colette from singing and playing.

I was not unhappy here.

But nothing—not my father’s temper tantrum, nor the possibility that my mother had had something to do with the Black Cross—none of it could do a thing to change the way the night with the Spiritualists had made me feel.

I’d glimpsed a world in which I might mean something, but only as if peeking through the keyhole of the door that kept me out of it. I needed to see more of it. I needed to see all of it.

Daphne brought me food because I refused to leave the attic. The anger distilled slowly, chilled in my veins and left me feeling clear-headed in a very numb way. If I were to leave my room, it would be to pretend the whole argument had not happened … or to leave for the address on the calling card, and see what the Black Cross was all about.

Daphne and I ate dinner together in my room but we did not speak much.

When the next daybreak coloured the smoggy sky purple and blue, I took my time rising, lying there idly trailing one hand up and down the wall above my pillow as birds called out from their roosts near the window.

On the armchair, my trousers lay sloppily folded and draped across the side.

The Black Cross calling card was still there, burning a hole in my pocket. A flash of the inspectors in the little cemetery as we’d set fire to Kitty’s bones, scorched into my memory.

I threw back my blankets and rolled out of bed, grabbed my trousers from the chair and tried not to dress so impatiently that I’d look a complete mess.

Downstairs, there was barely a whisper of life. Too early, too soon after the night had finally wound down. What had my father told guests inquiring about his quaint little server’s absence? That he was out? Under the weather?

Hashish and tobacco had left their ghosts in the halls along with French perfume; someone must have spilled liquor on a sideboard. Gin and tonic, it smelled like, when I investigated with a wrinkle of the nose.

I turned onto the last set of stairs and found a gentleman below at the front door, quite like a kitchen mouse as he fumbled into a bowler hat and overcoat. I stopped and peered down at him; at the sound of my footsteps, he froze and looked up at me. His first time at Julien’s-off-the-Strand, judging by how jumpy and ashamed he was, hastening to leave before anyone saw him.

“Good morning to you, sir,” I greeted, sliding my hand along the banister as I practically skipped down the stairs, avoiding the squeakiest ones. Despite the argument with my father, there was a strange lightness to my step today.

The man cleared his throat, eyes leaping all around as though he suspected I’d brought other witnesses.

“Yes, good morning,” he said in a thin, hoarse way as he bobbed his head and left.

I swung into the kitchen for coffee and a quick breakfast of bread and cheese. Cook waved at me with an elbow, his hands busy with the morning’s newspaper. Cigarette clenched between his teeth, he raised his brows and husked, “Where are you rushing off to?”

“I’m off to the Black Cross,” I said, shrugging into my light coat at the kitchen door. And speaking it aloud gave me pause for a moment or two, just staring at my shoes.

I really was off to see it.

Scruffy little Cook nodded, calling after me over his shoulder as I slipped out the door into the alley, “Zelda’s requested that beet and potato stew for lunch, like at Pagani’s! Don’t miss it!”

I poked my head back into the kitchen. “I won’t!”

***

Clutching the Black Cross calling card, I dodged through the street traffic of a crisp, bustling September morning and endeavoured not to immediately change my mind.

The Black Cross would surely send me away. I was just a tiny fool in a cap and a half-buttoned, slim-fit coat, brimming with obsessive questions. Of course, they wouldn’t have time to spare on endless inquiries. And yet what if they did? Maybe they took on students, or … did Spiritualists require office boys? How did one presume to request a purpose in life, anyway? Working for my father was far from purpose for me.

Midmorning sunlight glinted off the many different greens in the corner of Regent’s Park that jutted against Park Crest and Portland Place. The Black Cross was almost too easy to miss, an enormous, scholarly corner building of old-world limestone and Lincolnshire, rising four stories with smooth but tired columns redeemed by a lovely lace of green ivy as they propped up a wrap-around second floor promenade. Blackbirds perched on the highest window ledges. The building was the last on the row of lavish old noblemen’s townhouses encircling the park, but must have come before them because its romantic state of sleepy, rain-stained elegance spoke of a timelessness the townhouses lacked.

A bronze plaque announced the Order on the low, wrought-iron balustrade between columns.

98 ½ PORTLAND PLACE

THE BLACK CROSS

ORDER OF OCCULT OCCURRENCES

1701 – MDCCI

Strange, how excitement could make one feel so lightheaded and ill.

I climbed the shadowy portico and heaved open one of the heavy black walnut doors.

It groaned a wave of cold, slightly musty air as I slipped inside, and promptly stopped short to gawk around like an idiot. The front gallery was a bit dark, sparsely but nonetheless thoughtfully decorated by little potted palms, paintings and tapestries that drooped above a lacquered sideboard or two. On the far wall hung a massive oil painting, one of those surreal Romantic types with a fair lady and a nightmarish creature.

The door thudded shut behind me with a thunderclap that echoed around the room. I jumped.

“Hello,” a sharp-nosed secretary called from the high desk off to the left, and I jumped again.

“Good morning.” Hesitantly, I crossed the room to present my calling card. “My name is Will Winchester. I would like to formally inquire about … ”

I frowned, waiting for the secretary to look up from some paper on which he busily scribbled with a satisfying scrape-scrape of his gold-tipped pen. Pale hair swooped to one side of his head, he raised his brows. “Are you reporting an incident?” he asked.

My mouth hung open for a moment as I considered the question. “I’m reporting … Actually, I’m reporting an interest in working with the Black Cross.”

The secretary raised his brows a bit higher.

“I have a card.” I stared at him. “I was given a card.”

“You’re in need of an interview, then.”

“Well, I’m not certain what—”

“Wait here, Mr. Winchester.” The secretary climbed down from his tall desk and left me in the gallery.

Shyly, I looked around. The room was about as somber and silent as an empty church. Somewhere, a clock stuttered along. Tick. Tick. Tick. Did I mention my mother to anyone? Would they know her name, or … ?

“Mr. Winchester?” The secretary leaned back in from the hall. “Sir Westwood and Officer Chesley will see you now.”

I followed him down a hall even darker than the gallery. We rounded another corner, and half the corridor became a stretch of multi-paned windows looking out on a humble, private courtyard. The whole place turned in an L-shape, forming a full square where it joined the neighbouring old slate and brick terrace. Clearly that was Black Cross property, as well; doors with little framed stoops opened onto the courtyard with its garden fountain and rose bushes.

Outside in the morning sunlight, a groundskeeper struggled with overgrown shrubbery while a group of men spoke together outside the brick terrace. Over their heads, a neatly-dressed woman opened the window of her room for fresh air. The whole place emanated a sense of preserved knowledge and quiet mystery. We passed a small den, where a gentleman in tweed paced with a lady in sky blue, their voices carrying.

“It’s a discard case. Warren’s only transferring it because he doesn’t think it matters.”

“Well, he’ll want to be credited if the Cross discovers anything, won’t he, Mr. Abberline?”

“Oh—please, we don’t need any more Cock Lanes. This place is cluttered up enough as it is by useless artefacts and … ”

They caught me glancing their way. The man’s face soured. The lady just smiled.

Anxiously, I ran my thumb over and over across the golden letters on the calling card, my stomach in knots. The secretary stopped at an open door. I noticed just in time to keep from running into him.

“Mr. Winchester,” he announced me, then skirted around and went back the way we’d come.

I stood in the open door, neck hot under my collar.

In a plain and faintly gloomy room, some melody tumbled unobtrusively from the horn of a little phonograph under the only window. Busts of Greek philosophers sat frowning in the corner, and over those hung Rembrandt-esque portraits of men whom the plaques beneath proclaimed to be: FOUNDER, FOUNDER, and FOUNDER.

Two gentlemen sat on the opposite side of a broad walnut desk staring back at me as if they’d expected someone much different. Which was reasonable. One of them sported a sharply-trimmed beard in shades of greying brown, and below his thick, brooding brows, his eyes were surprisingly clear and receptive. The other gentleman seemed a neurotic piece of work, sniffling into a kerchief with one hand while with the other dusting crumbs from a light midmorning snack back onto a plate at the corner of the desk.

“Good morning, sirs,” I said in a tiny voice.

“Good morning,” both men replied almost in unison, and proceeded to wait for me to explain my visit.

“My name is Will Winchester.” I cleared my throat, realising then that I should have organised an introduction on the way over. I was painfully conscious of the pitch of my voice, wavering under the words as I tried to sound formal and composed, especially with the way the older gentleman’s eyes sharpened on me. But my thoughts all ran together, per usual. “I recently bore witness to one of your organisation’s inspections and thereafter had the great fortune of accompanying your team to the close of the inspection, and upon the close of the inspection and the gathering of my testimony, Mr. Inspector Clement—sorry, Inspector Clement presented to me this card, and I knew I had to call—if you’ll have it, of course—”

“Good Lord, boy, take a breath,” the older gentleman interrupted with a weary chuckle. I snapped my mouth shut; today was one of those days I could not help but keep tally of every boy and sir and Mr. He smiled faintly, eyes nested in crow’s feet, as he stood and reached across the desk, coaxing me in to shake his outstretched hand. “And why did Inspector Clement present you with a card?”

“Because,” I said, “I expressed a tentative interest in … joining on with the Black Cross.” I stumbled on the words, breathless again. I’d only intended to visit. But said out loud, there was a terrifying realness to the possibility. And I loved it.

“Commissioner Westwood,” the older gentleman introduced himself, not very enthusiastically but certainly cordially. “And this is Officer Chesley.” With a nod to the other gentleman, Commissioner Westwood seated himself again and leaned back with a few creaks of his chair. Chesley glanced at him, then glanced at me. He raised his brows, smiling a twitch of a smile that didn’t seem entirely sincere. There were still some crumbs on one of his lapels.

Patiently, Westwood said, “Well, take a seat, boy. We’ve a process to this interview.”

I eased down into the leather chair before them and went back to staring, far from confident. An interview. More testimony, perhaps. It was as though Commissioner Westwood’s grey eyes saw right into me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. God, but my heart was thundering.

“The Black Cross is the Scotland Yard of the occult, in a way,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “We work closely together.”

“Closely enough,” Chesley hastened to elaborate. “But you know how that goes.”

“I don’t,” I replied sheepishly. Chesley just squinted at me, appraising my plain but clearly middle-class clothes, perhaps. My size. More than likely the faintly-bruised and scraped state of my face.

“Dealing with criminals is not exactly the same thing as dealing with the metaphysical.” Chesley paused to blow his nose. “Apologies. I’ve a chill. Anyway, if we aren’t officially affiliated with the Church—we still use some old procedures, but we are by no means Catholic—we must be affiliated with something, somehow. And that isn’t to say we are just some club of folklorists or ghost conjurers, either.” He glanced at Westwood as if seeking some commiseration, then threw his eyes back to me. “Perhaps it’s all superficial worry, though, what with interest in the preternatural all the rage now.”

Oh … I nodded, raising my brows a bit. He suspected my interest to be short-lived, a hobbyist’s, the fleeting fancy of trend.

Westwood sighed. There was a moment of quiet. Once confident Chesley was very much through, Westwood went on. “Yes, Commissioner Warren and I have gone over this.”

“Hmm.” Chesley shrugged.

“You’re a Spiritualist society,” I concluded. “You investigate spirits.”

Chesley’s face pinched into a disdainful smile just on the edge of laughter. Westwood nodded first, then shook his head.

“Well, yes,” he said. “But more than that, we seek, and we study, and we archive any and all occurrences of the occult. Mysteries, if you will. Hauntings are merely one department in which we specialise. We’ve also accounts and inquiries into daemonology, myth, the revenant and corporeal undead, witchcraft … ”

With a gentle creaking of his chair, Westwood reclined to adjust his forest-green waistcoat. I felt very small under his clear, solemn gaze.

“The Black Cross acts not to deem anything ‘good’ or ‘bad,’” he said slowly. “The end goal is not to police the occult, but to pursue some harmony between natural and preternatural, to record its existence in as much possible detail. I suppose, next to our brother societies, that is a bit idealistic. While we indeed endeavour to scientifically support the mysterious things we compile, there comes time all a scholar can do is archive and theorize.” He cast me a glance from the corner of his eye. “You see, science and superstition are not divorced of one another. Quite the opposite, actually. And so, we work to gather evidence, to engage in order to learn, and to use what we learn to instruct the balance of man and … what he has yet to understand.”

An entire agency of men. An order of Spiritualists. Not just mediums, or conjurers, or mind readers. Scholars.

“Did you not read all this in the application paperwork?” Chesley flashed a quick, fretful smile before snapping Westwood a hard look. “Have we taken that out of the application paperwork?” he whispered as if I did not still sit before them.

Wait …

I stiffened, eyes wide.

Commissioner Westwood rummaged through the desk. “I seem to have misplaced this month’s submitted applications, Chesley,” he declared below a low chuckle. He didn’t seem worried by it; Chesley, on the other hand, watched with clear distress, edging out below his breath, “There were only four.”

They misunderstood. They thought I’d already applied for membership.

My heart pounded hard below my throat, stomach all aflutter with horrified excitement.

Well … I could not dash their hopes, now, could I?

“Oh, yes, that’s all right, I’m sure you’re very busy and receive many applications each month,” I insisted, the words again running breathlessly one over the other.

“No, they don’t seem to be here. Well!” Westwood sighed and pulled out a little leather folio from a drawer. “Nonetheless, if you’d like to review the paperwork before you sign … ” He gestured for me to take the folio. I did, shyly, running my fingers over its edges as I peeked inside. The first page was a membership agreement, awaiting my signature.

But what would I sign? Willow Winchester? That wasn’t going to work, was it? Never mind that, surely a guardian’s signature was also compulsory for someone not yet of age. My heart sank. Here it was, over as soon as it had begun. Foolish to ever have expected more. I would go home. Miserably, but I would.

Unless …

“Is this a legal contract?” I asked. “I’m afraid I cannot sign a legal contract yet myself, sirs. I’m not of age, and I haven’t my birth papers—nothing, actually—fire—tragic fire, lost my mother. And the papers, of course. Such misfortune.”

My father’s official legal guardianship was over Willow Winchester, after all. Not Will.

Westwood’s smile faltered just a bit; his gaze darted over me, up and down. “You’re a proper Englishman of … what age?”

“Sixteen years, Commissioner.”

Chesley’s eyes slid over to Westwood. Westwood studied me a moment, newly intent, as if he suddenly saw something he hadn’t before. Never mind the signature—now I was to be sent home. I was too young. I waited, breath caught in my throat, for the verdict.

“Winchester, you said?” Westwood pressed.

“Yes, sir,” I answered meekly.

He softened again. “It’s a written promise of both parties, not a legal contract,” he assured me. “Our solicitors keep it extensively up-to-date, so there should be no problem. Signing does not bind you formally nor suggest we act as your caretakers, but if your legal guardian is apprehensive—I presume that’s where your concern lies—he may meet with our solicitors any weekday after the hour of one o’clock.”

Maybe they assumed I was a complete orphan, not just motherless, some unfortunate who’d slipped through the cracks somewhere along the way. God knew it wasn’t a rarity. But what Westwood said seemed sensible. And for me, a young man as the world mostly saw me, to be operating much on my own was not a rarity, either.

“Mr. Winchester … may I call you that?”

“If you must,” I sighed. Chesley squinted at me. I flushed, embarrassed to have accidentally spoken it aloud, and avoided his eyes.

“If you don’t mind, I’ve one more question.” Westwood drummed his knuckles at the corner of the large desk. “For what reason, truly, other than your witnessing an investigation, was your interest raised in the Black Cross? What compelled a middle-class fellow like yourself to enquire at an order such as this?”

I fell still with the folio in my lap and my heart in my throat, gawking at him. My eyes skipped to Chesley; I could feel his judgment.

“Well … ” I said, finally finding my voice again. I looked to Westwood once more, holding his gaze. “I see the phantasmal world every day, sirs.”

In the office of the Black Cross Commissioner, the phonograph began to skip. Chesley leaned over with a sigh and gave the box a hard smack. I picked anxiously at the corner of the leather folio and met Westwood’s stare, flustered but undeterred.

“Mr. Winchester.” Where the smile was absent, his eyes shone in the dimly-lit office. “I would be very much inclined to accept you into the Black Cross Order of Occult Occurrences as an inspector in the Spectral Department.”

Chesley and I both looked to him in disbelief.

“Bypassing Assistant?” Chesley pressed. “With apprenticeship, still, I assume?”

“No.” Westwood did not grace him with a glance; he simply studied me as though I did not stare right back.

“Shouldn’t we discuss this, Westwood?” Chesley looked fit to apoplexy, face tight and red.

“What is there to discuss? Clement gave the young man a card.”

Chesley bit his mouth into a thin line. “Ah,” he derided. “A card. Of course.”

“Yes—but—” It felt as though I’d forgotten how to speak. “Mr. Westwood, sir, I’d be content with any position. Apprentice, office boy, any sort of help. I’ll fill ink and run errands. I’ve been privately tutored. I speak small amounts of French, and … ”

Westwood shook his head. “There is always room for exception,” he murmured.

My eyes shot to Chesley, ready for him to disagree. He didn’t, just peered at Westwood as if he’d gone mad. Finally, he said in a thin, flat way, “Exception or not, he’ll certainly undergo probation, as everyone must.” Then he sat there, watching me with pursed mouth.

“Why would I ever waive probation?” Impatiently, Westwood went on before Chesley could interrupt again. “Now, Mr. Winchester. Spectral inspectors are required to take up a room on campus for their first year, due to extensive fieldwork. Members receive an advance payment for the first three fortnights, subsequently receiving fixed wages delivered the sixth of every month. Do you have any questions?”

Take up a room on campus.

Payment.

“No,” I peeped. “No, I haven’t any questions.”

“All right, then.” Commissioner Westwood stood as if his hinges were old and needed oiling. He gestured sharply at Chesley; it took a moment before Chesley understood, hurrying from the room with sudden urgency. The hush in his wake was slightly uncomfortable, a silence heavy with words soon to be spoken. The floorboards creaked as Westwood skirted the desk to lean back against it and study me gravely.

“Mr. Winchester … ” he said, in a smoky timbre. “Do you know the motto of the Black Cross?”

I swallowed hard, gawking up at him. “Unfortunately, no, sir.”

“‘Nulli sunt casus.’” He smiled, and it was nothing like his other smiles, just a sharp perk of the mouth. “‘Nothing is impossible.’ Though the unofficial dictum I prefer is ‘Believing is seeing.’”

“Do you mean ‘seeing is believing,’ sir?”

“No.” Westwood didn’t bat an eye. “I do not.”

“All right, I do have a question,” I blurted then, brow knotting. It just couldn’t be this simple. “Do you acquire all new members this swiftly? With a simple interview, no evaluation or … ?”

There it was again, that penetrative glance of Commissioner Westwood’s, fast and curious. “It is only occasionally that talented individuals arrive upon our doorstep, Mr. Winchester, in the stead of ardent but, respectfully, unremarkable scholars. I have full confidence Inspector Clement would never have directed someone to apply for membership if he didn’t believe him a perfect fit.”

I nodded once, quickly, to be convincing. Directed me to apply. Yes.

“You called seeking understanding, did you not?” Westwood pressed. “How could the Black Cross deny a man the need to understand—to be understood?”

I stared after him dumbly as he retrieved a pen and turned to the side, clearing the way for me to approach the desk.

Believing is seeing.

As if in a dream, I stood and moved slowly from the chair, setting the folio down. Westwood withdrew the first blank agreement and laid it out.

My pulse thudded in my ears as, with a crisp, satisfying scratch of the pen, I signed my name.

“Here we are!” Officer Chesley came trundling back into the office with a little wood-box camera and its rattling tripod.

Commissioner Westwood fiddled with his cufflinks. “I’ll handle the opinions on the waiving of your training later, but I beg you not … give me cause to regret my decision, Mr. Winchester.”

I looked up meekly, in a numb sort of wonderment, as I set the pen aside. It almost seemed a threat—to put himself at ease with his own decision, perhaps—or to remind me that such a swift admission did not in any way mean full trust.

“Yes, sir,” I murmured.

Chesley readied the camera. “If you’d be patient a few moments more,” he urged, “we’ll send you to build your profile after we secure a photograph.”

I backed away on my mark for the photograph, to which Chesley directed me.

“Once that’s all through, you are free to fetch your belongings. Simply stop in on your return and we’ll arrange a tour to your room. If you require a courier, we may have a free hand to lend.”

“Oh,” I said with a tight smile. Right. My things. “No, that would be—”

Too much attention. Suspicious. I wasn’t even thinking yet of how I might tell my father. Or not tell my father. Tell Zelda.

“I don’t have much,” I insisted. “I shall manage.”

Westwood raised his brows. “You’ve been photographed before, Mr. Winchester? That’s it, just hold that position … right, you haven’t any other engagements today, have you? Apart from retrieving your possessions?”

“No, sir. Just this. This is all I have.” I looked to Westwood just as the flash went off, then blinked hard against the bright slash it left lingering in my vision. Chesley issued a bitter sigh.

“Would you like a second one?” he muttered to Westwood.

“No, surely that one will do.” Westwood nodded, smiling that deep and sadly knowing smile, like he understood exactly what I meant when I said, This is all I have.

***

After a nerve-wracking and seemingly endless half-hour of composing my registry profile with the secretary—in which he continually glanced at me around that sharp nose of his, asking all the compulsory questions about name and age, date of birth, residence, talents and studies of note, while I sat in fear he somehow knew there was no mysteriously misplaced application and the residence I listed was false—finally, it was done.

It was so simple, I was slow to believe it. But it was done. I was a member of the Black Cross.

A different light shone on the world. The moment I hit the narrow street that ran behind the terrace of Winston Crescent townhouses, to which ours belonged, I practically sprinted for the kitchen door and blew up and down the stairs inside checking every room until I found Zelda in the downstairs parlour unpacking the mass of the week’s clean clothes, fresh from the commercial laundry.

“Zelda!” I elbowed the door shut and leapt onto the loveseat. “Where are Daddy and Miss Valérie?”

“Out to the races with Dr. Lowells and the wife,” she conceded, bordering on unease as she eyed me with furrowed brow. “Is something wrong?”

“No, and that’s the thing!” I could scarcely contain myself, wild and winded. “Zelda, I’ve been bad to you. I didn’t tell you about the other night. On Waterloo, I ran into Black Cross Spiritualists. They gave me a card. I went to meet them. Zelda—they want me to work for them!”

Zelda dropped a starched shirt and gave me a look of such horror, the smile crumbled from my face.

Perhaps … I had been a bit rash.

After a terrible pause, she set the clothes aside neatly and smoothed her dress. Confused and suddenly crestfallen, I waited, heart pounding, hating how betrayed I felt by her lack of equal exhilaration.

Thinly, she said, “Come with me.”

I followed her to her room, where she opened the small jewelry box her grandmother had given to her before she’d come to London. There was nothing in it now but small sentimentalities, some bank notes and a string of yellowed pearls. Out from under them all, she pulled a key, and all the waiting excitement fell through my stomach as I realised what she meant to show me.

We went down to my mother’s room, and Zelda unlocked it.

“You’ve something to see,” she said in a mindful, quiet way.

The room was stuffy and stale, its air thick with secrets. And yet it felt vaguely intimate, somehow, as if my mother’s presence had been closed up there with all her old belongings like a tomb. A French Louis Vuitton trunk of shoes, a box of jewels, yellowed lace. A wind-up automaton and porcelain figurines, furnishings like ghosts under grey sheets, lonely silhouettes with the curtains drawn tight on the windows.

A book of fortunetelling cards. An overabundance of candles, all different shapes and colours and states of use, along a shelf of pendants, feathers, dried flowers, books on horticulture and metaphysical studies. Charlie and Colette standing in the dark corner, all pasty faces and wide, intelligent eyes.

I reared back, startled to see them there. Zelda’s grip tightened on my arm. She hadn’t seen them; she thought I was upset. I flashed them a frustrated look.

Zelda pulled the cover back from a vanity table, glass foggy with age. I wasn’t prepared for my reflection. I looked a mess. A disheveled, wide and wild-eyed mess. Finally, in my mother’s room, and hollow inside where perhaps something like sadness or anger should have been.

Dust turned Zelda’s fingertips grey as she drew a little calotype from the top drawer of the vanity table. It was a photograph of her—my mother. Signed on the edge: Kisses, Margot; 1867.

A wistful chill wound through me as I realised I had already forgotten what she’d looked like.

In the image, she was so young, so beautiful in a dark and dreamy way. We shared the same face shape and eyes, the same brooding curve to our lower lips. Without thinking of it, I dusted my knuckles along my mouth as if I needed proof. The way she peered past the photographer was almost devious, a secretive little glint in her eyes caught for all time.

“Why did she leave us?” I asked. It was not lamentation. It was honest curiosity. It seemed too possible to me now that anything my father had ever told me about her was untrue. Margot Winchester, corrupted by the age of Spiritualism, the mother who left.

Zelda let me hold the photograph. I ran my fingers over it like it might make her more real to me. “She was unfaithful,” Zelda said. “That puts a strain on the marriage, a lady rendezvousing on the side like that.”

“Did she work for him? Or was she … ?”

“Oh, no, she came from money and status.” Zelda clucked her tongue as if to say, Shame. “The townhouse was hers. Until marriage, that is. Your father, he never appreciated her more unconventional interests, and surely that also lent sway to her imminent departure.”

“You mean the Black Cross.”

Zelda’s glance jumped to me. It was enough for confirmation. “He accommodated all her hobbies, even when she vowed she saw and spoke with spirits, but … ”

I put the photograph down, gaze swerving her way.

“I’m sorry?” I whispered.

Zelda nodded with a tight little frown, as if ashamed to say it again. My heart lurched but I could not tell whether it leapt or sank.

My mother had seen the Missing as I did.

Zelda tossed her blonde braid over one shoulder and stooped to throw back a corner of the faded rug.

Beneath it was painted rough and dark on the floor a large circle, with a second circle scrawled within, and diagonal lines that came to a point as if below the rest of the rug hid some collage of geometric shapes. Eerie symbols and markings, smudged and faded, followed the painted lines, the alphabet of some unknown tongue.

I’d seen something similar before. At a Spiritualist gala, a gentleman who’d called himself a daemonologist had displayed diagram after diagram, each similar to this. But …

Guardian angels, my mother had said when I first saw Charlie and Colette. But I hadn’t a doubt, now—she’d known them for what they were, my unearthly little playmates.

“She spent all her time at those ghost conjuring parties,” Zelda muttered, frowning. “What do they call those ladies?”

“Planchettists,” I offered.

“It was good-natured and harmless, until she changed. Oh, please don’t think it too bold of me to say, but it was her insistence she was a witch that finally had your father fed up with her.”

Witch. Never mind; that was a laugh. Witches were superstition, the craft of simple village folklore—the history and study of which was, surely, what Westwood had meant when he mentioned it earlier in that stuffy office of his.

Zelda reached to take the little calotype back. I grabbed it. I needed to keep it. With a sigh, voice like fine old velvet, she said, “She knew she wouldn’t win you in a petition against your father’s custody. The eyes of any court would have judged her unwell.”

For a moment—just a brief, fretful moment—I felt a stab of regret. My father had only been doing his best. To keep me with him, to keep me from finding out about my mother, to keep me from following in the same path.

Yet, somehow, he’d hidden this from me my entire life, and when I’d gone to him, he’d failed to mention my very own mother had been the same.

The things I could have asked her, that we might have spoken of together! Imagine how alone and misunderstood she too had felt!

Zelda reluctantly passed me an obituary from 1878. Mrs. M. Winchester, it read. Her body had been found on the Chelsea Embankment, assaulted. Murdered. Not quite as monstrous as but certainly a premonition of last year’s Whitechapel Ripper’s.

A dismal chill crept through me. She was so estranged, so distant and nearly unreal, and I should have been anguished by the tragic revelation. Murdered. I only felt in a dull daze. Selfishly frustrated she was gone. Shocked, and cold, and a little hurt—liberated by the knowledge, but empty of trust.

It seemed to me, much as I didn’t want it to be so, that despite our shared audience to the dead, my mother wasn’t any better in truth than she was in talk. The fact of the matter was that I’d never truly know. My father felt safe with commercial frauds, psychic hoaxes and séance party parlour tricks. But he had no idea what to do about a child who could see actual spirits just as his mad wife had.

“They never found the assailant,” Zelda whispered as I passed the obituary clipping forth.

“I’ve joined the Black Cross,” I whispered back, sick with anticipation. I glanced up at her, guilty but unable to disguise my relief, my resolve, just as she did not hide her woeful fear. “I interviewed this morning. They’re employing me. I’m not running away, it’s just that they require new members to board there at first. It’s not very far. It shall be as though I’m away at school.”

For all the times she’d indulged my stubbornness over the years, surely this would be the day Zelda refused it. I waited, not sure how to go about arguing.

But she just smiled at me, very faintly. “Darling,” she said softly, “you know if you leave for that place, you’ll hardly be welcome home again?”

The silence rang around us. Dread knotted in my stomach. I hadn’t stopped to think about this adventure being forever. But she was right. It changed everything.

“I know,” I whispered.

***

With my mother’s room locked up again, I went with Zelda down to the kitchen.

“Will’s leaving,” she told Cook. Cook slid a noontime sandwich and cup of cocoa across the table to me, nodding idly. But then he understood the tone of Zelda’s voice and looked over in shock.

“For good?” he pressed.

“I’m not sure,” I said, and I wanted to believe it for some reason the same I wanted it to be untrue.

Zelda clapped her hands together and announced warmly from behind a weak shield of pride, “He’s found employment outside the house!”

“Well!” Cook blinked a few times, smiling as though he almost wasn’t sure how.

“There are travel cases in the coat room,” Zelda said, stroking the hair at the crown of my head. “Take what you can at the present. Cook and I shall bring a trunk with the rest after … well, once your father is distracted.”

I left the two of them whispering together as I fetched one of the boxy, handled travel cases and made my way upstairs. Agatha and Daphne were in the sitting room, Agatha embroidering the hem of a dress with ribbon, Daphne curled up on the divan with a book. I stopped in the doorway.

“I’m leaving,” I declared. The more it was said, the more I realised I really was … wasn’t I?

“Ooh, off to where?” Agatha hummed.

I cleared my throat. “It’s not a short trip. I’ve found employment.”

Agatha looked up sharply.

“Good,” Daphne whispered, and something in my chest tightened. Uncertain how to reply, I said nothing, and just listened to the echo of my own footsteps as I climbed the stairs to my room to pack my belongings.

Agatha followed me back down to the kitchen. “What do you mean you’ve found employment?”

“I mean just that,” I said, heart in my throat.

“And you must leave?”

“They’re letting out a room to me. It’s a unique sort of work.”

“You’re sure you’re needed immediately?” Zelda pressed, hands wringing together unless she kept them busy rearranging the things in my travel case.

“When else should I go?” I asked, and tried not to let the sudden sick nervousness change my mind. Leaving. On my own. Without telling my father. Without saying good-bye. And Charlie and Colette—did it matter if I said farewell to them?

“Sit still,” Agatha said, and took a comb to my hair.

“New employment!” Cook paced for a moment, rolling a cigarette and nibbling at the inside of his own smile. “Yes, when I was your age, I was outside the house working, too!” When I wasn’t looking, he placed a little leather-held knife on the table before me.

“My son’s,” he said. He struck a match; cigarette smoke curled up between the four of us. “From his time as a soldier. Protected him well, Will. Can’t protect from cholera, but protects ’gainst most else well enough.”

I slipped the knife from Cook into the back of my shoe, where the worn leather sheath of it wasn’t too uncomfortable.

“Will,” Daphne said in a small voice as she stepped into the kitchen. She gestured for me to hold out a hand, and placed in it her tiny prized ring with the blue stone. “For you,” she murmured.

That something in my chest tightened harder. I waited for her to meet my eyes before I said, “Thank you, Daphne.”

“And from me!” Agatha pushed into my free hand the pearl-studded comb with which she’d fixed my hair.

“Listen, all of you,” I insisted, laughing weakly, “I very well might be back sooner than you think. At any rate, I won’t be that far away.”

I doubted any of us really felt that was the truth. Something new was beginning but something had to end for that, and what was ending, I did not want to imagine just yet.

“At any rate,” Zelda echoed, “you might want to hurry on now, as your father and Miss Valérie are sure to be home soon.”

“You aren’t telling him?” Daphne’s gaze swung around to mine.

Mutely, as I pulled my cap down snug, I shook my head.

I wanted to; I really did. Despite everything, it pained me not to at least say good-bye. He was my father … and yet despite that, part of me felt he was deserving of the shock.

Cook tucked a pasty in my coat pocket. Daphne clasped my face in her hands. There was unfinished business between us after her almost-jump from Waterloo, and it pained me to leave it unresolved. I didn’t want to abandon her. She was a sister to me. But her eyes shone with apology and the better kind of heartache, and she leaned to plant a kiss at the corner of my mouth. I blushed, flustered, smile twisting politely.

“I wish I ached to live life as much as you do, Will,” she whispered, stroking a thumb over my cheek. “My valourous hero.”

My brow knotted. I didn’t trust myself to say anything without stammering it into nonsense, so I simply nodded and held her a little tighter in our hug.

Zelda followed me out the kitchen door. Daphne, Agatha, and Cook watched from over her shoulder, clustered there in the doorway; I jumped off the stoop into the alley, clutching my travel case with both hands, then frantically turned around and blurted, “What will you tell my father when he asks where I am, Zelda? He’ll come after me—”

Zelda snagged me by the collar and crushed me close in the most earnest embrace. Her braid tickled my cheek as I set down my case and clung tight. Trying to take note of the way she felt, the way she smelled.

“Never you mind that,” she said firmly. “Be clever but also be wise.”

“I love you,” I mumbled against her shoulder.

“Go on, now, dear, and Cook and I shall bring your trunk first chance we get.”

I blew kisses to the others. Zelda waved as off I went, jogging first until I was at the street, terrified that if I looked back, my father’s face would be there—home from the races, in the window, watching.

But soon I was at the street, and the sun was warm through the morning chill. I pulled the Black Cross calling card from my pocket just to hold it, and felt again the glow of fate.

A quiver of terrified excitement ran through me as I stood at the edge of the romantic little Black Cross courtyard. It didn’t seem inclined to leave me be any time soon. I didn’t want it to, in all honesty.

I should have waited more than a quarter of an hour for Research Inspector d’Pelletier, the guide for whom Commissioner Westwood called to show me my room, but the longer I waited and looked around, my hands clammy on my travel case, the more restless I became.

Surely when my father discovered this turn of events, he would know precisely to where I’d gone and would send someone to fetch me. Or—and I wasn’t sure which was worse—perhaps he wouldn’t much care.

I struck off across the humble courtyard for the wing opposite the main offices.

The door there opened on the simple, light-coloured sitting room at the end of a wide hallway, with a few chaises and chairs under the French windows, small potted palms stretching towards the light.

Not far down the corridor was a large dining hall. I peeked in as I passed, finding it just as unassuming as the sitting room save for a scattering of old, old candelabra cradling fat candles. A man seated in the far corner with a paper and cup of tea glanced at me over his round glasses.

“Lost?” he asked. “If you’re looking for the main offices, they’re … ”

“Oh, I’ve already been,” I replied, blushing faintly. “Thank you.”

He raised his brows. “Well, did they direct you along the wrong way on your errand?”

“Oh … no, I’m not an errand boy, sir, I’m an inspector here.”

His brows climbed higher; he looked me up and down, then cleared his throat and went back to his paper.

Mildly irked by his obvious contempt, I caught the pucker of my mouth before he could notice it and hurried on, putting a comfortable distance between the dining room and myself before slowing to a stroll again. The sound of my footsteps bounced around the empty corridor, as did whisper-soft conversations and the occasional open and close of a door somewhere else far away in the grand building. Like the echo of ghost people, there to hear but still somewhat removed.

The light fell through the windows at a slant between thick taffeta drapes; in a room down the hall, someone played at a piano. Two ladies drifted past me arm-in-arm.

“They say Welsh,” one said. “But I’ve spoken with him before, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“I don’t even care what,” the other remarked. “He didn’t even say hello.”

“You know he’s a singular fellow, Evie … ”

“Peculiar, I’d say!”

I went the direction from which they’d come, to a set of broad doors of thick black walnut, designed as richly as Flemish furniture. They hung open on a modest music room occupied by a zoo of instruments—pianoforte, dusty harpsichord, a cabinet of lyres and a set of violins. The grate of the marble mantle was empty and charred, guarded on both sides by little stone lions, and someone at the old French pianoforte in the patterned shadow of the mullioned windows let his fingers dance over the faded black keys with an easy passion.

It was Inspector Clement, from Waterloo.

He might have been a ghost himself, he looked so detached from the world, playing with a slow intensity that shouldn’t have been called concentration, because it wasn’t. He just seemed lost in thought. For whom was he playing? No one. Well, me.

I was a bit afraid to approach him, though I wanted to very badly. Instead, I just set my case down at the door and wandered around the spacious room, hoping he’d notice me. The occasional discordant and awkward note made the music all the more genuine. Something close to a Chopin piece, but there was no sheet of music before him. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if he’d seen me yet. The swell and jut of his shoulder blades under the fine grey of his waistcoat and the way his hands seemed so intimately acquainted with every black and yellowing key as he watched them with distant eyes distracted me, which made me run into a loveseat, which jumped an inch or two with a harsh scrape upon the floorboards.

The music stopped in a surge of mutilated notes. I froze, eyes wide.

“Good afternoon,” I said, blushing furiously.

Clement squinted at me, nonplussed, until slowly recognition bloomed across his face.

“So, you’ve found your way here after all,” he said, a flat congratulation. “That was quick.”

“Well … yes, I had to come,” I replied timidly, unsure what else he expected me to say. “You gave me the card.”

Clement issued a little sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. I decided it was a laugh, judging by the shadow of a smirk that flickered across his mouth. Impatiently, he waved me over. I approached, eyes roaming his patterned sleeves, unbuttoned and rolled up. His braces hung out limp from under his waistcoat, off his shoulders. He was either very bold or very crass to be seen in public looking so casual, no jacket and no hanker-tie. Around his neck, flirting with his collar, was instead a very small chunk of quartz on a short leather cord—like the locket I hid, myself.

“I didn’t expect you’d actually call when I gave you that card,” he muttered. Confused and suddenly very self-conscious, I cut him a startled look. Then why on earth had he given it to me?

“Do you know what a ghost is?” he asked then, wiping a bit of dust off the hinges of the pianoforte. It was like another interview question. I issued a mute shrug, frown deepening. I didn’t know, after all, apart from the base understanding that a ghost was what remained of people who had died, and it was abnormal for others to know the Missing so intimately at all.

“A leftover soul,” Clement answered himself. “Historically, the Cross has called it ‘vis viva.’ Some intangible essence like that which is in you or I. Per working theory, apparitions manifest as some sort of Electro-Static energy, as in their presence that’s what our instruments respond to. But don’t let any of that fool you into thinking the Cross has figured it all out. Just because we know how to find them and how to get rid of them doesn’t mean we know what they are or why they are, just as no one can explain what we are and why we are.” He raked his hands through his hair then dropped them to his lap, slouching at the keyboard. “Our soul. The part that … gets left behind. After all, what is a soul, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I conceded, completely unprepared for such an existential question.

“Perhaps there are mysteries to which there are no solutions.” Clement cast me a rather catlike look from his side of the pianoforte. Eyes hooded, nonchalant but penetrative. “What’s your burden, then?”

“Pardon?”

“What’s your burden?” he repeated, raising his brows. He was better behaved than the night at Waterloo, but he was still very forward and neglected all the right manners.

“I can see them,” I said, realising finally what he meant. “Ghosts. Spirits. I’ve been able to see them since I was small.”

“A clairvoyant, eh?” Clement hummed. “Thought so, by the way that wraith slipped into you so easily on the bridge.”

Clairvoyant.

He narrowed his eyes in appraisal. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Only three years between us.” He was nineteen, then, still not even fully an adult himself. This close to him, it was obvious in the softer shape of his face. “Well,” he said around a sigh, “you must be something, as Westwood doesn’t let just any little witness waltz into our ranks.”

“Well,” I echoed, hands folded neatly atop the pianoforte, “Westwood also said you don’t give just anyone a card, either.”

Clement propped his elbows on the pianoforte with a gentle cascade of off-key chords. “All right,” he said, flustered. “It’s true. And I may have told him about you.”

My gaze veered back to him.

“Listen,” he said. “I have never witnessed something like what happened on the bridge. A bystander interfering with the investigation? Of course. A bystander with such clairvoyant sensibilities that he takes on a mild possession right before my eyes? Never, absolutely never. So of course, I told Westwood about you.”

I was both galvanized to know that and terrified I would not meet anyone’s expectations. “Well, what’s your burden?” I prompted, desperate to move on from talk about me.

Clement waved his hand, dismissively. “Third parameter psychosensitive,” he said.

“I see,” I said pleasantly. But I hadn’t the slightest what that was. Psychical abilities, perhaps? What if he saw right through me? Knew I had not formally applied, knew I wasn’t exactly what I appeared to be …

“I can’t read your mind,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried for.”

I gawked at him, far from comforted considering I hadn’t spoken the worry aloud.

“Or did I just read your mind, then? Will you ever know?” Clement laughed silently, a little nod of the head and toothy smile. “I can’t read minds,” he said again. “Your eyes just went so wide. Stop fretting. Psychosensitive means ‘empath.’ Clairsentient. Say, what of your lady friends from Waterloo? Your sisters? We left them shaken, hmm?”

“Oh, they aren’t my sisters. They’re my father’s—”

A courier interrupted us, coming at a rapid pace across the music room to shove a wax-sealed packet at Clement.

“From Danforth, sir,” the courier said, then turned on his heel and left. Clement opened the packet. He glanced it over before sliding it my way across the pianoforte. Gingerly, I picked it up to read.

Open Spectral File No. MCDXCIV, the cover page declared. Reported repeated disturbances, Dis-embodied voices, Shadow figures, Owners troubled, To be investigated Wednesday, 24 September, by Lead Inspector Clement, Inspector Quinn (Police Escort), Scouting Inspector Winchester (Clairvoyant), and Assistant O’Brien.

I looked up at Clement, mouth open. “Already?” I said. “Tomorrow?”

Didn’t matter. I had my first assignment as a member of the Black Cross, and it was with the same men from Waterloo.

Clement took the packet back and thumbed through the pages. “They promoted you upon entrance to scouting inspector?” he mused aloud, cocking a brow, then ran a hand through his messy hair again. There was no apology in his voice, nor compromise or validation, just something so casual and yielding as if he’d never been rude to me in the first place. Welsh, the ladies earlier had said. For the most part, he just sounded like a Londoner, but I could hear the Welsh slipping through in the occasional slant of vowel or faded roll of an r.

He glanced up at me with a flicker of his hazel eyes.

“It seems we’ll be working together quite a lot in the future,” he said, and sighed.

***

“Ah! Mr. Winchester, yes?”

Research Inspector d’Pelletier paced around worriedly not far from where I’d waited earlier. He was very blond and seemed too tall and willowy for his round nose and round mouth, breaking into a deeply dimpled smile as I hurried his way.

Mr. I nodded, trying to swallow the chalky taste in my mouth. It was a new thing, to be so damnably anxious and excited at the same time. “Inspector d’Pelletier?” I ventured. His face lit up even brighter.

“Hello!” he cried, with the lilting voice of a proper Frenchman.

“You must have thought yourself mental,” he said as he led the way through the courtyard. “Did you? I did, when I first discovered my sensitivities. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Communing with spirits and ghosts, it’s all very monstrous if you ask me. But here, working here, makes it worthwhile.”

Monstrous. Perhaps. I’d never really minded it, except for being castigated. I certainly didn’t mind it now that I knew there existed an entire institution of people just like me—and I was part of it.

“Lord, you’re young, too,” d’Pelletier hummed, squinting at me sideways.

“Yes,” I said quietly. Apparently, this was indeed a spectacle.

He stuck out a wide hand, smiling brightly.

“Oh,” I said even more quietly, and handed him my travel case, which he carried for me, swinging it at his side as though it weighed nothing.

“Our chapter has not acquired many youths,” he said as he led the way to the dormitories. “But don’t let that frighten you. You’re not the only young one.”

“Youths such as Lord Kingsley?” I asked.

D’Pelletier glanced at me over his shoulder, brows raised. His smile broadened. “Yes, actually,” he said. “Inspector Kingsley. And a training medium, Miss Dubois.”

The dormitories were in the adjoining brick terrace, once a set of slim, side-by-side townhouses, now lodgings connected by a long lower parlour. Beyond the broad, dark door through which d’Pelletier led, light through painted-glass windows cast throbbing colours on the scuffed floor; black velvet flowers pranced up and down the red paper of the walls. Near the first set of stairs was a dusty tapestry with the same coat of arms from the Black Cross card, flaunting a lion and a raven. Nulli sunt casus was woven beneath.

“The rooms are let out.” D’Pelletier showed me along, tromping up the steep, narrow sets of stairs; at each landing, a handful of doors cramped about the short hall. “I believe about thirteen members reside here in Knight’s Hall. I’m not sure; I board in Scholar’s Hall.” We stopped on the third floor; he led me to an open door just across from the stairs, half around a jutting corner, and gestured for me to look in. “Your lodgings. A little narrow, I apologise, but you’ve a desk, a wardrobe, a window seat … ”

Peeling blue-striped wallpaper. A lamp that smelled like old oil and a damp wick. The ugly rug on the floor. It was perfect and perfectly terrifying. A room. My room. My … home now.

I peeked out the window, down at the courtyard.

“All the usual information is in your folio. But you may ask anyone anything, really. We’re a distracted bunch, but we don’t bite.” D’Pelletier laughed loudly. At my curt glance, the laugh sort of shriveled up in his throat. I don’t think he’d expected to be laughing alone. He stood at the door, an unwitting contender in one of the typical staring matches Daphne said I started quite often. He seemed to be waiting, perhaps for me to say or ask something. I wasn’t going to. I’d expended all the nervous sociability allowed with Clement. Now I needed to focus on myself.

Finally, d’Pelletier wilted a little but grinned again nonetheless. He nodded in farewell, murmuring, “Glad to have you here,” as he drifted out of sight and back through the hall.

Once I could no longer hear his strong steps, I closed the door.

The bed gave a modest little squeak when I flopped down onto it, folio in hand, and looked up at the faded ceiling, smelled the stale scent of the blankets and listened to the noises of a lived-in building, which always to me seemed like oversized rats scraping in the walls.

Yes, my room … and a heavy sense of something akin to homesickness weighing down on me.

If you leave for that place, Zelda had said. Hardly be welcome again …

This was a very new and unfamiliar sort of commitment.

This was change.

I dug through the folio Westwood had given me. There was the Black Cross crest again, heading one of the letters. Written by the secretary in thick, garish script below it were my name and occupation title, which felt a bit theatrical: Black Cross Second Parameter Clairvoyant, Spectral Department, Scouting Inspector.

Two dainty knocks sounded at the door.

I sat up on my elbow, brow knotted. “Ah—who’s calling?”

Nobody called. Nobody came into the room. Someone had probably mistaken my room for another’s. But the quiet suddenly felt a little … less empty. Movement, behind me. Except the door hadn’t opened.

I turned quickly, and immediately caught sight of the tiny girl near the chair.

She was dead, of course.

Just a little Missing waif, with a gaunt face and purple mouth, staring at me. But perhaps she wasn’t the type to speak or even realise I could see her.

“I’ll have to find a new room, I suppose,” she announced then in a frail, treble voice.

I smiled faintly, mildly amused, and nodded and shrugged at the same time in indifferent apology. I missed Charlie and Colette suddenly. But I didn’t have time to converse with dead girls whose rooms I’d taken over, never mind that the Black Cross had ghosts of its own.

When I looked up again, the Missing girl was gone.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps I would feel at home soon enough.

“Why, it is Will Winchester!” O’Brien cried, tromping down under the Black Cross portico columns and out onto the junction of Portland Place and Park Crest, that leather knapsack bouncing on his knobby shoulders. “I didn’t believe it at first—but here you are!”

“Here he is,” Clement echoed dryly as he lit a cigarette from his silver case, slouched against the damp September evening in a patchwork coat and deep scarlet knit neck-wrap.

Face pinched with a flustered smile, I nodded quickly. I was a tweed-capped bundle of eager nerves; I’d spent the day feeling like a mouse in the kitchen walls, flipping through some of the books left on the shelf in my room by the previous tenant, peeking out the window, now and again slipping around the halls to familiarise myself as unobtrusively as I could. Now it was nine o’clock, Wednesday evening, as the summons had read. My first assignment with the Black Cross.

Inspector Quinn eventually strolled up from around the corner, wearing those tiny spectacles that really did not seem to match his strong jaw and brown leather overcoat. He stared at me for a long moment, then accepted my presence with a short nod.

I was excited, but painfully paranoid to be out and about. Again, I told myself this was a certainty, not a temporary escape, but still in the back of my mind I wondered how long it might be before my father came calling for me—or, God forbid, that I run into him or someone else I knew outside Portland Place.

But at nine o’clock at night, Julien’s-off-the-Strand would be full of people and he, busy with his obligations … and so I tried very hard to discard the distraction as we climbed into two separate horse-drawn cabs. I was in the midst of a Black Cross team. They were strangers, and I couldn’t say I trusted them completely yet, but … with them, I was not alone.

We made our way to the southern reaches of Hampstead, to the modest middle-class residence of Mr. Nichols, a Board of Works chairman. He and his wife greeted us grandly once we arrived; their little old maid took our coats and hats while music echoed from the parlour as if we were important guests to be impressed. The Nichols children stared at me as introductions were made like I was some sort of monster. Perhaps they were curious about my freedom, seeing as I wasn’t entirely an adult. Perhaps they did not trust us. Or perhaps that was simply the way someone looked at the world when they cohabitated with ghosts. Did I look at the world that way?

Mr. Nichols gave us a tour. “That’s its room now.” He pointed to the drawing room. “We keep it shut up. No one dares open it, not even the maid, the poor Mrs. Carrie. But every now and then we find the door ajar, and that’s how we know that … it’s out and about.”

“And what is it you wish to come of our inspection tonight?” Clement asked.

There was a fragile pause. Mr. Nichols drummed his fingers. “I only wish to know what’s here with us,” he finally confessed, brow furrowed and eyes bright with desperation. “And why? Why is it here? Call me a fool, but I hope to discover it’s my father. The problem is that I just don’t know.”

“If given the opportunity, would you wish the spirit banished from your residence?” Clement asked next.

“No!” Mr. Nichols shook his head, ignoring his family’s discomforted glances. “If it is my father, no. Not at all!” He remembered something suddenly and gestured Clement after him. “I have some things for you, to help you conjure, or whatever it is you do. Photographs and other things … used in the séance, too … received a direct response to them, they said.”

Eventually, Clement ushered the Nichols, their grim-eyed children, and the maid Carrie out the door to a hotel, to stay for the night under Westwood’s tab.

“Are you nervous?” O’Brien elbowed me as we gathered in the parlour, across the hall from “its” room. I grunted, rubbing at my shoulder.

“Not nervous, just curious,” I mumbled.

“Curious? You’re brave!”

I was most certainly nervous. Beyond nervous. I had to impress the Black Cross, after all, being new. That was some great pressure—not to mention how I pressured myself. There was a craving in me to be part of this like nothing I’d ever felt before, and it was strange, and unsettling, and liberating. I wanted to learn how to investigate and I wasn’t sure I’d ever forgive myself if I somehow … couldn’t manage it.

“The complaints seem typical of an enigma,” Clement interrupted. He quieted the family’s gramophone, annoyed. “Objects throughout the house are moved or misplaced. Phantom footfalls are common. The servants’ door locks itself, disturbing knocks and unexplained banging sound at random. Then there’s the matter of ‘its’ room.”

“Don’t forget the shadow-like figure they’ve glimpsed,” I reminded, hesitantly.

All three of my teammates looked my way as though they’d forgotten I was there. Blushing faintly, I stared back. Did they think I hadn’t read the case summary that had come with the summons Clement distributed?

“Who conducted the séance?” Quinn followed gruffly.

“The SPR,” Clement said. “Mr. Nichols wrote them, they held the séance, then passed the case off to us.”

“The outcome?”

“Nothing but knocks and the like,” O’Brien recounted. “The medium didn’t channel a thing. Something childish by nature, she said.”

“Of course, if that’s how she defines a semi-conscious enigma,” Clement said, sounding bored. “They’re generally childish by nature.”

“Do you think it’s really the late Mr. Nichols?”

“Can’t say yet.”

O’Brien paused his note-taking to lean close to me and whisper, “An enigma is a semi-intelligent phantom that does not manifest as a full apparition, as a residual echo can.”

I regarded him mutely in return, not giving away how intimidating this cataloguing of spirits was. Because it was, a little, and I felt keenly the distinction between us though no one else seemed to care that I was clueless as to how the night would proceed. Perhaps Westwood had failed to notify them he’d waived my training. I’d never expected such an art—a way to find ghosts as opposed to being found by them myself.

“Did they lend us the thermospecs or St. Peter’s Arrows tonight?” Quinn asked.

Clement veritably pouted. “No, of course not.”

O’Brien’s glance snapped my way quickly, eyes wide and mouth pursed. Startled, I froze. But then I understood.

“What are those?” I whispered, so as not to interrupt Clement and Quinn’s discussion.

“Ah,” O’Brien gasped, excitedly, as if he hadn’t clearly been waiting for me to ask, “the St. Peter’s Arrows are modified weather vanes that use lodestones to locate changes of Electro-Static pressure within a ten-foot radius. And the thermospecs … ”

“All right, then.” Clement cleared his throat. “I want the bells posted within a quarter of an hour.”

The air in the Nichols house was gloomy and vaguely unwelcoming. I stuck to O’Brien’s side.

“Very similar to the Arrows,” he explained proudly, showing me the ambience compass. “The quartz mechanism and thermometer inside follow shifts in ambient charge like a regular compass follows North.”

“Ambient charge?” I echoed.

“Spiritual aura.” O’Brien’s hands slipped through the dark, fingers waving. “Electro-Static energy, all around us.”

“Don’t stamp these down, now,” Clement chided over his shoulder as they set up with their fine, tautly tied strings those same little bells from Waterloo. I laughed meekly. He didn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t been teasing. He reached over and plucked Quinn’s pocket watch out to check the time. Quinn didn’t seem bothered by it. “Hmm. Ready for invalidation?”

I tried to stay out of the way, trailing after them from room to room.

“O’Brien, take note,” Clement muttered now and again. “Natural shadow play in the east parlour due to angle of streetlamps and street activity.”

“Door’s crooked on its hinges,” Quinn said, demonstrating the way the nursery door would not stay closed unless fully latched.

As we moved up to the third floor, I caught O’Brien staring at me again in the bobbing light of our lamp. Once more, he waited to explain.

“What’s invalidation?” I prompted, only half an hour or so late.

“Invalidation is the first phase of inspection,” he began, but he shut up with a snap of the teeth as Quinn stopped and turned to us.

“I fear you both may not have heard,” he said coarsely, not without a bit of sarcasm. Behind him, Clement stood with arms crossed, frowning at us with a little lift of one brow. Quinn went on, obviously speaking for him, “We’re testing sound carriage now. Winchester, you remain on this floor. O’Brien, below. Clement and I shall be one flight down.”

Noises echoed now and again from outside the townhouse, down on the street. But O’Brien’s voice was very clear, drifting up from the second-floor landing of the stairs. “Invalidation,” he resumed explaining. “You mustn’t ever begin inspection without first attempting to discredit natural causes for claimed activity. Tricks of the eye, plays of light or … You saw Quinn testing the doors near open windows, in case of drafts—oh! Quinn says please walk along the hall regularly, Will!”

I followed the instruction, wandering away from the stairs and back again.

“Jump now, please!” O’Brien delivered the following directions. “And stamp around!”

I did so, feeling rather silly storming around in the dark for no reason. My pounding footsteps, the creak of the floor here and there. An oval-shaped wall hanging rattled each time I passed it, as did the glass of an unlit lamp.

“Thank you!” O’Brien called. Then down below, he did the same; I stood at the top of the stairs, loosely hugging the banister as I listened. His voice moved back and forth as he traveled. “You mustn’t ever assume the impossibility of drafts causing doors to move on their own, or peripheral lights creating wholly natural but unexpected shadows, mistakenly reported as ghostly appearances. Or the carriage of sounds throughout the building being the source of unexplainable knocks, bangs, dis-embodied voices—”

“If only we could test the sound without the contamination of conversation!” came Clement’s shout, strained to carry two floors up. “Damn it, O’Brien!”

“What now?” I whispered, stepping lightly after O’Brien on the stairs once Quinn called us back down.

“Now,” O’Brien murmured, handing two tiny handheld lamps to Clement, who struck matches to light them both, “we douse the lights, close the windows, and investigate.”

Quinn went around darkening all the rooms. I didn’t have to ask why the inspection called for it; ghosts seemed most comfortable to come and go in places with little light.

“We won’t split up,” Clement announced in a low voice as all our eyes finally adjusted to the dark. “I want Winchester observing all he can.”

I perked up. Well, finally he remembered. “You may just call me Will,” I murmured.

Clement stared at me, unmoved either way. Then he looked to Quinn.

“Shall we start with this floor?” he husked.

The house was full of shadows, empty, and all ours—free reign in someone else’s home, every secret nook and cranny, and whatever Missing kept to them.

For some reason, I’d expected to be relatively unbothered by foreign hauntings. It was just the dark, and it wasn’t as though I didn’t know what might drift about in it. I’d expected wrong. This wasn’t the dark I knew. It wasn’t the thought of encountering an unfamiliar apparition that set me ill at ease; that had happened plenty of times before. As inconvenient accidents, of course, and admittedly with a minor startle. But never because I purposefully searched for them. This was someone—something—else’s dark, and we were only visitors.

We moved slowly into one room and Clement promptly turned the lamps down as low as they’d go without fading out completely. O’Brien had the dowsing rods out, eyes glued to them, waiting for the smallest of twitches; Quinn held the ambience compass loosely in one hand, the other in his pocket. I just tried not to be obvious in the way I fell in close to O’Brien’s side, eyes jumping all around. What would I see, hear? What did we do in someone else’s dark?

“Is there anyone here with us?” Clement said. I jumped, startled; his words felt so much louder in the tight quiet.

“Hello,” Quinn greeted the dark blandly. “We don’t mean any trouble.”

“We’ll wait for you for just a moment, if you’d like to join us.” Leaning back against the wall near a house plant, arms crossed, Clement had become a different person. Patient, and focused, his voice very careful and pure. His eyes slid over my way. Hurrying not to be caught watching him, I looked to O’Brien.

O’Brien didn’t notice for a moment. Then he lit up, grinning like a proud little boy. “This is the antiphonary session,” he explained in that companionable whisper of his. “Like music, ‘antiphony.’ We call out, and … hope the spirits answer.”

“Ah.” I nodded.

“It’s best to have next to no contamination of the inspection’s silence so as not to compromise call-and-answer.” O’Brien’s smile went a bit sheepish; it was clear we both thought about the sound carriage evaluation earlier. Self-consciously, he lowered his whisper until I had to lean very close to catch the shape of the words. “Call-and-answer is always used, but we’re often allowed an assortment of instruments to verify the spiritual aura, the Electro-Static … ”

“Yes, the energy. Clement told me about that.”

“Oh. Well, we’ve a limited selection, unfortunately. The Officers lend them out as they see fit, and it’s such a tedious process to formally request so … we make do. I mean, who really needs Franklin meters and thermospecs, yeah? We’re content with our ambience gauges!”

O’Brien laughed meekly, as if still unconvinced himself that the tools allocated were satisfactory.

“So, what does all that mean about my being able to see them?” I whispered. “The Electro-Static … ambience?”

O’Brien’s smile faded quickly. “Ah … well … ” His face pinched in deep embarrassment. “That, we don’t know.”

Quinn cleared his throat, peeking out the door and down the unlit hall. “We’re from the Black Cross,” he called out. “An altruistic organisation invited by Mr. Nichols. To determine why you’re here. Do you have a message for him you wish us to convey? What is your name?”

“It’s hiding. It’s not sure of us yet.” Clement sighed. My eyes veered over to him. How did he know that? Was that his being an empath—did he encounter the Missing in different ways than me?

Clement pushed away from the wall. “On to the next!”

In the dining room, Quinn and Clement took seats at the table and laid out the sentimental items Mr. Nichols had lent us—the photograph, an old pipe, a scarf, and fat golden rings. Quinn removed his spectacles and wearily massaged his eyes. “Who is here?” he asked. “Do not be afraid. We just want the answers to our questions. Mrs. Nichols believes she’s seen you in this room … is this you, in this photograph?”

“What’s the point of it all?” I whispered as O’Brien and I moved slowly along the wall.

“The goal is to make contact.” O’Brien paused to examine his dowsing rods, intently. One slightly angled, the other straight. I didn’t feel anything in the quiet yet. Nothing other than my anxious alertness.

“There are two ways to effectively work a haunting once contact is made,” O’Brien said. “To remove the ghost from the premises by ‘trapping’ it in a Solomon’s bottle, or ‘purging’ it by burning a piece of remains from the deceased, anything to which it might be connected … ”

“Like Kitty,” I said, and almost stumbled into a sideboard near the door. So did O’Brien.

“Like Kitty.” He smiled just a tiny bit. “Purging banishes the spirit completely by destroying its place of attachment. Think like a ship’s anchor. See, if it really is a matter of some spiritual electricity, that electricity must have grounding somewhere or else it should scatter into nothingness, shouldn’t it? Well … the Cross is still researching that.”

What is a soul, anyway?

“There weren’t any tragedies mentioned in the initial interview, were there?” Quinn grumbled to Clement.

“Nothing more tragic than regular family deaths. Oh, but—the file notes the previous tenant, a Mr. Ollens … drank himself into an early grave with a bottle of laudanum after losing his wife and both children within twenty-two hours of one another.”

“How?”

Clement waved a hand. “O’Brien, come here, let me see the papers. The woman miscarried one babe, and in hysterics, smothered the other. It could be any of these souls in here.”

“What do you mean when you say, ‘when contact is made?’” I prompted timidly when O’Brien returned to our little corner, picking up our conversation again.

“Interaction. Acquiring evidence of the haunting is our first task. If we can’t identify the spirit, we can’t bottle or purge, can we?” O’Brien thought about it for a moment. “Mild possession is the standard contact. It seems to be the easiest, anyway.”

I cut my eyes back over to him. The Wraith at Waterloo. Mild possession. All of this was so routine to them. And yet I was desperately spellbound.

“Mild possession,” I repeated.

“As opposed to daemonic possession,” O’Brian explained, more flippantly than I’d have expected. I gawked at him. He didn’t seem to notice my surprise. He sighed. “Always and at the very least,” he went on, “we advise the living on how to coexist with the dead. That is the more supreme goal of the Spectral Department—or it’s supposed to be—ah!”

I jumped as he broke off into a short, choppy stuttering of excitable sounds that didn’t quite make words before he finally spit out, “Movement! Real movement! Ambience changing!”

Heart leaping, I looked down. The dowsing rods had slowly crossed one over the other, perpendicular as if a crucifix. A chill zipped down my spine, tingled in my fingertips as my pulse quickened.

“Note, there was no wind nor draft to move the rods.”

“Noted,” Quinn grunted in reply, expertly scribbling in a little book in the low lamplight.

“Quinn … ” Clement slouched idly into one arm at the dining table. “What did Danforth say about the Waterloo report?”

“Denied. It needs to be rewritten.”

“Of course it does! They’ll just send us again, you wait and see.”

A sharp thud interrupted the casual conversation, as if something had fallen over out in the hallway. I flinched back near O’Brien, who flinched himself back to the wall. Almost immediately after came the dainty chime of a bell.

Clement shot up from his chair. “Quinn, was that a bell in the hall, or … ?”

“Not certain.”

“Yes,” I spoke up. “It was.” Quinn and Clement glanced at me; I stood firm instead of shying away behind O’Brien.

Nothing followed but an eerie, vigilant silence. My ears rang. I couldn’t breathe for a moment, defenselessly intrigued.

Quietly, Clement said, “Note, we are the only visible trespassers in the house.” Quinn scribbled away. “Was that you, spirit?” Clement went on. “Apologies, do you feel left out? Listen, I was only chatting with my friend, here … can you do that again? Old Mr. Nichols? Mrs. Ollens?”

The vague feeling of being unwelcome thickened. Quinn and Clement reverted to low, private whispers. Someone opened a door down the hall with a scrape and a whine.

The door.

“Shh!” Clement smacked at Quinn’s shoulder. “Did you hear that? Was that the door? It seems to respond to Ollens, not Nichols.”

“Documenting!” O’Brien abandoned the dowsing rods to scribble away in Quinn’s notebook as Quinn moved very carefully to the doorway, peering down the hall.

“Drawing room door,” he confirmed. Its door.

“Hello!” Clement called. “Have you come out from your room?” Leaning with hands planted firmly on the table, he turned to O’Brien and muttered, “Where did the Ollens woman kill the child?”

There was nothing but the whisper of pages as O’Brien hurried through the case file, close to one of the lamps. “Doesn’t say,” he replied finally.

“I would place bets it is that room,” Clement murmured through the brittle hush.

Quinn turned around with a shift of his leather overcoat and said in a husky voice, “My stomach is all in knots, men. I believe it’s here.”

As if taking that as a cue, the shadowy outline of a man passed by in the hall behind Quinn, too swift and too dark for me to see much more save for the flash of low lamplight in one wide eye.

But I saw it. Slinking by as if surveying us, and quickly. Something Missing.

“There—in the hall—” I almost choked on the words, my resolve buckling in the moment and leaving the whisper frail on my lips.

O’Brien and Quinn both looked sharply to Clement. I blushed furiously, heart in my throat, hoping I hadn’t derailed some manner of procedure or anything else.

Clement’s eyes burned into me. Quinn’s sparked off my glance as his jaw tightened. But it was not out of cruelty; in fact, it seemed like he strained against a pleased smile as he gestured for me to follow him.

“Well,” he gritted out in a low, almost cooperative tone, “come on, then.”

I hurried clumsily after him into the hall, feeling a little less like a useless neophyte. The floorboards creaked underfoot and the light deprivation made all my other senses wild. Everything I touched startled me; everything I heard raised the hair on my arms. Surely if someone struck a match, they’d have found me bug-eyed and mad-looking, stripped of distraction and whittled to instinct.

The drawing room door was an intimidating shape in the dark—hanging open, a threshold into blackness. And a looming shadow beside me, bristled and ready for action like a hunting hound, Quinn grunted, “What did you see and where, boy?”

I pointed up the hall. “It … an apparition, moving that way.”

A bell sounded from one of the upper floors, a cold, demanding ringing like glass breaking over and over.

Clement was beside us quickly. “Here we are!” he cried below his breath, triumphant, as he took off fast and fearless up the stairs to where the bell sounded.

Quinn sighed and retreated to fetch O’Brien. Deliberating for only a breath or two, I hurried up the stairs after Clement, clutching the banister and trying not to trip in the dark. It felt as though I couldn’t catch my breath for the sharp excitement. I still could not believe I was here, with them, in pursuit of a spirit I did not know or need to know. I nearly felt possessive over it. My discovery. With my talent.

And it was exhilarating to serve some purpose other than serving drinks and other things to men whose purpose was to pay for the company of young ladies who owed them nothing.

I reached the top of the stairs and jerked back with a start; a shadow in the nursery door caught me entirely unprepared. But it was just Clement.

“Christ,” I gasped, fist pressed to my chest as if it might really coax my pounding heart out of my throat and back in its place.

Clement simply stood there, peering into the room. Without looking my direction—without moving at all—he said very slowly, “Winchester. Is Quinn on his way up?”

Outside the nursery in the dark hall of the haunted Nichols house, Clement put one hand over Quinn’s mouth and gripped his big shoulder with the other. “Hush!” he whispered urgently.

Quinn removed Clement’s hand easily as the light of O’Brien’s lamp spilled further and further forth upon what awaited us in the nursery.

A tower of toys.

Toy upon toy had been carefully stacked. Not propped together as if a pyre or a handful of kindling, but one atop the other with precarious but perfect precision. The longer I looked at it, the more disturbing it appeared to me—unnatural that any of the toys should have been balanced at such orientations at all. A wooden rocker horse, a tin train, a small elastic band pond sailboat and a child-sized stool … a little porcelain-faced clown doll with a pointed velveteen hat, grinning at us from its perch atop the tower like the star of a demented Christmas tree. From its hat dangled a tiny bell, and from the tiny bell came the ringing we’d heard, as though someone had given it a hearty shake.

The dancing of the bell dwindled, slowed to a stop as we watched on in cold, mute shock.

“Poltergeist,” Quinn murmured after a long moment, coarsely and with great detest. “The Germans’ ‘noisy ghost.’”

I hadn’t any clue what to say, or even what to think, as I had never seen anything like it before. The hair rose on the back of my neck and with my breath thick in my throat, my eyes jumped about sharply, in search of something, anything, a figure, that flash of a wide eye again. The ghost was there. I knew it was. Listening, perhaps. Watching us watch it …

Thud! Thud!

Something slammed with great force against the wall of the nursery; and as the bang burst through the eerie silence, not a one of us failed to jump. O’Brien cursed below his breath, tending to the lamp lest he spill any oil.

The bobbing light danced across the face of the clown doll like it danced in Clement’s wide, wild eyes. He turned to me, and then to Quinn, demanding, “Knock on the wall.”

In O’Brien’s free hand, the ambience compass whirred, as if trying to warn us of something in mechanical tongue. I pressed my ear to the paper lining the wall above the wainscoting, powerfully anxious to do so as Quinn reached to give an unenthusiastic knock or two above my head.

“Can you tap back to us?” Clement urged. “Spirit, can you … Quinn, knock again.”

With a sigh, Quinn knocked a second time, more deliberately. Once, twice. I leaned against the wall and listened. The seconds passed in mockery. I counted them to the ticking of the nearby grandfather clock and my heartbeat, not quite sure what to expect.

THUD!

A framed piece of hand stitching fell, narrowly missing my nose as I staggered back with a stunned gasp. I had felt the punch to the wall with my cheek and my fingers and my ear, and the violent vibrations were as if something with actual physical clout had struck it with immense force from the other side.

Everyone flew into diligent discord.

“Did you hear that?” I cried.

“O’Brien, note immediately—”

“Can you make that sound again for us? Mrs. Ollens? Mr. Nichols?”

“Now, that wasn’t very nice at all!” Clement snapped. “Are you angry with us? Do you not want us here?”

A flash of reflected light caught my eye as the pendulum in the grandfather clock swayed to a more violent beat, thrown hard by someone or something unseen.

“Look,” I said, struggling to get everyone’s attention. And they did look, it wasn’t that they didn’t hear, but they looked only in time to watch the old ornate clock go tumbling and crashing to the floor as if shoved in a rage.

Glass shattered. Lacquered details crunched. A thick silence followed, empty except for the shards of our surprise and tense, guarded confusion.

But the Missing thing was gone, as fast as it had come, leaving us with the mess. We all stood rooted in place for a lengthy moment or two. Finally, Clement uttered a tetchy sigh and dragged his hand through his hair.

“Well,” he muttered, “that will be deducted from my cheque.”

***

“I don’t understand,” I said as we took down the bells around the Nichols house. Dawn was upon us, after the last few long, boring hours of silence. “Are we not to see the body snatchers as with the Waterloo wraith?”

“They’re not body snatchers,” Clement spat, rolling his eyes. “They’re the Stygian Society.”

“We aren’t pursuing banishment, so no body snatchers,” Quinn explained.

Clement heaved an exasperated sigh to remind us: not body snatchers.

“And we aren’t pursuing banishment because Mr. Nichols explicitly requested we not,” Quinn finished.

I nodded as if to say, I see, though I only half understood.

“It seems to me you have in your home a semi-conscious enigma,” Clement disclosed to the Nichols family upon their return. I hadn’t expected nocturnal investigating to be this rigorous; I was not unaccustomed to late nights, but I was so exhausted suddenly that the chirping of the birds and the hustle and bustle of suburban traffic—and the Nichols children’s solemn staring—really gnawed at my nerves.

“The spirit is slightly aware of its surroundings, and what it’s doing, though it lacks the agency to fully manifest … ”

“But is it my father?” Mr. Nichols urged.

“The communication we made was inconclusive,” Clement said flatly, as if reciting—though not without a deep, apologetic frown. “I’m sorry, sir, but there simply is not enough evidence to presume as much. I’m not saying it’s not your father … but I can’t say that it is, either. With time, the phantom may grow strong enough or clever enough to prove its identity to you. And—here’s my card, again—should you ever wish the spirit be removed, you know where to call.”

As compassionate as he was with poor Mr. Nichols, on the ride back to Portland Place, Clement was once more his fractious self.

“I hate inconclusive cases,” he grumbled, scowling out the small window of the coach. “I absolutely hate them. I’d rather just burn the bones or bottle the spirit and get it over with.”

“If you need help writing up your report … ” O’Brien began as we made our way in the grey of creeping dawn through the main building to the dormitories.

“O’Brien,” I said blearily, “can’t we just meet tomorrow? When I can think straight again? Please.”

“The lounge at elevenses,” he agreed merrily.

I was worn out and worried I might be too naïve. Shaken, but hopelessly romanced by the eerie spectacle of someone else’s haunted home. Yet the whole night had been as amazing as the first. There was no denying that.

A slip of paper waited for me, stuck neatly folded in the door of my room.

My heart lurched to my throat. A note from my father, perhaps? A note from Westwood, or someone else, saying I was to be dismissed due to no formal application, or …

I plucked the page out with cold fingers and slowly smoothed it open. In slanted, scratchy blue ink, it read:

Trunk delivered in your name. Stored in footman’s room, first floor. – Clerk

Zelda and Cook had come with my things. I’d missed them. My belongings were downstairs, and I was too tired to drag the trunk up on my own.

Feeling foolish for how easily my throat tightened and tears burned the backs of my eyes, I entered my room with a stiff creak of the door and just let it fall shut carelessly behind me as I dropped down on the bed. I’d undress in a moment, when I was not so winded by the sharp, sad pinch to my heart.

***

“This is Officer Bartlett,” d’Pelletier said, holding his hands out to the Officer and me as if waiting to guide us through greeting each other. But then he squinted at me in that slightly tactless fashion of his. “You look as though you haven’t had a wink of sleep,” he remarked.

I blushed, peering up at him unenthusiastically from the table in the dining hall, at which I’d settled with black tea and something to eat.

“My first case was last night,” I mumbled around the last corner of my toast and marmalade.

“Hard on you, hmm?”

“Not particularly,” I lied.

“It’s quite the field, isn’t it?” D’Pelletier’s companion stuck a hand out. “Mr. Pierre Bartlett, Officer, Chief Bookman of the religious files.”

I shook his hand with a pinched smile. “Will Winchester,” I said shyly. “Scouting inspector. Spectral Department.”

“Yes, it’s a pleasure.” Bartlett beamed at me. He was shorter than d’Pelletier—it wasn’t unimaginable that most people were—with a soft, unremarkable but well-kept beard and emotive eyes. Fatherly. He felt so fatherly. “You’re getting along nicely, I hope?”

“Yes, sir,” I murmured.

“You’ve had your first case? Have you been taught the report system?”

“Yes, sir. O’Brien briefed me.”

“And the organisation of research and department files?”

“No, sir, I … ”

“Pierre,” d’Pelletier saved me. “His training was waived. He’s learning on the fly.”

I was worried my precarious situation, the matter of my gender ambiguity, might not hold up outside of my father’s house, where all the world’s standards and rules were already topsy-turvy. But to feel so unsuspected, and hear the most comfortable pronouns spoken with such ease the last few days, was absolutely bolstering.

Bartlett raised his brows high in a tender series of creases. “Is that so?” he prompted. “Well, I won’t presume, but if you are still in need of a tour, I’d be happy to oblige.”

I couldn’t contain a bashful smile. “That would be grand.”

Bartlett kept his stride slow so as not to out-walk me as he led me around the big building. I didn’t tell him I’d already explored a bit myself. D’Pelletier tagged along. As Bartlett talked, I couldn’t help but wonder about what it might be like to have someone like him as a father. He seemed so pleasant and gentle, eager to teach—smiling as though he wished to protect anything I might tell him. And when I looked to him while he spoke to me, he looked me back in the eye.

“The Cross was founded by a small club of men in 1599,” he explained, “including a Rosicrucian and a nobleman’s clairvoyant daughter, who all came together in mutual obsession with myth, mystery, and mysticism. ‘Nulli sunt casus’ was their oath. Or … ”

“ ‘There are no accidents,’ ” I murmured.

“Yes.” He softened, warmly.

“Officer Bartlett … ” I waited, not sure it was polite. “What is your gift?”

Bartlett laughed, a rustling little chuckle. “Oh, I am merely a scholar.” His eyes hung on me. “I take it, then, you have extrasensory perceptions?”

I nodded. “Clairvoyant,” I said, and was immediately self-conscious because I had not expected to feel so proud saying it.

“Hmm.” Bartlett said as we stood admiring the hall of notable scholars, a cramped and humble little corridor of a gallery with several portraits and personal donations from significant members of the past. “You’re one of our greatest assets, those of you with mysteries in your blood. Men still scorn and denounce the unknown forces of nature we study, yet revel in modern technology as if it isn’t any more mystical. Why, the Bell Telephone Company helps voice escape time and place, does it not? But sensitives, like yourself, are our proof, aren’t you?”

D’Pelletier sighed. “He did say he was a scholar, didn’t he?”

Bartlett smiled down at me again, issuing a little shrug as if to say, Oh, well. This time, I didn’t even try not to; I just smiled happily back.

***

After Bartlett and d’Pelletier had gone, I lingered outside the fourth-floor libraries, a wing Bartlett had affectionately called Hermes Hall.

This place seemed suddenly so vast and full of unfair mysteries. Rather overwhelming. My chest tightened. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for this. Or even worthy of it. I didn’t know. There was so much to learn …

Voices echoed from a nearby lounge, spilling out with light from open windows. There was a garden of flowers painted on the purple walls inside; I glimpsed as much through the hinges of one of the double doors as I peeked in, secretly.

A number of men and ladies grouped there on the burgundy loveseats and mauve armchairs. Laughter, the light melody of pomp and gossip over the chatter of silver spoons in fine china and sighs of tobacco smoke.

“There are so many rumours about that bloody decadent family,” some man said with a little intonation of doubt.

Another chuckled haughtily. “Yes, but what else keeps a great family around, besides money and mystery?”

“It may be for the better, Mr. Myers.” This man spoke in a thickly conciliatory way. “Never mind inheritance or birth rights, a young lord is still a young lord and deserves some time for himself before resigning to the responsibility of the ‘great family,’ isn’t it so?”

“I just never imagined he’d look so … ” Another of the men dropped his voice to the low and secretive hum of guilty talk. “That eye of his. I didn’t think it was as terrible as they said, and—such a pity!”

I froze. Young lord … that eye … They spoke of Inspector Kingsley, didn’t they?

Kingsley! I’d been wondering where he was; I had yet to see him. Then again, he was a nobleman. Why would he board at Portland Place? I wasn’t sure what I would say to him when I saw him next—perhaps just thank him for that night on Waterloo—hopefully without dissolving into a rambling fool in the presence of someone like him. About my age, I’d guess, a member of the Black Cross, and one of the youngest Earls in present London society, legacy carrier of the prominent Kingsleys.

“You’ve never seen his eye before joining on here?”

“No, I haven’t … ”

“How the devil have you escaped an encounter with a Kingsley party on the town for so long, friend?”

I didn’t think Kingsley’s eye was so terrible. It hadn’t bothered me at all that night on Waterloo.

One of the ladies uttered a short, derisive laugh. She looked barely of age, but she seemed a gossiping queen already. “Don’t let him fool you! You might call it his ‘badge of honour.’ God knows that whole family’s moral compass has been defective for decades. It’s worse with every generation. Dorland, tell Mr. Samuel about the 1886 All Hallows’. Lady Kingsley was murdered—”

“Now, Jessica,” the man beside her chastised, but it was hardly stern. “She wasn’t murdered.”

“Uncle, you’ve been in that objectionable house, you cannot say there’s not something about that family. They’re witches, I promise you, bordering on the criminal. Their history’s in Hermes Hall and everything, just out of reach unless you’ve got the key. There’s an entire chapter of it on le monsieur noir—their ‘black gentleman.’ Did you know Hyacinth believes it’s a familiar, not just a spirit?”

Witches … Again, there it was. Witchcraft. A strange heaviness crept through me, a cautious breath lingering on my lip.

“The man’s an actor. Hired to keep us spooked. The manor’s an occultist playhouse, and quite fun!”

“We live in that type of world now, Miss Jessica,” someone else added with a smile. “Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Davenport brothers?”

A new man spoke up, his voice thin and slightly monotonous. He was out of my line of sight from the hinges. “Well, Hyacinth also suggests the boy is manic, but I doubt that. Growing up without proper authority will produce a wild child of any class.”

“Can’t have a Kingsley without fine wine, fine dining, fine fashion, and fine love, Dorland—”

“Bordering on the criminal, I’m telling you!” That Miss Jessica’s laughter was an awful, shameless sound. How did such a young lady hold so much sway in conversation without anyone keeping her in check?

With that, the talk in the lounge moved on effortlessly, as if they’d been discussing something as inconsequential as the flooding of Lord’s Cricket Ground, and from behind the other open door to the lounge, there sounded a small sneeze.

I went rigid, eyes wide. Oh God, someone had caught me listening! I pulled away from the door at once, skittering down the hall like it was all I’d been doing in the first place. But as I passed the opposite door, I caught the sneezer who hid behind it.

Inspector Cain Kingsley himself.

He’d been spying on the little party, same as me, cramped between door and wall and squinting through the hinges with the tension of fury obvious in his hunched shoulders. But when he met my eyes, he first became pale and then turned a bright shade of scarlet. Without a word, he grabbed my arm, and we fled the scene of the crime.

I stumbled after him with no real opposition, though I did slow a bit as I glimpsed a figure standing in the corner at the end of the hall, behind a potted plant. Lithe and pale, a young man in all modest black, not even a dash of color to his old-fashioned cravat. He wasn’t alive; I knew by the placid way he stared at us, the way he seemed to blur into the shadows of the paneled wall behind him. First the girl in my room, now this one. Just how many ghosts haunted the Black Cross itself?

“Oh—” Kingsley sputtered with an embarrassed laugh, as he dragged us both into a nearby library and hurried to shut us in. “Oh, you gave me a start.”

He leaned back against the doors and looked to me with a willful sort of guilt, just daring me to call him out. He was a bit shorter than me, which was something; while I’d inherited a bit of my father’s height, I wasn’t unusually tall.

“Wait.” His brow knotted and he relaxed a bit. “It’s you!”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out at first save for a shy little laugh. “Yes, hello,” I said finally. “I received a calling card from Inspector Clement, and … ”

“Oh, I knew you were here.” Kingsley shrugged. “He told me.”

I bobbed my head, not sure whether I should shake his hand or not. “Will Winchester,” I confirmed.

“That’s right.” He stepped around and into a cluster of books left stacked all about, plopping down to sit cross-legged on the floor among the towers like the bastions of his own private castle. He looked over, brows raised, waiting for me to join him.

“This is delightful!” he cried as I sat down, too.

“Lord Kingsley—”

He flashed me a look, one colourless eye and the other dark blue. I was trying very hard not to stare at the colourless one, but I kept hearing the gossip again and again in my mind. Badge of honour … that family’s moral compass has been defective …

“Please,” he said with the usual dignity expected of a young nobleman, “call me Cain. I trust you with such informalities.”

“Cain,” I corrected myself with a quick smile.

An uncomfortable hush spun out between us. He knew I’d heard everything they’d said about him and his family. But he must have been aware they had a file somewhere; I guessed he’d be much more distraught if he’d only just found out.

More paramount than that … why would there be a file on a family, his family, locked in the archives of an order for occultist investigation?

I cleared my throat. “What they said about you in there … don’t worry, I know better than to trust parlour talk as right and true.”

Cain looked off elsewhere, moodily. There was something about him uniquely puckish and grim at once; the dark little freckle just off the corner of his right eye made him look all the more romantic. “I’m well-acquainted with the common division between outsiders when it comes to my family,” he said flatly. “Simply put, we’re either loved or deplored. But that’s all well, it’s always been that way. It just infuriates me when certain people degrade us and belittle us, and go so far as to claim criminal witchcraft. Here, of all places! In the Black Cross! Where myth unites with man! In the era of Spiritualism!” He broke off into a weak little scoff. “Anyway. Mr. Winchester … ”

“Please—Will.” I shrugged, smiling faintly as I echoed him, “I believe you can be trusted with such informalities?”

His eyes danced over to me, a glance through his lashes. “Will,” he repeated, returning the soft smile like our exchange of first names meant we shared some exquisite secret. “Don’t let their talk colour the Cross for you. The science of gossip is extraordinary. Why, I’m sure that’s not the first or the last time they’ll talk about me behind my back.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be friends with them, then.”

“Ha!” Cain laughed and heaved a short huff of a sigh to blow dark hair out of his mismatched eyes. “No,” he said, “they’re not my friends at all.”

It wasn’t hard to believe him a far better representation of the Black Cross than an overheard conversation. Perhaps there was some sort of secret we shared—being hated by those around you was one of those deep pains that couldn’t be commiserated until it was felt, after all. And we’d both felt it, I could see.

“Were you researching?” I asked as we wandered downstairs again, once Cain had deemed it safe to leave our hiding spot.

He glanced at a nearby mirror then looked at me over his shoulder, all wide, soulful eyes—like an owl’s, bottomless and full of secret knowledge. Even his colourless eye could still be so emotive, somehow, in its eerie and silent way.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I was just visiting my not-friends, you see. One of these days, though, I’m determined to get my hands on a key to the locked archives. I want to know what they’ve got written down about my family.”

“What is criminal witchcraft?” I prompted, and immediately bit my mouth shut because it felt too forward. Cain didn’t seem to think so. He shrugged limply.

“Using your gifts with the intent to harm, cause malice, or cheat the laws of the world,” he whispered distractedly, looking at the mirror again. Did he see something I didn’t? Another Black Cross ghost? I snuck a glance before he looked back. There was nothing.

“You want to know what happened to this monstrous eye of mine?” Cain’s voice was sly, just like his smirk. And yet it wasn’t empty of bitterness, either. “The one about which they all so love to chat?”

“Oh, it’s all right—it’s not troubling at all, just different—and I really don’t notice it, mostly. What I mean is, I don’t think any less of you for it. Not that I’d ever think less of you!”

I sighed. I had quite a way with words, didn’t I?

“It’s a diabolical mark,” Cain declared with a swell of pride.

I frowned, clueless.

He cocked his head back and laughed. The sound bounced around the room; two men across the center gallery from us, chatting as they donned their overcoats, sent a judgmental look or two.

“I’m lying,” he said. “Fever, when I was small. I like to say it’s my little monocle into the après-monde.”

“Après-monde?” I whispered.

“The afterworld,” Cain whispered back, fixing me with that haunting owl-like gaze. Monocle into the …

“You have a talent, too, then?” I said before I could consider the question’s politeness or lack thereof. I wanted to know so badly how many others in the Cross were not just dedicated scholars, but … “You’re also in tune with the—um, dead?”

Cain nodded slowly, peering at me through his lashes.

“Well,” I changed the subject again hurriedly, “if you manage to get a key, I would gladly explore the locked files with you.”

Using your gifts with the intent to …

“If I manage to get a key, you’ll be the first to know,” Cain promised with a perfectly infectious smile.

From the windows, I watched him disappear into the dormitories across the way. I didn’t know what to think or feel. Cain Kingsley, of the great Kingsley family, was far more like me than I could have ever possibly imagined. It was odd, to feel unworthy but special at the same time.

More than that, I had the feeling we’d become friends easily, and that was a comfort. I needed a friend.

Open Spectral File No. MCDXCV, Reported apparitions and small other disturbances, Owners troubled, To be investigated Monday, 29 September, by Lead Inspector Clement (Psychosensitive), Inspector Quinn (Police Escort), Medium in Training Dubois, Scouting Inspectors Kingsley and Winchester (Clairvoyants), and two Assistants.

“But her—” Cain spat as I slipped out the Cross’s main door, just after nine o’clock in the evening. He and Clement already waited against the balustrade. His lip curled as though the words tasted bad, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his coat.

“Do you really believe I had a thing to do with it?” Clement gestured impatiently, which, with his hands in his pockets, too, was more a vehement flap of the elbows.

“God, I despise Miss Jessica!”

“Well, Kingsley, if you could kindly put that aside for the night and remind us all of your nobleman’s charm … ”

“If you could kindly put aside your despicable need for female attention.”

“I won’t promise anything.”

“And neither shall I!”

“Good evening,” I said timidly from the stoop.

Cain leapt at the opportunity. “Will, you remember Miss Jessica from the lounge the other day! The most querulous, contemptuous, pretentious girl—”

Clement cleared his throat and nodded his head hard, alerting us to the fact that Miss Jessica herself was approaching from the dormitories.

“Good evening, men!” she called with a girlish wave. She was tall and thin and seemed too beautiful to be as querulous and contemptuous as Cain claimed, except that I’d already personally witnessed her relentless disdain. Through the gap of her fashionable cloak, with the glinting silver chain at the throat, I glimpsed a regal vivandière-style top cut to perfectly accentuate her frame.

Miss Jessica strolled to a stop beside us with a rosy smile that might have been amiable if not for her foxlike gaze. “Well,” she chirped, tossing silky blonde hair over one shoulder. “Apologies. My uncle has no perception of time once he’s set on conversation. Here I thought I’d bear the shame of tardiness alone, and you’d all be waiting, but it seems we’re still missing … ” She counted with a dance of the gloved finger. “Three? Let’s hope punctuality does not play too pivotal a role in the night’s work, then.”

Cain threw a savage look Clement’s way. Clement’s mouth hung gently open like he thought he had something to say, but he merely squinted at Miss Jessica in mild disbelief before glancing at me. As if I had anything to offer him.

“Oh!” He snapped his attention away to where Quinn rounded the corner from Park Crest. “Here’s Quinn now, too! How are you, my lovable brute?”

***

Overgrown shrubbery and sweeping cork oaks clustered about the graveled drive of Triviat Manor, walling out the jagged outline of the city. It was refreshing. As we made our arrival, a small girl peeked down from an upstairs window, watching.

“Hello, hello, good evening! Oh, you can’t know the relief I feel to finally have you here. But where is my head?” Lord Triviat shook each of our hands as his valet hurried to our aid. But we had little luggage to attend to, just our cases of equipment, and so the man seemed a little lost as Lord Triviat made the rounds of introduction.

Lord Triviat was tall and broad, and if not for his state of excitable relief, he might have been formidable-looking with his mascara-curled mustache and the silver streaks in his ink-black hair. He acquainted us with his sister Lady Drucilla and his mother; his mother, he said, who was hunched over a walking stick with a crystal horse’s head and looked fit to crumble into a heap of dusty skin at any moment, had owned the house with his father. When his father fell in the second Anglo-Burmese war, he’d inherited it all.

“Is your wife inside with your daughter, then?” I asked. All at once down the line of us, each of my teammates pinned me with a pointed look as though I’d done something unspeakable.

Lord Triviat’s mouth gave a little twitch and his eyes shone brightly as they roamed me head to toe. Smiling uneasily, I shrank back.

“Mr. Triviat, apologies … ” Clement began, but Lord Triviat shook his head kindly to halt him. He cleared his throat.

“There are no children here and my wife moved to stay with her sister two years ago,” he divulged. “She couldn’t bear the house any longer after our … daughter died.”

Clement snatched me by the back of the coat as we all moved to follow inside.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” I said preemptively, looking around at Clement with wide eyes. “I read the case file, and it did mention the death of his daughter, but apparently it wasn’t as thorough as to note there were no other children—”

“You are a scouting inspector!” he fired back. “Lead inspectors and police escorts do the interviews. Are you a lead inspector or police escort?”

I hardened, peering up at him without lifting my chin. “No.”

“Then keep your pretty mouth shut, fool!”

Lord Triviat led us up the front steps and into the manor through doors of blond wood. Giltwood Corinthian columns welcomed us inside, stretching to a rose-red ceiling with detailed medallions and chandeliers.

“The entry hall,” Lord Triviat began the tour, “is not the favourite place to be alone, particularly at night. The maids say doors open and close on their own. My sister hears walking, someone following her. She says she sees ‘things’ on the upper balcony when there is no one there at all. Not even the domestics, she insists. I’ve stayed awake through the night on more than one occasion, suspecting an intruder. But there never is. It’s just … peculiar, I suppose.”

He led on through the billiards room, and a drawing room, and a dark and solemn back hall to a set of servants’ stairs. With thick wooden steps with alternating spindles along the handrail, the ceiling very low and close, they twisted sharply up and up and up, seeming as if they’d reach to the heavens if we so endeavoured to climb. Lord Triviat’s face was hard and pale as he stood with one hand on the banister and offered us a thin, pensive smile.

“This,” he said, “is where my daughter Della tumbled to her death in the year 1887. I believe I provided as much information when I filed my report to your offices.” His eyes flickered to me, just briefly. “She was naught to six. Once … well, I profess I am a wise man, and a sane man, and a moral man, but once or twice I thought I saw her here. Now, I am sure it was a father’s grief but Drucilla insisted I tell you. Drucilla also insists it is my daughter who tugs at her dress and touches her hand. That shadows peek at her from above here, crawl down from the upper flight and sit on the bottom step to watch her pass.”

The girl I’d seen in the upper window, the girl in a stark white dress with her dark curls, peeping down at us … she had not looked as young as Della was when she’d died. But who could she be, then?

I didn’t say anything about it yet. Maybe a little vindictively, after Clement’s censure earlier.

“The windows in the attic open of their own accord,” Lord Triviat disclosed with a wearied sigh. “The pressing matter is that the windows are old, and the only way they stay open at all is if one is to hold them. It frightens the domestics half to death, but again I say, the windows are old.”

“All in all, it is a beautiful house,” Clement said. “Have any other tragic deaths occurred on the premises, that you may know of?”

By this time, after Lord Triviat insisted we relocate to the downstairs drawing room for cigarettes and coffee, his mother was falling asleep in the chair near the mantle. The drawing room opened onto the foggy lawn, small, scrolled columns flanking the French windows. Standing with his back to the wide glass and lighting a bejeweled pipe, Lord Triviat’s silhouette was a bit eerie.

“Drucilla is my baby sister, you see,” he replied forthwith. “We had a second sister, Deborah, who took to typhoid fever, quarantined up in the atrium. Other than that, and of course my darling Della, ‘tragic’ deaths, you ask? I cannot be certain. The house has been my family’s for a long time, after all.”

“Have you contacted Mr. Henry Sidgwick at the SPR, Mr. Triviat?” Clement asked, putting out his cigarette in a gold dish with cherub faces at the corners.

“I am not interested,” Lord Triviat said thickly, “in séances or news acclaim.”

Clement nodded. He smiled, charming and compassionate. He said, “And what, sir, if you don’t mind my asking, is the goal for which you hope of our inspecting your home?”

Lord Triviat returned the smile. But he looked cold suddenly, puffing on his pipe. Cold and full of bitterness. Behind him, his sister Lady Drucilla stared hopelessly out the glass doors at the dark rolling lawn.

“All I wish,” he declared, “is for this thing to be gone, if there is even a thing here at all.”

We stood to shake hands. I doubted he realised he did it—or perhaps he did—but Lord Triviat’s eyes kept wandering back to me. I pretended I couldn’t tell; I felt strangely guilty for having shaken him so deeply by asking about the girl in the window. Always, always feeling guilty for scaring others.

Finally, the Triviats departed with their servants to stay at Claridge’s while we inspected the big house. In the drawing room, we unpacked the small equipment trunks.

“This Franklin meter is broken,” Clement complained with a huff as he tossed the instrument aside. “Look at it. The gauge is loose. It couldn’t read a lightning bolt if it struck it right at the tip.”

“It uses electricity, then?” I asked politely.

Clement met my eyes over his shoulder, one brow not quite cocked but lifted in disdain. “Yes, Winchester. Named after the American Benjamin Franklin, a working meter gauges ambient charge, of which the association to spiritual occurrences, proposed by Black Cross Spectral Department Research Inspector Lyman, was officially adopted as working theory last year. He even won a lovely little plaque. I feel as though I already mentioned such, but I can’t remember.”

Blushing furiously, I looked away with a tight frown. Well, I would have settled for a simple explanation, without the facetious flair.

“You may call me Will,” I reminded in a tiny voice. “And I don’t think you told me about this tool in particular.”

Clement frowned at me a moment, then looked away.

The team—and by team, I mean everyone else talking over the heads of myself, O’Brien, and Assistant Young—decided the claims of apparitions and phantom touches were typical of something intelligent. The dead daughter, perhaps.

I kept my mouth shut, brows raised. Yes, Lord Triviat’s poor daughter—but what about his sister Deborah? If it wasn’t Della I’d seen in the upstairs window, it had to have been Deborah. She’d died at no older than thirteen, perhaps, by the way she’d looked. But nobody asked.

“We have the bells and a pendulum,” Miss Jessica said, sounding quite bored already and disregarding the way Cain ignored her.

Clement tossed her the pendulum, a crudely-cut crystal of some sort nestled into silver filigree, on a chain much like a rosary’s. Not like the stone around Clement’s throat … which he’d apparently removed at some point earlier.

“All right, then,” he said. “Quinn, let’s rig the toys in the nursery with bells. That way if they move, we’ll know. Oh, and the attic windows.”

“Clever,” Quinn grunted.

Set-up and invalidation took the better part of two hours and handfuls of notes regarding play of light and sound carriage; the manor was so large and the shadows already seemed so alive. Then, slowly but surely, O’Brien and Young doused nearly every light, and the silence that followed was like a tomb.

“We’ll press on in this fashion,” Clement decreed, standing with his hands on his hips in the middle of the wide vestibule. “Quinn, you and I shall take Young and see if we might provoke anything in the attic. Kingsley, try the nursery … ”

He stopped, turning only his face to the left, where a broad, ornate threshold led off into the neighbouring room. The lamplight danced on the planes of his face, softening him to his real age again, especially with his eyes so wide and intent. Looking for something.

“The far corner, near the billiards room,” he went on in a murmur, mouth scarcely moving around the words. “I’m unsure whether it’s shadow play or a trick of the mind, but every now and again I swear something moves over there … O’Brien, you remain with Miss Jessica and Winchester here. We’ll reconvene at midnight to survey the servants’ stairs where the Triviat girl died.”

My heart sank. He was separating me from those with whom I was familiar—to spite me for earlier? I tried to catch his eyes, pathetically panicked. Alone, in foreign dark again, and with someone whom I scarcely knew. Not that I knew any of the others very well.

I couldn’t come across ill-equipped for the job, though. I needed to prove myself so as not to let Westwood down—or myself. I lingered at the foot of the grand stairs, watching the others off, leaving me and my assigned partners in the vast, ominous shadows of the vestibule.

Miss Jessica tapped her foot, waiting for O’Brien and me to join her under the central chandelier. Once close enough, she clasped a firm hand on my elbow. There was nothing friendly or helpful about it. Her eyes widened in the dull lamplight as she looked me over in that foxlike way.

“You’re a special case, hmm?” she said.

“Excuse me?” I wanted to ask, but instead I whispered a rather irritated, “Ouch,” and squinted at her distrustfully until she freed my arm from her grip.

“I know they waived your training. Chesley has complained all about it and Westwood’s other recent lapses in judgment. He’s getting old, poor man.” Miss Jessica’s gaze drifted carefully around my face and stature. She softened, but only a bit. “You’re a despondent little thing, aren’t you? Well, apparently, Westwood imagines you’ve got quite the gift hidden somewhere in there, waiting to be finessed.”

She reached out and touched a finger to my temple as if to confirm: quite the gift in there. I pulled away with a narrow, startled glance.

“I do not care what you can do or from whence you’ve come, or how blessedly handsome you are,” she said. “I won’t treat you any differently for it.”

O’Brien looked between us with his usual skittish worry, probably anticipating some heated exchange. There wasn’t to be one. The criticism might have gotten to me if not for that last remark. Blessedly handsome.

“I would never ask you to, Miss Jessica,” I replied, biting back a scoff of a laugh.

“Your voice hasn’t even deepened yet.” She gave a dainty sniff, casting me a sidelong glance. “And you’re surely not of any special family.”

“You’re right to assume as much,” I conceded with an unaffected smile.

A very large painting of Lord Triviat and his wife hung in the hall, beside a smaller but equally magnificent piece of a tiny girl with dark hair and dark eyes and a perfectly puckered mouth. Della, most likely. Together we stood with our lamps lifted to admire it. It was slightly crooked. I reached out to straighten it a bit as Miss Jessica moved off to wander the perimeter of the front hall.

“Miss Jessica is rather … dominating,” O’Brien whispered, so close I could feel his breath on my shoulder.

“Is she?” I said flatly, not in any particular need for more consideration of her character. I’d surely gathered enough by now.

“Her uncle is a Council member at the Society of Psychic Research.”

“The Society for Psychical Research,” I corrected.

“Miss Jessica is young, like you and Kingsley. Don’t call her Jessie. She hates that.”

“Trust me, O’Brien, I haven’t the slightest desire for us to be friendly enough that I should call her anything other than Jessica. O’Brien, what’s the pendulum?”

“Ah!” He bent a little, like a drooping tree, to talk level with me. “It’s quartz and lodestone, as well. Moves in the direction of spiritual aura.”

“Listen, Inspector,” Miss Jessica said from the wide archway leading off to the right of the vestibule. “I would like you to remain here. O’Brien and I shall get a head start on the servants’ stairs. Call for me should anything stir up. If not, just … keep surveying.”

“Should I leave a taper?” O’Brien waved the long unlit wax stick, worried. “You won’t have a lamp when we go.”

“No,” I murmured. Bless little O’Brien. “I’ll be fine.”

They left, taking the light with them. I heaved a sigh and sat down with my back to the wall, struggling not to dwell on how much I despised Miss Jessica for leaving me alone and hated Clement more for leaving me with her in the first place.

But the longer I sat alone, the more I decided perhaps I wasn’t as fine as I’d thought.

The manor was so large, and I so small and vulnerable in the dark. I stood, a bit nervous now, brushed off my legs and stepped into the pale squares of moonlight that fell in from the window above the front doors. As though the shadows couldn’t touch me if I weren’t touching them. I tried to just let myself slip further and further in tune with the house. The cobwebs in the corners, the stray moonlight glittering off glass and crystal gas sconces, the creak of the building settling, the dull shuffling of our men moving around upstairs, distant, there if I listened hard enough, the small whisper behind me …

I turned with a scrape of my heel on the floor, eyes wide.

Nothing.

Perhaps it was something outside—the wind in the trees, against the eaves. Leaves rustling on the portico. O’Brien and Miss Jessica, accidentally too loud. Or Clement, up the stairs, wondering why on earth I was alone?

No. I knew better.

My heart thudded hard just below my throat and the silvery tang of nerves rose on the back of my tongue. Just as in the Nichols house, I felt so disadvantaged in dark I did not know. This was not Waterloo; this was not my attic room with Charlie and Colette.

The words were chalky in my mouth as I managed to whisper back, “Who’s there?”

The stillness was heavy like a held breath. I could feel someone—something—looking at me. Dreadful. Unnerving. My chest tightened. I turned, slowly.

There she was.

At the door to the billiards room, opposite where Miss Jessica had taken off with O’Brien. A shadow in the shape of a smaller person. And whichever Missing girl it was, she kept looking at me as I looked at her.

“I see you,” I said, flinching at my own tiny voice. I wanted to run, get somewhere with light and people. But I couldn’t. This was what I was supposed to do. I glanced around, keenly conscious of how very alone I was in the silence.

When I looked back, the shadow was gone.

“Winchester!” Miss Jessica called shrilly.

Shamefully, I wasted not a second in reporting to her.

“We’ve heard movement on the stairs,” O’Brien recounted, eyes wide and quartz pendulum clutched tightly in his wiry fingers.

“Have you?” I husked, then tried to clear the knot in my throat as I ran my hands down the sides of my neck a few times, to calm the shiver of goosebumps still there. “Where on the stairs?”

“Closer to the top.”

“Listen, Winchester,” Miss Jessica still went on, “I don’t care if Westwood thinks you’re a prodigy. You’re just another Black Cross inspector to me, and that’s all there is to it.”

Stunned, I shot her a look. Westwood had called me a prodigy? I’d just assumed derision from her earlier. My jaw tightened. Either way, her chatter was getting very annoying very quickly. “Fine by me, Inspector.”

“The one thing I won’t tolerate—”

“Oh, only one thing?”

“Yes, and it’s mediocrity. So go on, then, Winchester, if you’re such a gifted young man, prove you’re worth going straight to inspection without training.”

Aggravated, I stormed up one small flight of the servants’ stairs to where the slanted ceiling was so low I could feel it at the top of my head, and there where O’Brien’s lamp did not penetrate the shadows, I called, “Della, will you come speak with us?”

Nothing.

Miss Jessica held out a hand. “O’Brien, the pendulum.” He passed it to her. She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said, tenderly, to counter my impatience. “Come, spirit, and give us a sign of your presence.”

I stayed vigilant for any sort of response. It was only my second inspection; I didn’t consider myself proficient in antiphonary inquiries yet at all. But I was not exactly comfortable practising in the company of Miss Jessica.

“I swear there was movement,” O’Brien said, a look of failure stamped across his face.

“I believe you,” I whispered. I sat down on a step, lacing my fingers below my chin. “It’s one of the clients’ complaints, anyway.”

Miss Jessica daintily touched the middle of her forehead with the first two fingers of her free hand. “Give me a moment, please.”

“Medium in training,” O’Brien reminded me.

“So I’ve heard,” I reminded him.

“I feel people.” Miss Jessica sighed. “So many people, moving along these stairs … I see them, yes. Two girls, playing … ” Her eyes fluttered open and she crossed her arms, pendulum hanging limply from one fist as she twirled a lock of hair around a slender finger. “I don’t think, presently, there’s much activity in this spot. We should move on.”

“We’re not even supposed to be here,” I said just short of patiently. “And anyway, in the front hall, I … ”

A dull ringing struck up in my ear. The sound sharpened to a point then faded out, leaving its pressure behind, and a gentle touch like a rolling raindrop dusted along the side of my neck.

I flinched away, swiping at my shoulder in annoyance, half expecting to find something there. A cobweb, a moth.

Yet there wasn’t a thing.

“Phantom touches,” I murmured, hand lingering at my neck.

“Hmm?” Miss Jessica raised her brows. Suddenly, the pendulum dangling from her fingers veered forth and hung eerily in the air as if someone had taken it in two fingers and pulled it taut.

“Shift in ambient charge!” O’Brien sputtered, hurrying into his knapsack for paper and pencil.

What if … ?

My heart jumped. I twisted around halfway, the words rushing out into the swell of shadows on the stairs: “The pretty girl who was in the upstairs window—is that you?”

Miss Jessica and O’Brien both gave me their own looks of doubt.

Thud, scrape, thud, thud, shuffle—!

Something dashed up the stairs. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a flutter of white, like little doves taking flight. A gown. A gown, and one bare, grey foot.

It was her, the girl from the window, running up the stairs away from us. I knew it. I saw her! So clear but gauzy, nearly see-through like Charlie or Colette often were. I felt her footsteps from where I sat. Up, up the stairs, away from us …

I shot to my feet. “Hello!” I called. My breath caught in my throat with almost irrational excitement. “It’s you, isn’t it? From earlier? I believe I saw you out there in the hall just now, as well!”

Miss Jessica almost pushed me over as she hurried past, two steps at a time, pendulum out and face upturned to the twisting servants’ stairs. I followed; O’Brien trailed after, trying to keep the little lamp steady as we bounded up.

“Della, darling, is that you?”

“No,” I snapped, “it’s Miss Deborah. She’s too old to be Della.”

“Well, we haven’t confirmed that yet, have we?”

“It’s Deborah.”

The three of us stumbled forth from the servants’ stairs onto the mezzanine floor, which overlooked the vestibule where the rest of our team had just reconvened. Nothing awaited us.

Miss Jessica whirled to me. “You saw something in the hall and didn’t say anything?” she hissed. I just brushed past her and hurried down the main stairs again to the others, all out of breath and in a delicious rush.

Quinn stood at that portrait of petite, dark-haired Della Triviat, frowning deeply, with his arms crossed. He reached out and straightened the painting like I had earlier. I slowed to a stop, watching him. It had gone crooked again?

“Why were the lot of you upstairs?” Clement demanded. O’Brien and I both looked to Miss Jessica. She remained silent, mouth in a tart but guilty line. Clement uttered a sound of distaste and sauntered away to hang over the shoulders of O’Brien and Young as they frantically scribbled to catch up with the night’s notes.

Finally, he said, “Well, did anything happen I might like to know?”

“Footsteps, Inspector,” Miss Jessica said, sounding at least a bit repentant. “On the stairs, where the girl died. We followed them up to the balcony then came down to meet with you.”

Clement pointed to Young. “Get out the ambience compass.”

“Men!” Cain half-whispered, looking like a specter himself in the bouncing light as it cast ghastly shadows on his Ganymede face. He gestured subtly up at the grand stairs.

There, at the top, an unusual shadow had swollen up out of the others beside the baluster.

One of the little ghost girls. Outline of a bow in the mass of darkness that was her hair. The end of that white dress, dainty feet …

Two sets of dainty feet. One barefoot, the other even tinier in lace-edged booties.

A chill tingled down my spine. They were both there, and I could see them so clearly. Soft, and colourless, Miss Deborah in a stained nightgown, holding tragic little Della’s hand as Della peered at us all with a head horrifically crooked on her shoulders.

In Assistant Young’s hand, the ambience compass twitched and spun wildly with ghastly clicks and whirs.

“Adelaide?” Cain called, using Della’s full name as it read in the file. “Adelaide, is that you?”

“Shadow figure,” Quinn dictated for the Assistants. “Wholly opaque. In the open. Un-retreating … twenty past midnight.”

Opaque? Could they not see the girls in detail, clear as day?

His eyes wide and cold in the weak light, Clement spoke in a vigilant whisper so low I could barely hear him. “We must achieve as much communication as possible to determine its identity and … ”

He turned suddenly, pointing at me.

“Winchester,” he said. “I want you to approach it.”

Aghast, I gave him a look as if to say, Why me? Clairvoyant, they were all calling me. And Clement had said himself he’d never seen a passerby so susceptible to possession. But …

Dumbly, I started forth.

The Missing girls didn’t move an inch as I climbed the stairs towards them. For a moment, they began to fade out—and then they steadied again, just standing there, watching as I drew near. They reminded me so much of Charlie and Colette. The way Della’s head hung at a terrible broken angle made my skin crawl. Did she know? Did she feel pain?

Very faint, as if spoken through some sort of barrier, Deborah called, “Hello!”

I paused, blinking fast in a flutter of lashes as if to clear my vision of my own thoughts.

“Yes, hello there,” I said breathlessly. “You’re finally speaking with me. Miss Deborah, is it? And Miss Della.”

Of course I’d engaged with Charlie and Colette, back at home. Out of necessity, or boredom, or confused curiosity. But I’d certainly never desired as much with the occasional unfamiliar spirit on the street, or in a conjuring crowd. Whoever would have wished to?

Right now … I did.

“Della, don’t be afraid,” I whispered, echoing Cain. “Deborah, you and I have met already, haven’t we? Listen, we don’t mean any trouble. We only wish to let your Daddy know—your brother—that you’re here. Which one of you opens the attic windows? And who touched my neck earlier?”

I was just a step or two away. Della began to flicker out again, shrinking half behind Deborah. Her little wraith’s voice struggled to pierce the scrim between us, living and dead. High-pitched murmuring, faster, faster, until finally she shot away in a blur, dissolving from sight before she even made it to the shadows. In the blink of an eye, Deborah was gone, too, off with her niece.

“Winchester?” Clement called from the bottom of the stairs.

“Come up here with me!” I spun about in exhilaration, winding an arm around the top of the banister. Miss Jessica and the others be damned; the Nichols case be damned. Like a chill fever, a delicious rush tingled under my skin, and I was perfectly thrilled—

A wave of cold rolled up against my right leg, shuddering from knee to ankle. Startled, I glanced down, and found myself looking right at Della Triviat.

Shimmering bow, tiny hands, the dreadful twist of her head. She inched closer without seeming to really move any limb. I staggered back a step or two, hoping she could not see how her broken neck and bottomless eyes so deeply disconcerted me. Dark, abysmal eyes, like holes cut into her moon-white face.

“Shadow figure!” Young hissed, down below.

Apparently, they really could not see the girls as vividly as I. Della gawked up at me as though she knew very well, as Charlie and Colette also did, the difference between us. That she was dead, and I was not.

“Not scared anymore, hmm?” I whispered, mouth dry.

With a fragile, hollow giggle, she reached for my hand. Her little fingers slipped into mine, cold and not quite material. And then every point of reference swirled towards her, like breathing in steam from a new cup of tea.

The manor, bursting at the seams with daylight! Piano drifted from some faraway room. And the world was like a dream, swimming around me, waxing and waning as if I saw it and heard it and felt it from a distance. Cain was gone. Clement, Quinn, and O’Brien were gone. Everyone I knew, gone.

Because … just as with Kitty on Waterloo, I was little Della Triviat, wasn’t I?

The cold rooms of a plaintive house were filled with warmth and sunshine now, lace curtains fluttering about the painted sills, a bird chirping in a gilded cage in the corner. A voice. Found you!

Laughing. Chasing. Hide and seek. There was a girl, flash of white and gently tangled hair. Always just out of reach, flitting by like a butterfly. Wait for me! Hiding behind a door. Next to a cabinet. Around the corner.

All the adults towered above me. The muffled echo of life tickled my ears like Della’s lacy jumper tickled my knees. I ran through the billiards room, around the butler’s hip. No knapsack and lamps in the vestibule, no; just velvet drapes, damask furniture, gleaming floors. The pale girl in the white dress, peeking from upstairs. Come on, Della, I’ll count to ten … I bumbled up the main stairwell and across the balcony. I knew I shouldn’t hide in the servants’ stairwell because my father had told me innumerable times and so had the governess. Don’t play there, it’s dangerous! The world was so bright. Quite welcoming. Was it really this different, seeing through a child’s eyes? Had I viewed the world this way, once?

I hid behind the short baluster in the corner. I waited. Someone coming. Got you! I jumped out to scare the girl in white, but there was a maid in the way. I tripped. I lost my footing and the world spun around me, spun violently, spun clockwise, counterclockwise, twisted to and fro like the staircase turning up, up, up to the top of the house where maid after maid poked their heads out over the railing screeching for me. And there she was, the girl, staring down from around the last maid’s shoulder. Miss Dellaaa!

The first snap of the neck jolted me out of the trance sick and shocked.

Breathless, disoriented, I grabbed O’Brien—when had he rushed to my side? Ah, to keep me from tumbling down the stairs, myself.

“She was playing with Deborah,” I gasped.

Young wrote frantically. Quinn lumbered up the stairs to us. “Winchester,” he said, voice gravelly. “Deborah died much before Adelaide.”

“I know that!” I was shaking, frantic, all my nerves alight. “Deborah’s ghost, Quinn. They played together. They were playing when Della fell.” I shook loose of O’Brien and pounded down the main stairs, back into the vestibule.

Charlie and Colette, back at home. The little wraith in my Knight’s Hall room. But Della and Deborah were not mine like those three were. Perhaps it was unfair of me to care in a requisite sort of way—my curse, my responsibility. But someone had to care for the Triviat girls as I cared for my ghosts, even if I … didn’t, not truly. Even if I did simply out of principle, and as a hypocrite.

“Where did they go?” I pressed, choking the words out through the dizziness. It made me a bit queasy. The vision’s lingering feelings were distorted and stuck like waking from a too-vivid dream. “The girls! Where did they go? Della’s mother left because she didn’t realise it was her own daughter haunting her, just longing for her love, I’d bet, and—do you think she moves the portrait of herself because she hopes they’ll realise it’s her?”

Clement whirled around and dashed over, throwing Della’s portrait down from the wall. Without a word, he whipped out a folding knife, with which he tore into the paper backing like a dog on the hunt. I jumped, eyes widening.

“Aha!” he cried. With the paper shredded away, he plucked from the back corner of the portrait a small ribbon-bound chunk of dead dark hair.

I couldn’t miss the sudden sharpness in the dark. The girls were back. They watched. Intently.

Miss Jessica rummaged so hard in O’Brien’s knapsack, she almost knocked him over, pulling out a leather bag and little flask like the ones O’Brien had tossed at Clement over Kitty’s rotted coffin. She gave them to Clement, who struck a match. The lock of hair went up in slow, hungry flames until the fire nipped at his fingers. He let go. Before the smouldering hair even hit the floor, it had all burned away, just sparks and pungent-smelling embers dancing in the dark as Clement muttered that same little banishment rite from the night in the Bethnal Green churchyard, crossing himself once, twice, thrice.

“Amen,” he finished.

A small gust swept through the hall, cradling a distant, high-pitched shriek as it streamed through from every corner. Knocked all the portraits around, tugged at the drapes and blew out our lights until it dissolved into a flurry of writhing black shadows over the painting on the floor. Clement staggered back, cursing below his breath.

And then it all just … stopped.

Slowly, quietly, the Assistants moved to collect our things. Clement sent Cain and Miss Jessica to retrieve the bells from around the house.

Della Triviat was gone and something in me locked up. It was a strange feeling, like the gears inside that kept running every man—or woman—just suddenly jolted to a halt.

“We’re lucky I thought to check the portrait,” Clement declared. “Leave it to a lonely, grieving man to keep a lock of his dead daughter’s hair in a painting.”

Purging banishes the spirit completely, O’Brien had said before.

Completely.

A pall of guilt sank over me. I was so accustomed to the presence of the Missing. And now, suddenly, they could just … disappear forever.

My breath hitched. “Must we have done that?” I pressed. Clement looked over, taken aback, as I started towards him swiftly. But Quinn snagged me by the elbow to stop me, easily enough.

“Well, yes,” Clement said, unperturbed by the fact that we had just banished a little ghost still full of feeling. “That was the whole point of our being here, Winchester.”

Feeling quite panicked for some reason, I demanded, “How can you be so bloody insensitive, Clement? Della wasn’t like Kitty! She was conscious of everything and you didn’t feel what she felt. I did. Now we’ve destroyed the last lingering piece of her without … ”

Clement’s eyes flashed. “Without what, Winchester? Taking tea together?”

“We didn’t even discuss it as a team—”

“This is how we work a case.”

“You called a ghost a leftover soul,” I said. “And now there’s nothing left of her. Yet you don’t even seem to care!”

Clement froze, like a form carved from granite as he cut me a new sort of look. Chagrined, but shaken, as if I’d reminded him of something and he did not appreciate it.

Jaw tightening, he said, “Lord Triviat wanted it gone.”

“But it was his daughter. It was the only part of her that was left, and where is she now?”

“Gone! Gone, gone, gone, what the devil don’t you understand about that? She’s bloody gone, Winchester!” Clement’s temper pitched, fuming and informal, as did the volume of his words. Bells rang somewhere upstairs where Cain and Miss Jessica had been sent to collect them. “You act as though we’ve killed someone. She’s already dead. It was a bloody ghost.”

“Yes, all right,” I said, hackles raised. I hadn’t felt this stormy inside since that afternoon in my father’s library, when I’d brought up the Cross. “The girls are dead, but they’d been like us once. Feeling, breathing, thinking, living, and Della still thought and felt, even as a spirit.”

“You’re all bent out of shape because they were intelligents, aren’t you?” Clement scoffed. “Because they felt like something more than what they are. Listen, the mild possession’s still fading. You’ll stop feeling the spirit’s memories soon enough—”

“Lord Triviat loved her!” My chest ached, something twisting and twisting inside it like my voice seemed to twist in my throat. “Do you know what some would give for their father’s love?”

Clement’s damning glance silenced me. He stormed my way through the shivering lamplight. Quinn held out a hand to halt him in his hostility, but he stopped with a scrape against the floor just before Quinn’s arm. I held his glare with my own as calmly as I could, mouth bitten into a firm line.

“I don’t doubt he loves her still,” Clement husked. “But he does not wish to be haunted. How would you feel to have the remnants of a loved one, there, beside you, but losing them and losing them again—no longer yours, no longer alive, not even at rest? How is that fair to a man, to the little dead thing that still feels and thinks? Closing the case is my duty, which is what we have done. Triviat requested the spirit be gone. That’s that, and you’d best take note of it because it’s your duty, as well. I won’t expect any less. Inspection isn’t the place to work out your moral standing.”

Furious, chastened tears stung coldly at the backs of my eyes and tightened up my throat. I wouldn’t have called it a dilemma of moral standing. I certainly felt relief to know Della was no longer consigned to an incomplete sort of existence, but apparently, I harbored some sense of twisted attachment I’d never before realised, and I felt horrible and selfish for never thinking of the Missing like this until it was possible to get rid of them for good.

“It’s not closed, though,” I said bitterly as Clement turned away, raking his hands through his hair. “Deborah is still here, too.”

He stopped, head hung with his hands knotted at the back of it. Thickly, he replied, “Lord Triviat did not request the purging of his sister’s spirit, so yes, as it stands, the present Triviat case is closed. We shall alert him to suspicions regarding a second spiritual presence, but what happens with that is entirely up to him.”

Bastard. I knew it was wrong to target him for how terrifyingly bewitched I was by something so potentially unconscionable. But I was just angry.

I cleared my throat, determined to regain composure. I could at least be better at that than him.

Quinn released my arm. “Don’t push him,” he snapped, not unkindly. And I didn’t. The gripping sense of urgency was dulling down. Clement was right—it was as if the mild possession had left a brief stamp on me. That was disheartening.

Still, I burned inside.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Cain watching from the mezzanine, hands full of bells and twine. I wilted, miserably. At least Miss Jessica had not been audience to my making a fool of myself.

***

“What parameter are you?” Miss Jessica inquired as I climbed into the coach after her, just outside the walled lawn of Triviat Manor. Cain followed shortly. The others took a second cab, with our equipment.

“Ah … second.” I gave a limp shrug. “Not that anyone’s told me what that means.”

“I’m sure they haven’t.” Miss Jessica sighed. She paused, letting the significance of her charity sink in. “Those with spectral gifts are separated into three parameters in the Cross,” she said, raising her voice over the rumble of the coach across packed dirt and cobbles. “Generally, those designated as ‘first’ have more psychical gifts.”

“Psychical,” I repeated, brow knotting.

“For me, mediumship. Men designated as ‘second’ are natural clairvoyants or conduits, such as Kingsley. And yourself.”

“And how is that different?” I murmured.

“Clairvoyants observe the spectral realm through a different lens, is how my uncle puts it. Mediums are thrown images and words, in the backs of their minds.” She gestured to her head, speaking softly as though she’d forgotten to be at odds with me. “Clairvoyants see apparitions clearly whereas most usually see shadow figures. And men of the ‘third’ … well, their gifts can’t be limited to any one parameter.”

I kept my face pressed to the little window and watched London roll by in the sodden nighttime. Small throngs of dolled-up men and women still lingered. Like there, my father and Miss Valérie, in the still-bustling West End looking utterly unconcerned and frivolous per usual as they crowded at a late-night coffee stand, outside a playhouse winding down from a performance, with other Londoners for whom it seemed the luxury of a night out on the town was simple—

I shot back from the window, eyes wide.

Miss Jessica and Cain looked to me curiously, each in their separate ways.

“Whatever’s the matter with you now?” Miss Jessica cocked a brow. “Is the division of spectral parameters so intimidating?”

“No, I … ” I fumbled the ruffled window curtain closed. “Nothing. I just need sleep, perhaps. I’m sorry.”

For one terrible, terrifying moment—I could have sworn it true on my life—my father had looked over just in time to watch our coach pass, and might have caught sight of me just as I’d caught sight of him.

No, couldn’t be. Not possible. Surely it was too dim in our cab, and he was preoccupied. I was being irrational. It had been a long, strenuous evening. If he hadn’t come looking for me by now, he didn’t care to find me. Unless of course he had, but hadn’t looked in the right places yet. And yet again, I could not choose which of those possibilities was the worst.

The sky hung cold and glum over Portland Place as we returned from the Triviats’. I waited for Cain as everyone checked in with the nighttime secretary. He was the last to wander out into the courtyard, gently closing the big door and huddling into his coat, watching his feet with tired, distracted eyes. He was so mysterious in a dreamy sort of way, like he belonged to a fairy tale or a Classical myth.

I opened my mouth for his name, but it tangled with the knot in my throat. What was I even to say? I just didn’t want to be alone. My clash with Clement, how the case had ended, seeing my father …

Cain stopped short at the edge of the humble courtyard and turned half to me with a surprised look like it had taken him a moment to recognise my presence.

“Could we walk a bit?” I blurted, without even saying hello.

He blinked a few times, then livened with the perk of a faint smile. “Of course,” he said.

Grass and stray pebbles on the path crunched underfoot as we wandered the perimeter of the courtyard. The grounds were quiet, serene in that way of the latest hours—or the earliest—when the world felt somehow not real.

“I’ll be let go,” I finally said as we started our second lap around.

Cain gently swung his arms even with his hands deep in his pockets. “Let go?”

“From the Cross.”

He snorted. I wasn’t sure whether to suffer insult or consternation that he found my fear humorous. But his little scoff became a light laugh, an adult sort of giggle not at all at odds with his soft face.

“No, you won’t,” he said, grinning at me through the slants of light as we passed by the occasional door lamp. Similar as there was a chance we were, I still felt so very inferior to him with his lovely rings on his lovely gloves and his dapper, perfectly cut overcoat, even gently disheveled from the night’s work as he was.

“I’m on probation yet,” I insisted. “My behaviour tonight … ”

Cain stopped, casting me a skeptical look. “Have you met the lead inspector with whom you quarreled? Please, Will. Clement is the last man to report insubordination. It was a mere disagreement. Not his first. Certainly not his last.” He shrugged and strolled on towards the side of the main building that met the brick of the dormitory terrace.

“Cain,” I said, following him still, “could I ask a favour of which you just can’t assume any impropriety or implications?”

Cain pursed his mouth to one side like such a preface automatically and mischievously intrigued him. “I never assume,” he teased.

“May I sleep with you tonight?”

Pulling the door open, Cain squinted at me as though he didn’t believe that was the real question. Or perhaps reconsidered his eager reception of it. I blushed, fiercely.

“It’s not as questionable as it sounds, I just don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” I explained, flustered and frustrated by pitiful nervousness. My father and Miss Valérie, my father looking right at the coach, my father … if he had seen me …

Cain hummed to himself in thought. “Well,” he said around a yawn, “I’ve heard from others that some of ‘those bloody decadent Kingsleys’ do quite a lot of questionable things, so it wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary, right?”

He flashed me a faint but saucy smile as he moved through the long, narrow parlour to the King’s Hall stairs.

“It’s fine, Will,” he said, as always so pleasant when he had no reason to be. “I don’t mind at all.” Steep stairs creaking underfoot as he led the way to his lodgings, already stripping off coat and gloves, he murmured, “Clement really shook you, didn’t he? He’s hard like that on people—at least, the ones in whom he invests stock. I promise, he does not waste time disagreeing with someone if he does not like them.”

“Pardon?”

We came to his room. He hung up his things. “He thinks you’re a wunderkind, Will. A socially awkward, completely naïve little wunderkind.”

I lingered in the doorway, hardly sure what to make of that. I was suspicious. And, frankly, overwhelmed. First Westwood, now Clement?

“It’s just because I’m young,” I said. “And happened to surprise him that night on Waterloo. Please don’t profess I’m some special thing.”

Cain’s eyes lingered on me. He nodded idly. “That’s probably true,” he said. “I receive similar treatment at times. Rather cruel, to make us think we’re special, hmm?”

His room wasn’t much larger than mine, but the cramped handful of posh furnishings made it feel smaller. His family had probably insisted on the four-poster bed, the narrow armoire, the upholstered armchairs below a tall, rich portrait on the wall. Even his desk chair was not the standard, especially not the drapes that matched the Kingsley-crested blue and silver of the bedclothes. On the desk, a lamp with Bohemian pendalogues and an orange waiting to be eaten.

Cain threw back his blankets. With a tiny shiver for the partially open window, he began changing his clothes and cried gaily, “It’s like we’re brothers! I haven’t had a slumber party since my cousins visited from Cambridgeshire.”

I glanced away out of courtesy as he changed. Leaving the top two buttons of his fine night-shirt undone, he plopped down at the foot of his bed and pulled his legs up; as he changed into clean socks, tucking the ends of his flannel pants in, his eyes flickered over in another one of his quick, covert glances to the mirror. His gaze was heavy. Then, yawning like a sleepy puppy, he said, “It’s curious, Will.”

“What’s curious?”

“You always look as though you run from someone, hide from something.”

My stomach gave a sick little pinch. Avoiding his eyes, I sank down into one of the armchairs with a twist of a smile in surrender and my coat flopped across my lap. God, but I wanted to tell him. Someone. Anyone. Especially tonight, I needed a confidante. Over and over with my mind’s eye, I kept seeing my father and Miss Valérie in Trafalgar Square.

I needed someone to be there for me, and Cain Kingsley, controversial “child” Earl, was clearly willing despite all my inadequacy.

“My father,” I conceded, and I very much meant to be cool and collected about it, but something in me just suddenly broke open. “My whole life he’s reproached me for my gifts, or curses, or talents, however you wish to define it, this sensitivity to spirits—clairvoyance, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Cain confirmed.

“And I don’t care if he meant to protect me or if he really just doesn’t believe me. He could have at least pretended to listen.” I paused for a sharp breath, the words chalky in my mouth. “No one understands. No one, Cain. That night on Waterloo, though, I … When I came here and signed on, it was utterly against my father’s orders. He loathes this place. Loathes Spiritualists. And I’ve been horrified—petrified—he’ll find me and force me back home.”

“But he hasn’t,” Cain guessed.

“Not yet. I don’t know whether to be saddened or grateful for that.”

“A conundrum for sure.” He nodded, brow pinching as he frowned in a puckered way, uncertainly, tongue twisting to the inside of one cheek.

“I saw him tonight,” I said. “On the trip back. And what if he saw me? I don’t want him to come after me. I don’t want to go home. This is my new home. I’ve already decided it!”

Catching another breath, I glimpsed myself in Cain’s mirror—fingers twisting in my coat, a dark and unforgiving look of stifled resolve on my lowered face. My eyes churned. A stormy sky, Miss Agatha’s lover had said. And I understood it now. Yes, a very daunting and merciless stormy sky in my eyes, just before the rain burst forth.

I resembled my mother, in a way.

From that photograph Zelda had given me. My mother had not looked so angry, but she’d radiated a mysterious intensity with the same wide-eyed, relentless stare …

Instantly I was self-conscious of it. I looked to Cain.

His eerily mismatched eyes were fixed on me. With an absent nod, he returned the grave look with the ghost of a smile. Pleased, almost, again as if … as if there were some secret only the two of us shared.

“Ah,” he murmured. “You’re but a tragedy just like the rest of us, aren’t you?”

I looked away again, blushing. What on earth was that supposed to mean?

He slid off the edge of his bed and wandered over to stand under that huge portrait, all rich, dark colours and thick brush strokes of a lithe and handsome man. Perk of a smile, dull brown eyes. Same dark, little freckle under the right eye.

“This is my father,” Cain said, pointing. “He passed a few years back. I’m sure you remember that rocking London’s Season, my decoration as Earl before even coming of age. But strict inheritance entails are hard to dissuade, aren’t they? Anyway, the thing is, the rest of my family was powerfully opposed to me affiliating with the Cross, like yours. I did, though.” He flashed me a little grin over his shoulder, propping a hand on his hip. It shifted his short night-shirt along the small of his back, the hem catching on the soft knit of his long flannel under-pants there. “I’m a tad spiteful at times, perhaps. But mainly I signed on because it felt right for me. And it’s never proved otherwise, not for the year I’ve been here.”

He slid his eyes back to the portrait, smile fading.

“Sometimes,” he said with alarming maturity, for a moment sounding as if within him hid the soul of someone, something, much older than it should have been, “I long so deeply to know whether he’d be proud of my decision or not. I’ll never know. I have to trust myself.”

He was quiet a moment. But he shook the grimness easily, bouncing over to drop to his haunches and untie my shoes. I sat up straight, giving him a funny look.

“Stop that,” I laughed, embarrassed.

“Well,” he parried with a roll of his eyes, “you’re staying tonight, aren’t you?” He caught my shoes as I tugged them off, setting them neatly near the chair. “Think about it, Will. If your father wished to remove you from the Cross, shouldn’t he have done so by now? Unless, of course, he wants you to feel comfortable first.”

I froze, looking to him in horror.

Cain’s eyes widened. “Ah!” He laughed, waving his hands. “I’m teasing! I’m sorry. Will, you’re safe here. I promise.” He stood and drew back the layered blankets of his bed. “Oh, your nightclothes are still in your room, aren’t they?”

“I’ll go fetch them.”

“No, I have an extra pair or two.”

He handed me a clean night-shirt and went back to readying his bed. I flopped the shirt over one shoulder as I began unbuttoning my waistcoat—

Ah. Right.

The difference between Cain and me, under the waistcoat, under the shirt.

“Don’t look, I’m self-conscious,” I said quickly, fighting the brief surge of panic. It wasn’t a lie, anyway. I hadn’t thought of that at all today, hadn’t even remembered my bandages until I’d gone to undress, myself. They were just a part of my routine, a second thought and a habit. Sleeping in bandages was the last thing I wanted to do, though. I’d done it before a few times, and it was terrible. But I’d just broken down about my father; following up with my gender-queerness was a bit too much for one evening.

“Would you prefer the edge of the bed, or the spot next to the wall?” Cain asked, still facing away as he plumped the pillows.

“I think I can sleep on the chair,” I told him as I hurried to unwind the binding from myself under the long shirt he’d handed over.

He scoffed kindly. “Nonsense. I’ll take the edge.”

I was safe, between Cain and the wall on his sumptuous nobleman’s bed.

Like we’re brothers, he’d said. I couldn’t pretend I completely believed the sentiments. We hardly knew one another yet, and we came from rather different worlds. But at the same time … the two of us were young martyrs in a world of towering skeptics. The way he’d looked sitting on the edge of his bed, the way I’d looked after my dark outburst. The shadow in his eyes after that wretched gossip in Hermes Hall the other day. He seemed a troublemaker, sure, but taking a bit of pride in his family’s scandals did not excuse him from the hurt of being ostracised, ridiculed, deplored.

He understood, I realised then.

So if I told him everything, about my mother, or my peculiar gender ambiguity, perhaps he would get it.

I didn’t quite know how best to form friendships, but Cain Kingsley was somehow becoming my friend. I couldn’t deny it, falling asleep safe with my back to his and my knees drawn up against the wall. If I told him the rest of my secrets, it would have to be later. If we were to have a brotherhood, it was still young and fragile, and I was not prepared to lose the only friend I had right now.

Creak, creak …

Tiny footsteps on the faded wooden floor behind me. I bristled. The ear-ringing feel of a new presence infected the dark classroom. It weighed on me, left its whispers on the back of my neck. Like knowing someone walked behind you even if you didn’t look.

The classroom was all hard, pointed shadows except for the spill of muddled light through the painted-glass windows overlooking the street below. I’d been stationed there on my own for my first solitary call-and-answer. Goosebumps tickled along the back of my neck, but the silvery chill of anticipation during inspections was beginning to feel exciting.

On the blackboard, lines of grammar drills written in chalk slanted this way and that, in crooked, looping cursive.

Tap, tap, tap.

I listened closely to the new sound, one that very much resembled the dainty sound of a pencil being dropped on a desk.

Tap, tap … snap … creak …

Someone drew closer, tentatively. Slipping between the long desks behind me. Slowly, very slowly, I turned from the blackboard to face the rest of the classroom. The footsteps stopped. No suspicious shadows. No figures. No Missing.

“Was that you?” I called softly. My voice bounced tiny and thin around the empty room. “Hello … ?”

I sighed. A mirror stood near the desk, perhaps for the teacher to keep an eye on students’ attentiveness without having to turn around. Arms crossed, I leaned back against the first row of desks, eyes roaming the room through the glass. A plain bookcase, an Anglican crucifix on the wall beside it. A massive supplies cabinet shrouded in shadows, heavy drapes drawn on the windows below the painted-glass, two little legs peeking out from under those drapes, real as could be. Two little legs and two little feet, pasty and grey.

A sharp shiver zipped down my spine, fast to come and fast to go.

“Aha!” I whispered, eyes widening.

Carefully, I weaved through the desks. I was within a step of the ghost. Still it stood there, hiding behind the curtains. Little legs and little feet!

I curled my fingers in the dusty drapes and flung them back from the mullioned window, wondering if the ghost hid from me or if it waited for me.

Gone.

Like the shadow of a bird flying past, a chill against my side darting off in some other direction. The classroom doors crashed as they slammed shut after it.

“Clement!” I called, dashing off to the room in which he and the others held their own antiphonary session. Or … never mind Clement. “O’Brien!”

Open Spectral File No. MCDXCVII. St. Mary-le-Strand Girls’ School, Proprietors troubled, To be investigated 12 October. Obituaries on file for three young girls and one young boy.

The girls’ school may as well have been Jane Eyre’s Lowood for how remarkably cold and isolated it felt, tucked away off Houghton Street just above the Strand. A large, churchlike building, the colours of its old painted-glass windows providing the only real life.

“Do you want it gone?” Clement had prompted, bored, down in the Anglican deacon’s headmaster offices, where the Father ended the pre-investigation tour and gathered his things to leave for the night.

He’d given Clement a hard look of suspicious disbelief. “Of course I do!” he’d said. “The Bishop won’t hear a word of it, and what else are we to do, call in the Catholics?”

Clement flashed him a hot glance. “No, of course you shan’t,” he’d hummed with a grand smile, in just the right way that the rest of us knew his subtle mockery while the deacon took it as comfort. And then he’d slid his eyes over to me—perhaps in warning, perhaps to ensure I’d been listening, maybe even to check my response to that request. I didn’t know if he’d meant for me to see it, let alone if it was out of spite or thoughtfulness.

Quinn had been lent to a different team, so we were given Officer Dorland, a Cross man who’d moved on for the most part from fieldwork to archives work. But the Cross, much as it felt otherwise to me, being new, was not exactly overpopulated by spectral department inspectors, and Dorland had apologised gratuitously on the way over for being rusty, as he had not been on a true field inspection in quite some time. All with a smile that didn’t seem as apologetic as it did obligatory.

Dorland … He felt familiar to me, but I couldn’t place how. Perhaps I’d run into him in the halls or the dining room before. He was a tall man, not too overweight, red-haired and barely bearded with a sagging throat like a turtle’s chin and beady eyes that glittered like the chain of his pocket watch. As with most upper middle-class fellows, he seemed to care quite a lot about coming across dignified and levelheaded, though it ran the risk of presuming superiority over everyone else. Especially a young lead inspector like Clement.

He sat primly and stiffly as I turned in slow circles with my head tipped back, admiring the angel faces carved in the coffered ceiling, and O’Brien documented what I said about the little bare feet under the drapes.

“Well, perhaps it is time to use this, then!” Dorland suggested, extraordinarily proud of the little Edison Talking Doll he’d brought along. “A child spirit will love it.”

Clement rolled his eyes with great drama, sprawled on a daybed. “We don’t know that the spirit is a child.”

Dorland set the doll down and paced about slowly with his hands behind his back, enunciating and projecting every word with grating monotony as he resumed call-and-answer. “Are you here, spirit? You’ve been quite a pest to the poor Father and the girls here, yet you can’t even show yourself to us? Come then, I’ve a doll here for you to play with. Unless you can’t manage it, you weak little thing … Inspector Clement, there are four known deaths in the place on file, and all are children.”

I plopped down in a chair next to O’Brien. “Do you know what my favourite claim is?” I whispered, desperate to keep my mind off the inevitable—the end of the case and the deacon’s intolerance of any ghostly guest. O’Brien glanced at me with a tight smile; he seemed particularly spooked tonight. I smiled back, hoping it put him more at ease. “The two girls arguing about closing the drapes as ‘the boy who came through the walls’ asked them to, so they could all play, and one girl wished to, and the other was afraid. It’s fascinating!”

O’Brien’s eyes skittered down to the ambience compass in hand, smile dimpling uncertainly. Clearly, he did not share in my fascination.

“Cara? Judas? Rachel? Temperance?” Dorland beckoned, rattling off the documented names.

“We shan’t assume identity,” Clement reminded. Slumped against his arm in childish impatience, he issued a huff of a sigh.

“I said come, then, don’t you wish to play with the doll? I’ve brought it just for you. Are you so helpless a phantom?”

“Right,” Clement muttered, unamused, snatching two single wax tapers and lighting them from the lamp. “Well, you just keep to it, man, and Winchester and I will move to the upper floors.”

I stared at him for a moment until he thrust one of the tapers into my hand, and I understood it was a certainty.

“It’s got to be a child,” Clement grumbled as he and I climbed the stairs. “All the obituaries are for children. Two died of influenza, one of appendicitis, another of concussion after a spill.”

I threw him a perplexed glance. “But you told the Officer … ” Unless he’d just wanted to argue with Dorland out of principle. I sighed. “Well, I didn’t see a grown man’s feet below the sashes, anyway.”

“Are you tired?” Clement dug around in one of his breast pockets. “To keep us alert,” he suggested as he withdrew his cigarette case and showed me the little white tablets inside it. “Cocaine tablets.”

My eyes veered back up to his. “Clement,” I said.

“Don’t worry. It’s prescribed to me.”

“You’re in pain?”

“Not when I have my prescription,” Clement replied with a little smile. Lately it had been said wonder drugs were perhaps more detrimental to health than previously thought, but all the most fashionable of circles still indulged. Daphne had urged me to try a tincture or two with her before, and from Zelda I’d endured a week-long lecture for taking it without a doctor’s orders.

I gawked at Clement, utterly thrown. Never mind that; was he, like Cain said, not angry with me for the Triviat case?

Well … there was no use exacerbating the contention if he wasn’t acknowledging it. Perhaps it was even a peace treaty.

“All right.” I sighed again. “I am a bit tired, yes.”

Clement passed me the tiny fold of paper he’d pulled out from under the tablets, white powder scraped along the crease where he’d ground a tablet up with the corner of his cigarette case.

“Well, don’t spill it everywhere,” he warned.

“Well,” I parried, “I apologise, but I’m a novice, unlike you, apparently.”

We both sniffed, and Clement let out a hiss of a satisfied sigh; with a fingertip, he poked at the last of the powder and rubbed it along his gums lest the dose of medicine be lost. Timidly, I mimicked him.

The stairs were old and dark, each step issuing sharp cracking sounds underfoot as we continued forth. “What’s the most popular complaint?” he asked, moving slowly and carefully to keep the noise down.

“Mischief?” Daintily, I dusted off my nose in case any of the good powder still lingered there.

“It’s more active at night, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps she doesn’t want to be alone when everyone retires for the night. She knows she’s frightening, but all she really wants is to be paid attention. Or he. We don’t know yet.”

Clement stopped at the second landing, where the stairs turned one last time before opening onto the upper floor. I ran into him then shuffled back down a step or two, avoiding his narrow glance.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered. He could be quiet when he tried.

I peeked around him, feeling eerily weightless and alert now. “Hear what?”

A quick, deliberate whistle sounded from somewhere on the second floor.

Clement pointed. “That.”

“Was it the wind?” I murmured, knowing it was not. The whistle had been markedly human.

“Listen!” he whispered, throwing a hand out as if to cover my mouth.

Shadows throbbed along the old stairwell, cast by our meager lights. Beyond the whisper of linen and squeak of the steps, as Clement shifted in place, were the faint, rustling thuds of someone walking around up there.

When we climbed the last set of steps, the shuffling movement halted. Silence could be peculiarly loud in the absence of noises. Clement drifted along, his taper like a ship’s lantern pushing through the dark. Slowly, he eased down to sit cross-legged against the wall, between the door to the girls’ long bedroom and the door to the morning room, under another old hanging crucifix. I sat opposite, leaning back against a large curio cabinet.

We waited in a lengthy silence, just our breath and the distant ruckus of Westminster, the closer but still muffled echoes of Dorland’s slightly aggressive antiphonary inquiries. Senses, open to the dark. Waiting for something, anything to happen.

“Damn Quinn to hell,” Clement grumbled after a while, lighting a cigarette. He climbed to his feet and, for the ash, fetched a small porcelain dish from the curio cabinet over my head.

“Clement … ” I chastised in a tiny voice.

His smirk became a pout as he plopped down against the wall again.

“I can’t stand Dorland,” he griped. “Nothing shall turn me against a man faster than inflammatory call-and-answer—don’t bully the ghosts, for Christ’s sake! Winchester, I prefer Miss Jessica over Dorland, what does that say, hmm?”

Well, he was rather talkative tonight. More like he was in dire need of someone to fill Quinn’s place as his listener. For Cain’s sake—and slightly my own—and because I hadn’t the best check on my tongue, I muttered, “Yes, but just which part of Miss Jessica is so preferable?”

Clement’s eyes shot to me, dancing in the candlelight. “Hmm? Is little Winchester jealous?”

“What’s there to be jealous of?” I retorted. “Certainly not her haughty inefficiency as an inspector, or compulsive need to assert her elevation above you as if her fashion, which is unnecessarily fine for an inspection, doesn’t do enough for that. And I told you, it’s Will.”

“Woah, there,” Clement said with a mildly-guilty chuckle. “I only meant to tease you’re sweet on her … ”

My eyes widened; my face flushed weakly. I cleared my throat. “Oh,” was all I managed in reply, strangled by half a flustered laugh, before I buttoned my mouth shut and looked off elsewhere. “Well. No. Definitely, definitely not.”

“However.” Cigarette pinched daintily between thumb and forefinger, Clement tapped ash into the porcelain dish. “I would agree with you on most points. Though she’s not entirely inefficient.”

Another lilting whistle sliced through the quiet, this time from the morning room directly to Clement’s left.

I looked to him, eyes wide. He looked back, almost just as startled.

Murmuring, from a different room.

Clement stood, abandoning his cigarette in the porcelain dish with a hiss of tobacco smoke through his teeth. He stalked the sound, moving with a very careful, quiet stride. Aiming to be just as gently swift, I followed him.

As soon as we reached the room from which the murmuring had come, the sound echoed once more from the other side of the hall.

Clement sent me a look, seemingly at a loss. “That is a voice, is it not?”

I nodded mutely. It wasn’t very clear, more like overhearing a soft conversation. But it was a voice. We approached it again. And, again, it disappeared as soon as we came upon it, striking up a few moments later in yet a different place. It led us all around as if it knew we’d follow wherever it drifted.

“Clement,” I said, stopping in the middle of the hall. “It’s toying with us.”

Clement’s eyes veered my way, all quips and smirks replaced by the usual heat of his inspector’s tenacity. “Go fetch that wretched doll from downstairs,” he said suddenly.

“Yes, sir.”

I moved like a sylph through the darkness, alight with nerves and tense with diligent excitement.

“If you don’t mind,” I said as, with the Talking Doll cradled against my chest, I passed by the long dining hall into which Dorland and O’Brien had relocated.

“Of course not,” Dorland replied, far too congenially.

Upstairs, Clement and I set the doll up in the middle of the hall. He wound the little monster up and she recited a nursery rhyme with a sloppy, distorted recorded voice.

“Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating a Christmas pie … ”

Clement and I exchanged looks of disgust.

“That’s atrocious,” he said. He retrieved his cigarette and lit what was left of it. “Stay here, won’t you? I wonder if they’ve any news downstairs for us.”

He left me alone, seated glumly in the dark fingering the delicate ringlets of the Talking Doll’s hair.

If the ghost was lonely, or even just playful, perhaps simply sitting there was not the best approach. Hesitating if only for a moment, I set the doll down against the wall and wandered into the girls’ morning room. It was nothing more than an outgrown nursery, with plain seats and bookshelves and a few scattered penny bazaar toys—a horse whose chipping paint made its grin more a snarl, spinning tops and hoops. But there were some nice trinkets in there too, like the wonder turner I flipped to-and-fro, seated on a little stool. On one side was a birdcage; on the other, a songbird. If I flipped it fast enough, the bird was caged, and then free, caged and then free.

A daedalum sat on the small table next to me, surrounded by neatly-folded hand stitchings. I gave it a little whirl, stooping down to peek inside. Click-click-click. Dancing bears, swooping birds, men flipping off prancing horses—

“Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating a Christmas pie … ”

I bristled.

“He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and said, ‘What a good boy am I!’”

Chills ran like spiders up and down my arms. Slowly, slowly, I turned around, to find that while I’d been peeking into the daedalum, the Talking Doll had moved from the hall. Into the room with me, seated on the stool at which I’d just sat.

I staggered back, tripping over a puzzle and tumbling down with a racket. “Shit! Blast!” I hissed, hurrying to pat out the flames of my taper, whose embers had rained all over the floor. Smoke curled like ribbons from the wick, its char and soot smudged on my hand.

“Clement?” I called, the metallic tang of fear rising on my teeth. “Clement, are you out there? This is not funny at all. You’ve … ”

My voice died out in my throat with each word until finally I gave up on speaking. I knew better. Clement was not upstairs with me. Whatever ghost was haunting the school’s halls had moved the doll.

The tiny phonograph inside the doll continued to wind as if beckoning me. Over, and over, and over again, it recited the rhyme until finally I dragged myself off the floor and stood, gawking at it.

“Hello?” I swallowed hard, a distinct tightness in the dark like something bound to snap—the scrim between us, perhaps, my aliveness and the Missing’s lostness. “I believe I saw you earlier. I did not … mean to upset you.”

The Talking Doll stopped.

Breathless, I backed away until I hit the wall. Feeling safe with my back to it, I slid down to sit with my knees drawn to my chest. “Hello?” I tried again. The silence rang in my ears. I knew this friction. Something sad, something desperate for connection. It was beginning to overwhelm me. Made me feel sick and panicky. I needed to call Clement and the others upstairs. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The words wouldn’t come out. I felt … cornered.

Whir. Whir.

The doll wound up again. But instead of the nursery rhyme, the stuttering phonograph inside the beautifully dressed little body echoed a choke of breath and a quivering warble of:

“Why are you here?”

My eyes widened. That was … how could it be? Impossible. There was no way those words could be on the wax cylinder inside the doll!

“Let me out … help me … just let me go … ”

The Talking Doll stopped and a figure made of shadows shot up in the far corner of the room. I pressed back against the wall, eyes wide.

But—somehow—I was also thrilled to laughter.

“There you are!” I blurted, just above a whisper.

How to explain the twist of hopelessness and exhilaration to see a ghost too weak to come together in colourful detail or shape, just a black figure in the vague outline of a person? A dark, moving shadow full of unknowable energy, intelligence, alive in some sense.

The shadow ducked down, still clearly defined from the rest of the dark room and full of intent. It crawled under a table and behind the chair along the wall. I rolled to my knees and followed, pushing toys out of the way. The shadow disappeared under a small bookcase. I dropped flat to the floor, peeking under.

There were … hinges there.

Confused, I sat up on my knees. The little Missing thing was nowhere to be found. Hesitantly, as though it were some transgression, I stood and pushed the bookcase out of the way. It ground against the floor, thin legs stuttering.

Behind it was a small, slanted door, hardly to my shoulder in height.

Of course, I opened it.

It squeaked in the most terrible way, hinges stiff from disuse. I opened it only enough to look inside, but the space beyond was pitch black. Damn it, I wanted to be horrified. But I was spellbound by the mystery, like I’d been when Charlie and Colette had shown me their clothes beneath the floorboards.

“Hello?” I whispered softly.

A wave of cold crashed through, seizing me with purpose. I stumbled backwards. It wasn’t as immensely frightening as the first time, now that I knew what it was. Mild possession. All right, so it was still terrifying to be sucked into the void unwarned, and to feel a life that was not your own, but at least I expected it now.

The ghost struggled with it. Or maybe my body struggled against it. My heart thrashed in my chest and I held my breath through the horrendous dizziness. Panicked shivers rolled down, one after the other, circling my head and then my chest and then my hands and my stomach and my knees, and then I just … crumpled down to the floor, a weak and disoriented mess.

Unforgiving stab of memories. Hackney. Bow Road. This was not the same London I knew. Cramped, sordid townhouses, weathered roofs and crumbling brick, falling apart around the people who called them home. Some East End street, the windows of a confectionary. Ginger beer. Ice cream. Jude. My name, his name, Jude. Newsboy hollering about Napoleon. Flash of a small crowd—tooling and dipping with a patched-together street family. Wanted to go to Church on Easter. On the Strand. St. Mary-le-Strand, great gothic Italianate tower stretching into the smoggy sky.

Everything was blurry, prismatic. I struggled to keep up with the images as they moved around me. Father, may I confess? The world tilted violently to one side and I fell into St. Mary-le-Strand Girls’ School. Everything cold, ascetic. Girls marching in tight, quiet lines, modest dresses and starched pinafores. I watched them as I swept the classroom, washed the windows. What’re you gawping at, sir? You don’ even speak! I emptied the chamber pails and listened to a girl cry miserably where she hid in the pantry because her knuckles had been switched. Can’t compare, can’t compare, she moaned. I’ll ne’er be a proper wife or mother, I’m doomed, mum!

The headmistress was a horrid woman with a prominent nose and puckered twist of the mouth, tiny eyes and a tight knot of hair at the back of her head. Whipped my hands for speaking to any of the girls. It was improper, immoral, dangerous. The Father said, Saints took whippings and arrows, remember. Read for me, Jude. I read the Bible for him best I could, alone together in his office. Come here, Jude, you’ve a soul so good though you were bad for so long. He stood me before him, hands on my arms, big, old hands, tender hold. I’ve saved you from the rot of those East End roads. Jude’s heart swelled the same that his stomach sank. Confession, he said, every week, once a week. Read from the Bible and kneel for the Father—

Bright, warm morning, sunshine dancing in through lacy curtains. The headmistress was a screeching bird. Not another one of you! Sodomite! Get away from my husband! Sent again and again by the Devil to corrupt a holy man! Mum, no. Mum, I didn’t start it! The little room behind the bookcase, tall enough for me to stand full young man height and throw myself at the locked door, pounding, clawing, shouting. Let me out, let me go, I’ll leave, let me out!

The door flew open, and a stranger caught me. I knew his type. I don’t know how Jude knew his type. But his was a dirty, cold-blooded type, and his fingers bruised, almost gagged me when he covered my mouth to keep me quiet. Buggerer! Buggerer! Confusion like a bright, cold light. I grasped for freedom, but I was pinioned to the floor by this unknown man. Knew the headmistress had found him, just for me, and his bloodshot eyes and maniacal sneer of triumph were the last things I saw before he smothered me with a feather-down pillow.

Breathe! Breathe? Couldn’t move! I screamed but I couldn’t hear Jude screaming. Scared, so scared, everything dark, spinning, body twitching, let me go! Let me go! Hands around my throat, yanked me up then slammed my head down against the floor—

The pillow ripped away from my face and I gulped a desperate breath as I tried to roll away as fast as I could.

But there was no pillow. The face in my swimming vision was not the murderous fiend’s. It was Clement’s, looking down at me in wide-eyed and bewildered worry, and it was the most comforting sight in the world. I clung to him in a perfect terror. He was solid and human and there, drawing me up off the floor, and I was safe and alive.

“O’Brien!” he shouted. “Dorland!”

I felt I couldn’t breathe enough to make up for the vision. My hands shook as the vast, black, helpless sense of doom loomed over me as real and daunting as one of the shadows in the room.

It was the nightmarishly clear sensation that I had just been murdered.

Before anyone else in the girls’ school morning room could seize the silence, I said in a rough whisper, “Get your notebook, O’Brien.”

Clement took me by the chin and gestured for Dorland to come closer with the lamp. “Let me see your eyes,” he snapped. “To check the dilation of your pupils. Quinn’s not here to do so.”

Weakly, I swatted at his hands. “I’m fine,” I croaked. “O’Brien, his name is Jude. Fourteen years of age. The former Father and his wife hired a man to kill him, because … ”

The Father with his hand on Jude’s head, on Jude’s shoulders, parting the Church man’s frock coat and moving for his trousers—

“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?” I hissed, stomach lurching. “O’Brien, did you write all that?”

“Was it concussion?” Dorland pressed, turtle chin quivering and beady eyes skittering for mine.

“What?” I couldn’t think straight yet. “No, he was suffocated. Actually, yes; I believe he hit his head very hard.”

Dorland set the lamp down and turned O’Brien about so he could rummage for supplies in the knapsack as I pulled away from Clement and ran for the girls’ dormitory, where I promptly scraped an empty pail out from under the nearest bed and retched in a hard, silent way, to no effect other than the way it momentarily seized up my entire frame.

Such a monstrous secret! The boy—Jude—the Father. The way it had felt to jerk about below that cutthroat, the crippling chill and iron grip of unjust finality.

Murder.

I could never express the rottenness left over from the hollow trance. The guilt for simply … still being alive.

Clement flopped a handkerchief down across my shoulder. He’d followed me. I blushed, miserable and embarrassed. But I took the kerchief and wiped saliva from the corner of my open mouth.

“The work we do will get easier,” he said.

I spit into the pail to clear my mouth anyway. Lecturing me was one thing; trying to comfort me was another with which he didn’t seem entirely confident. I didn’t know what to say.

In the morning room, Dorland had shoved things out of the way with vicious scrapes and rattles, taking a thick stick of red chalk to the open floor in the light of the lamp. His hand moved fast as he drew a circle, with a diameter only perhaps the length of my forearm. A smaller circle within it. Slashed two overlapping triangles inside that, scribbled a few jagged symbols at each intersecting corner, and dragged the lines of a cross through the center.

I halted in the doorway, rearing back.

Hadn’t there been a hellish diagram like that in my mother’s room?

Clement watched on, his arms crossed and face set in a detached sort of observation. Dazed, I trudged over and sank down to sit on the little stool near the table, draped my arms about my knees and watched with a dark and circumspect frown.

Dorland snatched one of the obituaries from the case file. Scanned it. “Concussion,” he whispered, turtle throat shivering. He lit the obituary with a taper. Hurriedly, he set it in the center of the circle and began to scrawl words around it as the paper curled in slow little flames.

O’Brien leapt up to help, spreading red brick dust along the outside of the circle, opening a glass flacon and juggling it with the holy water flask.

“Deus, in nomine … ”

The air swirled like a channel above the circle and the ghost boy flickered into being at the center. Pale, almost all colourless, just thin enough for me to see O’Brien through him and just vivid enough to catch the pinch of tragic confusion to his face. Under his feet, Dorland had written around the burning obituary, Judas Gideon Hombrey.

“ … Spiritum, hic ligare … ”

The apparition went foggy, then suddenly vanished as did a sigh on a snowy day, coiling like a stream of smoke right up and into the open flacon in O’Brien’s hand. I didn’t want to watch. But I couldn’t rip my eyes away.

“Amen!” Dorland said in that overzealous way of his.

In the flacon was a silky, stormy grey, a swirling and shivering … something. As though it were possible to bottle a raincloud. It was the Missing boy. It was Jude.

“Where does it go?” I demanded.

“Where does what go?” Dorland said.

My jaw tightened. “The ghost. The flask.”

“Asphodel Meadows.” He shortly realised I didn’t understand beyond basic knowledge of Greek mythology. “Under Hermes Hall,” he amended, smoothing his suitcoat down and smiling thinly as if uncomfortable with my ignorance. “The room in which we store the bottled specters. ‘Asphodel Meadows.’”

“But where do they go while they are in the glass?”

Dorland just squinted at me with that affected perk of the mouth and his uneven brow furrowed. O’Brien blinked a few times, smiling nervously. “Well … nowhere, I suppose,” O’Brien said for him. “They’re to be studied.”

“That’s unnerving,” I whispered, profoundly displeased by the answer though I’d suspected it was coming.

“This one, especially.” Dorland was breathless, suppressing his enthusiasm. “Presently, we’ve much study underway regarding the Electro-Static currents of spectral forms. I know a handful of men who have been wanting to compare currents attached to natural and unnatural deaths, such as suicide, or murder … ”

A little more loudly than intended, I stood and left the room, the stool skidding behind me.

The hall was perfectly dark and quiet, swallowing me up where I stood hugging myself at the far end of it. I hadn’t any right to mourn, did I? I helped. I liked this. That was just as villainous and unforgivable, was it not? Now Jude was condemned to eternity as a specimen, and I only cared because I felt some sort of ownership over the poor little things.

“Clean that circle up well and proper now, Officer,” Clement muttered, back in the morning room.

“Well, of course.”

“I shall, if you’d like,” O’Brien offered.

“Dorland, your next team may well appreciate your asking permission before taking any action.”

“Apologies.”

Shuffling. Footsteps. Clement came out into the hall with me.

“Don’t you want to see it?” he asked, voice low.

I looked to him, aghast. “No, Clement!”

“But how will you learn?”

That was a valid question. Swallowing on a tight throat, I said, “I’ll … look later.”

He made his way over slowly to stand by me. My heart pounded. Were we to quarrel again, so soon? Casting aside my stubbornness, I said thickly, “Aren’t we to be freeing the spirits, Clement? We trapped him. He knows what he is, where he is. He just wants to be noticed. How can you be satisfied by this?”

“Is it not better than purging?” Clement shrugged.

I threw him a fierce look. How could he be so merciless?

Rather just get it over with.

I couldn’t say why it troubled me so deeply. I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to trust him. The Black Cross understood me, but … it terrified me to wonder if Clement did not. What was I to do then?

“I just don’t know that bottling’s any less deplorable,” I conceded in a small voice, casting my eyes off elsewhere. “That’s all.”

The world was quiet and still again, and terribly empty. Empty because Jude was in the flask, and O’Brien wrapped it in a cloth and put it in the knapsack, and I tried not to think about what it was like to have the whole dark to yourself only to be suddenly contained in a little bottle.

***

“A murder!” Dorland heaved a dramatic sigh, all of us cramped in a larger hansom cab on the short ride back to Portland Place. “So much paperwork to be done now! And imagine what the poor Father will say when we alert him to the murder of a child in the school. It’s no surprise the spirit was attached to the place. Somehow, they hid the crime, judging by the obituary. You don’t suppose the monster’s still running free, do you? You’re positive you didn’t descry anything else, boy? The man’s identity? The aftermath?”

“Dorland, just shut up already,” Clement snapped.

“O’Brien,” I murmured, drawing shapes on the cab window through the fog from the morning mist and chill. “I’ve a question, if you’d be so patient as to accommodate it … ”

“Hmm?” O’Brien sat right beside me, which made it easy to keep the conversation quiet. It wasn’t one I wished to share.

The question snagged in my throat at first. I swallowed hard, finger sliding down the glass of the little window. “What was it that Dorland drew to catch Jude?”

O’Brien hesitated, as though he recognised my defeated spirit. “A summoning circle. Properly assembled, with a name or some other piece of remains, it summons the ghost, and creates a channel into the bottle.”

Summoning. Under the rug, in my mother’s room. The arcane symbols, the unreadable alphabet like some ancient, undiscovered hieroglyph—undeniably occult. What Dorland had drawn so hauntingly resembled it.

O’Brien accidentally elbowed me a few times as he dug the bottle out of his knapsack. He turned it with a gentle hand for me to examine, as if a proud souvenir. But he smiled sadly. “The bottle’s iron-necked, with corresponding Solomonic keys for binding.”

Slowly, with a deadened sort of fascination, I took the glass into my fingers. It was heavier than I’d expected. Stewing within was a leftover soul. And it would be there forever. Until unsealed again, I presumed. It still resembled a storm cloud, but that was it. It didn’t seem quite as alive anymore as I’d feared.

I hoped maybe Jude would know I held him, anyway, that he could feel my apology through my fingertips on the flacon. For finding him, and letting him be bottled. For not really understanding what he was. For still, despite my guilt, being so full of insatiable curiosity. If he was even sentient anymore, whatever sentient meant to the Missing.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Clement staring at me—hard. Clement, as if he knew I was torn up inside, angry at him once again, and troubled because he could do nothing about it for me.

***

The ghost girl in my room was going to come and go, I discovered. One floorboard creaked; I heard the brush of a bare foot against another. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as the little wraith paced about like someone who couldn’t sleep.

My report on the St. Mary-le-Strand school inspection could wait until tomorrow. I simply couldn’t think about it right now. Instead I stood at the mirror in only my nightshirt and under-pants, toes curling on the cold floor.

I pulled my shirt tight at the small of my back and turned side to side before the dim glass. I was an adult in essentially every way, though a small one. Willow.

I wasn’t with my father anymore. I was trying very hard to think of that as a certainty and not a temporary adventure. I pulled my smaller set of bandages from my trunk of things to wrap my lower abdomen, as Zelda had taught me to do during those four hellish days a month my anatomy betrayed me, said it was supposed to help ease the pain. And it occurred to me as I let my nightshirt fall loosely along my sides again that, on my own, I wasn’t required to abide by the original rules. I could be who I was, wear what I pleased, when I so chose.

Imagine. A soft, lovely gown, maybe deep cobalt in colour, with sleeves that came to a point at the knuckles. I loved that style. Nothing too flashy or dazzling. Longer hair, tied casually half-back at the crown of the head. Just feminine enough; I didn’t need all those curls and pins. I could almost see myself in the image. My face, my eyes, my hands … though perhaps I only invoked what I knew of my mother.

At any rate, I simply couldn’t waltz around like that before Commissioner Westwood, the man who’d so generously and swiftly taken me into his order, now could I? I’d still be Will Winchester, but he wouldn’t understand that. Which was the worse lie, my foregoing an application or my gender ambiguity?

A lady’s dress seemed inevitably enraging and uncomfortable, anyway. Unless it was one of the lounging gowns like Daphne or Agatha wore, all casual and unrestrictive, the kind with short sleeves and a loose, flouncing skirt, flash of long black stockings. Something that didn’t trap me; something that felt free and inconsequential.

Once or twice, my father had mentioned explaining away his son once I was age of majority. But even then, I would hate to be only his daughter forever.

I tossed and turned once under the blankets. I longed to write to Zelda, to let her know I was doing all right … ask her why she hadn’t come to call yet after bringing my things. I tried to imagine her fingers running through my hair. It had always helped me drift off to sleep when I couldn’t on my own. But the chills down the back of my neck were empty of comfort. Sleeping alone in a strange place was far from easy sometimes, even though my eyes burned for it. I felt small and cold and estranged. Except for my room’s ghost, of course.

I thought about asking the little wraith’s name, but I didn’t. Sometimes talking to the dead was like feeding a stray. They’d never leave you alone again if you engaged them—like Charlie and Colette. And I wasn’t sure I could bear that right now.

“Let’s go out!” Cain cried from the doorway of the downstairs lounge, a rather smallish sitting room mostly used by Cross men and women for solitude. Even I had taken to retreating there to the window seat with tea and a book, as was mostly my habit in the interim between assignments. I’d already gotten through People from Other Worlds and Tales of the Dead, and now I was a good way into the first volume of Phantasms of the Living.

Puzzled, I lowered my hand from my mouth where I’d been idly dragging my thumb along the ridge of my teeth. “I’m sorry?”

Cain nodded as if I’d agreed. “I’ll be waiting outside.”

Bundled up against the bite of a drizzly October day, we went to Kew Gardens. All different shades of gold and green burst under the overcast sky as we strolled along through the populous park, into the great glass and white wrought-iron Temperate House.

Bright and verdant leaves reached for the pitched roof. The air was balmy indoors even as, outside, a light rain began against the glass ceiling. We wandered between towering palms and other sumptuous tropical plants. Cain trailed his fingers along their shining, waxy petals, feistily chatty today, going on about anything and everything from that gambling trial with the Prince of Wales to how poorly his cousin’s window garden was fairing.

“How long has it been now?” he asked suddenly. “Since you ran away.”

I wasn’t immune to a bit of embarrassment to have it put that way—ran away. Not to mention he apparently still thought about my paranoia. But my tragedy wasn’t his responsibility.

“Well over a fortnight,” I replied sheepishly. Actually, it was closing in on a month since I’d left home.

Cain studied me from the corner of his eye. “Are you still afraid sleeping in your own room?”

I tilted my head back, watching the rain through the glass as we walked. “I’ve made out all right,” I said. “I consulted the secretary the other day, to see if anyone’s come calling for me … No one has.”

Cain issued a dainty little sigh. “Then perhaps,” he started slowly, as if reluctant to speak it aloud, “perhaps no one will.”

I reached out to finger some of the bright pink and yellow petals we passed. It was true. And in honour of being true, I had not been sleeping with too much difficulty. Perhaps in part due to simple exhaustion from our work. But also, perhaps because I felt as if I were in a different world here, and it was easier than I thought to forget all about the Belgravia townhouse and everything there.

“No one will,” Cain repeated, flatly.

I almost ran into him; he’d stopped in the path, just standing and staring at me.

“The other evening,” he said, “at dinner with my uncle, my cousin Alois brought up one of his infrequent haunts. I don’t know that you’ve heard of it, but … Julien’s-off-the-Strand?”

My heart fell through my stomach, swift and sudden. I cleared my throat. “I have.”

Cain shrugged, regarding me through his lashes as he smiled with a dry perk of the mouth. “I didn’t really care to listen. That type of establishment isn’t exactly on my list of nightly romps. But Alois was all out of shape because his favourite lady friend had moved on from the place.”

“Good for her,” I said as evenly as I could.

“Well, the rumour’s actually that she ran off with Mr. Julien’s son. Alois said the boy isn’t even eighteen yet, and acted the server at the place, so Mr. Julien must be doubly devastated.”

“Yes, how inauspicious,” I agreed, cursing myself for how bitterly the words sounded, “that his business suffer such unexpected change. And his son, too? The man must be heartbroken.”

His brows raised and his mouth in a thin, patient line, Cain waited for me to finish before he said, “Will, the son’s you.”

You. The word knocked the wind out of me; I didn’t realise how I’d been anxiously toying with an exotic flower until I accidentally pinched a petal in my hand with the jolt of surprise. A coldness spread through me, yet there was no sadness or sting of betrayal attached. I just felt rather numb, and … sadly at ease.

That was the working story, then, was it? Julien Cavanaugh Winchester II’s son Will Winchester had run off with one of his girls. He’d explained me away, just like that. I was gone just like my mother.

Daphne.

She had to be the girl. He must have requested she seek employment elsewhere. Perhaps he’d just kicked her out. It couldn’t be too bad, unless he’d let Miss Valérie handle it. My wish for freedom had wrought so much trouble. I was a disgrace. I was selfish, wasn’t I?

My mouth popped open, but I hadn’t a thing to say. I blushed, furiously, suddenly deeply self-conscious to be found out as the little prince of a pleasure house—a fine, high class one, but a pleasure house nonetheless.

“You must think differently of me now,” was all I could manage.

Cain laughed, curtly. “Please. If everyone is to be judged based on proximity to ‘unpalatable’ businesses, well, no one in London would have any friends, now would they?” He shrugged, moving on again slowly without turning away. His two-coloured eyes did not waver from mine.

“So you may sleep peacefully,” he declared, reminding me to what end the story was worth. “But if you’re ever fearful again … ” He flashed me a perfect little smile, so good at looking innocent when he was an irreverent little imp. “You know where to find me.”

The joke was difficult to miss, even for someone who hadn’t grown up surrounded by flirtations and solicitations. I choked on a laugh, eyes wide, and smacked at his arm kindly much like Zelda often had to me when I was being mischievous. A gentleman and his lady quietly admiring a plant across the path looked over sharply at the noise we made. Cain hurried off around the corner, grinning. I followed with an apologetic wave their way.

Cain was right, though. I could sleep peacefully now.

It bruised me, somewhere deep but far away, to know my father wasn’t looking for me even when I was in the most obvious of places.

But I was honestly, truly free of Julien’s-off-the-Strand. I’d never stop hoping Zelda or one of my father’s girls would drop by to leave a message or check up on me. I’d walked out of the house and seemingly out of their lives completely, and while that was a sore truth, I had to understand it was necessary and right. That world was in the past, my absence was taken care of, and my father was not looking for me.

Perhaps that might have made someone else feel absolutely uncared for.

But somehow, I had never felt more cared for than I did at the Cross, with others whom I’d hardly known a month—yet who seemed to know me more than my father ever had.

***

Open Spectral File, No. MCDXCVIX. Newly reported disturbances, Singular Apparition with repeated appearances, Residents troubled …

“No Assistant?” I asked, passing the case file back to Quinn as we crossed Oxendon Street for one of the many establishments crammed together in the row of tall, narrow old buildings. Advertisements plastered the neighbouring merchant windows; our destination was more quaint and unassuming, gold and silver letters arcing like a rainbow across front windows, lit colourfully from behind by lamps circled in pink and scarlet paper: MISS OPHIE’S PARLOUR.

“Danforth’s a dunce,” Clement called over his shoulder as he dodged a shuddering street cart, his collar popped and his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

“Well, he at least recognised you are the only inspector fit for such a location,” Quinn grumbled, and it took Clement’s crooked grin and waggling brows for me to realise Quinn had made a joke.

Miss Ophie’s Parlour was, much like Julien’s-off-the-Strand, a mistress house masquerading as a tea shop. It was already empty for the night; Miss Ophie had left a key wedged in the windowsill and, inside, a note for us detailing the recent ghostly events in the place. The note was pinned to the lacy blue gown in which one of her ladies had been found three months ago, filled with morphine on the back stoop.

“It’s not much,” Clement said on a sigh, crosschecking Miss Ophie’s missive with the small case file. “Pre-work didn’t find anything relevant to the complaints, either.”

O’Brien wasn’t there for my questions so I leaned to Cain instead, whispering in the stuffy quiet, “Pre-work?”

“Research,” Cain husked, holding his temple in one hand and frowning around the front room. “Preliminary findings. Does the architecture have limestone or oak, were there any remarkable deaths throughout the years, anything that might be related to the reported activity or call for a certain instrument, so as to adjust our strategies accordingly.” He cleared his throat and crossed his arms, hunching low into his coat and muffler. “How else do you think the case file is built?”

I gave a simple hum in reply, brows raised. Someone was rather cross tonight.

“Quinn,” Clement said brightly, sweeping the blue dress up off the table and holding it to his shoulder to swing about limply as if modeling it before a mirror. “I’ve got plans later tonight, so I say skip invalidation, what do you say?”

“As police escort and former constabulary, I recommend against it,” Quinn muttered with contradictory indifference.

“Brilliant!” Clement draped the gown over one arm like a coat and went back to Miss Ophie’s note. “We shall skip it, then.”

He read from the letter as the rest of us wandered about, closing the thick red velvet drapes and dousing the few lights left for our arrival.

“A young Miss Maude was employed here, expired by excess of opium tincture.”

I removed the paper from the lamps in the front windows to lower the lights. Cain had stopped at a hanging mirror, almost gaudy in its chipping giltwood curves and baroque corners. He stared intently into his reflection, his face pale and sullen, his eyes … resentful, almost.

“The ladies here,” Clement went on, “profess they hear their dead friend singing at night. A client of this fine establishment recently claimed to have been welcomed into a room by dear Miss Maude, only for the room to be empty. There is the smell of her perfume. She’s been seen in mirrors on numerous occasions.”

My eyes shot to Cain—but he’d moved on from the mirror, arms folded tight.

“Echo,” Quinn suggested.

“What does Miss Ophie want with it?” I pressed.

With a pout, Clement dug from the equipment trunk the St. Peter’s arrows about which O’Brien had told me before, then reached out to nudge Quinn. With a sigh, Quinn said for him, “She only wishes to validate the occurrences.”

“So, don’t you worry your little head about re-killing a ghost.” Clement hoisted up what looked something like a spirit talking board. He tucked it under one arm and I made a very dissatisfied face once he turned away, more for my own pleasure than for anyone else to notice.

In the reception room, we set up our bells and the Arrows around a small table pulled to the center of a few seats. Eyeing the little spirit board, I stepped over our bell strings and took a seat next to Quinn on the loveseat. I’d never seen one like it before, with its large dial in the center, circled by the usual alphabet and numbers. Yes. No. Don’t Know. Good-bye.

“This is a talking board, isn’t it?” I asked meekly.

Cain glanced at me without lifting his head. Clement didn’t look at all, focused on rolling up his sleeves and draping his patchwork coat across his lap.

“Yes,” Quinn answered me. “A Tuttle Psychograph. More efficient than planchette boards, smoother, doesn’t break so easily.”

Perhaps not in theory, but the Cross psychograph looked as if it might have been used long enough to contest that.

“At least they’ve finally stopped lending out the Pease Telegraph Dial,” Cain said. “That thing’s ancient.”

Clement lit a cigarette and waved out the match.

“Perfume is a complaint,” Quinn grunted. “Don’t recommend tobacco smoke.”

The tip of Clement’s cigarette glowed bright and hot in the darkness as he stretched his arms up above his head, fingers laced. “Which one of our two little mediums would like to start us off, eh?”

Cain slid his eyes to me, looking rather wan. I returned the glance with knotted brow. Clearly none of us were strangers to ghost conjurings and séances, but I’d only ever been a quiet audience member; I was far from ready to host my own session. And Cain …

“I will,” Cain said curtly, pulling his chair closer with a scrape against the floor. “Shall we join hands for the opening lines?”

Quinn’s big, rough hand practically swallowed mine. Cain’s was cold in my other. It was so very still between the four of us, I could hear the gentle hiss of tobacco and paper as Clement’s cigarette burned itself slowly.

The dial was big enough for all of us to rest the tips of our fingers with ease. “We wish to call on Miss Maude,” Cain began with an impatient sigh, still rather uncomfortable, it seemed. “Miss Maude, are you here? There is an empty chair—Clement, there is an empty chair?”

“Yes.”

“Take a seat, lovely, we’d love to chat.”

“You are the most informal medium I have ever had the displeasure of conjuring with.”

“Well, I’m not a medium by the definition, so there you have it.”

“Stop,” Quinn said.

We sat for the better part of an hour in ringing quiet. After a while, I closed my eyes, on edge as I tried to let all my senses drift into the dark. Someone’s pocket watch ticked away. Muffled ruckus from the street. Quinn shifted a bit beside me with a creak of the loveseat.

“Open yourself up, Kingsley,” Clement pressed.

“Unfortunately, I’ve been open since we arrived.” The candlelight shivered on Cain’s face as he narrowed his eyes. No stately charm there.

“So, are you the petulant one, or the spirit?”

“The ambience here is overwhelming, Clement. I have a terrible headache and my stomach is a mess. Alas, the joys of being a conduit.”

“I thought you had means to keep closed to potent energy,” Clement murmured, brow knotting.

“The defence doesn’t seem completely agreeable tonight.” Cain’s eyes veered to the psychograph. “Clement,” he reproved, exasperated, “you moved the dial.”

“I did not!” Clement half-whispered back.

“You did,” Cain argued. “I watched you.”

“Well, if I did, it was not intentional. My arm is tired.”

“So, rest your palm on the table, then.”

“What’s the difference?” I whispered timidly, looking up at Quinn. “They say I’m a clairvoyant, but Cain is a conduit?”

“No, I’m still a clairvoyant, too.”

It was Cain who answered me, not Quinn, as he held his free hand out for Clement to pass over the freshly-lit cigarette for an inhale. The drag was short and gentle, smoke rolling out from Cain’s nose as he sighed through it, mouth in a tight line. His drastic polarity of demeanour tonight was slightly cowing, and I felt like a travesty of a friend for staring at the way the flame of the candle flickered in his bad eye.

“You don’t know the difference?” Quinn said, voice gravelly. “Have they not reviewed that yet in your training?”

“Quinn … ” Clement sighed, letting Cain just keep the cigarette. “His training was waived.”

My eyes jumped between the two of them, mildly attentive to pronouns today. As he shifted about again, like he felt too big for the loveseat, Quinn uttered a little wordless sound that didn’t seem too disapproving.

Creak …

I turned a bit to look out into the hall, then snuck a peek at Cain. He didn’t seem to look at anything special; his gaze just rested on the candle as the cigarette burned slowly between the first two fingers of his free hand, the other draped daintily on the psychograph dial. And the reflected candlelight turned the milky grey of his bad eye a shimmering gold.

“We’ve come to hear from you,” he went on blandly. “Can you move this dial beneath our hands? There is an alphabet. Perhaps you might spell out your name?”

Clement crossed one leg over the other, watchful eyes flickering from the slowly-moving ambient compass to Cain. My stomach pinched. Cold. I felt very cold suddenly, head to toe. I waited, for the visions, someone else’s memories. Mild possession. Was it not about to come on?

The scent of French perfume filled my head. I squinted at the others. Did they smell it? The world spun—throbbed just a bit. I was still at the table. No, I was upstairs. Girls in a room. Girls like my father’s girls. Sunlight. A syringe. Hanging out the window waving and calling down to the knocker-uppers below. Hallo, boys! Images jumping across my mind like the first drops of rain against the window. Looking in a mirror. Miss Maude pinning up her auburn hair. She was pretty in a simple way. Pale and thin in that sleeveless blue gown. Rosewater and zinc to cover the freckles, pompadour powder, singing below her breath as she trimmed her eyelashes and plucked her brows. Bottle of stinking gin. Bottle of wine. A balled-up fist in a leather glove, with a cameo on the thumb, fingers knotted in the rings of that bronze syringe. Pink conch shell cameo ring, delicately carved and filigreed in gold …

I gasped hard, lashes fluttering, as all the images vanished as swiftly and roughly as though they’d been yanked out of me. How odd. Bewildered, I stared across the table at Clement. He raised his brows, popping a new cigarette for himself onto his lower lip. He leaned across the table for Quinn to strike the match one-handed and light it for him.

Creeeak … creak-creak-creak …

Quinn dropped the unlit match. One of the golden St. Peter’s Arrows wound its way around to point at the door to the hall, but it did not stay still. It continued to drift along until it faced our general direction … following something unseen, it seemed.

Cain stared the golden arrow down, head tipped, with an eerie, serene curiosity.

The psychograph dial shifted, tickling the tips of my fingers as it began to drift on its own below our hands.

Cain was unmoved, that same dark frown ghosting across his face. Clement watched with heated eyes, and Quinn waited to document the message as the dial moved torturously slowly from one letter to the next.

H … E … R … E … C … A … I … N

My eyes widened.

Clement leaned forth again for Quinn to successfully light his cigarette this time. Hiss of the match. Quietly, he issued a sigh of tobacco smoke, the stream of which suddenly swirled off towards Cain as though something sucked it forth. Cain went stiff; his hand slid off the psychograph dial as the last bit of smoke rolled off Clement’s lower lip.

“Cain?” he prompted.

Bam!

Cain kicked a foot up to prop against the side of Clement’s seat and fixed him with a sinful look. His fingers fiddled at his knee as if with the hem of a dress, his eyes hooded and his head tipped back.

“Sir, you flatter me … ” His mouth curled in a slow, suggestive smile. His foot scraped back down to the floor and he craned forth towards Clement. “Oh, we met at the park. It’s so bright out! May I use your pearls? Kiss me and touch my waist, sir … I’ll treat you right and proper—”

Clement snorted, laughing on a throatful of smoke and coughing into his hand. “Oh, dear, I certainly hope so!”

“She’s not talking to us,” Quinn snapped as it occurred to me that the possession had drifted on from me to Cain. “She’s replaying moments.” Clearly not accommodating of Clement’s flippancy, Quinn shoved our investigation notes my way with a tap of the finger, directing me to take over recording the events.

“Well, it’s certainly Miss Maude, isn’t it?” Clement cried with a devilish grin.

“Yes,” Cain rattled off in a dazed whisper, voice cinched to a slightly higher pitch, but still his own voice. “Who is that, on your ring, the pink ring? ‘Miss Urania,’ hmm, well, shall I be your muse tonight … yes, I would love that, I don’t know how to do it, sir, I’ve never but smoked it … ”

Clement looked to Quinn with a flick of the brow. “She injected the tincture?” he half-mouthed.

I couldn’t look away from Cain. It was him, but it wasn’t him, and it was a terrible, disconcerting thing to witness. Some hired medium I did not personally know at a séance party was one thing; this was another entirely.

Suddenly Cain straightened up, face dimpling in feverish confusion. His lashes fluttered like little butterflies against his cheeks as his eyes began to roll back. Madly, he itched at his arms, fingers clawing against his sleeves.

“Death by excess of opium tincture,” Quinn confirmed for Clement.

My brow knotted over wide eyes. “Is that what that looks like?”

“Keep up with the notes, Winchester,” Clement demanded.

“Take her away!” Cain scratched and scratched at his arms. “Ugh, take her away, take her away!” It was him again, thank God. But he was not back to stay.

Creak-creak-creak-creak-creak!

Every one of the golden arrows lurched suddenly and violently around to face our little party at the table—and each pointed directly at Cain.

His face had darkened. An ominous light glinted in his narrowed eyes. It was a look quite distinctly that of some consciousness other than Miss Maude’s and … other than his own.

He slammed his hands to the table. I jumped, dropping the pencil. It bounced off my knee and then my toe, rolling away under the loveseat.

With his eyes still cradling candlelight, a spill of sharp, rhythmic words sprang forth from Cain’s tongue.

“Fuge, ar-keta—prekraschay, moy mastiir govorit—ma Apollona, sh-sh!”

His voice cracked and his maddened gaze shot about the room, lip curled in a soft snarl. Gasping, hissing the strange words through clenched teeth. Voces mysticae, utterly foreign and venomous as some ancient curse with its deeply rounded vowels, susurrating shh sounds and trilled r’s that made the words come alive in a sinister way once they leapt from his mouth—

“Sh-sh! Sh-sh, kun! Ma Apollona!”

A dark bead of blood peeked from Cain’s nose. Dread pitched in me with a sickening wallop of the heart and I looked to Clement in a perfect panic.

“Dostatochno! Prekraschay! Prekraschay! Suka!”

But Clement just sat perched on his seat, one knee hugged to his chest. His eyes were ruthless in the candlelight, hazel borrowing some of the sparks and turning to gold as he watched Cain with an unfeeling sort of intent. I didn’t think he’d notice my pleading look, but then he slowly slid his glance over to meet it. Unmoved. Unmoving. Focus narrowed for the end of the case, per usual, and indifferent to anything else.

“Ma … sh-sh … tikho … ”

As the breathless chant faded away in rustling whispers, Cain’s mouth softened into the shadow of a smirk and from the back of his throat purred a ghastly but giddy chuckle, which in turn died out into a sleepy sigh as he leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. The little bit of blood finally rolled down from his nose towards his lip.

And whatever had spoken through him just … drifted away.

Quinn stood roughly, skirted the table and hurried to Cain’s side. Clement lit another cigarette, smoking like a chimney tonight. After a moment, he murmured, “Kingsley.”

Cain drew a breath. His lashes fluttered rapidly again as if to clear his vision; finally, he noticed Quinn hovering over him.

“Oh … ” He looked so dazed and embarrassed. “Well, hello again. It’s Miss Maude. She’s just an echo. Repeater. Not intelligent, but very strong energy. I mean, she died so recently, did she not?” Wearily, he took the handkerchief Quinn offered and cleaned the blood from his face.

That was it. As if this were not a surprise to him. As if this were not a surprise to any of them. I didn’t even try to keep up; I was deeply stricken, heart pounding yet. And … feeling very guilty for being so fascinated by the things that frightened me.

“Well,” Clement said, checking his pocket watch. “We’ve made excellent time tonight, haven’t we?”

“Are we still seeing Mr. Zayne?” Cain asked, staring idly at the psychograph.

I shot Clement a look. “Miss Ophie only requested validation.”

Clement snapped his tongue against the back of his teeth and eyed me sideways, clinging to patience. “Indeed,” he muttered, “and Mr. Zayne requested I deliver his monthly cheque tonight.”

I didn’t have the capacity for his battle of wit after such a disturbing scene. Still shaking weakly but dizzied by relief for it to be through, I slumped back in the loveseat and sighed, offering him a repentant smile that slowly dissolved into the winded, dumbstruck sort of giggling that came with the rush of leftover panic.

On the stoop of the tiny Stygian Society shop, Cain waved out a match and puffed twice on the cigarette Clement had so graciously donated, then passed it to me. Tentatively, I took a turn with it as we sat together in the damp night air, watching Fleet Street keep busy around us.

With a shuffle on the step, Quinn ducked out of the shop to join us, standing there like a guard dog with his spectacles in his coat pocket.

“Was Miss Maude the only spirit you encountered?” he asked, looking down at Cain from the corner of his dark eye. He was worried, always so attentive to the wellbeing of our team.

Wearily, Cain took a long pull from our shared cigarette. “I don’t know,” he murmured, meeting Quinn’s eyes without lifting his head. “You tell me. Was it?”

Laughter echoed from inside Mr. Zayne’s warm, dully-lit shop.

Quinn nodded. “It seems as though you made contact with an unrelated entity.”

“How uncomfortable for you all,” Cain said thinly. “I apologise.” For some reason, I got the feeling he didn’t truly care. But how could he not be deeply frightened by an unbidden and unknown spirit invading him like that, especially without his knowledge?

“It spoke in unrecognisable tongue,” Quinn went on. “I recorded it best I could. The linguists at the Natural History Museum should assess the phonetics before we submit to the daemonology department.”

“Oh—” Cain looked up at him quickly. “I don’t believe that’s necessary! It did not feel like a daemon. Perhaps an elemental, if anything. It’s all right, Quinn. I’m all right. Undue fuss. It happens sometimes. I’m not technically a medium, after all.”

Quinn’s face settled in a deep frown, unyielding and unconvinced. But he said nothing by way of agreement or disagreement.

We left not long after, piling into a coach with very sleepy-looking horses and a sleepier-looking driver. As our ride lugged itself forwards from the shop, going even more slowly as foot-passengers parted for it, I watched from the window a turtle-chinned fellow who’d been loitering near an alley slip into the now-empty Stygian Society with Mr. Zayne’s littlest man, Marius.

The turtle-chinned fellow didn’t look like the type to frequent Fleet Street alleys, all tweed and expensive topper, fine fur-lined Ulster coat. Wait … those beady eyes and that dissatisfied lip were familiar …

Dorland.

What was he doing there? He was an Officer; Officers were scarcely assigned fieldwork. His accompanying us to the girls’ school had been an exception, and as far as I’d observed, only field inspectors associated regularly with the resurrectionists.

“Look,” I said, elbowing Cain as we were off. “Dorland’s with Marius.”

Cain nodded, distracted but far less agitated now. “Research for a case, perhaps.”

I settled back into my seat. That made sense. I couldn’t vilify a man just because he seemed the perfect villain, anyway.

***

“What in the world is this?” I said as I threw down my coat, baffled. While we’d been out at Miss Ophie’s Parlour playing audience to Cain’s possession, my room had been all rearranged.

“I thought I’d surprise you,” the Missing girl with the pigtails chirped from the opposite corner.

I jumped. I hadn’t seen her manifest in the shadowy room, but I could certainly make her out now amongst the shapes of all the furniture.

My bed had been moved against the wall and rather sloppily made, as if by someone who’d watched their mother or maid but had never tried it before themselves. The things on my desk were sorted to all different places and the chair dragged around to the table, while the revolving bookcase had somehow moved from the corner to the foot of my bed.

“Do you like it?” the vibrant little ghost peeped, clutching anxiously at her pinafore and smiling a shy, sweet smile.

Truthfully, I was too achingly exhausted to care either way. Wild laughter echoed from a room overhead as I flopped down into the small armchair. “It’s fine,” I hummed, rubbing blearily at my face. The Missing girl fiddled at the lamp on the desk. I could see her pale little fingers pinching at the knob. She went paler—faded, almost, so that she was barely there—and then the knob turned to her hand, light swelling up in the room.

“There you go,” she sing-songed. “Now you can see!”

“Thank you … ” Yawning, I shrugged out of my waistcoat. “What’s your name, dearie?”

Oh, why had I asked that? Because I felt guilty, that’s why. Because here I accommodated her only to go out and banish others forever with my team. Because, apparently, after most my life, I’d only just now decided I wanted to care about the Missing’s existence.

In the blink of an eye, she was across the room and beside me. I jumped a second time, squeezing my eyes shut and drawing a sharp breath. “Don’t do that,” I said under an embarrassed laugh, fumbling with the buttons down the front of my shirt. “I’m too tired for that right now.”

Her presence was grey and fragile, as though she struggled not to fade away. “My name’s Mary Ann. What’s yours?” she peeped, big eyes following my hands like a cat following a bird as I reached up my flannel undershirt to peel off my scratchy bandages. And then there she went. Gone, dissipated. But she was still in the room. I could feel her.

“Mary Ann … ” I hoisted myself up out of the chair. “That’s pretty. I’m Will Winchester.”

“Are you a boy or a girl?”

My smile drooped. Wasn’t she perceptive. Rather, I was being watched more than I realised. Discomfited, and suddenly feeling quite violated, I dug around for my big marine-knit sweater and shrugged it on as quickly as I could before hopping up on the bed. I just laid there for a moment, unsure of how to respond—if I even cared to respond. Society was one thing; I’d never expected having to explain myself to a bloody ghost. Charlie and Colette had never asked me, and I certainly hadn’t thought about sharing these things with them. Had they not noticed? Had I not noticed they noticed? Did it even matter in the end?

The truth was, tonight I certainly felt aligned with my anatomy. But to answer that felt a betrayal to myself. I frowned, heavy now with unfair shame and frustration, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong. “Well,” I replied bitterly, “sometimes I am one and then the other. Either way, I’m Will. Say, can you turn the lamp down?”

She didn’t reply. I waited, patiently, wondering if she was trying, or if she might say something or reappear. She didn’t. Clearly, she’d spent herself up.

I sighed, crawling out of bed to extinguish the light. I rather liked the bed against the wall. It was cozier somehow, tucked into the corner like that.

“Good night,” I said wearily to the dark room.

“Good night!” came Mary Ann’s high-pitched call.

***

All Hallows’ Eve at Julien’s-off-the-Strand was, as expected, an indulgent occasion. My father’s girls dressed up in teasing costumes and masks made all the men that much bolder. Really it seemed license to cast away any lingering idea of goodness or manners, to flirt and titillate without real consequence. And, of course, I would spend most of the night serving themed treats and strong drinks, barred from the downstairs drawing room where some public medium was paid to thrill and about whom Charlie and Colette complained because she’d ask for them to play but wouldn’t wait for them before she just made loud knocks and noises under the table herself.

At the Black Cross, the celebration was much more fantastic.

“Cain, really,” I said, sitting cross-legged on his bed while he transformed my face into a skull with white and black theater paint. “We don’t need to be flashy.”

“Nonsense,” Cain hummed. “What else is a masquerade about?”

I tried not to smile too much, so the makeup would dry properly, as I took white chalk to sketch full skeletal anatomy down the fronts of the broadcloth suits he had laid upon the floor, and he sat before the mirror painting his face to match mine—though the smile was a little wistful. I didn’t know that I wanted to draw attention to myself tonight, when I’d probably be endeavouring against distraction with all the ladies swirling about in wonderful costumes and flowing gowns, imagining again someday in some future I didn’t yet know where I might do the same when I so chose.

But I was so unspeakably relieved by how quickly Cain had returned to normal after what had happened at Miss Ophie’s that I just wanted him to do as he pleased. And that meant dressing up with him.

“We’ll be suitably ghoulish,” Cain declared. “Little sprites of death. Just you wait, Will. You’ll see. The whole place will be a zoo in a few hours. Doors open to London, courtyard full of lights. The ladies all become faeries and witches, and the gentlemen … well, the getup trends this year are wild!”

He was right. The Black Cross grounds were only modestly populated on a normal day, but tonight the place writhed with people.

The building was aglow. Lustres and lamps caged in folded paper “bone” shapes threw off a dancing light while candles pulsed in carved melons. The spice of sweet hot drinks drifted about in the autumn crisp of evening, while the band in the upstairs great gallery struck up concertos. Laughter and animated voices layered thick together with frightened shouts, dissolving into good cheer from the eastern hall where trick mirrors and curtains had been set up like a maze.

In the small courtyard, non-confidential Cross cases and their physical evidence spanned the long lengths of two velvet-covered tables. Ritualistic talismans, skeletal specimens on display. Photographs of haunted cemeteries and séances smudged by mist-like anomalies. Bottled spirits brought up for air from Asphodel Meadows and which I certainly avoided. Unaffiliated Londoners strolled along in the midst of men from the SPR and the West London Division of Psychics, galvanized by the grotesquerie and the preternatural as if the place were some grand fair full of exotic imports and zoos. Everyone chose to be a Spiritualist for the night, it seemed.

I was mesmerised; I didn’t know what else to do with myself but wander about in mute wonder as if it all were exotic to me, too. But after a short while, I began to feel very crowded by everyone around, defenceless, and on edge. I wanted to stop worrying about it so badly, but—this was an opportune night, should my father wish to seek me out, when even the Cross was open and vulnerable, wasn’t it?

As inside I turned onto the second floor, squeezing past a small cluster of people who did not seem to notice the way they blocked the stairwell, two hands plopped down on my shoulders from behind and twisted me around as their owner cried, “Kingsley! I thought you were down in the—”

I gawked up at Mr. Zayne, who gawked back down at me.

“You’re not Kingsley,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Well, you’re dressed the same,” he explained.

“Winchester,” I corrected shyly.

“Clement’s backup Kingsley!” Mr. Zayne cried, smelling vaguely of embalming chemicals and gin as he officially greeted me with a choke of a hug. Backup Kingsley? It was either a grand compliment or … really not.

“Everyone’s in here.” Mr. Zayne dragged me off with him into the great gallery, where the band was deep in a lilting Mendelssohn piece. He swung his arm down off my shoulders only once we spotted Clement. And Miss Jessica, and a man I did not know, and a woman of whom I’d also never had the pleasure of meeting, the lot of them talking and laughing as Mr. Zayne strolled up.

I stayed a better number of steps away—where I could still hear, of course—close to the door with my fingers twisting in the ends of my sleeves and my eyes drifting about the room. I’d only ever seen the high-ceilinged gallery unlit and unused throughout the day, but tonight the windows hung open so the music might spill out on the courtyard below, and the gold-painted crown moulding caught the lamplight brilliantly. The floor was buffed sufficiently enough for someone to slip a bit every now and again, between the handful of couples dancing around in little circles.

“You inspected Miss Ophie’s!” Mr. Zayne cried, sounding utterly heartbroken to have been excluded. “Why, I’ve been there a few times. Not fair, Clement! Not fair at all! Were the girls there, too?”

“No,” Clement scorned, “we put them up at Claridge’s, as we always do.”

“Resurrectionists are always such a delight in public conversation,” Miss Jessica simpered around her drink. The man with them chuckled and she beamed up at him in a way I thought a bit misleading, unless she aimed to be on his arm all night.

“Mr. Zayne Lissie here is indeed a delight,” the other woman said, steering away from contempt. She spoke much like Cain did, with smooth, unapologetic dignity. “I’m rather tired of forcing laughter around stuffy gentlemen who force humor in an attempt to be interesting at all.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Ogden,” Mr. Zayne murmured with a tip of the head as though he meant to wink but thought twice about the impropriety.

Talk moved on to something else. Clement looked remarkably quaint and old-fashioned, bypassing a silly costume in favour of a chequered waistcoat and tapered pants. It was almost difficult to believe him the same half-gentleman he routinely appeared. Tonight, he was actually rather adorable—

Under the paint, my face was suddenly afire. Clement, adorable tonight, and how dare he be when he frustrated me so? He wasn’t scowling; he spoke pleasantly, and he laughed, and his eyes were so big and full of feeling. Much different from the usual hazel heat or charismatic temerity. Perhaps he’d administered himself a dose of his good powder. Or gin, like Mr. Zayne. At some point, he’d slicked his hair back, but it was falling loose already.

My mouth was dry. I snatched a drink from the refreshment table and stalked out of the gallery, hoping no one had really noticed my presence in the first place.

Adorable. What was wrong with me? Clement was a willful and temperamental young man with questionable levels of patience and tact. So he could clean up for a Cross sanctioned event. So could Quinn, who, when I’d seen him earlier, had been quite approachable in a pinstriped waistcoat and starched shirt.

I stopped on the stairs to drain half my cock-tail in one chagrined—and stronger than I expected—swallow. My face pinched. Never mind Clement; one day I might want to find someone adorable, and be found adorable in turn. But what was a queer thing like me to do then? Especially one without a mother, or really a father, who could see the dead and much preferred wearing trousers and bandages to a corset and a dress, who was acknowledged in the role of a sir regardless of anatomy? Bi-gendered, ambisexual, half and half. A boyish girl for a man who might want a lady, a feminine-formed boy for a girl who desired a man. Always a betrayal one way or another. Always only half of what someone might want. Never mind sexual inversion; I was just a tangled mess.

How could anyone ever wish to be part of that with me?

“Will!” O’Brien bounded over as I came off the stairs into the hall. I couldn’t help but laugh, startled once I realised it was him in the baggy, tailed pouch of a suit that was his theatrical cat costume. He held the mask under one arm, a slouching hood with a full feline’s taxidermy face, as he grabbed my hand to shake in greeting. “How is your first Cross Hallows’ Evening?”

“Overstimulating,” I replied with contradictory cheer, as I leaned up and he leaned down so as to hear me over the noise in the crowded hall. His face dimpled in swift concern. I laughed again, shaking my head. “But quite all right,” I promised.

“Our awkward little prince,” Cain sing-songed, swooping in from the crowd then to hook an arm in mine. Thank God he’d found me again, because my head was spinning and the usual social ineptitude still crept against the rolling warmth from the strongly mixed drink.

“Awkward?” I thought I’d done splendid lately at being normal.

“Oh!” Cain laughed. “And, O’Brien, hello!”

O’Brien winked, lifting his mask with both hands to hold before his face as if he’d replace it on his shoulders. “Meow,” he replied.

“Good-bye, O’Brien,” I called, waving as Cain tugged me along elsewhere with him.

“I finally managed to shake my family,” he said as he spirited us far to the north wing of the building.

“Your family was here?” I asked, stepping smartly to keep pace with him.

“Well, the ones who care for the Cross.”

Cain swerved into an empty corridor not far from the music hall, quiet and full of chilly shadows, and as he pressed me up against the wall, all the show flitted from his face. My smile faltered; my brow knotted. But I didn’t even have time to wonder on his intentions before his eyes fixed with mine and he breathed:

“I have a key.”

I have a key …

In the cool, quiet hall far from the lights and the All Hallows’ crowds, Cain’s bad eye was all the ghastlier ringed in black paint, though I thought it suited him and his lovely face.

He didn’t elaborate. Just took my hand tight in his own and led me farther down the narrow hall to a thick, dark door under the old rear stairs.

The door bore an unremarkable little plaque with the title LOWER RESEARCH ROOMS. That one was not locked; it opened upon another flight of stairs downwards. My grip on Cain’s free hand tightened until he pulled away to light a long wax taper, which he’d apparently hidden inside the front of his suit.

Into the bowels of the Black Cross we descended. It wasn’t a cellar, per se. But like a cellar, it was distinctly colder and markedly damp, and the stairs led to an underground place I could only assume had at one time been a servants’ pathway. The air was dank with the scent of dirt and stone and mouldering wood, but someone at some point had put forth effort to make the crude passage seem welcoming and up-to-date, adding idle menagerie to old shelving, propping a painting here and there against the patchy grey stone of the wall as if just another corridor above ground.

We took a hard left turn and Cain stopped at a door marked with the Roman numeral one. Its lock was elaborate, quite large and baroque. Around the winding, curling pattern was an inscription in German: JOHANN MARTINGERSTL, SCHWOBACH, 1 NOVEMBER ANNO 1748.

Cain showed me the key. Darkened by time and the touch of many fingers, made of steel or some old alloy, ornately crafted, and about six inches long.

“Bartlett let me borrow it,” he said.

With a great thudding click of the bolts, Cain eased the broad door open on a gulf of shadows and a powerful draft of stinking air.

A rat near the door scurried away at the bounce of candlelight. Water dripped from somewhere in the room, a steady echo like a delicate heartbeat. And as Cain took the candle from me and swung his arm from side to side, trying to illuminate as much of the room as he could, a fascinated chill zipped down my spine.

It was an evidence storage room.

Near a terracotta of the Virgin was a collection of thick coin-like items bearing winged lions with human heads and she-wolves devouring human figures. Rows and rows of shelves held skulls, jarred spines, marble urns. Crowding the floor were old torture devices, even a dirt-caked coffin or two. A random lacy bassinet and an old Italian trunk sat amongst all manner of gadgets, draconian artefacts to gilded relics, some so foreign-looking they seemed otherworldly.

As we eagerly explored, I slowed before a shelf cluttered with little animal bones and jars of cemetery dirt, flowers and crystals and feathers twisted in rope, a cracked porcelain-faced doll …

Evidence. It was like standing in a silent room with every set of eyes on you. There was no identification on any of the items, so there wasn’t any way to know why the things were there. What they were proof of—what they had been through.

I took a moment to flip through an original index of Black Cross terminology, lingering on the page with official differentiation between echoes, enigmas, and intelligents.

“Cain,” I said, glancing over.

He peered at me from around the terrible spiked door of a Virgin of Nuremburg propped in the opposite corner, with a dark softness to him that brought to mind paintings of martyred saints or cupids.

I closed the old Cross index carefully, almost not sure I could ask what I’d been wanting to ask for quite a few days now. “At Miss Ophie’s Parlour … ”

Instantly, a shadow eclipsed Cain’s face. But perhaps he’d only withdrawn a bit further behind the spiked door, regarding me through his lashes from across the cramped room as though he weren’t really seeing me.

“You know what sort of scene you made, don’t you?” I asked.

Gravely, he said, “Yes.”

“Is that how mild possessions always go?”

He blinked rapidly as if surprised, face softening again. “Oh—oh, no. That was a conduit possession. And I’m sorry it frightened you.”

I was immensely relieved to know I didn’t make such a scene when I saw the Missing’s memories. But I was still a bit lost. Chilled and desperately curious.

Cain leaned back against the wall. “As you’ve only recently observed,” he murmured, “I am a conduit clairvoyant. You, Will, merely experience the ghost’s soul like a vision. You remember the soul. A conduit possession is … becoming the soul.”

“But how do ghosts know whom to choose for that?”

He smiled at me through the candlelight, a somewhat spellbinding and sinister sort of thing with his chin inclined and the shadows shifting across his painted face. Swinging the borrowed key on one finger, his eyes moved about the room, searching for the words in the dark.

“Clairvoyance, ‘one who sees clearly,’” he said finally. “There is a veil between us and the dead, our realm and theirs. And for whatever reason, we see through it. Reach through the rips in it, while others merely witness ghosts when they manage to slip through on their own. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes.”

Cain shrugged. “Somehow, it seems … we become clearer for them to see, as well. We do not know why that is. Can all men see clearly at first, but tend to lose the ability? Do they not realise it? Or is there something else about us? The Mesmerists say people like you or I are born with an inexplicable magnetism. Perhaps they’re right and perhaps that’s the answer. Perhaps we’re beacons of light in the darkness of the après-monde to whom ghosts are drawn, intelligent or not, because we possess about us some … connective mesmeric force.”

Mysteries in your blood, Bartlett had said.

Cain laughed lightly. It was at odds with the grim look to his fairy tale face. “To answer your question—they find us at random, in a sense, but because they see us more clearly. So I suppose we’re just lucky, hmm?”

I stared at my feet, winded by the explanation. Finally. That was why the Missing came to me. Why they’d always come to me. But I hadn’t asked for it. It was unsettling. I was constantly surrounded by onlookers, then, even when it didn’t seem so? And even in that way, my peculiar intimacy with the dead was something of which to be proud?

Beacons of light.

Cain stared at me from the Virgin of Nuremburg with a light in his eyes as if he wished to tell me something. As if …

As if we both hid something, and both looked for something. But we couldn’t and wouldn’t tell each other.

He sighed, pushing away from the wall and wandering back out of the room. I held the taper as he locked the door again, examining the plaque hung opposite the evidence room that read ASPHODEL MEADOWS, with an arrow pointing to the tunnel’s next turn.

“Well … that room didn’t have at all what I hoped for,” Cain grumbled. “I think Bartlett misunderstood which key I wanted.”

“Why would a file be locked?” I asked.

“Because it’s dangerous, or as of yet incomplete, or too beyond the grasp of ordinary researchers and can only be viewed or changed by higher officers.” Cain issued a limp shrug and a touchy sigh. “Or they don’t wish the public to know about it, I suppose.”

***

Upstairs again, outside a lounge where the talking boards and planchettes were out, and guests gathered around them, Cain snatched up glasses of wine for the both of us.

“Kingsley!” d’Pelletier cried, waving Cain over to where he stood near the courtyard doors, smoking a cigar with Officer Dorland.

Cain heaved a sigh, lashes fluttering around an exasperated eye roll as he navigated the busy hall towards d’Pelletier. He was about as excited as I’d be to put himself in Dorland’s company, apparently. And it wasn’t very excited at all. But I followed, of course, hiding a yawn behind one hand, as I was not about to let a friend waltz alone into a bottomless pit of conversation with less than desirable partners. No offence to d’Pelletier.

“Were you acquainted with Officer Hyacinth?” d’Pelletier asked, baby face dimpled in a sincere frown.

“I’ve spoken with him on occasion,” Cain replied with a bored little flick of the brow. I tried not to acknowledge the way Dorland’s glance moved to-and-fro between us in keen evaluation of our costumes.

“Well, he died this past Tuesday.” D’Pelletier sighed dramatically. “Apoplexy. He’d always had a weak heart. We’d tease that, one day, one of the Cross ghosts might startle him and spook him accidentally to death. What irony he should go while in bed with his wife!”

I choked on a mouthful of wine and Cain’s short, shameless laugh drew others’ eyes for an awkward moment or two.

“Shame, isn’t it?” Dorland gave a little wag of the head. “Shame, that Hyacinth should go like that.”

“Had he died in another less outrageous manner, would it not still have been a shame?” I said, and immediately decided I shouldn’t have.

Holding his smouldering cigar off to one side, Dorland blinked rapidly as he tipped his head just so, smile frozen on his mouth and eyes roving me over in a most critical way. Cain and d’Pelletier turned similar wide-eyed and pointed stares my way. Wasn’t I every bit of how Cain had described me—socially awkward, and completely naïve.

Dorland’s short eyelashes were so pale, they shimmered gold in the bright light, making him look even more shrewd and calculating than he already did with that plastered-on smile of feigned patience and politesse. I’d thought him annoying on investigation, but now he made me even more impatient. Or perhaps it had just been a long, long night for me, and it was time to go to my room.

Dorland shook his head with a mildly patronising chuckle. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. I merely speculate … as to whether he’s likely to return in spectral form to this world? Given how he passed.”

Something tightened up through my back, hot and tense. “Like Jude?” I countered, quietly.

“Jude?” Dorland smiled, puzzled.

“From St. Mary-le-Strand Girls’ School,” I said, struggling to keep my frown from twisting into a sneer as some cold resentment rose like a tide in my chest. I wasn’t sure that I succeeded. “Case number MCDXCVII. Judas Hombrey was murdered and you bottled the spirit for further study—”

“Apologies, Officer!” D’Pelletier again glanced at me in embarrassment. “What the boy meant was nothing inflammatory.”

Dorland’s eyes veered off to meet d’Pelletier’s, to whom he offered a smile over our heads as if Cain and I couldn’t possibly know what he thought. But we were both already well aware that not everyone believed us more than children despite our obvious young adulthood.

“It’s quite all right, Inspector,” Dorland said. “We’re all conscious of youth’s charm, or the lack thereof. And there lies the risk run when the Cross takes on younger men.”

“The Cross only acquires the most spectacular of youths, I’ll remind you,” Cain chimed in quickly, with a pedigreed smile despite the owl-like glint in his eyes. Dark, and penetrative. “It’s a rare but necessary exception made for—well, the exceptional talents.”

Dorland squinted at him briefly. “Ah … beyond that creative costume, I must be speaking with a Kingsley then, mustn’t I?”

He knew exactly with whom he spoke; Cain’s eye did not exactly promote anonymity. I urged Cain off before he could really get into it with Officer Dorland, but I tripped on the folded edge of the hall rug and just stumbled into him instead. Cain lost his footing and tripped forwards in turn, spilling his wine down the front of Dorland’s suit.

“Oh, blast!”

“Pardon—”

“Mon dieu! Kingsley!” d’Pelletier sputtered through the commotion, looking around in sheer dismay as most of the hall’s crowd turned our way in surprise.

Dorland went bright red with rage, eyes bulging as chilled wine seeped down his collar. His mouth flew open with a shiver of his turtle chin but before he could say a word, Cain and I abandoned him in the center of attention and dashed out the door, laughing wildly and apologising in the same breath.

“Well, I am just mortified,” Cain insisted with great drama, hooking an arm in mine and marching us through the outside crowd. “How could I be such a disgrace. I’m so deeply shaken by my lack of composure, I simply cannot recall if I let go of my drink on accident or on purpose … ”

Open-mouthed, my eyes swerved to him. He just snorted, grinning wickedly with his tongue between his teeth. He had, hadn’t he, the cheeky little maverick? He’d thrown his drink on Dorland.

“Well,” I said after a long sigh, infected by his smile, “I cannot say the man didn’t deserve it.”

“Shall we go up to Hermes Hall and read about vampires and revenants?”

“Vampires?” I echoed.

Cain laughed merrily. “Cast aside that doubt, Will. You hunt ghosts, do you not? What makes you think the Undead are any less fabulously real? The vampire czar lives in London, after all. Right under your nose and you never even knew it”

Monsters of the night plucked from the pages of a penny dreadful, right under my nose. It was just as Westwood had said in September, I supposed—believing is seeing. And I had so much yet to see.

“Reconnaissance,” the case coordinator said, an older gentleman with wiry, powder-white hair, and papery skin that drooped gently at his jowls as he handed Clement and me the assignment summary. “Just clip your reports to the top page. The designated Officer will take care of the rest.”

“Reconnaissance?” I asked, trudging after Clement out of the fieldwork offices and through the halls of the main building. Closed Spectral File, the summary said. Location of Waterloo Bridge, Reported recurrent sightings of apparitions, To be reconnoitered by Lead Inspector Clement and Scouting Inspector Winchester.

“We head to Waterloo and patrol for further spectral activity, following the last case.” Clement uttered a little peevish sound from the back of his throat. “I hate reconnaissance. We can’t demand a spirit show itself. If it doesn’t want to, it won’t.”

“Then why perform it?”

“Protocol. To quiet the superiors up.”

The silence between us on the ride over that night was suffocating. It was obvious to anyone that at present we were not each other’s first choice of company, but at least at the girls’ school he’d struck up a bit of conversation. Tonight, he just sulked, leaning against the window.

“Why did they send me with you?” I tried anyway as the cab came to a jolting stop just off the Strand. “Why not send a regular inspector, or … ”

Flipping up his coat collar, Clement hopped out and cocked a brow, looking at me without lifting his head. “Because,” he said bluntly, “they’re testing you.”

Right—I was still on probation, was I not? The idea of returning to Waterloo already made me feel heavy; now I hadn’t a clue whether Clement hoped I passed this apparent test, or that I failed, or if he didn’t even care.

An omnibus rattled past us at the junction, rocking below the driver and packed riders, plastered with posters advertising ship makers and merchants. Through the chill river fog, the place teemed with people. And not for the expected reasons.

“Blast,” Clement husked, hands tucked in his pockets. Together we hurried across the street, but the hurry was short-lived. Constabulary in rounded helmets and belted uniforms kept a moving crowd of curious Londoners under control at the edge of the Victoria Embankment—how lucky they had so recently relocated the police service headquarters to a new building just up the street. The men paced along a perimeter of kerb signs that crawled with bold, black letters: POLICE – DO NOT ENTER!

“Pardon,” Clement said, offering the stooped old man beside us a warm smile. “What’s all the fuss?”

“They’ve found a lass,” the old man replied, voice scratchy and deeply Irish. He raised his bushy brows and pursed his wrinkled mouth, and was on his way again with an unexcited shrug.

I looked to Clement sharply, brow knotting. They’d discovered a girl. Had she jumped?

Clement dragged a hand down the side of his face and let it just drift to a stop with his knuckles to his lips. He fixed his gaze on the scene down on the pier, where a light flashed once—and again—as a policeman photographed with a field camera and the rest waited respectfully for him to be through so they might cover the body. The body …

It was clear enough from where we stood. A young woman on the ground, soaking wet and limp. Her hair stuck to her pallid face in pretty coils. How poetic, that something could still look pretty when it was dead.

Beyond the grisly scene, lights reflected off the dark river; ship masts bobbed against the distant, jagged silhouette of Tower Bridge. Yard inspectors in their long coats whispered to each other just a stone’s throw from the body. The boxy camera flashed. The woman’s pale blue gown and black-collared jacket looked set to crush her, waterlogged as they were. I didn’t know what to feel. Another poor soul, fished from the stinking water. And everyone around us whispered of it as if it were simply a change in the weather. Images jumped through the back of my mind—a drawing room, Daphne, everyone staring as Athena and I dashed out of the house. Daphne a vision in white on the ledge of the bridge flirting with disaster and me screaming, screaming, screaming her name …

“He killed me!”

I twisted around, looking behind me.

The tragedy’s sightseers were thinning out, full of gossip already. Electric lights flickered over a shop across the street and pedestrians clustered about a coffee stand, cursing at another omnibus that clattered by through the fog and sprayed them with muck as it narrowly avoided swiping up against a passing coach.

But I looked right at her.

Dripping raven hair, plastered in loops and wavy strands to her face, which was bone white and swanlike. Her lips matched the blue and purple of her sopping gown. And there was a hole just off center in her forehead—a bullet hole, muddy blood washed away but flesh still singed black from the gunpowder.

It was the lady who lay on the Embankment below.

My eyes shot back to the pier as though it were possible for her corpse to have moved, or even reanimated at all. It was thoughtless reaction; any man would have known better. The woman was lying down there yet, of course, and it was her vivid Missing self behind me, standing still and serene and shot dead in the bustling night.

I gripped the ends of my sleeves. “Clement,” I urged, aiming to remain inconspicuous. “Look behind us.”

Clement frowned, surveying the small crowd over his shoulder. “What?” he grunted, casting me a surly look of doubt.

I gestured, turning again. How could he miss her?

She was gone.

Damn it. Mouth hanging open but no words prepared, I met Clement’s eyes. He heaved a sigh. An inspector trudged up to the line of policemen stationed about the posted signs and Clement waved for him suddenly.

“Inspector Bridges!” he called, elbowing his way over. “It’s Clement, from the Cross!”

I remained where he’d left me, hugging my coat closed tight and burying my nose into my muffler. On the pier, the police photographer began to pack up his boxy camera and the other men carefully hoisted the drowned corpse to a waiting field gurney, flapping a sheet down across her. The apparition of the woman behind me had chilled me to the core. It was different during inspections; I was prepared for the Missing then. But this was more like what my life had been before. Random appearances, ghostly distractions. So corporeal to me, so vibrant …

“He killed me!”

I bristled, eyes widening. The whisper hissed out just over my shoulder now, that eerie, warbling pitch of a dead voice flung desperately at the veil between us. Creeping like ice along my neck. The stench of the Thames thickened about my head. She was right behind me now, wasn’t she?

“I ran and ran but no matter how fast, he caught up, leering at me under that hat like a fox at a rabbit—”

Everything around me kept swirling on, but I was rooted in place as if alone in nothingness.

Beacons of light …

I panicked. Perhaps my inspector’s composure was not quite as developed yet as I’d believed. Get away, get away from the unfamiliar spirit before anyone noticed my distracted distress, before the ghost realised just how in tune I was to her presence, before she, possibly, did something really quite menacing.

“ … barging in on such a macabre event as if a starving dog for scraps,” the short, neatly dressed inspector chastised Clement as I dodged over. The roundness of his face seemed far too jolly for his scowl.

“I’m not,” Clement insisted. “I merely inquire upon the details of the event so as to … ”

“Westwood may inquire himself once the Yard has a case to discuss. I’ve told him this before.” The inspector kept stepping away only to back up again every time Clement spoke, clearly not interested in the help of the Black Cross.

“Inspector,” Clement said, surprisingly all civility and no truculence, “this is extraordinarily pertinent, as we’ve an extensive file regarding those who have jumped here, and we’re out tonight reconnoitering the bridge.”

“Reconnoitering for what?”

Clement wilted, but his eyes were wild yet, resolute. “We’re from the spectral department, Inspector Bridges.”

“My God!” Bridges cried. “Yes, of course! How remiss I’ve been not to consider the girl’s ghost! Inspector … I’m sorry, what was it?”

“Inspector Clement.”

“Inspector Clementine—”

I raised my brows. Clement’s lip curled.

“The corpse is hardly stiff! What is there to reconnoiter? You Spiritualists, so exorbitantly infatuated with death and darkness! The disrepute!” Red-faced, Bridges held Clement’s eyes and leaned close to reclaim professionalism. “Here’s a detail for you. The girl’s not a jumper.”

“Yes,” I said. “She was killed.”

Bridges hadn’t noticed me until then, but he promptly sent me a violated, discomfited look. I cleared my throat, looking elsewhere. I shouldn’t have spoken. Clement glanced my way, but not in impatience, as I’d expected. Almost … in pride. Then he raised his brows and waved his hands at the inspector, leaning forth with a tight smile as if to say, You see?

Smoothing his coat closed and turning half away, Bridges scrutinised us with marked uneasiness. “This seems to be a murder, very recent,” he said. “I highly doubt a specter’s to blame, but if we suspect any inhuman elements as we search for the depraved bastard who viciously slew this poor woman by apparent gunshot to the head, yes, of course, we’ll alert our little ‘Scotland Yard of the occult’ post-haste.”

“For the girl’s sake,” Clement spat, “I pray it is something inhuman. Painful, isn’t it, to imagine an act so monstrous might be committed by a mortal man like you or I?”

I cut Clement a secret glance, at war between the part of me that so helplessly admired his fearlessness, even the times without tact, and the stubborn part of me that clashed with the stubborn part of him.

Bridges looked Clement up and down. “Let the woman grow cold before you try to conjure her ghost, won’t you?” he said, voice coarse with contempt. He acknowledged me once more with an absent nod of the head before he stormed off to his men.

Clement glared past the pier at the vast black stretch of the river, his eyes bright with some private fire.

“Well,” he husked. The crowd had dwindled down to just a few children in patched caps, a huddle of working men, a lone figure in a damp cloak nodding to us gregariously as he took leave from the terrible scene. Clement adjusted our knapsack on his shoulders and forced a little laugh. “Doesn’t the Yard sound quite like a bitter old lover to you? All’s well, though.” His eyes drifted to me.

“How did you know she was killed?” he asked.

“She told me,” I whispered. “Not by whom, though.”

Clement studied me a moment, face empty. Then he raised his brows with a wry little twist of the mouth. “At least we’ve got something for our reports, hmm?”

***

“Stop here,” Clement told the driver of our coach on the way back to Portland Place.

I frowned, pulling back the window curtain to squint out into the dark.

“Why?” I asked. “We’re still far from … ”

The words faded away as I realised just how far from the Cross we’d gone while the night’s dreary scenes had distracted me, flitting by again and again in my mind. Significantly south of the Strand, we were stopped in a smoggy, questionable waterside place in the shadow of blackened chimneypots and warehouses.

I cast Clement a doubtful glance as the window curtain slipped from my fingers. “This is not our neighbourhood.”

“No, it’s not,” Clement confirmed. He gathered himself and the knapsack. “It’s Southbank. I’ll pay your fare to go on back, but I’ve another appointment tonight.”

“Here?” My face pinched. “In Southbank. You’ve an appointment.”

“If you’re going to be nosy,” he said, pushing the coach door open with his heel, “just follow me, then.”

“Oh, get out of the cab already,” I muttered, pulling my cap down snug on my head. “I’m coming with you.”

Southbank was hardly preferential in the day, never mind this late at night. God knew what Clement wanted with the industrial waterside. I was apprehensive. What if he was up to something dangerous or depraved?

But I also really did not wish to be alone so far from the streets I knew and admittedly, I was—as he’d said—nosy.

After what had happened thus far tonight, neither of us seemed in the mood to truly have at each other. As the weeks had gone on, I kept trying to be angry with him, but … I just kept giving up halfway.

We dodged a bit of rickety traffic and foot-passengers like ghosts themselves. The whole jumble of streets had a feel as though they kept stubborn secrets from the rest of the city, hardly empty but still quite lonely. Dark, muddy, unnervingly dilapidated, it was a place where there seemed to be no sky, just smut and fog, thick with the noxiously sweet and earthy stink typical of unhealthy air. I flanked close to Clement’s right, bristled and ready for anything even though the moment I met this or that stranger’s eye, I looked away again quickly, head down.

Around a corner and away from others, Clement stuck two fingers in his breast pocket and plucked out a tiny paper packet, not even as long as my thumb. He flicked it with his index finger and raised his brows.

“I’ve powder prescription this month,” he offered quietly.

I didn’t think once to turn it down. All the rotten feelings drained away almost immediately. The scene at Waterloo, the ghastly testimony of the Missing woman, most of the unease about our present perplexing adventure.

“Now we shan’t fall asleep,” Clement reported, head tipped back.

“It’s too cold to fall asleep out here,” I said.

“Oh, is your fashionable coat not warm enough? Where’d you get that thing, anyway? It’s new.”

“Kingsley,” I confessed.

“Ha!” Clement cried. “I thought so.”

“I feel as if your tone of voice implies something.”

“Toff bastard.”

“I’m immune to your impolite and very jealous scorn, you intractable shit.”

“Listen to you! Such eloquence!”

“It’s a tragedy you can’t fit in his coats. You could surely use a new one. You look like a lurker.”

Chuckling, still sniffling a bit, Clement threw down the knapsack and dug around in it.

“You’ll want this,” he said, passing me a kerchief before tying a second about his nose and mouth, knotting it at the back of his head. He caught my baffled look and with a sigh, as he waltzed around another corner into a dismal warren of hidden streets and courts, he reached out to tap a peeling, faded health notice from the Governors and Directors of the Poor, posted on the sagging brick: CHOLERA AND WATER. THE INHABITANTS WITHIN THE DISTRICT WHERE CHOLERA IS PREVAILING ARE EARNESTLY ADVISED NOT TO DRINK ANY WATER …

Promptly, I tied the kerchief on, too, and followed close on his heels.

He took a left into a winding alley-like street, guided by the occasional melancholy gas lamp. Puddles gathered at the seam of the pavement, cramped not only between desolate old lodgings with jutting brick and crumbling stucco to either side but by a mass of dingy people. My heart raced a little harder. I’d never seen firsthand the thorns in the city’s conscience, these shadowy, sad, working-class corners. A real rookery if any. Perhaps not the worst, but the worst to which I’d ever been borne exposure.

As if he knew my discomfort—or, more remarkably, felt responsible for it—Clement took me by the arm and kept me close as he pressed on along the walls towards whatever it was for which the small, buzzing crowd had gathered. A boxing match, perhaps. A dog fight. Something else illicit. Very awake and aware now, I saw no gambling slips in anyone’s hand as we bobbed and weaved around people, but this was a poverty-stricken place, so perhaps they didn’t care about slips …

A charity’s soup kitchen.

The disorganised queue rounded the corner into another shadowy yard called Ladd’s Court, and at the dead end under the tall arched and bricked-in windows of some building’s backside, a sizeable wooden table had been set up, where the unfortunate locals swarmed like flies to a rotting thing.

I tugged at Clement’s sleeve, utterly shocked. But I didn’t know what to say. He just shrugged, sending a sensitive glance it didn’t seem he meant for me to see. And it left me feeling rather fluttery and flustered. A soup kitchen. Clement, the aloof and complacent Clement … volunteering at a soup kitchen.

A handful of better off individuals, masked just as we were, tended to the diners. A few women of the faith, gentlemen in proper coats, two or three ladies in high-necked gowns and lovely little capes, all aproned as they passed out bowls of stew, collected empty dishes, then turned to the next set of hungry hands. At the night’s makeshift hearth, two of the Sisters ladled out servings while another large pot cooked over a street fire. A frame sign stood guard there:

CHARITABLE SOCIETY FOR THE IMPROVEMENT

OF LIFE AND LONGEVITY

SERVING TONIGHT

MRS. BEETON’S SOUP FOR BENEVOLENT PURPOSES

“Mr. Clement!” one of the ladies greeted as we approached. She tugged her mask down with one hooked finger just enough to reveal a full, sweet smile, and I recognised her from All Hallows’, the great gallery upstairs with the music and the lights. The one who had so flawlessly saved Mr. Zayne from Miss Jessica’s contempt.

“I’ve brought a friend.” Clement gestured my way absently. “He’ll be splendid help, I promise.”

Sullen light from a gas lamp bounced off the jade brooch at the woman’s throat as she draped an apron around me and tied it at my waist. I blushed, that she should do it for me as if I were a child. “Thank you, miss,” I mumbled sheepishly, still reconciling with what I’d gotten myself into. It was unbelievable how the charity transformed a gloomy, dangerous little place into something almost pleasant.

Affixing his own apron, Clement leaned over and said, “Please don’t stray. I’m not in the mood for an explanation to Westwood and Chesley as to why the Cross’s newest little recruit is black and blue and robbed for every penny he’s worth. Which doesn’t seem to be a lot, but … ”

I pouted though he couldn’t see it beyond the mask. Even with the way his eyes danced, I caught the seriousness in them, as if he teased so I wouldn’t notice how much he did consider my safety.

Such as it was, somehow, I’d found myself right back in my old vocation as a makeshift server. And I really didn’t mind.

Labourers, loafers, street Arabs, surly-looking fellows and half-dead looking fellows, sad-faced and quiet ladies of every age and size—the sorts of people one might hurry by up in Westminster and the West End, with eyes cast away. A baby wailed, but only shortly. A grubby little boy barely tall enough to see above a windowsill struggled to cradle a kitten who seemed to really prefer otherwise. The rain hovered like a mist, tingling on what parts of my flushed face it could touch.

Not but an hour and a half ago, we’d been watching the Yard assess a body found in the river, and now, here, we were surrounded by surprising life.

Two young and plain-looking mill girls hand-sewing buttons onto broken shoes peeped up at me as I handed them bowls of thin stew with chunks of bread plopped on top. Their wide eyes followed me after I moved on, whispers and shy giggles muffled as they huddled together.

“His nails’re so clean, you see that … ”

“An’ his face, I wish Rudy washed ’is face like that.”

Never mind I was unaccustomed to girls admiring me much; in the end, I really hadn’t a thing in my life to complain about, did I?

“Ah, if it isn’t Southbank’s best knocker-up!” Clement said, not far away, with a boyish grin obvious in his voice.

“Look at this rascal,” replied a plump, bow-legged woman with mousy brown hair and rheumatic fingers. “Rowan, you’ll excuse mum, here, my walking’s bad tonight.”

My eyes cut to Clement. Rowan. His first name?

“Have you been well?” the little woman asked.

“Yes, mum.” Clement let her pull him down for a kiss and a pinch. Either he was very good at hiding his distress from our night’s assignment, or this place transformed him into a different person. With the tired old woman, into the child he still technically was—not even twenty yet. Or … the child he used to be.

“But have you been good?”

“Always, mum, you know that.”

“Lies,” the woman scolded, whistling it through her few teeth as she pinched him again.

I wandered up beside Clement, ducking below a gas pipe precariously tunneled out through a cloudy window.

“Eat now, mum,” he said. “The weather’s hurting your knees, yet? I can bring poppy confection powder, mix it right in some mint tea … ”

The woman gave him a dark look as she carefully cradled her food and eased down to sit. “Been long enough since you’ve gone for me to stop worrying ’bout you—look at you, doin’ so well, always said you were cut from different sod’n the rest of us—yet here I am, still worrying.”

Clement slid down his kerchief mask to plant a kiss atop her head before he went off to fetch more soup and bread.

Since you’ve gone …

I hurried after him. “Clement,” I urged, falling in close to his side, “what does she mean, since you’ve gone?”

He stopped short, a defenceless look flashing almost too fast to catch across his face. His brow knotted. He reached into his coat for his packet of tobacco.

“Shall we smoke?” he said quietly.

At the sodden junction of the street, Clement rolled a cigarette. He didn’t look at me. “I was here for a time,” he said. “When I first came to London.”

The match hissed as he struck it in the gloomy lamplight and I gawked at him, brow knotted. Clement, here? Surely not so. He was a somewhat adorable and defiant half-gentleman but nothing like these poor souls, not in morals, not in education, not in health.

“From where?” I asked.

“Northamptonshire.”

“I thought you were Welsh.”

His glance flickered over as he rolled a second cigarette for me, sized me up briefly as though debating whether to be bothered by my knowledge of such. A flat smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “I am,” he said. “Port Talbot, originally. But I moved to family in the Midlands after my father died, and came to London to work four or five years ago.”

Our face coverings dropped to our chins, he lit my cigarette for me with the glowing tip of his own, watching the bright little embers of it swell with hooded eyes. He looked so vulnerable, suddenly. Looked his age, soft and tired and in need of a warm dinner, a warm home, a warm, comfortable bed with a fire blazing. Tobacco smoke swirled silky between us as I rolled my lower lip between my teeth, wrestling with the question for a moment.

“Why are you so merciless with the ghosts?” I asked finally.

Clement looked over at me with a sweet pinch of shock to his face. “Merciless?”

“During inspections,” I persisted. “How are you so—so thoughtful and conscious of the suffering here, yet utterly immune to the suffering of the Missing?”

“The Missing … ?”

“The ghosts.”

“How quaint,” he said with a flick of the brow.

“They’re just as unfortunate and dispossessed as these people.” I nodded to the crowd further up the alley. My voice was chalky in my throat where the bitterness from Clement’s powder had finally faded. “Here you are, full of such goodwill, but all you wish on investigation is to burn the bones and ‘get it over with.’ Are you really so unsympathetic to what it’s like to be stuck in the après-monde?”

“The ‘après-monde.’” Clement uttered a scoff that was more like a nervous laugh. “You’ve been in Kingsley’s company a lot, hmm?”

“Della Triviat was sentient, Clement, and you did her away without a thought,” I reminded him crossly, a bit embarrassed to have been caught using Cain’s name for the in-between while also caught in his hand-me-down coat, and somewhat in awe of my own brashness.

“Christ, are you still in a huff about the Triviat case?”

“Of course; I am! And Waterloo tonight, you wanted the corpse’s name before she was even dry.”

“Lord Triviat wished his house be cleansed of spectral activity, as you evidently still do not recall.” Clement heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes. Somehow … it wasn’t very convincing of true indifference. “And we reconnoitered tonight, why shouldn’t I have wanted the woman’s name?”

“But where do you draw the line between spirits we destroy and spirits we let alone? What gives you that right?” I didn’t want to be so spiteful, but I was desperate to understand. I wasn’t sure when, but an overwhelming need to know Clement had broken open in me. I wanted so badly to look up to him. And perhaps I was afraid to consider I shouldn’t want either of those things.

“If the ghosts are intelligent,” I pressed, “why not ask why they do what they do? What it’s like for them?”

“Yes, Virginia.” Clement scoffed. “What do you believe this to be, Will, Wilde’s ‘Canterville Ghost?’”

“Oh, how very droll, because Virginia asked the same of the ghost in the story—Clement, I’m very serious. We could have asked Della things, we could have learned from her!”

Like I might have learned from Charlie and Colette. Like I might now, from Mary Ann back in my room. Della, Jude, Maude, how many countless others over the years … so many questions about the Missing world still unanswered. Yes, and I couldn’t even begin to think about Jude in that sealed bottle. Others like him, kept on a shelf to study.

Clement sighed through his teeth. “My bloody task is to keep spirits away from those who do not want them around.”

“Right, and my worries are trivial and my inefficiency as an inspector is a grand burden.”

“What?” Clement’s face dimpled. “You’re part of the team—”

Suddenly he threw down the end of his cigarette as if the last puff had burned his fingertips, grinding the smouldering paper into the concrete with a toe.

“You know,” he husked, lamplight glinting off that tiny chunk of quartz at his throat, “enough of this. You’re not the only little saint. I grew up with the dead, too.”

“Yes,” I said, frustrated by the ugliness of my own voice but unable to defuse it. “Third parameter psychosensitive, you said. An empath. Though you sure as hell lack some empathy.”

His eyes flashed over me; he didn’t correct me. And ah, I could hear it now in his unflinching indignance, certainly, the soft, throaty consonants typical of the midlands straining against the mostly London of his voice as he spat, “If the dead torture the living, why, I’ll put a stop to it right away. Learning is our duty, but so is that. For Christ’s sake, the ghosts aren’t human, Winchester! They might seem it, but they’re not. They’re electromagnet—aura—ambient, static—something. You’ve got me all worked up and I can’t remember! They’re leftover souls. And the longer they exist in the pale, the après-monde, whatever you want to call it … ”

“The in-between.”

“Sure. As they linger, any remaining humanness fades. Leaves the shell of a soul, in a sense. Time mutates and warps it all until, suddenly, we’ve got entities beyond our control. Daemons, elementals, faeries.”

What’s your burden? he’d asked when we’d first, officially, met. In the music hall, after my interview. Burden.

“And what sort of heartache has so disillusioned you?” The words scraped from the back of my throat bitter and defiant. Clement’s eyes veered over as if the question had flown like an arrow and pierced something secret and suffering.

And I, of course, was flustered and instantly guilty for how hurtful I’d been. I didn’t wish to be so cruel to him. It was just that … A tragedy like the rest of us, Cain had said that night in his room.

Clement’s mouth hung just gently open as if his voice failed him. But then he cleared his throat and leaned back against the brick wall, tapping one foot behind the other.

“What happened with the Triviats … ” He began to roll another cigarette, speaking flatly and quietly. “I realise that was a difficult assignment for you. I shouldn’t have made a scene as I did. But you must understand the precarious role we play, our obligations as spectral inspectors in a world such as this. We may ask all the questions we please. You’re right, we have not learned everything yet. But would you want to be condemned to the ‘in-between’ forever? Nothing but a shadow figure in a room full of feeling, breathing, living souls, to whom you no longer matter?”

My heart fell swiftly.

His eyes slid back to me burning bright in a way so achingly innocent and meaningful, I feared it would haunt me. It was his conscience, I realised.

“I’ve experienced my small psychosensitive share of possessions on sundry other cases,” he said. “Do you think I’ve not undergone the same war between right and wrong in what we do? Do you really believe me so heartless?”

My voice strayed. “No,” I managed to whisper, finally.

“I’ve learned you can’t feel too much, or you can’t do what you need to do.” Clement lit his next cigarette. His eyes settled elsewhere as he waved out the match. “And here you come, reminding me of everything about which I endeavour not to think, and now we’re both … angry with each other for the same bloody thing.”

I wilted in guilt, feeling quite undeserving of his guidance and wishing he would look at me again so he might see that what he said meant so much to me. A young and wild half-gentleman like him shouldn’t have been so full of wisdom already, righteous and cynical as it was.

I finished my cigarette and rolled the stub of it between thumb and forefinger, grinding out the last bits of unburned tobacco. Hunching into my coat, I took a deep breath to let out slowly, and take all the bad with it.

Merciless, I’d said. But he wasn’t. He was just stubbornly pragmatic and perhaps, somewhere, I’d already known all that.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, heartfelt and penitent. “For calling you merciless. I … trust you. Please don’t doubt that.”

How was it fair to hold any sort of grudge against him when he clearly had a secret self to which he feared the world would not be kind?

Just as I did.

For a moment, I thought Clement wouldn’t reply, but then he uttered the timid remains of a laugh. “Good. I’m one of the most trustworthy fellows you’ll ever meet, after all.”

There it was, his dastardly charm. Relief rolled through me and I smiled gently as, with only a breath of hesitation, I cast him a playful glance. “Unfortunately.”

Clement sighed. “I fear you simply do not yet know me well enough.”

I gestured behind us, to Ladd’s Court. “I’d like to, but apparently trustworthy fellows are also greatly secretive.”

“We prefer mysterious.”

“ ‘We?’ ”

“Myself and the other few trustworthy fellows left in the world.” Clement issued a shy smirk like such battles of wit reinvigorated him, seeming entirely unconscious to how the smile made him adorable again. He gave my cap a little tug, something with all the sentiments of a hair ruffle, and let his hand drift down for a brotherly touch to the back as he brushed past me. He was, after all, barely a grown man yet—all that uncouth and uncooperative deportment as if trying to reject his own innocence, lest anyone use it against him. I understood that, absolutely.

Clement struck off towards the crowd of hungry people, adjusting his apron as the nighttime wind combed through his hair. Somewhere nearby, a church bell rang for the half hour. And I felt, for some reason, that I was extraordinarily lucky to know him.

In the fieldwork office, the case coordinator said with a tight little frown of remonstration, “The case has been inaptly written off as closed too many times now.”

Clement puffed on a small giltwood pipe of tobacco at the open window overlooking Portland Place, seated half on the sill with one leg hugged to his chest in all his usual grace—braces hanging, patterned waistcoat half-buttoned, striped sleeves rolled up over the long sleeves of his undershirt. He uttered a curt scoff, eyes narrowed.

“It’s the damn Bridge of Sighs,” he tried to reason, wholly uninterested in deference to superiors in that charmingly recalcitrant way of his. “More and more hopeless souls are left there every year, full of anguish and shame. In fact, we’ve just been there! Last week, Will and I witnessed the discovery of a body. Waterloo will never be properly closed. Might as well write it off like that Berkeley Square. Undecided. Unresolved.”

“ ‘Inconclusive,’ ” Miss Jessica corrected with a lofty sniff.

Clement pointed to her with the mouthpiece of his pipe as if to say, There. “I won’t accept that case. Give it to someone else.”

O’Brien tried to exchange an amused glance with me where he, Miss Jessica, and I waited patiently near the office door for the case summaries. But I was far from amused by the possibility of returning to Waterloo. Again.

In a short impasse, the coordinator stared at Clement as if he wanted to disbelieve the impertinence but really had no reason to, while Clement stared back at him, daringly calm.

The coordinator gave up with a long sigh, drooping back into his chair and covering half his face with a sun-spotted hand. “Fine,” he conceded, wheezy and defeated per usual. “I shall switch the case for the Starlight Theater. Furthermore, we are awaiting a response as far as your police escort, though we’ve stressed to the Yard we’d like to proceed with the inspection tonight.”

“What’s Quinn doing today?” Clement asked.

The case coordinator didn’t even turn to face him. “Inspector Quinn has no assignments tonight,” he said, slowly, as if waiting for Clement to cut in again. Clement readily did.

“Then I’ll talk to him, and he’ll come along. Problem solved.”

“Clement, that entails a request for replacement inspector, first of all … ”

“I shall take care of the paperwork so you don’t have to. He’ll come along, of course.”

The coordinator heaved one last weary sigh. We all knew very well Clement was going to get his way, and so did the coordinator. The temptation of less paperwork, in the end, proved too much. “All right, then,” he said. “If you won’t even allow your fellow man a night off, so be it.”

Starlight Theater, Proprietors and patrons troubled, Multifarious Apparitions and Dis-embodied Sounds. The other team’s names had been scratched out and replaced by ours: Lead Inspector Clement, Medium in Training Dubois, Scouting Inspector Winchester, Assistant O’Brien, Inspector Quinn (Police Escort).

And yet, when the clocks around London struck three hours before midnight and we were on our way to the theater—it was sans police escort.

“And Quinn?” Miss Jessica asked. Clement waved a hand and rolled his eyes.

“I’m bending the rules tonight,” he said, only mildly reproachful. “Who’s ever really required an escort on investigation?”

Miss Jessica raised her brows. “A fortnight ago, Inspectors Perbley, Priggs, and I did, when we encountered a fraudulent case.”

We climbed from the cab under the dazzling façade of the playhouse. This part of the city crawled with them, but the Starlight was hard to miss thanks to the large, chipped and peeling mermaid floating above the front doors, salvaged from the stern of some long-ago ship. Playbills made a collage across the windows.

It was a small theater, all dressed-up in a very French style. The manager met us nervously in the reception room, shaking our hands and saying, “Pleasure, it’s a pleasure, let’s hurry as I have a reservation with colleagues, I didn’t know if you’d be coming tonight for this alleged ‘grey lady’ … ”

He gave us the tour. Dressing rooms, business office, waxworks display, main stage.

“And what sort of action do you wish to result from our inspection?” Clement asked on a sigh, picking absently at his thumb with the nail of his middle finger.

“Honestly,” the tiny-faced manager snapped, “guests come more for the ghoul than our shows and I will not have Starlight immortalised as a haunted house before it’s immortalised for the most marvelous classical productions this side of the palace!”

“Duly noted,” Clement said, and he didn’t have to look at me for me to know he still paid close heed to my response to our clients’ wishes.

Inside, once through with invalidation, we gathered before the stage. The thick velvet curtains hung open, golden tassels dancing above the floor; still suspended against the backdrop was a monstrous wooden moon, prop scenery. Its painted toothy grin made it look hungry, its fat black eyes crazed.

“Disturbing,” Clement said, then pulled over our equipment case to unpack. “What have we got tonight?” he hummed to himself. “Bells, a working Franklin meter, thank God—oh! That’s right, the thermospecs!”

“Prototype thermospectacles,” Miss Jessica reminded primly.

Clement already had the thick multi-lensed things, very similar to miners’ goggles, situated on his head by a leather strap. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he wasn’t as old as he presented himself. This was not one of those times. He looked up at O’Brien through the bulky thermospectacles. “Oh,” he breathed. “These are very odd. And we’re to see ghostly figures with them?”

“That’s the hope,” O’Brien said, smiling anxiously as if the goggles frightened him a bit. I didn’t blame him. “The lens holds therm … thermopiles.”

Clement pushed the goggles up to perch atop his head. “I’m taking these,” he declared, then pointed to Miss Jessica and me. “Walk-through.” And then he dropped the goggles back down to his nose.

There was something about a dark, haunted theater that was unnerving in a unique way. But the waxworks hall was disturbing in its own right.

I stepped over the velvet queue rope at the door to the wax displays, stretching out a hand to help Miss Jessica, who had to lift her lovely skirts rather high to place a leg over the rope. She took my fingers with a gentle, “Thank you,” below her breath, and then both of us suddenly remembered how little we liked one another. I pulled my hand back a bit more slowly than she took hers away, lifting her chin in an overly dignified manner as she stepped along with her other foot and smoothed her skirts down.

We wandered through the modest display of wax figures, arranged in two rooms just opposite the reception room and conjoined at the center by a wide threshold that had once held doors but now only held empty hinges. A number of models and scenes, a few unfinished displays covered by sheets. They weren’t Tussaud by any means, but—here, the beheading of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, their faces stretched in overdramatic looks of fear; there, Her Majesty smiling with dull dark glass eyes placed a little too closely to her prominent nose; against the far wall, the burning of a witch.

I slowed to a stop.

The replica of a witch’s pyre was crude and homemade, sparsely-bunched twigs and branches. Tied to it by whiskered rope was the wax figure of a young lady, in simple peasant dress, her arms hanging palm-out and open as if to say, Look at me … A noose dangled about her neck. Iron rivets stuck through her elbows and shoulders like the thorns of a rose. And she peered out straightforward with a calm, secretive smile, looking at something no one else could see—

A shadow passed by behind me in the shiny glass of her eyes. I turned with a sharp little inhale. But it was just Miss Jessica, stepping in a circle as she looked around.

“I’m not picking anything up in here,” she complained, using her breathy Medium-in-Training voice. She fell still, blonde hair swaying along her back. “It’s no wonder there are ‘multifarious’ apparition sightings. It’s as if they’re all staring at you, is it not?”

The shadowy shapes of the wax figures stood sentinel around us, obstructing view in some places and at others catching in the corner of the eye. I let my gaze drift along the crowd of fake people. Like the Missing sometimes, the wax figures were nothing but distinct black masses in the dark, inanimate and empty of innate presence.

Miss Jessica reached up to start braiding her hair in boredom—then suddenly stopped.

“What?” I murmured.

“Did you happen to count, when we entered this room, how many displays were covered in sheets?”

The hair stood on end along my neck and arms just to imagine why she asked. “Why?” My mouth barely moved around the whisper, my stomach aflutter. “Do you see something odd?”

Footsteps pounded down the hall. Miss Jessica and I whirled around to watch as O’Brien stumbled to a stop at the door. “Clement would like you two to return promptly,” he gasped, all excitable in his anxious way. “There seems to be much movement upstairs, above the stage.”

We hurried after him to the stage without looking back, perhaps irresponsibly as inspectors. But I don’t think either of us wanted to confirm or deny whether the number in sheeted figures had somehow changed.

Clement waited at the edge of the stage, those ghastly thermospectacles abandoned in one of the chairs.

“Where upstairs?” Miss Jessica asked, pushing past me gently as if determined to appear properly urgent.

Clement shrugged, gesturing. “Between the scaffolding and the dressing rooms, I’d say.”

“Was there any other activity while we were gone?”

“Why do you think I sent O’Brien for you?”

“Well, I’m just asking.”

“You were gone for ten minutes—”

A woman walked by behind them, up on the stage. I went rigid, standing with O’Brien amongst the theater seats.

She was a spirit, obviously. We were the only ones in the building. And her form was surprisingly natural-looking, if a little soft and shivery—fast, but graceful steps, long hair trailing off her shoulders the way the ribbon of her dress trailed along her skirt, sleeves stretching to little diamond-like points at her dainty knuckles. All in shades of grey.

She crossed the stage with no sound whatsoever, and disappeared off the right wing towards the dressing room stairs.

An echo. She had to be. I strode fast and with a purpose to the stage, where I skipped the steps and hoisted myself up between the footlights. And then the real eagerness snapped inside me and I shot forth, hoping to catch up with the Missing woman before she disappeared completely.

“Will?” Clement called. “Christ … come on, we’ll follow him … ”

I hurried up the steep, narrow stairs to the dressing rooms, a handful of adjoining nooks each just big enough for a wardrobe, a mirror table, and room to walk in a circle.

A light shone in the farthest one.

Soft, golden light, the shifting flame of a tiny lamp on the vanity. The room was stuffed with fanciful costumes and jewelry, posh little stools and stands. I slowed to a stop in the center of it, footsteps bringing hollow thuds as if the floorboards had nothing beneath them.

“Hello?” I whispered, mouth dry. Beacons of light. If the woman really were an echo, would she still be able to find me?

I crossed the small room to turn down the lamp until it was just me and my eyes adjusting to the jutting shadows of the furnishings. But …

On the scuffed floor where the last bit of light from the lamp pooled close to my toes, something in the grain of the wood looked odd. I eased down to my knees, leaning over it.

It was a symbol, like from the summoning circle used to bottle Jude. Or the numinous, arcane thing in my mother’s room.

My heart stopped for a moment, then began to race in the pit of my chest. I traced the marking with a mindful finger. Painted there at some point, but scrubbed and scrubbed at except it just couldn’t fully be erased. My eyes jumped about the floor, searching for more, for anything—the faded outline of a pentagram? A larger circle?

From down the hall near the stairs, Clement said, “Will?”

Miss Jessica’s shrill voice carried back behind his: “You can’t just take off without explanation!”

Befuddled, I hovered on my hands and knees over the faint shadow of the marking and looked up to call for them—only to lift my head into the swishing skirts of a woman walking straight into me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and braced for the taffeta of her dress in my face. But nothing hit except a blast of cold air.

“STO-O-O-O-O-P!”

The wrenching shriek was so close yet so far away, as if it were in my head, slicing through all thought like a blade. Someone, a woman, pleading with every fraying thread of her being for someone to cease … what?

My eyes rolled open. I was on the stage. Walking fast. Layers of a modest gown, drifting about my legs as I moved. Felt very odd to breathe in a corset, worse even than bandages. Was it laced too tight? Lights down; the theater was empty. I’d forgotten some things upstairs.

Christina Claudette Hughling. Actress. From Brompton. Dover originally. Wavy hair that tickled my fingers as I tucked it behind her ears, as we climbed to the dressing rooms. She, moving; me, seeing. A little song trilled from a phonograph somewhere overhead. Had Joyce forgotten to stop the record? Sighing. Following the wall with one hand, the other pressed to her middle, where something gave a hard, conscious wriggle against the compression of her clothes. Oh—a child. Bastard child, Christina thought, a hiss somewhere deep inside near the angry flutter behind her navel.

The lamp in the dressing room was aglow. I stopped at the top of the stairs with Christina, confused. She was sure she’d snuffed it out. On the vanity was a note. We eased down to sit and unfolded the little page.

Miss Claudette … such a fan … I attend your every performance … dinner … meet at 9 o’clock in the evening …

Corner of the eye. Someone in the doorway. A large man, voluminous cloak. Bowler hat. Grotesque white faceless mask, just holes for the beady, glittering eyes to peek through. No … I dropped the letter and the cameo ring on his balled-up leather fist cracked against my jaw as the stranger hit me—

Candles. Surrounded by candles. I saw Christina suddenly as if I were in the room before her, and she was hanging. Hanged … hung over the center of a large diabolical-looking circle painted on the floor. Absolutely a circle like the one in my mother’s room, and the vanity stool kicked off to the side too far away from her feet. Her hands dangled limp and white at her sides the way her swollen face sagged gently against her shoulder, stare glistening empty like the stare of that wax witch downstairs. I could feel him behind me, the masked man—my hair stood on end as if reaching for his presence—could hear him breathing, a slightly laborious and wheezing sort of breath.

I gasped myself out of the trance, on the floor of the dressing room cradled half against Miss Jessica’s knee.

“O’Brien,” she hissed. “A kerchief, please. He’s in a fit.”

“I’m not in a fit,” I croaked, but Miss Jessica smothered most of it to tend to my apparent nosebleed. I sat up on my own, winded and sick to my stomach. And then I just burst into tears.

“Miss Christina Hughling,” I reported, hands shaking. The fear was so vibrant yet, it was like the pitch of a fever that would not break. “Killed, here in this room. I don’t know, a deranged fan, perhaps. On the stage, movement upstairs, she’s an echo, certainly … ”

The circle. I couldn’t say it. The circle on the floor. On my mother’s floor.

Miss Jessica blanched. “I’ve felt that,” she murmured. It seemed for one moment she would lose her temper, but then she just looked sad. “Murder. It’s the worst feeling in the world.” She stared long and hard up at Clement, before her eyes veered back to me as if analyzing my reaction in comparison to hers.

O’Brien turned frantically, the flame in his lamp stuttering. “There wasn’t anything in the file about … ”

“Get him on his feet,” Clement said, his narrowed eyes lingering on me, and then he turned on his heel and stormed out into the dark hall.

Off to Fleet Street we went, to wait patiently while Mr. Zayne tore through his fat, mouldy books searching for the records of a Miss Christina Hughling, murdered in the Starlight Theater.

O’Brien stayed by my side as if a nurse to a ward as, still feeling quite fatigued and feverish, I wandered about peeking and toying with all the outlandish things in the Stygian Society’s collections. Mr. Zayne’s other men weren’t there; it was surprisingly peaceful as thick candles burned and a campy song echoed from an old phonograph. Anything to get the music from Miss Hughling’s death out of my head.

Looking rather cozy in a sweater with holes cut in the ends of the sleeves for his thumbs to poke through, Mr. Zayne fell very still with his finger to the faded page of his ledger of the deceased. Slowly, he met Clement’s eyes.

“What?” Clement snapped. “Out with it, man.”

“It doesn’t say murder,” Mr. Zayne said. “Says here suicide, Clement. 1877. Old Mr. Thomathy annotated. She even left a note, apparently.”

Clement shot me a scathing glance. “Will, you said—”

“I wasn’t lying!” I cried. “She was murdered. I know for a fact she was. He hanged her. I saw it. Well, I saw her hanging. And then I woke up!”

“Well, the post-mortem examination should have discovered any wounds, and what sort of murderer simply hangs his victim?” Miss Jessica defied. “She left a note. She killed herself. Who performed the pre-work? They were absolutely remiss!”

“I saw it,” I insisted fiercely.

And yet the images were already fading. Everything, slipping away, except the dull shroud of murder and the vision of the woman floating above the wicked circle on the floor.

The frown flitted from Miss Jessica’s face as she looked to Clement, eyes wide. “Someone’s managed to conceal the crime, then.”

“Son of a bitch!” Clement hissed, slapping the death book shut under Mr. Zayne’s nose. He didn’t have to elaborate for any of us to understand his sudden bitten-back rage. We’d have to file a report with Scotland Yard regarding the murder—of course on the evening we’d bent the rules and taken no escort with us.

“But who would have concealed it, and how?” Miss Jessica pressed.

“The police could have, if they’d been so inclined.” Clement dragged a hand down the side of his face. “The family perhaps requested it to keep their personal affairs out of the papers. But the killer might have done it, too, if he held enough power. Listen, that’s a mess in which I’d rather not be tangled, so let’s just burn her damn bones and call it a night.”

Miss Jessica was aghast. “The man may still be free!”

“Do I look like a Yard inspector to you?” Clement retorted.

Mr. Zayne pointed to the door, where outside through the hustle and bustle of Fleet Street, his men, the other members of the Stygian Society, were on their way back from—well, I hadn’t really any idea what they did beyond their work with the Cross, and it was probably wrong to conjecture it something criminal or deprave. But who knew.

“Dover,” Mr. Zayne read after taking a moment to find Miss Hughling again in his big book of names. “Body was shipped back to Dover where her family is, Clement.”

“Bloody hell, we’ll just note that and leave the case open, then.” Clement heaved a sigh and grabbed his muffler from the back of Mr. Zayne’s chair. O’Brien and Miss Jessica followed him out, she, of course, already talking his ear off about how the devil we were to patch up our night’s escortless blunder.

I stood with my arms crossed, looking around the dim, musty shop until finally my eyes found Mr. Zayne over a tall stack of timeworn French books. He was already looking at me.

“There’s something of import you want, isn’t there?” he prompted, tapping his cigarette case on the top of his makeshift front desk. It was so odd, how shabby could meet cultured in the strangest of ways with people like him and Clement.

I blushed faintly, nodding. “How did you know?”

“Well, you stayed in here. Other’n that, just a feeling.”

“How did the Black Cross find you, Zayne?” I asked politely.

He offered a little smirk and a nod of the head, rubbing at one cheek with the scrape of stubble against his palm. “Ah, what a proper way to word it, Winchester.” He lit a cigarette, offered me one, then hoisted himself to sit cross-legged on his front desk. He gestured for me to pull a chair over and sit beside him. I did.

He smoked thoughtfully for a moment, then gave me the kindest of grins. “You know, they passed the Anatomy Act so long ago, but there’re still plenty of resurrectionists. I picked up the trade about your age or younger, on top of employment as errand boy at Madame Felicity’s, just up the street here. Thought it was better than tooling—crowing—cracking and all the like. Well, the resurrectionists nowadays work for different masters, but mainly me and the other boys dug up bodies for doctors, undertakers, occultists … ” Mr. Zayne paused, made a puckered face, then chuckled and shrugged. “And the Cross kept aware of it, of course.”

I was in awe. It was almost a shame, how the surprise was more like morbid curiosity. Respectful curiosity, I mean. Mr. Zayne had been a perfect crook in training. And Clement, in that poor Southbank neighbourhood … what if he’d been like Mr. Zayne before the Cross?

“Felicity traded my contract to the Black Cross, I don’t know, not too long ago, and since then I’ve been one of their bone-snatchers.” Mr. Zayne grinned. “I get paid handsomely.”

“How do you know Clement?”

The question tumbled out unwarranted. It was what I really wanted to know, though. You could ask anyone about Cain, but Clement required a more intimate perspective.

Mr. Zayne sent me a sideways glance.

“The Cross already had him when I joined, see,” he said in a low and velvety tone. “He was … seventeen, then, I think? And all he’d do was play the bloody piano. But I managed to get him to talk after a while.”

He said it with a mysterious glint in his squinted eyes, something secret and proud, and nostalgic. Seventeen … Clement hadn’t really been older than me when he’d signed on. And the question I’d been dying to ask Mr. Zayne had only unlocked more questions.

“Zayne! Winchester!” Clement called from outside. “We don’t have all night!”

“I simply cannot believe this!” Miss Jessica’s voice carried tightly from the walk out front. “And now you’ve a police report to write … ”

“I have a question for you, now,” Mr. Zayne said as I donned my coat and muffler. “Even trade, yeah?”

Fingers on the door, ready to go, I met his eyes as patiently as I could. “Of course, Mr. Zayne.”

“Is it true?”

My heart lodged in my throat for a breath or two. “Is … what true?” I prompted. My mother’s involvement with the Cross? Her murder? The house from whence I’d come? That I hadn’t formally applied? He couldn’t possibly know any of those things. Could he—?

Mr. Zayne shrugged, just sitting there on that damn examination table. “That you’re special,” he said, innocently. “Clement says you’re special, like him. Like a lot of you. Is it true you’re special, Winchester? Can you really see things others can’t?”

I blinked a few times in surprise, breathing a sigh of relief I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. “Yes,” I whispered then, but I didn’t mean it vainly. I was just flustered to know how often I was spoken of unawares. And … highly, apparently. By Clement. To three people now. God, but he was so confusing to me. “I mean no. I mean, yes, Westwood said I was an exception, but I don’t think I’m very special.”

“Oh.” Mr. Zayne smiled warmly. I would have sworn there was another twinkle in his eye. “Everyone’s special. The trick is knowing it, and owning it.”

Stately families had long since fled the cheerless, exhausted city, dark and sad and wet as it was as autumn died away. But the rest of London went on like clockwork, grinding clatter, tolling bells, people on the street hopping around puddles and horse filth as rain and smog choked the blustery sky. And just as November turned towards December, my worst nightmare came to life.

Across from me in the reception room of the Cross main offices were my father and Miss Valérie. The secretary just closed me in with them like Daniel in the den of lions.

“They can’t even offer mid-morning refreshments?” my father complained, having already made himself comfortable in a chair near the mantle. His colour was poor, his eyes tired. But his demeanour was ostentatious as ever, from the flashy pattern of his suit to the shine of his shoes. Beside him, Miss Valérie inspected the faded Chinese rug underfoot with a wrinkle to the bridge of her nose.

I stood near the windows, heart pounding. I opened my mouth. I closed it. I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t find words to say.

“I found you, darling,” my father seized the silence, saying it so compassionately, so tenderly. His brows furrowed. “Thankfully, it wasn’t all too difficult to figure out!”

“How long?” I felt as if I’d choke on my tongue. I wouldn’t have washed up and dressed so fast had I known he was the one calling when the courier roused me from a good sleep. My hair was a mess and my flannel sleeves peeked out from crooked cuffs, bandages all haphazard under my shirts as a stray bit of tooth-paste dried on my thumbnail.

“How long have you known I was here?” I said again.

“Since you left, Willow.”

“Will.”

Miss Valérie cut me a confused glance. My father fiddled with his walking stick, smiling plaintively as if for the first time musing on how he’d raised me … or how little he truly knew me, his child.

“Since I left?” I scoffed, gently, shaking my head. “Yet it took months for you to seek me out?”

“Don’t fret, Will,” my father said, trying to placate me, or perhaps curry my favour. “I promise, we did not come to force you out of this place, though God knows we could have.”

“I know.” I felt myself hardening inside. “I lost many a night’s sleep over it.”

“As you should have … ” His eyes flashed, like off some brilliant threat biding its time. “Do you know why I refrained?”

I could barely mouth the word. “Why?”

“Because it is no longer your home. I will not have you back.”

The entire world seemed to retreat from me. It was not a surprise. But I was confused for a breath or two … the most peculiar twist of devastation and joy.

“This was your choice,” my father went on as if it pained him. “You made your decision against all my better warnings and the lessons I tried so hard to teach, so I’ve no other option but to disown you.”

“Disown me?” I sputtered.

“Yes, dear,” Miss Valérie hummed, eyes hooded and face tight with make-believe regret. “It was an unfortunate necessity, and it gave your father great heartache. Why, he even had to see a doctor for chest pains with all the stress of the betrayal.”

The betrayal. Like I was a conspirator. Like I’d caused him such trouble on purpose.

My father cleared his throat. “My will has already been altered. You cannot collect loans in my name, you will get no portion of inheritance, et cetera, et cetera. I am confident any of the scholars here might explain to you the legalities, should he contact my lawyer for a copy.”

This was just preposterous. What sort of inheritance did a businessman like him have in store for me, anyway? A house of prostitutes? Miss Valérie’s good shoes? Miss Valérie …

“This is all your doing,” I seethed before I could keep myself in check, stabbing a finger in her direction. “You’ve always wanted me gone. Admit it!” I swung around to face my father again. “She’s convinced you I’m terrible and ungrateful for so long, and you believe her, that’s the worst part! She only wants you all to herself. You wrote everything to her in the will, didn’t you?”

“It would be appreciated if you refrained from speaking as though I am absent from the room,” Miss Valérie said thinly.

My father held out a hand to silence me, a shadow falling fast through his eyes. “Your mother was a madwoman who fancied herself a witch!” he cried. “It is because of organisations like this that she carried on with the delusions, and now you’re too tangled up in them to see any reason, either. You made your decision. You left.”

Witch.

“Yes, and you’re telling all your guests your beloved son ran off with one of your girls,” I finished for him, somehow laughing and yelling at the same time. I felt brittle, something frigid beyond panic. “Don’t think I have not heard. The speed of parlour talk is extraordinary. Which girl, Daddy? What did you do to her to make the world believe the lie?”

“Don’t preach to me of lies when you’ve signed on with this place in some devious and fraudulent manner, without the hand of a guardian—”

“There was no contract. Ask Westwood yourself. I’ve been employed properly, as any other young person.”

“Clearly you did not join as Miss Willow.”

“Why on earth would I?” I spat, veritably burning from the inside out with all this and sick with his constant, ignorant reminders of my intermediateness. “As far as the Cross knows, I lost my birth papers in a fire. After all, Will Winchester doesn’t have birth papers, does he?”

“You two are causing a perfect ruckus,” Miss Valérie whined, turning to the fire.

“Oh, hush up!” I said at about the same time my father rumbled, “Valérie, be quiet.”

“Daddy,” I pressed, “what exactly are you telling everyone when they ask of me?”

He shook his head slowly, feigning great despair. “That I’ve disowned you, that you’ve run off with Miss Daphne. Miss Daphne is no longer under my employment.”

The final thread of fear snapped away. Absolutely livid, I stormed across the room. I swear my father flinched away at first, afraid of me. Good.

“What did you do?” I demanded. “What did you do when you found out they helped me leave? What did Miss Valérie do—”

“Miss Valérie has no part in this!”

“What did you do to Daphne, you terrible, terrible man!” Angry tears threatened, my eyes wide and cold with them. “Oh God, is she dead?”

“No, you insufferable dreamer!” My father was truly insulted. “She ran off herself not even three days after you left, to be in Paris with her sister. Zelda accompanied her, and thank God, I never did understand why your mother loved her so, the gypsy—”

I shouldn’t have, but his demeaning Zelda made something in me give way and I swung at him. He caught my wrist and swung back, giving me a smack. I staggered against a table, plagued by visions of that day in his library. Finally, the tears came pouring forth.

“Zelda didn’t call before she left?” I held my face, shaking with the conscious outrage. “Why didn’t she say good-bye? Neither of them said good-bye! What did you two do to make them hate me so much they didn’t say good-bye?”

“Child, you are simply uncontrollable!” Miss Valérie cried, clutching at my father’s shoulder as if to protect him from me.

My father, on the other hand, said nothing. Mouth bitten in a furious line, he dug through his pockets and threw a few letters on the table. Their wax seals were broken.

“Those are from the two of them,” he fumed. “I managed to apprehend them before they were sent. I don’t know why I’m giving them to you now.”

“Because they’re mine, and rightfully mine,” I said, gathering the letters up. The words were just flying out, fragile and sharp as broken glass between my teeth. “If you’ve disowned me, don’t stop there. Scour me right out of your life completely. Burn Mamma’s things. Sweep us under the rug if we’re such a blemish on your days.”

“Goodness, child, you ought to be mentally diagnosed, sounding like a witch with a curse, yourself!” Miss Valérie disparaged with a forced little laugh. She was afraid of me, too.

But something in my father’s eyes changed at her comment. The sadness there was real, I realised, real and hopeless.

He stood roughly and held me fast before I could writhe away, scowling and hissing witlessly at him to let me go. But he had both hands closed firmly on my shoulders as he stooped to speak low and thick into my ear.

“I did not come to upset you,” he said. “Nor to threaten you. I only came to make you aware of the repercussions of your actions. Willow, I never wanted this for you. Not after your mother.”

God, but the name Willow injured me today, even more from his mouth than any. As though he spoke of someone special I ought to have known but didn’t. Someone kind and obedient, next to whom I seemed an utter failure; someone he’d wanted me to be … and who I very much wasn’t, in many ways.

Someone whom we both knew was a different sort of ghost—missing, but having never really existed in the first place at all.

“Darling,” he mourned, “you chose to leave! I would have provided the world for you, but you cast it aside for the same dreadful sideshow hobbies as your mother—it’s broken my heart and you must bear the weight of that. Whether you hate me or not, I am still your father, and I wish you only the best in your endeavours, I hope for your happiness, but I shall not have you back. You’ve made it painfully clear you want nothing to do with me, your only family … ”

“Well,” I whispered very gravely, voice trembling. “The Cross is my family now, and they’ve been better to me in a few fortnights than you have been for many years.”

I should have felt guilt, I thought. I should have felt love for him. Maybe I did, and I hated for those to be my last words to him today, but guilt was certainly no part of it. I pitied him. And it was a much worse feeling.

My father and Miss Valérie left.

Clutching the letters, I watched from the high windows until they disappeared into a coach at the corner. And then I fled.

I wanted to feel exultant. I’d meant it when I’d told my father the Cross was more family than he’d ever been, but—

I almost rounded a corner right into Westwood on my way out of the main offices. He looked at me keenly, raising his thick grey brows. I was in such a daze. But I wasn’t as good at lying as my father. Westwood would see right through me; certainly, he already knew my tragic situation and was simply waiting for me to confess. Perhaps he even knew who my visitors had been, or had overheard it all. Willow. Fraudulent. Disowned.

Panicked, I just bobbed my head in gracious apology and took off, rushing through the halls towards the dormitories.

Westwood didn’t stop me.

***

I went straight along for King’s Hall. Cain didn’t answer when I knocked, perhaps out with his family. But I just couldn’t bear being alone. I tried Clement’s door, the second on the right, Cain had said sometime before.

Clement was in.

“Well, I’m alone in the world!” I choked out, throwing the letters down on his faded floor and climbing onto the small striped chaise in the corner. My bandages were torture; they made it feel as though my chest closed like an asthmatic’s.

Clement just gawked at me, his brows raised and mouth open like his casual greeting had gotten stuck in his throat in the face of my outburst. He was half-dressed, swimming in a comfy-looking banyan robe, knit wool socks peeking from his casual trousers. His was one of the windowless rooms in the center of the terrace building, and a scholarly disaster. Papers and books were scattered about with lamps and candles, the rug at his bedside a bit crooked from use. A Catholic cross hung over a small wash stand, with his dusting powder and tooth-paste, comb and dish of water to soak up unclean air considering the absence of a window for a fresh draft. It was almost like a small corner of Mr. Zayne’s in there. Except it smelled much better. Like peppermint and sweet cloves. Cigarettes and him.

Clement dragged the lopsided wooden chair from his desk around to sit directly in front of me. “What are you going on about?” he ventured impatiently, but I recognised it as one of his fronts because there was a very worried spark in his eyes.

“Do you really want to hear it all?” I muttered.

Clement hesitated just a moment, then nodded.

As if some vengeance against my father, it was with a furious storm inside that I told him everything.

I told him who my father was. I rattled on about my mother, and how she’d had the same gifts as me, she could have been there for me, but she’d left us and I had this gnawing suspicion that her name was somewhere in the criminal witchcraft files, though I couldn’t say why. I told him I’d joined the Cross against my father’s wishes and after helping me, Daphne and Zelda had flown to Paris so now I was really, truly alone.

“That Julien’s?” Clement stressed.

“I’m alone in the world!” I reminded him.

“Lord, Will, hush that nonsense up already.”

“I’m a pariah. I’m hated. I’m a reject like the rest of you—”

“Pardon?” Clement gave a little flick of the brow.

Exasperated, I clambered up to my elbow. “My father finally paid me a visit to cruelly disown me, Clement,” I said through clenched teeth, not sure what he did not understand here. “I am no longer welcome at home. I can’t live on my own! I don’t know how to live a normal life. I grew up in a glorified brothel!”

Clement’s hazel eyes clashed with mine. “What makes you think you must live on your own?”

“The Cross’s charity can’t last forever, obviously.”

“Of course it shall! Men have breathed their last breaths here, devoting their entire lives to the study.”

“So, you advise I live as a burden on others? That’s your suggestion?”

“You’re not alone, and you’re not a burden!” Clement heaved an impatient sigh, fed up with my dramatics. “You’re not thinking clearly! It’s not the end of the world. In fact, I believe it a fine new beginning.”

I scoffed, wiping angrily at my face now that the tears were through, their tracks sticky along my flushed cheeks. “He even removed me from his will.”

“Like a courtesan king has anything to offer a son!”

The sting of truth that I knew, but resented.

“Even that would have been something,” I murmured in a ragged way. “A proper place in life instead of just … ”

Just a living Missing, drifting around amongst those who actually had a place, and a home, and a name.

“I don’t find it very comforting to think we all belong in some place,” Clement said, looking again so very young and tortured. “I’m of the belief it’s about belonging to someone.”

I waited for him to look my way. But he avoided me, deliberately.

Oh … That had come from that secret self of his, I realised with a tight pinch in my chest. The self that understood me more than I’d ever given him credit for, that just sat there and let me berate it time and time again.

And it left me feeling hollow in a strange new way—a good way, somehow. A numb sort of peacefulness.

“I don’t mean that others own you.” Clement sighed curtly, fumbling for better words. “Only that you belong with certain people.”

I smiled a little. Oh, Clement. “I know what you’re trying to say,” I said. “And I’m sorry to be this way. It’s just … have you ever felt so relieved and sad at the same time?”

He rummaged through the piles on his desk for a bottle of cough syrup and nodded, throwing me a sincere glance that caught me off guard. “Yes,” he finally replied. He smiled faintly, too, a little perk of the mouth. And then his secret self flitted away again, as if he hadn’t known it had come in the first place. “Yet, Will, you’ve been doing it on your own already.”

This was true. Perhaps it had been true even before I’d left home.

“Here’s the thing. Your sadness is his victory, but your triumph is his failure. Simple as that.” Clement paused, tapping a finger idly on the little tawny medicine bottle. “Does Westwood know?” he prompted, raising his brows.

“Of what?” I mumbled.

“Your curiosity about your mother and her potential ties to the Cross.”

“No.”

“Is this place full of lies?”

That was a different sort of question. “No.” I wiped at my face the last time with the pinched end of my sleeve like all proper manners said not to.

“Your father’s wrong about that, then.” Clement shrugged. “Are you like your mother?”

“No. I don’t think so. Though I must’ve gotten my knack from her.”

“Are you a devious and deceiving son?”

I thought about this a moment, running my tongue along the ridge of my teeth as the tension in my jaw began to fade. “No,” I finally said, eyes flickering over to meet his.

“There, do you see?” Clement gave another idle shrug. “Listen. Being unaccounted for, existing on the fringes, not known but not sought, either … Would you really rather be weighed down by responsibility and reputation like Kingsley?” He smirked with good-natured pity and opened the cough syrup bottle, holding it my way. “I’m terrible at this solace thing. Do you want a sip to calm your nerves?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he only thought he was terrible at it. “Thank you, no.”

Clement fell quiet for a long moment, slouched in the chair. His eyes wandered off elsewhere, empty of their usual fire. Finally, he murmured, “The Cross is family.” There was a distance to his smile as he dragged his fingers through his hair, but his smile still warmed the silence as he stood, pulling me up with him.

“Are you happy here with the Cross?” he asked, hand lingering on my arm. The frank hopefulness in the question was both pathetic and endearing, something I hadn’t expected at all. He wanted me happy? Something in my chest tightened as I peered up at him and he stared back, waiting for my answer, in a simple sort of hush that needed nothing else. Was I happy here?

“Yes,” I whispered. And it was the truth. I had him and Cain, and even the others, and my own room with its own ghost, and people who believed in me for some reason. Wasn’t that more than enough?

Clement’s gaze roamed my face. “When you look at me like that, Will, you’d think you were a lady awaiting her knight’s victorious kiss.”

Nearly choking on a startled breath, I swept his hand away as my heart fell and then lurched to my throat. “Well, aren’t you just full of yourself, now?” I sputtered, face on fire.

“Not to mention you sound like a girl when you cry, too.” He sank back down on the chair and slouched against his arm at the edge of the desk, grinning at me.

I bristled, and scoffed, hoping to come across far less thrown than I was as I flashed him a disapproving look. “What does that even mean? Is there some sort of difference between male and female tears?”

“I don’t believe so … ” He kicked up a foot to prop against the chaise, wagging his leg back and forth so that his knee bumped into mine. “I wouldn’t blame you for fancying me, Will. I’m quite the remarkable man, don’t you think?”

“Remarkable? Trust, Clement, if I were romantically inverted, I could find much more suitable—well, suitors—and you’re hardly a man, anyway, you’re not even twenty-one—”

Clement laughed, waving his hands. “Good Lord, Will, I’m giving you a hard time!”

“Well, hush up, already!”

I couldn’t say I was not romantically inverted. I knew he only meant to play, but I was just suddenly very aware of how real romance was outside my father’s house. Of my own romantic compass and the way it could inexplicably and unwarrantedly swing north or south or west or east, unpractised and vulnerable.

And … when had he stopped calling me Winchester?

“You have a real talent for ruining your character as soon as you’ve redeemed it,” I muttered.

Clement froze halfway through a catlike stretch, arms in the air. “I’ve redeemed myself?” he said in dismay. “Why, now I’m quite embarrassed!”

“God, you’re unbearable, and I regret telling you anything,” I said, blushing madly and casting him a sharp glance as I swatted his leg out of the way.

In truth, I didn’t regret it. By his harmless laughter, I knew he actually hadn’t the slightest clue what secret self of mine he’d narrowly avoided.

I stooped to gather up the letters from Zelda and Daphne, lying fanned out on his floor as they were, utterly impatient with my flustered state. Damn Clement. I certainly had not looked at him that way, the bastard. A lady awaiting the knight’s kiss, please.

And yet, for some reason, the exchange delighted me greater than I’d been prepared for.

I felt somehow as though … I mattered very much.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” Clement said, scraping up out of his chair and sorting through his room for some real clothes. “Have you been to St James’s Baths? I aim to go once a month. Nice, really, not too expensive.”

“Oh—no.” The public baths? I shook my head quickly, still rattled by the moment and cautious of what it meant and what that meant if it meant anything at all.

He pouted at me from the corner, holding a clean shirt. “Well, fine then. You might just tell me I’m horrid company and get it over with.”

I closed my eyes and covered my face with a hand, taking a moment to gather myself. But also, so he couldn’t see how he made me laugh. “I just need some time to myself, I think. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

On the way out, I met his eyes over my shoulder, offering the best smile I could muster. “Thank you,” I said. I meant it.

Clement nodded because he knew I meant it, and that was enough for the two of us because after everything, we certainly knew each other well by now. Well … well, enough.

Closed into my Knight’s Hall room, I surrendered to the delicate acceptance of being disowned. It was like a bruise, rotten under the skin … but healing.

I paused at the mirror to fix my hair a bit, keenly conscious of the fact that Zelda wasn’t there to trim it lately. It was long enough about my ears to tuck behind them now, flipping up at my neck, wavy and a bit wild.

Like a ghost conjurer preparing for contact, I sat with little treasures laid out before me—the opened letters, Agatha’s comb, Cook’s knife, Daphne’s ring, the sullen and bewitching photograph of my mother.

Mary Ann watched me from the corner, her eyes wide and dark like holes in a sheet. “Sir?” she peeped. “I mean, miss?”

“Sir is all right today,” I said without looking up.

She crouched down to her haunches, apparition shimmering there in her colourless glory. “What’s all that?” she hummed.

“The extent of my personal possessions,” I replied. Daphne’s ring was a bit too small for my thumb, so I put it on my locket chain instead. The locket … I’d never been able to get it open. When I’d been younger, I spent hours one afternoon trying. Zelda had told me to leave it alone because perhaps that meant it wasn’t to be opened. But now I was beyond curious. My father had said it was my mother’s locket. What was in it? Another picture of her? Or in the true splendour of a witch, if she’d really been one, cemetery dirt? Black cat’s teeth and a lock of her hair?

“Who’s that?” Mary Ann drew closer to me, voice a whispery little warble.

My eyes slid to the photograph. “That’s my mother.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“She’s dead.”

“So am I!” Mary Ann thought this was the most tickling thing. Her laughter echoed even after she flickered out, disappearing into the in-between.

Alone again, I read the letters through which my father had already snooped. My chest hurt with the urge to cry once more, but the tears felt all dried up, leaving just the raw ache inside. One letter was from Zelda, dated the first of October, sent from Dover on the coast. Felt like so long ago … She described in her uneven looping words all her love for me and her hope for my future and how she and Daphne had called but I had been out, and they could not miss the train for which my father had presented them tickets, though she knew I’d forgive her anyway. That was true. Yet I still felt such a failure. I had missed her, twice. First with my trunk of things, then with Daphne as they …

I took a slow, steadying breath and kissed the letter, willing the meaning travel somehow to Paris and comfort her.

Sliding out of the second letter before the note itself, cool and smooth in my palm, was one of Daphne’s cameo hair pieces. Twisted gold, like a gentleman’s stick pin but for a lady’s tresses. The three Greek Graces—Splendour, Mirth, and Good Cheer—danced and twined with each other lovingly like sisters where they were carved in the creamy-coloured conch shell at the top. I ran my thumb over their delicate figures, smiling faintly. Surprising, that my father had not taken it from the letter when he’d checked it. But he wasn’t all coldhearted; I had to admit that. We just were not right for each other.

“I love cameos!” Mary Ann trilled from the corner.

Clearing my throat, I stuck the hair pin behind my ear like a pencil and drew out Daphne’s letter. It bore the same date as Zelda’s.

Will, she’d written in a lovely slanting script, I told you before I wished I ached to live life as much as you. I’ll tell you now that you were and will always be my brightest star, my baby brother and gallant little hero. I am forever sorry I stole Madame Zelda, but I feel you’ll be more comforted to know where you might find us both should you ever feel inclined to look. I’ll forward an address soon. All my love, Daphne.

I remembered her kissing the corner of my mouth when I’d left the house, and now, no longer in such a hurried moment, I suddenly recalled the soft sweet feel of it, the familiar scent of her hair. Something pinched deep in my chest. Tightened, and twisted. Gallant little hero … A lady awaiting the knight’s kiss, Clement said; had Daphne ever looked at me that way, and gone unnoticed?

I was sad, but I was not unhappy. Zelda and Daphne were in Paris, and I was with the Cross.

“I’ll write them,” I said to Mary Ann, though she was nowhere to be seen. “Perhaps I’ll even visit them one day when I’m not so required here and I’ve saved up enough for the trip. For now, we’re all safe and free, and that’s something to be thankful for a thousand times over. Wouldn’t you agree, Mary Ann?”

***

Winter finally sank its teeth into the world, bringing out the deepest darkest greens in the trees as the usual fog settled permanently over London. But it was warm inside Fleet Street’s Stygian Society, where Mr. Zayne and his men had begun Christmas decorating early. A Saint Nicholas hat crowned a jar of formaldehyde … somethings; sprigs of holly were tacked above the front door. Round the necks of two stuffed mice fencing each other in Shakespearean costume, which was Mr. Zayne’s favourite taxidermy display of all his bizarre taxidermy displays, were tied tiny red velvet ribbons.

“ … yes,” Quinn was saying, soft leather coat whispering as he crossed his arms, “it’ll be a great report, won’t it?”

“ ‘Suspected poltergeist.’ ” Clement scoffed. “Winchester’s first hoax case, too. Some public medium—the thief—she and her husband really believed we wouldn’t catch them sneaking around the place stirring up ‘activity.’”

“The lengths to which schemers will go!” A fruit-flavoured hard candy clicked against Mr. Zayne’s teeth as he rolled it cheek to cheek with his tongue. “Ah, right—Winchester, what says you?” he asked eagerly, veering the talk a new direction. “You seem like a real party animal. Are you coming along with us to Cheyne Walk or are you retiring for the night?”

I stood up straight, blushing faintly to have been caught fiddling with the hare-headed mannequin hanging in the corner. Everyone else stared, awaiting reply—Mr. Zayne, Quinn, Cain, Clement with the candlelight sparking off that quartz at his throat, all of us here rather early for an inspection night due to the fraudulent case. Party animal. That was, positively, a joke. A party down on Cheyne Walk, in West London’s bohemian hub. Invitation extended by Mr. Zayne Lissie the bone-snatcher.

“Um,” I said.

“It will be fun!” Cain insisted.

I nodded. If he was going, I would, too. “Yes, okay. Why not?”

Clement rolled his eyes dramatically. “All right, then, it’s decided.”

It was a romping get-together, a writer’s party in some elegant brick-faced and ivy-covered townhouse facing the Thames. The young mustached host seemed to know even Mr. Zayne quite personally, greeting him with a firm embrace and calling to the rest of his guests, “All my Spiritualists have arrived, never mind your theories on the erotica of antiquity, Gregory, we shall talk some real fun things now!”

The place was softly aglow, full of idealists and Pre-Raphaelites and other quirky, artistic souls—and, this side of London, certainly not the sort of place where anyone stopped to question the presence of almost-adults like Cain and myself.

It was vaguely nostalgic, but in a refreshing way, an utterly unpretentious gathering of friends and acquaintances who simply wished to talk literature and debate philosophy, or play silly parlour games, smoke cheroots or a small pipe of opium and dance lazily to the music from the phonograph. All Mr. Zayne’s men were there, Marius being the scrawny one and Jasper the rude brute and Henry the one I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting until then. Even Inspector d’Pelletier was in attendance, and Miss Jessica, which surprised me for all her insistence on propriety. Apparently privilege and pedigree vindicated hypocrisy. As did wearing a gown cut low enough on the bosom to leave little room for imagination.

Typical and terrible, how a lady could turn men into such little boys. Pitiful waltz of eyes, a handful of men chasing Miss Jessica’s attention, and Miss Jessica wanting my attention for some reason while I desperately avoided her foxlike glances. Did she imagine our few moments of peace together at Starlight Theater some sort of surrender to her acquaintance?

“Here,” Clement said on his way to the decanter for a second glass of brandy, pressing his cigarette case to my chest as if delivering a secret missive. He paused, squinting briefly at my collar. “What’s this? Fancy, hmm?”

I looked down, perplexed. Ah, right. I’d decided to wear Daphne’s hair cameo like a pin, peeking out of my breast pocket. A sheepish heat arose in my face.

Clement shrugged, tapping the cigarette case as he brushed by. “For the social ineptitude.”

“The … ?” I popped the silver case open just enough to see his prescription powder inside. With a click of the tongue, I took his advice anyway while everyone was in uproarious delight over Cain’s attempts to teach that brute Jasper how to waltz like a proper gentleman. I wasn’t against help with social ineptitude. But even with a little sniff, I still skirted around on the fringes of the comfortable crowd, reverting to old wallflower ways.

At a mirror, I slowed to a stop, eyes lingering on Daphne’s cameo while the party swirled on in the reflection behind me. Cameos were so ethereal and pretty—Daphne’s hair pin, that pink cameo from Miss Maude’s memories and Miss Hughling’s murder in the theater.

Wait a moment.

Miss Hughling. Flash of soft pink conch shell as a hand flew around to her face, tossed her from the vanity stool. Miss Ophie’s Parlour, the hand curled in the syringe rings, black leather and …

A cameo ring.

It was so clear to me, so perfectly and ornately carved. White against pink, profile of a Greek figure. Catching the light, nested in gold, flashing on a fat gloved thumb. So clear, it was like I’d held it in my hands before.

The whole world seemed far away as I wandered towards the balcony, through all the music and voices and lights as far away myself as if I weren’t even there.

Was it … the same cameo ring?

I couldn’t trust I remembered it clearly enough. My mind ran in circles with it, but they weren’t even my memories to begin with. Perhaps they’d blurred.

If it was the same, why?

“You look exhausted,” Miss Jessica said.

I jumped. She’d snuck up on me, outside in the biting night and deeply confounded by the damn ring. Trapped, I plastered on the obligatory smile. “Do I?”

Miss Jessica’s lashes fluttered as she smiled in a way she’d never smiled at me before. “Do you always answer questions with questions?”

“Perhaps?”

She drifted closer until she stood beside me, shoulder grazing mine. “I heard from a little birdy,” she murmured, lacing her fingers idly and dropping her voice low so only I could hear over the echo of the party inside, “that you’ve really proved Chesley and his doubts wrong.”

My smile soured a bit. “Is that so, Inspector?”

“Miss Jessica,” she corrected. “I’ve also heard that you and Clement are quite the pair.”

“We work very well together, but not as well as he and Quinn.”

“I mean that you’re friends,” she said.

I cut her a glance, suspicious of the patronising tone.

“We are,” I confirmed.

Miss Jessica tipped her head to one side with a thoughtful sigh. “You’d be wise to stay cautious around him. His worst curse is he has too much talent. He forgets how to function in society, and I just fear you’re so new and impressionable, he might infect you with his lack of manners. And then you’ll be staring at me brazenly, too.” She paused, not without a flush of pink to her cheeks and a heavy sidelong glance. “There are only two types of men who don’t stare brazenly. Men who are not interested in ladies, and men to whom it is worth speaking. You’re the latter. I admire that you don’t stare.”

Oh God, was she … being coy with me after being so horrid at first? “Surely your uncle and your father don’t stare,” I said, flustered and taking personal offence for Clement. She stayed silent, looking at me hard as I fumbled for something else to say. “Do you have brothers? If you do, I’m certain they don’t, either. It’s just—you make it so easy to stare.”

I didn’t mean it unkindly, but in all truth, she should have taken it as an insult. She didn’t. She just puffed up proudly, smiling at me in adoration, and I stood there dumbly wondering what sort of life created a girl like her. Then again, I was my own case to study, wasn’t I?

“Unless, of course,” Miss Jessica hummed, far too close to me now, “you’re of the former persuasion, and that is why you stare at Clement while he stares at me.”

My face flushed, faintly. With a little twist of a frown, I uttered a sound of frustration from the back of my throat, and rolled my eyes around to meet hers. What was it now with all the comments on my romantic predisposition?

Miss Jessica peered at me with such coy anticipation, flutter of lashes that preceded a kiss, and I would have laughed had I not been so frantic for escape. Ah, that was why she brought it up. But what would I do if she … ? How had I gotten myself in this dilemma? Captured her fancy? It wasn’t the idea of kissing a girl; it was the idea of kissing her, and if I stared at Clement, it was simply attention as his mentee, of course, as his friend, nothing more—

D’Pelletier was suddenly at the balcony door. “Jessie?”

Miss Jessica and I shot away from each other. D’Pelletier’s pinstriped trousers made him look longer and taller than usual. He didn’t even seem to notice the awful tension or the fact that Miss Jessica had been two breaths from boldly kissing me.

“May I speak with you?” he said to her, low and deliberate and thick with the sing-songy Frenchman’s lilt. He offered me an unrequited smile of apology. Miss Jessica sighed, rolling her eyes.

“Bonsoir!” she cried, before wandering off on d’Pelletier’s arm with a dainty staccato of heeled boots. “You’ll have to answer my question another time, won’t you?”

I decided not to wonder what I possibly could have done to deserve any of that, and grabbed another colourful drink from the table as I went back inside.

Clement was busy with Mr. Zayne and other acquaintances but, thankfully, I found Cain in a room with doors painted like an Oriental garden, alone and picking through the books on the shelf. Wild-eyed, I rushed to close the two of us in together.

“Miss Jessica tried to kiss me,” I blurted.

“Ugh!” Cain laughed despite the disgusted wince. “Did you do it?”

“No. I’m not—”

“A boy,” he answered. “I know.”

My heart plummeted; I stepped back defensively.

Well, this was certainly not something I had expected tonight.

“No,” I husked, voice thickening as a pall of dread fell over me. “I only meant to say I am far from interested in kissing her.”

Cain’s eyes widened. “Oh,” he said. He stared at a book on the shelf, the spine of which he fiddled with in awkward guilt, while I stared at my feet, face burning but insides cold with fear. Shock, to be found out. Violated by his unfair knowledge. Confused, and painfully self-conscious.

“But … yes, what you said, as well,” I conceded reluctantly, feeling as though I might choke on every word. “Somewhat.” I cleared my throat. “How long have you known?”

Cain’s gaze flashed around before settling on me again. He issued a limp shrug, eyeing me in one of those ways in which he seemed too harsh and brooding, darker inside even than Clement. He held my stare as if daring me to ask what he thought of it, any of it. I couldn’t. The words didn’t come.

Deeply apologetic, he finally murmured, “I’ve known a long time, Will. Not that you’re not clever or convincing—really, I think you’re a genius—but I’ve known.”

“How?” I demanded.

His eyes darted to the mirror, anything to avoid me it seemed. “I had a feeling.”

“Well, I am a boy.” I didn’t want to be angry with him; I wasn’t angry with him. I was just so caught off guard. Ashamed, a bit discouraged, and terrified he’d think differently of me. Honestly, I’d known this moment was inevitable. But I had to be grateful it came with Cain, of all people.

“But I’m a girl, as well.” I cleared my throat. “By anatomy, certainly, and otherwise, just as often.”

Cain’s brow knotted. “Like the Principal Boys.”

I laughed weakly. “No,” I said. “It’s not a costume, or a subterfuge.”

He sat down on the edge of an Etruscan sofa. “Explain it to me, then,” he implored, practically begged, remorseful and desperate to make it up to me, it seemed.

I wanted to. Because I trusted him. And I did not want him to distrust me, or—God, to think of me in the wrong way. I eased down on the arm of the chair opposite him and took a deep breath.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be a lady,” I said. “Only that some days, I do not orient as one, while other days I do. I don’t mind it. Really, I don’t. I hardly even think about it. That’s how simple it is to me. I suppose I’m fluid between the two, male and female. A mix of both. Intermediate. Queerly gendered.”

Cain squinted at me. In the awful pause, as the grand fun echoed beyond the closed doors, I feared he would not understand and think me mental. He’d be disgusted, appalled, disappointed. I prepared for everything good to be over. But the longer the quiet between us stretched, the more and more I resented resignation to that outcome.

“Queerly gendered,” he echoed, a devious little hum riding the back of a sigh. “I’m jealous, Will. That’s quite unique. Bewitching and rebellious. Mystical, almost. Like some … ”

“I’m not a spectacle,” I said curtly. But I couldn’t be too insulted. He was a Kingsley, after all, and it was well known the Kingsleys gloried in the counterculture.

Yet he understood me not just as a Kingsley … but also as my friend.

“So, should I call you ‘Miss Will,’ then?” he asked.

I reared back, face twisting. “Oh. No. Please don’t. Nothing is different. It’s just that now you know.” Another concern struck me, and I looked to him in a wild way, like the social disaster I apparently was. “Please forgive me for scandalising you when I slept in your bed.”

Cain snorted, raising his brows. “You, scandalising me? Will, you’re too much. And anyway, I’ll scandalise myself as I please, thank you.” He glanced one final time at the mirror, quick enough I almost didn’t catch it.

“Don’t hate me for this,” I said, brow knotting. “Please don’t tell anyone. Not even Clement, or O’Brien, or Quinn.”

“Why should I hate you, or tell anyone?” Cain’s face pinched in a puzzled smile, and for the first time, the shyness of it did not seem a ruse. “As if I haven’t yet explored a more ‘earnest’ life, myself,” he murmured with a small smile, the beginnings of a bashful laugh. “We all do, whether we care to admit it or not. We all have our secrets.”

My heart fell past my stomach. Not in dread or guilt, but in a rush of immense relief. My curious ambigender was hardly beyond his idea of strange or unbelievable, it seemed; he was, after all, a forward and mischievous young nobleman. He really didn’t care, did he? He didn’t look at me any differently at all, just with a sad sort of patience as if he’d been waiting for me to offer my most vulnerable parts … as he already had, himself, that day in Hermes Hall, after the gossip about his family. Because he trusted me as I trusted him.

And here I’d feared he would not want to know me for this.

“How long would you have played unaware?” I asked.

Cain stood, stretched a little like a cat rising from a nap, and paced around between the chairs. “Unaware of what? That you’re a bit queer? For the most part, I don’t even remember that I know. I just thought that … that was what you meant to say earlier.”

I shook my head, somehow smiling and pouting at the same time.

“Haven’t I made a fool of myself, then?” He paused, eyes roaming me. “I’m guessing your tyrant father doesn’t know.”

I uttered a cross laugh much more like a scoff. “Oh, I’d never dream of telling him. See … ” I stalled only a moment, because I wasn’t sure I wished to speak of it anymore. I’d come out and told him; I didn’t want to dwell on something that needn’t have been dwelled upon. After all, he’d apparently known for a long time. Now, what was there at risk of changing between us?

“After my mother left,” I said, “my father decided he’d rather raise a son than a daughter. Good thing, I think. Imagine if he hadn’t. I would never be as free to be myself as I am now. I can’t say why he did it, whether he was unequipped, or just unwilling, or perhaps hoped I wouldn’t turn out as my mother did.”

That was all I’d say on the matter. It wasn’t my father’s story, after all. It was mine. It was me. And my father could not—did not—own me anymore.

“As your mother?” Cain echoed.

I nodded and shrugged, looking away. I didn’t have to elaborate for him to understand.

He nodded slowly. “So, it’s a bloodline with you, as well,” he whispered, though it seemed more to himself. But then he livened again suddenly, giving my shoulder a squeeze as he breezed by to the painted doors. “All’s well, Will,” he said with the pleasant smile so characteristic of him. But it was a little wider and more enigmatic once there was liquor behind it.

“Good to know, Cain,” I replied, but I smiled, too—a real one, one which I could not suppress.

The sunrise is one of the world’s secret treasures.

I was starting to fear I’d see so many of them with the Black Cross that I’d grow immune to their silken, golden-veined calm. In the open-sided hansom cab on our way back to Portland Place, Cain, Clement, and I sat in the chilly air watching the world, still windless and full of ghostly shades, eerily lit in those moments before dawn broke. First that knowing grey light slithered through the world, as if springing from the very ground itself; the quiet surrounded us, caressed and swallowed us. And then the thickest of clouds would lighten, turn deep dark violet and blue, and very pale pink through the fog over rooftops and chimneypots, as rattling, sauntering morning life stirred in the streets.

I looked between Cain and Clement—Cain, dozed off, having made a pillow out of his muffler on Clement’s shoulder. And sleepy-eyed Clement, slouched in terrible posture with his arms crossed. He caught my glance to raise his brows, mouth perking in silent laughter at Cain’s childish nap.

Perhaps I was overtired, or vulnerable after my talk with Cain; perhaps I’d simply had a bit too much to drink for my tiny body. But I was just suddenly so pleasantly overwhelmed by it all, and helpless against the smile that warmed my face.

It took almost a week of balking and dwelling for me to finally sit down before Cain in the dining hall and declare, “There is something imperative I must bring up.”

Cain looked over from his lunch of soup and hash, blinking a few times. “Mm-hmm?”

I chewed on my lower lip. It seemed so outlandish and needless, but …

“What are the chances of seeing the same thing twice, in two separate possessions?” I asked.

Cain frowned. “And how do you mean?”

“The cameo ring.”

He waited, as if he expected me to say more. “Cameo ring,” he repeated dispassionately when I did not.

“A gold ring, with a conch shell cameo on it.” I leaned closer over the table to him. “I saw it at the Starlight. An actress was murdered, but the villain made it appear suicide, and hasn’t ever been apprehended. He wore a pink cameo ring on his thumb. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but then I remembered I’d seen the ring before. At Miss Ophie’s, with Miss Maude.”

Cain nodded slowly, brows just gently raised. “Miss Maude, with the psychograph. The one who died of excess … ”

“Opium, yes,” I rushed in a half-whisper, “but she did not inject herself. Remember? If you don’t, it might be in the file. Quinn recorded all you said.”

“I recall.”

“And the hand on the syringe, did you see it? I did, before the possession moved to you. The ring was there. It was pink. Same design. The same ring, Cain. I’m positive. Is that not peculiar? It can’t be coincidence.”

Cain peered at me intently with his owl eyes, which had grown wider and rounder as I last spoke, a bit intimidating below his still-knotted brow. For a moment, I thought he didn’t believe me; he thought me mad and was finally realising it.

“So … ” I ventured.

He stared at me a breath or two longer, then dropped his spoon with a dainty clatter.

“So, what if Miss Maude was murdered, as well?” he breathed, taking the words right from my lips.

***

Clement was irascible per usual. We’d apparently woken him up. He slumped on the pinstriped chaise in the shadowy corner of his room, arms crossed and eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know what riddles have you two all excited, but I don’t have time for Mother Goose,” he grumbled.

“We’ve discovered a murderer,” Cain announced forthwith.

I swung a pointed look at him, eyes wide. He just shrugged.

Clement glared. “I could still be sleeping right now.”

I sighed. “Clement, what Cain means is something feels afoot.”

“And what on earth could that be?”

Cain and I traded a glance.

“The cameo ring,” I said, meekly. Clement just stared at us, uninterested. I heaved another sigh. “During inspection, in our possessions, twice a pink cameo ring has shown up. Once at Miss Ophie’s—we both saw it—and in the theater, the man who … you know. He wore it.”

Clement rubbed at his face. “It’s a popular fashion.”

“The curiosity has some merit,” Cain argued. “One of the cases involves a murder recorded in death ledgers as a suicide. Miss Maude was administered the tincture of opium by someone else, and that someone else wore the same ring.”

“Right,” I urged, stomach all aflutter as the more we spoke of it, the realer it felt. “Well, consider the possibility Miss Maude did not die as officially recorded, either! You see? Paying attention to the spirits before we just eradicate them is important, isn’t it?”

Clement scoffed weakly at that, but did not argue. He fell quiet, chin in hand. Finally, he threw his hands down and rose from the chaise. “I’ll be going back to sleep now, if you two don’t mind.”

Frantically, I stepped in his way to keep him from his bed. “Clement—”

He sighed through his teeth and sat down again, veritably sulking as he leaned back against the wall with arms crossed. “All right. You two mean to suggest the man who killed Miss Hughling also slew Miss Maude, and that he is still at large.”

“Yes!” Cain and I cried, exasperated.

“I just want to sleep,” Clement whined, rubbing at his face.

“Should we notify Bartlett?” I asked. “Westwood?”

“No.” Clement pointed. “You’re not telling anyone else. Not yet. Right now, this is merely a puzzle keeping you children busy.”

“Must you be an ass?” I muttered. “Innocent girls have been murdered.”

He sighed, dragging a hand down his face again. “You do realise that, to hypothetically solve this hypothetical mystery of yours, there must be more murders with more evidence of the ring.”

“Not necessarily,” Cain pressed. “We can do our best to avoid that.”

“If we could compare police records with Black Cross files and see if any cases note a—the circle!” I spun to Cain, eyes wide. But I hadn’t told him of that. My wild glance swerved to Clement. “The circle,” I said again. “In the theater. The man hung Miss Hughling over the center of a circle.” I waved my hands in the vague shape of it. “Like the circle we use to bottle spirits, but different. Something occult, though, certainly.”

Clement sat up straighter, suddenly awake enough to flash me a brutally reproving glance. “And you divulge this now?”

“I forgot,” I sputtered, blushing and frantically contrite. “I’d been in shock.” It was only half false, and I did feel guilty for the lie. I had no idea why I’d kept quiet about it.

“You’re sure there was a circle? It wasn’t, I don’t know, a patterned rug?”

“Well, what I saw was a bit blurry and fast … ”

“Cults, Clement.” Cain leaned back against the desk. “It’s been some time since the Cross encountered a cult, hasn’t it?”

Restless, Clement’s hands raked through his unruly hair, one of those gestures that seemed unfairly charming for his usual deportment. He slid his gaze over to Cain. “Say, Kingsley, haven’t you got a meeting with your secretary today?”

Cain pushed off the desk, eyes widening. “Ah, you’re right! What time is it? Blast. Tilmont won’t be happy at all. I’m late—”

“Wait,” Clement said, with uncommon patience and a loose fist pressed to his mouth as he stared darkly at nothing in particular. Finally, he husked, “Not a word about this elsewhere. It’s a riddle yet. This damn ring you see may be pure coincidence, and perhaps you didn’t see a circle, Will. Perhaps the girls knew the same man. Doesn’t mean he killed both. And anyway, Miss Hughling’s death was somehow concealed, so if there is a common villain, he may have that sort of power, and that’s something. But … ”

Clement uttered a sigh that was more like the beginning of a groan, flopping down on the chaise and folding both arms over his head.

“If it’ll put you both at ease,” he said, “we’ll visit Zayne later for a bit of after-hours research into recent—recent—unnatural or suspicious-sounding deaths. Not because I believe something’s really afoot. It’s for my own damn peace of mind, so you two will let this go once you agree it’s all nonsense.”

I could see it written all over him that he didn’t quite mean that. He just wouldn’t admit he could not discount the odd reoccurrence of the cameo ring, either. And certainly, he felt obliged after he’d wrongfully failed to mention the unsolved attack on Miss Hughling to avoid discipline.

Sounding defeated, he added, “Only when I say so—then and only then—shall we approach Westwood and Scotland Yard. Understood?”

***

Holiday spirit had officially inundated the world. The Crystal Palace and Polytechnic Institution were at it again, as every year, competing for most brilliant decorations. Roasted chestnuts sweetened the icy smell of the Thames as carolers strolled the slushy streets. And in the front room of the Stygian Society, Mr. Zayne peeked at Clement from his side of the examination table desk, with cracked spectacles perched on his nose and an old handwritten book open in front of him below a dusty graphoscope.

“A mystery?” he said.

“Something like it,” Clement grumbled. “More like random incidents that may or may not be related in a suspicious fashion.”

“Why don’t you go to Quinn?” Zayne pushed the cracked spectacles to rest atop his head, his rolled-up sleeves stained with ink. “Surely he’s got more to offer you regarding a suspected serial murderer.”

“It’s not that dire yet,” Clement said.

Mr. Zayne sent him a disbelieving glance. “Well, it all seems so. Winchester’s nothing but wide eyes and Kingsley is staring into that mirror so deep, you’d think he might see the other side through it.”

Cain jumped, flushing guiltily and looking around at us with a frown. “What?” he said. “No, I’m not.”

“Clement,” Mr. Zayne whispered, gravely. “Simply tell me what I might do for you, and I’m on it.”

Clement pulled a chair up to the ghastly desk with an awful scrape across the floor and announced, “We require a look through your books.”

By the light of candles and over endless chains of fresh cigarettes, we crowded about Mr. Zayne’s ancient-smelling books to weed through entries that danced across the yellowed pages like handwritten lace, for any unnatural deaths in London over the last five years. Accidents, suicides, murders, anything that wasn’t sickness or age and that perhaps had some reference to an unknown assailant.

“Find anything?” Mr. Zayne hummed after no less than two hours. As a light snow fell sadly down along the shutters, he sat cross-legged at the door with a stray cat he’d let in off Fleet Street, feeding it some Russian salted salmon right from the tin.

Clement leaned back with a creak of the chair, covering his face with both hands and sighing long and tired into them. “The only ‘motif’ we have,” he said wearily, “is that both Miss Hughling and Miss Maude were young women who died tragically, in a way that is easily left alone—or easily concealed. There is no organised timeline that might correspond with cult ritual. Then again, our list is … what was it, Kingsley? Two hundred names long? Five years and two hundred-some unnatural deaths.”

“Then you have nothing.” Mr. Zayne tapped the tin of salmon to loosen it up for the cat. “What are you to do, now?”

Clement dropped his hands to his lap and looked at Cain silently—looked at me. He folded the list of names up and slid it Cain’s way.

“Pick through Hermes Hall and see if any cases match those names,” he murmured. “Winchester, consult the cult cases for a circle that best matches what you believe you saw.”

Cain looked to me as though I were the one to approve the decision. I shrugged, rubbing at the side of my neck. My eyes burned from so long hunched over the tight, minute names and dates and cemetery plots in the big books.

The pink cameo ring …

“Well,” I said. “What else are we to do, I suppose?”

Cain crouched by the small mantle in our corner of Hermes Hall, poking at the coke there, which someone had kept stoked all night, until it flared up into tiny flames again. I ran my thumbnail along the ridge of my teeth, slumped in one of the hard-backed chairs at the table under the window and reading the list of names from Mr. Zayne’s books over and over, and over again.

“How many names have we gotten through already?” Cain asked below a sigh.

I dropped the slip of paper and propped a foot on the edge of the chair, leaning forward against my knee. “Thirty-seven and only three corresponding with cases here.”

He stood up, reaching high to stretch his back. “I want tea. I’ll make us both tea.”

His footsteps drifted away down the hall. The fire popped and rustled under the mantle. A delicate lace of ice had gathered at the corners of the windows, and outside across the way snow turned Regent’s Park soft and white. Stories below, street-cleaners scraped at the slush; voices and action rattled around in the icy air.

The chair creaked as I unfolded myself from it to wander slowly over to the shelves. SPECTRAL DEPARTMENT, the plaque read … Cain had said the cult cases were in the archives of the Religious Department.

Combing my fingers through my hair, tucking behind my ears the longer pieces there, I rounded into the neighbouring room. RELIGIOUS DEPARTMENT. The grate was empty, the room colder and emptier for it. Still, and silent. Pale wintry light pried through half-opened curtains. Next door, spectral case files formed three shelves down the center of the room, with one small rolling ladder; here, case files only loosely filled the space between books on the subject.

The floor whined a bit underfoot. I pulled a file down, flipping it open. Flimsy, yellowed pages—Daemonologie, by King James VI. Theology books with fraying spines, dusty treatises … I plucked another thin file down. No. XVII – The Witches of Somerset.

My heart gave a little twist.

Witchcraft.

Beside it, Clavicula Salomonis. The Key of Solomon. I slid the case file back on the shelf and pulled the grimoire down. Inside it was a plethora of conjurations, pentacles, circles … How could I possibly find precisely what I’d seen in the Starlight? I’d need to draw it myself, as well as I could remember it.

Footsteps sounded down the hall, too heavy to be Cain’s. Frantic, unsure of what I’d say if I were found poking through witchcraft files, I shut the book and tucked it under my arm, turning sharply through the doorway—

“Oh!” It was a disgruntled sound of dismay as I collided with Officer Dorland, who was on his way into the very room with a file marked No. MCMXCIII in one hand. I staggered back a step or two, dropping the grimoire in a terrible flutter of pages.

Dorland himself reared back with a scrape of the heel and a look like he’d just seen a ghost. Which was very ironic. And for which I had to excuse him, as he was not an inspector and possessed no spectral talents as far as I knew.

Gathering himself quickly, face flushed, his beady eyes hung attentively on my every twitch as I stooped to gather up the book, saying, “Excuse me, sir, I’m sorry … ”

I cradled the book to my chest, smoothing out the pages on which it had landed as I hurried around him through the door. But, swiftly, Dorland caught me by the elbow.

My heart stopped as I looked up at him. Days like this, on which I felt very much a girl constantly alert to the differences between myself and the rest of those in the role under which I was housed, a man like Dorland made me feel very small and in trouble. His dark little eyes roamed over me; I was almost too flustered to realise it was a pinch of regret to his pink face, nothing else.

“Forgive me.” He cleared his throat. “For startling you. For a moment, I—mistook you for someone, whom you couldn’t possibly be.”

“Well, we worked together,” I reminded him in a soft, tiny way. “At the girls’ school. And we spoke on All Hallows’. I don’t know that you remember, I was dressed up.”

“Ah, yes.” I could not discern whether he truly remembered or not. “Mr. … Mr. … ?”

His gaze drooped to the book in my hands, open on a page full of pentacles and amulets. I snapped it shut and cleared my throat lest I not be able to speak with my heart thundering below it.

“Winchester,” I peeped. “Spectral inspector. Winchester.”

His eyes cut to me fast; he squinted a bit tighter before releasing my arm, slowly. “I knew a Mrs. Winchester! In fact, I … pardon my bad manners.”

I froze.

“Margot Winchester?” I whispered.

Dorland livened, remarkably—and nothing about it felt pretense. “Yes, actually.”

“My mother,” I said, feeling dizzy and cold. I opened my mouth for more, but there was nothing else.

“You don’t say!” he cried. “Yes, I knew her!”

A lump thickened in my throat. I couldn’t breathe.

Dorland’s eyes danced. “She was quite the medium, yes … passed only two days before her interview with the Cross. Such a tragedy. I’m so very sorry … I hadn’t known she had a son. I hadn’t known she had a child at all.”

He’d known my mother. She had intended to join the Black Cross. Puzzle pieces, handfuls of puzzle pieces, and yet none of them matched together yet, not enough to see anything at all.

“I was very small when she died.” I swallowed, mouth dry. “And my father didn’t speak of her much.”

“We must take luncheon together one of these days,” he pressed. “I would feel honoured to share with you all I know of Mrs. Winchester, the wonderful woman that she was.”

“Of course!” I blushed for my own unexpected eagerness. My head spun. Dorland wasn’t exactly preferable company, but he knew more about my mother than I did and I still burned with anger but I wanted to hear it. “I have a case tonight,” I said. “So perhaps not tomorrow. Will you be on grounds, or are you leaving for holiday?”

“Will.”

Dorland and I both turned sharply, to where down the hall Cain stood at the mouth of the stairs carefully carrying two little cups of tea. There was that darker side of him—the mismatching owl eyes, head slightly lowered.

Everything in Dorland’s expression soured. “Why, Kingsley, it is good to see you again.”

“You as well, Dorland.” Cain turned on his heel and strode unhappily into the spectral archives.

I bobbed my head graciously to Dorland then hurried after Cain, hoping Dorland did not mistake my excitement for some sort of tolerance of him as a person. He merely nodded his head in return as he disappeared into the other room, a bit too turtle-chinned and beady-eyed to look gentlemanly without seeming snide.

“What was that about?” Cain grumbled as he closed the door behind me.

“Nothing.” My mother. My mother. “He was just … you know how he is.”

“Yes, and I hate him.” Cain sighed, plopping down on a lavender divan. His eyes roamed the files we’d abandoned stacked on a desk. “Will, I appreciate your help, but if this is too tedious, I can handle the rest myself. Really.”

“Oh, no, it’s all right, Cain. Thank you for the tea.”

“How many cases have we gone through?” he asked a second time.

“Thirty-seven,” I reminded him.

“Splendid. Only over a hundred more to go, then. Hand me the next?”

***

It was the last inspection before holiday leave, and also the last case of the year, gifted to the Cross by the SPR after its receipt of a letter pleading for assistance.

Miss Violette Ogden, one of the Cross’s few mediums, waited outside during the interview of the Burke-Adams house maid and gardener. Miss Ogden was entirely opposite Miss Jessica in character, placid and looking as elegant as she moved and spoke. Deep blue gown with lace collar and lace overlay beneath fine winter wraps, her cheeks rosied from the brisk, slushy eve, raven hair soft and smooth and held up off her slender neck by a raven-shaped clasp. I knew her almost immediately not just from All Hallows’, from the great gallery with Clement and the others, but from the soup kitchen that night after reconnaissance.

The research inspectors’ pre-work found no great mystery at the Burke-Adams house in its history; Sir Dalton Burke was wealthy, he’d bought the townhouse from an even wealthier American friend, and he’d lost his two sons at sea and his daughter just a year ago, after Boxing Day. That was when he’d abandoned the house, and rumours of ghosts sprang up not long after it was sold.

What happened to the daughter was simple and tragic. Earlier in the year, Lady Diana Burke’s fiancé broke off their engagement. Fraught with so much grief, she locked herself in an upstairs room and took her own life with her father’s straight razor.

In the Burke-Adams house, objects were moved, sometimes thrown to the floor. Music boxes sounded off on their own, and phantom voices drifted about the empty halls. Passersby and the new residents swore they saw a woman in white here, there, in the windows. The gardener’s little mustached terrier often waked in the middle of the night to growl into the dark for no perceived reason, and the gardener said the maid was just a mad old woman who didn’t understand the worst parts of ageing.

The servants wanted the spirit gone, and Sir Dalton Burke refused comment when the Cross had reached out to him during the preliminary research.

“I suppose, as we’ve got you tonight, Miss Ogden, they didn’t think we’d need anything but the compass,” Clement complained, crouched over the equipment trunk. Thankfully the house was warm; the current residents possessed the luxury of keeping their fires lit around the clock. Comfortable without our cold weather wraps, we’d ended our invalidation tour of the fine house in the back stairwell, a beautiful room small in length but which vaulted up to the second story, moonlight falling in along the sectioned stairs through high windows.

Miss Ogden smiled magnanimously. “My apologies, Clement.”

“Well … ” He sighed, running his hands through his hair in a distracted way, as if his inspector’s focus demanded his usual restlessness be channeled elsewhere. He raised his brows and gave Miss Ogden an especially pleasant smile. “Shall we start with a medium’s tour?”

Miss Ogden tipped her head gently one way and then the other, then nodded idly and retrieved a sketchbook and stub of pencil from the small carrycase she’d brought along.

Without a word, she stood in the center of the room with pencil poised above the open sketchpad. The silence rang faintly about us as she closed her eyes and took a slow breath through her nose. Quiet, so quiet—not a whisper from us and not a sound elsewhere in the settled house.

Just when the quiet began to press in, drawing us into its stillness, Miss Ogden stirred and moved towards the stairs without opening her eyes. Expertly, she lifted her foot at just the last moment to climb the first short section slow and blind. As she turned for the second set of enameled stairs, her eyes fluttered open. She stood profile before a large portrait of the new residents. And then she drifted on again.

Slowly, Clement followed her. Quinn took the ambience compass from O’Brien and gestured for him to take notes, then passed the compass to me as we all moved after Miss Ogden in silence.

“She’s crying.” She stopped short as she stepped off the stairs into the second-floor hall. “Was there some sort of loss? Not death, but … ”

O’Brien tapped my shoulder. He whispered, “We do not give official mediums case information, nor have them present during interviews.”

She moved through the house with a special sort of blindness, I realised in mute wonder. Yet she saw more clearly than we did at the moment.

“I hear … ” She sighed. “I don’t know, but they’re speaking.”

“They?” Clement prompted.

“They.” Dreamily, Miss Ogden wandered on down the hall, her long, lily-white fingers tight on the sketchbook. “Oh, I can’t see him clearly, but he’s much older than she. And she loves him.”

She halted again, whipping her head around to watch something move down the hall. But there was nothing there; it was within her vision, and her vision alone. She smiled, a deep and sentimental smile that just unraveled itself slowly across her mouth. “I wish to move on. I’m drawn to be upstairs.”

The whole house was quite sturdy compared to other places we’d inspected; hardly a creak sounded on our way up to the third story. I trailed my fingers along the smooth, thickly-carved banister as we went up, and in the periphery of my flickering glance, there stood a woman in the far corner of the hall. Half engulfed by peaceful shadows, just a flash of white dress that, when I looked up quickly, had already gone again.

“Will.” Clement peered down from the top of the steps. “Come on, then.”

Miss Ogden stood in a room with yellow-papered walls and a long, wide rug.

“Oh,” she uttered, uncomfortable, from deep in her throat. Her face twisted. She shifted, running one palm up her forearm, and then the other, as if she’d caught a chill. “That burns,” she said bitterly. “What happened here? Dreadfully grave in this room. But she’s joyous, I don’t understand.”

“This is the room,” Clement whispered to Quinn, watching Miss Ogden with a measure of subdued excitement. “Where the girl … ” He dragged a finger up one arm and then the other, making a slick sound with his tongue and teeth.

“Don’t be profane,” Quinn muttered back.

Miss Ogden sagged down to a chair and sat with her back to us, hunching low over her sketchbook. The lines of tension in her body were obvious; the light for her to see was poor, but she scrawled away with fervour, hand moving furiously on the paper, the scratch of the pencil rustling through the quiet.

“Yes,” Miss Ogden edged out through gritted teeth, her voice raw, raspy. “She is happy. I hear her humming. She dances with him, this man. I still cannot see him … does no one else in the house know him? ‘But I love you,’ she says. ‘Embrace me.’ ‘Gladly, kitten.’ How long has this secret affair gone on—?”

Miss Ogden stood, spun on her heel and strode purposefully out of the room. We all parted for her, startled.

In the hall, she came to a sweeping stop and cast Clement a dark glance over her shoulder.

“Do you know that someone died in that room?” she demanded.

We were all very quiet, waiting for Clement. Miss Ogden tucked her sketchbook under her arm with pinched fingers.

“Yes,” he finally conceded.

“And do you know how this individual died?”

Clement stood with his arms crossed, gaze locked with hers, unwavering and serene. “Yes, Miss Ogden. She killed herself.”

I squinted through the dark at the sketchbook at her side, very curious as to what psychic image she’d recorded. Dark scribbles, an oval shape, pencil lead dug hard into the page. Traced and retraced and traced again so that the outline of it was a bold, writhing mass of repeated lines.

Miss Ogden narrowed her eyes. “No,” she said, voice thick and unfriendly. “She was killed.”

On her drawing pad, the profile of a woman in the center—sketchy curves of hair, fast angles of her face, but no features, filled in by pencil so that it was a silhouette—

Like a cameo worn as a brooch. A hair pin. Or even a ring.

***

The candlestick at the corner of Mr. Zayne’s makeshift desk rattled as he dropped down onto it a large file box labeled 1889, stuffed with wax-sealed documents, crumpled newsprint. I reached out to steady the candle before it fell and set the whole place ablaze, papers and chemicals and cluttered junk galore.

“There wouldn’t be a mistake in the case file,” Mr. Zayne griped, rolling up his sleeves before assailing the box of papers, “as there isn’t a mistake in my books, as I do not make mistakes filling out my books!”

“Well, someone made a mistake.” Clement practically hovered over his shoulder—which was something, as Mr. Zayne was certainly not smaller than him. But then he seemed to feel bad for the way we’d blown so madly into the shop, scaring away a few burial club members come to pay their weekly dues, so he withdrew with a sullen look a bit too volatile to be a pout.

“You’re lucky I keep my receipts,” Mr. Zayne remarked when he finally located Lady Diana’s death certificate. “See that? ‘Suicide with a razor; probably insane at the moment of death.’”

Clement took the wrinkled certificate and stared at it as if it had done him some injustice. Preemptively, Mr. Zayne removed the box and hoisted his most up-to-date death ledger in its place. His boorish friend Jasper came in, tapping grey snow off his knit cap.

“What’s the fuss about?” he grumbled, nearly shutting the door on O’Brien, who’d moved out of his way.

“Highgate East.” Mr. Zayne pointed in his book. “Her plot’s north side of Egyptian Avenue. You might require a jimmy bar for the mausoleum door.”

I stared at him, mildly disturbed but captivated by his masterful knowledge of cemeteries.

Clement snapped a glance to Quinn, who, next to Jasper, seemed an utter aristocrat. “Take O’Brien and burn the bones. If she’s been cremated, we shall have to reassess.”

“Me?” O’Brien sputtered, all bugged eyes and red face between his big ears.

“Take them, Jasper,” Mr. Zayne said.

Quinn frowned at Clement, hard, suspicious, but Clement ignored it. I waited in the corner, still in a daze. Seeing repeatedly in my mind Miss Ogden’s psychic drawing. Fierce, bold lines, circling and circling—a fashionable cameo, undeniably.

Quinn helped Jasper gather their tools and, with O’Brien flighty and clearly shocked to have been delegated such a pressing task, they set out, the door closing behind them on an echo of laughter somewhere out on slushy Fleet Street.

“Zayne,” Clement husked. “Do you have the other name?”

Mr. Zayne gave him a funny look, then suddenly lit up. “Oh! Yes, right.” He swung away from his desk and reached for a landslide of papers on the floor next to it, which seemed to have overflowed from his box of records. “That poor girl from Waterloo.” He plucked up a fresh obituary. “Miss Lerna Weiss. ‘Shooting, willful murder.’” He straightened up again with a wary shadow softening his face, gently sweeping that cracked, hare-headed marionette out of the way where he’d moved it to hang there in the corner above his papers.

“Is this about your secret murderer?” he murmured.

“Do you have this one’s place of interment yet?” Clement was in a manic sort of focus, flipping through the big death ledger.

“Clement, you can’t just go burn the girl’s bones without a case. Westwood will be furious with the lot of you! Furious with me—”

Clement snatched his coat up and shoved into it, eyes flashing over Mr. Zayne. “We will not be going to the cemetery.”

“Then where?” For the first time, I saw a temper broil within Mr. Zayne, but somehow, he kept it respectfully restrained.

Clement was already opening the door; he cast a glance over his shoulder, looking straight at me though he spoke to his resurrectionist partner.

“Waterloo,” he said.

Waterloo Bridge was a lonesome, dismal thing, all lumps of muddy ice and snow. The lights of surrounding streets and lamps along the road could scarce break through the winter haze, their halos just hovering in the dark as the pale fog softened the noise of street traffic shuffling through it.

Clement moved fast and with fierce purpose, off the junction of Wellington Street and down the Embankment to the pier. As I caught up, breathless with urgency and my face tingling from the bracing cold, he spun to me and demanded, “Reach out to her!”

It was as if the night stirred to the wildness inside us. The wind tossed hair in and out of Clement’s face, set his popped collar dancing about his throat. I looked to him in a helpless sort of impatience, knowing exactly what he desired—a mild possession with another appearance of the pink cameo ring.

“I can’t just order she show herself,” I argued. “Do you really think she’s another victim?”

His hazel eyes were ablaze.

“Listen,” I said, at once intimidated and relieved by his frenzy. Why did I protest against his believing in our mystery? “The murder was not framed as a suicide. Perhaps it was by a simple street gang. It’s possible! We can build a case. It’s Waterloo, Clement. Surely, they’ll open another file. Then we shall come back and … ”

Farther down, by the water, she stood watching.

A dark figure, smudged over by the fog. No muff, no cloak—just soaked dark hair and a buttoned autumn gown blackened by murky water. Bone-white hands dangling at her sides. She watched us. She …

Recognised me.

The metal taste of instinct rose on my teeth and I stepped around Clement, striking out towards the figure with a power in my stride that I did not expect. “Miss Weiss!” I called.

She was there—and then she was gone. I quickened my pace, searching the riverside mist for her. It was no use. Fogs like this made it nearly impossible to see one’s own hand stretched out before them.

“I came back!” I called for her. “I came back to hear from you!”

“He killed me.”

I turned sharply towards the voice, heart aflutter. “Yes!” I choked out. “Yes … who was he?”

There—in the corner of my eye. She gawked at me as if baffled I spoke with her. There was a soft glow about her, just enough to remind me she was far from as corporeal as she appeared. Pasty white face, wide and endless eyes. She was intelligent. She was like Charlie and Colette, Mary Ann …

“I don’t know,” she hissed.

“What did he look like? I might be able to see what you saw, feel what you felt, if … ”

She faded away into the fog only for her voice to burst again just behind me, that hateful lament:

“He shot me!”

“Yes, he’s a monster.” I turned in a slow circle, following her voice as it moved around me. She, always just out of sight, her words bouncing in the eerie dark. Someone alive walked by not too far away, coughing. I jumped. I waited a moment. I said, “Lerna, did you see a ring on his hand?”

“How do you know my name?”

“A ring, Lerna.”

“I don’t know. I tried to run!”

Becoming dizzy, I stopped and closed my eyes.

“Pistol—or a revolver—I don’t know the difference, only that my girlfriend Iris says I should get a pocket derringer, but—”

“Please, Lerna, concentrate. Did he wear a ring? I must know, in order that we may … ”

My chest clenched tight. So that we may what?

I let out a slow, shuddering breath and forced myself to look into the fog again. “So we may avenge you, Miss,” I said.

“I believe he wore a ring, yes.”

Her voice, on the back of my neck. “What colour was it?” I gasped, shoulders bunched up.

No answer. The city muffled like a ringing in the ears. I waited, frozen in place, begging she had not worn herself out and petered away into the night. Tears burned my eyes, helpless and cold; my throat ached.

“Rosy pink!” Lerna whispered, right up against my ear.

I spun about, calling desperately, “Clem—!”

But Clement was already there, and caught me through the fog by the elbow. I gasped again, fairly choked on his name. A few tears shook loose of my lashes and stole down my face of their own accord despite my hollow astonishment.

I hadn’t lied to the Missing woman. Perhaps not immediately, and not without some difficulty, we would find the owner of this cameo ring.

I met Clement’s eyes, the stray tears going ice cold before they even reached my chin. “Did you bring the oil and matches?” I husked. “Or must we stop by Mr. Zayne’s on our way to the cemetery?”

His hand firm on my arm, Clement peered at me almost shyly, surprised and … His eyes sharpened as if he realised the warmth with which he gawked. A few strangers passed by, skirting wide around us, as all strangers were wont to do at this hour of night when no one could be trusted.

Quietly, Clement said, “The ring appeared, didn’t it?”

***

Crunch!

Mr. Zayne heaved the small hand axe off the splintered latch of a still shining coffin, and with hands red and raw from the cold hoisted the thing open.

Miss Lerna Weiss, beautiful even in her stinking decay somehow, dark hair folded loosely about a grey, blistered and shrunken face. Black lace, black taffeta. Withered flowers against the stained satin. Nails, purple like what was left of her lips. Like the rotting skin around the puckered wound in her temple, which had been cleaned, and stitched tight as possible with a thick thread.

Mr. Zayne pulled down the handkerchief he’d tied about his nose and mouth. “She’s a victim, too, eh?” he asked reverently, shaking dirt off his axe.

Clement burrowed lower into his thickly knit neck-wrap. “All we’ve got is a list of deaths and questionable evidence. No suspect. Westwood and the Yard won’t think anything of it unless we have a suspect.”

A fresh snowfall had begun on our way to Abney Park Cemetery; the flakes sparkled along the corpse as Mr. Zayne climbed out of the plot and Clement rummaged for our purging items.

“I don’t know the words,” I said glumly, hands shaking just a bit as I took the pouches and flasks from Clement. “Will you say the words?”

Mr. Zayne crouched, leaning against his upright shovel and holding our little lantern as he watched Clement and I both cross ourselves. As Clement began the banishment rosary, I wandered round the open grave to sprinkle blessed salt, splash holy water and oil. Clement handed me the matches. I struck the flame, and as I dropped the match into the coffin with Miss Weiss, Clement murmured, “Amen.”

Flames skittered along the splashes of sacred oil, crackling as it met kerosene and chancel. The smell of burning hair and putrefying flesh rose with the smoke, ruining the pureness of winter night wind.

As I watched the fire, I noticed Clement’s eyes hanging on me with a sort of melancholy pride. As if he wanted nothing more than to watch me in my newfound confidence and bask in silent adulation the rest of the night—at least until he realised I noticed, probably, the miserably predictable thing.

I should have been excited, I thought, to have found another piece in our cameo ring puzzle. But I didn’t feel anything, really. I was hollow and cold in the most peaceful of ways. Like the way Regent’s Park looked, covered in December snow. Quiet. Indifferent. Happy nothingness.

If we couldn’t find the man who’d killed all these women, I at the very least refused to leave any of them trapped in the in-between, waiting. Forever.

***

Hands stinging with the sudden relief from the cold, I cuddled the hot water bottle for which I’d stopped by the quarters of the dormitory’s night maid, then moved on to the footman’s alcove.

“Hello,” I murmured, peeking in through his door where he nursed a small cup of coffee. Just after four o’clock in the morning—an employment like this turned almost everyone nocturnal, it seemed. “May I leave a message for Officer Dorland?”

The old man squinted at me, skeptically. Perhaps I looked every bit as defeated, and ragged, and cold as I felt. His eyes moved off to the cubbyholes, pencil labels on yellowed cardstock with the names of all the dormitory terrace residents, which once each month were full of bundled bank notes for us all.

“No Dorland on grounds,” he replied, voice light and whispery like autumn leaves on the street. “But I shall drop it with the secretary, for whenever the officer next arrives. What’s the message?”

“If he could please call not later today, but tomorrow—for elevenses? If he’s free. I know tomorrow is Christmas. I shall understand if he postpones.”

The footman gave me a glance as if he judged my request for a meeting on Christmas Day, either way.

I dropped my coat and muffler near the door of my room and emptied out my pockets at the desk. The notes from Mr. Zayne’s books, which Cain and I had used earlier, only to find nothing … the drawing of the circle and little symbols I was most confident were like those in the circle I’d seen, a handful of similar shapes and images from that grimoire …

And that, with Miss Ogden’s drawing, apart from a list of girls who’d died terrible deaths, was all we had.

Feeling dull and bruised inside, as if I could not feel anything else until I got some sleep, I changed and crawled into bed, tucking my toes under the hot water bottle.

Someone stared at me.

My eyes rolled open to the pale apparition of Mary Ann right there at the edge of the bed, her gaze fixed plainly on me in the dark.

“Good Lord—” I half-hissed, startled, pulling the blankets over my head.

“Sorry,” she chirped. “Why do you wear bandages? Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”

“Why do you dress as a boy?”

I sighed, still rather disgruntled by the prospect of a peeping ghost. I was not in the frame of mind for it. “Because,” I grumbled. “I can’t just suddenly dress like a girl when I am one, can I? That would cause a hell of a scene and a lot more trouble than I need.”

“Is it fun dressing up as a boy?”

“Mary Ann,” I said firmly, then regretted being so impatient. “It’s not dressing up. Listen, I’m tired. I need rest. Is that all right?”

“I’m sorry, miss!”

I flashed her a reproving glance.

“Sir!” she added. “Daddy always did say children were to be seen and not heard … ”

With a patter of tiny footsteps, Mary Ann drifted away. I peeked over the blanket to watch her. Despite the footsteps, she had no feet. In fact, she had manifested only half a body, from the waist up very defined but somewhat misty. She lingered at the desk, inspecting Cain’s motif notes.

“What’s all this?” she asked.

“A riddle,” I mumbled. “Mary Ann, shh.”

“What does ‘pro … pen … city’ mean?” she struggled to read aloud.

“Propensity. A predilection, an inclination.”

“These aren’t like the riddles I’m used to.”

“No, I expect not.”

“Daddy had the prettiest rings,” Mary Ann said on a wistful sigh.

“Did he?” I yawned. Why was I still going on with her?

Mary Ann’s voice emerged from the shadows, full of a little girl’s woe. “My daddy’s cameo rings, from Great Grandmama. He never would let me wear them or play with them … Mamma sometimes did, when he wasn’t home.”

I closed my eyes and hoped she’d understand my silence was a sign for her to go.

“He says they are his good luck charms,” she went on anyway. “But they didn’t work.”

Sighing through my teeth, I said, “I’m very sorry for him. Anyway, I need to sleep, Mary Ann.”

A floorboard creaked in the corner.

“My daddy said he’s a scientist, not an inspector!” Mary Ann’s voice was muffled, tiny and warbled against the scrim between our worlds. “But the rings didn’t work and nobody listened!”

The prettiest rings … good luck charms … Inspector.

And what if … ?

Despite how quickly I sat up and looked to her, Mary Ann was gone again from sight.

“Mary Ann,” I said firmly. I could feel her in the room yet. My heart skipped a beat. Surely it meant nothing. But … “Mary Ann, what do you mean by that? Where is your father?”

“I don’t know. He used to be here.”

I almost forgot to breathe. “Here?”

“They wouldn’t let him do his research!” Mary Ann cried, bodiless, thin and shrill as though she thought she were in trouble.

My mouth went dry. It seemed my voice came not from my throat but from somewhere distant instead as I said, “Your father was here, at the Black Cross?”

“He still is!”

“What’s his title?” I demanded, clutching my blankets. God, but I wished she’d show herself again. “His department? Mary Ann, where is he?”

“Don’t know! I don’t know what you mean!”

“Mary Ann, where did your father go?” The air was cold and full of a brittle urgency. They wouldn’t let him …

Mary Ann’s hopeless voice came from the far corner of the room, like she cowered there invisibly, frightened by my interrogation.

“He said he wants to know where a ghost comes from, and I don’t know where he went because I got sick like Mamma, and he promised I was going to Heaven, and I don’t know about Mamma but I’m still here and Daddy left!”

I felt sick, staring blankly into the shadows of my room. “You lived with your father here?” I could barely drag the words out. “You haven’t a clue where he might be found now?”

“No … ”

“What’s your full name, Mary Ann?”

Mary Ann flickered into existence in the far corner, like a fresh flame dancing up on a candle wick. Seemingly solid again, white and wide-eyed, she chirped as though she didn’t know why I asked, “Why, it’s Mary Ann Joyce Dorland.”

Dorland.

Officer Dorland, holding bottled Jude in his grossly slender hands. The circle under Miss Hughling’s dangling feet. Dorland with a thick cloud of cigar smoke around him, All Hallows’ Eve. Slipping into the Stygian Society with Marius. Speculate as to whether he’s likely to return in spectral form? I hadn’t ever seen a cameo ring on him. Never mind that, what sort of imbecile donned such a distinct accessory while committing unspeakable crimes? Good luck charms.

Surely it couldn’t be that easy. A member of the Black Cross. A man with whom I’d spoken to scarcely twelve hours ago. Jude. Hyacinth. Where a ghost came from. That was it, wasn’t it? It made perfect sense. What else—who else could it be? The Black Cross refused to allow the experimentations he wanted, so he experimented on strangers.

A sick, reprehensible, deranged suspect, one of our own, and I was to meet with him to speak about my mother.

Shaking, I forewent my bandages and just tugged my big cable knit sweater over my nightshirt, nearly tripping as I hurried into socks and shoes and coat. I passed the second night maid, who tended to the occasional iron heating grate and dwindling lamp as I hurried quietly, but urgently, through to King’s Hall and knocked at Clement’s room. Nothing. I knocked again.

Clement flung open his door and he couldn’t even look at me properly before I sputtered, “I know our man!”

Swaddled in his blankets like a child, Clement fiddled around for a cigarette. He ran a hand through his messy hair and met my eyes in a dazed and groggy sort of way.

“Have you slept at all?” he croaked.

“No,” I replied.

He winced like he couldn’t handle as much. “All right … and about what have you arrived so worked up this time?”

“It’s Dorland,” I said. “He’s said many times he—you remember, don’t you? At the girls’ school, his interest in the relationship between cause of death and Electro-Static energy? It’s him and he’s testing his theories on these ladies and if you just come to my room, I have proof, you’ll see!”

It took a moment to sink in for him. But by mid-drag on his cigarette, Clement’s eyes widened and he shoved up from his chair, ditching the blanket for a patchwork coat.

With a pinch to his face, clearly a whirlwind of shock and disgust inside as much as I was, he husked, “Shall we fetch Kingsley?”

***

With Cain still buttoning up a black velvet-backed waistcoat, he and Clement followed me to my room.

“Mary Ann,” I half-whispered, heart thumping, mildly nervous to expose my roommate. “Mary Ann, can you tell them about your daddy?”

“Your room’s haunted,” Clement surmised, raising his brows. “By Dorland’s daughter.”

I shrugged and nodded.

Mary Ann was hesitant at first, watching fearfully from the frosty glass of the window. Cain saw her, too, I realised by his little breath of surprise. And Mary Ann knew it.

“Who’s he?” she mewled.

“This is my friend Cain,” I said gently.

“No, the scary one!”

“My other friend, Clement.”

Clement scoffed, slipping the leather-corded quartz off his throat.

“No, the … never mind.” Mary Ann sounded frustrated. Suddenly she flickered into being near my bed, her hands clasped against her middle, and she peered around at us with such a look of heartbreak.

“Tell them, Mary Ann,” I begged. “They want to hear.”

Appearing overwhelmed by guilt, she told us—as if it were a burden for us to know. Cain turned to me, wide-eyed and alarmed. He seemed in as much disbelief as I that the events at hand had coincided in such a way.

“Will … ” he started, but suddenly Clement moved forward, past Mary Ann, who petered out with a flinch. He drifted to a stop at my bookcase and without a second thought began inspecting the shelves. In his free hand, he wound the leather-corded quartz anxiously between his fingers; he dropped to his haunches and dragged his fingers along the spines of my modest collection. Drew one book and flipped through. Put it back. Another, another, a fourth.

Clement slipped out an older book, one of the few already there when I’d first moved in. Fantasmagoriana. I hadn’t touched that one yet. He stroked the cover with a loving touch, dreadfully silent. With hooked fingers, he opened it at its page marker—a photograph.

He stood. Pulling the little daguerreotype out, Clement first passed it to Cain, who then passed it forthwith to me.

It was a photograph of Mary Ann, standing in the Cross courtyard with whom one could only presume were her mother and father. An extraordinarily petite, wan-looking woman with her hands on a tiny Mary Ann’s shoulders, looked as if she’d married a bit too young. Standing next to them, but without touching them, was Officer Dorland.

I was awestruck. “How did you know this was here?”

Clement shrugged, avoiding my eyes. “I was drawn to it,” he explained finally, with all the shame of an apology. “Psychosensitivity.”

“I put that in the book!” Mary Ann said proudly. “Before Daddy left.”

“Shall we go to Fleet Street?” Cain whispered.

“But it’s the first day of holiday leave,” I said. I checked the clock on my desk. “And … nearly five o’clock in the morning.”

Clement shook his head, returning the quartz to his throat. “Zayne will be there. He lives upstairs, after all.”

As we left, Mary Ann cried softly. But it was a sound of relief, like she’d been waiting for too long to tell anyone about it all.

***

Mr. Zayne’s mouldy book listed the death of Mary Ann Joyce Dorland, buried in early 1875 in Brookwood Cemetery, as an accident due to arsenical poisoning. Clement kept his cocaine out on the table near our mugs of muddy coffee as Mr. Zayne groggily took the better part of an hour to sort through his receipts box for Mary Ann’s actual death certificate and obituary. A mistake of rat poisoning for flour in some morsel or another, it said, but which was never traced to any one cook despite the grieving father’s inquiry.

We were all very quiet, clustered together in the dim, creaking hush of the Fleet Street shop.

Nobody had to speak it.

If what we suspected of what Mary Ann said and what the death ledger read was true, then Dorland might have poisoned his own daughter and left her to haunt the building. It was quite possible I boarded in the very room in which she’d died. And his wife?

“Will we be off to her grave, then?” Mr. Zayne sighed, rubbing his hands together for warmth in the freezing pre-dawn hours of Christmas Eve. “Don’t know which train we’ll catch, but it’ll have to be come morning … all the way to Brookwood … ”

“No,” Clement said. I looked to him sharply—as did Mr. Zayne and Cain. Clement stretched his arms above his head then folded them tight to his chest, hands tucked beneath. “Dorland,” he growled. “The bloody shit of a man. I remember when he petitioned for experimentation rights, too! All this because he can’t have his way, and he’s covering it up so well. What are we to do, then? We don’t have adequate proof to offer the Yard. And what’s to say he hasn’t assistance from a man in their offices in concealing the crimes?”

Cain fidgeted, looking at Clement from the corner of his eye as he announced, “I’ve already sent for Dorland’s present address from our registration office. Inconspicuously, of course.”

“Bless your poor valet.” Mr. Zayne gave a little snort of a tired laugh. Cain smiled in a flat way.

“I’m to meet with Dorland today or tomorrow,” I said, staring blankly at Mr. Zayne’s death ledger. Each of my companions shot pointed looks my way.

“And why the hell would you?” Clement demanded.

“To speak with him about my mother.” Finally, I looked up at them, brow knotted.

“Will, no,” Cain hissed.

“It’s fine,” I argued, for the first time neglecting kindness with him as he had with me at Miss Ophie’s.

“Agreed,” Clement said. “It’s fine.”

“What?” Cain and I echoed almost in unison. Mr. Zayne’s glance volleyed between all three of us.

Clement fixed his eyes on me with a terrifying measure of trust. No, I couldn’t bear anyone depending on me. Panic throbbed for a heartbeat or two. What could he possibly want?

“Meet with him if you must,” he said thinly, bone-weary and clinging to the cocaine’s alertness. “Do not let on you know a thing. Gain his confidence. Perhaps, if you can manage the act long-term, we might be able to secure a confession from him somehow.” He saluted with just two fingers, a droll gesture at odds with the grave fire in his eyes. “Brilliant, hmm?”

“Brilliant!” Mr. Zayne agreed, but it was mockery. He shook his head very firmly, assuming authority I’d never expected from him. “The three of you have hardly slept a wink these past two days, and I’ll turn you all in for breaching Cross protocol if you don’t get some damn rest before going after this may-be-killer of yours. It’s no empty promise, Clement. Also, build a bloody case. I’ll lend you copies of the death records.”

***

As I’d asked of her, Mary Ann woke me at half-past six o’clock in the evening, and the world was already sullen and bonelike with the slow, wintry dusk. Strange, how it didn’t mean anything to me anymore to accidentally sleep the day away.

There was something both mournful and beautiful about the Cross draped in a soft snow, near empty as it was on the first evening of holiday leave. While the rest of London gathered for Christmas Eve dinners and parties, Cain and I picked at a birdlike dinner of tea and sandwiches—Clement claimed he was not hungry but we made him take food anyway—as we pieced together a pseudo-case. Barely even pre-work standards. Cross-referencing files, Miss Ogden’s psychic drawing and my tentatively sketched summoning circles … scratching up new reports entirely for Miss Weiss and Mary Ann.

Some case we had. Putting it all together made it seem even more fantastic and useless. Counting Mary Ann, there were five deaths of which we knew, and the only real proof of their connection was intangible and utterly unverifiable. The vision of a ring in clairvoyant possessions. The Yard would fly desperately into action, of course! Hardly.

“Where would records of Dorland’s experimentation applications be found?” Clement asked through another long stretch of his arms.

“I’ll find them,” Cain murmured without looking up.

It felt hopeless to me suddenly—Case No. MDIV, Pink Cameo Ring. Perhaps this was all a mistake. It couldn’t be Dorland; it was too unbelievable. Or too believable.

Ice crept along the window in my room like ivy as I closed it to just a small crack for fresh air, then flopped down on the bed and buried my head into my arms. The wick of the desk lamp whispered inside the little flame. Mary Ann hummed softly somewhere in the corner, a nursery rhyme, and someone knocked three times at my door.

I sat up on my elbows, brow knotting as I glanced at the clock. Ten-thirty at night. Clement probably wouldn’t have knocked; Cain wouldn’t have knocked so heavily. The secretary or maid?

Mary Ann went silent as I answered the call, opening the door halfway and peeking up at … Officer Dorland.

A bass chord of panic strummed through me, thick with dread.

Our prime suspect towered before me, stout and uncomfortably proper, with his prying eyes and turtle chin and a distinctly sweet scent about him. Too much musky cologne. Oh, pray Mary Ann didn’t show herself and make a mess of things—

“Apologies,” Dorland said in that thin, almost wavering way of his, with a gregarious smile. “I do hope it wasn’t presumptuous of me to call so late, but I’ve Christmas plans tomorrow and I know the schedule of our spectral investigators is rather … irregular. I didn’t wish to disturb it any further for you. I’ve tea waiting in Hermes Hall, if you’d join me!”

I gawked up at him, absolutely certain I could not complete my mission. More than that, perhaps I wasn’t ready to hear about my mother.

Gain his confidence.

With a cold sense of danger but an inescapable surge of courage, I swallowed the chalky taste in my mouth and said, “It’s not presumptuous at all. Quite thoughtful, really. Hermes Hall, then?”

He waited in the cramped landing hall for me as I pulled from my satchel the precious photograph of my mother and tucked it into my jacket pocket. From the corner of my eye, I caught him surveying the room absently from the open door; if he at all possessed the predisposition to notice Mary Ann watching wide-eyed from the corner, he hid it expertly.

In the quiet and watchful stillness of Hermes Hall, Dorland had started a fire in the religious file archives, where we’d run into each other the day before. A rosewood tray of tea sat on the table under the window. Outside, on the street, the sweet voices of carolers drifted about with the holiday traffic.

Cautiously, I sat down with him. He seemed attentive to my nervousness, but in a way I was unwilling to consider entirely kind. As he prepared me a cup, I slid forth the little photograph.

“My mother,” I said. “Mrs. Margot Winchester.”

Dorland cleared his throat, shifting around in the plain chair, which seemed a bit too small for his broad build and healthy weight. He crossed one leg over the other and adjusted his suitcoat before reaching down and very respectfully plucking up the calotype as I reached out and shyly dragged my tea over.

Recognition bloomed in his eyes as they roamed the picture, and I fought a cold little grimace. What had my mother been doing with a man like this? Had she known about his diabolical endeavours? How did I sit across from him so coolly when I knew of his maniacal schemes, when I’d witnessed the last memories of his tragic victims?

“Ah, yes, Mrs. Winchester.” Dorland’s beady eyes glittered. His eyes were the worst part about him. They were so intelligent, so alert, and impossible to read. “She was a stunning woman and—well, you’ll pardon my forthright compliments, but she was beautiful inside and out.”

My jaw tightened; disgust pinched in my stomach. “Um. Thank you, sir.”

“You inherited her most striking features, Mr. Winchester!” He sighed in tender reflection. “Those haunting eyes … yes, I do see her so much in you now that I actually sit before you. Is it any wonder I mistook you for her yesterday?”

“Well, perhaps not, unless she made it habit to don waistcoat and trousers,” I mumbled.

Dorland’s smile gave a little twitch and he eyed me sideways as if remembering how little he appreciated my conversation.

“And you were also blessed with the mediumship, weren’t you?” he asked.

“Clairvoyance,” I said, the obsessive need for information at war with the horror to be in his company, down in the pit of my chest where my heart thundered. “I know almost nothing, Dorland. Please just tell me about her.”

His smile deepened, short lashes fringing his eyes in gold. He reached across the table and put a hand on mine. I stiffened. It felt markedly more intimate than it should have. I knew that in my precarious position, especially outside my father’s, I was far from exempt from more twisted attentions. But perhaps I imagined it viler than Dorland truly intended.

“Margot came into the Spiritualist scene early enough to still receive small condemnations for her talents,” he said. “She was something of a private medium, communicating with the dead for those individuals who sought out the supernatural for personal means. Ladies who’d lost soldiers, men who’d lost fathers, parents who’d lost children. She operated alone, and with a false name, for some time before I discovered her. I was delighted by her raw talent and I invited her to gatherings of our metaphysical societies. We wanted her in the Cross, understand. She was knowledgeable on Solomonic circles and blood magic before I even took her on a tour through our libraries.”

I pulled my hand from his to drink my tea, letting the steam curl up to warm my face.

“But she was disinclined to archival work, or even inspection.” Dorland sighed. “She was restless. She turned to criminal witchcraft.”

My heart fell swiftly past my stomach then leapt to my throat as if to choke me. I stared at him, eyes wide.

Dorland nodded and closed his eyes, seemingly so injured by the betrayal. With a sigh, he took my clammy hand again, cradling it in his fingers.

“Would you like to see her file downstairs?” he whispered.

My heart skipped again, to a hollow place.

The locked files, he meant. Criminal witchcraft files. Part of me rejoiced. The other was devastated. What did I say? Would I be in trouble somehow? Would Cain be angry with me … ?

I’d read once, in a novella about vampires, that curiosity was a restless and unscrupulous passion.

And it was true, because the damnably curious side of me whittled everything else away and I whispered back finally, “Yes.”

***

I trailed after Dorland, down away from the religious file archives and through the dimness so characteristic of Hermes Hall, to the door through which Cain and I had gone the night of All Hallows’. Dorland fetched a small lamp from the cupboard beside it.

Perhaps we were mistaken about Dorland. Perhaps Mary Ann really had died of accidental poisoning, and Dorland was just a morally reviling and uncomfortable man by nature, and we simply wanted him to be the suspect for fear we’d never find one.

The swishing shadows of the lower research rooms seemed to follow us as we rounded two corners to the second archive room. CONFIDENTIAL, the plaque read. Dorland withdrew one of those thick old keys, and let us in.

Damp dirt and darkness thickened the freezing air. Clearly another old storeroom, the cold stone floor had some time ago been humbly swept and covered by a faded Oriental rug. Two small tables and their chairs sat along one wall.

“May I look around?” I whispered.

“Of course,” Dorland said warmly.

I struggled to keep calm and patient, but I was overwhelmed with curiosity. Again, there were odd, jarred things on the shelves, dried herbs and bundled things. Mortars and pestles. Crystals, smooth gleaming stones. Fortune telling cards. An old painting of a woman dancing with a devil. Vellum scrolls and a tangle of rope and feathers with a little sign saying, Witch’s ladder, 1719, Case No. MCMI. Powders, bones, a few faceless dolls made of rags or wood, a set of photographs whose many different subjects had had their eyes scratched out or their heads cut away …

“Mrs. Winchester began dabbling in the darker arts.” Dorland stood with the lamp in the doorway. “Witchcraft, such a pitiful abuse of clairvoyant and psychical sensibilities … She used what we call a ‘jinx’ to deteriorate her aunt’s health, to secure her own father next in line for inheritance from his childless brother—and we were forced to revoke her guest access to the Cross.”

Inheritance? I turned around, eyes wide and wild. “My grandfather, her father. Who was he?”

Dorland squinted as if full of pity for me. “Dear boy, you really haven’t a single inkling as to your own history, have you?”

“The most I ever knew of her was her connection to the Cross.” I shrugged, hopelessly distracted. My fingers smudged through the dust on case file covers as I pulled them down from the shelves, flipped through them, pushed them back. Oh—what if I stumbled upon the Kingsley file?

Dorland set the lamp down on the table and wandered over beside me, dropping a hot, heavy hand on my shoulder. “She was daughter of the fourth Baron Thistle-Clarke’s younger brother,” he said, “that curious state of stunted privilege that is such elegant martyrdom on the right faces.”

“What else?” I prompted, clenching my teeth against their chattering, in the dark underground on a wintry night.

He gave my shoulder a reassuring little squeeze and pointed over at the table, where a thin folio lay near the lamp. “Her file is just there. Though I understand if you feel too ashamed to look through it.”

A silvery sort of urgency rushed through me, at once rotten and exhilarating. My heart pounded. Witchcraft. Her case. Eyes fixed on the file, I turned, brushing away his hand—

Dorland’s arms swooped down from behind, halting me with a coarse cloth twisted tight like a rope and stretched out taut by two fiercely-clenched fists. He yanked, wedging it hard into my mouth like a horse’s bit.

“Ungh—!”

It dragged me staggering back against him, ground my lip into my teeth. A sharp gasp and shocked cry rattled in my throat as I clawed at his thick arms, scratching and pulling. Blast, blast, blast! But for any small bit I managed to budge his arms, Dorland only tugged back harder, the cloth biting at my skin. Every hard breath, gulping in the sweetness of it.

“She and I spent a blissful Season together,” he grunted out as we struggled against one other. He chuckled, with mild difficulty. “I’ll speak to you man-to-man, Will. I did consider courting her to marriage. But she became obsessed with her practice, going on and on about making a far better life for herself and her family than what her father presently had to offer. Criminally, of course!”

I threw back my elbows, desperately, hoping to make impact. Squirming, writhing—Cook’s knife was upstairs in my desk drawer. I should have thought to bring it. I should have … I was a reckless fool … Clement. Cain. God, would that I had told them before going with Dorland!

Dorland’s determined grunts and clenched-teeth sighs of impatience made my stomach lurch. I swung back a heel and landed something, at least. The bastard cried out, lost a bit of leverage. Our legs tangled. Oh God, he’d crush me if he fell on me.

“Truthfully, I adored her audacity!” He laughed, forcing me to my knees by the small of the back. “But she was so enthralled by nonsense. I tried to distract her with research and ideas upon which to expound, tried to kindle her interest in the science of it all, not the madness of old ritual. Magic.” He spat the word as if it tasted bad.

I strained to pull and beat at his arms yet. I dug in my nails. Dorland cried out in startled rage and tightened the choke of the cloth. I tried for his face next but to no avail. He pressed at my back again, flattening me fast and easy to the musty rug. Christ, but I’d really messed this one up, hadn’t I? Sweet, sweet cloth—saltiness. Furious tears and snot smeared across my flushed face.

“For example,” Dorland went on, laboriously, as he clutched the gag at the back of my head one-handed and caught my wrists together in a bruising grip with the other. “Studying the unseen threads that tether the dead’s souls to the earth … yes, you know of what I speak. The Electro-Static currents! Is it left by a natural death? An unnatural death?”

He pinned my arms stretched out before me. Rug, burning my skin. Ears ringing. I couldn’t breathe, crushed under his knee. He’d break a rib if he pressed any harder, I was sure of it. And it was a terrible, terrible thing, to sob and cry out only to have the sound forced back into your own throat.

“That is where our science fails us, you see! I thought, if she and I could solve that mystery, her reputation would be redeemed. Yes, I thought with lovely Margot’s gifts, I’d have no trouble arranging my theory.” Dorland sighed. “She was never interested. You, however—you, Will, are keener on the scientific process. Yes, I’ve read your case reports. Perhaps even more gifted and aware than your own fanciful mother … To know you somehow found your way to me as well, to the Cross and to me, why, it’s got to be fate!”

The world spun. Everything began to fade—I was fading. Dorland’s voice droned on above me and a shape slipped in from the hall … thin little Marius, from the Stygian Society, threadbare coat and patchy cap. He dragged a luggage trunk behind him, eyes bright and slightly skittish in the lamplight.

Breathless with excitement, Dorland was saying, “… and imagine the experiments with your blood, Will … with witch’s blood.”

Oh, I’d made a grave, grave mistake. I hadn’t even stopped to consider Dorland’s next victim might already be in his grasp. And it was me.

Everything went blurry, then whispered away like a ghost flitting off into the dark.

Mary Ann was colourful and full of life.

Shadows swarmed, slithering at the corner of the eye like the tunneling black that hovered just before dizziness became fainting. But Mary Ann was vibrant, pink and apologetic. Her plaits shimmered in some otherworldly glow. Covering her mouth and shaking her head and looking at me with such pain in her wide eyes, she wept.

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, soft and susurrating. “I was scared to see him again, so scared, Miss or Mr. Inspector!”

Miss or Mr. That made me smile. “Shh, Mary Ann. It’s not your fault.”

It was mine, for waltzing right into Dorland’s clutches. How could I have been so stupid!

I was at sea in the blackness. Up was down. Down was up. I let the darkness swing me to-and-fro, infect me with the delicious swaying. It was nice, suspended there in the ringing peace wherever I was, in whatever plane of existence. A dream.

Oh … was I dead?

Was this the in-between?

“Willow … ”

Who was calling?

“Willow … ”

Suddenly upright, I ran. It was surprisingly easy to run through the gauzy dark. Gradually I realised I was not in nothingness; buildings clustered, neat and tidy townhouses, but they seemed a mockery of the real grandeur with their dismal, faded colours and black windows like drooping frowns.

I heard music.

On the slippery cobbles, I turned around and around. The music came from one of the homes. Laughter echoed with it, tangled up in the dancing notes.

I knew the laughter instantly, shimmering like a golden thread in the dark.

“Mamma!” I cried, ashamed of how my voice sounded so high and tight with fear. The townhouse—No. 9 Mansfield Street.

I darted inside. Nearly too dark to see. I almost tripped over the ends of my gown. Gown? I stopped in the hollow hallway, fingers curling in the dress. Very soft under my fingertips. Mirror, was there a mirror? I wanted to see what I looked like, I wanted to know if I looked nice or not. Was this a possession? I felt like myself, but …

I followed the music up the shadowy stairs. Candles burned in a room filled with occult books and oddities, various collections that looked straight out of a dungeon, or Hermes Hall’s storage room, or the spookiest nooks of the Stygian Society.

At a makeshift shrine sat a few children’s books, a knife laid atop them with a handle carved like some winged, naked creature with a goat’s head and feet. Dust and cobwebs blanketed the whole display. But Dorland had lit the candles. Dorland … ?

Dorland stepped away from a Solomon’s circle on the floor below the shrine, in which a young woman lay, and I watched in horror as he fell upon the woman to the deafening music, carving shapes into her wrists while she screamed without a sound because she was gagged.

I fled, tearing at the gown lest it trip me again. My breath ripped from my chest in sharp gasps. There, a mirror. Lit from below as if by some unseen candles, my reflection flickered into the visage of the woman from the floor.

Dark, numinous sort of beauty, hair swept loosely out of her face, up off the long, pale neck. Lace and brooch of a high collar, beetle in amber. Nails painted black. Thick black cloth tied about her delicate temple—a blindfold. In the center of it a white oval with a large black pupil, embroidery in the shape of the All-Seeing Eye. I was locked in place, engrossed and repulsed at once. Someone gasped slow and shrill behind me as the woman in the mirror reached up and untied the blindfold. It was her.

My mother.

The world spun. Blood, and witchcraft, and a madman, and my mother crying in the mirror, and her whisper like she spoke to me right through the back of my head.

“I never meant to die, darling … I didn’t want to die.”

My heart broke. She reached out of the mirror, pulling herself to climb through the glass as if through a window, and instinctively I climbed through it beside her, hurrying the other way as my ears rang and a pressure clamped down on my temples hard enough to crush my head on my shoulders—

I jerked awake with a choking gasp, alone in a cold, bleak attic.

Blearily, I squinted around. A black cloth draped over the only window, smothering any light but for the hot dancing glow of scattered candles. Scratches and grime marred the woodwork; glimmering spider webs laced the stovepipe in the corner.

All at once I noticed the multitude of mirrors hiding in the shadows, leaning propped against the walls like some crop of mythical stones.

And I saw myself in them, in the fiery swell of candlelight, bound to a rigid-backed armchair of dusty velvet—shivering and disheveled. No gown, thank God. No jacket either. My mouth and toes were numb from the cold. What was that on my face? Dried blood. From my nose? My lip was split, sore. My arms … first set of sleeves rolled up, flannel undershirt sleeves cut along the sides to reveal my bare forearms beneath. Bruises there. My neck ached. My shoulders ached. I strained to wiggle my fingers, shake the pins and needles from my hands. I didn’t mean for it to, but a frantic whine rattled weakly in my throat as I realised how securely tied my hands were, rope burning my wrists at the arms of the chair. From the magnificent baroque phonograph cabinet across the room tumbled that eerie music from my dream, gently muffled by a scarf in the horn.

Dorland stood near the phonograph, blending into the shadows.

I reared back as much as one could whilst tied to a chair, panic sluicing through me like a cold wind.

Officer Dorland, in all his deranged glory, on his hand that blasted cameo ring glinting in the candlelight. And I hated everything to know we’d been right.

“Good morning,” he crooned. Despite his prim smile, his eyes were skittish. “Or should I say good evening?”

I drew a slow, shuddering breath. And then suddenly, the horror in me pitched violently to rage.

“You killed my mother!” I howled. “I saw her! You manipulated her, you unconscionable wretch—you killed my mother like you killed your wife and daughter!”

Dorland’s lashes fluttered rapidly and his smile curdled, only to return full force. “I’m sorry?”

“Mary Ann told me!” My voice cracked in my dry throat. “About the experiments the Cross refused to permit you. I know what you’ve done, Dorland. You killed Miss Hughling, Miss Maude, Lady Diana Burke. My mother, your own wife and daughter, stealing their lives—”

“Please,” Dorland parried with a repulsive chuckle. “They were worth nothing more than their paltry contribution to science, anyway.” He squinted down at me in deep disfavour; he knew I was not bluffing. I’d found him out. Me, Westwood’s charity case, newest runt on Clement’s team of rejects. Margot’s child.

Thinly, he said, “How did you … where did you see Mary Ann?”

“She came with my room,” I gritted out, charged with a hostile sort of instinct. “It’s where she died. Remember? Surely you did not fail to recognise that when you dropped by.”

He turned to dig in the big trunk that sat just beside the phonograph. Christ, was it the same trunk Marius had had? Was that … how he’d transported me here, wherever we were?

Dorland had gathered all his monstrous composure again, smiling that awful, convoluted smile as he straightened up. In his hands was a twine-bound stack of cabinet cards, which with his grossly long fingers he began to untie and display for me, one by one.

These were no regular cabinet cards, but a series of small, mounted photographs of dark and gruesome scenes … All his victims.

I turned away instantly, sickened. Dorland took me by the chin and forced me to observe each and every one.

“I hope to catch photographic evidence of the soul’s electricity at the time of death,” he droned in my ear, as if I didn’t wrestle to escape his grip. He was mesmerised by his own project, remorseless, and completely apathetic to my dismay. “Dispersing, leaving the body behind … ah, see! Something cloudy in this one, strange orbs of light in these images.”

Miss Weiss, her blood an eruption on the pavement. Miss Maude on the stoop of Miss Ophie’s. Miss Hughling hanging. Lady Diana limp like a doll, arms flayed like a fish at market. Other unfamiliar young women, whom we hadn’t encountered on investigation, all of them in those awful, devilish summoning circles. Mary Ann in her bed. My bed. Dark, bloody bile staining her mouth. Her chin. Her little nightgown. The big, plaintive eyes I knew, but lifeless here, and …

“Get that away from me!” I squeezed my eyes shut, choking on a panicked sob of breath. “Take it away, Dorland, please!”

He meant to kill me.

Clement and Cain hadn’t a clue where I was—when or where I’d met with the monster, or what had happened, and Dorland revealed everything to me because he meant to kill me, didn’t he? For his deluded studies. Perhaps just for revenge.

“I’m certain,” Dorland wheezed, sounding disappointed for some reason, “you wonder how I managed it all. A few good friends in all the proper places, meticulous research and report-building … and your mother’s jinxes were rather powerful for a novice witch, Will.” He shuffled through the cabinet cards. “Look there, do you see this one? The spectator’s feet in the upper right-hand corner? Your mother’s feet. Look at those lovely shoes. And—ah, there, those lovely shoes once more.”

I closed my eyes again with a shocked, stuttering breath. It was my mother, bloody and limp in one of Dorland’s ritualistic circles, in the shrine room as I’d seen before I’d woken. Hovering over her like glow-worms were a few tiny orbs of light. I couldn’t look. I wouldn’t look.

“Why did you do it?” I said through my teeth, tears finally bleeding hot through my lashes. I was livid in the sickest of ways. “Why did you kill her when she was of such use to you?”

“Use!” Dorland laughed. “You endearing thing, she was a witch and nothing more. She used me for practice, and a good standing in the right corner of the world. Thus, I thought she’d return the favour and allow me to use her … imagine! The strength of her blood! The death of a witch! But she left no ghost. Thankfully, I know more now than I did then.”

He bound the little cards again and tossed them to the floor, then crouched down before me with a covetous grip on both my knees. The cameo ring dug into my thigh.

“Now I have you, Margot’s own flesh and blood,” he whispered. “And if I have my way with you, too … oh, can you imagine the bond that tragedy might forge between the electricity of your soul and the corporeal world? Like a strike of lightning, charring the earth! What a haunt you shall be, such a talented young medium.”

“Clairvoyant,” I spat, wiggling my knees to shake his hands. It was futile.

“Even better!” Dorland’s eyes danced. “Will you be an intelligent specter? Or will your forlorn little soul reduce you to a violent, angry enigma?”

Gain his confidence …

My eyes widened. “Wait,” I blurted.

He squinted up at me, impatient.

I swallowed hard, the words sticking chalky to the roof of my mouth. My racing heart made it difficult to breathe. “I apologise, Dorland,” I finally croaked. “I was just … shocked to learn all that about my mother. I never knew. That’s all. Please forgive my childish lack of control over my emotions. I’ll grow into it. But the thing is, you’re right.”

He measured me with those beady eyes. “In regards to?”

“Your theories,” I urged. “I’ve thought it since we bottled Jude. You’re right about—about the type of haunt corresponding directly to the means of death and it’s shamefully unfair to deny you scientific license. You, a man with such solid enterprise, when the Black Cross declares itself a place of learning? How does one learn if not through study?”

His watery eyes stayed fixed on me in shy shock as I bargained, “I won’t tell a soul what I know. We shall work together. Why do you believe I am so interested in my mother’s past? I want to … ”

My breath caught on my lower lip for a moment, trapping the words.

“ … I want to be like her!” I finished in a breathless whisper, eyes wide and cold. “No, I want to be better than her. Your apprentice. I’ll even push for the Cross to reconsider its outlook on your theories. I shall get Westwood to bend. Please, Dorland, just untie me.”

And then I would run and not stop until I reached the bloody Yard.

Dorland’s hands shifted on my legs as if he’d move away. I’d convinced him. I waited, heart pounding.

But suddenly his fingers tightened again like talons and his turtle chin quivered as he roared, “DAMN THE BLACK CROSS!” Spittle flew from his lower lip. His voice boomed around the closed-up room. “Damn the Black Cross, it won’t change! They won’t listen to you, you fool. That’s why I’ve done it all on my own from the start. The Black Cross today is a sniveling, pathetic carnival act, folklorists and useless scholars, damn the Black Cross!”

His hands shot to my throat and instinctively I just held my breath anyway, clutching at the armchair under my bound wrists.

To die, then and there, and be with my mother forever in the in-between … that was my place. I’d failed Clement. I should have listened to Cain about meeting with Dorland. I’d never see either of them again. I would die before Daphne died. Zelda would never know what happened to me. Nor my father, who had wanted to protect me from all this, and …

And I didn’t want to die.

Punishment for my mother’s wickedness was not for me to suffer. I was not her. I was Will Winchester, Spectral Files Scouting Inspector, and I refused to be anything else. Not a sacrifice. Not a victim.

Dorland’s greedy fingers fell back to my knees and inched up my legs. My heart dropped. Of course. Fitting of a man as wicked as he. Or perhaps I just looked so much like my mother to him. Well, didn’t he gamble well with me? Newly furious tears stung the backs of my eyes; the coppery taste of panic rose on my tongue. Horrified he’d find my other secret. Burning with shame to wonder if he already had. I hadn’t any idea how long I’d dreamed. Perhaps I could kick him, somewhere vulnerable. Except I was still bound; I could not run even if I managed to deter him momentarily. Bastard. Bastard!

“Dorland!”

Dorland and I both looked to the door as, with a scrape and a shuffle, Clement burst in off the stairs—armed with a fighting knife, it looked like, his grip on which he quickly flipped, ready to use it.

Cain came up behind him with a dark composure all too reminiscent of his conduit possession at Miss Ophie’s.

Clement’s eyes flashed. “Officer Dorland,” he hissed, “kindly remove yourself from Winchester’s person, won’t you?”

I was a perfect mess of feelings, all in disarray, but my confidence resurrected just to see them as I sputtered, “My God, it’s about time, you two!”

Right. Cain had sent for Dorland’s address. He’d been suspicious, and Clement had wanted to meet again after I spoke with Dorland. Perhaps they’d called at my room and Mary Ann told them. But how had they gotten in? Dorland and I had heard nothing for our heated exchange, the music …

Not important. Dorland had gravely misjudged a few things, one being that the three of us were alike in a very key way—our impervious nerve.

“Kingsley, Clement,” Dorland greeted, standing to his full height. His forced smile gave a little dissatisfied twitch as he cleared his throat, adjusted his sleeves. Clearly, he was thrown off and hurrying to reevaluate. “You’ve joined us at a very inopportune moment. I wasn’t expecting any visitors tonight. I’m embarrassed to say I’m not prepared. I don’t even have tea made up to offer you.”

Clement started forth, but halted abruptly with another scuff against the floor and endless reflections scattering in all the mirrors as Dorland snatched a revolver from an interior pocket and shoved it right to Clement’s temple.

I froze—as did my soul.

“Now, this is just extraordinarily ill-advised,” Dorland said, thin but deliberate. “First you come into my home unannounced, disrupting my personal affairs, in which you now wish to involve yourself unwelcome? Greatly discourteous, Inspector Clement!”

“You’re mad, Dorland,” Clement growled. His knuckles were sharp and white where he clutched his fighting knife. But he … was also shaking. It alarmed me to see him so panicked, a flurry of failure and fright darkening his face. And it was my fault.

From the attic doorway, Cain said coolly, “Will doesn’t exactly fit your modus operandi, Dorland. Let him go.”

“My modus operandi?” Dorland chuckled with that same ugly, false smile and a little shake of the head. “Quite the contrary; Will is a prime assistant. Witch’s blood!”

Cain reached into his pocket. I saw it the same as Dorland did and I choked on a strangled little sound of despair as he spun to point his revolver Cain’s way instead.

But there was the clatter and click of another weapon being readied—and this time it came from Cain himself, from a curious little derringer he’d pulled swiftly from its hiding place at his waist. He held it near his hip as the American sharpshooters did, aimed for Dorland, with a lofty lack of fear that did not exactly put me more at ease.

The attic nook suddenly felt much smaller. Dorland traded a glance of sad surprise with me over his shoulder, as if to wonder together how Cain and Clement dared impose upon our pleasurable little time.

“Well … now, if it is not too presumptuous,” Dorland said in that grating, monotonous voice of his, turtle throat quivering and mouth smacking in thought, “I would love to know how you managed to uncover all this in the first place. I’m honestly amazed.”

“You were sloppy.” I spoke with the husk of my usual voice, frayed and weak from shouting, as I met Dorland’s eyes in the mirror behind Cain. “Your good luck charm, you imbecile. Your grandmother’s pink cameo ring. What kind of murderer dons such an indicative detail? Amateurs, of course.”

The smile clung to Dorland’s mouth as he glared at me.

“The Yard awaits you outside, Dorland,” Clement said through grinding teeth, hazel eyes bright with resolve in the hot light of all the candles. Impatiently or nervously or both, he rolled his knife over and over in his palm.

They didn’t have Scotland Yard. I knew them well. They’d come to my rescue reckless and stupid, just the two of them.

“You have a choice, sir,” Clement went on. “You come peacefully and confess, or … ”

“Or what?” Dorland’s brows arced gently. His gaze slid to Cain. “This would all be over if you’d just shoot, Kingsley. Or are you the only one of your clan who lacks the conviction to kill?”

My eyes veered to Cain, brow knotting. He either didn’t notice, or ignored me. But what was that supposed to mean?

“Tell me, children,” Dorland said. “How did this climactic moment play out in your minds? Heroically, perhaps? Unfortunately, none of you shall leave this house alive, and as always I will have no trouble concealing your disappearances.”

Cain cleared his throat. The glow of candlelight spun gold in his bad eye; the ominous feel of his steady stare thickened as he said, “Dorland, you may have me.”

“You may have me,” Cain said again, “if it is witch’s blood you want.”

The friction in the attic tightened as we all looked to him in confusion.

“What are you doing?” Clement demanded.

“Cain—?” I sputtered, but his name ended in a series of choked gasps; Dorland grabbed a fistful of my hair to hold me in place as he jammed his revolver to my head. I clenched my teeth, blinking rapidly against the tears that sprang up from the hair-pulling.

“I’m sorry?” Dorland hummed.

“You desire Will for your experiments, don’t you?” Cain wore a menacing fortitude, his voice low and daring. “Take me, and let Will go. I believe it’s a fair enough trade. We’ve both got witch’s blood, after all. You’ve read the file on my family, have you not?”

Dorland’s beady eyes narrowed. “Yes … yes,” he said after a moment. “I’ve read the file.”

Witch’s blood?

“You think the disappearance of Lord Kingsley, Earl of Brackham, will be so easily ignored?” Clement laughed as he edged towards Dorland, clutching his fighting knife. Dorland pressed the gun harder to my temple. Clement fell still.

“Fair trade,” Dorland said as if Clement were not even there. “A Kingsley soul! Will, please forgive me, but now I’m disinclined to any other compromise. Kingsley, shall we shake on it?”

Slowly, Cain lowered the derringer.

“Cain,” Clement husked.

He passed the pocket gun to Clement and, with an honourable and solemn look of resignation, he moved forward close enough to put his hand on my shoulder.

“On your word, then,” he whispered meekly, like he knew Dorland would be titillated if he sounded so, so afraid of him. “Let Will go, and … you’ve got me.”

Dorland did not hesitate. He set the revolver down and hurried to unknot the rope from my wrists. My arms tingled numb and cold with the release of pressure.

“Leave this place, you two,” Cain said with a smile. “And on your way out, take the bloody scarf from the horn over there, won’t you? I can’t hear the music.”

Impatiently, Dorland pulled me up by the elbow from the chair. Cain pushed me aside; I stumbled, knees weak and stiff, clutching my sore wrists to my chest. Clement wound one arm about my middle before I lost footing, depositing me out of his way as, slowly, holding Dorland’s eyes as Dorland held his, he moved across the candlelit room and plucked the scarf from the phonograph.

Music burst through the quiet, prancing along unaware of the tension. Rich, bewitching song, doleful Vivaldi. Cain snatched the scarf and the knife and shouted, “Clement!”

“What?” Clement cried, frantic. Then he seemed to remember the gun in his hand. “Oh!”

All at once, Cain tossed the scarf over Dorland’s face as Clement readied the derringer—lifted it and pulled the trigger.

A throbbing crack! split through the room. Somewhere, a mirror exploded, raining glass upon the floor. Dorland let loose an awful cry, but Clement had missed. With the derringer’s only shot sacrificed, he swung to box Dorland across the face with the gun itself.

Dorland lumbered back, flailing to catch himself against the broken mirror. He held his bloodied mouth as a low, angry sound rattled out of him.

Clement swerved away to drag me from the room with him, but I dug my heels in, hitting at his helpful arm. “We’re not leaving Cain here with him! We—”

Crack!

Another mirror near us hit the floor, bursting into fat shards. Dorland had found his revolver again.

“Damn it!” Clement hissed as we dropped to hands and knees. “Will, Kingsley can handle this, I swear to you!”

Still standing by the armchair in the center of the room, Cain uttered a low, chilling laugh. And from under Clement’s protective arm, I watched in maddened disbelief as he pushed up his sleeve and cut a shallow line along his own bare wrist with the point of Clement’s knife.

Hoarsely, he cried, “Dmitri, come!”

Throb of my pulse in my ears. The Vivaldi. Dorland fumbling with his gun. Clement’s breath, over my shoulder. A long black leg extended from a mirror in the far corner.

Panic coiled and snapped in me like a whip as I pressed back against Clement, who pressed back against the wall himself.

With an otherworldly grace, just as my mother had in my dream, or vision, or whatever it had been, a lithe, ghastly pale gentleman in a nice broadcloth suit stepped through the glass and into the attic room.

Missing.

Yes, ears ringing. Hair on end. The figure was obviously not of the living. But it …

A slow little trickle of blood rolled like a saintly tea from Cain’s bad eye, down his cheek.

“Cain!” I gasped, but Clement quickly covered my mouth. I sent him a wild glance only to be taken aback by the reverent nervousness knotting his brow.

Diabolical mark … Cain had said that day in the vestibule.

The bewildering phantom flickered from the mirror to Cain without ever seeming to have moved at all. Cain tipped his head back and peered up at the thing, fully manifested as it was with crackling energy and splendorous detail. A pallid but portrait-beautiful young man, with eyes the colour of blood clots and a smile so full of adoration it was almost sinister.

My heart stopped.

I’d seen this thing before. In the hall, the day I met Cain. Without a doubt, it was the same apparition that had been watching us as it faded away into the darkness of the corridor. Soft face, even stare, all black suit, and—

“The Kingsley daemon!” Dorland wheezed in deplorable delight.

The thing swooped to bended knee and took Cain’s hand to dust its pale lips along his knuckles, and then it closed its eager mouth on his bleeding wrist. Not a drop of blood hit the floor. The Missing man … drank it.

Cain shivered and looked down at the thing and said, “Kill Dorland.”

The Missing man burst into shadows.

Every flame of every candle flickered; the shadows of the room seemed to scrape and caw like ravens. Cain closed his arms around himself tight and sank down into the armchair with a weary sigh.

The Missing man shimmered and shifted from spot to spot like rain on the wind. Dorland stood amidst a bit of broken glass, heaving great, excited breaths as he struggled to follow the ghostly gentleman with his eyes.

The thing gathered itself from the fringes of the room, emerging from a dark corner to peer at Dorland in ever shortening patience.

“Daemon!” Dorland cried, ecstatic. “Daemon, be still! Ah, it’s true—the rumours are true!”

All the candles went out in one grand breath as the Missing thing descended upon Dorland like a rook to silver.

Everything, grey and smoky. The looming shapes of mirrors. Cain in the chair. The wailing phonograph. Black cloth over the window. Dorland’s shadow in the far corner, and a figure wrapped in darkness.

Cain’s daemon.

Dorland uttered the strangled shout of a man being restrained or physically forced. His silhouette writhed, twisted … lifted suddenly, as though some unseen hand pried him up off his feet. Slowly, and purposefully, to hold him hovering there twitching and trembling in its clutch. The Missing thing shivered back into vivid detail before him, just peering at him curiously. Dorland dropped the revolver with a dreadful clatter, and his gagging gasps curdled into sounds of anguish.

With every step the thing took forth, Dorland listed back, his toes dragging on the floor, as if carried by the thing’s gaze. It reached for the black covering over the slanted window, pulling it easily to the floor and flooding the smoky room with the bruised light of a wintry dusk. Silky ribbons of bluish grey still unfurled from all the candles. And Dorland hung there in the air before the handsome, blood-eyed daemon. It merely looked at him and he gave an awful shudder. Blood bloomed in one of his eyes, before suddenly they both began to circle—twist, within their sockets, into his head and then back around again. Blood streamed down his face, staining his beard, from his nose and his ears and his tongue. Parts of him began to jerk with a sickening rosary of crunching bone.

The stiff latches of the window jerked up without being touched; rust fell in tiny pieces to the floor. With a gentle brush of the fingers, the daemon pushed the window open.

Down below was Mansfield Street. The smell of frost and snow swirled in from the rooftops and the merry sound of carolers echoed up into the attic, prancing around with the Vivaldi.

Dorland’s flushed, straining face contorted and his fingers wiggled stiffly. The daemon stretched out a hand, long bone-white fingers winding through the cold air. As his eyes finally rolled up to white and stayed, Dorland uttered one last gurgling, choking sound that may or may not have been futile resistance, and then just before bursting into a swirl of fleeing shadows, disappearing again like it had never been there in the first place, the Missing thing gave Dorland a push.

He fell limply out the window to crack and flop off the roof, then plummet fast to the pavement just outside his own front door.

Shrieks struck up down on the street in an instant. The violins and flutes of the Vivaldi record squealed to a halt but the record continued turning, Dorland’s ugly voice jumping along the wax:

“The Kingsley daemon … the Kingsley daemon … the Kingsley daemon … ”

I wrenched free of Clement’s arms, leapt to my feet and staggered into the opposite room—no pail, no wash basin. Nails scraping along old paint, I wrestled the window open there and leaned out in time to get sick onto the snowy back roof, away from the sight of the street. And then I just crumpled down to sit, buried my face in my arms, and began to sob in relief.

***

Clement and Cain let me cry. I was thankful for that. But it didn’t satisfy me.

“God … oh God,” I whispered, once I could speak again, or even think at all. Drying my face carelessly, I scrambled up and across the attic, stamping on blood and glass to peek out the window at Dorland’s body down below, sprawled broken and bloody on the walk as people on the street either ran, screaming, or swarmed like ants to a spilled treat.

“He’s gone,” Cain whispered. “Don’t worry.”

“Yes, he’s gone,” I said, my voice ragged. “He’s dead.”

“No.” As if on the throne of some hellish rule, Cain still sat in the velvet chair to which I’d been bound. “I meant the daemon.”

The legs of the chair scraped upon the floor as I shot over and grabbed him by the shoulders.

“What was that?” I entreated, nerves alight, though I felt horrifyingly hollow inside. “What happened? What did you do, Cain?”

He was alabaster pale, face set in a grim frown, and the blood that flaked like rust under his scarred eye made him seem a corpse come to life again, Ligeia in the flesh.

“We all have our secrets, Willow,” he whispered.

I reared back as if he’d struck me. Never mind that it was not a time in which Willow was right, it was just I … had never disclosed that name to him.

“What is that supposed to mean, you awful boy?” I hissed in desperate bewilderment. I turned to Clement, who sat against the wall quite dazed and disheveled. “What does that mean?”

Cain twisted around to cut Clement his own damning look. “I told you it wasn’t safe to see Dorland alone.”

“How was I to know he’d want to kill him, too?” Clement cried, voice strained and weak, as though his last thread of sanity were fit to snap. Dark red bloomed on his sleeve, just off the shoulder.

Blast. I hurried over to him. “Clement, you’re bleeding.”

“Ouch,” he grunted once I got my hands on his upper arm. There was a rip in his sleeve, blackened at the tear. A gash along the flesh beneath.

“Did you take a bullet?” I gasped.

“Nearly, I suppose,” he muttered, picking a small sliver of mirror glass from his palm before swatting my hands away to inspect his own arm. “Seems it only grazed the flesh.”

His face pinched as he glanced up without lifting his head.

“Could you two please explain ‘Willow’ to me?” he begged. “That’s a girl’s name.” His brow knotted. “Are you a girl, Will?”

“Not at the moment,” I said bitterly as Cain grumbled, “Sometimes he is.”

Clement slouched, staring at me in a diluted sort of shock, as if my ambiguous gender were a harder truth to swallow than Cain Kingsley being in possession of a daemon.

I couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, as Cain wouldn’t meet mine. My face burned in shame. Failure. Dread. I would fall short; Clement’s thoughts of me would change. And everything would be ruined.

Clement cleared his throat and tore his gaze away. “Did Dorland know?” he husked.

“He knew my mother,” I said instead.

The quiet in the room hung heavy on my shoulders.

I rubbed at my neck; it ached so deeply from however long I’d been in that chair. My hands would not stop shaking. “That’s why he wanted me. She’d worked with him. He killed her.”

The brittle quiet in the attic sharpened to a point.

Clement stood slowly, holding his arm. “Will, I’m so sorry … ”

I shook my head. “She was mad. Criminal. She committed despicable acts at Dorland’s side, and it hurts, but it’s not as though I really knew her. Thus, it doesn’t deal quite the blow it might have. I’m glad I didn’t know her.”

From the velvet chair, Cain peered at me in that unnervingly penetrative way of his. “That is why you are so interested in the locked files. Isn’t it?”

Clement shuffled over and swung the back of his hand out against Cain’s shoulder. “How did you know Will was a girl?” he demanded, notes of betrayal in his voice.

“I’m sometimes a girl,” I corrected tersely.

Cain’s face dimpled somewhere between a wince and a scowl. “I just knew. I had a feeling.”

“Lies! Your little daemon told you, didn’t he?”

Aghast, I threw Cain a sharp look. I didn’t even have to ask aloud.

“I’m sorry, Will,” Cain said glumly. “I know ‘Willow’ is not the name true to you—and I never intended to speak it aloud just now, but he’s been whispering it and whispering it since I asked him where you were.”

“That thing,” I guessed. My voice was barely there. “From the mirror. It told you my name. It knew where I was.”

“I asked him to keep watch on you until you’d met with Dorland.”

“Keep watch on me?”

“Yes,” Cain said through his teeth. “And I’m sorry the blasted fiend didn’t tell me Dorland took you until I asked.”

I fixed on him a look of horrified betrayal of which I was not entirely proud. A chill wound through me, fast and piercing. Innocent ghosts were uncomfortable, yes, but it was something altogether more disturbing, more violating, to think something like that Missing thing, that daemon, something I had not sensed or even known at all, had been there with me and somehow without my knowing.

“I’m a witch, Will.” Cain’s mismatched eyes hung on me grave as a painted saint’s. “And Dmitri is my family’s familiar.”

I backed away with a crunch of glass underfoot.

No small wonder the file on the Kingsleys was locked, or that the world said what it did about them. No wonder he wanted to know. But my mother … and if Cain was a witch …

He stood, gracefully, as if stretching his legs. Somehow, his wrist had not bled out. In fact, it already seemed a bit healed. Impossible. Or perhaps not, for a witch. I hadn’t any idea. I hadn’t any idea about far too many things suddenly, I realised.

Cain drifted over to the window where the early evening wind blew slush in from the roof. There he turned to face me with a wicked regality, and for the first time I was truly cowed by how imposing he was. Such intellect and eerie elegance condensed down into such a small young man. This was his darker side, and it called for full attention.

“Spectral gifts are generally solitary gifts,” he said. “Occasionally, however, they are inherited. And that is what makes a witch. Not cackling, ugly old hags who live alone in the forest, boiling up brews of baby brains and dead toads, frolicking with the Devil. No. A bloodline of gifts, forever in tune with the phantasmal. Your mother was a witch, Will? Then it is witches’ blood that courses through your veins, same as it’s witches’ blood that courses through Kingsley veins.”

A bloodline with you, too … he’d said, what felt like so long ago.

“Dmitri.” Cain looked away. “Or, the red-eyed fellow with whom you’ve just made acquaintance. He’s my family’s familiar. I am the heir chosen to bear his company. I offer a bit of blood for the spell, and he’s bound to do my bidding.”

“Witches’ blood,” I repeated, shrinking further back against the wall with a tiny, hollow laugh. “No, Cain, I am not a witch.”

“Yes,” he whispered, looking so much more human than he had when he’d entered the attic and practically begging me with his big owl eyes not to hate him. “You are.”

Panic cinched my heart. Oh God, all my father had feared had come to be. I’d gotten tangled up in everything my mother had done—everything—and I couldn’t deny what I’d seen. That spectral gentleman had walked right out of the mirror, no normal Missing, and Cain had called it a name and it had tipped Dorland out the window at Cain’s demand and …

“Dorland’s dead,” I said again, staring blankly. “And I feel nothing. You seem to feel nothing. What kind of men are we … ?”

“Would we be any better had we allowed him to continue his atrocities?” Cain countered, thickly, almost impatiently.

“We killed him.”

“We did not kill him.”

“Yes, we just let that thing kill him—”

“Would you rather him be alive?” Cain barked, then immediately appeared to regret it, looking away.

“No,” I hissed, eyes narrowed. “Of course not!”

“We work too closely with life and death,” Clement offered in a husk of his usual voice, trying to defuse the two of us. But he didn’t need to; I wilted, empty again. I was out of feelings, it seemed. Nothing left with which to weigh good deeds and necessary evils. What Cain said was true. We’d done nothing to the man, ourselves.

We all have our secrets.

I looked to Clement, but he had nothing additional to offer. It was obvious he’d known all along about Cain and the Kingsley daemon, the reasons for which Cain was desperate to see the criminal witchcraft files. He had known. Neither of them had told me. That made me feel very small and helpless, and … alone again.

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Cain murmured.

Clement studied me with a soft look of frustration and guilt.

“Clement,” I snapped, “if you don’t stop looking at me as if you don’t know me anymore, I swear—it’s really not that complicated.”

Clement cleared his throat and, with a flutter of lashes, his hazel eyes darted off elsewhere.

“Do you resent me?” Cain asked. I looked back to him quickly, brow knotted. All the darkness had flown from him, leaving him bloody and faint. He stared at me with wide, haunted eyes, ready to shoulder my condemnation. Just as I’d said to him before, at that party on Cheyne Walk. Don’t hate me for it …

Did I resent him for being a witch? For having a pet daemon which invaded his friends’ privacy. That slew men at his mere call. The betrayal of morality was staggering—I had good reason to resent him—to fear him.

But I didn’t.

Witches’ blood.

I swallowed, throat raw. “We all have our secrets,” I replied in a whisper.

More distraught voices echoed up from the street, sharp and fragile in the cold. “All the blood, all the blood … don’t look! Fetch a doctor! What the blazes happened?”

Glass crunched under Cain’s feet as he grabbed a piece of rope from my restraints and hurried to cinch Clement’s bleeding arm. Clement waved him away, wincing as he struggled to tear a piece of his own sleeve off.

“Come here, Will,” he husked, and struggled to wrap with the linen the bruised place of my arm—one or two little puncture marks, like rusty-coloured freckles in the center of the bruises, along my vein. Through his teeth, he said, “He must have monitored your consciousness with morphine, then.”

“What time is it?” I whispered.

“Nearly six o’clock. You’ve been here since last night.” Cain pulled Clement over again, who finally allowed him to tend to his injury.

Clement sighed weakly. “Well,” he said. “I’ve tasted heroism, and it’s not my cup of tea. What about you two?”

A brisk wind flowed through the streets of London and the echo of carolers gave way to the rustling whispers and murmurs of onlookers at the grand scene outside No. 9 Mansfield Street.

Yard inspectors marched to-and-fro through the cheerless townhouse while constabulary stood guard about the pavement, Dorland’s body covered but the mess he’d made a bit harder to conceal as snow and slush soaked it up like cotton.

What was I to say when I returned to my Knight’s Hall room? “Cain’s familiar killed your father, Mary Ann. I’ll forward your thanks once I get some sleep.” That was terrible.

Westwood smiled compassionately when he arrived, though his eyes picked us apart without words. Chesley, on the other hand, refused to even glance our way as Scotland Yard’s Commissioner Bradford in his sleek grey overcoat and primly pressed trousers harangued Westwood like he’d already harangued us.

The sky was low and chilly, the heavy velvety grey of a December evening. Three Kingsley men had come at first notice. Cain stood amongst them bundled deep in his winter wraps, nodding out of obligation to those who spoke to him but staring forward with empty eyes. Unhearing, uncaring.

Dorland, grinning over the gruesome cabinet cards. My mother in the mirror, and the All-Seeing Eye on her blindfold. Cain, eyes wide, shining with hellish secrets. The fear in Clement’s face that made him look utterly childlike and painfully mortal. That damn Vivaldi, twirling, winding, as Cain’s daemon pushed Dorland out the window …

“And what happened then?” one of the inspectors asked, not without a bead of dutiful doubt.

“The Officer went on about how he’d conceal our deaths when he was through with us, moved like he meant to lean on the window but forgot he’d opened it, and down he went,” I said in a half-whisper, teeth clenched against their chattering. My tired voice was ready to just surrender to the trauma as I sat on the stoop of No. 9 Mansfield Street with my arms crossed and my hands, stinging numb from the frosty night, tucked against my sides for warmth.

It truly appeared as though events had transpired just so. As with Cain’s wrist, all the disturbing disfigurements inflicted upon Dorland had somehow disappeared, as if the daemon had covered its tracks. It left me reeling—had I really seen what I’d seen? The cluster of shadows in the shape of a man, walking right out of the mirrors?

I almost questioned it. But I knew better. Oh, I knew.

“There are photographs upstairs,” I told the inspector. “Little cabinet cards of … the victims. Proof. I can show you, if you’d like.”

The inspector softened, seeming suddenly full of pity for someone of my circumstances experiencing such a grisly affair, now that he was confident my testimony matched my teammates’. “Yes,” he murmured. “I’ll make note of that for our men. Thank you.”

“Here,” Clement husked once the inspector moved on. Injured arm in a sling, he tossed his coat down around me with his good hand much like he had that first night in the Bethnal Green churchyard. Not that his good hand was much better, wrapped for the gash mirror glass had left in his palm. He passed me a book of matches and stooped down so I might light his cigarette for him.

We watched as policemen struggled to remove Dorland’s body from the thoroughfare, field gurney sagging beneath the lumpy form as it shifted about below the covering.

“I’m sorry,” Clement said, awkwardly, as if hesitant to disturb me in my isolation on the steps.

“Why?” I replied curtly. His coat smelled like him and I wanted to curl up in it and go to sleep for a long time. Days, perhaps. Until I felt alive again, like the revenants allegedly of lore, on which we had a surprising number of files in Hermes Hall. Dear God, don’t let him bring up Willow …

“My decisions were unwise and impulsive, and it put you in peril here as I’m to be watching you closely for Westwood due to your—” He stopped suddenly.

I stiffened, raising my eyes to him. His gaze flickered to meet mine but I looked away again, quickly. “Due to my … what?” I asked, the words thick in my throat.

“Due to your newness,” he hurried to explain, flustered. “As a Cross inspector, as a clairvoyant. Your probation, of course. And you’re still quite young, after all.”

He could not lie to me, either because I knew of his secret self or because he could not manage it. I stared up at him. I didn’t say it. But the words waited on my lips, on a breath. Clement held my gaze, knowing the words were there.

Due to my mother.

Perhaps my eyes said it, as his eyes burned into me like a dying fire and said, Yes.

“I trusted you,” I said, in a bruised sort of awe. Trusted them both only to discover now that not only was Clement to spy on me in the shadow of Margot Winchester’s sins, but Cain was a witch himself with no qualms tasking his daemon to stalk me—to kill a man.

But I was too exhausted, too empty of feeling after all that had happened, to fight the truth. Westwood. My mother. Watching me. Witch’s blood. What else was there to say about it? My mother was a witch. And so was I.

I looked up at Clement from the steps, hunched down in his coat and offering a weak smile. His frantic scramble for words was apparent, but there was nothing he needed to say.

“I still trust the both of you,” I murmured. “You and Cain are two of the last trustworthy gentlemen left in the world, after all.”

Clement was still for a long moment, perhaps not believing me at first. But then he just smiled in a wilted and heartfelt way, looking off past the press and police chaos with tired eyes.

“Gentlemen,” Westwood called, waving to us from the sidelines near Cain and his uncles, who huddled whispering together in their fine toppers and dapper wraps. Westwood replaced his hat on his grey-brown hair, mouth twisting gently in thought. “Shall we leave the Yard to their work now?”

***

At the desk in his small, green-papered office, Westwood examined the pseudo-case file we’d assembled—or attempted to—the day before.

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “This is the event of the year, isn’t it? They say we’ve scandalised the entire holiday season.”

The fire under the mantle popped and sighed, and outside the snow had turned to a slow, dark, frosty rain.

“Yes … ” Westwood sighed, long and worn, resting his temple in tented fingers as he flipped gently through our meager file. “But … Black Cross protocol … building cases without permission, failing to report spectral activity and operating without Yard clearance … we are infinitely lucky Dorland catalogued his own evidence, or I don’t know that Bradford would have accepted any of this at all. Now, what this does for Cross reputation, I … ” He sighed again and dragged both hands down his face. His eyes passed over Clement, lingered on Cain a moment before moving off to me—not inconsequentially. I held his gaze, respectfully, wondering if he could tell I was aware of his tasking Clement to watch me.

“Temporary suspension,” he said in a rough, tired way. “Twelve days, beginning after leave. It shall reflect in your next wages.”

His gaze drifted about us a bit more compassionately. I even dared to think it proud.

“But I commend you,” he added, “for the heroic deeds you’ve accomplished. Now. It’s Christmas and I’ve a wife and two daughters waiting at dinner downstairs. Lord Kingsley, I don’t doubt you’ve also family to attend to, however … you are all welcome to dine with the rest of us. I would not take offence should you choose recuperation instead.”

***

One of Cain’s uncles awaited him in the front gallery. We stalled in the wide corridor before it, Cain pale and pouty, clearly spent and wanting nothing to do with his family tonight.

“I leave for Buckinghamshire tonight, until New Year’s,” he said apologetically. His eyes slid to me. “Home.”

“Tonight?” I echoed. “You won’t arrive until three in the morning, at least.”

Cain nodded.

“Wish the great family Happy Christmas for me,” Clement hummed, and Cain laughed, a dainty scoff, and smiled faintly.

“Yes, Happy Christmas.” He gave us both hugs and gentlemanly kisses. As he moved off to fetch his uncle, he turned, walking backwards, smile much revived into something akin to his usual impish smirk as he said, “Lucky for us, Krampusnacht has long passed, but keep watch for Belsnickel and don’t let him find out we’ve been bad.”

He disappeared into the gallery. I looked to Clement, perplexed.

“Austrian,” he explained, shifting his arm in its sling with a tiny pinch to his smile. “Christmas devils.”

In the dining hall, we joined Westwood and his family, and a few other Cross men who were not exactly secret about how often they glanced at us. They’d heard the news already, of course. Everyone had heard.

It was peaceful, at least, a humble Christmas spread, warm drinks and warm conversation, and a good fire burning under the mantle. But it also seemed rather lonesome. I felt somewhat lonely, which was different from lonesome somehow.

Back at Julien’s-off-the-Strand, had anyone taken my usual job of organising stockings and little personalised notes on the fir tree? My father, Miss Valérie, Daphne, Agatha, Zelda, and Cook, taking dinner and playing games together, as if all family. Or was the house lifeless and quiet—I, absent. Daphne gone. Zelda gone. I could almost see my father, sitting alone with a brandy and his pipe as he stared listlessly into the fire, saddened by the emptiness. But maybe that was actually a memory, from a long time ago, shortly after my mother had left.

Surely the story would be in the papers the very next day, little hired boys crowing out on street corners: Killer o’ ladies Officer Henry Dorland of the Black Cross Order of Occult Occurrences, fell from his very own window! Spill’d his guts all o’er the pavement! But a threepenny bit!

What would my father think when he heard of it? Would they disclose my name? My mother’s name? Would he care at all, suddenly, or … ?

Clement sighed, carefully pushing hair out of his dark and heavy eyes lest he agitate the cut on his hand, as we made our way to the dormitories together. “Will, I’ve some anodyne from the druggist, for peaceful rest … if you’d like some, too.”

I nodded slowly. I wanted a sleep with no dreams, no thoughts on how I might keep what happened in Dorland’s attic secret forever. No thoughts on what it meant, how glad I was that he was dead.

I changed for bed as he went to fetch the medicine from his room. Mary Ann was silent—nowhere to be found. With only a half-knock to announce his return, Clement wandered in and flopped down in the corner armchair, fiddling with the quartz at his throat and looking around lazily as I took a healthy swallow of the Ferris and Co. anodyne syrup, then passed it back to him. He lifted the medicine bottle in idle cheers.

It didn’t take long at all for me to drift off once I got comfortable under the covers, all the tingling tension uncoiling from my body. I stirred just once before dropping off the edge of wakefulness and into the soundest, most blissful sleep, when the lamp went out and Mary Ann’s shadow pranced away along the wall—and I found Clement also curled up asleep on the bed, facing me. I studied him a moment, as best I could with the way my eyes begged to close again.

He looked so peaceful and childishly soft, fingers curled limp into his injured palm. His face, for once, was empty of thought, and empty of subdued feeling.

I remembered, barely, lying curled up like such near my mother when I was very small. How comforting it was to have another weight on the bed, the warmth of someone’s body not touching but very close. And Clement’s peacefulness was like that of someone who needed very badly to remember what that felt like, too.

“Look what I’ve brought from home!” Cain cried, dropping down on my bed a fine, slate-blue suit just my size. “A late Christmas gift. I hope it causes no offence—it’s custom tailored.”

I ran my hands over the soft fabric, blushing and flustered that he’d spent money on me. “You didn’t have to, Christ … ” I insisted, but I didn’t try to stifle my giddy smile. “It’s so nice!”

My eyes caught on his reflection in the mirror and I seized up for a moment, stomach pinching as I recalled his daemon. A swarm of shadows. Those ruddy red eyes and smile so wide and sweet it was hideous, blood running down Dorland’s disfigured face, rosying shattered glass, Your little daemon told you …

“Stop looking for him,” Cain said below his breath. “Can I borrow that comb?”

I averted my eyes from the mirror as I passed him Agatha’s pearl-studded comb. I couldn’t help it; every now and again I just remembered, stabbed by leftover shock. “I’m sorry,” I said, but Cain shook his head.

“It was a moment of great distress. Dmitri can be frightening at times, and Dorland … ” He fixed his hair in the glass, adjusted his cuffs and collar. “Anyway, I have the red-eyed gentleman on a tight leash.” His eyes slid over to meet mine through his reflection as he smiled faintly. “You haven’t any reason to fear. I promise.”

London was all manner of festive for the New Year. Bells clanged and clattered from church to church; warm lights spilled across the streets and glittered through the winter weather.

The Black Cross end of year ceremony filled the grounds with about half the crowd of All Hallows’, still a remarkably sizeable affair for a building so usually underpopulated. With port and champagne, everyone gathered in and around the great gallery, exchanging good tidings, clove-stuffed oranges, gilded nutmegs. Journalists directed men with box cameras to-and-fro, perhaps more excited than they might have been had the Cross not been talk of the town after Dorland.

Quinn found Cain and me almost as soon as we entered, dropping his big hand down to give us both brief, but tender, squeezes to the shoulders.

“I’m proud,” he said. I blushed, not quite sure how to reply. To have Quinn’s praise …

“Quinn, when you smile like that, it scares me,” Cain sing-songed. Quinn sighed and gave him a tiny, loving shake.

“My brother,” he introduced the man next to him, who was smaller and much less wolf-like, perhaps only because of his hairless face.

“Good evening,” he greeted, clearly not as interested in the whole affair as Quinn desired him to be.

“Oh, thank God!” Clement heaved a breath of relief when Cain and I found him in the crowd. “I was afraid you’d try to wear a dress.”

A different kind of heat flared in my face. “All right,” I snapped, but that was all I said before, much to Cain’s obvious amusement, I snatched Clement by the sleeve and pulled him out of the gallery with me.

In the hall, I let go and spun to him fiercely. He looked surprised and uncomfortably guilty—cowed, almost, rearing back against the wall so suddenly that he knocked a painting askew and scrambled to fix it before it fell.

“Clement,” I said, more than mildly panicked something would never be the same between us. He wouldn’t like me anymore. Cain’s knowing my bi-gendered state did not change a thing, but … why did it matter so much to matter at all to Clement? “I am only sometimes a girl, so do not make jokes like that. You’re not being witty. I don’t like it.”

He set his port down on a nearby sideboard and peered at me in miserable bewilderment. “Well,” he said, tripping over the words, “when you revealed it all to me, it was not the most opportune time to speak in detail of it.”

“I thought, by the banter between you and Mr. Zayne, and Mr. Zayne’s more earnest acquaintances, you wouldn’t be ignorant to that side of things. Listen, it’s not difficult, I’m confident even you can grasp it.”

“Oh, I believe I do!” Clement was blushing. Furiously. In shame or perhaps frustration. “You’re androgynous,” he said.

A startled laugh broke free from my throat and a handful of others around the hall glanced our way. Androgynous—anatomically both sexes. Embarrassed, I turned to press my back to the wall beside him, avoiding his eyes as I said, “Not quite. Simply queer. An intermediate of boy and girl, and it’s … really as simple as that.”

He didn’t look at me.

“Believe me,” I kept on, brow knotting. “If I didn’t have to tell you, I wouldn’t have. I don’t want to be on guard against others’ judgments and advances.”

“Judgments,” Clement echoed with the husk of a laugh, as if the prospect insulted him. “Advances.”

“I’m afraid of you thinking differently of me, acting differently!” I persisted, then shrank further back against the wall at a few more glances our way. My face was on fire. Lowering my voice, I said, “What does it matter my gender’s ambiguous? It’s not as though I traipse about every day thinking, ‘Female Will this’ or ‘Male Will that.’ Do you do that? No. I’m just Will. I’ve never lied, nor put forth any deceit, so please—”

“All right,” Clement murmured. “You’re getting worked up. I never meant to work you up, Will.”

“I know it’s your habit to ridicule, in order to keep your secret-self safe,” I said thinly. “But this is not a frivolous thing.”

He fell silent, frowning. Thinking, perhaps, that I was either right or I was wrong. Thinking of all our secret self moments—the honest conversations, my running to him after seeing my father, burning the remains of Miss Weiss, Christmas with anodyne and much needed repose in my room …

Clement sighed, mouth pressed in a firm line. “It’s odd to think about,” he murmured, “and I apologise, but I might often forget to think about it at all.”

“Good,” I whispered sullenly, but in truth I felt indescribable relief.

“Who are you today, then?”

“I’m just … Will,” I said, uncertain of how else to say it. “The same Will you’ve known from the start.”

There was a tight hush between us. After a moment, he ventured to glance at me through his lashes.

“Well,” he said, “you said yourself, trustworthy fellows are mysterious, aren’t they? And this … uniqueness of yours is certainly mysterious.”

I conceded to a smile, a limp little perk of the mouth. “It’s in the confidence of only Cain and yourself.”

“I won’t pry. Though I’m curious as to how one even stumbles upon such an orientation.” Clement folded his arms, carefully, his shoulder still not quite right as rain. He threw his sparking hazel eyes off elsewhere. “I have worries.”

Worries.

“What for?” I sent him a hard look from the corner of my eye, dreading what he might mean.

He frowned. “I shall never know when I mistreat you.”

“Clement, you don’t mistreat me,” I blurted, shocked he’d ever think such.

“I mean, when to address you as Miss, or … ?”

“Oh.” I shook my head vigorously. “Cain said the same thing. And just as I told him, simply don’t. It doesn’t matter in the end, really. And if you offend me, don’t fret, I’ll alert you right away.”

“Clearly,” he mumbled, and cast me a gentle smirk without turning his head.

I returned the glance from where I leaned next to him against the wall, hands behind my back, and just hoped desperately he’d see how much I needed his confidence. I didn’t know if the conversation was complete; it was clear Clement didn’t, either. But it was enough to just hold each other’s eyes a moment, knowing the words were there somewhere, waiting.

Through the open gallery doors, the gala buzzed and swirled, while we just lingered there against the wall like ghosts, unbothered and for the most part unnoticed now.

Clement gestured with two fingers, clearing his throat. “Your hair’s come undone.”

I reached up to fix it with a sigh and a faint smile. “It never wants to hold to wax, it just doesn’t.”

“Mine doesn’t, either.”

“Can we go back in now … ?”

Clement pushed away from the wall, eagerly. “Yes, of course,” he said, as if he’d been waiting for me to ask. He snatched up his wine and drained the glass, grumbling as we strode back into the gallery, “Did they bring out the cognac yet?”

The music faded down as we came through the doors, the roar of the crowd and tinkling pizzicato of crystal-ware attenuating as a hush settled low over the quaint old room. Commissioner Westwood, with a few other higher officers, had taken to the risers near the windows.

“Everyone, good evening,” Westwood greeted. “What a gathering tonight!”

Chesley handed forth a little page of notes. Westwood took a moment, eyes passing over it. Finally, he read off the year’s announcements beginning with thanks to patron donations. News of research and archival discoveries. Summaries sent from Cross ambassadors on the Continent.

A woman in the crowd near us chuckled softly into her drink and whispered loftily to her companion, “Ambassadors.”

A scientific partnership, a newly patented Franklin meter with an attached flash bulb that signaled for changes in ambient current, a list of spectral cases closed throughout the year. Respectful reminders of those who had passed—two unfamiliar men, then Hyacinth, and Dorland.

“Finally … ” Westwood turned the page over for another side covered in writing. “Promotions and acclaims.”

There was a collective shift in attention throughout the crowd, which had gotten rather bored and restless with the longwinded announcements.

Applause rippled through the room and the musicians in the corner played something courtly and majestic as Officer Bartlett was awarded recognition for tireless research and organisation, two other men were promoted, one of whom into Dorland’s old position …

“Oh,” Westwood said suddenly, abandoning the page and looking up and around the room as though he’d forgotten so many eyes were upon him. He reached into his breast pocket, withdrawing a second small paper. “Yes, to announce officially, the late Henry Dorland has been declared responsible for the abduction and attempted murder of one of our inspectors, and suspect in the deaths of at least five other individuals.”

Instantly the crowd was alive with whispers and sounds of dismay.

Chesley gave Westwood a nudge, raising his brows. Westwood smoothed out the new paper. “Dorland’s studies have been removed from open archives and his expulsion from our ranks recorded. I’ve also an official statement here from the Yard, declaring the innocence of our three men found at the scene of Dorland’s accident, recognising the aid of the Black Cross, and announcing immediate police investigation into their own offices and other places in search of any obstructions of justice. And with that, we really must recognise this year’s most courageous inspectors.”

He gestured in the direction of Cain, Clement, and I.

Heads turned; the crowd shifted for a better view of us, standing at the back of the gallery, where I awkwardly juggled our drinks and Clement leaned forward for Cain to light the Woodbine cigarette hanging off his lip.

“Oh, good Lord,” Cain said under a sigh, waving out the match and offering the curious audience his very best and most shameless smile.

Westwood squinted across the gallery at us. As if we three hadn’t attracted enough attention already the last few months.

Clement puffed once on his cigarette before plucking it from his mouth, glancing around as though he hadn’t an inkling why everyone stared. “Carry on!” he cried, taking his drink back to lift in cheers as the offended whispers commenced.

Westwood’s stiff smile sagged a bit in exasperation. “Lord Kingsley and young Mr. Winchester discovered Henry Dorland’s reprehensible actions,” he went on. “They compiled a small spectral case file regarding them, which is currently in the hands of Commissioner Bradford and his detectives. Oh—yes, and Mr. Winchester is our newest member this year. Welcome, Mr. Winchester. We are so thankful Dorland did not kill you.”

Someone in the crowd chuckled along with Westwood and his poorly-timed humor. It wasn’t me. Someone else sneezed rather violently, with an embarrassed echo of, “Well, pardon me … ”

Chesley waved at us impatiently. “Would you two please—you’re being formally recognised—will you come up here, now?”

Clement. What about Clement? I shot him a look, stricken and mildly incensed he should be excluded from the praise. He caught my glance and smiled, shrugging.

He’d known all along about the honours and his absence from them.

Cain dragged me forth, smiling around graciously at the tentatively applauding crowd as it moved aside for us. Everyone seemed just as unsure as we in how to feel about the whole thing.

Was I to be proud of all that had happened? Of paying heed to some other soul’s memory, of digging up bones and setting them afire, of being incapacitated and transported to Dorland’s house and tied to a chair, moments from death or something worse, only to accept salvation in the form of a daemon tearing the man apart from the inside out.

Because it had, and we had watched. We had just watched …

Westwood’s hand closed on mine with surprising care. As we shook together before the crowd, I looked up at him, brow knotted. He smiled with a distant glint in his eyes that seemed at once sad yet very pleased.

“Thank you,” he said, where only I could hear.

I swallowed, throat tight. “No,” I replied, flustered and feeling every bit the social wreck again, “thank you, sir.”

The musicians abandoned the stately songs for more whimsical tunes as the writers of magazines and papers sought Cain and I out asking question after question about the cameo ring and Officer Dorland, and with what detail could we recount his fall from the window …

“Why, I can’t imagine what dreadful trouble was in store for London without you!” cried Miss Jessica, tugging on her uncle’s arm to pause as they passed us by.

“Yes,” Clement agreed playfully. “I hold the spectral department together, don’t you think?”

Miss Jessica’s smile became coyer. “Well, I was speaking to Inspector Winchester, but … ”

Her uncle touched her elbow in polite parting and moved off to chat with a few gentlemen not far away. With a flutter of lashes, Miss Jessica slid her gaze to Cain.

“I’m sure you must be relieved,” she said. “Finally, a statement from the Yard. You’ll sleep easily now, shan’t you, as that clears up every rumour.”

Cain’s gaze sharpened as he eyed Miss Jessica. “Rumour?”

She nodded slowly, with a faint smile and a pinch to her brow. “Yes,” she said, brushing a soft curl aside from her cheek. It was maddening, how soft and pretty she could be while simultaneously so unbelievably cruel. “You haven’t heard? Kingsley, it’s even replaced talk of October’s horror—you remember, that governess Miss Pearcey, pushing the perambulator full of bloody dismemberments through Hampstead and Finchley?”

“Yes?”

“Well.” Looking very sorry for Cain and his family, Miss Jessica leaned closer and lowered her voice respectfully as she said, “All holiday, the talk has been how you killed Officer Dorland, and only a day after Miss Pearcey herself was hanged, too. How quickly talk shifts! On from one sensation to the next. Terrible, isn’t it?”

Suddenly seeming very small and very lost, a hollow look eclipsed Cain’s face as he stared at her as though he did not see her. “Thank you for the well wishes, Miss Jessica,” he finally said in a frail way, then turned and weaved along through the crowd towards an empty balcony.

Clement scoffed, throwing his third empty wine glass down on a passing waiter’s tray. He flashed Miss Jessica a scathing glance, then elbowed off after Cain.

Miss Jessica appeared confused. With a thoughtful hum, she offered me an apologetic smile.

“Mr. Winchester,” she said politely, and I loathed it. “I hope you plan to stay on with us, despite the … strenuous time you’ve experienced.”

I wanted to be insolent with her. But I couldn’t. It was just too much effort at present. “Of course,” I said. “This is my home, Miss Jessica. If you’ll pardon the sentimentality.”

As her smile faltered, I bobbed my head and left her side, winding my way across the floor to the balcony to which Cain and Clement had flown.

Cain stood gripping the stone balustrade and shaking his head; Clement loomed at his shoulder, struggling to defuse him in low, tense whispers.

I admit, I hesitated a moment. Looking out at them, a brief note of horror strummed through me. Just one heartbeat, maybe two. The party swirled on, colors, lights, sounds, as I peered at the two of them and worried I had made the wrong decision back on that dreary, dreadful night on Waterloo. I should never have accompanied them to that Bethnal Green churchyard. I shouldn’t have come with the calling card. Witch. Daemon. Murderer. The attic room. All our secrets, every single one of us—

“Men,” I called quietly, peeking around the French doors of the balcony.

They looked up as if they hadn’t anticipated an interruption. Cain, in his rich pinstriped suit with the black velvet waistcoat and family crest winking from the buttons. Clement all tousled and finger-combed hair. Upon seeing me, Cain wilted into a smile, his eyes sad but soft. One dark blue, the other milky like a pearl. And Clement blushed, embarrassed by the show of sympathy. He looked me up and down once more as though, for a bit, he’d occasionally have to remind himself I was still the same me he’d known from the start. I could be patient with that adjustment, I decided.

Biting the inside of my lip, I was unsure of how to communicate what I wished. I just felt that simple, sweet closeness to them again, the one in which I needed no words, let alone did I have them. If I was afraid of anything, it was not the two of them. It was just a nervousness for what would come after tonight. Back at my father’s, day in and day out had been predictable. Here, every morning brought something new and unknown, but … there were no others with whom I preferred to face that than these two. No others with whom I trusted my darkest secrets. The attic room of No. 9 Mansfield Street. My mother. Myself.

I cleared my throat. “To a prosperous New Year,” was all I could come up with, lifting my drink.

Clement chuckled, cracking his knuckles into his palm and fumbling for a cigarette to join in my toast. Cain’s smile lingered as he found composure again, eyes clearing.

Something had changed between the three of us.

“A grand New Year,” Cain agreed, gesturing that I join them out in the icy dark.

As I came up, he hooked his arm in mine; Clement propped an arm around the both of us, tousling my hair, and then Cain’s.

“What has next year for you?” he asked. “Kingsley?”

“Work.” Cain sighed. “Too much work.”

Yes, something had changed between us quite drastically—or it had been there all along and the veil simply fell away from it, leaving me to stare it down stripped of formalities and defences.

We were all very much alike in ways I was still learning.

“I would like to go to Paris,” I chimed in. “I have family there I’d like to see.”

Zelda, and Daphne. And I longed to learn all I had yet to learn, continue with my beloved motley team. Access the locked files with Cain. Know the secrets that hid behind Clement’s smirks.

I’d spoken the truth to Miss Jessica, after all. I’d found the Black Cross. Or it found me.

Witch’s blood.

Perhaps my father had been right, in unknown ways, not entirely selfish in his fears of the Cross. But, ultimately, whatever was to come, this was where I belonged. This was my place in the world.

No … this wasn’t my place.

There was something in Cain, Clement, and I that belonged together. They were my people, as Clement had said before. We would move on from all that had happened, and we would move on together.

“What about you, Clement?” Cain pressed.

Clement sighed a little cloud of tobacco smoke, then passed the cigarette down the line for us to share. “Why, next year will give me whatever I tell it to,” he said with a grin. “Say, Kingsley, is your hair darker than Will’s?”

Cain uttered a thoughtful little cluck of the tongue to the back of his teeth, evaluating my hair. “Why?”

“It’s almost midnight—you know what they say, a man with dark hair passes through the door first, or bad luck for us all.”

“Clement, you’re bad luck for us all no matter who passes through which door and when.”

“Kingsley, you flatter me!”

“Oh, good Lord … ”

I pursed my mouth as I blew a stream of silky smoke, then handed Clement the cigarette again. And I was so tired of crying, but tears stung at my eyes for how natural it felt to just look at the two of them, and smile.

END

Acknowledgements

Thank you, Georgia – first for putting up with me and second for living in the world of the Black Cross with me. Nikki – for taking a chance on this manuscript. My mother – without you, this story would not exist.

And thank you to my better half, who never complains about how much time I spend bringing the worlds in my head into the world we all share.

Jerico Lenk

Undergraduate studying Creative Writing, Classics, Russian and Western European History. Lover of cable knit sweaters on rainy days and the history of the occult. Unabashed nerd and fanfic author on the side. Out for queer representation and great sex hair.

Lenk writes poetry, YA/NA, and spec fiction. On loan from Seattle, he currently lives in Tampa, finishing his degrees at the University of South Florida.

http://jericolenk.com

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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