“THAT MAKES NO sense,” Jacob said.
“I know! We’re thousands of feet in midair over the Atlantic Ocean. The whole point of this airship is to keep people from just Walking in.” Or out, I thought.
“Are you sure?”
“I can feel them.” I shuddered and hugged myself. “I feel them coming.”
“Okay, that means the Emperor and his goons can, too, right? They should take care of them.”
“Yes.” I slowed down, remembering something Ivan said, and the memory gave me a chill beyond the touch of the approaching Shadows.
Oh, crap!
“Jacob?”
“What?”
“When they first showed up, and Ivan told me about them, he said the Shadows were dangerous because you couldn’t sense them coming.”
“Okay, maybe he’s wrong about that—”
“He didn’t sense them coming.”
“He could have just been oblivious.”
“Or maybe I can sense them because they’re related to me, my Mark.”
Jacob stared at me as if he was about to say it was a crazy idea. I could see the point where it dawned on him that the whole concept, everything around us, was crazy.
“Why don’t I hear any sort of alarm?” I asked.
Jacob let me go and darted to the door.
“What are you doing?”
“If you’re right, we have to raise an alarm, warn the crew, Ivan’s people.”
Well, duh. That was obvious. I silently thanked Jacob for finding the thread of reason in our situation. I ran to join him at the door just as he started cursing in frustration.
“Apparently, they don’t trust you completely,” he snapped. “Can’t get the blasted door open.”
“Great,” I looked around at the stateroom for some form of communication. I couldn’t find a phone. I saw Jacob look around and say, “There we go.”
He went over to one of the inside walls of the room and pulled open a small cabinet door set into the wall. A brass plaque on the door read “utilisation pour l’aide.”
Inside was something that could have been an antique-style phone, or intercom, or one of those Victorian medical devices you see in quack museums. He pulled a brass cylinder out of the recess drawing out a thick fabric-covered cable after it. Inside the recess, beneath a brass grille embossed with a floral motif, three large toggle switches were labeled helpfully, “un,” “deux,” “trios.” Next to those was a large mahogany knob.
Jacob looked at a sign mounted on the inside of the cabinet door. “How to call emergency . . . here . . .” He flipped all the switches on and pulled the knob. A small light above the grille glowed a weak incandescent yellow. A moment later, a second light came on next to it. The grille started crackling, and I heard a voice in distant and slightly irritated French.
Jacob had been holding the brass cylinder to his ear. He lowered it to his mouth and spoke into it. “Hello? Hello?” Nothing happened, and the French voice became more irritated.
“Hello, do you speak English?”
The French speaker gave no sign of hearing. My heart raced as he talked over Jacob’s attempts to speak to him. If anything, it felt as if the number of dead fingers tracing the edges of my Mark were increasing. It felt unclean, a corruption spreading beneath my skin, as if their phantom nails were attempting to split the skin and release a corrupt infected version of the Mark like the one carving through the Shadows’ skin—scarring my body the way they had Whedon’s.
If their presence made me feel like this, I could only shudder at the thought of what Whedon must have felt as this corruption ate away at her.
After about thirty seconds, the voice snapped something derisive, the speaker died, and the second light winked out.
“What?” I suddenly realized that Jacob hadn’t been able to communicate at all.
Jacob stared at the device in his hand, then at the grille. “What the hell?”
“What did he say?”
“Something about wasting his time. Pissed off and shouting through a bad connection, I’m lucky I understood anything. I haven’t used any French since school.”
“Did you use that?” I pointed at the cylinder in his hand. Along the length of it was an elaborate lever that made the whole thing look more like an expensive showerhead than a microphone.
“Crap, I’m an idiot.” He grabbed the mahogany knob, pushed it in, and yanked it out again. “Single duplex, an intercom, not a telephone. I need to switch the mic on to talk.”
The annoyed French voice came on-line again in a burst of static, and the second light came on. I did manage to catch one word, “merde.” This time Jacob worked the lever and repeated, “Hello, can you speak English?” A third light glowed when he spoke and winked out when he released the lever.
“Oui. Yes. What—bzt—going on down—bzt—”
I heard a click as Jacob worked the lever on the mic. “I’m here with Det—Lady Dana Rohan. She needs to talk with someone in charge of security on this airship.”
A click as Jacob released the lever, “—know what cabin you—bzt—am officer of the night—bzt—can talk to—bzt—cessez de perdre mon—”
Jacob handed me the microphone. It was cold and heavy in my hand, like talking into a lead pipe. I worked the lever. “You need to raise an alarm. I can feel an attack coming. The Shadows.”
“—c’est ridicule, you cannot—bzt—serious, my Lady. We are fifteen thous—bzt—feet above—”
I hit the lever again. “Listen, I know where we are. But I’m feeling it now, and I felt it before. I’ve seen these things before.”
“—you wish me to wake—”
I never heard him finish, because the lights in the cabin died, including the little bulbs above the recessed intercom.
“That’s not good,” Jacob said.
I hadn’t even realized that the light fixtures had been electric, with their elaborate cut-glass chimneys. I guess I’d been thinking they were gas if I’d thought about them at all. Then again, open flames on an airship were probably not the best idea.
It took a moment for my eyes to start making out shapes. Fortunately, the moon was full and low in the sky above the clouds outside the window, so we weren’t plunged into complete darkness.
Jacob stepped back from the intercom.
I backed up with Jacob into the center of the stateroom. My skin rippled gooseflesh as I felt invisible corpse-fingers reaching for me. Every couple of seconds I had to resist the effort to turn around and stare at the nothing that was stalking me. The more I thought about the sensation, the more aware I was of every detail.
I shuddered.
“What do we do now?” Jacob asked.
“I don’t know . . .”
We were trapped in the stateroom, unarmed, with no way to open the door or communicate with the rest of the airship. I was free to Walk to another world, but one step and I would be above the Atlantic Ocean without an airship around me. The thought sent my heart racing.
The Shadows are coming from somewhere.
“Oh, crap.”
“What?” I glanced over at Jacob and saw he was staring out the window to the stateroom. I looked out expecting something dire: another airship on a collision course, a massive storm cell, a flying dragon—I didn’t see anything. “What do you mean, ‘Oh, crap?’”
“The clouds, you can see the light reflected from the airship.”
“Yeah, so.”
“Running lights, other cabins—this isn’t a general power failure.”
“Just us?”
“Just us.”
If the Shadows were after me in particular, then having our cabin lose power was just stretching coincidence too far.
“Oh, crap,” I echoed.
A creak filled the darkened stateroom accompanied by rotting fingers brushing my Mark.
There was only one possible escape. Then, only if my otherworldly sense of direction held, and only if I was right that I had felt a direction to where they had come from. “Jacob, grab me now.”
“You can’t think—”
“Now!” I yelled as the door to the stateroom creaked open on a half dozen shadowy figures. They started darting toward us before the door was completely open, I saw flashes in the silver moonlight; torn uniforms, scarred skin, wild black eye sockets.
Then Jacob threw his arms around me, I shoved my hand under his jacket and twisted my fingers around his belt as I took a step away in the direction I thought the Shadows had Walked from.
“Fuck!” Jacob screamed in the wind as the airship around us disappeared.