CHAPTER TWELVE

CURSE WHAT SHADOWS LAY

SCOUT STAYED HOME again, out of protest, but I told him he had to guard. He looked dubiously at the door to the basement and then at my mother’s workroom, went over to her door, and lay down, chin on his paws.

“Good boy.”

His tail thumped once, but then he looked away from me and closed his eyes. He didn’t watch as I put my bracers on.

Steptoe sat in the car waiting, rubbing his thumb over the cover to his pocket watch. He put it away when I got in and started it up.

“What do you think it is?”

He shrugged. “It could be something living or another object of some kind.” He rubbed his chin uneasily.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re not afraid to go there alone with me?” he answered.

“You’ve proven yourself.”

“Not to all.”

I said emphatically, “To me.”

“I’m not used t’ being believed or befriended. I haven’t deserved it for a while, but I’ve moved myself in this world, I have, and I’m trying to find the good side of things. It’s because you accept me, the others do. You cannot know what that means to me.”

I didn’t answer that, only slightly understanding because my recent experience wasn’t the same as his, but close enough, and I knew he needed to talk.

He stared out the window at the dark neighborhood as it slid by. “I was responsible, you know.”

“I know. I was there. But it was those two who work for you that scared the professor into regenerating without his ritual. You hadn’t told them to kill him.” No, but in fairness to my memory of the night, he had told them to bring him the professor’s head, horrifying me. That was only if the unthinkable happened, which it had, but I hadn’t known that then. Steptoe’s minions, or at least one of them, had gone in for the kill. I couldn’t hold Simon responsible for that, and as awful as the “off with his head” bit seemed, I knew now that it was one of the ways to resurrect the phoenix wizard if they had to. As for Brandard’s overreaction and immolation— “He thought they would kill him,” I said aloud.

Steptoe’s nail scratched the stubble of his beginning beard. “Too eager they were and too stupid to heed what I’d told them. An’ one of them, I’m certain now, had another master ’e answered to first. He attacked the professor. I hadn’t sent them in to use fisticuffs and beatings. I was only hoping to persuade him a bit. The other one, though, had different ideas and orders.”

I considered who that might have been and offered, “Malender?”

“Mayhap. I can’t be sure who. There’s others about, Tessa, who oughtn’t to be. Old ones, ones that used to be great when times were different, wanting to rise up again. They want to send the world back into darkness. Primitive times.”

I thought about running to the fire that night, to hear voices railing in the night, Steptoe so thick with his cockney accent I could barely understand him and the two cohorts scarcely human at all arguing with him. I’d been scared of him, myself. He’d been hopping mad, and all I’d known was that he seemed to have directed the professor’s death. I knew better now, but I didn’t know everything and wasn’t sure I ever would. The professor, trapped inside Brian, still hadn’t all his memories or wasn’t sharing if he did. I couldn’t think of what it might be that Simon Steptoe needed so desperately from the professor.

“If the world is tipping . . . aren’t you on the wrong side?”

That brought Simon around to face me, as I pulled into the long driveway and stopped the car.

“It would seem so, eh, ducks? But it’s where I want to be, this time around. Where I need to be. And wot kind of friend bows out when you need him?”

“Nobody I want to know. So.” I pointed out the window. “Ready?”

“Not quite. The eleventh hour is best for what we’ve in mind. Wait a few, then we’ll go in.” He patted his vest pocket where he’d stowed his pocket watch and seemed to be mulling something over. “I want you to know what I was pestering the professor about. Told you I was centered here, right?”

I nodded.

“Centered is a polite word that guv’nors use. I’m chained, but it’s a long chain. Not sure ’ow far it stretches but it’ll do me a fair bit of harm to get to the end of it, as it were.”

“What gets you free?”

“Don’t know. Yet. I thought the professor might know. That’s what I was about that night, trying to get him to tell me.” Steptoe paused for a long moment. “He’s the one that chained me, see?”

“He did?”

“Seems likely. Don’t it?”

I thought about it before answering, “Probably. But he doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to remember.”

“See? You understand.”

“He wouldn’t help Mortimer either.”

“Crusty old git.” Steptoe sighed. “So I don’t know what it is that will free me, or even who, to be sure, did it, although Brandard’s the best guess.”

“What do you know?”

“I know I’m shackled to that church, the famous one, at t’other end of town.”

My eyes widened. “St. John’s Church? The one where Patrick Henry gave his ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ speech?”

“One an’ the same. A movin’ piece, it was.”

My town is steeped in historic places and that one ranks among the top. I’d been there a handful of times on school outings, feeling all patriotic as we were traipsing through. “Wow. You’re sure?”

“Ironic, is it not?”

“Considering we’re talking about liberty, I’ll say.” I gestured. “I can’t see how we can search St. John’s for your curse, though. Especially if we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

“Too right.” Steptoe’s vest pocket sounded a little chime from the watch he carried there. “Eleven. Let’s go.” He paused outside the car, one hand on the fender. “Tessa.”

“Yeah?”

“I take it back. I have a pretty good idea what was taken from me that ties me down here.” He looked a tad embarrassed.

I waited.

He cleared his throat. “Lyin’ comes a bit too easy to me still.”

“Change takes a while.”

“It does. I had a tail once. Barbed. Demon-like.”

I couldn’t help it, I glanced behind him. He showed no sign of having had a tail once. “Must have been hard on the suit.”

“Glamour, lass. Does wonders for a dapper man.” His mouth pulled wryly. “And now it’s gone. I know. There was a battle, a bitter one, and I was already thinking I’d taken the wrong side, so I went down.”

“You got defeated on purpose. That made you some enemies on both sides.”

“You have the right of it.” He shifted. “Woke up without my tail and bound to old Richmond.”

“That must have been a long time ago.”

“’Twas. I stayed in hiding for near a century while I regained my power and worked on my humanity. I saw things. Learned them. Decided what to make of them. Looked to the Light and found out there’s good and bad everywhere, so it begins and ends with one being. I do what I can, but it’s a struggle. You called me chaotic good. There are times, my girl, when the chaos rears up and wants to take me with it.”

“One day at a time.”

He said, “But there’s another lesson here. If you’re looking for something, it helps to have a piece of it already. So I’m looking for meself, as it were.”

I thought of the feather Goldie had left me and the possibility that just opened. “Does it call you?”

“Sometimes.” Steptoe saw the expression on my face. “The professor didn’t teach you that?”

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

“I need to have a word with the old man, then. He’s been neglectful.”

“But if you’re bound to St. John’s, wouldn’t your . . . erm . . . tail be there?”

“Not that I’ve found. The thought finally came to me that I might be wrong about the binding, so I sent my lads to shake the professor down about whatever he knew. It might not have been me tail, and it might not have been him, though it seemed most likely. And this happened.” He indicated the ruins of the old house.

“We’ll find it,” I told him.

“Thanks, luv. I knew you might be tellin’ me that, as one friend to another.” He took a deep breath. “Well, we’d best get on with it.”

The ruins seemed to be waiting for us.

We approached the place quietly from the backyard, me on edge thinking we were asking for trouble and Steptoe because he had all his senses primed to find what he thought he’d detected earlier. Whatever it was. I hoped we wouldn’t find anything, except if it helped Steptoe, I was in.

A low fog had come rolling in, just enough to cover the backyard with mist and dew, and make the place look spooky. Tendrils reached up as if to grab whatever they could, before dissipating and dropping back down into the condensation. It broke apart reluctantly as we waded through.

My voice dropped to a whisper. “This can’t be good.” I shook a vine of fog off my ankle.

Steptoe agreed. I didn’t feel much better to hear him whispering as well. I stripped my gloves off and stuffed them deep into my jean pockets. I could feel my stone growing warm in the palm of my hand. My bracers set off a faint but comforting candle glow about them.

“Setting up a shield?”

“If we need one.” I tapped the bracer.

“Good idea, that.”

A wave of fog rolled up and caught him, knocking him down and covering him almost instantly. Steptoe bounced up with an indignant sputter.

“Are you all right?”

“Pass your hand through this naughty bit of cloud, and I will be.”

I swept my left hand through the mist circling around us, and it shredded away. I thought I heard a faint hissing as it did.

“You’ve had your bit of fun. Now show us what you wanted and we’ll be on our way,” Steptoe announced.

Curling away from us, the fog climbed the last remaining pillars and then across a surviving and sagging eave of roof, framing an entrance. I watched the performance warily.

“I think we’re being invited inside.”

“Not until we know what we’re dealing with.” Steptoe put his hand out in front of me, in case I started to go without him, and frowned into the night. “Show yourself.”

It might have been the wind, or maybe the faint and far away howl of a dog, but something answered. “Only to you, Shimon.”

His name, in an olden accent. He growled softly in answer, still holding his arm out to protect me. “Bring up your shield. Now.”

I did, the metaphysical one and the actual one that I’d dispatched Joanna’s Kitsune with, balancing it in my hands. Simon’s intense gaze moved to view it, and his eyes widened slightly in surprise. I twirled the shield in answer.

“At least he’s taught you something.”

“Damn straight. I just hope we won’t need it.”

“Remember when I told you about masters. This one used to be mine.”

And the mist erupted about us.

I fought without knowing what I struck at. It had body and substance and could hurt me even as I hurt it, but I never saw it. I kicked and used the shield to slice and dice, wielding it right and left without a target. But it hit, and hit hard, and something wet and slimy spewed around us. The grass, already slippery, became nearly impossible to move on without sliding, so we anchored ourselves, back to back, and battled.

Steptoe held his brolly like a sword, having fetched it out of nowhere, or maybe the inside flap of his suit coat. It hummed with the pitch of a nest of angry hornets as he swung it. The noise settled in my eardrums, annoying and lethal. My shield developed a whine of its own, no less lethal as I used it, but growing ever heavier.

I tired just swinging it, and whatever in me that manifested it, well, it seemed to be draining. I went to one knee and couldn’t get up. Whatever it was we fought had tentacles to spare. And stink, too. Something gaseous and marshy, backed up by sulfur and brimstone. I gagged as the greasy smell coated the back of my throat.

Steptoe felt me slip. He let out a string of curses that I could only translate if I was fluent in gutter speech of old London, but they didn’t need to be interpreted. Then, boom! Boom! Boom! He tossed out a handful of flash-bangs, and the fight exploded out of private and into the neighborhood night, loudly and in vivid color.

As did our opponent. Between us and the ruins, something ghastly off-color grew. And grew. And grew until it towered over us. I pulled my shield up and over my head.

Steptoe answered it by slamming his umbrella point first into the ground, where a massive crack opened up, flames edging the ripped earth. The crevice threatened to swallow both of them up. He ripped off his suit coat and threw it to me, before turning about and launching himself at the rippling monstrosity to hug it tightly. He took a leap, pulling them both into the chasm in the ground.

Flames roared up, and then the gap closed with a snap and all went quiet. Very quiet.

“Steptoe?”

Not that I expected an answer, though I would have appreciated one.

I stayed on one knee for a very long minute, blinking, covered in slime, and wondering if Steptoe would come back. If he could come back. The brolly had gone in with him, but I clutched his jacket in one hand and my shield in the other. He would expect, perhaps, that I’d go after him. I clutched his coat closely, in case something would rise out of the wisps left along the ground and try to snatch it from me. Nothing more happened, though I could see lights from nearby houses snapping on, one by one. We hadn’t gone quietly, at the end.

I ran home. Covered in ichor, I had no intention of inflicting myself on my new-to-me car. I’d come back for it in the morning. Safely, more or less, in my yard, I hosed myself down, dancing in the chill of the water. Scout watched from the window of the mudroom door, nose pressed to the glass, my only witness.

Two thoughts slammed into my brain: now we had to rescue Steptoe as well, and two, would Evelyn and I be able to pull off a visit to Silverbranch without him?