Chapter Three

“Romney Marsh.” He repeated the words over again as he had already a hundred times. His name. He had to hold on to it lest the last threads defying separation break and he forget who he was. How long could a spirit retain its identity after being banished from the flesh?

He didn’t know; nor could he be sure how many other cases like his had occurred. Most spirits parted from their bodies only at the moment of death.

His body lived yet.

And, damn it, he needed to get back to it, but not where it lay now in a dim room at the asylum, nothing more than a drooling husk with a beating heart.

He couldn’t—he wouldn’t!—go back there.

Romney Marsh, Romney Marsh. The words echoed in the indistinct swirl of energy that now passed for his mind. He had become the thought rather than the thinker, the spark that endured all.

Cut adrift, he had fled the terrible place his body lay and followed a call, faint at first but increasing in power, that drew his spirit as a magnet pulled at iron filings. Two days ago that had been—two days and a night, for he’d drifted through the dark streets of this city, streets all limed in hard frost, the way an elusive tune twines through a memory. To his surprise, he could see—not the way a body sees but in misty color, like images viewed through droplets of water. He’d seen the large elaborate mansion from whence the calling issued. He’d hovered in the street, not feeling the cold, and observed other spirits flocking around the place and passing in.

So many spirits. He recognized them for what they were, being insubstantial as they. Incandescent clusters of light, they streamed and floated, clung to the outer walls and even the turret at the top of the house. Whatever called from within drew them powerfully and irresistibly.

He too had entered the mansion, seeping through the wall like blood through a bandage. Inside he could see it all—the lofty proportions and lush furnishings of the house, the humans and steam units inside, and all the spirits streaming to one of the larger downstairs rooms.

And he could feel everything, the steam servants’ artificial intelligences and the calling which stemmed from not one but three places: the room into which most of his fellow spirits flowed, the cellar below it, and a single room upstairs.

When he concentrated, he could tell the sources differed in both degree and color: the call from the parlor sure and powerful—this had reached out into the city; that from the cellar dark and terrifying; that from upstairs fainter, but delicious.

The source in the parlor demanded, that in the cellar repelled, that from upstairs promised. Just like the three bears, he told himself ironically, and wondered from whence that thought had sprung. A bit surprising to discover a disembodied spirit kept its sense of humor.

He wished he could remember more of what must be contained in his mind. Romney Marsh, Romney Marsh.

Holding hard to what little he possessed, he parted from the other spirits, which seemed unaware of him, and floated upstairs. He had to see what—who—attracted him.

And it proved to be a woman. He gathered himself in the corner of the room she inhabited—her bedroom—and watched half dazed as she changed her clothes for dinner, stripped off rough blouse and skirt and donned the dress spread on the bed. The soft yellow lights of the room caressed her naked flesh, and he, coalesced much like the raindrops on the window glass, could only stare in appreciation.

No slender miss, this. She had a body of generous proportions, wide at the shoulders and hips and supple with muscle. She also had skin of pure milk-white, straight black hair that hung down her back all the way to her generous, tempting derriere, and, when she turned, a pair of breasts in which a man might lose himself. Her eyes, set slightly atilt in a heavily-boned face, were an unexpected and startling shade of tawny gold.

Shock sent him hurtling backward through the wall, unable to tell whether when she turned those eyes she caught a glimpse of him. He fought to recapture himself, to remember who he was—Romney Marsh—but after that he could return to no energy but hers.

He haunted her room. Of course, she did not spend all her time there. She sometimes went to a big chamber on the ground floor where she worked her body in a routine of fighting with her fists, a knife, or even a sword. He followed her helplessly and even watched her while she slept, the conviction forming that he must make her see him.

Could she help him resolve his dilemma? Or did he want her to see him for another reason, because she was quite simply the most fascinating woman he’d ever encountered?

After that he tried twice more to manifest himself within the confines of her room—once upon her rising and once after she put on an incredible display and chased two intruders from the place—no shrinking maiden, this. But concentrate his energy as he might, he couldn’t quite materialize, though he felt sure she caught glimpses of him.

She had some affinity for spirits, he sensed. She definitely had some attraction for him. And he felt sure she’d heard him when he congratulated her following the fight late that night—undertaken in the nude on her part.

What man, corporeal or otherwise, could fail to admire that?

He observed as, clad only in a silken dressing gown, she spoke at length with a dark-haired man—discussing him.

And when the dark-haired man—her brother?—went out, leaving the two of them alone, seen and unseen, he knew it would be now or never.

Concentrating with unprecedented intensity, he hovered beside her bed, pictured himself as he knew he appeared when in his body, and did his best to make himself look solid.

She turned. Her unusual golden eyes widened, and she saw him.

About bloody time, he thought with a victorious rush. And now what? Could they communicate?

“Who are you?” she breathed in a low, husky voice that should have raised his pulse—did, for all he knew, back where his body lay.

“You can see me?” he asked, projecting the word-thoughts into her mind the way he had projected his image.

“Of course I can see you. Why else would I ask who you are?”

“Romney Marsh,” he supplied the name to which he clung so hard.

Her eyebrows, like two black slashes above those incredible eyes, twitched. “Well, Mr. Romney Marsh, you’ve strayed to the wrong place.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The party’s downstairs in the solarium, where my father’s summoning the souls of the dearly departed. You must have taken a wrong turn at the stairs.”

“No. I don’t want him. I want you.” Abruptly he realized it for truth: he wanted her as only a man possessed of flesh could—and surging flesh, at that. It made no sense, yet he couldn’t deny it.

She shifted slightly on the balls of her feet the way she had just before she took on the two thugs who’d come through the window. Did she, then, think she needed to fight him off?

He said quickly, “I’m not here to harm you. Rather, I need your help.”

She tipped her head. The black hair slid over one shoulder to caress a generous breast. His nonexistent fingers itched.

“I’m not able to help you.” She waved a hand in the air. “Be gone, spirit, to the next realm.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.” She leaned toward him, and her gaze moved over him with considerable interest. “Do not partake in my father’s mischief. Spare yourself that. Move on and embrace peace. I dismiss—”

“No.” He moved closer, and her eyes widened again. “Don’t do that. Don’t send me away.”

She drew herself up to her considerable height, which had he possessed his body must nearly match his. “But, Mr. Marsh, it’s where you belong.”

“It isn’t.”

“Give me one good reason why,” she challenged.

He could give her the very best of reasons. “I’m not dead.”