Chapter Ten

“Rom, I’ve been thinking about what you said. Are you sure there are corpses in the cellar? Could you go look and make certain?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” he asked, his voice a caress in her mind.

“Probably not. But I’m intrigued by the idea of you appropriating a body that won’t interfere with us. Even though I don’t like to think what my father could be getting up to that would require the presence of dead flesh.”

“Well, I’m fairly sure I can go most anywhere. But I’d rather not leave you.”

The energy of which he was made flickered and broke apart into separate particles like muted light. These shifted and moved to touch her, arousing her all over again. He brushed her throat, caressed her cheek, and slid inside her bodice.

“Oh,” she breathed.

Nice—titillating, in fact—but she couldn’t let him distract her again. Wanting this man who wasn’t a man could drive her out of her head.

“You’re a goddess, Topaz Hathor.”

His energy still danced across her breasts, and she narrowed her eyes before she answered, “I look like an overgrown gypsy.” She might believe that, but she’d take any compliments he cared to dish out.

“You’re the most arousing, fascinating woman I’ve ever known.”

She pushed herself up in the bed, and he returned to the pillow beside her, a dim form through which she could see the bedspread. “If you’re going to look in the cellar, we’d better do it now, while everyone else is asleep. Do you fancy acting the part of investigator?”

He contemplated it and replied thoughtfully, “No acting required there, love. I suspect in truth that’s what I am.”

****

The big house felt eerie with the lights muted, all the human inhabitants sleeping and most of the steamies shut down.

Romney trailed Topaz down the corridor like smoke, past closed doors through which he could sense life, or emptiness. She paused momentarily outside the door one down from her own and mouthed, “My brother.”

Sapphire, that would be, with whom Romney had observed her speaking. Two energies occupied the room. Sapphire did not lie alone.

Lucky bastard, Romney thought bitterly, watching the twitch of Topaz’s robe across her rounded bottom as she moved on.

At the head of the stairs, she paused again outside another door and mouthed, “My father.”

Did her parents not sleep together, then? Rom sensed only one soul within. But what a soul! Even at rest and acquiescent it shimmered with power, and the spirits who, like Romney, had been drawn to this house teemed around it.

The man possessed genuine ability, like Topaz’s only a hundred times stronger, and well developed.

Romney skittered away, half afraid the man might sense him. What then? Would Hathor emerge and banish him? He didn’t want that to happen for more than one reason: he wanted Topaz’s help, and he wanted her.

Would Hathor be able to isolate his—Romney’s—spirit among the many that flocked to this place?

He descended the wide, curved staircase ahead of Topaz and waited for her at the bottom.

“What’s the matter?” she hissed.

“I didn’t want your father to sense me.”

“Right. Mind the steamies, now.”

A unit on standby waited beside the grand front door. Romney knew it would switch on if anyone drew near enough. Topaz led him along the side of the staircase to the back of the house.

“The cellar door opens off this hallway outside the kitchen. Don’t look in there.” She indicated that room. “It always gives me the shivers.”

The kitchen, lit by one muted lamp, looked like a forest of steam units, all shut off and staring with blank, sculpted eyes. It took many mechanical hands to feed a household this luxurious.

He examined the cellar door even as Topaz whispered, “It’s locked.”

“No barrier to me. But I’ll have to go alone.”

“Yes.” She looked at him with concern. “I’m not sure what you’ll find down there, but it might be dangerous. Are you sure you can get back out when you want to?”

“If I can move in, presumably I can move out.” But if he did find a usable body, it wouldn’t be much good to him unless the door could be unlocked from the inside and he could force that body’s fingers to work the latch.

“Presumably,” she echoed. He could feel her emotions, a mix of excitement, worry, and desire. A woman of flagrant courage on her own behalf, she nevertheless feared for him.

“Don’t do anything stupid. Just see what’s down there. And look for a body. We don’t want to attract my father’s attention.”

But who knew what might do that? Romney could still feel Hathor’s power one floor down. What might Hathor feel?

Moving softly, he shifted through the door. Immediately sensation rushed at him, nearly too much to handle in his disembodied state: the typical scent of a cellar overlaid by a myriad of other things. Chemicals, new wood, burning, decomposition, and blood. The energy of which he consisted twitched in response; whatever took place down here, he didn’t like it.

He forced himself to move on anyway. A series of dim lights illuminated the stairs and a hallway that led from their foot straight onward. Doors—all closed—lined the hallway. The things he could smell lay behind them.

He drifted down the stairs and halted, sudden memory, like déjà vu, flooding over him. Abruptly he transported, via memory, to another place.

A corridor not unlike this one but above ground, lined with closed doors, each secured by a lock. Hard hands hustled him along even though he was trussed like a goose in the market stall, arms bound tight to his body in a cloth shirt. His emotions nearly choked him and made it hard to breathe: anger, intense frustration, and a healthy wallop of fear.

“You can’t do this to me,” he told the two men leading him along—orderlies wearing gray coats. Gray. Just like that, he knew where he was; he remembered. “Someone will come looking for me, and once it’s discovered I’ve been held against my will—”

One of his minders struck him, a blow that took him in the mouth and rocked him on his feet.

“Keep quiet unless you want your feet in a bucket and a wire down your back.”

Quiet? The place was anything but. He could hear moans, cries, and screams coming from behind the locked doors. They had paused before a room, and his keeper swung that door open. Romney balked, knowing if he went in he’d never get out under his own power and would soon be screaming just like the rest.

He fought as hard as he could with his hands secured, kicked out with his feet and shoved with his shoulders and head. He knew himself to be a doughty—and dirty—fighter when in possession of all his limbs.

Now, though, the two keepers subdued him summarily, and brutally, using fists and a rubber cosh. They thrust him into the cell, and he fell to the floor, where he lay bleeding, still convulsed by rage.

He came to himself in Hathor’s cellar, the images now bright in the field of energy that passed for his mind. As if a sluice had opened, he recalled scene after scene: the days of being locked away that brought him to the edge of madness, the frustration and helplessness that beat at him ceaselessly, and the long, repeated sessions that had finally separated spirit from flesh.

He had been driven to madness inside Grayson Asylum. And his body—would it be any good to Topaz if he got it out of there?

They wanted to break him because—he groped for it—he knew too much. They dared not kill him outright, but destroying him mentally proved an effective tool for assuring his silence.

Only he had escaped. Into Topaz Hathor’s bedroom.

He hovered in the dank air of the cellar hallway, reluctant to go on and unable to turn back. He thought of the woman waiting outside the cellar door, and even now desire flared. He had never felt for any woman what he felt for Topaz Hathor. For her sake he needed to move on.

He drifted through the nearest door. No light illuminated the space, but it seemed spirit didn’t require light. He could see it was an office equipped with chairs and a desk stacked with papers. Those would no doubt warrant perusal at a later date.

He moved through the wall into the next room, a larger space that felt cold and contained several bodies stretched out on slabs.

Jackpot, he thought, and drifted over to look.

Three corpses, two male and one female, all completely devoid of spirit. They must be fresh, for they smelled of death but not much decay. He examined both the male bodies closely, considering appropriating one of them. Both were middle-aged, one with graying hair and a neat beard, the other black-haired and with a livid steam blast through the center of his head.

Murdered? He couldn’t tell. But if so, why?

Why would Topaz’s father have freshly-killed corpses in his basement?

He hovered above the corpse with the beard, wishing he could communicate with its occupant and obtain some answers, but its spirit had definitely flown.

Frederick Hathor might be able to call the fellow’s soul back; Romney could not.

Could that be what all this was about? Did Hathor’s wealthy clients pay the man to recall the souls of their dearly departed, reanimate them somehow? But how? Dead flesh remained dead, right?

He abandoned the three corpses and drifted on through the rest of the huge cellar. One room contained high quality steam units, nothing as sophisticated as Patrick Kelly but finer mechanicals than Romney had ever seen. Still another room, farther back, looked like a torture chamber rigged with metal tables, a large steam plant, and what he recognized as electrodes.

Memory nearly drove him against the wall. Quite suddenly he recalled his bare feet drenched with water and an identical electrode thrust against him. And pain that shattered him into a thousand pieces.

He came apart now in response, the separate bits of energy of which he was composed flying from one another in his distress, scattered into the gloom of the cellar beyond his recall.