There was no omen of disaster. In fact, the day had gone fairly well. Both of the older boys, after the first bit of sulking, seemed to be taking their punishment with relative good grace, and certainly nobody had tried to summon anything else. Charlotte had kept Michael busy making a box for the hedgehog, which they’d named Star, after a book on Babylonian mythology had connected her species with the goddess Astarte, and Elizabeth was lost in a book.
She’d slept well for the past few nights too, or, if she hadn’t, she’d managed to get herself down without waking Charlotte and thus Olivia. Olivia had followed her youngest student’s example and, curling up in one of the library chairs, had immersed herself in The Moonstone. Reading anything fictional these days was a rare enough pleasure to occupy all her attention. If the household had experienced any alarm, she didn’t hear it…
Not until the door opened and Mrs. Edgar stood on the threshold, face white beneath her cap. “You’re wanted upstairs,” she said. “Now, ma’am.”
“Who is it?” Olivia asked irritably, yanked abruptly from Indian diamonds and drowned maidservants. If Fitzpatrick and Waite had tried summoning again, she would personally feed them to whatever they’d called up. Feet first. “One of the boys?”
“No, ma’am,” said Mrs. Edgar, voice low and quiet.
Annoyance gave way to fear. “Elizabeth? Or—?”
“It’s the master, ma’am,” said Mrs. Edgar. She swallowed and shook her head. “He’s home. They’re home. And something’s wrong.”
***
Wrong didn’t begin to describe it.
Gareth stood by the bed in Simon’s room, looking down at his friend’s still body. Simon still breathed regularly, and he’d had the strength to reach his room with Gareth and Mrs. Grenville supporting him, but he hadn’t moved since he’d fallen onto the bed. His eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything either. He didn’t speak, and his skin had gone a shade of grayish green Gareth had never seen before and could only assume was a very bad sign indeed.
Not, however, as bad as his right arm.
Snaking up from Simon’s wrist, the lines of his arteries stood out as if his arm had been a picture on one of Gareth’s charts. Unlike in the picture, though, Simon’s arteries from his elbow down were glowing a sick purplish black that looked like it shifted every time Gareth blinked. Like it squirmed.
That was mad. Light didn’t move on its own. Then again, a man’s blood vessels didn’t glow either.
Gareth looked up. Simon’s room was rather pleasant as such things went, done in shades of blue and gold, with a fire already blazing in the fireplace. Painted lamps cast their own circles of light over the bed, and a small pile of books lay on the night table. It was all very civilized. Mrs. Grenville stalked through it as if it were a jungle. If she’d had a gun, he almost would have expected her to start shooting holes in the mantelpiece.
Sensing his gaze, she spun and glared at him. “Well?”
“What is it?” Gareth tried not to sound querulous. He did usually like to know the normal facts about a patient before viewing him in any other way. He wasn’t sure there were that many normal facts in this case, but the theory, notwithstanding, held.
“A curse. Or something.” Mrs. Grenville shrugged, the first desperate and uncertain movement Gareth had ever seen from her. “On a rose, of all the stupid things. It hit the first finger on his hand. Goddamn classic,” she spat.
He supposed it was, as curses went. Gareth picked up Simon’s hand and turned it over . It felt unnaturally cold, he noted, even while he screamed his own, rather less-effective curses in the back of his mind. There was a hole on the right forefinger. Not large. “How long ago?”
“Half an hour. We’d just gotten into the carriage when he collapsed.”
“Right. Give me a moment.” Gareth switched his vision and almost immediately felt his stomach turn over in revolt.
As bad as Simon’s arm looked in the normal world, it was far worse in the spiritual plane. The light that had clustered around his arteries was thicker, almost viscous, and a dark gray that brought to mind old bread dough. Gareth could almost smell the decay. That wasn’t the worst of it.
When he looked at the light through his aethereal vision, it did squirm, growing thicker in places before splitting up again and sliding farther along Simon’s arm. Gareth could see the dark blue shape that was Simon breaking apart before it, slowly but steadily. The rest of Simon was paler—energy expended to try and fight the intruder, Gareth assumed—but nothing like what was happening midway up his arm. Gareth suspected it wasn’t simply flesh and blood that crumbled.
No, dammit.
He flung power out without thinking, slamming it down into Simon’s arm in a wall between the rest of his friend’s body and the invading, rotting light. There was a blast of amber fire in the aether. From Mrs. Grenville’s startled curse, Gareth thought something had showed itself in the normal world as well.
The rotting light…retreated wasn’t a strong enough word. Gareth’s power blasted it backward, down the long paths it had climbed to get so far, and left it midway between Simon’s wrist and his elbow. Radial, Gareth thought absently, textbooks turning their own pages in his mind, ulnar, brachial. For the moment, the light’s restless writhing movement halted.
It wasn’t out yet. But Gareth had made a good start. He took a breath, feeling renewed confidence fill him along with the air…
Then the rotting light turned its attention on him.
***
Nobody was screaming this time. At first, Olivia found that a relief. Then, as she made her way up the stairs and down the hall, the silence became more ominous. There was carpet on the hallway floor and no way her footsteps should have echoed. They echoed in her mind anyway.
Mrs. Edgar opened the door to the master bedroom and stood back, farther back than simply letting Olivia inside would have required. There was no explosion, however, and nothing rushed out the door.
Olivia rushed in.
The room receded in her vision, its furnishings becoming faint and then almost translucent. None of them mattered except Joan, pacing the room like a caged beast, and her husband, lying on the bed and looking about three steps from a corpse.
Gareth was standing over him, holding out both of his hands. A faint golden glow had formed around them, contrasting with the rather leprous air Olivia could see around Mr. Grenville’s arm as she got closer. Closer still, she saw the pallor on Gareth’s face and the sweat on his forehead.
He was fighting something with all his strength. She had no idea whether he was winning.
On her way out the library door, Olivia had retained enough presence of mind to snatch up a candle and matches. She lit the wick now and made hasty gestures to the four directions, invoking all the elements to protect her in whatever happened thenceforth. It was a hasty compromise. She didn’t have time for a proper shield, but she wasn’t fool enough to go in without one. Not the way Mr. Grenville and Gareth both looked.
A word in Enochian brought her more knowledge, and she caught her breath with the terror of it. Now she could clearly see the writhing foulness inside Mr. Grenville’s arm, insidious and persistent and awfully aware, like nothing she’d encountered and only barely like anything she’d read about. It seethed in his hand and his forearm, but a wall of dark amber power blocked its further progress.
For the moment.
The light was throwing itself at the wall, a steady stream of gray rot that, at the moment, beat itself against the power to no effect, but that didn’t let the power progress any farther either. Stalemate, Olivia thought. In time, Gareth’s power would weaken and so would the wall, even if he fed it with his own life force.
That was if the light didn’t begin to attack him directly. Olivia could feel it in the air now. It was blind malice, but it wasn’t quite senseless, and it knew Gareth was there. If the light found the link between power and man…it would be very bad. And there was almost nothing she could do. The light was magical, but it was physical. It was part of Simon’s body now rather than a spell Olivia might lift.
She swallowed. “A healing spell might help,” she said, turning toward the door. “I’ll get the notes.” Olivia tried not to think of the time it would take or how she’d never had call to use that particular sort of magic. No need, when Gareth had been there. No need now, perhaps, if he’d had enough power.
Abruptly, she turned back. A few more steps carried her to Gareth’s side, just within arm’s reach of him. Olivia bent and traced symbols on the ground, calling on power, and saw the world shift again. It wasn’t as dramatic as it had been in the forest, but it was enough, and she bit back an oath at the roiling half shape the light took on in that view.
Warmth rose up from her feet and spread throughout her body. If working with power was enough to let her see the light’s true shape, hopefully the power itself would be enough to defeat it. Olivia remembered the way she’d grounded Elizabeth’s energy, fixed her mind on reversing the process…
…and placed a hand on Gareth’s shoulder.
***
For the first few seconds, Gareth wasn’t sure where the rush of energy came from, nor did he care.
The rotting light had been pressing forward relentlessly. He’d been holding his ground, pouring more and more of his power into the wall, and it had held under the assault. Only held, though. Gareth was no tactician, never had been, but he thought trying to gain ground might be disastrous for him and for Simon. As it was, he had started to feel the price in his own body as the light came onward.
The thought had occurred to him that he was in over his head.
Injuries didn’t fight back. Disease did, in its way, but any illness he’d ever faced had been a pale shadow of this, whatever it was, which coiled and gathered only to surge again. The sense of its hatred for him, for all normal life, had crept over Gareth like the faintest brush of the power itself. Balam might have killed them all, if he’d gotten out of the circle, but he had been straightforwardly predatory compared to the cold and slimy thing in Simon’s blood.
Gareth had been trying not to think much about that.
Then, like a drenching of cold water on a hot day—energy. It flowed over him and into him, and Gareth took it without thinking. The wall blossomed outward into amber flame, driving the rotting light off, back, then out, destroying it on the way. Gareth’s head was full of a high buzzing he thought was the light screaming, and he felt himself smile at the sound. Hurt, did it? Good.
Somewhere nearby, Simon was breathing more deeply. His hand clenched and then relaxed, fingers spreading, and the last of the light vanished.
Gareth sent his power through Simon’s arm once more, scouring his veins for any trace of the curse-or-whatever, and smiled when he found none. Energy still lingered in his body. When he shifted his sight back to normal, he thought he probably looked slightly mad.
No matter. Mrs. Grenville was kneeling by Simon, her hands on his good shoulder, and talking urgently and intently in a way Gareth didn’t think he should watch. Instead, he turned to see who his rescuer had been.
Deep brown eyes met his, shining with the same energy and triumph Gareth felt.
Olivia.