Chapter 41
I blink awake to find myself curled in a warm embrace. Adrian’s strong arm lies snug around me, holding me against his chest, and his breath ghosts across the back of my neck. Early light streams through the window, and all I want to do is lie here forever.
Unfortunately, my bladder has other ideas. Adrian grunts when I slide out from under his arm, then rolls on his back and watches as I gather my clothes.
“Good morning,” he says with a sleepy grin.
“Good morning.” I give him a peck on the lips. “I’ll be right back.”
I hurry down the hall to the bathroom; thankfully it’s unoccupied. When I wash my hands, the mirror above the sink shows a face that still looks drawn, but much better rested than before.
I return to find Adrian getting dressed. “I suppose we should set the room to rights,” he says regretfully.
“We’ll just have to mess it up again tonight.”
He grins again. “It’s a deal.”
By the time we make our way down to breakfast, my stomach is complaining quite strongly about skipping dinner the night before.
The restaurant is already half filled, mainly with men in suits and oiled hair, many with sample cases by their sides.
Traveling salesmen, I assume. Others have a rougher look to them, and a woman in a long veil eats by herself at a small table, holding the veil out at intervals so she can slip her fork beneath without giving anyone a glimpse of her face.
I order the scrambled eggs with bacon and hot cakes, while Adrian chooses the sugar-cured ham and fried apples, with coffee for both of us. I set to the meal like a starving wolf, until Helen sits down in the third chair of the small table.
“I’m sorry we didn’t wait to order,” I say, after swallowing an indecently large forkful of eggs. “We missed dinner.”
“No need,” she says, looking amused. “I completely understand.”
Soon, she has a cup of coffee and a breakfast of a waffle and baked apples in front of her. “I haven’t heard back from anyone yet, but that’s no surprise,” she says, pouring a generous helping of syrup on her waffle.
“I had a dream last night,” I say. “And yes, I know dreams aren’t reliable, but mine have had bits of memory mixed in with them since I came back to myself.”
“Some dreams are more reliable than others.” She scowls as she takes a bite of waffle. “An old…friend…of mine believes in their oracular power, and uses them to guide her waking life.”
From the way she says the word friend, I suspect they were quite a bit more than that. “Mine are the opposite of oracular. Nightmares from the past, mixed in with fragments of memory from my captivity.” I pause, a sudden thought occurring to me. “I have some questions about magic.”
“I’ll try to answer them as best I can,” she replies. “Though I focus on the practical rather than the scholarly aspects.”
I take a deep breath, steeling myself. “When I was in France…a man, a friend, was injured. We weren’t able to save him or retrieve his body once he passed.
A few nights later, I…I saw him. Walking, clearly dead, his eyes glowing like fireflies.
He wanted into the camp. I panicked and shot him…
” My throat tightens, and I clear it. “He was gone by the time the other soldiers came running. It was put down to shell shock, and I’m certain I did have that, but… ”
“What was it in your friend’s body?” she finishes.
She doesn’t seem to question whether I did in fact see Emerson, or at least his remains.
“I don’t know. The European wizards…well, I can’t judge them, I might have done the same if our country was being invaded.
In their desperation they tore open the Veil between our world and the Outside. Horrible things came through.”
Adrian nods. “Some of the European soldiers I knew talked about it, once they were drunk enough. They said those weren’t angels at Mons.”
“They were right.” She sighs. “We—well, not me, people who are much more connected to ley lines and the Veil and all that—spent much of the war here trying to keep it from ripping farther and unleashing gods-know-what across the world. At any rate, my guess is something slipped through one of the holes and into your friend’s body. ”
Just as I’m about to get my footing, something knocks me off balance again.
The Outside? Some kind of Veil? Ley lines?
None of this means anything to me, but Helen speaks as if it’s normal.
As if the ordinary world I’ve lived in has always had this underpinning of horror while I bumbled about in ignorance.
Adrian finishes off his fried apples and dabs his lips with his napkin. “You’ve given us a great deal to absorb.”
She smiles ruefully. “I’m sure I have.”
“If my dream is accurate,” I say, putting aside all my other questions for the moment, “then Bianca wanted to find some way to remember everything that happened to us once we returned home. I assume we knew somehow that our memories would be suppressed. I think I wanted to learn magic?”
“It would seem you succeeded,” Adrian says.
“In learning some magic, though not how to retain my memories. Though Bianca apparently remembered me, or at least my name, so maybe it worked for her?” I try to recall the details of the dream. “She wanted to warn people about the body-swapping. Damn, I wish I knew what she wrote in her letters.”
“The public library won’t have a copy, or at least that would be very unlikely.
” Helen finishes off her waffle, using the final bite to soak up as much syrup as possible.
“But there’s the university library, the museum library, and of course private collections.
I can’t do much about the latter, but we could at least check the university and the museum to see if they happen to have a copy. ”
“As someone who works—worked—in the rare book trade, that will be a long shot,” I say. “There aren’t that many copies left.”
“Unless that was what Swarm-You was trying to get from Dr. Dane,” Adrian suggests.
Helen shakes her head. “Dr. Dane is versed in metaphysics, not Italian Renaissance art. It would have been much better off contacting a different professor, unless you had some previous connection with Dr. Dane you haven’t mentioned?”
“No.” I shake my head.
“Why do you think this museum might have a copy?” Adrian asks. “Do they have a large collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, or…?”
“No, but they do have a large collection of occult tomes.” She dabs her mouth with a napkin. “I know the Lettere Segrete isn’t technically that, but it sounds as though Giuliani’s letters might have held some interesting tidbits for those versed in the arcane.”
I blink in confusion. “Why does a museum library have an occult collection?”
“Well, the museum was built as a spirit trap for an evil book,” she says with a shrug. “I suppose the rest came later.”
I put a hand to my forehead in anticipation of a headache. What has my life become? Everything used to be so normal, easily explainable by mundane means. I want my lost ignorance back, I want my old life back, I want all of this to have been a horrible dream.
Most of it, anyway. I drop my hand and see Adrian looking at me with concern.
“Just having a moment of existential shock,” I tell him.
Helen gives me a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about magic and the Outside and everything else, but it must be a bit overwhelming to the two of you.”
“A bit, yes,” Adrian agrees wryly. “You’re the expert here, Helen. If you think this museum library might have it, that’s where we’ll start. It will take someone time to translate if it is there, so you and Sterling can work on his magic then.”
It makes sense, I suppose. I nod my agreement, and Adrian and Helen chat about current affairs as we finish breakfast. From their talk, I gather the Yankees won the previous day’s game, and a millionaire bootlegger from Cincinnati gunned down his wife in a public park.
After, we take the trolley to the museum; carved into the granite above the doors are the words NATHANIEL R.
LADYSMITH MUSEUM. The architecture is…odd, to say the least. Though the imposing entrance reminds me of the Natural History Museum in New York—grand stairs, soaring columns, arched entryway—the roofline beyond is uneven, with taller sections sticking up into view here and there, lacking any sense of uniform design.
At the top of the stairs stands a bronze statue of a portly man, his walrus mustache shining as though frequent touches have kept it free of tarnish.
Helen reaches up and gives it a rub herself. “For luck.”
Inside is an enormous foyer containing displays of extinct animals and dominated by the fossilized skeleton of some great aquatic reptile hanging from the ceiling.
“I haven’t been here since they got the Mosasaurus up!” Helen exclaims, clearly delighted by the creature. “At least it won’t be able to go far if it starts to move.”
I look at her aghast. “Is that typical?”
“It happens more often than you’d think,” she replies breezily. “Follow me.”
She leads the way to one of the ticket booths. “I’m here to see Librarian Irene Endicott,” she says. “Helen Rath.”
“One moment, Miss Rath,” the man says, and steps away, presumably to use a telephone. He returns shortly. “She says you know the way.”