CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE #2
Voss ignored him. “Miss Bishop is the strongest known anchor because she has crossed once and remained in proximity to the threshold. But she is no longer alone in the disturbance.”
Duncan went very still.
Voss’s eyes moved over them again. Ceci between Archie and Duncan. Archie’s hand still locked around hers. Duncan’s palm still at her back. The three of them arranged like confession.
“The attachment matters,” Voss said.
Ceci could barely breathe.
Voss smiled. “Now you understand.”
“No,” she said. “I understand you found another way to make yourself useful to the devil.”
Sabrina let out a sharp little breath that might almost have been a laugh.
Voss’s expression cooled.
“The threshold answers to what binds,” he said. “You are attached here now. To the house. To these people. Most inconveniently, to these men. That is why the opening came sooner than I expected. A clean return would have been simpler when you wanted only to leave.”
The words pierced because they were true enough to bleed.
When she first arrived, she had wanted her phone to work, the world to make sense, a door to open back to the life she had lost. Now, the thought of leaving Hawarden hurt differently because Hawarden had faces.
Voices. Hands. A bed still warm upstairs.
A future she could not bear to imagine without the two men standing beside her.
Voss tilted his head.
“Love is such a crude word for a force people refuse to measure.”
Duncan said, “Leave.”
“You will need me before dawn.”
“No.”
“The gate will open. If Miss Bishop is there, it can be guided. If she is absent, it will tear open anyway, and the result will be less predictable.”
Ceci’s voice came thin. “You want me to help you cross?”
“I want to use what is already happening.”
“To go where?”
Voss looked at her for a long moment.
“Forward enough to correct the failure.”
Sabrina’s face hardened. “Your failure?”
“Mosley’s. The movement’s. This country’s failure to recognize the necessity of order before sentiment poisoned it.”
“You want to take what you learned from the future,” Ceci said, “and make fascism more palatable.”
“I want to remove the errors that made it crude.”
The hall went cold.
Archie said, very softly, “That is the ugliest thing anyone has said in this house, and I once heard a bishop discuss modern art.”
Voss’s gaze snapped to him. “You joke because you have no answer.”
“No,” Archie said. “I joke because shooting you would upset Margaret’s carpets.”
Duncan did not look amused.
His pistol remained steady.
Voss took one small step back into the rain.
“Before dawn,” he said. “Old Hawarden. The red gate will open. Miss Bishop will come, by choice or by pull. You may attend to her or try to lock her in a room. Either way, the threshold will answer.”
Ceci heard the faintest tremor beneath the words.
Need.
He needed her there. Maybe not only her, but something about her presence mattered more than he wanted to admit. Duncan heard it too. “You cannot do this without her.”
Voss’s eyes flicked to him.
Archie saw it and smiled slowly. “Ah. That sounded expensive.”
Voss’s mouth flattened.
Ceci stepped closer to the door. “You need me because the gate does not answer to you.”
“It answers to force.”
“No. It doesn’t.” Her voice steadied as she spoke. “That is what you keep getting wrong. You think possession is the same as being chosen.”
Something dark passed through Voss’s face. For the first time, she had found the wound beneath the polish.
Good.
The satisfaction was brief, but clean. Voss put on his hat.
“You have several hours to indulge in moral clarity. Spend them wisely.”
He looked at the page in Archie’s hand.
“Ask them whether they want to die well. Men of their type usually do.”
Then he turned and walked into the rain.
Duncan followed him as far as the threshold, pistol still raised.
No motor idled beyond the lamps. Voss walked away alone, swallowed little by little by the wet dark until only the rain remained.
Margaret shut the door with enough force to make the frame complain.
The hall was silent.
Then Grace took the page from Archie and folded it with shaking hands.
“He is lying,” she said.
No one answered.
She looked up. “He is lying.”
Sabrina touched her arm. “Some of it, certainly.”
“That is not comforting.”
“No.”
Archie leaned one shoulder against the newel post. His smile was gone now. Without it, he looked older and far more tired. Ceci wanted to go to him. She wanted Duncan’s hand back at her spine.
She wanted the door closed, the room upstairs, the three of them beneath blankets while the future stayed outside where it belonged. Instead, she said, “I can’t leave you here.”
The sentence entered the hall and changed every face. Archie looked at her first. Duncan turned from the door. Ceci’s voice shook, but she kept going. “If the gate opens. If it can take me back. I can’t go alone.”
Duncan’s expression closed as if struck. Archie’s did the opposite. It opened too far, and the pain in it nearly made her reach for him.
Sabrina whispered, “Ceci.”
“I know.” Ceci looked at her. “I know what I’m saying.”
Grace clutched the folded paper. “Do you?”
“No,” Duncan said.
One word. Quiet. Final.
Ceci turned back to him. He stood with the pistol still in his hand, rain shining in his hair, face pale under the hall light.
“No?” she asked.
“You cannot decide this for us.”
“I’m not.”
“You are already trying.”
That hurt because it was true.
Ceci swallowed.
Archie pushed away from the newel post, wincing as he did. “Duncan.”
“No,” Duncan said, eyes still on Ceci. “We will not soften the thing because we want one another. That way lies ruin.”
Ceci’s temper flared. “And staying here lies what? Honor? Duty? A memorial plaque?”
His face changed.
She regretted it at once.
Then she did not.
“Look at it,” she said, pointing to the paper in Grace’s hand. “Maybe he forged the dates. Maybe he forged all of it. But is the shape wrong? Tell me honestly.”
No one spoke.
Archie looked down.
Duncan’s jaw flexed.
Ceci’s eyes burned.
“That is what I thought.”
Sabrina moved to the table further down the corridor and poured brandy into a glass with hands that only barely trembled. “Everyone into the library.”
No one obeyed at first. She turned, glass in hand. “Now.”
That worked.
They moved together, slowly and badly, like survivors after impact. Margaret went ahead to bring more lamps. Grace came next with the folded page. Archie followed, one arm close to his ribs. Ceci stayed beside him until Duncan reached the doorway. Then she looked back.
He had not moved.
“Duncan.”
His eyes met hers.
For a second, the whole hall disappeared. There was only the man who had kissed her as if restraint had become worship, and the soldier who could already see the battlefield inside the choice she had offered him. Then he set the pistol on the hall table.
He came to her.
The library looked obscene in its calm. The papers on the table still lay in ordered stacks from the day before. A fire had burned low in the grate, and Margaret began reviving it with brisk, punishing efficiency. Sabrina set the brandy down in front of Archie.
“Drink.”
“I am wounded, not fainting.”
“Both states can coexist.”
He drank.
Grace sat at the table and unfolded Voss’s page again. She smoothed it flat with both hands as though she could make it less terrible by treating it like a research document. Ceci stood across from her.
The pull came again.
This time, the pull arrived as sound rather than image.
Wood shifting.
Iron scraping.
A latch lifting in the dark. Ceci grabbed the back of the nearest chair. Archie stood at once. Too fast. He swore and caught his side. Duncan reached her before the chair tipped. His hands closed around her waist.
“What is it?”
“The gate.”
Her voice barely existed.
Duncan held her more securely. “You hear it?”
“Yes.”
Grace looked toward the windows. “I heard nothing.”
“I did,” Ceci said.
Archie came close on her other side, paler now. “What did it sound like?”
She looked at him.
“Like it opened.”
The library went silent.
Then Ginger began barking outside.
Once.
Then again.
Wild, furious, terrified.
Margaret straightened by the hearth. “That dog does not bark at shadows.”
Duncan released Ceci only because she had steadied. “Where is she?”
“The west lawn,” Grace said.
Another bark.
Then a crash of sound from somewhere beyond the terrace, like a body striking brush or a branch breaking under weight. Archie reached for the poker by the fireplace.
Duncan said, “No.”
Archie did not release it. “We are well past no.”
Sabrina crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back. For one second, she only stared.
Then she said, “Duncan.”
Everyone moved.
Beyond the glass, rain striped the dark lawn. Ginger stood near the edge of the gravel path, hackles raised, barking toward the trees. Something pale had been fixed to the outside of the library window.
A page.
It clung there in the rain, held beneath the blade of a small knife driven into the wooden frame. Duncan reached the window first. Ceci saw the writing through the wet glass before he touched the latch.
Black ink.
Large enough to read from inside.
The anchor is not the traveler.
The anchor is the attachment.
Ceci stopped breathing.
Archie’s shoulder brushed hers.
Duncan’s hand froze on the window latch.
Sabrina whispered something vicious.
Grace looked from the paper to Ceci, then to the men beside her. The gate called again from the dark. This time, Ceci felt it answer not only inside herself. She felt it move through Archie’s hand.
Through Duncan’s stillness.
Through the terrible, bright line binding the three of them together. And at last, she understood. Voss did not only want her to be at Old Hawarden. He wanted all of them.