Chapter 3 #3
To his surprise, however, a glittering sapphire dress came into view.
Celia slid into the booth, not on Hugo’s lap but close enough to get a better look at the amulet.
And Ezra. Her face held none of the tightness he’d glimpsed before—she had a carefree smile and a laugh like lilies.
It was an extraordinary transformation. So extraordinary that Ezra couldn’t help but wonder if she’d used magic for it.
“Your father kept this all to himself?” She giggled. “It looks like it belongs in a museum!”
It belongs in Egypt. Ezra shoved this thought behind glass walls, forcing his mind into unsteady silence as he stared down at the elaborate amulet. There was no Eye of Horus staring back, but he did see a symbol drawn in a similar style. One that looked very much like an ear…
“If this does what Papa believes it can do, I’m sure it will end up in the hidden wing,” Everett drawled. “I’d hoped to have a bit of fun with it first.”
“And what does your father think it can do?” Celia asked airily.
“I’d like to hear the scholar’s theory first,” interrupted Hugo.
But it wasn’t his Oxford training Ezra was leaning on as he edged closer to examine the ear-shaped symbol.
The scarab twitched when his shadow fell over it.
Rose gasped. Celia jumped. The Order magicians went still.
Ezra didn’t move either as the jeweled bug began to open its shell and unfold tiny stone wings.
It was just like the scarabs that once scuttled around his childhood flat…
“Oh look! There’s writing on the wings!” Rose bounced up and down in the booth seat. “What does it say, Ezra?”
Despite their smallness, he could read the symbols easily: “May your ears be opened and your mouth spill forth, be filled with the voices of the Duat.”
Rose’s eyes widened. Celia sat back—her feathers pressed against the booth—no longer giggling.
Hugo leaned forward, bronze-colored hair flopping in front of his face.
There was no more fire on the young man’s knuckles, yet his gaze burned.
The other sons of the Order held similar positions, crouched in a way that made Ezra think of jackals he’d once seen gathered around the corpse of some unfortunate camel.
“The Duat,” Everett murmured. “Didn’t you just say that’s what the ancient Egyptians called the realm of the dead?”
“Yes.” There was a slight prickle at the back of Ezra’s neck. He was beginning to think he shouldn’t have read the hieroglyphs aloud.
Rose pressed in with the rest of the young men. “So… this is like the ancient Egyptian version of a Ouija board? Will it let us speak to the dead?”
“Let’s find out!”
The scarab’s wings snapped shut as Everett snatched the piece from its linens and draped the golden chain over Rose’s head. The young woman let out a shriek that was perhaps meant to be playful, but only made Ezra’s blood glow hotter.
“That’s not some necklace from Cartier!” he snapped at Everett. “Get it off her!”
Yet Rose, who’d been so terrified of curses, stopped screaming.
Her manicured nails settled into her lap.
In the opposite mirror Ezra could see that the flapper’s face had gone slack.
Her lips formed a small pink O. Her eyes were glazed.
Unseeing. She didn’t flinch as the scarab crawled off the amulet, up the bare skin of her throat, and into her open mouth.
Celia, at least, had the decency to look horrified. “You heard the man! Take that amulet off!”
“Not yet.” Hugo’s ring glinted on his pinky as he held up his hand. “First we should see whether or not the spell actually works…”
Besides, Ezra wasn’t sure that yanking off the gold chain would do much good, now that the scarab was crawling up Rose’s tongue. He could see flashes of blue glass between her teeth, glimmering as they started to chatter. The tapping sounds of her incisors were like Morse code.
Celia’s eyes had gone sharp again. “She’s going to choke on that damn beetle if we don’t—”
A rasping sound came from Rose’s throat. The voice didn’t match hers at all. “C-C-Celia. My girl. What are you still doing there? My death is not worth your life.”
The young woman blanched.
“Oh ho! Is that the late Lord Beaumont I hear?” Hugo clapped his hands together.
Rose’s body turned toward the sound. Her teeth rattled again, before taking on a deeper, masculine tone.
“Shame on you, Hugo, frittering powers away on parties. It’s just what I feared—I told your father you could never fill Nolan’s shoes.
Your brother had such promise. He was going to take the Pratt family name all the way to the top of the Order.
Nolan was born to be heir, but you?” Rose’s blank eyes skittered about the room, her lip turning up with disgust only an aristocrat could manage. “You’re a waste of good blood.”
Hugo’s expression detonated with the force of a grenade—hot flashes of shock. Stray pieces landed in Ezra like shrapnel. The dead. The dead are speaking.
“Just your luck you’d get your overbearing grandfather,” Everett laughed. It was hard to tell if he was unaware of Hugo’s woundedness, or if he just didn’t give a damn. “I wonder who in the Beyond wants to talk to me.”
But Rose was turning in the opposite direction, click, click, clicking those teeth.
What rose in Ezra then was equal parts dread and need.
Of course, he’d thought about what he might say to George if he ever went to visit his brother’s grave.
How he’d kneel in Thornhill’s plush lawns and press his palm to the dirt.
It should have been me. I’m sorry. I hope you get all the damn sugar cubes you want, wherever you are. I hope I can be worth it. Worth you.
But now all of that sat trapped at the top of Ezra’s throat.
Rose’s mouth opened. “Du hast mich getotet, du hurensohn! Du hast meinen Schatten gestohlen!”
It took a moment for him to register the words. Not George, but German.
Bile rose in Ezra’s mouth.
The thing was, he had more than one ghost.
Screams tore out of Rose. He couldn’t understand the language, but the fury needed no translating.
Syllables snapping like bone; so many bones had been snapped, somehow.
None of Ezra’s commanding officers could explain it, nor could they understand how he’d destroyed the German platoon so thoroughly.
Fifteen to one. All of their voices were rising now.
Bubbles collected at the edges of Rose’s lips as she kept shrieking, an endless barrage of German curses mixed with drool.
Out of the corner of Ezra’s eye he could see Celia crawling across the table, not caring at all that the sequins of her dress slid up her milky thighs.
She’s trying to take off the amulet. But when she reached for the chain, Rose snarled and threw out her own arm.
An invisible force smashed Celia back into the mirror so hard that its glass cracked.
The veins around Rose’s forehead were pulsing. Red wreathed her eyes. “Wenn du uns verdammt hast, kannst du uns auch retten!”
One of the other young men at the table tried to remove the relic next, only to find his wrist snapped back. His howls of pain were almost a match for Rose’s screams.
Almost.
Ezra wanted nothing more than to run, but he was still a soldier at heart, and Rose deserved better. He stepped toward her with both palms outstretched. One hovering over each shoulder. “Rose… can you hear me? I need to remove this amulet.”
She grabbed his wrists. Pink nail tips pressed against his veins, but there was no pain. Her next voice wasn’t German. It was soft and warm—too full of sunlight to belong to someone so dead. “I protected you, brother. I saved you.”
George… The name went dry in Ezra’s mouth. He stared at the flickering blue beetle latched on to Rose’s tongue.
Her nails pressed hard into his skin. “It’s your turn now,” the ghost said.
“What are you waiting for?” Celia’s shout sounded distant, as if underwater. “Get that thing off her!”
Now the fingernails were starting to hurt.
Ezra glanced down at Rose’s grasp, expecting to see red wounds, but instead he was surprised to see that his skin was outlined with gold.
As if some medieval monk had decided to illuminate him.
Because of this light, he seemed to sense the room’s shadows even more strongly—they quivered in the edges of Ezra’s vision.
He felt something… both forgotten and familiar…
rising in his veins, filling them like some dark-scaled cobra.
Not again.
Not here.
He snatched the amulet’s chain. There was a pulse, but Ezra wasn’t thrown back the way the others had been.
He managed to tug the chain off Rose’s head.
She crumpled as soon as he did, her head full of bruised petals coming to rest on the table.
Drool dripped from her lips, made even more stringy as the glass scarab clawed its way out.
But the rest of the booth was not staring at this.
All eyes were on Ezra. Shining Ezra. In the mirror he could see that the gold light still traced him, though it seemed to be fading.
The… snaky feeling… was slithering away too.
Thank God.
He took a few long, deep breaths.
He wasn’t going to black out.
He wasn’t going to wake up to more ghosts.
Rose’s eyes were shut, but the flapper was still breathing. Ezra watched the scarab warily as it shook drool off its lettered wings and took flight, landing back into the amulet he was holding.
“Well, that wasn’t quite as fun as I’d hoped,” announced Everett. “I didn’t even get to speak with anyone.”
Hugo shuddered and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with the snap of his fingers.
He took several draws of smoke before he spoke.
“Disappointments, all around.” His stare settled on Ezra.
“You lost a brother to the war too?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
“At least yours saw fit to speak with you.”
All of the hollowed-out glass spaces in Ezra were aching. Echoing.
I protected you, brother.
I saved you.