Chapter 5 #2
“It died the same year Lady Blackwood did. Right around the time the war started.” That autumn had been filled with dark headlines.
George had stopped playing soldier that year too, putting aside childish things for notions of a real battle.
“Biz’s brother was fixated on the idea of being a hero.
Almost every boy was, in the war’s early days.
We’d been spoon-fed bullshit about the Boer battles and fighting for king and country.
Even though it was Lord Blackwood who told us those stories, he didn’t want George fighting at the front.
Not without me. If we enlisted together, if we watched each other’s backs during battle, then we had his blessing.
” Again, Ezra felt that weight on his chest as he gazed out at the tidy brick mews of Mayfair.
“I followed George to France just before I turned eighteen. My paperwork was fuzzy anyway… Lord Blackwood had never formally filed my presence with the government, but they were so desperate for soldiers at that point that they overlooked my alien status. I wasn’t British enough for citizenship, but I was British enough to become machine gun fodder.
I wore their uniform. I shielded their sons.
I tried my damnedest to keep George alive. ”
Bones splintering again.
This memory was all too clear. He recalled the cold fear of seeing the enemy’s shadows rise out of the tree, their bayonets catching the wicked starlight.
He remembered the smells of blood and piss and every awful elemental thing that made up a man, spilling into the dirt.
He remembered Noah—a private from Lancashire who received so many freshly knit socks from his sisters that he’d shared them with Ezra too—getting disemboweled.
He remembered understanding that he, too, was going to die here. Horribly.
And George.
His brother fought bravely. He’d always fought bravely—with sticks and stones and bayonets—but by God, his last battle was something to behold. His bayonet went clean through one attacker’s throat. He whipped out his pistol and fired at another, who fell too close to Ezra’s feet.
We fight together.
They’d pulled strings to be assigned to the same unit. Really, someone of George’s ranking could afford to ride out the war in some beleaguered chateau. He never should have been anywhere near the front lines.
We protect each other.
Another German pulled out his Luger. Ezra could see straight down the barrel of the pistol—the bullet was meant for him. And then, all he could see was George stepping in front of the gun.
His face was so clearly there.
And then it was not.
It seemed impossible that someone so funny, so earnest, so brave could become just another pile of meat.
But the bullet didn’t care. It tore straight through George Ellington’s skull, exiting his eye in a sick scarlet bloom.
The blood. The blood, the blood. Red washed everywhere as Ezra watched his brother’s life spill out.
Everything that had made George George… gone in an instant.
Ezra felt himself disappear too.
When he regained consciousness, everyone else in the foxhole was dead.
The Germans’ bodies were almost unrecognizable, apart from the crimson piping of their uniforms. Many were missing limbs.
Ezra couldn’t have done that with a knife…
Had a grenade gone off and knocked him out?
That would be the logical explanation, but there was nothing logical about the way the trench’s bodies were arranged in a perfect circle around him.
These details hadn’t mattered much to the commanding officer. “You stopped the bastards, Bright. You’re a goddamn hero!”
No, Ezra knew. Heroes saved people; they didn’t dismember them in a fit of black rage… George was the one who should’ve earned the medal for valor. It’s what true British soldiers do.
“I tried my damnedest to keep George alive,” he told Vincent again, his voice splintering. “I wasn’t enough.”
And yet he was also too much. Lord Blackwood was no stranger to magic…
magic he’d pretended Ezra was imagining.
The golden light under his basement door was proof.
But why convince a child they’re going mad?
Why send a seventeen-year-old off to war?
Why fear his return? Unless… he knew. He knew what Ezra’s powers had done.
The rage.
The shadows.
The shine.
It had felt all too familiar, grasping the amulet.
Magic might explain the way the Germans’ bodies had been so broken—arranged in such a perfect circle.
Ezra was too scared to push into this theory.
You might not like what you find. He’d tried to warn Celia, the way Lord Blackwood once tried to warn him.
You’re not safe. There’d been so much terror lurking in the man’s voice at breakfast, the morning before the Victoria Cross was pinned to Ezra’s chest.
“Lord Blackwood never forgave me for George’s death.
I saw him just once, when I returned to London.
He made it quite clear that I was never to return to Thornhill.
As far as the Ellingtons were concerned, I was dead too, and God help me if I tried to tell Biz otherwise…
He intercepted all my letters to her.” Ezra sighed.
“I had no home to return to. Egypt felt too far, and London was too loud for a recovering soldier. Oxford presented the perfect solution. Lord Blackwood helped with my admissions process, but only on the condition of my silence.”
A disbelieving look had taken over Vincent’s face. “That’s bullshit.”
“It’s true—”
“I believe you, Ezra.” The other man ran a hand through his bright gold hair.
His jaw clenched. “I—It’s just unbelievably shitty.
You weren’t some souvenir Lord Blackwood found in a Cairo market.
You were a child! But he treated you like some sort of talisman, asking you to take responsibility for his son’s life?
In the war to end all wars? I call bullshit. ”
Ezra’s knuckles went white. This was not the black-snake rage… but it did come from somewhere deep. So deep that he almost never felt it on the surface, like this. “Please, don’t tell Biz about that last part. It’s best if she believes the silence is all mine—”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
“I shouldn’t even be here,” Ezra said. “If Lord Blackwood knows I’ve been socializing with his daughter, there will be trouble.”
“Good! You’re coming to the Cotswolds with us this weekend! No question.”
“I’m not talking about a slap on the wrist, Vincent. Lord Blackwood could find a way to pull my funding.”
“Then let the bastard pull it. I have more money than I know what to do with. No one will bat an eye if I put together a private grant.”
Ezra couldn’t say why this made him uneasy… Perhaps it was the idea of all the blood that had bought the Cains’ fortune. There’d always been a slight stickiness there… even though he knew most of the munitions factory bullets had killed Germans.
“I couldn’t,” he began.
Yet he was… Their car had slowed to a stop in front of the tailor: HUNTSMAN. The display window was awash with gold letters, displaying the finest of jackets on headless mannequins.
“Nonsense,” Vincent dismissed. “I’ve got to do something constructive with my inheritance, and I’d rather invest in you than the railway. Now, let’s get you dressed the part.”
Wealth, Ezra had come to realize, had a certain scent.
This shop was filled with it—silk-stitched pocket squares and crisp suits.
Leather undertones. The store was pristine.
The tailor, precise. Ezra could feel the cut of the man’s gaze as Vincent introduced them.
More measuring followed. He’d never been so closely fitted before—all of his childhood suits had been George’s hand-me-downs, slightly too small.
His current suit was from Selfridges, which Vincent uttered like a curse word as he explained the situation to his tailor.
“Please get him out of these department store rags, Johnston! We’ll need the usual set of suits. Oh, and a velvet dinner jacket. Humor me, Bright.” Vincent’s lips quirked when he saw Ezra’s expression in the floor-length mirror.
“I don’t need velvet—”
“You do, if you plan on spending your evenings with Bright Young Things like Miss Sinclair.” Vincent stepped up behind Ezra, close enough for his breath to leave a mark on the bare skin of his neck. “So. Did you two have a good time last night?”
There was a slightly bemused look on Ezra’s face as he stared into the tailor’s mirror.
Again, he wondered what Vincent might think, if Ezra spoke of secret societies and magical speakeasies.
His old friend was always one for the mystical side of things—much keener to read literature about Ra than any of the actual pharaohs who’d worshipped that god.
“She showed me the ropes,” he said instead.