Chapter 11 #2
Safe enough to catch their breath, at least. And feed the cat…
Calamity had come with the flat, when Celia and her mother first moved to Bloomsbury.
The fluffy white cat ruled over the tiny space—made even more cramped by all the boxes left over from a past inhabitant.
Trash, mostly. Eudora Sinclair despaired at the clutter.
Celia had swallowed her pride and sorted through the cast-off belongings.
There wasn’t much she could salvage, but she’d made friends with Calamity in the process.
The feline had come to accept the two women in her domain, though Celia had never quite managed to lay full claim to her own pillow.
Or her comings and goings.
Eudora Sinclair had long ago stopped trying to steer her daughter.
These days she mostly kept to bed. But Calamity quickly picked up where Eudora had left off.
No sooner had Celia cracked open the door to the flat than the cat was at her ankles, twining and meowing and trying to trip Celia toward the empty dish in the corner kitchen.
It smelled of boiled potatoes and much worse…
She hurried to crack a window or two, but there was no battling the stench. No fleeing from it either. All three of her guests crammed the doorway. They made quite the crowd—with Biz’s bloodied face and Ezra turning round as if he kept expecting a larger, magical space to appear.
“You live here?” hazarded Vincent.
“I sleep here,” Celia answered. This and the dress shop weren’t living… just existing. “And eat, sometimes.”
Biz bent down to shuck off her muddy heels.
She didn’t leave the shoes on the floor but instead gripped them tightly.
Surely she’s not afraid of soiling them…
Celia thought of all the sheep shit smeared across Thornhill’s rugs.
No. Elizabeth Ellington’s ruin remained grandiose.
She still had the space to turn everything around.
“It’s certainly… cozy,” the young woman croaked.
“Not really,” Celia answered. “Don’t worry. We won’t be here long.”
Calamity—who was not used to so many people—had flattened her ears.
Her tail whipped back and forth, growing to the size of a feather duster.
With a hiss she scurried under the couch that doubled as Celia’s bed.
Ezra tossed a pitiful look at the thing: its balding brocade that clashed so horribly with the wallpaper’s peeling parrots.
Her boa spilled over one gilded side. Her cat let out a horrible get oooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuut yowl.
Celia took a sharp breath and opened the kitchen’s icebox.
It was running out of ice: The drip pan threatened to spill, and the sprats that sat in the corner were going gray around the gills.
Just ready to turn. Not that her mother would ever know…
The woman subsisted on laudanum-laced tea and the occasional canapé.
Aha! Celia patted the sides of her beaded star dress…
“I’m sorry, did you just pull a meatball out of your pocket?” Vincent let out a laugh of disbelief. So much more bubbled just beneath the surface…
“A mummy’s ball,” Celia corrected. “I believe that’s what Hugo was calling them.”
Ezra’s face darkened.
Biz shifted so that it was easy to see the fine white scars on her heels—notched like a prisoner’s calendar.
“It’s all real, isn’t it?” she asked in wobbling voice.
“All those dreams I had… those nightmares…” Green eyes darted in her brother’s direction.
“Everything you saw. Everything you asked me to believe…”
“Magic,” said Celia. Best to just name it and be done.
Vincent let out another laugh. It might’ve landed a lady in an asylum, for how punchy it was.
Calamity yowled even louder under the makeshift bed.
Ezra shrank back, his broad shoulders hitting the doorframe. “This isn’t a joke, Vincent.” He didn’t raise his voice, yet somehow they all heard him. “I know it sounds absurd—”
“Absurd? I think we’re well past absurd.
I just watched a steel knife bounce off your chest as if it was nothing more than a rubber ball!
” Vincent looked as if he’d jumped into a game of charades, mimicking Everett’s stabbing before letting his fingers wiggle about wildly.
“And then you lit up like a Guy Fawkes effigy. Pray tell, what kind of magic is that?”
“We don’t know. We were hoping that’s what the clue might lead us to,” Celia snapped.
It was all too much—Calamity’s screams, the spoiling fish, the thought that the Order would be coming for her now, and she wasn’t ready for that reckoning.
She wasn’t even ready to run. “Before you broke into Ezra’s room, stole the scroll, and read it out for every blue-blooded magician in the room to hear…
” Mummy’s ball juices leaked through Celia’s fingers.
She hadn’t even realized she’d made a fist, squashing the aging meat.
“You’ve put all of us in the Order’s line of fire. ”
Vincent frowned. “The Order? What’s that?”
“I didn’t break into Ezra’s room.” Biz’s blood-streaked chin trembled. “I went to get Vincent’s headdress… The scroll was rolled up next to it. I figured that Ezra had finally decided to play one of our games… like the scavenger hunts Papa used to set up…”
“Your father was a part of the Order of British Magicians,” Celia said sharply. “So was mine. None of this is a game. It’s a matter of life and death and magic. This”—she waved around the flat—“is what happens if you lose…”
She took a breath full of slimy scales and drugged tea.
“I can’t afford to lose again. Neither can you,” she told Biz.
The other socialite met her gaze, eyes hardening.
Did she remember how many times Celia had watched her dance?
There seemed to be something swaying back and forth between them now.
Guilt and blame? No… the footing had changed.
Now that Elizabeth Ellington knew about magic, she’d become a different creature entirely.
Not prey.
Thomas Ellington had raised his daughter to be a hunter.
“It’s real,” Biz repeated, firmer this time. “The clue. The treasure it leads to…”
“My mother left it for me to find,” Ezra explained softly.
The socialite drew herself up, surprised. “Your mother? The one in Egypt?”
“I never had another.”
Biz blinked and Ezra took a deep breath.
The air seemed to twitch between them. Beneath the bed, Calamity gave a new meaning to the word yowl.
Celia thought that surely her own mother would stir, but the lump of blanket behind the ornamental screen remained still.
A teacup on the nearby table was sticky with oblivion: All hail the power of laudanum.
Even if Eudora heard what her uninvited guests were saying, she wouldn’t care to remember.
Wouldn’t care to do anything but lie there…
“We need to go to Cairo,” Celia said. “And we need to leave now, if we want to uncover this treasure before the Order does.”
A stormy expression clouded Ezra’s face, but he said nothing.
Celia collected her boa from the chaise and left the plate of turning fish on the kitchen counter. She kept the window cracked open—wide enough for the stench, yes, but also for Calamity. The cat deserved a chance to escape, as much as Celia did.