Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

41. The Haunted Streets

Chapter 41

The Haunted Streets

Victor broke the kiss with a frustrated snarl of pure wrath, driving his head back into the pillow as he fought to master his heaving body and panting breath. He was still touching me, fondling me gently now as if to soothe me from my sudden fright, cursing under his breath in a foreign tongue as the same harsh voice called at the door again:

“Doctor D’Arco! News!”

Again the same insistent knocking; I could feel Victor’s vexation rise as he grumbled the name Absolon against my skin, bringing the back of my hand to his lips for a defeated kiss.

“I don’t give a damn if the world’s burning, Absolon,” Victor called toward the door of the chamber; with a sigh I pulled the fur coverlet up over my breasts and his hands. “Stay in the hallway,” he continued, “and tell me, quickly and directly, what in all of hot Hell is so damnably urgent and why I should care.”

“They’re changing the date of Walpurgisnacht!”

I could hear Victor growl in exasperation. “Walpurgisnacht is the Eve of May.” His tone was abrupt, his enunciation crisp and incisive. “They can’t change the date of the last night of April—unless you mean to tell me they’re also rescheduling All-Hallows? The equinox? The solstice? Preposterous.”

“Yes, very preposterous; life is such a creeper.”

Victor grunted, his vague amusement doing little to lighten his dark mood. “Who told you?”

“Cyril Chesterton said a disprite told him so.”

“My new student Chesterton?”

“Yes, yes. Came downstairs to the door. I answered. Little frightened, Chesterton. Tell Doctor D’Arco a real disprite came to a seance, real one, no ectoplasm, looking for him. Real disprite said, Doctor D’Arco must know Walpurgisnacht is on the eve of the vernal equinox. ”

“Just now? Is Chesterton still here?”

“Yes, minutes only, very urgent; no, not still here. And John Brighton, John Brighton is moaning in the dungeon, nightmare again, very pitiful, a fiery dream of Walpurgisnacht. He told me so.”

“Greycliff…” I whispered, and Victor nodded: I had nearly forgotten that he was down here somewhere, presumably still locked in Victor’s dungeon. “If they change the date of Walpurgisnacht, sir—if they can —then your contract with Gremio runs out sooner? Then you…” I paused and drew a breath, unwilling to say the next word. “Then you… die , sir… not on the Eve of May, but six weeks sooner, on the March equinox? Then we have to banish Gremio in greater haste, before your time runs out and?—”

“Precisely. Someone is attempting to contact me in that regard,” Victor sighed, the hard edge of his voice softening as—hidden entirely by the rich fur coverlet—his thumb slowly, longingly stroked the side of my breast over the fabric of my chemise. “And, given the nature of this information, he is likely taking a risk in doing so.”

I could not allow myself to tremble—not now—but a single shiver still slipped my command at that unexpected caress, the pleasure of his touch made all the more forbidden for its risk : Absolon was at the door, danger rising somewhere in the night.

“Can’t you summon him into your parlor,” I mastered myself enough to ask, “whoever it is?”

“The parlor needs repair, and for something of this nature I need at least a name or a sensation.” His voice rose again as he called to the door: “The disprite’s name, Absolon? A description? A feeling ?”

“None mentioned, Doctor D’Arco.”

“Of course,” he whispered with a grim, sardonic chuckle, holding me gently to his chest to bring me with him as he sat up in bed with a groan. “Of course. And what ought I to do with you, Elizabeth,” he looked into my eyes, brushing the backs of his scarred fingers over my cheek, “now that I must go—immediately—to find this spirit in the streets tonight?”

“You ought to take me with you, sir,” I replied. “I’m still after all your student and your apprentice. And after all of this—” I rested my hand on his chest, pressing a small kiss to the corner of his mouth—one more, I thought, one last little kiss, before he puts the mask on again—“I won’t let you leave me behind.”

The wheels of Victor’s great black carriage rattled and growled over the fog-slick street; the gap of an absent cobblestone sent a shock through the bench seat, and I watched the choked glow of the lanterns sway while the sure, hollow rhythm of the black horses’ hooves carried on. Those swinging lanterns at the sides of Absolon’s driver’s seat were nearly the only light now: we had reached a lonely road in a part of London for which none of the city’s powers cared enough to install gas street lamps; if any old oil lamps remained, they were neglected and dark. Beyond the curtains of the carriage window I thought that I saw wan candles in the dirty windows of buildings, their weak halos flickering now and again as we passed—unless they were the glowing yellow eyes of some unknown creature of the night following us, watching from alleyways and shadows.

I raised my head from Victor’s shoulder to look up at his face. The dim, fog-thickened lantern light broke across his mask, and I wove my fingers tighter into the gaps between his own, our entwined hands resting together on his knee.

Only candles, then , I thought to myself, or I should have sensed a change in him . Slowly I laid my head back down against him, the black leather upholstery creaking at the shift of my weight, and I allowed myself to be soothed by the comforting sensation of his arm around me as he pulled me closer into his warmth.

But still, still, I could not help but think of the pale sheen of Gremio’s lone remaining eye casting cold shadows in the library as he dragged his terrible carcass across the floor, or imagine Absolon-creatures with gnashing teeth leering around the corners of shabbily shuttered stores.

“Something vexes you.” Victor’s voice sounded as ever it did behind the metal mask: more distant for its vague, muffled resonance; colder, more foreboding. But it was his yet, and what I did not doubt so many would find frightening was now to me a comfort.

“Only a little, sir.”

He grunted quietly, waiting for me to continue.

“I feel as if there’s something in the fog.”

“There is. And if we are fortunate, one of them will be the informant we seek.”

“Is he here, sir, do you think?”

“ Here , beside us now?” He paused for a moment, and I knew that he considered what he sensed. “Doubtful. This street is too crowded. Given the nature of his errand, he will likely be alone.”

I looked out the carriage window to what Victor had called the crowded street. It was dark and empty, so far as I could tell: save only for a solitary beggar making his slow way to an alley there was no life, no movement to be seen in the choking black fog.

I blinked my eyes. And then even the beggar was gone—disappeared—and I wondered whether the fog had deepened, or whether I had ever beheld him at all?—

Or whether he had disappeared in truth: some manner of disprite, or some sorcerer’s phantom vanishing under his own power.

With a tentative sigh I shivered lightly against Victor’s warmth: I did not mean to, but at the sight of the desolate street and its vanishing denizen a faint chill of the uncanny slipped down my spine. Our love ought to have made me stronger. I was in the arms of perhaps the greatest sorcerer the world had ever known, the great survivor who walked the midnight world in power, who loved me, who would fight for me and die for me, reckless of what grisly infernal fate at last awaited him below.

And that, I think, is why I was afraid. Now I only loved him all the more, more and more with each passing hour; my tender madness rising to a quiet obsession that every satisfying touch could only stoke, not assuage. And I could not think of life without him anymore.

I held his hand as he held mine, my fevered nerves alight. “What’s wrong with my Sight, sir? I thought that I glimpsed a lone man, but then there was only the London fog. Why can’t I See what you See?”

“They are ghosts, for the most part,” he whispered behind his mask, his rough hand stroking me lightly where it rested on my hip. “More difficult to See, generally, unless they wish to be perceived. And the black fog shrouds the senses: the perfect place to hide for disprites who prefer to remain unseen.”

The carriage turned down a different road again, shifting me closer against Victor.

“It seems a roundabout way of getting to Witch’s Corner, sir, when the tunnel as I remember it goes straight for long passages.”

“The better to discourage would-be followers from skulking behind,” his voice rumbled with dark amusement, “and to avoid a particular assortment of traps and ambush points. Our road home will be more indirect yet, most likely, unless circumstance necessitates haste.”

“A rather dangerous excursion, then. Do you ever tire of it, sir? After all you have seen?”

He slowly shook his head, and I thought that I caught a flash of a fond glint in his dark eyes. “That is the adventure of it: the future is unwritten, and even a fortuneteller’s glimpses can be revised—wrested, if need be—into something new and strange. There is always a new chance—to sense, to imagine, to feel—” His voice lowered as his hand that held my body curled, the strong fingers stealing a slow caress of my hip. “To come alive again. Alive as I have never known.”

I squeezed the fingers of his other hand where they lay interwoven with mine, letting my eyes fall closed.

“No,” he continued, and I was close enough to feel the deep rumble of his voice resonate through my bones, “I do not tire of it. Yet I am loath to take chances now—I, who have never been accused of caution—because I cannot risk you .”

He trailed his hand from my hip slowly up my side, and I exhaled softly as he touched my face.

“You’re a good man, sir,” I sighed, my whisper so faint it was nearly under my breath.

In his moment’s silence, I wondered if I had taken him aback.

“You’re a good man,” I repeated, “whatever they may say.”

A new sensation, I thought to myself as I rested quietly against him, listening and waiting for the steady beat of strong hooves to be joined by some shrill, spectral cry in the night: a new sensation, to feel that eerie trepidation of the uncanny in his presence, and yet have no fear of Victor himself.

And yet again I knew full well what he could do to me with his art alone, how entirely and how pleasurably at his mercy I would be once more, whenever next he wished to take me away: a new danger discovered, a new peril to beset me, though this time it was one which I welcomed with open arms. Any moment, any moment I might feel that dark shadow surround and caress and fill me again—I shivered to remember all that he made me feel in the moments before we were interrupted; a frisson of the softest and most gratifying kind of terror rose up my spine at the memory of being overtaken completely by his art, then being gently, inexorably readied by him to be overtaken again?—

“Are you frightened?”

“Only a bit cold,” I said, more hurriedly than I had planned: I had yet that outworn instinct for subterfuge, honed by hiding my heart and my fervent fantasies so deeply and for so long.

But if the only was a lie, the rest was not: my black shawl (the skull-dust having been thoughtfully removed while I was asleep) kept out some of the night’s chill, but not all.

“Partly the night,” Victor intoned, “partly the sensation of the ghosts themselves. But these little shades are scarcely worth your shivers. And you are warm now, Elizabeth, because I will it to be so.” No sooner did I hear a thrice-repeated phrase murmured behind his mask in a foreign tongue than my breath caught in my throat: I felt a dark flicker of his art begin to rise slowly through me, spreading with each quickening pulse of my heart as if carried by my blood, and I could not help but wonder if he knew—if he understood the nature of the memory that had so fascinated and thrilled me only a moment before—and I wondered what he meant to do now, my nerves tingling faintly beneath my heating skin as I worked to steady the slow breath I drew in anticipation.

“And you are safe,” his voice deepened as his arm around me held me tighter; I could feel the flex of the hard muscles under his black robes, “safer than ever you have been. Do not forget all the city’s dread of the notorious Doctor D’Arco. The most dangerous thing you will meet on these streets tonight rides beside you,” he lowered his head to me, and I could feel the brush of his black hood against the side of my neck, the cool, dead touch of the steel mask against my warming cheek, “his arms around you, his art within you, his heart in your hand.”

I needed not even the spell for his words and his touch to warm me, though his art lingered in my body all the same—a distant echo of his possession of me, more comforting than arousing now; a rich, steady ember-glow in my marrow to keep away the chill of the night. I touched the side of his mask, looking into that fearsome burning gaze before I closed my eyes, pressing a kiss to the fixed, skull-like grin of the slotted metal armor that barred my lips from his.

It could not hold us apart entirely: I thought that I felt a warmth on the other side, the lightest touch of his lips against mine through the narrow gaps as he kissed me through the mask.

Another turn, and the carriage slowed as the glow of gas lamps lifted some part of the darkness.

“Doctor D’Arco,” I heard Absolon’s voice, along with the subtle scrape of claws as he knocked on the solid roof. “Witch’s Corner.”

We pulled away from each other in slow silence, waiting for Absolon.

There was something strange, I thought, something satisfying somehow, about alighting from a carriage once more at that same shabby street corner, at the same witching hour, my circumstances now so altered that my first desperate venture to this place—only months ago—seemed now to belong to another lifetime. With the black-cloaked Absolon holding the door for me, with my hand held in Victor’s scarred, muscular grip, as I picked up the skirts of my mourning dress as I used the opportunity of my higher vantage point to look to the road ahead before stepping down the stairs: no moon to be seen, but Witch’s Corner lay at the extremity of the row of fog-choked street lamps, their shrouded points of light leading away like a procession of unblinking will o’ the wisps, drawing unlucky wanderers on, on, eventually to Simon Buckingham’s house. That was the way from whence I had come, the first time I arrived here, and I thought to myself that I hoped we needn’t go that way tonight.

I should rather go back through those dark, desolate streets behind me, with their vanishing beggars and their silent ghosts.

Down I stepped, my right hand in Victor’s grasp, carefully reaching my little shoes down to the slickened footpath where the cobblestones ended. My eyes rose to the sign hanging above the shop on the corner, still dripping black dew from the fog, the word Spiritualist almost entirely obscured by dark soot. I must have smiled a little to see it, even as I wondered what to do with my right hand in his now that both of my feet found the pavement.

I needed not wonder long. With a squeeze he kept my hand, his grip warm, firm, and certain, his other hand holding a lantern before us. He was reckless, I knew then, of who should know about us, and for the few steps and the fleeting moment it took for us to reach the door below the blackened sign I allowed myself the exhilaration, the romance of it all: it was an adventure to be with him here, together on the street in the haunted midnight fog, some mystery of the unknown on the verge of unfolding before us: for that moment Absolon was behind, driving the black carriage slowly around the corner at Victor’s command; the entrance to the shop at Witch’s Corner was still ahead, and for that moment we were alone but for the shadows of the night.

“Doctor D’Arco!” The close quiet of the fog was soon broken by the call of a man’s voice and the creaking groan of a door: Chesterton appeared before the spiritualist shop, huddled with crossed arms against a cold I could no longer feel. “I knew any two-horse outfit at this hour would be you. Come in, professor—and Buckingham,” he added with what seemed a mild start as he realized Victor was not alone, and I could tell that he did not entirely know what to make of my presence. “We took the liberty of closing after it happened, canceling the rest of the seances for the night to keep everything as it was for you; had to turn one or two customers away, but?—”

“Very good, Chesterton,” Victor grunted in approval, and I found myself hurrying a bit to keep up with his long, purposeful stride as he stepped to and through the door, pulling it shut behind us.

The old bell tied to the inside door knob clanked tunelessly on its half-frayed rope. Across the dim parlor, I watched the heavy curtains slump back into place behind the somewhat rounded form of Mistress Savoy; she emerged and stepped toward us, framed by the sequins of the embroidered moons and stars as they glowed a fiery orange in the candlelight from the table. By Victor’s lantern and that lone candle I thought that I saw the young woman’s eyes widen at the sight of us—at the sight of Victor himself, surely, paired with the sensation of his shadow—and I thought that I heard the soft, sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, almost a gasp, as her hand touched for balance the wax-spattered black velvet of the tablecloth.

“Doctor D’Arco,” she managed in her Boston accent, collecting herself admirably after her initial thrill of fright, “we hoped you would come. Mrs. Buckingham, pleased to see you again as well. For better or for worse there hasn’t been a change in the candle since, even now with it nearly spent, unless I missed it just this past moment when I checked the back again.”

“A steady flame,” Victor’s voice rumbled by my side as he drew me toward the table with him, “other than what can clearly be accounted for by techniques of the trade or ordinary circumstance?” Indeed, the candle was nearly gone; more wax hung in half-frozen rivulets over the candlestick than remained for what was left of the wick.

It was then that I noticed the cards scattered across the well-worn rugs on the floor, some face down and some face up, their arcane signs and symbols lying in haphazard disarray.

“Very steady,” Mistress Savoy replied, “no unaccountable flickering at all. I’ll admit I was hoping to see it burn blue on its own for once, without the powder trick.”

I heard him chuckle, just a little, and it struck me that their honest, unconcealed charlatanry seemed to entertain him—but his voice became suitably professorial when he spoke again. “Where were you when the disprite appeared?”

“Behind the curtain, taking my turn running the pull-wire for the levitating chair. The wire went slack—as if the chair were actually rising under some other power—and I felt at once a thin, cold draft as if someone had opened the back door, and yet at the same time a rush of heat, as if a fire had surged up from the tunnels. Then I heard Chesterton exclaim aloud from the parlor.”

“That’s when the cards went flying off the table, professor,” Chesterton continued where Mistress Savoy had left off; he was speaking quickly, his voice heightened in some combination of excitement and eager terror. “It would’ve been a great trick if it were ours—” Chesterton looked to his American co-conspirator, who nodded in somber agreement—“but I knew—I knew right away—I felt it, like a cold touch creeping up my skin, but so cold it burned like fire. The customer jumped up and bolted right out the door; good thing, too, because then the disprite talked to me.”

“Continue,” Victor grunted. With a glance to my eyes he slowly released my hand, and I let him go. I sensed a growing suspicion, a restlessness in him as he touched the table, pressing his palm into the black velvet; he broke a long, cooling wax-drip from the candle and rolled it between his fingers and thumb; he held the back of the chair, palmed the crystal ball, and I knew he was seeking something—a feeling, a sensation, some subtle trace of spirit the others had missed.

“Mistress Savoy heard him too. A man’s voice, hollow and distant, as if it came up out of the ground from some tunnel or tomb. Doctor Vittorio D’Arco , the voice said, and I could’ve sworn I saw a figure forming—I thought the black fog was creeping in under the door, rising into the shape of a man. He’s not here , Mistress Savoy had the sense to tell it as she hurried out from the curtains, and then it started to fade back away, as if the still night itself had blown it in through the door and now breathed it back up. Tell him , the voice came again, fading faster than the figure until I couldn’t hear it at all. Tell him now. He must know. Walpurgisnacht has changed. Walpurgisnacht is on the equinox.

“And that’s all, professor,” Chesterton concluded. “That’s all it said.”

Then Victor bent down, picked up two cards from the floor in his scarred fingers: two cards which I had noticed lying face up together, apart from and somehow more prominent than the rest; he considered them as his black brows lowered over his narrowing, burning eyes, holding the cards up to his mask as if to smell them—and then with a snarl of disdainful triumph and a flick of his wrist he cast them onto the table, setting his lantern down beside them with a heavy thump. I felt Chesterton and Mistress Savoy at my side, the three of us eager for the sight of the cards: on the first was an illustration of a street performer, his tricks laid before him on his table, his wayfarer’s hat cocked jauntily aside and a stage magician’s wand in his hand; the second card showed a king seated in mastery—a crown on his head and scepter in his grip—atop the high, precarious perch of fortune’s turning wheel.

My eyes widened. I thought that I understood, and I felt my stomach sink as my theory was confirmed: I smelt a faint, familiar scent of sulfur and fine cologne, horribly redolent of that disastrous attempt at summoning in Victor’s parlor; I drew closer to Victor by instinct, wanting nothing more than to hold onto him, to be held by him, grasping for his hand as I wondered how now we were to behave and why now, of all times, I should care; amid it all, I listened to Mistress Savoy murmur to Chesterton behind me: “The Juggler and the Wheel of Fortune—a maker of his own fate—some manner of mountebank, artist, sorcerer?—”

“ Fortunato! ” Victor bellowed in commanding rage, and in an instant his left arm was around me, holding me again to the heat of his powerful body; I do not know whether it was his voice alone, or the fury of his art, or the trace of his old rival that made the very earth seem nearly to tremble, and if not for the sound of the legs of the velvet-draped table chattering on the floor, I would have thought that the trembling was mine alone. But his strong hand was on the small of my back, and I knew that he felt the arch and quiver of my spine as his shadow rippled through me, my nerves and my skin tingling with a terrible pleasure in its wake. I heard my pulse in my ears as it occurred to me to panic, listening to my own blood race as I felt his art begin to take me away—I wondered whether to resist or to relax into this sensation I had come to so desire, desperate not to be overcome here , not now ?—

“Fortunato,” Victor’s voice seethed behind the mask, rising again into wrath as he reached back to seize the pair of cards in his hand. “Show yourself, Fortunato! Ego sum ego solus! ”

No sooner had he declared himself in those words of sorcery than the front door of the shop burst open in a sudden rush of wind; I head the mad clanging of the door-bell on its rope, the breathless gasps of Mistress Savoy and Chesterton behind me as all the light went out, and I saw the two cards fly from Victor’s hand as he flung them to the wind: two dim points in the night, rimmed faintly in the moon-pale glow of Victor’s faerie fire until the black fog consumed them.

Another surge of Victor’s art shuddered through me as he relighted the lantern, the wick flaring wildly in its glass as he seized both the handle and my damp hand—and then we ran.

Neither Chesterton nor Mistress Savoy followed; the door swung shut behind us, and they were gone.

We were alone again, running again from that dear, dingy fortuneteller’s parlor where we had met under such strange circumstance; but now we were pursuing rather than pursued, his warm grip firm around my hand rather than locked like iron around my wrist, and the Talisman that I once had pressed so deeply into my palm was no more than a memory. Though I could not feel the night for his spell that warmed me, I guessed its chill from the raw dampness of the fog against my face; my nerves were still heightened, sensitive to every stirring of his shadow, yet the exertion of the run through the night had distanced me from that peril of sinking too deeply into his art.

One more turn, and my breath hitched before even I felt Victor stop beside me. The foggy aureole of the street lamp before us began to change its nature: not to dim, precisely, but to bleed out its warmth into a pale, silver-white sheen like the glow of a ghastly moon. I thought of Mistress Savoy, waiting for the candle to burn blue—and then I smelt again that rich, cloying scent of a man’s cologne.

My grip must have tightened around Victor’s. I felt him subtly comfort me—the slow, deep stroke of his rough thumb across the back of my hand—as I sensed his shadow spread, unfurling into the fog like vast wings of deeper night as his hard body flexed and tensed at my side: not with fear, but with a kind of effortless, gloating triumph.

“Summon him, Elizabeth,” Victor pressed into the back of my mind, anticipating my question ere even I asked. I knew he had not spoken aloud: I could not feel the resonance of his voice at my side, only the heaving of his chest that slowed as we both caught our breath after the run. “Summon him, as you did before.”

“Can we trust him?” I willed my voice into Victor’s mind in turn, not wishing to speak aloud. “After what he did when I summoned him last?”

“No. But he cannot hurt you now, nor can the others who watch us. Whether he meant for this to be a rendezvous or a failed ambush, I have him now—already halfway bound to that lamp post.” He set his lantern down on the sooty dew of the pavement and gestured to the pallor of the street lamp with his open hand, chuckling in grim exultation as the gas light flared white with such force I thought its glass would burst, and the densest patches of the black fog that had drawn in around us seemed to shudder and pull away.

Fortunato , I whispered as I began, nearly under my breath, and I repeated the name twice more as I created him in my mind from the description Victor gave me on my last attempt, shaping him in the memory of the feeling of Victor’s fire. Fortunato, Fortunato.

“And if my old friend should attempt anything I find distasteful,” Victor growled aloud, indulging in the savor of his own wrath as if he wished for all the midnight city to hear him, forcing the lesser ghosts to bear witness, “he will be granted the privilege of being bound to a street light for the next hundred years.”

The pale glow of the street lamp began to blacken, as if some part of the amorphous bank of fog were gathering before it, shaping itself into a form.

A successful summoning, I supposed: Victor seemed pleased, flexing his hand more tightly, more possessively around mine, and from behind his mask I heard a quiet grunt of something like satisfied pride.

“Such a warm welcome,” came the sound of a man’s voice, seemingly from everywhere and nowhere at once, “for an old friend and fellow-sorcerer who comes in peace, bearing information which is rather pertinent to your survival—your own, Vittorio, and that of this sorceress at your side—your…”

From the way that his final word trailed into the night, I knew that the owner of the voice was considering me, attempting to discern what I was to Victor; I waited for my professor to introduce me as his student, his apprentice?—

“My Elizabeth,” Victor intoned at my side, his deep voice firm and even and certain; for a moment as my hand curled more closely around his, hidden in the blackness of his great cloak, the haunted midnight streets seemed warm and alive.

It was with some manner of comfortable detachment therefore that I watched the fruits of my summoning, at once like and unlike watching the vision of Victor’s phantom forming: the figure of a man that resolved before my eyes from the fog was more complete, more real somehow—not the image of a thing, but the thing itself—and yet indistinct, all shifting boundaries and uncertain features; every time I refocused my Sight, the details slipped away like sand through grasping fingers.

All I could say with certainty is that the apparition wore all black and was dressed as a modern man, his top hat most often the proper height for recent fashion, his head cocked with an arrogant tilt and his eyes aflame, his long black coat waving now and again in a dead breeze that did not touch the skin nor move the fog.

And every time I endeavored to focus my Sight again, I thought that I Saw from the corners of my vision points of light encircling us at distance through the black fog, as if a ring of the night’s stars had descended from the cloud-shrouded sky to settle around us on the city street. The others who watch us , Victor had said, and I stifled a shiver to remember it.

I had not been wrong about the eyes.

“As I told your associates during their little feigned seance,” Fortunato continued, “there has been a change of plans. A very purposeful change of plans, orchestrated especially for your disadvantage.”

“Walpurgisnacht,” Victor growled, the Germanic consonants crackling thick and heavy in his deep voice. “And after you betrayed us both to Gremio, why should I believe, little ghost, that you would trouble yourself to assist us now? I liked your information better before I knew it was yours.”

“And now that it is mine? Believe me or not. Do as you will. You always have.” I thought that I saw Fortunato’s lip curl in a self-pleased sneer. “But while I owe you no explanation, suffice to say that my exchange with Gremio did not go as planned—he did not honor his part of the bargain.”

I felt as distinctly as I heard Victor’s low, ominous chuckle beside me, bitter and sardonic and yet gratified. “Imagine that.”

“Some slight revenge would ease my mind.”

“It always did.”

“Only when justified.”

“And on which occasions did you determine it was not?”

Fortunato began to speak—but then he shook his head, a conspiratorial flicker in his eyes, and for the first time I sensed something more than solely antagonism between them.

“Then, Vittorio, if you mean to trust in my information after all?—”

“Not a single damned word of it,” Victor grunted. “But you will tell me regardless, and you will not waste my time, nor hers.”

“Then listen, and listen well. The date of Walpurgisnacht,” Fortunato began, “is to be changed from the Eve of May to midnight on the eve of the vernal equinox, six weeks sooner than it would naturally have been?—”

“If all of Hell were to miraculously unite, even then they could not change the date of the Eve of May?—”

“—No. Of course they couldn’t. You know it, Vittorio, as well as do I; but they can stretch pinpricks into loopholes as easily as did we—they can change the date of when they observe the thing, and declare that its day of observation will legally count for the thing itself. And that’s precisely what they did—what that damned Hell-horse did.

“As he and I had arranged,” the wavering shade of Fortunato crossed his arms as if preparing for a long, unpleasant tale, “I took a day out of my allotted time in Erebus to meet Gremio in the court of that infernal town, wasting one precious day I would have spent with my beloved Rosa, because the mule had promised me to sue on my behalf—to win for me more time with Rosa in the world below. That was to be his end of our exchange. A sorry state Gremio was in when he arrived—your handiwork, Vittorio, I presume?—his poor ashy carcass careening into court in a creaking wheel-barrow with some strapping imp huffing behind. I heard bone scrape on bone as Gremio turned his mule-head to look at me with his one lamp-like eye as he passed me by, muttered change of plans , and left me standing there—alone, betrayed, and made a fool—standing alone in plain view of all the gathered pandemonium, listening to the provoking chafe and wobble of that damnable unsteady wheel rolling over the pitted floor. He was carted over to the jury and started pressing not for what he promised me in our bargain, but for a change to Walpurgisnacht.

“So dismissed and cast aside, in my broken pride I thought of leaving, but a different instinct held me fast. And so I stood there and I listened to him, waiting to hear of something I could find a way to ruin.

“I didn’t have to wait long. From what I overheard him say, he had thought you dead, Vittorio—it matters little to me why , but the more time passed, the more his happy expectation of receiving you in Tartarus shifted to suspicion, and from suspicion to the vexing conviction that you had managed somehow to live after all, and to dodge Hell yet again. And so Gremio proposed to change the date of the masquerade ball, and for that observance to count by law for Walpurgisnacht itself, because that way the hour will come and go before the thrice-damned mortal sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco even realizes his time has run out. And when he does, it will already be too late.

“And that is how I came to presume that you lived yet, and that some doom is meant to await you at midnight on what was once the Eve of May—now the eve of the equinox—and that Gremio would be so terribly disappointed if a little leak of information were to lay his plans to waste.

“I watched in silence,” Fortunato continued, “all the while, as all those ghastly heads of the jury nodded, and I listened to the cyclical creak as the sweating imp wheeled Gremio out the far door, the latter nickering in triumphant overestimation of his own cleverness without so much as a backward glance to me.

“So you see, Vittorio, I take a certain pleasure in betraying him, as he betrayed me, and more even than usual I envy you for your flesh and blood: in my current state, the satisfaction of running him through with a fine sword is unlikely to be mine. But if I can be an instrument of the violation, the ruination of those new designs which Gremio preferred over his promise to me?—”

Despite the fog and the uncertainty of his form, I knew that Fortunato’s terrible eyes burned with a bleak fire, his lips pulling back into a smooth, fearsome smile.

“—It will be,” he concluded, “some consolation.”

Victor allowed a considering silence, and I watched the ghostly, touchless wind flutter at the corners of Fortunato’s long coat.

“The masquerade ball,” Victor replied at last, his voice no more than a low rumble in the black, fog-soaked night, “remains, itself, unchanged but for the date?”

“So far as I understand.”

“And Gremio? Does that horse-faced fool mean to attend?”

“If he manages to drag his sorry carcass out of his wheel-barrow in time—he has, as do you, only weeks to prepare—I don’t think he would miss it for all the embers in the Devil’s arse.”

“Good. If you prove true and discreet, Fortunato, consider your debt to me settled. If not,” Victor paused for effect, “you will, perhaps, learn to enjoy the view of this part of town from your lamp post.”

“A generous offer. But I do not demand the relief of debt this time, Vittorio; not even from you. Only revenge against Gremio will satisfy me.”

“That makes three of us,” I said under my breath, or so I thought: I felt at once the sharp, hollow fire of Fortunato’s spectral regard and the steady heat of Victor’s human hand constricting in pride around mine, our touch still concealed within his great black cloak.

Fortunato seemed to smile.

“Revenge delights you, does it, sorceress?”

“I cannot say it ever quite delighted me in itself. But it sustained me for a while, when it was nearly all I had to my name: it gave me purpose, a power to shape to the shapeless darkness. Revenge of the mind alone nearly set me against the heat of my own heart,” I was speaking to Fortunato, yes, but now I meant the words for Victor, “and I am sorry for it—but glad, so deeply glad, that I heeded my heart before it was too late. And for all that Doctor D’Arco and I both have endured, revenge against Gremio would delight me all the more.”

“Then may it be yours.” The shade before us seemed to tip his hat, and for the first time since he appeared I smelt again the dirt and the musty dampness and the sleepless smokestacks of a London night: I realized that the scent of his cologne was failing, and with it the material of his ghost. “If you get the chance to run him through, Vittorio,” Fortunato’s voice was dissipating, indistinct, “give the blade a good twist for me.”

The gas light behind him flickered in its glass, buffeted as if by a spectral wind, and then went dark; his features dimmed and faded into the black fog, and he was gone.

From the corners of my Sight I watched as pair by pair the distant points of light surrounding Victor and me winked out until only a few remained. Still a few too many, I thought; I would have trusted them better had their owners crept nearer and shown themselves, no matter how eldritch or fantastical their forms, like the faeries that had followed us by the Crystal Palace lake.

Or perhaps they were near already, close beside us, and it was only the soot-dark fog that hid them from me.

I drew closer to Victor in instinct as he took his lantern from the ground, and as he drew himself back to his full height I looked up to watch its glow break over the steel of his mask.

“What if it’s a trap, sir?” I whispered in the close, black stillness of the fog. There were other sounds now, as if the dead midnight street had reawakened to some poor semblance of life: I heard hooves and the slow wheels of a carriage in the distance, the steps and hushed voices of men down a dark alley at our side. “What if it’s all false? He might be an emissary of Gremio, contriving to draw us into some manner of ambush, or gain our confidence in hopes of collecting information for his master—or merely hoping to waste our time and efforts with false leads.”

“He might be,” Victor replied. “But if he attempts some act of treachery, it will be his last. And he knows it well. Let us go, Elizabeth.”

I nodded, and with the embrace of our hands held discreetly between us we walked the soot-slick pavement back toward Witch’s Corner—or so I presumed, though beyond the misty light of Victor’s lantern there was nothing to be seen in the darkness—and I became acutely aware, this time, of how he matched his pace to mine, slowing his long strides that I would not have to fight to keep up. He had still that mild hitch in his step, as if his injuries from the battle with Gremio still troubled him to some degree, yet I thought that abroad on the streets was not the place to ask.

“Do you trust Fortunato, then?” I asked Victor, watching the rim of the halo of his lantern for any sign of movement as we walked.

“Not particularly—other than that, as betrayals go, this one would be entirely inelegant: were it to become apparent that the legal date of Walpurgisnacht has not changed after all, and we find ourselves prepared to face and banish Gremio six weeks too soon…”

“Then we’ll be even more prepared when Walpurgisnacht comes,” I completed his sentence after he paused for me. “Or we could seek out Gremio ourselves, were it possible somehow, and become the hunters rather than the hunted.”

“Precisely. A singularly ineffective betrayal, if it is meant to be so. And so you may take some measure of solace, I think, in the fact that such ill-chosen incompetence has never been his style. But amid such company as we keep, you are right to speculate—to continue to consider—to mistrust.”

I meant to reply, but the words caught in my throat: at the far limit of Victor’s lantern glow, I thought that I saw a man in ragged clothes stagger out from an alley toward us—but no sooner had the stranger’s face caught the light than I saw it twist and blanch, the would-be ruffian’s eyes wide in terror as a mortal fear seemed to plunge through him. The touch of Victor’s shadow, I did not doubt: that same sinking sensation of his dark art that brought me now such familiar comfort, that threatened at any moment to rise and bring me again such heady pleasure, now drove a man to turn and run back to the blackness like a scrabbling insect frightened back into its den.

And still Victor walked on with me, unperturbed, a quiet grunt behind his mask at first the only hint that the incident had so much as met his attention.

“Your shadow, sir,” I breathed with a small smile of relief. I ought not to have felt as safe on those midnight streets as I did in that moment, witness to the effortless dread he stirred in the lesser creatures of the night.

“No. Your shadow and mine,” he whispered; his deep, low voice sounded half-hollow for the mild echo of his mask. “Entwined.”

My pulse warmed and quickened, ever so slightly, at the pride and promise of that last word; I thought I heard the slip of my own quiet sigh as I wove my fingers closer between his.