A Study in Darkness (27 page)

The two doors on the left were locked.
Now this is more interesting
. She could try to pick the lock, but the rusted metal said it wouldn’t be a silent procedure. Instead, she knelt, peering through the keyhole to see what she could. Quite a bit, it turned out, for there were no curtains on the window and the room was bright. Evelina bit her lip, angling herself to get the best view. Even though Magnus had said Lord Bancroft’s automatons had been burned, she half expected to see the familiar stack of trunks, or a bizarre machine that the Blue King had commissioned—indeed some indication that the doctor was hard at work on villainy.

But disappointment flooded her, making her breath huff
out in defeat. The room was almost empty, the walls papered with outdated posters from the theater’s previous owners. A dressmaker’s model stood forlornly in one corner, but that was all. Nothing the Gold King—or anyone else—was going to care about. She got to her feet.

That left only one more room. Would it be another disappointment, or would it be the locked door that led to Bluebeard’s skeletal wives, or perhaps pentagrams painted on a blood-caked floor? Then again, it might just be the doctor’s private collection of immoral publications.

She tried the handle, and as before it would not turn. Plus, she felt the buzz of a spelled lock—a simple enough piece of magic, but this was Magnus. Picking it would only end up releasing who knew what magical attack. She knelt to peer inside, but this keyhole had been blocked, perhaps hung with a bit of dark cloth. Superstitious dread filled her, leaving her tingling from the nape of her neck down to the palms of her hands. She got to her feet, pressing her fingers to the door, and opening her magical senses.

All she felt was nothingness. Whatever was going on in there, Magnus had shielded it thoroughly—and it was far beyond Evelina’s scope to pierce that veil. Now she knew she had to get inside.

A chair scraped. Evelina gasped and started, her feet leaving the floor in a bound of fright. She clamped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. She’d made more noise than she should have.

Why didn’t I sense him before?
The answer was simple. If he could shield one room, he could shield another. She’d been tricked.

“Who is there?” came Magnus’s voice from the other side of his door, and then his footfall.

Disgusted, Evelina stepped away from the door, shaking the dust from her skirts where she had knelt on the floor. There was nothing to do but act like she had legitimate business there. She cleared her throat, knocking on the door before nerves could overcome her. The experience was a bit like putting her hand down a wild animal’s burrow. No telling if she’d feel soft fur or something much less pleasant.
She was, after all, dealing with a man with a secret room, and one who ought to be dead.

The door swung open almost at the first rap of her knuckles. Magnus wore only his shirt and trousers, his jacket and waistcoat abandoned. The shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, the picture of casual comfort.

“Miss Cooper,” he said with just a hint of a tease. “What might I do for you?”

“I need parts. Good ones.”

“Parts?” he asked innocently.

“Mechanical parts.”

With a sly smile, he stepped out of the doorway, gesturing her into the room. “Please, come in and tell me all about it.”

She walked inside and caught her breath. In this bizarre theater, in this dingy building in the worst part of town, Magnus had a library. It was just three or four bookcases, and plain, practical ones at that, but they were crammed with ancient, crumbling volumes bound in gold and leather. Excitement flooded her with a mixture of greed and pure thirst, and a faint cry escaped her before she could hide her wonder.

“Lovely, aren’t they?” Magnus strolled across the room to pat a fat tome. “And almost as necessary as food and drink to those who love them.”

He was right, and she forgot everything for a moment: Keating and the Blue King’s war, the locked room, her curiosity about the other rooms the doctor lived in—the ones beyond the connecting doors to her left and right. Nothing mattered but that she had stumbled upon a trove of written treasures.

Magnus pulled a volume off the shelf, the tan leather heavily tooled with swirling designs, and held it out to her. Evelina checked to make sure her hands were free of grease and then accepted the book, conscious that it had to be hundreds of years old. The title was in a language she didn’t even recognize. Gingerly, she lifted the heavy cover. The binding creaked, releasing the scent of old paper and glue.
The smell brought back hours of pleasure she’d spent curled in her favorite chair, deep in study.

“The text is in English, though it’s hard to read,” she said.

“It was written by one of the alchemists of John Dee’s time. That is his original hand.”

Evelina glanced up, quickly reading the amusement on his face. It wasn’t just a book, but a book about magic. She had been starved for this kind of information all her life. “And you’re letting me look at it?”

“You’re one of the few people I know who would even appreciate it. There is little joy in having such a thing if one can’t share the experience. A book is so much more agreeable when it can be discussed over a glass of wine, don’t you agree?”

She did wholeheartedly, but she could not help looking for the trap hidden beneath the offer. “Is this some kind of temptation?”

“I am the serpent and you little Eve? No. There is no moral edict here for you to transgress. I merely ask that you do not dog-ear the pages.”

But she wasn’t done groping for reasons. “You wanted me to be your student once. Your Helen, as you called it. Is that what is going on?”

He fell back into a large wing chair, steepling his fingers. “Ah, that was my error. Helen is the embodiment of eternal wisdom captured in feminine beauty. A pure being, as it were, and a creature that I have always pursued as my muse. I have oft thought a human soul in a body cleansed of fleshly desire could achieve that perfection. Something you have the technique to create.”

“But last I checked, I was flesh. Don’t mistake what I can do with who I am.”

“And therein was my error.” He gave a tiny smile and waved her to another chair. “I think, with your tendency to leave broken hearts in your wake, you are rather more Lilith than any other archetype of the female soul.”

Lilith, seductress and mother of demons. Evelina didn’t like the comparison, but refused to rise to the bait. “Where does Serafina fit into all this? Is she your new Helen?”

“She is hardly new, but you are correct in that she is the vehicle of my ambitions in that direction—one that I have had the leisure to improve upon of late.”

Instinctively, she thought of the locked room, and wondered. “Was Serafina the doll that Tobias saw?”

“An earlier incarnation of her, yes. Since then, she has made significant leaps.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah, I can see the subject interests you. I would be more than happy to share what I’ve learned, colleague to colleague.”

Evelina savored the offer a moment. How wonderful it would be to compare what he had done with Serafina with her work on Mouse and Bird, to have a meeting of minds with someone with different, and definitely more, experience. Yes, it was dangerous, but it was also intriguing. “You’ve never answered me about how the dancing automatons operate.”

“I animate them magically. Surely you guessed that much.”

“But how? What you do is sorcery. Death magic.”

“Not at all. What I have achieved does not require death. Far from it.”

“Not even Serafina? She is so much more alive than the others.”

“And she needs to be, to serve me as I need her to. But truly, I have never put anyone to death so that Serafina could live. Does that satisfy you?”

Evelina nodded, though she knew very well the answer could be true and not true depending on a thousand things. Sophistry was second nature to practitioners of dark magic—at least, that was what her Gran Cooper had said.

“And why should it concern you?” Magnus went on. “You’re not in danger of casting any dark rituals. Nothing but the crudest spell slinging is even possible until an acolyte has undergone the correct preparation.”

It all sounded so reasonable. “But there is always the question of when studying a thing turns into condoning it.”

He laughed, but she caught the flash of irritation in his eyes. “How puritanical of you. But like so many extreme
views, it sees but a sliver of the truth. You believe I spend my nights drowning puppies in the service of the devil. In truth, I have never harmed the furred or feathered. I do not harm innocent things. Why bother? There are too many guilty ones ready to hand.”

“So you only harm those you deem guilty?”

“You are so focused on harm. Have you ever thought that I can heal?” And he rose and grabbed her hand, pulling her to her feet. And then he dragged her close enough that the book was pressed against her bodice. She could feel his breath on her face, the smooth heat of his long fingers wrapped around hers.

And then his energy flooded her. She had always perceived his energy as dark and oily, and that was definitely there. And beneath that was an astringent bitterness, like the strongest of coffee without cream or sugar. But once the first bite of that had passed, a dark warmth welled up, flooding her like the heat of a hot, hot bath. It reached into every pore, through every branching vein and work-weary muscle. Strength followed, buoyant and bright, lifting her up as surely as if Magnus had pulled her to her feet. It seemed to start in her feet and crawl upward like flames licking up a tree, setting her alight with a fire she’d thought gone forever. For the first time in many, many days, she was not afraid.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“Astounding!” she replied in an astonished whisper.

He released her hand, and she almost cried out. But unlike so many spells, it didn’t fade when contact was broken. He left the vivid feeling of health behind.

She’d healed before, but it had been far less efficient. With a great deal of effort, one could summon enough devas to fix a sprain or a bruise. And the last time she and Nick had combined their power in a healing spell, they’d nearly wrecked one of the Hilliard House drawing rooms. Magnus’s technique was like a thoroughbred compared to a pony.

“Imagine what that could do for the convalescent,” he said. “And it is all power that already belongs to you as a birthright of the Blood.”

She thought of Lacey. She’d told him the story of the dying woman, and knew he must be thinking of that, too. “What of the seriously ill? Can you heal them?”

His lower lip twitched in the suggestion of a smile. “Yes, but there is a difference between helping nature along and interfering with her plans. There is peril in being too good as much as there is in being a puppy-drowning madman.”

But she could only see Gareth’s grief and Lacey’s suffering—that grief, swallowed down because there was no time to properly feel it, welled up raw as an open wound. And suddenly everything became clear.

To hell with Keating’s reasons for sending her here to spy—all at once she had her own reasons for working with Magnus. She wanted to know what she could do with her magic. In fact, after that taste of power, she couldn’t turn her back on her potential for one minute more.
Be careful. You know how using power gives a rush to the head
.

Evelina struggled to calm herself, gulped air to calm her speeding heart, but it was so hard. She’d experienced the freedom of holding a book of magic and openly discussing it. She was sick to death of hiding, denying what she was and covering up her power like it was a contagious rash. And now this—she could heal.

This was a miracle, and she could wield it like a sword against the suffering she saw on every street corner. She could cure Imogen, rid her of those nightmares about wandering away from her body. Best of all, she finally felt there was a means to take back control of her life from creatures like Jasper Keating—because anything that could heal was a two-edged blade.
Be careful. Don’t even think that way. This is the kind of temptation Gran warned you about
.

Yes, this was the temptation she had feared, but perhaps it deserved a second look. There was definitely something here she could use.
Stop it!

She looked up, catching Magnus’s dark, dark gaze. “How did you do that?”

“Ah,” he said with a mocking lift of his brows. “So
now
the little kitten wants lessons.”

September 21, 1888

To E.C., care of The Ten Bells. You have until the first of October. Do not abuse my patience
.

Enclosed was a brown substance wrapped in a twist of paper. When Evelina unwrapped it, she recognized a pinch of her uncle’s shag tobacco.

WEDDINGS WERE NEVER THE SEAMLESS AFFAIRS ONE HOPED
for, but Emerson Roth, Lord Bancroft, had never actually seen the walking dead intrude upon a celebration—until now.