The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set (123 page)

Silence descended—the unnatural silence of work stilled midmotion. If Alexia had been a fanciful girl, she would have said
it was like time freezing, but she wasn't, so she didn't. She merely listened for the one sound that didn't stop.

It came, a low keening wail, and Alexia realized that
she was familiar with just such a noise. Not a sound made by the living, but still a sound
made
rather than a sound
manufactured.
It was the intermittent sharp cry of second-death, and Alexia had a pretty good guess as to who was suffering it.

F
ormerly Lefoux. Formerly Lefoux, is that you?” Alexia tried to make her voice gentle.

The silence stretched and then the faraway screaming came again.

There was something inexorably sad about the sound, as though it were that much worse to die a second time. It moved even
Lady Maccon's practical heart. “Formerly Lefoux, please, I will not harm you. I promise. I can bring you peace, if you would
like, or simply be here with you. I promise, no soulless touch unless you request it. Don't be afraid. There's nothing I could
do. I don't even know where your body is kept.”

The magnetic disruption wore off at that juncture, and the contrivance chamber sprang back into humming, clanking motion.
Right next to Alexia's head, a contraption that looked like a tuba, a sleigh, and a mustache trimmer cobbled together let
out the most amazing sound of
reverberating flatulence. Lady Maccon started in disgust and moved hurriedly away.

“Please, Formerly Lefoux, I should very much like to ask you something. I need your help.”

The ghost materialized into existence out of a massive glass valve to Alexia's left. Or, more properly, she materialized as
much as she was able into existence, which wasn't all that much anymore. Bits of her were now drifting off in spiraling fuzzy
tendrils. Her shape was no longer human, but more cloudlike, as little wisps of her noncorporeal form fought against the aether
currents. Many of those currents were now centered in on Lady Maccon, so the ghostly parts were carried toward Alexia. The
vampires called preternaturals
soul-suckers,
but science was coming around to thinking of them more as aether absorbers. This particular phenomenon of her physiology
was only really visible when she shared the room with a dying ghost.

“Soulless!” screamed Formerly Lefoux once she had found her voice, or possibly, found her voice box. She spoke in French.
“Why are you here? Where is my niece? What has she done? What have you done? Where is the octomaton? What. What? Who is that
screaming? Is that me? How can that be me
and
this be me, talking to you? You. Soulless? What are you doing here? Where is my niece?”

It was like some broken symphony destined to repeat the same few lines of music over and over again. The ghost was caught
up in a loop of reasoning. Periodically, Formerly Lefoux interrupted herself to cry out, a long low moan of agony to accompany
the wail of second-death. Whether it was pain of the spirit or pain in truth was
difficult to tell, but it sounded to Alexia not unlike poor Biffy being forced into werewolf shift.

Alexia straightened her spine. Before her lay her preternatural duty, staring her in the face. That didn't occur very often.
Under ordinary circumstances, she would have asked Genevieve for permission, but the inventor was gone. She had abandoned
her poor aunt in this state. The ghost was suffering.

“Formerly Lefoux,” she said politely, “I am in the unique position to offer you… that is, I could… Oh, dash it,
would you like an exorcism?”

“Death? Death! Are you asking me if I want death, soulless? To not exist at all.” The ghost twirled like a child's toy, spiraling
all the way up to the beams of the contrivance chamber ceiling. The tendrils of her fleshless body swirled around like the
feathers of one of Ivy's more excitable hats. Floating far above, the ghost became contemplative. “I have served my time.
I have taught. Not many get to say that. I have touched lives. I have finished them all. And I have done it after I died as
well.” She paused and drifted back down. “Not that I like children all that much. What can a ghost do? When my niece, my lovely
intelligent girl, became enamored of that awful woman. All I taught her was gone. Then the boy. Just like his mother. Devious.
Who thought I should end up teaching a boy child? And now. Look what it has all come to. Death. My death, and a soulless offering
me succor. Unnatural. All of it. Preternatural girl, what good are you to me?”

“I can give you serenity.” Lady Maccon's eyebrow was quirked. Really, ghosts in near poltergeist phase did ramble most awfully.

“I don't want peace. I want hope. Can you give me that?”

Sympathy, so far as Alexia was concerned, only went so far. “Very well, then, this is getting disturbingly philosophical.
Formerly Lefoux, if you'd rather not have my aid in the matter of your existence, or lack thereof, I should probably be on
my way. Do try not to wail so loudly. They will hear you in the street above, and then BUR will be called. Frankly, the Bureau
really doesn't need this kind of additional work on full moon.”

The ghost floated back down. For a moment, she recollected herself, switching from French to heavily accented English. “No,
wait. I will… What will I? Oh, yez, I will show you. Follow me.”

She began bobbing slowly across the room. She had no concern for obstacles or pathways through the devices, instruments, and
tools of Madame Lefoux's collection, merely floating in a straight line. Alexia, who was more substantial in every understanding
of the word, made her cumbersome way after. She lost sight of the ghost on more than one occasion, but eventually they ended
up in a corner of the massive room, next to a large barrel that rested on its side and was marked with the logo of a well-respected
pickled onion manufacturer.

As Formerly Lefoux neared the barrel, she became more and more substantial, until she was almost her old self—the ghost Alexia
had first met nearly half a year ago. A tall, gaunt, severe-looking older woman, in clothing years out of date and small spectacles,
who bore a marked resemblance to Madame Lefoux. There might even once have been dimples.

The keening wail was much louder here, although it
still seemed to be coming from some distance away, with an echo as though emanating from the bottom of a mine.

“I do apologize. I can't stop that,” said the ghost at Alexia's wince.

“No, you wouldn't be able to. Your time has come.”

The ghost nodded, an action that was visible now that she had managed to gather herself into better order. “Genevieve gave
me a long afterlife. Few ghosts are so fortunate. They usually have only months. I had years.”

“Years?”

“Years.”

“She is a truly brilliant woman.” Alexia was properly impressed.

“Yet she loves too frequently and too easily. I couldn't teach her that lesson. So much like her father. She loves you, I
think, a little. More, if you had given her the opportunity.”

The discussion had gotten away from Alexia again. This was often the case with ghosts—no more control over conversation than
of their own forms. “But I'm married!”

“All the best ones are. And that son of hers.”

Lady Maccon looked down at her own belly. “Everyone should love their child.”

“Even if he is a wild creature born to another woman?”

“Especially then.”

The ghost let out a dry laugh. “I can see why you two are friends.”

It was in thinking about Genevieve's love life (a thing, Alexia must admit, she tried desperately not to do, as it was so
preposterously captivating) that Alexia put everything together. Not fast enough, of course, because the
wails were getting louder, and nearer. Even a ghost such as Formerly Lefoux, with such strength of character and mental fitness,
could not resist her own demise when it was fated.

Alexia asked, “Is there something wrong with Genevieve?”

“Yes.” It was said on a hiss. The ghost was shaking, shivering in the air before her, as though riding atop an ill-balanced
steam engine.

“That machine, the one she was building, it wasn't a government commission, was it?”

“No.” The ghost began spinning as she vibrated. The tendrils were back, drifting away, floating into the air—puffs of selfhood
carried away. Her feet were almost entirely disintegrated. While Alexia watched, one of Formerly Lefoux's hands detached and
began drifting toward her.

Lady Maccon tried to dodge the hand, but it followed her. “It's the kind of contraption that could break into a house, isn't
it? Or a palace?”

“Yes. So unlike her, to build something brutish. But sometimes we women get desperate.” The screaming was getting louder.
“Right question, soulless.
You aren't asking me the right question.
And we are almost out of time.” Her other hand detached and wafted toward Alexia. “Soulless? What are you? Why are you here?
Where is my niece?”

“It was
you
who activated the ghost communication network, wasn't it? Did
you
send me the message, Formerly Lefoux? The one about killing the queen?”

“Yessss,” hissed the ghost.

“But why would Genevieve want to kill the—”

Alexia was cut off midquestion as Formerly Lefoux burst apart, like a rotten tomato thrown against a tree. The ghost exploded
noiselessly. Parts of her drifted off in all directions at once, a spread of white mist wafting all around and through the
machinery of the contrivance chamber. Then, showily, all those bits began drifting in Alexia's direction—eyes, eyebrows, hair,
a limb or two.

Alexia couldn't help herself; she let out a scream of shock. There was no going back now. Formerly Beatrice Lefoux had gone
to full poltergeist. It was time for Lady Maccon to fulfill her duty to queen and country and perform the required exorcism.

She approached the barrel of pickled onions. It lay on its side, and it was a very big barrel. She checked around the back
where multiple coils and tubes were coming out, hooked into some interesting-looking lidded metal buckets. Either Madame Lefoux
was particularly interested in the quality of her pickled onions or…

Alexia knew well her friend's style and design aesthetic, so she looked for any small protrusion or unusual sculptural addition
to the barrel, something that might be pressed or pulled. On the end of the barrel facing the wall, she found a small brass
octopus. She pushed against it. With a faint clunking noise, the wood of the pickle barrel slid away, like that of a rolltop
desk, revealing that there were, unsurprisingly, no onions inside. Instead it housed a coffin-sized fish tank filled with
a bubbling yellow liquid and the preserved body of Beatrice Lefoux.

The formaldehyde, for that is what the liquid must be, had done its job. There was also clearly some way in which the bubbling
injections of gas were allowing the ghost to still form a noncorporeal self while not losing too
much flesh to decomposition. Alexia was caught by the genius of the invention. It was one of the great trials of ghostly employment,
that specters would stay sane only so long as their bodies could be preserved, but that they could not form a tether and apparition
if that body was immersed fully in a preservation liquid. Madame Lefoux had invented a way around this conundrum by having
air bubbling through the formaldehyde in enough quantity to permit a tether, while allowing the flesh to stay submerged and
preserved. No wonder Formerly Lefoux had enjoyed such a long afterlife.

But even such ingeniousness as this, the height of scientific breakthrough, could not save a ghost in the end. Eventually
the body would decay enough so that it could no longer hold the tether; the ghost would lose cohesion and succumb to second-death.

Alexia thought she might mention this tank to BUR. They would probably want to order a few for their more valuable spectral
agents. She wondered if the gas injections had something to do with the explosive nature of Formerly Lefoux's poltergeist
state. In any event, the tank's work was completed. Alexia had to devise a way inside.

The screams were now deafening. Formerly Lefoux's misty body parts were centering on Alexia, attaching themselves to the exposed
skin of her arms, face, and neck, like body part burrs. It was repulsive. Alexia tried to brush them off, but they merely
transferred to her wrist.

There seemed no way into the tank. Madame Lefoux had never intended to open it once it was built.

Lady Maccon was getting frantic to stop the screaming. She was also becoming increasingly aware of time
wasted. She must get out of the contrivance chamber and stop Madame Lefoux's mad scheme to build a monster to kill the queen.
Why would Genevieve, of all people, want to do such a thing?

Desperate, she flipped her parasol, hefted it as far behind her back as her condition would allow, and swung it around with
all her might. She hit the side of the glass tank with the hard pineapple-looking handle. The tank cracked and then broke,
spilling the yellow fluid and with it a strong, suffocating scent. Lady Maccon backed away hurriedly, lifting her ruffled
skirts out of the toxic liquid. Her eyes began burning and watering. She coughed as the sensation moved to her throat, and
she tried to breathe in shallow gasps. Luckily, most of the liquid was absorbed quickly by the hard, compact dirt of the contrivance
chamber floor.