The Rose Master (16 page)

He stepped forward.

“This member of our order has decided to abscond his duties,” the Master said. “A pity.”

The room appeared to hold its breath. One of the men behind Lord Grey stepped forward and shoved him to his knees before I even had the chance to understand what was happening.

“He thinks he is too smart, too talented to remain with us. He thinks he has surpassed our abilities.”

Laughter seemed to swarm around the room as Lord Grey stood, once again, to face the Master.

“Let us see if his power matches his arrogance.”

As his last words dimmed, a monstrous chanting began, guttural and harsh, expanding in the very air we breathed. The temperature plummeted as the candles petered out, leaving us all in absolute blackness.

For long moments, there was nothing; no sound, not even the breathing of the men I knew were still in the room. The cold was an agony. I turned around to look for any glimmer of light, trying to tear through the darkness around me, when I heard Lord Grey groan.

“Sir!” I cried, without concern for anyone else hearing me. There was another groan, but I didn’t know where he was. I needed to get to him!

I saw the eyes at the same time Lord Grey did, for we gasped in unison. They were a blinding yellow, glowing enough to allow me vision, but before I could take advantage of it, something lifted Lord Grey high into the air and flung him across the room. He crashed against the floor with a crack of bones.

None of the men went to his aid. Someone had to help him!

I tried to slip into the circle, but a jolt of heat pushed me back, just like when I’d touched Lord Grey’s hand. I tried again as whatever creature the Brothers had summoned hissed and stalked after its prey, but all I managed was to burn myself. The creature’s eyes got closer and closer to the crumpled figure on the floor.

“Someone do something! Sir!” I screamed.

As if he’d heard me, Lord Grey lifted his head, catching sight of what was hunting him. He shouted something I couldn’t understand and a pool of light surrounded him. Stumbling to his feet, he reeled as far away from the eyes as he could manage. The circle held him trapped inside, like it held me outside, the men stoic in absolute silence.

“Sir, look out!” I screamed just as the air rippled next to him. Lord Grey leapt aside at the last second, missing a strike by a hair’s width. Had he heard me?

Fear tightened around me, as I was sure it tightened around him. He had to know what to do to end this. He was a magician, one of the Brothers!

Lord Grey looked in my direction and I could see, even from that distance, how frightened he was.

“Do something, sir,” I said, my voice cutting through the darkness. I knew he survived; he was sitting in his chambers with me this very second, showing me his life, but it was all so real. He didn’t need me to do this; I knew that as well, since I hadn’t been there the first time, when this had really happened. So why did I feel so powerless, like I’d failed him at the most crucial of moments?

Lord Grey turned back to the creature I still couldn’t see, facing it even as its growls sent chills down my spine. He lifted his arms high above his head and held them there.

I began to hear gasps and the screams of splitting wood. Warmth spread out around me, rising to a boil, morphing the air before my eyes into a shimmering curtain.

Lord Grey’s voice sliced through the sudden noise, power coiled in his every syllable.

“Get thee gone!” he screamed and slammed his arms down to his side.

All air left the room as the explosion ripped through it. I was thrown backward against the wall, screams rising from all around me to an unbearable level. I covered my head as objects crashed on top of me, burying me under their painful weight, and waited for the end, whatever that might mean.

Seconds, minutes, or even hours later, I became aware that the screams had stopped, and that nothing was collapsing on me anymore. Shifting my arms, I allowed the rubble that covered me to slide off my body. My limbs ached, but I wasn’t bleeding, not that I could see, at least.

The room, however, was scored with red. Blood covered the floorboards, glittering like ink in the light that had suddenly returned, pooling around each body.

Oh, Lord, the bodies!

Every man who’d been in the room was dead. The Master, Allister, all the uninitiated. Their bodies lay in the most impossible of angles, their flesh torn at the most vicious places.

Lord Grey lay in the middle of the circle, immobile.

“Sir,” I whispered and scrambled toward him. “Sir!”

But I was being pulled backward even as my hands dug into the boards to hold on to this moment. I needed to see what was going to happen to him, what would happen to all these people, but it was already rushing away from me, the room changing.

I gasped as Rosewood’s sitting room appeared before me, Lord Grey looking thinner than ever, his eyes unrecognizable as he paced back and forth.

“You need help, August,” his father said. “You need to sleep. To see a doctor. You haven’t rested for a moment since you’ve returned. What happened in London, son?”

“Leave me alone! Just leave me be!”

The memories shifted faster now, faster than I could grasp.

Lord Grey pacing for hours in his chambers, his hands trembling with energy, his eyes half-mad with thoughts too dark to begin to guess at; Ms. Simple appearing, pushing plates of food toward him, picking them up untouched hours later; Lady Grey, the woman I’d seen in lavender, coughing her way to the grave as her son looked on from the pool of shadows in which he lived; Lord Grey ripping a letter to shreds while his father watched, the only visible words left,
Lilly Bellingham
; Lord Grey turning to books, thick tomes of unfamiliar symbols opening up before him, his hands landing on pages at random, calling out words as if they were his salvation; creatures rising from nothing, from air, objects appearing and disappearing, fires started and snuffed out with a single glance from feverish eyes.

Just as I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand any more, the flashes stopped.

Lord Grey sat in his room with a book opened before him.

“Sir, please,” I said just as he opened his own mouth. A string of complicated, twisted syllables left his lips.

I knew what had happened as soon as the cold entered the room. I recognized the chill, the kind that invaded every piece of flesh it touched. It was the same chill I’d been fighting since I’d stepped foot in Rosewood Manor.

It had no real shape, shifting between male and female, animal and human, visible and invisible without care. Lord Grey watched it with a thin smile on his face.

“Do you think you’re strong enough to kill me?” he asked. “I welcome your attempts.” He opened his thin arms and closed his eyes. “No? Well, that is a shame.” He brought his arms down as he had in the order’s room, and I braced myself for another disaster.

Nothing happened.

The creature laughed. I gasped at the familiar sound, feeling the hairs on my arms prickling with fear.

“Oh, August, my boy, you think I’ll make it so simple for you? No. You did not pay attention in class, it seems. Your skills are not enough. They will never be enough.”

With that, the creature lunged at him and lifted him off the floor.

“And do you know why, dear August?” It growled softly. “Because I am a part of you. I will feed off you until the day you die, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

It released its grip and Lord Grey crashed to the floor.

I gasped as the round mirror disappeared from before me.

“Take a moment, Anne. It was a lot of information for you to process, but it’s better to see it all at once. There is just a bit more I’d like you to understand, but I thought it best to let you come back to the present for a moment.”

Words had abandoned me. My head throbbed with everything I’d seen and felt, with everything the man sitting in front of me had lived through. I opened my mouth to speak, but my mouth was so dry I had to clear it a handful of times before anything but a croak came out.

“It can’t be true, sir,” I said.

“I can assure you, it is. All of it.”

I rubbed a hand across my aching forehead. “Magic exists? Demons and creatures, it’s all real, sir?” He nodded. “That’s what haunting this house?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But, sir, you were able to . . . kill the demon the order conjured up.”

“The term is ‘banish.’”

“Banish, then, sir. You were able to do so then, why can’t you with this one? Is it because of what the creature said, that it is a part of you, sir?”

Lord Grey looked away. “Partly. The creature I conjured is a wraith, a powerful being, much more powerful than the demon the order set loose against me. It feeds off my energy, making it impossible for me to banish it on my own. And there is one other thing I need to know before I can attempt to defeat it: who its master is.”

“But sir, if you called it up, shouldn’t it serve you? Shouldn’t you be its master?”

Lord Grey’s eyes pierced mine. “That’s the very question I’ve asked myself over and over since all of this began. You see, demons dwell in an in-between space that even magicians know nothing about. They are wild and untrained, but can be called up for short amounts of time to perform specific orders, as the one the Master raised against me was. It was no more than an animal, a large, powerful one, to be sure, but an animal nonetheless. Wraiths, however, roam our world, doing the bidding of their human masters. They are intelligent, familiar with our ways, able to manipulate us with one word. These creatures cannot just appear unbidden. That means someone conjured it before I did, since it is painfully obvious it does not recognize my authority. And yet, it came when I called it. A demon who is already bound to a human will not obey another’s call unless it’s ordered to do so. And since I do not know whom it serves, I cannot fully defeat it. All I would manage to do would be to cast it out for a while, but it would return, twice as strong.”

“Do you have no suspicions as to who could have conjured it, sir?”

“Of course. The Master is my first choice; he was powerful enough to perform the conjuration, but as soon as he breathed his last in that room with the rest of the Brothers, his bond with the wraith would have cracked in two. Besides, Anne, you must remember that I called its name at random. No one sent it here. Its master could be anywhere in the world.”

I frowned. This was all so confusing. Taking a breath, I steered Lord Grey back to the past, to what he did know. “And your father, sir? What happened to him?”

“He drowned. In the very fountain where you almost lost your life, Anne. He wasn’t supposed to touch it, no human was, and he knew it all too well. The fountain was a kind of truce the wraith established with me, its home, of sorts. It promised not to harm the people I cared about, drawing its energy only from me and the fountain, as long as no one touched the black monstrosity.” He sighed. “I did my best to warn them all, to keep them safe. You saw the symbols on the hall stones, all of them stamped there by my magic to offer what little protection I could grant. The mirror in the dining room, the same. But all my efforts were like holding a cloth napkin to stave off a thunderstorm. The wraith broke its promise and attacked my father as he sat in a drunken stupor, clawed at him in a frenzy of blades until it forced him out of the manor and into the surrounding woods.”

My heart grew a layer of ice. “Sir, where was your father sitting when the attack began?”

“In the armchair in the sitting room, why?”

“I think I saw the marks.”

He stopped moving. “You saw the claw marks.”

I nodded. “As I was cleaning, sir.”

His shoulders twitched in a shiver. “Yes, of course. That is why I keep the sheets on the furniture. Unpleasant, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, sir.”

“My father found himself at the foot of the fountain.” Lord Grey’s voice had thinned and paled. “Who knows what happened? Perhaps he staggered and reached for support, perhaps he was pushed. I found him later that day, bloated with water, his eyes reflecting the black marble underneath their dead gaze. That was almost six years ago.”

I swallowed. “Sir, please forgive my presumption, but why have you all remained here? Surely leaving would have ended the nightmare,” I said.