And yet, if Alice were honest, she did have a mean streak, had enjoyed watching the girls at Wycliffe jump through hoops for her attention, doing all manner of things and giving her all manner of gifts to be invited on one of her many adventures. It didn’t matter that one never knew if they would end in simple fun or in a firm reprimand from Miss Gray. There had been very few girls at Wycliffe who did not think it worth the risk.
And then there was Henry. That they had dared to speak of her brother’s death—to make light of it, even—filled her with hatred so powerful it almost stole her breath. She was very nearly shaking with rage.
Perhaps this was her comeuppance. What was it Edmund had always said? You reap what you sow.
“Lia?” She jumped, following the voice to the end of the row. James stood there, his face a mask of shock. “Is it you?”
Alice shook her head. “It’s Alice.”
James’s shoulders sagged, the light leaving his blue eyes. “Of course, I’m sorry. I saw you…I thought…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
She stepped toward him, looking up into his blue eyes. “It’s all right. We are twins, after all. I’m only sorry to disappoint you.”
He smiled, but she could see that it cost him something. That it did not come easy. “Nonsense. I am happy to see you. I’ve been meaning to call. I heard Virginia and Edmund left. Does that mean you are all alone in that great house?”
“Yes. They left some time ago.” She was embarrassed to realize she did not know how long they had been gone.
“But isn’t it strange? Being alone in so big a house?”
The look in his eyes was too close to pity for her liking, but then she remembered her appearance, the wild ride to town from Birchwood. She straightened her back and tried to smooth her hair.
“Not at all,” she said firmly. “I quite like the silence. It is nice to be truly independent. To have no master.”
His nod was slow. “Yes, I suppose when you put it like that, I can understand.” His gaze traveled her face, and she wondered if he was seeing her or her sister. “Can I help you with something? In the store?”
She looked down at the Keats book, still in her hand. “Oh, no! I was simply browsing. Coming in out of the cold for a moment.”
“Of course,” he said. “Would you like to stay for a chat? I could offer you tea….”
“Tea?” Her customary bravado faltered with the offer. She could not remember the last time someone had offered her anything, least of all their company. She felt suddenly shy, uncertain of the rules. “Oh…no, thank you. I couldn’t. I…I must be going. It will be dark soon.”
“All right, then,” he said. “Perhaps another time.”
“Yes, of course.” She shoved the Keats book back on the shelf, and he reached out for her shoulder as she moved past him. She shrunk back, unaccustomed to being touched.
He held up a dried leaf, still attached to a twig, and smiled faintly. “It was caught in your hair.”
“Thank you,” she said, continuing to the door. She opened it and was preparing to step through when she turned back around, meeting his eyes. “It was nice to see you again, James.”
She stepped into the cold and shut the door behind her, hurrying for the carriage, her shoulder still warm where James had touched her.
She made herself a supper of bread and cheese and washed it down with hot tea. She felt triumphant. It had taken her nearly twenty minutes to light the stove and find a proper cup, and she had had to guess in her measurement of the leaves, but in the end she had done it: brewed a perfectly good—albeit strong—cup of tea, all by herself.
She sat at the servants’ table to eat. It was the first time she had been content somewhere other than the Plane since before Father’s death. The table was heavy and solid under her plate, the kitchen warm from the stove, the tea fragrant and soothing. She allowed her mind to wander, surprised to find that, for once, it did not go directly to the Souls, the Plane, Samael.
Instead, her mind drifted to James. To his blue eyes and the look in them when he’d reached for the leaf in her hair. As if he were seeing her for the first time.
Of course, she reminded herself, it was because she looked like Lia. Exactly like her. And everyone knew Lia had been James’s beloved even when the three of them were small enough to run about, play hoops and sticks in the fields while Mr. Douglas consulted with Lia and Alice’s father about some rare volume on offer at auction. They had played together, yes. But it had been Lia to whom James had gravitated. Lia to whom his eyes drifted more and more as they grew into adults.
But he had seen her today—Alice. She was sure of it.
Finally, the tea gone, her plate empty save for crumbs, she wandered upstairs. Her mind was foggy as she made her way to the Dark Room, the eerie tune emerging from her throat like magic, the call of sleep lowering the veil between the worlds, weakening her footing in this one, though it had seemed so sure only moments before.
Once in the Dark Room, she climbed onto her mother’s bed. She had grown accustomed to sleeping here in the days since Aunt Virginia had left. Here she could sleep among Adelaide’s things, lie on the coverlet that had been hers and be only steps away from the spell circle carved into the floor. Everything seemed closer here: the Plane, the Souls, Samael, her mother.
Her hunger satisfied, she closed her eyes. Her hold on this world loosened immediately.
And then she was free.
There were things about the Plane she still did not understand. She could control, to some extent, which worlds she traveled, though it had come with significant practice. She could not control, however, the time of day in which she arrived or the weather once she got there. Sometimes she traveled in her sleep, the sky as black as pitch outside Birchwood, only to find herself flying through sunlit skies in the Otherworlds. She might leave New York in the physical world, the heat and humidity oppressive in midsummer, and find herself in a barren Otherworld, the wind icy, the ground covered in snow. There was no accounting for any of it, and while her power had grown in other areas, she’d come to accept that there were some things she would never understand or control.
Now, she flew through a sky that could have meant twilight or early morning. A thick fog swirled in the air, limiting her view so that she could see only a few feet in front of her. She smelled the tangy brine of the sea, sensed the stretch of it somewhere beyond the fog, and knew she was in a surrealistic parallel to her own world.
She had been here many times before.
She was grateful for the power of thought on the Plane, for she would otherwise not have been able to control her direction with the fog obscuring her view of the landscape below. But she had only to think of the otherworldly sea, the soft sand, the large rocks standing guard on the shore, and she began to descend.
Her body hurtled through the fog, and she laughed aloud, the thrill of it causing a rush of euphoria to speed through her veins. She sensed the approach of the ground before she saw it, felt her body slow as it came closer, adjusting to its nearness automatically, as if she and the Plane were one. As if it were alive, a living, thinking entity, bypassing her mind entirely and speaking directly to her soul instead.
She landed gently, coming to rest on the sand, silky and cold beneath her feet. The sea was a gentle roar to her right, the waves moving violently in from the horizon. A boy sat on a rock in the distance, his head turned her way. He hopped off the rock and came toward her, and she began closing the gap between them.
As always, he was wearing the strange trousers and too-revealing shirt. They had not spoken about it—the boy had always seemed leery of her—but she thought he might be from another time. The Plane was like that, a repository for people from all places and times, past, present, and perhaps even future. It had existed since time immemorial and would exist long after the physical world passed into extinction.
“You again,” the boy said when he finally reached her.
“Yes,” Alice s
aid. “Hello. I suppose you’ll be going now?”
The boy always left right when she arrived. Alice understood that he did not like the Souls, did not want them to be more aware of his presence than necessary, and he knew from experience that where Alice was on the Plane, surely the Souls would follow, and sometimes, to the boy’s horror, even Samael himself.
“I suppose so,” the boy said. “Wouldn’t want…Well, you know.”
Alice nodded, understanding the cryptic nature of his words, though she was not subject to the same danger when thinking about the icy prison of the Void. She could consider it with impunity, while travelers like the boy were forced to avoid all thought of it, lest the Souls imprison them there. In fact, she had explored the Void on several occasions, landing on its frigid surface under a pale blue sky, viewing with detached horror the people trapped under the ice, stretching as far as the eye could see.
There was more than one advantage to the fact that the Souls needed her to do their bidding. She was allowed a freedom on the Plane unheard of by most creatures, and she took full advantage, traveling all the worlds until she knew them as intimately as she had once known the grounds surrounding Birchwood.
She turned her attention back to the boy. “Have you seen my sister?”
The boy shook his head, and she wondered if it was her imagination that she saw a hint of sadness in his eyes. “Not for a long time.”
She narrowed her gaze. “Are you certain?”
He nodded. “I only saw her the one time, like I told you before.” He sounded defensive. It raised Alice’s hackles, made her wonder if he was defensive on his own account or because he was protective of Lia.
The ground rumbled beneath them, the sand beginning to shift at their feet.
“All right, then,” Alice said, relenting. She did not want the boy to think he could lie to her, but neither did she want him to be detained in the Void. He reminded her a little of Henry, if only her brother had been able to walk in his lifetime. “You must go if you don’t want them to see you.”
He nodded. “See you next time.”
He did not rise into the sky but instead dissolved before her eyes, another phenomenon she could not explain.
The rumbling got louder, the ground shaking, the sand shifting, closing in around her bare feet. She looked up, scanning the skies until her eyes landed on a black cloud in the distance. It was not affection but gratitude that made her heart lift as they approached. The Souls had become her family. With Lia and Aunt Virginia gone and Henry dead, there was no one else. No one to whom she could speak. No one who sought her company.
It was irrational, she knew. The Souls and Samael wanted her for only one purpose: to aid them in getting Lia to open the Gate.
And yet they were familiar to her. They sought her out on the Plane. Samael needed her. Believed in her as no one else had.
The sky cracked with lightning, thunder rumbling through it as the Souls came closer. Their powerful steeds, nearly double the size of horses in the physical world, panted and gasped as if returning from a long journey, their teeth bared in grimaces that were foils to the placid expressions, ones that belied the fury that ran through their veins, on the faces of the Souls. They approached as one, emerging from the sky like a swarm of locusts.
The ground shook as they landed before her. Members of his elite Guard, they were only a fraction of the Souls who did Samael’s bidding. The man at the front was always the same, raven-haired and flinty-eyed. He carried a mark on his neck like the one on the medallion—Lia’s medallion—save for one difference.
The serpent on his neck was more than a tattoolike mark. It was alive, writhing and hissing, its triangular head both evil and compelling as it twisted toward her.
“Mistress,” the Guard said, his voice a salve to her broken soul. “It is good you come. We receive word from our brothers that the Gate is growing in her power. You must keep watch.”
It was not the first time they had asked her to spy on their behalf, for the Souls could not see things that happened in the physical world. The two worlds existed on separate planes. It was impossible to see one while occupying another. It left the Souls at a disadvantage. While they could receive information from their dark brethren, the Souls who had made their way to the physical world through Lia and the Gates before her, such communication took time. It required the physically bound Souls to travel the Plane in the same way Alice did, to seek a place of privacy and comfort where they could allow their spirits to loosen from the bonds of the bodies they appropriated while in the physical world.
Alice shook her head. “I can see nothing. Lia has gone to London, remember?”
“There is a way,” the Guard said. “A spell.”
Alice flinched in surprise. She knew there were spells for such things. Knew there were ways around the edicts of travel enforced by the Sisterhood and the Grigori.
But those things were against the rules, and though she had been testing the limits of them for some time, this was another thing entirely. Should she be caught, she would be censured by the Grigori, quite possibly banned from the Plane that was her refuge, her salvation.
She looked into the Guard’s eyes, her voice a whisper. “It is forbidden.”
The Guard was silent for a moment. Then he began to laugh, the sound of it harsh and grating, like an out-of-tune piano. “You fear the Grigori? After all you have done?”
It should have been an accusation, an indictment. But coming from the Guard, it was not. She heard the admiration in his strange voice, saw respect in his eyes. It fortified her, and she lifted her chin.
“I have done what I must, but it is only good fortune that has allowed me to remain uncensured. It is through no actions of yours—or Samael’s—that I have avoided punishment by the Grigori. Further risking their wrath seems foolhardy when you need me accessible on the Plane and free to face my sister in our world.”
The Souls behind him began to mutter, their horses shuffling as if in protest to Alice’s words. The Guard in front cut them a look, and they grew still once again.
“Nevertheless, it must be done,” he said. “Samael has commanded it. The old woman is dying. Your sister will soon make her way to Altus for directions to the missing page. Our brothers in your world must beat her to it. Such action requires your skills as Spellcaster.”
“I do not know such a spell,” she hedged. “I don’t even know if I am powerful enough to cast it.”
“We will give you the words you need, as we have always done, Mistress. As we will always do. We will give you the words you need to see through the veil, to travel wholly, not just to these Otherworlds, but to places far and wide in your own. And when you return to your body, you will remember the things you have seen and heard and you will impart these things to us.”
His tone did not allow for argument. It was no matter. Alice would not have argued the point anyway. These were her people now, and this, her world. There was nothing else left.
She nodded. “I will do as you ask. Just remember: If I am prevented from traveling the Plane, I will not be able to act on your behalf with my sister. Not in these worlds.”
“We will see to the Grigori,” he said, lifting the reins of his steed. “Now go. Wait in the circle for the words, and they will come.”
The others followed his lead as he turned his horse. They galloped across the sand, picking up speed just before they launched into the sky. Alice watched them go, watched the hulking black mass fade into a faint cloud in the distance, the rumble of hooves soften to a murmur before disappearing completely.
She dropped onto a rock near the shore. The waves lapped at her feet, the ebb and flow of water the only sound. It was quiet and peaceful, and for a moment she wished she could stay long enough to sever the astral cord connecting her sprit-self to her body back at Birchwood. It would be so simple. Someone would find her body, cold and dead, on her mother’s bed in the Dark Room. They would bury her on the hill near Henry and Mother a
nd Father. Perhaps they would even be sorry.
And she would be free. Free to roam the Otherworlds at will.
Except, of course, her freedom would be short-lived. She would be of no use to Samael and the Souls without the ability to navigate the physical world. They would be angry at her betrayal, her weakness. They would hunt her as she had heard they hunted her mother, detain her in the Void where she would be trapped for eternity with the others.
She stood to go, her soul heavy as she lifted into the sky. There would be no escape from the path she had chosen. She would do Samael’s bidding, as she always did.
As she always had.
She was drying her hair the next day after a bath when the sound of pounding made its way to her from the ground floor. She stopped moving, wondering if she’d imagined it. But no, there it was again: someone knocking on the door.
Still clutching the towel, she made her way out of the Dark Room. It was her chamber now. It had been many weeks since she had used her own room for anything. She continued down the stairs, the knocking growing louder and more insistent. By the time she reached the foyer, she was flustered and angry. She threw open the door.
“All right, all right! I’m com—” Shock and dismay cut off her words when she saw who was standing on the threshold. “James! Whatever are you doing here?”
He looked taken aback by her tone. “I’m sorry. I should not have come without an appointment.”
His eyes took in her attire, his cheeks flushing slightly, and she realized that she was still in a nightdress, though it was nearly two in the afternoon. It was becoming more and more difficult to maintain a foothold on the rituals and customs of the physical world. Her life at Birchwood had a schedule all its own.
“I’ll come another time. When we have made an arrangement for a call.” He turned to go.
“Wait!” The words were out of her mouth before she had time to consider them.
He looked back at her.
“I could make us tea, if you would just give me a moment to change…?”