Emma Holloway - A Study in Ashes

Imogen choked on a cry, smacking at the curtains when they tried to fall back and obscure her view. Logic said she’d see the forest. Instead, she saw the inside of a house. Her house. Those were the stairs descending from the bedrooms to the second-floor landing—but to see it at this angle made no sense. There was no room where she stood, much less a window—and everything she saw was far too large.

As she slowly realized why the perspective was so wrong, a memory of screaming returned—screaming and pounding on the glass. She’d had this same experience the first time she’d looked out the window.

To see what she saw, she would have to be inside the longcase clock that the sorcerer Dr. Magnus built. It had sat on the landing of Hilliard House, facing the stairs, ever since her family had moved in.

Shock melted her insides to a puddle and she leaned against the cool glass to hold herself up. Is this where I begin shrieking again? Reflexively, she sucked in her breath, but a stab of fury made her cough it out again. Fear doesn’t work. Fear doesn’t help you fight back. Anger does .

Rage cleared her head, sharpening her senses and blowing the last fog from her wits. Blood pounded in her ears, deafening her—until it dawned on her that it wasn’t her pulse at all. Now that she knew where she was, she realized that thudding heartbeat was the clock’s steady tick.

But why in damnation am I in a sorcerer’s clock?

She sensed, rather than saw, the change around her. Slowly, she turned to face the room, her face going slack with astonishment. Now, instead of shrinking, the room was simply fading. She could see the pattern of the carpet through the sofa, the bookcase through the wing chair. The study had been an illusion, and no doubt the woods outside had been some sort of construct, too. She’d been tricked.

Because what she saw now was Dr. Magnus’s clockwork, the wheels and gears moving in carefully regulated increments. The moment her mind grasped that, the furnishings disappeared altogether. Now that I see what’s real, I can act . She wasn’t going to be fooled by a comfortable sofa or a scary dark woods one second longer.

But for a moment, Imogen yearned for those soft cushions—for now everything was unfamiliar. She tilted her head back, her gaze going up and up. Brass gears the size of waterwheels arched up into shadowy darkness, their polished teeth looking sharp and pitiless as they clicked past. She started as something spun to her left, sending a shiny arm flying to a new position. Another thing clunked and she whirled around, half expecting a gyrating mechanism to smack her in the head. Her breath was coming fast, her pulse—hers, not the clock’s—was speeding with alarm. There were springs and cogs and wheels everywhere, all ceaselessly moving, and all looking like they could crush flesh and bone without missing a beat.

She understood none of it—Evelina and Tobias had been the ones crazy for taking things apart. Yet now this was her landscape. She would just have to learn how to navigate it. There would be no sitting out this quadrille.

Anna was somewhere in there, too. Imogen could feel her presence, just as she had throughout a dozen years of nightmares. And her twin had chosen this particular battleground for a reason. She tried to kill me once. I did my best to kill her . There was only one way this confrontation would end.

Imogen’s mouth went dry, her eyes prickling with hot tears. She wrapped her arms around her middle, as if holding herself in one piece. This was the nightmare of nightmares.

She needed to find her twin and destroy her, once and for all.

London, September 24, 1889

LADIES’ COLLEGE OF LONDON

2:45 p.m. Tuesday

IT HAD BEEN FIVE FRETFUL DAYS SINCE EVELINA HAD DISCOVERED she was penned within the college walls. She’d received no word from either Keating or Sir William. The only thing that had changed was that she had received a delivery of equipment from Moriarty.

Evelina sat in her rooms, elbows on her worktable and a scatter of projects on every side. Sunlight touched the silver bracelets she wore, the buttons down the bodice of her fashionable day dress, and the implements spread out before her. There was a heavy brass microscope, a gas burner, a leather case of slides, and enough half-assembled pieces of clockwork to give a horologist fits. The clockwork had been her own project, but the rest was from the professor. He had sent the very best.

After indulging her talents in secret for so many years, it was a luxury to have a private workspace and the time to sate her curiosity. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? She had all that leisure because the rest of her life had been taken away—including Nick and Imogen. And being confined had given Evelina too much time to grieve for their loss. She was starting to feel frayed, like pieces of her were unraveling and falling away. She either slept too much or not at all, pacing her rooms until her feet ached.

Some primitive reflex warned her she was in danger of collapsing altogether. She needed a problem outside of herself to keep her moving forward. So escape was at the top of her list, and Moriarty seemed the best tool she’d found—not a comforting thought. But while she made up her mind about him, she forced herself to concentrate on the unsolvable problem of her friend’s illness. Though different, her grief for Imogen was every bit as acute as the wrenching loss of Nick.

She’d sat by Imogen’s bedside that November night when the Helios had returned victorious, but Evelina had enough magic to know the young woman on the bed was just a shell. Imogen’s soul had been ripped away. Could Evelina do anything to put it back?

She asked herself that question plenty of times, but a letter had come from Baker Street yesterday—delivered by one of her uncle Sherlock’s pet urchins who’d clearly climbed over the college wall—with news that Poppy Roth had approached the detective with a view to hiring him on the case. But, Holmes went on, magic wasn’t his forte. He had promised to turn the problem over to Madam Thalassa, but apparently she was proving hard to find. Since Evelina knew both magic and the Roth family, did she have relevant data to add? Strange but true, Holmes was very nearly asking her opinion.

Her first thought was that he did well to treat Poppy Roth seriously. The girl was a force of nature. Her second was that she was on dangerous ground. It was her magic, and that of the devas at her command, that was keeping Imogen’s body alive in hopes that she would recover on her own. Evelina had set the spells in motion the night she’d spent at Imogen’s side—it was the best she could do when she had so little time. She’d tried to work from afar since, but navigating the realm of spirit was not her talent. Not even the university’s impressive archives—which had special dispensation to maintain a collection on magic and the spirit realm—had been able to help.

The difficulty was that if a true medium—even one as reputable as Madam T—went crashing through Evelina’s existing spells, things could go horribly wrong. And yet she couldn’t take those spells away because Imogen would die. She had to explain all of this to her uncle, but it was hard when she had to smuggle letters out of the college with all the cloak-and-dagger drama of an international spy. It would be a damn sight easier if she could just fix things herself.

Her jaw set, Evelina concentrated on the surface of the worktable, the grain of it flowing through an archipelago of chemical stains and the odd crumb from her breakfast. She would make one more try before she admitted that for all her vaunted talent, she couldn’t help her best friend in the world. She let her consciousness drift, her vision going soft as she passed into a blank, rudderless state.