Mercedes Lackey - The Wizard of London

“Are you two all right?” she asked anxiously, taking Sarah by the shoulders and peering into her face, then doing the same with Nan.

“Yes’m,” Nan said, as Sarah nodded.

“Faugh,” Sahib coughed, as he straightened. “Let’s not do that again any time soon, shall we? I’m getting too old for last-minute rescues.”

Last minute rescues —‘ cause we went off alone, like a pair of gormless geese ! “Oh, Sahib—Mem’sab—” Nan felt her eyes fill with tears, as it suddenly came home to her that her protectors and benefactors had just put themselves into deadly danger to save her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’ mean—”

“Nan, Nan, you aren’t to blame!” Sahib said immediately, putting one strong arm around her shoulders. “You did nothing that you shouldn’t have done, and if you hadn’t been so careful, we wouldn’t have known where you were until it was too late! No, it was our fault.”

“It certainly was,” Mem’sab said grimly. “But it was someone else’s as well… and there is going to be a reckoning when I find out who. But let’s get away from here first. I don’t altogether want to find out if the bindings keeping that thing confined to this house will hold under provocation.”

Sahib took Sarah’s arm, giving her Grey to tuck inside her coat, and Selim offered a hand to Neville, who was so tired he hopped onto it without a protest, and then lifted the raven onto Nan’s shoulder. As they walked quickly away from the building, Mem’sab continued.

“Someone came to me a few days ago with a story about this place, how some haunt was making it impossible to rent out and he was in dire difficulty because of it. He wanted Sarah, or me, or both of us together to lay the spirit—but I have heard all of the stories about this address, and I knew better than to try. Something came to dwell there, over a hundred years ago, and it is not a thing to be trifled with. Men have died here, and more than one, and many people have gone mad with fear. Whatever that thing was—”

“Is old,” Nan put in, with a shudder. “Real, real old. I dunno how it got ‘ere, but it ain’t no spook.”

“Well, evidently this person decided to force our hand,” Sahib said thoughtfully—and as Nan looked up when they passed under a streetlamp, she saw that both his face and Selim’s were grim. “I believe that I will have a private word with him.”

“As will I—although I am sorely tempted to tell him that his devil has been laid, and suggest he spend a night there himself,” Mem’sab said, with deep anger in her voice. “And from now on, we will contrive a better way of bringing you girls if I should need you.”

“Please,” Sarah said, in a small voice. “What happened to Nan and Neville? And you and Sahib and Selim?”

Sahib cleared his throat awkwardly; Selim just laughed, deep in his throat. “You saw us as we seem to be—”

“Are,” Sahib corrected dryly.

“Are, then—when we are Warriors of the Light,” Selim concluded.

“Though how Nan happened to slip over into a persona and power she should not have until she is older—much older—I cannot imagine,” Mem’sab added, with a note in her voice that suggested that she and Nan would be having a long, a very long, talk at some point in the near future. Then she sighed. “Pray heaven I will not need to begin teaching you ancient Celtic any time soon.”

But, for now, Nan was beginning to feel the effect of being frightened nearly to death, fighting for the life of herself and her friends, and somehow being rescued in the nick of time. She stumbled and nearly fell, and Sahib sent Selim in search of a cab. In a good neighborhood like this one, they were not too difficult to find; shortly, both the girls were lifted in to nestle on either side of Mem’sab, birds tucked under their coats with the heads sticking out, for Nan had left Neville’s hatbox and was not at all inclined to go back after it. And in the shelter of the cab, Neville providing a solid oblong of warmth, and the drone of the adult voices above her head, safe at last, she found herself dropping off to sleep.

But not before she heard Mem’sab saying, “I would still like to know how it was that the child came into her Aspect without any training—and where she found the Words of Power for invoking the Holy Light.”

And heard Grey answer.

“Smart Neville,” she said in her sweetest voice. “Very smart Nan.”

***

The children and birds were tucked up safely in their beds, and Sahib had gone out for that “private word” with the one who ostensibly owned Number Ten. He had taken both Selim and Agansing with him, leaving Karamjit and Isabelle herself to stand watch over the house. Karamjit had made the rounds, reinforcing his shields and wards, and she had gotten out the set of Elemental Wards given to her a long time ago, before she had left for India, and placed them at the cardinal points of the grounds. She had no way of knowing on her own if they were still powerful, those little four-colored pyramids of stone and glass, but she had faith in the friends who had given them to her. She had seldom had to use them, twice in India, once in England, but never since her return.

The troubling thing about this was that she was not altogether certain the incident had been one man’s ill-conceived attempt to clear his property of the evil that haunted it. In fact, the more she thought about it, the less likely that seemed. She sat in her favorite chair beside the fire, and though the fire was warm, her spirit felt chilled by the prospects of that eventuality.

“Karamjit?” she said to the shadow standing at the window. “Are you as uneasy about this evening as I am?”

“At least, Shining Star,” he replied grimly. “We have not ended what this night began. And the thing behind that door may be the least and most obvious of the evils we face. Sahib is returned.”

She leaped to her feet as the front bell rang, and with Karamjit behind her, hurried to the front hall.

“Not here,” Frederick said, sotto voce , as he handed his hat, coat, and gloves to Sia to take away. She nodded, and all five of them returned to the warmth and privacy of his study.

“The bird,” he said succinctly, as he settled into his chair, “has flown. Not only that, but he was a bird in false feathers. I am reliably told, and Selim has verified, that there was no deception on the part of our quarry’s servants, that Mister Benson has not been resident in his townhouse for a month. He has been salmon fishing in Scotland, and knowing the gentleman’s sporting reputation, that is not an opportunity he would have forgone even for a death in the family. So whoever it was that called himself Benson had no right to that name and no financial interest in the property.” He grimaced. “We have, as young Nan would say, been gammoned.”

Isabelle took a deep breath. “Which leaves us with the question of why someone would lure those two children there. If Nan had not told Karamjit where she was going—we would not have known where they were until they were found.”

“Which would not have been until morning.” Frederick’s eyes were dark with rage. “And we know what state they’d have been in at best. If they had lived. At least four people who remained overnight in that room have died, and several more have gone mad. Someone wanted those two children dead or insane. Specifically those two children, and not you as well, my heart, because the cabby was sent at a time when you were away from the school.”

Isabelle felt her eyes widening, and a cold rage welling up in her heart. “So we have two linked mysteries to unravel—who and why.”

He nodded. “And when we have those answers, we need something more. We need to know what we are going to do about it.”