Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1)

Mind the Gap (Hidden Cities #1) Page 37

Jazz screamed, her voice mixing with the anguished moans and wails of old London. The wind of the Hour of Screams buffeted her, increasing in force and urgency. The fog of ghostly images wavered as though it might blow away, but instead it rippled and altered yet again.

Whitcomb's apparatus evaporated, the laboratory around it shifting. Lights cut the darkness, and at first she thought that somehow the Blackwood Club had overcome the Hour of Screams and was attacking, the lights their torches. Then she saw the silhouette of the car rolling through the fog and staggered back.

The headlamps shone through the spectral mist, and in it she could make out dozens of tiny, dour faces.

The car jerked to a halt at a strange angle, half on the curb. The door swung open and her father staggered out, not bothering to close the door. Jazz stared at him and she knew something had gone horribly wrong. He'd gone to try to take control of Whitcomb's apparatus, but the inventor had sacrificed himself to deprive the Blackwood Club of the battery, because he'd made himself the battery. Her father had tried to use the same magic Whitcomb had manipulated to transfer the power into himself, to become the battery so that it would not die with Whitcomb. But he'd been rushed. Frenzied.

It had not gone well.

Whatever magic Whitcomb had used, in his desperation her father hadn't done it correctly. Looking at him, Jazz could see it all. His eyes bled scarlet tears. Silver light flick-ered behind them, and the sigils on his flesh glowed. His body had begun to wither. This must have been the very same night, but he looked twenty years older, as though some cancer had eaten away at him.

He staggered toward the house. Jazz nearly crumbled when she saw it, sketched there in the fog of ghosts. Her childhood home. Only when she tasted the salt of her own tears on her lips did she realize she had begun to cry. She shook her head, wishing she could call back to her father across the years.

Jazz watched him go up to the door, fishing in his pocket for the key. "I don't want to see," she whispered, the words a kind of keening cry, a prayer, a wish.

But she could not look away from the sight of him stag-gering up the stairs and into her bedroom, where he stood over her crib. He swayed as he gazed down at baby Jasmine.

He reached down into the crib and picked her up, then made his way —stumbling once and nearly dropping her—to the rocking chair in the corner. Withering even as she watched him, crumbling in upon himself like wilting flowers, he collapsed into the chair, holding baby Jazz in his arms.

Crying, he kissed her forehead.

In the now, Jazz dropped to her knees and wept along with him, the ghosts swirling around her head with a final gust of wind.

Silver light spilled from her father's lips and his tears, and it crackled like lightning in a burst of illumination from the sigils on his papery skin. In his arms, the infant gurgled happily as her entire body flared with brilliant light, eyes gleaming silver. The glow slowly vanished.

James Towne's last breath rattled in his throat.

Baby Jasmine settled down, slipping back to sleep.

A slap cleared her mind. Blinking, Jazz stared up at Terence, her cheek stinging from the blow. From the depths of her sadness, anger flared, even as she became aware again of the ground under her knees and the cool air of the tunnel. Her tears began to dry on her face.

"What the hell —" she began.

He grabbed her wrist, pulling her to her feet. "Pay atten-tion, Jasmine. While you were off with the fairies there, the Hour passed. Or didn't you notice the screams were gone?"

Jazz glanced around. In the midst of the vision that had played out before her, she hadn't noticed at all. But he was right. The Hour of Screams had ended. A ragged voice came to her from down the length of the black tunnel, ex-horting others to rise and give pursuit. Torches clicked on, one by one.

Some of the Uncles and the BMW men might have been affected by the Hour, but not all. Josephine Blackwood would have seen to that. They were still after her.

"Come on!" Terence whispered, tugging her through the door and into the parallel tunnel. His torch lit the way, picking out dripping sludge and a scurrying rat.

It was her nature to resist, but not this time. Jazz let him lead her along the tunnel, careful with her footing and try-ing to pick up the pace. She had to make sense of what she'd seen, had to decide what it would mean for her.

"Faster!" Terence said.

His grip tightened on her hand. Jazz shook her head to clear it and matched him step for step.

"What happened to you back there? What did you see?"

She took a deep breath and cast a sidelong glance at him. All along she'd held her secrets close. Her mother had taught her never to share too much of herself. A dreadfully sad lesson, now that she considered it, but Terence had done the same, and Harry as well. All of them with their secrets. If only they'd been truthful with one another, things might have turned out much differently.

"You know about the ghosts," she said, and it wasn't a question. Of course he did.

"Harry sees them," Terence said. "I had an idea early on that you see them too. Now I know."

A loud crash behind them signaled the arrival of the Blackwood Club. The Uncles and the BMW men would be pouring through the door between tunnels now. A glance back showed her the wavering glow of a trio of bright torches, but there would be more.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"I told you. Deeper."

Jazz gave a soft, sickened laugh. Still more secrets.

"I know the story now. How this all began," she said. And then she told him, as succinctly as she could, the tale of their two fathers and their shared tragedy.

"I've never been much of a believer in destiny," she whispered, breathing heavily now with the exertion of their flight. "But this is all so tied together, it can't just be coinci-dence."

Terence could only nod.

They were still holding hands and Jazz felt the contact acutely.

"So what am I supposed to do? It's magic, isn't it?"

Terence darted abruptly to the left, hauling her with him and nearly colliding with the stone wall. She put out a hand and leaned against it, feeling the rough surface under her fingers. He held his torch pointed at the ground, and the yellow gloom it cast made them both look like ghosts.

"That's not why we're here," Terence said, his gaze grim. "We're here to move on from magic, not to grow stronger from it. If you have a destiny, it's to finish the job my father started —the job your father interrupted."

She felt his grief and relented. Whether he was right or wrong, Jazz wasn't sure it mattered. All of the tales she had heard about magic —Terence's and Harry's and her own— they were all tragedies. Had her mother known the truth of what her baby had become all along or only learned it in the end?

It no longer mattered. She'd tried to run away from the part she had been meant to play. Her mother had tried so hard to prepare her for that. But she could never have run far enough or hidden deep enough.

Terence shone his torch on a rectangular metal hatch about four feet high and two wide. He pushed it open, and once more Jazz felt that tugging, a fishhook set deeply into her chest, pulling her through and downward. A narrow curving stone staircase lay before them, and they quickly de-scended.

"Quiet," Jazz said, concerned about the sounds of their footsteps.

"It doesn't matter. Josie Blackwood's got a little magic of her own. The whole club dabbles, fancying themselves as true sorcerers. They want to take the old magic of the city into themselves, have the kind of power no one's seen for centuries. But for now she's got enough to follow our trail. How do you think they found you? It took a while, but they found you every time. And she's come too close to lose us now."

The stairs continued winding downward. Jazz had not thought to count them, but just when she began to think they must have descended two hundred or more —and the shouts of their pursuers started to follow them down—they reached another iron door. Terence swung it open on thick, squealing hinges and flashed the torchlight into the cham-ber ahead.

Shadows retreated, strange silhouettes scattering into the deeper darkness. Jazz might have asked what they were, but Terence pulled her through into the chamber and then they were running again. What she saw of the floor and walls in the torchlight unnerved her. The stones that had been built into the foundations and arches of these subter-ranean caverns were ancient things, dating back at least to Roman control of London, perhaps further. These were the halls of old kings or the churches of archaic gods.

They raced through corridors and courtyards and chambers, down short flights of stone steps. At last Terence drew them to a halt. Jazz shook her hand loose from his, si-multaneously relieved and disappointed at the loss of con-tact. Without the feel of his hand in hers, she felt alone. The weight of the entire city hung over her.

Terence fished in his pocket and withdrew an object. Jazz narrowed her eyes, trying to make out what it was. He snapped it open and gave it a flick, and a tiny flame blos-somed to life. A lighter. What did he need with that when he had a torch?

He dropped it into a narrow gutter to the left of the door they had just stepped through, and a small rivulet of oil ignited. A line of fire raced along the perimeter of the circu-lar room, a ring of flame that illuminated the vast chamber and threw dancing shadows on the high, domed ceiling.

Alan Whitcomb's apparatus filled the center of the chamber.

Jazz caught her breath. "You've been building it down here all along?"

"I couldn't do it aboveground. They would have found me eventually. And this was my father's intention from the start, to use it down here in what was once the heart of the city."

In the flickering firelight, she stared at the massive con-traption. It sat awaiting its final component, the battery that would bring it to life.

"They're not far behind us," Terence warned.

"I know that!"

The visions she had seen in the tunnels above were fresh in her mind. Whitcomb had prepared all of the parts of the apparatus. She had seen him testing the gears and levers in his occult laboratory.

Taking a deep breath, she approached the apparatus. She could see the levers where she was supposed to put her feet, the metal braces that would hold her arms, the bracket that would close upon her chest. The ghosts had not only given up the secrets of Jazz's past. They had shown her what they required of her.

"I don't understand," she said, wrapping her hand around a cold metal pipe that made up part of the apparatus. It thrummed in her hand like the rails in one of the Tube tunnels, alive with distant power. "You rebuilt this thing, but you didn't know the battery was a person?"

He shook his head. "I knew someone had to operate it from the inside. I've strapped myself in a hundred times, try-ing different power sources. There are connections for out-side power; I suppose he left them intact only to test the apparatus, but I always presumed the battery would attach there. How could I have known the battery would be a hu-man? Who could have imagined it?"

Jazz took a deep breath. Trembling, she gazed up at the gauges and bars and steam valves of the apparatus. When Terence put a hand on her shoulder, she did not turn to meet his gaze.

"What will happen to me?" she asked.

Down there in the cold heart of the city, the only sound was the crackling of the flames that lit the chamber. Then Jazz heard approaching voices and footfalls and knew that they were out of time.

Terence did not reply. That was good. If he'd said any-thing other than I don't know, it would have been a lie, and the time for lying was over.

Jazz grabbed hold of two thick pipes and stepped up into the apparatus. It began to hum.

Chapter Twenty

off the rails

The ghosts had been waiting for her. As Jazz locked herself into the apparatus —even before she began to put her weight on the levers beneath her feet—apparitions began to mani-fest in the fire ring and in the shadows of the domed ceiling above her. Phantoms of all eras faded in, as though they'd been there all along but were only now revealing them-selves. Victorian ladies and newsboys drifted alongside the starving specters of Shadwell thieves and the madmen of Bedlam. Yet there were so many others, clad in the garb of wartime and peacetime alike, from centuries of London's life. None of the spirits seemed to notice one another, nor did they pay any attention at all to Jazz. They simply waited.

The beams of half a dozen torches approached from be-yond the chamber. Figures stepped through the firelight, more substantial than the ghosts. Josephine Blackwood raised a hand and pointed at Jazz, shouting something —per-haps a command. Jazz could not hear her. She felt as though she were drifting far away, and when she looked down she saw that the levers had been slowly released by her weight.

Gauges spun. Gears began to clank, and steam hissed from release valves. Terence had prepared the apparatus to receive its battery and now it roared to life. The pipes thumped and the gears churned, and Jazz blinked and stared in amazement as the apparatus began to fade, becoming al-most transparent. She glanced down at herself and realized that her own body also had faded. Still among the living, she was becoming a ghost.

"Mum!" she shouted, panic overcoming her. For just a moment she'd forgotten her mother was dead, and there was no one left among the living to whom she would call for help.

The men she'd called Uncles and the thugs in their em-ploy began to spread out among the ghosts in that chamber, careful of the flames at its edges but unmindful of the wraiths. They couldn't see the spirits of the city. Several of them had guns drawn, aimed at a shadow in the midst of the room.

Jazz blinked, realizing that the shadow was Terence in his dark clothes, somehow both more solid than the rest of them and less substantial even than the phantoms of London's past. He also held a gun.

Ignoring those whose weapons were pointed at him, Terence aimed at Josephine Blackwood. Jazz could see his mouth moving —shouting a warning, perhaps—but she couldn't hear a word. It was as if she had slipped out of the world.

The gunshot dragged her back in. That, she heard.