CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The interior of the house was just as grand as the exterior, though perhaps more stark than I was expecting. Marble floors swept clean of dust wound through hallways where, judging by the shadows on the walls, portraits had once hung. A seemingly random array of furniture sprinkled otherwise empty rooms. Madam Lumiere led us briskly through the foyer, past an immaculately appointed sitting room complete with grand piano and porcelain statues, but no other furniture, then through the kitchen, and to a glass-paned solarium off the back of the house. There she sat, at a small table barely larger than the teacup it held, in a wicker chair that had seen better days. There were no other chairs. An orange tabby cat watched us from the safety of a potted fern hanging on the far side of the room. The hellhounds circled the chair once, then slumped onto the tile floor flanking Evelyn. They yawned mightily, then fell fast asleep. Madam Lumiere took a sip of tea, then peered at us impatiently.
“Well,” she said. “Explain yourselves.”
“Right, I guess that’s . . .” I gestured to Addie. “Do you want to start? Should I?”
“Cassius and The Good Doctor were attacked at the Convaclation Patisserie. Pierre’s place. Doc was able to get the big guy out, but he looked like he had been drained, and had the requisite puncture wounds. We tried to deal with it, but when we went in, our technology fell apart. That’s when Nik decided we needed to call in the cavalry. Literally.” Addie jerked her head at us. “Took us a couple days, but we tracked them down.”
“This is dangerous business,” Evelyn said quickly. “Mixing the timelines does not go well. You’re risking the entire Gestalt by having them here.”
“We’re taking precautions. Isolation chambers. And they’ve been drained of their magic,” Addie said. “Right now they’re little more than kids in fancy costumes.”
“Hey, whoa. Kids in very fancy costumes, with sharps,” I said. “And the skill to use them.”
“You’re not going to scare me with knives, boy,” Evelyn said. “Not after what I’ve seen. So if they have no magic, what good are they to you?”
“Conduits,” Tembo said, holding his amulet up. “We can draw a small amount of power without disturbing the Gestalt.”
“So far, it’s been a matter of the Eccentrics—” Addie paused when Evelyn snorted. “Yeah, Nik doesn’t like that. Anyway, it’s been a matter of us getting them to the fight, then standing back and letting them do their jobs.”
“So far, two vampires down,” I said proudly. “The bakery is open for business.”
“I appreciate the visit, really I do.” Evelyn set her teacup down and folded her hands into her lap. “But get to the part with the vampires, before I lose my patience.”
“The point is that we took Team Middle Ages back to the bakery, and we found a vampire. Something had turned Pierre. He showed all the classic signs—light sensitivity, pale skin—but he’d also gone full medieval.” Addie glanced at us, then dropped her voice. “He’d filled the place with pancakes.”
“That’s not how vampires work,” Evelyn said. “They’re monsters. There would be bloodlust, an insatiable hunger. It would be an absolute massacre. Not a breakfast buffet.”
“Which brings us to our next problem. Because there was a vampire. It attacked us. Fortunately for Adelaide, Knight Watch was there.” I produced the small scarab that had been on Pierre’s back and set it on the table next to Evelyn’s teacup. “They each had one of these on their back. This is Pierre’s, who showed the signs of turning, but wasn’t aggressive. The other baker—whose name I never caught, actually—the scarab on his back was much bigger.”
“And where is that device?” Evelyn asked, peering at the scarab through a pair of opera glasses.
“In pieces, back on the Silverhawk,” Bethany interjected. “I broke it with my might.”
“When she knocked it off the vampire, he collapsed. Once we pried these things off, they turned back to their mortal selves. Unfortunately, the big guy was already dead,” I said.
Evelyn sniffed, picking up the scarab with bony fingers and turning it over in her palm. She sighed, and looked up at us.
“Henri,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she continued. “The other baker. The boy had a gift for madeleines. A bloody shame.”
“We think someone is trying to spawn a new generation of vampires. Or, at least, they’ve created one,” Addie said. “What we don’t know is who is doing it, or why.”
“Ridiculous. No machine of science could create a vampire. Their magic is in the blood, a legacy of the condemnation of their first sire,” she said. Her voice rose precipitously. Her hand shook as she held the runed cog. “They are a damned breed. A scourge upon the face of the earth. And they! Are! Dead!”
Suddenly, the previously composed Madam Lumiere broke. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and the gear tumbled from her hand onto the floor. The hellhounds were on full alert now, searching for whatever had caused their mistress such distress. Chesa took a step forward, but Adelaide bowled past her, kneeling at Evelyn’s feet and taking her hand delicately.
“I’m sorry, Evie. I’m so sorry.” She patted her softly. “If we had left Pierre to rot in his damned bakery, perhaps none of this would have happened.”
Evelyn laughed through her tears, then pushed Addie back. She took a lace kerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.
“Well. He does make a quite exquisite éclair, does he not?” She smiled sadly, then let out a deep sigh. “I am sorry, friends. This is all a bit much for an old lady. But I should have known it would happen someday. Come. Bring your terrible clockwork. We will see what my father has to say about it.”
“Your father? But . . .” I trailed off as she rose and led us back through the kitchen. I gave Addie a questioning look. “I thought her father was dead?” I whispered.
“She kept his lab, his notes, his journals. Maybe there’s something in them about such a device. He was very interested in mythical creatures.” She waited until Evelyn was out of the room before plucking the cog off the floor. “Some in the Gestalt blame him for what happened with the vampires. Not me, of course. But some.”
The hellhounds followed us, loping heavily in our midst, weaving up and down the column like drill sergeants inspecting their wards. Every time their heavy flanks bumped into me, I caught a whiff of sulfur.
We followed Evelyn through the kitchen and down a shadowed hallway. The lamps here were extinguished, and the floors were marked by dust and disuse. We passed an arched doorway that had been chained shut. I arched an eyebrow at Addie.
“Cecilia’s Spiritorium. Still haunted, if you’re to believe the lore.”
“I can hear you, Lady Adelaide,” Evelyn called from the front of our little column. “The only thing lingering in my mother’s den are memories. Unpleasant ones. Come, it is just down here.”
The hallway terminated in a door fashioned to look like a bookcase that swung aside at Evelyn’s touch, revealing a hidden staircase. We descended into the basement. It looked like the storage room for the props department of every mad scientist horror movie in history, except nothing looked fake and the air smelled like static electricity and chemicals that shouldn’t have been mixed. As we entered the room, Ida let out a tiny squeal of ecstasy.
“So . . . many . . . things to take apart,” she squeaked.
“Behave yourself,” Addie whispered. “You’re a guest in this house.”
“There’s a box of broken clockworks in the corner, if you need something to distract yourself,” Evelyn said, pointing.
Ida zoomed to the treasure trove and set to work.
Other than the sheet-covered tables, racks of jars, half-assembled engines, and all manner of scientific equipment splayed out across the room, there were also shelf after shelf of books and journals, crowding the walls. They added a musty smell to the space. In one corner, far from the chemicals, stood a cozy reading chair with its own dedicated Tiffany-style lamp, and a library trolley of journals, some of them open. Evelyn went to the chair and lovingly closed the one on top of the trolley, hugging it to her chest.
“I come down here sometimes, to be with him. This may all look like dry scientific text, but I hear these words in my father’s voice, and smell him in the ink.” She smiled, just a little bit. “It’s like he’s still here, giving me a tour of his laboratory, explaining some new invention or exciting discovery he’s just made.”
“He was a good man, Evelyn,” Addie said, standing awkwardly beside the chair.
“Bah, you never met him. You’re just being kind.” She set the journal back on the trolley, then looked around the room. “Now, let’s see. I think the books about mythical creatures are in this section, behind the hydraulic modulation compressor.”
Under Evelyn’s direction, we cleared off one of the workbenches and started laying out journals. We didn’t get very far before I realized a fundamental problem with our system. I raised my hand.
“Uh, these are in French.”
“Yes, of course. Do you write your diaries in another language? No. You write them in your native tongue. Englishmen, thinking everyone should speak English. BAH!”
“We have a lexigramophone back on the Silverhawk,” Addie said. “Would it be possible for us to borrow some of these?”
“Clearly not. They do not leave this room. Father would not allow it.” Evelyn ran a finger down one of the open pages. “It does not matter. I speak both languages quite well. As though I were an educated person with a brain. Imagine that.”
“Okay, okay, we get it. You’re smart,” I muttered. “So anything in there about vampires?”
“Yes, so much. But it will take time to digest everything.” She pointed at the scarab, which I had placed in the middle of the bench. “I take it Nikola has had a turn with that?”
“He did. Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it,” Addie said. “It’s part of the Gestalt, but also part of the Unreal.”
“A brilliant man, our Nikola. But not good at seeing the value in other people’s work. Here, let me take a look.” Evelyn abandoned the journal and bent over the scarab, examining it through a jeweler’s loupe that she produced from her hair bun. “My eyes are not what they were. But it reminds me of something. Ida, if I can pull you away from your toys for a second, would you fetch me those schematics? Right over there, above the workbench.”
Reluctantly, Ida abandoned her work and gathered the requested papers. While she was doing that, I looked over the journals. My French wasn’t quite up to par, but I knew enough to recognize some of it. The elder Lumiere certainly had a thing for creatures of legend. There were entries on dragons, centaurs, even the elusive werewolves that Knight Watch insisted didn’t exist. All were accompanied by drawings, some surrounded by formulae of varying complexity. Nothing in the book referenced vampires, though. I closed the book and moved on to another.
“This looks promising,” I said. “Histoire de la Nuit. ‘Story of the Night,’ right?”
“Very good,” Evelyn answered, sarcasm dripping from her lips. “Bon travail.”
I cracked open the book and flipped through. No pictures, but words like Blood, Immortal, Monster, and Death popped out at me. “What’s the French for vampire?”
“Vampire,” Evelyn said.
“Ah. Okay.” Scanning the pages, I didn’t see that, though there was more than one reference to Une Cage Dame. “The caged lady? Is that what this says?”
“That seems unlikely,” Chesa said, looking over my shoulder. “Unless her dad was into some kinky stuff.”
“You’ve disparaged my father quite enough, thank you.” Evelyn came over and closed the book, sliding it back onto the shelf. “That book has nothing to do with vampires, I assure you.”
Eventually, Ida dumped the rolled pages of the schematics on the bench. Evelyn unfurled them, anchoring the curled corners with various books and vials.
“Yes, see the similarity?” she said. “Here, the aether pump, and this is a hacked-together reversal of the dispersion mechanism. And this tank must serve as some kind of reserve. One of them was wearing this?”
“Yeah, Pierre. Though Henri had a larger version.” Addie squinted at the faded ink of the drawings. “So what is this a schematic for?”
“Father’s aetheric dampeners. The very devices responsible for preserving the Gestalt,” Evelyn said. “I think what you have here is some kind of energy vampire. An engine built for drawing out aether, rather than blood.”
“They must have somehow hooked into the mythic ideal of vampirism to make it work. Explains why the attack didn’t kill Cassius or Addie,” I said. “Only Henri, and he was the host.”
“But for what purpose? The aether is everywhere. Why try to steal it?” Addie asked.
“I do not know. But if they interfere with the dampeners, then the whole Gestalt is in danger.”
“We haven’t detected any fluctuations in the timeline,” Addie said. “But maybe we’re looking in the wrong places. Why would they attack Pierre? There’s no dampener in his bakery.”
“Whatever their reason, we need to figure out our next steps,” I said. “Where are these dampeners? Can we do something to protect them?”
“They’re all over the world. The Convaclation has several, but the network is spread throughout the Gestalt. There’s no way for us to cover all the dampeners,” Addie said. “Simply too many sites.”
“Then we focus on the dampener closest to the attack. You said there were several at the Convaclation. How many, exactly?” I asked.
“Three. One at the airfield, another in the exposition center, and a final one in the gardens of the dead.”
“Gardens of the dead?” I asked. “Yikes!”
“So, what, we split up? Two members of Knight Watch to each location, with Eccentric backup?” Chesa asked. Tembo nodded sagely.
“I think that would be best,” he said. “I will note, we only have two healers.”
“Just a risk we’ll have to take,” I said.
“I am glad you are willing to volunteer, Sir John,” Tembo said. “It speaks well of your character.”
“What? No, I—”
“Agreed. It’s dangerous. But I think it’s our best chance.” Addie turned to Evelyn. “Madam Lumiere, we need to make sure you’re safe, as well. I suggest you collect the necessary research from the lab and relocate to the Silverhawk. We may have need of your expertise.”
“Can we revisit this No Healer thing?” I asked. “See, I tend to get hurt. Especially when there aren’t any healers.”
“We’ll send Ida with you,” Addie said. “She has a mind for engines.”
“Wonderful. She’ll be very helpful, should I randomly turn into an engine.”
“Not as rare as you might think in the Gestalt,” Addie said. She clapped her hands together, causing the hellhounds to snap to attention. “Let’s move out, people!”