The Reckoning of Noah Shaw Read online

  30

  LURED BACK

  I’M JOLTED AWAKE BY AN acrid smell and searing light.

  “Sir? Sir!”

  An older, anxious-looking stranger hovers above me, kneeling. My palms are on the floor, and I try to raise myself up but the world tilts beneath me.

  “What the fuck just happened?”

  “What the devil are you doing here?” the stranger, now identifiable as a guard, asks. The words spark something in my mind—a memory. Simon. The professor. I struggle to hold on to it when the man asks, “Been here all night?”

  I crane my neck to the side and see Goose, also sprawled on the floor of the bedchamber in the servants’ quarters, looking equally dazed. The ochre velvet drapes, the window looking out onto the ruins, the inlaid floor—all gone.

  “I’m Noah Shaw,” I say slowly. “Lady Sylvia’s grandson.”

  “I thought I recognised you,” the guard says.

  “Recognised me?”

  “From your portrait.”

  “What portrait,” I say slowly.

  “Went to a piss-up last night, did you?” he says, rising to his feet. “Came here for a giggle, passed out?”

  I swallow, my mouth sour and stale. “Something like that.”

  The guard sighs. “Chundered anywhere, have you?”

  Goose sits up, holding his head as if it’s made of glass. “No, sir. We’re professionals.”

  The guard offers a hand to me. “Right, then. Up you go.”

  I stagger to my feet. “Christ.”

  Goose is next. “Hell.”

  “You’ll want to be hydrating. Get some protein into you.”

  “Mmm,” I say, noncommittally. “Can you tell us how to get back to—” I look around, trying to remember what happened before—

  Before.

  “The book,” I mutter, scanning the floor. We’re in the room where we first found it, aren’t we? Did I drop it whilst exploring?

  “What’s that?” the guard asks.

  “Nothing,” I insist. “We got turned around a bit.”

  “No worries, I’ll get you back to the East Wing.”

  “Thank you.”

  We follow him; the trip is mercifully uneventful but unfortunately lengthy. The light outside is dawn-dim—daylight hasn’t broken, yet, but it will soon, bringing tourists with it.

  “All I want is a room somewhere,” Goose sings quietly.

  I laugh, despite everything. The guard shakes his head. Kids these days, amirite?

  After a century, he finally deposits us at the residence and leaves us with more well-meaning hangover advice in a modernly appointed, comfortable living room. Once Goose and I are alone, though, it’s massively, brutally awkward.

  “What did you see?” I ask him first.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t even know—”

  “You do,” I say, with a fervour that surprises me. “Tell me.”

  After a pause, he says, “A fucking ghost.” He stares at a fixed point on the wall. “A bloody fucking ghost is what I saw.”

  “You didn’t take anything? What M gave us?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  That’s what I’ve been relying on, I realise—that we were both high out of our fucking minds.

  I grasp at that crumbling explanation anyway. “Maybe—”

  Goose shakes his head, stricken. “Don’t try coming up with an explanation. There isn’t one.”

  “Maybe M slipped you something at the pub?” I ask, still reaching. In the scotch, maybe. Why not?

  His eyes narrow, still staring straight ahead. “Who cares. We still saw what we saw.”

  He’s not wrong. I felt exhausted when the guard left us, collapsing onto a velvety grey sofa like a discarded doll, but now the aftereffect of whatever’s been marauding through my system is pinching my consciousness, keeping me awake and wired.

  “He was your cousin,” says Goose, with a faraway voice to match his faraway look. “What was his name, again?”

  “Sam,” I say quietly. “Sam Milnes.”

  “Bad end for Sam,” he mumbles, scraping his fingers over his pale stubble.

  “He’s the one who hanged himself here,” I say. “Day of my father’s funeral.”

  “You saw it?”

  I nod, head aching with every movement.

  “With your ability, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Goose’s eyes meet mine. “So he was Gifted too, then, right? Isn’t that how it works?”

  That’s how it used to work. “He must’ve been.”

  “What was his ability, you think?”

  I haven’t thought about it. I’ve avoided thinking about it. Even now, when I remember him—especially now—it’s mostly horror I feel, and cold. How his fingers were blue when we found him—me and Mara, together.

  And how quiet it was near him. A black hole of sound that not even Mara’s heartbeat penetrated.

  Then I left her to retrace his steps. To follow him, out onto the ledge.

  It was Mara’s voice that brought me back.

  “I don’t know,” is all I say to Goose, swerving from that train of thought. “It didn’t seem . . . relevant . . . at the time.”

  Goose looks over from his perch, strung up and tense, sitting cross-legged in an oversized ivory armchair. “Maybe it’s relevant now. Maybe it’s why he ended up dead.”

  I shrug, disengaging from the question, the memory.

  Goose doesn’t seem to need my encouragement, though. “There are only three reasons ghosts are barred from the afterlife,” he says, ticking them off with his fingers. “One, they’ve got unfinished business. Two, they need to be avenged before they can move on. Or three: They’re pure fucking evil.”

  “I’m tempted to ask why you know so much about this . . .”

  “I’m entitled to my phobias, all right? And I don’t want to end up like him.”

  He’s shaken, more than I’ve ever seen him. “That doesn’t seem likely,” I say. Reassuringly, I hope.

  He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Look, mate, I appreciate the effort, and I know you’ve seen more shit than I have, but let’s be honest—you’re as bloody lost as I am here.”

  “Fair. Though I will say, of all the people I’ve seen who’ve died, he’s the only one I’ve ever seen . . . like that.”

  “The only ghost, you mean.”

  Or shared hallucination. Or induced dissociative episode. I was prepared to expect Simon. But not Sam. “Right,” is all I say.

  Goose sits up straight, gripping the armrests with both hands. “What if that was his ability?”

  “. . . Being a ghost?” I ask, despite myself.

  “No, idiot, when he was alive. Like, mine is amplification, supposedly, yes? What if his was something broad, like . . . communication? And being around me let him communicate with us, the living?”

  The idea is . . . a lot. But then, so is everything else.

  There’s one thing, though, that I can’t seem to get around. “Our Gifts are gone, though.” Or had I heard his heartbeat, before? I can’t be sure. I can’t trust it.

  Goose shakes his head. “You heard M, that could’ve been temporary. We might’ve cut ourselves off from it, she said. Maybe Sam unlocked them for us.”

  I consider it. I listen.

  No sound. Nothing. I can’t hear Goose’s heart beat, or his pulse race, or his lungs expand and contract. There’s only us, talking.

  Still, I glance at my hand. I’ve gotten used to the throbbing, the omnipresent ache of tiny fractures knitting together wrongly. I open it, spreading my fingers. The pain is white and searing.

  I close my fist quickly.

  “Why not?” Goose asks. “Will and intent, the key to everything, she said.”

  She did.

  “Well, I want it,” Goose says. “I’m not avoiding it.”

  Not like me, he doesn’t need to say.

>   Instead, I ask, “So that’s what we’re going with, then?” to be sporting. “You’re a medium?”

  Goose shakes his head vigorously. “Total fucking nightmare. Like literally, my fucking nightmare.”

  I raise my hands in defence. “It’s your theory, mate. I was going to suggest you and I might be secret cousins also, given the genetic memory factor.”

  Goose leans back, tilting his head up to stare at the chandelier hanging above us. “I mean, everyone in England is possibly secretly related to each other, so, sure, I suppose.”

  “I only thought it might be slightly more consistent, considering the Simon and professor bits.”

  Goose cocks his head to the side. “Simon and professor bits?”

  “The hospital? His wedding?”

  Goose scrunches his brow. “Whose wedding? What?”

  “That was Lord Simon we saw,” I say. “Just after the book, the Bible with my family tree fell, and the branches started growing, off the page onto—”

  “Yeah, that I saw. The names in the floor, and Sam hanging—God. Fuck.” He recovers himself. “Wait, so, you saw something else after that?”

  I nod. And then I describe it to him, my throat going dry as I do; the old parts of the manor, overgrown and dusty and rotting, then the room glowing with light and life for just long enough to illuminate the door, at first, and then—

  M’s words echo in my skull.

  You’ve locked away memories that might hurt you. Somewhere in your mind is the key.

  I shake my head to rid it of M’s voice. “The professor fancies himself an . . . architect, was his word, at one point,” I say. “A chess master, basically. I think he can see the outcomes of certain events, but claims he himself can’t do anything to affect them. So he manipulates others into doing it.” Goose was gone when M talked about my parents. I can’t remember if I ever explained that bit to him before. “He manipulated my mother into marrying my father,” I say bitterly.

  “Why?”

  “So I would be born.”

  Goose shudders. “Vile.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was your great-great-grandfather with him?” He looks around, as if Simon might be standing over his shoulder.

  I nod again. “In one of the—”

  Memories, a voice whispers in my mind. Mara’s voice, again. My Mara.

  “Visions,” I finally say, ignoring her.

  “So it worked,” Goose says. “What M told you to do. You did it.”

  I saw how Simon learned of M. And saw that the professor found him, not the other way around.

  But the professor had sent Simon to India, after M. He’d told M the opposite. Why?

  And how was it, if Simon wasn’t Gifted, as the professor said, that I could see his memories at all?

  And what did Sam have to do with it? Why did he appear to us—both of us—at all?

  “Simon said that someone, a man, gave him . . . more time. More life.” I try to find the words to explain what I saw—

  Remembered.

  I bat the word away. “I didn’t just see them in the manor, though. I saw Simon wake up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there, and heard the physician say that he wouldn’t last the night. Then, someone else came in and . . .” The details are fading with every word I speak, mercifully. I can’t remember the man’s name. “The point is, if there’s someone out there who can extend the years of someone’s life, that means . . . they or someone else would have the ability to cut them short,” I finish.

  Goose clears his throat.

  “What?”

  “I mean, I hate to state the obvious . . .”

  I raise my brows.

  “Isn’t that what Mara can do?”

  I shake my head immediately, and not just because I don’t want to talk about her. Or think about her. “No. Her ability—it’s not what I saw.”

  Goose looks pointedly away.

  “Honestly. Mara’s my opposite.” Healer, destroyer. Hero, Shadow. “The man I saw wasn’t giving life or ending it, he was . . . exchanging it? Transferring it?”

  “Well, if every action has an equal and opposite, et cetera . . .”

  “Exactly. That might be why the feather and the sword are the professor’s symbols . . .”

  Goose cocks his head. “What, like Leo’s tattoo?”

  I nod. “And the pendant,” I say, reaching for it. My thumb brushes the rough grooves in the design. “We looked it up, once, what they meant.”

  My heart races as I remember—

  Can I see yours? she asked months ago, in a different house in a different country, in what might as well have been a different era.

  As if I could’ve said no to her, then. I slipped the black cord I used to keep it on over my head, and placed it in her small, warm hand.

  “Egyptian goddess, Ma’at, wore the feather of truth in early paintings,” Goose says, bringing me back to now, to here. He mistakes my look of surprise. “It was an A-levels question.”

  I nod, as if that’s why I know about it. “Weighed a man’s heart against it—if his sins were heavier, he’d be eaten by a beastie.”

  Goose strokes his chin. “Then what’s the sword for?”

  “Think she held a sceptre, not a sword, in the original. Sword’s the modern interpretation—justice is swift and fierce. Or something,” I say, hoping we can move on now, back to A-levels and England and away from Miami and Mara.

  Goose leans forward, stretching his legs out, elbows on knees. “But then there was what your dad was doing, right? That doctor he had working for him, using you all—”

  Using us. The ivory walls of the living room bleach out into white, and instead of windows looking out onto gardens I’m in Horizons again, looking at Mara through glass, at her face when Kells told her I’d died. I remember the way she sounded there, her hollow voice and empty eyes, and what I did and said to her to stop it—

  Get out. Kill them all.

  Kells used us, and I used Mara.

  She was drugged. Compromised. More vulnerable than I was, and I used her. She woke up alone, in Horizons, had been told I was dead, and then did what I told her to do to get herself and Jamie and Stella out. She killed them all, and then I threw her away.

  “Mate? All right?”

  Clearly not. I run my hands through my hair, gripping it too hard just to feel something else. “Bit fucked up, is all.”

  “We ought to sleep, probably,” Goose says, though his eyes are wide, and his face is still ashen.

  Part of me wants to agree. But the other part is afraid to close my eyes. I don’t know where I’ll be when I wake up.

  31

  REMNANT OF THE PAST

  WE COMPROMISE. INSTEAD OF BED, we head to the kitchen. We cajole the staff into allowing Goose to cook, and though they protest at a bit, at first, it’s mostly for show. They seem glad to have the morning off, as there’s no one but us in the residence anyway.

  Goose is taking the security guard’s advice to heart and is assembling omelettes for us.

  “So,” he says, surveying his ingredients. “The professor. His symbols. Feather, sword, opposites.” He moves a few jars of spices into a cluster. “Then we’ve got your father, and that doctor.”

  He’s determined to work this out, to fit it all together, bless him. “The professor talked about needing balance in the force, or something. And on that Horizons list, they differentiated between ones they labelled ‘originals’ and the ‘induced,’ according to a protocol developed by the professor, as it happens, under an alias, of course.”

  “Wait, induced? Like, synthetically?”

  “Not like. Exactly.”

  “Copies,” Goose says quietly. “Your friend Stella said that, before . . .”

  Before.

  I open the refrigerator, hoping there’s a way to assemble Bloody Mary ingredients, because this conversation requires more alcohol.

  “So we’ve got the originals,” Goose says, holding
up a raw onion, and placing it on the counter. “And then the copies, basically, that your dad made.” He prods the withered, caramelising version in the sauté pan.

  “Right. Here’s what I haven’t twigged yet, though. My father loathed my . . . Affliction, or whatever, so why would he want to re-create it in anyone else?”

  Goose shrugs. “Lots of reasons. Seems profitable, for one.”

  Goose wasn’t there for the part when my father seemed completely fine with me holding a gun to my head, ready to pull the trigger.

  “Do it then, if you’re that selfish,” my father said.

  “If I am, it’s because you made me that way,” I said back.

  “Spoken like a true spoiled brat . . . I thought you were ready to be the man your mother hoped you would be, but I see you’re just a child, who would burn all his gifts because he can’t have the one he wants.”

  I can’t say it. I wish I’d never heard it. “Not that he’s above authorising human testing,” I say. “But something doesn’t fit, yet.”

  Goose twists around. “Not just authorising human testing. Authorising testing on his own child.”

  The words sharpen the memories I’ve been desperate to forget.

  “Deborah had theories about how to find others like you, and theories about how to cure them, but nothing promised to help you, until she found your Mara. Mara ended up teaching me as much about you as you did about her. More perhaps. I had no idea how your ability worked. How you heard things, what you saw. But it was hubris,” my father said. “If there is a way to arrest the anomaly, we haven’t found it. You might be the key to it, Noah, but we’ll never know as long as she’s alive. And you can’t stay away from her, and she can’t help what she is.”

  She can’t help what she is, he said. Was he right?

  If he was, after all, then I helped make her what she is.

  Get out. Kill them all.

  I have stayed away from her, though, at least. My father was wrong about that.

  When I find my voice, it’s hoarse. “My father wouldn’t have been above trying to replicate the thing he’d eventually be trying to eradicate,” I say slowly, hoping that’s enough of an explanation for Goose without having to recount the rest of it.

  It seems to work. “Remember what I said, about unfinished business?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Sam killed himself here, at your father’s house, on the day of your father’s funeral. He’s your cousin, we now know, but maybe your father did something to him, too?”