Eterna and Omega Read Free Page A

in my employment, before any trouble began. From first meeting in a quiet alcove, I was lost. Our rendezvous infrequent as we were both so careful … My heart was noble, I assure you, and a gentleman’s boundaries were maintained. But all that is history. What I believe we created in that house was a Ward … Not a ward in need of a guardian but a Ward, in old magical terms—”
    â€œA Ward of protection, yes, I am aware of the concept,” Evelyn asserted.
    â€œSomeone, some thing, didn’t want us to have it, and we need to know why. So now I beg you—obtain a lock of hair from my darling Clara,” the spirit said, his chill directly at her ear, as if he didn’t want her to miss one word of the vital details, “and take it to where I died. Localized magic is about connecting organic materials of life and death, and since I don’t have a grave, I can only hope that the disaster site will serve, and that from there, I will be able to tell Clara more about the Warding.”
    â€œI hope you’re right, Mr. Dupris.” She was brilliantly conversant with him, but she couldn’t be sure if that was instinct or literal translation from his plane to hers. “But I shan’t be visiting your haunted house, or Clara, past midnight. This is the stuff of the morning, for safety’s sake. Now leave me be lest you drive me to nightmares. Good night, Mr. Dupris, and I’ll deal with you tomorrow. You can … waft yourself out.” With a curt nod of her head, she exited the parlor.
    Louis bowed after her, a formality even if she couldn’t see him, calling a good night and thanks, and then, with what focus he had left, floated back onto dark Fifth Avenue, praying for dawn.
    *   *   *
    When Clara awoke the morning after any seizure, it was a sequence of putting herself back together, sense by sense, like restacking a deck of cards that had been thrown onto the floor and scattered.
    For a woman who prized herself on relative control of her vast emotional and metaphysical scope, the loss of control in an epileptic seizure was the worst fate that she could imagine. She’d had to endure it since a séance she’d attended just as she was beginning to blossom into womanhood. Clara had expected that becoming an adult would change her abilities somehow but had not anticipated that becoming more sensitive would make her more susceptible to fits. Since the age of thirteen, vastly greater care had to be taken lest she be overtaxed and overtaken, as she had been at midnight in Trinity’s sacred plot.
    Every muscle of her body was screaming in pain. The clenching part of the seizure was always brutal and lingered on like a beating. Thankfully, this time she hadn’t bitten off a chunk of her tongue; the cheek was bad enough.
    When the thorough aches sharpened her senses enough to grasp the whole of herself, she noted was in her own bed, in the elegant little upstairs room that had been hers since she moved into the town house after her parents’ deaths. Rupert Bishop had been a congressman then; now he was senator. But even then, he had made sure that his young ward had lacked nothing. He had seen to her education and given her leave to be and to express herself, to expand her mind. Most of all, to become the Spiritualist she and Bishop both felt she was born to be.
    When she was only twelve years of age, it was her vision as expressed to grieving widow Mary Todd Lincoln that led to the creation of the Eterna Commission. Now, seventeen years later, she would have to be the one to end it, somehow. Too many people—not least her beloved Louis—had already died.
    Lavinia. Thin memories returned like pale mist creeping over a dark expanse. Darling Vin had been her hero. That’s how she’d gotten home. She didn’t remember being helped into bed, but she must have put her in this muslin nightdress, as her best friend