Strange and Ever After (Something Strange and Deadly #3)
Susan Dennard
CHAPTER ONE
I was not supposed to be here. Oliver would be furious. Joseph even more so. This dock was the no-man’s-land between realms. It was a place for ghosts.
But my mother was dead.
And I, Eleanor, intended to find her.
Wood groaned beneath my feet as I shifted my weight. A soft, golden glow pulsed behind me. It was the curtain, a door back into the world of the living. I could almost catch a few sounds from that earthly realm—low voices and the hum of an airship engine—but the dark, lapping water beneath the dock was louder.
I took a single step forward. The curtain throbbed brighter, flickering in the corners of my vision. Then it pulled back—taking the sounds from earth with it.
Another step—the wood creaked again. At least this time I wore boots, unlike my last trip here. I’d been barefoot then, sleeping on a ship bound for France. At that time I had thought I merely dreamed this empty expanse of black water, with its driftwood dock and still air. Now I knew this place was a barrier and that I ought to turn back—I ought to leave this world before the Hell Hounds came.
Those giant, monstrous Hounds, guardians of the spirit realm. They kept the Dead on their side of the curtain . . . and the living on theirs.
But let the Hell Hounds come. Let them blast me far beyond this dock and the spirit world. Let them send my soul straight to the final afterlife.
For at this moment I truly did not care.
I glanced down and found I wore exactly what I had fallen asleep in: Daniel’s loose shirt, tucked into a pair of his trousers and rolled up to expose my hands. I flexed my fingers before me. Everything about me looked hazy, as if my body were layered in fog.
All except for my right hand. My spirit hand. That was clear and crisp.
I examined it more closely. This hand had been amputated—cut off after a Hungry Dead had shredded it beyond repair. Though I had been without it for only three months before my demon, Oliver, had returned the hand to me. He had bound the ghost of my amputated hand in the earthly realm, leaving me with this phantom limb.
So perhaps my right hand appeared more real than any other part of me because it was the only part of me that actually belonged in the spirit world.
With a deep breath, I lowered my arm and set off at a steady walk down the dock. I was here to find Mama, so that was what I would do.
Mama. Is dead. Mama. Is dead. The thought had not stopped pounding in my brain, beating in time to my heart.
Allison Wilcox had been the one to tell me, only a few hours ago. It felt like years. Or maybe only minutes . . .
It had been a beautiful, sunny morning in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris. The sort of sunny day that had made it impossible to believe I’d barely escaped the previous night with my life.
The Spirit-Hunters had come to Paris to stop a surge in walking corpses, only to learn too late that the source of les Morts was actually a demon—Marcus’s demon.
Yet the Spirit-Hunters, Oliver, and I had done our jobs well. We’d killed the demon named Madame Marineaux and saved the City of Light from hundreds of rabid Hungry Dead.
The following morning, Daniel’s huge, egg-shaped balloon had creaked and swayed in the wind off the river Seine. Its shadow had drifted over me . . . then away . . . then over me once more. The long gondola hanging below gave it the look of a white-sailed ship with a wooden ladder dropping to earth.
“Hurry, Eleanor,” a voice had called. I glanced up and found Joseph’s head poking from the gondola thirty feet above. A bandage wrapped around his head; his black skin was sickly and puffy with exhaustion.
Madame Marineaux had cut off Joseph’s ear in a blood sacrifice.
“There is no time to waste,” Joseph added, with a final scratch at his bandages.
I nodded and tiredly grabbed at the first rung. The Spirit-Hunters and I were traveling south today—racing a train bound for Marseille that had departed the evening before with Marcus on board.
And with Jie on board too. He had taken her from us, so now we would take her back.
Then we would make the bastard pay for everything he’d done.
Yet the instant my boot hit the first rung to Daniel’s airship, a new voice called, “Eleanor! Eleanor!” and my stomach plummeted.
I recognized that shrill pitch—and God, I’d so desperately prayed I would not have to hear it.
Allison Wilcox.
I had known she was coming from Philadelphia . . . but now? Already? It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning, and nothing good could have brought her all the way to Paris.
Last I had seen her, only a few weeks before, I had confessed to her that my brother had killed her brother. Yet despite that awful truth, Allison had still helped me reach the Philadelphia wharf when I needed to get to Paris—though she had also promised to call in the debt one day.