“Do you?” She put a slight emphasis on the second word, her gaze calculating. Then she leaned her head back against the wall as if it was too heavy to hold up anymore, her half-closed eyes suggesting I was no longer worth looking at. “God, this band is horrid,” she said, and she raised one elegant hand and tossed the still-lit end of her cigarette in a perfect arc onto the dance floor.
It was the coarsest, most unladylike gesture I had ever seen, and I stood mesmerized by it. There was something so darkly sensual about her, so unafraid. I was aware of a vein of pure, black longing within me. I wanted to be free enough to do something like that, effortlessly and without thought, a gesture that would horrify my mother, horrify myself. Much of what Gloria did and said was an act, but with an ache in my chest I knew that throwing her cigarette in that moment was not one of them. It was not staged in order to shock. She had simply wanted to get rid of her cigarette, and that was the fastest way.
I wanted to ask her—something. I knew not what. Everything. Instead, I said, “Does drinking stop the visions?”
Gloria blinked slowly at me, her eyes dark and unreadable as she considered the question. “I drink because I like to be drunk, darling,” she said finally. “And nothing stops the visions but sheer willpower.”
I swallowed and my gaze flicked down to her hand resting on the table. I wanted to touch it, to feel her power, to feel that connection with her, with someone, with anyone. With Gloria Sutter. I pulled my coat tighter around me and took a step away. “I have to go.”
“Let me ask you something,” Gloria said, as if we’d never stopped talking. She leaned slightly forward over the table. “Your precious mother. What happens to you when she’s gone?”
“Gone?” I said stupidly. “My mother is in perfect health. She isn’t going anywhere.”
Her voice turned harsh and almost amused. “Have you learned nothing? We’re all going somewhere. The question is where.”
The words hit me like slaps. I thought of the old woman I’d seen as a child, all the hideous dead I’d seen since. I could not—would not—think of my mother in the same way. “Be quiet.”
“Do you think you’ll get married?” Gloria pressed on. “What exactly do you plan to tell your husband? That you’ve spent your life staring into the eyes of corpses, but never mind, darling, I’m perfectly fine? You’ll never find a man to take you unless you lie to him—do you know that? Besides, the men all went to war and didn’t come home. I talk to those dead soldiers, and sometimes I think, ‘There’s another one. Another man no girl can marry.’”
I turned to leave, but Gloria was faster. Her hand shot out and gripped mine, cold and hard. I hadn’t yet put on my gloves.
The feeling was stronger this time, fueled by alcohol and exhaustion. It had taken me years to learn to fully control the power I’d been born with, but Gloria’s power dwarfed mine easily. How she dealt with it, how she controlled it, what it cost her, I could not fathom. I could only gasp as the seedy nightclub fell away and the world went quiet and there was only Gloria, me, and the sharp electric current between us. Then she let me go. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a taxi, shivering and inexplicably near tears. I would never marry; she was right. I was too freakish. And someday my mother would be gone.
I came home to find The Fantastique half mad with worry, moments away from calling the police. We had our first row that night, tearful and dramatic. I begged her forgiveness even as I bit back a resentment toward her I’d never felt before. I told her I’d made a new friend on the train home and we’d lost track of time.
I told her my new friend was named Florence. It sounded like a nice enough name. And through all the rows, that night and afterward, I never mentioned Gloria Sutter.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Despite the restless night I’d spent after drinking Gloria’s gin, I was out of the house early the next morning. The silence in my sitting room was too much for me, the walls narrowing in. The bustle of London’s morning streets numbed my mind. I told myself I was wandering with no fixed purpose, but by the time I took the tube to Aldwych station, I admitted that was a lie. Aldwych was only a few streets from the offices of the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research.
The tube doors slid open and I made my way, along with a smattering of suited men and important-looking women, up to the street. The pavements were still damp from the last evening’s rain, and a bank of gray clouds lowered over the city, threatening another round. My temples throbbed already. I was hungry and thirsty for some tea.
I had just paused at the doorway of a small café, considering a stop alone for breakfast, when a long black motorcar pulled up to the curb next to me and a man unfolded himself from the backseat.
I blinked at him in shock. It was George Sutter.
“Good morning, Miss Winter,” Sutter said, touching the brim of his hat. “Join me for coffee, will you?”
He gently rested one hand on my elbow, and I automatically let him steer me through the door and to a seat at a small table. “Just tea,” I managed to correct him after he ordered on my behalf—tea and a scone for me, black coffee for himself. Then he turned to face me, crossing one leg over the other.
He was dressed in one of his well-cut slender suits and an overcoat, a hat, and an unassuming tie. A folded umbrella sat in the crook of one arm. A businessman just like any other on a London morning, except that his air of power sent the waiter scrambling with extra speed to fetch his coffee. And I’d accompanied him at his request without question, like a servant.
Before he could speak, I asked the obvious. “How did you find me?”
“How do you think?”
I allowed a feeling of shock to move through me. “You have someone watching me? For how long? How did he follow me through the tube?”