The Case of the Spellbound Child Read online

  “I’m more interested in finding out if you’re just desperate for attention, or you actually want something,” she said coolly, quite as if she talked to spirits every day. “Obviously the one thing you don’t want is to move on, or you wouldn’t be playing the silly brat with stones and buns like a street Arab.”

  Now he seethed with resentment. How dared this slip of a girl judge him! What could she possibly know, anyway?

  “Sez yew, ye gurt cow!” he snapped back, then felt like a complete idiot, because she obviously wasn’t a cow, and she was laughing at him. He snarled and crooked his fingers, and advanced on her to give her a good dose of what he could do—

  Except the parrot mantled its feathers and growled at him, and suddenly he couldn’t move at all.

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with,” she said, calmly, and turned her gaze slightly to the side of him. “Does he, Peter?”

  Peter Hughs stood where her gaze had fallen, and as she asked that question, the young man laughed. “No, Sarah, he doesn’t. And I hate to say this, but absolutely nothing he has told me makes me think there is anything redeemable about him. The opposite, in fact. Every time I gave him a hint about how he could salvage himself, he ignored it, but every time I pointed him in the direction of revenge and intimidation, he could not act on what I told him fast enough. It’s time to send him on his way.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” echoed a new, feminine voice. Startled, Alf whipped his head in the other direction to find that there was a new person—to all intents and purposes another ghost—standing beside him.

  But this woman was just as outlandish as the medium was ordinary. She had a plain but strong face, but was dressed in plaid trousers of dull brown and yellow, a greenish, thigh-length tunic, a broad leather belt, and strange, wrapped-leather shoes. She also carried a naked, bronze sword in one hand, a small, round shield on the other, and had a raven the size of an eagle on her shoulder.

  “We’re ready if you are, Sarah,” the woman continued, bringing the shield up to hold it between herself and Alf.

  And to Alf’s horror he felt something hideously familiar open up behind him. The irresistible tugging at his insides. The cold chill at his back. “No!” he screamed, and turned to run for the door.

  But Peter Hughs suddenly had a stout staff in his hands, barring his way, and the strange woman advanced on him with her shield thrust aggressively at him. “I’m afraid the answer is yes, bucko,” the woman said evenly as her raven raised its wings and took to the air, hovering above him so his escape was barred on all sides. “Time to go.”

  But he wasn’t prepared to leave without a fight, and he braced himself, gathering all his stolen energy and readying an attack as vicious as anything he’d had planned for Reg.

  And that was when a little waist-high cannonball of fury came out of nowhere, caromed into his midsection, and knocked him back.

  Right into the gaping maw of the hell-hole that had opened up behind him.

  * * *

  Sarah Lyon-White let out her breath in a sigh of satisfaction and relief, as her friends Nan Killian and Peter Hughs, and her ward Suki, all emerged from the bedroom upstairs. In order to make sure they had all their possible strength in the spirit world, they had been laid out up there on the bed borrowed from the owner of the haunted cookshop, Sam Browne, and his wife Annabelle. “That went well,” she greeted them.

  “Suki made the difference,” Nan observed, patting the little girl’s tumble of unruly black curls. “The last thing he was expecting was to have her crashing into his gut and knocking him off balance.” She looked over to the young man—who looked very little like the androgynous “Peter Hughs” of the spirit world. This man was an athletic, dark-haired, handsome, and very broad-shouldered and masculine fellow with the subtle details of dress that marked him as a university student of some kind. He looked—and in fact, was—the sort of young man who flung himself into sport and his studies with equal enthusiasm. Caro was more than making up for her previous life as a bed-bound invalid. “Any trouble with the Portal, Peter?” Sarah asked, a little anxiously. If Caro’s hold on Peter Hughs’ body was going to be challenged, she would always be in danger around a Portal.

  “None whatsoever,” Peter responded, in a pleasant, cultured tenor. “Nothing calling to me, no urge to throw myself into it, and no sense that anything on the other side wanted me there.” He flashed both of them a dazzling smile. “I think we are all safe in assuming that the Powers That Be are perfectly satisfied with my tenancy of this body.”

  It was getting harder and harder for Sarah to think of Peter as “Caro” and not as “Peter Hughs.” Which, she supposed, was all to the good, another sign that the spirit that had been born and died female had settled neatly into the male body whose original soul had been cast out of it, too weakened by drugs and despair to care to live anymore. And certainly the fact that a Portal into the next world had no hold over her—him—seemed like the final token that so far as that next world was concerned “Caro” could go right on living as “Peter” until she—he—reached the Biblically promised three-score and ten. And perhaps beyond that.

  “I have to conclude you’re right,” Sarah agreed.

  “Well, that makes me as pleased as Punch.” Peter shoved both hands in his suit pockets and rocked a little back on his heels, a smile on his face. “Because I’ve never felt as comfortable in all my days, and not just because I’m not sick all the time anymore. I know you’re skeptical, Sarah, but I tell you, nothing feels quite as right now as being a fellow.” He dropped his gaze to Suki, who was standing beside him, done up in her Baker Street Irregular disguise as quite the tough little street-lad. “So Suki, have you got any desire to be a lad?”

  Suki looked up at him and snorted derisively. “Not bloody likely, ye gurt loon,” she said rudely.

  Sarah giggled behind her hand, and Nan laughed openly. “You’ll never get her to give up her velvet, silk, and lace for trousers, Peter,” Nan chuckled.

  “I like trousers,” Suki admitted, meditatively. “But dresses is better.” She stuffed her abundant curls up into the flat cap she took out of her back pocket and nodded with decision.

  There had been a very interesting effect to all of this, something that Sarah had begun to note now that she had been informed that she was a Spirit Master. Every spirit that she sent to the other side, willing or not, bequeathed to her a burst of magical energy. The more willing they were, the more energy she got. And this had not been an exception.

  No wonder I never seem to run out of power.

  Sarah turned her attention to the Brownes, who had emerged from the safety of the kitchen and observed all this banter with expressions of utter bewilderment. There could not have been a couple in all of London who would have fit the words “cookshop couple” as well as these two: middle-aged, plump, both enveloped in huge aprons, he going bald and she to gray under her cap. And, for this part of town, astonishingly neat and clean. The late unlamented Alf’s complaints of being “pisened” by the food here probably had more to do with the rotgut that he drank than anything he ate. Finally Sam voiced the only thing that he could comprehend. “Is—it gorne?” he croaked.

  “Very gone,” Sarah affirmed. “Isn’t it, Annabelle?”

  The wife nodded, her face flushed with relief. “It’s gorne,” she confirmed. “I dunno where it went, but it went somewheres what ain’t ’ere.”

  “And it’s not coming back,” Nan said stoutly, and reverted to the language of the streets and her childhood. “Blimey, if we hain’t blowed it clear t’ ’Ell, an’ the Divil may ’ave it.”

  “Divil keep it!” put in Suki, which at least brought a shaky smile to both the Brownes’ faces.

  “Now, I’m not guaranteeing what will happen if you don’t keep our bargain,” Sarah warned, knowing very well that present terror is soon forgotten, and barga
ins made out of fear forgotten quicker still when the fear is gone. “You’ve surely heard all the stories from your grannies about what happens if you don’t keep a bargain sealed the way we sealed ours.”

  With John Watson’s help, she and Nan had concocted an impressive little ceremony in lieu of actual payment for ridding the neighborhood of the haunt, which had involved pricking of fingers and fingerprints in blood on a most artistically rendered document provided by Peter, who had a vast collection of ornate parchment proclamations and charters in the University College of London’s many libraries to use as models. The “bargain” was a complex one, that bound every single person who had come forward as suffering from the hauntings to provide some sort of service to someone else in the group.

  The huge Italian family, the Bartilinos, were to provide two children every day to sweep the area at the front of the cookshop and the yard in back, and to help tidy when the shop closed. The Brownes were to provide one plain baked potato for each of the Bartilinos every evening. Mrs. Hardy, who ran the brothel and prided herself on having the cleanest house and girls in this part of London, was adding the Brownes’ laundry to hers, and sending clothing to be mended to the Bartilinos, who were to get anything past mending for themselves. And Lottie, the Cockney whore who had been a thorn in Mrs. Hardy’s side, was to join the House, and Nan had gotten rid of Lottie’s now-ex (and very abusive) pimp-lover by the simple expedient of Peter breaking his jaw. And since Lottie also had clever fingers and had once worked for a milliner, she was to help the Bartilinos by teaching them to make fabric flowers they could sell, from the scraps of the whores’ cast-off finery and any other rags of a better sort they could acquire. The Brownes were to supply the House with space in their ovens, since the House had a very unreliable stove. And those other neighbors of the area that had suffered fewer visitations had agreed to take on evening patrols to keep criminal outsiders such as Alf on their better behavior. It wouldn’t be possible or even practical to try to keep them out—but a few broken heads would teach troublemakers it wasn’t wise to make their trouble here.

  Peter was highly amused by all these machinations, but Nan in particular was pleased, as they had the side effect of unifying the neighborhood and making it safer and more pleasant for everyone. She and Sarah couldn’t do anything about the poverty—but they could make people’s lives better by teaching them to help each other.

  “Oh nobody’s goin’ ter be fergettin’, Miss,” Sam Browne pledged fervently. He mopped his face with his apron. “Not arter what we bin t’rough.”

  “May I suggest, however,” Peter spoke up, “That you continue the tales of hauntings, and make them as bloody as you like. That will bring a lot of the curious with money in their pockets here, and that can only help improve things.” He winked.

  “You shock me, young Marster,” Sam said, with a weak grin. “You shock me. An honest feller loike yew, University chap an’ all, suggestin’ sech a thing!”

  Peter shrugged, and grinned back.

  After a refusal of the cookshop’s hospitality past a cup of tea all around, the party took their leave, as the crowd outside the windows parted to let them past, then thronged into the shop to hear the (undoubtedly much-embellished) tale of exorcising the haunt.

  It was late—nearly midnight, in fact—but they were not in the least concerned about walking to a part of London where they were more likely to be able to find a cab. Nor were they concerned about how dark it was, here where the streetlights were very few and far between. Well, other than being careful about placing their feet. This was not a part of London to fall down in, because you’d get back up again smelling rather awful.

  But ruffians were not a concern. There were four of them, after all, and although they were relatively well dressed for this neighborhood, they all gave off an air of watchful—and sober—competence that would make would-be thugs think twice about taking them on.

  Of course, if any would-be thugs did take them on, it would not end well. Sarah, Nan, and Suki had all been trained by a Sikh, a Hindu, and a Muslim who had all been military men as well as skilled in their own native weapons and martial styles. And although their weapons were not at the moment visible, they were all armed. As for Peter, he had taken up boxing at University, and was quite competent at it. And enjoyed every moment of it.

  “I hope this project didn’t interfere with your studies, Peter,” Sarah said, since she hadn’t apologized for asking him to play “bait” for them these past couple weeks. If it had not been for him leading Alf on, she very much doubted it would have been so easy to be rid of him.

  “Not at all, actually. My body gets almost as much rest when I’m spirit-traveling as when I’m actually sleeping. Doesn’t yours?” he asked, glancing over at her.

  “It does, actually, as long as we aren’t fighting anything,” Sarah agreed. “I must say, I’m awfully glad you found you were still able to spirit-travel once you settled into Peter Hughs. It’s been exceedingly helpful.”

  “So am I! Otherwise you might have just discarded me like a finished project, and I enjoy helping you and the Watsons far too much!” Peter teased. “I’d have had no excuse to keep looking you up, otherwise! And I enjoy your company almost as much as your adventures!”

  “Well, since you decided on medicine instead of law, and John is unofficially a kind of mentor to you, that’s the biggest lie you’ve told today,” Nan replied, laughing at him.

  “Now, I never actually told old Alf a lie,” Peter pointed out. “I just never told him the whole truth. And I’m not responsible for where his imagination took him.” Then he frowned a little. “I do wish there was a way we could track down this ‘Reg’ person, though. I’m not pleased that there’s still a cold-blooded murderer about.”

  “Oi,” Suki objected. “Wotcher think I been doin’? Oi ’opped ’round to Lestrade, an’ give ’im everything yew tol’ us. ’E didn’t need much asides of ‘Alf’ an’ ‘Reg’ an’ where Alf’s body wuz foun’. ’E ’ad that there Reg coolin’ ’is ’eels in gaol in no time. An’ arf a dozen lads willin’ t’swear ’e tol’ ’em ’e done for Alf too.”

  “Lestrade is competent enough on his own ground,” came a deep voice from behind them. “Don’t ever tell him I said so, however.”

  Sarah glanced behind her, but couldn’t see much but a tall shadow that had moved up to join their group. There was no doubt of who that shadow was, however. “Hello, Sherlock,” she replied. “Are you about to resurrect soon? I certainly hope so. We miss you, and passing meetings like this aren’t enough.”

  “Not immediately, no,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Not until I am certain that Mary Watson is also safe to be resurrected, and that is not yet possible to say.”

  Sarah nodded, but she was disappointed, and she was fairly certain that Mary Watson, although she would not complain, was weary of masquerading as a young man. It had been an adventure and an amusing novelty for a while, but Sarah’s intuition suggested Mary wanted to move about as herself freely again.

  “So what brings us the brief pleasure of your company, Holmes?” asked Peter.

  “Partly to ensure your safety, and partly to guide you to the growler driven by a confidant of mine that I secured for you,” Holmes replied. “And if you’ll look about a block ahead, you’ll see it waiting there for you.”

  “Why thank you, Sherlock!” Sarah exclaimed with gratitude.

  But when she looked behind her, he was already gone.

  3

  THE growler would drop Peter off last, allowing him to use as an excuse that a growler was the only cab he could find at this hour. Not that he’d need an excuse, not really. The real Peter Hughs had been an utterly useless, spoiled, wet mess, a disappointment to his parents and to himself, unwilling to actually put in the work to succeed at anything, and so, ended up at failing everything, including life. And he’d come within an inch of so completely betraying everything
he should have cared for and fought to protect that he had nearly provided the spirit of Moriarty with a new body.

  Only the intervention of the brave ghost of a former invalid named Caro had prevented that—even as Peter abandoned his life and body, Caro took it before Moriarty could, intent on denying the villain a second life, regardless of the costs to herself.

  And Caro’s sacrifice had been rewarded. She settled into Peter’s body, weathered the pain and suffering of being weaned from the opium he had given himself up to without a complaint, and endeared herself to Peter’s parents in the process, who thought that the opium withdrawal was a life-threatening disease, and were astounded by the “new” Peter that emerged from his brush with death.

  And Caro—now really, truly “Peter”—had rewarded them. He’d—Nan could only think of Caro as “him” and “Peter” now—had gone back to the University course he’d abandoned. After wavering between law and medicine (much to the delight of his parents, who would have been happy with anything at that point), he’d chosen medicine “out of gratitude to Dr. John Watson, who saved me.” He had moved back in with his parents, who were very well off, although the new reformed Peter would have given them no qualms at all if he’d insisted on living in his own flat. But this was in no small part because he was very much taken with “his” little sister, who adored the new and reformed big brother that had come home very much the improved prodigal.

  Not that Caro had entirely abandoned her original family. She was quietly making certain they were all right . . . but was not unhappy to discover that they had moved on past her death.

  “It’s not as if I was much more than a pleasant burden,” she’d pointed out. “And I do not blame them in the least that they miss me, but are relieved to have that burden gone.”

  And with that, she moved on herself, into her new family, and the new role of advisor to her new little sister. As Peter, she was determined to make sure that sister grew up to be as strong and capable as Sarah and Nan, and was taking advantage of being the “Golden Child” to get that project well underway.