The Fire in the Glass Read online

  The

  Fire in the Glass

  THE CHARISMATICS

  BOOK ONE

  Jacquelyn Benson

  VAUGHAN WOODS PUBLISHING

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents described here are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons—living or dead—is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Jacquelyn Benson

  Cover design by Sara Argue of Sara Argue Design

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Vaughan Woods Publishing

  Typeset in Minion Pro and ALS Script by Cathie Plante

  All rights reserved. The scanning, uploading, photocopying and distribution of this book without permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from this book for purposes other than reviews, please fill out the contact form at jacquelynbenson.com.

  First edition: May 2020

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2020901483

  ISBN: 978-1-7345599-1-0

  Published by Vaughan Woods Publishing

  PO Box 882

  Exeter, New Hampshire 03833 U.S.A.

  Stay up-to-date on new book releases by subscribing to Jacquelyn’s newsletter at jacquelynbenson.com.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Note from the Author

  The Smoke Hunter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prophecy is not an art, nor (when it is taken for prediction) a constant vocation, but an extraordinary and temporary employment from God, most often of good men, but sometimes also of the wicked.

  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

  Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao. It is the beginning of folly.

  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  (Translation by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English)

  ONE

  Hampstead Heath, London

  February 16, 1914

  LILITH ALBRIGHT RATTLED ACROSS the heath on the back of her motorcycle, pushing for speed as though it were possible to outrun the inevitable.

  Dark clouds scudded over the broad, open countryside, the brown fields broken by tumbled stone walls or hedges of twisted gorse. The wind was still sharp with the lingering bite of winter. It was hardly an ideal day for a ride, but Lily had not taken the green, mud-spattered Triumph out for a pleasure cruise.

  It was an escape, and it was futile. What she was running from could not be outpaced. That was the trouble with the future.

  It began early that morning with the washbasin.

  She splashed the cold water over her face. Drops ran down the line of her jaw and fell into the enameled bowl, shattering the surface of the water into a thousand tiny ripples.

  The ripples coursed across the shallow reflection of her features—her mother’s infamous auburn hair, her father’s sharp gray eyes. Then the moving water transformed, shifting to become a whirlwind of light, spinning snow.

  The blizzard obscured the uncomfortable familiarity of her face, devouring it in a veil of white that parted to reveal a new scene: the open door to her building on March Place in Bloomsbury.

  Icy flakes spun around her, blowing in to dust the worn carpet.

  Lily drifted inside.

  Besides the snow on the floor, the hallway looked as it always did. The walls were papered in a rust-hued paisley, accented with a still life painting of a pair of oily pilchards resting next to a mug of flat ale. The air smelled vaguely of boiled nettles.

  Light spilled down from the landing above, coming from the open door to the flat that sat directly beneath her own. These were the rooms where her neighbor, Estelle, lived with her companion, Miss Bard.

  She rose to the landing and looked inside.

  The living room was empty save for the dog on the rug. The animal was pale green and split precisely in half. It lay in a pile of ashes, looking up at Lily with sad eyes.

  She moved past it, drawn toward the bedroom.

  The air felt stuffy, crowded with some unseen presence. Estelle sat at her vanity, gazing into the mirror, her eyes locked on the closet behind her, the door of which sat ajar.

  Inside, something moved.

  It was a subtle shift of the shadows accompanied by a soft tinkling of glass like bottles dancing in a milkman’s crate. The shifting gathered mass, took on speed, and rushed into the room. It swept toward them in a shape both like and unlike that of a man. It thrust forward a long silver weapon, thin and sharp as a fencer’s sword. The glittering point met the skin of Estelle’s arm and the mirror shattered, cracks spider-webbing from side to side.

  In her seat at the vanity, Estelle tipped backwards. Her descent halted abruptly halfway to the floor. Suspended, her thin body swung from the chair and passed out of the room, heels dragging on the rug.

  The snow came in, whirling with blinding intensity.

  The storm passed and Lily was somewhere else, somewhere strange and wrapped in darkness.

  The air smelled acrid, chemical. The walls around her were made of stacked glass, bottles and jars that caught and reflected the ghostly image of a flickering flame, then multiplied it in myriad dark, shimmering facets.

  “Thief,” said a voice from behind her, hoarse and thick with an unfamiliar accent.

  It was Estelle. Lily turned to see her sitting on a flat wooden table, her face white and pale as death. She held a hand to her throat. Blood seeped through her fingers, staining the bright blue of her robe. Her eyes were wide, staring vacantly into the nothingness over Lily’s shoulder.

  Smoke curled around her feet, tendrils rising to embrace her.

  “Murderer,” she said, raising a long, trembling hand. She pointed into the shadows. “Alukah.”

  Estelle vanished, swallowed by the smoke and the darkness. The ground before Lily opened to reveal a pool of deep, dark water, its surface quaking as though disturbed by some sudden intrusion. She fell towards it, and then the dark water was at her feet, spilling across her bedroom floor from where the overturned washbasin spun slowly into stillness.

  Lily fought a familiar cocktail of rage and grief as she opened the throttle of the Triumph, taking the motorcycle to its bone-shaking limit, her teeth clenched against the jars and jolts of the road. The brown expanse of the heath blurred into an afterthought.

  For as long as she could remember, Lily had been plagued by glimpses of the future.

  All manner of horrors paraded themselves across her mind. House fires promised to leave charred corpses in their wake. The bone of a neighbor’s leg pointed its splintered e
nd up through the flesh. Ships faltered in the icy waters of the North Sea.

  For years, she tried to put the knowledge to use. She warned, begged, lied, and manipulated to steer events toward a different outcome. As a girl, she tripped orange sellers to keep them from stumbling into an oncoming lorry or stole travel vouchers from nightstands. She tormented dogs into taking a snap at her before they could inflict more irreversible damage on someone else.

  To the rest of the world, it looked like the most rank disobedience. She went through nannies like handkerchiefs. Her mother’s airy disinterest in discipline was the only thing that kept Lily from being regularly beaten.

  Far worse than any punishment she did receive was the knowledge that her efforts meant nothing.

  The fire she averted one day would come roaring through the next week. A bone saved from breaking would find another way to shatter. She would dash into the street to catch a cat no one else knew was about to be hit by an omnibus, only to see the same animal lying by the side of the road the next day, covered in flies.

  She kept trying. She fought to win her lonely battle against fate despite the steely opposition of the nannies and the guilt, grief and gutting frustration—right up until the day her mother died.

  Lily foresaw it in exquisite detail.

  She used every tactic in her extensive repertoire to prevent it. For a brief moment, it looked as though she might actually succeed. Mad requests were made and acceded to. A few key personal items were successfully misplaced. Everything was in place for this future, finally, to turn out differently.

  Until it didn’t.

  Lily finally accepted the truth. There would be no changing what she saw in her visions. It wasn’t a gift or a responsibility. It was a curse, her own private torture.

  Banished to a cold, gray finishing school for five withering years, she had tried to escape from that curse. Feeling a vision come over her, she attempted everything from pinches to reciting Milton or once, memorably, sticking a fork into an electrical outlet to short circuit the revelation.

  None of it worked. She could not prevent the knowledge from coming to her. She could do nothing except try her damnedest to ignore it, then keep living despite the unavoidable, stabbing guilt, and the rage and frustration that threatened to burn her up from the inside out.

  Most days, living was enough.

  Then there were days like today.

  She leaned into a turn, the motorcycle bouncing against a bump in the road. She gripped the handlebars, hands iron-tight, willing the Triumph into submission.

  The profile of an old manor rose up beyond the sharp thorns of the hedge. The stone walls were stained with age, the windows fogged with years of dirt. Scaffolding ran along one long wing, tarps flapping in the icy breeze.

  There were no other houses here. No cars or carriages cluttered the road. Only the dark figure of a lone horseman riding across the fields broke the isolation of the scene.

  Estelle was going to die.

  Estelle who made her living speaking to the dead, who loved gossip, turbans, and a particularly unctuous brand of Italian sweet vermouth. She was adept at catching Lily at the exact moment she was coming up the stairs, luring her into a glass or a chat or the whirlwind of some scandal or another.

  It was not easy to make friends, living with knowledge that could never be shared. At any moment, Lily might discover that the people she had come to care for would be taken from her. Estelle had been the first one in a very long time to blow past her carefully laid defenses and find a way into her heart. Now some monster was going to make a ghost of her.

  So Lily ran. She had run from the flat, grabbing her riding clothes and bolting out into the chill of the morning. She caught the tram to Highgate, on the outskirts of the sprawling expanse of London, and retrieved her Triumph from the garage. She rode it as though grief could be left behind by speed and distance.

  Her tires devoured the deserted road, the chill biting at the exposed skin of her cheeks and neck. This was usually a miracle cure, a panacea for all manner of ills. The feeling of racing into the wind, of changing her course with a shift of her weight, must be the nearest thing in the world to flying. Lily could be plagued with frustrations, and an hour or two on the motorbike would leave her feeling peaceful as a monk.

  Not this time.

  Out in the fields, the horseman kicked into a gallop, flying across the open fields of grass and heather. Lily joined him, leaning low over the handlebars. The engine roared and shook beneath her, straining with what she demanded of it, but it couldn’t push the image of Estelle’s bloodstained form from her mind. It was impossible to outrun the feeling of her own powerlessness. All her reckless pace earned her were stiff muscles and a chapped nose.

  Nothing changed. Nothing ever would.

  Then a sharp crack splintered the stillness of the heath.

  The Triumph lurched beneath her as a trail of flame blazed across her thigh. The engine skipped, squealed. Tires skidded against the dry dust of the road. The horizon shifted, rising up as the motorcycle tipped her toward the ground.

  She hit the road hard and felt the bite of it tear at the thick wool covering her shoulder. The motorcycle spun, ripping from her legs and sliding across the packed earth. She rolled, finally coming to a stop on her back, arms spread, looking up at the wide gray expanse of the sky.

  The clouds seemed to spin slowly above her.

  Silence settled in, filling the space left behind by the roar of the Triumph’s engine.

  She closed her eyes, wondering vaguely just what part of her she might have broken.

  A new sound rose, growing from soft to a rapid intensity. It was the pounding of hooves, falling quick and heavy enough that she could feel them through the earth at her back.

  They clattered to a stop beside her.

  “Hold, Beatrice,” said a rich, masculine voice.

  She opened her eyes.

  Her unimpeded view of the sky was marred by the appearance of a man’s face as he stood over her, dark eyes framed by wind-tousled hair.

  There was something of the country preacher about him. It was in the sober cut of his thick black wool coat, the subtle signs of wear about his cuffs. A country preacher would have worn a collar. The man leaning over her lacked that as well as his hat and the top button of his shirt.

  The neglected button left the white cloth open at the neck, revealing a triangle of pale skin dusted lightly with dark hair. Lily found it drawing more of her attention than it ought to. It did not help that he was posed against the backdrop of the windswept heath, a setting designed to make any reasonably-proportioned male look like a hero out of a Brontë novel.

  “You’re a woman,” he exclaimed, crouching down beside her.

  “Yes,” Lily confirmed, wincing.

  “You were riding that motorcycle.”

  “I was.”

  “What does that feel like?”

  It was such an odd question that Lily glanced over at him, wondering if he was ridiculing her. His expression was open, curiosity apparently genuine.

  “Rather sore at the moment,” she replied flatly.

  She moved to rise. A black-gloved hand pressed against her chest.

  “You really ought not do that.”

  The accent gave him away. His rich voice was clipped into the posh tones of the upper class, sounding of Eton with a dash of Oxford. There was something else there as well, something warmer—a slight burr of the North.

  A gentleman, despite his surprising lack of a hat.

  Lily had little reason to like gentlemen.

  “Would you please remove your hand?”

  He pulled it back quickly.

  “Sorry, but you might have broken something. A fall from a motorcycle cannot be much different than a fall from a horse.”

  “A motorcycle is much lower to the ground.”

  “It also moves faster. Have you any pain in your neck?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “S
top that,” he ordered, looking alarmed. “What about the rest of you?”

  “I have just crashed my motorcycle. It hurts in rather a lot of places at the moment.”

  “Wonderful,” he announced. He seemed to mean it. “Try wiggling your fingers. Your toes?”

  Lily obeyed impatiently.

  “Does anything feel numb?”

  “No.”

  “Headache?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Move your limbs. Right arm first. Left? Now your right leg.”

  Lily obeyed mechanically and with barely concealed impatience.

  “May I get up now?”

  “You might want to take care of the bleeding before you do that.”

  Lily pushed herself into a seated position, feeling the ache of what would shortly be some significant bruising on her arms and chest. She looked down.

  Her left thigh was covered in blood, surrounding a ragged tear in the heavy twill of her trousers.

  “Blast,” she swore.

  She pulled at the tear for a better look.

  She was aware of the man beside her, of the utter impropriety of revealing a pale sliver of her inner thigh in front of some well-bred stranger. She didn’t care. His opinion of her could hardly amount to much given that he had come across her lying in the road.

  The raw tear in her thigh continued to ooze blood, soaking her leg.

  “It’s just a scratch.”

  “It needs stitches,” the gentleman countered.

  “I’m sure that’s not necessary.”

  “You are dripping blood onto the road.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of black silk. He unwound the neat ball of it and Lily recognized the length of a cravat. He held out the neckcloth.

  She hesitated.

  “Go on,” he encouraged.

  “It will be stained.”

  “Then I have a further excuse not to wear it.”

  Lily gave in. She tugged off her driving gloves and took the stretch of dark fabric from him.

  She circled her thigh with the silk twice, then tied it tightly, trying not to wince. She could see where the blood already soaked through the fabric, turning it a deeper shade of black.

  Beside her, he stood.