Alan swallowed hard. “Mr.… Dufay?”
For a horrible moment Alan thought Maud had yowled without moving her lips. No—it was the tortoiseshell, awake and with all its hair standing on end. It swiped once at the edge of Maud’s skirt and then bolted. Alan couldn’t spare attention to see where it went. Maud’s head tipped to one side and then the other as she inspected him. She looked barely human. Worse than birdlike.
“Ha—arm,” Maud said, or possibly hard, or some other word that sounded like half-chewed gristle in her mouth. Her lips dragged back over her teeth. The next sound was no word at all but a pained, feral growl, and she lunged right at Alan with her fingers in claws.
“Bloody hell! Maud!” Alan had hold of her wrists. She wasn’t strong, but whatever had control of her body was determined, and probably cared less than Alan did if some of Maud Blyth’s tendons were to snap. “Can you bring yourself back?”
“What,” she said hoarsely, and writhed. “Wha—at.”
Definitely not Maud. And not seeming much like a gentleman who’d been alive a century ago, either, unless he’d died of something very unpleasant and his mind had gone beforehand. Alan should have asked more questions.
“I’ve seen you do this, Maud,” Alan said between gritted teeth. “You swapped back and forth, easy as you like. And I don’t know who you are, but you can piss off and let her speak for herself.”
Maud blinked at him. What happened next reminded Alan of the trick where someone whipped away a tablecloth and left the setting: a sense of shifting, along with a sense of dangerous motionlessness. The angles of her features changed yet again.
“Oh my,” she said, and gave a long, rich laugh that raised the hairs on Alan’s neck even more than the growling had. It was intelligent, mature, and malicious. And it was still not Maud. “Room for everyone, darlings, wait your turn—”
Maud bent at the waist as if kicked. Her arms dragged out of Alan’s grip and she staggered backwards two steps.
“—no,” she gasped.
“Maud?”
She straightened, gulping for breath, flushed red and looking—no other word for it, really—haunted. “They’re so much stronger,” she panted. “With Mrs. Navenby I could—”
And she was gone again. The next voice spoke a version of English that was nearly another language entirely—the one after that did nothing but spit obscene vitriol about women—the one after that could barely speak at all for coughing and wheezing, and managed to fumble Maud’s hat from her head, leaving her hair a pin-tugged mess.
The one bright side to all of these fucking, fucking ghosts seemed to be that no single one of them could maintain hold of Maud for long. Alan had a dreadful vision of a dead lecher taking Maud’s body on a ride around London like a stolen bicycle.
The downside was that there were enough of them that they just kept coming. Despite Alan’s best attempts at calling and encouraging her, Maud didn’t resurface again.
What was this doing to Maud? What was Alan supposed to do? Dragging her out of the cemetery seemed the simplest approach, but whenever he tried to touch her, she either flinched or flailed or tried to hit him, or—oh, wonderful—burst into loud, wailing sobs and crouched to curl herself into a ball like a hedgehog being poked with sticks.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Alan.
“Oh dear,” said a mild voice behind him.
He spun. For a moment he saw the stout, white-haired man from earlier. Then the man cradled a spell, and the illusion dropped. The magician who stood there was also stout and elderly. But now familiar.
“Miss Blyth isn’t having the best of days, is she?” said Seraphina Vaughn.
Alan looked from Maud—still crouched, hugging her knees, and emitting the occasional whimper—to Mrs. Vaughn, the last surviving member of the Forsythia Club. The one who was working begrudgingly with Bastoke’s people in order to find the Last Contract, because she believed in their plan to pool magical power.
Mrs. Vaughn had been on the Lyric. She and Alan had never spoken directly before.
There didn’t seem much point in pretending.
“You’re following her, then,” Alan said.
“I could have been following you, Mr. Ross.”
Alan ignored that. “You thought we were going to dig up the knife in a cemetery?”
“I am past making assumptions about where the others hid their pieces of the contract,” said Mrs. Vaughn calmly. “Mazes and parrot cages. Why not buried in a grave? Though I’d have thought walking into a cemetery like this one, knowing oneself a medium, would be a piece of risk-taking too far even for the bold Miss Blyth.”
As if to illustrate her point, Maud began to cry again, in the stifled manner of a child torn between terror at attracting attention and the sheer unbearable size of their emotion. This particular ghost seemed to have gained a firm foothold. Alan crouched to put a hand on her shoulder, trying to murmur the soothing nothings that penetrated this sort of weeping fit when Tom was having one. He glared up at Mrs. Vaughn.
“Are you just going to stand there, ma’am?”
“Should I be involving myself?”
“It’s in your interests to keep Miss Blyth safe and sane,” Alan said. “Everything she’s doing is to find this bloody contract that everyone wants. I thought your lot were all about that. Making other people do the dirty work and then swooping in like magpies to collect.” Bitterness seeped into his voice.
Mrs. Vaughn lowered herself to one knee with the aching slowness of age. She frowned at Maud.
“I can’t say I know how to fix a possession. I can try a general negation. And a few other things.”
Only when the first spell washed over Maud did Alan realise he’d invited one of Maud’s enemies to inflict God only knew what kinds of magic on her, without interruption or supervision. It wasn’t as if Alan had any idea what these spells were.
Christ. Too late to chase the woman off now.
None of them seemed to have any effect anyway. Mrs. Vaughn looked increasingly annoyed, in the same way that Edwin had when failing to drop the warding on the oak door. Eventually she cradled a spell that looked like pinkish spun sugar and held it in front of Maud’s face so that it was sucked into the girl’s nose on her next tear-choked inhalation.
Maud sniffed a few more times and yawned widely, and then her eyelids dropped shut and she keeled over to lie motionless on the gravel path.
“What did you do?” snapped Alan.
“She’s asleep,” said Mrs. Vaughn, straightening and brushing dirt from her skirts. “There. Your problem has been solved. Now I suggest you get her out of here.”
“How?” Alan gestured to the prone body of Maud, substantial in her layers of clothing, and then to his barely taller self. Before Mrs. Vaughn could claim that this was not her problem—he could see that approaching in her smug, round face—he went on, “If you’re helping, then help. Fetch someone. A doctor. A policeman. Anyone.”
Mrs. Vaughn raised her eyebrows at him and turned away. It was neither refusal nor agreement. Alan, watching her amble towards the street, figured he had a coin-toss chance that further help would actually arrive. He didn’t dare to leave Maud alone. Nor did he know how long she’d sleep.