Marked Read online

  THIRTY-THREE

  “THAT MAKES NO sense,” Jacob said.

  “I know! We’re thousands of feet in midair over the Atlantic Ocean. The whole point of this airship is to keep people from just Walking in.” Or out, I thought.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can feel them.” I shuddered and hugged myself. “I feel them coming.”

  “Okay, that means the Emperor and his goons can, too, right? They should take care of them.”

  “Yes.” I slowed down, remembering something Ivan said, and the memory gave me a chill beyond the touch of the approaching Shadows.

  Oh, crap!

  “Jacob?”

  “What?”

  “When they first showed up, and Ivan told me about them, he said the Shadows were dangerous because you couldn’t sense them coming.”

  “Okay, maybe he’s wrong about that—”

  “He didn’t sense them coming.”

  “He could have just been oblivious.”

  “Or maybe I can sense them because they’re related to me, my Mark.”

  Jacob stared at me as if he was about to say it was a crazy idea. I could see the point where it dawned on him that the whole concept, everything around us, was crazy.

  “Why don’t I hear any sort of alarm?” I asked.

  Jacob let me go and darted to the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “If you’re right, we have to raise an alarm, warn the crew, Ivan’s people.”

  Well, duh. That was obvious. I silently thanked Jacob for finding the thread of reason in our situation. I ran to join him at the door just as he started cursing in frustration.

  “Apparently, they don’t trust you completely,” he snapped. “Can’t get the blasted door open.”

  “Great,” I looked around at the stateroom for some form of communication. I couldn’t find a phone. I saw Jacob look around and say, “There we go.”

  He went over to one of the inside walls of the room and pulled open a small cabinet door set into the wall. A brass plaque on the door read “utilisation pour l’aide.”

  Inside was something that could have been an antique-style phone, or intercom, or one of those Victorian medical devices you see in quack museums. He pulled a brass cylinder out of the recess drawing out a thick fabric-covered cable after it. Inside the recess, beneath a brass grille embossed with a floral motif, three large toggle switches were labeled helpfully, “un,” “deux,” “trios.” Next to those was a large mahogany knob.

  Jacob looked at a sign mounted on the inside of the cabinet door. “How to call emergency . . . here . . .” He flipped all the switches on and pulled the knob. A small light above the grille glowed a weak incandescent yellow. A moment later, a second light came on next to it. The grille started crackling, and I heard a voice in distant and slightly irritated French.

  Jacob had been holding the brass cylinder to his ear. He lowered it to his mouth and spoke into it. “Hello? Hello?” Nothing happened, and the French voice became more irritated.

  “Hello, do you speak English?”

  The French speaker gave no sign of hearing. My heart raced as he talked over Jacob’s attempts to speak to him. If anything, it felt as if the number of dead fingers tracing the edges of my Mark were increasing. It felt unclean, a corruption spreading beneath my skin, as if their phantom nails were attempting to split the skin and release a corrupt infected version of the Mark like the one carving through the Shadows’ skin—scarring my body the way they had Whedon’s.

  If their presence made me feel like this, I could only shudder at the thought of what Whedon must have felt as this corruption ate away at her.

  After about thirty seconds, the voice snapped something derisive, the speaker died, and the second light winked out.

  “What?” I suddenly realized that Jacob hadn’t been able to communicate at all.

  Jacob stared at the device in his hand, then at the grille. “What the hell?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about wasting his time. Pissed off and shouting through a bad connection, I’m lucky I understood anything. I haven’t used any French since school.”

  “Did you use that?” I pointed at the cylinder in his hand. Along the length of it was an elaborate lever that made the whole thing look more like an expensive showerhead than a microphone.

  “Crap, I’m an idiot.” He grabbed the mahogany knob, pushed it in, and yanked it out again. “Single duplex, an intercom, not a telephone. I need to switch the mic on to talk.”

  The annoyed French voice came on-line again in a burst of static, and the second light came on. I did manage to catch one word, “merde.” This time Jacob worked the lever and repeated, “Hello, can you speak English?” A third light glowed when he spoke and winked out when he released the lever.

  “Oui. Yes. What—bzt—going on down—bzt—”

  I heard a click as Jacob worked the lever on the mic. “I’m here with Det—Lady Dana Rohan. She needs to talk with someone in charge of security on this airship.”

  A click as Jacob released the lever, “—know what cabin you—bzt—am officer of the night—bzt—can talk to—bzt—cessez de perdre mon—”

  Jacob handed me the microphone. It was cold and heavy in my hand, like talking into a lead pipe. I worked the lever. “You need to raise an alarm. I can feel an attack coming. The Shadows.”

  “—c’est ridicule, you cannot—bzt—serious, my Lady. We are fifteen thous—bzt—feet above—”

  I hit the lever again. “Listen, I know where we are. But I’m feeling it now, and I felt it before. I’ve seen these things before.”

  “—you wish me to wake—”

  I never heard him finish, because the lights in the cabin died, including the little bulbs above the recessed intercom.

  “That’s not good,” Jacob said.

  I hadn’t even realized that the light fixtures had been electric, with their elaborate cut-glass chimneys. I guess I’d been thinking they were gas if I’d thought about them at all. Then again, open flames on an airship were probably not the best idea.

  It took a moment for my eyes to start making out shapes. Fortunately, the moon was full and low in the sky above the clouds outside the window, so we weren’t plunged into complete darkness.

  Jacob stepped back from the intercom.

  I backed up with Jacob into the center of the stateroom. My skin rippled gooseflesh as I felt invisible corpse-fingers reaching for me. Every couple of seconds I had to resist the effort to turn around and stare at the nothing that was stalking me. The more I thought about the sensation, the more aware I was of every detail.

  I shuddered.

  “What do we do now?” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  We were trapped in the stateroom, unarmed, with no way to open the door or communicate with the rest of the airship. I was free to Walk to another world, but one step and I would be above the Atlantic Ocean without an airship around me. The thought sent my heart racing.

  The Shadows are coming from somewhere.

  “Oh, crap.”

  “What?” I glanced over at Jacob and saw he was staring out the window to the stateroom. I looked out expecting something dire: another airship on a collision course, a massive storm cell, a flying dragon—I didn’t see anything. “What do you mean, ‘Oh, crap?’”

  “The clouds, you can see the light reflected from the airship.”

  “Yeah, so.”

  “Running lights, other cabins—this isn’t a general power failure.”

  “Just us?”

  “Just us.”

  If the Shadows were after me in particular, then having our cabin lose power was just stretching coincidence too far.

  “Oh, crap,” I echoed.

  A creak fil
led the darkened stateroom accompanied by rotting fingers brushing my Mark.

  There was only one possible escape. Then, only if my otherworldly sense of direction held, and only if I was right that I had felt a direction to where they had come from. “Jacob, grab me now.”

  “You can’t think—”

  “Now!” I yelled as the door to the stateroom creaked open on a half dozen shadowy figures. They started darting toward us before the door was completely open, I saw flashes in the silver moonlight; torn uniforms, scarred skin, wild black eye sockets.

  Then Jacob threw his arms around me, I shoved my hand under his jacket and twisted my fingers around his belt as I took a step away in the direction I thought the Shadows had Walked from.

  “Fuck!” Jacob screamed in the wind as the airship around us disappeared.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BITING COLD.

  Weightlessness.

  Clouds.

  Full moon staring down at us, huge, blind, and blinding.

  Tumbling headfirst toward clouds a thousand feet below us. A large shadow drifting across the clouds below us.

  I pushed myself back as we fell.

  We slammed into a bulkhead and tumbled onto a cold steel floor in a maintenance corridor somewhere in the lower decks of the airship. Jacob groaned beneath me. I pushed myself up off him. “Are you all right?”

  “Few bruised ribs, I’m okay.” He pushed himself up into a sitting position and I watched him wince. “I can’t believe you timed that right.”

  Me neither. “That wasn’t my first plan.”

  “Oh.” He grabbed a pipe along the bulkhead wall and pulled himself upright. He reached down to help me off my knees. I let him help me up, even though he looked the worse for the fall. “What were you trying to do?”

  “The Shadows came from somewhere. I was trying to follow them back.”

  Jacob grunted and hugged his side. “I think I prefer Plan B. Plan A sounds a lot more like going from the frying pan into the fire.”

  I looked up and down the corridor. “Which way you think is the best way to find someone to raise an alarm?”

  “The signs say engine maintenance this way. Should be people there, or at least another intercom.” I followed in the direction he pointed. After going a few dozen feet he asked, “So that wasn’t where the Shadows came from?”

  I shook my head, “No, I think it was.”

  “What? Nothing there but air, clouds, and a very long fall.”

  “And another airship, below us.”

  “What?”

  “They must have come from that airship, but I waited too long to follow them back. It only matched the course of this airship long enough to let the Shadows come across, then it dropped down below our course to avoid someone like me Walking back on board.”

  “That sort of cuts off their retreat, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t think whoever’s behind this looks at the Shadows as soldiers. More like guided missiles.”

  “Great. Wonder how long before they strap a bomb to them?”

  “Please, don’t give them any ideas.”

  Jacob was built for strength, not for speed, and my primary means of keeping in shape was running a few miles every day. So, all things being equal, I should have easily kept up with him, especially since he was grunting and holding the side of his chest with his injured—hopefully only bruised—ribs.

  Things weren’t equal. My Disney Princess ball gown was seriously restricting my movement, even after I kicked off the uncomfortable shoes. The skirts tried to tangle my legs and catch on every bit of hardware projecting from the walls. I ended up having to grab the skirts and hike them up like a showgirl just to keep up with Jacob.

  We were deep into the corridors, lit only by minimal red-tinted lighting. I had lost much hope of finding anyone down on these decks; there didn’t seem to be anyone working down here. But before I decided to tell Jacob to look for a passage back up into the ship, we finally ran into someone.

  It was almost literal, as the guy appeared out of a side passage that was nearly invisible from down the corridor. Jacob stopped short so quickly that he almost fell back into me.

  The man was tall and almost as broad as the corridor. He was shiny bald and had a full black beard. He wore boots, overalls, and a white shirt marred by streaks of black grease. He carried a massive wrench, a length of steel about five feet long that looked more like a medieval weapon than something you’d find in a machine shop.

  “Anschlag! Keine Eintragung! Wer sind Sie?”

  “Okay,” I said, “That’s not French.”

  Jacob held up his hands and asked, “Do you speak English?”

  “Dieses ist nur ein eingeschränkter Bereich, Mechaniker und Technik. Sind Sie verloren?”

  “I’d guess that’s a no,” Jacob said. “Parlez français?”

  “No high school German?”

  The big guy with the wrench looked at Jacob and said, slowly, “Non laissé. Retournez.”

  “I think we’re in a restricted area,” Jacob said.

  “I don’t speak a word and I figured that out.”

  Jacob grunted and said, “Avertissez.” He spoke slowly, his own accent worse than the German mechanic’s. “Nous sommes attaqués. Avertissez.”

  “Attaqués?” The mechanic prodded Jacob’s chest with the end of the wrench, leaving a big greasy smear on his shirt. I saw Jacob wince and lean over in the direction of his injured side. However, he kept his hands up in an attempt to be nonthreatening.

  “No, not us. Why would—Damn—Pas nous. Pas nous! Ombres.”

  The big man paused, narrowing his eyes at Jacob. “Ombres?”

  “Yes! Ombres! Shadows!”

  Big guy looked unconvinced.

  “Damn, what’s the German word? I’ve seen enough World War II movies. Shatter, Shatner—”

  “Ombres?” The guy prodded menacingly with the wrench again.

  “Shatten!” Jacob said, and the guy froze. “That’s the word, Shatten.”

  “Schatten . . . Angreifen?”

  “Attaque d’ombres.”

  He shook his head and said, “Nein.” But he lowered the wrench. “Woher würden sie kommen?”

  I looked at Jacob, and he sighed. “No clue.”

  “Woher kamen Sie?”

  Jacob looked at the guy and said, “I’m sorry, my command of German is somewhere between Hogan’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare. Can you get us to someone who knows English?”

  The man pointed down the corridor where we’d come from. “Sie müssen zur—”

  His words were cut off by a shrill klaxon. He froze and looked up as if the body of the airship was about to collapse down on him. Quietly, he said, “Nein. Dieses geschieht nicht.”

  He was frozen for another moment, but then he moved as if one of the Shadows was already chasing him, running back down the corridor toward where he’d come from.

  “I guess they figured it out,” Jacob raised his voice over the klaxon.

  “Yes.”

  “We should probably lay low and let them handle it.”

  I’d already resumed our trek down the corridor.

  I heard Jacob behind me. “Where are you going?”

  “This is going to keep happening.”

  “What?” He shouted over the klaxon.

  I turned around. “Someone is sending these things after me. We can’t just let these people handle it!”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “If we don’t get the one in charge, whoever’s sending them, whatever these people do about it will be pointless.” I resumed running down the corridor.

  Jacob caught up with me. “You don’t know who’s in charge or where they are.”

  “I don’t know who, but I’m pretty sure where.” I stopped
in front of a cramped-looking staircase spiraling up into the ship. “You saw this thing when we boarded. It has airplanes attached, doesn’t it?”

  * * *

  —

  IT was insane, and Jacob spent a great deal of effort trying to talk me out of it. But I didn’t see that I had much choice. I’d meant everything I’d said. If someone was targeting me, just relying on the local guards to pick off the Shadows wasn’t going to solve the problem. My unknown nemesis had shown little problem in tracking me down, and there was no reason to think they’d stop after this attack.

  But I had seen the airship drifting below our position. Whoever had orchestrated this certainly had to be on board. And, if the bad guy was on board, we were still thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a day’s flight from shore; there was nowhere else to go.

  I couldn’t not take advantage of that.

  If the dress didn’t kill me first.

  If you ever get the chance to ascend a cramped spiral staircase in a full ball gown, I’d suggest taking a pass. The skirts were annoying in the corridor. In the cramped space twisting upward, they became actively hostile, snagging on every third step. By the third deck up, there were enough rips in the skirts themselves that I had to start tearing free the petticoats.

  The klaxons had died down after the initial alert, and Jacob said from behind me, “I don’t think we’ll be able to just walk into that section of the ship.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get there.” If we get there.

  A couple more decks, and we ran out of staircase. I stepped out into a corridor that was clearly in the residential part of the airship, even if the corridors were less ornate than the ones by my cabin. The walls were paneled and bore a fancy wallpaper design, and the floor was carpeted, but anything more elaborate—art, furnishings, tapestries—was missing. I guessed that we were in a servant’s passageway.

  Across from the stairs was a white enameled plaque that seemed to show a map of the deck layout. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the cursive French legend, so I waved Jacob over, “Can you make sense of this?”

  He walked over and started touching parts of the deck map, “Kitchens . . . Lavatory . . . Dining halls A, B, C . . . Cabins . . . More Cabins . . . Electrical Junction . . . Another Lavatory . . . Janitorial . . . Restricted—”