Curse of the Nandi (Society for Paranormals Book 5) (15 page)

Chapter 19

I found Mr. Elkhart Senior in a small library within the Hardinge home. Heavy curtains were pulled across the tall windows, and several candles were placed about the room. As I eyed the well stocked shelves, I decided on the spot that I would have to discuss with Lady Hardinge about imposing on her generosity. Surely she wouldn’t be too bothered to lend me a book or two from time to time, particularly as there wasn’t a bookstore to be found in East Africa.

Mr. Elkhart rose from a wing backed chair in front of an empty fireplace and held his slim hands out to me. With far greater spontaneity and less reserve than I normally felt, I returned the gesture and allowed his cool hands to embrace mine. He glanced at my right ear, bitten by a vengeful werewolf, and then down at my metal left hand, the wolf energy shimmering along its gleaming elements. His eyes, a darker tea color in the dim lighting, glistened with empathy.

“Would that I had been there,” he murmured, his soft mouth downturned.

I shrugged, for I was not accustomed to such intense compassion. Normally I’d have dismissed the sentiment as unwanted pity, but I couldn’t on this occasion, not with him.

“I’m not sure there’s much you could’ve done, Mr. Elkhart. I had wandered off into the forest when the werewolf bit my ear, and Koki is a formidable adversary,” I said, seeking to allay his anguish. “And both interactions occurred during the heat of day. You wouldn’t have survived the sunburn.”

Mr. Elkhart smiled, every line on his face gentle and welcoming. “You underestimate this old vampire, my dear. And I wish we might have less of this vulgar English formality between us. It’s so foreign to me, especially as I feel as if we are like family.” He hesitated and his eyes darkened with a touch of anxiety as a small frown formed between them. “Would you mind terribly if I called you by your given name? And you might refer to me as Uncle James, if it pleases you.”

Uncle James
. The thought that I could be so familiar with this noble gentleman, as if we were family, and that he could have such tender feelings as to invite me to address him thus thrilled me. Before moving to East Africa, my circle of intimate acquaintances had been very limited. In fact, I could now safely admit that I had had no friends to speak of, only a werewolf mentor and a set of relatives who tolerated me at best.

But now that circle had widened considerably, with people who could be trusted with my secrets and I with theirs. And here was yet another; he looked upon me with such a fatherly expression that I felt a constriction in my throat. I nodded and said nothing.

“Excellent,” he enthused, beaming at me as if I’d just elucidated on a complex scientific equation rather than choking on my useless tears. He squeezed my hands. “Now that’s settled, we need to discuss the matter of the Society. It’s time you were told the truth, after all, although I suspect you’ve divined a significant amount on your own and with your friends.”

“Some,” I said, my voice tentative with repressed emotion.

He led me to a two seater before reclaiming his chair and repositioning it so he was immediately in front of me, with only a small side table between us. Fortunately that table had upon it a tea service, which Mr. Elkhart Senior, or rather
Uncle James,
put to good use by pouring me a cup of the reviving substance.

Once I had a cup in hand, he began. “You are already privy to the duplicity of Prof Runal specifically and the Society in general,” he said, his voice soft despite the hardness of the statement. “Of course, I am in no way denying the good work the Society has accomplished over the centuries, protecting both the normal and paranormal communities, and thus avoiding an all-out war that would ravage Europe and destroy us all.”

I nodded my concurrence with this, and he continued. “The misfortune lies in the extreme measures the Society was and is prepared to carry out in order to protect its secrecy. Yours wasn’t the only family to be so utterly disrupted, nay even destroyed, because of the Society’s concerns that bordered on obsession. And while I have no objection to a healthy dose of paranoia, there is a point beyond which it exceeds the bounds of moderation and mutates into a dangerous psychosis. And this is precisely the state in which we currently find the Society: gripped in a manic frenzy to rid itself of all possible dissenters and any hint of competition.”

“Competition?” I repeated, as the implications squirmed on the peripheries of my mind.

Uncle James nodded as he saw the dawning awareness in my expression. “Yes, dear Beatrice. Prof Runal had another purpose in coming here. It wasn’t just to pay you a visit and inquire after your health.”

“I knew it,” I whispered, all the bitterness of unspent tears and wasted years poisoning the very air I breathed.

Uncle James sighed and reached over to pat my hand, his every movement encompassed with a tender sympathy. “Well, I’m sure he had and still has sincere feelings for you, my dear. Who wouldn’t? And I know he did the best he could for you within the limitations imposed on him by his position.”

I snorted and focused on the steam rising from my cup. How I wished the past would as easily dissipate. “So why was he here?”

“To learn about the competition, of course,” Uncle James murmured. “You see, the Society has a firm grip on the European community. Their influence, while strongest in Great Britain, extends significantly across the continent. Now they have turned their gaze to the colonies, for they have learned, through painful and alarming experiences, that they may not be as superior in power and abilities as they once believed. Those encounters with their own fallibility have rattled them to the core.”

“Maybe we’re in need of a bit of an upset,” I muttered, my words dark with the turmoil of memories. “The arrogance of it all, believing that the creatures on other continents are inherently inferior simply by virtue of not being from Europe.”

Uncle James leaned back into his chair and tapped the tips of his fingers against each other. “Yes, that may be true, but never underestimate a cornered beast, especially one that is facing its own mortality. Such a creature will go to any lengths to escape its fate.”

“Including a visit to East Africa?” I asked, my eyebrows raised in skepticism.

“Including a reconnaissance,” he corrected me.

I gazed thoughtfully into the remaining puddle of tea in my cup. “Prof Runal mentioned something about a larger conflict, in which a dwarf who kidnapped me is only a symptom. And Koki spoke along the same lines.”

“Indeed,” Uncle James said, his features stern. “Mark my words: Prof Runal wasn’t sitting about, enjoying the sunsets and catching up with his best pupil, my dear. Rest assured he put every moment to good use and has returned with a far more detailed set of observations than anything you’ve ever reported back to him.”

My hands clenched the cup so fiercely that the delicate porcelain shattered against my metal hand, pricked my other hand and doused my skirt with the remaining tea.

“Oh bother,” I said, for I did hate wasting tea. I brushed the shards off my lap.

“Are you all right?” Uncle James asked in an anguished tone as he removed a handkerchief from a pocket. “Give me your hand.”

I proffered my left hand, which seemed to be functioning well enough despite the hot tea and bits of porcelain that still clung to it.

“The other hand, Beatrice,” he said, and only as he patted the handkerchief against my palm did I realize the human hand had been cut. The sting of it caught up with me only then. Once he was certain it was clear of debris, he poured a bit of tea over it, and the warm liquid soothed as it cleaned. After that, he tied the handkerchief in place.

“Perhaps we’d best leave the conversation for another time,” he continued. “At any rate, there’s not much to be done about it, apart from maintaining vigilance.”

“Does Kam know?” I asked, wondering what the Lightning God would do upon learning his own fears had now been realized.

I was on the verge of explaining to Uncle James who Kam was, but it seemed from his grim smile that he already was acquainted somehow with the African Lightning God. “Oh, I’m quite certain he is fully aware of the comings and goings of Prof Runal and all that it implies,” he said. “A more pertinent question is, what will Kam do? He seems to have some regard for you, but I wouldn’t be wearing that necklace of yours to remind anyone, particularly him, of your former association with the Society.”

Even before my fingers traced the S-shaped dragon medallion that lay just below my mother’s locket, I knew to which necklace he referred. The S-shaped dragon was the symbol of the
Society for Paranormals and Curious Animals
. At one point in history, it had included a sword thrust through the dragon, but as an acknowledgement to the growing diversity in the Society’s membership, the sword had been discreetly removed. Yet now more than ever, I seemed to feel that sword all the more for its absence.

“Why have I kept it on all this time?” I wondered as I pulled it over my head and held the metal in my right hand. “After all that’s happened, I should’ve tossed this long ago.”

Uncle James cupped my hand in both of his and stroked it gently. “Prof Runal gave that to you, didn’t he?”

At the mention of my former mentor, I closed my eyes and sighed.

“It’s no shame to have held onto this memento of a happier time, or at least a more innocent one,” he continued. “This is your connection to those memories.”

“No more,” I said with a ferocity that startled us both. I thrust the offending jewelry into a pocket, determined to store it in the back of a drawer the moment I returned to the cottage. At the next opportunity, I vowed, I’d melt the medallion and chain down and craft a pair of arrowheads with Prof Runal’s name engraved into them.

“So like your mother,” Uncle James said with a tender combination of amusement and admiration. Then his entire being physically and energetically seemed to retreat from me as he ruminated on the past.

“I had hoped that after her upset over my departure had subsided, she would join me,” he said wistfully, gazing into the empty fireplace and beyond. “In anticipation, I sent her that locket along with a letter imploring her to join me. I fully expected her to, for surely there was no sense in remaining? I was therefore doubly perturbed to receive the locket — the one you now have — returned to me along with a terse notification that she’d married. And so soon after I’d departed. It made no sense.”

Every limb of mine yearned to squirm in discomfort at being witness to such intimate confessions. It did seem from Uncle James’ words and tone, and more critically from his longing expression, that there had been a closeness between himself and my mother that was possibly inappropriate, even if she hadn’t been married at the time. My hands clenched together at the notion.

“And then of course life took its own turn,” he continued with a chuckle, and he raised his gentle eyes to mine. “And now, here we are.”

I forced a smile. “Yes, indeed, here we are.”

At that, I realized that a good deal of time had passed, well beyond the strict limits of socially acceptable visits, at least according to Mrs. Beeton who had much to say on the topic. Then again, Mrs. Beeton would be both amazed and stunned at the degree of unacceptable behavior that occurred on a nearly daily basis in Nairobi and particularly among my inner circle of acquaintances.

“I’d best be off,” I murmured, rising up and hoping my knees wouldn’t betray me, for I despised the womanly habit of fainting as much as I loathed the waste of tea.

Uncle James rose to see me to the door, at which point he answered a question that I hadn’t thought to ask. “As to your deceased husband, he won’t leave because he can’t, Beatrice,” he explained. “Mr. Timmons mentioned the spell woven into the wedding vows. I suspect it didn’t work out as well as Mr. Knight had planned, for whatever reason. He is bound to you, but not in the physical form he’d hoped to acquire before his death. Instead, he must remain with you as a ghost, a narrow and rather limiting version of the eternal life he conspired to achieve.”

“You mean I’m forever burdened with him?” I demanded, perturbed both at the notion and at the relief I felt.

“I’m afraid so,” he replied. “At least until we can find a master of spells who can reverse it.” Rubbing his chin meditatively, he added, “Although I suspect the cost of such a reversal may be greater than the inconvenience of leaving it in place.”