A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [4]
The Irishwoman clucked her tongue. “Rebecca. Why aren’t you with our friends? We scored a victory against Darkness. All of us. Why can’t you make use of it?”
The headmistress’s eyes were red with tears, her blouse askew. A white cat lay curled at her feet, and her thin hand stroked it almost mechanically, as if she dared not stop.
“I’ve no regrets, Rebecca. Not a single one,” the voyeur spirit murmured. “It’s time you felt the same.” She turned back to the great stage opposite, inside of which her friends had resettled. Her two ghostly companions had disappeared and so she addressed the former Guard, those she considered family. “It’s time all of you felt the same.”
In the living painting that showcased her cohorts, the sturdy man who had confessed his heart in the earlier scene still sported distinguished age lines, unruly salt-and-pepper hair and clergyman’s clothes. His blue eyes were wide and sparkling with an incomparable quality of compassion. But somewhere deep behind those oceanic orbs, somewhere deep behind the wide and contagious smile and the armour of good humour, lay the same private and keening pain that had just been on display.
“Twenty years of nonsense, Michael Carroll. Upon my dead body, I swear to you, you’ll have a very merry Christmas if it’s the last thing I do.”
Chapter One
Vicar Michael Carroll turned the ladle in his pot of mulled wine and let the scented steam rise to his nostrils, unlocking emotion, memory and all those forces that such smells do around the Christmas holiday. He glanced out the window of the kitchen in his small Bloomsbury flat, which looked unflatteringly down upon an alley, and was pleased to witness a solitary flake of snow brush the thick, uneven glass before vanishing. It would be the first of many firsts this season, if the fates allowed.
Drawing himself a heaping tankard of Josephine’s favourite cabernet, procured from the stores of her café and heated with bobbing chunks of cinnamon, fruit and cloves, he moved into his small dining room. The corners of the chamber were plastered at uneven angles, having settled awkwardly at the beginning of the century when the building was new. The window here only gave half a view of the avenue beyond, but he could see lamplighters plying their trade and nearing his street. It was not yet dark, and a purple sky reigned over parapets and smokestacks that grew ever higher and higher, the churning wheels of industry cranking them upward to challenge twilight’s celestial throne.
He sat at a rough-hewn wooden table worn smooth by use, by company and the press of his own hands. Sliding his palms forward onto it, he eased into his chair, bracing himself and his heart, connecting with something solid and simple. The odd powers that had coursed through his body had once made his fingers twitch. Those powers were no more. Nonetheless, holding his palms firmly down, rooting himself to the table and to humanity, was one of his usual exercises. It brought him peace.
Michael, unlike his five compatriots in The Guard who had until very recently been charged with the Grand Work, had never cursed it. Theirs was a strenuous and at times lonely responsibility—though it didn’t have to be—but it was ultimately rewarding. The Guard had been the law of the land, spectrally speaking. Though they’d left benign spirits well enough alone, each of their coterie had been granted a specific, beautiful power to arraign evil spirits and keep them from harassing the unwitting mortal populace. The Guard had controlled traffic of the unfettered and malignant dead all throughout London for twenty some years. They’d done the world a great supernatural deal of what Michael would consider Christian charity.
But he had to admit that his role in the Grand Work had held some irony. Literally the Heart of the group, he could open locked doors, touch a breastbone and flood someone’s veins with joy, change the emotional contents of a room, shifting energy and