A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [5]
In the beginning they’d been simple teenaged youths, arraigned by a goddesslike force and called to duty. They’d been universally awkward and unlikely companions from disparate backgrounds and classes; they’d suspected little of their lives ahead. Michael hadn’t known anything when he began seeing ghosts, when he began learning how his respective gift augmented their group. He hadn’t known how long it would take for their prophesied seventh member to join their ranks—or that one of their beloved number would fall in recent battle. What he did know was that, from the very first moment he laid eyes on her, he loved the young and spindly brunette who would be their second in command. He’d loved Rebecca Thompson since Westminster Bridge in the summer of 1867.
She, in turn, likely from that very same moment, had loved the young man who would become their leader. Alexi. The battle with Darkness and the Whisper-world, in retrospect, seemed the easy part.
Michael pressed his hands harder against the table, slid them farther from his body, stretching his taut muscles and wrestling with his nerves like Jacob did the angel. He’d not seen Rebecca since they laid Jane in the tomb three days prior; she had gone to her apartments and locked herself in. She blamed herself, he could tell, wished God had taken her instead. Michael thought the sentiment might kill him. Nothing felt familiar. He’d lost his powers, Jane, and now he was losing Rebecca. His heart, so full of joy and love, was suffering a tumbling withdrawal from its preternaturally augmented height. It was a terrifying, dizzying fall.
“Pull yourself together, man,” he murmured. “It’s nearly Christmas.”
His front door burst open, making him jump and splash warm wine onto his hand. Pursing his lips, knowing just who it was without even a glance, he finally looked up to behold the stern and striking figure upon his threshold. All in black stood his dear friend and unintentional rival, Alexi Rychman, former leader of the London Guard.
“Dear God, Professor. I truly thought, now that the weight of the known world is no longer entirely on your shoulders, you might at least allow yourself the more socially preferred custom of knocking upon a friend’s door before entering.”
“Old habits,” Alexi intoned, his voice rich, low and commanding. It would always be thus, even though he had no group to lead any longer.
Behind Alexi, a moonbeam of a young woman stood with an apologetic look on her face. Michael grinned and forgot his irritation. “Ah, well, Mrs. Rychman . . . with you at his side, all debts are erased.”
Alexi turned proudly to his entering bride. She was certainly the youth among them, Alexi not quite twice her age, but then again, where ancient prophecies were concerned, when gods were fiddling with mortal lives and taking their bodies as their own, age hardly mattered. Her fine taffeta skirts, in her favourite shade of rich blue, brushed the coarse wood of the door and rustled as she closed it.
She received Michael’s warm expression with a radiant smile that transformed her death white face into a ray of magical starlight. There was nothing about her that was ordinary. The whole of Mrs. Persephone Rychman remained white as a spectre, even the hair piled atop her head in an elegant coif. But the light here was diffuse enough that she did not have to wear the dark blue tinted glasses that shielded her eerie, breathtaking, ice blue eyes from any harshness.
“My husband never allows me to get to a door first, Vicar Carroll, otherwise I might abate his most startling tradition,” she said sweetly.
“Since we’ve lost so many traditions, I suppose we’d best keep the ones remaining,” Michael chuckled in reply.
While he had wanted an evening alone—to plan, to ruminate, to dream—he could not deny that Persephone made all disappointments bearable. She had saved them all from spectral Armageddon, and her mere presence reminded him