A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(90)

Staff was summoned. Selim was taken to bed. The rest of them—except for Puck, who remained in the study—dispersed briefly to their rooms. Neville and Grey were exhausted and subdued—and very cold, so Nan and Sarah tucked them into their sable muffs to warm up.

That was when Nan started to shiver. She looked over at Sarah and realized her friend was shivering, too. “I’m chilled to the bone,” she said aloud. “I think we all are.”

Sarah draped a couple of blankets over chairs by the fire. “Nan, there’s blood in your hair,” she said, looking at Nan in shock. Nan put a hand up to her head, and it came away sticky.

“I can’t feel any wounds,” she said. “But I know I had one—” She looked down at her arms and pulled her skirt up to look at her legs. Her stockings were slashed to ribbons, and the sleeves of her jacket were cut in three places. “I think Puck must have healed all of us, not just Selim.”

She cleaned up where the wound had been. They bundled themselves into warm, clean clothing, draped themselves in the blankets, picked up the muffs and headed back to the study, where they found pots of hot tea and curry and rice waiting. The others must have been just as cold as they were, for everyone turned up draped in blankets or shawls. And they were all as hungry as tigers, even Puck. Without any regard for manners, one and all, they practically inhaled the food, and then sat nursing mugs of hot, sugared tea in their hands.

“I think we had best get what we remember down on paper immediately,” Sherlock advised. “Once we have that . . . we must see what we can make of it.”

“I’ll take notes,” Memsa’b volunteered.

“We’ll ward the room,” John Watson said, grimly. “I’ll be damned if I want another hole into hell opening up here again.” He and Mary did incomprehensible things around the edge of the room while Memsa’b gathered up a notebook and pencil and sat down at Sahib’s desk where the lamp was.

One by one, they went through everything they could drag out of their exhausted memories. When they were finished, they all sat in silence for a very long time.

Finally Nan spoke up. “If it’s coming here . . . why hasn’t it come already?” she asked into the quiet. “It can open those portals—so why hasn’t it just come through one?”

“Likely because it can’t,” Puck spoke up at last. “These things have rules, though I’ll wager Holmes doesn’t believe that. It can reach in here briefly, take prey and drag it back, but it can’t just come here. It has to be invited. And invited in a particular way.”

“A magic ceremony of some kind—” John Watson hazarded, and Puck nodded.

Since this was completely out of Nan’s purview, she half listened with one ear, with Neville in his muff, cradled in her lap, while trying to put together both sides of the puzzle—the abductions, and the pronouncement from that thing in the other world. King? Priest? A little of both. It had talked about Our Communion, and said that “the pure” would enter into it. But it spoke about this “Communion” as if it already existed. So what could it be? And why had it had girls taken from here then sent back mindless? If all it had wanted to do was rip their souls out of them, why send them back? If she had learned anything from John and Mary about magic, it was that magic was costly in terms of energy, and making a door between two worlds must have been fantastically costly. So why send them back?

And there was something about “the pure” that kept nagging at her. The thing had taken Arthur Fensworth, and had not removed his soul. Could it have been taking other people all along? Fensworth had spoken of seeing other humans. Had Amelia’s visions been a view into that other world right at the time when those people were taken? And if so, why had they not had their souls taken? Why had they been left to scavenge and hide in the ruins? What was the difference between Arthur Fensworth and those girls? It couldn’t have been that he was male; he had said he had seen women and children coming to “feed.” It had to be something else. . . .

Was it that they were “pure” and he was not?

Her eyes widened. “John,” she said, slowly, into a pause in the other discussion. “The girls at the hospital—are they all virgins?”

John Watson looked at her for a moment, mouth agape, ears reddening. “Ah . . . I . . . er . . . I cannot speak for the three newest, but . . . ah . . . yes, the first three are. . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

“Well, I can speak for the other three, since I examined them closely,” said Holmes, without a hint of embarrassment. “They were.”

“That thing back there . . . it talked about how the ‘pure’ would become part of its ‘Communion.’ And that’s certainly one difference between them and Arthur Fensworth.” She raised an eyebrow. “Also between them and those other people he saw in the ruins, coming to feed.”

“By Jove,” John Watson said. “I think you might be right. But . . . why?” Then he shook his head. “Never mind that. There’s six of them. It said it was ‘about’ to come across into our world. That means it can’t yet . . .” He turned to Puck. “You said it has to be invited, probably with a magic ceremony. Magic ceremonies often need odd numbers of participants; three, five, seven, nine or thirteen. What if he can control these girls on this side? They could invite him!”