AN: Well, this has certainly been a word journey!
Spoilers: This is an AU of "Awakening", where we imagine that Nikola couldn't reach the grappling hook, and therefore couldn't help Helen stop Afina, allowing the Vampire Queen to wake her court.
Rating: Teen, with warnings for blood and Jack the Ripper.
Disclaimer: I should be so lucky.
Character/Pairing: At this point, it might be easier to make a list of people who are not in this story, but the chief Kiss Kiss in this Big Bang is Helen Magnus/Nikola Tesla.
Summary: Helen and Nikola must work together to stop a vampire apocalypse, but that's only if they can save themselves first.
The Woman in White
There's a woman at the London Sanctuary who's been there since 1898.
Her room is on the ground floor, overlooking the back garden, and in the summer, the valiant London sun shines through the light curtains. When the window is open, the breeze carries the soft scents of summer flowers, and the room seems almost lively, but most of the time, the atmosphere is overwhelmingly reminiscent of a hospital.
For a long time, the only sound in the room, besides whatever floats in from the garden, is the sound of her breathing. Her chest rises and falls softly, her pale skin bleeding pigment into the white cotton sheets until it's difficult to tell where the woman leaves off and the bedding begins. Only her red hair, spread starkly against the pillows, provides variance in colour. Now, there is the quiet hum of machinery as well; devices added to the room as they were invented, to better monitor her unchanging signs of life.
She has survived the turn of two centuries, the influenza epidemic, the Depression, the Blitz, the reconstruction, and the great, albeit somewhat unanticipated, Elwetrische migration of 1973. By the time Declan starts working at the Sanctuary, she is practically part of the architecture. The only person who has been there longer is James himself.
Declan knows better than to ask who she is, not that he thinks James won't tell him, but rather that he's almost positive he would, and Declan's not sure he wants to know. It gets to be a habit, not knowing, and it's almost five weeks after James's death that Declan remembers her at all, and even then, it's only to ask Magnus how best to evacuate her. He requests Druitt's help, assuming that teleportation is the easiest way to move a comatose woman. Magnus sends Clara to manage it, and Declan just assumes that Druitt is busy somewhere else.
When they rebuild the London Sanctuary, they simply put her back in her bed, and she sleeps on.
Her name is Mary, Declan learns, but aside from that and the date, her file is empty. When things calm down, he resolves, he'll ask Magnus. Not knowing was a luxury he afforded himself when he was second in command, but as Head of House, he needs to understand everything that lives within the walls, even if he's still not entirely sure he wants to.
At the Sanctuary, things have a habit of never calming down.
There was no alarm, no overt indication that anything was wrong, but Declan hadn't survived this long working for the Sanctuary Network by ignoring his hunches, so when that specifically frustrating sense of wrongness settled into his gut as he poured over his end of quarter paperwork, he got up to take a quick look at the security camera feeds. If nothing else, a potential disaster would spare him from having to deal with the accounting, which was late anyway as it was nearly the end of September.
The feeds were empty of anything that could explain his unease, but even the absence of anything alarming on the screens was not enough to quiet his stomach. There was something not right. Something that pulled at the edge of his awareness like a string, tugging at his thoughts as though they were open to share. He paused for a tranq gun on his way out of his office, and picked up a flashlight before heading towards the back of the house to begin his sweep.
The house was very nearly deserted this weekend. Unlike the Old City Sanctuary, which functioned primarily as a boarding house for employees and patients alike, the UK establishment actually let the staff have the odd weekend off. Declan suspected this was largely because Magnus refused to hire more than the absolute minimum number of fulltime people, and do the rest of her work through a network of less likely to argue with her freelancers. James had been solitary by nature but a capable delegator of tasks, and Declan had inherited an operation somewhat larger than the one Magnus ran, in population if not in scope.
So Declan encountered no one as he traversed the dimly lit halls. No creatures out of their enclosures, no stealthily invading force of freshly minted bad guys, nothing at all to explain his unrest. He was just about to give up, with some disgust at his own paranoia, when he rounded the corner to the very back hallway on the lower floor and came face to face with the source of his discontent.
He had the presence of mind to shine the flashlight directly in her face to buy himself a bit of time to get over his shock, and it worked fairly well. She cried out and raised her hand to block her eyes from the intensity of the beam. It sounded almost like she was afraid of him, instead of being startled or caught off guard by his appearance, but before he finished thinking that, he had reached her, dropped the light in favour of keeping grasp of the gun, and closed his fingers around her narrow wrist.
James's Source Blood gift had been the increase of his brain power. He had originally assumed that the blood had made him smarter, but as he watched the progression of modern computing, which he held in somewhat less disdain than he pretended; he became more and more convinced that the blood had in fact sped up his processing speed. He wasn't particularly smarter than his colleagues, he simply ran through his thoughts at a greater speed. It was thus that he had been able to deduce motive, means and opportunity so quickly for the Yard, and it was a skill that Declan had been practicing in himself ever since he began work at the Sanctuary. He did this not so much to impress James, nor with the idea that it would help him keep his job, but with the understanding that if he didn't, he would never get a word in edgewise.
So it was that as soon as Declan's hand closed around the strange woman's arm, his mind began to close around the facts: the seeming frailty of her bones, the long white dress she wore, her unfamiliarity with the idea of a flashlight. This was Mary, the woman in white he had so steadfastly ignored, who had lived here since James had looked his age. As soon as that thought crossed his mind, he felt as though a floodgate inside his head had opened, loosing his thoughts into the ether, pulled by some unseen hand into the open. He struggled against her grasp, but for all her frailty, she held him fast, and he felt his thoughts leech away as the blackness closed in around him.
Helen watched helplessly as Nikola careened into the chute, pushed by the very Vampire Queen he had thought to revere. She could tell by the length of his shout that the fall was far indeed, and could only hope that his newly recovered powers would be sufficient to heal him after he broke every bone in his body. At this point, it was probably too much to hope that he'd be able to get out of the chute on his own, and Afina's victorious smirk made it clear that she had similar doubts. Helen resigned herself to having to extricate Nikola herself, but of course she had more pressing concerns at the moment.
Afina's teeth were still unsheathed, Nikola's blood on her chin and her eyes alight with a feral hunger far more powerful than Helen had ever seen in Nikola. Afina had been sleeping for a very long time, Helen remembered, and it was likely that she had merely used her biting of Nikola as a distraction instead of actual nutrition, which put Helen at the top of a potentially very unpleasant list. Helen considered her options and found them woefully unattractive, which simply meant that it was time to develop a few new ones. Even though she was sure it was pointless, Helen took a step closer to the abyss.
"Nikola!" she called out, and Afina laughed and pushed her away from the edge.
"Don't worry," she said, not even sparing a glance as she walked away from the chute. "He won't be disturbing us. That old trap was designed for a true vampire, a warrior. Not a school boy."
"Why did you do that?" Helen demanded. She was starting to guess, but hoped for confirmation.
"When I repopulate my species I plan to do much better than a mixed blood mongrel," Afina said, busily pressing chyrons on a panel Helen hadn't noticed before. In vain, she tried to make out the sequence, but Afina blocked her sight with her body.
A door slid open, and in a flash, Helen found herself pressed back against the wall of the tomb, held in place by all the strength Nikola had ever had and been too considerate to ever bring fully to bear. Helen swallowed her instinctive panic, and forced herself to rationally rewrite everything she knew about vampires.
She had never feared Nikola, none of them had. How could she, when she had seen his vanity and his vulnerabilities laid out so clearly for all those years at Oxford? Even with the Source Blood inside him, he was still Nikola, the foreigner who never fit anywhere, not in even in America, who claimed she would take all comers. Helen had weathered Nikola's increasingly elaborate schemes, watched his breakdown during the Wars, and eventually made sure the world would never bother him again, only to have him resurface with even more bizarre designs six decades later, and kiss her in an Italian hallway as though no time at all had gone by.
It was his harmlessness that had made it so easy for her to let him back in, even as she plotted her escape route from the Roman catacombs. She never believed he would kill her, no matter how hard she pushed. John had proven the point moot with a characteristically dramatic rescue, but the fact remained that when it came to vampires, Helen's defences were firmly down. That assurance, and her complete unwillingness to lose him on the heels of losing James and possibly John, had made her reckless, tampering with Afina's encasement without giving thought to any possible consequences.
Of course, if she was entirely honest with herself, even if she had known that saving Nikola would result in the reanimation of the Vampire Queen, she probably would have done it anyway. Her relationship with Nikola was complicated and tentative, not to mention dangerous (and whatever stronger word Will had come up with), but it was all she had left, and she knew herself well enough to know that she would not sacrifice it for anything. Furthermore, it was done now, and Helen Magnus was not in the habit of looking back.
It was to her detriment now, the ease and affection she had for him. She had been lulled into thinking that vampires would be like him, and her indulgence of him, from the reading to the precious moments she'd given Afina to scheme, were going to cost them both, and Helen didn't know if either of them could pay it. The Caesars, the Pharaohs, they had all held one thing in common: a sense of complete superiority. They were the masters of the human race, and Helen found herself quite mastered, despite her hatred of it. She had to stop thinking of Afina and Nikola as being the same species. It was clear enough that Afina did not consider them as such, and with Afina's hand pressing her back against the stone, Helen's remaining illusions about the weakness of the vampire race were quickly cut off.
"You though," Afina continued, and Helen had never wanted to wipe the smirk of a creature's face so badly as she did now, "will be quite useful."
"How?" she said, though she knew very well what Afina had in mind. "I'm less vampire than he is."
"Exactly," Afina gloated. "A blood donor that stays young and fresh forever, but without the bitter aftertaste."
"I hope you choke on it," Helen said, mustering a strength to her voice she could not match in her body.
She would not flinch. She would not cry out. She had been bitten before, and knew the uncanny rush that would follow. She knew Afina was different, stronger, more cruel, but she refused to fear. Instead, she latched on to the feelings she'd aroused when Nikola had lain dying on the floor of this accursed tomb, felt the hot determination and anger coil in her stomach. This was where her strength came from, not from superhuman muscle or reknitted bone. She had been born in a time when her sex had rendered her nearly worthless, or at least not worth anything she cared to value. She had always fought an uphill battle. This one was no different.
Afina did not choke.
James knocked out his pipe against the mantelpiece, sprinkling used tobacco into the hearth fire, and settled back into his armchair to begin stuffing the pipe anew. Once it was lit, he set his feet upon the fender and took to contentedly puffing half-formed smoke rings as though their malformations were his intent and not the result of fruitless hours of practice. Helen was gone for the evening, out at some lecture or other that had been so uninteresting to him that he hadn't bothered to remember any of the details, and the rest of the inhabitants of their fledging Sanctuary were settled in for the night, whether crate, cage or guestroom was what they called home.
Though he had no complaints with regard to his partnership with Helen, James treasured evenings like this. In his spacious and well lit sitting room, he could not pretend that he still kept his cluttered rooms on Baker Street, but he could enjoy the illusion that the silence of the evening would not be shattered by some marauding sphinx-cub, and that the morning would present no dilemmas more complicated than reasoning out the truth behind the carefully innuendo-ridden reports on various social scandals in the more tawdry of London's newspapers.
He very determinedly did not think about how easy it had been in his old rooms to open the wooden box he kept in the top drawer of his desk, fill the needle with a surgeon's care, and press plunger to vein with no thought to being found mussed and insensible by a meddling Helen Magnus. John had never lived in this house, but between them, James and Helen had burned his memory into every part of it, and ten years on, the pain was still as fresh as it had been all that time ago, and while he was maintaining the pretence of being respectable, it was difficult for James to forget.
With Helen expected back this evening he could not indulge himself as he might wish to, but he found that he was content to limit himself to pipe and port, and the hope that when Helen herself returned, she would be willing, as she often was, to accept his advances. It was not a happy game they played with one another, but it did permit a certain forgetfulness they both needed very much, and it was a damn sight easier than anything else he could think of, short of vices that might leave him floating face down in the Thames.
He heard the bell ring downstairs and sighed deeply at the ruin of his evening's peace. He counted patiently, fifteen seconds for Allistair to reach the door, another six to determine the caller's intent and degree of emergency, and then no more than thirty for the butler to reach his rooms. When James reached a full minute with nothing to show for it, he resigned himself to an evening truly lost, seized his medical bag from where it lay on his desk, and made for the stairs.
The sight that greeted him drove all thoughts of leisurely malingering out of his mind, and the coldly efficient medical doctor was in full form by the time James reached the bottom of the stairs. Allistair was on his knees, holding the slight figure of a poorly dressed woman in his arms. She was covered in blood, but her pinked cheeks and the lack of any emergent pool beneath her suggested that the blood was not hers.
"Allistair?" James said, expecting a report with all speed.
"I've no earthly idea, Dr. Watson," the butler said. "I opened the door to find her swooning on the sill, and when I made to offer her my arm, she collapsed as soon as I laid a hand upon her, though I swear it was not with any force that I grasped her."
"I see," James said. "Please carry her into my examination room. This is hardly the place for a diagnosis. And send someone for Helen. I doubt this poor soul is in any normal trouble, or she would not have come here so late."
"At once," Allistair said, and heaved the unconscious woman up into his arms.
It was a short trip to James's exam room, which was still located on the first floor near the kitchens to give Helen some privacy, though he had not treated a normal patient in some months now, save for his regulars who all knew very well what else went on in Dr. Magnus's domain. Then Allistair disappeared to the kitchen to rouse one of the boys to send after Helen. Of course the butler knew where she was.
James lit the lamps and turned them up as bright as they would go. He did not care for practicing medicine in the dark, but sometimes there was little help for it. It was not, after all, as though he could wait until morning. He shrugged on a lab coat, lest she wake and be sick on his waistcoat, and prepared for the examination. Wherever Helen was, he hoped she would return soon. It flew in the face of all logic and science, but James could not shake the idea that this woman, whoever she was, would require Helen's help most of all.
Declan came to with an acrid smell in his nostrils and a cool hand on his forehead. As soon as he coughed, the hand was withdrawn, sharply, as though it had not meant to offend, but the smell lingered. The pieces floated, just beyond his reach, but the strings that pulled his thoughts from him were gone, and he found it easier to order his mind.
The smell was easy to identify. The slime mold, caught by James and Ashley nearly a decade ago, had once again escaped its enclosure. Declan knew that it meant no offense, that it was simply curious as to what was going on in the Sanctuary, but its habit of eating the carpet, not to mention any available shoes, was rather annoying. Still, it was harmless enough and easily caught, if one had access to a medium sized fish tank.
He was struggling to sit up before he remembered the woman in white.
His gun was gone, which did not surprise him, and while he did have a knife strapped to his leg under his trousers, he wasn't entirely sure it would be warranted. He had, after all, been unconscious long enough that the slime mold had made it all the way down the hallway, and it did not move with any good speed. If Mary wished him ill, she'd have worked it already. Instead he found her sitting too, just out of arm's reach, as though she had been waiting for him to wake up.
"I'm sorry," she said, her accent so thick he could barely make it out even though it was definitely British of some kind. "I'm sorry, Declan. I didn't mean for that to happen."
Declan was used to the odd, but he was not used to the odd knowing his name, and his surprise must have been clear upon his face, because she shifted backwards, further away from him.
"My name is Mary, do you know that?" Her accent was driving him nuts. It sounded like something off a TV program. He remembered her age, and realized that she was a Londoner like he was, only from another time.
"Yes," he said. "And I am Declan MacRae, though it appears you already know that."
"I cannot help that," she replied. "You touched me."
"Yes," he said, though he did not understand. "Shall we continue this in the study, or do you already know everything I am going to say?"
"Your mind is your own again, Mr. MacRae," Mary said.
"Declan, please," he said, and stood. Without thinking, he extended his hand to help her up, but she only smiled and got to her feet on her own. "Right," he said. "Are you cold? We can get you something besides pajamas now that you're awake. Dr. Magnus keeps clothes here you might be comfortable in, though she's quite a bit bigger than you are."
"That would be nice," Mary said.
Declan realized that while her accent was old-fashioned, her syntax was not unlike his own. The idea made him a bit uncomfortable. He pushed the thought down, even though she'd told him she couldn't read it, and led the way down the corridor and up the stairs to the room Magnus used for storage. They were greeted by the faint scent of mothballs, and Declan pulled the chain that brought the suspended lightbulb on. Mary squinted up at it, eyes closed against the light, and then began looking over the various trousers, skirts and business suits Magnus kept stored at the front of the closet.
"What year is it, Declan MacRae, that I can call you by your Christian name and Dr. Magnus can walk about in men's clothing?"
"It's 2011," he said. "You've been out for a long time. Did you not get that from my mind?"
"No," she said. "You have a great many dates in your head, future, present and past. I couldn't tell which of them was today's."
"Ah," he said. "If you look towards the back, you might find something a bit more familiar."
"Thank you," Mary said, and pushed back into the closet.
She emerged a few moments later with a simple dress, its hem cut quite a bit shorter than the others. It had been made to go over a petticoat and corset, but the intended wearer had balked at the idea of both, much to the chagrin of her uncle who had gone to a great deal of trouble to plan the party. Declan had recused himself to the laboratory until the argument was finished; he knew better than to get between Ashley and James. The party had been quite memorable for other reasons besides that, though, and Declan still had his own costume carefully wrapped at the back of his wardrobe.
"This was not Dr. Magnus's," Mary said.
"No," Declan said around a surprisingly large lump in his throat. "That was Ashley's."
Mary cocked her head at him, and he imagined he could see her sorting through whatever information she had gleaned from him when he had grabbed her arm.
"It worked, then." It was not a question, which was just as well as Declan couldn't answer it. "And I'm sorry you lost a friend."
"It was some time ago," Declan said. He shook his head. "I'll show you up to a guest suite if you like, and then perhaps something to eat?"
Declan led the way upstairs, careful not to brush against Mary on the staircase or as he opened the door to her room. He gave her directions on how to get back to his sitting room, his public one, not the one attached to the apartment he had inherited somewhat reluctantly from James, and was all the way to the kitchen before he realized that he'd neglected to explain how any of the modern plumbing features worked. He considered going back upstairs to rectify his mistake, but took so long debating that Mary showed up in the doorway with wet hair before he'd made a decision, rendering the whole point moot.
"There's bread and cheese," he said, gesturing to the plate he'd set out. "And some fruit. I thought perhaps you should start out simply. Tea?"
"Black, please," she said, taking a seat. "I suppose you want to know exactly what I can do."
"That would be a good start," Declan said. "But please eat first."
"I can manage both," Mary said with a smile. "Tell me, have you ever heard of Jack the Ripper?"
Kate took a moment before going back to the punching bag after Will left. She wasn't winded or tired, at least not in the conventional sense, and she knew her own physical limitations well enough to know that she had at least another round in her before her muscles started to burn, but emotionally she was nearly worn out. It had been primarily adrenaline that got her through the raid, adrenaline and anger, and now both were running low and hitting things was not making her feel much better. Still, she pushed on, fists against the bag in a rhythm as fast as she could manage.
It was only a matter of time before Castor contacted her, thinking he would get his due. She would give him no such satisfaction, and had half a mind to set up the meet herself. Dead Bridge would do nicely, set the tone she wanted and give her home field advantage. She caught the bag in her gloved hands, stilling it in midair, and then undid the laces on her gloves with her teeth. She hung the gloves, the only things in the whole room she hadn't inherited from Ashley, and pulled her cellphone out of her jacket to send the message.
Kate swore when she saw that she had a text from Castor already. At least it was Dead Bridge he wanted to meet at, and he had outlined terms for a truce. She wasn't stupid enough to believe him, of course, and was already planning her lines of defense even as she showered and dressed. Escaping without drawing the attention of Will or the Big Guy wasn't easy, but Kate was an accomplished smuggler, and she knew a few ways out of the Sanctuary that would at least be harder to track, if not completely unnoticeable.
She parked halfway up the bridge, in plain view of the black van that perched on the edge, and walked up to meet Castor and the rest of his crew. She had a gun tucked into the waistband of her pants, obscured by the line of her jacket. It wasn't exactly allowed by the terms Castor had outlined, but she wasn't about to walk up to him unarmed, and she suspected he'd have his own piece in any case.
"I'm here, Castor!" she called out, shouting over the wind once she was close enough. "What do you want?"
"You messed up a very pretty operation of mine, Freelander," Castor said, stepping out from behind the van. Kate tensed, but Castor spread his hands wide to show his apparent harmlessness.
"It's a bad habit I've acquired lately," Kate said. "Are you expecting something from me?"
"I think you might like this one," Castor said. He threw open the sliding door of the van and Kate saw the unconscious form of a young woman sprawled out in the back.
"What the hell, Castor!" Kate exclaimed, dropping her guard a little bit even as she felt two of Castor's goons flank her.
"Nothing like that!" Castor said. "I don't trade in anything that looks like me. We nabbed her just before you raided us. Said she could sense the distress of the creatures and was trying to free them, but since she lacked your spectacularly well-armed back-up dancers, she didn't really stand much of a chance against us."
"Charming," said Kate.
"Anyway, we got a little bit distracted just after we nabbed her, and then out of the blue she fainted on us," Castor said.
"And you called me because?" Kate said.
"Well I sure as hell don't traffic in humanoids," Castor repeated. "And also, right before she fainted she said 'Sanctuary', which of course made me think of you."
"What do you want, Castor?" Kate was entirely sick of his posturing. "Just make me your offer."
"We turn over this, whatever she is, and you forget to tell Magnus my name when she gets back to town," Castor said.
Kate weighed her options. There were two guys behind her and God only knew how many more at the bottom of the bridge. And Castor seemed to be genuine in his proposal.
"Fine," Kate said. "One of your goons has to carry her to my car."
"Done," Castor said.
"And Castor," Kate added. "This was your warning. Next time I won't be so nice."
He didn't get close enough to shake her hand, but one of his goons slung the girl over his shoulder and followed Kate back to her car, so Kate didn't complain. She had the goon put the girl in the backseat and then wrestled her seatbelt on. Hopefully it would look like Kate's passenger had merely fallen asleep. She didn't fancy explaining an unconscious female whose name she didn't know to a curious police officer, so she drove the speed limit all the way back to the Sanctuary. Even with her precautions, she didn't breathe easily until she was inside the gate.
Once she parked, she leaned over and punched the intercom. A few seconds later, she was telling Will that she'd picked up a guest and needed help and also a medical gurney. He reached the garage in record time, the Big Guy on his heels, and since Kate had the door open, Will was right there when the girl groaned and wrestled to sit up straight in Kate's car.
Will stared, and the girl stared back.
"Sophie?"
James was approximately halfway through taking the woman's blood pressure when she awoke.
"No!" she said, and pulled her arm out his hold. Moving more quickly than James was aware was possible in a petticoat and skirts, she was off the table and had pressed herself back against the opposite wall before James could blink.
"My dear, I am a trained physician," he said as kindly as he could manage, though to be honest she had given him quite a start. "I promise you that you are in a safe place and possibly in need of medical care."
"Where is Dr. Magnus?" the woman demanded.
"She has been sent for and will be returning shortly, I assure you," James said. "If you would please return to the table, I can – "
"No," she said firmly. "It must be Dr. Magnus."
James bit the inside of his cheek in frustration before deciding to chalk it up to the insensible things that women did sometimes. It was better than taking it as a slight to his professionalism, in any case.
"Would you at least care to wash?" James said, indicating the basin on the sideboard. There was quite a bit of blood on the woman's dress, though his initial guess had proved correct and it was not hers.
"Thank you," she said, and cautiously approached. "But you must not touch me."
"Why not?" He had never liked being told what to do.
"Because I already know that you love the man I stabbed tonight," she said. "And moreover, I know that he loves you, in his own twisted way, and that is why you are still alive. I do not care to learn anything more from you."
James reeled, clutching at the examination table for support when he thought his knees might give way. She seemed uneasy as well, as though she could detect his emotions beyond the visible evidence he gave. And of course that was what is was. She could read his mind.
"Are you only capable of reading the thoughts of those you touch?" he asked, hoping to catch her off guard by seemingly reading her mind in turn.
"The men I touch, yes," she said, her voice weak but otherwise unharried. "Except for John Druitt, whose thoughts project from him like a bullet from a rifle. You yourself were unremarkable until I mentioned stabbing him, at which point your surprise must have rendered your thoughts strong enough for me to read without contact. I beg you, do not touch me."
"No fear of that," James said, taking a step back. "But tell me what you have done to John."
"I may have killed him," she said. "At least I stabbed him in a place where he may die of his wounds."
"How did you find him?" James asked with some jealousy. The last he had heard of John, the killer had been in Germany.
"I let him find me," she said. "I knew the date, and so I went to Whitechapel and waited."
James kicked himself for not thinking of the same plan. It was the anniversary of Mary Kelly's death, though not of her discovery, and it made sense that John would be in London tonight.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"You will not believe me when I tell you," she said.
"I cannot believe you if you do not tell me, either," he pointed out.
"Very well," she said. "I am Mary Kelly."
To his credit, James did not openly gape at her. "How is that possible?" he asked.
"Dr. Magnus has told you that we met?" Mary said. When James nodded, she continued. "I was not in my rooms when the Ripper came for me; I was hiding. An abortionist friend of mine had sent a young woman there to recover, not knowing that by doing so her life would be in danger. Druitt did not know the difference, and when he was done, there was nothing sufficient for proper identification."
James shuddered. He was usually able to shrug off crime scenes, but every detail of Mary Kelly's flat had been burned into his mind since he'd seen it a decade ago.
"When I heard the news, I hid," Mary said. "And then I fled London until tonight, when I deemed it safe to return for revenge."
"Your intuition is commendable," James said, but he got no further because at that moment Helen burst into the room.
"James?" she said, "Allistair said there was a woman…"
She trailed off as her eyes fell on Mary and widened in surprise. James was about to step in and endeavour to explain when he saw the play of emotions on Helen's face mirrored in Mary's eyes. Mary began to convulse, caught in thoughts she had not expected and could not control, and he had only just stepped around the table to catch her when she collapsed against him.
"And that is all I remember until I woke up in the bed here. Even the first few moments of wakefulness were very disjointed, like I was moving outside of time until you filled in all the blanks for me when you grabbed my arm," Mary said.
"So it was Helen's arrival and her thoughts that bowled you over?" Declan said. "Even though she was a woman?"
"Yes," Mary said. "I did not have time to wonder at it and I have no idea if they ever figured it out."
"Oh, I have no doubt that James at least had a guess," Declan said. "He would have written it down, and I would have filed it alphabetically when I redid the archive after he died. James's filing system was a mess, but I've more or less sorted it out."
"I am sorry for that loss as well," Mary said, a soft expression on her face. "He deserved someone better than the Ripper."
"Thank you," said Declan. "Are you up for checking the archive tonight?"
"Yes," she said. "I think the sooner we figure out why I am awake now, the better."
Declan hadn't thought that far ahead. It followed that if an overwhelming telepathic event had been what rendered her comatose for more than a century, a similarly spectacular event must be responsible for her awakening. He went to the computer and began a search in the archive, much to the interest of Mary.
"Fascinating," she said. "I will have a lot of catch up on."
"I think there's a manual somewhere," Declan said absently. He checked himself off her incredulous look. "Not for time travel, or whatever, but more for abnormals who come to us from low tech locales."
"I see," she said.
"It was one of James's pet projects," Declan said, smiling. "He didn't get out much once the 90s started."
"Apparently no one had the sense to die properly," Mary said.
Declan was about to answer that when the search turned up Mary's file. He printed off two copies and handed one to her, his fingers accidentally brushing hers as she took it. She shuddered.
"I can read, Mr. MacRae," she said, but she didn't sound like she'd taken offense, either from the accidental touch of his presumption of her illiteracy. "There's not a lot to do when one is in hiding."
"I'm sorry," he said, as much for the touch as anything else. She nodded and they turned to reading.
James had been characteristically verbose in his diagnosis, and eventually Mary had to admit that she could make out the words but not their meaning.
"He theorized that you detected their thoughts because of something called the Source Blood," Declan said. "It's what they did to themselves back in the 1880s, what gave them their powers."
"That makes as much sense as anything," Mary said. "Except that I still don't know why I am awake."
"You were overloaded by James and Magnus," Declan mused. "James thought you put yourself in the coma until you could cope with the power of suddenly reading the thoughts of people you weren't touching. Presumably, you're awake now because you can stand to be in the same room as them, but short of getting Magnus here to test it, I can't see a way to be sure."
"It wasn't just waking up," Mary said. "It was as though someone had shouted very loudly."
Declan straightened and reached for the telephone.
"What did I say?" Mary said.
"Nothing in particular," Declan said, already dialling. "It's just that around here, I like to know who's shouting."
"Who's shouting?" Mary repeated.
"Let's just say there's a short list, and I'm not a fan of most of the people on it," Declan said.
The phone began to ring, and a few moments later, Declan was talking to Bigfoot.
To be continued...