An Uncle had pulled the trigger. Terence darted aside but not quickly enough. The bullet caught him in the shoul-der, spun him halfway round. He swung his gun hand, sighted along the barrel, and shot the man in the chest. The other two with guns began to fire, but Terence was already moving. Philip —mad, one-eyed Philip—charged toward him. Terence shot him twice, once in the abdomen and once in the leg.
But he had nowhere to hide.
Josephine Blackwood raised her hands and the shadows began to coalesce around her fingers. She chanted something and the air shimmered. They might all dabble in magic, but whatever of it remained in the world, she had tapped it.
Jazz opened her mouth and screamed.
London answered with anguished cries from its past. The fire crackling around the circumference of the room flickered as a wind roared through the chamber. The Hour of Screams had arrived once more, but differently this time. Steam cried from the valves of the apparatus. Jazz howled her frustration and fury.
The ghosts of old London joined her in a chorus, and then the chamber seemed to contract for a moment before exploding in a rush of apparitions.
A phantom train roared through the room, right through the apparatus, and Jazz was its screaming whistle. Piccadilly Circus flooded with people throwing their hats into the air, women kissing men who were total strangers, hundreds and then thousands embracing, celebrating the fall of Berlin. Parades marched by.
Killers stalked victims in dark alleys. Lovers walked hand in hand. Rough-hewn men unloaded crates from ships along the filthy Thames. Bobbies walked their beats. Children played in parks and gardens. Tires screeched and horses whinnied as accidents took the lives of innocents. The wealthy walked past street beggars with nary a glance. Little girls sold flowers. Dancers performed upon a stage. An old woman pulled her shawl around her and wept for a love lost, a life unfulfilled. And more.
The ghosts of old London filled the chamber, the appa-ratus summoning them into a hurricane of memory and emotion. Jazz saw them all, and she felt their yearning for rest. For solace.
She arched her back, pressing down on the levers of the apparatus with all of her strength. Her eyes went wide as the first of the ghosts rushed into her. They began to push into her throat, sliding in through her nose and eyes and ears and, with a chilling rush, sifting through the pores of her skin. They filled her entirely, and as they did, the stories and secrets played no longer before her eyes but across the stage of her mind. All of the tales, funny and tragic, sweet and wistful and heartbreaking and horrifying, became hers.
All of the magic passed into her.
With a thunderclap, it ended. The apparatus gave a hiss like a final gasp and the gears began to slow.
The screams were gone, along with the regret in the heart of the city. Jazz inhaled deeply, and the air down in that vast subterranean world smelled clean. The world had moved on. She under-stood now. The world had moved on, but London had clung to the past, dragging the weight of its ghosts like iron chains.
But she had felt its sigh of relief. And now the city was free to seek its future.
****
Jazz freed herself from the apparatus. Its gauges were cracked and broken, the gears bent and rusted. How the thing had ever worked, she could not imagine. She slid out between the pipes and jumped to the floor of the chamber.
In the flickering of firelight, Terence Whitcomb and the members of the Blackwood Club lay sprawled across the stony ground. Slowly, groaning, most of them began to rise. Two men lay still, either unconscious or dead. Terence stag-gered toward her, a weary smile on his face, yet there also seemed to be an air of sadness around him. He had dedi-cated his life to this moment, and now that it had arrived, what would he do?
Josephine Blackwood and the Uncles seemed shriveled and diminished. The woman raised her hands, malice etched upon her face, but she looked foolish sketching the air as she tried to cast some kind of spell. The realization shattered her. Jazz saw it fill her eyes, watched as her body went slack. She was just a sad old woman now. All of the power she'd lusted after, like youth, was a lost dream, for-ever beyond her grasp.
As Jazz looked on, they all seemed to be growing older. One by one, heads hung in despair, they turned away and began to shamble back the way they had come.
All save for Josephine.
She crouched and picked up a fallen pistol.
"Josie, no!" Terence shouted, scanning the ground for his own gun.
The crone pointed the gun at Jazz and fired. As Josephine pulled the trigger, Jazz felt her gorge rise as though she might vomit. Instead, what burst from her was a human figure —a gray shimmering form in a top hat and tails with a simple prestidigitator's wand. He waved it even as the bullet passed through him, but what struck Jazz was a wilted daisy.
The gun in Josephine Blackwood's hand had become a bouquet of flowers.
The old woman crumbled to the ground and began to weep quietly.
Terence stared at Jazz and then at the ghost of the magi-cian. "It can't be."
The magician reached toward him, spectral fingers pass-ing through Terence's cheek and reaching behind his ear to produce a silver coin. Then he bowed deeply, stepped back-ward into Jazz, and vanished within her.
The stories and secrets of old London had not disap-peared or been destroyed; they had found a new home.
Jazz reached for Terence and pulled him close. He winced at the pain from the wound in his shoulder. She drew his face down to hers and brushed her lips against his in a gentle kiss, then kissed him more deeply, a maelstrom of emotions rushing through her.
"Jasmine," he said.
She shook her head, gave him a final glance, and then turned from him. When she walked past Josephine Blackwood, the old woman didn't even look up. Terence called after her once, but Jazz did not falter. She had de-scended so far into the underneath that the journey upward would take time, and she was keen to get started.
London awaited.
****
On a Tuesday in the last week of October, Jazz sat on a low wall in Regent's Park, away from the zoo and the rose garden and the major pedestrian traffic. A man with a guitar strummed and sang on a nearby footpath, instrument case open but for the moment filled only with the hope of future generosity.
A small group had begun to gather around her, an odd coterie that included a tidy young professional, a couple of aging homeless, and a dark-eyed junkie thief unused to be-ing as exposed as the park required.
The thief's eyes were skittish, but Jazz often found that she loved them best of all.
Tuesday. Jazz had discovered that she liked knowing what day it was. That had taken some getting used to once she had returned topside and become part of the city again. But she liked the feeling. It made the day hers, in a way London was enjoying an Indian summer, and the sun felt warm on her arms, now turned a rich bronze from many such days. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore a spaghetti-strap tank top, cutoff shorts, and a cute pair of sandals she'd retrieved from the closet in her old bedroom. After all she had been through, robbing her own house be-fore the bank finally sold it off hadn't been difficult.
A few others approached cautiously, seeing her there on the wall. Among them she saw Aaron, a nouveau punk, maybe twenty, sauntering toward her with his usual arro-gance. When he reached the small, strange group sitting on the grass in front of the wall, his entire demeanor changed. He stood up straight and even smiled. The green hair must have seemed out of place elsewhere in the park, but not here. No one was out of place here.
"Mornin', Jasmine," Aaron said. He had a pack slung across his back and now he brought it down, unzipped it, and produced a bottle of water. "Here's for you," he said, handing it over, "and I've got a bunch more. Give 'em to whoever."
Jazz touched his hand. "Thanks, Aaron. You're a good one."