From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 12
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
Pushing himself off the stoop with both hands, Middle rushed directly at Millie with a snarl. He was quick, she had to admit, but her little gambit had paid off and she'd goaded him into fighting her on her terms rather than his.
He was on her in a flash, but Millie neatly stepped aside and kicked out to catch him by the ankle, and he spilled forward onto his face in a tangle of limbs. She turned just as Left and Right came at her, lower and slower than their leader had done, but just far enough apart that she wouldn't be able to reach both of them until they were close. Left was missing the conviction of his wisdom that Right had, so she focussed on the latter and punched him square in the nose before he was within swinging distance of his own. He went down wailing and clutching, tottering away backwards, blood spatters marking the path of his retreat.
"Go home, boy," she said to Left. "Or I'll do you one, too."
The blow to the back of her head came as a surprise.
Millie keeled forward, but kept her feet under her as she stumbled away from her attacker. She barely managed to spin around and knock away the fist that had been intended for her face. So confident was he that he was going to connect, he overbalanced, and Millie was more than happy to put her elbow in the side of his head as he did, helping him to re-acquaint himself with the dirt.
Oh, but Left, he was a sneaky opportunist and Millie screamed as he smacked her right in the bandage on her finger just before she took a forearm straight across her mouth. She immediately began to taste blood. A quick flick of her tongue confirmed her teeth were where they should be, and the slightest motion of her finger told her her cut had re-opened.
Now she was properly upset.
Like some kind of fire-haired demon, she descended on Left, who was quickly coming to regard his minor victory as Pyrrhic. But before she could reach him, Middle lived up to his goblin characterisation by grabbing a handful of her hair and yanking her backwards.
Though it hurt tremendously, she was, in a way, thankful. Where she was from, grabbing hair meant that whatever rules might govern strangers punching each other in the street no longer applied. Grabbing her own hair closer to her head to prevent it from being pulled out, she hauled back and kicked him squarely between the legs as hard as she could. Middle's knees instantly buckled and he went down for the third time. Millie was in no mood to do it a fourth, so she kicked him again, this time in the stomach. His eyes went all glassy and the air blew out of him in a wheeze, doubling him over again until he was a tight ball coiled around pain and regret.
Wiping blood off of her lips with the back of her hand, she turned to see the bottoms of Left's shoes flashing as he legged it away as fast as his feet would carry him. As tempted as she was to bean him with a rock, she decided against it. Right was still clutching his nose, and the glare she gave him encouraged him to make a game attempt to follow.
Satisfied, she turned back to the crumpled pile that was Middle, who was desperately trying out his best impression of invisible and failing. She knelt down next to him and flicked the top of his ear with a finger.
"Oi. You in there?"
The boy whimpered.
"I'm going up to get my friend. If you're still here when I come down, more than just your fag is going in that pile of shit."
Not waiting for a response, Millie trudged all the way up to the fifth floor to find a face she'd never seen before open the door when she knocked on it. He'd only had one eye, true, but it was the wrong one. Somehow not surprised, she thanked him for his time and made her way back down to the street to find bare concrete where Middle the Urchin had been. That, combined with the fact that Vickie thankfully hadn't ended up in a place that contained people like him left Millie feeling much better than she thought she would have under the circumstances.
That left only one more place to check.
After she could no longer taste blood, of course.
November was led down a series of identical-looking hallways, all of which were the same austere off-white. The plush carpet ended with the stairs, giving over to hardwood that bore a clearly-worn path where the varnish had been worn away by countless feet making the same journey she was.
Every door she passed on this floor had a slit-shaped window in it, with a sliding metal cover shut over it. Not a single one was open, so she had no idea what kind of people would later be emerging from them. It was eerily quiet, with the flat, utilitarian colours lending a stillness that belied the idea that there were people behind them at all.
"Here we are, room 212," Jeffery said, coming to a halt before a door on their right with that same number painted in black just above the window slat. A loop of keys jangled as he twisted the key in a lock that struck November by how substantial it sounded.
She didn't have time to dwell on it, however, as a gentle pressure on the small of her back insisted that she make her way into the room that the lock belonged to.
Inside was just as austere and antiseptic as the hall, except, in a way, worse. The hallway was functional, a way to get from here to there. The room she was now standing in was supposed to be a living space where presumably ill people were to be able to rest.
There was a wardrobe in one corner, a bed in another, and that was it. No tables, no chairs, not even a painting on the wall. It was an off-white box with a place to lay down in it. At least it had a window.
"If you need anything, pull on the cable by the bed and someone will be up to see you. Don't abuse it," Jeffery said in a way that told her that particular addendum had been added for a very specific reason.
Without further ceremony or conversation, the door clicked shut behind him before the lock once again boomed into place, and November found herself alone with a suddenness that only served to amplify it. She peeked into the wardrobe to find it empty, devoid of even a single hanger. Nor, thankfully, was there a mirror.
She made her way to the window and parted the curtains. The courtyard she'd arrived through stretched out in front of her, somehow more foreboding now that she could see all of it as a single whole. There was no sign of the wagon she'd come in in, nor were there any motorcars parked in the drive. The front gate was already locked up, leaving her sealed into her decision.
Below the window was her bed, on top of which was a pair of neatly folded masses of dull grey, one of which, when held up, turned out to be a simple dress. There was nothing exceptional about it whatsoever, which she suspected was by design. It was sturdy, but upon closer inspection had been mended in several places. A hole here, a tear there, November wondered how many women had worn it before her, standing in the same place, having the same thoughts.
Changing into the other grey pile that turned out to be woollen bedclothes, she found them slightly itchy and big enough that only her fingers poked out from the sleeves, but they were at least clean and of a colour other than black, even if grey was not far off. Satisfied that they would be warm enough, she folded the dress alongside her only set of real clothes—her only possessions, she realised, in the wardrobe and flopped onto the bed.
Blood tingled in her veins as she had a good stretch beneath the heavy duvet. Her back and knees popped as soon as she straightened them, and it dawned on her that it was the first time she'd been flat on her back since she'd woken up in Private Stokeworth's grave.
Wriggling her toes and fingers under the cool fabric, she took simple pleasure in the sensation of being warm and under covers. No matter what else happened in this place, she would at least be thankful for this moment.
But warmth and security soon became heavy weights on her eyelids, and she was too tired to even attempt to lift them off. The world was silent and black, and before she could have another thought, gone.
On a sheet of paper, the address Millie was looking at was an innocuous combination of letters and numbers, much like any other address she'd ever seen. When she looked up from the paper, however, and saw the words 'Serenity Grove Cemetery' in foreboding iron writ over a decrepit gate, it took on a different colour altogether. Everything beyond the gate did nothing to change that colour to anything other than black.
The gate was still open and Millie took that as permission to step through, even though she had no business with any of the permanent residents beyond.
Walking through the maze of headstones was like walking through a city in miniature. Much like buildings, there were big ones and small ones, broken ones and tacky ostentatious ones, all arranged along paths and myriad lanes that instead of separating neighbourhoods, separated the space for the living from that which belonged to the dead. Stray from it and she was like to trip, bash her head and earn her right to move from one to the other.
Millie had never really been spooked by cemeteries. They were, in their own way, tranquil, and more than likely the only place for miles where you were guaranteed to have peace and quiet, even if you did have to share it with a thousand corpses beneath your feet. Though she wouldn't have chosen one for a picnic, she didn't go out of her way to avoid them.
Why would she? She didn't know anybody here. Her brothers weren't even buried on this island. There was only one grave that contained an immediate Brown that she knew of, and it was too far away to scare her off.
She shook her head; she wasn't here to think about things that weren't worth thinking about, she was here to find Victoria.
But as Millie wound her way deeper and deeper into the repository for mortal coils, the more she began to wonder if the first place she'd gone might have been the right one after all. Why would Vickie be in a cemetery, of all places? That first house had been nice, the kind of place she could see a man like hers returning to from the war to make a home out of with a nice girl.
Here? The long shadows created by the setting sun out of the bare trees were splintered and broken over so many wildly different surfaces it was hard to draw a straight line from any one point to another. It was disorienting, and the presence of so many statues made Millie feel like she was being watched. Many of the statues were angels, some old enough to look like they were permanently weeping. Black tears of soot and grime cast stripes of malevolence down many an otherwise beatific face, causing Millie to quicken her pace.
Reaching the 'back' of the cemetery, as Millie thought of it, the population of the dead began to thin, replaced by the living, in the form of trees. Was this for some sort of future expansion? Or did no-one outside want to build anything this close? The trees thickened quickly, obscuring whatever may have been beyond them, but being buttressed against a cemetery, she couldn't imagine it was anything pleasant.
In any case, amidst the nearest trees Millie finally found what she had come to find: the only thing in the entire place that looked liked it was designed to sustain the living.
It wasn't much more than a shack, if Millie was honest. If she was generous, she might have described it as a cabin. But growing up in the city, they might as well have been the same thing to her. Maybe Elise could tell her the difference.
Except she grew up in a barn, Millie thought.
A single light could be seen flickering between the crack in the curtains that hung over the solitary window she could see, letting Millie know ahead of time she wouldn't be getting away with an empty house this time.
She tromped up the stairs as a kind of warning of her presence, since she had no idea what kind of person would choose to live in a place like this, nor how a person that did would respond to a lone female knocking on their door with lots of questions.
Quietly, it turned out.
The door swung open slowly, and two strangers stood staring at each other in shocked silence.
Millie broke it first. "It's you!"
"You were at the pub last night!" the man said.
"Yes, I was. That's why I'm here, actually. My name is Millie Brown, may I speak to Victoria?"
"Who?"
Oh, it's that much of a secret, is it? He's going to play that dumb?
Millie didn't have time for plays. "Victoria. The woman you were at the pub with? I'm a friend of hers and I'd like to see her, please."
"You know her?"
"Yes, she's my best friend. Is she here?"
A dark cloud seemed to settle over his shoulders, and his one good eye could not hold hers. "No, she's not."
Millie forced her irritation down into herself to be dealt with later. "Could you tell me where she is?" The smile she forced the words around was transparently false, but she could feel the slime under her fingernails as she clawed at the bottom of her barrel of patience.
"I think you'd better come inside," he said.
"No, I think I'd rather not, stranger. I'll happily take an answer to my question, however."
He threw up his hands. "I don't know. There's your answer. Would you like to know anything else? Because there's a lot you need to hear if you really are her friend."
A three-way battle raged within Millie's head at that. Part of her wanted to just spin on her heel and stalk away, another part wanted to pick a fight right there in his doorway for wasting her time, but the third part, the part that stood victorious at battle's end, was the part that took the look on the man's face to mean there really was a lot he wasn't saying and that she really did need to hear it.
"All right," Millie said.
The man bowed slightly and gestured for her to step inside.
The inside turned out to be more cabin than shack, and Millie felt she now had a firmer grasp on the difference.
What she no longer had a grasp of was her rationality.
"Why didn't you take her to hospital!?" Millie shouted at the man she now knew was called Bertram Jones, who was sitting on his bed like a scolded schoolboy.
"Every hospital in this area is full of Spanish Flu cases. Besides that, all they would've done for her is prescribe rest in the best case. Worst, they'd've started drilling holes in her head."
"So you took her care upon yourself and then decided to throw her out into the night alone when you found out what she could do?"
Bertram pointed to a blackened, hook-shaped brand in the floor. "She did that."
"With fire? Because that's how—"
"With her mind. I watched her do it." He spoke so quietly, Millie had had to stop talking to hear him—she suspected on purpose.
"What? What do you mean?" Millie asked, unable to keep her voice from breaking.
"I was holding that poker in my hand," he pointed to a black rod sticking out of a bucket beside the stove, "out of the fire, in empty air. She got angry and suddenly the end of it got white-hot. Literally white—so hot and so fast, the handle burned me when I had been holding it comfortably the instant before."
"But that's impossible," Millie breathed.
Not that it couldn't be done, of course, it had clearly been magic, but that Victoria had done it. Was there a such thing as a secondary Manifest? How was it possible for one witch to stop bullets and heat up metal? It beggared belief, no matter how 'broad and deep' her studies were.
Grabbing the poker by the end, Millie pulled it out of its bucket and stared at the end that matched the brand on the floor. It was charred, black and cold, like every other iron fire poker in the history of the world when it wasn't in use. Letting her breath escape in one long exhale, she tried to focus her mind, to feel what the metal could tell her. If there was any residual magic in it, then maybe she could—
"What are you doing?" Bertram asked.
"I have no idea," Millie answered truthfully. She hadn't Manifested yet, how was she to know what real magic felt like? Was she going to suss day-old magic out of dead metal? Would she even know it if she found it?
She tossed it back in with a loud metal clang and rounded on Bertram. "Why did you let her go? You knew she was hurt!"
Bertram's face flushed red. "I know. I shouldn't have. I acted rashly."
"We all do when we're scared," Millie said, crossing her arms and rolling her eyes. It was an immature gesture, she knew, but all she felt then was such a toxic slurry of angry and frustrated that if the worst she got was immature she would chalk it up as a triumph of self-control.
"I wasn't scared. I was angry."
"You, too?" Lover's quarrel? Millie wanted to spit, but she now knew all her suppositions about their relationship had been false. Still, she was feeling spiteful, as much at herself as him. Her assumptions were why Vickie was missing. Again.
"When I found out she was a feather girl, I was furious. I couldn't believe I'd given her shelter."
"Oh, please. You don't know anything about her. How dare you presume to judge her that harshly!" Millie spat. "You don't even know why she did it, or how many she gave out. You didn't even know her name until I got here."
"And you know me? You know why I feel the way I do about that? You know about my nephew being given one? When he was fifteen?"
"Vickie didn't give it to him, did she? She never gave them out to children. Every single time she gave one out, she told the man she gave it to the same thing: 'The only reason I'm not over there is because they won't let me go.' She tried to join up three times, under three different names, but she got caught every time. You seem to be familiar with anger and frustration leading to stupid choices, how do you think she felt? Her twin brother was killed by the Turks at Ctesiphon, and I know there isn't a day that goes by where she doesn't think she should have been right there beside him; more so because we lost that battle." Millie felt her anger bleed out of her as the next thought formed in her consciousness. "Except now she can't even remember him."
Deep in her chest, Millie felt her heart rend in two at the thought. The idea of that being the reality of the world made her want to crawl into a hole and die from grief, but that wasn't a luxury she had. Not while she still had a chance to fix it.
Bertram sat with his hands in his lap, his face a mask of conflicting emotions.
"Besides, she's been atoning for it since she stopped. She—" Millie had to stop herself even though she'd just resumed. She didn't know what Bertram knew, and she didn't know how much Vickie would want Millie to say, given that she wasn't as close to Bertram as Millie had thought. Some of Vickie's secrets needed to remain hers, if she even knew them herself anymore.
