Fateful

  I cry until I feel like it’s impossible for me to cry any more. One of my hands closes over hers, the only good-bye I can give her. I never even knew whether she was Inga or Ilsa. Then I gently cover her with the cloth, wishing it could keep her warm.

  Stiffly I rise and walk to the next body. Then the next. And the next. I think I am almost numb to the horror of it, that I can bear anything, until I pull back one more cloth and see who lies there.

  Mikhail.

  He lies there as perfect as a statue; his slicked-back dark hair and Vandyke beard aren’t even mussed. The man might as easily be sleeping. Mikhail looks like he had a peaceful death, and his body is here for his loved ones to bury, assuming he loved anyone. There’s no saying which emotion is stronger: my outrage at the fact that his worthless body was recovered when so many others weren’t, or my relief that at least he’s dead.

  But I tell myself that’s no way to think. Being glad Mikhail died on the Titanic means being glad the Titanic went down.

  I can’t grieve for Mikhail, but I can cover him up decently, I suppose. So I lift the cover again to pull it over his head—

  —and his icy-cold hand clamps around my wrist.

  I gasp. Mikhail’s eyes snap open, as focused and malevolent as ever.

  He’s alive.

  Chapter 30

  THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING. AND YET IT IS. AS I GAPE down at Mikhail, his hand tightens around my wrist, and a shadow of his old mocking grin appears on his face.

  I scramble away from him; his fingers lose their grip. But I stumble against another body and it paralyzes me for an instant. Mikhail pushes himself into a sitting position, then manages to stand. He’s still weak, but he’s definitely alive.

  He can’tbe.

  “This is a bad dream,” I whisper. “Only a nightmare.”

  Mikhail rasps, “I told you we were gods.” His voice sounds like that of a dead thing.

  I look wildly around the shadowy blue rink, as if this will make the driver and attendant magically appear by my side. Our only witnesses are the dead.

  “Last night—must have been—the full moon,” he says. “In times of great danger—great cold—the initiated go into a place beyond the laws mere mortals are prey to. Then the moon awakens us. Restores us to life.” Mikhail grins. “Do you see now how magnificent we are?”

  I can’t speak. I can’t think. A dead man is talking to me.

  “Night is falling. I can feel it.” Mikhail’s eyes close for a moment in satisfaction. “Soon my strength will return. Then I can change. I can be restored.” His eyes open, and he focuses again on me. “I can eat.”

  I run for the door. Mikhail’s on my heels, our footsteps echoing in the space. “Help me!” I cry out, but apparently the men waiting outside can’t hear. There’s only my voice echoing, Help, help, help, help, throughout the icy morgue.

  He’s not as fast as he was before—still weakened from enduring the sinking and his long, mysterious sleep—and I think for a moment I’ll make it out. Then I feel Mikhail’s hand grasp the sleeve of my coat and spin me around.

  I stagger back and manage to twist out of his grasp once more. As he snarls in frustration, I realize that we’re more or less evenly matched now. I stand a chance. If he wants a fight, he can by God have one.

  My fingers curl into a fist—thumb on the outside so you don’t break it, Ned told me once as a joke—and I smash that fist into the side of Mikhail’s face. It hurts my hand, but it hurts Mikhail too; he shouts in real pain, and that feels so good the aching in my fingers means nothing.

  I kick him in the shins. Again. Then I aim my kick higher, and Mikhail doubles over in pain.

  “That’s for Irene,” I pant, “and how you tried to trick her family. And that”—I shove him back hard, so that he hits the wall—“that’s for Ned.” Another kick, and another. “And that’s for Mr. Marlowe, who only wanted you to leave his son alone. And that’s for Alec—oh, God damn you for what you did to Alec—”

  Mikhail’s hand shoots out and grabs my ankle as I kick; the yank forward is so sharp that it sends me tumbling to the floor, and something in my knee cracks. Pain shoots up through my leg, down to my toes, and tears spring to my eyes.

  “You have had your turn,” he rasps, looming over me. “Now I shall have mine. Blow by blow. Pain for pain.”

  Evenly matched meant he still had an even chance, and right now it looks like that is turning against me. I fumble for my pocket, hoping to pull out the silver chain and locket to burn him again, but my coat’s in the way.

  Mikhail reaches down as though he’s going to grab me by the hair—

  —and another hand grabs him, stopping him in place.

  “It’s my turn,” Alec says.

  “Alec!” I cry out. Of course, of course—the Brotherhood initiated him. That means the same magic that protected Mikhail protected him too. When the salvage crew found their bodies and brought them onboard, they waited here, in a sleep just like death, until the full moon awakened them.

  My Alec is alive.

  “Tess,” he says, but he never looks away from Mikhail. They face each other, equally disheveled, equally pale. Anyone would believe they truly had been brought back from the dead.

  Mikhail says, “We saved you.”

  Alec answers, “You wanted to enslave me. You failed.”

  It’s impossible to say which of them attacks the other first. They match each other punch for punch, shove for shove, and I can see the battle of the red and black wolves about to begin. Perhaps they’re still too weak to change, but not for long.

  In a flash, something shifts, and Mikhail seems to have the upper hand as he forces Alec back against a long, low metal table—perhaps a place where the bodies were examined. But I have my hand on the locket now, and I slap it against Mikhail’s other cheek so he’ll have matching scars. As he howls from the burn, Alec and I both push him back. It’s two against one now. I prefer these odds.

  Then Mikhail’s head snaps up, and his eyes gleam gold like the wolf’s as he stares at Alec. “You are initiated,” he says. “You belong to the Brotherhood.”

  Alec stops. He becomes as still as if he were carved of stone. His eyes seem to dim and die as that mysterious darkness fills the rink. Only the ice seems to hold any remnant of its former light, an eerie blue that outlines the bodies too sharply.

  Oh, no. The Brotherhood’s mind control. The silver didn’t protect him during the initiation.

  “You are ours,” Mikhail whispers, in the obvious thrill of triumph. He straightens, once again the gentleman in his dinner suit despite the burn scars on his cheeks. “You will do as I command.”

  Alec’s hands go slack, unfolding from fists to hang at his sides.

  Mikhail looks at me, and it’s hard to say what he enjoys more: bending Alec to his will or making me witness it.

  Then he says, “Kill the girl.”

  I can’t run—my back is to the wall, and they’re between me and the door. Alec turns to me, with his flat predator’s gaze; the only thing more horrible than knowing I’m going to die is knowing that it will be at his hand.

  Or can I kill Alec instead? He’s not at his full strength. I have a chance. But that murder would haunt me forever.

  I lift my hands, balling them into uncertain fists. Alec’s mother’s locket still dangles from my fingers. In case these will be the last words I say to him—perhaps the last words I will ever say, I whisper, “Alec, I love you.”

  Alec blinks. His eyes refocus. It is no longer a monster looking at me—it’s Alec, my Alec.

  He turns back to Mikhail and pulls something from the inner pocket of his water-stained coat: The Initiation Blade, just where he left it. At first, Mikhail can only look at the dagger with pure greed so overpowering that he doesn’t even suspect what’s coming when Alec lunges forward. The Blade punches between Mikhail’s ribs, and Mikhail gasps, mouth wide in shock and pain, as blood begins to drip onto the floor.

  I watch in
horrified fascination as Mikhail pulls himself free of the Blade, which gleams wetly with his blood; between streaks of red, I can see the gleaming gold. Alec looks as if he can hardly believe he stabbed a man, but his grip on the hilt remains sure.

  “Only—a wound,” Mikhail gasps. “You will need more than that to kill me.”

  Alec swallows hard. “I know. I’ll need silver.”

  With that he takes the Blade and swipes it, hard, against the sharp metal edge of the nearby table. Gold flakes away in ribbons, and when Alec holds the dagger up again, I can see the exposed silver core.

  Mikhail presses his hands harder against his gut, as if he could hold the blood in that way, as if it were not already too late. “You won’t do it, Alec. You always said you never wanted to be a killer.”

  “I don’t,” Alec says. “I’m doing this to save lives, Mikhail. To save Tess, and countless others.”

  “And to save yourself,” Mikhail sneers.

  Alec simply considers that before saying, “Yes.” Then he plunges the Initiation Blade into Mikhail’s heart.

  The next moment is terrible. Mikhail groans—a sound that is in its way almost as haunting as the screams of the drowning on the night of April 15. It, too, is the sound of dying. Alec looks stricken, and I embrace him from behind, one arm along the length of his arm, so that the blame for the fatal blow he struck is mine as well.

  Then Mikhail falls to the ground, as dead as any other corpse in the room. Alec somehow turns in my arms to embrace me too, and for a long time we can only hold on to each other, unable to believe we have triumphed over the Brotherhood. Over the ice. Over death.

  A few hours later, I lie in the bed of a Halifax boardinghouse with flickering light from the fireplace playing over my bare skin, and Alec’s.

  After defeating Mikhail, we slipped out the back of the rink; I hope the poor men who were waiting out front will forgive me. Mikhail’s blood has been mopped up, and he has taken his old place among the corpses. Ragged as Alec looked, we were able to tidy him up enough to pass through the streets of Halifax unnoticed. We found this boardinghouse and took a room—together, though this required a bit of subterfuge.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe,” Alec says, as though he read my mind. He lazily traces one finger along my shoulder. “Perhaps soon we can make that come true.”

  It doesn’t surprise me at all; I knew almost from the beginning that something would tie us together forever. But it makes me smile. “Only right that you make an honest woman out of me.”

  “You’re the most honest woman I know. Almost too honest.”

  “Just because I said you looked like death warmed over when we were trying to clean you up.”

  “That’s one example, yes.” But his bare chest shakes with suppressed laughter.

  I kiss him, and that silences all laughter for a while.

  When at last we part, breathing hard and smiling even more broadly than we were when we began, he says, “I thought I’d have to persuade you.”

  “To stay with you?”

  “The danger hasn’t ended because Mikhail’s dead.” Alec looks grave again. “Sooner or later, the Brotherhood will come after me again. Probably they’ll be in Halifax within days, to see if Mikhail survived. They won’t appreciate my defiance, or your interference. And I know you well enough to be sure you’ll interfere.” He means it as a tribute.

  “You don’t have to persuade me, for the same reason I don’t have to persuade you any longer.” I put my hand over his heart. “When the ship was going down—when we thought we had no more time left—I knew how foolish we’d been to hurt ourselves by saying good-bye one moment before we had to. Now the miracle’s happened. I have you back again. I won’t walk away this time, Alec.”

  “The same reason.” He smiles softly. “It would take more than the Brotherhood to separate me from you again.”

  I snuggle close to him so that we’re pressed together from temple to toe. “Where will we go?”

  “I wish we could just stay here. In this room, in this bed, forever.” The firelight paints Alec’s wild curls a deeper chestnut, almost red. “But you want me to be practical, don’t you, Tess? We should go back to Chicago, at least at first. My father’s affairs need to be settled. I don’t want to take over Marlowe Steel, but I have to decide who I can trust to do it for me. And—I know we can’t bury him, but I’d like to have a gravestone for Dad. Something to remember him by.”

  I squeeze his hand, acknowledging that need, but I have to ask, “Won’t people be surprised that you’re, well—alive?”

  “Yes, but it’s going to be easy enough to explain. You said the newspaper reports about the Titanic come two or three times a day and still contradict each other half the time. We can easily say I was left off the survivor rolls by accident, that I was injured and unable to send a Marconigram until now.”

  That makes sense. And I like the way Alec says “we,” how perfectly understood it is between us that no matter what happens next, we’ll be together. Flattening my hand against the broad muscles of his chest, I whisper, “And you’re free.”

  “We might still have to go into hiding.” Though his noble guilt no longer forces him to push me away, Alec still feels he must warn me. “The Brotherhood won’t let me go easily, even if I walk away from Marlowe Steele. We should do it now, maybe, when they know nothing, but . . . I can’t do it to my grandparents, my cousins.”

  Pretending to be dead is Alec’s smartest course, but also the cruelest. He would never take that path. I envision the little cabin on the frontier he once spoke of, but snug and cozy now, not an outpost but a true home with smoke rising from the chimney and curtains on the windows. A garden with vegetables for us and flowers for me—amazing, to think of having my own bit of earth to plant flowers. Alec will no longer live as a wealthy man; I will no longer live as a servant. We’ll be equals. Together. “As long as we’re together, we’ll be all right. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Except on the night of the full moon.”

  “One night a month. We can manage that, I know it.”

  “I hope we can.” Though Alec still has doubts—and given all that has happened, he’s right to—I don’t see the same fatalism in him that I did before. He finally believes he has a chance at a good life. With me.

  I say, “Free from the Brotherhood’s control, too. We know that now. Mikhail tried it, but it didn’t really work. The silver you touched during the initiation saved you.”

  “It didn’t.”

  I prop myself up on one elbow to stare at Alec. He looks utterly serious, but not dismayed—in fact, the only word for the expression on his face now is joy.

  “Mikhail had me,” he says. “He had me under his control until the moment he commanded me to kill you—and that was something I could never do. My love for you is what keeps me human, Tess. And it always will.”

  Fateful

  Author’s Notes

  ALTHOUGH I RESEARCHED THE TITANIC WHILE conceiving and writing this book, on some points I chose drama over accuracy. For instance, Myriam would almost certainly have boarded the ship at Cherbourg rather than Southampton; servants traveling in third class was so unheard-of that I’m sure Tess’s handy key was unheard-of too; and the Titanic had no “seventh officer.” Rather than fictionalize the life of an actual officer aboard the ship, I chose to invent George Greene and his position onboard. In fact, I worked around real individuals on the ship as much as possible. Writing a big paranormal romance set amid a real disaster would have felt disrespectful if that story were not firmly and totally a fantasy, one that didn’t make claims about the behavior, motives, and culpability of anyone actually onboard. Among the few real-life passengers named in Fateful, only designer Thomas Andrews has more than a cameo, and that because he really did serve as a kind of unofficial advisor on White Star journeys due to the trust everyone had in him, something I wished were better known.

  There were some historical points that, despite my rese
arch, I could never clarify. Who knew that there were running debates over the placement of the Titanic’s kennel—or that I could ever need that information? Where I couldn’t find a solid answer, I made my best guess.

  Moorcliffe and the Lisles are fictional, but Tess’s life as a servant is not exaggerated. Everything from her bad mattress and the frozen water in her morning basin to the lack of electricity and plumbing in the servants’ quarters is historically accurate—thanks to my friend Tara O’Shea and her extensive collection of books on life in service in the early twentieth century. My interest in the subject came from the classic TV series Upstairs, Downstairs. Sharp-eyed fans of the show will find that the ill-fated Lady Marjorie Bellamy has a brief appearance in Fateful.

  Among the Titanic books I relied upon most were the classic A Night to Remember by Walter Lord and 1912 Facts About Titanic by Lee W. Merideth. I also found invaluable the archives and message boards of the website www.encyclopediatitanica.com, where enthusiasts and survivors’ family members have assembled a trove of information about the ship, the wreck, the aftermath, and the era. Any extraordinary bit of accurate detail should be rightly attributed to the research of the enthusiasts who have kept the stories of the ship alive for the past century; any errors are wholly my own.

  Finally, I first conceived of this book while visiting the traveling exhibition of Titanicartifacts in New York City at the insistence of my friend and Titanic-o-phile Jennifer Heddle. On the day I found out we’d sold the book, I was visiting the exhibition again with my friend Naomi Novik. On the day I wrote the final page, I saw it a third time—now in Melbourne, Australia—with my hardworking Australian publicist, Jordan Weaver. Because I indulged Jen’s passion for the subject, I got a great idea; because Naomi and Jordan indulged my newfound enthusiasm, I was able to soak up some wonderful details from the recovered artifacts and reconstructed rooms in the exhibit. So thanks are due to all three of them.

  About the Author