Well this was going to be interesting. Our original plan had been for Bezique to lead us to one of the labs this Charles Lechmere guy used when he was putting his things together so we could ambush him as soon as he showed up there again. It had sounded like the best way to handle things at the time. But, as it turned out, that couldn't work. The bastard was protected thanks to his zombie bombs. We couldn't do anything to him, or to the rift itself, without setting those off and destroying a huge part of the city. Which felt like a pretty bad thing to let happen. Maybe there were a few timeline hiccups we could fake our way through well enough, but killing thousands of people and destroying most of London would probably be going a bit too far. Even the Bystander Effect wouldn’t be able to shrug that one off. We couldn't let it happen.

Which meant we had to do this the hard way. We had to find his zombie bombs, and the best way to do that was to find some of his magical spellwork so we could track the zombies themselves. And the best way to do that was to go to the same lab we were going to go to before, but this time, without actually ambushing him. We didn’t want to encounter the man himself at all. Unfortunately, we were pretty sure he would know we had been there as soon as this started going down. Just like he would know we were disabling his zombie bombs. We would be giving up whatever small element of surprise we might've had. But there was nothing else to be done about it. I had already asked if he might just set off the bombs himself the moment he realized we were disabling them, but according to Bell and Aylen, the only way they could be set off was if the rift was closed, or he died. Those were the two triggers. And they didn't think he was the type of person to kill himself just to set off those bombs.

I really hoped they were right about that. Because this whole thing was going to go very sideways if they misjudged him. On the other hand, I trusted Aylen, and Bell was literally both the original inspiration for Sherlock Holmes and the Knight of the Round Table who had created the Atherby clan. He was my ancestor. I… I really had to sit down and think about that at some point. I was running around with my ancestor, the oldest one yet, the founder of the Atherbys. What would my mother think about that? What would Seller think about it? Hell, what would Gabriel Prosser think? I… god, it was this huge thing and I barely had time to think about the ramifications. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say and get answers to.

I could do that in the future. I could find a way to track him down once we were back in the present. He was the head of the Crossroads detectives. It wouldn’t be that hard to figure out how to get a message to him. Hell, I could just ask him to set something up in the future.

In any case, we couldn't just sit around and dwell on that, or feel sorry for ourselves about how complicated the whole situation was turning out to be. The only choice we had was to take it one step at a time. And the first step was to get to that lab to see if we could find what we needed to track the damn zombie bombs.

Bezique was, as always, perfectly willing to help with that. She did think it was a bit odd when we said we weren't going to stay there and meet the other Jacob-Blooded just yet, but I told her we wanted to study him first and find some of the work he had made. Part of it felt bad about not just being directly up front with her about what we were doing, but we didn't have time to convince her that she was a victim and he was a monster. I hoped that the best way to do that right now was to treat her better, be a friend to her, and try to let her see the difference for herself. I had no idea what was going to happen if it came down to making her eventually choose between him and me, or what revealing myself to be the actual Jacob would do that equation. It might've helped, honestly. But if she was going to change her mind about who she wanted to side with, I wanted her to do it on her own, based on how she saw us and what she wanted. I didn’t want to turn into Jacob and make her decide to enslave herself to ‘him’ instead. And yes, that entire thing was complicated by the fact that I wasn't being completely honest with her. It was all weird and difficult to even think about. Just like the rest of this situation.

But it was also something to deal with later, bad as that might’ve sounded. We were still on that first step of dealing with Lechmere. Which meant making our way through London. Bell had both a car and a carriage, but we used neither. Nor did we use any of the various forms of transportation Aylen had available. Instead, we walked through the city. Aylen said she wanted me to get a good look at the place and see where things were so I could easily teleport around once we knew where we were going. And, to be honest, I was pretty sure she wanted me to have a chance to look around and breathe a little bit before things went sideways.

Either way, her home was near Westminster Abbey, maybe a few blocks south-east, near what they called the Victoria Tower Gardens. Which itself was just south of the Parliament building. Meanwhile, the area we were heading for to find this lab was on the opposite side of the Thames, somewhat near Bethlem Royal Hospital. Which was just fantastic and appropriate, considering that place's history as an infamous psychiatric hospital. Hell, the actual word 'bedlam' itself was literally derived from the official nickname for that place. It was essentially the prototype for all those scary mental institutions throughout history, and home, I was certain, to more than its fair share of horrific trauma. So it was really no wonder Jack the Ripper had set up shop nearby. Hell, for all we knew, his bullshit, evil experiments into creating those monstrosities had something to do with the place’s reputation. Though since, according to our current tour guides, the place had been around since the 1200s and was first used to house psychiatric patients toward the end of the 1300s (or the early 1400s depending on who you asked), probably not. But even then, I was sure he wasn't exactly helping the situation. At the very least, he was certainly benefitting from it. I felt confident in assuming he was collecting some of the victims to do his experiments on from that place. Which… yeah, this fucking guy had to be stopped.

The other reason we were actually walking was because Aylen and Bell both wanted to see if we could draw out any more of his creations. They were pretty sure the man had those things scouring the city for us--well for me-- while he was busy at his day job. If we could grab more of them, at the very least, we wouldn't have to deal with them later. And they might be able to help. After all, Bezique had already proven herself very useful. Granted, she herself said that she was different from the others (and I wasn’t sure why that was, unless it was just a result of Lechmere experimenting with her), but still. And, apparently, Bell had some ideas about ways to disable the creatures, a couple spells he had researched once this whole thing started getting worse. He didn't want to try them on our new friend, so he needed others to target instead. Preferably out here in the open where they wouldn’t be reinforced by whatever protective spells Lechmere had inside his lab. He needed an easy test without complications so he could see what to adjust.

I’d asked him about my inability to affect these things despite being constructed from dead creatures, and he confirmed he had the same issue. There was something about them that made it hard, or even impossible, for us to use Necromancy on them. Maybe just because they were actually alive. That whole issue was complicated.

In any case, the distance we needed to cover to get all the way from Aylen’s place to where this lab was supposed to be was around eleven miles. Eleven miles of walking through this city. Which would have taken a long time, but we didn’t simply walk. We jogged. Well, for us it was jogging. For most people it would have been a sprint. I kept looking around as we were going, taking in the directions and explanations Bell and Aylen were giving. Honestly, eighteen hundreds London was fascinating, and listening to the two of them going on about it just made me wish we had time to have a real tour of the place without distractions. But then, what else was new?

At the very least, this little jog gave about half an hour for me to think and worry a bit more about Aylen’s situation. We already knew how she had ended up getting stuck in the past, and why she had chosen to stay there after running into the version of me that showed up with Shiori and Asenath a few years into it. Now she was choosing to take the long way to get to each of these rifts whenever they showed up, often putting herself into stasis for years or even decades between those times. But even then, she still lived through a lot of time, doing her research. It made me wonder about how lonely that was. She knew her mothers and grandfather were out there, but she had to stay away from them to avoid changing the future. She had even made friends and a sort of family with the Camelot people, but had to leave them to avoid changing what was supposed to happen there. She’d had to abandon them just like that. And then there was Avalon. The actual person Avalon. I knew Aylen cared about her the way I did, she loved her, and Valley loved the other girl right back. Yet Aylen had made the best choice she could, the best choice for the future of… of everything. She chose to live through all these years, to take the long way back toward the present, just so she could both research how to accomplish her plan and so she could show up at the rifts to tell me about it. And, of course, to warn me about Invidia.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I felt like I should say something to her, find a way to thank her, or find help for her, someone who could stay and be with her through all this. But I had no idea how to go about that. I didn't even know if I could tell her that I would talk to Avalon and make sure they got some time to reunite properly, because I had no idea if this was already past the part of the timeline where I would meet up with our girlfriend. And it kind of felt a bit awkward to ask about that sort of thing.

Setting that aside, the bad news was that we didn't actually run into any more of those Ripper creations for Bell to practice his new spells on. Of course, Bezique immediately volunteered to be the subject as soon as we neared the entrance to the lab and hadn't seen any of the others yet. All of us, Tabbris, Miranda, Aylen, Bell-Bedivere, and myself, immediately and very firmly vetoed that idea. Even after she insisted that she just wanted to be helpful, and that if disintegrating (one of the possible results of the spells depending on how they ended up working exactly) was the cost of that, at least Jacob would smile on her sacrifice. She didn’t seem all that convinced when I promised that Jacob very much would not smile at her throwing her life away for no reason, but she did at least drop the idea when it became clear that none of us were going to agree to it.

The entrance to the lab really was close to the hospital, only a block or so south of it, actually. It was hidden in a narrow L-shaped alley, near the very corner. There were several spells protecting the place, but we managed to carefully disable them. Which also gave me time to look around and realize there were absolutely no homeless people on the entire block. They are all over the place in other areas, yet none dared be anywhere near this place. Which might have had as much to do with the nearby asylum as it did with this secret lab. But either way, the realization sent a cold chill through me. Was that stupid, after everything we had experienced and everything I already knew? It was probably dumb to let a simple realization like, ‘the homeless avoid this area’ creep me out, and yet there it was. It made me want to hold my staff at the ready, just in case.

So, I did just that. I also made sure to summon several ghosts before sending them out to search the place. I would have sent them inside the lab ahead of us, but I could already tell there were Necromancy defenses in there that would’ve caused some real problems for them.

Miranda had her own shield out as well, holding it at the ready. Next to her, Tabbris had produced that miniature crossbow-glove thing, and seemed to be standing directly in front of Bezique to protect her from whatever might jump at us. Aylen had summoned Sovereign down out of the sky and had him transform into his armor-form to wrap around her. Finally, Bell had snapped his fingers and produced some sort of halberd that was taller than he was. The shaft looked like an oversized skeleton arm, complete with an elbow at the center. The head had a spear-like blade sticking out the end, with an axe-head facing forward. Both blades were pitch black, and the axe part had a single crimson glowing eye-shaped design on either side.

Seeing that, I opened and shut my mouth before coughing. “Uh, interesting weapon.”

“It is somewhat ostentatious, I know,” the man agreed. “It is called Tiresias, after the blind prophet. Among its many gifts, as the weapon draws blood, it gifts its wielder with an understanding both of their opponent’s weaknesses, as well as what they will do moments into the future.” He offered me a small smile. “Quite useful in the middle of an altercation.”

Oh it definitely sounded like it would be, that was for sure. Even if the sight of the thing still creeped me out a little bit. But I pushed that thought aside, considering briefly just how creepy everything I did would seem to outsiders. With a little nod, I turned back to the door in front of us and exhaled. “Okay then, time to go in there and see what we can find about my counterpart.” I said that part with a glance toward our little guide. I still felt a twitch of guilt about not being completely open with her. But the time for that would come. Right now it was more important to make sure we had everything we needed to make sure London didn't end up becoming a smoldering ruin.

It took another minute to disable the rest of the traps on the hidden door there. Honestly, it just looked like a part of the wall unless you were staring very, very closely at its seams. There was an oddly-shaped circular brick intended to function as a handle. But we first had to make sure the whole place wasn't going to come down around us or immediately alert the man himself. He would know about us being here, but we didn’t want him to come too quickly.

As we passed through the doorway and started into the lab itself, I had a moment to think very briefly about that whole Invidia thing. How was I ever going to deal with that? If Aylen was right, and I had no reason to think she wasn't, that meant the evil bitch had all my powers and then some. She could do everything I could do, plus everything she was capable of while possessing Charmeine’s ghost. Seriously, what the hell could we do about that? She had already been incredibly dangerous even before she had my abilities, but now? The very thought made me shiver.

Oh wait, I was also shivering because it was damn cold in here. Clearly, this guy didn't keep the heat on while he wasn't there. He had the whole place set up like a freezer. Probably to keep all the bodies safe. Yeah, bodies. We’d come through that door into what looked like a wide open warehouse full of dozens of tables with bodies laid out on them. Not just human bodies either, all sorts from any species I could imagine. Some of them were partially cut open, had pieces removed, and others had even begun to be sewn together with parts from one attached to a completely different species.

It was a total horror show, to say the least. But even as we stood there and stared, Bezique immediately started skipping through the massive room, cheerfully calling out greetings to the bodies like they were friends or family members. She held out the cards she had been given to show the dead bodies, happily explaining all the stuff that Tabbris had told her about playing that game. It was weirdly adorable but also sad. She talked to them like they were close to her, and called them by names. I assumed, after a moment, that she was using the names the people had while they were alive. When she came to bodies that were combined, she listed all the names together, like, “Oh hello, Baes-Donald-Yevn! I hope you’re feeling better today!”

Yeah, it was… something. I could only take watching it for a moment before grimacing as I turned to the others. “Okay, so let's find some examples of his spellwork so we can track down those zombie bombs. I don’t want to be here any longer than we have to.”

With that in mind, we spread out carefully to start searching, keeping our guards up just in case. Absolutely anything could happen in here. I wasn't about to take it for granted that we were safe just because we had disabled all the alarms we could find. We had to find what we needed and then get the hell away from this lab.

And only part of that urge was because of how much the place creeped me the hell out.

“What an odd mirror.” As Bell said that, I looked over to see the man holding up what was, indeed, a very odd-looking mirror he had picked up from somewhere. It was about two feet high and two feet wide in total, but it wasn’t square. Instead, the whole thing was made up of dozens of runic symbols linked together by narrow strips. It was like someone had taken a large piece of wood and cut that single piece into all the different runes, keeping them linked by those narrow strips so it would stay in one piece. Then pieces of glass had been attached to each bit of wooden rune in the front. It was a ‘mirror’ made up of like forty or fifty individual, uniquely shaped pieces of glass. A mirror that was actually an entire spellform.

I started to say something. But even as my mouth opened, I saw it. A face in the scattered glass pieces of the mirror. A face that was not Bell’s. I saw it, saw her, and recognized what I was looking at immediately.

“Bell!” I shouted, hand extending to do… something. But it was too late. That face in the mirror rose out of it, hands grabbing onto the man while he cursed. His weapon fell, as he released the mirror. But it floated there, allowing the figure within to pull herself out and into that man. She possessed him, she possessed Joseph Bell--Bedivere, founder of the Atherby clan and my own ancestor, even as the rest of us threw ourselves that way to stop her.

We failed. A blast of concussive force exploded outward, knocking all of us, and the tables full of body parts, across the room.

“Oh,” Invidia, possessing Bedivere, announced, “You see, dearest Charmeine?

“I told you I would find a suitable man for you to control.”