Page 581 of Flirting with Darkness

10

THE CHRISTMAS BALL

Ghost ended up doing exactly the things his father had suggested.

It felt strange to do so.

Some part of his mind rebelled.

Yet he felt compelled to do those things, nonetheless.

He ate as much as he could stomach, literally and figuratively.

When the servants brought up platters, he ate bread, cheeses, chunks of dried meat, more bread, oranges, dried apples, custard, cake, butter, jam. He washed it all down with milk and exotic Turkish coffee that tasted bitter and sweet, but made him feel significantly better. The coffee improved his clarity, vigor, and his state of mind much more than he would have felt after an equal or greater amount of tea, much less wine.

When he finished eating, he took a bath.

As he sat in the steaming water, he sipped a second cup of the strangely alluring coffee.

He thought about the things his father had said.

He contemplated the things he had not said.

He wondered at his own composure in the face of all this.

His plans had been dashed to pieces mere hours upon his arrival here. His father seemed determined to claim him as a son, even as he made it clear he’d known of Ghost’s plan to kill him in revenge for his mother.

He now wondered about those plans himself.

Would he still kill this man?

Something about even posing the question now struck him as childish. Yet the question of what he was doing here at all felt to be genuinely up in the air once more. It also felt less pressing than determining what exactly had happened to him down in that crypt.

Had his father been telling the truth?

Had some magick rendered him unconscious?

For some reason, Ghost believed him it had been so.

Which meant he had vastly underestimated the occult arts, in terms of what they could do. He strongly suspected the apparition he’d met on the train had been warning him about that very thing, when she’d spoken of his father’s growing power.

Which brought him to his father’s offer of teaching Ghost those same arts. But could he really risk his own mind and soul in the den of a dark magician?

Even a dark magician who was his father?

The very fact that the offer felt real made Ghost light-headed.

It bewildered him entirely that his father now seemed serious about claiming him as a son. Could that really be possible? If so, why? Why now? And why him? Why did he not pass on his occult proclivities to one of his legitimate offspring?

Ghost turned over all these things as the waters of his bath slowly cooled.

When he finally got too cold and climbed out of the copper basin, he discovered he had only an hour left to dress for the ball.

The servants his father assigned him seemed to know the precise moment he left the tub. They returned to his room and began to assist him in dressing in the expensive suit and shirt and vest and shoes his father had procured for him and left in the wardrobe.

Within a half-hour’s time, Ghost found himself in a black wool three-piece suit, with gold thread embroidered into the vest and cravat, and a white shirt. He wore thick wool socks and the Italian leather shoes he had previously noticed were left for him in the wardrobe. His father had even provided him with a gold pocket watch with a mother-of-pearl face, and a gold chain for his waistcoat.

A black top hat of dyed beaver completed the ensemble.

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