threes. All doors locked and checked and checked again. Everything in its place. It's not uncommon." She paused. "Especially in geniuses. Who are all a little mad, I find."
Sebastien reached out and touched the white ceramic knob that Doctor Tesla had used to shut down the power. Slowly, he felt his hair lift on his neck, the finer hairs of his arms standing on end under his shirt sleeves. When he pulled his finger back a heavy blue spark arched across the distance.
He put it in his mouth out of habit rather than discomfort, and Phoebe reached out and touched the bloodless hole in his coat with her palm. "He stabbed you in the heart."
"Lung," Sebastien said. "Not that it would have mattered." Her fingers dimpled fabric. He covered them with his own.
Abby Irene reached out and nudged a pencil on the countertop. "Do we trust him?"
Doctor Tesla, she meant. Not Jack. Sebastien kissed Phoebe's ring and let her hand fall. "The evidence," he said, "would indicate that Kostov was withholding information from him. And we need him."
"Yes, but do we trust him?"
"No." Sebastien sighed. "Not yet."
* * *
The rattle of the lock alerted Garrett and the others in advance, but though she was forewarned of their return, the grimness on Jack's and Doctor Tesla's faces was distressing. Tesla locked the door behind himself again while Jack came across the rubber-matt covered wooden floor. "It appears that Kostov is a Russian agent," he said. "I found one-time code pads and the like. We can only presume that he's been sending details of Doctor Tesla's work to Moscow, and using la bête here to instill panic in the citizens of Paris and destroy their morale. Unfortunately—"
"We found no means of summoning the beast," Doctor Tesla said. He walked around the console, rather than reaching past Sebastien, and straightened the pencil on the desk. When he looked up, he saw Garrett watching, and shrugged a little. "I fear it is my work that is being used to call up monsters."
He turned and surveyed the warehouse, the wires and knobs, transformers and capacitors and coils. Ceramic and copper and glass and steel. "We cannot leave the city in the dark."
Wordlessly, Jack reached into his pocket and handed the Doctor a revolver. "Silver bullets," he said. "Whatever manifests is material enough to eat people, and they worked on the beast of Gevaudan."
Doctor Tesla weighed it in his hand. "I am not sanguine about the discharge of firearms here." He gestured about the lab with his free hand, and offered the gun awkwardly back to Jack. "But perhaps I have another solution. When the electrical field is concentrated—as it must be, if we are to lure the beast where we wish it—presuming in advance of experiment that your circumstantial evidence is correct, and it is the interaction of the electrical standing wave with moonlight that permits the monster to materialize in the first place—in any case, when the electrical field is concentrated, it is quite inimical to life."
"The death ray," Sebastien said.
"Some melodramatically so call it," he said. "It unsettles me to consider that the Russian empire may have that technology as well."
And so do the French, thought Garrett. No wonder they were so unconcerned regarding the possible cost of war with England. She rubbed her hands against a chill that had more to do with her divided loyalties than the cavernous and ill-heated space in which she stood. Images of ships adrift at sea, the crews scattered like dropped sticks upon the deck, filled her mind's eye. "What is its range?"
Doctor Tesla winked and turned away. "I intend eventually to build a transmitter that will cover the entire Earth with broadcast electricity," he said. "But that of course will not be concentrated enough to cause death. Very well then"—he straightened dramatically, thrusting his coat aside so he could plunge his hands into his trouser pockets—"if we are agreed? Let us relocate the pigeons, so we may have at your beast while there is still moonlight to work with."
". . .pigeons?"
Doctor Tesla was already in motion, surging toward a spiral stair that led to the catwalks among the ceiling lattice. "Yes," he said. "My cote is over the laboratory. If we are to concentrate the electrical field, I can't permit any risk to the birds."
"Why don't we set the field in the yard?" Jack asked, as they clambered up the metal treads.
"I've not yet uncovered how to distance it from the transmitter," Tesla said. "We'll