This is the part where Jacob would usually make a joke, but he doesn’t, and when I glance his way, he looks … pale, what little color he has draining out of his face.
“Was it because of me?” he whispers.
“What? Don’t be silly,” I say. “I’m the one who’s an in-betweener.”
“The Emissary must have caught your scent in Paris,” says Lara. “And followed you here.”
“What if it’s me?” Jacob murmurs.
“It doesn’t matter how it found me,” I say. “What matters is that it’s here, in New Orleans. And it’s going to keep coming after me until we send it back. Or on. Or wherever Emissaries go when they aren’t—”
“Listen to me!”
Jacob slams his hand down against the display case, and I hear the crack, the splinter of glass. We all stop talking then and look, in shock, in horror, in surprise.
Before this, Jacob has turned pages and fogged windows.
But this is the first time he’s broken something.
He looks down through his palm at the cracking starburst in the glass, the damage spreading from the shape of his fist.
There’s no triumph on his face, no glee, only fear.
“What if it’s me?” he whispers again, as if he can barely get the words out. “What if I’m the reason it found you?” He looks from me to Lara and back. “You said Emissaries are drawn to people touched by life and death. But I’m literally haunting Cassidy. That has to make it easier to find her, that has to make her louder, or brighter, or …”
“Jacob,” says Lara sternly. “Listen to me very carefully. Emissaries are drawn to in-betweeners. We have a marker, a signature. But you, you throw the whole thing off. Because you are not supposed to be here, with her.”
“I don’t think that’s making him feel better,” I say as Jacob’s head falls, but Lara pushes on.
“You are confusing, and wrong. You mess up the balance. And you are probably the only reason Cassidy is still alive.”
Jacob looks up, surprised. I look over at Lara, just as stunned.
“What do you mean?” he murmurs.
Lara makes an exasperated sound. “You’re not normal, Jacob! You’re a ghost, tied to a living girl, siphoning off her life force until you’re strong enough to do things like put your hand through a glass display counter. You’re probably throwing the entire Veil off balance every second you’re still here. But you’re also probably confusing the Emissary, and buying us time.”
Jacob swallows, rubbing his knuckles. “Are you sure?”
“No,” snaps Lara. “I’m not an expert in the long-term effects of ghost-human friendships. But I do believe that she’s safer with you than without you. Now,” she says, turning back toward the other members of the Society. “We’re going to need some things from your store.”
* * *
We lay the supplies out on the counter.
A handful of stones, to anchor the circle.
A ball of white string, to tether me to the living.
A bottle of scented oil, to purify, and to burn.
And a box of long wooden matches, to strike the flame.
Elements of creation, and destruction. Of life, and death. Give and take, as Lucas said as we were gathering up the items from around the store.
“I’m not sure how I feel about this,” says Renée, watching us.
But we’ve explained the spell—is it a spell? I don’t know what else to call it, and I’m kind of excited I get to do one, even if the only reason we get to do one is because I’m being chased by Death.
“It sounds like more of a ritual,” says Jacob. “A summoning? No, what’s the opposite of a summoning? A banishing?”
As far as I can tell, it is a kind of banishing spell. A way to sever the connection between the Emissary and me. The problem is, in order for it to work, we have to be in the same place. Which means we either have to go looking for Death, or wait for it to come to us.
“Oh, what are these?” Jacob points to a row of brightly colored pouches. “Do we need one?”
I pick up a pretty red pouch. It’s a small, solid weight in my palm, and when I lift it to my nose, it smells … earthy. Damp. Like the woods after a storm.
“That,” says Philippa, “is a gris-gris bag.”
I look up. “What does it do?”
“All kinds of things. They’re talismans. Some for protection, and others for luck, prosperity. That one, I believe, is for balance.”
Balance. I think of the tarot card, the Two of Swords, the need to balance the scales.
“What’s in it?” asks Jacob.
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” says Philippa. “Let’s see, that one has a crystal, and some herbs, nail clippings, hair, a bit of grave dirt.”
I yelp and drop the bag, but Philippa catches it before it falls.
“Careful,” she says, petting the bag. “You’ve got to treat them nice. Feed and water them …”
“What does it eat?” whispers Jacob as Philippa sets the pouch back on the shelf.
“Speaking of grave dirt,” says Michael, producing a black pouch the size of a softball. “This should be enough.”
I don’t want to reach for the bundle, but I do, expecting to feel some terrible omen pass over me when it hits my hands. But it just feels like a bag of dirt.
I realize I can’t pay for any of it—not unless they’re willing to take a handful of international coins—but Renée waves me away. “The Society looks after its own.”
We load the supplies into Lara’s red backpack as Lucas polishes his glasses and says we really should be going. I wish I could stay here, in the safety of the shop, but he’s right. It’s getting late, and my parents will be waiting back at the hotel.
Jacob turns toward Philippa, who seems to be having a one-sided conversation with Amethyst the cat.
“Sorry,” he says, “about the case.”
She blinks, and looks up. “Things break,” she says with a shrug, as if she’s lost more than one display case to a moody spirit.
“Wait,” says Michael, “that reminds me.”
He takes two charms from a cabinet behind the counter. Smooth glass circles threaded onto cords. He hands one to Lara, presses the other into my palm. When I look down at the charm, I see a series of blue and white rings around a black dot.
It almost looks like an eye.
“An evil eye,” confirms Michael. “It won’t do much to stop an Emissary, but it might buy you some time. The charm’s designed to break when someone wishes you ill. It should break when danger’s near.”
“Thank you,” I say to Michael, pocketing the evil eye. And then I look at Renée, and Philippa. “Thank you for everything.”
“Good luck,” says Michael.
“Be careful,” says Renée.
“Come back anytime,” says Philippa brightly as Lucas leads us out.
The walk back to the hotel is weird.
Not the being-hunted-by-an-Emissary kind of weird. More the I-have-so-many-questions-I-don’t-know-where-to-start kind of weird.
Jacob circles Lara, demanding to know every detail of the room beyond the shop curtain, while Lucas and I walk side by side, and I wait for him to say something, and he doesn’t.
“So, are we going to talk about this?” I finally ask.
Lucas eyes me over his wire-framed glasses. “About what?”
“You’re a member of the Society of the Black Cat!”
“I’m a historian.”
“You’re their historian. But you said you don’t even believe in ghosts!”
Lucas slides his glasses from his face and begins to polish them again. “I believe what I said was that I prefer to focus on the history.”
“Does he have any supernatural powers?” Jacob calls out. I ask the question, and Lucas scrunches his nose.
“Beyond an extreme dedication to research? No. I’m not a psychic, or a medium, or an in-betweener, as you say.”
“
Did you know that I was?”
He considers that a moment. “No. But when you spend as much time as I do around the … paranormally inclined, you do notice certain signs.”
I look down at myself. “Like what?”
“The way you walk, for one, like you’re always listening to something others don’t hear. You’re clearly sensitive to haunted spaces, you spend a fair amount of time talking to someone only you can see, and you have a way of disappearing rather suddenly.”
I nod, considering. “Fair point. His name is Jacob, by the way. The one I’m talking to.”
Jacob waves. “Hey. Jacob Ellis Hale,” he says to Lucas, holding out his hand, “best friend, partner in crime, excellent taste in comics.”
Of course, Lucas can’t hear him, but I convey the message.
“I’m surprised you would allow yourself to be haunted,” Lucas says as we turn onto Bourbon Street.
“It’s unconventional,” says Lara, “but he comes in handy now and then.”
Jacob stares at Lara as if she just sprouted a second head. I have to admit, I’m pretty surprised, too. Up until today, the closest Lara’s come to paying Jacob a compliment has been calling him Jacob instead of Ghost. Now, in the space of thirty minutes, she’s been nice to him—twice.
“I clearly don’t approve,” she clarifies. “But I think we have bigger problems right now …” She trails off as we reach the hotel.
“Kardec,” she says, reading the sign. “As in the French founder of Spiritism?”
“Precisely,” says Lucas, sounding impressed.
“Wow,” says Lara, surveying the lobby, “they really went with the theme.”
“Wait till you see our room,” says Jacob.
“Your parents are done filming for the day,” Lucas tells me, “so I’ll see you in the morning. Do stay safe, Cassidy. Lara.”
“No ever says goodbye to me,” mutters Jacob as Lucas turns to go.
“Wait!” I call out. I still have a dozen questions, but I choose to settle for the most important one. “You won’t tell my parents, will you? About …” I gesture at us, at everything.
Lucas raises a brow and gives me a half smile. “Me? I’m just the guide.”
We watch him leave, and I remember my first impression of Lucas Dumont, a skeptical scholar, just like Dad. I guess you never know.
“Do you think your dad is secretly a member of a paranormal society?” asks Jacob, and I snort.
“Doubtful,” I say as we cross the lobby.
Halfway to the stairs, I notice the sign hanging on the door to the séance room.
OUR MASTER OF SPIRITS IS AWAY.
THE SÉANCE ROOM WILL BE CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
I wonder why he left.
“If I had to guess,” says Jacob, “it probably had something to do with your séance.”
Oh. Right. The whole channeling-actual-Emissaries-of-Death-when-you-just-wanted-to-put-on-a-show. I can see how that would be upsetting.
Upstairs, Mom and Dad have changed out of their Inspecters outfits and into loose, summery clothes. Dad’s even wearing shorts.
“Did you girls have fun?” asks Mom.
We make some noncommittal sounds, peppering in the word yes.
“What did you get up to?” asks Dad.
Well, I think, we located a secret society dedicated to studying the paranormal, and we met its living members—your guide is one of them!—and then had a conference with some of its dead ones, and they helped us figure out how to banish the Emissary of Death that’s chasing me and hopefully it works so I won’t die. Again.
“Not much,” I say casually. “We just wandered around the Quarter.”
I toss my camera onto the bed, and Lara leans her backpack down against a chair. Her bag’s not zipped all the way, and Grim wanders over and starts rooting around inside. He’s almost got the pouch of grave dirt open when I realize what’s happening. I rush over and scoop him up.
The last thing we need is the cat treating our spell supplies like a litter box.
Grim sighs in protest, and then goes limp in my arms, like a sack of, well, grave dirt. If grave dirt had lots of fur and a low, grudging purr.
I hoist him up and look into his sleepy green eyes.
“Are you my brave protector?” I ask.
Grim looks at me for a moment, and then opens his mouth wide, and for a second, I think he’s displaying his rows of tiny sharp teeth. But then I realize it’s just a yawn.
Punctuated by a burp.
Dad laughs, and I sigh and set the cat on the chair, where he promptly sinks into a puddle.
“Good thing you have me,” says Jacob. “I’m pretty sure that cat is useless.”
Grim twitches one ear, already asleep.
“Well, I don’t know about you,” says Mom, pulling the pens from her messy bun, “but Cemetery Day has made me famished! Shall we go find dinner?”
* * *
There’s a kind of restaurant Dad calls a “hole in the wall.” I think it’s supposed to mean a cozy little place, the kind you only know about if someone’s told you, or you’ve been there before. Like the Society, but for food.
Tonight we eat in the Marigny, a neighborhood just north of the Quarter. To get to the restaurant, we don’t have to step through an actual hole in the wall, but it’s pretty close. We go through a gate and down an overgrown courtyard, across a threshold that looks like it was a wall once, before someone knocked the center out.
But the food—the food is amazing.
Bowls of gumbo, and shrimp étouffée, jambalaya, and other dishes with winding, musical names, full of heat and spice.
I forget the one-bite rule and dig in, tasting everything.
Lara reaches out a fork and takes a dainty bite of each, and despite the messy nature of the meal, she never spills a spoonful or loses a grain of rice. I bet she could eat a beignet dressed in black and never get a speck of powdered sugar on her.
All through dinner, I keep the evil eye charm nestled in my palm, bracing for trouble, jumping at the slightest scrape of a chair or strange angle of light. But Lara smiles and chats as if nothing’s wrong. She’s so good at pretending everything’s okay. I watch her, wishing I was better at it. But it also makes me sad, that she has so much practice at it.
And even though we’ve only known each other a couple of weeks, having her here feels right.
Even Jacob has softened toward her, and more than once I catch him and Lara exchanging looks, not even murderous ones, but the kinds of glances that pass between friends.
It makes me feel happy, and full.
“I met my first ghost in London,” Mom is saying to Lara. “When I was about your age. Not in the Tower, or in one of the graveyards, or anything like that. I was on a double-decker bus.”
I sit forward, realizing I’ve never heard this story.
“He was just sitting there,” Mom goes on, “looking out the window, waiting for his stop. He asked if I would hit the button, and I did, and he got up and walked away, and I called after him that I hoped he had a nice day. And my father looked at me and said, ‘Who are you talking to?’ ”
Mom breaks into a smile. “The boy wasn’t there, of course. Not anymore. And I’ve never seen a ghost like that since—but it was such a thrilling thing. Like a corner of my world had pulled away, revealing a whole new place.”
I bite my lip, wishing that someday I could show her that other place, take her with me through the Veil.
“Is that why you write books?” asks Lara.
Mom sips her drink and hums a little, thinking. “You know, maybe it is. Stories have a way of making the world feel bigger, too.”
Lara nods and looks down at her plate. “I met my first ghost in St. Mary’s.”
Dad frowns a little. “That’s a hospital, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she says briskly, “I was quite sick once. Scarlet fever.”
Mom brings her ha
nd to her mouth. “Your parents must have been so worried.”
Lara looks up, blinking quickly. “Oh, yes, they were.” She looks down again. “I got better, obviously, but they kept me there a while, on the ward, and one night, I couldn’t sleep. Someone was singing. Quite loudly, in the hall. But no one else seemed to hear, or notice.” She stares off into space, a faraway look in her eyes. “So I got up, and went to find them.”
“And tell them off,” says Jacob, teasing.
Lara’s gaze cuts toward him, but she doesn’t stop talking. “There was this curtain in front of the door, and when I pushed it aside, the voice was so much clearer. So I followed it. And I found her, around the corner, at the end of the hall, looking out the window and singing. She was holding a baby, and the moonlight was streaming through, one of those bright spotlight moons, and I could see straight through both of them.”
I shiver a little.
But Lara only straightens, and smiles, and says, quite briskly, “Of course, afterward, I knew, it must have been a fever dream. I was still quite sick, after all. But I never forgot that woman, or the singing, or the child in her arms.”
The table is quiet for a long moment.
In the end, it’s Jacob, of course, who breaks the silence.
“You know, I thought the creepiest thing in the world was children singing, but I take it back. It might be that.”
Lara and I both laugh, and Mom and Dad look at us as if we’ve lost our minds.
After dinner, we make our way back through the maze of garden and gate and start back toward the Quarter. The streets around us are filled with people, and I scan them all, holding my breath as I search for a broad-brimmed hat, a skull-faced mask. Jacob walks backward, checking behind us. Lara glances around, too, even as she carries on with Dad and Mom, talking about the histories of New Orleans neighborhoods.
But I’m still thinking about Lara’s story. Did she know what to do? Even then, did she know that she’d crossed into the Veil, that the woman there was a ghost, a trapped spirit, waiting to be sent on?
She couldn’t have known then, right?
And yet, it’s hard to imagine a version of Lara Chowdhury that doesn’t know.
Hard to imagine she was ever scared or confused.
Bridge of Souls (City of Ghosts #3) Page 10