The man closest to me holds out his hand and smiles. I shake it and he introduces himself as Ian Hindley. He’s got thinning brown hair and a mustache. His smile seems genuine, and I wonder if he’s a sympathizer. As I go along, shaking hands and hearing names, I can’t tell which of them want to see me dead now from which of them will just want to later.
I’m seated beside Burke, and the food arrives almost immediately. Steak medallions and some kind of blackberry sauce. All of a sudden I’m inundated with small talk. Someone even asks me about school. I thought I would be too tense to eat. But when I look down, my plate is empty.
Their conversation is so nice, so pleasant, that I don’t notice right away when it turns to tradition. The subject comes on slow and easy in my ears. Their words about the morality of the athame, and the intent of its creation, vibrate through like the buzzing of bees. It’s interesting. It’s another perspective. It’s reasonable. If I swear to it, they’ll stand behind me. If I swear to it, Anna stays in Hell.
My eyes start to wander around the table, across their laughing and smiling faces, over their eerily similar clothes. Gideon is talking amiably with them. So is Thomas, and even Carmel, their eyes lightly glazed. To my right, Burke sits, and the weight of his stare hasn’t left my profile.
“They think they’ve got me,” I say, turning to him. “But you know better, don’t you?”
All at once the table falls silent. Like they hadn’t really been having their own conversations at all.
Burke makes a pretty good show of looking around with regret.
“I had hoped that meeting the Order, and hearing your purpose, would keep you from making this mistake,” he says.
“Don’t do it,” says a feminine voice, and I look across the table to see the ash-haired woman who walked with me earlier, whose name I now know to be Mary Ann Cotton. “Don’t profane yourself, or the Biodag Dubh.” Oh, Mary Ann. Me and the Beedak Doo are just fine.
“This is a nice little cult you’ve got here, Burke,” I say.
“We are a sacred Order,” he corrects me.
“No. You’re a cult. A buttoned-up, prissy British cult, but you’re still a cult.” I turn to the rest of them and draw the athame out of my pocket, out of its sheath, letting them see the firelight reflect along the blade. “This is mine,” I say over the top of their creepy sighs. “It was my father’s before me, and his father’s before that. You want it back? I want a door to the other side, to free someone who doesn’t belong there.”
It’s so quiet that I can hear Gideon and Thomas push up their glasses. Then Burke says, “We can’t just take the athame back,” and when Dr. Clements protests, making one last plea for the old bloodline, he holds up his hand and squashes it. “The Biodag Dubh will forever serve your blood. Until that blood is extinguished.”
In the corner of my eye, I see Carmel’s hand grip her chair, always ready to bludgeon something.
“This isn’t the way,” Gideon says. “You can’t just murder the warrior.”
“You have no right to speak, Mr. Palmer,” says a member with close-cut black hair. He’s the youngest, probably the newest. “You haven’t been of the Order for decades.”
“Be that as it may,” Gideon goes on. “You can’t tell me that none of the rest of you don’t feel the same. The bloodline has existed for thousands of years. And you’re going to snuff it out, just because Colin says so?”
There’s a ripple effect of people looking back and forth at each other, Thomas, Carmel, and me included.
“He’s right,” says Dr. Clements. “Our will doesn’t matter.”
“So what do you suggest?” Burke asks. “That we open the door and allow a dead murderess back into the world? Do you think that’s in accordance with the will of the athame?”
“Let the athame choose,” Clements says suddenly, like inspiration has struck. He looks around the table. “Open the door and let Jestine go with him. Let them both go. The warrior who returns is the worthy bearer of the Biodag Dubh.”
“And what if neither of them returns?” someone asks. “Then the athame will be lost!”
“What if he pulls the dead girl back?” asks someone else. “She can’t remain here. It can’t be allowed.”
Thomas, Carmel, and I exchange glances. The resistance came from Burke’s staunchest supporters, but the rest of the table seems to be with Dr. Clements. Burke looks ready to chew glass, but in the next second, his face breaks into the warm, slightly embarrassed smile of a corrected man.
“Then that is what will be,” he says. “If Theseus Cassio is willing to pay the price.”
Here we go.
“What’s it going to cost?”
“Cost?” He smiles. “Plenty. But we’ll get to that in a moment.” Incredibly, he calls for coffee. “When the athame was created, those who created it knew how to open a door to the other side. But those magics have been lost for centuries. For tens of centuries. Now the only way to open the door resides in your hand.”
I look down at the blade.
“The door can only be opened through the Biodag Dubh. You see, you’ve had the key the whole time. You just didn’t know how to turn the lock.”
I’m getting tired of people talking about the knife like it isn’t a knife. Like it’s a gate, or a key, or a pair of ruby slippers.
“Just tell me what it’s going to cost,” I say.
“The price,” he says, and smiles. “The price is your life’s blood, leaking out of your gut.”
Somewhere around me, Thomas and Carmel gasp. Burke looks regretful, but I don’t believe it for a minute.
“If you insist,” he says. “We can perform the ritual tomorrow evening.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
My life’s blood, leaking out of my guts. Oh, is that all? That’s what I should have said. I shouldn’t have let him see the fear shiver through me. I shouldn’t have even clenched my jaw. It gave him too much satisfaction, knowing I was scared, and that I wasn’t going to turn back. Because I’m not. Not even with Thomas and Carmel giving me their bug eyes.
“Come on,” I say. “I knew from the beginning that it might end up like this. That I might have to walk a fine line between breathing and not breathing, if I was going to save her. We all did.”
“It’s different when it’s just a possibility,” Carmel says.
“It’s still just a possibility. Have some faith.” My mouth is dry. Who am I trying to convince? They’re going to practically gut me tomorrow, to open the door. To Hell. And once I bleed it open, they’re going to shove me and Jestine through.
“Have some faith,” Carmel repeats, and nudges Thomas to say something, but he won’t. He’s been behind me on this. All the way.
“This might not be such a great idea,” he whispers.
“Thomas.”
“Look, I didn’t tell you everything my grandpa told me,” he says. “They’re not backing you. All of his friends, the voodooists, they’re not looking out for you.” He glances at Carmel. “They’re looking out for us.”
Some kind of disgusted, disappointed sound comes out of my nose and throat, but it isn’t real. It’s not surprising. They made their position about bringing Anna back pretty clear from the start.
“They think it’s out of their jurisdiction,” Thomas goes on. “That it’s the Order’s business.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” I say. Besides, that’s just an excuse. No one but us wants Anna in the world. When I pull her out of Hell, it’s going to be into a room of people who want to send her right back. She’d better be ready to fight. In my mind I see her, exploding into the room like a dark cloud, and lifting Colin Burke by his puppy scruff.
“We can find some other way to help Anna,” Carmel says. “Don’t make me call your mother.”
I half smile. My mother. Before I left for London she made me promise to remember that I’m her son. And I am. I’m the son she raised to fight, and do the right thing. Anna is trapped in the Obeah
man’s torture chamber. And that can’t be left alone.
“Will you guys go find Gideon?” I ask them. “I want you to—will you do something for me?”
The looks on their faces say they hope I’ll still change my mind, but they nod.
“I want you to be there, for the ritual. I want you to be part of it.” As someone in my corner. Maybe just as witnesses.
They turn back down the hall, and Carmel tells me one more time to think about it; that I have a choice. But it’s not a real choice. So they go, and I turn around to pace the halls of this fireplace-infested druid brainwashing summer camp. As I turn a corner to a long, red hall, Jestine’s voice rings out.
“Oi, Cas, wait up.” She jogs to me. Her face is slack and serious. Without the confident smirk, she’s changed entirely. “They told me what you said,” she says, slightly flushed. “What you decided.”
“What they decided,” I correct her. She looks at me evenly, waiting, but I don’t know what for. Tomorrow night she and I are going completely off the map, to the other side, and only one of us is supposed to come back. “You know what it means, don’t you?”
“I don’t think it means what you think it means,” she replies.
“Jesus,” I snap, turning away. “I don’t have time for riddles. And neither do you.”
“You can’t be angry with me,” she says. The old smirk returns as she keeps pace. “Not four hours ago I saved your best mate’s life. If it hadn’t been for me, that corpse would have chewed through his carotid faster than you could blink.”
“Thomas told me I shouldn’t trust you. But I didn’t think you were anything to worry about. Still don’t.” She bristles at that, like I knew she would. Even if she knows it’s a lie.
“None of this was my choice, right? You of all people should know what that’s like.”
She’s fidgeting while she walks. For all her tough talk, she must be terrified. Her hair hangs down her shoulders in damp, wavy strings. She must’ve had a shower. When it’s wet it all looks dark gold. The red blends in, hidden.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps. “Like I’m going to try to kill you tomorrow.”
“You’re not?” I ask. “I sort of thought that was the point.”
Her eyes narrow. “Does it make you nervous? Wondering who would win?” There’s steel in her jaw and for a second I think I’m looking at a genuine crazy person. But then she shakes her head, and her frustrated expression looks a whole lot like Carmel’s. “Have you ever considered that I might have a plan?”
“I never considered that you didn’t,” I reply. But what she calls a plan I call an agenda. “Have you ever considered that it might be just a tiny bit unfair? What with me bleeding all my guts out.”
“Ha,” she scoffs. “You think you’re the only one? Blood is a one-passenger ticket.”
I stop walking.
“Jesus, Jestine. Say no.”
She smiles and shrugs, like being stuck like a pig happens to her every other Thursday. “If you go, I go.”
We stand in silence. They mean for one of us to make it back with the athame. But what if neither of us brings it back? Part of me wonders if I could just lose the athame there forever, and they’d be without it; without a way to open the gate and without a purpose. Maybe then they would just disappear and get their hooks out of Jestine. But even as I wonder, the other part of me hisses that the athame is mine, that stupid blood-tie singing in my ears, and if the Order has its hooks into Jestine, the athame itself has its hooks into me.
Without a word, we start to walk together down the long hall. I’m so pent up and irritated with this place; I want to kick down the closed doors and break up a prayer circle, maybe juggle the athame with a couple of candles just to see the horrified looks on their faces and hear their screams of “Sacrilege!”
“This is going to sound weird,” Jestine says. “But can I hang out with you guys tonight? I’m not going to get much sleep, and”—she glances around guiltily—“this place is giving me the creeps right now.”
* * *
When I walk in with Jestine, Thomas and Carmel are surprised, but they don’t seem hostile. They’re probably both pretty thankful that Thomas still has his whole carotid. Gideon is in the common area with them, sitting in a wingback chair. He’d been staring into the fire before we came in and doesn’t really look focused now that we’re here. The light from the fire digs into all of the creases of his face. For the first time since I’ve been here, he looks his age.
“Did you talk to the Order about being in the ritual?” I ask.
“Yes,” Carmel replies. “They’ll make sure we’re ready. But I don’t know how much good I’ll do. I’ve been a little busy for extra witchcraft lessons.”
“Witch or not, you’ve got blood,” Gideon pipes up. “And when the Order readies the door tomorrow, it’s going to be the strongest spell anyone has attempted in perhaps the last fifty years. Every one of us will have to pay in, not just Theseus and Jestine.”
“You’re going,” Thomas says to me, sort of dazedly. “I guess I hadn’t thought of that. I thought we’d just pull her back. That you’d stay here. That we’d be there.”
I smile. “Get that guilty look off your face. A corpse just tried to eat you. You’ve done enough.” It doesn’t do any good, though; I can see it behind his eyes. He’s still trying to think of more.
They all look at me. There’s fear in them, but not terror. And there’s no reservation. Part of me wants to smack them upside their heads, call them lemmings and adrenaline junkies. But that isn’t it. Not a single one of them would be here if not for me, and I don’t know whether that’s right or wrong. All I know is that I’m grateful. It’s almost impossible to think that less than a year ago, I might’ve been alone.
* * *
Gideon said it would be a good idea to get some sleep, but none of us really listened. Not even him. He spent most of the night in the same wingback chair, dozing uneasily, on and off, jerking awake every time the fire crackled too loudly. The rest of us lay where we could without leaving the room, on one of the sofas, or curled up in a chair. The night passed quietly, all of us staying in our own heads. I think I passed out for a few hours around three or four in the morning. When I woke up it felt like the very next moment, except the fire was dead and pale, and misty light was drifting in through the line of windows near the ceiling.
“We should eat something,” Jestine suggests. “I’ll be too nervous later on, and I don’t fancy being bled dry on an empty stomach.” She stretches, and the joints of her neck crack in a long string of pops. “Not a comfy chair. So, do you want to go find the kitchen?”
“The chef might not be there this early,” Gideon says.
“Chef?” Carmel exclaims. “I could give a shit about a chef. I’m going to find the most expensive thing in that kitchen, eat one bite, and throw the rest on the floor. Then I’m going to break some plates.”
“Carmel,” Thomas starts. He stops when she fixes her eyes on him, and I know he’s reading her mind. “Don’t waste the food, at least,” he mumbles finally, and smiles.
“You three go ahead,” says Gideon, taking me by the arm. “We’ll catch up shortly.”
They nod and head for the door. When they turn into the hall, I hear Carmel mutter about how much she hates this place, and that she hopes Anna can somehow get it to implode like she did with the Victorian. It makes me smile. Then Gideon clears his throat.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s the things that Colin didn’t tell you. Things that you might not have considered.” He shrugs. “Maybe just the useless hunches of an old man.”
“Dad always trusted your hunches,” I say. “You always seemed to help him out.”
“Right until I couldn’t,” he says. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that he still carries that around, even though what happened wasn’t his fault. He’ll feel the same way about me if I don’t make it back. Maybe Thomas and Carmel wil
l too, and it won’t be their fault either.
“It’s about Anna,” he says suddenly. “Something that I’ve been pondering.”
“What is it?” I ask, and he doesn’t reply. “Come on, Gideon. You’re the one who kept me back.”
He takes a deep breath and rubs his fingers along his forehead. He’s trying to decide how, or where, to start. He’s going to tell me again that I shouldn’t be doing this, that she’s where she should be, and I’m going to tell him again that I am doing it, and he should butt out.
“I don’t think that Anna is in the right place,” he says. “Or at least, not exactly.”
“What do you mean, exactly? Do you think she belongs on the other side, in Hell, or not?”
Gideon shakes his head, a frustrated gesture. “The only thing anyone knows about the other side is that they know nothing. Listen. Anna opened a door to the other side and dragged the Obeahman down. To where? You said it seemed like they were trapped there, together.
“What if you were right? What if they’re trapped there, like a cork in a bottle neck?”
“What if they are,” I whisper, even though I know.
“Then you might need to consider what you would choose,” Gideon replies. “If there is a way to separate them, will you pull her back, or send her on?”
Send her on. To what? To some other dark place? Maybe someplace worse? There aren’t any solid answers. Nobody knows. It’s like the punch line from a bad spook story. What happened to the guy with the hook for a hand? Nobody knows.
“Do you think she deserves to be where she is?” I ask. “And I’m asking you. Not a book, or a philosophy, or the Order.”
“I don’t know what decides these things,” he says. “If there’s judgment from a higher power, or just the guilt trapped inside the spirit. We don’t get to decide.”
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