I’d barely finished when Tom said in a flat voice, “Let’s go. My watch isn’t here.”
We started back in silence. Tom was brooding Heathcliff-level hard, his mouth thinly set, his eyes staring unfocused. I tried and failed to think of something to say about his watch that would do any good, and my efforts to distract him with other conversation fell flat.
I really was a little bummed I’d missed the whole fight with Drayne, but not because I thought it was exciting. That was twice now that Tom had rescued me. (Three if you counted Megan, but since she didn’t actually chase us, I decided not to. And okay, he’d conjured the weapon we used against the werewolf, but it was my idea, so that one was a tie.) Tom two, Lydia zero. I didn’t like being in debt to anyone, much less a handsome, broody dead guy. I’d have to make sure I evened that score some time.
We went the long way around the werewolf’s plot. Only one person saw us despite the ward, a filthy young man, or maybe a teenage boy, dressed in rags and sitting in a tree. I braced myself for whatever he might do, but he only stared, his eyes wide and dark in his round face. It felt so rude to just walk by without acknowledging him that I raised a hand as we passed his perch and said, “Sorry to disturb you.” He turned his head to keep watching us, but he didn’t say anything, and his dead stare didn’t change.
When we got back to Cyrus’s plot we found him sitting in a lawn chair in his scrubby garden, beside a statue of a woman in a toga holding a water jug. He was drinking a beer instead of switchel for once and taking in, I supposed, the splendor of his lands.
Tom handed him the knife without saying anything, then bent to where Cyrus’s six pack rested in the grass and pulled a can off for himself.
Cyrus examined the knife, then said, “You managed it then.” For Cyrus, this was high praise.
“Barely,” I said. My voice was still hoarse, and I hated the part of myself that wanted Cyrus to ask about it, or the bruises on my neck. But he only glanced at me as he stood and went inside his house. We followed.
Cyrus went into the kitchen and began washing the fiend blood off his remnant.
“So that’s our part of the bargain,” I said.
“Yep.” He dried it with the end of a dirty towel hanging by the sink, closed it, and put it in his pocket.
“The ritual, Cyrus,” I said. “How do we reverse it?”
I guess my tone was harsher than I intended, because he did look at me then, a little surprised and, was that a touch of hurt in his eyes? “What, you’re afraid I’d cheat you? I’ve got my honor, you know. You want a drink like your friend there?”
A few minutes later we were all sitting outside on identical folding chairs, the kind that never seem to be quite level. Cyrus had insisted, because it was such a beautiful day.
“Why do you sound so surprised?” I asked. “Don’t you control the weather?” He just looked at me like I was a remedial student and opened another beer.
“Okay Cyrus,” Tom said when he’d (rather quickly) finished his own beer and settled back into his seat with a second. “Start talking.”
“I’m surprised you two clever kids haven’t figured it out on your own,” said Cyrus. “Seems like the first thing you’d think of, to me. You reverse the ritual by reversing the ritual.”
“What, start at the end?” I asked. “But the ritual ends with the canteen. In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t got it. Because we are in it.”
“No, you’re right, the ending is different. And a few other details too. But I was talking about the incantation.”
“Like, say it backwards?”
Cyrus nodded. “Not the words themselves, but the order of them. The purpose of the remnant doesn’t change.”
“Which is what?” Tom interrupted. “I still haven’t worked out how you used my pocket watch as some sort of transporting device.”
“You know how the ancient Egyptians were buried with all their stuff, because they thought they could take it with them?” I asked.
“I guess,” Tom said.
“Well, there was a grain of truth to that. The things people love become part of them, and they become part of those things. Those objects become physical vessels for their spirits, almost like their bodies are, but on a much smaller scale.”
“So I’m connected to my watch.”
“Exactly,” I said. “It works like an anchor.”
“Then why the hell can’t I find it?”
“Can we get back to the topic at hand?” Cyrus asked. “The day’s not getting younger.”
He was right, the sun was setting. Knowing Cyrus, he just wanted us to leave before he had to invite us to dinner, which was pretty mean considering we’d just killed a fiend for him. But I just gestured for him to go on.
“So the incantation is reversed, and the remnant is the same,” Cyrus said. “Instead of salt and water separately, you need blood, which is both, and which is also another part of you.”
“But can Tom bleed?” I asked.
“He can if he thinks he can,” said Cyrus. “Don’t worry about whether it’s so-called real. You’ve already got a physical connection in the remnant, so that part’s covered.” He took a long slurp of his beer, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, “Then you’re consumed in flame, and that’s all there is to it.”
Tom and I just stared at him.
“Consumed?” Tom asked.
“In flame?” I added.
There was that raven’s croak again, Cyrus’s signature laugh. “Yep. Light yourself right on fire.”
“Why would we do that?” Tom asked.
“Fire is change,” Cyrus said with a shrug.
“Um, Cyrus?” I asked. “When you say light yourself on fire...”
“I mean, you’d better get that mind over matter thing down pat,” he said. “It’s fire if you make it fire. And you’re fireproof if you make yourself fireproof.”
“But say I have trouble with that last part,” I said. “Tom and I were wondering about the specifics of whether and how I could actually die here. Well, I was the one wondering, but we were talking about it.”
Cyrus just went on looking at me and when I failed to go on he said, “And?”
“And you were here when you were alive,” I said. “Can’t you maybe shed some light on this topic?”
“Nope. First time I was here, I made damn sure not to do anything that might kill me. I practiced that ritual for months, trying different variations until I got it right.” Cyrus set his can on the ground and, as he sat back up, burst into flame. I jumped out of my chair and got behind it. Tom didn’t move.
“And you can bet I didn’t start practicing this until I knew how to make things true in this world,” Cyrus said through the flames. A second later, the fire was out. Cyrus picked his beer back up.
“Very dramatic demonstration.” Tom stood up and put his hat on. He held his hand out to Cyrus. “Thank you for your time and your beer.”
“Pleasure.” Cyrus had the relieved tone of a host finally getting rid of someone who’s stayed at the party too long. He shook Tom’s hand.
“Wait,” I said as I stood too. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you, Cyrus.” I saw him suppress a sigh. “Don’t worry, it’s quick. Drayne was saying something, a spell I guess, when he attacked me.”
Cyrus didn’t ask about the attack, only said, “A spell is exactly what it was, I don’t doubt. There are incantations for a lot of things besides banishing, you know.”
“But the language,” I said. “It was similar to our incantation, but I don’t think it was the same. I caught a word that sounded like ka-rosh, with that mush-mouthed kind of r sound, but a softer o, and the accent was on the second syllable, where I would have expected it to be on the first.”
It took someone who was very good at languages to be able to make those kinds of distinctions under the pressure of a fiend attack, but Cyrus didn’t acknowledge that. He only said, “Don’t know that word. But then I wouldn’t. I
don’t speak fiend.”
“So they have their own language?”
“Course they do.”
“And if someone was speaking that language, if I’d heard someone say that ka-rosh word before...”
“Then you met yourself a fiend, most likely. It’s not like you can just sign up for Beginner Fiend over at the community college, is it?” Cyrus chuckled at his little—very little, if you asked me—joke.
So Jeffrey Litauer was a fiend. I’d suspected it from the moment I’d heard Drayne muttering those words. Maybe even from the moment I’d met Drayne. They reminded me of one another. They were both so... nerdy. “That’s what I thought. Thank you.” I hesitated. Did I hug him? Shake hands like Tom had? Cyrus was still sitting, looking up at me with his arms crossed, and he didn’t move. So I guess that answered that.
But as our eyes met he said, “Be careful, Lydia. You’ve got the strength and the smarts, you just need the confidence.”
It was the nicest thing, by far, Cyrus had ever said to me.
TEN
* * *
It was no surprise, when I walked through Tom’s front door, to be immediately greeted by the smells of vanilla and tobacco. The vanilla was much stronger, a warm smell like a long winter Sunday spent baking. “Sugar cookies?” I asked.
“Pound cake,” Tom said. “Our cook was always nice to me. Never made too much fuss when I snuck in to pilfer.”
Of course there would be a cook. The Dodd family with their gold-and-banking fortune no doubt had lots of servants. I wondered if he was one of those kids who was raised by a nanny who presented him to his parents once a day for an inspection and a pat on the head.
The house was a recreation of the one I’d banished him from—sort of. He was born and raised in that house, and he seemed to have created it partly as it was at various stages of his life, and partly as it was when he haunted it. There was the gilded mirror in the front hall, and the same teak table and awful striped curtains in the dining room, but no bookshelf and therefore, thankfully, no gargoyle. No Garm either. The only furniture I recognized in the parlor was a liquor cabinet (on which I noted three crystal bottles of amber liquid) that I thought was in the kitchen in the real world. But the family photos on the mantle spanned a century, and included several of Maisie.
From the parlor Tom showed me into the study, and as we walked in I heard my favorite sound in the world: the thump of a dog’s tail against the floorboards, when you come into a room where he’s napping in a spot of sun. There was Garm, against the far wall, but only the inanimate wooden statue. (Although in much better shape than when I’d last seen him, and without the blue toes Katie had given him.) Beside him was a dog bed, its soft wool cushion covered in black and white hair, a blue plaid blanket rumpled up in one corner.
Then I heard the clicking of dog feet against the hardwood floor in the hallway, and remembered Tom saying you could conjure animal sounds. I supposed there was no reason you couldn’t also conjure beds and hair.
Tom caught me taking all this in and gave me a sheepish look. “Doesn’t feel like home without a dog.”
Couldn’t argue that one. “Little John died more than five years ago, and I still wake up expecting him to be sleeping at the foot of the bed,” I said.
“Your Newfoundland.”
I nodded. “I picked him out because of Jane Eyre.”
“Pilot.”
“Yes!” I was impressed. Kevin, of course, had never read Jane Eyre. He wouldn’t even watch the movie with me (any of the movies). “L.J. was black and white, just like Pilot.” I gave the Newfie statue a scratch behind one ear. “And Garm.”
As if summoned by the name, a bark boomed somewhere in the back of the house.
“How does that work?” I asked. “Did you just do it or is it automatic, like on a timer or something?”
“He’s just part of this place,” said Tom with a shrug. “The plot more or less runs itself, according to how I defined it. You’ll be hearing plenty of Garm.”
“I’m glad.” And I was. Charlie was allergic to dogs. (Or so he said. I suspected mostly he just thought they were dirty and didn’t want one around.) But I agreed with Tom: it hardly felt like home not having one. I was more than happy to adopt Garm, or at least the echoes of Garm, for however long I was here.
There was a back door between the kitchen (old-fashioned, including a baker’s rack loaded with pound cakes) and the family room (modern, including a television). Outside was a garden surrounded by a low stacked stone wall. “Come see my favorite part,” Tom said, and led me along the white-pebbled path, past the wall to... nothing.
Tom’s entire face opened up in shock. The lawn beyond the garden sloped down to simply nothing. Not light, not darkness, not matter, not energy. Just a gray, empty nothing. I stepped closer to the edge of it, then recoiled, gagging from a strong smell of sulfur.
Tom took my elbow and pulled me back. “Helen.” His voice was deeper than I’d ever heard it, an almost canine growl.
“Megan will have told her about...” I trailed off, staring into that blank space, my mind going blank along with it. There was something almost hypnotizing about it. I suppressed the urge to move to the edge again, to see what would happen if I dipped my toe in.
“She wants me to know she can punish me for helping you.” Tom’s grip on my arm tightened a little. “Come with me.”
He led me back inside, upstairs to what looked like a boy’s room, right down to the wooden train set in the corner. There was a chair near the window that was covered in dog hair. “I’m going to do my best to ward this room, then you’re going to stay in it while I go get Gemma.” He took his hat off and ran his hand through his hair. I knew him well enough by then to know that pacing came next.
“Ward it how?” I asked. “So nobody can come in unless they’re invited or something?”
“Not quite. Isn’t that vampires?” He went on without waiting for me to answer. “I’m going to make a boundary. It’s similar to the shield we used as we were walking: it doesn’t make it impossible for someone to come in, it just makes it harder.”
I opened my mouth to protest, to say I wanted to come with him, but Tom interrupted me.
“I won’t be long. I’m going to close you in, okay?”
It wasn’t okay, but it didn’t matter; he’d already closed the door. I could hear him saying something outside. Then his footsteps retreated.
I quietly tried the old-fashioned brass knob. I have no idea what I would have done if it turned. I just wanted to know. Maybe that uncertainty of purpose is why my will to open the door was weaker than Tom’s will to keep it closed. In any case, it wouldn’t budge.
The light through the window overlooking Tom’s back yard—including the erased spot—started turning dusky while I waited. I can only measure the time I stood there by saying that I alternated between worrying about Tom and worrying about myself seventeen times.
What would happen to him, if Helen and Roderick came upon him on his way to Gemma’s, alone? He hadn’t been in the netherworld long enough to build the kind of skills he’d need to match them. He’d gotten me away from them, but if he was to be believed, that had been as much luck as anything.
And what would happen to me, if they came back? Not to be mean, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in Tom’s wizardry. If they got past the ward and I was alone, trapped with my back to a wall... I’d been fighting apparitions since I was a teenager, but I’d been doing it with water, salt, and an ancient incantation. I doubted such weapons would be much use here. I fingered my locket and wished that my remnant had been something more useful, like Cyrus’s.
As I was fretting over this for that seventeenth time, I heard Tom muttering outside the door. Then he knocked, which I thought was kind of cute, and came in. “Will you come outside? Gemma’s here to help us.”
I was so happy to see him, to have us both safe, and to be let out of that room, that I almost hugged him. I decided against it. T
his did not count as a rescue, not when he was the one who locked me in in the first place. So it was still Tom two, Lydia zero, by my count. “Sure,” I said.
Gemma stood on Tom’s front lawn, her dress and one stray lock of dark hair moving in a slight breeze. She stepped forward when she saw me and took my hands in both of hers. I gave them a squeeze and returned her smile. If she was annoyed at having been pulled off her lovely estate and into this dangerous situation, she didn’t show it. But whether her happiness to see me was genuine or not, my happiness to see her certainly was. Besides her obvious power, Gemma was fun, and nothing seemed to dampen her spirits. I was sure it would be easier to not curl up into a ball of paralyzed fear with her there. And I could see by the way he stood and the lack of stiffness in his jaw that she had the same effect on Tom.
“Now,” she said, “we’ll have to delay dinner to get this underway. Tom, could we maybe slow down the twilight a bit?”
Tom closed his eyes and tilted his head back. The sky brightened.
“How did you do that?” I asked. If I was going to have to set myself on fire, I needed to learn this stuff. “I mean, I know it’s possible here, but how did you actually do it?”
“I remembered what it’s like during the day, is all,” Tom said. “It sounds simple, but you have to remember really hard, I guess.”
Gemma laughed and turned to face the house. She extended her arms out to either side, as if trying to embrace the whole thing. “Let’s set some boundaries, shall we? This plot is yours, Tom. Enforce your claim.”
Tom squinted at his shiny black front door. He looked like he was trying to remember the date of the Norman invasion or the atomic weight of zinc. Gemma touched his face, and it immediately relaxed. “Don’t make it hard,” she said. “It’s the opposite of effort. Don’t worry about whether you’re safe here. Know you are.”
To me that sounded like dialogue from some bad supernatural-martial-arts-sci-fi movie playing on cable at three in the morning for insomniacs like me, but Tom seemed to understand what she wanted. He closed his eyes and said softly, “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 12