by E. E. Holmes
“See? Eating,” she said as she chewed. “Can’t get loud and overexcited when I’m eating!”
Mrs. Mistlemoore narrowed her eyes at us for a moment, then pulled her head back into her office, leaving the door open this time.
Flavia turned back to me, forcing the bite of toast down with what looked like a rather pained swallow. “You bit his ear off?” she whispered incredulously.
“Yeah. It was stupid. And gross. But… satisfying,” I admitted, keeping my voice to a whisper as well. “He probably would have killed me at that point, but luckily Tia swooped in and stuck him with his own syringe before he had a chance to retaliate.”
“Tia? Tia did that?!” Flavia hissed, eyes wide with shock.
“Yeah, it was pretty badass. I’ll tell you the whole story later. Finish telling me what happened to you, though.”
“Well, he was tying me to a chair when I regained consciousness. All the other furniture in the room had been pushed back against the walls, and the curtains were drawn. I thought for sure I was going to be… be raped, or something.” Her voice broke and she pulled her glasses away from her eyes so that she could dab at them with her napkin. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could possibly have anything to do with me being a Durupinen. Then there was a knock on the door, and for one glorious moment I thought, thank God, I’m saved. But he just walked over, cracked the door, and then stepped back to let the visitor in. It was another guy, and at that point, I just thought, well, that’s it. I’m dead.”
“The other guy, can you describe him?” I asked her, sure this was information Catriona would press her for later if I didn’t get it now. I flipped open the folder and grabbed a pen to jot down the details, so I wouldn’t forget.
Flavia furrowed her brow, as though the memory was hard to retrieve. “Mid to late twenties. Tall—maybe two or three inches taller than Charlie. Also, very thin. Bit spotty—pock-marked, you know? Clean shaven. Blonde hair, kind of shaggy, and he wore dark-framed glasses. He looked… intellectual, I guess. Like, I wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he’d walked into the library. He had a backpack with him, and I noticed it had a sticker on it from a local coffee shop: Cuppa Wonderful. I’ve been there a few times.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Not a single word that I could hear. He whispered with Charlie for a few moments, then went right over to a chair in the corner and pulled it to the center of the room so that he was sitting right across from me. That was when I noticed the Summoning Circle drawn on the floor, when he was setting up the chair. He was careful about making sure that the back legs of the chair were within the boundaries of the Circle.”
“What happened next?”
“Charlie took out a book. Even though I had just spotted the Summoning Circle, my brain still wouldn’t accept that the whole mess was Durupinen-related. Honestly, my next thought was that he was a medical student gone crazy. Like, I was about to be the victim of some hideous medical experiment that his professors wouldn’t sanction, and this newcomer was his laboratory assistant.” She laughed caustically. “I guess the mind goes to strange places when you’re panicking. Anyway, it took me several more minutes of spiraling down a rabbit hole of B-movie horror plots before I realized that the book Charlie was holding was the Book of Téigh Anonn.” She suddenly froze, eyes wide and terrified again. “But I should have told that to someone straight away! Do they know? Do they know that he’s got the Book of—”
“Calm down, it’s okay,” I told her, rubbing my hand soothingly on her shoulder. “They know. I told them. They’ve recovered it.”
Flavia let out a deep breath and sagged with relief. “Oh, thank God. Do the Trackers know where he got it?”
“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “But I’m sure they’re working on it.” I gave her a hard stare. She looked even more exhausted than when I first sat down. “Why don’t we stop now, okay? It was stupid for me to ask you about this. You need more time to recover before we—”
“No!” Flavia cried, and her voice was strong, forceful. “I’m fine. And the faster you have all the information I can give you, the better chance you’ll have of catching anyone else that might be involved in this.”
I considered arguing with her, but decided against it. I’d never seen someone look so fragile and so fierce all at once—well, except maybe Hannah, once upon a time, but her made-of-glass days were far behind her now.
“Okay. I’m shutting up now. Just talk. I’m listening.”
Flavia nodded her thanks, adjusted herself against her pillows, and took another sip of tea. The cup had long since stopped steaming, but she didn’t seem to care. “He began drawing runes everywhere—on the floor, on the walls, on… on me,” she faltered, rubbing unconsciously at her arms, where the marks had been meticulously scrubbed away. “Then he began to do the same to the man sitting across from me. I kept trying to catch his eye, to plead with him to stop participating in… whatever was happening, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t look at me.”
“Fucking coward,” I muttered under my breath. If Flavia heard me, she didn’t let it disrupt her at all.
“Since no one seemed to have any interest in telling me what was happening, I fended off my panic by studying the runes, to see if I could get any kind of clue about his intentions from which ones he was using. That was a mistake,” she said, and a shudder rocked her frame. “The fact that I couldn’t recognize the Casting only made me panic more. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. I began to fight against my bindings, tipping my chair over and upsetting candles. Another mistake.” She touched the shadow of a bruise that still marred her collarbone beneath several rune-shaped scars. “I’m not sure if it was necessary for him to cut the runes into my skin, but he did so after that. Then he took out the box.”
She looked up at me. “Did… did you see the box?” she whispered, and I knew that she held within her more fear and horror at what that box had done to her than anything else.
“Yes,” I told her. “Did Mrs. Mistlemoore explain what it was?”
Flavia shook her head. Tears tracked down her cheeks. “She just said that it twisted my Spirit Sight. I think she didn’t want to upset me. But Charlie pointed it at me, like he was taking my portrait. He lit all these bright lights and told me to hold still. He even said to me…” She was rendered temporarily speechless as the disgust rose so palpably in her throat that she had to swallow it back, to choke it down. “He said to me, ‘Smile pretty for the camera, now.’ Then there was just a blinding pain, and everything went dark, and… and that’s all I can remember until I woke up last night.”
“Really? You can’t remember anything else?” I asked, trying to mask my disappointment.
She shook her head. “Nothing. I wish I could, but… from what Mrs. Mistlemoore has told me about what happened to my Spirit Sight, it’s probably a very good thing that I can’t.”
I sighed. “Yes, I think that’s probably true.”
“That thing he pointed at me… the old camera thing… Mrs. Mistlemoore told me that it twisted my Spirit Sight, but… what was it? Where did it come from? What was he trying to do?” Flavia asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“It’s called a Camera Exspiravit,” I said, and the words felt like poison on my tongue. “It’s a complicated process that I don’t think I can properly explain, but when used correctly, it captures a Durupinen’s Spirit Sight and then bestows it on a Necromancer.”
Flavia’s eyelids fluttered. For a moment, I thought she might faint right there in front of me. I started up out of my seat, though how the hell I thought I would help if she fainted, I had no idea. But she didn’t pass out. She closed her eyes a moment and then opened them again, the horror of my words now all over her expression. “Bestow? But… that is not possible.”
“It is possible. Do you remember all the Necromancers who descended on your camp four years ago? Do you remember how they controlled the spirits that came with them?”
&nbs
p; Flavia swallowed convulsively. “The torches. They had captured their essences in the torches they used to light everything on fire.”
“Yes, but did you ever wonder how it was that they could even see the spirits to command them?”
“I…” Flavia looked stunned, as though she couldn’t believe she had never considered asking this question before. “I never… I just assumed, some kind of Casting. A Melding, perhaps, or…”
“Well, it was a Casting, but not one of our own. Did you ever see any of their faces?”
Flavia shook her head. “They were hooded. Masked. I never saw one of their faces, or I surely would have spit in it or else clawed their eyes out.”
“Well, if you had seen any of them up close, you would have seen that their eyes were silver. It’s an effect of the Casting. It’s what your eyes looked like, until this morning.”
Flavia looked like she might be sick. Then she set her mouth into a determined line. “How?” she asked. “How did they do it?”
“It took them years and years of cruel experiments, but they finally perfected it. They used a willing Durupinen traitor to give the Spirit Sight to all the senior members of the Necromancers, and that enabled them to carry out their siege.”
Flavia blanched. “What Durupinen in her right mind would ever allow a Necromancer to put her through what I went through?”
“Well, I never said she was in her right mind,” I hedged. “When done properly, the Camera Exspiravit doesn’t twist the Spirit Sight. It merely lifts a copy of it from the Durupinen and bestows it on a Necromancer by means of the image itself. If the image is destroyed, so, too, is the Necromancer’s borrowed Spirit Sight.”
“And a Durupinen allowed that to happen?” Flavia asked in an awed and horrified whisper.
“Yes,” I said. “Her name is Lucida, and she was the one who betrayed us to the Necromancers four years ago, when the Prophecy came to pass. She’s still alive; she was captured and sent to the príosún at Skye. I imagine the Trackers will be paying her another visit soon, to answer for her part in this experiment.”
“But I don’t understand,” Flavia said, rubbing at her temples in a weary sort of way. “If the process isn’t meant to destroy the Durupinen’s Spirit Sight, then what happened to me?”
“When the Necromancers fell at Fairhaven, much of the equipment and documentation of the process was destroyed in the ensuing raids. Charlie took it upon himself as one of the uncaptured Candidates to take up the mantle and try to revive the process. He thought it was the key to the Necromancers rising again.”
“Well, at least that plan is dust,” Flavia said, with just a hint of satisfaction in her voice. “It may have been hell for a few of us, but at least he’s been caught and that… that torture device has been destroyed.”
The plan may not be dust at all. The Necromancers might even be rising as we speak, turning our Caomhnóir into allies and our príosún into a fortress, I thought wildly, though I said nothing of it aloud. Instead I pressed where I knew I probably shouldn’t press. And yet I had to know.
“Flavia, you said you don’t remember anything from the moment that Charlie took your likeness. Is that right?”
Flavia seemed to freeze at my words. One corner of her mouth began to twitch repeatedly. She shook her head.
“Mrs. Mistlemoore said that might happen,” I told her softly. “She said that your mind is going to protect itself, because twisting the Spirit Sight can be… very painful.”
Flavia swallowed convulsively. Her eyelids fluttered. “When I think about it… when I try to recall something… it’s like there’s a door there, that’s been slammed shut. And when I jiggle the handle, or try to peek through the keyhole…” Her whole body shuddered. “I start to feel trapped and suffocated. I can’t breathe. My skin starts to crawl. And then the door just… pushes me away. Please, Jess. Please, don’t ask me about it. I don’t think I’m supposed to remember.”
“Okay,” I told her, reaching out to pat her hand, which was visibly trembling upon her blanket. “No more questions about that, I promise. What I actually wanted to ask you about happened after Mrs. Mistlemoore and the Scribes reversed Charlie’s Casting on you.”
Flavia frowned. “After?”
“Yes,” I said. “So, after I ask you, if you still feel the… the door thing… then don’t worry about it, okay? Don’t try to answer. I’m not here to cause you any more pain.”
“Okay,” she said, looking mystified and still a little wary.
“The night that Mrs. Mistlemoore reversed the Casting, I was here in the hospital wing, asleep. I woke up just as they were finishing, and she gave me the good news that they believed they had succeeded in restoring your Spirit Sight to its proper state, even though they were still waiting to see if there would be any lasting damage.” I paused, choosing my next words carefully. “I came to sit with you, and held your hand. When I touched you, you… you grabbed onto my hand and opened your eyes.”
Flavia’s eyes widened. “I did?”
“Yes. The next few minutes are a blank for me, but the next thing I knew, you were lying peacefully asleep again, and I had created a spirit drawing.”
“A spirit drawing?” Flavia whispered.
“Yes. Right on the fabric of the partition that was blocking off your bed space,” I said.
Flavia looked utterly bewildered. “But… how could a living person evoke a spirit drawing? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I shook my head. “Neither have I. But then again, you were in a unique state, having your Spirit Sight twisted and then untwisted again. I don’t think the normal rules apply.”
Flavia gave a nervous chuckle. “No, I suppose not.”
“Anyway, I… you know that I’ve done a bit of… of prophetic drawing,” I said, not quite meeting her eye.
“I think it’s fair to say I know that better than most people,” Flavia said quietly. This was, of course, true. It was she who had finally correctly interpreted the prophetic drawing that enabled us to free Irina from the wrath of the Traveler Council, the drawing that I had misinterpreted as predicting Annabelle’s death but that had, in fact, been revealing Annabelle’s true nature as a Walker. She had promised me that she would never tell anyone that I was a Seer, and I believed her. Her promise might be moot now, as it was highly possible that I’d soon have to tell everyone myself. Still, I wasn’t ready to admit to Flavia just how scared I was, or just how much could be at stake. I couldn’t bring her to look any more scared or exhausted or utterly drained than she already looked.
“I… I just wanted to know if you remembered anything about that night. Do you remember seeing me? Or… or waking up at all?”
Flavia furrowed her brow. I could practically hear her gears turning as she dug through her memory for any clues or fleeting images. At last she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jess. I just can’t recall anything. It doesn’t feel blocked, not like when my Spirit Sight was twisted. Just… blank.”
I nodded resignedly. “Okay. Just one last thing. Would you be willing to look at the drawing, just to see if it looks… familiar?”
Flavia didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be having some sort of internal struggle. At last she closed her eyes and sighed. “Okay. I know you wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t really important.”
“No, I definitely wouldn’t,” I agreed. “So, is it okay if I show it to you?”
She looked alarmed. “You… you actually have it with you?”
“No, I just took a picture of it. It’s on my phone,” I said, pulling my phone out of my pocket and giving it a little wave.
“Oh, okay,” Flavia said, and she sounded relieved. Somehow in her mind, I supposed, an image of the drawing was less frightening than the drawing itself. “Right, then, let’s see it.”
I opened my gallery, found the image and handed the phone to Flavia.
Almost at once, her eyebrows drew together in confusion. She put down her teacup and used her fingers
to enlarge the image on the screen, taking her time to examine every angle, every detail. I watched her very carefully for a flash of comprehension, an inkling of a memory stirred somewhere in her traumatized brain, but I saw nothing but concentration and puzzlement in her features. At last, she sighed and handed the phone back to me.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you, Jess, but I’ve never seen that place before. It looks like some kind of Durupinen stronghold, though, with the triskele flags on top of the parapets. Maybe a seat of one of the other clans? I wish I understood it, so I could help you.”
I fought to keep the disappointment out of my face. “Don’t worry about it, Flavia,” I told her, not bothering to mention what I’d already been able to deduce from the image. “I’ll figure it out.”
Flavia looked stricken. “I can’t imagine why I would be the one to reveal this image to you.”
“Maybe you weren’t,” I suggested. “Maybe it was a complete coincidence that the vision struck me while I was sitting with you.”
The look Flavia gave me was almost pitying. She didn’t believe that any more than I did, and we both knew it.
“Well, anyway,” I said, trying to keep my tone light, “now that you’ve seen it, who knows? It might bring something back to you. Just think about it for me, would you?”
Flavia nodded, her lower lip trembling. “Sure.”
“Hey,” I said gently, taking her hand and squeezing it. “Don’t feel guilty about this. And while we’re on the subject, don’t you dare let yourself feel guilty about any of it. Nothing that happened to you was your fault. No decision you made or action you took made you culpable in any of this, do you understand?”
Flavia nodded, refusing to look at me.
“I’m going to let you eat and get some more rest,” I told her firmly, standing up from the bed. “I’ll come check on you later, okay?”
Flavia just nodded again. At a loss for what I could possibly say to comfort her, I just gave her an encouraging smile, and turned to go. Her voice rang out behind me, quiet but sharp.
“Jess? Could… would you please… stay with me for a little while?”