by E. E. Holmes
I snorted, “Well, actually, that’s pretty much exactly what it means.”
Finn made a tiny sound that could have been anything, but I took to be a tiny snicker.
“Well, I don’t care a fig for your problems. The contents of this flat are mine, and I’m not leaving them, especially with people who have no idea of their true worth,” Lyle said.
“Look, we don’t want to throw your things away,” I said, lying through my teeth. “But maybe we could just… just move them to a more convenient area so we could, y’know, walk? Or sit on the furniture?” I gestured toward the nearby sofa, stacked four feet high with boxes of newspapers.
“No, no, no!” Lyle shrieked hysterically, and his energy seemed to billow out from him, raising the hair on my arms like an electric current. “You can’t move these things! You can’t do that! I have a system, an organizational system. If you disturb the system, things won’t be catalogued properly, and the whole integrity of the collection could be compromised!”
We all carefully avoided looking at each other. It couldn’t have been more obvious that the whole contents of the apartment were worth more as kindling for a good-sized bonfire than as any sort of legitimate collection, but there was no chance of convincing Lyle of that. There was still a lot I needed to learn about dealing with spirits, but one thing I had managed to learn at Fairhaven before torching the place to the ground was that a spirit was pretty set in its ways, much more deeply than a living person. A living person was always changing, growing, aging, adjusting to the world around them, but a ghost was a different story. It was a lot more difficult to coax any kind of change out of a ghost. Siobhán explained that that was why so many spirits were known for repetitive behaviors: walking the same hallway, looking out the same window, wailing at the same time of night, and so forth. And the longer a soul was in that state, the less mutable they became. There would be no convincing Lyle to move or get rid of his “collection,” but there was also no way we could hide out in an apartment that was basically a royally-themed death trap. So that meant…
“You’re gonna have to expel him,” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to Finn.
He nodded grimly, as though he’d heard the entire argument I’d just considered in my head and arrived at the same unassailable conclusion. He waited until Lyle was chastising Hannah for replacing Her Majesty’s bobble-head at the wrong angle, and muttered back, “If I do that, I can only keep him out temporarily. Do you know how to put up the wards to keep him out for good?”
“Well, I’ve never actually done it, but I’ve got the Book of Téigh Anonn, so we can do our best,” I said. “If it doesn’t hold, we’ll just have to think of something else.”
“Only chance we’ve got,” Finn said.
He took a decisive step forward, which was impressive amidst the labyrinth of crap, and began to murmur under his breath. His movement caught both Lyle and Hannah’s attention.
“That’s it, I want all of you out of here right now,” Lyle shouted, throwing Finn a panicked look. “I don’t care what kind of trouble you’re in, you’re not going to desecrate my life’s work with your ignorant…”
Whoosh. Before Lyle could even put the final touch on his insult, he flew backward through the nearest wall and out of sight, as though snagged and tugged by an imaginary fishing line.
“What just happened?” Hannah asked.
“Expelled him,” Finn said.
“We’re just going to force him out of his own—”
“Do you have a better idea?” Finn barked. “He was never going to give the place up voluntarily, and I’m not about to tip-toe around this garbage like it’s a museum display for the next month. He had to go.”
Hannah opened her mouth to argue again, but then closed it and nodded. “You’re right.”
“I know I am. But he’s going to get his bearings back in a few minutes so you two had better take a crack at setting up some wards. I’m going to try to shift some of this stuff and see what we’re dealing with in the rest of this flat.”
Finn stalked off through the heaps as Hannah and I set to work. I was essentially useless in the technical aspects of the casting, but luckily Hannah was a natural at all things Durupinen, and within minutes, she had chalked the appropriate runes onto the door and under the windows. We then had to seal them with wax dripped from a white Spirit candle while we both repeated the accompanying words to the casting, which, though they were in an ancient form of Gaelic, were not overly complex.
“Well, I think that should do it,” Hannah said. “We’re really lucky that we performed the Uncaging last night, or we probably wouldn’t have had any of this with us.” She held up the little leather bag into which she was depositing the chalk, book, and stub of the candle.
“Yeah, lucky,” I said, fighting a wave of nausea.
“Are you okay? You look like you’re going to be sick,” Hannah said, looking at me properly for the first time since we’d begun the ritual.
“Yeah, I feel sick. I think I just need to lay down and get some sleep,” I said. This was probably a pipe dream, though, because the pain that had been creeping back through my arms was building to a pulsing crescendo. I found myself wishing one of the magazine towers would tumble over and knock me unconscious just to put me out of my misery. “But what about Annabelle? Shouldn’t we head downstairs and see if we can find her flat?”
Hannah shook her head. “Not at this hour. We’ll scare the life out of her if we go banging on her door now. It can wait until the morning.” She looked at her watch. “Well, I mean, a normal time of the morning. And besides, you need sleep. The question is, is there anywhere in this junk heap where you can actually lie down?” Hannah said, her expression skeptical. She turned and called over her shoulder, “Finn?”
“Oi?” came Finn’s muffled voice.
“Is there anywhere Jess can lay down and get some sleep? She’s not looking too good.”
Crash, crash, bang, shuffle.
“Bed’s clear,” he shouted. “First door on the left in the back hall.”
Hannah led the way, picking through the treacherous landscape to a tiny, dusty bedroom. The room was in the same state of disaster as the rest of the flat, except a space had been cleared about three feet in diameter around the narrow bed in the corner. I was too tired and in too much pain to spare more than a passing, whimpering thought about the cleanliness level of the mattress before collapsing upon it.
Hannah perched herself on the edge of the bed next to me, gingerly shifting a newspaper aside with her foot. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again she said, “Milo and Savannah should be back soon. I told him where to find us.”
“What about Lucida? Aren’t you supposed to let her know where we are, too?”
Hannah bit her lip. “I’ve got to try a blind Summoner, but I can’t do it in here, because I need a ghost, and we’ve warded the place. I’ll have to go outside and try from there. Actually, I should probably go do that now.”
She stood up, which looked so much harder than it should have been, and walked back out of the bedroom. I still didn’t really understand what she was going to do, but I decided that a detailed explanation of blind Summoners could wait until tomorrow. I looked over at Finn, who was now trying to clear a wider path into the tiny dingy bathroom.
“I haven’t had a chance to thank you yet,” I said.
He glanced up from his work with a look that was half-confusion, half-hostility. “Thank me for what?”
I rolled my eyes. “For getting us out of there. For saving our lives.”
“I didn’t get us out of there. That was all your sister’s doing,” he said, looking away from me again and flicking a dismissive hand over his shoulder.
“It wasn’t just her. You… they tried to dismiss you, but you wouldn’t go. You stayed with me.”
“I’m obligated to stay with you in any situation I have judged to be potentially dangerous. I was just doing my j
ob,” he said, as though quoting from a Caomhnóir handbook.
“Damn it, Finn, I’m trying to thank you, but you’re making it really difficult. Can’t you just say ‘you’re welcome’ like a normal person?” I cried.
He paused, his hand clenched around a commemorative tea cup as though deciding whether or not he was going to chuck it at me. Instead he tossed it down into a nearby box and we both listened to it break before he said, stiffly, “You’re welcome.”
“There, see? Was that so hard?” I asked.
He ignored this, as I expected he would, so I gave up on further conversation and tried in vain to grope past my pain into unconsciousness. I couldn’t be sure whether I actually managed to drift off entirely, but the next thing I heard was Hannah’s voice.
“Well, it worked, thank goodness. She sent the Summoner back, so I know she got the message.”
“Anything else?” Finn asked.
“What do you mean, anything else?” Hannah asked.
“Did she send any news? About… anyone at Fairhaven?”
“No, she just sent the Summoner back. There was no reply.”
“Oh,” Finn said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice.
Something clicked. I sat up, my heart starting to thump.
“Jess, what are you doing up? You’re supposed to be sleeping,” she said, frowning with motherly concern.
I ignored the scolding. I was too busy lamenting what an idiot I was. I had somehow completely forgotten that Olivia was Finn’s sister, that he’d left her behind at Fairhaven.
“Finn, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Sorry for what?” he asked. He had cleared off a nearby wingchair and was now stooping to unlace his boots.
“I didn’t even think… your sister was back there,” I said, barely able to coax my voice above a whisper.
Hannah grimaced, and I could tell that she’d forgotten, too. “I’m sorry, Finn. I should have asked in my summons. I was so focused on making sure that Lucida knew where to find us that I didn’t even think to ask about anything else.”
“Olivia’s fine,” he said. He pulled off one boot and flung it aside. “I saw her in the entrance hall when we were leaving. I’m sure she got out. And when Lucida comes back, I’m sure that’s what she’ll tell us.” His tone dared me to contradict him. I didn’t. I couldn’t. The alternative was too horrible to consider. I laid back down in silence.
The terror and adrenaline of our escape had left little room in my mind to dwell on the reality of what we had left behind at Fairhaven, but now that we were safe, at least for the moment, my fear and guilt bubbled up through the cracks in my resolve, and I let it rise, choking me. What had there been for Lucida to return to? Was Fairhaven gone? Had they been able to contain the fire before it consumed the castle in its entirety, or had it been reduced to a smoking, hollowed out shell? I thought about all of the irreplaceable history it contained: the tapestries; the library; the archives; the relics. Though I had not grown up revering the culture they represented, I could appreciate their connection to me, and the fact that not a single one of them could ever be replaced.
But far more terrible was the idea that our escape could have cost someone in that castle his or her life. The fire had swelled so quickly; was it foolish to hope that everyone had made it out alive? I thought of Mackie, still weak from an attacking ghost, of Celeste and Siobhán and Fiona, fending off the spirits in the great hall, where the flames had begun. I thought of all my terrified classmates, huddled in their pajamas in the entrance hall, scattering like frightened birds at the command to flee. Had they done so? Could some of them have gone elsewhere, looking for friends and sisters, and been trapped inside? I knew the answer, and it made the nausea roil in my stomach. Suddenly, after feeling so glad to have Lucida gone, I ached for her to return with any news that might start to extinguish the new fire my guilt had lit within me.
3
Return from the Brink
“JUST… CAN YOU TRY TO sit her up? Wow, she really looks bad.”
“Have you had a look under those bandages since we got here?”
“I’m afraid to take them off.”
“Fair enough, but shouldn’t we be cleaning them, or something?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know the first thing about caring for burns.”
“Jess? Can you sit up? You need to take these pain meds. I dissolved them in this water, so you can just drink it.”
I felt a hand cradling the back of my head, and struggled to obey its pressure to sit up. I felt a glass pressed to my lips, cold water trickling down over my chin before I could force my muscles to remember how to swallow it. I spluttered and choked. It was bitter and gritty in my mouth.
“She feels really warm. Does she feel warm to you?”
Several hands pressed themselves to my cheeks. Every one of them felt like ice.
“She’s burning up. What should we do?”
“We’ll keep an eye on her. Those pills should help with the fever, too.”
“Shouldn’t we take her to a hospital or something?”
“Are you crazy? That’s way too risky. They know she’s injured. They’ll be scouting every hospital, clinic, and doctor’s office in the area. We’d be caught for sure.”
“But—”
“I said no!”
A few minutes later, or it could have been hours, or maybe several pain-wracked centuries, voices broke through to my consciousness again.
“We have no choice.”
“But—”
“Look at her, Hannah! She’s got some kind of infection or something. Nothing is keeping that fever down. If we don’t do it, she’s going to—”
“Don’t! Don’t even say that!”
“Well, then listen to me!”
“But she’d never agree to it!”
“She doesn’t need to. She’s in no state to make a decision anyway. It’s been three days. She’s dying, do you understand me? She’s dying, and you’re going to lose her unless we do this. Now are you going to set up the circle, or do I need to do it for you?”
Dying. Who was dying? The word had silenced the room as I struggled to understand what it meant.
“No. No, I’ll do it,” someone said. My sister. It was my sister.
I blacked out again, and when I came to, the voices around me had warped into dim, muffled sounds. I couldn’t feel past my pain and the strange, swimming feeling in my head to ask what they were talking about. I couldn’t remember where we were or what we were doing there. Who was talking? Why couldn’t I see? I thought I might have been moving, that someone might have been touching me, or carrying me. Or I could have been floating. Floating away. How nice it would be to float away.
I could hear chanting, and wished it could be music. Someone was holding my hand, very gently, but their touch lit it on fire. I cried out.
The chanting grew louder, and a familiar feeling flooded through me; a feeling of openness, of conductivity. My mind spun with images, thoughts and feelings I couldn’t control. Was I dying? Was I going crazy? Who was I?
As I grasped in the whirlwind for some sense of myself, slowly, very slowly, the cloudiness and confusion started to ebb away. My vision began to clear. I became aware of my body, which was lying on a musty-smelling floor. And even as my cognizance of the terrible pain in my arms sharpened, the pain itself began to dull, receding as though someone was draining it out of me. As the last dull throb of it pulsed away from my fingertips, the tumult of images flickered to a halt, and something inside me thudded closed, leaving me breathless, but entirely myself.
“Jess? Can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes. I was still lying on the floor, and five anxious faces were staring down at me. Gingerly, I sat up and looked around. We were in Lyle’s flat. The rug had been shoved into a heap in the corner, and a casting circle had been chalked onto the floorboards beneath.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“How are you feeling?
” Hannah asked. Her face was streaked with tears.
“She should be feeling bloody fabulous,” Lucida said with a smug nod.
I considered this and realized that I did, indeed, feel pretty damn fantastic. I felt utterly refreshed, like I’d just woken up from the best nap of my life. My mind felt calm and sharp. I felt like I could have run a marathon or scaled a building. My body was pulsing with a boundless energy, shooting through my legs, coursing through my arms.
My arms.
I held my hands and forearms up in front of my face and gasped out loud. The formerly ravaged skin was flawlessly smooth, polished and glowing like it had just been buffed or airbrushed.
“What… I don’t understand! What happened to the burns?”
“Gone. Healed,” Lucida said.
“That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Savvy said, grabbing my hand to examine it for herself.
“But how? How did you do it?” I asked Lucida.
“I didn’t do it,” Lucida said, smiling.
I looked at Hannah, who had dropped her eyes to the floor.
“Hannah?”
“We had no choice, Jess. I knew you wouldn’t like it, but—”
“But what?”
“Aura flow. We used the aura flow from the Crossing to heal you.”
“Aura flow?” I asked blankly. Then my brain finally caught up. “Wait, wait. Are you talking about leeching?”
I looked from Hannah’s guilty expression to Lucida’s snide one, and in that moment felt my heart drop, leaden, somewhere into the region of my feet.
“Please, no. Please tell me you didn’t.”
“Of course we did,” Lucida said. “And before you start laying the guilt trip on your sister, you ought to know that she just saved your life.”
“You were really bad, Jess,” Savvy said quietly. “You should have seen your hands.”
“Your fever wouldn’t go down. Everything was infected, and you were completely delirious,” Hannah added.
“But why didn’t you just take me to a doctor?” I cried.
“And risk getting caught?” Hannah asked.