Autumn Bones

by Jacqueline Carey

Page 62

 

  To be honest, I was starting to have my doubts about the coven’s effectiveness, but even I could feel that this spell should have worked. Since it didn’t, I won’t belabor the details, but I was watching from the sidelines as they encircled Sinclair, who stood in the center with the empty pickle jar, a look of determination on his face.

  According to Casimir, if the coven could bind Grandpa Morgan’s spirit in the circle, it wouldn’t matter that Sinclair wasn’t willing to fulfill the terms of the burden his mother had laid on him. Once the duppy was bound, their collective will would overpower it, and Sinclair could recapture it on his own terms.

  It sounded good, anyway. And when the coven finished their incantation with a resounding, “So mote it be!” a flicker of white light raced along their joined hands before rising into the night sky with a sense of purpose that’s hard to describe.

  Well, actually, it’s not all that hard—it felt like the supernatural equivalent of casting a net or a fishing line. For a few tenuous moments, my hopes soared. And then it felt like the supernatural equivalent of that net or fishing line coming back empty, or at least what I would imagine it would feel like, since the closest I’ve ever gotten to fishing was accidentally getting sucked into an episode of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel.

  A bitter sense of loss suffused me. Until the coven’s effort failed, I hadn’t realized exactly how much hope I’d pinned on their success. I let the disappointed members confer among themselves for a few minutes before asking what their failure meant.

  “It means his spirit is already bound,” Casimir said soberly.

  “To what?” I asked. “Or who? By who? Or . . . whom?” Despite Mr. Leary’s best efforts, I still had a hard time with that one.

  Casimir shook his head. “I don’t know. I would have said there wasn’t anyone outside this circle capable of it. ”

  “What about Liz Cropper?” Mark Reston from the tattoo parlor suggested, which triggered a five-minute discussion about the coven’s history of infighting and bitter quarrels with former members.

  I pulled out my notepad and jotted down “Liz Cropper” and a couple of other names they mentioned, watching Sinclair out of the corner of my eye. He was quiet, not taking part in the conversation.

  “You don’t think it’s a disgruntled ex-coven member, do you?” I asked him.

  Sinclair shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, Daisy. Whatever they’re talking about was before my time. But . . . if my grandfather’s duppy is bound to someone, I’m guessing it was him that did the binding. ”

  “To . . . whom?” I asked. “Like, whoever . . . whomever . . . stole the Tall Man’s remains?”

  “Whoever,” he said. “Yeah, maybe. Do you have any new leads?”

  “No,” I murmured. “I was really, really hoping this summoning ritual would work. Any further thoughts on what kind of death magic we might be talking about?”

  “No. ” Sinclair was silent a moment. “I’ve tried, you know. Tried to will myself to consent to do what my mother wants. ”

  “You don’t—”

  He shot me a look. “Yeah, I do. I brought this on Pemkowet. If it’s within my power to stop it, I have to try. But it’s not working. Either I just can’t, or my mother was wrong and my grandfather’s spirit isn’t bound to the terms of their agreement. ”

  “Or both,” I said.

  “Or both. ” He summoned a wry smile. “Hey, at least those videos are going to be good for the paranormal tour business. And you look pretty badass in them. ”

  “Yeah, that’s an unexpected bonus. ” I tucked my notepad back into my messenger bag. “Do you think it’s worth it?”

  “No. ” Sinclair’s smile vanished, his expression turning grave. “I think that if we don’t catch my grandfather’s duppy before Halloween, something very, very bad is going to happen. ”

  I sighed. “Me, too. ”

  Forty-two

  Over the course of the next couple of weeks, after Stacey Brooks’s ghostbusting footage went viral, Pemkowet experienced an unprecedented boom in tourism for the month of October. A skeptical reporter from the Chicago Tribune got wind of the story and came out to investigate. Under pressure from Amanda Brooks and the PBV board, who were over the moon about the publicity, Chief Bryant strong-armed Cody and me into letting him ride along on a call to a site where we laid to rest the particularly gruesome ghost of an old lumberman who was crushed to death by a skid of falling logs in 1857.

  After that, the reporter was convinced; and after his story was published, tourism doubled again and other news crews followed, hoping to get a scoop as good. I drew the line at cooperating with any more of them, though. So far we’d been lucky, but the bad feeling I had about this whole thing persisted. Maybe Letitia Palmer’s unleashing her dead obeah man father’s spirit had proved a boon instead of a bane for Pemkowet, but I didn’t think that was going to be the case in the long run.

  Grandpa Morgan’s duppy was still out there somewhere, and the longer he went without showing himself, the more my nerves were on edge.

  And Pemkowet’s dead continued to manifest in a variety of grisly manners.

  Cody and I did our best. I hadn’t given up hope of finding the grave robber and the Tall Man’s corpse. We tracked down a few disgruntled ex-coven members, all of whom Cooper confirmed were false leads.

  We even paid a second visit to Clancy Brannigan, or at least to his doorstep. One of his neighbors, poor crazy Marcia Hardwick, provided a handy excuse by phoning in a complaint about seeing strange lights through gaps in the plywood covering the clerestory basement windows in the rear of his house.

  Okay, she thought he was building a spacecraft in his basement, but it was still a good excuse.

  There was a long wait after Cody pressed the buzzer, but eventually the video screen lit up to reveal the distorted, close-up image of Clancy Brannigan’s face, a slick of sweat on his skin, the visor of a welding mask propped above his brow.

  “What is it now, Officer?” he asked testily. “Has one of the Cavannaughs confessed?”

  “Ah . . . no,” Cody admitted. “We had a report of strange lights, sir. Is everything all right?”

  Clancy Brannigan snorted. “Right as rain, boy. I’m working on an important project. Come back when you get the truth out of the Cavannaughs. Until then, don’t bother me. ” His hand rose, blurring the screen.

  “Wait!” I said quickly. “Mr. Brannigan, can you think of anyone other than the Cavannaughs who’d want to steal your great-grandfather’s remains? Anyone?”

  He hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I can. ” A crafty look crossed his face. “Anyone who married into that cursed family. ”

  I sighed. “Okay. Thanks for your time, sir. Sorry to disturb you. ”

  “You ought to be. ” The screen went dark.

  “Damn,” Cody said as we headed back toward the cruiser. “That old coot’s really got a hard-on for the Cavannaughs. ”

  “No kidding. I’m starting to rethink that whole lucidity thing. Although he’s right—we probably should interview spouses and significant others. I was going to suggest it earlier. ” I glanced over my shoulder. “So he must have some kind of lab down in his basement, huh? What do you suppose he’s working on? A new and improved widget?”

  “A spaceship,” Cody said drily. “To take him to a planet without any Cavannaughs. ”

  I laughed.

  Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only thing I had to laugh about. Clancy Brannigan’s obsession notwithstanding, interviewing associates of the Cavannaugh family was a dead end.

  And as for the dead, they just kept rising.

  And Cody and I continued to work as a team, spending a succession of glorious autumn days laying the dead to rest with the spirit lantern and a hammer and nails, while tourists continued to flock to town in the hope of witnessing an actual haunting before we cou
ld get to it, buying out the historical society’s stock of a slender volume titled Bloody Pemkowet, taking Sinclair’s tour, and staking out sites that they thought were likely to reward their patience.

  Oh, and the other thing that didn’t happen? Yeah, that would be a serious and candid conversation between Cody and me about our relationship, or nonrelationship, or whatever it was. Or wasn’t.

  Which is not to say we didn’t hook up again, because in fact we did after a particularly difficult and grueling ghostbusting assignment that left us both emotionally wrung out and desperate for life-affirming connection. And okay, yes, horny. It’s weird how death’s presence can have that effect.

  In a totally different way, it was as intense as it had been the first time. Less primal, but no less urgent and with more manual dexterity.

  Afterward, I gathered my scattered clothing from his bedroom floor. “Hey, Cody? Are we ever going to talk about this?”

  A faint snore escaped him in answer.

  At that particular moment, I couldn’t blame him. It had been a really, really hard day. Still, we couldn’t go on like this forever.

  I should probably have talked to my mom about it; or at least Jen or maybe Lurine. I didn’t know why I hadn’t already, except that I didn’t know what to say about it. It was hard to explain how and why it had happened the first time. The storm, post-wolf Cody curled naked in his blanket, that unexpected surge of raw desire . . .

  This time was different, but it wasn’t something I could explain to anyone who hadn’t lived through what Cody and I had experienced that day. I’m not saying it compared to the sort of PTSD-inducing trauma that soldiers in combat and some police officers experience in the line of duty, but it was rough enough that I got why they don’t want to talk about it with someone who hadn’t been there.

  And, too, there was a Casablanca factor that kept me from feeling inclined to discuss it. Between the relentless manifestations of the dead and the fact that Halloween was approaching and we were no closer to finding Grandpa Morgan’s duppy than we had been weeks ago, it was fair to say that the problems of one little hell-spawn and a werewolf on the down-low didn’t amount to a hill of beans.