Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  “How long was I sleeping?” I asked Phineas.

  “If by sleeping you mean languishing on the brink of the death from which I’ve saved you, two days,” he said.

  “Two days?”

  “Yep. Wulf brought me to the B&B. I drove you and your car back here.”

  I struggled to remember what had happened. The cramps, my heart. My original certainty that it was food poisoning. Those delicious crab enchiladas, which Penny had refused my offer to try because, she said, she was allergic to shellfish. I looked up at Phineas.

  “It was Penny. She must have poisoned my food when I went to the ladies’ room or something.”

  Of course Mr. I Have Good Instincts About People looked skeptical. Which made me want to punch him, but I didn’t think I could lift my arm high enough. I was getting sleepy again.

  “How can you be sure it was her?” he asked.

  “I guess it could have been the waitress or the chef, but I think if there’s an Underwood at the table when you get poisoned, you start with them.” I glared at him in lieu of the punch. “You said she had a good heart and good intentions.”

  “She does,” he said. “She…” He frowned, and didn’t say more for a minute. He had dark bags under his eyes. I wondered how much he’d slept in those two days I’d been out.

  “Why would she do that?” I asked, as much to myself as him. “She called me. She brought me to Bristol.” My eyelids were drooping, and I was starting to slur my words. “Why would she ask me to come and investigate if she was just going to turn around and kill me for it?”

  Phineas shook his head. “Maybe she was forced somehow. It would make sense, in a way.” His voice sounded like it was coming from far away. “She…” he went on.

  But I was asleep again before I heard the rest of the sentence.

  After another day of dozing and drinking Phineas’s awful tea, which tasted like some form of torture despite his claim that it was “mostly” just rosemary, I was more-or-less better. The first thing I did was take a long overdue shower. I didn’t like to think of how I’d looked, or smelled, while Phineas was nursing me back to health. Then I scolded myself for even caring. Phineas, I reminded myself, was an asshole. Sure, we’d been getting along lately. And he could be funny. And he just saved my life. But he was still the liar who broke my canteen.

  The smell of bacon wafting down the hall sped up my dressing considerably. I came into the kitchen with wet hair and a watering mouth.

  “Is it morning?”

  “It is. You should call your brother.”

  I guess I was still a little out of it, because at first I stared at him, thinking he knew of some way for me to communicate with Nat. “What?”

  Phineas frowned. “Charlie? He’s your brother right?”

  “Oh.” I started to make coffee—I didn’t think I’d ever want tea again—and shook my head. “Brother-in-law.”

  “Oh. Well, he called so many times I thought it would be cruel to leave him hanging, so I answered.” Phineas smiled and shook his head, I guess remembering something Charlie had said. “He’s a funny guy.”

  “Yes, he is. What did you tell him?”

  “Everything, pretty much. Not at first. I started out making excuses, but he set me straight.”

  I laughed and went to sit in the living room. “Yeah, I’ll bet he did. He knows what I do. Nothing you could have told him would have surprised him.”

  “So I gathered.” Phineas leaned over me with a plate of eggs and bacon. “He seemed to know quite a bit about me already, actually.”

  I became very interested in balancing my plate on my lap and finding a sturdy place to set my coffee cup. “He’s family,” I said finally. I rested my head against the back of the couch and said, “So. This poison. I assume a regular emergency room wouldn’t have done squat for me.”

  “No. That was from my world.”

  “And if I’d died, would it have looked like heart failure?”

  “I think we can assume it’s the same thing that killed the other five, if that’s where you’re going.”

  “It is.” I gave Wulf a piece of bacon. “So if he hadn’t gone to get you, I’d be dead too.”

  “Actually, no. That’s what’s weird. It wasn’t a lethal dose.”

  I frowned. “Did Penny not know how to use it? Then maybe it wasn’t her that did the others?”

  “Or she did know how to use it, and she didn’t actually want to kill you.”

  “Is this going to be another Penny Has Good Intentions story?”

  “Yep. Suppose someone, like her creepy sister for example, ordered her to kill you. She’d have had to make it look like she put in a good effort, right?”

  “Or she could have just said no.” But even as I said it, I knew that might not be true. We already knew of one Underwood being kept in a closet and, judging from his bruises, beaten for good measure. Maybe in that family, you didn’t get to say no.

  Which was exactly what Phineas thought, of course. His theory was that Penny assumed (or at least hoped) he would find me, and held back just enough so he’d be able to heal me. Then she could blame him for the fact that I was still alive. It might look like she’d screwed up, but at least it wouldn’t look like she’d defied an order.

  Because apparently just admitting he could have been wrong about Penny was too painful a prospect. But I, being the one actually brought to the brink of death, was not feeling so charitable. I kind of wanted to strangle the bitch.

  “Sitting around making farfetched guesses is fun and all,” I said. “But ideally, we ought to get her to tell us herself what the fuck she thought she was doing.”

  “True,” agreed Phineas. “We’re going to have to deal with her.”

  “So how will we do that? Go marching up to the library with pitchforks and a bag of feathers?” I rather liked the idea.

  Phineas frowned thoughtfully over the slice of bacon he was chewing. “Why would we bring feathers and not tar?”

  I was tempted to toss the throw pillow under my elbow at his head, but it was too comfortable where it was.

  We debated the relative merits of confronting Miss Dreadful versus just sitting back and waiting for her to screw up. Even if she had meant to kill me, she’d know I wasn’t dead by now. Which meant she’d know that we were on to her, and she wasn’t exactly the picture of calm on the best of days. Nervous people made mistakes, and it was possible she’d lead us to our ghost and devil.

  Which were all good points, but we decided on confronting her anyway, mostly because I was too pissed off not to. Phineas urged me not to lose my temper with her, insisting that she could be brought over to our side. But who wanted her on our side? The idea that she might have useful information to impart, if only I could play nice, did not appease me when I looked at my thin, gray face in the mirror. Or when I threw up all that bacon half an hour after I ate it.

  We went to Bristol the next day, but Penny was not at the library. The kid working there told us she was ill. Sure, okay. Maybe she had a taste of her own medicine. Or maybe she was just hiding because she was a cowardly bitch.

  We tried at The Witch’s Brew, and then again at the Mount Phearson. Neither the Thaggards nor Nolan could remember seeing Penny lately. Wendy was clearly curious about why I was asking (and why I looked like such shit) but she had too many customers for me to get into it, so I just told her we’d talk later.

  While we were at the hotel, we took a walk around the grounds to see if my ghost friend would show up. Not that he could tell us anything, but I’d been sick for a while, and I didn’t want him to think we’d forgotten about him.

  As we approached the woods and the trail head there, Wulf let out a low sound that was not quite a growl. His hackles were up, his tail stiff.

  “Someone’s in there,” I whispered to Phineas.

  He nodded and we stepped into the trees, slowly, trying not to make any noise. Wulf felt no such need for caution. He let out a bay and started running. />
  “Wulf!” I hurried after him, but he’d always been faster than me, let alone since I’d gotten a bad back and hip courtesy of Cranston Farquhar and a weakened system in general courtesy of Penny Dreadful.

  But I didn’t worry too much, at first. Don’t get me wrong, I was tense. That wasn’t his happy bay. But I wasn’t worried the way I would be later. Wulf wasn’t the best trained dog in the usual sense of the word, and as prone to running off after a scent as any hound, but he always came back to me. Always.

  Except he didn’t come back.

  It had been dry for several days, and he didn’t leave any footprints that we could see in the failing light. Phineas and I searched up and down the trails, then off the trails through the woods. It was like a warren back there, with the random stones of old chimneys poking up suddenly out of nowhere, and the pits of ruined foundations. Apparently all those outbuildings in the drawing of Silas Underwood’s Mount Phearson had been swallowed by the forest, and left to decay there. Another Bristol, under the first one. Dead.

  That made the situation even worse. There were a million jagged edges, a million nooks and crannies a dog could fall into. Especially once the sun went down. By then our voices were hoarse from calling him, and I was in pretty bad shape. I was still weak and nauseous, and the panic was making my whole body shake. All I could think of was Penny, telling us about the devil legend.

  You have to make sure your pets are inside at night, because if they cross his path in the dark, they’ll drop dead just like that.

  Well, it was dark.

  “Who was he chasing?” I asked, not for the first time.

  Phineas just shook his head. “Come on. Let’s go see if they’ve got a flashlight at the front desk. That little thing on your phone isn’t going to help us back here.”

  I nodded numbly, but I didn’t turn to follow him. I wouldn’t leave the woods. There are pets you love, and then there are pets who are straight-up people. Wulf was the latter kind. A flashlight was a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but I wasn’t feeling reasonable.

  I walked through the trees, calling for Wulf again. The wind whipped up, and some hiker’s carelessly discarded paper cup, emblazoned with The Witch’s Brew’s purple logo, was tossed against my shin. I bent automatically to pick it up. And I saw something, at the bottom of a tree trunk.

  “Phineas!”

  He had been following me, saying something, probably repeating that we should go back to the hotel. He rushed over to my side. I pointed at the smear of liquid. It was too dark to make out its color clearly, but I knew it was blood.

  Phineas’s jaw hardened as he looked at it, and he got down on his hands and knees, right there in the cold dark forest, to look for a trail. I was too distracted to realize it at the time, but that was right about when I stopped thinking Phineas was an asshole, and he became my friend for real. Saving a girl’s life is one thing. Trying to save her dog’s is another.

  We probably still wouldn’t have found him, if not for the whine. Maybe twenty minutes later I heard it, in response to one of my calls. It was faint, but it was enough to give us a direction.

  He was on the ground beside a pile of moss-covered stones, panting in pain. He was bleeding from a gash in his chest. I dove down to him, babbling something about my dream, about the little boy’s dog. Wulf gave a half-hearted thump with his tail, but he didn’t turn his head. The cut didn’t seem deep, which meant it wasn’t his problem, or at least not his main one. We couldn’t see well enough to assess much.

  I was afraid moving him might be a bad idea, but leaving him where he was was definitely a worse one. Phineas carried him back to the parking lot (no small feat, Wulf was not a light dog), where we stood under one of the lights while I looked at his gums.

  “The light is weird, but I think they’re pale,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Internal bleeding, I’m pretty sure. Help me get him in the car.”

  While we wrapped Wulf in a blanket in the back seat, I remembered all too well a different time I’d rushed a dog to the emergency animal hospital. Just a dog. Kevin had used those awful three words. Trying to calm me, he said later, and maybe he meant it. He cried almost as hard as I did when all we came back from that hospital with was a little jar of ashes. So little. I couldn’t believe our big beautiful Newf had been reduced to such a small space. But no matter how sad Kevin was, or seemed to be, I did not forgive or forget those three words. Years of infertility, then Kevin cheating on me; there’s no doubt our marriage was doomed either way. But just a dog was its death knell.

  I handed Phineas my phone. “I’ll drive. You find us the closest emergency vet and get directions.”

  Wulf let out one low whine as we pulled out of the Mount Phearson’s parking lot. After that, he didn’t make another sound.

  It was a ruptured spleen. They had to take it out, but apparently that was okay because he didn’t really need it. The vet didn’t know what had caused it any more than we did. “Trauma” was all he could say. (No shit.) Beowulf was still pretty young. They said he had a good chance of surviving the surgery. That was supposed to make me happy, I think, but it didn’t. I didn’t want a good chance. I wanted a perfect chance.

  After I got the “good chance” speech, I went and sat back down on the long bench that was the only seating in the waiting area. I pushed at all the cat and dog hair that covered it, wondering why they’d upholster a bench in an animal hospital. I didn’t realize I was crying until Phineas reached out and squeezed my hand. The touch was so unexpected that I actually let out a little yelp.

  It was six in the morning when a nice old lady came out and told me that Wulf had pulled through. I wouldn’t be able to bring him home that day, she said, but I probably could the day after that. Then he would have to be kept from any strenuous activity and encouraged to lay down as much as possible (easy), and not be left alone at all (harder) for at least a week before I could go to my regular vet to get the stitches out.

  We were in a sullen, sunless valley just over half an hour from Bristol, in some town whose name I’d forgotten, and at least three hours from home. I’d have to get a room locally until I could get Wulf back. I walked over to the window to look for Phineas, who had gone out to get us some sausage biscuits from the fast food place next door. I wanted to ask whether I should reserve a room for him, too.

  I spotted him, walking around the corner with our food bag in one hand. The other was clutching his collar closed at his neck, against the chilly drizzle that had set in outside. I was about to wave to catch his eye when suddenly he stopped and turned. There were a few crows on the lawn of the animal hospital, at the edge of the road, picking at a squirrel who had met an unfortunate end. As Phineas walked toward them, one of the crows hopped forward to meet him, then another, then a third. Two more flew in from somewhere else.

  Phineas stood there for several minutes, apparently in deep conversation with these five crows, although I couldn’t see either his mouth or their beaks moving. Given that I’d recently been poisoned and then driven sick with worry for Beowulf, I honestly considered whether or not the whole thing was a hallucination.

  When he came back inside I took the offered biscuit and asked, “Were you just talking to those crows?”

  “Yep.” He sat down on the bench and started to unwrap his own biscuit. I glanced around, wondering whether we’d get in trouble for eating in here, but we were the only ones in the waiting room.

  I sat beside him. “You want to elaborate on that?”

  “Sure.” His voice was muffled by the huge amount of sausage he’d shoved into his mouth at once. I grimaced as he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and once again marveled that a guy with perfect fingernails and expensive clothes had such bad table manners. But I didn’t say anything this time, and Phineas went on talking and eating at once. “You know the old legends about crows and ravens, that they’re messengers from beyond your world?”

  “I thought it
was hell, specifically, that they were messengers from.”

  “No. At least, I don’t know what legends you’ve heard, but that’s not how it really works.”

  “So you got a message from the crows.” Sure, why not. It probably wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever told me.

  “Yes. It took them a while to find me. I’m going to have to leave as soon as we’re done with breakfast.”

  We chewed in silence for a few minutes while I contemplated just how, exactly, one talked to crows, and waited for him to explain. When he didn’t, I asked, “So what was the message? Was it about the ritual to bring back the dead?”

  Phineas stood up and crumpled his greasy wrapper in one big hand. “No. It was a little on the personal side. Give the hound a hug for me.”

  That was the last time I saw him for the next week and a half. Whether by coincidence or some special phantasm psychic powers, he showed up at my doorstep again the same day Beowulf got his stitches out. No car, as usual, but he did have a suitcase.

  “Ready to go back to Bristol?” he asked.

  I wasn’t. “I don’t know. I’d like to give Wulf another day or two to rest.” That wasn’t really true.

  We were in the kitchen by then, and Wulf had rushed forward to meet Phineas, then over to scratch at the door, begging for a walk. Phineas raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Well, he doesn’t know what’s good for him.”

  He crossed his arms and waited.

  “Fine. I’m scared.”

  And that was true. I’m a pretty brave girl, if I say so myself. I’ve faced down ghosts, fiends, feral ghoulish toddlers with horrible sharp teeth. I’ve kept going despite severed fingers. But seeing Wulf like that, hearing his pathetic little whine, had really shaken me. I decided a direct confrontation with Penny Dreadful, and the Underwoods in general, wasn’t such a fantastic idea after all.

  Phineas, on the other hand, seemed more serious than usual, and more determined than ever. “We don’t have to stay in Bristol,” he said. “But we have to go up there. We need to have a look at Kerr House. And if that doesn’t pan out, we need to turn over every damn stone in Bristol until we find their devil.”