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

by Jen Rasmussen

  The cellar was one big room. There wasn’t much in it except a hump in one corner that I expertly identified as a pile of stuff. It was covered, along with the floor and the walls halfway to the ceiling, in a layer of something fuzzy that I assumed, by the general smell of the place, was mold.

  I walked a circuit around the edges of the room while Wulf sniffed around furiously. His hackles were raised, but he didn’t bay or growl. The mold was everywhere. Inexplicably, there was also an occasional mushroom poking out of the uneven, sometimes lumpy walls. Or a little patch of lichen. I finally got up the courage to touch the fuzz and realized it wasn’t mold at all, but moss.

  This shouldn’t have freaked me out as much as it did. Moss is more pleasant than mold, right? But there was something awful about it, on top of it just being really fucking weird, that I couldn’t quite place until I touched the wall again, above the moss line this time.

  It moved under my fingers.

  I snatched my hand back and found it crawling with worms. Not like earthworms—I could have lived with that—but tiny, wriggling, maggoty things. I bit back a scream and shook them off. They hit the dirt floor in a series of sickening dull patters.

  “What the fuck, Phineas?”

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t—”

  I peered at the spot I’d just touched, although I wasn’t foolish enough to put my hand back out. I could tell what I was looking at now, though, and it wasn’t the concrete or cinder blocks you’d have expected of basement walls. These were made of wood. Not wood paneling. Just wood. Bumpy, knotty, crawling, rotten wood.

  “No, I am not okay! It’s like we’re inside some gigantic, dead tree.”

  I wanted to scream again, but I bit the inside of my cheek, and inwardly scolded myself for being so silly.

  Get a hold of yourself. You’ve seen a lot worse than moss and wood and bugs.

  That was true, but my skin had gone cold and clammy nonetheless. I like trees as much as the next girl, but being trapped inside one was something completely different. I can’t explain it, except to say I felt like I’d been eaten.

  “What the fuck?” I asked again.

  Phineas had walked over to the lump in the corner while I was having my little freak-out. “Ah. So that’s it.”

  “What is?” I went to stand beside him, and I saw what he saw.

  It was not a pile of stuff. It was a table made of branches, all of them covered in the same moss. And also covered with a great deal of something that, even in the crappy light, I knew to be blood.

  “It’s where he works,” said Phineas. “The ritual was done here.”

  “Why a tree?”

  Phineas shrugged. “You’re familiar with the image of the tree of life, branches reaching up into one world, roots going down into another?”

  I remembered a Celtic pendant I used to have, a gift from an old boyfriend. (Where had it gone?) “Sort of, yeah.”

  “Trees are what you want, if you’re doing life and death magic. But I don’t imagine they wanted to do rituals with human hearts out in the open woods.”

  “Great. I’m going to go stand by the stairs now.”

  And I did, while Phineas grabbed Wulf’s leash and looked around a little more. Truth be told, I thought if I stood in front of that table for one more second I’d vomit. That blood had to come from somebody else, a victim we didn’t know about. There was too much of it to be accounted for by three disembodied hearts alone.

  Someone had been killed here, I guessed so their body could be given to one of my canteen ghosts. I hadn’t given much thought to the details of the ritual for bringing back the dead, but it made sense. I mean, you could hardly give the person you were raising their own body back, could you? I was pretty sure people would notice a decayed zombie walking around, even in Bristol.

  Life and death magic, Phineas had just said. Sure. You couldn’t have one without the other. If you were going to bring someone back from the dead, you’d have to put someone else in their place.

  I felt sick thinking of someone spending their last moments in this terrible place. What they’d have been thinking and feeling, whether they’d understood what was happening. I hoped they were unconscious.

  Finally Phineas sighed and said, “There doesn’t seem to be anything else this room can tell us. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice.

  After that I really did have to go to the restroom, so we made our way to the guest house after all. It had been gutted at some point to serve its new purpose as museum gift shop, and the normal feel of it was soothing. The shop itself sat behind a little lobby area with a few tables and chairs. The ladies with the toddlers were still there, licking at ice cream cones while their sticky children played on the floor.

  When I got back from the ladies’ room, Phineas was standing in front of a display on the wall, yet another picture in a gilded frame, flanked by two plaques.

  “More portraits?” I asked as I came to stand beside him.

  The picture was of the current members of the Bristol Garden Club. Madeline Underwood was one of them, as was Marjory Smith. There were two other women about Marjory’s age, late fifties, maybe, or early sixties, and a heavyset (fake) redhead with very big teeth.

  And in the middle of them all, looking out of place among such a dour crowd, was a woman with blond hair, fake boobs, and bright blue eyes. She was showing off her I-spend-two-hours-a-day-at-the-gym upper arms in a sleeveless sweater. I glanced at the plaque that listed their names from right to left. The trophy wife was Mrs. Suzanne Warner, another name I couldn’t place but thought I’d heard before.

  Wulf whined beside me. He needed to use the restroom himself. We left, and paused in the parking lot while Wulf peed on the trunk of a pin oak. I didn’t pay much attention to the minivan pulling up beside us, until the driver rolled down her window and said, “Hi!” in a voice perky enough for me to instantly hate her.

  It was the trophy wife. She was smiling at us, displaying excessively deep dimples that Suzanne Warner’s photo had shown no evidence of, despite the fact that she was smiling in it. They reminded me of the little boy ghost, when he’d smiled at Beowulf.

  But they reminded me of another ghost more.

  The eyes flashing at me with amused ill will were not Suzanne Warner’s pert blue ones, but a rich, liquidy brown.

  And then, too late, I remembered where I’d heard the name John Kerr before. It had nothing to do with candy.

  “Gemma,” I said.

  Beside me, Phineas said something else, too low for me to be certain, but I thought it was Mercy.

  Suzanne-Gemma didn’t answer or make any move to leave her seat, but the side doors of her minivan opened, and out came three women. Another emerged from the passenger side. It was most of the Bristol Garden Club, looking like a cross between a brute squad and a coven.

  Marjory Smith was walking across the lawn. I guessed we knew who called them. Had Madeline Underwood shown our picture around to everyone, demanding to be notified if we turned up anywhere? But they’d never confronted us directly before. I glanced around. The parking lot was deserted.

  My musings were halted by that same Madeline Underwood. She stepped forward and produced something from her purse that at first I thought was a voodoo doll, I guess because the word coven was still hanging in my head. As she got closer to me, I had just enough time to register that it was, in fact, a tiny spray can, before she pointed it at Phineas’s face and sprayed.

  He disappeared. Just like the day I’d seen him going back to his own world, except so briefly I could barely register that he was gone before he was back again. It was long enough to escape the pepper spray, though.

  I had no such luck. As I stood marveling at Phineas’s magic trick, the redhead, her spray can hooked to a teddy bear key chain, got me right in the eyes.

  I had my hands over my face after that, and was too busy yelling fuck over and over again (as I do in such situations) to h
ear much of what was going on. I was shoved. Wulf was howling. Then decidedly masculine hands grabbed my shoulders. While Phineas pulled and tugged at me, I felt the leash leave my hand as Wulf ran off. Someone shouted something. A car door slammed. Another car door opened, closer, and Phineas shoved me inside.

  There was a high-pitched feminine scream, more howling, the sound of high heels against the blacktop. Phineas shouted something in a language I recognized, but did not know, the language the fiend Jeffrey Litauer had once used against me. There was another scream. I was crying by then, and trying not to rub my face, vaguely aware that you weren’t supposed to if you’d been sprayed with pepper spray.

  There was an oddly incongruent sound of air brakes. Then more car doors. Wulf was licking my ear as my car started and began moving.

  “What just happened?” I asked between continued shouts of fuck.

  “A school bus pulled up, full of kids,” said Phineas. “The ladies composed themselves and moved rather quickly toward the gate house.”

  “You couldn’t kill those bitches or something?”

  “In front of two dozen ten-year-olds?”

  The car took a series of turns, and Phineas stayed quiet for a while. I turned my own drama down to a dull moan.

  Finally he said, “You didn’t see her, did you? When she got out of the van.”

  “You mean Suzanne Warner? I saw her long enough to know that’s Gemma Fucking Pierce in that body.”

  “Well, I don’t know Gemma Fucking Pierce, but I can tell you one important thing about her.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  A milk compress and a fair amount of whining fixed my pepper spray problem, at least partially. The issue of Gemma Pierce was a little harder to resolve.

  “She’s one of your canteen ghosts,” Phineas said once I’d stopped swearing and crying long enough to have a conversation. By then he’d fed Wulf, and was making instant coffee with the crappy little hotel coffee maker.

  “Yes. Well, no. She’s not my canteen ghost. I didn’t banish her. But I knew her there.”

  “And?”

  I sighed. “It’s complicated. She was my friend. She was…”

  I’d been about to say a good person, but was that quite true? There had always been that little edge there, beneath the surface, that for all her kindness to me had frightened me a little.

  “She helped me,” I said finally, which was certainly true. “And she liked it there. We offered to bring her out with us.”

  “We?”

  “My friend. It’s a long story.” I did not want to talk about Tom. “But something happened, at the end. Jeffrey did some ritual to her, and she kind of went lifeless for a few days. She almost didn’t come out of it, and when she did she was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Quiet. Angry.”

  My eyes had cleared just enough to see that Phineas was frowning. He took the milk cloth and handed me another towel, this one soaked with what smelled like dish detergent.

  “You want me to put soap in my eyes now? What, I’m not in enough pain for you?”

  “Pepper spray is oil based,” he said. “Be gentle, but try to get the soap on the worst spots.”

  “How do you know so much about pepper spray?”

  “I was reading up on it on your phone during your third and fourth profanity monologues. Then I spent the fifth through, I would guess, the seventh or eighth running to the gas station across the street for milk and soap.”

  “You left me alone here?”

  “I didn’t think you’d miss me.”

  “Did you get me a candy bar?”

  “No, but we’ll get some real food soon.”

  I closed my eyes and dabbed the soapy cloth around them and across the lids. “What did you say?”

  “I said we’ll get—”

  “No, not just now. When they pulled up. Did you actually ask for mercy?”

  He was quiet long enough to make me open my eyes again. His blurry form stood looking out the window, shoulders rigid. I waited.

  “I said Mercy,” he said finally. “But I wasn’t asking for it. She… your Gemma reminded me of someone.”

  “Are you sure she’s my Gemma then, and not your someone? Could your someone have been in my canteen too?”

  I expected the usual rejoinder of my canteen, but Phineas just shook his head. “Mercy Tanner is long gone.”

  I kept waiting, but he only busied himself with the coffee.

  “Phineas!”

  He set a mug in front of me and sat down with another in his hands. After a resigned sigh he said, “Mercy Tanner was a human woman I… knew.”

  I bit back a smartass comment about the use of the word knew. Judging by the misery in his voice, it was not the time. “When was this?” I asked instead.

  “1764,” he said. “It was November 1764 when I saw her last.”

  “So for you that was…” I tried to remember what the math was.

  “A little more than ten years ago,” he said.

  “You don’t sound over it.”

  “If I’d stayed here the whole time and it was two hundred and fifty years ago, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be over it.”

  “What happened?”

  “She ran off, after betraying me to an enemy. She told him how to get to me and he almost killed me. Meanwhile she disappeared with a few of my valuables, including my vessel.” He glanced at me. “The canteen, I mean.”

  “And who was this enemy?”

  “He’s called Amias. And he’s killed nearly fifty phantasms over the last fifteen years. That we know of.”

  I groaned a little. “Another fiend serial killer?

  “Amias makes Jeffrey Litauer look like your grandma.”

  “Actually, my grandma is kind of scary.”

  “Someone else’s grandma, then. The point is, there’s no comparison. Not even to someone who nailed people’s hearts to their wrists. You’ve never seen anything like these crime scenes, believe me.”

  It wasn’t hard to resist the urge to ask for details. “When you say over the last fifteen years, I assume you mean your time.”

  Phineas nodded. “I was tracking him, in fact I was closing in on him, when Mercy turned the tables.” He shrugged, but it was jerky, a poor attempt to appear flippant. “I hope she was well paid, at least.”

  “And you haven’t found him or her since.”

  He shook his head as he stared into his coffee cup. “That wasn’t her, in Suzanne Warner’s body. It was just her smile. The curve of it, those dimples. It was like looking at Mercy’s mouth in someone else’s face. But when she got closer, so I could look her in the eyes, I knew it wasn’t her.”

  “It was Gemma’s mouth too,” I said. “If that’s a family resemblance and Gemma and Mercy are related, this Amias has to be the Bristol devil. How many devils could Mercy’s family have been friendly with?”

  “I suspected it all along, because of the connection to my vessel. But suspicion wasn’t enough.” Phineas gave me a wry half smile. “I’m considered by some to be a bit over obsessed with him. And until just recently, he hadn’t killed anyone for a long time. Everyone thought he was dead, or he’d stopped for some reason. I needed evidence.”

  “What do you mean, until recently? How recently?”

  Phineas sighed. “That was my message from the crows. It was definitely him. He does it in a very specific way. And she was the first victim we’ve found in almost four—”

  He slammed down his cup.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Almost four years my time! How could I have missed that?”

  “I’m still missing it.”

  “That would put his last victim right around 1923.”

  Well, that was interesting. There was no question that Gemma was the ghost banished from Kerr House in 1923. I told Phineas the story she told me, about her affair with John Kerr, that she got pregnant with his baby. Mrs. Kerr
killed Gemma in that house. And Gemma haunted the family, making sure they didn’t get any babies of their own, until their line was dead and gone.

  Phineas was frowning by the time I finished. “So Amias hasn’t killed anyone since she was banished, and he just killed someone again right after he brought her back. We need one of your lists. Possible reasons he would’ve gone quiet while she was gone.”

  I held up my right hand and ticked off a few on my fingers. “She’s his partner, or an accessory. She’s actually the boss, and he’s following her orders. She has a role in the murder. She helps him prepare for it. She drives the getaway car.”

  My breath caught.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “What is?” asked Phineas.

  “She helps him get away. Or at least gives him a place to hide.” The devil’s bargain was for sanctuary. If Amias wouldn’t kill anyone while Gemma was absent from Bristol, maybe it was because it was too risky. Maybe the sanctuary was compromised.

  Phineas seemed to be following my line of thought. “Which would mean she’s part of the bargain. Or she struck it.”

  I pulled out my phone, but my eyes were still too irritated to look at the screen. I handed it to Phineas. “Now we definitely need a list. This is too much new stuff to process without one.”

  He handed back my phone and got the cheap pad and pen from the nightstand instead. “I prefer ink.”

  “How quaint. Fine. We need to know the details of the bargain. Whether Gemma made it, or what her place in it is. Why Amias needs her.”

  “Bargain details, Gemma connection,” Phineas said as he wrote. “And what her connection to Mercy is, too.”

  “Sure,” I said, although that sounded more like a personal inquiry than something we really needed to know. “Next item, we need to know how to banish Gemma. Can you make me a new canteen, since you broke my old one?”

  “My old one,” Phineas said absently. He looked up from the pad and shook his head. “I found out a couple of things about that ritual while I was home. It’s impossible for Suzanne Warner’s soul to be restored to her body at this point. She’s dead. If we banish Gemma, her body dies too.”