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

by Jen Rasmussen

  What is it with fiends and teeth? But I didn’t say anything out loud. I was staring at the baby, trying to figure out if there was some way to jump Amias and take her without hurting her.

  “Your heart and kidneys, I’ll just eat,” Amias finished.

  “And I would let you do this because…” Phineas raised his eyebrows.

  Amias shrugged. I realized with a chill that it was Phineas’s one-shoulder shrug, and was glad that, whatever weird shit was up between these two, I at least had Phineas’s word that they weren’t brothers.

  “I wasn’t thinking I’d give you a choice,” Amias said. “And I’m sure it goes without saying…” He smiled and nodded at the travel mug in Phineas’s hand. “Take the lid off that, or start an incantation, or light the oil in that bowl, and I’ll break her adorable little neck.”

  Diana woke and started to wail as he slid a finger over her perfect skin. Or maybe it was Gemma. Probably both, united in their revulsion.

  “You wouldn’t dare!” I said. “You need her.”

  Amias smiled at me, the patient look of a teacher to a remedial student, and opened his mouth to say something, but Phineas cut him off before he did.

  “She’s right, you’re bluffing, but it doesn’t matter. The real Diana Warner is dead and gone. Why would I care what you do with the nasty ghost who killed her? Go ahead.” Phineas took the lid off the travel mug. “Snap her neck. Drop her. Smash her against the wall, for all I care.”

  “Now you’re bluffing,” said Amias.

  I knew he was right. Mostly. Of course Phineas didn’t want to see Diana hurt. He knew she was in there, somewhere. But he also knew she might already be beyond recovering. And he’d already told me we needed to accept that risk. If it came down to it, would he sacrifice Diana to get Amias?

  I didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

  I had a set of fireplace tools tucked in the corner where the hearth jutted out from the wall. Purely ornamental, since the fireplace was gas. But pretty enough. And made of iron.

  I’d been inching toward it, slowly, by degrees, whenever Amias was focused on Phineas. Now the poker was within my reach. I knew I couldn’t kill him. But maybe, with luck, I could hurt him enough to get him to drop the baby. And I’d catch her. I hoped.

  I could get myself killed, and worse, Diana could get killed at any of several points in that plan. But I’d still rather count on myself than Phineas.

  With one movement that I hoped was sudden and unexpected, I grabbed the poker and jumped at Amias. I threw my bag of jet in his face and then, while he was distracted by that, stabbed him just above the knee. Phineas threw his own jet at him, for good measure.

  It was hard to tell whose shrieks were louder, Amias’s or the baby’s. I caught her, barely, as Amias fell to the floor. Her head was only inches from the carpet when I did.

  I scurried away as Amias reached out a hand, even though I knew he didn’t have to touch me physically to hurt me. Diana was screaming and crying, frightened from the fall. My grip on her was so tight it was making her cry harder, and the fact that I was smushing her against my shoulder probably wasn’t helping.

  Amias was still on the floor, his face gray with pain, but his mouth was moving. He was saying something, reciting an incantation. I did not have good experiences with fiends sending incantations my way.

  I yanked at the poppet I wore, trying to make sure it wasn’t covered, but I was all tangled up with the baby. My legs crumpled beneath me as a searing pain shot down my spine. I managed to hang on to Diana as I fell, but I banged her little shoulder against the floor, and her screams began anew. I couldn’t feel my feet. Then I couldn’t feel my legs. But I could feel my back, scorching, blistering. I could actually smell it. My spine was red hot, burning me from the inside out.

  I finally got hold of the poppet and held it up. Amias laughed, and then the poppet’s head was on fire. I ripped it off, cord and all, and flung it toward the fireplace, but not before it burned the shit out of my hand.

  All of that happened in a matter of seconds, but Phineas hadn’t spent them standing around. The bowl of water and oil on the table was lit. The travel mug was open beside it. He’d already started the incantation, but when he saw the flaming poppet hit my rug, he stopped and rushed to stamp it out. He pulled the container of his salt-honey-clove concoction out of his pocket and threw it over Amias.

  Amias screeched again. His focus temporarily off me, I scooted farther away, holding Diana in one arm and using the other like an oar to move myself, until my back was against the wall.

  I needed to stand up and run, and was saying all kinds of filthy words to myself in an effort to make that happen, but it was no good. Everything below my hips might as well not have been there at all.

  Phineas was standing over Amias now, reciting again. Amias’s desperate eyes flew from Phineas to me and back to Phineas again. Then he smiled, which I took to be a bad sign.

  Almost casually, Amias flicked a hand, not at me, but at the wooden bookshelf beside me. It burst into flames. I screamed and moved away as fast as I could, but when I tried to stand, I fell again and nearly lost Diana.

  The fire was spreading unnaturally fast, even for fire. The curtains had already gone up.

  “Phineas! I can’t move!”

  Smoke was starting to fill the room, and my eyes. I was coughing and crying, holding Diana against my neck, trying to shield her from the smoke as best I could. And trying to push aside my panic, to calm myself enough to think even a little bit.

  But that was a losing battle, too. I do not like fire.

  I heard a frustrated cry from Phineas, then the sound of glass—my windows?—shattering everywhere. Then Phineas was carrying me, while I carried the baby. There was humid air on my face, a damp summer drizzle.

  Not enough, I thought. That is nowhere near enough water to put out a fire like this.

  A neighbor who was out walking her dog called 911. Phineas sat me down on the porch of the house across the street and took the baby from me. I didn’t want to give her to him, but he was insistent, and I was pretty close to collapse by then.

  The neighbor who had called the fire department was tugging at my sleeve, asking me if Wulf was still in the house. How did she know Wulf? I looked blearily up at her, then down at her dog. Rudy was her dog. No. Ruby. I knew Ruby. Ruby loved Wulf. I looked back at the neighbor. Doreen. That was her name. I shook my head.

  “No. Wulf is at Martha’s.”

  She didn’t know who Martha was, but she got the message anyway. “Is there anyone else in the house at all?” She looked from me to Phineas.

  I raised my eyebrows, but he shook his head.

  “No,” he said to Doreen. “There’s no one else.”

  It was the fucking chimney. Amias had come down it and back up again, like some kind of evil Santa. If only I’d had an iron screen to go with those andirons.

  I asked Phineas—in a not very nice tone—why the fuck he hadn’t mentioned that Amias could fly.

  “It’s not flying, exactly,” was all he said.

  Sure. Great time to argue the finer points of the superpowers every fucking phantasm seemed to have except the one on my side.

  Yeah, I wasn’t in a very good mood.

  My burns only kept me in the hospital for one day, but it was three before I could walk properly again. While we tried to get a hold of Zack Warner, his daughter and I moved into a furnished apartment provided by my insurance company. Wulf stayed on at Martha’s.

  My house was destroyed. And despite my more pressing problems, I was materialistic enough to find some of the losses difficult to accept. My Jane Eyre collection, for one thing. I won’t lie, tears were shed over that.

  But I was able to recover a lot, too. Among those things were a bunch of jagged bits of redware that might once have formed some sort of round shape, maybe a ring.

  As I’d learned from my experience with the canteen, once turned into a vessel, my travel mug c
ouldn’t be destroyed except by its maker. Yet Phineas was so relieved, when he found it among the wreckage of my life, that it almost made me smile for the first time since Amias rang my doorbell. I asked him why it was such a big deal.

  It seemed Phineas had gotten into a lot of trouble when he’d lost the canteen, which was why he’d spent so much time looking for it. He didn’t even want to think about the consequences of losing another vessel, especially in a confrontation with Amias, of all people. How to make those little netherworlds was a great secret, trusted to few. After all, they couldn’t have just anyone making them, using them to get rid of people they didn’t like. So their vessels weren’t supposed to fall into the wrong hands to be studied. And hands didn’t get much wronger than Amias’s.

  That Amias would come back for Diana at some point seemed inevitable. But Phineas claimed to have wounded him pretty badly, right before he escaped. Something about a curse and his nervous system. I tried not to look skeptical as he assured me that Amias would have to go to ground for a pretty long time before he’d be in any kind of shape to take up the fight again.

  As I recovered from my injuries and grew stronger, Diana grew progressively weaker. She became listless, her cries weak, her appetite waning. Gemma was a weed, choking out the life that was supposed to be growing in that body. She had to be pulled.

  Phineas went home to try to find some ritual that would get the ghost out of the baby. I’d questioned every source I knew, too, but so far we’d come up with nothing. If that didn’t change, and soon, it seemed certain that Diana would die.

  Would her body die with her? Or would Gemma, now in complete control of it, bounce back healthy? I suspected it was the latter; otherwise she’d have let go by now. She wouldn’t like killing a baby. She might do it anyway, to keep herself alive, but she wouldn’t do it for no reason.

  When Phineas came back, it was not with good news. The clock in my world was ticking too fast for him to spend more than a couple of hours in his, and in that time he’d only come up with one thing.

  “It’s dangerous,” he said. “It’s a water ritual. She could drown if we don’t get Gemma out of her fast enough, and I’m told it doesn’t always work, but it’s the only thing I found that came even close.”

  “What if we wait it out a little longer?” I asked. “This possession has to become unwilling at some point. Diana’s survival instincts will kick in. She’ll fight back.”

  Phineas shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’ll be too weak. She probably already is.”

  “Well, we are not going to risk drowning her, so we’d better come up with something else!”

  “This is the best we’re going to be able to do, Lydia.”

  “NO!” I was nearly hysterical. I was not about to let this baby die. All my pent-up wishes for a baby, and here…

  But you aren’t the only one with pent-up baby wishes, are you?

  No, I wasn’t. And maybe that was the key to saving us all.

  I put Diana-Gemma in her stroller. I popped a diaper and a bottle into the diaper bag and put the bag in the mesh basket underneath. I started to grab for Wulf’s leash, then remembered he was still in exile at Martha’s for trying to kill the baby. He tried, Amias tried, even I came close to dropping the poor thing on her head. But the baby was still alive. We’d come this far.

  “Where are you going?” It was the third time Phineas had asked me that question since I started making these preparations.

  I finally answered him. “For a walk.”

  “A walk. You can hardly move, still.”

  “I’ll manage. I want to be outside.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.” I reached down to touch the sleeping baby’s cheek. It was cold. “We’ve got to have some girl talk.”

  His look clearly conveyed his conviction that I was insane, but he didn’t try to stop me. He was right, though. I couldn’t move well, and I didn’t make it far. But I didn’t need to. There was a little park in the apartment complex, so small it barely warranted the name. Just a couple of benches, a few trees, and a sand pit in the middle, for the kids to play in. There were several there, and the benches all occupied by their mothers.

  I kept my distance, in the shade of a tree nearby. I pulled the baby out of the stroller and held her where she could see the children, too. I pinched her gently, just enough to wake her. I hated doing it that way, but judging by how pale she was, I was in too much of a hurry for finesse.

  “She’s going to die if you don’t leave her soon, Gemma,” I said. “One way or another. We’ll try to force you out if we have to, but she could drown. And I know you don’t want to kill her. You could have by now, if you wanted to.”

  She let out a petulant cry, but she didn’t have the strength to keep it up. A captive audience, then. Perfect.

  I gave Miss Gemma Pierce a talking to that day. About motherhood. About babies. About freedom and chances and all the things the devil of Bristol had taken—from her, from Mercy Tanner. From so many victims, including those he’d killed on Gemma’s behalf. But he didn’t have to take anything away from this baby. He’d have no interest in her at all, if there wasn’t a Tanner attached to her.

  Diana Warner didn’t have to be tethered to that beast, the way Gemma had once sworn she would never allow her children to be.

  I talked about there being sins, and then there being corruptions so bad that you’d never recover from them, not in the next life, not in the next thousand lives. I had no idea whether this was true, in the greater sense, but it didn’t matter. It sounded true to me, and I knew it would sound true to her, too. The Gemma I knew, the one who wasn’t a monster, had to be there somewhere.

  I told her she could just follow her anchor and go back to Kerr House, if she must. Even if that meant Amias trying to bring her back to life again. We’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Just as long as she didn’t murder this little girl.

  I don’t know which part of this grand speech did it. I don’t even know the exact moment when it happened. She was half awake, her eyes drooping, but I kept holding her so the mothers and the children were in her line of sight. She let out a few sighs, here and there, but none were remarkable. Eventually she fell asleep, and I stopped talking. I put her back in the stroller and started back. She woke up half way, but not in any unusual way. Not with a start or a cry or a laugh. Just one little gurgle to let me know she was there.

  But which she?

  I pulled the stroller to the edge of the sidewalk and knelt down beside it.

  And Diana Warner smiled up at me.

  She had no dimples.

  I don’t know who I was crying for, but it was a while before I could talk. I handed her over to Phineas when I got back, and went to my room and closed the door behind me. I stood at my bedroom window, looking out at what I thought were the tops of the trees in the park we’d just been in, maybe one of them the very tree we’d been under.

  She was an awful person. A menace who had to be stopped. She’d stolen lives out of selfishness and greed. But she’d saved mine, before. And now Diana’s.

  And she was my friend. And I let her down.

  “Sail on, Gemma,” I whispered.

  Later, Phineas insisted on checking Kerr House, to see if Gemma had gone back there, but I knew she hadn’t. I knew she was gone.

  So Helen Turner was at least partly wrong. There were a few I didn’t fail. Max, Hugh, Diana. Maybe even Gemma. And I’d done it all without the canteen.

  I went to Bristol with Phineas in August, and saw a For Lease sign on the door of the diner. The windows were boarded up. For the first time in maybe ever, a Bristol business had failed.

  So the bargain was over, and the Bristol devil was gone. And okay, maybe we’d lost him for the moment, a source of great frustration for Phineas. But we’d flushed him out of his hole, and no place was safe for him now. There would never be any more living Tanners. His sanctuary was ruined forever.

  As f
ar as I was concerned, it all made for a pretty happy ending.

  Phineas went to talk to Mark and Madeline Underwood a few times, but neither threats nor bribes could get anything out of them. On those occasions, I stayed in The Witch’s Brew and let him go to the Mount Phearson alone. I thought if I had to see Madeline’s thin brows pinched over her thin nose, her thin little smile, after what she’d done to Penny and Max, after Phineas, after everything that had happened at that hotel, that I would end up getting arrested for doing something violent to her.

  Wendy looked out the window of her shop that day in August, and nodded across the street at the boarded up diner.

  “Our souls belong to us again,” she said.

  I asked her if she was sorry. I mean, Amias was an evil asshole, but he’d kept the place running for them all.

  “It’s a shame for Tim Poole. That diner was in his family three generations.” She turned away and smiled at me. “But you know what? I’m getting okay with seeing if I can survive on my own merits, for once.”

  Wendy and I stayed in touch, but as time went on without the Underwoods varying from their usual dour and creepy routine, our email exchanges focused more and more on other things, books or movies or a recipe one of us had found.

  Zack Warner did not keep in touch, which made me sad, but I guessed I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to be reminded of everything. I tried to tell myself that Diana was in good hands—she’d have a stable, affluent home life, at least—and that her brief time with me had been enough of an influence to keep her from becoming a diva like her older sisters. Of course I knew perfectly well that last part was nonsense, but I couldn’t stand the thought of her growing into a brat.

  There was never any question of what would happen to Max. He stayed with Martha, and they were happy as clams in a pod, or however the saying goes. Wulf came home with me, but enjoyed visits with Jack Nimble quite often.

  By the time summer started giving way to autumn, life was pretty normal again, the fire an administrative chore of paperwork and phone calls, Bristol the occasional day trip, and eventually not even that. Phantasms mostly just a memory. I saw less and less of Phineas.