by E. E. Holmes
Talia shook her head, looking disgusted. “And if I write you a nice big check for your new project? Do you think he’ll start talking then?”
Campbell looked genuinely affronted. “Talia, you know that’s not how it works!”
“I don’t know anything anymore!” she cried. Overcome with tears, she got up and fled the dining room.
Campbell closed his eyes and ran his hand over his face. He looked really tired all of a sudden, like sleep had eluded him for the last few days and exhaustion was finally catching up with him. It was strange how quickly tiredness came over him, how the circles beneath his eyes just seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Ready?”
I yelped. Hannah had come up behind me, and now looked impatient. Milo floated at her side.
“Yeah, let’s go.
The second we were clear of the dining room, I pulled my phone out and texted the pictures to Finn. “WE HAVE A PROBLEM. Found a rune too.” I typed.
We half-ran back to our room without exchanging a single word, but we broke into frantic discussion the moment we closed our door safely behind us.
“It’s a Summoning Circle! He’s turning this place into a giant Summoning Circle!” Hannah cried. “And what about that rune you found?”
“The basement is Warded Hannah! The rune was tiny enough, and hidden, but definitely there. Under a padlock on the basement door.”
“But why? What’s down there?” Hannah asked.
“I have no idea. And I’m not convinced that Campbell does either.”
“Wait, how could Campbell not know?” Milo asked. “He’s got to be the one who put it there.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I’m starting to wonder if Campbell’s as much a pawn here as the rest of us,” I said.
Hannah frowned. “What do you—”
“Think about it! This angel just shows up one day. It gives him the power to communicate with the spirits. It sends him visions that lead him to buy a former Durupinen property, and then instructs him on exactly how to turn his purchase into a Summoning Circle. It tells him just enough of what the spirits are saying to keep the money coming, but not enough to clue him in to how unhappy the spirits are. Whatever that angel thing is, it knows about the history of this place, and it knows a lot about the Durupinen, but I don’t think Campbell does. The angel is using him!”
Milo gaped. Hannah let out a dry sob. They both knew I was right; I could see it in their horrified expressions.
“It’s got to be the Necromancers. There’s no other explanation, is there?” Hannah whispered.
“I just don’t know!” I said. “There is definitely someone—or something—involved here using Durupinen knowledge for their own means.”
“We have to get out of here!” Hannah cried. “What if we’ve stumbled right into the middle of a Necromancer plot?”
I could hear the absolute, desperate panic in Hannah’s cry. Our experience with the Necromancers was harrowing for all of us, but no one was more affected than Hannah. The Necromancers’ manipulations, which played masterfully on every fear she’d ever had, were probably more traumatic for her than the sum of her eighteen years as a “mentally ill” orphan.
“I’m with Hannah on this one,” Milo said, looking uncharacteristically serious. “This shit makes the Blair Witch Project look like fun and games.”
“Yeah, it does,” I agreed. “But isn’t this what we signed up for as Trackers? When Finn gets back, we’ll get in touch with Catriona and tell her everything. Then we can get out of here and she can send in some expert-level Trackers to deal with whatever this is. But in the meantime,” and here I paused, giving them both a warning look, “panicking is probably the worst thing we could do.”
Hannah nodded and immediately took a long, slow breath. “You’re right. We don’t have to do anything. We’ll just keep our cover, and leave as soon as we can. Okay, we can do that.”
“Yes, we can,” I said. “So, keeping our cool, let’s discuss this rationally. Maybe if we put our heads together, we’ll be able to figure some of this out.”
“Okay. Right. Just brainstorming,” Hannah said, still taking slow and measured breaths.
“Exactly. So, there used to be a príosún here. Catriona said the Trackers don’t know where, precisely, it stood, but that it was somewhere on the property. Finding that rune on the basement door gave me an idea—what if the príosún was right under this house? What if that’s why the basement is Warded?”
Milo’s eyes widened. “You think the house is sitting on the jail?”
“I think it’s possible,” I said. “Especially if there was anything left of the príosún when this mansion was built. The people who purchased this land and built this house could’ve constructed it right on top of the old structure.”
Milo frowned. “But why would they do that? Why would you build a house on top of rubble?”
“It was common enough,” I said. “If the area was a good spot to build on once—access to fresh water, level ground, whatever—you’d build on it again. Plus, the príosún was probably underground, at least partially. Many of them were, remember. Before power tools and backhoes, why waste time and money digging a whole new cellar? So there could’ve been stones, or debris, or even partial walls that got incorporated into this house when it was built. Who knows what kinds of residual Castings could be on the place?”
“Yeah, that’s true!” Hannah said. “Or maybe they uncovered an artifact or something!”
“Exactly! So if the original builders of the house unwittingly incorporated Durupinen relics during construction, maybe Campbell found or disturbed something during the renovations,” I said. “People find all kinds of weird stuff when they’re renovating—in their walls, under the floorboards, in the foundations. In fact, lots of places aren’t actively haunted at all until someone comes in and starts shaking things up, so to speak. Pierce used to tell me about it all the time.”
Milo jumped in, sounding excited now. “Okay, brilliant theory time! Wait for it… Campbell’s angel thing was trapped in the príosún here, and Campbell unleashed it when he started renovating the place!” Milo took a bow, clearly convinced he’d solved the mystery, but I was already shaking my head.
“The timeline doesn’t fit,” I said. “The angel found Campbell first, then led him to this plantation. If the angel had been trapped here, someone else let it out. The problem is, I don’t think this property had been touched for a long time before that.”
Milo drooped a little. “Okay, fine, theory busted.”
I walked over to the window, on the lookout for Finn’s car. He still hadn’t replied to my text, and I was starting to get antsy—he never took this long to respond. “I just wish we knew what this angel thing is!” I exclaimed. “It’s probably not a spirit—Hannah or I would recognize it if it were. It’s too sentient to be a Wraith, I think. Maybe it’s an Elemental, but Elementals are about fear and hunger, and I’m not sensing either of those things.”
“Me neither,” answered Hannah. “So it must be something we don’t know about yet. But why does it know about the Durupinen? Why does it need a Summoning Circle?”
“Jess, have you tried drawing it yet?” Milo asked suddenly.
I turned away from the window and frowned at him. “No. It doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s just a… cloud. Why would I draw it?”
“Well…you drew Grayson without his revealing himself to you. You hadn’t actually seen him, but you zeroed in on his energy and got a really detailed image. Maybe if you drew the angel, you’d be able to show us something that our eyes didn’t see.”
Hannah’s face brightened. “Hey, yeah! That is a really good idea! Your Muse gifts might tell us something more. And if not, we’d at least have a drawing to send to Catriona. Maybe she’d notice a detail or a clue that we missed.”
“Umm… okay, sure. Why not?” I said, leaving my window vigil and crossing the room to grab my sketchbook. I thought it
was a waste of time, to be honest; I’d only ever been able to use my abilities as a Muse to draw spirits, and as far as any of us could tell, this angel wasn’t a spirit. But Milo’s suggestion had calmed Hannah’s anxiety a bit, and she seemed eager for me to try. I knew at least part of her eagerness stemmed from this being a plan that we could execute in the relative safety of our room, so I decided to humor her.
I tossed my phone over to Hannah as I flipped open the sketchbook. “Just do me a favor and keep an eye out for a text from Finn, okay?” I said. “If he answers while I’m drawing, just tell him to come up.”
“Sure,” Hannah replied, placing the phone on the bed beside her.
I put my pencil to the paper, and searched through my connection to the spirit world, trying to find the moment when I’d first seen the angel.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered. And nothing was exactly what I expected to happen.
That was the last thing I remembered.
§
“Jess?”
Holy fuck, my head hurt. Someone had stuck it in a vice and was turning the crank, crushing it. I tried to answer, but all that escaped me was an agonized moan.
“She’s responding!” said an excited voice. A familiar voice. Hannah’s voice.
“Stay back, though. She might attack again,” a second voice cautioned. It was Finn.
I tried to speak again. My mouth was so dry it felt as though it had been stuffed full of cotton balls. I gagged and tried to wet my lips. The pounding in my head intensified.
“Jess? Can you hear me?” Finn said slowly.
“Stop… loud…” I managed to choke out before I gagged again and dry-retched. As I rolled over, I realized I was on the floor.
“What is it? What did she say?” cried Milo. He sounded absolutely terrified. They all did.
“I said… stop… talking… so… loud!” I gasped. I felt warm salty tears sliding down my face and into my mouth, and that’s when I realized I was crying. Sobbing, actually.
I tried to open my eyes, but the light in the room was like daggers straight to my eyeballs. “Why is it so bright in here?” I gasped. “I can’t see anything!”
“Kill that light!” Finn commanded. “And the one on the table, too.”
I saw the room darken perceptibly through my closed eyelids. Very slowly, I opened my eyes by tiny degrees, until I was just barely squinting at the room around me.
The first thing I saw was Finn, who had backed into the corner of the room between the door and the closet. He was kneeling on one knee, with his hand extended out in front of him as if he were about to fend off something dangerous. Hannah crouched behind him, with the top half of her face peeking out over his shoulder. Milo hovered in the corner above them near the ceiling; he looked ready to spring into action at any second.
As the pressure in my head slowly began to recede, fear flooded in. What was everyone so afraid of?
“What is it?” I asked hoarsely. “Is it behind me?”
“No, there’s nothing behind you. It’s… okay now, I think. How do you feel?” Finn replied, very cautiously.
“My head is killing me and I can hardly see,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing anymore. I think it’s over,” Finn said gingerly.
Hannah burst into tears. She attempted to scramble out from behind Finn and come toward me, but he held her back. “No. Let me go first, just in case.”
Oh my God. They were afraid of me. My own sister, for whom I’d almost literally come back from the dead, was afraid of me.
My heart began to pound even more violently. The tears welled up again. “Finn, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
Finn walked slowly toward me with his hands up, as if I were pointing a loaded gun at him. “Can I come sit beside you, Jess?”
“Of course you can!” I cried. “Finn, you’re really scaring me!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice, although uncharacteristically soothing, had a tremor in it. “I’m not trying to scare you. I’m only trying to keep everyone safe.”
“Safe from what?” I sobbed. I was afraid to move, to open my eyes any further. What would I see? What had I done?
“You had a… when you started drawing the angel, you went into a sort of… state,” Finn explained, although I could tell that state wasn’t quite the word he’d been looking for. As he took the last few steps toward me, I noticed he was limping.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you hurt?” I squeaked, and then—as the awful realization hit me—“Did I hurt you?”
“I’m fine. No need to concern yourself with me,” he replied, using the same intentionally calm and even tone. Even as he said it, the pain in my head receded just enough that I was able to open my eyes a little wider. The very first sight my gaze fell upon was his right thigh: My pencil, the one that I had picked up to draw with, was protruding from Finn’s bloodied leg.
“Finn, your leg! Did I… what the hell… did I stab you?” I shrieked.
“It’s just a pencil. I’m fine,” he intoned, but I was absolutely losing it now. Suddenly, I couldn’t remember how to catch my breath, how to climb out from under the weight of this panic. This was far too much like my Prophecy mural experience at Fairhaven, when I’d awoken out of a Psychic Trance to find Celeste cowering beside me. Holy shit—what could be worse than the Prophecy?
“I don’t remember anything, I can’t—” I looked down at my own hands and my eyes fell on the wall beside me. It was covered in runes and Castings, scribbled everywhere in a wild hand. In horror, I sat upright and took in the rest of the room. Everywhere I looked, I’d scrawled more runes—on the walls, on the furniture, on the doors.
“I didn’t… I don’t… oh my God!” I yelped, before my throat itself started to close up on me. Clutching at my neck, I managed to gasp, “Finn… can’t… breathe…”
Finn placed one hand on either side of my face, gently but firmly. “Look at me, Jess! Look at me.” I found his eyes and locked onto them. “You are okay,” he continued. “Everything is okay. Breathe. Proper breaths now. Just breathe, alright?”
I looked into Finn’s face and breathed with him. In and out, in and out, in and out. As my throat relaxed itself, I lay my forehead against his and tried to rein in my sobbing, but I couldn’t—at least not yet. Finn stroked my cheeks, brushing the tears away as they fell. He continued to direct my breathing, guiding my breaths over and over, reminding me how to breathe. And I did. I breathed in the smell of him and the closeness of him until I was all cried out. I felt my heart rate start to stabilize as the pain receded from my head and my vision cleared.
“There now,” Finn said slowly. “I’m here with you. All calm?”
“Yes,” I said, forcing my swollen eyes open. “Yes, I think I’m alright. Now can you tell me what happened?”
Finn pulled his hands away from my face and sat back on his heels, wincing slightly as he did so. I tried not to look at the wound in his leg, the sight of which made me queasy. “Hannah will have to start. I didn’t arrive until you were already in the middle of… whatever that was.”
Hannah stepped hesitantly away from the wall, twisting her hands nervously together, but before she could take another step, Milo shot down from the ceiling and placed himself between us.
“Milo, you really don’t need to—” Hannah began.
Milo shook his head obstinately. “Sorry, sweetness, but I’m not taking any chances,” he said.
Hannah gave me a weak, apologetic smile from behind Milo. “Sorry, Jess, it’s just… you were—”
“Don’t apologize!” I said impatiently. “Just tell me what happened.”
Hannah wet her lips. “You sat down next to me on the bed and closed your eyes to draw the angel.”
“Yeah, I remember that part,” I said.
“But then, the moment you started drawing, you started… shouting.”
“Shouting? I was shouting?” I asked, horrified.
“
Well, it was loud,” Hannah said, her voice cracking. “You started to draw a shape—I thought maybe it was the outline of a head—and then all of a sudden you were yelling in Gaelic and scribbling on your sketchpad. Thank goodness the floor was deserted… everyone else was still down at dinner. Look what you drew!”
She held my sketchbook up so I could see the image I’d created. It had the vague form of a human, but it was composed entirely of violently scribbled letters and runes, all jumbled together on top of each other.
“What was I saying in Gaelic? Could you tell?” I asked. My Gaelic skills were dicey at best; speaking it fluently was akin to a possessed person speaking in tongues.
Hannah shook her head. “No… you were speaking too fast, and I was in shock. I kept saying your name and trying to reach to you, but you wouldn’t respond to me. Then Milo thought if we took the sketchbook away from you, you might stop. So I grabbed it, but—” Hannah gestured helplessly around at the room, now thoroughly graffitied. “And then Finn showed up.”
Finn took over. “This was well beyond a Psychic Trance, Jess—I know how to break a Trance’s hold. It was rather like a forced Habitation. You couldn’t see or hear us—or you couldn’t respond if you did. I thought if I could get the pencil away from you, we might break you out of its hold, but… well…” Finn glanced down at the pencil still sticking out of his leg.
“You tried to take my pencil, so I stabbed you in the leg.” I said it blankly, because I couldn’t quite believe it. “I stabbed you?” I said again, although this time it was a question.
“That’s about the whole of it, yes,” Finn said quietly.
I took another long, slow breath. “So what finally made me stop?”
“You flung yourself at me trying to get the pencil back, but I fought you off. You had nothing to draw with anymore, so you started scratching at the carpet, but you couldn’t make any more markings. I was about to try to expel the creature from you, even though that would’ve been quite painful for you. But not being able to draw anymore was the key that freed you. Your hands started moving more slowly, and then finally, you sort of… drooped.”