It was Rebecca, carrying a camping lantern. I wondered how she’d known I was there. And whether she was coming for me as a friend, or an enemy.
“Where’s Phineas?” I asked. There was no one else I trusted with the story I had to tell.
But Rebecca shook her head. “He’s not back. Said there was something urgent he had to check at home. We haven’t seen him since.”
She gestured for me to follow her, but I turned and looked back at the lake, the way I’d walked in.
You could just walk right back out again.
It was a cowardly thought, but not without its charms.
“Lydia.”
I looked back at Rebecca. With so little time left, I might as well just roll the dice, and see how she reacted to what Madeline had told me. So I fell in step beside her, and recounted my visit to the prison.
Nothing obviously horrible happened as we walked, so I guessed maybe being with her was enough to turn off the magical fence. Either that or I’d just been cursed without realizing it.
By the time I finished talking, we’d come nearly to the front porch. Rebecca stopped and turned to face me.
Shit, can’t we have our little face-off inside, where it’s warm?
“But of course you had more sense than to believe this.” Her voice was even colder than the wind. I crossed my arms, as if it would defend me against both.
“Did I?”
“Bella would never associate with Amias. But we know this Madeline person would. And has been, for quite a long time. She’s Amias’s creature. She’s feeding you what he wants you to eat.”
“But he’s abandoned her now,” I said. “She’s alone and broken and pissed off. And who better to get back at Amias for her than his biggest enemies? A woman scorned, and all that.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Rebecca said. “My sister wouldn’t betray me. Neither of my sisters. We’ve had this farm, been doing what we do here, for hundreds of years by your time. You really think they’d throw that all away? For anything he could promise them?”
“I couldn’t say. I don’t know either of them. Or you either, for that matter.” My voice had gotten increasingly stiff as this conversation went on. Now it sounded downright hostile, even to me. “Why didn’t you look for Bella?”
“What?”
“When she didn’t come back, and you didn’t hear from her. Why didn’t you look for her? Was it maybe because you already knew she was dead? Why aren’t you looking for Henrietta? Is it maybe because she’s not really missing?”
“You think I didn’t want to go after them?” Her voice was low now, and crackling with anger. “Both of them? I’m the oldest, you know.”
“I didn’t know, but I don’t see why it matters. You didn’t go after them.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t leave the farm. There has to be a Traven here.”
Shit. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. The sanctuary spell in Bristol had only worked while there was a living Tanner there. The enchantment over the farm might work the same way. There always seemed to be blood ties—or at least blood—involved, when it came to magic. Especially magic this powerful.
No doubt sensing that she’d scored a point, Rebecca pressed her advantage. “Phineas trusts me. That’s not enough for you?”
“Phineas trusted Mercy. He’s not always the best judge. Maybe he has a soft spot for witches. Or maybe you enchanted him.”
She took a step closer to me. The instinct to step back was fleeting. I stepped forward instead.
I don’t know what would have happened, if the crows hadn’t descended upon us just then. I’m sure it would have involved me getting my ass kicked.
But they did come. Five crows, swooping down and landing a few feet away with a hell of a lot of hoarse chatter. They quieted down when Rebecca went to them, and the cawing seemed much more organized. Sometimes there was no noise at all, and I guessed they were probably communicating telepathically, which made more sense than Rebecca speaking crow. I thought I saw her nodding a few times. Finally they flew off again.
Even by the weak light of her lantern, I could see that Rebecca’s lips were pressed together so hard it must have hurt. She muttered something.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did something happen to Phineas?”
“Phineas isn’t coming back.”
“What?”
“Did Phineas tell you how his Uncle Ranulf died? Amias’s father?”
I shrugged, confused. “No. Only that he died when they were young.”
“No, he didn’t tell me either. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what happened himself. But it seems it was suicide. Ranulf jumped from the top level of their tower. Amias was the one who found him.”
“That sucks, but what does it have to do with Phineas not coming back?”
“They were only seven years old. You know how those sorts of things are kept from children. Phineas barely remembers it. So he didn’t realize, until he went to see his mother.”
“Realize what?”
“That it was the night of Homecoming when it happened. Ranulf had been so sure that was the year she would come.”
“Alice, you mean.”
“Yes. It broke him, when she didn’t.”
“The crows told you all this?”
“They gave me the general sense of it, as Phineas gave it to them. I’m filling in a couple of blanks. The point is, that year, when they were seven, when Ranulf finally accepted that his wife was never coming home—”
“Shit,” I interrupted. “That was the last time Halloween and your Homecoming overlapped, wasn’t it?”
Rebecca nodded.
I shook my head. “It’s a crazy coincidence, but so what? Amias would blame his mother for that.”
“I don’t know who he blames. Phineas seems to think there was some sort of scene between his own mother and Amias’s father that day. Maybe Amias holds her partly responsible. And wants some kind of revenge.”
“So Phineas thinks…”
“He thinks we’ve been preparing for an attack in the wrong place.”
“Shit,” I said again.
“He thinks Amias pointed us all in the direction of the farm as a means of keeping our eyes elsewhere—”
“—so he can go back home and do his mass murder at the Homecoming celebration instead,” I finished. “In which case, Phineas’s parents are the ones in danger.”
I could see why he wasn’t coming back. It was only a theory. Judging from Rebecca’s disapproving face, she considered it a wild one at that. And maybe she was right. But Phineas wouldn’t want to risk it.
I turned away from Rebecca. I needed to think.
Not that I could. Every thought was more confused than the last, and they were all clamoring for attention, while my mind seemed unable to rest on any one for very long.
The problem was, I had no idea who to trust. That whole story, conveniently arriving via crow right after I started questioning Rebecca’s loyalty, might be completely made up. Phineas might be coming back, or he might be elsewhere.
Someone, certainly, was leading me into a trap. Madeline? Rebecca? Amias? Which direction was the trap in? Or was there more than one trap, even?
The only person I trusted was off on another plane. Not even Wulf was at my side. I was entirely alone.
Wulf.
I had an image of him, the first night we were at the farm, wagging his tail while Rebecca put a bowl of stew down in front of him.
On the other hand, he’d always cowered at the sight of Madeline Underwood.
It maybe wasn’t the very best criteria for deciding who to trust, but then again, decisions have been made on the basis of stupider things.
So I decided to assume Rebecca was being honest about what the crows had told her. Which meant Phineas was even now preparing his defenses back home.
If he was wrong, and Amias came to Traven Farm after all, Rebecca and Cl
audia and the rest of them were ready. There were enough of them who could do the ritual, and those who couldn’t could be on standby to light fires as needed.
If he was right, and Amias was coming to his plane instead, there was no reason Phineas couldn’t carry out pretty much the same plan.
Except that Phineas sucked at magic.
Had he ever watched us do the out-of-body ritual? Did he know it, well enough to teach it to anyone else? If he tried to do it himself, the results could be disastrous.
I turned back to Rebecca, who seemed lost in her own thoughts.
“You need to send me there,” I said. “I have to help him.”
She wanted to wait until the next day, when the veil would be thin and traveling would be easier on me. But I wasn’t having it.
“It’s dangerous to send you now,” she warned.
I knew that better than she did. I remembered the feeling of my lungs collapsing, my mind splintering. “But the overlap with our thin day is only an hour there,” I said. “Homecoming could already be underway.”
By then we were back in the kitchen. The dawn hadn’t come yet, and the house was quiet. Rebecca glanced out the window at the sky, then closed her eyes, maybe doing math in her head. “It is,” she said finally. “Or it will be shortly.”
“Well, there you go. I can’t wait. It might be too late if I do.”
“But we don’t even know if he’s right. It’s a guess.”
“Nobody knows Amias as well as he does. I’ll take his guess over any fact you put in front of me.” That wasn’t entirely true—I had a few doubts about Phineas’s theory—but I wasn’t about to admit them to her.
Eventually, she gave in.
I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. But I also had no idea how long I’d be gone, my time. Despite the inconvenient hour, I called Martha, who seemed wide awake and assured me that she and Max would love to have Wulf for as long as it took.
That job done, I turned back to Rebecca, who had already set a bowl of water on the table, beside what I suspected was a bottle of sage oil.
“Can I bring things?” I asked.
“Only what’s on your person, or anything in your hand.”
She lent me a sweater with zippered pockets. I put the bone dagger and a little packet of salt in one, and the skullcap candle in the other.
“A lighter?” I asked.
She found a box of matches, which I added to the pocket with the candle in it.
“You have a remnant?” asked Rebecca.
I was surprised by that, and not a little suspicious. What did she want a remnant for? I’d decided to trust her, but that didn’t mean I really did.
Was this ritual she was setting up even the one I’d asked her for? What if she sent me somewhere else, and I couldn’t get back?
“Isn’t the remnant for trapping me there?” I asked. “And will I lose it?”
“Not for trapping you there, for helping to hold you there,” Rebecca said. “The term anchor is very apt. Humans aren’t made to travel the way my kind can. It’s difficult for you to stay in a world where you don’t belong.”
“So the remnant will act kind of like gravity, attaching me to that plane.”
“Exactly.”
Maybe that made sense and maybe it didn’t, but waffling about it wasn’t going to help Phineas. I either had to do this or not. I handed Rebecca my locket.
“All right,” she warned one last time. “This won’t be as bad as when Phineas took you without a ritual to ease your way, but it will still be a struggle. There’s a reason humans only do it on thin days.”
I nodded. “Just light the oil.” Then, in case she really was on my side and I’d been a colossal bitch since I’d gotten back, I added, “Please.”
The ritual was just like the one I used to send ghosts into the switchel ring—salt, fire, dropping in the remnant. The incantation was different, but it was in the same language.
The trip sucked about as much as I expected it to.
Rebecca was right; it wasn’t as bad as traveling with Phineas. But it was even worse than being sucked into the canteen, and that was not an experience I had pleasant memories of, or cared to repeat. There was a lot of pressure, first from the outside, and then from within, pushing against my skull.
The pain in my head was bad enough to make me cry out, but luckily Rebecca knew better than to stop.
There was a buzzing in my ears, and what looked like the flies to match it, swarming over my eyes.
I couldn’t breathe. Everything went dark.
Then I took in a huge breath, like I’d just come up from under water, and opened my eyes.
And I was in a new place.
I blinked up at the sky. It was the normal blue you’d expect, so at least that much was familiar. I smelled grass. People were laughing and chatting, somewhere close. And something was tickling my cheek.
Grass, of course. Too tall for me to see around.
I sat up, and a wave of dizziness and nausea told me that was as far as I was going to get for the moment. But it was far enough for me to see the source of the noise: phantasms, twenty or thirty of them, setting out food on tables arranged around a tower that stretched up above the trees. They wore jackets and pants in mostly bright, primary colors. A few were singing. A child ran by with a yellow-brown ball, whooping as he threw it to his friend.
Except for the fact that the leaves on the trees were blue and purple, it might have been any party, in any park in my own world.
A sudden voice beside me made me yelp. I’d been watching the kids, and hadn’t noticed the tall phantasm approaching. Unlike the others, his clothes were a muted, plain brown. I could see the tip of something strapped to his back, and thought it might be a crossbow, or maybe one of Phineas’s stonebows.
Are you the cops, then?
He said something that sounded like a question, in a language that seemed familiar. Not the language I’d become accustomed to doing incantations in. This was much more like the language Jeffrey Litauer had spoken, and Drayne. I was pretty sure it was the same, although I couldn’t have sworn to it.
I knew now that there were no such things as fiends, that they were all just phantasms, but still. Hearing that harsh accent did nothing to put me at ease. And it’s not like I was all that relaxed to start with.
“Pardon me?” I asked. If they all traveled so much, maybe he would know English.
It seemed he did. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Who are you with?”
“I just came—” I stopped abruptly and felt around in the grass, momentarily panicked.
The first thing you do is find your remnant. You should know better.
But unlike the netherworld, this ground showed no signs of wanting to swallow my locket. “You just came…” the maybe-cop prompted as I closed my hand around it.
I looked up at him and smiled. “I just came using a ritual. I’m looking for Phineas.”
He scowled. “The veil doesn’t go thin for almost an hour yet.”
“Believe me, I know.” I stood up and took a few seconds to steady myself. “But I couldn’t wait. My business is urgent. Do you know Phineas?”
He made a noise in the back of his throat, the meaning of which I couldn’t guess. “Come with me. He’s in the tower.”
I finished fastening my locket around my neck, then fell into step behind him. I got a few curious stares as we walked, presumably from those who’d also calculated that I was early to the party.
We passed two stone circles, each filled with firewood, but not lit.
Good. Unless Homecoming normally involves bonfires, they’re finally taking Phineas seriously.
My escort glanced at me. “You didn’t come to fill his head with more conspiracy theories, did you?”
Okay, maybe not all of them.
“So he told you Amias is coming?” I asked.
“He always tells us Amias is coming. That’s no reason to make me work during Homecoming.”
>
“It is this time.”
The noise in the back of his throat again. He didn’t say anything else as we made our way to the tower and walked through the wide-open door.
I was expecting something dark and cold, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was downright cozy. The windows were long and narrow, like the arrow slits in a castle, but there were so many of them that it was as bright inside as it had been out. The walls were covered in something deep green that looked like wallpaper. I brushed my fingers against it. It was soft, like flannel.
My guide led me to the curved staircase that hugged the far wall. I looked up as I started to climb, but couldn’t see beyond where it rose through the ceiling. There were voices somewhere above, far away and indistinct.
It was a really tall tower. I wanted to do what I could to help in the fight against Amias, of course, but I kind of hoped that wouldn’t entail walking all the way to the top.
The next floor up was essentially the same, except there were a few gently curved benches, and the wall covering was blue instead of green. Above that another similar room, but with more furniture—tables and chairs—and purple walls.
The staircase kept spiraling up the outer wall, and the voices got closer and closer as we climbed. I thought I could make out Phineas’s by the time we got to the fourth floor (chocolate brown). By the fifth (gold) I was sure of it.
By the sixth (burgundy) I was pretty damn winded. You wouldn’t think six flights of stairs would be all that many, but those were some seriously high ceilings. It was more like eighteen of the stories I was used to.
The seventh—and thankfully final—floor was white and cream, with tall tables scattered around and more benches between the windows. Phineas was there with two older phantasms who, judging by their looks, had to be his parents. But I’m not going to lie: I was almost as happy to see the end of that winding staircase as I was to see him.
All three of them were facing the stairs, waiting. They’d have heard us clamoring up, of course. Phineas gaped at me, while his parents looked politely confused.
“You know this human, detective?” my escort asked.
“Yes, Flynn. She’s all clear,” Phineas said.
His mother had been murmuring something to him in their own language, but hearing English, immediately made the switch. “You brought somebody to Homecoming? Is she your…”
Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3) Page 12