by E. E. Holmes
“I know what you mean,” Hannah said when I confided this to her. “I’m feeling sort of downhearted, too.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied, with her own quiet wisdom apparent in her tone. “We did a lot of good, but there was sadness and injustice here that we couldn’t fix. Poor Jeremiah was really a victim, wasn’t he? He wasn’t knowingly doing anything wrong—and I really do think his intentions, at least at the start, were good. But now his dreams of helping people are over. And so many of the people here are going home just as sad and empty as when they arrived, which is a shame. But you were right, Jess. Crossing Irina would’ve been the kindest way to end this, all things considered. I’m sad about that. I mean, she did take advantage of these people, but she also gave them a kind of hope. It wasn’t even false hope either—not totally.”
The walk through the lobby did nothing to make me feel any better. Kyle’s parents were standing at the front desk, tearfully demanding resources about other mediums they could contact, while a bewildered-looking Maya explained that she simply didn’t have that kind of information.
Marigold sat on a window seat as she waited for her car. She was on her cell phone, talking to someone. “I’m not really sure, sugar. There’s nothing else I can do. I’ll just come home, I guess… Yes, honey, I know—maybe I should get myself a dog?” Her laugh ended in a barely concealed sob.
She looked up and we caught each other’s eye. Marigold smiled sadly at me; I smiled back.
Neither Marigold, nor the Owenses, nor any of the other guests was haunted any longer. Harold, relieved to see the Whispering Seraph scam destroyed, had been more than ready to Cross. Kyle, after a long, tough-love talk with Milo, had forgiven his parents before Crossing; I knew he had left the last of his anger behind in the Aether, where it couldn’t poison him anymore.
When we’d finally be able to open the Gateway, not a single spirit had refused to Cross. All the spirits lingering behind at Whispering Seraph were strong; I could be fairly certain that each had passed successfully through the Aether and into the world beyond. These spirits would be okay; I could only hope the same for the people they left behind.
“Did you forget something?” Hannah asked, as I stopped in my tracks at the bottom at the bottom of the porch steps.
“No. I’ll meet you at the car in a minute,” I said. I had just spotted Talia, who was waving me down from beside her town car. “Tell Finn I’m coming.”
Hannah followed my gaze. When she saw Talia walking toward us, she nodded her head in understanding and trudged off toward the parking lot, with her suitcase bumping along behind her.
“I was hoping I’d catch you before you left,” Talia said. Her face was drawn, and there were bags under her eyes, but she was smiling. It was a different smile than the few I’d seen her plaster on her face previously; there was something peaceful in it now. So very sad, but peaceful.
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “How are you?”
She shrugged. “I’m okay. Or I will be.”
I smiled at her. “Yes, you will.”
“I honestly couldn’t have said that before and meant it,” she admitted. She reached up and tucked a rogue tendril of hair behind her ear, but it floated back out again on the sultry Louisiana breeze. I could see that the runes from yesterday had almost completely faded from her hand. “And I have you to thank for that. Deeply thank you.”
“You’re welcome. It takes time to heal, but now that you’ve had closure, you’ll get there,” I said. “Sorry if that sounds like a psychiatrist’s sound bite, but it’s true… I promise.”
Talia sighed as she shrugged in agreement. Then she nodded in the direction of Catriona’s car, where a Caomhnóir was sitting behind the wheel, ready to escort Campbell to the Lafayette Boarding House. Campbell was sitting in the backseat, looking like someone had clubbed him over the head. His expression was bewildered, like a child who’d looked up in a crowd and found his mother gone.
“What about Jeremiah? Will he be alright?” Talia asked.
“I think so,” I replied. I knew that he had many hours of Tracker interrogation to look forward to, followed by a long and messy cover-up—and I had no idea how the Durupinen were going to explain any of this to Campbell without divulging their secrets. But luckily, none of that was my problem; I’d leave the Trackers, and their blind adherence to the Council, to take care of all that. But speaking of cover-ups…
“Hey, so I realize that I didn’t have you sign a fancy non-disclosure agreement, but—”
Talia laughed—actually laughed a true laugh. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Besides, who in the world would believe me if I did?” Her smile faded. “I can never thank you enough for what you did for me. I know you weren’t supposed to connect Grayson and me like that, and I… well, the least I can do is keep your secret.”
“Good. Well, I guess I’ll see you around,” I said, and turned to go.
“One last thing, actually,” Talia replied hesitantly. “Can you tell me… I mean, I think I already know—I think I felt it, but I just wanted to be sure…”
Her emotion rose up and cut her off, but I didn’t need to hear the end of her question. I knew what Talia was asking, and I was relieved to be able to tell her the whole truth. “He’s gone, Talia. Last night. It was peaceful.”
She sniffed and nodded slowly. “Okay. Thank you.”
I leaned forward and hugged her, because really what else could I do in a moment like that? Sometimes even the most heartfelt of words are inadequate.
§
I found Hannah, Milo, and Finn waiting for me by the car. “Are we all ready to go?” I asked.
Milo looked like he might start crying himself. “You’re by yourself. Does this mean Talia isn’t coming to live with us?”
I laughed. “No, you adorable stalker, I let her get back to her own life. But if she ever invites me anywhere with a red carpet, I promise you can be my date… and you can dress me.”
Milo went starry-eyed and turned to Hannah. “Sweetness, we’ve had a nice run, but Jess is my favorite twin now.”
Hannah laughed. “You can’t break up with me that easily. We’re Bound, remember?”
“Hey, wait. Are Iggy and the team still at the Boarding House?” I asked to no one in particular. “That will complicate things, won’t it?”
“Catriona sent them home when she arrived yesterday,” answered Finn. “They left on a flight late last night. Proper first class tickets, from what I was told. We’re meeting with them in Salem the day after tomorrow.”
“Good,” I replied. “And I’m dying to see Tia too. Poor thing, she probably thinks I abandoned her! But then again, maybe she hardly noticed—she might be in her happy place, under a pile of anatomy textbooks.”
Finn cleared his throat. “We should get moving. Catriona expects us back at the Lafayette Boarding House for debriefing,” he said, as he opened the car door for us. Hannah and Milo climbed into the backseat.
I shuddered. I was not looking forward to seeing Catriona and the Durupinen-Tracker protocols she stood for. I knew it would take every ounce of my civility not to start hissing in her face again. Whatever Catriona’s reasoning, her refusal to Cross Irina was the true crime here, as far as I was concerned. Okay, so Irina was—both literally and figuratively—no angel, but after decades of abuse, who wouldn’t lose her way?
“Hey Jess-Jess, would you care to join us?” Milo quipped from the car, breaking me out of my thoughts.
I looked up to see Finn still holding the car door open. “Ugh. Okay, but I am not sleeping in that nightmare factory again. After our meeting, I’m booking myself into the nearest hotel.”
“I might just join you,” Finn said under his breath, as I walked by him to get into the car.
“You’d better,” I replied just as softly.
It was nice to imagine, but we both knew it wouldn’t be that easy. We knew we’d made a decision that would undoubtedly hav
e serious consequences down the line. But we also knew we couldn’t go back on it. Not now. Not ever. And the Durupinen would have to deal with that.
Our car pulled away, leaving Whispering Seraph behind in a dust cloud that only an unpaved Southern country road could create.
“I’m not sorry to leave that place!” Milo said.
“Me neither,” I replied. “Although the food was great. And that bed too.”
“We never even got to try the spa,” Hannah said a little wistfully.
“I can turn the car around, you know,” Finn said jokingly, although not without a touch of his usual impatience. His aggravatingly endearing impatience.
I pretended to think about it. “No, we’re good.”
The property may have been behind us, but much still weighed on me from Whispering Seraph. Most keenly, I felt the weight of my promise to Irina. Soon the day would come when I would have to make good on that promise. I had no idea how I would manage to keep my word, or what the fallout might be. My life as a Durupinen carried with it a long and complicated legacy, a legacy full of dedicated service to the spirits, but also a history riddled with mistakes, willful errors, and a multitude of egregious sins. Perhaps I’d never be able to reconcile the two. I knew I would never be a Council sycophant or a Tracker who could blindly follow orders, but there was one thing I was determined to be, for my own sake as much as for Irina’s: I would always be a Durupinen who kept her promises.
II
Plague of the Shattered
The Gateway Trackers Book 2
Prologue
SOMETHING HAD SHIFTED.
Lifted.
She was no longer pinioned to the empty air, but free and floating.
The Caller had done it. She had promised she would, if she could find a way, and she had actually kept her word. She would never have believed another Durupinen capable of keeping her word, not after all she’d been through, but the Caller had proven her wrong. Despite this knowledge, she did not move, at first. The profound shock of freedom prevented her, briefly, from exploring the boundaries of it. After so many years of captivity, she’d almost forgotten what it was to exist without the weight and restrictions of the Castings that had acted as her chains.
What followed was a flexing and testing of energy, a re-learning of what it was to form, to move, to be. As she worked her spectral muscles, tested her strength, she felt her incredulity fade away, to be replaced by a growing, leaping excitement. At last. At last she could escape this infernal place and answer the call of the Aether. The insatiable pull of it had been her deepest torture these many years.
She kept low to the ground, slinking along in the shadows, trusting, perhaps foolishly, to physical obscuration to mask her phantasmal form. She would not linger, that was certain. She would not risk being discovered and imprisoned once more. She would follow the pull, stronger than the tides, to the nearest Gateway home.
Even as she thought it, her need for it expanded, a thirst she must quench or else risk shriveling into nothingness. Her incompatibility with this place, with the living world, would surely crush what remained of her if she didn’t Cross soon.
Suddenly, she felt the pull of it: the Gateway. It was close, closer than she’d ever dared imagine. Could it truly be so easy to find after so many years of being thwarted in her desire to seek it? Might it merely be a ploy to ensnare her once more?
She must know. She must follow it wherever it led, consequences be damned.
Some chambers she could not enter; they were most likely warded against intrusion. No matter. Whatever miseries lay incarcerated within would not distract her from the lure of her goal. The Gateway tugged her onward, a sensation so strong as to be nearly physical, triggering memories of a form she had not possessed for well over a century.
At last she could see it ahead, like a glowing orb lodged in the chest of the Caller, and she could not turn from it, she could not veer off course.
Come, the Caller was saying, drawing her in. Come and find your way home.
Yes. Yes, at long last she would traverse that final swift stanza of the tragic poetry that was her life on earth. The Caller was welcoming her, welcoming her into the arms that would close around her and embrace her through to her ultimate rest.
There was a moment—a twinkling of an instant—when she knew that something was frightfully, desperately wrong. The door toward which she was barreling— utterly unable to stop herself— was not open to deliver her to what lay beyond. The Gateway was singing its song, but it was sealed against her.
I have been deceived.
And this thought, sagging with the weight of her horror, was the very last that she had before she Shattered.
26
Dream Portrait
HER EYES WERE WIDE and dark and well-deep. Her hair was dark also, swept up onto her head in an elegant Victorian style. Her lips were curved into a wry little smile, suggesting humor and also strength of character. An intricate Triskele pendant lay framed in the hollow of her throat. She was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes.
And I had absolutely no idea who she was.
Unfortunately, I often woke up this way, staring into the face of a stranger. It was an occupational hazard of being a Durupinen who also happened to be a Muse. As a Durupinen, I could see and communicate with spirits as part of my role in Crossing them over from the living world to the spirit world. As a Muse, that communication often came in the form of art; in my case, a sketch or drawing that I sometimes completed involuntarily. This time, for instance, I woke from my sleep to find myself crouched in a squatting position at the end of my bed, a charcoal pencil clutched in my trembling, aching hand, having just created the image of the mysterious woman on a sheet of paper taped to the wall.
“Oh, hell,” I muttered as I flopped back into a supine position on the bed, dropping the pencil to the floor and shaking out my hand, which was now cramping up. I so did not need this today. I was beyond exhausted.
It had only been a few hours since I’d arrived back at Fairhaven Hall, seat of the Northern Durupinen Clans. Thanks to a red eye flight and a drive from Heathrow to the Cambridgeshire countryside, I was jetlagged and ravenous by the time we’d arrived at the castle. I’d raided the dining hall for pasties and then collapsed, fully-clothed, on top of my old bed. It may have been mid-morning, but I’d intended to get a few hours of sleep before facing any of the people I would have to see while I was here. Instead, only thirty minutes after I’d fallen asleep, here I was, bleary-eyed and shaky from the onset of a ghostly Visitation.
The door creaked open. I half-expected the face I’d drawn to peek around it, demanding to know why I’d failed to do justice to her aquiline profile, but instead, my twin sister Hannah tip-toed into the room.
I smiled watching how carefully she eased the door silently shut behind her, how she made absolutely sure to step over the creaky floorboard just beyond the threshold.
“Jeez, you are so loud!” I said.
Hannah jumped with a squeak of surprise and spun on the spot. “Oh, no! I was being so careful! Did I seriously just wake you up, Jess?”
I laughed. “No, no, I’m just messing with you. You were quiet as a mouse. I was already awake.” And I gestured to my new artwork.
Hannah’s gaze followed my hand and then her mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding! Already? We’ve barely been here an hour!”
I shrugged. “I know. What can I say? The place is crawling with restless floaters.”
Hannah came over to sit on the bed beside me. She reached out and rubbed my arm consolingly. “Do you want me to leave so you can try to get back to sleep?”
“No, don’t worry about it. I can’t now. She’s made sure of that.” And I jerked an accusatory thumb over my shoulder at the portrait.
“It’s a good thing you thought to hang the blank paper up,” Hannah said.
“Yeah, well, I’m more prone to them when I’m exhausted, plus this place is swarming with spirits, so
I figured, better safe than sorry.”
“She’s really pretty,” Hannah remarked, leaning in to take a closer look. “Do you know who she is?”
“No, we didn’t get that far,” I said. “But I’m sure she’ll be back soon. They usually are. And when she shows up again, I’ll be sure to inform her that if she wants any help from me, she’d better find me when I’m awake, or else plan to bring coffee as a peace offering. So, how is the old place?”
Hannah smiled. “The same, really.”
“Did anyone run screaming when they saw you?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘screaming’ exactly. But a couple of people suddenly remembered that they had somewhere else they needed to be as soon as they spotted me,” Hannah said with a sigh.
In truth, the resident Durupinen at Fairhaven had good reason to be wary of us. A little over three years ago, Hannah and I had arrived there as new Apprentices, ready to learn how to control and use our gifts. It wasn’t long before Hannah was identified as a Caller, a Durupinen who could summon spirits to her over long distances and even use them to do her bidding. It wasn’t just the sheer power of this gift that put the other Durupinen on their guard; Callers were historically met with fear and mistrust because of an ancient Prophecy.
The Prophecy foretold the birth of twins, one of them a Caller, who would be born of the illicit relationship between a Durupinen and a Caomhnóir, the guardians who protected us. According to the prediction, the Caller twin would have the power to reverse the Gateways and unleash an army of the dead back into the world of the living, allowing our ancient enemies, the Necromancers, to seize power. The other twin would have the power, through her own sacrifice, to stop this awful future from coming to pass.