Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1)

by Jen Rasmussen

  “So why didn’t you just ask him?”

  Phineas shrugged one shoulder. “You guys were being pretty hush-hush about things, and there were other people around. I figured if you wanted to be secretive about Cooper, it wasn’t my place to speak up. But as soon as he said that thing about Wick wanting to use Bristol like a battery, something clicked in my head.”

  Lydia came in while he was talking and sat beside her husband, while Wulf promptly threw himself down at her feet and started to snore. “But then of course we got distracted by the car accident, and me getting sick,” she said.

  “It was just yesterday, actually, that I finally put it all together and remembered,” said Phineas. “The vitals, the feeders. It was an awful tragedy, when their world was destroyed.”

  Lydia looked at him. “You should look up anything you can find on the feeders, when you go home. Know thy enemy, and all that.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re going home?” I asked.

  “Course he is,” said Lydia. “First thing he does when there’s a problem is hit his library.”

  “Me, too,” I said with a smile, which Phineas returned.

  “Must run in the family,” he said. “I need to look for anything that might help with your spell. I agree with you; if Wick’s got his eye on growing a sapwood forest around Bristol, the town needs protection.”

  “That’s nice of you,” I said. “But it’s really not your problem. I don’t want to put you through any more trouble—”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Lydia interrupted. “No offense, but we have friends in Bristol besides you. And if there are feeders setting up shop in this world? That’s kind of everyone’s problem. Or at least, it could become everyone’s problem. From what Phineas has told me, it’s insanely dangerous to give them any kind of foothold here. As in, the-fate-of-mankind-hangs-in-the-balance kind of danger.”

  “No pressure, though,” said Phineas with a grin.

  “Well, but that’s why we’re going to help her,” said Lydia.

  I mumbled my thanks, but I was a bit baffled by these two. From the second I’d met them, they’d taken on my troubles, Cooper’s, Bristol’s, all as if they were their own. And why? Because Max and his spiders had told them I needed help?

  Because you’re family.

  There was that. And it would take some getting used to. It had been over a decade since I’d had a family.

  I still felt guilty for opening up to them so much. Not all of my secrets were my own. I hoped Cooper would understand.

  If I ever even see Cooper again.

  I stood up and thanked them for their hospitality. “I’d better get back.”

  “It’s pretty late,” Lydia said, glancing out the window at the darkening sky. “You wouldn’t rather stay the night? It’s no trouble.”

  “Thanks, but Cooper left this morning. I need to see if Wick has been sniffing around looking for him.”

  “Be careful,” said Phineas. “If they’ve already figured out he’s gone, they’ll start watching you more closely.”

  I nodded. “I wouldn’t want to risk leading Marjory to Max. I won’t come back any time soon.”

  “I’ll be in touch with you at the hotel, if I have anything for you,” Phineas said.

  Once I was out on the highway, despite my assurances to Lydia that I was fine driving, I kept the music at full volume. Both to keep myself awake, and to drown out all the jumbled, overwhelming thoughts in my head.

  I’d inherited a fortune, and a nearly crippling amount of responsibility. For saving my hotel, my hometown. And if Lydia was to be believed, maybe even all of mankind.

  I’d found a cousin, fended off a curse, kissed Cooper, and then said goodbye to him.

  And I’d found out worse things about my father than even the stories and the rumors and that lovely word Devilborn had led me to imagine.

  Balls, no wonder I’m so tired.

  Lance and Agatha had long since retired by the time I got to the Mount Phearson. I would have to settle for Jamie, who was half-asleep at the desk, his head in his arms. He jumped when I approached, and pretended he’d been reading something.

  “Any messages for me?” I asked.

  He checked the computer. “Nope.”

  “Or… anything weird happen here today or tonight?”

  Jamie smiled at that. “It’s the Mount Phearson. There’s always something weird.”

  “I mean unusual-weird.”

  “No.”

  “Seen Marjory Smith around? Or Asher Glass?”

  He was looking increasingly curious about this interrogation, but he just shook his head. “No and no.”

  Thus reassured, I went to bed and slept for nine straight hours without so much as turning over. I woke up the next morning relatively refreshed, and ready to tackle my sanctuary problem.

  First order of business: figure out what that even meant. All I really had was a fairly vague idea that I wanted to do something like what my father had done all those years ago. And an even vaguer idea of how he’d gone about it.

  I knew now that it was Letitia—my sister Letitia, which was not an easy way to think of a woman who’d lived two centuries ago—and not my father who’d cast the spell. But that didn’t help me with any of the specifics. Was there an incantation? A sacrifice, like Martha had suggested? How had Letitia cast it? How had she sealed it?

  She’d bound it to the life of her family, I knew that much. But not their blood, which was unusual.

  I also now knew that my father, and some talented witches he’d threatened, had tried to find or recreate the spell after it was broken. I’d gotten the sense from Phineas that they’d devoted considerable resources to the attempt. But they still failed. Which meant I was unlikely to just find the spell in some old book lying around in an attic.

  And like I’d said to Phineas, if all those others couldn’t do it, how could I hope to?

  I knew I had a lot of power. Even an extraordinary amount.

  (Extraordinary. Cooper thinks I’m extraordinary.)

  But I was young, and my experience was limited.

  Limited to defense.

  That much was true. I specialized in protection. And now I owned the Mount Phearson, a place that also specialized in protection. Surely that combination had potential?

  Maybe I could start with the hotel, hoping its particular virtues might give me a boost, and once I’d mastered that, work my way outward to the rest of Bristol.

  But what would protection even mean? Barring someone from entry? Who? Wicks, specifically, wouldn’t do. They had friends, and they might always make more. A list of names would be impractical.

  Anyone without an invitation, then? I thought there was something about the protection afforded by your threshold and hearth that I might be able to tap into. But that would hardly work for a business that relied on strangers being able to access it freely.

  Maybe I could set it up so that anyone with ill will or harm in their hearts was kept out. Except that applied to pretty much everyone on the planet. Everyone wished somebody ill.

  I thought all this over while I had breakfast, took a walk around the grounds, and then, when I was no closer to any answers, a hike in the woods. Eventually I had to face the hard truth that I simply had no idea what I was doing.

  For the first time in a long time, I regretted my solitary existence, and wished I had a friend to talk to, to bounce ideas off. Or a mother I could ask for advice.

  Lydia and Phineas wanted to help, and maybe Phineas would find something in his library. But I couldn’t count on it. Wendy Thaggard was a skilled witch, but asking for her help would almost certainly mean betraying more of Cooper’s secrets, with no guarantee she’d even have any brilliant ideas. On the other hand, she might hear all about the sapwood seeds from Phineas anyway.

  It was while I was considering this that I came to the end of the trail at Greyhill, a ruined (and purportedly haunted) old house whose chief function now was servin
g as a place for the local high schoolers to drink and have sex. Needless to say, I hadn’t spent any time there when I was a high schooler myself.

  I felt a small flare of curiosity about this place I’d always heard about—and even, I’ll confess, occasionally dreamed about—but had never been invited to. I stepped forward for a closer look.

  The house itself wasn’t the main hangout, judging by all the debris around a fire pit a short distance away. That made sense; in a town where at least half the inhabitants believed in a devil, rumors of ghosts were likely to be respected.

  I walked for a few seconds among the empty beer cans and chip bags, but I didn’t feel any wistfulness for the teenage partying I never got to do. I was too old to be anything but annoyed by the litter, the carelessness. At least, I reflected as I poked aside a leaf with my toe to reveal a condom wrapper, they were practicing safe sex.

  I turned my attention to the modestly-sized and mostly-intact stone house. It was crumbling on one side, where the roof had fallen in a bit, and had gaping holes where the doors and windows once were. Everyone said it was haunted, but I’d never heard by whom. I supposed it was too much to hope it would be by a friendly ghost who could give me some tips on sanctuary spells.

  As soon as I walked through the ruined threshold, I knew there was nothing friendly—or even neutral—there.

  On the surface, it was unremarkable, just a rotting floor and a stone hearth and the smell of rodents and decay. But beneath all that it was pure sadness, pure spite. Pure wrong.

  Even the feeling that it was haunted was wrong, off somehow. I could see why people said it. There was certainly the impression of something left behind. But it wasn’t quite the same as a restless spirit. Was it place-magic that I was sensing, possibly in its purest and most intense form?

  No, that didn’t seem right either. It wasn’t just Greyhill I felt. There was something personal about the energy there. Something human, but not-human at the same time. Ghostly, but different.

  And if that sounds completely incoherent, it’s because that’s exactly what my thoughts were. I couldn’t place the feeling, familiar and yet wholly unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

  I returned to the hotel unsettled, and with no better an idea of what I was doing. Like my newfound cousin, my first instinct was to look to the library for answers. But I wasn’t even sure what the questions were. There was nothing to look up. I was already familiar with the entire magic section, and I was certain I’d never come across anything there about a sanctuary spell. Although, I supposed it was likely they’d gotten a new book or two, since I’d been away.

  Then again, maybe that was the wrong section to focus on. As I walked through the Mount Phearson’s lobby, my eyes went automatically to the fireplace, as they tended to do. But this time I stopped, taking in the small display on the hotel’s history—Colonel Phearson’s estate, its conversion to a hotel by Silas Underwood at the turn of the twentieth century—that I passed every day, but never noticed anymore.

  If memory served, the Bristol Public Library offered several volumes on local history. Maybe my sister was there, waiting in some forgotten old book to help me from beyond the grave. Letitia was the only witch I knew of who’d ever worked sanctuary magic successfully. Surely I ought to find out all I could about her.

  I decided it was worth a shot, and went to the library that afternoon. As I walked through the doors, I was struck by the familiar smell—paper and, always incongruously, mud—and couldn’t believe it was the first time I’d been there since my return to Bristol. It had, after all, been my own sanctuary as a child. But I supposed I’d been busy, what with all the vitality vampires and curse-casting witches and high school classmates I had to fend off.

  The library hadn’t changed: one simple, if extremely large, room with shelves on three walls and a fireplace on the fourth, a smattering of tables and chairs, and one enormous desk that dominated it all.

  An elderly couple sat in the familiar plush chairs arranged near the fireplace, reading. Apart from them and the librarian, the place was deserted.

  But that’s not the librarian.

  My chest tightened with a sudden pang of memory.

  How could I have forgotten her?

  Mrs. Deverly was one of the very few people in Bristol who had ever been truly kind to me. I’d at least had the decency to thank the old librarian, when I left town. But I never looked back. Never thought of her again. It never even crossed my mind to keep in touch with her.

  And now, it seemed she was gone. A stout young man had taken her place at the desk. What had happened to her? Had she only left the library, or passed on in a more permanent way?

  I decided to go and ask, but before I could get my own question out, the librarian said, “Verity Thane?”

  It took me a second to recognize him. “Is it Danny?”

  “Dan Alexander,” he said, coming around from behind the desk. For an awkward second it seemed he might try to hug me, but then he held out his hand to shake. “You were a sophomore when I was a senior.”

  “Of course! I’m sorry. How are you?”

  “Good, good. I hear you’re shaking things up around here.”

  I kept my expression as blank as I could manage. “How so?”

  “My mom’s in the Garden Club. She says you’re bewitching John Pickwick and stealing the Mount Phearson.” He laughed, clearly thinking I’d find all this as funny as he did. Then blushed when it became obvious that I didn’t. “Sorry. I’m not a big fan of local politics, myself. Or of my mother, if it comes to that.”

  I blinked at him, unsure of the proper response. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, if you knew her…”

  “Are you the head librarian now?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  “I was wondering what happened to Mrs. Deverly.”

  “Retired. Living on the other side of the mountain, I think. Or maybe in Asheville. I don’t know, she was gone by the time I started. Matilda Underwood had the job for a while, remember her?”

  I nodded, thinking of poor Max, and the one sister he missed.

  “She died a couple years back. Weird, huh, how that whole family got wiped out?”

  “Weird,” I agreed.

  “You think they were cursed? By your fa— by the devil?”

  “I think it was just bad luck,” I said, hoping that would be the quickest way to put the subject to rest. “Listen, Dan, I’m working on a little research project. Do you know anything about Greyhill?”

  Where did that come from?

  I’d meant to ask about the Pierce family, but Greyhill had somehow found its way to my lips instead.

  Dan waggled his eyebrows at me, I supposed in a way that was meant to be funny and suggestive at the same time. “Greyhill, huh? What kind of research is this, exactly?”

  It would have been easy enough to laugh at his joke, then change the subject to Letitia instead, but I decided to follow my instinct. If it was instinct, and not some manifestation of my strange, occasional psychic powers. That house had been with me since I’d walked out of it that morning. I’d never felt magic so intensely anywhere, not even at the Mount Phearson. Maybe if I could learn Greyhill’s secret, it would include a clue about how to bind up a place in so much power.

  I did give the joke the politest laugh I could, but then I said, “I mean the house itself. The history of the place, and whoever might have lived there.”

  Dan shrugged. “I don’t recall ever seeing anything about it specifically. But there are some old maps and stuff on the Local History shelves. They’re the top two under History.”

  He pointed, but showed no sign of actually letting me go over there, instead chattering on about what he’d been doing since high school. You wouldn’t think a man would find so much to say about living with his mother and working at a library, but it was a good half hour before I was able to get away and start scouring the shelves.

  Other than its appearance on
two early maps—which at least told me that one of Bristol’s earliest citizens must have built it—I found no reference to Greyhill anywhere. Letitia was almost equally elusive. There was only one mention of her, and a passing one at that, as the sister-in-law to Colonel Phearson, our most famous town founder.

  In the end, I found out more about Dan Alexander’s family that afternoon than my own sister. But it was nice to see the library again.

  That night, I managed to make a profile on Match Made In Cyberheaven, using a stock photo and a bunch of fake information. I found Cooper’s alias, a rather homely, redheaded Englishman named Clyde, and clicked the little red heart button next to his profile, indicating my interest.

  The next day I tried the Bristol Town Hall, and had a little more luck finding Letitia in the records there. Like many women of her time, she was remarked on only in terms of others: her husband had been the brother of Colonel Phearson’s wife, and she’d had two children who lived past infancy. Other than that, she’d never done anything deemed worthy of recording. There was, of course, no mention of her being the devil’s daughter, nor of her brokering any dark deals.

  I found nothing on Greyhill at all, not even in the property records.

  When I got back to my suite, I immediately checked Match Made In Cyberheaven for what was already the third time that day. But this time, I had a message from Clyde:

  Hello, you seem (and look!) interesting. As it happens, I’ve just gotten out of a difficult relationship, and I’m ready to get back on the bicycle, as they say. They do say that, don’t they? Anywho, I’m quite curious to know more about you. Traveling at the moment, but will be in touch soon.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at Cooper’s odd attempt at roleplaying. (Anywho?) It didn’t tell me much, but at least I knew he was safe.

  As was I, although my own apparent safety gave me much less cause to relax. It seemed too good to be true. It wasn’t that I was expecting to see Cillian or Falcon Wick around town—I assumed they’d gone off after Cooper, as we’d intended—but I was certainly expecting some harassment from Marjory Smith and the Garden Club.

  It seemed harassment wasn’t what they had in mind, though. At least not in the traditional sense.