The moment her pointer finger hit the page an intense light shot out at her, making her drop the whole envelope and jump back. It fell to the floor, blasting a beam upward that grew into a ring about two feet across in a cylinder all the way to the ceiling. “What the hell is that?”
Conrad made a tentative noise in the back of his throat. “Don’t touch it.” He crossed the room to his desk, flicking through a book that he pulled off a high shelf, and came back to stand next to her. He leaned close so she could see, smelling so good she could barely focus on the page. “This isn’t it exactly, but I think it’s similar.”
The page depicted a campfire, above it rings of smoke wafting up into the air. On the opposing page, a person dressed in a cloak stepped into the same fire. Lorelei pointed to the flames. “I would think you people would really want to stay away from that kind of thing.”
“Very funny,” he said, “but it’s not quite the same. If this is what I think it is, a sort of mercurial pillar, it should be for communication, but there are different kinds. Usually they take you right to the person you’re meant to be talking with for a set amount of time.”
“You mean that’s a portal directly to Ms. Pennycress in Paris?” Her eyes widened, and she grabbed his arm, digging her fingers in. “How long will we have? Can we go to the Louvre? Or the Musée d’Orsay? And the Petit Palais?”
“I don’t know what those words mean,” he said, “but I doubt they’re all reachable in under fifteen minutes.”
Lorelei deflated then shrugged. “Well, I bet Ms. Pennycress’s house is filled with all sorts of neat stuff too.”
As she walked toward the pillar of light, Conrad grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute, not by yourself.” He tossed the book onto his bed and made sure the two stepped up to the ring of light together. “Just in case there’s another giant spider or something on the other side.”
Conrad counted down for them to enter, and Lorelei rolled her eyes, but stayed in step with him, remarking as he counted, “Nothing’s going to hurt us over—ow!”
Blinded by the white pillar’s light, Lorelei felt a shove at her back and another against her shoulder. She inhaled sharply, trying to pull away but only banging her head up against something solid. Conrad was smashed right up against her, and though she didn’t necessarily mean to complain about that, getting squashed together in such a way wasn’t exactly how she had increasingly imagined pressing up against him would go.
When the bright light faded, she could see he was equally confused, looking down at her, his arms lifted and against the glass walls on both sides of him. Jammed in, they could only easily move their heads, but it was enough for Lorelei to recognize the object they were trapped inside though she’d never actually seen one in person before.
“Um, are we in London?”
Conrad glanced over her head and out the glass panels behind her. “I don’t think so.”
She leaned to see around his frame, nothing but foggy whiteness on the other side of the glass. “You sure? I hear it’s sort of like this.” There were skinny, red lines running through the glass panes holding them inside, and Lorelei imagined they looked pretty funny, the two of them squeezed into a telephone booth, but it would be less funny that the two had just appeared out of thin air to any onlookers.
Conrad shuffled a little and ran his fingers through the air over her head. Blue flashed to life then zapped out. “Actually, we aren’t anywhere.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” She reached for the handle on the door to the call box, but he stopped her.
“I wouldn’t do that. There’s nothing out there. Literally. I don’t know if you’ll even be able to breathe.”
Her fingers pulled back, and she looked up at him, too close. She wasn’t sure she’d properly be able to breathe in here either. “Then what is this?”
“Well, I still think it’s a mercurial pillar, it just didn’t take us anywhere on the material plane. It looks like we got sent to a box in the middle of Nowhere. Or somewhere adjacent to the middle.”
Even though there was no way to tell, Lorelei could feel the capitalization in his voice, eyes passing over the fog outside and the nothingness within it.
Conrad shifted as much to the right as he could and dipped his head after knocking it into the ceiling. “And apparently Ms. Pennycress made the box just for one, little lorelei and not the addition of a warlock.”
Squished in beside them was an antique phone with a separate mouthpiece and receiver hung up beside it. Beneath, instead of the expected set of rotary numbers, were only two buttons, one green and one red. She shrugged and freed an arm up to lift the receiver. Immediately a voice called out from it, loud enough to be heard even if she’d had the room to hold it at arm’s length.
“Hello, dear!” the familiar, scratchy voice called into the phone box.
“Hi, Ms. Pennycress,” Lorelei replied. “It’s Lorelei.”
“And how are you faring?”
“Oh,”—she blew out a breath, shifting a little as Conrad tried to shuffle his hips to the side—“you know, things are kinda hectic, and—”
“That’s nice. It’s all fine here too. Did you receive the package I sent you?”
Lorelei cocked her head, and she and Conrad traded unsure glances. “Um, no? That letter is the first thing I got from you since we met.”
“I hope you’ve started using the hair oil I included.” There was a chuckle from the other end.
Lorelei looked down at her waves, the nicest they’d been in a while even without any new products. “Listen, when we met you really caught me on a bad day—”
“There, now that the pleasantries are out of the way: you have reached J. S. Pennycress’s ethereal answering service, the safest and most direct route of sending yours truly a message. Only the intended recipient can open the portal to Nowhere, and once your message is left, it will be sent directly to me to be opened at my discretion. When you are ready, please press the green button and you may begin recording your message confident in its confidentiality. Press the red button when you are finished. And, please, dear, do be more detailed this time.”
Lorelei huffed—a recording. Well, that explained the interruptions. Sort of.
Conrad chuckled, trying to cross his arms, but it didn’t really work. She slipped her other arm up and reached out for the green button. There was a gentle beep through the receiver, and she cleared her throat. “Hey, Ms. Pennycress, it’s Lorelei, um, you know, the girl you met a couple months ago who works at the manor? Well, I didn’t work at the manor then technically, even though I think you thought I did, but I do now, and I guess you probably know all that since I sent you that letter, and that it’s me because you said this mercury box thingy is for me and only I can open it, but—” Her eyes wandered up to Conrad’s face, screwed up as if to say, What are you doing? “Anyway! I’m not actually alone, Conrad is here too. Conrad Rognvaldson? You know, the warlock guy whose parents own—well, his aunt owns—well, she’s not really his aunt, she’s his first cousin, once removed, but maybe she doesn’t really own the manor anyway, it might be his, I don’t—” She stopped herself as his glare deepened. “So that guy’s with me, and what I wanted to say in the letter was things are sort of crazy around here, and, um…”
Conrad whispered, “The urn.”
“Right! We found this urn with, like, a really creepy guy in it. Actually I guess it could be a lady, it has a lot of different voices going on. They’re still in there, but they seem like they want to come out, and the symbols on the urn were kind of familiar to us, and we were just hoping you could give us some more information if it wouldn’t be too much trouble because it might be related to this other problem Conrad’s sort of having with his family that’s kind of personal, so I don’t know if he wants me to say, but, yeah, that’s just about it. Um, also, have you seen Mona Lisa in person? What’s that like? Okay, I hope you’re having a great day, thank you so much. Bye!” She slammed her finger down
on the red button.
Conrad’s mouth fell open. “What in the deepest abyss was that?”
The receiver shouted back to them in Ms. Pennycress’s voice, “Thank you for leaving a message with the ethereal answering service. If you are satisfied with your message, please press the red button to lock it in. If you need to rerecord your message, press the green button to start over.”
“That was awful,” Conrad said plainly.
“Well, she said be detailed, but I wasn’t sure what was okay to say. It’s not like I’m the only one of us who’s ever choked on a phone call.”
He grumbled something about that being different, while reaching over her head to press the green button, erasing her message. “Just like a lie, you need to keep it short and concise. Listen.” The transmitter beeped again. “This is Conrad and Lorelei. My brother’s trying to kill us, and we found the dark entity you’ve got bound up in the attic. Tell us who that is and any info you have on a being called Zyr. Call back ASAP, it’s urgent.” He pressed the red button.
“Conrad!” Lorelei hissed as the speaker recited the directions to rerecord again. “There was no nuance to that, and you didn’t even say please or thank you!” Before he could argue his case, she erased his message, and took a breath to try once more. “Hey again, Ms. Pennycress. Well, not again, I guess, because we already erased those two other messages.” She caught him glaring at her, and sped up. “Okay, so the urn in your attic room at the manor, we found it, Conrad and me, er, I, and it was hella spooky.”
“The dark entity bound inside tried to convince us to free it,” Conrad said over her into the receiver.
“Right.” She put a hand on his chest to keep him from shouting, distracting herself before pulling back. “And it was really similar to this other entity called Zyr who I may have bumped into in the past. Literally went into the past, not just once a while ago—”
“She went through a Hephaestian mirror about four hundred years back.”
“And we were hoping you could please help us in identifying either of them or if you had any other information on the manor and something called the source, if that means anything to you. Oh! Or spells that…” She poked at his arm where the marks were.
“Spells that leave behind evidence on skin.”
“Like a tattoo,” she added. “Honestly, we would appreciate anything you could tell us.”
“It’s urgent,” he interjected, then sighed. “Please and thank you.”
Lorelei rolled her eyes and pressed the green button.
“You have exhausted all attempts to rerecord,” said the voice from the speaker. “Your message will be delivered privately and safely at Nowhere’s earliest convenience. Prepare to exit.”
“Well, that was a little better.” He pursed his lips. “What did that just say?”
There was a blast of bright white light again, and the glass wall against Lorelei’s back disappeared. She fell backward and away from Conrad, landing on the hard ground of his bedroom with a thunk, then scurried back up onto her knees. Between them, the opened envelope that Ms. Pennycress had sent lay there like it hadn’t just condensed the two of them into a telephone box in the middle of Nowhere, or even adjacent to it, and then violently catapulted them out, the ring left on it burnt and ashy.
Lorelei rubbed her eyes, bleary from the change in light. She felt tired suddenly, and a bit out of breath, pushing herself to her feet and glancing at the clock on the wall. “Four hours? That took four hours?”
“Whoa. Pennycress really did send us to Nowhere.” Conrad ran a hand through his hair. “And she’s using it to store her messages. That’s a powerful lady.”
“Ziah’s going to be so mad at us,” Lorelei mumbled, shaking out her skirt.
“Oh, shit.” Conrad sprinted to the bathroom and grabbed a long-sleeved shirt, notably not flannel, from the back of the door. “We’ve still got a little time. There’s no way the party’s over yet.”
“What are we going to say?” She checked her reflection in a mirror over his dresser, fixing her hair and thankful the rest of her had survived being crushed into the phone booth with him.
“Well.” He chuckled, pulling on the shirt and buttoning it. “The two of us missing? Tonight? We probably won’t have to say anything—Ziah will almost definitely come up with her own theory.”
“She was so excited about this, her feelings are going to be so hurt,” Lorelei said, waving from the door for him to hurry up.
“That’s not what I—” He shook his head and followed behind her. “You’re right, let’s go.”
CHAPTER 32
HIGH SCORE
They could hear the noise before they got to the door of the white room which wasn’t typical even with a party going on. The hall was dim and empty, as had been the rest of the manor during their quick ascent of the stairs, only Ando milling about the kitchen, singing to himself, not yet taking Lorelei up on her insistence to join them in the white room. She hesitated at the door, and even Conrad cast a cautious glance at it before opening it up.
Something like a firework exploded right in front of them on the door’s other side. More went off in a trail leading upward, ending at the ceiling where a last, violet burst blasted and rained down turquoise sparks. But no one screamed, and the only chaos about seemed organized enough if indeed chaos. People were laughing and carrying on, music rattling off the walls, and while the chandeliers were very dim, pops of color and light were bursting all over. A set of witches in masks ran past holding hands and chasing a small team of lightning bugs, laughing maniacally, their hair and dresses trailing behind.
Conrad leaned in. “This is different.”
The white room had faithfully conjured up the place from Hana’s past that Lorelei had prepared, still beautiful and spacious if filled with overly exuberant guests. The band Ziah had booked, Namtar’s Daughter, was playing from a makeshift stage, and smoke and sparks from what Lorelei could only assume were superfluous spells shot through the air. Guests were dancing, riding atop one another’s shoulders, and there was an awful lot of kissing. Valentine’s Day aside, the passion in the room didn’t appear to need those suggestive paintings from the white room’s earlier appearance to take off.
“Different how?” Lorelei asked as they cautiously worked their way into the ballroom. Another pair of masked guests darted past, and they both stopped short to avoid being run over.
“Feels sort of funny, right? Like there’s an…unease in the air?” He squinted out at everyone then grabbed a half-filled cup of some red liquid from a side table and took a sniff. “I don’t think there’s even alcohol in this.”
Lorelei felt it too, an odd sizzle floating about, but unlike how the white room typically pulsed with unused potential, this was a little colder. Some sort of bad juju was lurking beneath all the energy and cavorting. “Maybe it’s because we just lost some time. I felt really weird when I came back from the past through the mirror,” Lorelei told him, and he shrugged.
If nothing else, the guests sure were having a good time. Someone suspended by magic was passing just in front of them, laughing and spilling their drink as they went. Someone else bumped into Lorelei from behind, and as they did the floating man dropped out of the air. His mask popped off when he hit the ground, revealing Mr. Suwanee, but he only fell into hysterics and begged to be sent up again. Ms. Brimstone laughed maniacally, pulled him to his feet, planted a deep and passionate kiss on his lips, and dragged him away.
Lorelei and Conrad looked at one another. “I take it back—something weird is definitely going on,” Lorelei said, thankful for the shadows as she realized there was a lot more canoodling in the room than she originally thought. It seemed everyone had their hands on someone else, like they were all enchanted with some sort of love—“Philomena!”
The cupid was standing beside the table of desserts, hands clasped around a heart-shaped cookie, staring out at everyone with a wicked smile. She was positively giddy. Lorelei hustled ov
er to her. “Did you do this?”
Even the disapproval on Lorelei’s face couldn’t thwart Philomena’s elated grin. “Isn’t it wonderful? Everybody’s kissing somebody else—sometimes even two somebodies! Nikeros won’t have any idea how I got so many points!” Then she cocked her head and frowned. “You don’t look like you’re having a good time.”
Lorelei snorted, leaning over the table and lowering her voice. “Did you shoot everybody in here?”
“Not everybody!” Philomena waved the cookie then took a bite out of it. “It only takes about fifty percent to reach full love capacity.”
Lorelei turned to Conrad who was just catching up to her and ducking away from someone else who’d been set aloft. She grabbed his sleeve. “Can you go find Hana, please? And quick, before her uncle shows up and sees her doing something he thinks she shouldn’t.”
His gaze meandered over to Philomena for a moment like he wanted to ask why, but then he just nodded and left for the crowd. She watched him go, appreciating Ziah’s pestering about his clothes. He’d ended up in a wine-red dress shirt he’d managed to roll the sleeves up on and tuck in on their dash to the white room. Per the succubus’s orders, it fit, and well, though his pants might have been even better. Lorelei groaned. Of all the times for him to look so good, why did it have to be during a crisis?
“Oh, I guess you’re not having as bad a time as I thought.” Philomena came around the table, munching up the last of her cookie, eyes pinging between Lorelei and where Conrad was headed off to.
A set of green sparks shot up from the crowd and caught a curtain at the edge of the stage on fire. One of the three women at the microphones flicked a hand and doused it in water, not missing a beat in the song.
“Are you kidding?” Lorelei raked her hands down her face. “You’ve got them all so twitterpated they’re going to literally burn this place down.”
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 32