The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2)
Page 38
She shook her head, afraid of stacking the lies too high and having them come tumbling down around her.
“Good.” He grinned. “Well?”
She shuffled closer to the furnace under his watchful eye and reached along its side. The heat off it made sweat break out on her skin even as she continued to shiver, though that may have just been from the risk. If nothing else, this could buy them some time to flee, but at worst it would doom them all. The source—she swallowed, looking down into her hand as it finally fell on her query—what the hell was she thinking?
Lorelei revealed what she had sought and held it out to him in both hands, eyes locked onto his face. His hardened look twisted, then changed wholly, eyes widening, jaw unclenching. Byron reached out, and Lorelei let him take it, afraid to even breathe. Held close, he marveled at it in the furnace’s light. The flames flickered over his face, devilish and obsessed, so much worse than any of the others had ever looked when they fought for who would possess it. Then he tugged on the velvety, green ribbon that kept it safely tied up, and the paper fell away from the beautifully wrapped, if slightly banged up, stupid, little box.
The furnace’s flames went out as a sound like the train pulling into Moonlit Station swept around the room. Wind slammed into Lorelei, and she covered her head, dropping down to the ground. Dirt and debris pelted her back, blind in the darkness and deafened by the noise.
And then just as soon as it started, it stopped. The furnace bloomed back into life, the wind died, and the room was still. Lorelei peeked out from under her arm into the subbasement, her eyes darting around wildly until they fell on the body lying flat on its back, arms splayed to the sides, and a green ribbon laying limply in its hand.
A note card flitted down through the air to land on Byron’s chest. She stared at it, heart racing, until she saw that it raised, slowly, as he took a breath. He wasn’t dead, but he also wasn’t moving, eyes shut.
Carefully, Lorelei crawled on her knees and reached over him until the tips of her fingers just grazed the edge of the card, and then she snatched it back and scrambled away to the far wall. She pulled her knees up to her chest and panted, heart chaotic as she peered at him, waiting.
Still, he didn’t move.
She allowed her eyes to flick down to the card to read the script.
Ma Choupette,
I hope this note finds you well, but I daresay it likely does not if the curse has been deployed. I expect you have used it wisely and not on someone giving you only a little trouble, though I’m certainly not one to judge.
Dependent upon the target, you will have between twenty-seven minutes and twenty-seven days before they wake, but once they do, you will have an entirely new mind, if the same body and soul, to mold to your liking. If you were careful enough to save it for that troubled young man, you’ll have a bonus binding on your hands, albeit a less trustworthy container, so do be careful not to trigger any memory relapses in him. The last time this was attempted, one of us bungled the whole thing and went and got herself killed for a bit, and I expect you won’t be quite as lucky as she to come back.
Also enclosed is a tincture to be used on the scalp and split ends not more than once a week. My hope is upon seeing you next, you’ll at least have that mess sorted, and we can move on to whatever presents itself thereafter.
- J. S. Pennycress
Lorelei’s eyes cast themselves over Byron’s form once again. It hadn’t budged, but she now also saw the tiny vial of a viscous, yellow oil beside him. With a huff, she crawled over, grabbed it, and stuffed it into her bra just as she heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Lore?” Hana’s voice shouted, her tiny feet coming quick.
Lorelei popped up from the ground to see the girl catch herself on the railing, free of the viper. Ren’s lumbering, slower form was descending just behind her, dried blood across his shirt, arm broken, but otherwise intact. “You’re okay? Where’s that snake?” She stumbled around the table, every muscle sore.
“Gone,” she said, moving her shoulder and wincing. Her pajamas were torn and hanging down her arm, but there was no blood. “It just disappeared, and I thought you were…” Hana threw herself at her, squeezing her tight around the middle.
Ren’s eyes met hers, relief in them as he leaned against the wall.
“The others?” she asked, barely able to muster the question.
The elf took a breath and stood straight again. “They will all recover with rest. And that one?”
Byron lay still in front of the furnace, firelight crackling over him, but his face held none of the malice it had before. He was simply asleep. “I think we’re safe for at least the next twenty-seven minutes.”
CHAPTER 38
FRIEND
The quiet that had fallen on Moonlit Shores Manor following Valentine’s Day had been welcome if taxing. Not a single guest, not even Philomena, remembered the cat-like intruder, only a raucous party and a good night of sleep. Of course, the patrons found it in them to complain about the breakfast-less morning that followed.
The blizzard had dumped at least a foot of snow on the town, bringing its normal comings and goings to a halt. The last of the dirtied remnants finally burned off two weeks later, and business at the manor slowly returned to, well, not normal—not normal at all—but to be fair, it had never really been such a thing.
Byron’s magically-induced unconsciousness was still holding, but even if his body was unstirring, homicidal warlocks in comas needed babysitting. As Lorelei descended the stairs to the basement with two hot cups of tea in hand, she reminded herself that the curse on him promised a reprieve from who he’d been, but she still felt a chill at the thought of him waking.
Shaking the shivers off, she crossed the boardwalk that stretched out over the pond. There was a splash, and a familiar, white orb covered in black hair hovered just at the surface. “Hello,” she called out, faux bravery in her voice despite speeding up to escape into the hall.
She paused at the bedroom door just around the corner, listening. She didn’t expect to hear anything, but she listened anyway, trying to smell the familiar scent of its previous occupant but only a bittersweet longing settled into her chest. She pushed on down the hall to the door at its end and the stairs there.
Ziah was sitting in a comfortable armchair that had been relocated to the furnace room, a book of test questions open on her lap. She looked up at Lorelei with her light eyes, lips curling into a warm smile. The orange glow behind the big, metal grate fell over her almost like a cozy fireplace.
“Tea,” Lorelei announced, handing over a mug. She glanced furtively at Byron, still and rigid on the floor, the table pushed to the side of the small room so there was a clear line of sight to him wherever one stood. He could have been dead if not for the slow rise and fall of his chest.
“No change.” Ziah yawned and took a sip. “How’s it going up there?”
Lorelei heaved a sigh. “Fine. Ren actually took some calls and Grier says he fixed that lock on 482, but he hasn’t been able to get out yet, so we’ll see.”
Ziah chuckled then chewed on a lip. “Have you heard from…” Her voice trailed off as Lorelei shook her head. “He probably just hasn’t found anything yet. And with Arista’s wards turned against her, I can’t imagine she’s letting him—”
“Conrad’s an adult,” said Lorelei sharply. “He makes his own decisions.” She stared at a crate beside the furnace, the one she’d hidden the box behind. Its details blurred together as she remembered the last decision he’d made. In her mind she watched him pack his things all over again, bloody, angry, silent. She took a ragged breath, her own anger dripping away. “What if he doesn’t come back?”
“Conrad? Not come back?” Ziah’s voice tittered as if the suggestion were ridiculous, but it was forced. “This is his home.” She crossed the room to stand beside Byron’s body.
No, this wasn’t Conrad’s home, not now that the deed, still folded up in the coat pocket of his brot
her, said he had no claim to it. And really, Lorelei was unsure he ever even wanted it in the first place. She had no idea what he wanted at all.
Ziah leaned down over Byron and held her cup just at his head, tipping it.
“What are you doing?”
A drop of hot tea spilled out toward his face, and just before it scalded him, totally evaporated into nothing.
“Just checking.” She flashed Lorelei a smile. “Are you sure you’re ready for your turn? I don’t mind keeping you company or just doing a double on my own.”
She shook her head—too many times Ziah had already sacrificed her chance at a break because of Lorelei’s fear of what was barely different than sitting with Mr. Ecknees upstairs beside the fireplace. She sent her off and settled into the armchair, flipping through the study packet Ziah left behind, but her mind could barely register the names of the warlocks deemed important enough to be the answer to a residency question. She tossed the book onto the table and finished her tea, filling the quiet room with the sound of her nails drumming on the side of the mug.
Needing to move, she got up to pace and looked over the things there for the hundredth time, but for the hundredth time still didn’t see them. Instead, she went back to that night when he left. Conrad had been in bad shape from the spell used on the cat-like creature that had transformed into a man in the ballroom. He’d destroyed it, Ando said, after the rest of them weakened it, and then collapsed. When he finally came to and saw Byron laying before the furnace looking nothing but peaceful, he’d gone quiet and something about him hollowed out.
No magic could be worked on Byron’s body, it couldn’t even be moved. They couldn’t slip the deed or the skeleton key out from his pocket either. Everyone read the card Ms. Pennycress included with the packaged curse, and they’d all finally been told the truth about the brothers, how Byron had been there once before and almost destroyed them all then too.
With the fear of him waking up looming, Conrad decided he had to leave. He said it was because he had to find something that would either shatter the barrier around Byron’s body while he slept—though he didn’t say what he would do to him if he could—or contain him when he finally woke up if it didn’t go to plan according to the letter. Lorelei suspected that was only half of it, especially after finding out Bridgette’s role in the whole thing, that Lorelei had gone to her for help, and of course that his brother was just lying there, untouchable and looming like a shadow over them all.
If Ms. Pennycress hadn’t been exaggerating about what the curse did, there wouldn’t be a need for containing Byron. In fact, Ren was convinced the problems on the horizon were vastly different than what the others thought—it would be a management issue with Arista locked off the grounds by her own wards—but Lorelei couldn’t imagine Byron as anything other than a crazed warlock on a path of destruction. Specifically, a path that had targeted her for whatever the hell his idea of fun was.
“Excuse me.”
Lorelei’s fair share of frights had been exceeded in the nearly half of a year she’d spent at Moonlit Shore’s Manor, but the sound of Byron’s voice ringing so clear behind her as she stood what she thought was alone in the furnace room totally eclipsed every other instance of fear she’d had.
She spun around, plastering herself against the wall and knocking her head on a sconce, stars bursting behind her eyes, vision gone blurry. The form moved on the floor, sitting up, and as the room stopped wobbling, Byron Rognvaldson’s face blinked back at hers. His skin was sallow, his hair a mess, and his jacket hung loosely off his shoulders, but all Lorelei could see was the man who had tried to kill her. And now they were all alone.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, raising a hand, and she cowered at the multitude of possibilities that might shoot from his palm. When he instead brought it to his own face and rubbed his eyes, she took the opportunity to grab at the heaviest thing near her and brandish it.
“I’m feeling quite woozy.” Byron’s voice was hoarse as he tried to clear two weeks of silence out of it, but it was also calm. Not calm in the way that he knew he was about to do a horrible thing and absolutely revel in it, but just…calm.
Lorelei pulled her shoulders back and straightened.
Taking in the space, his head moved stiffly. “I don’t…entirely know where I am.”
Flexing her fingers around her weapon, she cocked her head, watching.
Byron blinked, glancing down at his lap. He studied the ground and then lifted his hand off of it to turn over before his face. “I don’t know…” his voice trailed off as his eyes raised back up to Lorelei.
She stiffened, holding her breath. His lips pressed into a tight line, eyes narrowed. There, that was the familiar look she was used to, cold, calculating, criminal, and then—then—everything changed in an instant, and he tilted his head like a lost, little boy. “Who are you?”
Lorelei looked down at herself as if she’d been transformed into someone else without her knowledge, but she was still dressed in her own jeans and sneakers. In fact, she may have had on the exact same sweater as the night they’d first met in his childhood home when he had threatened to slit her neck open.
Byron’s eyes settled on her weapon, but he didn’t move to protect himself. Instead, his hands just braced against the floor with something like fear.
Lorelei glanced up at what looked like the broken leg of a dining chair that she was holding above her head. Cautiously, she lowered it, but didn’t let it go. “I’m…” She swallowed, her own name refusing to come out of her mouth. He was a clever man, evil even, but was this all an act? Even if he had only been rendered powerless by opening the box, he was more than big enough to physically attack her if that’s what he wanted.
But no, the letter from Ms. Pennycress had said it all. It was a curse, and when the target woke, he would be new of mind, if the same body and soul, to mold to your liking. And if anybody could do that to Byron, it would be the kind of person who kept ancient evils bound up in her wardrobe, sent mercurial pillars in the mail like they were nothing, and stored her messages in Nowhere.
Lorelei pointed to herself, hand shaking. “I’m a friend.”
“Oh. Well, friend,”—he held up a hand again, and she flinched, but he only waved—“could you tell me who I am?”
***
See how Lorelei’s story ends in
Vacancy Book Three: The Willful Inheritor (coming in 2021)
Thank you, Dear Reader, I hope this brought you joy.
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And if you would like to read more:
Standalone Novels:
The Korinniad – An ancient Greek romantic comedy
She’s All Thaumaturgy – Is it a fantasy quest or a 90s teen comedy? Trick question, it’s both!
The Association – A supernatural murder mystery
The Vacancy Trilogy:
Book One: The Weary Traveler
Book Two: The Wayward Deed
Book Three: The Willful Inheritor (coming 2021)