by Nova Nelson
“Wrong again,” he said, but he didn’t sound so confident this time. “I’ll give you one more guess solely because I find entertainment in your flailing.”
One more guess and then what? I suspected whatever it was wouldn’t be great for me.
My Insight was screaming at me to be careful, to proceed with caution.
But the rest of me that was sick and tired of the dead and didn’t want to give Mannan the satisfaction of seeing me sweat had other ideas. “Fine. Last guess. She left you after some big nasty left those scratches across your face. Turns out she didn’t love you like you thought.”
As I’d guessed, the scars were a sore point for him. He jumped to his feet, and I wondered if he was going to skip the magic and simply hit me. But he planted and didn’t move.
“I’m saving her,” he said. “Saving her from wasting precious years of her life with that bumbling loser. I may never get her to love me again, but I can still make our time together matter. And I do that by helping her see the light. She may love him now, but as he ages, she’ll become torn between her duty to him and her duty to herself.”
“You haven’t been paying attention then, Mannan. Her soon-to-be groom just got the hook-up for some anti-aging potion.”
I thought I had him, because clearly this was news, but then he said, “Even with a brew that stops time, it only does so temporarily. He may look the same age until the day he dies, but die he will, and with the same life-span as before. And then she’ll spend perhaps a hundred years of her life mourning him.”
Yeah, it seemed thin as a motivation to me, too. Whatever lies he told himself, the reason Mannan was kidnapping his ex boiled down to one thing: he didn’t want anyone else to have her if he couldn’t.
“Giovanni was a frame job, wasn’t it?”
“I would say that’s a clever conclusion, except it should be obvious now.”
“Why didn’t you just kill Leonardo? Wouldn’t that have solved the problem?”
For whatever reason, that question seemed to calm him, and he sat down on the bed again. “Of course not. Murdering him while they’re still in the early stages of love would have only caused her to hold him in her heart more fiercely. She could spend centuries paying tribute to the man she loved who was taken from her too soon, and that would be even worse than spending years mourning him after a life well lived. She would elevate him to the status of a martyr, a god. No man could ever compare to that. To kill Leonardo would be to condemn her. But to frame him for murder… He would live on, but her love of him would not. If you really want to end a life, you must assassinate the character. If you want to make a man immortal, cut him down before his time.”
Mannan had clearly thought this through, which didn’t bode well for me and my hope of escape.
“Why did you make the body walk out?”
Mannan sighed. “I admit, I didn’t do my research. Our kind is rare. You can travel through dozens of realms without encountering another. I had no idea that two existed in this one.” He paused. “Giovanni saw me before I murdered him. And when you appeared on scene, I realized my mistake: his spirit could reappear at any moment and tell all, and you would be around to hear it. You clearly had a close relationship with the deputy, so I couldn’t have that.”
“So you tried to frame me?”
“No, no, no. I had to do something to keep Giovanni’s spirit at bay.”
“You held his body as ransom?”
“Vanity doesn’t end the moment we die.” He grinned. “You should know that as well as I do.”
I thought back to a lot of the spirits I’d encountered, but I didn’t have to think hard to know he was right.
“No one wants to see his body desecrated,” Mannan continued. “So I simply walked it right off the scene. It was something a killer might have done anyway, dispose of the evidence.”
“It’s something a killer did do,” I reminded him. “But there’s something you didn’t consider.”
He waited patiently, and I had the urge to keep him waiting. But instead, I said, “You didn’t consider that the mayor of this great town might have a long-standing grudge against both the Fifth Winds here, and that she used to be the magical examiner and would test for traces of necromancy first thing, in hopes of being able to arrest one of us.”
He cleared his throat almost imperceptibly. “No, I didn’t consider that terribly specific possibility.”
“It’s only a matter of time before everyone knows Leonardo didn’t do it. And if you think for one second Serena ever suspected him, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the way they look at each other.”
“That can change. Once I get her out of Eastwind, I’ll have plenty of time to lay out the evidence against him.”
“She’ll never believe you.”
“Ah, but she will.” He rose from the bed and prowled over to her. “You really should learn more about your powers. Our playground is the stars, the spirit realm… and dreams. Surely you knew that.”
After some of the dreams I’d had with Roland, I understood.
“And dreams,” he continued, “are the doors to the subconscious. Hypnotism is but a nap away.”
“You’re going to hypnotize her?” I said. He was right; I didn’t know we could do that. Sheesh, why did we get all the shady powers?
“I’ve already begun. It won’t take many more sessions, and I should have plenty of time on our journey home to Avalon.”
“All blaring consent issues aside, I’m curious how you think you’ll get her back to Avalon undetected.”
“And I’m afraid you’ll have to stay curious.”
“There are worse ways to be.”
“Like dead?”
I hesitated. “Are you going to kill me?”
He got a good laugh out of that. “And have a Fifth Wind haunt me for eternity? No thanks. Once Serena and I are out of Eastwind, neither you nor anyone you know will be able to find us if I don’t want you to.”
“And what about what she wants?”
He shrugged a single shoulder. “She’ll want whatever I want until she sees the light.”
“Until you force her to see the light, you mean.”
“Whatever semantics you prefer. Makes no difference to me.”
“So you’ll let me go?”
“No, nothing so helpful. But I’ll leave you here unharmed until someone discovers you. I’ll be long gone by then.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but before I could he pressed a palm to my forehead and I was out.
Chapter Twenty-Two
By the time I awoke, the candles were burned down to the last of their wicks. What time was it? The room lacked a window, which seemed like quite the fire hazard. While the stone walls themselves wouldn’t catch, there was plenty of flammable material inside, and smoke inhalation was no joke.
At least I didn’t have to worry about that at the moment. Nothing was near the candles, and as Mannan had said, he wasn’t looking to kill me.
I felt hungover from the spell. But if it’d worn off, did that mean he was already gone? What was the range on this kind of magic? Maybe something had broken the connection. Or did it have a time limit?
I could wonder about that later. The important thing was that I was awake.
And I was still tied to a chair.
“Siren’s song,” I grunted, struggling against the rope around my wrists.
“You’re not going to get free doing that,” said a man’s voice from the corner of the room. As the spirit floated forward, I recognized him immediately. He’d already attacked me twice. Well, not him, per se.
“Giovanni. Have you been here the whole time?”
“Not a chance. I waited until he left. I’m not crazy. If he knows I’m back in the realm, who knows what he’ll do to me.”
I assumed the “me” in that was his body, not his spirit. “Then why are you here?”
“Because I can’t let that guy win! And you’re my la
st hope for being heard.”
“Not really. Ruby True—”
“I’d not waste my breath on that hag.”
Ah, so all the Stringfellows could be as delightful as Jasmine. Noted.
I resisted the impulse to point out he didn’t have any breath to waste and said, “Be that as it may, it sure would be helpful if you’d go say hello to her and let her know I’m tied up at the Ram’s Head. Time is of the essence. Speaking of which, what time is it?”
He peeked around me and I surmised there must be a clock on the wall outside of my field of vision. “Just after six in the morning.”
“Whoa.” More time had passed than I’d suspected. I tried to collect my thoughts and prioritize. I needed to keep Mannan from leaving with Serena. If he made it back to Avalon, we might never find them, and Serena would be lost forever. As much as I would lose no sleep over never seeing her again, I couldn’t stand the idea of Leonardo losing the woman he loved. But to stop that from happening, I needed to get out of this hotel room and alert the right people. “Please just go to Ruby and tell her where I am.”
“Afraid I can’t.”
“You mean won’t.”
“No. Can’t. Unless she leaves her home, I can’t get to her. She’s warded the place against me.”
Oh boy. The odds of Ruby leaving her home anytime soon were slim. “What do you mean against you?”
He showed no signs of shame when he said, “A few years back, I broke into her house to take a valuable stone. She didn’t know it was me, but I heard about it at the next Coven meeting. One witch said Ruby cast a shield around her home so whoever it was would grow a tail if they ever tried it again.”
“Oh please. That sounds like typical Coven gossip. You actually buy into that?”
He turned to the side just enough for me to see the donkey tail. “Apparently, it even works against ghosts.”
I groaned. Dead but couldn’t stop thieving. This was really the only help available to me? A man who was too big a crook for his own good?
That ruled out my plan B, which was to get him to contact Grim. No doubt the hellhound would still be inside for another hour, and we didn’t have an hour to spare. “What about Ted?”
“Not a chance. I’ve been dodging the reaper since I first died. No way I’m moving on so long as a necromancer like Mannan is still around and capable of possessing my body for his own deranged purposes. I will not have my reputation dragged through the dust.”
Says the man who lived a life of nothing but criminality.
But before I could say anything to that effect, something else he’d said tugged at my attention. “Your body…” I echoed, sensing the seeds of a new plan that didn’t require working with this useless spirit.
As the seeds started to sprout, I realized that I hated the plan. No, hate wasn’t a strong enough word.
There had to be another way.
And then I remembered the last time I was trapped like this. It was in the cramped basement of the doppelgängers. And I’d been able to send a telepathic distress signal.
Would it still work now that our circle had been broken? It was worth a try.
I closed my eyes and tried to call out to Donovan and Landon. Whoever I could reach, I would take.
Help. Trapped in room five at the Ram’s Head Inn.
I might as well have been shouting and hoping they’d hear. As soon as I’d tried to send the SOS, I knew it wouldn’t work. Even when all five of us were in Eastwind, it didn’t work like some sort of telegraph, relaying verbal information.
No, Tanner had said he’d gotten flashes. It was a visual thing. I could try to send images of the room, but I couldn’t see much of it, and it looked like any other stone room. Maybe Donovan would recognize it as the inn, but by the time they searched the rooms, it might be too late for Serena.
I needed to think, to relax.
If Mannan was leaving Eastwind, there was only one way, that I knew of at least, to cross between the realms, and that was the train. He would be taking the first train out of town if he had half a brain in his head.
And there it was. I had it. The first train out.
I knew exactly when that one left. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I may not be able to communicate full sentences telepathically, but a single image might work. And one of the only people who might understand it happened to be one of the two people who had a shot of receiving it.
I imagined a clock, large, wooden, with easily visible hands. And then I pointed those hands to 6:47 a.m. The first train out of Eastwind. The one Grace had written in her daily planner so many months before that had tipped off Landon and me to the fact that she was still alive, not murdered by her werewolf baby daddy.
I held the image in my mind as long as I could before the outside pressures crashed in and distracted me. I opened my eyes. Did it work?
The truth hit me like a fist to the sternum. No. It didn’t work. It couldn’t have.
And that meant it was time for my other option. The one that made my skin crawl to even think about. Would I pull it off in time to intercept Mannan before he and Serena boarded the Avalon Express?
Only one way to find out: I had to possess Giovanni’s corpse. It would feel dead wrong, but lives depended on it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The trouble was, my hands were tied and I had the staurolite pendant around my neck. Sending my consciousness into Giovanni’s body would be tricky enough without the gemstone doing what it was designed to do and grounding me in my physical form.
With a little shimmying of my shoulders and a good bit of looking foolish, I managed to get the chain in my mouth. But now what? The logistics of pulling it over my head like this were impossible. So I settled on tugging it out from under my clothes so the heavy stone rested on top of them. I could only think of one thing to do: I had to break the chain. Thankfully, it wasn’t too thick, not much sturdier than what you would expect from a nice piece of jewelry. But that didn’t mean it was pleasant to get the metal between my teeth and gnaw down on it. Finally one of the links bent, and the chain tugged apart. The staurolite slipped off and fell into my lap. A few leg wiggles with what limited mobility I had, and it was on the floor.
Great, now I could move onto step two, which would be even more unpleasant than biting metal.
Please let him still be in Fulcrum Park…
Imagining his perspective would be difficult enough without him having been moved. I threw my mind out his way and got a finger hold. Good. He was still in Fulcrum Park. As I settled in, though, I could hear through his ears, and I knew I was in trouble.
With great force, I opened his eyes. He was still on the ground where we’d left him, but since it was no longer the middle of the night, a small crowd had gathered around him, whispering quietly.
Oh great. If Flufferbum from the Eastwind Watch wasn’t already on this story, he would be soon. But PR wasn’t in my job description.
Wait, what was in my job description?
That was iffy. Might be a good idea to figure it out someday.
As the people came into focus, a child’s voice shouted, “Look! He’s opening his eyes!”
Worried murmurs rose up from the crowd as they created space for me.
Whatever magic Mannan had used to keep rigor mortis from setting in on Giovanni was fading, and as I laboriously bent his knees to get him to standing, I was worried we might have a cricket situation on our hands.
But all his limbs stayed connected, regardless of how stiff, and the small crowd—I counted a half dozen—parted to let me through.
The sun hadn’t risen yet, which was good news. Since it was only February, by the time the sun was up, it would be too late to intercept Serena.
Giovanni wasn’t dressed for the cold, still in the clothes he’d had on at home when he was murdered. They appeared more like rags now, but thankfully I couldn’t feel the chill as I struggled to keep him putting one foot in front of the other all the way to
the station. The front doors were locked, but that didn’t mean Sheriff Bloom wasn’t inside. She didn’t need sleep, which was likely the only thing keeping the drifts of paperwork from officially spilling out of her office.
I knocked again, harder this time.
Was this plan a bust? Would I have to ride this corpse all around town to track down someone who would listen and help? My mind was already concocting a new plan when I caught sight of movement through the glass.
Bloom opened the door and planted herself on the threshold, taking me in from head to toe.
“Who are you?” she asked, which was an admirably perceptive question, considering the average person would assume I was who I looked like: Giovanni Stringfellow.
But here I was stumped. I couldn’t get him to speak more than some grunt noises, and I’d never been great at charades.
I held up a hand, hoping she would be patient with me. And then I looked around for a stick.
I found one and lumbered over to the closest snowdrift.
Bloom watched over my shoulder as I wrote my name.
Unfortunately, my control over Giovanni’s fine motor skills wasn’t great, and it took her a few guesses to read the scratches. When she finally hit on it, I motioned wildly that she was correct.
Her lips parted slightly as she blinked at me. “Nora Ashcroft. What in the Heaven are you doing in Giovanni?”
I motioned for her to follow me, and to her credit, she did without further questions.
The rest of the plan went smoothly enough. She followed me to the Ram’s Head and inside, up the stairs, and to the locked door of Room 5, where I was being held.
The fact that the door was secured was no problem for her, and a quick wave of her hand allowed her to enter.
I saw myself sitting in the chair, tied up, head slumped over, and got a bit of a shock at it. But it also reminded me to get back into myself, which I did just as Bloom rushed forward to untie me.
“If I never wore a dead guy again, it would be too soon,” I mumbled. My head was pounding—no doubt a side effect of jumping from head to head—and the moment my wrists were free, it felt like some psychopath was using my hands as pincushions.