Spirit Ascendancy (8 page)

“I had noticed, actually,” I shot back. “Somewhere between burning down Fairhaven and finding Annabelle naked and tortured downstairs I did indeed figure that out.”

“Be serious, Jess.”

“I am being serious!” I cried. “We shouldn’t be using spirits like this!”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t we use them to help us? Why are we the only ones who should be used all the time?” She stood up; her hands, clenched into white-knuckled fists at her sides, were shaking. “My whole life they’ve been finding me, asking for things, demanding things. They’ve ruined every home I’ve ever had. They scared off every friend I’ve ever made. They’ve never left me alone.”

I had no idea what to say. I’d opened the floodgates. Every bitter feeling she’d ever had seemed to be welling to the surface at once.

“Now we’re in the most dangerous situation we’ve ever been in. People are hunting us down. They already killed your friend Dr. Pierce, and they’ve nearly killed Annabelle, and I don’t doubt for a second that they’ll kill more of us if it will get them what they want. And it’s all because of these ghosts!  So if I need to use them to protect us, or help us, or get us out of this alive, then I’m going to do it! Don’t you think they owe us that?”

“I’m not saying they shouldn’t help us,” I said. “We need all the help we can get! But there’s a line, Hannah, and it’s not always very clear where exactly it is, but I’m afraid we’re crossing it. First the leeching, and now this? It feels like a pretty damn short walk between what you’re doing and what the Necromancers did to the spirits down in Annabelle’s flat.”

“How can you say that?  It’s completely different! Those spirits were in pain! But I’m not hurting her!” Hannah said, gesturing down to the candle again, still dancing and swaying with its infusion of spirit energy. “I’m protecting her! If she was caught trying to deliver that message and I hadn’t severed her, the other Durupinen would use her to get information about us!”

“But we’re using her too, don’t you see that? We can’t lose sight of the fact that these ghosts are human beings! You can’t just remove someone’s humanity, just because they’re dead!”

“I can, actually,” Hannah said quietly. “You just watched me do it.”

We glared at each other. Finn had stood so still during our argument that he might have been turned to stone.

“Have you ever stopped to think,” I said slowly, “what would happen to that ghost if that candle went out?”

Hannah continued to glare, angry tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”

“Good,” I said. “I just… let’s not lose sight of why we’re putting ourselves through all of this in the first place. We have a job to do. It’s not fair, and I know it completely sucks, but we have to do it.”

“I know that. If you think I don’t know that, then you don’t know me at all.”

What could I say? Wasn’t she right? She was my own sister; we’d shared a womb together, and I barely knew her at all—not in the way I should have. I should have been able to predict the ends of her sentences, to know the meanings of the slightest shift in her facial expression. I should have known the sounds she made when she was asleep, and the feel of her hand when she held mine. But I didn’t. I’d barely been able to scratch the surface of this fragile, damaged, enigmatic person who should have been my other half and my best friend. I was almost too afraid to get below the surface, too afraid she might shatter if I dug too deep. And now we had no choice but to cling to each other, two virtual strangers cast from the same mold.

I was saved the pain of agreeing with her. The candle flame began to spark and leap unnaturally as the ghost of the woman returned. Her tea towel was dangling loosely from her slackened grip as she opened her mouth and spoke in a voice that was half her own, and half Lucida’s.

“Don’t leave the building, whatever you do. They might be lying in wait for you. No Necromancers have shown up here, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching and waiting for their opportunity. Tell Finn I got his photos, but I’ll need to do a little more research before I can make heads or tails of all the different castings and what they might mean. I will make arrangements to have you moved. Wait for me if you can, but send a message if you need to vacate before I get there. Keep each other safe.”

The voice echoed briefly before dying away, leaving the woman’s ghost floating, vacant and unseeing, in the air before us. We all looked at her for a moment, like we were waiting for something to happen, though of course it couldn’t.

Hannah caught my eye, for a brief moment. Her face was defiant as she turned to the candle and, with the murmured words of her casting, released the essence back into the waiting ghost’s body.

“I… where am… I really ought to get back. He’ll be so angry. Can you please let me go back?” she pleaded.

Hannah looked at her a moment, mouth open as though to say something to her, but instead she blew out the candle and the woman vanished, tea towel still clutched between her worrying hands.

TAP, TAP, TAP.

I looked over at the window and saw her floating beyond the glass, her tiny fist poised to knock again.

“Mary? Is that you?”

She nodded vigorously and smiled. Despite my confusion at seeing her, I smiled back. I untangled myself from a nest of blankets on the sofa and ran to the window. I yanked and pulled on the battered old lock until it reluctantly squeaked open.

“Come on in. Oh, wait.” I pointed to the runes we’d drawn below the sills. “I forgot. We warded all of the windows.”

“Come out here with me,” Mary said with a laugh, and floated in a playful little circle, like an ivory leaf in the wind. The breeze caught at her long white nightgown, buffeting her back and forth.

“Sorry, I’m fresh out of pixie dust,” I said.

She stared at me curiously, so I clarified. “I can’t fly, Mary. I’ve got this body that gets in the way of things like that.”

She laughed again. “You can just shed it. Shed it and soar!”

I shook my head. “It’s not quite that easy.”

“Oh, but for you it is. Go on, then.”

I wasn’t smiling anymore. “No, Mary. I can’t come with you. I have to stay here.”

Suddenly she was nose to nose with me at the open window, her hair floating around us like mist on the water. “Cut your strings, Jessica,” she whispered. “Cut your strings and fly!” Then she looked down at my feet and giggled.

I followed her gaze and screamed. There at my feet was my own body, crumpled on the floor, eyes glassy and empty. And then I was falling. Falling into the empty pools of those eyes, which widened into chasms, ready to swallow me whole. A door slammed shut behind me.

I woke up with a yelp as I felt my body hit the couch with that peculiar thump that starts you from a dream in which you are sure you are plummeting to your death. I looked around wildly. The room was dim with the pale, colorless light that precedes the dawn. Savvy was standing by the bathroom, one hand on the doorknob, looking sheepish.

“Sorry, mate. Closed it a little harder than I meant to.”

“I… that’s okay,” I said, a bit out of breath. I frantically patted my hands over my body. It was reassuringly solid, though clammy with cold sweat.

“You okay there?” Savvy asked, as she crossed back to the couch.

“Yeah. Just had a nightmare. A weird one. I’ll be fine,” I said.

Savvy shook her head. “It’s one nightmare after another around here, innit?”

“Truer words were never spoken, Sav,” I said. I laid back down, but sleep, a fickle friend in the best of times, did not revisit me.

Two days dragged by in agonizing slowness. There was never any more discussion of sending Lucida another message. In the first place, there was really nothing new to tell her; in the second place, I think my argument with Hannah about blind Summoners had shaken her confidence in using them, and though she speculated aloud what might be keeping Lucida, she never once suggested that we send one to go find out.

The knot of uneasiness in my own stomach grew by the hour, especially as the sense of health and energy I’d gained from the leeching began to fade away. Milo had taken to his own ghostly version of pacing, disappearing and reappearing over and over again in the same pattern of locations in the flat until Savvy, jumpy from her own highly-strung nerves, shouted at him to stop before she grabbed him by his hair and tossed him through the nearest open Gateway; after that, he contented himself with flickering feebly in and out of focus to channel his excess anxiety. Annabelle slept for a solid fourteen hours after she filled us in on her captivity, but her slumber was wracked with nightmares that caused her to cry out repeatedly, and she still looked drained even after she’d woken up and had her first real meal.

We were all teetering on the edge of freak out, but in no one was the stress more palpable than in Finn. He was wound so tightly I thought he might start pinging off the walls at any moment, like a little silver ball in a pinball machine. Every sound made him jump. Every movement, even from one of us, sent him springing from his chair, poised for an attack that didn’t come. He subsisted on adrenaline, a few half-hearted swallows of food, and the strongest coffee we could coax from Lyle’s battered old coffee pot. He couldn’t even write whatever he usually wrote in his shabby little black books, huddling over them for a few moments at a time before sighing loudly and shoving them back into the depths of his pockets. What he
could
do was be even more snappish and bad-tempered than usual.

It was at the very zenith of our tension, just after Finn had shouted at me for drumming my fingers on the table, and I had opened my mouth to literally release the Kraken on him, when the door to the flat burst open. Everyone screamed, and Finn leapt to action impossibly fast, which would have been impressive, except for the fact that “leaping to action” meant tackling me to the ground and shielding me with his body.

“What the—Finn get OFF of me! It’s just Lucida!” I cried, wriggling fruitlessly while he processed this information for himself. Then, with one fluid motion he was on his feet, and I was left to mutter mutinously and massage my upper arms, which he had clamped in a vice-like hold in his haste to fling me to the ground.

“Sorry it took me so long to get away, my lovelies,” Lucida said, closing the door shut behind her, though not before scanning the corridor carefully to be sure she hadn’t been followed. “Fairhaven is in a right state, and I had quite a few arses to kiss and tasks to complete before I could get away.” She didn’t even break her stride, but proceeded straight across the room to the window leading to the fire escape. She jerked the curtain back and glared intently into the street below for a solid minute. Then she took out a cell phone, pressed a few buttons, flipped it over, pulled out the battery and the memory card, and flung it out the window. We heard it shatter in the dumpster below with a hollow clang.

“You seen anyone about?” she asked Finn, eyes still trained on the street.

“No,” Finn said. “No loiterers, and no repeat walk-bys except for the typical commuters. You got the descriptions of the men I sent with the photos?”

“Yes. They’d be hard to miss, but then again, I wouldn’t expect them to be back. They’d have to be thick to send the same men they’d sent before, and I know they aren’t thick. Marion, on the other hand…” She rolled her eyes.

“What about her?” I asked.

“Well, she’s just part of it, really. Fairhaven is a right mess, and I’m not just talking about the fire damage. The whole infrastructure has gone tits up. The Council is fighting like mad over whether to reinstate Finvarra, and they can’t agree what to do about you lot. Some of them think it’s best to just let you disappear; out of sight, out of mind. Others want to track you down so they can keep you under their watchful eye, locked up tight in the dungeon. And then there’s a small but pretty vocal minority who want to…” She drew a theatrical finger across her throat with a horrible squelching noise. “They think the only way to avoid the prophecy is to make sure you aren’t alive to fulfill it. Logical, sure, but just a bit controversial. Whatever else we may get up to, murder is not one of our usual pursuits.”

She paused in her explanation, apparently just to enjoy the horrified looks on our faces at the news that Council members wanted to murder us.

“That’s not really a shock, is it? Surely we all realize that things are deadly serious at this point,” she said, smirking.

I swallowed. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s just… hearing it out loud like that…”

“Well, no use dancing around the facts, love,” Lucida said. She took one last peek through the curtains, and then walked over to the kitchen, where she perched on the counter and helped herself to a box of chocolate biscuits. “Anyway, Marion is one of that minority, of course, but that’s not the real problem. She’s always had it out for you two. No, the real problem is her attitude toward the Necromancers.”

“You mean the fact that she refuses to believe that they’re back or that they pose any kind of real threat to the Durupinen?” I asked.

“Right in one,” Lucida said. “Fairhaven has never been so vulnerable, from the inside and the outside, and there’s a good chance the Necromancers are going to look for you there. If they come across the place in its current state of disarray, they may try to attack, regardless of whether you’re there, just to take advantage of the opportunity. Everyone needs to be on their guard. I needed to find a way to warn the Council about the Necromancers without them realizing that I’m helping you hide. It wasn’t easy, but I laid a fake trail in one of the locations we Trackers have been searching for you.”

“How did you do that?” Hannah asked.

“I managed to get into one of the flats we were supposed to search, an hour before the other Trackers showed up. I used the photos Finn sent me, and made it look like the Necromancers had gotten there first; castings on the floor, runes on the walls, and smashed up the furniture just for good measure. Then I circled back around and pretended to enter the flat for the first time with the rest of the team. It worked like a charm, but when we brought the evidence before the Council, that was another matter entirely.”

“They wouldn’t believe you? Even with the photos of the castings and everything?” Savvy asked, evidently floored that anyone could be that intentionally stupid.

“Marion wouldn’t hear a word of it. She just kept repeating that the Necromancers were gone, and that there must be some other explanation.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you lot had staged the flat to throw us off your scent,” Lucida said. She shook the last crumbs of the biscuits into her mouth and tossed the empty package aside. “Ludicrous, considering the complexity of the castings. No offense, but none of you have the skill or the knowledge to pull off even half of what we showed them. And some of them aren’t even found in Durupinen teachings, so where they think you found those, I’ve got no bloody idea. Anyway, I told her flat out that I thought the Necromancers were back, and that they were looking for you just like we are. I told her she needed to secure the castle and put the Caomhnóir on high alert.”

“And let me guess, she’s not doing any of it,” I said.

“Correct again,” Lucida said. “She also forbade anyone on the Tracker team to alert the rest of the castle to our suspicions. So now everyone in that castle is a sitting duck, and if the Necromancers do show up, infiltrating it will be a lark.”

“But there has to be something you can do,” Hannah said.

“Yeah, since when have you listened to Marion?” I added.

“And I’m not about to start now,” Lucida said, winking. “I told Catriona everything before I left. She’ll spread the word as best she can, but if it’s not coming directly from the Council, I doubt many people will listen.”

Hannah dropped her face into her hands. “But then how can they—”

“Look, love, I appreciate that you’re worried about them. I am too, but we haven’t got time to worry about anyone but ourselves at the moment. We’ve warned them, and that’s the best we can do for the moment,” Lucida said, and her voice, though brisk, was not without emotion. “And speaking of ourselves, we’ve got to get moving. We’re scheduled to be out of this flat and on our way in the next hour, so it’s time to get your stuff together.”

“We’re leaving? Where are we going?” I asked.

“A safe house I’ve set up for you. It’s a miracle they haven’t found you yet, and we don’t want to lose any more time, so chop, chop. Put what you need in a bag. I won’t delay for nothing when I get the all clear.”

Everyone leapt into action. Savvy ran into the bedroom to start gathering things, and a moment later, Annabelle emerged, tousle-haired and wide-eyed.

“Savvy woke me up. She says we’re leaving?” she asked the room at large. Her eyes fell on Lucida and she froze.

“This is Lucida,” Hannah told her quickly. “She’s my mentor from Fairhaven, the one we told you was helping to hide us.”

Lucida waved languidly at Annabelle. “The sensitive, right?”

Annabelle nodded.

“We’ve never met, but I broke into your shop once,” Lucida said, as casually as though she were mentioning that they had an acquaintance in common. The shock on Annabelle’s face prompted her into further explanation. “I was in charge of making sure no one outside of the Durupinen had evidence of Jess’ identity. We investigated all of her acquaintances from her ghost hunt, including you.”

Annabelle’s body seemed to relax, though her mouth was still pressed into a tense line.

“How are you feeling?” Lucida asked, in an uncharacteristic show of empathy.

 “Drained,” Annabelle said rather dazedly as she watched everyone scrambling to pack up. “Like I could sleep for about a month and still be tired.”

“That’ll likely be an effect of the spirit cage. The ghosts would have tried everything to put themselves back together, including feeding on all the energy sources around them. You may find your sensitivity to the spirit world is a bit weakened for a time, until your aura replenishes.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that with Milo,” Annabelle said. “I can’t always hear him very clearly. Do you think that will improve?”

“It should,” Lucida said, moving back to the window and checking her watch. “I’ve never seen a spirit cage used. That’s a dark bloody casting, even for life and death situations, and I doubt there’s a Durupinen alive who’s ever encountered one, let alone cast one. But I’ve read about them, and the effects ought to wear off. Just try to take it easy, and don’t exert yourself psychically, if you can avoid it.”

“I’ll try not to,” Annabelle said.

“Sit down and rest, Annabelle,” Hannah said as she passed her, a stack of folded shirts in her arms. “We’ll get everything together for you.” This wouldn’t be hard, seeing as everything Annabelle owned was trapped downstairs in a flat we were all too scared to enter again. Finn had the foresight to grab her wallet, passport, and purse from the table before sealing the place for good.  She was now living out of the same communal clothing pile as the rest of us.

It only took about fifteen minutes to gather everything we wanted to bring with us from the odd assortment of belongings we’d amassed from convenience and charity shops during our stay. Milo surveyed our pathetic worldly possessions with a critical eye.