by E. E. Holmes
I knew where I needed to go next, and who I needed to try to see, but now I was scared. Agnes had said that there were only three people who would understand the message about the Sentinels. So far, I had delivered my message to two of them. The first had me arrested and imprisoned, though admittedly not because of the content of my message. The second had attacked me with Elementals, and this time, the ferocity of the response was directly related to the words I had delivered to her. Now there was one person left to whom I needed to speak Agnes’ words, and that person just happened to be the single most powerful figure in all of the Durupinen world. Her response would be proportionate to her power, no doubt; she could either make sure that every Durupinen in the world knew the urgency of Agnes’ warning, or she could bury it—and me—so deeply that it would take another handful of centuries for us to resurface. What if the High Priestess of the International High Council didn’t like what I had to say? What if she, like Lira, thought that the restoring of the Gateways to the Geatgrimas would render her irrelevant? That seemed like a pretty good reason to render me irrelevant.
I took a deep breath and let it out very slowly, trying to calm my frantically beating heart. Beside me, Finn shifted in the bed. “You all right, love?”
“Yeah. I will be. I’m just… processing.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t even want to think about it. I just want to be asleep.”
“Is that your way of telling me to bugger off?” he half-laughed.
“No, no,” I said quickly. “In fact, get over here.” I rolled over into the curve of his body and pulled his arm over my torso, like I was buckling myself in against the mental onslaught. “There. Much better.”
Finn buried his face in my hair and I focused on breathing along with him. And then, all at once, everything felt heavy.
The darkness pressing in upon us felt heavy.
Lira’s key, clutched to my chest, felt heavy.
The thoughts swirling in my head felt heavy.
My eyelids felt heavy…
And finally, sleep took me.
16
The Warning
SUDDENLY I WAS AWAKE, but somehow, some protective instinct was keeping my eyes from opening. A creeping feeling was inching its way up my spine like an insect, and the hairs on my arms stood at attention. The air around me had dropped at least thirty degrees. Goosebumps had erupted all over my body, and I was shivering.
A spirit. There was a spirit in the room.
Even with this realization, I did not yet open my eyes. Instead, I fumbled around with my numb fingers until I found Finn’s hand and squeezed it. He snorted and snuffled in his sleep but did not wake. I swore under my breath. I had no idea if the Milkweed Tavern was Warded or not—it seemed ridiculous that it wouldn’t be, but then again, Abigail was a bit eccentric. A brushing sound and a sudden expulsion of cool air against my cheek made me freeze, and I knew that when I opened my eyes, the spirit, whoever it was, would be face to face with me.
Steeling myself, reminding myself that this was something I did every day and probably would do for the rest of my life, I opened my eyes, prepared to calmly confront my nighttime visitor. Instead, I let out a shout of relieved laughter.
“Annabelle, what the hell!” I cried. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Annabelle stepped quickly back from the edge of the bed, retreating from the light as I switched on the bedside lamp.
“What are you doing? Is everything okay? You could have just knocked, you know. That would have had less chance of giving me a heart attack.”
Annabelle gave an odd sort of shrug, but didn’t reply.
“Why the hell is it so cold in here?” I asked looking around hopelessly for something as modern as a thermostat. “Do you feel that?”
Annabelle nodded, arms wrapped around herself.
“I think there must be a spirit lurking around. I’m not sure this place is even Warded. Is that what woke you up?”
Annabelle shrugged again. I looked more closely at her. Something was… off.
“Annabelle? Are you okay?”
She didn’t reply. She just kept staring at me with strange, wide eyes that somehow weren’t her own.
“Annabelle?” A horrible thought crossed my mind, but I quashed it at once. She wasn’t a ghost, that much was clear. I’d made that mistake once before, and I wasn’t going to make it again. She wasn’t Walking either. Her form was solid. Her feet made the floorboards squeak. She cast a shadow on the wall behind her. But if she wasn’t a ghost…
“Annabelle? Can you speak to me?”
Annabelle just stared for several long seconds. Then she gave an odd shudder and shook her head.
Another thought occurred to me, a thought which shaped my next question as it fell from my lips. “Am… am I speaking to Annabelle right now?”
Another pause. Another violent shudder. Another shake of the head.
The sound of my voice had roused Finn. He sat up behind me, blinking around in confusion.
“Jess, what’s going on? Annabelle? Is everything all right?” he mumbled, dragging his hand over his face.
“I… no, I don’t think everything is all right,” I muttered to him, and felt his body tense at the words. “She’s… something’s happened to her. A spirit maybe? A Habitation?”
“A Habitation?” Finn asked, alarmed. “But how—?”
“I don’t know how. But… I know this isn’t Annabelle, so what else could it be?”
I’d had my fair share of experiences with Habitation. A spirit had forcefully Habitated with me once, before I even knew I was a Durupinen—the experience had been torture. Since then, I’d willingly allowed Milo to Habitate within my body. It had been an undoubtedly strange experience—unpleasantly crowded both mentally and physically. But in both cases, I had retained a firm grip on my faculties. I knew who I was, and what was happening, and at no point did I feel that I had lost control over my own body. But Annabelle was not a Durupinen, and I knew from all the studying I’d done as an Apprentice at Fairhaven that non-Durupinen bodies could be taken over in ways that rendered them incapable of resisting the will of the Habitating spirit. In other words, when the average person was taken over by a spirit, they became, in essence, a puppet. I watched as Annabelle’s body twitched spastically. She may not have been in full control of her physical form, but she was putting up a damn good fight. It seemed there was just enough Durupinen blood in her to allow for that struggle.
I stood up slowly and took a step toward her. Finn reached out and grabbed my arm, but I shook him off. “Just give me a second,” I murmured to him. I felt his grip slacken, and though I could practically feel the tension rolling off him in waves, he did not try to stop me again.
I stepped forward very carefully, muscles tensed, ready to jump back at the slightest sign of hostility. “Do you need to talk to me?” I asked the figure cowering in the shadows.
A shudder. A nod.
“It’s all right. What do you need to tell me? I’m listening.”
I reached a hand out to her, and it was as though it were the key needed to unlock a door. Annabelle leapt forward, grabbed my hand in both of hers and began shrieking at the top of her lungs. But though the words were pouring from her like water from a fountain, I couldn’t understand a single one: she was shouting in rapid Romanian.
“I… I’m sorry, I can’t understand you!” I cried, trying to make myself heard over the steady stream of pleading wails. “English? Do you speak any English?”
It did not even seem as though the spirit heard my question. The Romanian monologue bubbled forth uninterrupted, increasing in intensity with every passing second as it became clear that I could not make sense of what the spirit was trying to say. And then, suddenly, a lightbulb went on, and I could have smacked myself for not thinking of it instantly. I couldn’t understand this spirit, but there was someone in this house who could.
“Finn, go get Ileana.
Now, now, we need her to translate!” I cried.
Finn leapt from the bed, threw our door open, and dashed from the room. Annabelle—or whoever she was—paid not the slightest attention to him as he flew past. Now that she had my attention, she seemed not to care about anything in the world except willing me to understand what she was saying. But no amount of pleading and hand-wringing could translate her words into something I could comprehend.
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying, over and over again. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying. Just hang on. Hang on and someone will be here to help us.”
Annabelle was crying now, tears streaming down her face, her whole body shaking not only with the struggle to maintain control over it, but with the emotional upheaval of the being who had hijacked it. Several times I wondered if she would be successful in forcing the spirit out—her eyes rolled back in her head and the pleas tumbling from her mouth took on a stilted, garbled quality, as though other words were trying to break through.
“Annabelle, if you can hear me, I know this is terrifying, but don’t fight it. Whoever this spirit is, they’re using you to deliver a message. Let them deliver it! The faster they do, the faster they’ll let you go!”
The commotion sent Catriona and Lucida barreling out into the hallway in frightened, sleepy confusion. “What the bloody hell is going on?” Catriona shouted over Annabelle’s continued pleas. She hesitated in the doorway, clearly unsure if she should intervene to pull the two of us apart.
“She’s possessed, Cat!” I shouted over the Romanian wailing. “She’s possessed, and I can’t understand what she’s—”
At that moment, Finn returned with Ileana, whose disoriented expression told me that she, too, had finally succumbed to her exhaustion. She stared at Annabelle and me for several seconds in utter bewilderment before springing into action.
“The dialect is antiquated,” Ileana said, snapping into a calm, businesslike tone, in stark contrast to Annabelle’s unhinged raving. “She’s… she’s apologizing for something… she’s sorry… she’s sorry she told… she’s got to slow down.”
“Tell her, then!” I yelled. “Tell her to slow down!”
Ileana began replying in Romanian. Annabelle cowered away from her at first, as though she were terrified to speak to anyone but me. I watched a kind of light come into her strange, dark, dilated eyes as Ileana’s words at last broke through. Annabelle gave a cry of relief. One hand shot out and snatched at Ileana’s hand, and the other reached out and grabbed mine. Now, having created a kind of conduit between us, she took a deep, gasping breath, and tried again, speaking more slowly this time.
“I’m sorry,” Ileana said, translating directly now. “I am so sorry. I have done wrong.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“I told them. I told them everything. But they promised. They promised to let me go. And it has been so long… so, so long since I have been free… they promised…”
“Who are you talking about? Who did you tell?”
Ileana had trouble with the translation. “The dead… no, the death raisers?”
“Dead? You mean the spirits? You told the spirits?”
Annabelle shook her head violently and repeated her words.
Ileana gasped. “Necromancers. She means the Necromancers.”
My heart, already pounding, started hurling itself against my ribcage. “You told the Necromancers what? What did you tell them?” I asked, trying to keep the terror out of my voice.
“The keys. I told them about the keys. They are coming for the keys.”
I looked at Ileana, whose face bore the same horror I could feel in my own expression. Ileana raised a hand to her bosom and pulled the long, golden chain upward until the large iron key was revealed dangling from the bottom of it. My hand, as well, went immediately to the key nested in my sweatshirt pocket. We looked at each other, and in that moment, I knew that, for perhaps the first time in our lives, we were on exactly the same page.
“What did you mean when you said that the Necromancers promised to free you?” I asked. “Free you from what?”
Annabelle watched with a tortured expression while Ileana translated the question, and then threw her head back and gave a long, guttural moan so full of pain that I felt dizzy and ill at the sound of it. Then she leaned toward me, scrabbling with her fingers to gain a hold on my sweatshirt and pulling me close to her so that our faces were nearly touching. Her breath was like ice as she gave her tremulous answer.
“Locked away. Locked away and forgotten, all for the crime of knowing the truth,” Ileana translated.
And it clicked. Finn gave a sharp intake of breath, and I knew that he had just had the same epiphany that I’d had.
“You’re the Tansy Hag,” I whispered. “You were the Traveler woman who helped Agnes Isherwood learn to Rift so that she could find me. They locked you away so that you could never tell anyone what the Durupinen had done to the Geatgrimas.”
“It was my only trespass. Knowing too much.”
“And the Necromancers offered you freedom if you told them the truth. So, now they know. They know that we’re raising the alarm, and gathering the keys.”
“Yes. Forgive me. I have been in agony for so long. Get to the last key before they do. It is your only chance. Forgive… me… please…”
With a violent, jerking motion, the Tansy Hag first released me, and then released Annabelle. Annabelle’s entire body went rigid, then her back arched, and her mouth opened in a scream, and the Tansy Hag rode the tremors of that scream out into the open air above our heads. I barely had a moment to get a glimpse of her wrinkled face, sunken and eloquent with sorrow, before she shot through the wall like a bullet out of a gun and disappeared into the night.
Annabelle crumpled, but Ileana and I managed to catch her before she hit the ground.
“What happened? Did you expel her?” I asked Finn.
“No! The space is Warded after all. As soon as she left Annabelle’s body, the room expelled her for me!” Finn bounded at once from the room. I knew without his saying that he was heading outside to see if he could find the Tansy Hag.
Annabelle was beginning to stir, moaning softly and struggling into a sitting position on the floor. She blinked around at all of us, clearly still disoriented.
“She… is she gone?” she mumbled at last.
“Yes,” I told her. Catriona hurried forward and together we managed to lift Annabelle from the floor and settle her onto the bed. Ileana, now that the Tansy Hag had vanished, collapsed into the nearby chair, a shaking hand pressed over her eyes.
“Does anyone want to explain what the buggery bollocks is going on?” Lucida asked, sounding breathless.
“I’m not sure any of us can, quite yet,” I replied before turning back to Annabelle, whose face was chalky white. “Can someone get her some water?”
Lucida hurried over to the washstand and poured a glass of water from the porcelain pitcher, and then leaned across the bed to hand it to me. Annabelle reached for it, but I doubted she had the strength to hold the glass, and so I sat her up and held the glass to her mouth. She did not protest, but drank greedily, rivulets of water dripping down her chin. When she had drained the glass, she flopped back against the pillows with a groan.
“Are you okay, Annabelle?” I asked, half-expecting the Tansy Hag’s cracked old voice to reply.
“I am,” Annabelle replied, her voice tremulous but very much her own. “I… what happened?”
“You were possessed by the Tansy Hag,” I told her. “We’re not really sure how. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Annabelle furrowed her brow, then clutched her hands to either side of her head, as though just the act of trying to recall a memory was agonizing. “Uh… I couldn’t sleep. I went outside to have a cigarette,” she began.
“A cigarette? I didn’t think you smoked,” I said, frowning.
“I don’t, much,” Annab
elle said. “But David was taking cigarette breaks constantly when we worked together. I would always follow him outside—we had some of our best talks standing against the outside of a building under a haze of his cigarette smoke. So, when I’m feeling particularly anxious, sometimes I’ll go outside and light one, just to smell it and watch it burn.”
I swallowed back a violent urge to burst into tears. I didn’t know if Annabelle saw that one of the Elementals had taken on the appearance of Pierce, and I didn’t want to ask. Instead, I plowed forward with my questions. “And then what happened?”
“I thought I sensed a spirit presence nearby, but it was… odd. It felt almost like the feeling I had when those Elementals came into the clearing.”
I looked sharply at Ileana. “Are we being tricked again? Could Lira have sent that Elemental to impersonate the Tansy Hag, like it impersonated my mother?”
But Ileana was already shaking her head before I finished my question. “When a spirit is that ancient, the link to the living human being degrades over time. It feels less and less human, and more like a purely spirit form. And an Elemental cannot Habitate, as a true spirit can. It could feed on her, certainly, but it could not have possessed her like that.”
I turned back to Annabelle, reassured. “And after that?”
“After that, it’s a blur,” Annabelle said. “I had brief moments when I could see and hear where I was, but mostly it was just… just blinding pain and darkness. And then it was over.” She looked up at me, frowning. “You’re telling me the Tansy Hag was actually possessing me?”
“Yes, it appears so,” I said.
