Spirit Ascendancy

by E. E. Holmes

  “Finn, what are you… you’re going the wrong way!” I cried, craning around in my seat. “They took her that way!”

  “We’re not following them,” Finn said, taking the corner like a maniac, veering dangerously into oncoming traffic in his haste to put as much extra distance between us and our pursuers as possible.

  “We have to follow them! They have Hannah! Turn around, Finn!”

  “No!”

  “We have to go back! We have to go back right now!” I cried, choking on a rising sob.

  “We can’t! We can’t go back there, Jess, I’m sorry!”

  “Let me out! Let me out of this fucking car right now!” I shouted, pulling in vain on the door handle.

  “That door must be safety locked,” he said, sounding almost relieved. “You can pull on it all you want, but it’s not going to open.”

  I ignored him, yanking the handle even harder, pressing against the door with my foot, battering the window with my fists. “Stop the car, Finn!”

  “No.”

  “We have to go back!”

  “If we go back, we’re dead! Do you understand me? Did you see what they did to Lucida? That will be us if we go back there. Now stop acting like a lunatic and let me drive!”

  I lunged at him. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to rip that goddamned curtain of hair back from his face so he would look at me. My fingernails scrabbled for his face, but Savvy and Annabelle grabbed me by the arms and pulled me back.

  Annabelle was shouting, “Jess, he’s right, we can’t—”

  “Don’t you tell me that! Don’t tell me we can’t go back there! That is my sister! They have my sister, do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I wrenched my arms out of their grasps and flew at him again, this time succeeding in clutching a fistful of his jacket and tugging, so that he twisted dangerously in his seat and the car began to swerve. Swearing loudly, he regained control of the wheel and wrenched himself out of my grip by shrugging out of his coat.

  “We just barely got out of there alive and now you’re trying to kill us?” he shouted. “Let go of me and sit down!”

  Savvy threw off her own seatbelt, muscled me back into my seat, and sat on top of me, pinning me into place. I struggled against her, but couldn’t throw her off. Instead, I continued to shout.

  “They have my sister! Why, Finn? Why the hell did you let them take her?”

  “Jess, stop it!” Savvy yelled.

  “Don’t say that to him, it’s not fair!” Annabelle said.

  “I didn’t let them take her! No one let them take her! I couldn’t get to her, but I could get to you, so I got you out.”

  “You should have let them take me instead!”

  “They didn’t want to take you!” Finn said. “Don’t you understand? If they’d gotten their hands on you, you’d be dead right now.”

  “But Hannah—”

  “They aren’t going to kill Hannah! They want her alive, Jessica! Don’t you see? She’s the valuable one! She’s the one who can do what they’ve always wanted to do, and reverse the Gateway! They aren’t going to let anything happen to her, she’s much, much too important to their endgame. But you? Don’t you remember what the prophecy says? You are the dangerous one, from their point of view. You are the one who could ruin everything by standing in their way. If they had gotten away with both of you, only one of you would still be alive right now, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be you. They need her. They need her to carry out their plans, and they won’t let anything happen to her, not now, anyway. If I could only get one of you out of there, it had to be you.”

  The argument I longed to scream at him got lost on the way to my lips and came out instead as an incoherent sob. My body slackened and fell back against the seat, and Savvy, looking intensely relieved, slid off of me and back into her own place, yanking her seatbelt across her heaving shoulders.

  “What are they going to do to her?” I choked out. “She’s so fragile, Finn. What the hell are they going to do to her? She won’t be able to handle it.”

  “Jessica, listen to me,” Annabelle said, in such a commanding tone that I had no choice but to turn and comply. “They aren’t going to hurt her, at least not too much. You heard what Finn said: they need her. They need her to cooperate, and they need her powers to be at their strongest, and neither of those things can happen if they hurt her.”

  “She’s tougher than she looks, that little spitfire,” Savvy said. “She’s been through a lot, but that makes her stronger, not weaker. She’ll hold her own till we can find her and get her back, you can bet on it. But did anyone see what they did to Milo?”

  Her question pulled me out of my sobs enough to look around the car. “Where is he? Did he go with them?” A tiny burgeoning hope popped into being in my heart. If Milo was with her, Hannah might just be okay.

  “No,” Savvy said. “He was still just floating in the alley after the van pulled away.”

  “I remember now,” I said, wiping my eyes with my sleeve and fighting to control the shuddering of my own breath. “I think they performed some kind of casting on him to keep him at bay. It was like he was unconscious or something, just hanging there.”

  “What can we do? Is there any way that we can bring him into the car?” Annabelle asked.

  “I told you, I’m not going back to—” Finn growled.

  “No, I’m not talking about going back,” she said impatiently. “I mean, using your connection to him, Jess. You’re Bound together, right? Is there anything you can do to get him here?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Hannah’s the Caller, not me.”

  “Yes, but you are connected, and that might be enough. I think we need to try. If the Necromancers take him, that’s another liability, another possible source of information. We need to try to get him back if we can.”

  “I… I should be able to hear him,” I said, and closed my eyes, searching desperately for a quiet space of calm inside myself where I might be able to concentrate, but I was so full of noise and terror and grief.

  “Milo?”

  There was no answer, only a blank, empty buzzing. It felt very, very wrong, somehow.

  “Milo? Are you there?”

  “Anything?” Annabelle asked.

  “I can’t… It’s so strange. He’s there, like the form of him, but it’s just empty.” My heart began to race. “What does that mean? What did they do to him?”

  “I have no idea,” Annabelle said.

  Savvy shoved her hand into her pocket and extracted her casting bag. “Summon him.”

  “But how—”

  “Do it right here!” she said, pulling out the chalk and drawing a great sweeping circle on the fabric of the roof interior. She shoved the candle stubs into the cup holders and lit them with her cigarette lighter. Annabelle cracked a window to let out the smoke.

  I hesitated. Savvy tossed her copy of the Book of Téigh Anonn into my lap. “We can’t just leave him out there! What if they find a way to take him with them?”

  She was right. I pulled myself together and completed the casting. I closed my eyes again, and within the cobbled-together, but nonetheless effective circle, I felt out into space, focusing with all my might on the place we’d just left behind. I found him there, though I could barely tell it was him.

  “Milo?” I asked tentatively.

  A trembling suggestion of something responded, but it was much too weak to be a real answer. He was there, and yet he wasn’t.

  “Come to the circle, Milo. We’re in the car,” I said, pulling and tugging at our connection with my mind and every ounce of energy I could muster.

  Again, there was just the merest trace of a reply, but it was so faint that I almost wondered if I imagined it. I continued to focus with everything I had, sweat breaking out, cold and clammy on my forehead, until I felt him break the boundary of the circle.

  I opened my eyes. He was in the car, hanging in the air between the fro
nt passenger seat and the dashboard, his eyes as blank and empty as the woman Hannah had Called to the rooftop to send her message to Lucida. It was a strange paradox, to see a ghost lifeless, but that’s what he was. The edges of his form were blurry and smoky, like someone had taken an eraser to him, and he looked paler, less in focus than usual.

  “Do you have any idea what they did to him?” I asked Finn.

  Finn was trying to drive and examine Milo at the same time. “No,” he said finally.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “How will we figure it out?” I asked, feeling the emotion start to close up the back of my throat again. “We don’t have anyone else we can ask!”

  “The important thing is that we’ve got him, and the Necromancers don’t. Let’s figure out our next move, and then we’ll worry about Milo. There might even be something in the Book of Téigh Anonn that can explain it. The real question,” Finn said at last, into the spiraling silence, “is where the hell we’re going to go. Lucida was our only ally, and now…”

  Fresh tears burned in my eyes as I thought of her, sprawled on the floor in that echoing stairwell. However much I may have disliked her, I never would have wished such a fate on her, and the thought that she had died trying to help us twisted my insides into a hard, painful knot. She was gone, and we were on our own, with nowhere to turn and a seemingly endless army of enemies about to close in on all sides. In that moment, if I’d had a proverbial white flag, I’d have waved it.

  “The cops will be swarming all over that building before long,” Savvy said. “I know you lot don’t like dealing with them, but couldn’t they help us?”

  “No,” Finn said sharply. “Both the Durupinen and the Necromancers avoid involving law enforcement at all costs, but that doesn’t mean they don’t keep tabs on police activity. They will be all over the scanners for any sign of us.”

  “But what about the cops coming after us? I know you fancy yourselves all stealthy, but I think just a few people might have noticed the massive street fight and the bodies in the stairwell,” Savvy said.

  “There won’t be any bodies in the stairwell. There won’t be anything for the police to find. The Necromancers are very neat, just like the Durupinen,” Finn said. “We can’t worry about what’s behind us right now. We need to focus on our next move.”

  “There might be somewhere we can go,” Annabelle said, chewing nervously on a fingernail. “I would need to make a phone call, and I couldn’t guarantee that we would be welcomed, but at this point, it might be our best option.”

  “What is it?” Finn asked, his eyes glinting in the rear view mirror as he locked them upon her.

  Annabelle hesitated. “You may not like it very much.”

  “Is it preferable to a violent death on the side of the road?” Finn asked grimly.

  “I will venture to say yes,” Annabelle said.

  “Well then, I already like it better than our current plan,” Finn replied. “Go on, then, what is it?”

  “You know that my family used to be a Gateway. We haven’t been an active family for several generations, and so my direct ties to the Durupinen are sketchy at best. But our clan had many branches, and I’m still in touch with one of my distant cousins, who is a member of the Traveler Clans.”

  Finn’s eyes widened in the flashing reflection of the mirror. “The Traveler Clans? What do you think they could do for us?”

  “They might be willing to take us in, to protect us, if we ask them.”

  Finn was frowning thoughtfully. “They’ve never had much of a hand in the greater power structure. What makes you think they won’t just turn us away? Or even worse, hand us over?”

  “I can’t say for sure that they won’t, but blood still counts for something, especially among the Travelers, and there’s a chance it counts for enough to save our lives. They might even be able to do something for Milo,” she added.

  We all looked at Milo again, a floating shell in the space before us, his eyes stretched wide, seeing nothing. I found myself thinking that the words ‘ghost’ and ‘haunted’ were never so appropriately and frighteningly paired before.

  Finn looked back at the road, silent.

  “So what do you think we—”Annabelle began.

  “I don’t know!” Finn growled. “Everyone just shut up for a minute so I can think!”

  I watched his hands, opening and closing on the steering wheel, and something clicked in my brain. This was not on him. It was not his responsibility to make the decisions here, just because I was falling apart over Hannah. He was just a Novitiate, not even finished with his training. I doubted even experienced Caomhnóir like Carrick or Seamus had ever dealt with situations this dangerous. I took a breath that barely found my lungs, but nevertheless allowed me to say, fairly steadily, “We all need to make this decision together; it’s not Finn’s job. As for me, I don’t think we have a choice. We have nowhere to go and no one to help us. If we don’t try something, they’ll find us before we can even take cover. And there’s nothing we can do for Milo on our own, but if we found other Durupinen…”

  Finn’s eyes found mine in the mirror. They were asking questions that I couldn’t answer. We would just have to roll the dice and hope that we got lucky.

  “We’re out of options,” he said, nodding. “My phone’s in the cup holder here. See what you can do. Is there a general direction I should be driving?”

  “They go where the wind blows them,” Annabelle said, reaching for the phone and starting to dial. “Just keep driving as far from London as we can get.”

  §

  We’d been driving for nearly four hours, and not once did anyone ask how long it would be before we arrived. No one seemed to care where exactly it was we were going; what really weighed on us was what we had left behind in our wake, and when it might finally catch up with us. Driving on the main highways had been nearly unbearable. Every vehicle that approached and then passed by made us hold our collective breath. It was with a sense of relief that we pulled off the main stretch and began to wind through an increasingly narrower network of twisting country roads.

  Finally, Finn coasted to a stop, pulling up onto the grassy shoulder of a rutted, dirt road that barely qualified as more than a path between two wooded slopes. It was pitch black by this time, and though we would surely have seen anyone else coming a mile away, a sense of unease continued to press in upon us as we sat in the solitary blackness, waiting.

  “This is the spot, according to the GPS coordinates,” Finn said, killing the engine, which felt unnaturally loud in the gathering gloom. “So now I suppose we just wait?”

  Annabelle nodded. “She said they would come for us here.”

  I shivered and looked again at Milo, a floating shell beside me. I decided to fill the awful silence with questions. The more I talked, the less I would have to think, to feel.

  “Who exactly are the Traveler Clans?” I asked.

  “They are of Romany descent, a nomadic branch of the Durupinen system. As an American, you probably know them better as gypsies.”

  “Gypsies actually still exist?” I asked.

  “Of course they exist! They aren’t fairies or trolls, Jessica, they’re just a group of people.”

  “I know that,” I said, bristling indignantly. “But it’s not like you hear about them or see them in typical society.”

  “That’s sort of the point,” Annabelle said. “They keep to themselves, a floating, independent culture.”

  “We’ve got plenty of them here in England,” Savvy said. “Not in the city so much, but out in the country. Folks aren’t too keen on them settling in their area, usually.”

  “So all gypsies are Durupinen?” I asked.

  “No, not nearly,” Annabelle said. “The Traveler Durupinen are just a tiny fraction of the Traveler population as a whole. Many hundreds of years ago, when the Durupinen lived in the open, they would use their talents wherever they went, communing with the dead and aidi
ng the nearby villages with troublesome spirits. Of course they’ve gone to ground, like the rest of the Durupinen now, but the association between the Travelers and spiritual practices still exists.”

  I thought back to my very first impression of Annabelle, with her tarot cards, long skirts, and jingling jewelry. “And I suppose,” I said, “it would be pretty easy for someone to capitalize on that association and make a nice little career for herself doing things like fortune telling and séances?”

  Annabelle very nearly smiled. Nearly. “Yes, I suppose it would. The lifestyle makes a lot of sense for a clan, if you stop to think about it. They keep to themselves and stay on the move, so they are never in much danger of being discovered for what they are. And because of the somewhat negative cultural reaction to Travelers, people leave them alone, for the most part.”

  We speculated about who would come, and what their reactions to us might be, and when we had talked ourselves out, we waited. We waited and we waited. The darkness deepened, completely enveloping the car. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; it was utterly disorienting. With nothing to focus on, and nothing to distract me, I began to struggle to keep my eyes open at all. Beside me, Savvy’s breathing settled into a deep and heavy rhythm. I felt Annabelle slump into my shoulder and fall silent. I fought the heaviness fogging my brain. I knew I shouldn’t drop my guard, but I was just so tired, so empty of any will to think, to feel, to stay in the present, which was so full of pain and uncertainty and fear…

  Rough hands seized me by the shoulders and dragged me, half-conscious, from my seat. I was too startled even to yell, but couldn’t have made a sound even if I tried as a wad of fabric was stuffed roughly in my mouth. Muffled shouts told me that Savvy, Annabelle and Finn were also being pulled from the car. Sudden small flares of light burst in front of my eyes as I was thrown to my knees in the tall grass, and it was by these lights that my eyes adjusted and I could finally see who had attacked us.