Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  “Exactly. Willing possession is pretty much impossible to counteract, actually. Megan would have been able to use Cassandra Mosley to get around her anchor and get to Bristol.”

  “Where she expected, or at least hoped, to get a body of her own.”

  Phineas nodded. “The three hearts are for a ritual that returns a soul to life.”

  “Yeah, I just told you that.”

  “No, I mean I already knew. I’ve never seen it done and I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard of it. The hearts have to share the blood of whoever you’re trying to raise. Somewhere along the line, whatever ghost these people were killed for is related to them.”

  That last part was new to me, and it was good news. If all I had to do was find a common relative among the victims, finding out who the ghost was might be easy. Banishing them once I knew was another question entirely, but one step at a time.

  “But not all the victims,” I said. “Only three. We need to find out which hearts were taken.”

  He nodded again. “Sure. But I wonder…” He was rubbing the back of his neck and frowning.

  “What are you doing?” I asked suddenly.

  He looked surprised by the question. “I’m thinking.”

  “But why? You’ve never been willing to hang around and help me solve canteen problems before. In fact, I had several arguments prepared to try to force you into it.”

  “No need.” Phineas leaned back with a sigh and stretched his legs, kicking both my foot and poor Wulf, who was under the table. “I’m not as much of an asshole as you think, you know. I mean, I’m probably an asshole, but I’m not allowed to help you with the ghosts. It was my vessel they were illegally trapped in. That was enough interference with human souls to get me in trouble. I couldn’t get any more involved.”

  “Except you can now?”

  “Now’s different. I agree with you that this devil is what you’d call a fiend, which means he’s my jurisdiction. Especially if he’s connected with my vessel.”

  “Your jurisdiction? What are you, a cop?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And why are fiends your jurisdiction? Are you one yourself?” The thought had occurred to me on more than one occasion, usually when I was thinking less than kind thoughts about him.

  “Technically, yes.”

  “What the fuck, Phineas!” I didn’t know whether I was scared or pissed off, but pissed off was easier, so I went with that.

  Once again, he was supremely indifferent to my anger. “But that’s just because you’re using an unfair word, painting us all with the same brush. It’s like if I called your whole race criminals or murderers instead of humans.”

  Oh. Well, that was different. “So what I’ve always called fiends are basically your kind’s bad guys?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I’m meant to believe that you’re one of the good guys.”

  He laughed. “I’m the best you’re going to get, how’s that?”

  “Not comforting. But I guess beggars and choosers, and all that.” But I was just teasing him. Much as he pissed me off, I reminded myself that he couldn’t be anything like Jeffrey Litauer or Drayne, the only two fiends I’d ever met in person, or ever wanted to. Wulf would never have put up with that, and he loved the guy. “Okay, then what should I call you, if not a fiend?”

  Phineas shrugged one shoulder. “We’ve been called by a lot of names. Elves. Others. Apparently in Bristol they call one of us a devil. It’s kind of situational, I guess.”

  “Fairies?”

  He scowled. “Of course not. Fairies are a completely different thing.” He seemed adamant on this point. Perhaps I’d hit a nerve. I filed that away for later.

  “I think my favorite was phantasm,” Phineas went on. “I met a family once who called us that. I have no idea why, but it’s a catchy word.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Phantasm Phineas?” He laughed with me, and it was just a stupid thing, but for a few seconds I hated him less.

  Most of the rest of our conversation consisted of me interrogating him about exactly who he was and where he came from. Was his world another dimension, or an alternate reality, or another actual planet, or what? (He’d always thought of it as a parallel universe, but he couldn’t say for sure.) Did he take on a human form when he came to visit here, or was this what he actually looked like? (This was the real him.) What about his world? Was it like ours, or different? (Both.)

  When I asked him to elaborate on that last point, he pointed at the plate of cookies I’d put out by then and said, “Well, for example, we bake things, but not the same things.”

  Always interested in pastry, I asked, “What kinds of things? Better things?”

  Phineas shook his head. “No sweets. Mostly just bread.”

  “How awful!”

  He laughed. “And we live in houses, but they don’t look the same.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “I guess they’d look like towers to you. They’re built for being able to see above the trees.”

  “So you have trees.”

  “Trees and animals, but they’re not the same, either.” He scratched Wulf’s neck. “We have wolves, but no dogs.”

  Naturally I was aghast at this. It was even worse than the absence of desserts. “No dogs?”

  “We don’t have any domesticated animals. I guess we just found other ways to do the things humans use them for.”

  “So you have no pets, but you have switchel and switchel rings.”

  “No, and switchel is gross. The canteen was made here, to be used here.”

  He explained that there was a bit of a logistical dilemma when it came to holding onto their criminals, what with phantasms being able to magically travel across the planes and all. They had to be outdoors to travel like that, and it could be prevented by binding them with iron, but if they tethered them to earth the arresting officer couldn’t transport them, either.

  So they’d started making these little pocket netherworlds to keep their prisoners in, a sort of magical paddy wagon. And they made them using unremarkable, everyday objects that humans wouldn’t notice or care to steal. (Which apparently, back when Phineas made it, a switchel ring was. Funny, he didn’t look hundreds of years old. If I’d had to guess I’d have pegged him at around forty, older than me, but not by much.)

  This led me to the question of how an object that was designed not to draw human attention had ended up on my bookshelf for Phineas to come into my home under false pretenses and smash. And that’s where he ended the conversation. He said it was a waste of time to dwell on the past when we had immediate issues to deal with, and that he had to go home to check on some things, before we went to Bristol.

  “We don’t have to go to Bristol, not right away,” I said. “I have a genealogy research firm I work with sometimes. They just seem to be able to do stuff I can’t on my own with one of those websites. I could have them look into the victims and—”

  “No, we have to go,” Phineas interrupted.

  “Why?”

  “You want the ghost, and I want the devil, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And they clearly have some relationship. The ghost could lead us to the devil, but the devil could also lead us to the ghost.”

  “Too much repetition of ghost and devil, you’re losing me.”

  “The stolen hearts are our best lead,” Phineas said, “but they aren’t our only angle. I think we need to find out more about this bargain, when it was made, and who made it.”

  “Find out as much about Bristol as we can, really,” I said. It was time for a new list. I found my phone and started one.

  1. Find out which 3 hearts & how they’re related—common blood will lead to identity of ghost.

  2. Find out about bargain—may lead to identity of devil.

  3. Identity of either may lead to identity of the other.

  Put in plain terms like that, it seemed simple enough. I agreed
we should go to Bristol.

  A quick search before Phineas left turned up two bed and breakfasts and one hotel there, and the hotel took dogs. After some back and forth as to how long we’d need, I reserved two rooms for a week, which sounded like a nice round number, anyway. We agreed to meet there the following Monday.

  It wasn’t until later, when I was in bed that night, that I realized Phineas had given me a bunch of names other people called him, without saying what he called himself. That didn’t exactly surprise me. The other two fiends—phantasms, whatever—I’d known got awfully touchy when I asked for their real names.

  The Monday plan gave me three days to put my affairs in order at home. I let Charlie and Norbert know they’d need to make other arrangements for Warren. This never made Charlie happy, but he couldn’t exactly complain, since he was the one who pulled me off nanny duty and kicked me out in the first place. I spent the rest of the weekend working, trying to get far enough ahead to hit my deadlines and pay my bills even if Bristol did end up taking the whole week.

  I was up late the night before I left, long after Wulf retired for the night. By the time I turned off my computer I was exhausted and cold, but my mind was spinning, and the house was too quiet to distract me from my own thoughts. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I thought a hot shower might help.

  Moonlight shone through my bathroom window, filtered through a layer of frost. I reached for the shower door in a hurry, not even bothering to turn on the light, eager to get the water hot.

  Helen Turner was standing behind the glass.

  Her neck and chest were covered in blood, her eyes wide and dead.

  I screamed and jumped back, slipped on the floor, and fell backwards. I got my arms behind me in time to save my head from slamming into the ceramic tile, but not my tailbone. That made me scream again, louder.

  Wulf came to see what all the commotion was about, and licked my face in sympathy, but his tail was wagging the whole time. And why shouldn’t it be? It wasn’t like there was a ghost in the room. Helen Turner was no ghost.

  Maybe it was a hallucination that I saw every so often in the few years after I killed Helen, by the most disgusting means possible, in the netherworld. Or maybe it was some remnant of her left behind. Maybe it was the part of her that became part of me, never to be separated from, never to be escaped. Maybe it was just a manifestation of my own guilt.

  I didn’t know, but it didn’t much matter. It sucked, no matter what it was, and I never got so used to it that she didn’t manage to scare the shit out of me every time.

  I could taste blood in my mouth, not my own. I brushed my teeth and rinsed with mouthwash, looking stubbornly down into the sink as I did. I knew if I looked up, I’d see her behind me in the mirror.

  I decided the shower could wait until morning, and went to put on some pajamas.

  She was in the closet. Of fucking course.

  Her skin was so white under the fluorescent lights it was almost blue. As always, her eyes were lifeless, a corpse’s eyes. Helen was as dead as dead could be. But that never stopped her from talking.

  “You won’t be able to do it,” she said.

  And she never said anything nice.

  I mean, okay, I bit the woman’s throat out. But she killed my brother. We were pretty much even. I didn’t see why I had to be damned to having my inner critic personified henceforth in the form of Helen Turner.

  But ignoring her didn’t do any good. So I asked, “Which part? Finding the ghost? Finding the devil?”

  She flapped this away in what I guess was meant to be dismissal, but her dead slack hand resembled nothing so much as some pale fish, jumping out of the water. I took a step back from her.

  “You won’t be able to save any of them,” she said.

  “Any of who? I’m not going there to save anyone.”

  “You’ll fail them.”

  And with that vague and useless prophecy, she was gone.

  The next morning I took a handful of ibuprofen and fished out one of those round airplane travel pillows from the back of my closet, to sit on in the car. The drive was only supposed to be two and a half hours long, and it should have been lovely, even in winter, with plenty of woods and eventually mountains to look at. But we hit some construction east of Asheville and it ended up taking well over three. Despite the pillow, my tailbone was killing me, and Wulf and I were both tired, hungry, and cranky by the time I could see Bristol in the distance. The sight did nothing to improve my mood.

  It was just over halfway up a mountain, nestled in a wide expanse of flat-enough land that joined it to the mountain next door. It looked just like a hat on a devil’s head, resting between his horns.

  “Not the most subtle devil, are you?” I muttered as I exited the highway. The shadow of the mountain almost immediately fell over our car.

  “Nope,” I said to Wulf. “Not subtle at all.”

  Wulf whined, whether due to the precognition of some ghastly event up there in Bristol, or just the need to pee, I couldn’t tell.

  The Mount Phearson hotel was a sprawling white building at the back edge of Bristol, with woods that quickly got thick on one side, and a stately patio and garden on the other. I took Wulf for a walk around the latter before we went inside. It felt good to stand and walk, but it was cold and windy and getting dark by then. I hoped he’d do his business quickly, and that my room inside would be nice.

  There was a little dead boy on the patio, holding a braided leather dog leash.

  I was accustomed to ghosts, so it wasn’t a shock, exactly. I was mostly just curious. This was new for me. Ghosts normally hid when they knew I was coming. As we got closer, the curiosity turned to pity.

  He was young—somewhere in the neighborhood of ten, I guessed—and so afraid. He was looking frantically around, his movements twitchy and disjointed. Even translucent in the gathering dusk, I could see his face well enough to see the panic there.

  I stepped forward and asked, “Can I help you, sweetheart? Have you lost your dog?”

  The boy jerked around to face me, eyes wide, and shook his head, hard. But then Wulf stepped forward and whined, and when the boy saw him, his face relaxed. He even smiled a little, hinting at some very cute dimples in his round face, and moved toward Wulf, who wagged his tail hard enough to shake his whole back end. But just then the nighttime floodlights went on around the hotel’s yard, and the boy disappeared.

  Wulf whined again, and started sniffing furiously around, trying to catch the ghost’s scent. After a few minutes I said, “I think he’s gone, buddy.” Wulf gave me a mournful look and raised his leg to pee on one of the patio chairs.

  “Lydia.”

  Phineas was walking toward us, hands stuffed in the pockets his wool pea coat.

  “How’d you know we were out here?” I asked.

  “Saw you out the window. Been waiting in the lobby for a while, checking things out.”

  “And?”

  “Feels haunted,” he said.

  “It is. We just saw a ghost. A little boy.”

  He didn’t do anything more than nod politely when I told him about it. This did not surprise me. Phineas didn’t even care about the ghosts that were his fault; I couldn’t expect him to be all that interested in one that had nothing to do with him. But I resolved to keep an eye out for the boy, and help him if I could.

  “The young man who checked me in was friendly enough,” Phineas said as we headed inside. “But the owner is, to put it mildly, creepy.”

  He held the door for me. The first thing I saw was an enormous fireplace, complete with an enormous fire. I’m not generally a fan of enormous fires, even contained ones, but I was cold enough to be grateful for it. The lobby was spacious and expensively furnished in burgundy upholstery and dark wood.

  I made a mocking, dismissive gesture back at Phineas. “You’re just spooked because this town has been bartered to the devil.”

  “You think?” Phineas laughed, then nodded toward some
thing across the room.

  I turned and saw a woman by the front desk—which was actually a desk, almost as big as the fireplace, unlike most hotels where it’s a counter—speaking to a young man who looked afraid of her. She was tall and thin, and when I say thin, I don’t just mean her frame. Her lips were thin, her nose was thin, even the finger she wagged at the intimidated employee was thin. She was dressed like her lobby, in a suit the color of the wine I wished I was drinking right then.

  “Thin isn’t the same as creepy,” I said.

  “Wait for it,” said Phineas.

  And then she turned to look at us, and I got a better view of her face. Phineas was right. It was the eyes. When I say they were dead, I don’t mean in that flat, expressionless way some people’s are (although that’s pretty bad too). I can’t really explain what I do mean, though, except to say, picture a head stuffed by a taxidermist. Even a good taxidermist can’t make a dead thing look really alive, you know? I was unpleasantly reminded of Helen Turner the night before.

  “It’s like there’s no soul behind them,” I whispered. “Maybe she’s the devil’s wife.”

  Phineas chuckled, but I instinctively shrank closer to him as the woman approached. Wulf’s hackles went up, and he leaned against my legs.

  “Miss Trinket,” she said, extending a hand. I didn’t want to touch it, but my own hand went out automatically. Her shake was firm and cold. “Madeline Underwood, proprietor.” Her voice was low and throaty. Sexy, actually, although she certainly didn’t look the type.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, thinking it an obvious lie.

  “I wish I could say the same,” Madeline said in a firm but professional tone. “But despite what your companion told me when he checked in, I know you’re not a journalist. I’m familiar with your website.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “Can’t we extend the definition of journalist to include people who run informative websites? I mean, that’s not all that different from a magazine, when you think about it.”

  She didn’t argue the point. She merely said, “You aren’t welcome here in Bristol. But if you insist on staying, you are welcome in my hotel. I welcome the opportunity to keep an eye on you.”