“Amias came here last summer,” Rebecca said. “He wasn’t able to get to the farm, of course, but I guess he’d been spying on us for a while. He knew our routine. Cornered me in the grocery store in Lady’s Slipper. Frozen foods.” She sighed. “Bella was too partial to ice cream,” she said, as if that was to blame for Amias finding them.
“Last summer?” Phineas gave me a pointed look, but I was slow to get it.
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “And for exactly what we were just talking about. Sanctuary.”
“He wanted sanctuary here?” I asked.
“He wanted us to teach him how to make a new one for himself. He didn’t want to rely on another witch to do it for him.”
“Letitia would have learned her magic from Mercy,” Phineas said to me, referring to Mercy’s daughter. And Amias’s. Letitia was the one who had turned Bristol into Amias’s sanctuary.
“And Mercy learned a lot of what she knew here,” I said. “So Amias figured you were the ones to come to.”
“We claimed not to know the spell,” said Rebecca. “That Mercy had developed it on her own.” She looked at Phineas. “Perhaps as a way of hiding from you.”
Phineas flinched, but if Rebecca noticed it, she didn’t acknowledge it.
“It was a plausible story. You know what an advanced witch she was. But he didn’t believe it. Like I said, the illusion surrounding the farm works similarly. He insisted we must know, or at least be able to figure out, how to do what he wanted.”
“He threatened you?” Phineas asked.
“He gave us a deadline. Give him the spell by Samhain, or he would kill us all.”
Phineas ran a hand through his hair, his expression doubtful. “You know what he does. And why we think he does it. I think you have to consider the possibility that he intends to kill you all—and harvest your souls—either way. If he gets what he wants from you first, great. But he’s not breeding those birds just to threaten people.”
“I’m sure he’d love to sacrifice us,” Rebecca agreed, in the same voice she might have used to comment on the weather. She didn’t look afraid, or even particularly angry.
Even though Amias just killed her sister. Why aren’t you more pissed off, Rebecca? Or do you just hide it really well?
I kept those particular questions to myself, and instead said, “But he can’t hurt you if he can’t get in here. In my experience, the sanctuary spell is pretty impossible to break.”
“I’m confident in my magic, but not so confident as to be blinded by arrogance,” Rebecca said. “He’s extremely powerful. He’s got his own crew of witches, who are familiar with sanctuary and how it works. And we’ll have dozens of guests here. I’m not willing to risk all of their lives on this one line of defense.” She looked around her sparse kitchen. “For that matter, even if that defense holds, I’m not very fond of the idea of being under siege.”
“Then why not cancel the celebration entirely?” I asked.
“Samhain is more than just a celebration,” said Rebecca. “We’re not just getting together for dinner here. It’s a thin day.”
“She means the veil is thin,” Phineas said to me.
“Between worlds?” I asked.
“Between the magical and the material,” Rebecca corrected. “Things are possible on Samhain that aren’t, the rest of the year. We get together to share our power, and renew it. To protect one another and give each other strength. Sometimes, to combine our powers into new things, new spells, things that we couldn’t do before. It’s not something we’d let Amias take from us.”
“Well. That sounds pretty powerful,” I said. “Like it would be a bad day to attack you. Are you sure he’s not bluffing? Maybe this isn’t what he intends to use the birds for.”
“We’re not sure of anything.” Rebecca looked at Phineas. “I’ve warned the others. There might be some who decide not to come. But for the rest of us, we’ve got to do more than sit here and hope that he can’t get past the enchantment.”
“So what’s your plan, then?” asked Phineas.
“It wasn’t fully formed.” Her pale stare wasn’t exactly accusing, but it was hard. “Bella’s job was to find you. She thought you might be able to help, being the expert on Amias. I suppose that’s what she was doing down there. Pity she didn’t find you before Amias found her.”
“And Henrietta?” I asked, wanting to derail the Bella guilt train before it could get much farther. “Where is she?”
Rebecca sighed. “She had this idea that we could give Amias the spell he wants, but modify it without his knowing. So that whatever place he casts it over, instead of a sanctuary, it becomes a prison.”
“Now that’s an interesting idea,” I said. “Is it possible?”
“Henrietta obviously thought it was,” said Rebecca. “But it would be tricky. We’re quite advanced, my sisters and I, but we weren’t sure how to do such a thing. Henrietta went back home, to—”
“—the Library,” Phineas finished for her. “I heard a rumor she’d been there, but I wasn’t able to track down anything concrete.”
“Yes. She hoped to find something that would help her develop this spell.”
“And you haven’t seen either of them since,” Phineas guessed.
“No. I haven’t.”
Then why the hell didn’t you go looking for them? Another question I kept to myself. But that didn’t mean I would let it go. I wasn’t ready to sound like I was accusing her of anything, but I wasn’t sure I trusted her, either.
We didn’t know why Amias had killed Bella, but it obviously wasn’t to keep her from connecting with Phineas. Not when Amias put us on his own trail, by using the shadow eaters and then leaving her body where I would find it. Phineas was sure he’d done that not only to taunt us, but to draw us in, to get us to come to New Hampshire and try to stop him. That way he could kill all his stones with one bird. Or one flock, as it were.
“And here we are,” I said. “So I guess it worked.”
“Which means we need to get ready,” said Phineas.
We decided to stay at Traven Farm through Halloween. We were in full Western movie, you-want-a-showdown-you’ll-get-one mode, until Phineas spoiled it by saying, “My mother won’t like it.”
I mean, really. What sort of desperado worries about what his mother will think?
But Rebecca was frowning at him, and seemed to be counting on her fingers at the same time. “They fall on the same day?”
Phineas nodded.
“Oh, dear. When’s the last time that happened?”
“I think once when we were little,” said Phineas.
“Anyone want to let me in on what we’re talking about?” I asked.
“Remember I told you about Homecoming?” When I nodded, Phineas went on, “Well, this year it happens to fall on the same day as Halloween. Or partly on the same day, with the differences in time.”
“And that’s what hasn’t happened since you were little?” I frowned. “But that can’t be…” I trailed off, struggling with the numbers. Math was never my strongest skill, and this was especially hard to figure out without a spreadsheet. Or probably even with a spreadsheet. “If one of my days is one of your hours, then one of my years would be…”
“Between fourteen and fifteen days, on our plane,” Rebecca supplied. “Equating one day to one hour is an easy reference, but it’s not an exact calculation.”
“Still. That means our Halloween happens roughly every two weeks in your world.”
“But remember, it only lasts an hour there,” said Rebecca.
“And it’s complicated by the fact that Homecoming doesn’t always fall on the same day, or even in the same month,” Phineas said. “There are variables in astronomy and astrology and—” He waved a hand. “That’s not important. The point is, it’s a rare thing for them to coincide.”
“Okay,” I said. “So your point is, if you’re here dealing with Amias, you’ll miss your holiday. And your mom might ground you for
it.”
“Very funny. But that’s not quite all there is to it. Having the days line up like that makes the celebration even bigger.”
“Why?”
“When the veil is thin, humans traveling to our plane isn’t the unthinkable thing it is otherwise,” said Rebecca.
“And a lot of us have human families, remember,” Phineas added.
“I see,” I said. “So these human relations can join in on the holiday too, and that makes it an extra big deal this year.”
“Exactly.” Phineas sighed. “She’s going to be mad that I’m missing it. I’ll have to stop by and tell her at some point.”
“What about Amias?” I asked. “Can he use this somehow? Bring more birds over, or something?”
“I don’t see how,” Phineas said. “If he’s cross-breeding the birds to train and control them, bringing purebred ones here wouldn’t help him much.” He looked at Rebecca, but she shook her head.
“I can’t think of any advantage this would give him,” she said. “But we should keep it in mind.”
Phineas nodded, frowning. “He did always hate Homecoming. It’s an odd coincidence.” He shrugged. “I’ll give it some thought.”
We parked the car in an abandoned lot Rebecca directed us to, brought our stuff in, and got settled in two of the farmhouse’s many spare rooms (which Rebecca assigned to us, rather than letting us choose). Then I took my phone out of my laptop bag. And stared at it for a good five seconds, trying to think of who I had to tell that I would be gone for two weeks. There really wasn’t anyone, anymore. It was a depressing thought.
I settled for calling Martha, not because she’d worry, but because it made me feel better to tell someone where I was. She suggested that Wulf stay in touch with Jack Nimble via email, and wished me a pleasant trip.
Somehow I doubted it would be.
At least the dinner was good. I didn’t expect Rebecca to be much of a cook—despite apparently having sheltered witches for many years, she just didn’t strike me as the nurturing type—but I was proved wrong by the stew and fresh bread she somehow managed to produce in way less time than such things should take. I wondered whether they were magically enhanced, and whether that affected the nutritional value at all.
I had food for Wulf in one of my bags, but Rebecca waved me back to my seat when I got up to go get it, and gave him his own bowl of stew. I decided I’d been being too hard on her, and she might be a kindred spirit after all.
While we ate we talked about our next steps. If Amias’s goal really was to draw us out, that worked both ways. Knowing exactly where he would be on a specific date was closer than Phineas had gotten to discovering his whereabouts in a long time. Unless you wanted to count the day Amias set my house on fire, that is.
We needed a trap, some way to turn the tables on him. Rebecca was a powerful witch, but Amias had witches of his own, not to mention a flock of shadow eaters. Or half shadow eaters, with the other half being something he could train to do whatever he wanted. We needed something more on our side. But it was hard to think of anything that Phineas hadn’t already tried many times over during his years of hunting his cousin.
Phineas and Rebecca spent half the meal talking about things that were over my head, so I kept mostly to myself, quietly mulling over the problem. Amias could be hurt like any phantasm could—iron, jet—but in my previous encounters with him, he’d always found a way to get the upper hand. Clearly those things didn’t hurt enough.
Bullets would hurt, of course. But I still had burn scars on my hand from the last time I’d tried to pull a gun on Amias. He had a particular talent for heat, which meant metal was his friend, and our enemy.
I was mentally cataloging all my past experiences with phantasms, considering all my possible advantages, when I stopped a spoonful of stew halfway to my mouth and said, “But words can hurt you. Or some words can.”
Rebecca and Phineas paused their conversation to give me equal looks of puzzled condescension.
“Are you talking about a ritual?” Phineas asked. “Because last time we tried that, it didn’t go so well, remember?”
“Of course I remember. That was my house that got reduced to ashes. I’m not talking about a ritual. I’m talking about his name.”
Rebecca tilted her head to one side, considering me. “You mean his true name?”
“I guess I do.” I told them about Drayne, the fiend I’d met in the canteen netherworld, and the rage he’d unleashed on me when I asked him about his name. I’d gotten a similar reaction from Greta Litauer, when I asked her about her brother Jeffrey’s name. Phantasms were not big on giving people their true names.
“I assume there’s a good reason for that,” I said.
“There is,” agreed Phineas. “Names have power. To people who are good with magic, they can be used in all sorts of ways.”
“Like to control a person? Not to kill him, but to, say, subdue him and force him to call off his army of killer birds?”
Phineas nodded at me. “His true name could certainly help us do that. Too bad we have no way of finding out what it is.”
“He’s your cousin, and you don’t know his name?”
“We take names like Phineas and Rebecca, names from other worlds, as nicknames almost from birth,” Phineas said. “We guard our real names more closely than anything. We don’t even tell our husbands and wives. Our parents are the only other people who know them. And Amias’s father is dead.”
“But according to you, his mother is here on earth somewhere. Or was. Could she still be alive?”
“You don’t give Phineas much credit,” Rebecca sipped stew from her spoon while regarding me with those cool, disapproving eyes. “You don’t think this has occurred to him before?”
“We’ve been trying to track down his mother for many years,” Phineas said. “If she’s still alive, she knows how to hide. Probably because she’s terrified of her son. We’ve never been able to find her.”
“Well, maybe it’s worth trying again.”
“Along with more practical solutions, like additional magical wards,” said Rebecca.
“And more straightforward ones, like weapons,” I said. “Explosives or something. Surely we could get our hands on something he can’t turn against us. Are there plastic guns?”
Phineas frowned. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”
“I’ll look into it,” I said.
“So, he’s coming for us in two weeks, with a flock of shadow eaters,” Phineas said. “And as of right now, our best ideas are plastic guns and my untraceable aunt. Why am I not feeling very confident?”
By noon the next day, I wasn’t feeling any more confident than Phineas. I don’t know where I’d gotten the impression that there were plastic guns. From the movies, maybe. Oh, a plastic gun is possible. But that doesn’t mean you can just run out and get one.
I did manage to find more information than should probably be readily available on how to make homemade explosives, but I was afraid amateurs like us were just as likely to blow ourselves up as Amias and his shadow eaters.
“Getting Amias is obviously important,” I said when the three of us sat down for lunch. “But the birds are the more immediate threat. If we can’t find a way to force Amias to call them off, then we need something that will take them out of the equation, without hurting any of us at the same time.” I nodded at Phineas. “Like that dragon.”
“Well, don’t count on them bringing us any more of those,” Phineas said with a scowl.
“I know, but how exactly would it have killed the birds? You said it wasn’t fire? Some kind of venom?”
“Sort of like that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we can do something with venom or poison, too. Strychnine appears to be the most common avicide. I just learned that word, by the way.”
“But if you can’t deliver it via dragon spit—”
“Dragon spit?”
“Yeah, they don’t breathe it, they spi
t it. And barring that, how will we hit a whole flock of birds with strychnine and have it kill them instantly?”
I sighed. “Let’s go back to fire, then.”
“Why, do you happen to have a flamethrower?” asked Phineas.
“Not hardly. I do not like fire. But there’s a reason it’s one of Amias’s favorite weapons. It kills just about everything, right?”
“Plus it would be kind of fun to use against him, for once,” Phineas said, looking interested.
“But that goes back to the problem of killing them but not us,” I said. “If we could make some kind of trap, or lure them to a fire without getting into it ourselves…” I trailed off.
Rebecca had listened to this whole exchange in silence. Now she frowned at me, but it wasn’t her usual stern frown. More curious, like I’d just sprouted horns or something.
“She may be on to something,” she said to Phineas, then looked back at me. “You’ve sent souls into a vessel many times, I understand? And even yourself?”
“Yes.”
“There’s another ritual that’s similar, but because there’s no remnant to anchor you, it’s very dangerous. I normally wouldn’t teach it to someone who hasn’t been training with me for quite some time. But I think it would be best if more than one of us knew it. And since you already have experience with moving souls around, you might be a good candidate.”
“Similar in what way?”
“In the sense that it transports your soul. Except in this case, it removes it from your body.”
I blinked at her. “In other words, it kills me.”
“In a way, but only temporarily. As long as you get back within a few seconds, there’s no lasting harm done.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then your body will die. That’s the dangerous part. It’s difficult, once you’re disembodied, to have control. It takes a great deal of mental fortitude.” Rebecca pursed her lips, clearly doubting that mental fortitude was a quality I possessed. “Your soul, once freed, will have an urge to move on. You’ve got to fight that instinct and return to your body.”
Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3) Page 9
