“No, no, nothing like that,” I said, sparing the quickly reddening Phineas the trouble of answering. “I’m just here to help.”
His father was frowning—Phineas’s frown. They had the same eyes, though he was much shorter than his son. “But it’s too early to come through the veil yet.”
“Tell me about it. It was not a fun trip.”
Phineas’s mother—obviously the source of his auburn hair—laughed, and I saw that she was also the source of his lopsided smile. Looking at her, I was reminded of the first time I’d met her son. I’d thought him handsome then. In fact, I’m pretty sure lovely had been the word he’d called to mind. (Of course, within an hour I’d reclassified him as an asshole.) It was that smile, the same one his mother now wore. It was like a window, letting out some light inside them that couldn’t be dimmed by anything that happened outside.
“All right, detective. If she’s with you, I’ll be going,” said Flynn.
Phineas and I both thanked him, but Flynn didn’t bother returning my wave as he began trudging back down.
“He doesn’t seem like a very happy guy,” I said.
“He resents having to patrol today,” said Phineas’s mother.
“We don’t have a lot of crime here,” Phineas added.
“Except for serial killers, you mean?”
“Well, exactly,” said Phineas. “Only a threat like this would justify someone working during the holiday.”
A threat Flynn didn’t even believe was real. I didn’t say that, but Phineas went on as though I had.
“It all seems pretty far-fetched to them,” he said. “Amias has never done anything on a large scale before. And it’s exactly because murder is rare among us that it’s hard for them to imagine, one man killing so many at once. Obviously they know it happens—on earth, mostly—but that doesn’t mean they think it will happen here.”
“Even though you told them he has the birds?” I asked. “The people here know what shadow eaters are like. Surely they realize how awful it would be to unleash that many on a crowd.”
“A few shadow eaters that Amias managed to befriend, killing one person, is one thing,” Phineas’s father said. “The idea of him controlling that many…”
Phineas shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, maybe they’re right. Maybe it is far-fetched. Amias bred and trained those birds on earth, not here. I don’t know how he’d bring them across, a flock that big. I might be completely wrong with this guess. I just hope Rebecca is okay at the farm if I am.” I’d never seen him look so uncertain.
“Rebecca is still ready if he shows up there,” I said. “She doesn’t need us.” I took a step forward and grabbed Phineas’s shoulder. “You are not wrong. It makes sense, him coming here. We need to be prepared.”
His mother was beaming at me, despite the gravity of the subject matter. Maybe she was just happy to see her son getting some respect. “Are you going to introduce us, or not?” she asked Phineas.
“Right. Sorry. This is Lydia.” He gestured at me, then back at them. “Lydia, my parents. Gwen and Eric.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
When the handshakes were over, Phineas shook his head at me.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Well, hello to you, too.”
“It was dangerous.”
“Yes, so Rebecca told me. But you’ve helped me in my world plenty of times. I figured it was time I returned the favor. And I’m fine.”
He peered into my eyes, checking my pupils, maybe, like I’d taken a fall and he was looking for signs of a head injury. “Are you?”
“Yes. So where do we stand? I saw the fires were set up.”
Phineas nodded. “At least I managed to get my boss on my side. Sort of. Enough to authorize two fires and a patrol, anyway.”
“And do you have people who know the ritual?” I asked.
“Gwen and I know it,” said Eric.
Phineas glanced at his father, then back at me. “I explained it to them, and we’ve got all the stuff, but I’m not completely sure I got the incantation right.”
“I can go over it with them. Do we have time to practice? It’s pretty hard.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Eric said with a laugh. “I’m sure we’re more than up to the task, if a human can do it.” My offense must have registered in my face, because he quickly added, “No no, I didn’t mean to imply you’re inferior or anything. Just that you’re not a very magical people, as a rule. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not part of your culture. The things you can learn are usually fairly simple for us.”
“She’s one of the rare ones,” said Phineas.
“Well then. Good,” Eric said. “Then I’ll be glad to learn from her.”
“Great,” said Phineas. He turned to his mother. “But you don’t have to.”
Gwen raised an eyebrow, and I covered a smile with my hand. The stern mother look was, it seemed, universal across all planes.
“Now that Lydia is here, you should man the other fire,” said Phineas.
“Meaning you don’t think I can do it,” Gwen said.
They started to argue, but Eric put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Phin has a point. Two souls out of body for two fires. And two people to light them.”
She scowled at both of them, then turned away to look out a window. When her back was to us, Phineas leaned into me and whispered, “I inherited my magical talent from her, you see.”
I stifled an inappropriate laugh.
“It’s getting crowded out there,” Gwen said. “The veil will be thin soon.”
“Then let’s get down to business,” I said.
Eric and I sat down, and I recited the incantation slowly, while he repeated each line after me. We only went through it twice before he had it memorized.
“Sorry about that crack against humans before,” Eric said when we were finished. “I really didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just… it’s been a tense day. And I don’t necessarily express myself well when under stress.”
I smiled at him. “That makes two of us. Believe me, I’ll say enough stupid things to offend you much worse, and more often, before this day is over.”
He laughed. “Then we’ll both try not to take it personally, how’s that?”
“Deal. Listen though, about this ritual. I’m sure you’re right and you’re up to it. But did Phineas warn you about how quickly you have to get back in body?”
Eric nodded. “Sounded like he made a point of learning all about it from Rebecca. Even if he doesn’t have a knack—do humans still use that word? Knack?”
“Yep.”
He smiled. “It’s been a while since I’ve traveled to that plane. Even if he doesn’t have a knack for these things himself, he likes to be prepared. And I got the impression he was worried about you doing it, frankly.”
I shrugged a little. “He’s protective. I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m a human or because I’m a woman.”
Eric waved that off. “He’s protective of everyone. He worries too much.”
I tried not to laugh. Phineas was pretty much a walking definition of laid back. He joked about everything. If that was a phantasm’s idea of a worrywart, I could only imagine what the normal ones were like.
Phineas and Gwen had posted themselves at opposite windows to keep watch. Eric and I each took a window halfway between them, so we had the whole clearing covered. I was surprised to see how much the crowd had grown. Everybody seemed to be drinking, eating, laughing. Your basic holiday feast, really. Like the stern mother look, it was universal.
“It must be almost time,” I said. “For it to turn Halloween back home, I mean.”
“The humans will start coming in less than half an hour,” Phineas agreed in a tight voice.
“You think that’s when he’ll hit? Will he need the thin veil to get the birds across?”
“I don’t know, bu
t that would be the ideal time either way. It’s when the crowd will be thickest.”
Of course. Might as well collect all the souls he could. Go big or go home, right? Or in this case, go home and go big.
I looked past the revelers, at what was beyond the clearing. The forest spread out in a pattern, like farm fields, squares of different kinds of trees. They were broken here and there by other towers, not quite as tall as the one I was in, but tall enough to provide a view over the trees.
“What are all the towers?” I asked.
“Our houses.” Phineas pointed. “Ours is that way, in the yellow section. They’re different on the inside than this one. This is our gathering place, for parties and such. The weather is good today, so people are mostly outside, but it’s built for fitting a crowd in.”
“Like a big round ballroom,” I said.
Gwen sighed. “A shame we don’t dance.”
“But you have music,” I said. “I heard them singing outside.”
“Singing,” Eric agreed. “Very few instruments.”
I saw no sign of birds above the trees, but for all I knew Amias could be in the crowd already, and I’d never know it. We were too high up to see faces.
We watched in silence for a bit longer, while the tension we were all feeling built in the room until it was almost unbearable. I was just thinking of some inane thing to say to break it, when Eric spoke first.
“How long have you known Phineas, Lydia?”
“Not long by your time,” I said. “I guess a little over a year, by mine.” It seemed a lot longer since that summer day when I’d found Phineas sitting on my porch steps. Right before he smashed my canteen, like an asshole.
“Ahhh,” Gwen said in the tone of someone realizing something. “You’re the one he cut his hair for.”
“Mother.”
“I prefer it long, myself, but—”
“Mother.”
I bit down on a laugh, and we went back to our quiet vigil.
It went on for so long that even I began to doubt Phineas. Soon I was seeing humans—identifiable by their jeans and sweatshirts—mingling with the phantasms below. The veil was thin, and the party was in full swing.
“He’ll come,” Phineas said, although nobody had questioned him.
I stared out at the forest and shook my head. “No. He won’t.”
“I’m telling you—”
“He’s already here.”
I pointed at a cloud of gray and brown floating through the trees. The birds were here.
About the only positive thing about those birds emerging from the trees was that there were less of them than I thought.
There had seemed to be thousands when they were right on top of me in Silas Underwood’s pit, but I guessed exaggerated perception was only natural at a time like that. In reality, it was bigger than you’d like a flock of vicious soul-sucking killer birds to be, but it didn’t seem entirely unmanageable.
There were several minutes of chaos while we fought our way down through the tower, against the mass of screaming people crushing themselves in, fleeing to the higher floors to make room for more coming in behind them. I almost lost Phineas a couple of times, but he grabbed me and actually lifted me up at one point, swinging me out of the way of a very large phantasm who came lumbering up the stairs.
Advanced warning. That was the whole point of keeping watch in the tower. Isn’t that why towers were invented in the first place? We were supposed to get ahead of Amias, get the people inside, and destroy the birds before anybody got hurt.
But as soon as I got outside, I saw how hopeless that was. Maybe the delay on the stairs had been longer than I realized. (It really was a hell of a lot of stairs.) Or maybe shadow eaters were just really fast fliers. Maybe both.
Dammit, people. If you’d taken Phineas more seriously, maybe you’d have been inside to start with.
Some of them were paying for that mistake with their lives.
There was no sign of Amias that I could see, but his flock had descended. Some of the birds were chasing people down. Others had already caught their prey. Not three feet away from me I saw them covering a figure—I couldn’t tell if it was human or phantasm, male or female—like ants covering an apple core on the sidewalk. Screams were rising up around me. And the breeze carried the sickening scent of blood.
It would have been easy to let the scene before me paralyze me, but I couldn’t afford to do that. So I put a wall up, somewhere between my eyes and my mind. I saw that figure on the ground as just that—a figure—instead of a person. I couldn’t think about the person.
I yanked the candle out of my sweater pocket, and with a silent prayer of thanks that it wasn’t raining, hastily set it on the nearest table and lit it.
Several yards away, Phineas’s father was doing the same thing. I was vaguely aware, out of the corner of my eye, of Phineas and his mother and a couple of others rushing toward the fires that had been prepared.
My hand was shaking as I brought the bone dagger up to my neck, and I cut myself a little deeper than I intended. At least that meant plenty of blood on the knife. I started the incantation.
The air was thick with birds, singing that incongruously melodious song as they rushed toward me. I could hear more behind me.
I ripped open the salt packet with trembling hands, and talked faster.
A few birds were on me now, digging into my back and shoulders. Once again that biting, burning pain overwhelmed me, and I almost fell to my knees.
Keep going. It’s your only chance.
I’d spilled most of the salt, but there was enough left—at least I hoped it would be enough—to sprinkle over the blood on the dagger. I ran the blade through the candle flame, three times.
Two of the shadow eaters came at my eyes.
Luckily for me, the dagger’s work was done. I turned it on them instead. One of the birds fell, although I was pretty sure I’d bumped it more than stabbed it. I brought my other hand to my face, shielding my half-closed eyes as I swung more-or-less blindly at the second one.
The shadow eater bit and bit, and blood ran through my fingers.
But I was on the last word. It came out as a scream, but it was enough.
As soon as I felt myself separate from my body, there was a screech—nothing at all like their usual chirping—and all the birds within my sight, from the one that had been eating my hand to a mass of them up ahead, chasing a child toward the tower, stopped what they were doing. It was almost comical, how abruptly they turned, like a swarm of bees in a cartoon. They flew at me as one.
The instinct to fly away was as heavy as always, but I knew what I had to do. I looked around until I found Phineas. I focused on him.
But it was different in this world. The urge to move on was hard enough to resist at home, on the plane where my soul belonged. Here was a place I had no business being in. I wanted nothing more, in that moment, than to leave it.
And there was one other wrinkle, a complication I hadn’t had an opportunity to practice with back at the farm.
Psychopomps.
I could feel the shadow eaters biting into me, although I knew that was impossible. The pain was no different than it had been when I was in my physical body. I felt them on my face. I tried to scream, and tasted their feathers.
But this time they weren’t trying to pick me apart. They were pushing me, tugging at me. Herding me.
It was impossible to resist them. Of course I would let them take me. I’d go wherever they wanted me to. I should go. I had to go.
“Lydia!”
Phineas’s voice.
That was right. I was on a mission. I was supposed to be saving lives.
The trouble with that was, such worldly concerns as death and murder and cousins holding grudges had lost all sense of importance. Just one lifetime, among many. And too complicated to mourn much, if I wanted to leave it behind.
“Lydia!”
I could see him now, through the flapping w
ings around me. He was running away from his position by the fire, toward the flock of shadow eaters surrounding my disembodied spirit.
Phineas. Running toward the creepy birds. Knowing that, once he reached them, they would surely tear him to pieces.
That snapped me back to reality. If he could manage to do that, I could do my part.
I flew forward as fast as I could, and the birds followed.
I doubt Phineas could see me, but he saw the shadow eaters, swarming and screeching, and knew I was moving toward the fire. He ran back to it again. I couldn’t see what he did, with them all around me, but as soon as I passed over the bonfire it went up in flames.
As I might have mentioned a time or two before, I do not like fire. The whole idea of this exercise was that my body was back there, safe, out of the way. It couldn’t be burned. But I still panicked when I saw the fire rise up around me. It had started way faster than a fire should, so it was roaring full blast before I’d even fully realized it was lit.
The birds were screaming, but I barely noticed in my rush to flee the fire.
And that irrational fear was a huge help, for once. It got me back to my body in what was, if not my best time, at least an adequate one.
The first thing I did when I felt myself slam back into myself—and what a weird feeling that is, let me tell you—was take a deep breath. So it’s no surprise that I noticed the smell first.
It wasn’t at all unpleasant, actually. Like chicken wings in the fryer.
Most of the birds had gone up in flames immediately when the fire hit them. I saw Flynn and one other phantasm dressed like him, shooting their bows at a handful who had gotten away.
Phineas was running toward me, but he didn’t stop. I turned and saw his mother standing by the other fire. Judging by all the small shapes littering the ground around it, Gwen and Eric had killed a huge number of shadow eaters as well.
There were also dozens of dead birds elsewhere in the clearing, among the scattered bodies of their prey. Some had had their necks broken by people fighting back against them. Others had been shot, or trampled by the crowd. There seemed to be only a few stragglers left in the sky, and most of them were fleeing.
Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3) Page 13
