Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles)

by Amanda DeWees

  “Why do I get the feeling,” he said dryly, surveying them, “that you’re not here to release me?”

  Chapter 23

  Maddie stared at the place where William had been standing just a moment ago. Nothing else had changed. No crash of thunder marked his going. There was no flash of lightning or shadowy figure or pit that had opened up in the ground to swallow him up. He was just gone.

  “William?” she whispered.

  “Where did he go?” asked Mr. Marzavan. She stared at him wordlessly for a second. He looked just the same, except that he had drawn back his head in shock so that his chin had completely vanished. Clearly he had been taken off guard just as she had. “What just happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said numbly. “William?” she called, this time getting the word out more audibly. “William, where are you?” She whirled, scanning the garden. No William. Not a sign of him. “William!” She darted down the path, searching in every direction.

  “Here, that’s enough,” said Mr. Marzavan firmly. In a few long strides he had caught up with her. “We won’t find him that way.”

  “How the hell would you know, jarhead?” she yelled. “You’ve forgotten everything you ever knew about magic. You’re as useless as—”

  “That’s enough, Miss Rosenbaum,” he thundered. “We’ll get nowhere if we don’t collect ourselves. Now come inside. My housekeeper will make us some tea, and we’ll see if we can find some answers.”

  “As if tea will help anything,” she muttered. “Now, if you’d said vodka…”

  The fierce look in his bulging blue eyes shut her up. “Young lady,” he boomed, “you are far too young to drink spirits, even if there were any possible way that your friend would be helped by your becoming incapacitated. No, you are going to tell me the real reason you came here and what you fear happened to your friend.”

  “Yes, sir,” she mumbled. Not quite cowed, she followed him into the house. Maybe he did have a point. She needed to stay sober and have all her wits about her if she was to find out how to save William.

  When the housekeeper had brought them a tea tray and vanished again, he said briskly, “Now, Miss Rosenbaum: tell me why you sought me out, and what you expected me to do for you.”

  She plunged in, throwing things out as they came to her, and for a wonder he let her zig and zag all over the place without trying to direct how she told the story.

  “So you believed I might be able to help you defeat this Melisande creature,” he said at length, when she’d wound down, “and put everyone’s lives back on track. That’s a bit of a tall order.”

  “It wasn’t going to be just you,” she said. “Joy and Gail found Dr. Aysgarth—well, an Aysgarth. And maybe Dr. Sumner can help. I just wish we knew what had happened to William.”

  “Before, when you made your wish, and it changed your past,” said her host, “you were able to put together memories of that alternate life.”

  “Do you mean you believe me?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “I believe you believe it,” he said finally, “and I think your concern is genuine.” She felt a quick dart of gratitude for this, that he wasn’t treating her like a crazy person or a liar. “So,” he continued, “if we take as axiomatic the premise that history is rewriting itself, do you have any new memories about William? Perhaps he was pulled out of this timestream into an alternate one, the way you say I was. In which case you may be able to find him, as you did me.”

  She screwed her eyes shut and tried to think. But she still remembered him in her life. Hanging out with her and Joy. White-faced with shock when she broke his heart. On the stage at McCloskey’s, singing “She Says Yes.”

  “Perhaps he attended another high school,” Mr. Marzavan was saying. “Perhaps you should look on the internet.”

  No, he was still there in Maddie’s past. Holding hands with that awful Sheila, smiling at her with a smile that should have been for Maddie.

  On the pointy end of Sheila’s knife in Maddie’s visions. Sheila, who was summoning the demon Amdusias to step into William’s body…

  “Oh, my god,” she whispered, her eyes going wide as the new memory slotted home. “Oh, no—”

  “What? What do you remember?” She could faintly hear the question, was aware of Mr. Marzavan’s pale eyes watching her anxiously.

  Then everything disappeared.

  * * *

  Stan drove. Joy and Tanner sat close together in the back seat, Rose in her car seat buckled in next to them. They couldn’t leave her at home alone, of course, and as for finding a sitter—“I just don’t think I could leave her with anyone,” Joy had said. “Not even Bobby and Donna. What if—well—anyway, it makes sense for her to be with us. She was with us, sort of, on Samhain night when we went up against Melisande the first time.”

  She didn’t want to voice the thought in front of Tanner, but she was terribly afraid Bobby and Donna would get disappeared or pulled into a completely different existence. He had asked her to call them up anyway, and she suspected he wanted to hear their voices one more time in case he never saw them again. When they didn’t pick up, she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or frightened.

  “Have you got your mirror?” Tan asked now.

  “It hasn’t gone anywhere in the last ten minutes, silly.”

  “I’m sorry I keep asking.”

  “No, it’s better to be safe.” She should have known that he couldn’t have total confidence in things he could no longer see. She squeezed his hand to reassure him. “It’s zipped up under my jacket, so she won’t see it before we’re ready.”

  After consultation, all of them in their little army had scrounged up mirrors—Joy’s makeup mirror, Eleanor Aysgarth’s compact, and so on—and attached them to lengths of string or ribbon to hang around their necks so that they’d be at the ready for capturing the succubus’s reflection. Her father and Eleanor had marked the backs with Melisande’s name and magical symbols to make them more effective, and then the two of them had decided to station themselves at the statue. “If that location still possesses its powers, we may be granted a wish,” her father had said. “Even if Melisande has somehow stopped it up or diverted the energies, we may be able to get them operating again. And with Gail and Caroline Ansley in the underground chamber, we’ll have the advantage of triangulating.”

  Ms. Ansley, when Gail tracked her down, had turned out to be living an interesting alternate life as a pilot and skydiving instructor. She retained scarcely any memories of the true timeline, Gail had reported over the phone, but she cheerfully agreed to join their scheme since it sounded like an adventure.

  “I hope we’re not putting her in unnecessary danger,” said Tanner. He had confided to her about a terrible vision the succubus had shown him of death coming to all those they loved, and she could tell it had shaken him. “If she dies because of me—”

  “She won’t die. None of us will. Because we are going to beat that rag and bone and hank of hair. We’ll get the world back on track, and everything will come right again.” She put her lips against his ear. “And when this is all over,” she whispered, “you and I are going to leave Rose with Dad for a weekend and have that honeymoon we didn’t get before.”

  He actually grinned at that. “And here I was planning not to rush you.”

  “Rush me? You just better brace yourself, buster.” Now that she had him back, she wanted to show him how much she’d missed him—especially now, when he might need reassurance badly.

  Even as she thought this, he carefully bent his head toward her, and she put her lips to his for a long sweet kiss. This, at least, was something the succubus hadn’t stolen from them. And the sad truth was that closing her eyes did help. As long as she could see his terrible wounds, she was afraid to touch him except with the utmost gentleness, and she knew already that he didn’t want to be treated like something fragile. So with his lips warm and tender on hers she let herself remember him the way he had been. Just
for now, she promised herself. Just until I get used to it.

  “Hey, lovebirds,” came Stan’s voice. “Sorry to break the mood and all, but we are on our way to battle.”

  “You need something?” Tanner sounded irritated, and she didn’t blame him.

  “Well, I was wondering if you think it was safe to just leave Raven like that. I’d hate for him to surprise us by showing up at the wrong moment. Do you really think he’s secure?”

  “If he isn’t, there’s not much we can do about it,” Joy pointed out. “But it’s all the more reason to move as fast as we can to divert the energies she’s drawing on and take the bitch out.”

  “I love it when you speak kick-ass,” Tan said softly, and she rubbed her cheek against his, smiling.

  As crazy as it was, she was happy. Happy to have the real Tan back, even so cruelly wounded. Seeing him with Rose made her heart swell with painful sweetness: when she led his hand so that he could safely cradle her little head or stroke her hair, the smile on his face brought a smile in response from Rose, even though he couldn’t see it. “I’ve missed you both so much,” he whispered, bringing his face close to Rose so that he could breathe in the sweet baby smell.

  With an effort, she brought her mind back to the mission. The plan was for the four of them (counting Rose) to find their way into the rose garden, or, if it refused to manifest, to get as close as they could to where they remembered it. Their hope was that the presence of Joy and Tanner and Rose would reclaim the garden for the powers of good—to bring it back to life, if that was needed, or halt the poisonous influence it might be exerting to divide all the couples they knew. Or, if nothing else, to counter Melisande’s influence with their own, so that she couldn’t continue to use the garden for her own schemes.

  For that reason they made a hasty stop at the old graveyard to cut a white rose from the bush planted at Josiah Cavanaugh’s grave. Joy made Tanner stay behind in the car with Rose while she and Stan found Cavanaugh’s grave and snipped a rose. Stan wanted to dig up the whole thing, but Joy was sure that would bring nothing but bad luck. Without roots, the rose she took held no hope of living—under normal circumstances, anyway—but it might remind the garden what it should have been, would have been if not for Melisande.

  Joy’s father and Eleanor would be at the statue, trying to transmit a wish for Melisande’s defeat. Meanwhile, Gail and Ms. Ansley were stationed in the underground chamber beneath the theater building. Joy had never been there and couldn’t really picture it, so she had a harder time believing in its potency. But triangulating was important, her father had said, even if not all of the points were equally powerful. Their efforts were more likely to be successful if they were all working together to create a circuit. And the more power they drew, the more likely that they would attract Melisande’s notice and bring her out where they could fight her face to face.

  They hadn’t heard back from Maddie or William, but Tanner and Joy were relieved, if anything, that their friends were out of the line of fire tonight.

  Joy checked that Tanner’s charm bag was still zipped into the pocket of his leather jacket—they all carried them as protection—and tested the strength of the string around his neck from which his mirror was suspended.

  “It doesn’t seem like much of a weapon,” he said. Everyone else in their little army carried a silver knife.

  “I’m just afraid that—”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t make sense to put a knife in the hands of a blind man.”

  The word blind made her heart hurt, and she squeezed back still more tears. She wanted to find her father and shake him until he agreed to bring Tan’s eyes back. But right now that wasn’t something she could afford to think about. Instead she made a silent promise to him: I will be the best blind man’s wife in the whole goddamn world. She would do everything she could to make up for everything he’d lost, to make his new life as painless as it could possibly be.

  She needed that determination when they arrived at Ash Grove and, leaving the car behind, began their painfully slow progress up the ridge. Maybe without that private resolve she would have been more on edge, more intimidated by the crazy, risky mission they were on against a terrifyingly powerful enemy. But she strove to keep calm, focusing on helping Tan, as she and Stan talked him uphill through the wood.

  He held on to Joy on his right and Billups on his left, as they gave him guidance—“Tree branch coming up, better duck”—“There’s a gully here, be careful.” There was only a half moon, so she and Stan both carried flashlights. It was slow and awkward, supporting Tan and lighting the way with her flashlight. Rose, strapped to Joy’s front in her carrier, added a challenge to her balance. At least she was a happy challenge, babbling in little soft baby sounds that brought a faint smile to Tanner’s lips. The sight made Joy’s heart so full that for a second she could only think of how lucky she was, how much worse things might have been.

  And maybe it was that rush of love that brought them into the rose garden. Suddenly the crunch of leaves underfoot changed to the silence of footsteps on grass, and when she looked away from Tanner she saw that they were in the rose garden again.

  But it wasn’t their garden any longer. Her eyes widened at the scene around them, and dismay laid a cold hand on her heart when she saw what was revealed by the beam of her flashlight.

  “Are we there?” Tanner whispered. “How does it look?”

  She shook her head, for a second lost for words, filled with a terrible thankfulness that he was spared the sight of what had happened to their refuge.

  “Oh, Tan. It’s not dead, but—but the leaves are all shiny and hard like metal, and the thorns are way too long. The roses look… I’d be afraid to touch them.” Everywhere she looked, instead of the wild beauty that they had first found there, she saw an armed hostility. Metallic edges glinted in the beam of her flashlight, and the sawtoothed leaves looked like they could draw blood. Once the lush green grass had been a soft cushion for them when they lay together. Now each blade of grass was just that—a blade. Lovers unwary enough to tryst there would soon be bleeding and cut to ribbons.

  Tanner seemed to grope after understanding. “It’s not just an illusion, some kind of glamour?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Grief rose up in her throat, and she moved closer to him for comfort. This place had been precious to them, and it had been defiled. “It isn’t the place we loved any longer,” she said.

  When Stan’s stunned voice broke into her thoughts, Joy realized he was now a believer. “It’s weaponized,” he said, and the shock and fear looked strange on his round, comfortable face. “That’s what it is. It’s a killing garden.”

  * * *

  “Are you sure this will work?”

  The smile Eleanor gave him was a strange mix of the alien and the familiar. Steven was still trying to adjust to this change in someone he’d known for so many years. The old Eleanor had operated on efficiency, control, and rigorous preparation. This new Eleanor seemed more freewheeling, more inclined to do things by feel and to trust in hunches.

  Now that they were standing at the base of the statue, for example. She hadn’t prepared any incantations or drawn a magic circle. All she’d done was remove a ring from her finger—“ninety-nine percent silver, and the algiz rune engraving means protection”—and place it in the center of the plinth where the statue of Cavanaugh used to be. Then she rested her hands on the plinth and closed her eyes. “Do as I do,” she told him.

  “What are you doing?” Steven asked, as he placed his hands on the stone. “Are we concentrating on a wish for Melisande’s defeat, or for the world to return to normal?”

  “Both of those things will happen if we can open a door for Josiah Cavanaugh.”

  The back of Steven’s neck prickled. “Bring back Cavanaugh? But—”

  She raised one of her hands from the statue base to make a little dismissive wave in his direction. “It isn’t like when you forced reality to warp itself to
bring your wife back. Josiah exists outside time now. He came to me when I was a child and prepared me for this.”

  Steven gaped at her. She was smiling serenely. Was she crazy? What if this offbeat fortune-teller was just deluded? Maybe he’d been wrong to trust her. “Came to you how?” he asked warily. “In a vision?”

  “He was closer to what most people call a ghost. But his consciousness is very much alive, and he is still Ash Grove’s most devoted guardian. He just needs an assist from flesh-and-blood custodians in order to manifest.”

  Good lord, she was crazy. She’d be talking about ectoplasm next.

  “I can see that you’re skeptical,” she added. “It doesn’t really make sense, you know, that after all of your experience with the supernatural you would draw the line here.”

  He wasn’t entirely sure himself, unless it was—he shifted his weight guiltily—that he was a snob. Maybe he only believed outlandish truths when they were communicated by someone in a suit in a conference room. Open your mind, he lectured himself. After all, Mo dressed like a ragpicker’s child, and he had one of the best brains in the field.

  Or had had. He sighed. He wished Mo were with them. Had Joy heard anything back from Maddie, any important information from the new Mo? He took out his phone to text her, then frowned at the screen. “No signal,” he said.

  “Well, that’s to be expected, since the electromagnetic emanations of the supernatural can disrupt cell reception.”

  He gave a rueful nod. “I should have thought of that myself.”

  “Yes, you should have,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t you think it’s time you brought more focus to bear, Dr. Sumner?”

  Different methods, perhaps, but the same take-charge Eleanor. “At your service,” he said, feeling more confident.

  * * *

  “Stan,” said Joy suddenly, “I think you should go.”