With the fire already burning, that was the best I could do. I hoped it wasn’t too late.
I turned back to Arabella. “Come on, I’ll drive so you can get some sleep.”
“Are you sure?”
It had been easy, inside Number Twelve, to forget everything else and focus on survival. Now that we were safe, the anger and fear and sorrow were rushing back in.
But I still put on the best smile I could manage, and said to the woman who had spent the better part of twenty-four hours dragging me around in my cursed, weak, sweaty state, “Yeah, you look like crap.”
“To Cooper.” Lance raised his glass of very expensive wine, then lowered it again and took a well-mannered sip.
“To Cooper,” Agatha repeated, and mimicked her husband. The rest of the twenty or so people in the room followed suit.
I was more inclined to gulp, myself, but tried to maintain my composure.
At Lance’s insistence, we were gathered in a private room at Haven for a lavish (but dignified, of course) commemoration of Cooper, to honor his memory and celebrate his life. In other words, a wake, minus the funeral.
As if he was really dead.
It had been three days since our return from Boston. The Mount Phearson staff was crushed to hear the news of Cooper’s loss.
As if he was really dead.
Arabella was the one to tell them so; I only used the word gone. Despite those three days passing with neither demands from the Wicks, nor word from Cooper, I continued to stubbornly insist that he was—or at least might be—alive.
In truth, I didn’t know whether I really believed he was still out there, or I was only pretending to so I could avoid the pain. But it didn’t matter. Might be was good enough. Might be kept me upright and breathing. Might be meant a memorial dinner was completely unnecessary.
I didn’t want to be there. It reminded me too much of my mother’s funeral, of Madeline Underwood giving a toast much like Lance just had, and the empty feeling of this same hotel afterward.
But as I didn’t want to be anywhere—unless it was storming Cillian Wick’s gates—and it seemed to mean so much to everyone else, I went along with it.
How funny, I thought, as I surveyed the room. Cooper had more friends in Bristol than I did. But then, he was the charming one. They stood one by one and told their stories about him, and I tried to smile.
The Murdochs were conspicuously not among them. We’d had no word about Phineas. Lydia had gone to join him in his world, and according to her friend Martha, she’d taken Wulf with her. Without so much as a hound to serve as an interplanar messenger, they were out of reach.
But three days in our world was only three hours in his. There was no reason to worry, not yet. Surely his parents were taking care of him. Maybe he’d inherited his talent for healing from one of them.
He’ll be okay. We’ll all be okay.
We might be okay.
The room became suffocating. Everywhere I turned, there was someone to tell me how sorry they were, how much they would miss Cooper. Someone who wanted to show me a snapshot they’d taken on their phone, or tell me yet another story about something nice he’d done for them.
I sought a moment’s peace in the restroom, but even that wasn’t safe. Rosalie stopped me at the sink as I was washing my hands. I rarely saw her out of her hotel uniform, but she was dressed in head-to-toe black for this occasion.
“You know, just a few weeks ago he calmed down an irate guest for me,” she told me. “Lance was in Asheville for that thing, so I couldn’t call him, but I swear to heaven I thought this guy might hit me over a clogged toilet. Then Cooper comes in from his morning run…”
Here she paused and pressed a many-ringed hand to her chest. She’d often admired how Cooper looked in his workout clothes. Then, as if realizing who she was talking to, she gave herself a little shake. “Well, you can guess the rest. Cooper could charm anyone, couldn’t he?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “He could.”
Can. Can charm anyone.
Let’s not keep talking in the past tense, as if he’s really dead.
I could have gone upstairs, but my suite was worse. The quiet was bad everywhere, but worst of all there. Walking through my door was like falling into a hole, a silent void where Cooper’s voice should be, his laugh, the words he whispered when we were alone. No amount of noise could fill it. No other voice would ever be his.
And of course his things were everywhere, that hooded sweatshirt I hated, his toothbrush in the cup beside mine, his favorite mug. Small and inescapable objects constantly accusing me of either getting him killed (he’s not dead) or failing to rescue him.
I had every intention of going back to Pennsylvania. But after the curse broke, and my fever along with it, I was able to view things in a more cold and rational light. I was willing to wait—a short time, at least—for help, for Phineas to come back or Arabella to come around. As strong as I felt, both unburdened by the curse and back in Bristol with all of my soul, I wasn’t sure I could undertake such a mission by myself.
And there was no point in going unless there was a reasonable certainty of success. We’d already gone into that monster’s lair twice. I had an instinct that the next time would have to be the last, that we wouldn’t be able to push our luck much further. I had to be sure it would count.
“I need to speak with you.” Granny materialized at my elbow. I looked around and found that I was back in the main room again, although I had no memory of walking there.
I gave her a hug—everyone wanted to hug me these days—and asked how she was doing, my mouth making all the right sounds. I hadn’t seen her since I got back, although I’d spent my first evening home at Wendy and Caleb’s, telling them everything, crying, and eventually getting drunk enough to pass out on their couch.
“I know it’s a bad time,” Granny said. “I wanted to give you some space to recover, but this shouldn’t wait much longer. I found a loophole.”
I stared at her. “How could that be?”
“We need to talk about it.” She looked around and then raised an eyebrow at me. “And I’m guessing this is one party you won’t mind missing.”
“Let’s go upstairs. I’ll grab a bottle of wine to bring with us.”
“Grab two. Wendy and Caleb are coming too, and you might as well ask Arabella. This doesn’t involve her directly but it’s all so tangled together.”
“Okay. I’ll bring some extra glasses, too.”
It took a while for everyone to politely extricate themselves. Arabella was the last to knock on my door.
“Sorry about that, I was cornered,” she said. “Boy, that Rosalie sure loved Cooper.”
I smiled. Rosalie always had, from the first time he came to the Mount Phearson, to talk to me about a man named Wick, and a seed that looked an awful lot like an acorn suspended in amber.
I cleared my throat and went to pour some wine so nobody would see me tearing up.
He’s not dead.
He might not be dead.
As soon as I could trust my voice again I said, “Okay, Granny. Let’s have it.”
I didn’t mean it literally, but she really did hand me something: a piece of paper torn from my own notebook. The sanctuary spell I’d written less than a year ago.
Verity worked the sanctuary spell around Bristol and the Mount Phearson Hotel, and gave a piece of her soul, to bind it.
And when she was finished, the sapwood seeds were safe at the Mount Phearson. None but Verity or a Blackwood could touch them, or enter the vault where they were kept.
The hotel was a fortress against harmful magic, and could not be burned or destroyed.
Verity and Cooper were given sanctuary too, and could not be harmed in Bristol. The town was a safe haven, a place feeders could not enter.
No sapwood seed was ever planted in Bristol; no sapwood tree ever took root. Bristol went on much as it was, peaceful and prosperous and free from devils.
I reme
mbered the words pretty well, but I read through them just the same, then handed the page to Arabella, who among the present company was the only one who hadn’t seen it.
“Bristol is mentioned four times in that spell,” Granny said. “The first two are okay, that’s just you setting your boundaries, all well and good. But the other two are problems.”
I looked over Arabella’s shoulder, scanning the spell again. “No sapwoods in Bristol, Bristol peaceful and prosperous. How are those problems? Seems like a good deal to me.”
“But that’s just it,” said Granny. “It’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Granny, let’s back up a little.” Wendy looked at me. “How much do you know about your father’s sanctuary here?”
“Just the basics of the bargain, and that Letitia worked the spell with soul magic, same as I did,” I said.
“Has Lydia ever told you the whole story of how she knows so much about it?” Wendy asked. “That she heard it from Letitia’s daughter?”
“Well, the ghost of Letitia’s daughter, in a stolen body,” Caleb corrected.
“That sounds like quite a story,” said Arabella.
“And it’s one I’ve heard,” I said, pulling us back on track. “Her name was Gemma, right? She was a witness to the whole thing, I think. But she didn’t give Lydia a lot of details. Just that they sealed the bargain, and that was that.”
“They sealed the bargain,” Granny repeated. “Amias and the town founders, and they bound it with Letitia’s soul. But your sanctuary isn’t like that. It’s not a bargain, not really. It’s just using the power of your soul to work a strong spell, and give you what you need.”
Except I don’t have what I need. And all I want right now is to go to bed and hope I dream about Cooper.
I took another sip of wine, and tried to focus. “But it is a bargain, in its way. I set up my spell to mimic Letitia’s, to be an exchange. Maybe I’m not really making Bristol prosperous in return for my sanctuary here, but I am protecting it from being devoured by a sapwood forest, which I think is a pretty valuable service.”
“And you still don’t see the problem?” Granny asked.
I shook my head. “You tell me.”
“Valuable or not, you were not contracted to provide that service. A bargain requires two parties. You only had one.”
I blinked at her, and then felt sick as I understood. “Letitia and my father, they worked this magic with Colonel Phearson and the other founders. All together.”
“Now you have it,” said Granny. “It’s not a good deal because it’s not a deal at all. You can’t presume to speak for Bristol. You can’t enter into a contract on its behalf. You can’t decide who can or cannot enter its borders, and you can’t decide what can or cannot be planted here. You simply don’t have that authority.”
“But you’re wrong,” I said. “The spell is working. The Wicks can’t enter the town, we know that.”
“Because it hasn’t been challenged,” said Wendy. “You set the terms, and so far Bristol has let you. Nobody here has refused them.”
“Marjory Smith has certainly tried to refuse them,” I said.
“Actually, she hasn’t,” said Wendy. “She’s tried to kill you, and she’s tried to break the spell. But she’s never gotten a group of citizens together and refused your protection. We think that’s what they would have to do. If they chose to invite a Wick in…”
“So you’re telling me my sanctuary can be broken at any time,” I said. “By any citizen of Bristol?”
It wasn’t as bad as all that, although it was certainly bad enough. Granny was quite sure that the parts of the spell that pertained to the hotel and the seeds were unbreakable, and fairly sure that my protection while inside Bristol’s boundaries was, too. Everything, in other words, that either Cooper or I actually had the authority to speak for.
“The hotel is yours, of course, and a Blackwood would have the authority to decide on the fate of the seeds.”
“Depends who you ask,” Arabella interjected.
“As for your protection, as I said before, since this isn’t a valid contract, it’s not really a bargain,” Granny went on. “It really is a straightforward sacrifice of a piece of your soul to gain the power to make certain things happen, and thankfully soul magic is strong enough to have given you that power. You set a boundary within which you are safe. And you chose to protect Bristol. Not an exchange, but two separate acts.”
“But they could break the parts that have to do with Bristol itself,” I said. “They could invite the Wicks in. They could let them plant the seeds.”
“I believe so,” said Granny. “Not Marjory alone. Not an individual citizen. But if she got enough of Bristol together, I believe they could refuse those parts of your spell.”
“All of this is just a theory though, right?” I asked. “You’re just guessing.”
“True,” said Granny. “But I’ve been working magic for a very long time, and it’s a hell of an educated guess.”
“I agree with her, for whatever that’s worth,” Wendy added.
It was worth a lot. I wished it wasn’t.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s just a theory, anyway,” Arabella said. “We have to proceed as if it was all fact. It’s our worst case scenario. We have to be prepared for it.”
“We’ve still got two things on our side,” Wendy said. “First of all, they don’t know any of this. Marjory doesn’t have the wording of your spell, she doesn’t know exactly how you worked it. I wouldn’t put it past her to figure it out, but for now, she doesn’t know what power she’s got.”
“And what’s the second thing?” Arabella asked.
Wendy shrugged, as if this was obvious. “Wick doesn’t have all the seeds. And he still can’t get to them in the hotel. He can’t plant anything.”
Arabella and I exchanged a look. “I was afraid you were going to say that,” she said.
“What’s up?” asked Caleb. “You didn’t happen to trade the seeds for some magic beans and forget to tell us?”
I wasn’t ready for jokes, even silly ones, so I just answered that as if it was a real question. “No. The ones in the vault here are fine. But we found out a few months ago that Cillian Wick is trying to develop a way to start the forest with only two seeds.”
“And just to state the obvious for the elderly among us, he has two seeds,” Granny said.
“He has the East and the South,” I said. “Last I heard his research called for compass opposites, but who knows.”
“Again, it doesn’t matter how far he’s gotten or how close he is,” said Arabella. “We have to proceed as though the worst case is true.”
“Then it’s simple,” I said. “The only way for us to protect Bristol from itself is to get those two seeds back.”
Arabella and I stayed up long after the others went home, talking about going back for (Cooper) the seeds. Of course, we didn’t know for sure whether they were at the compound. But Cooper thought they were, and that made it worth pursuing. Especially since we had no place else to look.
And if I just happened to search for Cooper while I was there, well, who could blame me for being thorough?
“One thing is for sure, it needs to be a calculated, organized operation,” Arabella said. “We can’t go in there half-cocked.”
Like Cooper did.
“No,” I agreed. “We’ve already broken in there twice—”
“Technically, once,” Arabella corrected. “The second time Wick let them in. It was a trap, right? Some seer told him they were coming?”
“That was what my vision made it seem like. But either way, he knows we’ve gotten in before. He’s bound to change up his security. Or at least strengthen it.”
“And he’ll probably move the seeds, if he hasn’t already.”
I shook my head. “I’m not so sure about that. We’ve seen that he prefers magical security measures over physical ones, which is pretty smart when you’re gua
rding against people who can heal themselves but can’t do magic.”
“So?”
“So, I’m sure all those enchantments didn’t spring up overnight. That kind of thing takes time to construct. And vitality. Lots and lots of vitality.”
“The one thing the Wick clan lacks,” Arabella said with a nod. “Even if he doesn’t want to leave the seeds at the compound, it might at least take him a while to find an acceptable substitute.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t go soon,” I hastened to add. “Because we should. But accuracy is more important than speed, so to speak. We want to wait until we have a solid plan that we’re pretty sure will work.”
“And a solid crew. We need to have all the right skills covered.”
“Which skills are the right ones?”
“I won’t know until I map it out. But I think we should wait for Phineas, for starters. Teleportation is awfully handy for an in-and-out operation. There’s no barrier he can’t cross.”
“As long as it’s outdoors,” I said. “Phantasms can only travel under the open sky.”
“Still. That’s almost impossible to defend against.”
“You’re assuming he still wants anything to do with this. And that Lydia will let him have anything to do with it. We have no idea whether he’s even okay.”
“We’ll wait for news.” Arabella started to pace. “And I wonder if I could bring a few of the younger and more rebellious Blackwoods over to our side. I should start putting out feelers. But that will have to be done delicately.”
For the first time in days, maybe even in months, I started to feel optimistic. We could do this. We could go back in there. And then we would just see.
“We should call it a night,” I said. “It’s late, and we have an early wake-up call tomorrow.”
“We do?”
I nodded. “We have work to do.”
But the night wasn’t quite over for me yet. When my phone rang somewhere in the middle of it, I answered automatically, half asleep.
“Verity. I won’t ask how you are. I can guess, from my own experience. I’m sorry for your loss.”
That voice woke me up. It was like having a bucket of ice water thrown over me. Nasal. Weak. The kind of voice you would immediately classify as non-threatening.
Witch Bound (Devilborn Book 3) Page 15
