Cooper looked baffled by my sudden nervousness, not that I blamed him. “What’s wrong?”
“Phineas knew about… things. Vitals, feeders. Your world.”
He stared. “He knew about the seeds?”
“Nothing specific, but he knew the basics. And once he brought it up, I answered most of his questions. I’m sorry. It didn’t seem like—”
But Cooper shook his head. “It’s fine. It’s my father who insists on this sacred secrecy, not me. And like you said, we need a new strategy.”
Well, there was at least one thing he wasn’t mad at me for. It was a start.
Cooper stayed on my sofa bed that night. There was no talk, on either of our parts, about any other arrangement. It was hard enough having him even that close and not giving in to temptation. But I’d made up my mind, somewhere between the kissing and the fighting, that we needed to take things slowly. It was all too much to handle at once.
I went to see Wendy Thaggard the next morning, armed with Cooper’s permission to let her in on as much as I felt necessary. She sat me down in her office with a plate of cookies, and listened to my theory about Letitia’s spell with a similar expression to Cooper’s when he’d heard the same story.
“You can’t do that!” she said when I finished.
“Why is that everyone’s first reaction?” I asked. “I’m not—”
“Messing with your soul is dark magic,” Wendy said firmly.
I gave her a hopeful look. “You say that like you know something about it.”
But she only sighed. “Actually, I’ve never heard of binding a spell with a piece of your soul. It just seems like dark magic. But I have no idea how you would do such a thing.”
“Doesn’t sound like you’d tell me if you did.”
“Oh, I’d tell you. I would just call you an idiot at the same time. Trading a piece of your soul? That’s like, something they do in tragic plays. No good can come of that.”
“No, trading your whole soul is what they do in tragic plays,” I said. “Trading a part of it may be no different than binding a spell with blood. For all we know, it grows back, like hair.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” said Wendy. “If it was no different, Letitia would have just used blood. You’ve been to Greyhill, right? That house, the feeling there. You must have sensed it.”
“I did,” I admitted. “But that could just be because Letitia was disturbed and unhappy.”
“Or Letitia could have been disturbed and unhappy because she was missing a piece of her soul.”
I sighed. “Maybe. But I have to do something, and this may be the only way.” I stood up. “As for dark magic, I don’t believe in it.”
Wendy laughed. “Amias’s daughter doesn’t believe in dark magic?”
“I think magic is more like nature,” I said. “It isn’t dark or light or good or bad. It’s ruthlessly neutral. It just is. Which means this will be what I make of it, just like any other spell. I won’t let myself end up disturbed and unhappy. I will still be a whole person.”
“Are you convincing yourself, or me?”
“I don’t know, how convinced are you?”
“Not terribly.”
“Then I guess I’m convincing myself.”
“Wait,” she said as I turned to go. “Have you asked Lydia?”
I frowned at that. “Lydia? I didn’t get the impression she was an especially expert witch.”
“She’s not. But she used to be a ghost hunter.” Wendy shrugged. “If you need an expert on souls, she’s probably as good as anyone. I don’t think you can exactly ask a priest this question.”
“I’ll call her. Thank you.”
“Just be careful. We don’t need another dispute over that hotel, if you get yourself killed with this.”
“I’ll be careful. But if it makes you feel better, I could always do a will first and leave it to Lance.”
Another bark of Wendy’s boisterous laugh. “An outsider taking ownership of the Mount Phearson? I’d almost kill you myself, just to see the look on Marjory Smith’s face when that came to pass.”
Lydia Murdoch became my favorite person on the planet when, half an hour later, she did not argue with me or tell me I was either stupid or crazy.
All she said was, “That explains so much! I always wondered why Greyhill felt haunted and yet not haunted. I’ve never encountered anyplace else like it, and I hate being stumped when it comes to ghosts.”
“So you think it’s a sound theory?” I asked.
“Makes perfect sense to me.”
“Great. Then do you have any thoughts on how I might actually chip off a piece of my soul?”
“Well, that’s the bad news,” Lydia said. “Your soul isn’t accessible the way the physical parts of you are. I can’t imagine any way to get to it without, you know, exposing it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the only way to do this is to die.”
I had one stroke of luck, at least: Lydia already knew a ritual for separating the soul from the body. She’d even done it herself.
“So it’s not really dying,” I said.
“Wellll… call it a gray area. But I’m warning you right now, it’s tricky. Your soul’s immediate instinct is to move on. Fighting that is hard.”
“Okay.”
“No, I mean like really hard. And the longer you stay outside your body, the harder it will be. Plus if you stay out too long, it’s impossible to get back in, no matter what you do. So you’re going to have to pull that bit of your soul off super fast.”
Too bad I wasn’t sure how to do that part at all, let alone quickly. I spent three days gathering ideas, enlisting the help of Wendy and her Granny, the Murdochs and their friend Martha, but telling Cooper nothing about it. Better to present him with a complete plan when I had one. I figured that way, not only would I be able to give reasonable answers to his specific objections, but it would also make it look, to him, like I’d considered it more thoroughly.
Not that how long I spent considering it was his business, anyway. And it wasn’t that I was taking it lightly. Only that I saw no other options. I spent those same three days putting up wards around the hotel and writing spells to protect us, but I wasn’t confident they would hold indefinitely, not against enemies as powerful as ours.
I couldn’t risk letting them inside again. Which meant I couldn’t try to bind my magic to the hotel’s own. Instead I had to do what Madeline Underwood had once done; I had to become the Phearson’s mistress, and make my will supreme.
So every spell I wrote was focused on one thing: making our enemies unwelcome. The Wicks, Marjory, the Garden Club, even Asher, although I supposed the latter could get me into trouble with the law. With luck, they wouldn’t be able to come onto the property at all.
At least for a while. But they’d found ways around my spells before. They could do it again. And this time, they would do worse than make us sick, if they could.
I needed something stronger. Something nigh on unbreakable. Letitia’s spell had held for two hundred years, and was only broken in the end thanks to a loophole she herself had built into it. Clearly soul magic was strong stuff. I was convinced that building a sanctuary was the only answer.
But Phineas’s library was no help, and none of the others could find anything in their own books or notes, either. I even went back to the Bristol Library and weathered another conversation with Dan Alexander, so I could take another look through the books on magic and make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
Nobody seemed to know a specific method of peeling off a piece of one’s soul. Probably because nobody was crazy enough to try such a thing. Except the devil’s daughters.
I would just have to figure something out. If I could learn to do this soulwalking thing properly, going in and out of my body at will, then I could even try more than once, if I needed to, until I got it right. It would be dangerous, but then so was everything about my life lately.
I wrot
e draft after draft of the sanctuary spell, changing my focus once again, trying to find the best way to guard everything that was dear to me and under threat: the seeds, the vault, the hotel, and us.
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 thought about adding more specific names, besides just mine and Cooper’s, but it was Wendy, of all people, who told me not to.
“You’ve already got a lot going on here, and I think you need to be careful not to overreach,” she said, reading my draft over coffee in her shop. “You can’t just write everyone you know a happily-ever-after and expect that to stick. Your will would never be strong enough to bind it all.” She shrugged. “And anyway, we’re not the ones they’re after. Being under Bristol’s umbrella of peace and prosperity should be plenty for us.”
Wendy also agreed with my wording about feeders, and only feeders, not being able to enter Bristol. Keeping strangers out was one thing, but neither of us thought I’d have the power to ward the town against its own citizens. Marjory and her coven—and her awful nephew—would remain a threat.
“Well, one thing at a time,” I said.
Finally, I was ready to bring it all to Cooper. He was still staying in my room (still on the sofa bed), spending hours cooking on my tiny stove, trying to keep his restlessness at bay. He wasn’t dealing well with being confined. There wasn’t much for him to do, other than try to stay dead as long as possible, and as always, he hated not being able to act. So he was often moody. I was concerned about how he would take this.
I was right to be. He yelled. A lot.
“End of discussion!” he shouted finally, in an imperious tone that made me want to smack his handsome face. “This is not even a question.”
“No, it wasn’t a question!” I shouted back. “It was a statement! This is what I’m doing. I am not asking your permission.”
“But you are asking for my help.”
I sighed. That was true. If I was going to die (or even enter a death gray area) in one of the most dangerous rituals known to witches, I wanted someone there who could bring me back if something went wrong. Phineas could help, maybe, with his skill at healing. But I considered Cooper a safer bet.
He’d done something like that before, after all. We’d done it before, after Kestrel attacked him. Now we just might have to do it the other way around.
“Cooper, listen. I only have to die a little bit. It’s not even dying, exactly.”
“There is no such thing as sort of dy—”
“—and then you pour some vitality into me, I come back to life—”
“—minus one part of your soul—”
“—and that’s the end of it. You’re making it sound way worse than it—”
“Don’t even finish that one.”
We went around like that for a while, until finally I gave up and went to the door, ready to go get a glass of wine at the Cask & Barrel, just to get away.
“This is a done deal,” I said, my hand on the door handle, my back to him. “I already have everything I need. The others are coming at noon tomorrow to help. Wendy, Lydia, and Phineas. Wendy said she might even bring her Granny. I hope you’ll help, too, but if you don’t, I hope you’ll at least wish me luck.”
No sound came from behind me. I gave up and opened the door.
And almost collided with Agatha, who had been about to pound on it.
“There you are. You need to come right away. Something’s happening. I don’t even know what. Marjory Smith and the Garden Club are outside, and they’re… it’s… and Asher Glass is there with his police car, and…”
“Outside?” I asked. “They haven’t come in?”
“No, but they’re in the parking lot. And people are… it’s dark out there. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Verity.”
I turned back to Cooper. He stood by the window, holding the curtain back. I grabbed the clearly shaken Agatha by the elbow and pulled her inside, then went to stand beside him.
The Garden Club was indeed gathered in the parking lot. From my vantage point three stories high, I could see they formed an odd shape, like a crop circle. They were chanting something.
Agatha was right: it was dark out there. As if there were storm clouds above, although the sky was clear. The darkness hung over the coven, the parking lot, the hotel. But in the distance I could see the mountains, wreathed in sunshine.
A small crowd had gathered nearby, and judging by the way some of them were huddled up and shivering, it was also cold out there. Even though I knew the forecast would tell me it was a lovely, warm spring day.
Asher leaned against his police cruiser. He’d left the lights flashing, as if it was a crime scene. Several people approached him. They all walked away after he spoke to them; the faces I could make out looked anxious and confused.
Guests were hurrying to their cars, speeding away. Some stayed and watched. A few appeared to be laughing awkwardly. Pretending, perhaps, that they thought it was some kind of show. The town with all the supernatural folklore, bringing some of that local color to the tourists.
But none of them looked like they quite believed it. They all seemed scared.
“What are they doing?” Agatha whispered, obviously plenty scared herself. “Why haven’t they come inside?”
“Because they can’t,” I said. “The wards are holding.”
“So we’re safe,” said Cooper. “Without the sanctuary spell.”
But I shook my head. “The wards are holding for now. But wards go against the grain of this place, you know that. They’re already on the property. It’s only a matter of time—and not much of it, I’m betting—before they find a way inside.”
“And what will they do when they get in?” Agatha asked.
I didn’t answer. Instead I turned to Cooper. “You have to help me. I can’t do it alone.”
“Verity, you can’t—”
“Stop it!” I shouted at him.
Agatha jumped at the force of my voice, but Cooper stayed completely still.
I gave him the hardest look I could manage, frightened as I was. “We have to do this, and it has to be now.”
I wasted more time than I was comfortable with barking orders at Agatha, trying to get her to focus. “You and Lance need to get down there and calm the guests. Tell them it’s a local theater troupe. Comment on how good their special effects are. Whatever you need to do. Agatha, go.”
When she finally left, I turned to Cooper. “Either you help me, or I have to try to do this alone. I really hope you pick the first option.”
“There’s a third option that involves me chaining you up and throwing you in that vault.”
“Cooper, they are out there. Enemies literally at our gates! Accept that I am capable of making my own decisions and help me!”
Without waiting for him to answer, I turned away and slid my supply chest out from under the desk.
Pewter bowl, cedar chips, bone dagger.
That last one had been hard to find, either online or in Bristol’s go-to shop for such things; luckily Wendy’s Granny had three.
Skullcap candle, silver holder, sea salt.
I dropped the bag of salt, and said an uncharacteristically strong word as it spilled all over the carpet.
And then Cooper was beside me, helping me clean it up.
“Thank yo
u,” I said when we’d swept enough back into the bag to do the ritual.
He didn’t answer, just took the candle and the dagger from my full hands, and helped me get everything on the table.
Lydia had warned me that I needed to practice the ritual, to leave my body and return to it immediately the first few times, just to get the hang of it. But I’d never had time. And now the clock was ticking, and it was too late. Much as I’d repeated myself to the others, insisting over and over again that I knew what I was doing, that I understood the risks, I found myself faltering. I’m not a brave person, by nature.
But I was cornered. We would just have to make it work. And I couldn’t show the slightest hesitation to Cooper, or he would never let me do it.
“Okay,” I said briskly. “I could probably do away with some of the ritual trappings if I knew this well, but since I don’t, we’ll just have to do it the formal way.” I put a handful of cedar chips into the bowl, then went to the sink to fill it. “Can you light the candle for me? It’s infused with skullcap oil, if you’re curious.”
“I’m not,” Cooper said. I ignored his clipped tone, but I wished he would stop pouting. I needed him for more than just physical assistance.
“I’m going to cut myself, sprinkle some salt on the bloody blade, then pass it three times through the candle flame, while I speak an incantation,” I said. “I can’t be interrupted once I start, so we have to make sure we’re clear on everything now.”
Cooper nodded as I set the bowl back down on the table.
I handed him my sanctuary spell, a rolled-up piece of parchment tied with a white ribbon (just to prove I wasn’t doing dark magic, I guess). I’d written it in fresh spell ink just that morning. “I think you’ll be able to tell when my soul leaves my body,” I said. “As soon as it does, I need you to light this paper with the candle flame, then toss it in the bowl.”
“That’s it?”
Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1) Page 20
