Chapter 5
October 16, 1846, Marshfield, Massachusetts
Five Years Ago
Silas saw his dead body below him. He had only moments before his spirit would join the ether or filter into whatever otherworldly hell awaited him.
The interlopers stood over him. That housekeeping wretch and the uncouth author, standing with a crowbar of all things in his hand. That was how Silas died, then? The greatest wizard of this century, if not this millennium? That was how Silas finally lost the freedom he had so painstakingly clawed from every hand that had tried to take it from him? A meager blow to the head?
He reached out with his healing magic, determined to mend the wound, to destroy these custrons, but the spell didn’t take. He hailed from a powerful necromantic line, but he saw the lifelessness in his own eyes as he faded away. Even he couldn’t bring back a body from the dead. Even he couldn’t work magic without a body.
The house. Flaring his magic, Silas sent his soul into the shack’s ramshackle walls. He could inhabit it just as that blasted spirit inhabited Whimbrel House. And then he would bring it crashing down upon all of them. His magic was significantly diminished—regardless of the state of his donors, the spells he’d accumulated from them had died with his flesh. But he had enough threaded through his soul to destroy them all.
Magic tethered him to rotting wood, to cold stone and rusting nails. Wrongness like twisting sinews spiraled through him. It fit nothing like a human body. He couldn’t sense things the way he’d always sensed things. He couldn’t move . The moment he merged with the dwelling, true, unadulterated fear swept through him. This ... This was no solution. This was not immortality; it was a cage ! Even his father’s fists had never bound him so completely. Made him feel so utterly helpless.
He would kill them, and then these half-rotted walls would collapse around him, and he would be nothing once more.
And his mother ... his brother ... would they be waiting for him?
Panic flooded him. The emotion burned crisp and sincere, for he had nothing visceral to mitigate it. No pulse to race, no skin to grow clammy. He raced through his natural gifts, trying to sort out his next move. Kinesis, healing, life-force shifting, condensing, breaking, luck—
New people filtered into the house. He felt their presence like ants crawling across his skin, yet without the sense of touch. Like they prodded a crooked limb fallen asleep, all the blood gone from the flesh. But he felt them, alive and scattering and ...
Alive.
Panic ebbed enough to let him think.
He didn’t use life-force shifting often, but it let him steal the energy from another living thing. Paired with his kinetic spell, it also allowed him to move souls. That dual magic was how he’d pulled the spirit from Whimbrel House into the stray he’d grabbed off the street in Portsmouth.
But he could not move his own soul, not while it was tied to a living body. He’d tried before, as a youth. Knowledge of how to complete that feat had been lost to the ages, if it had ever been possible. And yet his body, this cage , was not a human body. It shouldn’t be hindered by the bounds of flesh, no?
He reached out into an empty room. Sensed a cobweb. Used an alteration spell and condensed it until it became a hard, minute ball, pulling from the rafters and clanking onto the floorboards. Nothing in the derelict house changed in response. Before, part of his body would have temporarily mutated. A nose, inverted; a testicle, twisted. But nothing here. It was not the same, as a house. There was power in that, but not freedom.
Silas craved freedom .
And so he reached out to the ants scurrying numbly over his new self, whisking his awareness from room to room. Used a kinetic spell to knock over a cracked lantern in another room. The sound alerted someone. One man broke off from the others to investigate.
That’s when Silas seized him, holding him with kinesis. Dipped into his own life-force. Moved it along the connection—
The first gush of air into Silas’s lungs felt like falling into a winter pond. He looked around, the room dark save for where moonlight trickled through broken slats in the shutters. The moldy floor pressed against his back. He sat up, examining his hands, the fingers a little darker and thicker than his own. He stood, feeling himself, feeling , and smiled.
A sudden impact, something other , rammed into him. Nausea broiled in his gut, forcing him to bend over, but no bile rose up his throat.
Out! the force said, stronger than any he’d ever encountered. Out! Wrong!
Silas pushed back. Managed to straighten. Turned around, but he found himself alone in this space. Floorboards creaked underfoot, threatening to break with the sudden shifting of his weight.
Who are you? screamed a voice in his head. Not a voice, but words . Words with the force of a gale pressing into his mind. Words that weren’t his. And with the words flowed pressure, like Silas’s soul stretched too big for the vessel containing it. Like a vise pressed his skull tighter, tighter, tighter .
But of course. This body hadn’t been vacant when he’d seized it. This ... watchman? ... still resided within.
Gritting his teeth, Silas pushed out his necromancy to banish the unwanted presence.
The vise tightened still.
Who are You? the spirit railed, and another impact, like Silas had been struck by his own kinetic blast, rammed into him, this time knocking him off his feet. Pain radiated up his hip from where he’d struck the floor.
Get. Out. Silas pressed back, relieving some of the pressure. He cast his spells again, trying to pull the spirit away. Trying to force it into the house, into hell, into anywhere else .
But the spirit didn’t move. The otherness of it didn’t stop.
Silas couldn’t move his own spirit within his human body. He’d known that. But with a sinking horror, he realized he couldn’t move this other spirit from within his human body, either. The limitations of mortal flesh applied to both of them.
“Charlie?”
Two consciousnesses whirled around, blinded by the sudden appearance of lamplight. Another watchman held it up, frowning. “What are you doing in here?” he asked.
Silas pushed, stretched, dominated . For a moment, the unwanted spirit quieted. “Thought I heard something,” he said. The voice was not his. A little too high. A little too rough. This new tongue accented the words halfway between American and English, like it was used to the first, but Silas only spoke the second.
“We’ve checked out the rest. All of it’s downstairs.” The watchman motioned, then walked away, expecting dear Charlie to follow.
Silas’s right foot moved forward to do so. Silas hadn’t been the one to move it.
You are mine now. Silas bolstered, stretched, magicked. Leave.
Wrong, came the retort. Get Out. Wrong.
A splitting pain cracked through Silas’s mind. He drew blood from his tongue holding back a scream.
When he gained control again, he was standing outside, the night calm and cool, with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. But he was out. He was free.
Silas ran, the pressure in his body building, building, building ...