Wizard of Most Wicked Ways (Whimbrel House #4)

Chapter 25

July 15, 1851, Blaugdone Island, Rhode Island

Owein’s senses weren’t the same in a house as they were in a mortal body. He could see, but not with the vividness of eyes. Hear, but not with the keenness of ears. Taste and touch were gone, but he could detect aromas as though they were being drawn for him, distantly, on the reverse side of a piece of paper. Everything was there, but muted, and his senses were limited to the structure of his new body. He had no heart to feel the sorrow of it, but sorrow had always been a spiritual thing. Though it weighed heavily on him, he moved quickly, precisely, ensuring he wouldn’t hurt the injured and fallen. Settling over his old foundation, he pulled boards and beams and struts apart, fitting them back into place with the largest restore-order spells he’d ever cast. Not a single one addled his mind, because he had no physical mind to addle. The rooms separated in cracks and pops, stairs swung back into place, shards of glass reorganized themselves into windows, seaming together until not a fissure remained to whisper of past damage. Broken furniture glued back together and flew through reopened spaces to its designated rooms. Beds remade themselves, books hopped onto shelves, clothes whistled their way back into drawers. Even the pages of Merritt’s latest manuscript shuffled into order, or at least as orderly as the author had kept them in the first place, which wasn’t very.

Owein straightened the portrait of a long-forgotten relative, recemented the toilet bowl, and set the breakfast table. He’d started a boy who couldn’t say goodbye, driving his spirit into the walls of his family home. Then he’d been a dog, then a boy again—a different boy—and a man for a short while. Now he was, in an ironic sense, home again. Home forever, but at least it was a forever where he could watch over his family for generations to come, until the hurt of it all grew too much and he let the world weather him down, until the walls splintered and the roof caved and he was once again a free spirit, bound by nothing but air and heaven.

The last snaps of wainscotting and breaths of reconstituted paint were his farewells. His consciousness flitted to his bedroom, righting the spilled inkwell and straightening the doorframe, then, one by one, reorganizing all of Cora’s letters. He realized with heavy dismay that he’d lied to her. He never would write her back, would he? Never say the things he wanted to say.

Without meaning to, the paint on the ceiling began to drip, drip, drip—

A strange plunging feeling overwhelmed it. Would have stolen his breath away, if he’d had any to steal. Startled him, because he wasn’t supposed to feel such a physical and grossly familiar sinking , not as he was. But he felt it, swift and sudden as a winter gale.

Owein’s soul was sucked from his bedroom. He flashed by the hall and down the stairs, through the wall separating the reception hall and the dining room, out the northwest corner of the house itself.

He hit his body all at once, feeling as though a horse had fallen atop him. It hurt . His ribs, his backside, his legs, and most of all his head, radiating heat from a gash above his brow that thumped in a relentless three-note pattern.

Like the draw of a blacksmith’s bellows, Owein breathed in a searing lungful of air and opened his eyes to a red-rimmed blue sky. Blightree’s face over him was so pale he looked like a ghost. One hand pressed to Owein’s chest, the other clutching a communion stone. The old man smiled at him, the slightest ticking up of the corner of his lips, before he collapsed against Owein’s shoulder, never to breathe again.