CHAPTER 26
We pulled her a safe distance from the shed, where the wraith wailed and threw itself at the boundary of the sigil like a thing possessed.
Amelia, coughing and shivering, backpedaled in the grass until I managed to grab her under the arms and get her to her feet, searching her for any sign of injury. She was soaked to the skin, still wearing the baggy shorts and button-up she’d had on the day she died, now stained with silt.
Shivering, she grasped my shoulders and looked between Kessian and me, then the wraith, which had gone eerily still, staring at Amelia like she was a lost meal.
“You’re okay,” I said. “You’re safe.”
Once the words were out, the relief hit me. It took her legs out from under her, because she collapsed into my arms with a sob, hugging me so tight the water soaked through both our clothes.
“Let’s get you inside,” Kessian said. “Warm you up.”
With lightning reflexes I didn’t think she’d have the capacity for in her current state, she grabbed Kessian’s wrist. His face went white like it hurt, and in a moment of self-reflection, Amelia softened her grip.
“I have things to tell you. Things I saw, knew.”
A terrible hope arose. “The others. Laurelie, Dad, everyone the wraith ever took. Can they be brought back, too?”
She shook her head. “Not themselves anymore. You know how caterpillars become goop in the cocoon before they become a butterfly?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“No!?” said Kessian.
“It’s like, the longer you’re in there, the less you’re … well, you. The more you’re everyone. I—I’m Amelia, but for a little while I felt like Laurelie, but mostly the strid.” She shook her head. “But that’s not what I need to tell you.”
“There’ll be time,” I said.
“No! I’m already forgetting.”
Kessian said, “Tell us inside.”
“It wants to go home,” she said as we helped her up the stairs into Lunaris. “I—It is a people and a place, but it’s lost its identity.”
My familiar had laid out warm towels and fresh clothes. Amelia had to be convinced to change. I pushed her through the door to my bedroom. She kept babbling as I closed it to give her privacy.
“Someone poisoned it. I should know who, but his face is a monstrous blur. It didn’t want to remember. It didn’t want to think of him.”
“So it’s a man?” I said.
“I think so? The strid. It’s sick, and taking people makes it feel a little better, but also makes it sicker, but it can’t stop.”
“I’m listening,” I called to her from the kitchen while pulling tithes out of the first-aid kit under my sink.
“It took me to this place. Somewhere in the water. It looked like … I don’t know how to describe it, and the picture’s not as clear anymore. Was it ever? It’s like a dream I’m trying not to forget. And I have to tell you. It feels important.”
“Keep going,” I said. “Maybe talking about it will jog your memory.”
Kessian pulled his trousers down so I could run a healing spell over the slash marks left on his leg. They closed, leaving behind pink scars.
“Grandad’s house was there. We—I kept visiting it. Something about time. Something about the clocks …”
The door burst open. Kessian hurriedly pulled his torn trousers back up. Amelia, drowning in the T-shirt and pajama bottoms I’d loaned her, came out, rubbing her head and grimacing as she tried to remember the rest.
“Take me to Grandad’s house.”
“Your family will want to know you’re okay,” Kessian said.
“This can’t wait! I’m afraid I’ll forget it all. Please.”
I grabbed my keys. Lunaris had fired up the engine before I’d crawled into the driver’s seat.
We pulled up outside Grandad’s house ten minutes later. It still had the stench of smoke to it and a blackened smear fanning up from the burnt-out window. I’d barely parked before Amelia was clambering out the door, rushing up and lifting a plant pot for the spare key.
“Clocks. Clocks. Something about time,” she kept saying as she fit the key in the lock and pushed inside.
The smoky smell hit us harder as we entered. Amelia walked up to the grandfather clock, running a hand along the glass. “No, no, not that one.”
She walked a lap through the living room, dining room, and kitchen.
The clocks were countless. If she required a specific one, I wouldn’t know where to begin.
She went up the stairs at a harried pace.
I took my time in case Kessian needed my help, but he doggedly clung to the railing and used his cane.
The door to Grandad’s study was open. I held out a hand to protest Amelia going in, in case the floor was no longer stable, but she’d stopped just outside.
The interior had been remade in shades of black and gray. There were the hulking impressions of what had once been a desk and bookshelves, but most of the chair had been reduced to charcoal. Whatever books or notes were kept there were only ash.
Amelia pointed to the metal brackets where a shelf had once been. “There were clocks there with little Post-It notes beneath, and they all had names. One for your dad, one for Laurelie, one for you.”
“What were they for?” I asked.
“Tools for keeping time,” she said.
“I know that, but—”
“They don’t work. Not here.”
“Not anymore,” Kessian remarked, looking at the piles of ash on the floor.
“No, I mean Dad’s and Laurelie’s were stopped at 3:16 and 12:00, but yours, Tal? It still ticked.”
I was trying to follow. “So … mine worked?”
“Not here. They don’t work unless they’re underwater.”
“That … is normally the opposite of true,” Kessian murmured, but neither of us dared interrupt her. She’d grabbed onto a yarn and was following it to some sort of conclusion.
With a faraway look, she regarded the rest of the room. In a sudden frenzy, she went to the desk, and before I could call her back from the danger of a floor that could collapse, she wrenched open a drawer and froze.
I ventured a few tentative feet into the room to see what she’d found.
It was hard to discern amongst the ashes, but a pocket watch lay within, sooty and dark.
She picked it up, rubbing away the soot to reveal a flash of silver and a mother-of-pearl inlay.
It was tarnished with rust, but it was beautiful.
Beautiful and familiar.
“Grandad gave that to me for my sixteenth birthday,” I said. “I … I lost it. I had it on me the night I went into the strid.”
“How could he have found it?” Kessian asked.
I didn’t know. Amelia picked it up reverently and opened it. An engraving on the inside lid read:
34-96-13
“That wasn’t there before,” I said.
“Do those numbers mean anything to you?” Kessian asked.
I shook my head.
Amelia said, “I think it’s for you.”
“Why? What do I do with them?” I asked.
She screwed up her face in concentration, rubbing her head so hard it looked like it hurt. “I saw everything in there, and now it’s like my head’s sprung a leak.” She dropped her hands and let out a deep sigh. “I can’t remember the ‘why.’ Just that you need this. Someone wanted you to have it.”
“Just … someone?” I prompted.
Through her exhaustion, she looked a little afraid. “I’m losing sight of everything from in there, but if I remember right, you left it for yourself.”
We drove back to the spa. I called Fae, Mum, and Marlowe and told them to come see us at once. They came expecting bad news.
Fae was first to arrive, and when Amelia came out to greet them, they at first screamed like she was a ghost, then immediately burst into tears and crushed their cousin in a hug. By the time Marlowe, Lettie, and Mum drove up, they couldn’t see Amelia, she was so enveloped in Fae’s arms.
Lettie nearly fell to her knees and wept. Marlowe looked so shell-shocked that it didn’t become real until he hugged her. And Mum, she just looked at me open-mouthed.
“You did this? You brought her back?”
“Somehow, yeah.”
“And Laurelie? Your father?”
“I … I think it’s been too long.”
Mum’s face fell. I’d been about to ask why she didn’t mention Grandad when a thought occurred to me.
He hadn’t been dragged into the strid. The autopsy report claimed he’d died by the wraith’s hands, that it gave him heart failure, but the wraith had never done that before.
Its methods had always been, far as we knew, drowning. It had never left a body to bury.
Marlowe extricated himself from the tangle of arms around Amelia and clasped my hands. “Thank you. I don’t know what else to say, but thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“How did you do it?”
“Grandad’s trap. It worked.”
At this, everyone stopped and stared in the direction of the shed. It was just visible over the stony knoll and through a strand of trees.
“Is it still—?” Marlowe asked.
“I’m going to check. You all can stand back.”
“I’m coming with you,” Kessian said.
“And me,” said Marlowe.
“Well, I’m not,” Amelia said, curling into Lettie’s protective arms. “I’ve seen enough of that thing to last a lifetime.”
As we set off up the knoll, Mum came with us, too. Blue light still filtered in beams through cracks in the door. I held out a hand.
“Maybe take a step back.”
Everyone did. I swung the door open and jumped back a few paces.
The wraith still stood confined, its shoulders hunched. Mum took a step closer. Marlowe said, “Well done, Tal.”
The wraith lunged. All of us staggered back at the ferocity of it.
I thought for sure it would break through—light seemed a more flimsy barrier than the wooden door had been—but the sigil held fast, and the wraith let out a keening wail of fury and pain as its shadows singed every time it slammed its shoulder against its cage.
“The question is, what do we do with it?” Mum asked.
Kessian and I exchanged a look.
“The answer to that’s complicated,” I said.
“It’s trapped, but the sigil won’t last indefinitely.
Continuously replenishing the tithes is just asking for a fatal mistake.
But we don’t know how to banish it permanently.
Honestly, I don’t think it can be except by cleansing the strid.
Which, in practical terms, means finding whoever murdered Grandad and lured all those people to their deaths in the first place, and either bringing him to justice or getting him to undo it all. ”
“And do you have any more information on who did it?” Marlowe asked. “Warwick?”
The wraith continued its assault on its prison with renewed vigor.
“Not yet.” Watching the wraith, I couldn’t quite let go of that connection between the strange shape of its antlers and the identical statue in Warwick’s house.
It played over in my mind again and again.
How could he have created such an exact replica without having studied the wraith, and when could he have?
It only appeared to take someone, and far as I knew, Warwick had never been present during an assault.
Unless … Unless the relic wasn’t mimicking the wraith, but the other way around.
I recalled the details of that statue. The hollow tines, the holes placed at intervals along two of them, two central holes fusing into one.
The strange flutelike instrument that had been played on the banks of the strid had that exact shape.
“What if he has the murder weapon in his house, right under our noses?” I asked aloud.
Everyone stared at me, uncomprehending. I walked them through my thought process, the shape of the antlers, the flute from the dream, and the statue in Warwick’s house.
“He’d have to be a fool to keep it out in the open like that,” Marlowe said.
“Or very arrogant,” Kessian said. “Which he verifiably is. That presents a new problem, though. Last time we snuck around his house, we got caught, and even if we managed to steal it, that would make it inadmissible as evidence. We’d be the ones on the hook for possessing the murder weapon.”
He was right. “We need something that gives the authorities the right to search Foxbury Manor. Something ironclad enough he can’t bribe his way out of it.”
Mum offered to search through the contracts kept between Warwick and Grandad, if any had survived the fire.
Marlowe, meanwhile, would research Warwick’s solicitors to see if any of them had dirt they were willing to part with.
I didn’t think either would provide us with the proof we needed, though, because I had an inclination the proof we needed was already gone.
First, there’d been the fire. Then, when he’d caught us sneaking around, he’d accused us of stealing a contract. We hadn’t, but someone had.
Whatever they’d absconded with, I suspected it was what we needed. With Fae and Camilla’s wedding tomorrow, the search would have to wait until the day after, but a little crackle of hope went through me as I said goodnight to Kessian without kissing him, but thinking about it.
If Warwick went to prison for what he’d done, maybe Kessian wouldn’t have to fear losing his home anymore.