Chapter 6 Toolie
Toolie
Celeste uncorked a little vial and shook out a line of powder along the crown of the grave. Her nails were painted gold, chipped and flaking. “Give me your hand, Sully,” she said.
I did. She pressed her thumb to my palm and, without warning, jabbed the skin with a sewing needle. I hissed, but she just grinned and squeezed, coaxing a fat bead of blood into the bowl.
Scarlette scoffed. “Is the show really necessary?”
Celeste ignored her. “Power always needs blood, sugar. This isn’t Hollywood. This is how things are made and unmade.”
Moab stepped closer, boots squelching in the mud. He nodded once at me, the unspoken go-ahead we’d used a thousand times before. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks, but I didn’t move.
Celeste set the bowl in the center of the circle and lit three candles, sticking them in the earth so their flames made a wobbly triangle.
She sprinkled bone dust over the wicks, and the smoke curled blue, sharp, and sweet.
She started to hum, low and hollow, words I half-recognized from somewhere else.
Not Latin, not English. Old, wet, and hungry.
“Scarlette,” Celeste said, eyes still on the flames. “Get in here.”
Scarlette hesitated just long enough to make a point, then stepped into the triangle.
She knelt opposite me, keeping the grave between us, her back straight and face stony.
Celeste joined her at the third point, and for a moment the three of us knelt in silence, lit only by candlelight and the greasy glow from a distant lamplight.
Moab shifted position, always with an eye on the street, but never letting the circle out of his sight.
I focused on the stone under my hand, the letters, the cold. I remembered the first breath after waking—how the world tasted sharp and wrong, how my own body felt like a suit I hadn’t broken in.
Celeste’s hum rose into words, tumbling over each other like river stones. My jaw clenched at the first syllable—Gaelic, for sure, but older than any I’d heard. She passed the beads through her fingers, click click click, never missing a beat, her eyes closed and lashes slick with rain.
I felt something then. Not a chill, not exactly, but a tightening, like all the air in the graveyard was being sucked into the dirt. My skin tingled. My teeth ached. I pressed harder on the headstone, and the shamrock tattoo flared hot enough to make me gasp. “Catherine?” I said.
Scarlette’s eyes flicked up, and for a second, I saw fear under her mask. “Toolie?” she whispered.
I didn’t answer. My voice was gone, ripped out by the wind or by whatever Celeste had conjured. The grave marker pulsed under my palm, a throb in time with my own heart, or maybe with the memory of the old one.
The circle of candles burned lower, the wax melting into the earth. Celeste reached into her pouch and scattered more bone, then snapped her fingers so the flames jumped and danced. Her chant sharpened, lost the river flow, and became a pounding, a battle march.
A crow landed on a branch above us and made a sound like a door slamming in the next room.
Celeste’s eyes snapped open, wide and black. “Name her, Sully,” she said, voice doubled and echoing.
I swallowed, felt blood in my mouth. “Catherine Dunn,” I managed. “Bring her back.”
The wind died. Even the city’s noise shriveled, as if the whole world was waiting for the answer.
Celeste whispered a last word and blew out the candles.
For a second, there was nothing. Just mud, cold, and the taste of burnt sage.
Then the earth under the grave shifted, not enough to see, but enough to feel in your bones. Scarlette hissed and jerked back, falling on her ass in the mud. Moab barked out a curse and made for the circle, but Celeste caught his sleeve and held him off.
I couldn’t move. My hand was glued to the headstone. The shamrock on my arm glowed, veins branching from it in sick green lines. My heart was a trip hammer.
And in the space where Catherine should have been, I heard her voice, clear as glass, say my name.
The candles reignited, all at once. The air tasted like copper and violets. I smelled river water and wet hair and the salt of tears.
Celeste leaned in close, face streaked with sweat and rain and something else. “She’s coming,” she said.
Celeste’s chant climbed, her voice splitting in two, then three. For a second, I heard the words in stereo, like there were other voices layered in. Then it all snapped to a pitch so high my ears rang.
Scarlette’s eyes went wide. She tried to say something, but her hair lifted off her scalp, fanned out like she’d stuck her finger in an outlet.
Blue sparks flickered at the tips of her fingers, and she stared, transfixed, as the arcs hopped from nail to nail.
She choked out, “What the fuck is this?”
Celeste didn’t slow down. She snapped her fingers, and the tealights flared. The smoke thickened and swirled. The air got so dense I felt like I was breathing through wet velvet.
The taste hit then, sudden and total: dust, old paper, something bitter and wild, like chewing dandelions. I gagged and coughed. Scarlette did the same, but the sparks only got brighter.
Moab’s voice boomed through the haze, “You okay, Toolie?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. My tongue was numb. All I could do was press harder on the headstone, try to hold on.
That’s when the visions started.
Not memories, not exactly. More like watching home movies projected on the inside of the mist.
First, I saw Catherine, rain-slicked hair pasted to her cheek, eyes wild and lit from within. She ran through a field, skirt hitched above her knees, feet bare and mud-caked. Her laughter chased itself in circles, echoing around the graveyard until I couldn’t tell if it was real or just the wind.
Then it switched: Catherine at the hearth, hands kneading dough, flour dusting her nose, face split by a grin so bright it made me wince. She looked up and straight at me, as if she knew I was there on the other side.
The memories kept coming, faster now. Catherine in bed, curled against my side, her hand tracing the line of my jaw.
Catherine screaming at English soldiers, fists balled, fearless even with the muzzle of a musket pressed to her breastbone.
Catherine shoving me through a cellar door, slamming it shut, whispering, “Don’t let them find you, Sully, don’t let them—”
The air throbbed with every scene. The mist turned those flashes into afterimages, each one painting itself across the night for a heartbeat before vanishing.
Scarlette stared at the images, pupils blown wide. “I see her,” she whispered. “I see her, too.”
The static doubled. The hairs on my arms stood so tall they ached. My vision went blue-white around the edges. The taste of sage and dirt filled my nose, mouth, and sinuses. I couldn’t breathe anything but memory.
Moab shouted again, but this time I barely registered it.
Celeste’s voice cracked. She spat out three syllables like a command. The smoke sucked inward, toward the headstone, forming a column of twisting color—blue, green, dirty gold. The temperature dropped ten degrees in a second.
Something electric crawled up my wrist, into my shoulder, and parked itself at the base of my skull. For a second, I was certain Catherine was standing behind me, warm hand on my neck. I jerked around, but all I saw was fog and the flicker of tealights.
The ground hummed under my knees. The name O’Toole on the stone pulsed with a light from below, as if something was burning in the coffin beneath.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the visions didn’t stop. They bled through my eyelids, burned themselves into my retinas.
I saw Catherine’s face up close. The freckles. The cut on her lip. The way her lashes clumped when she cried.
I heard her voice. “Sully. Come home.”
Scarlette’s sparks snapped so loud they left smoke trails in the air. She dug her nails into her palm, but the blue glow just seeped from the wounds, mixing with the candlelight.
Celeste finally broke the chant. Her lips went slack, sweat running down her temples in sheets. She pointed at me, then at the headstone, and croaked, “Finish it.”
I didn’t know what to do. My hand felt welded to the rock. My whole body vibrated with the urge to run, but I stayed. I put my head to the stone. “Catherine Dunn,” I said. “I’m here.”
The air collapsed.
Every candle blew out at once, sucked down by a wind that came from the dirt, not the sky. The static vanished, leaving goosebumps and silence.
We sat in the darkness, panting.
Moab’s voice found us through the black: “Toolie?”
I opened my eyes. The mist was gone, burned away by the jolt. In its place stood a shape, not quite a shadow, not quite a person, hovering where the headstone met the earth.
Scarlette stared, jaw slack, hands still sparking.
Celeste’s head lolled, but she grinned with all her teeth. “That’s her,” she breathed. “You did it.”
The shape flickered, condensed, and for one heartbeat, I saw Catherine as she’d been: wild and scared, but brave. Alive.
She reached for me.
I reached back.
For the first time since waking in that grave, I didn’t feel cold. Not even a little.
The wind picked up, this time from below, cold and mean, whipping up the candle flames and bending the grass flat. The city faded, the sounds of Dublin peeling away until the only thing left was the wet, slow beat of my own heart.
Celeste’s hum rose to a shout. The ground started to tremble, not a proper earthquake, more like a muscle tensing so hard it threatened to snap. The air shimmered. The colors all went wrong—blue shadows, green light, the world leaching into sepia and then to white.
Scarlette’s pupils blew wide. Moab bared his teeth and laughed, a short, sharp bark. I felt the shamrock tattoo crawling up my arm, spreading, the veins beneath branching into new and ugly shapes.
Then Celeste screamed. “NOW!”
Reality tore.
The space between us split, a vertical gash opening from the grass to the sky, edge-to-edge with howling light. The wind roared, shoving us backward, but Moab locked his arms around Celeste, and Scarlette grabbed my sleeve with both hands.
Inside the split, colors danced, impossible and wrong. I saw glimpses: faces, rivers, armies in the rain. Fields burning, black dogs running across the sun. I saw Catherine, over and over, her hair wild and her arms outstretched.
Celeste shouted, “HOLD!” but it sounded like she was yelling underwater.
The rip in the world expanded, sucking us forward. Scarlette howled, Moab roared, and I just focused on not letting go. The world tilted, twisted, the sky above flipping upside down, and the headstones rolling like marbles on a sheet.
The wind changed direction and yanked us straight into the rift.
It wasn’t like falling. It wasn’t like flying. It was both, and neither, and it hurt so much my teeth vibrated in my skull.
We tumbled end over end, all sense of up and down destroyed. The hum of the earth became a scream, and I tasted smoke and blood and rain on my tongue. Everything I’d ever forgotten came at me in a rush: every fight, every touch, every breath I’d ever stolen or lost.
Catherine was at the center of it, her voice calling my name, her fingers curled in a fist that punched straight through the veil.
I reached for her. I missed, then reached again.
Time didn’t matter. Space didn’t matter.
Only the promise.
The last thing I heard was Celeste’s voice, far away, “Focus on her, Sully! Bring her to you!”
I did. With everything I had, I did.
And then the world went black, and the only thing left was her.
Catherine.
Waiting.