Chapter Four Séance
Chapter Four
Séance
Though I remain in the kitchen—my feet planted firmly in the land of the living—that same inexplicable sense of dread threatens to suffocate me as I call my sister’s name into the spirit realm. “Filippa?” Familiar ash drifts through the hole I’ve torn in the veil. It lands like snow upon the pentagram. “Are you here?”
Our only answer is a particularly violent crack of thunder, and Coco and I nearly leap out of our skin. Across the pentagram, Lou startles too, cursing when her knee collides with the table and knocks over a candle. Though Reid jumps to his feet to avoid hot wax in his lap, he doesn’t break his connection with Lou and Beau, who jerks his head around with wide eyes. “Did you hear that?”
Lou scoffs, her eyes watering in pain. “Yes, Beau, everyone heard that—”
“Not the thunder,” he says quickly. “There was— Someone laughed .”
“I heard it too,” Mila says.
My hands tighten around Coco’s and Odessa’s as I follow Beau’s frantic gaze around the kitchen. “I didn’t hear any laughter.”
“Nor did I.” Unlike the rest of us, Odessa speaks with a studied air of detachment, but her eyes shine just as bright as ours. Her grip holds just as tight. Telltale signs that—despite her bluster—she hasn’t ever participated in a séance either. The realization brings little comfort. “Are you sure you heard something?”
“Of course I am! At least”—Beau glances back at the pentagram, which still gleams innocuously in the candlelight—“I think I am. I—I might be.”
Frowning, Reid tries to clean his chair with his elbow, but the wax has already hardened into brittle flecks upon the wood. Like ice. “It feels cold.” He glances up at me warily, his breath visible in the sudden chill of the room. “Is that normal?”
“It is for the spirit realm.”
Odessa’s gaze does not waver from the pentagram. “What else is the spirit realm like?”
Mila draws closer to my chair.
“Strange.” I look fixedly at the pentagram too, waiting for any sign of Filippa—her thick black hair, once gleaming like mine, or perhaps her emerald eyes, the row of dark stitches down her cheek. “Everything in the spirit realm is the same as it is here, except... different.”
With a scoff, Beau cranes his neck to see every nook and cranny of the kitchen, still searching for the source of mysterious laughter. “That clears things up nicely, thanks.”
“Frederic upset the balance with his experiments. He broke the laws of nature. I don’t know precisely how it works—I’m not a witch—but the realms began twisting before his ritual on All Hallows’ Eve. I can only assume the distortion has worsened since he resurrected Filippa.” I glance at Lou, who listens raptly despite swaying slightly on her feet. Reid tightens his grip on her hand, his frown reflecting my own.
Something is wrong, Célie , she told me in Brindelle Park, where the trees had blackened and died. My magic feels sick.
“You assume ?” Beau asks in disbelief.
I glare at him. “If you must know, I haven’t actually been to the spirit realm since All Hallows’ Eve. I have no idea what it might look like now, and to be frank, I don’t want to know.” Then, to Lou, “What do you think? Have you... felt any different since Frederic’s ritual?”
“Something is happening.” Before she can answer, Coco points to where crystals of ice have started to form around the pentagram. “Should we try again, Célie? Without interruptions?” She speaks the last directly to Beau, who does one last sweep of the kitchen before slumping in his seat. Defeated. He does not, however, release Reid’s or Odessa’s hands.
“Go on, then,” he grumbles.
I raise my voice over the tempest outside. “If you can hear me, Filippa... I received your message, and though I appreciated that knife in my back, I still have some—well, questions.”
As before, she doesn’t answer, and Lou’s eyes meet mine in the silence that follows. Perhaps she can sense my throat closing up. Perhaps she can see the tension building in my shoulders, my knuckles whitening around Coco’s and Odessa’s fingers. When the former winces slightly, I force myself to loosen my grip with a slow exhale, and Lou gives a quick, reassuring smile. I try to return it. Truly, I do—I try —yet a small part of me longs to close my eyes, to wash away the pentagram and forget all of this.
“Pip?” I say again.
The crystals creep farther across the table.
When my sister still doesn’t answer, my frustration breaks into twin waves of disappointment and relief. Both crash over me as another great boom of thunder shakes the kitchen and the candlelight flickers. Perhaps Beau was right. Perhaps this entire plan has been doomed from the start. Doomed and foolish . Filippa threw a knife at me, so why did I think she would reappear now? Because I demanded it? I resist the urge to sneer at myself, to sneer at our homemade pentagram and honey-scented candles. I’ve never been able to compel my sister to do anything, with or without magic. Indeed, our relationship has always been the opposite, hasn’t it?
Aren’t you a little old for pretend?
The memories of our childhood chafe now, interposed between a broken music box and a silver knife. An open window. A pang of longing at what could’ve been—what should’ve been—if only we’d been brave enough to try.
Another fork of lightning strikes, and in the brilliant white light, something gaunt flashes beneath Reid’s skin. Something white, something skeletal . My thoughts skip at the sight of it—stomach pitching like I’ve missed a step—but when I blink, incredulous, his face has returned to normal. Not a skull in sight.
Enough, Célie , I chastise myself. Focus.
“Why isn’t Coco’s blood summoning her?” Reid asks. “I thought the magic would—lure her, somehow. Pull her toward us.”
Expression contemplative, Odessa continues to stare at the pentagram like it’s a riddle she cannot solve. She doesn’t notice the ice crystallizing in her hair. The rest of us do, however, and Beau gapes at her as she says, “The blood should allow Filippa to traverse the space between us, similar to how Célie can project in her sleep. Perhaps it cannot force her to do so, however, if she is unwilling or unable.”
When lightning flashes again, tendrils of my own hair begin to float weightlessly around my face. I hook a foot around the table to keep my chair on the floor. “I don’t know what this is,” I say, unease creeping into my voice, “but it shouldn’t be happening. We should stop before—”
The candle flames shoot upward in response.
As one, we recoil, our eyes widening as the table begins to spin—slow at first, then faster and faster, until the candles fly in every direction. Instead of crashing to the floor, however, they hover overhead like the ghoulish fingers of a puppeteer, tipping to drip wax onto Reid’s and Beau’s heads.
“Blargh!” Beau leaps from the table, breaking the circle, and clutches his magnificent hair. “Knock it off, Lou! This isn’t funny —”
“It isn’t me!” Swaying again, Lou lifts an incredulous hand to her nose, from which a trickle of blood has appeared. Odessa nearly breaks my wrist as I lunge, crashing into the table before forcing my body to still. My lungs to cease. Panicked, Lou tries to magic the blood away, but at the flick of her wrist, the peonies wither instead. They curl and shrivel as if diseased, and Lou’s knees give out. Reid catches her just as another flash of lightning illuminates the kitchen. Illuminates their skulls .
Though Coco stumbles forward to help, she stops short after a single step, her eyes fluttering before rolling back in her head. Beau leaps to her side in panic. “ Coco— ”
Her body jolts with the next clap of thunder, however, and she blinks, shaking her head. “I’m all right,” she reassures him, wiping incredulously at the blood seeping from her ear. “At least, I think I’m all right—”
“What is happening ?” Lou looks wildly around the room, struggling to rise. “Is Mila still here, Célie?”
I dare not open my mouth to answer.
“I don’t know what this is!” Mila drops to her feet like a sack of potatoes, but no one hears her now except me. “This is—I feel heavy ,” she says in wonder. “Célie, the veil—it must be—”
My fingertips slip from the table’s edge, and Melisandre bolts from beneath the settee to tangle in Beau’s feet. With a curse, he topples to his knees in an attempt to avoid her, but Melisandre is no longer there; yowling, she rises into the air like the candles and levitates above his head. My chair already bobs amidst the copper pots.
Beau swats furiously at the candle attacking his head. “We need to close it!”
He’s right, of course. I summoned Filippa, not whatever magic this is, but I cannot bring myself to move—to breathe —as Lou and Coco huddle near the window, cringing with each streak of lightning. Fresh blood trickles from them both now. Even Reid seems weak and unsteady as he stands on a chair to rescue Melisandre. Below him, Mila gapes at the amber hue spreading across her hands. Odessa now resembles a macabre ice statue, her beauty sharper and brighter than before, and icicles sparkle in her hair as diamonds. The table still spins. It creates a draft through which Beau struggles to regain his footing. “ Célie— ”
In the next second, however, white light bursts from the pentagram, and cold wind blasts our hair backward. “Nobody move,” Odessa says sharply, but Mila’s chin has already snapped toward the pentagram. Her eyes widen in horror at whatever she sees there.
“Someone is coming,” she whispers.
And I can’t help it now—I lean forward in anticipation, heat blistering up my throat as I lean forward and ask, “Filippa?”
No one responds. The very room seems to hold its breath as the strange light vanishes once more. As the candles flicker once, twice, before an invisible force douses the flames.
All of them. All at once.
A beat of heavy, sentient silence follows—oppressive and unnatural—like a great beast waking from deep slumber and drawing his first breath. “Fuck,” Lou says tremulously. “Fuck, fuck, fuck —” The silence exhales then, and with it, an overwhelming scent of roses engulfs the kitchen—roses and candle smoke. The latter curls toward us like fingers in the darkness, and I choke as they wrap around my neck.
Not Filippa.
Stumbling backward in blind panic, I wrench my hand from Odessa, attempting to break the connection, to locate the pentagram. Odessa refuses to let go, however, and even with my vampiric vision, I cannot see through this blackness. The shadows remain absolute. If not for her hand in mine—viselike, as if she too hangs on for dear life—it would feel like we’ve plunged headfirst into absolute nothingness. Into the abyss.
“What is this?”
Beau’s voice rises over the sudden scrape of chairs, the frantic thump , thump , thump ing of my friends’ hearts. In the next second, he crashes into me, pulling me into his arms with Coco, who says quickly, “Everything is going to be all right—”
Even she sounds terrified, however, her heartbeat spiking, deafening in my ears. The sharp scent of her blood collides with the smoke, the roses, until my head spins in a delirious jumble of sensation. Her fingers clamp against my arm. Beau’s heart beats against my cheek. So warm. So hypnotic.
“Focus, Célie.” Odessa squeezes my hand to the point of pain, but I can’t—I can’t —and without my sight, the onslaught of scent is too much. I can taste the roses now, can taste the fear, the magic , and my fangs punch through as something fetid slithers across my skin—less scent or taste and more awareness. Like someone is watching me. No. Like someone has found me, and the weight of their gaze threatens to smother my consciousness until I become the darkness too. My eyes flutter back into my head. “Focus on my voice,” Odessa says, louder now, as Lou and Reid lurch through the darkness in search of light. “You need to close the veil—”
“The matches are on the mantel,” Reid says swiftly.
“They aren’t here —”
Lightning forks through the windows, illuminating a gloved hand reaching up through the pentagram.
All the air in the room seems to vanish. “What is that —?” Coco starts in horror, but in the next second, the hand strikes, lunging toward us as an earsplitting clap of thunder rends the night in two. Tremors rock the table. A copper pot crashes to the floor. We pitch into darkness once more, and though the hand snatches at my sleeve, Odessa moves with preternatural speed, dragging me just out of reach.
The hand lands instead upon Beau.
With a strangled curse, he flings himself backward, and Coco shrieks; a rush of movement disturbs the darkness. Before I can orient myself—before I can do anything but stagger into someone who smells like Reid—the candlelight flares back to life, higher and brighter than before. Hotter. It illuminates the smeared pentagram on the table. It illuminates Coco bent over it, panting, her palm covered in blood from where she dragged it through the lines. Breaking them. Disrupting the ritual and banishing the gloved hand.
The scent of roses lingers, however—as does the darkness. It smudges the edge of my vision, mottles Reid’s and Odessa’s faces as they peer down at me in concern. “Célie?” Reid clutches my elbow, steadying me, as his eyes search mine. “What is it? Do you need to sit down?”
“I—” My eyes flutter again, and my knees threaten to collapse. “I feel faint.”
I feel strange.
“It’s your adrenal cortex.” Odessa seizes my other elbow, steering me toward the table. The veil. It still flutters innocently above the scene, and I reach out without truly seeing its edges; I bind them clumsily before staggering into Odessa once more. When the others gape at us, she says, “The adrenal cortex produces hormones associated with stress, and long-term stress increases the appetite.” To me, “You haven’t properly eaten since you died.”
“It isn’t that,” I protest weakly, and in truth, it isn’t. Whatever that was—it felt familiar somehow, like I’ve experienced it before, known it before, but... how can that be? I shake my head, and the entire room pitches with the movement. Only once have I ever seen darkness like that. Only once have I ever lived through it.
“Jamais vu.” Speaking softly, Lou stands in the narrow space between the cabinet and hearth, her arms crossed and her body folded as if trying to make herself disappear. The wind outside has reached a crescendo now; it screams against the walls, the windowpanes, as if determined to reach us, to claw its way into the ominous quiet of the kitchen. “I felt it too.”
“ Never seen. ” Odessa’s eyes spark with interest, and she withdraws her small velvet box again. Unclasping the lid, she sticks her entire arm into its depths and rummages for several seconds before pulling out an enormous tome. Beau’s mouth falls open as she flicks through the onionskin pages until she finds the right one. “The phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognizes but that also feels unfamiliar.”
Reid crouches in front of me. “Was it Filippa?”
“I don’t think so.” I shake my head, prompting another wave of dizziness. “She would never wear gloves like that, and it didn’t— feel like her.”
“Frederic stitched her together with bits of other people’s skin,” Coco says. “She might wear gloves like that now.”
“What are we going to do?” Lou whispers.
She wipes the blood from her nose with the back of her hand. I still see it, though. It gleams slick and scarlet in the candlelight. Wrenching my gaze away, I turn instinctively to Mila. She hasn’t yet spoken, hasn’t moved at all from her spot beside the table. She simply stares down at the smeared pentagram with a hard jaw and detached expression. A cold one.
It reminds me of Michal.
“Mila.”
It seems to take a very long time for my voice to reach her, but when it does, she lifts her face and says, “We need to find your sister.”
“You think—you think she’s responsible for this?” I swallow hard, every word demanding terrible effort.
“I think something is very wrong here, and if Filippa did in fact rise from the grave, she might know what it is.” Her silver eyes flick to Reid, to Lou and to Coco—the latter two still cannot catch their breath—before returning to me. “Are you sure you want to find her, Célie?”
We stare at each other for a long moment. Though a good sister would say yes—though I want to say yes—the answer lodges in my throat unexpectedly. Perhaps because I don’t recognize my sister anymore; I don’t even recognize myself, which makes us veritable strangers. The Filippa I knew would never have thrown a knife at me. She never would’ve mocked my pain. Except...
And you’ll never know a world without sunlight, will you? Not our darling Célie.
“I—I don’t think we have a choice,” I say, shaking away the bitter memory of our last conversation. “If my sister has risen, we need to know.” Still, the situation has proven itself to be dangerous for everyone, and if Mila involves herself, I don’t know how Filippa will react. I don’t know what Filippa can do . “Perhaps I should go instead.”
“No,” say Lou, Reid, Coco, Beau, and Odessa in unison.
Despite listening to only half the conversation, they seem to have pieced together enough information to understand. “Be reasonable, Célie,” Reid says.
Beau shakes his head incredulously. “Mila is a ghost —”
“—and vampires can still die,” Odessa finishes. “You have a great deal to lose, even while pretending to disdain it.”
Under different circumstances, I might’ve argued, but the less I speak now, the better. My vision continues to pulse scarlet. As if sensing my struggle, Mila nods, her expression hardening, her shoulders squaring as she rises to her full height. “I’ll be careful, Célie.”
She leaves before I can thank her—gliding straight through the window toward Saint-Cécile—and a boom of thunder reverberates through the house. Through my head . I clutch the table to hold myself steady while Reid grasps my elbow. I still feel odd. Disoriented.
Hungry.
Another boom of thunder follows, rattling the copper pots. Then another.
And another.
It takes several seconds to realize the pounding noise isn’t thunder at all. Even Beau turns to look at the door before I make the connection. Because—someone is here. Someone is knocking . Frowning, I peek at the clock on the mantel as the door quakes beneath another onslaught. The hands read half past four in the morning.
Whoever this is, they aren’t stopping by for tea.
Lou swallows audibly, stepping from her nook and glancing from the pentagram to the door to Reid. “Should we—er—open it?”
“Are you insane?” Beau asks, low and incredulous. “We just summoned a demon —”
“We don’t know it was a demon.” Though Reid straightens, still staring hard at the door, he doesn’t release my elbow. “Whoever is out there might need our help—and I doubt a demon would knock before entering.”
“I don’t care who it is.” Coco rubs her arms absently, as if warding off a chill. “They can come back later. After what just happened, we need to rest—”
In the end, their bickering matters very little.
Everything matters very little.
Because with one last deafening knock, the front door splinters before blasting from its hinges, revealing Michal Vasiliev—dripping wet and furious—on the threshold. “Hello, pet,” he says through gritted teeth, and his eyes —
They’re the last thing I see as my breath hitches, my heart leaps, and my knees collapse.