Chapter 24
Nova’s head shot up, and she stared at her bedroom door, her eyes blazing with sudden panic.
“Who the hell could that be? It’s ten o’clock at night.”
“Oh. Uhhhhh…”
She whipped her head around to face me, her expression morphing from panicked to accusatory like a traffic light going from red to green.
“Did someone follow you here?”
“Not exactly,” I muttered. “But I… okay, don’t get mad.”
“I’m already mad.”
“Okay, well then, don’t kill me.”
“No promises,” she growled.
I sighed. “Fair enough. After I saw you at the bookshop, Eva and Zale sort of kidnapped me and—”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s a long story, but anyway, the point is that in the course of our conversation, I sort of told them to come meet me here tonight.”
“Why?!” Nova cried out. “Why would you do that?”
“Because they said you’ve been acting kind of crazy, and I knew you had that book, and I thought it might not be something I could handle on my own.”
“I’m not acting crazy!” Nova shrieked, nostrils flaring.
I just stared at her. She rolled her eyes.
“Okay, fine, I’m acting a little crazy, but I’m dealing with crazy shit, okay?”
“Exactly. And so am I. And I think we both need help. Eva and Zale knew it, and that’s why they basically forced me into an intervention.”
“And now it’s my turn?”
“And now it’s your turn.”
She glared at me for a long moment, but I stared calmly back. Finally, she deflated.
“I’m still mad at you,” she grumbled.
“Fair,” I conceded. “So… should we go down and let them in?”
“Fine. Not like I can stop them anyway. If Zale gets a whiff of drama he’s like a bloodhound on a scent.
Even if I send him home, he’ll just crawl back through a goddamn window or something anyway,” Nova sighed.
She looked me up and down and said, “Stay here. And come up with some kind of story if you don’t want them to ask why you’re soaking wet and wearing my clothes. ”
She stomped out of the room, leaving me alone. I didn’t bother trying to come up with an excuse for my current state of dress. Zale and Eva knew about the scrying visions now. I’d just tell them the truth if they asked what had happened to me.
And what I’d seen in that tidepool…
The vision. I’d barely had a moment to process what I’d actually seen, and now I could feel it pushing its way to the forefront of my mind so that I could finally appreciate what I now understood.
Ambrose was the Darkness. He created himself, an abomination born of a bargain with a demon and the ill-fated magic that nearly destroyed the Geatgrima, and himself in the process.
What I’d witnessed tonight—the attempt to break through the Geatgrima by a living person with a butchered soul—had gone horrifically wrong.
I’d seen the form of the Gray Man—it seemed to be the manifestation of Ambrose’s maimed spirit, a form he created in order to attempt to pass over the threshold.
He had found a way—no doubt a wild and unsafe magical experiment—to exorcise that same spirit from inside his body, and then cloak himself in it.
In his deeply disturbed brain, he must have decided that he could literally disguise himself as a spirit, walk through the Geatgrima, find Isabel, and bring her back with him.
It was madness, of course, but who did he have to reason with or dissuade him? He was conjuring the vilest of demons for advice. There was no logic or sense left in a man like that.
When the Geatgrima had expelled him, he had dragged spirits with him.
What was the place just inside the Geatgrima called?
Jess had told me—the Aether. That was it.
She had mentioned that spirits sometimes lingered there before moving on.
Was that what had happened? Ambrose had penetrated the Aether, and simply made a mad grab for whatever spirits he could reach before he was flung from the plinth?
However exactly it had happened, the effect had nearly killed him.
I recognized the black network of veins under his skin, the icy cold breath that puffed from him like a steam engine.
This was the state he had been in when Sarah Claire had found him.
How much time had passed between Ambrose’s second bargain with Abaddon and the madness I had just witnessed?
It must have been a long time—didn’t the story go that the Darkness had been there for ages before the Vespers came to these shores?
And yet, Ambrose didn’t look any older. Crazier, yes.
Less human, definitely. But older? No. I began to wonder what kind of magic he had performed, what other experiments he had meddled in, in order to stay youthful for so very long.
Maybe a man with only part of a soul didn’t age the way other people did, but somehow I didn’t think so. I pondered it for a moment.
Isabel was young when she died. Not much older than me, to guess by the visage of the young woman I’d seen.
Perhaps he realized he had to stay young too, had to remain the strapping, handsome man she had once loved.
What chance would he have to keep her if time had worn him down to a shadow of his former self?
Shadow. The Gray Man. I shuddered. Poor Ambrose.
I just barely had time to register the shock that I had just felt pity for the Darkness when the door burst open, and Eva, Zale, and Nova re-entered the room.
Nova was ranting as the door opened, and I caught disjointed phrases that nonetheless conveyed the general subject of the lecture, “betrayal of trust” and “invasion of privacy,” the most prominent among them.
Zale looked rather chastened as he sat down beside me, but Eva looked completely unabashed.
She plopped down on the bed, and looked me up and down.
“Why are you all wet?” she demanded at once. “And why are you wearing Nova’s pajamas?”
“I had another vision,” I explained. “In a tide pool.”
Eva sucked in a breath through her teeth. “That must have been… cold.”
“Yup,” I responded wearily. “I’ll tell you both about it later.”
Eva gave me a quick nod, her expression sympathetic, and then we both turned our attention to Nova, who was clearing her throat impatiently.
“You showed up uninvited; the least you can do is pay attention,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” Eva replied, looking properly penitent, though the corners of her lips were twitching.
With all three of us now staring at her, Nova began to pace like a wild animal in a cage, her brow furrowed as she tried, it seemed, to gather her words. Finally, she stopped, still staring at the floor, her fists clenching and unclenching against her thighs.
“Okay. Goddess, where to start,” she muttered. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began. “A couple of weeks ago, I noticed my mother doing something strange.”
Zale raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that, like… the norm?”
“I swear to Hecate, Zale MacDowell, if you interrupt me, I will hex you into oblivion.”
“Noted,” Zale whispered, and pressed his lips into a thin line.
“I went into the library, and there was a whole section of books missing. Like, several whole shelves. I asked my mother about it, and she just told me she was doing some reorganizing. But she never touched the rest of the books, and those books never came back.”
“Do you know what the books were about?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nova said. “They were all about the history of Sedgwick Cove. Coven family trees, coven histories, trial records, those kinds of things.”
“Trial records?” I repeated. “Like… witch trials?”
Nova rolled her eyes. “Yes, but like… real ones. Covens and witches who strayed into forbidden practices, and were tried for it.”
“Who tries people for stuff like that?” I asked. “The Conclave?”
“Yeah,” Eva chimed in. “The Conclave acts like a panel of judges. Then they choose seven witches from the Cove to be the jury. The jury can make recommendations on a verdict, and the Conclave is supposed to abide by it, unless they agree, unanimously, to overturn it.”
“They almost never do, though,” Zale added. “Usually, the verdict from the jury determines the outcome. But then the Conclave gets to decide the punishment.”
I tried to imagine the current Conclave, squabbling like an angry flock of birds, to come to an agreement. “Are there a lot of trials?”
“No. The last one was, what… five years ago?” Eva asked the others.
“Sounds about right,” Zale agreed.
“Who did they—” I began, but Nova’s angry voice broke in.
“Can we focus, please! This isn’t a criminal history lesson!”
“Sorry,” all three of us muttered at once.
“Whatever. So the shelves stayed empty, and then I noticed that the locked cabinet had missing books, too.”
I frowned, remembering when we broke into that same cabinet the previous summer. “Isn’t that where your mother keeps all the books on malevolent magic?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Nova confirmed. “I didn’t want to mention it to my mom, though, because she’d flip out if she thought I was even interested in that cabinet. But I was getting suspicious, so I started snooping around instead.”
She paused here, like she was trying to decide how to proceed. We waited in silence until Zale couldn’t stand it anymore.
“And? Damn it, Nova, just spit it out, we’re dying here!” he shouted, but Eva punched him in the arm and shushed him. She was watching Nova’s expression with a curious intensity.
“My mom has a study on the top floor—she turned the whole attic into her… lair,” Nova said, sneering on the last word. “No one is ever allowed in there, not even to clean.”
“Lemme guess,” Eva said, a grin spreading slowly over her face. “You breached the lair.”
“Obviously,” Nova snapped. “I picked the lock when she left for a Conclave meeting.”
Zale let out a low whistle. “I would have thought she’d have magical protection on it as well.”
“Of course she did,” Nova said. “I disenchanted it, and then recast the protective charms when I was done. She’ll never know the difference.”
“Legend,” Zale whispered, his voice hollowed out with awe.