Chapter 11 Cendi
CENDI
The following morning in the library was peaceful.
Light streamed through the windows, painting everything in a gentle glow.
The hum from last night’s lattice spell settled into a steady hush that felt more like breathing than noise.
If I were to guess, I’d say that Maple had set everything back to the way it was supposed to. It felt nice.
It also felt nice that we were wrong about Maple.
Jessie spread our notes across a corner table. Notes that would have to be reworked now that Maple wasn’t a suspect. Robbie brought tea because he thinks best with a warm cup. Jaylyn lined up the spectral primers we had checked out and kept the one on mimicry close by.
We had just started arguing over whether glamour residue leaves a trace you can swab when the doors swung open, and Drew and Ava stepped in together with the kind of focus that changes a room.
I was beginning to realize that hunters usually did that.
Drew lifted a hand in greeting and headed straight for us.
Ava paused long enough to trade a quiet word with Maple, who relaxed a fraction, before joining our table.
“Good,” Drew said, dropping into the chair beside Jessie as if he had been assigned there. “You’re all here already. Saves us a sweep. We need to move the case forward.”
“Yes please,” Jessie said, actually sounding relieved by the offer of help from a hunter. “We would love a break from guessing.”
Ava set a thin folder on the table and flipped it open with two fingers.
“We ran a reconstruction on the office where the theft started,” she said.
“The echo reads humanoid, which we knew. It does not read as dead.” She looked straight at me.
“Whatever wore your face did not belong to the ghost register.”
We had kind of already come to that conclusion, but it was nice to at least completely rule out the presence of a ghost, even if we were still left with more questions than answers. Why in the world would anyone pretend to be a ghost, look like me, and steal the key? It didn’t make any sense.
Jessie threaded her fingers together. “So if it is not a ghost, we are left with what?”
I stared, feeling helpless. “I have no idea.”
Robbie glanced at me and then back to the file. “Too bad we don’t know a ghost we could ask.”
Ava looked more pleased than surprised. “I brought one,” she said. She turned toward the shadowed high corner where the stacks met the east wall and softened her tone as if speaking to an old friend. “Granddad, if you can spare a moment, I could use your wisdom.”
A moment later, a man formed where no one had been standing a second before, as if stepping through a curtain we couldn’t see.
He wore a suit that had been new the year cars got tailfins, hair parted by habit and pomade, eyes bright and amused.
He looked at the chalk remnant near Maple’s desk and nodded to himself, then turned to Ava with a fondness that could have lit a different room without help.
“Ava, really, calling me to the library?” he said, then caught himself and added with a wry glance at our faces, “which is not an insult, Miss Maple, I swear it. My granddaughter knows I’m weak for good bindings.”
“Mr. Lynn,” Maple said, hand to her pendant out of reflex, not fear. “You may haunt wherever you please.”
He winked and drifted closer, no dramatic float, only the absence of footfall. “Call me Lynn.”
Ava tilted a chair and he sat, or pretended to, and the chair humored him. She rested a hand on the back like a tether. “Granddad, this is Cendi, Jessie, Robbie, and Jaylyn,” she said. “Can you explain to them what it’s like being a ghost and the rules, for lack of a better term.”
Lynn folded phantom hands on the table and considered us. ““Happy to oblige.”
Jessie nodded. “Will you start with the limits? What you can and cannot do?”
“Of course. I can touch objects and carry them, move them. I am bound to the castle for it was my home before I died. I cannot shapeshift at all. No ghost can.”
“So my double who took the key,” I said, trying to keep my tone more curious than raw, “could not have been you or anyone like you.”
“Not without help. Changes are possible with magic,” he said.
“And also it won’t work without an agreement with the ghost you’re working with.
We have pride.” He looked at Ava and softened.
“I also wouldn’t help because I have a granddaughter who would kick me down the stairs if I did something so foolish. ”
Ava snorted. “Accurate.”
Jaylyn skimmed her notes without dropping her attention. “If a witch worked with a ghost,” she asked, “what could they change?”
“Light,” Lynn said. “Sound. Certain kinds of memory. You could borrow a shape long enough to cause a gasp, never long enough to hold a key unless the man who made the key was a fool. You could push a door a hair, never open one that does not answer to you. You could make people cold. You could make a cat hiss. You could not take a teacher’s desk apart and vanish with the heart of it unless somebody breathing moved the parts. ”
Robbie leaned back, thinking through the implications. “The thing that took the key did not glitch,” he said. “It used corners and shadow and the fact that people see what they expect. That reads more like a projection tied to a body.”
Ava shifted her stance. “Granddad, talk about anchors, so they have the full picture.”
“Every ghost has a tether,” Lynn said. “Sometimes it is a room. Sometimes it is a person who remembers hard enough. Sometimes it is a bit of iron in the wall that sang when they died and now sings to them forever. I haunt this castle because my work and my blood live here. I cannot go to the town square to buy a newspaper because I want to.”
Ava closed the folder with a soft thump. “Here is where this leaves us,” she said. “So the culprit being a ghost is ruled out.”
Right. But there has to be more information than that.
“So what or who took the key? And how do they look like me?” My questions were more me thinking out loud and not directed to anyone in particular.
Jessie tapped her pencil against the table. “What about motive? We still don’t have one.”
Drew rolled that into the plan with a nod. “We also need to ask who gains the most by stealing the key.”
Lynn rose from the chair without disturbing it.
The act of standing looked like memory resuming its height.
“I can only help so far,” he said. “But I can walk halls and listen. Ghosts hear the way old houses hear. Bring me a name and I will watch it for you.” He looked at Ava and the softness returned.
He lifted two fingers in a farewell and thinned into the corner’s shadow until the air held only the room again.
Silence settled. It did not feel empty. It felt like a deck cleared for a new spread of cards.
Jessie drew a grid on a fresh page and wrote in tidy letters.
Shifter. Projection. Operator. Motive. Opportunity.
Under motive she listed the chamber under the castle and the rumor that the key opened more than a door.
Under operator she wrote unknown and circled it twice.
Then I asked, “What about a shifter?”
Drew shook his head. “Shifters can only shift into their animal spirit within them. So a shifter is out, too.”
Jessie drew a line through the shifter on the paper.
Ava looked toward Maple. “We’ll keep working quietly,” she said. “Can you let us know if any bindings complain louder than expected?”
“Of course,” Maple said. “I will write it in a way that gets sent this time.”
Drew stood. “We have enough to brief Beth and John,” he said. “Now, I want a list of students we’ve disciplined for glamour tricks who might be better than they confess.”
“Marcus and Alicia already confessed,” Jessie said. “They built a projector and got a lecture. They did not have the skill to take on Cendi’s form though.”
“They are off the top of the stack,” Drew said. “Not off the list. We check everyone twice.” He lifted a brow at me. “Keep your circle tight. Do not walk alone. If someone asks you to follow them into a stairwell you do not recognize, do not go be polite about it. Shout.”
That was unsettling. What did he think was going to happen to me? Still, it was probably good advice.
“I can shout,” I said. “I am very good at shouting when needed.”
Robbie nodded. “She is,” he said, proud in a way that made me want to kick his ankle under the table.
Ava stood and stretched her hands as if shaking water from them. “We’ll be around. Lynn will be too. Don’t summon him for parlor tricks, please.”
“Never,” I said. “He deserves better than party questions.”
We watched them go, and I sagged into my chair. We were no closer to figuring out who or what had the key. The scary part was, what did the creature want with a key that could open any door? And why did it need to wear my face to take the key?