“What is happening?” Stephen drew Emily against him and held her tight. “What is this madness?”
“I don’t know.” Emily buried her face in his neck. “That
face
!”
“We are sorry we had to frighten you.”
They shouted and backed up against the former doorway as the ghost reappeared before them, glowing a soft and pleasant blue. Its features had returned to normal.
“What’s it saying?” Stephen whispered to her.
The ghost turned to Emily.
“The consort cannot hear. He has not been officially named. Would the locum wish to claim her consort?”
“Don’t hurt him!” Emily half shouted, half screamed. “You evil thing—you won’t hurt Stephen!”
The ghost bowed low, placing its hand over its heart.
“We would never harm the locum or her consort. We are sorry we have become evil in your eyes.”
“What is it saying?” Stephen cried, desperate now.
“Send us back!” Emily shouted.
The ghost shook its head sadly.
“You may not go back. The door is open. The abbey is no longer safe.”
“But my sister! Jonathan, Charles…Timothy!”
“They are not ours to protect. But we must protect the locum and her consort.”
It bowed again.
“If you wish a new guardian, we will dismiss ourselves and call another. You may name your consort at that time.”
“Emily.” Stephen grabbed her face and turned it to him. “Tell me what is going on.”
She was crying now. “It keeps talking about a door being opened, saying the abbey isn’t safe, but it won’t protect the others. It keeps asking if you’re my consort—”
He turned away from her and looked directly at the ghost. “I am her consort.”
“Stephen!” She wanted to clutch him to her and hit him at once. “I don’t know if it’s safe—”
“I’m going wherever you’re going, Emily,” he said, then addressed the ghost again. “I am her consort.
I am her consort. Tell me what is happening
!”
The ghost nodded and folded its hands before its body.
“Then it is done. The locum and her consort are safe. The door has opened. Do not leave the Other Side, for now the androghenie will go dark. We go now and wait for the end…or the new beginning.”
“Wait!” Stephen cried, reaching for the ghost. But it was already gone.
There was nothing but darkness surrounding them now. It was not harsh or oppressive, but it was close and strangely quiet.
“Where are we?” Stephen whispered.
“The Other Side,” Emily whispered back. “Where the ghosts live. I’ve been here before, but it was different. Brighter. It was
good
. It was where we found all the food and—” She stopped, clapping her hand over her mouth. “Oh no.”
“That ghost wasn’t good, Emily,” Stephen said. “And neither is this place.”
“The androghenie will go dark.”
Emily didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t know that she wanted to.
“Are we dead?” Stephen asked after an uncomfortable silence. “Was the food poisoned? Drugged?”
“I don’t know—but we were so foolish to take it, I see that now. It seemed so safe. They seemed so right and safe! Timothy said it was safe!”
Stephen clasped her hand and lifted it to his mouth, kissing it softly in the darkness. “It’s all right, Emily. It will be all right.”
“I don’t think so, Stephen,” she said, wanting to cry.
“We’re together, Emily. We’re here in this…nowhere, but we’re together.” He squeezed her to him and kissed the side of her face, pressing his lips tight against her skin. “We’re together.”
“What about the others?” Emily whispered.
What about my sister?
“I don’t know,” Stephen said. “I don’t know. We can only wait. And hope. And pray.”
He urged her down with him to the floor, drew her gently onto his lap, and held her as they waited there together in the darkness. They heard no sound but that of the each other’s breathing and their heartbeats. They sat and waited, and waited, and waited.
And prayed. Oh, how Emily prayed.
* * *
The muffled shout from below woke Jonathan more completely than any loud disturbance could; in fact, he had his knife in one hand and was reaching for his trousers with the other before he was even awake. He paused, listening for a moment, but there were no more sounds.
It could be nothing. It could be an accident.
Or it could be someone already dead.
He tugged on his clothes and glanced at Madeline. She was deeply asleep, looking tousled and peaceful. He reached for the key from the nightstand and took it with him, locking the door as he left.
There was no one in the study, but the door to the main part of the abbey from the tower was locked. He looked up the stairs, considering checking there first, but something pulled him down instead of up, and he told himself he would simply check the hallway first, then see if Emily and Stephen were in the turret room. Perhaps they had gone to the kitchen or to whatever mysterious place provided the food.
To be safe, he moved as silently as he could through the hall. But he froze in place as he heard the sound.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
No, Jonathan thought. His mind was playing tricks on him. It couldn’t be. He hurried down the hall toward the grand staircase, but he stopped at the top, peering cautiously over the balcony rail into the foyer below. His heart sank.
Whitby. His grandfather was here.
“Good morning, Grandson.” Whitby’s drawl echoed in the foyer. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Jonathan lowered his knife. His grandfather stood in the center of the entry room, looking ragged and unusually pale, peering up at Jonathan from below. He leaned on his cane with one hand, and the other was tucked casually behind his back.
“The spell.” Jonathan clenched and unclenched his hands at his sides. “Madeline’s spell and the fog in the forest should have kept you out.”
Whitby smirked at him. “No fog or spells can keep me from this moment, Jonathan, not even your petty tricks to lead me astray. I have found the talisman, boy, and now I will lead us to victory.”
He pulled his hand out from behind him. Jonathan felt something die inside him as he looked, for the first time in ten years, on the Perry sword.
“You can’t have found it.” He was practically choking on the words. “I destroyed it. I
destroyed it
.”
Whitby brandished the sword smartly in the air. “Clearly you didn’t.”
“I melted it down,” Jonathan said. “I took it to the abbey forge and melted it down with my own hands. I burned down the smithy ruins, I had the fire so hot.
I melted it down
.”
“It is here in my hand. It is the talisman—I know it like I know my own arm. You must be mistaken.”
“I am not mistaken,” Jonathan said. “I melted it down, and I put the smelt in the bucket, and I watered it down, and I sent it away with the rest of the waste, down through the drain to—” He stopped, the blood draining from his face.
To the lake. The waste from the abbey drained to the lake.
Jonathan stretched out his hand. “Whitby—Grandfather, please. Put down the sword.”
“How dull do you think I am?” Whitby snapped. He aimed the sword at Jonathan. “I have two of the talismans. You have the third, and the fourth has our daemon. Something is rising, Jonathan, and we must move quickly. You need not take the daemon up again, but you must give me the cup so I may do so. Give it to me now, or we all will die.”
“Grandfather, the daemon in the lake reforged that sword. It is compromised. It is no longer the talisman you think it is. Please,” Jonathan said, growing desperate now. “Put it down.”
“I did not find it at the lake,” Whitby snapped. “I found it at the witch’s cottage, in the ruins. I told you she was devious. I told you, but you didn’t listen.” His expression softened. “But you will see I am magnanimous, here at the end. You may keep her if you help me. Give me the cup, Jonathan, and I will let her live.”
“Grandfather, you must listen to me.” Jonathan took a step closer to the rail again. “Madeline did not have the sword. The daemon put it there. The Elliott daemon, Grandfather. It lives in the lake. It put the sword at the cottage for you to find. And if it let you come here today, it is using you for its own ends. Put down the sword. Whitby, I swear to you, you have stumbled into a trap. Put it down. Put down the sword.”
“I will not!” Whitby jabbed it at him again. “Give it to me, boy! Give me the cup!
Give me my daemon
!”
“I don’t know where it is!” Jonathan shouted back.
“Then you are of no use to me,”
a voice whispered at his ear.
It was the voice from the lake. It was the demon. And before Jonathan could even cry out a warning, it had knocked him against the back of his head and sent him sailing over the rail.
* * *
Charles was walking through the woods of the abbey with his fathers.
All three of them were there: Henry Carlton and Hamilton Elliott on his left and Neil Perry on his right, but sometimes Charles thought he saw a fourth, a man little more than a shade walking far off to Neil Perry’s side. They walked four—or five—abreast in the bright morning sunshine toward the lake, and Charles was not afraid.
“It’s iron tight,” Hamilton Elliott was saying, sounding pleasant and easy. “The spell is perfect in every way, and it cannot be undone.” He smiled at Charles. “
You
are the spell, my son. It is all contained within you. You begin it, and you end it. You are the circle. You will, bright and beautiful boy, rise to save the day.”
Neil Perry rolled his eyes. “Notice his pun.
Iron
. Leave it to an Elliott to bastardize such a treasure. That’s the purest Catalian steel that can be had, Hamilton, and forged in magic.” He pointed proudly to his chest. “It went through me like butter, man. Cut the demon out of me cleanly. Completely. That was
my
son. My blood. He freed me.” He glanced around, confused. “Where
is
my son?”
Hamilton ignored him and turned back to Charles, beaming. “You’ve done so well. You’ve brought them all here.” He touched Charles’s face. “You are everything I wished for. I can’t tell you more yet because it isn’t time, but remember that, Charles. You are everything I wished you to be.”
“You are indeed,” Henry said, leaning around Hamilton to nod. He puffed out his fat cheeks and nodded soberly. “Hamilton was correct in all things. I wish to apologize for holding him back. We should have tried to rescue you from that hellish house. That is my fault, and I am sorry.”
Charles felt strange, and he stopped walking. “I don’t understand.”
Neil ignored all of them, intent now on his search. “He should be here. Damn that boy, he’s never where I want him to be. Jonathan! Jonathan Augustus Perry, where in the name of the Goddess are you?”
Hamilton leaned close to Charles. He could smell his father; he smelled of cloves and dust and linen. “You need to remember this. It is very, very important. You are exactly as I created you to be. For all I have done, there is a greater purpose. The greatest purpose. It is for this you were made, this and this alone.”
Charles withdrew from his hold. “Supremacy of the Elliotts is not the greatest purpose,” he snapped.
“Jonathan!” Neil bellowed.
Hamilton looked tense. He glanced over his shoulder at the lake, then grabbed Charles’s hands and kissed them. “My beautiful son. My beautiful, perfect son. Remember. Remember.”
Remember.
Charles sat up and rubbed his eyes.
That
was a strange dream.
He turned to Timothy, opening his mouth to call his name, but Timothy was already gone. Charles frowned and rose, reaching for his clothes. He must be downstairs in the study.
But Timothy was not there, either. No one was. Charles paced around the room a few times, as if such a gesture would make them appear, but all he did was trip over Jonathan’s sword stick. He swore and kicked at it, but it only bounced against the wall and hit his shin again.
“Take it with you.”
Charles startled, then looked up. He knew the voice by now—of course, he had known it all along, but he wasn’t used to hearing it outside of the echo of his own ears. He nodded to the White Charles, who was standing large as life in front of him.
“Take it with you,” the White Charles said again. He was not smiling. “Take it and hurry.”
“What has happened?” Charles whispered, reaching down for the stick.
“Go,” was all the White Charles said. He looked weary and sad. “And do not be afraid. Remember this, that you see me again. We are almost joined now, Charles. Remember this. Remember I am you in the beginning. Remember the beginning, Charles, or you will only see the end. Remember.”
Then, as if he had never been there at all, the White Charles was gone.
Charles clutched the stick to his chest and moved cautiously back onto the stairs.
The door to the hall was ajar, and he could hear shouting—Jonathan was shouting near the front stairs. Charles slipped through the gap in the door and pulled it shut behind him. He saw Jonathan holding his hand out to someone below. He heard him pleading, saying, “Grandfather, Grandfather!”—
Whitby is here
—and then, with no warning, he saw Jonathan fall over the edge.
Charles did not stop to think. As a reflex he cried out and reached for his brother, as if from thirty feet away he could save him, but in his mind he did something far more useful: he pushed in and then pulled him out of the Void, pulling Jonathan back beside him. But when he let him go, Jonathan crumbled to the floor. He was unconscious.
“Well met. But it will not save him. Nothing will save him—nothing will save any of you now.”
Charles cried out and flattened himself against the door to the tower. He looked right and left and all around him, but he saw no one, not even the black fog.
“The end has come.”
The voice came from inside his head.
“You are mine. Give yourself to me, and we will take the justice we deserve.”
“No,” Charles whispered. “I won’t give myself to you!”
“Jonathan!” Whitby’s heavy footsteps thudded on the stairs. “Jonathan, what the devil are you about?”