Authors: Margaret Ronald
I was going to double Abigail’s damn rate for this.
I finally reached the top of the hill, cursing all nineteenth-century landscapers in those last few gasping minutes. A last set of stairs led up to the base of the round two-story tower, and two giant obelisks—no compensation issues
there
—stood just below the crest of the hill. Even from down here, I could see the skyline of Boston, glittering like spilled glass. Someone was having a party on the other side of the Charles; every now and then the heavy thump of a bass beat echoed across the river. I stretched my legs in a futile attempt to work out the soreness and climbed up the last few steps.
A steel-mesh door blocked the entrance to the tower—locked, padlocked, and bearing a sign saying that the tower was closed daily at dusk. I’d gotten through locks before using Deke’s breaker charm, but right now I didn’t want to use more magic than I had to. The aversion ward on its own was throwing off my sense of what to look out for, as the wrapped statue had proved. What I did have was a pair of wire cutters. Ten minutes’ work was enough to cut the mesh around the lock itself. Unsubtle, but no one’s ever accused me of subtlety. I squinted into the blackness beyond, then fumbled for the light on my keys.
I could start to put something together in the Fiana’s wake, I thought as I climbed the tight spiral stair, thin red light held before me as if to warn the tower’s inhabitants of my approach. Something to protect people like Elizabeth and the shadowcatchers and the magicians who didn’t have enough power or sense to protect themselves. Something that wasn’t just winner-
take-all, big-guy-gets-little-guy’s-stuff. Something more than Sarah’s ineffective community watch, but less than the gang that slugs like Janssen expected. If I could ever do it, now was the time.
I passed the exit opening onto the first floor, the balcony that girdled the tower—still high up, but not enough room for a circle—and kept climbing. The walls began to arch in around me, as if clasping me in hands of stone. My breath sawed in and out of my lungs, and it wasn’t because of the climb.
The air opened up above me at last, giving way to stars and an endless whistle of wind. I ran the last few steps despite the seizing up of my muscles, then stood for a moment, clasping the iron rail, unable to move back into that claustrophobic space. The lights of Boston and Cambridge spread out before me, glowing softly in the heavy air. A breeze tugged at my hair, then subsided, as if it wasn’t worth the effort.
This was my city. I’d said as much to Janssen, and I didn’t regret it. Here, in this high place, I could see it all—and further, the heavy green of trees in Cambridge and Newton, the Blue Hills through their haze, Summit Hill and its park, the great coliseum of Harvard’s stadium across the river. A gust of wind carried a shout of music past me, like an acclamation.
For a moment I forgot the task ahead of me, forgot Nate, forgot even that I was standing in a graveyard.
I could make it work
, I thought.
I could protect this city against people like Janssen and the thugs and the slimeballs. I could prove him wrong.
I gazed down at the lights, then saw the one thing that was a constant for me: the neon Citgo sign, flashing on and off in its usual pattern. And beyond that, the brilliant lights of Fenway.
I was missing the Sox game for this. Shaking my head, I got to work.
The bag I’d brought yielded several small bottles, as well as a zipped plastic bag of what looked to the casual glance like the kind of pot even a burned-out
hippie would turn down. First the holy water, in a wide circle around the top of the tower, then a ring of salt just inside that. I’d have to hope that the wind and rain would carry any remnants away before the park rangers noticed them. Then the aversion ward, taken out of my bra (where it had burned a nice brown circle into the fabric, like an iron forgotten against silk) and put two steps down on the staircase, out of the way. I didn’t want attention averted from me just now. And then, finally, brandy splashed onto the parapet, with the bottle set next to it, and a smear of maple syrup beside that.
You could do this with rum and sugar cane, with Kahlúa and chocolate, or vodka and beet sugar, and it’d still work. The basic tenets of the ritual were the same no matter which culture passed it down. You presented the dead with a gift, something that reminded them of life, got them to take it, and then asked for what you wanted in return. Exchange for exchange, the undercurrent balance sheet kept clean. The syrup was a sentimental touch on my part; the sugar didn’t have to be palatable to the ghosts to draw them, but I liked the thought of having something familiar. But the one thing the ritual always needed, no substitutions allowed, was blood.
The pig’s blood I’d procured had clotted the sage and stuck to the inside of the bag, but it still made a decent paste. I turned the bag inside out to smear it in a line across the railing of the tower, careful not to get any on my fingers. I wouldn’t have dared to do this if I were menstruating—the blood scent from me might not be strong enough for a ghost to detect, but I’d sure as hell notice it, and that would be enough to put me off my stride. Among the many other things blood can do in the undercurrent, the one thing I can absolutely count on is for its scent to distract me. Hence the sage.
I retreated to the center of the tower, then closed my eyes and spoke aloud the words that Abigail had taught me.
For a long moment there was nothing, only the rumble of traffic to either side and the almost subliminal beat of music from across the river. I glanced down at the salt and the gaping hole of the stairs leading down, and when I looked back the darkness over Boston had a new opacity to it, as if a filter had come down. This wasn’t night anymore; this was an
inhabited
darkness.
My lips went dry, and a whispering, crackling sound like a distant fire swept around me. It smelled arid, the cool drought of winter, even though the air kept its August heat. A second later I heard the clink of the bottle tipping over, and tasted the momentary tang of alcohol on the air.
I cleared my throat. “That’s mine.”
The air seemed to flex in front of me, like a tapped soap bubble, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of the two obelisks partway down the hill, framing a pillar of mist as tall as the tower. “It’s not yours now,” said a voice—no, voices, a chorus of them. It was as if four different people had responded, and some amateur audio technician had spliced the tracks so that each word came from a different speaker. And behind each voice came a dull susurrus of answering voices, a concord of souls answering as one.
I hadn’t planned for this. I’d expected a crowd, not an amalgam—the remnants, fragments left behind with the body when the spirit went elsewhere, without even the impetus of strong emotion. Over time the remnants had melded, becoming one entity, and that was what had responded. Not an individual ghost at all.
I shifted, turning my head back and forth. The voices were so tightly focused that I could hear them in my left ear but not the right. I was the only one who had their attention, for what that was worth.
I cleared my throat. “Am I speaking to Mount Auburn?”
There was a soft laugh, edged with affronted cries
and one or two mutters. That was an advantage I had: it’s hard to get an amalgam really angry. Kind of like getting a committee to agree on anything. “Maybe. Your drink?”
Technically, what I ought to do now was extract information in exchange for the sugar and alcohol. But that was what magicians did. “Consider it a gift,” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
The weird opacity to the darkness shifted, like a flock of bats between me and the light. “Ask?” the chorus said, some of the voices trailing out of sync behind the others.
“Ask,” I confirmed. Not demand. Not cajole, or trade. Just ask. These dead might not be quite sentient any more, but that wasn’t any reason not to treat them with respect.
Another laugh, quickly swallowed up in the babble of voices, none coming close to saying anything real. “Ask,” it said again, and I couldn’t tell if it was an order, an invitation, or simply an idiot repetition.
I’d take even that, though. “All right,” I said. “I need to talk to Abigail Huston.”
“Huston,” said a chorus of voices, and for a moment I thought I heard an echo on the far side of the hill. “Husss…”
Abruptly a woman’s voice spoke about two feet behind me. “I won’t say I don’t appreciate the gift, but it’s a little thoughtless to offer that.
Some
of us keep teetotal.”
I glanced over my shoulder. The air behind me was as still and heavy as the more palpable darkness before me. I couldn’t even see the tower railing, let alone the landscape beyond it. They were
all around me
, I realized, and the fluttery feeling in my chest increased to outright pounding, as if my heart wanted to flee but the rest of me was too stupid to follow.
Okay
, I told myself.
This is what you wanted. Ask about the stolen property and you’re done
. “Am I speaking to Abigail Huston?”
The woman’s ghost laughed, changing to a child’s mid-chortle. “Hardly,” it said, and the chorus echoed it. “We don’t care for her kind here. Little schemer.”
I still couldn’t smell anything—ghosts don’t have a scent, not unless they’ve been around the living long enough to accrete one. Without my talent I was lost, and the safeguards I’d gotten from Sarah suddenly seemed too flimsy.
“Hardly,” the amalgam repeated, amused now. “A woman like that? Really now.”
“Thief,” another element of the amalgam tolled, the susurrus of its voices coming together like spotlights on a stage. “Huston is a thief.”
“She is?” I caught myself. “She
was
?” Well, that explained how she’d acquired stolen property. Though I didn’t know what these fragments of Boston Brahmins would consider thievery. Bad manners? Blackmail?
“Poor little idiot, so scared of what she did that she fled here seeking sanctuary.” The amalgam rumbled with satisfied scorn.
“She’s not the one you should worry about,” a child’s voice said by my elbow, unexpectedly clear.
I glanced down—again, nothing, but an echo to it that didn’t quite register as scent seemed familiar. Maybe I’d met someone related to this particular remnant, and now he felt the need to warn me. Or was this a veiled threat? “I don’t understand.”
There was a watery, gulping chuckle. “Be glad you don’t. Be glad this is the first time you have called up the dead.” A wind curled down the side of the hill, tossing my hair in front of my eyes and stroking the darkness as one would soothe a pet.
I had patience for only so many cryptic warnings. “Please. I need to speak to Abigail. I need to know what she stole.”
The mottled darkness paused, a moiré filter between me and Boston. “She hid herself too well,” it said at last. “Dug down deep at her patron’s feet…she is hidden from everything, including herself.” There was
a moment’s silence, and it seemed the physical presence was receding—until I realized that my perspective had been warped, and what looked like shrinking shadows on either side were only shrinking in relation to the looming mist curling closer to me. “It would take a lot more than you, little puppy, to dig her out of that hole.”
My hair felt as if someone had dragged a fur coat over it. “Okay. Then maybe you can help me.” Silence, not yet hostile but not far from it. “There was something she owned. Something she passed down to her descendant.”
“Thief,” one of them whispered.
“Wretch,” said another.
“Whisht.” I caught a third hiss that didn’t even sound like a real word, but the amalgam caught it up in a whispering chorus. “Whisht.”
“I don’t care if she was a thief,” I snapped. “What did she steal?”
There came another laugh, but this one was gentler and somehow clearer, as if the radio station of the ghosts had hit a signal. “Everything. Everything that didn’t exist.”
Oh, great. Now we were on to philosophy.
“Gabble,” muttered the ghosts. “Gabble, gabble, gabble.”
“Gabriel,” another said, almost singing.
“Gabriel?” I said. “Is that who she stole it from?”
Nothing. Back to the endless “gabble” chorus. But now under their nonsense came the unwelcome sound of boots crunching on gravel.
Shit
, I thought.
One of the park rangers came up here, and either he’s a sensitive or he’s noticed the wreck I made of the door
. “Look,” I said, taking a step closer to the line of blood and brandy and sugar, “I need to know what it was she had. I don’t care if she stole it or not. She had something that caused nightmares, an artifact of some kind. Maybe even a ghost.”
The protrusion of mist flinched, and somewhere
within it I could hear a voice yelling, though whether that was in response to what I had said or a natural side effect of an amalgam, I didn’t know (after all, if our subconscious could speak, how many of us would be surrounded by shouting angry voices all day?). The yelling ceased abruptly, as if switched off. “Why?” it whispered, its voice dry and soft as a lizard’s skin.
Hell. This wasn’t good—I knew little about interrogation, but I did know that it wasn’t good if the balance shifted, if the questioner became the questioned. “I need to return it to its rightful owner,” I said.
The darkness turned in on itself, considering. I edged closer to the stairwell, but just then I heard the
clack
of a boot heel below me. Someone was on the stairs, someone close…
clack
, and a jingle, like keys or spurs,
clack
…
With a shock like ice against the base of my neck, I realized that I’d made one big error in drawing my circle: I’d drawn it around the edge of the tower, in the largest circle I could reach. Which meant that the entrance to the tower was included in it. I backed away from the gaping stairwell, up against the chill of the circle itself.
Then, “No,” one voice said, and though the mist roiled ever faster, this new voice remained singular and unblurred. “I lived long enough in the old country to remember them. I lost cattle to that host, I lost sleep—”