Satisfied, I nodded to Evan. From the bag he had carried, he lifted a silver bell with no clapper and the silver mallet that was used to ring it. He also brought out his father’s old, leather-bound Bible—the book Old Man Trueblood had been holding when he was accepted into the church and baptized, when he married, when each of his children were born, and when he died. I wasn’t much of a religious person—nowhere near as spiritual as Jane—but even I knew this book had power.
I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the clarifying exercise twice more to settle myself. Everything I did tonight would be in threes. I closed my eyes and nodded to Evan. As I opened my mouth he rang the bell, the clear, pure tone and my words overlapping each time I said the word bell. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The three tones seemed to ring on, echoing through the empty house, and continued, three times more with the first word of the next three lines. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now.”
I opened my eyes, and without pausing went on into the next three lines, knowing that Evan had the cadence now and would keep up with me, ringing the bell with each first word, even though the method of lines was changing.
“Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack.
“Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change.
“Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”
I fell silent, the bell chimes shimmering through the empty house. As the last tone faded, the water between my knees seemed to brighten. And so did the floor of the parlor. In the far corner where the stethoscope had rested for so long, a soft green glow spiraled up, a mist full of light. Close to the opening of the foyer where the stethoscope rested now, a twin, green, featherlike luminosity rose like smoke, twining and twisting. The mist rose from the floor like smoke, meeting the stained ceiling overhead, pooling against the high corners before spreading and reaching slowly toward the center of the room, overhead. Both tendrils reached the center at the same instant and touched, tentative, like delicate green fingers of budding desire.
A single fixture appeared in the center of the ceiling, an old-fashioned electric ceiling light, bright in the dimness. The magical light of the spell merged with the old light and with its other half and curled back on itself, undulating across the ceiling, to brighten the room, revealing furnishings as they had once been. Where the milky light fell down, back to the floor, tendrils twirled and danced and revealed a moment out of time.
But this scene was not like any time-spell I had ever seen. It wasn’t misty or uncertain, no dreamlike underpinnings or unfinished supports. It was crisp and clear and certain, full of sharp edges. This was not the result of a seeing spell. This was something different, something I had never seen before.
I had been wrong. The spell tied to the stethoscope wasn’t finished. The spell had, instead, created some kind of bizarre bubble universe, a pocket universe, a part of real time, sectioned off, sealed away from the world the rest of us knew, or maybe looping around and around over and over again.
Light blossomed out, opening like a flower in a segment of high-speed photography, to display the room as it had once been. The walls were wallpapered a deep blood-rose shade. The furniture was from the late nineteen-thirties or forties with a velvet upholstered couch in a vibrant wine shade against the far wall, a wheeled tea tray before it, a teapot wrapped in a quilted cozy. Wing chairs were aligned to catch the heat from the fire burning merrily in the fireplace. A card table stood in one corner and a bookshelf across from it. An old-fashioned phonograph, the windup kind with an ornate brass horn, was on a side table, and a squeaky song came from it, a man’s voice sounding hollow, yet inordinately cheery.
A woman sat in a wing chair, a basket of yarn at her feet, a steaming teacup on a side table. She was small with dark-auburn hair, dressed in a robe in a deep shade of navy, over a white nightgown. She was knitting with blue yarn that trailed up from a basket with large skeins, the pile of finished garment on her far side. She seemed to hear a noise and looked up, turning. Her eyes widened, mouth opened. A form fell upon her, the pop of vampiric speed sounding in the room like a gunshot. It was a child, dressed in dark pants and nothing else, his skin the dead-white of the three-day-dead. The vampire child, small but unnaturally strong, leaped, grabbed up the woman and spun her in her chair. She screamed, fear and pain in the harsh note.
My mouth opened to murmur a rejection, but I stopped before it left my mouth. It might affect the efficacy of . . . of everything. They whirled, caught in the remnants of the vampire child’s attacking speed. His fangs latched upon her neck, tearing. Her scream stopped, even as the two of them fell back. There was none of the tenderness of the vampire wooing his dinner, none of the pleasure I had heard could come from a feeding. A single strong sucking sounded and he started to drink, even as they fell into the far corner.
The woman lifted her knitting needles. She stabbed the child.
He screamed, the awful keening note of the undead brought to true death.
I shuddered, knowing I could do nothing to stop this violence. Terrible, horrible violence. A woman and undead child in mortal combat. No wonder the warding spell had gone horribly wrong. It had never been intended to protect against a child, no matter how feral.
Tears started in my eyes and trailed down my cheeks. I caught a breath that ached deep inside. But it wasn’t over.
Another pop sounded. Louder than the first. A man wearing an old-fashioned gray suit and carrying a black medical bag appeared in the room. He dropped the bag and pulled the woman and child apart. Blood pumped from a deep tear in her throat. Scarlet stained her white gown and splattered across the room. The child fell, a wooden knitting needle in his right side, the other in his chest, just to the left of center, a stake, positioned and angled in what looked like a deadly strike.