“And now the fire,” said Mr. Gold. Jules and I drew back as Papy stepped forward and touched the flaming torch to the clay.
“Now is probably not the best time to point out that wet clay doesn’t light,” muttered Jules as the flames sputtered where Papy touched the blood-drenched mass. Then—all of a sudden—the fire took on a life of its own and my grandfather jumped back as the body began to burn.
“It’s working,” I gasped, my heart racing as I leaned back to avoid the flames.
“I can see his aura expanding and rising up into the room,” Bran said excitedly. “Now it needs to come down and inhabit the body,” he said, placing his hands as close to the flames as he dared.
“Come on, Vince, let’s do this thing,” murmured Jules, as he grasped his wound to staunch the flow of blood.
Kate, I heard.
“Yes, Vincent?”
Something’s wrong.
The fear in his voice made my blood run cold. “What?”
Something’s happening. It’s like I’m in little particles that are all flying away from each other. It’s wrong. I’m disappearing.
“STOP!” I yelled. “Something’s going wrong!” I leapt down off the stepladder and grabbed the bucket of water that Mr. Gold had insisted on having handy, in case the fire got out of control. I flung the water over the top of the chalice, and the flames extinguished with a long hissing sound.
“Vincent!” I yelled. “Are you still there?”
“What happened?” Bran asked. He looked dazed.
“Vincent said he was disappearing. That he was spreading out.”
“Dispersion,” said Mr. Gold. Bran whipped his head around to face the revenant. “Dispersion of wandering souls. The third gift of the flame-fingers. You said you’d never heard of it. Well, I think we just figured out how it worked.”
TWENTY-SIX
“WHAT THE HELL IS DISPERSION OF WANDERING souls?” I asked, my voice shrill with panic. I was shaking and felt like I was going to throw up. “What just happened to Vincent?”
Papy appeared by my side and wrapped his arm around me protectively.
“There were two ways to treat wandering souls,” I heard Mr. Gold say. “Either re-embody them or disperse them. Not all of us revenants deal well with living forever. In modern times, some even opt for suicide. But guérisseurs in ancient times were said to possess the gift of letting a bardia’s spirit go while it was volant, essentially dispersing it to the universe.”
“So Vincent’s just been . . . dispersed?” I choked out as tears flooded my eyes. “How do we get him back . . . from the universe or whatever?” I was so paralyzed by fear that I couldn’t even feel my body. If Papy hadn’t been supporting me, I might just have fallen over.
No, mon ange. I’m still here, came Vincent’s voice. It was weak and came in through my brain waves as barely a whisper.
“Oh, thank God. He’s still here,” I announced. My tears flowed unchecked and I sank down to sit on the floor, resting my head on my knees. I felt like I had been picked up, shaken, and dropped to the ground, my shock and relief were so intense.
Papy fished his handkerchief out of his pocket and leaned over to hand it to me.
Bran staggered backward and sat down on the ground and Mr. Gold joined him, putting an arm around his shoulder and saying, “It’s okay, Monsieur Tandorn. He’s still here.”
Jules stooped over to sit on the ground next to me, holding a towel to his arm. Seeing the blood, I forgot about my own distress. “Let me help you,” I offered, and grabbing the first aid kit Mr. Gold had set aside for the purpose, I cleaned and dressed his wound.
“Well, that was a huge success,” Jules said, taking in big gulps of air. “Not only did I undergo massive blood loss, but I almost had a heart attack.”
“We’re not giving up,” I said, ignoring the horrifying thought that was endlessly looping in my mind: You were that close to losing Vincent forever. “We just have to figure out what we did wrong. I’ll bet it has to do with the box symbol. We’re missing something.”
Papy spoke up. “I realize that we are in a terrible rush, and necessarily so. But now that we know how perilous this procedure can be, wouldn’t it be better to break for the night and rethink everything in a calm fashion?”
Everyone agreed. It scared me that the more time went by, the more likely Violette was to call Vincent back. But plowing ahead without additional information was too dangerous.
“You okay, bud?” Jules said to the air, and listening, he gave a weak smile. “He says it’s the second time in the last few weeks that he’s been on the brink of permanent destruction. He’s getting used to it.”
Trust Vincent to have a sense of humor at a time like this. I knew he was just trying to make the rest of us feel better. He must have been scared out of his wits.