THIRTEEN
At the end of the wake, Peter was not fit to drive, and Iris and Oliver had both disappeared. For some reason, Claire’s meltdown around Emmet left me in no mood to use magic as a means of transportation, so I called for a taxi and made my way home like a regular person. When I arrived, the house felt deserted; I sent out a psychic ping to see if Iris had perhaps beaten me home, but it came back empty. No one was around, not even Emmet. I experienced a strange combination of loneliness and elation; I had not found myself alone in the house in forever. I realized that now was my opportunity to charge the atmosphere to see what memories I could make rise to the surface. My goal would not be, as Oliver had suggested, to try to get to the bottom of what my mother had been attempting through Tillandsia. Uncle Oliver meant well, but I really had no idea where I would even start on that. I suspected I could spend a lifetime sifting through the echoes that the house held, trying to find a few needles in a century-and-a-half’s worth of haystack. No, I had one specific event I needed to witness: my own birth. Once I had found my answers about that, everything else would fall into place. I was sure of it.
Even a novice such as myself should be able to shake a few lingering impressions loose, especially since I had such an exact target. I made sure the doors were locked against any nonfamilial intruder, and then I went a step further, charming all entrances so that no one, including family, could come in without my being alerted. It was a sad state of affairs, but I wanted to make sure my mother’s siblings wouldn’t discover what I was up to until I had answers.
I hoped that by holding something that belonged to my mother, I would have an easier time of honing in on the particular energies I needed to tap into. I would use my mother’s locket. That it had until recently been in her possession should be a plus. Tonight had been the first time that I hadn’t worn the locket since she had given it to me. It would have been too noticeable given the neckline of the dress I was wearing. I didn’t want to risk one of my aunts noticing it, or worse, recognizing it. I had left it in my jewelry box, mixed in with the few other pieces I had: the pearls I had received on my eighteenth birthday, the small diamond studs I’d received two years before that, the smaller blue box that held the engagement ring I still couldn’t bring myself to wear regularly—even tonight. I pushed away the emotions that reached from the ring to grab me and extricated my mother’s necklace. Something about touching it caused me to question my earlier optimism. Could there really be any hope of a familial reconciliation? Could separating a mother from her daughters truly be an explainable, leave alone pardonable, act?
I closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. I had to keep an open mind. I couldn’t let my fears prejudice me. Still, my previous exhilaration had turned to a heaviness of heart. I put the necklace around my neck and snapped the lid of the jewelry box closed.
Iris had taken over my mother’s room, the room where Maisie and I were born, as a painting studio. She said she liked the golden late afternoon light that filtered through its windows, but she’d once confessed that being in this space comforted her and made her feel closer to the dear little sister she had lost too soon. I wanted to cry as I remembered how sincere she had sounded when she shared this with me. I pushed the sadness away and took a good look at the space.
My mother’s lesser belongings had long since been given to charity, her more personal and precious items boxed up and stored in the attic for the day when Maisie and I chose how to divvy them up. But Iris had not erased my mother from the room. Far from it. A large, and now I knew firsthand, exquisitely accurate portrait of my mother dominated the room’s southern wall. I didn’t come in here often, but every time I did, I walked away feeling somehow touched by my mother’s presence.
A large easel stood in the center of the room. It held a canvas, but the canvas had been covered with a tarp. I decided to respect my aunt’s privacy. Now I wished I hadn’t so stubbornly refused taking pointers from Ellen. I really didn’t know how to proceed.
Emmet had used a combination of surprise and passion to surface the memory he had helped bring to life. I needed to get in touch with a powerful emotion, but I worried that my confused feelings about my mother’s return might color my perceptions. So nothing about my mother. Probably better to steer clear of anything about my aunts too. My mind floated over my recent history with Maisie. Too fresh. Too painful. These emotions might bulldoze over any more subtle energies.
My feet were tired. I kicked off my shoes and took a seat in an awkwardly placed armchair. For some reason, Iris had left it turned at an angle, away from the portrait of my mother, away from the easel. The only thing it faced was a bit of blank wall. A sense of familiar resentment started to rise up in me as I reflected on Ginny and her manipulations. I remembered how Ginny made me wait in the entrance hall of her house, staring at nothing but a blank wall for hours. I had dealt with it by making up stories for my own entertainment. Stories that would later serve as the backbone of my Liar’s Tour. The hall and the chair I had been forced to sit in were now both gone, burned away to nothing by the same fire that had consumed Connor. Resentment flared into anger, and then I heard voices behind me.
I whirled about quickly. There was no image, only a murmuring. I strained my ears to try to make out what was being said, but the voices were so faint, seeming to come from worlds away. And then they stopped altogether. I rose and crossed cautiously to the center of the room. Again, I could make out the faint but distorted sound of feminine voices. Was that a cry of pain? Desperation? I recognized Ellen’s voice and could almost make out her words. I caught an image of her and Iris huddled over my mother, but the vision looked like a poorly preserved kinescope being projected onto the room’s current reality. The image froze and then stretched like a rubber band, wrapping around and going through itself, reaching up and feeding into the portrait of my mother. I realized that any emotional imprint made on the day of my birth had long ago been channeled into the painting.
I tried to focus, to tune into the faint energies. I grasped the painting’s frame, pressed my hands against the lacquered oils. I could feel small eruptions of energy flare off the painting, but what I had come for was locked away—the energy that had been channeled into the work had been permanently transformed. I took my hands off the painting and put them over my face. A sob formed in my breast, but I stifled it. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to know the truth.
My arms trembled, and my hands quivered, but I would not give up without making one final effort. I forced my anger and disappointment into a hard, tight ball and raised my hands. The orb shot from my fingers, landing right where I had aimed it: the spot where I had seen the three women together. I stalked forward, focusing all my power on expanding the sphere of energy. I could see the flickering image from the past stretch distortedly across its surface. I fell to my hands and knees, leaning in to try to interpret the jerky movement of the grainy, bulbous vision. The room around me crackled with my magic, and the smell of ozone flooded my senses. I forced myself to ignore these distractions. I channeled more and more energy into the orb. Distorted sounds, out of sync and incomprehensible, arose in waves. Then, with no warning, the glowing sphere collapsed in on itself and was gone. I had forced too much energy into a fragile moment. I heard wailing, and it took me a moment to realize that I was the one making the sound.
I fought a growing sense of hopelessness. I held my hands out again, trying to build up more energy for a last-ditch effort, but my concentration was broken when my peripheral vision alerted me to something floating down from above. I leaned my head away, but a soft speck landed on my cheek. I reached up and tried to brush it off, managing only to smear it. I looked at my hand and realized that it was ash. My mind had no sooner registered this realization than other flakes began to descend from above, thick and heavy, covering me like dry, gray snow. The ashes formed a thin powdery layer all around me, but rather than resting where they lay, they lifted back up, whirling around me like a slow spinning dust devil, some of the ash working its way into my nasal passages. I jumped up and ran to the easel, whipping off the cover to use as a shield against the ash. I froze at the sight of Connor’s face staring back at me.
The easel held more than just a simple portrait. It was a triptych—the canvas had been divided into three equal portions. Both side panels had been completed; the one on the left showed Connor as he had been in his youth, and in the one on the right, his face had been turned into a demon’s, the same hate I had witnessed the night he died shining through the image’s eyes. The center panel was still inchoate. A few layers of paint gave the impression that Iris had made many attempts at beginning this portion. I realized she was using her art in an attempt to reconcile the two images she held of her dead husband: the man she thought she had married and the monster he had proven himself to be. My eyes glided straight over the reflection of his youthful glow on the left, drawn to the image of the flames I had seen devour him. Here on the canvas they were frozen in time. We had held no funeral for Connor. There had been no remains to bury; no body had been found. The fire elementals had feasted well. Ashes were all that had been left of Connor.
Ashes. I began swatting at the dust with the tarp, trying to wipe Connor’s remains from my skin, shake his ashes from my hair. Then I heard Connor’s laughter. I spun around toward the sound. The ashes coalesced before me, taking on a definite form. A hand, smoldering, reached out of the dusty cloud and grasped at me. I leapt back.
“I will live again. I will live through you.” I felt his words more than I heard them. The hand fell formless, and the cloud of swirling ashes rushed up in an attempt to surround me, envelop me, enter me. His spirit was attempting to possess me. No, it wasn’t me he wanted; his spirit was trying to supplant that of my unborn child. That simply was not going to happen. I forced myself to regain control of my magic. I slid away from Iris’s studio and into my own room.
For once I was ready. I had been preparing for this moment since the day after Connor’s death, when I’d witnessed his essence lurking in a mirror. An attempt had been made to cleanse the house, to balance out its energies and remove anything with evil intent, but somehow I’d known the sneaky bastard would manage to slip through. Neither of my aunts nor Oliver had mentioned sensing his presence, but for months I felt him lurking on the periphery, just beyond capture. Angry. Jealous. A black cloud of hopelessness that fed on its own shadow.
I threw open my closet door and dug deep behind the shoes and boxes of high school memorabilia. I grasped the cool neck of the bottle I had hidden there. I shuddered a little at the sight of my creation. It had started out as a simple cobalt-blue glass bottle, but Jilo had coached me, showing me how to clothe it in clay and paint it with natural pigments. What had once been a simple container was now an effigy. A crude but recognizable image of the man who had been so willing to sacrifice me for power, even though he believed himself to be my father. “When you make a spirit trap, the image don’t have to be dead on,” Jilo had told me. “It just got to be the image you hold of him.”
And it certainly did reflect my image of him. I’d captured his smugness. His rapaciousness. His cruelty.
I felt my blood pulsing in me. My temperature alternated cold and hot. My focus narrowed, blocking out everything but the burning anger I held for Connor. I felt confident. I felt in control. The door to my bedroom shook, then began to bend in and out as Connor tried to force it open. It looked for all the world like the door was breathing, expanding as it gasped in air, flattening as it let it go. I stood there in the silence. Waiting. Listening. My pulse pounded in my own ears. I took a step toward the door, and it began to shake so hard I halfway expected it to pull off its hinges, and then it stopped cold.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” I muttered under my breath. “This time I am ready for you.” I pulled the cork out of the neck, grasping the stopper in my sweaty palm. I felt his sudden panic. I knew he had realized that the balance of power had completely changed. I was no longer the powerless girl he could injure and leave to die. He moved away from my door. I could feel his energy retreat. Instead of pursuing me, he began to flee. At that moment I realized Connor’s spirit had no power outside of what I myself had loaned to it. By charging Iris’s studio with magic, I had given him enough energy to manifest. And I had just shut off his supply. I grasped the spirit trap tightly with both hands and used my magic to swing the door open.
I strode through it and into the hall. “Spirit without body,” I called out as Jilo had taught me, “this is your body.” I held the effigy bottle up high. “Spirit without breath”—I lowered the bottle and blew across the lip of the bottle, causing it to emit a whistle—“this is your breath. Spirit without blood”—I spat into its neck—“this is your blood.” I chased his dusty shadow back to the door of Iris’s studio, and I stood back from the door, willing it to open. It did, but it did so slowly, a weakening force on its other side trying to force me back. There was a sound—maybe it was only the door’s hinges protesting their being at the center of this war of wills, or it might have been an expletive shrieked by Connor’s wilting spirit.
“I command you, spirit, enter your body.” I tilted the bottle of the neck toward the door and took a step forward. “I command you, spirit, be filled with your breath.” I crossed over the threshold into the studio. “I command you, spirit, bathe in your blood.” The ash again lifted up and began to swirl, but I knew it was under my control now. “I command you, spirit, enter your body.” The ash pulled together into a gray ribbon, just thin enough to penetrate the bottle’s opening. I focused on seeing every last particle rise and take its place inside the effigy. Within moments the room was clean, the bottle full. I smiled as I plugged it with the cork.
“You know, Connor, I expected you to put up more of a fight, but I guess in the end you always were a disappointment.”
I turned the bottle in my hand. Yes, I had the foresight to prepare the trap and learn how to use it, but now that I had deployed the necessary magic, I had no idea what to do with it. Jilo probably would have buried it at her crossroads, along with God only knows what else she had deposited there over the years. But it would be foolish to inter Connor’s hungry ghost at the epicenter of Jilo’s magic. If it ever managed to free itself from the trap, it would certainly make use of any magic it could find to wreak havoc. No, it would be better to weight it down and drop it into the ocean. But tonight, that was not an option. I needed a place where I could keep it safely, someplace that would allow me to take the time to think about what to do with it in the long run. Time. The word turned around in my brain, like the bottle turned in my hand.
I hurried downstairs and out into the garden. The sundial Oliver had placed there would keep anything it touched in stasis. Connor wouldn’t just be locked in the trap I’d made for him—he’d be trapped in the moment as well. I could take as long as I needed to decide how and when to address the problem. I looked at the sundial and silently commanded it to rise. It vibrated, its own gravity making it much heavier to lift than I had anticipated. I tried focusing harder, putting more juice into my efforts, but the more magic I hit it with, the heavier it seemed to grow. Exasperated, I closed my eyes. “Please,” I asked. I heard a humming sound and opened my eyes. To my amazement, the dial had floated up and was hanging at eye level. “Thank you,” I said as relief rushed over me. Leave it to Oliver to rebel against even his own nature and create an enchanted object that must be asked to cooperate rather than compelled. I sat the spirit trap on the blackened soil the dial had been covering, and the ground opened up to swallow the bottle whole without my even asking. The dial descended back into place.