A ring of rosary beads hung around my neck, and my pockets were stuffed with fresh garlic. Jackaby had lent me a tin flask of holy water and a silver knife with an ivory handle. He had also sprinkled mustard seed in my hair before we left the house, a timeless safeguard I suspected he had just made up, but I wasn’t about to decline any help I could get.
Jackaby wore a crucifix made of silver, a Star of David forged from hammered brass, and a little tin pentagram. Every pocket of his coat was stuffed with herbs, odd relics, and handy artifacts. A rhythmic clinking and jingling accompanied our walk, and together we smelled like the inside of an Italian spice shop. I felt ready for a second encounter with a paranormal predator like Pavel, but I had to admit that to an ordinary bear or wolf, we were mostly just well-seasoned.
I also had no idea what to expect from the blue lights. “What exactly is a will-o’-the-wisp?” I asked.
“Will was a man,” he answered. “A simple smith, or so the story goes, who made a deal with the devil himself. He bartered away his immortal soul in exchange for paying off a paltry bar tab or some meager gambling debt, and the devil took him for a fool.”
We climbed over a grassy ridge and began picking our way into the dense forest as Jackaby continued. “By and by the smith’s time came due, but when the devil came to collect, he found Will twenty feet up in the branches of a tree. ‘You’ll have to come up to me if you want to bring me back down with you,’ called Will. Well, the devil was not impressed, and he shimmied up after him as quick as you please.”
The black trunks of tall trees behind us were beginning to conceal the glow of the factory lights as we pushed forward into the woods. “What the devil failed to notice was a horizontal notch about halfway up the trunk, which Will had carved that very morning. The moment the devil crossed that line, old Will dropped right down, dragging his blade into the bark in a straight line as he fell. In one quick motion, he had carved the sign of the cross into the wood, and the devil could not cross it to get back down. He was trapped.”
We stepped across a fallen fir tree and I realized my eyes were already adjusting to the darkness, at least to the point that I could discern where one black shape ended and the next black shape began. “So, with the devil at his mercy, Will struck a second deal. He would cut the symbol off the tree if the prince of darkness would leave him be and never bother him again. The devil knew he had been outwitted, and so he had no choice but to accept.”
“Couldn’t he have just climbed down the other side?” I asked. “Or turned himself into a bat or something and flown off? He’s the devil. He does that sort of thing literally all the time.”
“That isn’t how this sort of story works. Anyway, when Will arrived at the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter shook his head. Will had veered off the path of righteousness with all his drinking, his gambling, and his dealing with the devil. There was no place in heaven for the likes of him. Forlorn, Will made his way down to the dark gates, but the devil, true to his word and wary of another trick, wanted nothing to do with him, either. Out of respect for a fellow deceiver, the prince of darkness did offer him a single coal from the fires of Hell to keep him warm as he wandered the earth for eternity. With that little glowing ember, Will has contented himself to trick travelers forever after, leading them from their paths, just as he veered from his own.”
“So, we’re looking for a moderately clever tradesman with a lump of coal? That’s actually a bit disappointing.”
“You have no appreciation for the classics. That’s just one of the stories, anyway. Others attribute the phenomenon to fairy fire or elemental spirits. One of them involves gourds. All I know is that general consensus places them in the Unseelie Court, the branch of fairy taxonomy encompassing most of the more malevolent and malcontent of magical creatures. I told you, I’ve never seen a wisp in person. I have no idea what we’re actually looking for.”
A sudden flash of white-blue light lit the forest not twenty meters from where we were standing. It was accompanied by a loud, fizzing hum, and blinked out as quickly as it had started with a sharp snap like the crack of a whip.
“I take it we’re looking for that,” I whispered.
Jackaby nodded his agreement, and we crouched low as we moved toward the source of the light. “That wasn’t remotely what the legends suggest,” he said in a hushed tone. “In the accounts I’ve read, the fire is usually a feeble, elusive thing. Generally just a little hovering orb, like a bubble of flame.”
“So we’re up against a really enormous wisp?” I asked.
Jackaby took very deliberate steps as we neared a clearing. A dull, yellow glow lay beyond the line of trees, more like lantern light than the ribbon of white we had just seen. “There are living things ahead, but the aura isn’t like any magic I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it’s a wisp at all. Or any kind of fairy folk. The energy is all wrong.”
I could hear small, frantic animal squeaks, and there was movement on the far side of the bushes right in front of us. Jackaby put a finger to his lips, not that I needed the caution. Something whirred and clicked, and an instant later the forest burst into light with another arc of electric blue. It was as though lightning had struck the clearing directly ahead. For three or four seconds a snake of brilliant energy writhed just beyond the foliage, and then, with another crack, the forest was even darker than before.
I might as well have been staring at the sun. The after-image of the coil of light floating in front of me was all I could see for several seconds. I dropped and pressed myself into the ground, hoping whatever lay beyond those bushes was as blind as I was for the moment.
A high, shrill whine cut the silence, followed by a chorus of squeals and squeaks. “No, no, no, no,” someone grumbled. It was a male voice. “Output circuits still coupling. Damn! Need to recalibrate for diffraction.”
Jackaby stood. “You’re not doing magic,” he said aloud, cheerfully. “You’re doing science.”
And then a spanner hit him in the face.
Chapter Fifteen
The sketch of Owen Finstern turned out to be very true to life. The inventor’s hair was coarse and wild, and it drifted off behind him in tangled red-orange tufts like flames. His eyes were emerald green and ever so slightly offset. They moved constantly, darting between my employer, the surrounding woods, and me. He had been wearing a pair of perfectly round goggles with ink-black lenses, but he pulled them down to hang loose around his neck as Jackaby and I revealed ourselves.