Nell had begun pacing but stopped suddenly, cutting off whatever I was about to say next. “Can you just skip all this babying and get to the part where you tell him he has an ancient demon trapped inside him?”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, like the way you’re a witch? Come on. Be real.”
But even as the words left my mouth, I remembered how hard those invisible fists had shoved and punched at me. And when a faint crackle of light seemed to travel over Nell’s skin and hair, her eyes turning to slits, I sat as far back into the couch as I could.
She was a witch.
Oh, crap.
“Prosperity—”
“Call me Prosper,” I begged. “Please.”
“All right, Prosper it is.” My uncle cleared his throat explosively. “What I’m about to tell you may be shocking, too fantastical to be believed, but you have to hear me out.”
Listening. I could do that. The curtains fluttered around us as a breeze moved in, carrying with it a scattering of bloodred leaves. I smelled the faint cinnamon again, the smoky scent of autumn, and forced myself not to think of anything or anyone I’d left behind in Redhood.
“Your—our family, I mean,” Barnabas said, glancing at the family tree. “We’ve had dealings with a devil.”
Yeah, and what else was new? “I know,” I said, holding up my bandaged arm. “Her name is Catherine Westbrook-Redding.”
But this time, Uncle Barnabas didn’t laugh. “I wish I were joking, but believe this if nothing else—the Redding family’s fortunes in America were no accident. All of this wealth and power and influence came to us because Honor Redding made a contract with a demon—a fiend, as they’re really called—in 1693.”
“Oooookay,” I said, suddenly thinking of the gallery of stalker photos and articles on the attic’s wall. The engravings. “A fiend.”
“This kind of fiend is known as a malefactor. They draw up contracts with humans to give them whatever their heart desires. In exchange, upon their death, the malefactor will come to claim their soul.” Uncle Barnabas paused, but I wasn’t sure if he was trying to be dramatic, or just making sure my brain had time to catch up. I could barely hear him over the thump, thump, thump of my heart. The scratching of the racks of drying herbs against the wall. “Honor Redding leveraged the souls of his family and every settler in Redhood for a guarantee that the Reddings’ fortunes would not fail.”
Now that it was autumn, I knew to expect night to sweep in earlier, coating the room. In the silence that followed, it seemed to arrive all at once. With the dark wood all around us, the cramped nooks and crannies, it started to feel less like an attic and more like a coffin. And we were just waiting for someone to close the lid over us.
Nell snapped her fingers, and the three lamps in the room turned on. It startled me out of my thoughts. I blinked.
“Like I said, it’s a bit of a shock, but…” Uncle Barnabas’s gaze flickered between his bony hands and my face. “Do you need something for your nerves? Tea? I have a little brandy—”
“I’m twelve,” I reminded him.
“Right, well…right…”
Nell began to roll up the family tree. I watched the names of my family disappear branch by branch, until, finally, my name slipped by with the rest of them.
“It’s true,” she said. “It sounds absurd because it is absurd. I don’t think anyone ever gave you the full story. Like the Bellegraves. They sound familiar?”
Uncle Barnabas’s lips went white as he pressed them together. “Ah. The Bellegraves.”
“I do know about them,” I said. “We had a unit on Redhood’s history last year. They were the big family that followed the Reddings from England and settled Redhood with them back in 1687.”
Uncle Barnabas nodded, obviously pleased. “The families were great rivals. Honor Redding tried everything he could to destroy Daniel Bellegrave—sabotaging his crops, spreading malicious rumors about him, stealing correspondence. And still, the Bellegraves flourished. Back then, you know, the town wasn’t called Redhood at all.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to give him a “duh” look. I’d only had to hear about this every day of my life since birth. “It was called South Port.”
“Right. Once the Bellegraves were finally out of the picture, Honor renamed the town in…well, his honor.”
“And he drove them out by making a pact with a demon?” I said, not even bothering to hide how stupid I thought that sounded.
“A fiend,” Nell corrected.
“Okay, sure, a fiend,” I said, trying to ignore the way that word tasted like ash on my tongue. “So what does this have to do with me and Prue?”
“I’m getting there,” Barnabas said, standing. He made his way over to the corner functioning as the kitchen and began rummaging around in the boxes of tea. He kept me waiting until he had a mug of water spinning around in the microwave. “In order to outmaneuver the Bellegraves,” he called finally, “Honor used a very ancient kind of magic, one he’d only heard about in the stories passed down in his family for centuries. He summoned a malefactor.”
When Uncle Barnabas came back toward us, it was with one of the computer printouts that had been hanging over the bed alongside the newspaper clippings.
I took it with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, almost afraid to look. Three men and a woman were gathered around a fire, their hands thrown in the air—toward the winged, split-tongued devil floating above them in the cloud of smoke.
“Back then, anything that frightened the colonists was labeled witchcraft and devilry. They were never quite able to understand that the Devil—religion, for that matter—has nothing to do with this. Magic has been around for much longer than any of us could know, and flows from a place that exists between ours and whatever might lie beyond.”
“Like…the Internet?”
Uncle Barnabas choked on his tea, coughing. “More like another world or dimension. The souls sent there obviously do not return, and fiends are forbidden to talk about their home. So there are no first-person accounts to give us a sure answer.”
Nell jumped in here. “There are four worlds—four realms—in all. The human world at the top”—she held out a hand, then slid her other hand beneath it—“the fourth realm. The fiend world is the third realm”—she moved her hand again, creating another layer—“the world of ghosts—specters—is the second realm. The first realm is the realm of Ancients, the mysterious race of creatures that created magic and balanced the world when it was very young and full of darkness.”
“So they live in Earth’s crust, or something?”
“No!” she said, rolling her eyes. “Dimensions, Prosper. Worlds that exist layered beneath ours.”