I ignored him. “I just mean that if it was feeding on anything, it wasn’t me.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Barnabas said. “Perhaps he’s done us a favor and robbed the fiend of some power he’s managed to regain. But we’ll have to take the utmost care from now on. Nell, I need you to destroy any mirrors that we have in the house.”
“Wait,” I said. “Isn’t that bad luck? Seven years or whatever for each one?”
“You are bad luck,” Nell shot back. “If you think you can fight the Redding vanity and keep from admiring yourself, I’d try to avoid looking into any reflective surfaces for the time being.”
I was getting very tired of being told what a Redding was by a cousin who clearly had spent no time with us. And, no, she wasn’t wrong that some of our family was like that, but plenty weren’t.
“You seem to forget you’re a Redding too,” I said.
Nell inhaled sharply through her nose, her lips parting. Uncle Barnabas cleared his throat, cutting her off.
He handed Nell the crimson mask and jerked his chin toward the window. “Go hang it up and put a line of salt on the sill. That’ll keep them at bay for a while. Prosper is exhausted enough with the malefactor draining him. He certainly doesn’t need any other creatures coming for a visit.”
“Wait,” I said, holding out a hand to stop her. I needed both of them in the room to get answers. “What’s the plan, here? So there’s a malefactor inside me—do I trap him in a mirror to get him out? Feed him to a hag to keep him from feeding on me?”
Ye assume incorrectly, hedge-born applejohn. Alastor sounded offended at the suggestion. I do not feed off the filthy souls of humans. They taste of sunlight and peppermint. Blech.
Uncle Barnabas glanced up at the ceiling, scratching at his head. “We are, uh, entertaining a few options for solving your predicament at the moment.”
“You don’t have a clue, do you?” I asked flatly.
“No, no, no,” Uncle Barnabas said, waving his hands. “We are looking into other options, yes, but we believe our best bet is to finish what Goody Prufrock began. We’ll transfer him out of you and into another living host—a spider, a frog, and—” He smashed his hands together. “The trouble is, of course, we’ve been trying to track down the necessary ingredients for the spell.”
“Which are what?” I asked. “Can you just order them off the Internet?”
“Some,” Nell said. “But the spell calls for three toes of a man hanged for his crime—”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s specific.”
Nell shot me an irritated look, continuing, “Three toes of a man hanged for his crimes, a newborn eel’s freely given slime, wings of a black beetle plucked midflight, two eggs of a viper stolen at night, a gleaming stone cast down from the moon, all boiled in a cauldron at high noon—with the right incantation, of course.”
A dead man’s toes, viper eggs, a moon rock…really?
“And that’s going to work?” I asked, my voice pitching higher and higher. “What can I do to help? What’s my job?”
Nell looked at me like I’d asked if I could grow six more legs. “You want to actually do something?”
“You think I’m just going to sit and twiddle my thumbs and wait for this…this thing to come and destroy my family?”
My parents had worked too hard to build their foundation to see it all possibly turn to ash. I couldn’t get Prue out of the Cottage, but I could do this. The truth was, my family could stand to lose some money. But why did I get the feeling “vengeance” entailed more than just lost income—that it might involve lost lives?
Hmm…you are giving me rather intriguing ideas, Maggot.
“Your job is to stay put and stay out of trouble,” Uncle Barnabas said. “The dead man’s toes are proving to be, uh, a challenge. But I have a lead. Someone in Australia willing to dig up an old convict, and, well, snip snip.”
I tried not to shudder. “How long is that going to take? Why can’t we buy a ticket and fly over there to pick them up?”
But even as the words left my mouth, I wished I could take them back. A plane ticket to Australia was expensive—just because it was something my family could do, it didn’t mean Uncle Barnabas could. And, sure enough, I was right.
“With what money?” Nell scoffed. “Yours?”
“My parents asked you to help, didn’t they?” I tried again. “Maybe they can pay…?”
“No, Prosper,” Uncle Barnabas said sharply, only to soften his voice as he explained, “we cannot have any contact with them whatsoever. Your grandmother is watching them so closely now, and I have to imagine she somehow has access to view their bank accounts. We don’t have your passport, and we also don’t have the time to figure out how to go about finding another way to get you out of the country.”
Logic really sucked sometimes.
“I could just make a quick call,” I begged. “I could leave them a message from a pay phone or send an e-mail—”
“No!” Nell said, sharply enough to send Toad jumping into the air. Behind Uncle Barnabas, the CatBat hovered, its enormous eyes alert and unblinking as it looked for trouble. When Uncle Barnabas turned to glance back, it promptly crashed back down into the black dirt and herbs. “You can’t have contact with anybody. I put a glamour spell on you the second we left Redhood. It prevents anyone who is actively searching for you from being able to see you, but it only holds if you don’t reveal your location.”
“What about everyone else?” I asked. Most people were shameless about snapping photos of my family and sending them to magazines. All it would take was one person posting a picture online….
“Everyone else sees the glamour I put into place, not your real face,” she said, eyes glinting behind her glasses. “It’s like a magic mask. Don’t worry, I gave you a huge nose and beady little eyes.”
I sighed. “Well, it can only improve my looks, right? Everyone always says I’m a dead ringer for my great-great-uncle Ichabod, and he basically had the face of a rabid squirrel.”
Nell let out a sharp laugh, then caught her lip between her teeth, forcing herself to stop. She sat down again, this time on the far edge of the couch, keeping her distance.
“Please,” I said. “I have to do something. Assign me anything.” Anything to keep my mind off the fact I had an evil creature inside me.
“Well…all right. I suppose you could look for an appropriate vessel to contain him?” Uncle Barnabas said.
“That’s it?” I asked. “What about the plucked beetle wings? I could try to do that. What do I need—a pair of tweezers?”
“We already bought those,” Nell said. “All’s well that ends well, so chill out.”
My voice came out embarrassingly high. “Okay…but what happens if the fiend regains its full strength and escapes before my thirteenth birthday?”
“Well, that’s a worry for then, I suppose,” Uncle Barnabas said. “For now, I need you to believe in this plan and not contact your family, no matter what.”