Except that it wasn’t him. She only had to turn her head slightly to the right to realize that he was still at the edge of the liquid dark. Maura took a moment to visualize a protective shell around herself. Now she could see that the hallway ended at a doorway. Though there were other closed doors on either side, the one at the end was obviously the source.
She glanced back at the light switch beside Mr Gray. He flicked it.
The lights were like losing an argument with the correct answer. They should have been on. They were on. When Maura peered at the bulbs, she could tell in an objective way that they were on.
But the hallway was still not lit.
Maura met Mr Gray’s narrowed eyes.
They crossed the final few feet, soundless, pushing the absence of light before them, and then Maura hovered her hand above the doorknob. It looked ordinary, which is how the most dangerous things looked. It cast no shadow on the door, because no light reached it.
Maura stretched for the rightness and found terror. Then she stretched beyond that and found the answer.
Turning the knob, she pushed open the door.
The hall lights seeped darkly past her, revealing a large bathroom. A scrying bowl lay beside the bathtub. Three colourless candles had dripped all over the back of the sink. PIPER PIPER PIPER was written backwards on the mirror in a substance that looked a lot like pink lipstick.
There was something large on the floor, and it was moving and scraping.
Maura told her hand to find the light switch, and it did.
The thing on the floor was a body – no. It was a human. It was twisting in a way a human shouldn’t, though, shoulders unfolding. Fingers claws on the tile. Legs scrabbling, scuttling. An inhuman sound escaped from his mouth, and then Maura understood.
This person was dying.
Maura waited until he had finished, and then she said, “You must be Noah.”
Calla had also been having a persistently negative hunch that day, but unlike Maura, she had been stuck in an Aglionby Academy office doing paperwork and didn’t have the liberty of trying to find out what the source of the bad feeling was. Nonetheless, it grew and grew, filling her mind like a black headache, until she had given in and asked to go home an hour early. She was lying on her face upstairs in the room she shared with Jimi when the front door slammed.
Maura’s voice rose clearly from the front hallway. “I’ve brought home dead people. Cancel every appointment! Hang up your phones! Orla, if you have a boy here, he’s gotta go!”
Calla extracted herself from her comforter and scooped up her slippers before heading down the hall. Jimi, benevolent busybody that she was, smashed her ample hip on the sewing table in her hurry to see what was up.
They both stopped halfway down the stairs.
To her credit, Calla only thought about dropping her slippers when she saw Noah Czerny standing beside Maura and Mr Gray.
Noah Czerny was a very human name to give something that did not look very human to Calla’s eyes. She had seen a lot of living humans in her time, and she’d seen a lot of spirits in her time, but she hadn’t ever seen something like this. A soul this decayed shouldn’t have been – well, it shouldn’t have been anything. It should have been a remnant of a ghost, a mindless, repetitive haunting. A hundred-year-old scent in a hallway. A shiver standing next to a certain window.
But somehow, she was looking at a shambles of a soul, and in it, there was still a dead kid.
“Oh, baby,” Jimi said, full of instant compassion. “You poor thing. Let me get you some …” Jimi, ever the herbalist, generally had an herbal suggestion for every possible mortal ill.
“Some what?” Calla prompted.
Jimi pursed her mouth and rocked a bit on her feet. She was clearly stumped, but could not lose face in front of the others. Also, she did have a tediously good heart, and there was no doubt that Noah’s existence distressed her.
“Mimosa,” Jimi finished, triumphant, and Calla sighed with grudging appreciation. Jimi wagged a finger at Noah. “Mimosa flowers help make spirits appear, and that’ll make you feel stronger!”
As she stomped back up the stairs, Maura asked Mr Gray to show Noah into the reading room, and then she and Calla conferred at the base of the stairs. Rather than telling her how they’d come to have Noah with them, she merely held out her arm and allowed Calla to press her palm against her skin. Calla’s psychometry – divination through touch – was often unspecific, but in this case, the event was recent and vivid enough for her to pick it up easily, along with a kiss Maura had shared with Mr Gray beforehand.
“Mr Gray is talented,” Calla observed.
Maura looked withering. She said, “Here’s the rub. I think I was being shown that mirror with Piper’s name on it on purpose, but I don’t think it was Noah’s purpose. He doesn’t remember how he got there or why he was doing it.”