“Feed, I know. Those animals looked half-eaten.” Freya was silent for a moment as she tried to think. “It’s been so long since Mother has done something like this, it’s possible something went wrong.”
Ingrid hit the gas and they peeled away down the farmhouse driveway. They could still see Emily in the living-room window, watching them. “Zombies,” Ingrid muttered. “What do we know about them?”
“Other than that they’re uncoordinated, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re basically walking corpses with a taste for brains?” Freya asked.
“So Lionel Horning went zombie, killed Molly Lancaster, hid her body, and then came back to the farmhouse and slaughtered his animals?” Ingrid suggested. “Seems like a lot for one zombie to do, if you ask me. They can’t even walk properly.”
“Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Remember the Fontanier case?” Freya asked. “When we were living in France in the twelfth century?”
“Remind me?” Ingrid asked.
“Jean Fontanier was a farmer; he got killed accidentally when his horse spooked and threw him. His widow came to Mother but she refused to bring him back as he’d been dead for more than twenty-four hours. So his widow went to Lambert de Fois.”
Ingrid nodded. It was starting to return to her. Lambert de Fois was the head of their coven then. “Right.”
“The stupid warlock raised him from the dead, but it didn’t take. We all thought Fontanier had gone zombie, but it turned out that wasn’t the problem.”
Ingrid sighed. She remembered all too well now. By resurrecting the farmer after his body had been cold for a day, Lambert de Fois had broken the Covenant of the Dead, and Helda had not been pleased. “No. That wasn’t the problem at all.”
“Jean Fontanier wasn’t a zombie. Helda made sure he returned to life as something else. A demon.”
chapter thirty-six
Family Secrets
One of life’s greatest pleasures was returning home after a long trip, Joanna thought, as she put her carpetbag down in the hallway and hung her hat back on the hook. Gilly flew to her usual perch on the ceiling cove as Joanna turned on the lights. She was surprised to find the living room a mess, pillows on the floor, water bottles and wineglasses on the coffee table. The kitchen was worse, with its usual pile of dirty dishes and used pots on the stove. Joanna had gotten used to having the Alvarezes taking care of everything, and Gracella kept a very neat house. She rang the cottage but there was no answer. It was too late to say hello to Tyler anyway, she decided. She heard a car pull up and her daughters’ voices carry up from the driveway. Oh, good, they were home, she had quite a lot to tell them.
“Girls!” she said, throwing open the door.
“Mom!” Freya said, feeling guilty at the sight of her mother, even though nothing that had happened was technically her fault and at least one was certainly Joanna’s doing. Still, she did not relish telling her mother that in her absence, Ingrid had helped a vampire who had visited their town and that the nice guy Joanna had raised from the dead was now a zombie or, more likely, possessed by a demon.
“Where have you been?” Ingrid wanted to know.
Joanna ushered them inside and closed the door. “I’ve been looking for your father,” she said, wringing her hands. “I need his help. Listen, girls, there’s something you need to know about him—”
“I know where he is,” Ingrid interrupted.
“What do you mean, you know where Dad is?” Freya asked, staring at her sister. “And you didn’t say anything? How could you?”
“I’m sorry. He wrote me a few months ago. He wanted to get in touch with all of us, but he thought he’d try me first. He thought Mother would be too mad and that Freya would just burn his letters.”
Freya crossed her arms and flopped down on the nearest couch. “He was right about that. He left us, Ingrid. He abandoned our family! Don’t you get that?”
“I’m sorry, Mother. Freya. I didn’t want to tell you . . . I knew you would be angry, but I miss him so much. And he misses us, too. He just wants us to be a family again.”
“Yes, about your father,” Joanna said, her forehead creasing. “I need to tell you girls something. It’s very hard for me to say and I hope you will find it in your hearts to forgive me.”
“Why? What are you talking about?” Freya asked.
Joanna looked them both straight in the eye, with her head held high, as if steeling herself for the gallows. “Your father did not leave you. I tossed him out. I told him he had to leave us alone and that if he tried to get in touch with either of you I would make sure he regretted it forever.”
For a moment neither of the girls spoke and a heavy silence fell, fraught with centuries of loss and heartache and resentment. Ingrid thought about all they had missed: years of her father’s sage advice, his protection, his love. Freya could not even speak. The betrayal was so cruel she felt a compression in the pit of her stomach, as if she were going to vomit. “Why, Mother?” she finally whispered.
“I’m so very sorry, my darlings. I could not stop myself, I was so angry about what happened during the trials. I wanted him to do something about it—break you both out of jail, use his power to sway the judge—but he would not. Because of the laws of mid-world of course. But I wasn’t thinking rationally.”
Freya blinked back tears. “You lied to us. You told us he left us, that he was ashamed of us. That he didn’t want anything more to do with our family.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Ingrid said, sitting on the couch and putting her arms around her sister. “We can’t get those years back. But there’s something else you need to know. Dad was helping me with something important. And I think something might have happened to him. He hasn’t returned any of my messages for several days.”
“Something has happened to him,” Joanna said. She took another deep breath. Freya wondered if she could stand to hear another revelation.
“He’s gone to see the White Council,” their mother told them. “I went to his apartment and waited for him. A messenger from the Council came by, with a letter granting him permission to speak, but obviously he decided not to wait for it. He’s left to consult with the oracle. He’s probably there already.”
Freya gasped. “But why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. Unless word about our actions here have gotten back to him somehow; maybe he was reporting our violations of the restriction.” Joanna crossed her arms.
“Dad wouldn’t do that,” Ingrid said loyally. “If he went to the oracle there has to be a good reason for it.”
“What was he helping you with, anyway?” Freya asked.
“The Fair Haven blueprints. I found something—these odd little design keys. Dad was decoding it for me. He said he’d figured out what they were, but then he disappeared.”
“So maybe he wanted to talk to them about that?” Freya suggested.
Joanna whipped around to address Ingrid. “Fair Haven? You and Dad were doing something with Fair Haven?”
Ingrid described the key tags with the decorative scrolls. “I guess I should have asked you first, Mother, since you might know if there’s something unusual about Fair Haven that we should know about.”
Joanna shook her head. “Only that the Council told us when we settled here in North Hampton that the seam was there, the boundary where the living and the twilight worlds meet. But I think there might be something more to it. Before I left, I went out to Fair Haven, where the gray darkness in the water seems to have concentrated.”
“It’s not just here; it’s in the South Pacific, and near Alaska as well,” Ingrid said. “And I saw on TV the other day they think they might have found one near Reykjavík.”
Joanna inhaled sharply at the news. “Whatever is in the oceans is not of this earth, I’m quite sure of that. I went to look for your father because I was hoping he could help me figure out what it was and where it came from so we could stop it. That spell I put on it won’t last. I’m going to need both of you to help hold it up.”