Magick Rising (18 page)

you want.”

Our gazes held for a long, last time. Then, to my surprise and relief,

Lance just nodded. “Okay. Got it. I had to try.”

“And you won’t go summoning Richard again or trapping him in magic

circles, or anything like that?”

Now, oddly, Lance’s gaze met Richard’s. Richard shook his head.

Lance ignored him and said, “I don’t think I’ll get the chance to try.”

“Wait,” interrupted Dawn, who’d been remarkably quiet until now.

“What?”

Lance looked sorry—honestly sorry—to be saying this.

“I’m pretty sure that when we send Manon on, Richard goes on too.”

NO.

I wasn’t ready to face that. And yet, when I turned on Richard,

sympathy and regret darkened his eyes, too. I reached for him—but as long

as the others watched, we couldn’t touch. He did try. But his own big, male

fingers wafted right through mine, less substantial than a projection.

“That is my belief,” he admitted. “I am sorry, Penelope.”

But . . . but we had to go in and exorcise Manon before she could do

more damage! Maybe I could say
never mind
, and put off the job in exchange

for another day with Richard. But what if the other ghost of Sorrow’s End

hurt someone in the meantime? It would be my fault.

Besides, a day wouldn’t be enough. Or a week. Or a month.

Damn, but I was jealous of this French flirt who had spent a whole

summer with Richard. She’d put him into danger by not evacuating with her

father, and now she got to have him for eternity, while I hadn’t even had a

day
?

“Everyone look away,” I heard myself command. “Look away until I

tell you otherwise, okay?”

Dawn wore a grin as she pivoted. Teddy might not have understood the

occult reasoning behind my demand, but he did what Dawn did. He even

turned Lance first, by the shoulders.

Hesitantly, I again extended my fingers toward Richard’s.

Our fingertips met, lingered—

In that moment, what I sensed from him was love.

Then we were in each other’s arms, solid and real and together, holding

on as if we would never, never part. For a few breaths, at least, I pretended

that was true. His hard hold on me trembled, but not with fear. I buried my

face in his sandy chest, and he leaned his forehead on my hair, and we

just—held on.

“I can’t just let you go,” I pleaded, aware I was crying, not caring.

“Please don’t go with her. Please.”

“I doubt I have a choice,” he reminded me, somehow both grim and

gentle. “If I had, I would stay. Please know that. But . . . why should we be

special? I cannot count the hurricane survivors who lost loved ones—wives,

children, husbands, wrenched from their arms by the water. Some powers

are too strong for even the most determined of us to fight, and my darling,

death is one of those forces. So when I do leave, you must promise me

something.”

He even stepped away from me, which felt like a blasphemy, though he

held my elbows, and I clung to his arms.

“You must promise to breathe,” he instructed. “Promise to put food in

your mouth. Keep living so that life remains with it. Give fortune a chance

to find you again. Because . . . apparently, good fortune returns, Miss

Hamilton. I had the good fortune of meeting you.”

He said that last with a sad smile. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed

my fingers, rubbed them once against his bristly cheek. Then he backed

wholly away.

“Please put on your amulet,” he asked softly. “This has needed doing

for a century, and we must put it no off longer.”

So at least he’d stopped fighting my intention to help.

At least when I put on my own amulet, he didn’t vanish. Unlike Lance,

I wasn’t using some magic to hold him—certainly not somewhere other

than here—so the amulet didn’t have any affect there, either. But when I

lifted my fingers to his unshaven cheek . . . ?

They brushed right through him. Ghost-be-gone, indeed.

I told the others they could turn around but wouldn’t let them come in

with us. Neither Teddy nor even Dawn had power over ghosts—and I

didn’t trust Lance not to take off his amulet and manipulate Richard again.

When Richard and I entered Sorrow’s End, the house looked as neat

and empty as it had yesterday morning. After the chaos that Manon had

thrown down on us yesterday, the stillness felt especially ominous.

I took a deep breath to center myself. “Yesterday, before Lance . . .”

“Summoned me?” offered Richard, examining our surroundings.

“Yes. You never finished telling what happened or how . . .”
How he’d

died
.

He seemed to make a decision. “I told you Manon was an occultist? She

had tried—had worked magic to bring me back to her.”

That, I hadn’t expected. “Magic?”

“Manon used dark powers to call both me and the storm. If I had not

rejected her . . .”

My God. And here I’d thought Lance’s guilt trips had been bad.

Richard looked down at me for a long, dark moment. I got the

impression that worse things had happened in Sorrow’s End than I’d ever

imagined.

There wasn’t just one tormented spirit connected to this house.

RICHARD MOUNTED the stairs ahead of Penelope, torn between dismay

that she was in danger and gratitude for her effort. She’d become so much

more than the first woman to speak with him, to kiss him, after so very many

years.

“After she told me what she’d done, Manon collapsed. She seemed

dead.” He knew he must finish his story . . . but must he finish all of it?

He’d stood in the doorway, paralyzed by horror, unwilling to approach

her shrunken form for longer than seemed sane.

“Meanwhile, the storm shook the house like a dog with a rat. Water

rose over the second floor. Here.” He pointed at the steps as they passed the

landing, then pointed higher. “Then here. And then, everything went still.

The wind died. The waves gentled.”

“The eye of the storm,” said Penelope.

“I did not know of such things at the time. But in the silence . . .”

He shook his head, wishing she need not hear this part. But he would

not be a coward, not in front of her. “In the silence, I heard Manon croaking

some kind of chant in a garbled, foreign tongue. That’s when I knew she still

lived. I heard an odd clicking, and when I finally approached her, I saw that

she continued to scrawl a snarl of symbols and sigils onto the floor.”

He loved Penelope for her expression of horror. “She was
still
casting a

spell?!”

“She peered at me . . .” Fevered. So very needful, she’d frightened him.

“And she asked me to love her. And I, in my pride . . .”

In his ego, in his absolute horror, he’d said,
You must be mad, you vindictive

bitch
.

“You told her where to shove it?” suggested Penelope, and he wished

he could kiss her while she wore that amulet.

“But you see, I ought not have. She regained enough strength to stretch

her arms upward, and hell descended upon us.”

“So it was real magic.”

Richard coughed out a poor imitation of a laugh. Lightning had struck

downward, through the attic ceiling and then—through her. As it exploded

in flames, the wind peeled the burning remnants of the roof off like bark off

a dead tree. Shockingly cold rain drenched them both, dousing a spattering

of fires. A gale slapped him to the floor. “It was real magic.”

He’d crawled toward her, screamed for her to stop. He could not make

out her words, through the torrent, but understood her demand.
Love me
.

“Avoiding my own personal hell was not worth the lives of others.

Innocents were dying because I had rejected her. I had no idea how many

until later, but even the few hundred I believed were dying was too many. So

I said I would love her. I would marry her. I would do anything she

asked . . .”

And she’d screamed,
You lie!

He’d grabbed her. Shaken her. But her lips continued to move in the

ungodly chant, and the rain drenched down across them, across whoever

might yet remain on this accursed island—and it was his fault. He’d struck

her, then, gentlemanly behavior forgotten. She just laughed and chanted,

continuing to call the tempest, committing suicide and taking the whole

island with her. So, God help him . . .

No. That part, he could not admit.

“By morning, she was dead,” he told Penelope, hearing the stiffness in

his own words.

“And you’d promised yourself to her,” she guessed, still innocent, still

so very generous in her assessment of him. “So you’ve been stuck here, ever

since. Oh, Richard.”

“The water had gone down by then, by morning,” he forged on. “So

those of us who had survived began to gather in what was left of the

downtown . . .”

He could tell that she suspected he’d left something out. But he

continued, recounting the shocked numbness of everyone he met, of

himself.

They’d quickly organized to search for survivors but discovered only

death. No mere hundreds had been lost, but thousands. The island had been

reduced to rubble. Hills of splintered wood covered everything, including

most of the water, as well as a strange, foul-smelling slime. They’d had to

clear walkways through two-story-high piles of debris just to continue their

search.

Most of the bodies were naked, their clothes stripped away by wind and

waves, as if the storm were some rapacious villain who’d defiled them.

Perhaps it had. If being churned about amidst the wreckage had not

disfigured them, the Texas heat quickly did. Two thousand corpses. Then

three thousand corpses.

All of them the responsibility of shaken, grieving men, survivors with

little food and less clean water.

All of them his fault.

“So we drank liquor,” Richard admitted. The sight of Penelope,

listening with wide, wet eyes served as a life preserver to his sanity. The hell

of stacking human bodies like the
things
they’d become had felt eternal. The

stench had filled his nose and mouth despite the rags they wore like bandits.

Several times a day, someone realized a friend had died by recognizing a

piece of jewelry, a shoe.

But it
had
ended, he tried to remind himself. The island had survived.

People as true and good as Penelope lived here, now.

“We tried to load them onto a barge and bury them at sea. Too many

slipped our effort to weight them and washed back to shore. Eventually, we

had to build bonfires up and down the beach.”

Bodies burned with black smoke. And then, as he’d stared at one of

their rough cremations—he’d thought, unseeing—the pile had shifted as its

weight changed . . . and Manon Boulanger’s bloated corpse had rolled over

on the pile, as if turning to stare accusations at him.

Penelope stopped as they reached the landing in front of the attic, the

one that had not proven so safe as they’d hoped only the day before. “I need

to hug you now.” She even reached for him, but—

Richard didn’t consciously flinch away. He simply found himself half a

foot further from her, as if he’d vanished and reappeared.

They stared at each other. Apparently Dawn’s amulets worked. “For

your safety, I will forego the embrace.” Not that he deserved it, anyway.

As they stood there, the attic door squeaked open, wide on its hinges.

Manon was clearly waiting for them.

Richard went first.

THIS TIME, I WAS forewarned. I knew that the spirit of a vindictive,

sociopathic magic-user who’d all but trapped Richard into some kind of

bond had opened that door.

Still, I didn’t feel anything in the airy, quiet, sunlit attic.
Less
than

anything.

So it shocked the hell out of me when a lyrically French voice purred

down at me from the rafters, from the floors, from the corners, all layered

over each other like an Auto-Tune. “Girl.”

Lance was the one who legitimately talked to the dead—and more

specifically,
heard
them. I’d always been the one who
sensed
them, who felt

their stories and struggled to make them hear me until I got a strong

impression of their passing. Richard was the only ghost I’d ever
conversed

with, and him I could see. But Manon was so powerful that she spoke in

audible, echoing words. “You will translate for me, yes?”

“Translate?” I don’t speak French, so if she meant that, we were in

trouble.

“My beloved Richard—he cannot hear my voice.”

She said the name like
Ree-SHARD
. Only then did I notice that the man

we apparently both loved—each thought we loved, in our own way—was

staring at me in confusion, not swiveling his head toward the space around

us the way I had.

“Since you died, you mean?” I asked, encouraged that we’d at least