We Will All Go Down Together (47 page)

“So we take it slow.”

“Slower than this, even?” She wrung out her hands, knuckles white. “Look, I just want to know if you’re disappointed. If I—scare you.”

“Carra . . . I’d be a fool to say yes
or
no. But. . . .” He put his hand on hers, so braced for her to flinch he looked pleasantly surprised when she didn’t. “. . . I’ve worked here five years now, at least. I couldn’t deal with a little fear, I’d’ve took off running that first week and never looked back.”

His thoughts leaking in underneath, borne on a tide of merged energy:
I do feel something, though, for you. Right . . . here. Don’t you feel it too, for me?

Tears pricked her eyes. “Yes,” she said, out loud. Thinking, at the same time—

. . . but that isn’t necessarily a
good
thing, for me.
Or
you.

It almost never was.

Jo Glouwer woke to the memory of Davina Cirocco’s tongue in her ear, with what was left of the woman in question coiled all ’round and through her like smoke, that raised black sigil throbbing inside her elbow. Whispering, barest thrum of words, borne on nothing like breath:
Hey baby, time to shift ass. Somebody’s here.

Who?

Fuck if I know. She says
you
will, though.

Jo opened her eyes. Across the bachelor apartment’s single room, a shadow wavered, tall and nude and foully fair as any Thane’s vision, its unbound hair a nest for nightmares.

“Do I know you?” she asked, thinking she didn’t—yet suspecting herself wrong.

Only all yuir life, ye daftie, save ’twas that other’s face I wore, the whole time. Now let me in, Jodice; I’ve come far, and I’ve no’ got long. ’Tis time.

And yes, she did know the tone of that voice, almost from birth.

“Nan,” Jo said. “Told me was just a
cold
you had, last time I called.”

Aye, as the leech at the Clinic claimed, for all the good
he
did me. Still, ’tis of nae moment: my Black Man visited at the gasp and showed me what best tae do, spending that other’s last power tae bring me o’er, tae settle what’s so long owed. Will ye help or no’?

Jo shook her head, clearing it only slightly. The room was dim, dusty; she didn’t recall having drawn her shades in a week, no more than what she might’ve last ate or when she’d bathed. Why bother, so long as she had Davina? Was company made a home, after all.

Her new life: playing nursemaid to her murdered lover, forever cradled inside Jo’s ectoplasm-attracting aura, while the other spooks still coaxed to her moth-light moaned outside in jealousy. Sometimes, she roused herself to do small jobs for ready cash, booked through the Freihoeven Institute—Ross’d mentioned her to them as he passed through an internship there, in the wake of Glouwer-Cirocco-Puget’s dissolution.

But she hadn’t seen him in person since that day, when he held her hand and cried as she wiped blood off Dav’s cold face. Now he ran some sort of website—CreepTracker.org—providing a forum for Ontario’s aspiring paranormal investigators, which the Freihoeven mined in turn for fresh leads as to where the maximum spooky shite might currently be happening.

The work was easy, now she knew what she was doing, though, and for that she’d always thank him. It filled the proverbial hole, much smaller, if never entirely gone.

Not even Dav could see to that.

Eight long years since she and what was left of Davina Cirocco had been . . . joined, and she still wasn’t used to having people in her place who
weren’t
dead, no more than she was to thinking of it as only
her
place. So to find Euwphaim Glouwer’s last fragment suddenly there, as well, was hardly a great surprise, even now she knew the truth—how every touched tale her Nan’d ever told her was nothing but gospel, hard and dreadful reality. How everything Jo knew was built on someone else’s pain.

She could remember the very moment, exactly, when her world had spun off-kilter: right as that black angel Euwphaim so loved laid its uncanny imitation of a hand in hers and kissed her inside the elbow, imprinting her with its awful seal.

Jo sighed, shaking her head again. “You saying I’ve a choice?”

Cert, girl. The same as any other.

“I doubt that, somewhat.”

I’ve ne’er told lies tae you, Jodice, my hen. Not wi’out reason.

Jo swung her legs out of bed and sat up, floor cold beneath her feet. Behind her, she felt Davina eddy away, then swing back, as though leash-yanked, reassembling herself with her knobbly knees crossed, tucked ever so slightly behind one of Jo’s broad shoulders. More a pose struck than any real show of fear, but Euwphaim
was
an awful object, and no mistake—had been even before, wrapped for comfort and camouflage in a long-dead woman’s sagging skin, “her” face set in a parody of kindly old age.

Jo put one hand on her knee, palm up, closest to Dav’s. Closed her lashes and shivered, gooseflesh stippling all along the love-line, as her living energy-field spiked to the brief brush of Dav’s dead one.

Come all right in the end, we just give her her will,
she tried to tell her. But:
Enough delay,
her Nana snapped back, impatient.
Will ye do’t, girl?

“Oh, I’ll help, if it’ll set me free,” Jo replied. “Though, I’ll tell you this much—I’m none too like to boil a bloody child for flying ointment just to get from here to Overdeere.”

Did I say as ye should?

“Not yet.”

Nor shall I.
The no-voice turned persuasive, almost gentle.
All that falls tae you is tae bring our coven together once more, or close as can be. There’s Jonet’s girl, for one, that sees mair e’en than yoursel’, though the foremost Rusk o’ this time’s vowed hersel’ tae the Kirk, which cuts Alizoun’s get from the mix. But that Roke boy, the soiled priest—he’ll gi’ ye what ye need, for he fears his family far mair than e’er he loved ’em. Only list tae me, an’ you’ll see it done.

At her elbow, Dav gave a thin hitch of laughter.
Uh
huh
, piece of fuckin’ cake. You really down with all this mediaeval bullshit, Jo?

Hold yuir tongue, dead-girl. Ye’ve tae do’t, Jodice, sharpish, wi’ nae mair dispute. Yuir a witch, born and bred, and blood is blood.

“
Blood
, aye, but no witch. I’ve no learning on it, no craft—”

Ye took the mark, same as us all.

“You know as well as me why I did
that
.”

Aye. And has she thanked ye for it yet, yuir leman? Or would she rather be Below, ploughing hot coals, where all her kind maun go?

Another sidelong eye-flick from Davina, who probably had choice words lurking hid behind her ghost-teeth on the subject of whom a woman might choose to bed down with versus damnation predestined, if sense enough not to say ’em out loud. Jo rubbed at her forehead, feeling a migraine coming on.

She knew Euwphaim correct, however, in her heart of hearts: what Jo had done to bring Dav “back” sprang from selfishness alone, a futile railing against death driving her to reorder the universe by force.

’Tis yuir choice,
her Nan lied, empty eyes now full as two moons, just rising.
So say the word an’ send me elsewhere, if it suits ye better—leave us Three Betrayed unavenged, after all this time and worry, all this bloody sacrifice. Do as ye will, an’ live wi’ it.

Think I’ve not lived with worse?
Jo ached to snap back, but didn’t.

:At Euwphaim Glouwer’s request, I serve without complaint,:
the angel—Ashreel Maskim—had told her, softly,
:even I, who once laid the foundations of this world with my six siblings’ help. For she and I are
such
old friends, I can remember seeing the very idea of you form in her, long ago . . . at my suggestion, of course.:

You were there?
she remembered blurting out, amazed.

To which it replied—
:Why not? I am there still.:

(Here, there, everywhere else. Everywhere, at once.)

And thus was the pact signed, hours after Jo had penned Davina’s soul in her bottle, once she’d finally cried and drunk enough to call her Nan for that bloody name. Thus had it
been
signed, Jo later realized, from the very second its first syllable struck her eardrum. That simple; that easy. That irreversible.

Damnation take her,
Jo thought, wearily,
and me too, for bad measure. But let Davina walk free of this, please Christ, once it’s played to its close. . . .

So long as Jo was already dead, that was, when it happened. Long as she didn’t have to stand there and watch Dav go, then live the rest of her God-damned life alone.

Jo bent her head, aura blossoming coronal, open invitation to any dead thing within range; heard every shade for a mile ’round turn and sniff as she did, poised to come running. But was Euwphaim’s shade alone she allowed to enter in before twitching it shut once more—a bubble of invisible force, proof against death’s gravity for so long as Jo chose. Saw the dead witch breathe out a held sigh in relief at no longer having to spend so much effort to hold herself together, and thought:
That’s her freed for mischief, and those she turns it upon won’t thank me for it.

But then again, considering who those were, and their works—the family Druir, creatures rather than people, surely, even by her own unorthdox standards—Jo couldn’t really bring herself to feel too bad.

Good girl, Jodice,
her grandmother said, hugging her so close Jo could feel ghost-bones grate icy-sharp against her own.
This will nae be forgot.

While Jo just looked to Davina, dragging hard on that cigarette of hers and shaking her rexed red head as she did it, as though to say:
Bad idea, baby. Bad, bad idea.

And thinking, in her turn—
No other kind in my world, as you well enough know. Ye great American hoor.

“Save your thanks ’til the deed be done,” she replied out loud, reaching for her car keys.

“Janis said you could maybe help,” Josh Kim told Carra in Abbott’s office—a biggish guy perching uncomfortably on one of those rickety little intake chairs, black hair buzzed to the scalp instead of caught back in a clip, like Sylvester’s. They made for odd bookends, Korean vs. Mohawk, supplicant vs. enabler, to this whole innately freakish system: psychical research, bastard child of magic and science, forever the single pastiest game in town. “Because of . . . what you are, I guess. Your family.”

Carra frowned. “All I had was my mother, Mister Kim. And she’s dead.”

Beside them, Janis sighed. “No, Carra,” she said. “I meant your
other
family.”

“The Five-Family Coven, that’s what this is about,” Abbott chimed in, helpfully, from behind his desk. “You see, Mister Kim’s girlfr—” Kim made a flapping motion, causing Abbott to backpedal: “—his
friend,
Galit Michaels, was listed as a missing person by the Ontario Provincial Police in 2003. She was last seen in Overdeere, out by the Lake of the North.”

“Mmm,” was all Carra could think to say in response.

Frankly, she hadn’t thought about that part of her heritage in years. For most of her life, it had always been enough to be “plain” Carraclough Devize, psychic savant and haunted house survivor, let alone Jonet Devize’s however-many-greats grand-niece. Or even daughter to Gala Carraclough, who’d met her ex-husband Yancey Devize
in
Overdeere, where—in one of those typically contortionate Five-Family “coincidences”—Yancey’s own mother had been one of the Overdeere Redcappies, a Sidderstane-style offshoot of the Druir family, sired by Minion Druir’s son Quire.

All of which made Carra a species of Druir by default, if only to the sixth (or maybe eighth) degree. A dubious distinction at best, which was really saying something, considering the context.

Studying Abbott closely, now, and wondering:
Black Magic Posse aside, Guilden, does this really sound like a job for
me
? I speak for the dead, speak
with
them; lay them down, if I can. The Druirs, kinship aside—they’re something different. As much beyond my ken as anyone else’s.

“You know I’ve never even been up there, right?” she finally asked, for the pleasure of watching Abbott colour as he replied, a bit too quick: “Well, of
course
I do.”

I
wrote
your file, after all.

Carra nodded. “Just making sure.”

She turned her attention back to Kim, now looking distinctly as though he wished he’d left well enough alone, and probed the ragged edges of everything he was trying not to think of, as unobtrusively as she could manage. “
You
have, though—after Ms. Michaels disappeared? Heard the rumours too, I take it. About the Lake . . . Overdeere. That whole area.”

Reluctant: “Some, yeah. I did research, and Galit kept a blog; server took it down, but I still have printouts. There was this guy—”

“Someone she’d met, just before. One of the Sidderstanes.”

Kim stiffened. “How the hell can you—?” Janis touched his shoulder, gently, and he sighed. “Ganconer, that’s his name. Older guy, prematurely grey. Something wrong with his eyes.”

Carra nodded again, feeling the trance-buzz build. “They’re made of wood,” she told him, voice gone cold, removed. “Lady Glauce took them out, for punishment; they’re in a jar, in a box, under the hill. Down deep in the ground, the apple-stink, where the leaves mould over.”

Kim’s face twitched all over. “Christ,
what?
Why the hell would you say that?”

“Because
it’s just true.
”

He made as if to pull back, and her hands shot out, unprompted. One clamped onto his wrist, the other his forearm, hauling hard ’til they were nose and nose. Were her eyes rolling back yet? Impossible to tell, on her end—she could see through everything, lids very much included, her own skull’s bony lens. Watching the flickering images projected inside her forehead shift and whisper, like willows in a breeze
—the bank of green rushes o, down in the salley gardens, where my love and I did meet—
and narrating what she saw there, mouth numb, tongue dry-sodden, spit reeking of mulch. . . .