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“Out!” Trent said again, and Jenks flashed me a grin and vanished down the hallway to the sanctuary. He’d most likely go listen in through the flue, but at least Ellasbeth would have the illusion of privacy.
The coffeepot sat cold on the counter, an inch of old brew in it. I wasn’t going to offer Landon any. Being tricked into merging my mind with a goddess bent on taking me over had left a bad taste in my mouth.
Landon seemed to gather himself as the muted, musical voices of Ellasbeth and Trent dissolved into a rise and fall of sound. “You have a nice spelling area. You cook here, too?”
My attention flicked to his and held. “Not at the same time.”
Sucking his teeth, Landon shifted his feet. “Bis around?”
I nodded, glancing at the ceiling. “He’s sleeping, but he wakes up occasionally.” Especially when I was upset, but Landon already knew that.
From the back room Trent’s voice rose. “I’m willing to die for Lucy’s safety. I’m not about to sell her to you for a little less blackmail or my returned standing. You don’t have anything I want, Ellasbeth. Get used to it.”
My God, Trent could be callous when the situation called for it, and I propped my elbows on the stainless steel counter between Landon and myself.
David had once told me I’d saved Trent’s life, not while being his security, but by causing him to grow, to lose his at-any-cost outlook that the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many, that the ends justified the means. I’d seen it. Hell, I’d lived it while a mink trapped in his office, watching him kill his head geneticist to preserve his secrets and his money flow. But he’d tempered himself. Because of me, if David was to be believed, and it had saved his life because, as David had said, he wasn’t going to make the world live through another Kalamack bent on elven supremacy. Perhaps Landon had risen to fulfill that role instead, and I stifled a shudder at the thought because where Trent had a conscience, Landon did not.
“Why are you here helping me?”
Landon rose, his mood guarded as he spun the book Trent had brought over to face him. “Trent told me he thinks the undead will walk into the sun if they get their souls back. I tend to agree with him. I think it’s fitting that giving the vampires what they want will bring about their end. I don’t mind being a part of that.” He hesitated, and my heart thumped at his stillness. “My question is, why are you doing this if you think it will drive them into suncide?”
“Because Ivy’s life is more important than one lousy vampire who’s already on his way out.” Uneasy, I rubbed a watermark on the counter. Fear that the vampires would take their revenge out on Ivy and me if things didn’t go the way they wanted was never far from my thoughts, coloring my hopes—and my decisions.
Landon made a sound deep in his throat, and I jumped when he shut the book with a snap. “Trent’s charm won’t work.”
“Why not?” I said, not liking that he’d startled me.
“Because it uses the auratic residue left in the mind and body to adhere itself with, and the undead have completely polluted theirs with the auras they take in to survive.”
It was exactly what Trent had said, and grimacing, I steadied myself for some major boot licking. “You have another way?”
Landon pulled his attention back from the soft conversation in the living room. “In theory. The charm dates back several thousand years. I’ve never heard of anyone trying it.”
He was lying. I could tell in the way he was standing. “So … it’s a black charm?” I prompted. Elves were reluctant to label their charms as black and white—but a white charm never went out of style. “I won’t kill anyone.”
His eyes came up, mocking. “Lucky for you you’re dealing with people already dead.”
Oh God. It was a black charm. “What does it do?” I asked, my gut tightening. I can do this without trusting him. Hell, I used to work with demons.
Landon shifted the book between us until it was perfectly square with the counter. He was thinking, and my mistrust deepened. “In theory? It fixes the soul of an elder to a newborn. It was said to have been used to extend our collective knowledge past the grave.” He looked up, jaw set. “I’ll write it out for you.”
“Let me guess. You have to destroy the newborn’s soul to do it.” Yeah, the demons probably had a version of this. Ugly. It was just ugly the things magic could do.
Neck red, he didn’t say anything, finally turning to pull a few sheets from Ivy’s printer. “Pretty much,” he said as he took a pen from his pocket and began to sketch a pentagram as I might draw a smiley face. “The original soul must be forcibly ripped away and the old soul fixed into its place. Most times, the recipient became psychotic, which only added to the mystique of being a high priest back then, I suppose.” He looked up, reading my disgust. “I did say there’s no record of this charm being performed for several thousand years.”
“But you still know how to do it,” I accused.
“Aren’t you lucky for that,” he shot back. “You can’t get a soul to spontaneously attach itself and hope it sticks, even if it’s his own soul and his own body. It left once, it will again.”
He was right, and I tried not to look so pensive. The thought occurred to me that he might be giving me a black charm in the hopes of damning me with it. It wasn’t illegal to know black magic, just to do it. And destroying the soul of a newborn so an old man might live again was about as black as it got. “No wonder the demons hate you,” I said under my breath.
“Oh, are we going to compare past atrocities now?” he said even as he began writing a list of ingredients beside the pentagram.
I cocked my hip and watched him; his penmanship was as precise as his dress. “Stealing healthy babies and substituting your own failing infants is pretty nasty.”
“So is a thousand years of slavery. Or creating a species for your own pleasure, one that necessitates acts of perverted brutality to survive, acts committed on the people you love.”
He was talking about the vampires. “No worse than destroying your enemy by attacking their unborn children.”
Landon stopped writing. “They did it first.”
But who really knew the truth? I couldn’t solve a puzzle two thousand years dead.
His motion cocky, Landon spun the paper to me. Listed was a mix of plants, objects, and ley line equipment designed to sympathetically harness intent: blood, hummingbird egg white, sunrise spider silk, aspen sap, a copper Möbius strip, silk scarf, salt—probably to scribe the pentagram with—and a familiar phrase of Latin. Tislan, tislan. Ta na shay cooreen na da.
My lips parted and a wave of disconnection flooded me as the words rose from my mind. “That’s the phrase Trent used to move my soul,” I said, my voice sounding hollow, as if from outside myself.
Landon frowned, actually doing a double take as I blinked to find myself. “Trent has done this? Are you kidding me?”
“Not this one,” I reassured him. “But he held my soul in a bottle for three days while my aura replenished itself. I remember the words.”
Ta na shay cooreen na da. It flowed through me, and I held the counter as if it wasn’t real. I’d been trapped in my mind, standing at this very spot making cookies that faded away until Trent and I worked together, a symbol of us joining our minds so he could pull me out.
“Kalamack put your soul into a bottle?” Landon said, his disbelief obvious.
My breath came in a rush, as if I’d forgotten how to breathe. “My aura was burned off when I fought Ku’Sox. My mind thought I was dead, and he kept me on life support until my body was recovered and my aura was strong enough.” It had taken a kiss to break the spell, seeing as it was a very old charm to “wake the princess” from a lifesaving coma. I was starting to think that was when I’d begun to love him.
Oh shit. I love him.
The realization fell on me hard. My knees went wobbly, and I held the counter as a surge of emotion rose. I loved Trent. Sure, I’d toyed with the idea before, but now, after seeing him with Ellasbeth and giving him the foolhardy chance to make amends with her, I knew it was true. Damn it, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be romantic, with flowers and sun or moonlight, his touch on my face, and the scent of our hair mingling as we kissed. But no. It was me in my kitchen standing before a man I loathed, listening to the muted strains of the man I loved persuading his ex to get over herself and play by his rules.
Perhaps that means it might last this time.
“Rachel?” Landon said, and I shook myself.
“He’s better at magic than you think he is.” Head down, I locked my knees. Love shouldn’t be scary, but whenever I fell in love, my life fell apart. I didn’t want anything to change, but how could I stop it?
“He’d better be,” Landon muttered, looking at me as if trying to figure out why I was so distant. “Same words? Are you sure?”
Think about it later, Rachel. “It circled my brain for three days. What does it mean?”
Head down, he crossed off and rewrote things. “Most of it is to gain the Goddess’s attention.”
Swell. “And the rest?”
“I don’t know.”
It was more likely he just didn’t want to tell me. Tislan, tislan. Ta na shay cooreen na da. It hung in the back of my brain like a whisper of awareness—slowly gaining strength.
“She is a demon,” Ellasbeth said from the back living room, her voice breaking through the singsong litany in my mind where nothing else could. “Do you have any idea what people are saying? What this does to our child’s chances at success?”
“Lucy doesn’t care,” Trent said back. “Why do you?”
Landon cleared his throat, pushing his sketch across the counter so I could see it right side up. He was uncomfortable, and I didn’t think it was because of Ellasbeth and Trent. I wasn’t keen on any charm he had to remember, but it wasn’t as if I had much choice.
“Pay attention,” the man said, cementing in my thoughts that it was his skills he was nervous about. “I agreed to help you, but I’m not going to do it, and if anyone asks, I was here with Ellasbeth helping her petition Trent for the right to see her firstborn child.”
“Sure.” His stubble was starting to show, and I could smell the cold plastic of airport on him over his faint woodsy scent. Distant, I looked down at the curse. “Did the parents know you were doing this, or did you just steal the babies, too?”
Landon pulled himself straight, the width of the counter between us. “You want to be held accountable for the sins of your forefathers? Just keep throwing stones, Morgan.” Expression closed, he looked me up and down. “I’m assuming you can get a soul into a bottle?”
I scanned the spell, thinking it looked easy. But most of the bad ones were. “Yes.” I didn’t like trusting Landon and his memory-recalled charm, but he did want an end to the vampires.
“Good.” He leaned over the counter and tapped his pencil on the instructions. I knew the moment he caught my scent when he froze, then pulled back. “The, ah, spell calls for removing the original soul from a healthy body. I skipped that part.”
“You mean killing a baby,” I prompted, and he stared at me until I looked away.
“Step one,” he said tightly. “Sketch a pentagram onto a square of silk using salt. If you can match the scarf’s color to the recipient’s original aura, that’s even better.”
“I’ll ask Nina if she knows,” I said, tucking a strand of hair back.
“Second, anoint the feet of the pentagram with the sap, and do the same for the soles of the recipient’s feet.”
“Using what?” I interrupted, shocking myself when I looked up and found him too close. “The vampire recipient is like what, lying down?” This wasn’t good. There were too many variables to remember, and he clearly hadn’t done enough magic to know what was important and what could be fudged. “Are you sure there isn’t a book it’s written down in?”
“No.” His voice was tight. “I won’t misremember it. I’ve got it okay.”
“You’ve got this okay?” I accused, and there was a sudden silence from the back room. “You said no one’s done this for thousands of years. How do you know if it’s right or not?”
“The charm is fine,” he said, face red. He was lying; they did this charm at the dewar—more often than they wanted to admit—and that sickened me.
“Then what do I use to anoint the scarf and his feet? My finger?” I asked snarkily. The reason it wasn’t written down was plausible deniability. You couldn’t be brought to justice for a black charm there was no written evidence of.
“Ahh, I would think an aspen rod,” he said, and I took the pen out of his hand and added it to the list. “I’m destroying that before I leave,” he said, meaning the paper.
No you aren’t, I thought, but was smart enough not to say it. Damn it all to the Turn and back, people were crap. How can you respect a group who sacrificed babies to lengthen their own pathetic lives?
“Aspen rod,” I said, setting the pen down with an accusing snap. “Then what?”
Landon was eyeing me in distrust, and I gave him a sarcastic smile. “You do the same with the egg white, anointing the arms of the pentagram first, and then the recipient’s palms.”
“Using the same wand?” I guessed, and he nodded, flushed. “Can I use a chicken’s egg?”
“Not if you want it to work,” he muttered, and I took that as a fact. Eggs were a symbol of rebirth, but the Mayans used to believe that hummingbirds were the souls of warriors and would make an even closer tie. I could probably pick up one at one of the more exclusive charm shops.
“So let me guess,” I said, pulling the paper to me. It looked funny seeing the clearly old charm on fresh white paper. “Step three is to anoint the point of the pentagram and his forehead with his own blood?”
He grimaced, shifting from foot to foot. “I’d use the same wand again.”
“Then what?”
Landon hesitated, as if trying to decide only now if giving me this info was a good idea.
“What next, Landon …?” I intoned, and he tugged the paper back to himself.
“Roll the scarf into a cylinder and run it through the Möbius strip. Both loops.”
Big Möbius strip, check. I had one of those. I had two of them, actually. “What’s it made of?” I asked, and I almost saw him kick himself.
“Shit, I forgot that part,” he muttered. “Copper. Yes, copper.”
My fingers drummed on the counter. “You know what? I think I’ll just go to the library and find a nice reincarnation spell. Take my chances.”
Landon glared. “I know how to do this.”
“You sure?” I snapped, and both of us looked to the hallway at a pixy guffaw. No one was there, but a tiny whisper of pixy dust was slipping down.
Landon rolled up the paper, clearly ready to take his ball and go home. It was the lure of being the one who brought down the vampires that kept him here, kept him honest. “Most of this is all just to get the Goddess’s attention. It’s the thought that counts.”
I sobered at the reminder of the Goddess. Newt had assured me that the mystics and the Goddess herself wouldn’t recognize me even if I stood in a ley line and shouted for her, but she wasn’t called a goddess because she was impotent. “Okay, run the pentagram through the Möbius strip. Then what?”
My sudden meekness bolstered Landon’s mood, and I frowned when he tucked the paper into an inner pocket and went to get his hat from the table. “The scarf finds a neutral flow from the copper ions it picks up, so now you can shake the salt out and drape the scarf over the recipient’s face, blood spot at the forehead right where you anointed him. From there, you simply open the container holding the soul. Chanting the phrase will draw it forth, and the soul should go to him and fix into place. At least until he dies again. Burn the scarf to break the pathway and prevent the soul from escaping the body.”
He put on his hat, clearly ready to go. I nodded, still uneasy in that he might have forgotten something—intentionally. “You never said where the spiderweb fit in.”
“Oh! Right.” He hesitated in the archway. “Drape it over your shoulder for protection against an aggressive soul.”
Aggressive soul. Yes, I’d run into one of those before, but Al hadn’t used spiderwebs to help protect against them. Come to think of it, I’d never seen a spider in the ever-after, and I thought it pathetic that the elves and demons had polluted their world to the point where even a spider couldn’t survive.
“Ellasbeth, are you ready?” Landon called as he stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the hallway, and I heard her ask him for a moment. Frowning, Landon leaned against the frame of the opening.
“You sure you don’t want to add anything else?” I said, trying not to look at the pocket he put the charm in. I wanted it, wanted it bad.
“No.” Mood sour, he looked into the living room, then pushed himself forward. Steps fast, he came three paces in, eyes intent as he pulled the paper from his inner pocket, taunting me with it. I jumped when he tugged on the line out back, tossing the paper into the sink and igniting it with a single word.
Son of a bastard, I thought, grimacing at the sudden rush of shoes in the hall. Trent slid to a halt when he saw Landon standing over the fire in the sink, and he exhaled in relief. Ellasbeth click-clacked in behind him, coat over her arm, and Trent frowned. “Thanks for your help. You both have a flight out of here tonight, right?” Trent asked, clearly eager for them to leave.
Landon chuckled, turning the taps on to wash even the ash into the sewer system and out of my reach. “I’ve got a reservation at the Cincinnatian. Ellasbeth tells me it’s the only decent live-in hotel in the area.”
“Even if the staff is surly.” Ellasbeth’s mood wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. Trent must have given her something, but I bet it had cost her. Suddenly I felt as if both of us had been manipulated, even if it had been us who had called them.
“Do you have what you need?” Trent asked, and I nodded. The more satisfied Ellasbeth and Landon became, the more uneasy I felt. It technically wasn’t a curse if I didn’t have to kill anyone to perform the magic. There hadn’t been any indication that it required direct contact with the Goddess to do the curse either, but he could have left that out. He had before.
Smile stilted, Ellasbeth turned to Trent. “Thank you,” she said, and my pulse hammered. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I get a permanent address.”
My expression froze. Crap on toast, the woman was moving to Cincinnati. Shit, shit, shit! Why had I gone along with this? Made it sound like a good idea?
“I’ll wait for your call.” Trent put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a cold kiss good-bye on her cheek. My gut tightened. I knew I gave myself away when Ellasbeth leaned in to accept it, her eyes on mine and a mocking smile on her thin, lipstick-red lips. The tension rose. Landon clearly wasn’t happy either. I’m an idiot. My clear conscience wouldn’t keep me warm at night, hold me when I cried, or smile when I made a joke.
