The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (21 page)

“Salem…” Lily sighed. “You said you were napping, right?”

“It wasn’t a dream!” the shade insisted gruffly.

He and Lily both stood in the broken doorway to his room, where he narrowed his eyes over her in thought.

“The only person around here who can levitate objects is you,” Salem mused.

“Yes,” Lily retorted wryly, “because I’ve nothing more important to worry about than playing tricks on you. I was downstairs with Jaz. I didn’t do this, and Novel’s not here. You’re sure you didn’t imagine it?”

Salem gave a huff in answer to that, but added:

“We’ve got a ghost! A ghost is trying to kill me, just when I’ve decided that living’s not so bad. A fine spot of luck
that
is.”

At the mention of luck, Lily had to force herself not to give in to those guilty feelings about the djinn and the mirror. She packed Salem off to the kitchen to get some tea from Lady Eva, and stood in his doorway pondering if she could stand to ask Baptiste to fix the door back onto its hinges. She and the bloodshade hadn’t spoken since she’d accused him of attacking Jazzy, and though Lily knew now that it couldn’t have been him who hurt her friend, she still didn’t want to re-engage with the MC. Since Novel’s departure to find Pascal, Baptiste had been even less sociable than usual, and in a selfish way, that was making it easier for Lily to go on prolonging any kind of reconciliation between them.

“Ahem,” coughed a deep voice behind her, and Lily almost believed that Baptiste had stepped straight out of her thoughts and into the room.

But it was not the MC who had spoken, for the words that followed came from the lips of the great iron maiden, which still stood to one side of Salem’s door, now properly secured to the wall.

“There really was a dagger,” Gerstein offered. “I didn’t want to confirm it in front of Salem. He seemed so afraid. I thought it might be better if he convinced himself it was all a dream.”

Lily turned, observing the sympathetic frown the simulacra had created on the face of the maiden.

“You’re sure that nobody was holding it?” she asked him.

“It was floating, just like Salem said,” Gerstein confirmed.

Lily thought about the spirit who’d possessed Jazzy not long before she was attacked, and Novel’s assurance that the ghost was trying to help, not harm her. Now, there was a knife-wielding entity after Salem who couldn’t be physically seen, and Lily knew that Gerstein had no more ability to see ghosts than she did herself.

“How would you get a spirit to show itself and talk to you?” Lily asked the simulacra.

His metal face grinned.

“In this house?” Gerstein began. “I guess I’d ask the resident expert. It’s been quite a while since Lady Eva has conducted a proper séance.”

Crossed Lines

Eva, being a true gypsy madame, insisted on waiting until the moon was right before she would even consider arranging a meeting with the dead. Lily was worried for days on end that Novel might return home to the Imaginique in time to stop the séance from happening, but when she met him briefly in the Dreamstate in the third week of March, he told her he would return at the end of the month if he’d had no success in locating Pascal. With three days left until his promised return, Lady Eva finally gave Lily, Salem and Jazzy a time to meet her in the auditorium and conduct their otherworldly business.

“Physical labour is hard,” Salem mused. “How do you little human people manage it so often?”

He was pushing Jazzy’s wheelchair down the plush, carpeted aisle of the auditorium as he spoke, and Lily had to admit that it did look like hard work for him. Though Salem had a broad physique, his loss of magic had made him seem smaller as the months went by, and the bottle green suit he’d chosen for the séance was hanging loose in several places. Jazzy didn’t look much better in her chair, where she craned her head slowly to look at the shade, all the while clutching at the dressing still attached to her throat.

“Are you saying I’m heavy?” she croaked. “Lily, tell him off.”

“You’re tiny,” Salem cut in, “this chair weighs three times more than you do.”

The pair continued to bicker as they made their way towards the stage, where Eva had already placed her huge, circular table that she sometimes brought forward when there was a show on. Lily had flashes of old memories with every step she took towards that table, the most vivid being the sight of half of Edvard Schoonjans’s body emanating from its centre. If she had known then that they were cousins, she might have paid more attention to his bright ghostly smile and affectionate warnings. With only the weak and quarrelsome Salem and Jazzy beside her, Lily felt that this séance was not going to be as pleasant as the first.

Lady Eva came to the rescue just as Lily lost her nerve. The young shade was levitating Jazzy’s wheelchair up onto the stage when the gitano gypsy arrived, decked out in all her splendour. Eva wore a long crimson skirt with ruches all the way around its hem, and the ruffles of her black blouses sprouted from between the thick folds of a fitted jacket. She looked like a Hispanic screen goddess recapturing her prime, and her smile was one of excitement and confidence when she bestowed it upon the three participants approaching her table.

“Come, come, we must commence,” Eva urged, “the moon is high, the doors are open. Spirits are being welcomed to the space as we speak.”

Whether Eva was talking about the literal doors of the theatre or some other metaphysical doors, Lily wasn’t sure, but she knew there was a definite breeze from the direction of the foyer. Novel would never have allowed the doorways to the Imaginique to be so exposed when he was present, but Lily was hopeful that the séance would not take long if they found the right spirit at the first attempt. She watched as Salem wheeled Jazzy up to her place at the table, where the girl put her palms flat against the dark wood and exhaled a long, drawn-out breath.

“Are you sure you’re up to this, Jaz?” she asked.

Jazzy nodded, her dark curls bouncing against the sides of her unusually pale face. Lady Eva took a place beside her at the table, putting her small, lined hand over one of Jazzy’s and holding it firmly.

“It is necessary,” the gypsy madame said with a nod, “you are the beings that this spirit has concerned itself with thus far.”

Salem looked around the vastness of the auditorium with wide eyes. It was lit by a series of candles on the edge of the stage, and the night air breezed by every now and then to make them flicker. Lily watched Salem shiver as the wind caught his spine.

“Let’s get going then,” the former shade said briskly.

He and Lily took their seats, joining hands with Jazzy and Eva to form a circle. Lily was between Eva and Salem, and she felt the difference in their grips. Eva was firm and determined, her hands warm despite the chill, whilst Salem’s pulse was throbbing in his icy fingers. Lily squeezed his hand tighter, and he turned to give her a wary look.

“If you let go at the wrong time, it’ll mess everything up,” Lily warned him. “Keep holding on, Salem, and let Lady Eva do the rest.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” the gypsy madame added, beaming, “you’re coming along very well, my girl.”

Lily rather thought that, if Eva could have felt how much her insides were churning at the prospect of encountering the ghost, she wouldn’t have been so full of praise for her false confidence. Nevertheless, Lily kept up the pretence with a nod and a smile, and her eyes focused hard on the centre of the table as Eva leaned her head back to begin her chant. The older woman’s eyelids fluttered shut as the Spanish words began to flow from her lips, first as a whisper, then gathering in volume and tone. The chanting echoed up to the rafters of the high domed ceiling in the theatre, rattling along the backstage scaffolds and rumbling under the seats to the farthest distance it could reach.

Salem took a sharp breath in, and Lily felt a pinch as he gripped her hand for dear life. She looked straight across the circle at Jazzy, whose eyes were everywhere at once. She was studying something in the air of the auditorium, perhaps figures that none of the others could see, but there was an intense look of concentration in her every feature. Whatever Jazzy was trying to look at, it seemed to be out of focus even for her.

“Something’s wrong,” Lily exclaimed without thinking.

Eva’s chant slowed, her chest heaving with the strain of exhaustion. Lily was about to apologise for her interruption when the gypsy madame simply nodded, and gasped:

“You’re right.”

“I can see the spirits you’re calling,” Jazzy explained, her eyes still flying to and fro in the air above the table, “but they’re blurred and shadowy. I can’t pick out the girl we want to speak to.”

“Are you still taking that stuff Jeronomie gave you?” Lily asked her friend. “The potion that stops your Second Sight being so clear?”

“Actually, no,” Jazzy said, apparently surprised by her own answer.

The table broke its circle of hands, and all eyes fell to the girl in the wheelchair as she rubbed her chin in thought.

“I must have stopped taking it back at Christmas, when I first got ill,” Jazzy surmised.

“And the imprints of the people still appear as shadows?” Eva urged.

Jazzy gave a worried little nod.

“I guess I got so used to not seeing them clearly that I forgot all about the potion,” she continued. “What does it mean, Eva? Does it mean my abilities are weakening?”

“Or being prevented,” Salem added sharply. He looked around the vast chamber even though he couldn’t see what Jazzy was referring to. “You say the spirits are here, but they can’t come through to us. So I say, something’s stopping them doing it.”

“You’re damn right I’m stopping you,” said a voice from the end of the theatre. “I won’t let you do any more damage than you’ve already done.”

Bradley Binns, equipped with his finest black woolly jumper, emerged from the shadows of the far stalls of the ground floor. He had taken his chance with the Imaginique’s doors open wide, and in his hands he held up a large, smooth stone with a rune carved deep into its shiny surface. At the sight of the rune, Lily felt her magic rise in her blood, for she knew that shadehunters often used runes to make earthen weapons that could resist the magic of the ones they sought.

“You,” Lily seethed, “I knew it. I knew you’d come back here if we just waited.”

In truth, the young professor did look ashamed when Lily spoke in such accusing terms, but she was determined not to be fooled into giving him sympathy. Bradley kept his distance from the four at the table, standing in the centre aisle some ten feet away as he waved the stone in the air with a quivering arm.

“A spirit stone,” Lady Eva exclaimed hoarsely, “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

“Part of my family’s collection,” Bradley answered bitterly. “Actually, the only part that still remains.”

Salem got to his feet, and Lily saw Bradley flinch at the sight of the man who’d beaten him up not so long ago.

“And who are your family, kid?” Salem asked. “Hunters of Skye? The Sandown Group? Come on, which branch are you following?”

Lily presumed that those had to be the names of shadehunter groups, and Salem had asked the very question she wanted the answer to. Bradley, for his part, looked genuinely confused by the whole affair. Where minutes ago, he had entered the auditorium full of shaky confidence, now his pale, tawny brows were knitted with a lack of understanding. Again, Lily couldn’t help but feel his dopey look was genuine, and it became ever more difficult to reassure herself that he was a bloodthirsty shadehunter bent on spilling Novel’s blood.

“What are you talking about?” Bradley said, bemused. “I’m not a hunter. I don’t belong anywhere. My family are dead. All of them.”

Grief broke his voice in the very last words of his speech, and Lily heard Jazzy give a little gasp of sympathy. Bradley held the spirit stone up again as tears began to line the underside of his hazel eyes, and he shook them away like a puppy shaking off a sniffle.

“I won’t let you go pulling their spirits back from the beyond,” he insisted. “You’re not going anywhere near them again.”

“Again?” Lily asked. “Bradley, none of this makes sense.”

She stepped down from the stage of the theatre, walking slowly along the aisle towards the young professor. He was a mess of emotions where he stood, resolutely holding the stone, and he made no move to retreat when Lily reached him. She looked into his eyes, the last of her suspicion giving way to the truth that she knew she could see in his gaze. He was hurting and grieving right before her, for a family she didn’t know even existed.

“Who are you?” Lily said gently.

“Precisely what I’d like to know,” added a cold, echoing voice.

Novel was back in the Imaginique. His physical presence came as quickly as the words he’d spoken, and he shot like lightning across the room with sparks of the same crackling in his wake. The illusionist smacked the spirit stone from Bradley’s hands with a force that made the young man give a yelp, and Lily had no time to act before Novel had lifted the professor into the air by the grip of his gravity powers.

“This is the gentleman in question, Lawrence?” Novel asked, glancing back to the auditorium entrance.

Sure enough, Lawrence was standing in that doorway, and he nodded.

“That’s him,” he confirmed.

“What’s going on?” Jazzy asked from the stage, her small voice echoing around the space. “Lawrence, what have you done?”

It was Lily that Lawrence looked to when he answered, his eyes flashing with determination.

“You remember I said I was going to poke around again on his computer?” he asked. Lily nodded, and the voodoo boy continued. “Well I found a note he’d made about today’s date. It was labelled ‘Judgement Day’.”

“That’s right,” Bradley spluttered from his hovering position. “You’re a
murderer
, Lemarick Novel. Do you deny it?”

Novel looked nonplussed by the accusation, and he continued to hold the young professor up like a kitten by the scuff of its neck.

“Name my victim, and we shall see,” the illusionist answered dryly.

“On this day,” Bradley said with a heaving breath, “fifty years ago, you brought about the death of Aurélie Du Lac.”

To Lily, it seemed as though the whole world slowed down in that moment. Bradley dropped to the ground again as Novel’s powers let him go, and the illusionist’s face took on a pallor that was fit for the grave. Lily thought she remembered the name Aurélie, though she couldn’t place where she’d heard it, but there could be no denying the reaction that name had caused in the man Lily loved. It seemed as though that simple word had pierced his heart, and Novel stood dumbfounded, with all faces trained on his as they awaited a reply.

“Guilty as charged,” he answered in a painful whisper.