The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (22 page)

More Than A Memory

“You killed someone?” Lily asked in disbelief. “You can’t have, I mean… not unless they tried to kill you first, right?”

Novel shook his head. He would not look up from his place at the circular table. The table had seven guests now, though Bradley was a reluctant one, who was being held in his seat by both Salem and Lawrence, with a firm hand placed on each of his shoulders. The young professor looked livid again now that he could see Novel’s guilt, but Lily could hardly spare anyone else a glance as she studied her boyfriend’s face intently. There had to be some explanation for this other than Bradley’s truth, for Lily couldn’t come to terms with the idea that Novel could ever have killed another person in cold blood.

“Your history is long and bloody, Monsieur,” Bradley seethed, “and just because you usually leave them bleeding doesn’t mean you’ve never finished a person off. I know you killed her now. I’m certain of it just by looking at you.”

Lily was certain of it too, much as she didn’t want to be. Novel was crippled by every word that came from Bradley’s lips, each angry syllable stabbing him with invisible barbs. The illusionist became more wracked with remorse as each second passed, and his guilt was obvious as he finally raised his head to look at Bradley across the table.

“I know it doesn’t help you,” Novel began shakily, “but I want you to know it was accidental. It was my fault, at my hand, but I never meant to harm her. Aurélie was… dear to me, back then.”

And Lily suddenly knew where she had heard the name before. It was the girl Pascal had mentioned at the Council Hall, when he’d said that Novel was always expected to marry her, but something had gone terribly wrong. Lily remembered the bitterness and glib commentary she’d bit back at Pascal with, and felt instantly ashamed of herself. She couldn’t have known then that Aurélie’s relationship with Novel had ended so disastrously.

“He lost his temper,” Salem said softly. “It’s never happened since with anyone he’s instructed.”

Lily was Novel’s apprentice, and his girlfriend, and she now understood the illusionist’s desperate need to keep her in the dark about the real dangers of the world around her. He wouldn’t let her learn to fight properly, because he was terrified that such a rush of power between them would lead to history repeating itself.

“I lost control,” Novel added, his voice breaking with a sob.

Lily expected to see some sympathy forming in Bradley’s expression, but when she looked his way, there was yet more anger burning in his skin.

“You lying bastard,” he exclaimed through gritted teeth. “How can you sit there and say that, when you went back to finish the job?”

“Went back?” Novel asked, his pale brow rising. “I don’t follow your meaning.”

Bradley hung his head and took a deep, shuddering breath to quell his anger enough to speak.

“Aurélie was the only daughter of Vincent and Morgaux Du Lac,” the young professor explained. “They weren’t blessed with any more children, and the rest of the Du Lac bloodline had died out centuries before, during the Black Death.”

“That’s right,” Novel said with a nod, “that’s precisely why it was arranged for me to marry Aurélie. We intended to absorb the Du Lac bloodline into the House of Novel. They were a prestigious family, great collectors of powerful artefacts.”

“Like this one,” Jazzy chimed in suddenly.

She was holding the spirit stone in both hands, observing it with fascination.

“I don’t understand how you are connected to any of this, Mr Binns,” Novel said cordially. “Who are you, exactly?”

“Vincent and Morgaux’s adopted son,” Bradley admitted, though it seemed to choke him to do so.

“A shade?” Salem asked, looking the professor over with interest.

“Not a powerful one,” Bradley said with a sigh, “but yes. My father was some wayward chap who got a human woman pregnant, then ran away.”

“So was mine,” Lily said softly.

When Bradley looked at her, it was with some depth of connection, but there was still a great unresolved anger in his tense features. His gaze snapped back to Novel, and when he continued to speak, it was with a new layer of acidity in his words.

“I never had much chance to train as an adult, you see,” he explained, “because the Du Lacs were murdered when I went away to university.”

“I hadn’t heard,” Novel said, his face frozen with shock.

“A human witness placed a tall, thin man at the scene, who wore a long dark tailcoat and had hair that shone white in the moonlight,” Bradley continued.

Lily realised exactly what he was accusing Novel of, and she and the illusionist shook their heads at the same time.

“That could have been anybody,” Lily urged.

Bradley shook his head too.

“All of my parents’ magical devices and artefacts were stolen away, and the attacker left his name at the scene,” the young professor added. “Turn over that stone.”

Jazzy looked up in surprise, then did as she was told. She laid the spirit stone flat across her palms, rune side down, and the gathering at the table peered towards the smooth underside of the rock. By the light of the flickering candles, Lily could see that there was something scratched lightly into the rock, like a hologram, where you had to stand at a certain angle to see it. Lady Eva, too, was craning her neck, until Jazzy held up the stone in the way that Bradley had, angling it to and fro to find the name in the obsidian surface.

“Novel,” Lily read in a whisper, as the shining words flashed in her direction for a second or two.

Novel saw his name there a moment later, his lip curling down in resolution.

“I’m not the man who killed your parents, Mr Binns,” he said firmly, “but I am truly sorry that you never had the chance to grow up with your sister. That, I will accept responsibility for. She was a very sweet girl, and I destroyed her.”

A screeching, whistling sound hurtled through the Imaginique as Novel’s words faded away. Where Jazzy held the spirit stone up high, her arm began to shake, and soon a bright white light emanated from the runes where they touched her palm. Whatever Bradley had been doing to stop the séance before, Lily now supposed that Jazzy was doing the opposite, for a being began to take shape in the centre of the table. She was not a full vision by any means, and her form shook in and out of existence like a television losing its signal, yet there could be no mistaking who she was from the way she looked.

Lily recognised her at once from Bradley’s old picture, and she suddenly understood how a picture of a real Pendle Witch could exist. There must have been two hundred years between the invention of photography and the witch trials of Pendle Hill, yet Lily had never realised that what Bradley had told her would have been quite impossible if Aurélie was human. The shadegirl looked exactly as she had in the photograph, with her hair in dark plaits and her triangular face both pale and ashen.

Novel was pale and ashen too, and they looked quite a match for each other in some strange, macabre way. The ghost girl turned to look at the shocked illusionist, and she only smiled at him. When she spoke, Aurélie possessed a sweat and dulcet tone that matched her tender look.

“I forgave you a long time ago, Lemarick,” Aurélie soothed, “so it’s high time you forgave yourself. It never would have worked out, our marriage. I didn’t have a temper to match yours, but
this one
certainly does.”

Aurélie’s dark eyes fell to Lily, and she saw straight through them for a moment to where Jazzy still held the stone high. The ghost girl was flickering in and out more and more with each passing moment, and Aurélie seemed to notice that she might not have long to speak in the human realm.

“Lily, you’ve got it all wrong,” the ghost urged. “You thought Bradley was your enemy, but he isn’t. He’s a sweet, foolish boy labouring under a misapprehension. The viper is still amongst you, the traitor I’ve tried to warn you about through your dear friend here.”

Jazzy’s face was rapt with strain and concentration, and Lily realised that Aurélie was still using her now to pass the message through the spirit stone. The ghost faded out again for several seconds, returning with a more panicked look, and a more transparent body than before.

“Open your eyes and see the one who does not belong amongst you.” Aurélie struggled to speak, her words fading even as her body turned to thin air again. “You will lose
him
if you don’t.”

The ghost had half a second to glance around the table before she was gone. Jazzy fell forward, her forehead landing squarely on the wood with a thud. It was a sound which shocked Lawrence into action, and the voodoo boy lifted Jazzy out of the chair and into his caring arms. He rushed from the stage to take her away to rest, and Lily rose too to follow. She paused before leaving the table, though, looking back to where Novel had moved closer to Bradley, and placed a hand upon his shoulder.

“Lawrence thought you were a threat to me, and saw fit to call me home tonight,” Novel told the young professor. “It appears you and I were both wrong about each other. I don’t know who the man was that murdered Vincent and Morgaux but, if you’ll allow it, I’d like to help you find out.”

Bradley let out a shuddering breath, his face white with the fear of all that he had seen and the truths that had been revealed to him that night. Then, he nodded gently, and sucked in a breath to speak.

“If Aurélie forgives you, then so do I,” the professor said quietly. “I need all the help I can get to start investigating again. You were my only lead.”

The men began to converse, and Salem was deep in whisperings with Eva at his end of the table, so Lily made her move to see that Jazzy was all right. She rushed down the stairs and out into the foyer of the Imaginique, closing its outer doors with a wave of her hand. As the doors came together, however, they bounced against something that apparently lay between them, and opened again.

“Tarnation!” shouted a voice that Lily recognised.

“Jeronomie? Is that you?” she asked the air between the doors.

In a flutter of that same golden flash she’d appeared by, the potioneer was visible. Jeronomie Parnell clutched one of her shoulders with a hiss of pain, but her other hand was wrapped around the spade-shaped locket at her chest.

“You were invisible just now,” Lily exclaimed, “I guess I must have slammed the door on you.”

“I didn’t hear no apology in there anywhere,” Jeronomie answered gruffly.

When Lily chose not to give her one, the potioneer held up her locket and jingled it by its thick golden chain.

“I told you spells of vision were my speciality,” she continued briskly. “I went out to collect some ingredients for a brew, and the normal human folk ask an awful lot of questions if they see you picking wild flowers, digging up animal graves and whatnot. It’s just easier to not be seen.”

Lily did her best to soak in this new information, though she’d heard so much new information in the last hour that Jeronomie’s apparent power hardly registered in her mind at all.

“Right, well sorry,” she added belatedly, “but perhaps you shouldn’t wander around in here like that. Tensions are high. You might get hurt.”

Jeronomie tipped the brim of her wide brown hat and gave Lily a smile that only really settled on one side of her lips.

“I appreciate your concern, Ma’am,” the potioneer replied.

April

Barriers To Success

In Lily’s experience, trouble always seemed to find her just when she had stopped looking for it. This particular brand of bad luck had definitely spread to the rest of the Imaginique, who woke up on a fine April morning to find a thunderstorm brewing over their heads. The storm had battered the electricity within the building, and Baptiste Du Nord had been running all over the place all day to try and rectify the problems with the wiring. The rain of the storm was also so intense that it had seeped into the attic where the potioneer had been working for the last four months, and that was how Lily came to walk into a kitchen filled with cauldrons, canisters, bottles and jars.

“Isn’t it nice to have a home apothecary?” Salem asked her with a grin.

Lily looked at the items all around her, which frankly were a terrible mess, and raised one brow.

“If you say so,” she replied, “just so long as I don’t end up with eye of newt in my sandwiches.”

“Oh, eye of newt is so last century,” Salem jibed, “nobody uses that anymore, right Jeronomie?”

Lily hadn’t even realised the potioneer was present, until a head popped up from under the kitchen table. Where Jeronomie had once been desperately concerned with returning to Salem to good mental and physical health, she had now fallen into the same pattern as the regular Imaginique residents, and begun to find him terribly annoying. This was evident in the way she half grinned and half grimaced at his attempt at humour, nodding ever so slightly as she replied.

“It’s only really useful for cosmetic products. Not my line.”

Lily navigated the mess of potions in mid-brew, winding her way to the fridge to make herself some lunch. Whilst she wrestled with the lid of a jar of strawberry jam, she watched Salem picking up various bottles and perusing their labels. It was easy to see why Jeronomie had been locking herself away in the attic for so long, because her vast array of accessories were both terribly interesting and terribly fragile. That was a dangerous combination in the hands of Salem Cross.

“Minch powder!” he exclaimed gleefully. “That’s Scottish right? I know that one. They put it in stuff to stop you hearing music.”

Jeronomie gave a huffy sigh of agreement, and Lily thought about what Salem had just said whilst she was buttering her bread.

“Why would you not want to listen to music?” she asked him. “I mean, it might be useful if you were trying to study, or something.”

“Oh, you young naïve thing,” Salem replied with a waggling finger. “Music is a very dangerous thing. Sirens like Dharma have hypnotic songs to make men do their bidding. There are instruments when played that can put people to sleep. And then of course, there’s songspinning, which is a heck of a rare skill.”

There was a clatter and a smash, and both Lily and Salem turned to see Jeronomie with the remains of one of her potion bottles on the floor. It seemed the vial had slipped straight through her hands when she lifted it from the cluttered table, and the haughty woman now crouched to sweep up its broken shards. Her eyes were keen and narrow as she looked up at Salem, who did nothing to offer her any help.

“How come you know about songspinning?” Jeronomie asked wryly. “That’s pretty selective knowledge.”

Salem, who could never resist the urge to fish for a compliment when he was at his best, puffed out his chest proudly. He opened his mouth and lifted his tongue, and Lily got her first proper look at what Novel had described to her once as his glamour. The underside of Salem’s tongue was perfectly coated in a thin layer of silver, which shone as genuine as any metal, wet and glistening within his mouth. The former shade waggled his tongue invitingly, and even Jeronomie got to her feet to inspect the strangeness of it all.

“Well I’ll be damned,” she mused in a whisper. “I mean, I see something flash when you speak sometimes, but I thought you had metal fillings or something.”

“Sorry,” Lily said, raising a hand, “this is me being all naïve again, but what does Salem’s glamour have to do with this songspinning lark?”

Salem closed his mouth, giving Lily a conspiratorial look as he crossed the room. He put one arm around her shoulders, then used the other to reach out for her freshly-made jam-sandwich.

“Songspinning is the ability to entrance people with singing and make them do whatever you want them to. And this isn’t a glamour,” Salem said, “this is a gift.”

When Salem took a bite of her sandwich, Lily didn’t have any thoughts to spare for being annoyed at him. She was fascinated by the idea of his powers, and it seemed Jeronomie was too.

“If you can do that, then why did you get so depressed about losing your other magic?” Lily asked him.

The lightsider let a little crestfallen glance go her way as he chewed, and when he’d swallowed his bite, Salem gave a sigh.

“I lost it when I lost everything else,” he admitted.

“Impossible,” Jeronomie retorted at once. She pointed at his mouth with a rough, thick finger. “The magic there ain’t nothing to do with shadeblood. That’s… well, I don’t like to say what it is, with the present company.”

Here the potioneer gave a nod to Lily, who looked between Jeronomie and Salem for a few quizzical moments. Lily folded her arms resolutely in the silence that followed.

“Someone explain,” she demanded, “now.”

“Well,” Salem began with a sheepish look, “I guess by now you’ve figured out that the djinnkind are sort of like genies.”

Lily nodded. “I have.”

“So, like genies, some of them grant wishes,” he continued. “I made a deal with one, a long time ago, and she gave me this power in return.”

“You asked for it?” Jeronomie urged, her face a picture of intrigue.

Salem shook his head.

“Gifter – that’s what the djinn was called – gives you what you
need
, not what you ask for,” he explained. “It’s all down to the wordplay.”

Lily realised that Salem was presenting her with a very rare opportunity to do something about her own curse.

“This is a djinn that you can speak to?” she asked in confirmation. “One that you can negotiate with?”

“Yup,” Salem replied happily, “though she’s pretty scary to behold, and she lives in a pond.”

“You mean, you know where she is?”

It was Jeronomie who asked the question, even though it had been on the tip of Lily’s tongue. Salem gave a nod, but then he looked at the two curious women and suddenly shook his head. He held up his palms to them apologetically.

“I kind of know where she used to hang out,” he offered, “but I’m not telling you anything without Novel being in on it. I’m not making that mistake twice, not now that I’m keen on living long enough to get my magic back.”

Jeronomie’s shoulders sank, and she went back to her work with much less interest than before. Lily, on the other hand, was very interested in passing this news on to Novel. He’d been trying to find Pascal specifically to ask him about finding a djinn to negotiate with, and all that time Salem had been sitting on the very same information. Lily was sure that, with the right persuasion, Novel would be glad to know the location of the gift-giving creature that had bestowed Salem’s silver tongue upon him.

“It’s no wonder that tongue of yours doesn’t work in here,” Jeronomie said after a moment, looking up under the hood of her brow. “The Monsieur has got all sorts of tricks in this place to prevent unsavoury magic from being used. It’s hard as hell to get things done with so many hidden traps, not to mention the eyes in the walls.”

The potioneer sounded almost annoyed about that fact, but what she’d said gave Salem a wild, joyous look. He had barely integrated with the human world at all since his attempt to leave the Imaginique in November, and though he was certainly looking a lot more like his old self, he’d been very contained in Jeronomie’s company for the last few weeks. Now, he turned to Lily with a gleam in his gaze, and gave her shoulders a firm squeeze.

“Oh dear girl,” he teased, “please tell me you’ve got some humans you can take me out to test this on.”

Lily’s instant reaction was not to encourage Salem in any way, but then she realised that she
did
have a human who needed teaching a lesson.

“Mr. Cross,” she said with a mischievous grin, “I’d like to take you out on the town tonight.”

“Sweetheart,” Salem answered in the very same tone. “I’d be delighted.”