Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2) Read online

  Wulf pawed at me when he saw me put my coat on.

  “You know you can’t come. Jack Nimble hates you.”

  Clever dog, he recognized the words Jack Nimble. He turned away from me in disgust and flopped himself down on his bed. I gave him some rawhide by way of a peace offering and left.

  I was greeted outside Martha’s front door by Jack Nimble himself, who started to rub against my leg, then caught a whiff of bloodhound and stalked off with the same disdain Wulf had shown twenty minutes earlier.

  “It’s been so long, dear, how are your ankles?” Martha said when she opened the door. “Have you seen the cat?”

  I pointed toward the juniper jungle on the right side of her yard. “He went that way.”

  “Oh, all right, I’m sure he’ll be along when he’s done. Come in, come in! Your ankles?”

  I had no difficulty with my ankles that would prompt a person to ask me about them, but I’d long since given up asking Martha where her questions came from. “They’re fine, thanks for asking.” Martha’s kitchen smelled good, earthy and yeasty, which was a relief. I handed her the pies.

  “These will go lovely with the soup,” Martha said. “It’s mushroom-leek-cranberry. And I made some bread.”

  There was nothing crazy about the bread, and mushroom-leek-cranberry soup turned out to be better than it sounded. All in all, it was a pleasant lunch. Martha talked about how quickly Warren was growing and her garden and the likelihood that a coven of malicious witches had moved in two streets over, and were plotting to ruin the neighborhood fling-into-spring cookout next month. We’d moved on to hand pies and tea by the time we got down to business.

  “So, you never come to see me unless you have a problem you can’t solve on your own,” Martha said, which made me feel guilty, because it was true. Still, my coming to see her at all put me well ahead of everyone else she considered a friend. Charlie lived right next door, and he never came unless it was something he really felt he couldn’t get out of without looking like a jerk. “What have we got today?” Martha asked.

  “Three human hearts,” I said. “Why would someone want them?”

  “Three exactly?”

  “Yes. There were five available, but whoever took them only took three.”

  Martha frowned at this. “It’s a powerful number,” she said. “But as far as a specific ritual…” She shrugged. “Shall we check the library?”

  I was on my feet before she finished the sentence. “Indeed we should.”

  Not only was I happy to leave Martha’s gross tea behind, but I’d developed a fondness for her library over the past year and a half. It was stuffy and smelled weird, but it was cozy, and of course it was full of old books, which made it pretty much my ideal place, if there’d been a dog on the floor. Some of the books were batshit crazy, but some were really interesting. Some had spells in them that had worked for the people I advised on my website. And one of them had certainly worked for me when I needed it to banish Jeffrey. If I was going to find any rituals that involved three hearts, it would be there.

  Except I didn’t. Not that day, and not when I came back the next. The day after that, Martha called me after doing some searching on her own. She didn’t find a ritual either, but she found what seemed to be the mention of one.

  She sounded breathless and excited as she said, “Lydia, it’s for bringing back the dead!”

  Fuck.

  I was working late, making up for all the lost time at Martha's over the last couple of days, when Penny Dreadful called me back at nearly midnight. I caught her up on what I'd found out.

  “So there’s a ghost here who wants to come back to life?”

  “I banished a ghost a few months ago who wanted to get to Bristol,” I said. “Can you think of any reason your town specifically would be a good place to do this?”

  “Probably because of the devil,” said Penny.

  “The devil?”

  “Bristol belongs to a devil. I bet he can make these sorts of things work better than a person could. Who would be better for necromancy, right?”

  And it hadn’t occurred to her to mention this before? “The devil, as in Satan?”

  “No, it’s not that bad.” Penny laughed. “Some minor devil. Like an evil spirit.”

  Like a fiend, I thought.

  “Everyone knows about it,” Penny went on. “Although of course most people don’t believe in it. They think it’s just a local legend. It’s like they don’t even notice that their restaurants and shops and things never fail. Guess they like to think that’s down to them and how smart they all are.” I already thought Penny sounded young, but that pretty much confirmed it. She had exactly that condescending tone that people have when they’re sure they know everything.

  “But it’s actually down to this devil?” I asked.

  “Someone made a deal with him a long time ago. He keeps our town safe and prosperous.”

  “And what do you do for him in return? Please tell me you haven’t all promised him your souls.”

  “Course not. I told you, most people don’t even believe in it. According to the legend, all we have to do is give him a safe haven. Hide him, so he can be up to whatever he gets up to in peace.”

  “Hide him from who?”

  “I don’t know,” Penny said. “God, I guess.”

  Okay. There wasn’t much there that made sense, but I’d seen a lot of weird shit. I wasn’t beyond believing that this town might be under the patronage of a devil. And maybe now this devil had made a deal with someone else. A ghost, who he’d offered to bring back from the dead.

  In exchange for what? And who was the ghost?

  That was a lot of missing information, but there was one thing I knew for sure: this was all fucking Phineas’s fault.

  He broke the canteen. He let these ghosts loose to make their deals with devils, and left me with no means of dealing with a fiend on my own. This was completely his problem, when you thought about it.

  And I was damn well going to make him solve it.

  Of course, the biggest problem with my plan to make Phineas come and face the music was, I had no idea how to find him. Or where. The only things I knew about him were that he wasn’t human, and that he was an asshole. Which left what? A fiend, a demon, a genie? Definitely not an angel. He didn’t seem to have any sort of vehicle, saucer shaped or otherwise, but I supposed alien was an outside possibility.

  It didn’t matter though, because I was equally clueless about all those things. Most of my training had focused on getting rid of apparitions and spirits, not bringing them to me. Same with Martha’s library.

  “So what do you do when you need to find someone?” I asked Wulf on our walk one morning. “You ask around. See if anyone’s seen him, or knows how to find him, right?”

  Wulf was busy peeing on a tree and said nothing, but I was sure he agreed with me. Luckily for me, I had easy access to quite a few people interested in supernatural matters. As soon as we got home, I created an account for my own website, using the screen name Hound of Baskerville. I thought this was very clever, since Phineas had pretended Basker was his name, and I was hounding him down. Wulf, by then snoring under my desk, remained unimpressed with any of it.

  I went to my forums and posted a question about contacting someone from another world or plane. Within two days I had a dozen answers. Most of them were of the séance and planchette variety. One or two were a little more interesting. I was especially drawn to one posted by a certain Penny Dreadful:

  Evocation ritual, it said. Carve water, earth, and air runes into three blue or indigo beeswax candles and set them up in a triangle. Cut yourself—preferably in the head or face—with an iron dagger and put some drops of blood (that’s the fire element) into each flame. Then call to the spirit you’re looking for. If you don’t know which spirit you’re looking for, call for the kind of information or help you want, and one might answer. This will only work if you’re spiritually attuned, btw, but I’m as
suming you are or you wouldn’t be posting here. HTH.

  I replied. Thanks, Penny! I’m not sure what it means to be spiritually attuned. Do I have to do something special? Also can you tell me where I might find these runes?

  She answered within a couple of hours. You’re welcome, Hound! Check these links for runes. You’re spiritually attuned if you can see/sense ghosts and other beings. Most people actually aren’t, but they tend not to believe in such things. Assuming if you’ve an interest in hauntings, you believe in/can feel visitors from other planes.

  Well, I could check that box. I definitely believed in visitors from other planes, and I definitely felt them, sometimes a little more than I liked. The whole thing seemed pretty simple.

  Maybe too simple. How did my new friend Penny know this? Did she have experience summoning spirits? Was she friends with any of them, say maybe a devil? When she called, was it to lead me in the wrong direction, or into a trap?

  Yes was a possible answer to all these questions, but I didn’t really see anything for it but to be cautious and keep going.

  I had an iron dagger handy already, thanks to Cranston Farquhar. The hard part turned out to be the candles. If they were a magic thing, I figured Martha Corey would have some, but I was wrong about that. Trips to three different stores didn’t turn any up either. I could have blue, or I could have beeswax, but I couldn’t have both. Finally I ended up ordering them online, but they took two days to arrive.

  The day I was finally going to try the ritual, I’ll admit I was a little nervous. Not about the ritual itself—I was used to those, and like I said, this one seemed almost too easy—but about Phineas. I didn’t know exactly how evocation worked. I hoped it would compel him to answer me, somehow, because if left to his own devices that asshole would probably just ignore me. But compulsion had its own set of problems. Would the spell just make him drop whatever he was doing and yank him out of his plane? Would he have time to, I don’t know, change his clothes or get a snack first? What if he was sleeping? Or in the middle of some private activity I didn’t want to imagine?

  There seemed to be a lot of potential here for pissing him off. Not that I cared so much about his feelings, but he was inhuman, after all. He hadn’t shown any signs of aggression so far, at least not toward anything but pottery. But we’d only met on his terms. If he reacted to this badly, might that be dangerous for me?

  I got two phone calls that morning. One was from Martha Corey, asking if I’d like her to come and help. I could tell she wanted to, but I said no anyway. I was afraid she’d be too much of a distraction. The second was from cheating-lying-no-good-Kevin, who once again wanted to be the first to tell me something. Namely, that his new wife was pregnant.

  As usual, his timing sucked. I’d had four miscarriages while we were together, and more infertility treatments than I cared to tally up either in numbers or dollars. I was wrecked, and heartbroken, and every other sad word you can think of. And despite his cheating-lying-no-good ways, I blamed the failure of my marriage mostly on my inability to have children. So this was a bit of an emotional topic for me.

  I hung up on Kevin before he could hear me cry. Then I cried. For an hour. By the time I was done I was stuffy and blotchy and had a really bad headache. But I wasn’t nervous anymore. Screw Phineas if he didn’t like it. I was in no mood to take any crap from him or anyone else.

  I wouldn’t have been such a cowgirl about it if I knew what was in store for me.

  Oh, the ritual was simple. I was right about that. But simple and easy aren’t always the same thing. Case in point: the way that little ritual almost drove me mad, and that’s not hyperbole just because it was annoying or something. I mean it actually made me start to lose my mind.

  I set everything up on my kitchen table. That way if anything went wrong, there was easy access to both first aid cream and liquor in my pantry. When he realized nothing I was laying out was edible, Wulf plopped himself down on the rug by the back door, head on his paws, and regarded me with disappointment.

  After I lit the candles, I cut my ear with the dagger—I am way too vain to be cutting my actual face—and did the blood dripping thing. I was feeling a little cocky. I’d been doing rituals for most of my life, after all. I was assuming that would give me a leg up here. And maybe it did, I don’t know. Half of doing magic is confidence, and at that point, I had some.

  The last phase was calling to the spirit I wanted to reach. I started to feel pretty stupid then. I didn’t know the words to call Phineas in the language we learned from Cyrus, and I’d never done a ritual in English before. Was I supposed to do it all formal and quasi-medieval, like they do spells in the movies? Like, Phineas Basker, I summon thee unto me? I didn’t think I could bring myself to do that without laughing. I decided to just speak plainly and hope he’d hear me.

  “Phineas Basker, even though that’s not your real name, and you’re not really one of Cyrus’s asshole cousins, just an asshole, I’m calling you,” I said loudly. “I don’t have an incantation, but I’m hoping you can hear me anyway. Open up the veil, or whatever it is that you do, and get over here, because we need to talk.”

  The veil opened. It wasn’t all that different from the canteen opening, or so I thought at first. I could feel the change in pressure around me, the heaviness in the air. The candle flames sprang up. Even though they didn’t give off much smoke, my eyes started to sting.

  Then things started going bad.

  The pressure in the air transferred into my head, which, thanks to Kevin, already hurt like a bitch. It felt like I was being juiced like a lemon. But it wasn’t just the physical pain, or even mostly the physical pain, that was the problem. As my head was being pushed inward into itself, my consciousness started to push outward, escaping my body, exploding, crumbling.

  I could actually feel myself losing my mind, an expression I’d never taken literally before. Thoughts and memories started to peel off and float away. I saw Nat as a little boy. Warren as a baby. Nat doing a banishing. Cyrus eating liverwurst. My mother scolding me for bringing a note home from my teacher that said I was unprepared for class. Tom Dodd sipping a glass of rye. Kevin on our wedding day. My second-grade best friend Josie Patocki laughing at something. Nat in his coffin. Kevin in our bed with another woman.

  It went on and on, and all the while, as I watched these things, I was hearing completely unrelated things. My own voice inside my head, asking how many cups of sugar were supposed to go into the lemon cake (as far as I recall, I have never made lemon cake), worrying about Warren when he had rotavirus, his fever was so high, laughing at a line I remembered from a movie. The laughter stuck, until it surrounded me and blocked everything else out, loud and high and pretty much batshit crazy. I was actually laughing, in my kitchen, and I couldn’t stop. My stomach started to hurt worse than my head.

  Then something rose above the laughter: a sharp bark.

  Wulf was standing now, pawing frantically at the door. Someone was pounding on it. The veil, or whatever it was, slammed shut, and I leaned against the table, suddenly sweaty and faint.

  I hesitated before answering the knock, insistent as it was. Just who or what would I be inviting inside? I couldn’t be sure it was even Phineas I’d called. I didn’t know this ritual, but it sure as hell wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t trust Penny Dreadful. I had no idea what I was getting into. What I was getting, period.

  But there was only one way to find out, so I walked drunkenly to the door and opened it. Phineas was standing there. I saw two of him, both with auburn curls falling into their eyes.

  “You need a haircut,” I said. Then I stumbled past him and vomited into my holly bushes.

  When I turned back around, he was gone, but my back door was still open.

  “You had better be in the kitchen, because I am not doing that again,” I called.

  He was, pouring a glass of water, which he handed to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I don’t think that’s going to do i
t. I’ll be right back.”

  I went to brush my teeth. Which may seem weird, just leaving Phineas there after what I’d just gone through to talk to him, but I cannot abide vomit. When I came back to the kitchen, the water had been replaced with a mug and a teabag. Phineas stood by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil. I couldn’t decide whether I was happy to see him or not.

  “Why didn’t you just send Beowulf?” he asked.

  I blinked at him. “That’s a thing?”

  “Sure. Hounds can cross planes. Tracking. Hunting.”

  “That’s not exactly what I read about them,” I mumbled. But I guessed it was close.

  “They have to have the aptitude and be trained for it, so you probably don’t see it much, but it’s possible.”

  Sensing he was being talked about, Wulf pawed at Phineas, demanding attention. Phineas smiled down at him and said, “You’ve got the talent, don’t you?” Wulf howled his agreement.

  “I’ll try that next time, I guess.” I sat down as he poured the tea. I was still dizzy, and not entirely steady on my feet.

  Phineas sat across from me, looking calm and good-natured, like he always did. I decided that I was happy to see him. Infuriating as he was, I thought he was also capable. He’d be able to help me, once I found a way to make him.

  “I assume this wasn’t a social call?” he asked.

  “Not hardly,” I said. “Why would I call you for fun? You’re an asshole.”

  To look at his lopsided smile, you’d think I just said something nice. “So I’ve heard. What can I do for you?”

  I’d finished my tea and had a second cup in front of me by the time I went over everything, starting with Megan, all the way up to the carpool line and the phone calls from Penny Dreadful. His face went from its usual open, amused expression to thoughtful, then almost worried by the time I finished.

  “The wormwood and birch ashes would have been for a possession ritual. Willing possession,” he said.

  “Willing? As opposed to the kind of possession that requires an exorcism?”