6
puppets
That evening, Sera spread the photographs on her worktable and swore. She should have just sent Timothy away, or ran away herself. If so, she wouldn’t have heard his stupid, stupid words that now played at the edge of her consciousness. She wouldn’t have doubted her actions. Focusing on the death spread before her, she banished him to the abyss where her heart lived. She wouldn’t ever trust him. Nothing was going to get in the way of her dreams or her friendship with Mary, especially not a boy.
Pin by pin, she released her rigid bun and shook out her hair. Patience, she reminded herself while massaging her temples in even, circular strokes. Last night, she had stared at the pictures for hours and nothing happened. Tonight, it had to work.
Firelight danced along the walls, washed out by recurrent flashes of lightning. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she pressed bare feet on the floor and held her wand tight at her lap. She would stay there and stare as long as it took. Come Monday, Barrington would expect answers, and answers she would give him.
An hour later, the clock marked eleven. One hour closer to Monday. Sera rolled her shoulders, ignoring the peals. Lightning lit up the sky, and an answering thunder rumbled. The whitish light spilled over the pictures she focused on intently. As always, the steady hush of rain and moan of the winds calmed her, carrying away all thoughts save for Barrington’s words that she replayed as a mantra in her mind.
She breathed in…
Do not force the answer.
Out…
Let it come.
In.
Do not force the answer.
Sera paused. A slow trickle of numbness rolled down her spine.
Let it come…
Upon her next breath, the seep grew to a wave of fatigue that spread to her limbs and joints. The room took to a sudden and slow spin around her, much like when she used a great deal of magic and her reserves of power dwindled. But she wasn’t using any magic. Yet she grasped at her sheets as blackness framed the edges of her sight and proved the opposite.
A loud crash resounded in her ears, that of metal hitting stone. She winced and shut her eyes at the sound that pierced her eardrums. When the echoing sound faded, she opened her eyes and gasped. The room around her was changed. Her bed was no longer a bed but rather a wooden chair. And her room was no longer her room but a dim, rounded chamber of stone.
She stood slowly, her hands clasped tight on her nightdress. In this room, gas lamps hung from hooks, and under their gilded light, the seams of the stone glittered, telling of magic. She spun in place and hesitated. There was a short hallway behind her and beyond it another chamber, only there were doors in this other room, many gated doors.
A cold chill of awareness rooted her to the ground.
“A binding-chamber spell,” she whispered, inching closer to the corridor whose stone walls glistened under a thin sheet of condensation. She pressed her fingers to her lips and recalled all she’d learned of binding-chamber spells during her Air-level courses. Abilities or memories could be locked away within a magician’s mind. Whenever the magician needed the confined ability or memory, their magic would remember where it had been bound, and with much concentration, the magician could break it. A survival mechanism, Mrs. Pewter had called it.
Once broken, the magician mentioned falling into a vision or a trancelike state where they encountered a hallway or a tunnel of gated doors—the number of doors dependent on how many memories or abilities had been locked away. An unlocked gate represented an unbound memory or ability that the magician would retrieve upon walking through the door.
Sera sucked in a breath. No wonder her powers dwindled rapidly before. To break the spell took a large amount of concentration and vast reserves of magic. Something in the photos must have made her magic believe she needed whatever memory or ability had since been unlocked. She gulped. What on earth could it be?
Taking one of the gaslights in hand, she held it before her and started down the hall. The beveled stone floor was damp beneath her bare feet, and the stark cold bit at her toes. She eyed the encircling shadows but found herself very much alone. Droplets of water echoed in the deep silence, and beyond it, nothing but the flicker of torches.
Through the arched doorway, another chamber spread before her, long and narrow and lined with gated doorways on either side as far as the eye could see. Lit torches flanked every door…except for one set a slight distance away. A strange sensation coiled at Sera’s core, an invisible reel pulling her closer to the door.
Lamp clutched tightly in her hands, she walked down the center of the hall. A cool mist roiled along the stone ground, and she shivered, her tattered nightdress no match for the damp chill. Door after door was shielded with wrought-iron gates closed with black padlocks. With each locked door she passed, her heart sank a little more. She didn’t have just one memory or ability bound, but countless. She shook her head. Why, at only eighteen, did she have so many secrets sealed within her? Surely behind one of these doors was the memory of her father and siblings. One of the gates shielded the first fifteen years of her life before she woke up on the ship with no recollection of ever boarding.
She detoured and neared one of the lit doorways. The torch fires flickered, agitated by a fierce, phantom wind. Sera let out a breath and hesitantly reached for the gate. She hissed and retracted her hand, the metal scalding.
A feral pain pulsed in her palm with each heartbeat. She turned it upward and swore. The skin there was burned, a blister already formed, surrounded by pink, inflamed skin. With the injured hand at her chest, she stumbled back from the gate. It would be impossible to open it, not until she somehow broke the spell that kept the door shut. After one last side-eye at the offending door, she focused on the only unlit doorway.
She stood before the entryway and swallowed. Shadows swathed the small, tunneled entrance. She lifted her lamp and chased away the darkness. A broken padlock was on the ground in pieces. More worrisome, the gate and door were ajar.
A shiver shook her frame, her pulse loud in her ears. This must be the spell she had broken. One sliver of memory or an ability set free. All she had to do now was walk through the door. The burn on her palm pulsed as a painful reminder, but Sera inched forward. Sidestepping the broken padlock, she stopped before the gate and held her hand over the metal. No heat radiated from it. Still, she quickly tapped the gate with a finger. Perhaps the burn muddled and numbed her senses, but no sting met her finger.
The gate groaned as she pulled it open, the hinges stiff.
She hauled in a breath and tapped the knob quickly. This too was cool. But while the metal did not burn her, Sera withdrew her hand and hesitated. She could taste her fear, an acrid thing that soured her stomach. Could hear it screaming danger in the back of her mind. What if that door had been locked for a reason, done by someone who knew its contents would hurt her? Barrington’s words assailed her next, a deep-seated worry that she herself had wondered many times. What if her family didn’t want her? What if she remembered them casting her out, cursing her existence?
That was a possibility, but she opened her palm and glanced at the singed skin. Something in Barrington’s photos brought about this experience, unwittingly caused her to break the binding spell, and led her to this door. Images of the witches flashed through her mind. She had but a burned hand. Those victims died, their whole bodies incinerated. Was it not the duty of an inspector to face trouble head-on—whatever the danger—as long as it uncovered the truth?
She lowered her hand to her side and steeled her spine. Yes, in spite of what waited on the other side of that door, the knowledge would not benefit just her but those whose lives had been cut short.
She stepped forward, clutched the doorknob, and pushed the door open. Darkness. Sera gulped.
“I will be an inspector,” she whispered to herself in prayer. “I will be an—”
She swept inside.
“Inspector.”
The vision vanished, and she was in her room once more. Sera bolted to her feet and spun in a circle. Yes, this was her room entirely. She stalked to the window and yanked the frayed curtain aside. The world outside also remained unchanged under angry sheets of rain that slammed against her window and thunder that made it shudder. She turned, and her gaze locked on the clock on the mantel. Not even a minute had passed, though it felt like she had been in the binding chamber for hours.
Leaning back against the windowsill, Sera closed her eyes and braced, gripping her wand like a lifeline. This was it. Whatever memory or ability she had unlocked in the binding-spell chamber was at her disposal now.
Years of wonder swelled her throat, but she whispered, “Father?”
She searched the darkness of her closed eyes and found nothing. Bitter pain twisted her insides.
“Sisters?” she whispered, her voice weak. “Brothers? Family?”
A moment passed.
Nothing.
The heaviness in her chest vanished, leaving a painful void. “Serves you right for getting your hopes up,” she whispered to herself. A hot tear spilled through her lashes and trickled down her cheek. “What did you think to find?”
Voices echoed far away—faint sighs that reached her as unintelligible murmurs. Throat dry, she pressed back against the wall, fear welding her eyes shut. The temperature in the room plummeted, and awareness pricked the back of her neck.
The second sight.
All seventhborns were not only burdened with a cursed birthright but with the dreaded second sight once they came into their full powers. While some were rumored to have premonitions of death, others even able to see glimpses of the dead, Sera had manifested neither. Now it all made sense why. This ability had been bound and locked away with her many, many other secrets. And now it was unbound.
A wheezing breeze whispered past and rustled her hair against her cheek. A tart, sickly sweet scent filled her nose and squeezed bile into her mouth. Sera hugged herself, arms pressed tight against her body. She knew exactly what it was that burned before her and willed herself to be brave. She had to open her eyes. Whatever it was, it couldn’t hurt her. Ghosts could cause no physical harm.
She clutched her wand tight. One…two…three.
Her eyes snapped open. A broken breath left her. Another one didn’t come. There was no one in her room, material or immaterial. Instead, a white fog, similar to that which hovered over the corpses’ mouths, curled out from the impressions on the table in the middle of the room. The pungent smoke spilled over the edge of the table in continuous waves that now blanketed the floor.
The twirls of white slithered toward her, ghostly fingers preceded by a thin sheet of rime. The ice crackled and splintered like breaking bones as it approached her. Whereas once she would have run or blasted the impressions into a pile of ash, she slid against the wall and held herself still as the smoke wound about her feet. The mist, cool and damp against her skin, shackled her leg now covered in gooseflesh. It rippled then, much like a taut string being pulled from within the impression. Understanding the ghostly summons, Sera abandoned the wall and followed the mist to its origin. Heaven help her if it was the wrong choice, but there was only one way to find out.
With each step closer, the room grew colder and the scent of scorched flesh intensified, as the whispers became clearer. Face contorted from the horrible smell, she cupped a hand over her mouth and nose and turned her ear. The myriad of voices were different, yet all were feminine and urgent and scared. Some shouted no, please don’t make me. Others cried, don’t do this. Most disturbing, beneath their cries, a collective of voices whispered the same thing: puppet.
She stopped a few inches away from the table and peered over the pictures. The smoke spilled out from each impression and into the room like fog rolling in through an open window. Her eyes narrowed. Through the thinning smoke, she noticed the scenes in the pictures were still the same, but unlike before, the impressions were now riddled with ciphers. She lowered her face to the pictures slowly, her breathing suspended in fear that one breath would blow the circular symbols away. The markings were everywhere, scattered over the dead bodies and on the ground.
Rubbing her fingers together, she reached out to shift aside a photo that partly shielded another.
A hand burst out from somewhere in the smoke and clamped down on her wrist. “Puppet!”
Sera screamed and yanked her hand free. The force sent her backward and, tangled in her nightdress, she tripped and slammed to the floor. Sharp pain pulsed at the back of her head that she hit on the leg of her bed. In spite of the ache, she scurried to retrieve her wand and clambered to her feet.
The fog was gone. So were the voices, the scent, and the cold. Around her, the floor was dry in spite of the frost that had covered it moments ago. Her wand trembling in her hand, she approached the impressions once more. The scenes within them remained immobile, from the bodies to the smoke, and the symbols were gone. She shoved one picture aside with her wand and shifted back.
Nothing.
She spun and eyed the spaces around her, from the shadows in the corners to those underneath the bed. Satisfied that the nightmare was over, she crashed down onto the chair by her reading desk, deflated. She searched for answers in her mind—things she had read, stories told to her by others—and nothing could explain the living nightmare she’d just experienced. She had not seen any ghosts; at least the hand that gripped her had not been cold nor pale, no.
Remembering it, she reached blindly for a paper and quill pen, sure to keep the image fixed in her mind. The hand had been thick and masculine. She shivered. No, that had been no ghost. None of the voices that chanted had been masculine.
She paused. And what of those voices? She jotted down Puppet and a question mark. What could they have possibly meant? She proceeded to write the ciphers from memory. It was a spell. Of that she was sure, but what kind of spell?
Breathless at the questions that seemed only to multiply, Sera wrote them all down quickly, her handwriting perhaps as bad as Barrington’s. Was this what he expected her to see? How could he have known she would see it—the smoke, the hand, the symbols? Perhaps it was another test…but if so, why could she see the symbols now but hadn’t been able to see them before? Why had her second sight been bound?
Pen tapping against the sheet, she shook her head. Questioning herself would not bring about anything but more questions. If she wanted answers, she would have to see Barrington, regardless of proprieties and the time.
She dressed quickly, gathered up the impressions, and hurried to the corner of the room. Chalk in hand, she lifted the rug and quickly drew out the transfer spell minus the time-altering symbol. With the impressions held tight at her chest, she hauled in a breath and aimed her wand.
“Ignite.”