THE STUPIDEST PART ABOUT HER fight with Jane was that Miriam wasn’t convinced she could go back at all. She was eager to know what had happened with the Hunter sisters, to the nurse, to the animals in the cages, to the results of Dr. Querner’s tests, but with her father’s devil-trap in pieces it might not be possible. And then there was the issue of her deeply wounded soul . . .
But even so, it wasn’t Jane’s place to tell her what she could and couldn’t do. And how dare Jane threaten her with exposure!
Miriam looked at the shards of her father’s bowl and felt tears in her eyes. Yet another precious thing destroyed by the war. Where would it end?
She tried to push away the anger, the pain. She entertained a wicked thought, wondering if it would be such a bad thing for the shadowed space within her to expand, fill in the gaps left by her spiritual adventures. It could contain more that way.
No. Badgerskin had been explicit that the shadow-soul was not a benign thing. It could develop its own hungers, its own will. Miriam still wasn’t sure if she believed that was possible, but she could not entirely dismiss the fear.
Regardless, it would be a disaster if Jane blabbed her suspicions to her father. Miriam would be found out, stopped, and likely expelled from the Société; additionally, they might start looking around at everything a lot more closely. Nancy’s suspicious neglect of the Library would be discovered—at this rate, her inattention would likely be grounds for an inquiry, if not her removal.
Probably Jane hadn’t thought about that. Hadn’t stopped to think about how she might bring an end to their little family.
Miriam would simply have to find a way to prevent all of this from happening in the first place. And for that, she’d need to know what Jane was up to. She needed information; something she could use as leverage.
Fortunately, there was a fairly easy solution at hand.
Smudge was always around Jane, these days more so than ever. Oh, he’d always been Jane’s cat, but recently Smudge and his mistress had been inseparable—and that was why Miriam was going to take possession of that cat to spy on her friend.
The last thing she needed was to shave off more of her spiritual body, but Miriam couldn’t think of a more effective way to spy beyond peering in at Jane’s keyhole. But of course Jane might be anywhere when she was doing whatever she did.
But Smudge would be there for it.
It irked Miriam that she had to waste a bit of what was left of her soul to try to blackmail her best friend, but she really had no choice in the matter. This was all Jane’s fault, the sanctimonious busybody. It would cost Miriam resources and time to thwart her, but thwart her she must.
How sad that it had come to this. Nancy had said she didn’t ever want her girls to compete against one another, but here they were, each doing her best to ruin the other.
A small voice in Miriam’s head objected, pointing out that Jane had no desire to ruin Miriam. Jane was quite obviously concerned for Miriam’s well-being—but there was a line, and Jane had just crossed it. Leaped over it, quite frankly, and was making herself at home on the other side.
Walking up the stairs was proving to be a bit of a challenge. Miriam was already very tired. Chasing Smudge had been too much for her in her weakened state.
Again, Jane wasn’t wrong—she just didn’t have the right to tell Miriam what to do.
Jane’s door down the hall was shut tight. Miriam tiptoed up to it and pressed her ear to the wood. She could hear nothing. Crude as it might be, Miriam did align her eye to the keyhole. Jane was sitting on her bed, back to the door. It looked like she was reading.
More importantly, Smudge was on her chair, curled up into a little gray pillow. The tip of his tail struck the seat in an uneven tattoo as he slept.
Sneaking back to her room, Miriam prepared herself to cleave to Smudge. While using the mirror required an extra step, she thought it would be wiser than loitering outside Jane’s door. So, she plucked a few stray Smudge hairs off her sweater—they were always around—and set to training her scrying glass on the cat.
The sight of her spiritual body troubled her—the site of her amputated foot looked almost infected. The remaining spiritual flesh seemed to bubble before turning to steam and drifting off.
Miriam gritted her teeth and cut into the flesh of her thigh. She dug out a sizable chunk, figuring she’d better be prepared.
But as it turned out, she wasn’t prepared—not for what happened.
Smudge came into view in the mirror, still sound asleep, though he’d shifted slightly and was now belly-up with a paw over his eyes. Evening had fallen; the shadows in the room were long. Jane had turned on a lamp and looked tired from reading. She looked up to rub at her eyes.
Miriam had taken a hearty swallow of diabolic essence; she was feeling confident as she sent her spirit Smudge-ward—
—only to be bounced back. Her detached spiritual matter smacked back into herself, hard, like a ball that had been thrown at a wall with too much force.
SHE AWOKE PARCHED AND DIZZY. All she could think of was how much she needed a glass of water, so she made her way down to the kitchen through the gloom of the darkened house. Her throat was so very dry; once it was a bit more comfortable, her mind began to work.
Smudge. The cat—improbably—was a fortress. It hadn’t felt like she’d dashed herself against an animal’s will. In fact, it had felt the same as what she’d experienced when she’d tried to cleave to Dr. Querner.
She had meant to read up on what might have caused such a bounce or snapback; she just hadn’t had the time.
Now she did. Miriam went back up to her room and dug out Badgerskin—it had shifted to the bottom of her stack of books as she’d mastered its contents—and began to page through it again. Soon enough she found what she was looking for, but she couldn’t believe the words on the page.
There are, of course, creatures who will successfully resist the cleave. Those individuals who have specifically practiced various defenses against co-occupation will be more difficult to possess; a fellow diabolist, impossible. The Pact makes a second possession all but impossible. Similarly, conjuring a demon into an animal would also result in spiritual impenetrability. Yet another reason diabolic familiars are so useful, and yet so very dangerous.
Conjuring a demon into an animal . . . Miriam couldn’t believe it. Would Jane have been so bold as to summon a familiar spirit into her own pet cat?
Of course she had. This explained so much—Smudge’s newfound fascination with his mistress; his interest in the sphere of diabolic essence. But why would Jane commit such an offense? It was the single most dangerous thing she could possibly do!
She must have a reason—she must be using him for something. If Jane had truly created a familiar, it must have been in the service of some other goal. She surely wouldn’t tell the Société that she had flaunted their most reasonable rule . . .
Miriam laughed to herself in the quiet of her room. “Astral projection,” as Jane had called Miriam’s accomplishment, might raise a few eyebrows and lead to unwanted questions. Creating a diabolic servant . . . that was truly grounds for expulsion. Or, Miriam suspected, worse.
The more she thought about it, the more shocked she was that Jane had done it—shocked, but also impressed. Doing something so dangerous, so absolutely forbidden . . . that took chutzpah, as her aunt Rivka would have said.
And a certain measure of stupidity, too. Knowing what Smudge was . . . it sent a chill through Miriam’s heart. A demon, free to roam the world and change it as it saw fit! Miriam just hoped Jane had had the sense to summon one with little interest in leaving its mark on the human world.
But even a gentle demon might change upon being offered true freedom to roam the world as it pleased. As far as Miriam understood it, summoning a familiar wasn’t like making the Pact in the usual way—the Pact was a specific contract, its language ossified, its terms boilerplate—and the resulting partnership was necessarily limited by the human capacity to endure diabolic energy.
There would be no such checks on a creature like Smudge. And no Smudge, either. When a demon took actual possession of a living creature, there was no partnership, no constantly evolving, mutually beneficial relationship of the sort that characterized diabolist/demon relations.
Miriam heard a creak from the general direction of Jane’s room. Such sounds were not unusual in an old house, but now that Miriam’s blood was up and her curiosity had been whetted, she wondered just what she’d been missing by not paying more attention to her friend.
Once again, Miriam was reduced to spying at the keyhole. What she saw there astonished her, for she had certainly not expected to catch Jane dressed in a black dress their fashionable aunt would look at twice in a shop window while climbing out her window onto a strangely chic broom that hung impossibly in the air beyond.
But that was indeed what Jane was doing.
Jane could fly!
There she was, sitting astride the broom, like an illustration of a witch out of a children’s fairy book. But of course, the illusion was not complete until Smudge jumped up beside her, from where he sat on Jane’s desk. There, after an uncannily catlike amount of fussing and spinning and getting his tail in Jane’s face, he deigned to sit between her hands. Then they were off, and Miriam lost sight of them.
Miriam spent a few moments marveling at what an exceptional diabolist Jane truly was. Criminally reckless—that, too—but a criminally reckless genius.
Then, as Miriam was poised to look away, something caught her roving eye.
Jane had left the lamp on and a candle burning—so wasteful! But more importantly, in the bright light, something dark was moving.
It slithered in from the window where Jane and Smudge had just gone out and disappeared so quickly Miriam wondered if she’d really seen it. Then it, whatever it was, reappeared by the candle.
It seemed like a shadow—but a shadow cast by nothing at all. It flickered as the candle guttered in the evening breeze, changing shape and then settling with the flame—settling into the shape of a cat.
Not just any cat, either. It was Smudge. The real cat’s features were unmistakable within the unnaturally crisp lines of the shadow-cat’s form, from the fluff of his small but impressive mane to the downward curl of his whiskers, to even the shape of his eyes—for this shadow had eyes, bright slits in the darkness where the pale pink wallpaper of Jane’s room peeped through. Even the flicking of the shadow-cat’s tail was like Smudge’s.
It was the most uncanny thing Miriam had ever seen in her life. She broke out in a cold sweat as she watched the shadow-cat lick its paw furiously a few times before standing, stretching, and peeling itself off the wall. Miriam gasped and then clapped her hand over her mouth; the shadow-cat gave no indication it had heard her. Miriam wondered if perhaps it couldn’t hear—it was still paper-thin and translucent, like a shadow; or maybe it was too absorbed in stalking a pen that lay at the center of Jane’s desk. In a moment of playful glee eerily reminiscent of a real cat, the phantom used its paw to knock the pen onto the rug below and then leapt down after it before heading for the door where Miriam yet looked on.
Having no idea how the shadow-cat would get out of the room, or where it might wish to go once it was free, Miriam scurried away from the door as quietly as she could, backwards and crab-fashion on her hands, into the upstairs bathroom. She sat there in the darkness and listened. She wondered if she’d hear anything, what with how loudly her heart was pounding, but when Jane’s door creaked open on its hinges, the noise seemed to slice into her like a knife.
Why the shadow-cat opened the door, rather than finding some other, more subtle means of egress, Miriam could not say. She only knew that when she finally worked up the courage to look around the corner of the bathroom door, she saw Jane’s was ajar—and saw, too, the tip of the shadow-cat’s tail as it went down the stairs.
It was on a mission—that was clear enough. Miriam felt torn. She wanted nothing to do with this foul thing and its errands, but she also felt uneasy about it running about unsupervised in her home.
Continuing to run about in her home. This being wasn’t exploring. It knew its way around.
Miriam slipped off her shoes to muffle her footfalls and went after it. Treading as lightly as she could on shaking legs, she padded down the stairs, pushing herself to the limits of her weakened state. Even so, she only got there in time to see the Library door easing shut with a creak that felt bone-shaking in the otherwise quiet house.
Miriam didn’t know if Nancy was still in the Library or not, but it also seemed like a bad idea for the shadow-cat to be alone in the most authoritative repository of diabolic knowledge in the world.
Miriam eased open the Library door before descending carefully into the darkness beyond. There was a light burning in the distance, but Miriam hung back in the deep shadows until she accepted that she couldn’t see anything from where she lurked, least of all a cat made of shadow.
She crept closer to where Nancy was sitting, bathed in lamplight. She was at her desk, her back straight, feet on the floor, her posture perfect. She seemed to be staring into the middle distance—odd, when she’d been unable to look up from her desk much of late. Miriam thought she might be napping until she followed Nancy’s gaze and saw a jagged puff of gray shadow perched atop her desk, its empty eyes level with hers.
It was speaking in a breathy whisper Miriam could not hear. How frustrating; she dared not draw nearer, but eventually Nancy replied.
“I know you are disappointed. I had no idea this would take so long, my lord. But I must start taking better care of this body. It is deteriorating. The amount of diabolic essence I must consume in order to obey your will would stress anyone’s system. Please be reasonable, my lord. It upsets my stomach too much to eat, and then no sleep—”
Nancy stopped and stared intently at the shadow-cat on her desk, nodding occasionally.
“Lord Indigator,” she said after a moment, “you have demanded my obedience, and that of my demon, but because of your demands upon us, I am dying. I must rest more, I must eat more, I must consume less diabolic essence, I must have more lucid time with my children. They have noticed my . . . absence. Soon that absence will be permanent, as is your wont, but if you desire this body for your own, what good is it to you if it is damaged beyond repair?”
Listening to this conversation was like a nightmare, it just kept getting worse. And yet she had to listen—carefully, so she had a better chance to remember everything later.
She’d already learned who had been draining Nancy’s stores of diabolic essence—it had been Nancy! Miriam might learn much if she kept eavesdropping . . .
“You are already taking a substantial risk with my flesh. Commanding my demon to dissolve my spirit will enable your eventual occupation of this body,” said Nancy, after a few moments spent listening to the cat. “But we know what happens to bodies separated from their souls. If you would dwell permanently within this flesh, you must take care of it.” She paused, then nodded. “Yes, my lord,” she said. “I understand.”
Nancy’s soul—dissolved so that a demon could occupy her flesh instead! The Pact was supposed to prevent such things. It was supposed to prevent the possibility of them! But Jane’s familiar seemed able to circumvent the foundational premise of human-demon relations.
It was horrifying to contemplate . . . doubly so for Miriam, who had done something similar, and many times. At least, sort of. She’d had her reasons . . . but this demon also surely felt so, too.
At least she’d never intended to do it permanently.
Miriam didn’t think confronting the shadow-cat was a good idea, not when she knew so little about it—but she could confront Jane. Surely Jane could have no idea her familiar was operating in this way in her absence. She and Nancy had their differences, but this was beyond the pale. To permanently steal another’s body . . . such an act had been treated with the utmost horror in Badgerskin and all the other texts Miriam had read on the subject. And not only was it despicable, it was incredibly difficult diablerie, with the highest of costs on both sides.
As she’d learned what seemed like so long ago, there were only two ways to go about taking over someone else’s body. One could employ Miriam’s method of sticking to someone, dybbuk-like, and overpowering their will . . . or one could essentially hollow someone out to get inside—and stay inside. It was intended to be a more permanent sort of thing.
Miriam had borrowed bodies, but she’d never stolen one . . .
She eased herself out of the Library as silently as she could and headed up the stairs to wait for Jane. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing. It was not lost on her that it needed a host with space inside their spirit for someone else—and that’s just what she’d done to herself.