Helena
I have to make it quick, I thought, as Graham drove down a small country road and I knew we must be getting close. If this was anything like the last house, Byron couldn’t help me. I would have to find the map hidden inside Greenwood House on my own.
This was certainly the craziest thing I’d ever done, considering I still didn’t know what the maps would do once we collected them. We had one, which I carried with me on the plane, along with the spell books that told the story of the treasure—in a lost magical trade language called Cyprium. Stupid lost languages. So inconvenient.
Despite some words similar to Middle English and other magical tongues, I had made little progress in translating them. Together, the three maps, each shaped like a triangle of stone—formed “Pandora’s Box”. I assumed Pandora’s Box did something very destructive, and I had no idea what we would do with it once we put it together. I just knew that I had something incredibly powerful on my hands, something Byron desperately wanted me to find.
As we turned the bend, a house came into view behind some clusters of trees.
“There it is,” Graham said.
“Oh…shit.”
He hardly had to tell me that this was Greenwood Manor. The road led right to it, circling its impressive facade, but otherwise leading nowhere but here.
The manor was a huge, crumbling structure with white columns supporting an expansive porch and curving exterior stairs leading up to an equally large balcony, while the roof sloped dramatically from a widow’s walk flanked by two small dormer windows. All of it was frilled with lacy trim that showed a heavy French influence. Normally I saw this style of houses with the classical columns painted white.
If this house could speak, it would tell me it was no basic bitch. The house was pink, with gold window frames and a regal blue in the trim work. It was charming in the way that an old house can pull off some bold ideas, but I had a dim thought in my mind that it was also verging on tacky.
The house was fronted by a garden of what had once been orderly, boxy hedges. They were overgrown now, of course. It was surrounded by out buildings. The servants had their own humbler dwelling, that was still larger than many houses I had flipped in the past. The servant house was falling into complete ruin, the porches sagging, a hole in the roof.
Greenwood Manor itself was like a washed up old Hollywood actress. All that crazy pink paint was peeling. The trim was rotting in spots. The only bright side was that it looked structurally sound from here. Old houses were built out of strong stuff; they could take more punishment than you might think at first as long as the owners kept the roof in good repair and didn’t let any pests take hold.
“The roof looks okay,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s about all I can say about this place,” Graham said. “I peeked in the windows earlier.”
I had to admit, I was a little speechless. Taking on a place like this was not a one-woman task, no matter how determined the woman was.
Now I was absolutely certain Billie bought it for other reasons.
“Yeah, I can see your face slowly absorbing the experience.” Graham patted my shoulder. “Well, cheer up. At least you didn’t buy it.”
“Yeah. Let’s hurry and get the thing.”
I hopped out of the car and I could tell the air was a little cooler here than in the city, almost eerily so. The air was swampy compared to Pennsylvania, but luckily it was autumn. No way that house had air conditioning. Southern architecture only went so far with the high ceilings and breezeways to beat the heat.
We walked up a few steps to the doors, double doors with a fan pattern set in the wood that reminded me of a palmetto leaf.
“Byron!” I called. “We’re here! Are you able to let us in?”
No answer. Graham looked out over the garden. The porch was elevated enough to give a broad view of the maze-like hedge pattern. “Quiet out here,” he said, and his hand moved to the small of my back, a light but protective touch. He sensed the magic here. Having someone around who wanted to protect me was unexpected and nice.
“Very quiet…” I didn’t want to think about why. When you were dealing with magic, quiet and cool were not what you wanted. Quiet meant the animals had cleared out. Ghosts tended to cool things down, but since Byron wasn’t answering…well, there were other types of spirits. I was definitely on my guard as I took out my wand to tap the door handle and try the lock.
As soon as the wooden tip met the brass knob, a horrific screech emerged and I jumped back with a shriek of surprise.
Two rather twisted-looking spirits poured out of the keyhole, taking on form as they escaped. Both grew to size of men, and they floated, still letting out horrible endless screeches. They had the substance of multiple layers of cobwebs and faces that were barely a suggestion of eyes, nose and mouth. One of them swept toward me and the other toward Graham.
“Graham!” I cried. Graham wasn’t ready for this kind of attack.
“Shit!” He ran down the length of the porch and the thing was on his back the whole time. I saw him trying to fend it off with his hands but they had no solid form.
“Graham, don’t run away where I can’t—eek!” Okay, I had my own ghoul to deal with. It had run its body through me and I felt like I’d been plunged into an ice bath. I was left shivering, gripping my wand tight as I tried to chatter out a spell.
“Chaleur, chaleur,” I said, desperately trying to warm myself up. I had some experience with the warmth spell from working on old houses on cold winter days. I tried a fire spell to the usual pathetic effect.
The ghoul swept toward me and became solid just as it slammed into me. My back hit the wide planks of the porch, the wind knocked out of me.
Fuck. I tried not to panic. It was just a passing ghoul, I was pretty sure. Sometimes when a person died, random spirits blew in to feed on remnants of magic left behind. They were just the vultures of the magical world. Another pest like the paper imps in the last house. I was used to this sort of thing, but I didn’t enjoy it. Who would? One minute you were scoping out a house and the next moment a ghoul was swirling around you cackling with glee.
“Little witch, stay down, down, down on the ground…,” it chanted, and now when I tried to get up, my limbs stuck to the floor. Oh, yes, and ghouls also love poems.
I heard Graham roar like he was in a serious fight around the corner of the porch and I twisted, trying to loosen up the spell.
“Let me go!” I demanded with all my will. “I have to move! Ungh—” I twisted again and broke free, nearly tripping on my own feet in my attempt to get to Graham.
The ghoul tried to block my passage, swooping toward me. “Think you’re clever, do you? Well, I can see right—”
I blasted the ghoul in the face, getting a good hit in that time. It evaporated before my eyes.
Bevan swept down in front of me, his bat wings flapping so close to my face that I had to stop. “Helena,” he said. “I need to tell you—this house—”
“Uh-huh?” I knew Bevan wouldn’t appear if it wasn’t important, because he was an old-school familiar who didn’t come unless I called him, and would then chastise me for calling him too often.
“It’s almost a parallel.”
“Almost?”
“There’s a hole in the fabric between worlds just waiting to—”
Suddenly Graham flew forward across the porch with his hands wrapped around the ghoul as he strangled it, while demon wings had torn through his dress shirt and I could see the outline of his tail trapped down the leg of his pants. Damn, I didn’t need any more fantasies about the things these men had in their pants. I could also see that the ghoul had scraped his face, drawing lines of blood across the bridge of his nose and forehead, and even worse—the color of his skin was turning bluish. He’d been hit with the ghoul’s chill. His eyes glowed as he let out a final grunt of anger and the ghoul dissipated.
“Tear,” Bevan finished.
“I see.”