Brightly (Flicker #2) (16 page)

Opening the door, Lee called, a bit hesitantly, “Olivia?”

When there was no answer, she stepped inside and gently shut the door behind her.

The living room was dark, the curtains drawn and the lights off. She glanced around for a light switch, but finding none, she pulled out her flashlight. She cast its green light around the room slowly, searching for movement.

Framed photos hung on one wall, each showing a different moment: bridesmaids at a wedding, all wearing matching lilac dresses; a smiling family gathered in front of a Christmas tree; four women at Pike Place Market in Seattle, their arms around one another. Lee scanned the photos, noticing the pretty, dark-haired woman who appeared in each one. Olivia Freeman.

“Olivia?” she called again. “My name is Lee. I’m one of the people Clementine, Davis and Henry brought to the island. I’m here to make sure you’re all right.”

The house remained silent. Lee entered the kitchen.

Olivia Freeman stood before the glass-paneled back door, half-turned toward Lee. She looked to be in her thirties. In the moonlight, her eyes were unnaturally bright, brown flecked with gold. Her skin was pallid, with a greenish tinge that made her look ill. Rough barnacles climbed across her collarbones and up her throat, covering one side of her face. More spiraled down her thin arms and over the backs of her hands.

She didn’t look human. Not anymore.

For a moment, they stared at each other. Olivia’s breathing, a light rasp, was the only sound. Her gaze was empty, not really seeing anything. Lee recognized that look. It was the look of a human completely and utterly in faerie thrall.

Lee tried anyway, taking a slow step forward. “Olivia. My name is Lee. I—”

But Olivia turned away. Her hand curled around the door knob; the door must’ve accidentally been left unlocked, because Olivia was able to open it.

Instinctively, Lee lurched forward, prepared to grab Olivia and pull her back into the house—but when the dark-haired woman moved to cross the threshold, she stopped.

Olivia raised her hands, pressing them against the empty air. The runes carved along the inside of the doorway glowed green, pulsing softly but steadily, like little hearts. She couldn’t pass over the threshold. She couldn’t leave the house.

Watching Olivia start to beat her hands against the invisible barrier made Lee’s chest ache. Not so long ago, this was Lee: enthralled, a slave to faerie music and faerie magic. She would’ve dragged herself through broken glass to follow the sound of the revel music and grinned all the while.

She wanted to do something more for this woman. But what else was there? She could drag her into the bedroom and tie her down, but that seemed more traumatic than helpful. Right now, sealing her in this house so she couldn’t walk into the sea was the best Lee could offer. She hated that it wasn’t enough.

Olivia didn’t seem to notice that Lee was still here. The music had pulled her under. She would be gone with it until morning, or maybe longer. There was nothing more Lee could do.

Blinking against the sudden burning in her eyes, Lee left Olivia Freeman’s house. When she stood on the beach again, the merfolk were still singing.

Chapter Nine:

When Lee found Nasser, he was vomiting into the bushes behind the cottage.

The only thing that stopped her from going to him was the knowledge that he would hate for her to see him like this. Surely he’d retreated this far, to the woods behind the house instead of to the bathroom just down the hall from where they were preparing the purification circle, to avoid anyone seeing or hearing him. The only thing he loathed more than being sick was other people knowing it.

Lee grimaced as she turned away, trying to give him some measure of privacy as he finished coughing and spitting. At last, the sounds of him being sick stopped, though she could hear him breathing hard.

She watched Nasser straighten slowly, one hand braced against a nearby tree. Then he stiffened and whipped his head around to look at her.

For the first time in a long while, he looked surprised to see her. She’d never been able to sneak up on him before. Maybe he’d been too distracted to sense her presence as he normally did. He was pale and drawn, despite the heat, and his face was covered in a sheen of sweat.

“You looked sick when you ran out of the house like that,” Lee explained, so he didn’t have to ask. “And when you didn’t come back, I just thought…”

“Right,” he said, nodding, but his neck was turning red the way it did when he was embarrassed. “Of course.”

“
Are
you sick?”

Scrubbing one hand over his face, he said, “No. It’s the curse magic. Being in the house was making me nauseous, that’s all. It’ll pass.”

Lee shook her head as she approached him. “You should’ve said something.”

“You needed a hand with the circle,” he said, shrugging. “You still do.”

“We’re just about finished anyway. We can cast the spell ourselves.”

He pressed his mouth into a thin line. “I’m not incapacitated, you know.”

Maybe not. But he was still unusually pale and she could see the tension in his posture, like holding himself upright was an effort. Whatever the curse magic did to him, it hadn’t worn off yet. He just wouldn’t admit it.

“You just finished puking into the bushes,” she said, as kindly as she could. “You don’t need to wear yourself out any more.”

“Look, I’m not—”

She raised her hands, palms toward him. “We can take care of the rest,” she said firmly. “Let me walk you back to Brightly. Then I’ll come back here and finish up with the others.”

At first, she thought he would protest again. But he only shook his head and said, “I can walk back myself.”

“I don’t know if you should.”

“It’s a short walk,” he said dryly. “I’m pretty sure I can handle it.”

She knew him well enough to know he was trying to salvage some dignity. “We won’t be much longer anyway,” she told him. “I’ll see you at Brightly in a little while.”

He smiled tightly and she forced herself to step backward, to watch him walk toward the path that led back to Brightly. She stared at his shoulders until he was out of sight and there was nothing to do but return to the cottage.

In the living room, Jason was sketching a few final runes around the window, while Alice carefully inspected the purification circle they’d laid. For this spell to work, Alice had explained, every window and door, every point of transition, needed to be sealed with runes to properly direct the flow of magic through the house. She didn’t see Clementine and Davis; they must’ve been finishing up elsewhere.

On the floor was a large chalk-and-salt circle, split into quarters by two straight lines of salt and ringed with strings of delicately-drawn runes. A candle sat at the end of each line—one north, one south, one east and one west—and a final candle was placed in the center of the circle where the lines intersected.

“How’s it coming?” Lee asked.

“We’re just about ready,” Jason said, turning to her. “Where’s Nasser?”

She lowered her voice. “He’s not feeling so good. The curse energy is making him sick.”

Understanding spread over Jason’s features. He knew the price Nasser paid for his sensitivity far better than she did. For years, he’d seen what it did to his brother: the blinding headaches, the dizziness in crowds, the seizures. “Is he all right?”

“As far as I could tell. I think he was mostly just nauseous. I sent him back to Brightly.”

Alice looked up from the candle she was carefully repositioning. “By himself?”

“I wanted to walk him back,” Lee said, “but he insisted on going by himself. You know how he is.”

“Yeah, I know.” Jason sighed and shook his head. “Let’s just get this done so we can make sure he didn’t pass out on the side of the path somewhere.”

A moment later, Davis and Clementine trotted down the stairs and into the living room. They each held a stubby piece of chalk.

“Everything’s sealed and closed,” Clementine said. “Are we ready?”

“Just one more thing,” Alice said, standing and wiping her chalk-dusted hands on her shorts. She went to the windows on the other side of the room and hauled the curtains shut. She looked over her shoulder at them. “You might want to stand back a little.”

The four of them retreated to the kitchen doorway, watching Alice pace around the circle, counterclockwise. She pulled a folding knife from her belt and slashed a shallow line across her palm, letting the dark red blood roll down her fingers and spatter the top of each candle.

One of Lee’s first real magic lessons had been about sacrifice. Months ago, Filo had explained that, while most spells could be cast using only magic and runes to channel that power, more complicated spells required sacrifice, something of the spell caster to strengthen the magic: hair, flesh, teeth, blood. The bigger the spell, the greater the sacrifice needed to fuel it. Hair was the weakest fuel, but a skilled spell caster could work wonders with it. Teeth and flesh were infused with massive amounts of power, but they came at a heavy cost. Lee couldn’t imagine a spell that would be worth ripping out one of her own teeth or cutting a chunk out of her arm.

In most cases, it was easiest to pay in blood. Drawing blood was painful, but cuts healed and blood was replaced faster than hair or teeth. Better yet, not much was needed to satisfy most spells, as even a few drops of hot blood brimmed with magic. Even older blood, cold blood, was a powerful fuel.

Alice paced another counterclockwise circle. She tapped each candle wick with her fingertip and a spark sprang up, burning bright white. The salt that touched the base of the center candle flared brightly enough to sting Lee’s eyes, each line of salt burning like a fuse, until the entire circle glowed like the white-hot heart of a firework. Magic crackled and hissed. Lee felt pressure building in the air, enough to make her ears pop and her eyes water.

At last, the pressure released: a pulse of energy blooming from circle, powerful enough that they all stumbled. When Lee squeezed her eyes shut against the brilliance, she could feel the circle’s rhythm all around her, white-hot rings of energy rolling outward.

Chills broke out over Lee’s body as magic washed across the floor, making the soles of her feet tingle with pins and needles. All around her, the air was hot and electric as the magic did its work. It flowed out from the circle, guided by the runes they’d drawn all over the house, sinking into the bones of the house as it burned out the curse.

The circle’s pulsing slowed, and finally stopped beating. Lee peeled her eyes open as Alice pulled the curtains back, flooding the room with sunlight. The purification circle was shriveled, the salt burned black and the candles melted into puddles of wax. The runes drawn around the inside of the door and windows were darkened, as though burned into the wood.

“Well,” Alice said, surveying the room. “That’s one down.” She looked to Clementine. “Which house is next?”

The rest of the week passed at a dreamlike pace, both fast and slow, the island shimmering green and gold under the waves of heat and the merfolk singing in the dark.

Every morning, Lee and the others checked the cottages along Gilbert Beach, reinforcing the threshold spells that the nearby salt water eroded. Pricking her thumbs and smearing her blood on the runes became weirdly routine. When the spells were strengthened, they spent the rest of the morning purging houses of curse magic.

Lee’s afternoons were spent in the Brightly house, elbows-deep in books. Clementine, Davis and Henry had gone through most of this material before they ever came to Flicker, but that was before they’d realized a curse was ravaging the island, not an illness. A fresh set of eyes couldn’t hurt—and besides, Lee needed something practical to do after she’d finished with the runes, a way to keep her hands busy.

Most of the books in the Brightly collection were concerned with faeries that lived around the San Juans, creatures of the waters and the mountains that were referenced only in passing in the books back at Flicker, if they were mentioned at all.

Noticing her interest, Henry showed her a trunk filled with old journals—the handwritten research notes and sketches of several generations of Brightlys. Detailed sketches leapt off the pages: autumn-colored dryads dancing among the trees; black-eyed selkie women standing on the beach, their dark hair dripping and sealskins draped around their shoulders; pixies flitting around in vegetable gardens.

One sketch in particular struck her: a teenage girl with a long, golden braid kneeling on the edge of a dock, her gaze locked with that of a pale green mermaid that watched her curiously from the water. It was surreal, an image plucked from a fairy tale. Lee recognized the location as Nemo Cove. A note in the lower corner of the page read:
Lydia and mermaid. August 19, 1952.

Among the journals, Lee found several photo albums and a shoebox filled with loose photos: vintage black-and-white shots, washed-out Polaroids, pictures taken with disposable cameras. Some were labeled with names and dates, but many were not, turning the collection of images into a story told out of order, where the mundane and the fantastic blurred together.