“It doesn’t. Ironically, after the child was born, she felt honor-bound to confess all to her husband. He forgave her . . . but he did not forgo vengeance.”
Aha. Now everything makes sense.
“So you’re stuck here because your former lover cleared her conscience at your expense,” Shannon summarized.
“Not as I would have put it, perhaps, but yes.”
“What are the specifics of the curse?” I turned my thoughts to practical matters, as I imagined he wanted help in destroying the spell. At this point, I wasn’t sure why that would bring about his death, but I needed information.
“Yeah, what is this place?” Shan added.
“It is the country cottage my father purchased just before the war, where I retreated to lick my wounds after Marlena refused me. It’s also where Donal Macleish confronted me for my sins against him. We . . . fought. I had some mad idea of making her a widow, claiming the child as my own.”
“You lost.” From the state of the house, that much was obvious.
“Yes. The result was the isolation you behold. He set the spell so I could never interfere in another marriage, never touch another woman.”
“But how?” Shannon demanded.
“This place is . . . between,” Booke explained. “Slightly out of step with the real world. Impossible for me to leave, impossible for anyone else to get in.”
“In time or space?” I asked, trying to understand the challenge we faced.
“Both,” he answered, “so far as I can tell. The spell does not respond well to any attempt to meddle with it. Or at least, it didn’t for many years. In the past six months, however, I’ve noticed a decay in its potency.”
I nodded. “No spell can remain intact forever.”
“Not unless it’s tied to a permanent power source.” Booke gestured. “But there are no ley lines here, no pocket of crystals in the earth. Macleish was a powerful practitioner, but he has been dead and buried these many years. His casting wanes.”
Shannon frowned. “But that’s good, right? I mean, you’ll get out soon.”
His expression twisted with melancholy. “Dear Shannon, I was thirty-six when Macleish confined me here. Do the math, my girl.”
I could tell Shan was crunching numbers by the way she looked upward and to the left, chewing on her lower lip. The truth dawned on her around the same time I worked it out. He looked sixty or sixty-five, tops. But he’d been trapped in this cottage, counting the solitary years until it was a wonder he hadn’t gone mad.
“You’re one hundred and two,” she breathed. “How is that possible?”
Booke explained, “Time passes at a one for two ratio here. I suspect that’s part of the curse, ensuring I live long enough to despise my own company.”
I considered. “So one day here is two out there?”
“Did Macleish send you to fairyland or something? This is like what happened to that Thomas the Rhymer guy.”
He mustered a smile for Shan’s wit. “It wouldn’t surprise me if a similar spell inspired the original tale.”
“So the curse is crumbling, which means you’ll die when you rejoin the normal time stream. All the years will catch up to you at once.” I thought I understood what he wanted of us now.
Booke shrugged. “It may not be instantaneous, but certainly my days are numbered once the magick fails.”
“You want us to fix the spell?” Shannon asked.
He shook his head, fingers lacing tightly around the bone handle of his teacup. His knuckles burned white. “I want you to crack it. I’ve had enough waiting. I’m beyond tired, and I’m ready for it to end. I am selfish enough, however, that I do not wish to die alone. I don’t want to be an undiscovered skeleton in an abandoned house. I want a proper burial . . . and I trust you to see to it.”
The request hit me like a brick upside the head. His timing couldn’t have been worse; I’d just lost Chance. I wasn’t strong enough to do this for him. My first instinct was to run for the door, but I couldn’t get out, unless I cracked the spell. He didn’t seem strong enough to tweak the parameters just yet, even if I thought he would be inclined to do so.
Shannon set a hand on my arm, soothing. “This sucks,” she said to him. “You’ve hardly lived at all, unless you count those thirty-odd years as a pleasure-seeking asshat.”
“My son died,” he said quietly. “He was only eighteen. His mother wasn’t strong after his birth, and she wasted away. Macleish was alone within a few years of wreaking his vengeance.”
I guessed he’d found out via Internet searches. At this point, I just had to ask. “How do you—”
“Acquire food and modern conveniences?”
Shan looked like she wanted to know too.
“I made a deal with a minor devil. He can’t cross the spell barrier, but he can deliver items inside the house itself. It is easier for me to tweak the spell in order to permit inanimate objects to cross over.”
That was rather elegant, actually.
Shan asked, “You couldn’t summon anything strong enough to break the curse?”
“I have no Solomon blood. Without that surety, it’s dangerous to deal with demonkind. Anything strong enough to smash the magick would also be powerful enough to destroy me or compel me to a situation more dire than this.”
Her face darkened as she remembered her experiences in Sheol; then she gave a jerky nod. Things could always get worse. I respected Booke’s forbearance, since I might well have summoned something just to see an end to the interminable waiting.
I wondered aloud, “Did Macleish think you would starve to death?”
“The magick is sufficient to keep me alive, but I was weak and emaciated when I stumbled over a tome that offered me the name of a bargaining devil.”
“The Birsael,” I supplied. “There are castes of demons.”
Interesting to realize he owed his relative health and safety to a demon like Maury. But my knowledge surprised him. Booke studied me, alert for the first time since our arrival.
“You went to Sheol.” Certainty rang in his plummy voice, no less beautiful for his age. “That’s why I couldn’t raise you in any fashion.”
I nodded. My eyes burned with tears, just from that reference. For a few precious moments, I’d forgotten, absorbed in his troubles, but mine came tumbling down on me like an avalanche. The fact that he wanted me to stand his death watch and handle the funeral arrangements? Inexpressibly painful.
“She went to save me,” Shan said soberly.
Booke’s astute gaze flickered between us, making educated deductions about why our faces already held a funereal cast. “Chance was with you in Mexico, last I heard. Where is he now?”
My throat hurt so badly; I sipped my tea, but it didn’t help. Still, anything to delay saying the words. In the end, Shan said them for me.
“Chance didn’t make it.”
No. He promised me. He said, Even death can’t keep me from you. It was madness to believe those words, but they were all I had.
“It’s late,” Booke said, seeming to recognize my inability to function. “Perhaps we can continue in the morning?”
That would be four days in the real world. I couldn’t bring myself to care.
He went on, “Things will look brighter then, I’m sure.”
Falling Action
Sleep came in the shape of familiar nightmares.
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d watched Chance die over the past week. To make matters worse, I had to live with the fact that my choices had led me to that dead-end road. I saw Chance’s face; in my sleep, the knife pierced his chest again and again. His blood spilled down the stone ledge, opening a gate for us.
All along, I intended to die, if that was necessary to save Shannon. But it didn’t work out that way. Sometimes no matter how hard you tried there was no good outcome. I would’ve paid any price to see Shannon safe . . . I just didn’t realize it would come down to a choice between my best friend and the man I loved. In all likelihood, I should’ve seen it coming. A trip to Sheol wasn’t a walk in the park—and you didn’t return without dire consequences.
It was still dark when I gave up on sleep. The ticking clock hanging on the wall in the kitchen read 4:45 a.m. Soon, the dawn colors would light the sky; or at least, in the real world, they would. I didn’t know how day and night worked in this tiny pocket universe Donal Macleish had created with a curse.
I wasn’t entirely surprised when I found Booke already awake. He didn’t bear the appearance of a well-rested man. “Are you feeling better, Corine?”
That was so like him. He was the one dying of a slow, evil spell . . . and yet he worried about my state of mind. I didn’t see how I could fail to do as he wished, provided I possessed the means. Afterward . . . well, I couldn’t consider the necessary civil responsibilities. How would I even explain his existence? As far as the authorities knew, Ian Booke vanished in 1947. It would be difficult to explain how he’d turned up seventy-some years later, looking fifty years younger than he was.
“Not really,” I admitted. “But we’re here to focus on your problems.”
My issues weren’t just emotional, however. That morning, it was all I could to do keep last night’s sandwich in my stomach. The nausea I’d blamed on the train stirred again, growing sharper with each movement. I tried to cover how bad I was feeling, but Booke had sharp eyes, despite his age. He leveled a direct stare on me.
“Mine will keep,” he returned quietly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Now I understood why he had been so enthralled by the idea of traveling the world via my dreams. If he hadn’t gone anywhere before the curse hit, then he’d never seen anything but the U.K. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in the same small house for so many years—and likely it had been at least fifty before he got on the Internet . . . and acquired a social life that way.