Chapter 17 - Unhappy Revelations

Olivia stared down at the mass of scattered papers that made up her notes. They covered the small table completely and overlapped each other. There was so much information. So many diagrams. Two papers had to be kept separate because they contained the two halves of a spell circle. Theoretically, they’d been drawn without power and should’ve been safe, but Olivia used illustrations in her spellwork enough that it made her nervous having them too close together.

She dropped the pen she’d been using, put both her elbows on the table over her notes, and rested her aching head on the tips of all ten fingers.

She heard a faint “huh,” coming from across the table. It was the sound of a muffled, condescending laugh. She didn’t bother looking up. She could picture Northrop’s smirk without having to see it again.

Darius crept up to her side and put a cup of coffee down by her elbow. He returned to his chair on the side of the table between Northrop and Olivia.

Olivia picked up the Styrofoam cup and sipped. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted like it had come out of a cardboard box. Her bleary mind pointed out, in a vague, uninterested way, that it probably had.

“Did you get all that, Miss Witch?” Northrop asked.

Olivia lifted her head enough to glare at the sorcerer. “You know I didn’t.”

“Never mind,” Big Jacky said.

He was standing at the edge of the tent. Whenever he got tired of pacing, he’d stop and look toward the hole outside where the mansion used to be, as if he could see it through the canvas wall. He’d been in one of his staring moods when he spoke.

He turned to the table. “Northrop has thrown on you, in a matter of hours, what probably took years for him to develop. You do not have to understand it all to help us.”

Northrop said, “He probably prefers that you don’t understand it all. I’ve heard that some of this stuff can get you in trouble with the Torr.”

“Do you have everything you need to get started?” Big Jacky asked.

“Get started on what?” Olivia said.

“Numbers. We need you to check the numbers. The magic involved is over one hundred years old, even assuming perfect preservation, that kind of timespan would have an effect—”

“Not necessarily,” Olivia muttered.

She sipped her coffee again, but when the silence stretched on, she looked up at her master. Big Jacky was watching her.

“Please explain,” he said.

Olivia put her coffee on the ground rather than risk getting a brown ring on her notes.

She said, “There are too many factors, Mr. Noctis. It depends on the type of magic used, the kind of spell that it was set in, what bound it, how much energy would be needed to watch for the trigger—”

“And do you have all that information?” Jacky asked.

“Yes, but”—Olivia’s voice dropped into a whisper—“we’re talking about dimensions. I don’t know anything about them, and it’s illegal for me to do research.”

“The scaffold and its limits should belong to the territory within it. You can ignore the dimensions. For now.”

“Can I?” Olivia turned her head to look at Northrop. “Is it safe to ignore that factor?”

The sorcerer shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“You built the damn spell!”

“Yes, but I hadn’t tested it. It was supposed to be a safeguard.”

“A safeguard,” Darius repeated quietly.

Stolen novel; please report.

Everyone in the tent looked at the vampire.

Darius was holding up his half-empty coffee cup and idly rotating it. He seemed absorbed in watching the infinite shifting of the top rim. Since the lines, the light, and the shadows never changed, the only way you could tell it was moving was by the small imperfections in the foam.

“That’s such an interesting word,” Darius said. “You’ve used it at least four times now. Sauf-gard. Iset isn’t here to correct me, but I believe it comes from an Old French term. Something that offers security. Something that protects.” He paused. “This really is god-awful coffee.”

He put the cup to his lips, swallowed the last of the drink in two gulps, made a face, then put the empty cup on the ground beside him. When that was done, he looked up at Northrop.

“Most people today would use the term ‘fail-safe,’” he said.

“I’ve never heard the term,” Northrop said.

“That doesn’t surprise me. It was created in the mid-1940s. The nuances of it are fascinating. By its most literal understanding, it should mean something that’s safe against failure, but most people don’t use it like that.”

“What surprises me,” Northrop interjected, “is that we’re actually wasting time listening to you expound on your etymological interests.”

Darius went on as if the sorcerer hadn’t spoken. “Most people use the word ‘fail-safe’ to refer to some kind of measure taken to stop the worst from happening. When everything goes wrong, the fail-safe will protect us.”

Northrop leaned back in his chair. He laced his fingers together—a delicate task he undertook with great care—then he let his joined hands rest in his lap.

Darius watched the whole process and noted how the corpse’s lips were pressed together.

The vampire suddenly scooted his chair closer to the table. “Something’s been bothering me, Mr. Northrop.”

“What’s that?” Northrop’s voice was supposed to be relaxed, but the words came out clipped.

“Why did you set up this fail-safe?”

“I called it a safeguard.”

“Do the words matter? They mean the same thing, don’t they?”

“I won’t admit that.”

“Safeguard, then. Why did you set up this dimension-crossing safeguard?”

Northrop broke away from the staring contest to gaze at his hands.

“If it was to protect yourself from the Torr,” Darius said, “you would’ve only had to move yourself, or, maybe, the mansion. Why did you go through the trouble of setting the spell over such a large piece of ground?”

Northrop said nothing.

“Are you refusing to answer?” Darius asked.

“I’m trying to think how to answer.” Northrop looked up. His brow was drawn down in a scowl. “It’s impossible for me to intuit what you do and don’t already know.”

“Why would you assume we know anything?”

“Because it would seem odd to me that the Torr would murder a man for faking his own death! Perhaps I wanted to get away from my controlling mother! I’m sure there are one or two torrmen who would sympathize.”

Big Jacky’s voice broke over the conversation. “You know why you were pursued.”

“Reanimating the dead. Yes. So you’ve told me—a hundred years after you killed me for it.” Northrop added in a grumble, “When a man gets murdered, he likes to know why.”

Olivia waved her arms in front of her chest. “Wait. Stop. Are you telling me that you weren’t in trouble because of this”—she dropped her hands on top of her notes—“this dimensional stuff?”

“Apparently not,” Northrop said. He lifted his hand and, with a small flourish, flipped it over, motioning to Darius and, behind him, Jack Noctis. “The Torr seemed to have no idea that the spell was there.”

He returned his hand to his lap.

“But they couldn’t have condemned you for reanimating your own body,” Olivia said. “You weren’t dead yet.”

Northrop frowned. It was a tight expression. Sour. He was staring at his hands again. He flexed a few of his fingers and watched them move. Olivia realized they were the fingers where the flesh had sloughed off the bone. He was watching the tiny tips of his bones shift.

“I did reanimate others,” he admitted.

“In England?” Darius asked.

“In America,” Big Jacky said. He walked over to stand by the table next to Olivia’s chair. “He developed the theory while he was in England. He came to America to experiment.”

“Then you do know,” Northrop said.

“If you’re referring to the crypts, I know of them.”

“What crypts?” Olivia demanded.

Big Jacky explained, “Mr. Northrop had mass graves on his property where he disposed of his experiments. Many of them still had partially intact enchantments on them.”

Northrop’s head jerked up. “Partially intact? They had failed?”

Olivia was dimly aware that something about Northrop’s tone made her uneasy. There was too much interest. It almost sounded like hope.

“We didn’t test them to see if they could be raised,” Jacky said.

Darius asked, “How many bodies are we talking about?”

Once again, it was Big Jacky who answered: “At least twelve in each crypt.”

At first, Darius didn’t move. There was something terrible about his stillness. Then he lowered his head in a single nod and turned to look at Northrop. “You’re a goddamn ghoul.”

The hairs on Olivia’s neck rose. She glanced at the vampire. He was staring at Northrop. His face was mostly calm, mostly neutral—but there was tension in his jaw and a roiling fury in his eyes.

Northrop took a slow breath in. “Yes. A ghoul. Fine. Name-calling, but—fine.” He raised his eyes in stages to look at Jack Noctis; they landed first on the center of the table, then the far corner of the table, then, at last, on Jack Noctis’s face. “How many crypts did you find?”

“Two.”

“I see,” Northrop murmured. He raised his voice to ask, “Is that two crypts or two rows?”

Jacky put his hands on the table and leaned toward Northrop. “What do you mean, rows?”