own ruined abbey, and that he possessed little that could harm them and nothing they needed. While he might have run off to alert Lady Harriett to their presence, taking the time to search for him would be a self-defeating effort. In short, their first priority was flight. Byron was a problem that would wait for a more opportune moment.
Lucy held out her hand to Mary. “We might be separated. I must have what is mine.”
With no more hesitation than a few rapid blinks, Mary handed the final pages to Lucy. They felt as heavy as iron in her hands, as alive as a beating heart, as vital as a bolt of lightning. She did not even look at them except long enough to see the telltale signs of Mr. Blake’s designs. They felt so powerful, they frightened her, and they seemed to be gathering power, quickening in her grasp, urging her to action. The pages wanted to be looked at, to be understood and deciphered.
She closed her mind to them. New ideas would only confuse and distract. There would be time enough for that when she was alone. Instead she took the pages and placed them with the others. She rolled them up into a tube and placed them into the secret folds of her frock, where she kept her herbs and charms and tokens. The secret pockets were getting heavy with old and discarded tokens of her adventure that she dared not throw away, for she could not know what she would need to survive.
Mary led them out of the hall toward the main entrance. The body of the horrible tortoise lay there, already covered with an impossibly thick halo of flies. More flies crawled upon it, countless flies, an impossible number, so that the body appeared a living, writhing, buzzing mass. It turned Lucy’s stomach, and she hesitated to approach, and in that moment of hesitation she saw movement in the darkness. Four figures, cloaked in shadow, and yet vaguely familiar. In the flickering light of Mrs. Emmett’s lantern, Lucy recognized the revenants she had seen in Lady Harriett’s house, led by the gray-haired Mr. Whitestone.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Whitestone, stepping forward. “Lady Harriett says we are to take your book, young lady. Please hand it to me.”
At that instant, Mr. Morrison and Mary raised their shotguns.
Mr. Whitestone managed a nervous smile. The other three revenants looked at them and then at Mr. Whitestone, then at the ground. They seemed dazed and disoriented, and Lucy understood they were so impossibly old that their sense of self had in some manner altered. They had been in the world so long, they were no longer of this world.
“You cannot harm us,” said Mr. Whitestone. “There is no point in resisting.”
“If we cannot harm you,” said Mr. Morrison, “why did Lady Harriett not come herself?”
“We
“No,” answered Mr. Whitestone. “You would not use our own secrets against your own kind. You have never wished to be one of us, but you cannot be so lost as that, Miss Crawford.”
He stepped forward, reaching out as if to take Mary’s weapon away from her. She fired. The heavy scent of rotten eggs filled the air, and Mr. Whitestone staggered backwards, a massive wound open in his chest. Shot had scattered among the other revenants, but their wounds were smaller, less brutal. They bled all the same.
“This feels odd,” said Mr. Whitestone, looking down at his wound. “It does not close.”
They had filled their shotguns with sulfur, mercury, and gold, allowing the shot to penetrate and preventing the wounds from closing. The same understanding crossed Mr. Whitestone’s pale face. He staggered forward and fell to his knees. He looked up at Lucy, as though she were the one who had fired upon him. “All along,” he said, “it was you. And here is the other secret.” But he said no more. He pitched forward, face-first onto the cold stone.
The three remaining revenants looked at one another, then looked down at the body, then looked at Mr. Morrison and Mary, who was in the process of discarding her spent weapon for the fresh one. Perhaps the creatures were so outraged that one of their own had been, impossibly, killed, but Lucy did not think so. Even at that moment she could not help but believe they wanted to die, to end their existence, these creatures who had walked the earth for so many centuries that they could no longer remember who or what they were. They leapt forward and Mary and Mr. Morrison discharged their weapons nearly simultaneously. Mr. Morrison then cast his spent gun aside and took the fresh one, and fired it into the mass moving toward him.
Smoke engulfed Lucy and her party. Neither Mr. Morrison nor Mary made an effort to reload their weapons, and Lucy suspected the process was too complicated to do in the midst of a conflict. She had no idea what they intended to do if the revenants were not all down, but as soon as the smoke began to clear, she saw that they posed no further threat. Two of them were still, and one—a woman with thick white hair—lay on her back, her gown covered with blood, her fingers twitching like a dying beetle. It sickened Lucy to look at it, but in a moment the creature stopped all motion. It lay still, eyes impossibly wide.
Lucy looked at Mary to see her reaction, to see if killing her own kind had taken a toll, but on her face was only grim satisfaction. “Let us reload and continue,” she said.
“Mary—” began Mr. Morrison.
“You cannot understand, so there is nothing to say,” she said, not unkindly. “This is why I am here. Not to talk, not to negotiate, and not to capitulate. I am here to end them. Now reload.” She tossed one of her weapons to Mrs. Emmett, who caught it easily with one hand. “You know what to do?”
“I’ve always known,” said Mrs. Emmett.
Mary smiled. “In case you needed to protect Lucy from me.”
Mrs. Emmett betrayed neither pleasure nor pride. “I did not think it likely, but I thought it best to be prepared.”
Some ten minutes later, after a lengthy process of mixing shot, gold dust, sulfur, and mercury into their weapons, they were ready to proceed. Lucy was frightened and determined, but she also felt strangely useless. She might have owned the book, but this was Mr. Morrison and Mary’s adventure. She was merely the person who needed protecting. They were a team. She hated the feeling of being left out, and she realized, much to her own surprise, that what she wanted was to impress them—to impress Mary, to be sure, but to impress Mr. Morrison most of all. She wanted to be worthy of him, to be as useful as Mary made herself, but even after all she had learned and done, she was still weak and ignorant and helpless.
“Will there be more?” asked Lucy.
“That depends on how much they want to die,” answered Mary.
They walked out the front door, and Boatswain, the ghost dog, remained there, but it flared its ghostly nostrils in Mary’s direction, let out a hollow bark, then a whimper, and fled.
They took only a few steps before Lucy realized the coach in which they had arrived was no longer there.
“Very well,” said Mr. Morrison. “It does seem rather hopeless, but it’s not. Not entirely. Here is what we are going to do.”
He never had a chance to explain his plan, however, because right then men emerged from the woods. There must have been a dozen of them, their long rifles raised to their eyes as they advanced like soldiers upon a battlefield. These were not revenants, but mortal men.
“They cannot harm me,” Mary said quietly, “but I cannot disarm them all before they fire their weapons. The chance of harm coming to you or Mr. Morrison is too great.”
“What do we do?” asked Lucy.
“You may have to confront Lady Harriett now. Tonight.”
“I am not ready,” Lucy said. She felt light-headed and terrified. She was not ready for this. The confrontation could not come now. “I don’t know what to do. You and Mr. Morrison know what you are doing, but I do not.”
“You will have to be ready,” Mary said. “The book is yours. Be worthy. Take what the book offers. Remember what I told you. Twelve pages and twelve enchantments. Power and luck. Do not depend upon them, but know that the pages want you to succeed.”
“You
His voice cut through the buzzing in her head, the cold grip of fear. There was something else. A warm feeling she hardly understood until she realized that he held her hand firmly in his own. He smiled at her, and Lucy managed a smile in return. She would be ready. She had to be.
One of the men stepped forward to collect their weapons. They took Mr. Morrison’s guns and bag, and they took Mary’s guns, but they did not search her or Lucy other than to ask them to remove their pelisses to make certain they contained no weapons. Lucy still had the pages of her book and many more things besides hidden in
