“A month.” Sorcha wished Merrick was here. He would perhaps see the significance of that more than she could.
“Where are we going?” Raed had caught up with them at a jog, neither out of breath nor put off by the glare she shot him.
She waved at Wailace to lead on, while whispering at the Pretender out of the corner of her mouth. It was never good to expose frailty in front of a distressed next of kin. “What are you doing here?”
“You don’t have a partner at the moment”—he grinned—“so I am standing in for Merrick. He would want me to keep an eye on you.”
“By the Bones,” Sorcha hissed, “you are more useless in this than a fifth leg on a dog.”
“Now you’re just hurting my feelings.”
The lilt of his voice, charming and roguish at the same time, should have irritated her, but instead her mind treated her to a recollection of his nakedness and the feeling of his mouth on hers. Ridiculous.
“Since you insist on being here,” she asked as evenly as possible through gritted teeth, “may we just concentrate on helping this boy and his family?”
He was mercifully silent for a bit, though she was still painfully aware of his presence. It was almost a relief to get to the grocer’s house.
Wailace stood by the door, talking to a man who sat slumped on the ground, leaning against the wall of the house with his head in his hands. Sorcha walked up slowly and stopped to look down at him. His eyes were red- rimmed and haunted, his hand trembling. “Can you—” He cleared his throat. “Can you help my daughter?”
She knew better than to offer any definitives. “I promise to try.”
“She—” The father looked away, shame burning on his face. “She says things that . . .”
Sorcha had seen plenty of distraught relatives who had been forced to do terrible things, so she was partly ready for what lay within. “I understand.” She gave his shoulder a light squeeze, and asked the one question she needed to have answered. “What’s her name?”
“Anai,” he whispered, clutching his son’s hand.
Sorcha let him nurse his shame and distress. It wasn’t her job to comfort the kin, and now at least she had a familiar task at hand.
The door creaked open; the door always creaked. It was a given. Inside, there was an incredible plunge in temperature, enough to make her wish that she’d stopped to gather her cloak. Accompanying it was a smell, a pungent odor that assailed her mortal senses.
“Ancients, what is that stench?” Raed, who had probably experienced plenty of vile odors in his time on board ship, held his arm up over his nose.
It was certainly one of the stronger ones she’d encountered in her time in the Order. The unliving were fond of odor because it was one of the most evocative senses. This one was, appropriately enough, very like ripe fish heads—ones that had been out in the sun for a few days. But there was something else; the scent of shit—a sure sign of the unliving.
Sorcha already knew what she would find when she followed her nose to the locked door leading down into a root cellar. She turned about and warned Raed. “Whatever you do, Pretender, keep quiet.”
“Is there anything more useful I can do?” he gasped through his mouth.
She gave a little shrug. She wasn’t about to tell him that she was grateful not to be alone. “You can watch my back, for what good it will do.”
Sorcha knocked the lock open and stepped inside. It was as expected. The cellar had been cleared of everything; drag marks in the ground showed where the grocer’s stock had been quickly shifted. The small window at the far end had been barricaded from the outside, and the light was consequently gray and limited. Against the far wall was where they had chosen to shackle their daughter.
She could only have been about eight or nine years old, curled up on the bare floor sniffling to herself, her head hanging down with tangled copper hair obscuring her features. Her clothing was stained and torn, as if she had been at the center of some violent storm. It was a sight to soften the hardest heart.
Sorcha, however, was not fooled, even though the few maternal instincts she possessed kicked in every time a child was involved. Instead, she jerked her head at Raed, indicating that he could come in. When he made to go to the girl, she stopped him with one hand on his chest; a silent gesture that reminded him to be quiet.
The troublesome pirate frowned, but thankfully remained still by the door.
Together they stood there for a few minutes, breathing in the fetid odor and waiting for the child to stop crying. Finally she drew in a ragged hiccupping breath and looked up at them. Her eyes gleamed like a cat’s in the dimness of the cellar, but the light they were reflecting was not from this world.
Sorcha did not put on her Gauntlets, but instead went over to the girl and knelt down. The child’s lips drew back in a feral snarl while her head tilted at a knowing angle. The Deacon and the unliving creature inside the girl regarded each other; she with cool professionalism and it with undisguised hatred.
Finally, the Pretender couldn’t contain himself any longer. “What is it?”
The girl’s eye fell on Raed and she snarled, surging upward only to be brought back to the ground with a jerk as her chains snapped taut. It was good that her parents had been vigilant.
“A poltern, I think.” Sorcha, having stepped back smartly, now sat down on the ground two feet away from the thrashing girl.
“Then why . . .” He cleared his throat. “What about the Rossin?”
“This particular geist is buried very deep inside, barely any of it is actually in this world. Very much like a parasitic worm. You should be safe enough.”
He came to stand behind her, obviously taking her request to watch her back seriously. “And what about the girl?”
Anai’s lips stretched wide, but no words came out; polterns were not the most verbose of the geists. Instead the air grew even colder, an attempt to drive them out without expending too much of its energy or giving away its location.
The Deacon flicked a sharp gaze at Raed. “Remember the bit where I told you to be quiet?”
He took the hint and stepped back into the shadows. She had to have the geist’s entire attention. Letting her Center drop away from her, she concentrated her vision on the creature. Seeing into a possessed being was hard. The geist could hide deep within the psyche of a person, and a child was more complicated still.
The changing facets of a still-forming personality made an ideal hiding place, so children were favored victims of the poltern. Sorcha knew immediately that she was ill equipped to judge the strength of this one with her Sight. The hollow space where Merrick should have been felt even more gaping now.
Finally, she retrieved her Center and sagged back with a sigh of annoyance. The geist, meanwhile, danced in the eyes of the child and looked smugger than a cat with a mouse in its mouth.
“What’s the matter?” Raed was pacing, showing that being this close to a geist was unnerving him. Sorcha could understand that.
Without stopping to explain, she got up and went out of the ripe cellar into the house; a welcome if slight respite from the strength of the odor. Everything lay in disorder out here. The family had been forced to keep their supplies in the rooms where they lived. The mother was coping with a possessed child and a house she could barely move about in.
Scrambling over boxes, Sorcha went into the kitchen to find something heavy but innocuous. The drawer of knives and cutlery was immediately discarded as something she didn’t want to arm a geist with. Anything breakable, like the stoneware dishes, could also be deadly, and they were not nearly heavy enough. Finally, she settled on an iron cooking pot that had probably been used for making jams in better times.
Spotting Raed as he stood watching her made her chuckle. “Afraid to be alone with a little girl?” she asked, struggling with the cooking pot. It was big enough, even, to boil the child in it.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m just enjoying watching you.” She gave him a look that could have melted lead, until he took the hint and strode over to help shift the large pot back into the cellar.
The gleaming eyes of the poltern stared at them with visible delight. Nothing pleased a geist as much as the ability to stymie a Deacon.
“What on earth is this for?” Raed grumbled as they positioned the pot to her liking, only a few feet away from the cellar’s occupant. “Planning to whip up some jam while we’re here?”
“You’ll see.” She jerked her head toward the girl, hopefully reminding him that they were not alone.
