Brightly (Flicker #2) (14 page)

Lee smiled. “Of course.”

“It’s just that everything was going so well—and then this happened, and everything got flipped upside down again. I just…” Alice hunched her narrow shoulders slightly, like she was bracing herself. “I don’t want to lose him again.”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Don’t I?” Alice’s hazel eyes were serious, her mouth set in a grim line, and Lee heard the question she wasn’t asking, the one she’d never speak aloud.

To this day, Alice had never said the actual words to Lee, never admitted how she felt about Filo. She didn’t have to. Lee could hear it in Alice’s voice when she spoke about him. She could see it every time Filo left a room and Alice gazed after him with a secret despair that Lee prayed she never knew.

“No,” Lee told her firmly, despite the uncomfortable thumping of her heart, a reminder that speaking the words wouldn’t make them come true. “You don’t.”

“I got the stuff you asked for,” Davis said, setting a cardboard box on the table. “At least, what I could find around the house.”

He began to remove objects from the box and lay them across the worktable: a hand mirror; several large metal spoons; a stainless-steel knife; a glass snow globe; a silver serving tray; an empty picture frame; and several pieces of jewelry, including a shiny silver pendant and a pair of ruby earrings. The array flashed under the basement lights.

“I got the weird stuff, too,” Davis added.

Nasser started to protest the label “weird stuff,” but when Davis laid out the other items—a lock of chestnut-colored hair, three glass vials of blood, and two green-black barnacles—he changed his mind.

Leaning forward to examine the samples he’d requested, Nasser said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you collect these.”

Davis lifted one shoulder in a shrug, though his expression was slightly pinched, like he was remembering something unpleasant. “It didn’t take long. The barnacles were the hardest part, but even then, it only took a few minutes.”

“They’re not too difficult to remove, then?”

“Not really. You just have to be careful. The barnacles are embedded in the flesh, and having them pulled out is painful.” His expression darkened. “I numb the area before I pull them, but I hate doing it. I hate making people bleed.”

Nasser paused. “Have you a pulled a lot of them?”

“In the beginning, I did,” Davis admitted. “Only a few people had barnacles growing on them. We thought they were parasites or something. I pulled the barnacles and we combed the whole island, trying to figure out where they’d come from. But we didn’t find anything. Then the barnacles started growing back, faster than before, and more people got sick, and nothing I did had any effect. That’s when everything got out of control.”

Nasser turned his attention back to the samples Davis had gathered. A strange cold hung over each object like a fine mist: curse magic. The energy clinging to the samples was fairly weak, though, a fraction of what was attached to the victims. Now that it was separated from its living host, the magic would dissipate harmlessly into the air. The process had already started. Still, they had some time to experiment before the energy disappeared entirely.

“Have you ever broken a curse before?” Nasser asked.

“Never had a reason to,” Davis said. He grabbed a notebook that was lying on the table and flipped it open. “Tell me there’s a crash course I can take.”

“Curses are just long-lasting spells,” Nasser began. “They release magic over an extended period of time, instead of all at once. Now, casting curses is hard. Complicated. Even the simplest curse requires multiple layers of magic, all woven together and specifically constructed to have the desired effect. You can transfer the curse energy into an object, so the energy will leak out of it and affect whoever possesses it, or you can throw it directly at a human target.”

Davis looked up from his notebook with a frown. “Where’s the curse concentrated on the island? Is it in the houses, or is it in the people?”

“Both. The curse magic is melded to the houses, and it’s attached itself to some of the people living in them.”

“We’ll have to break the curse on each, then.”

“Right. It’ll be easier to purge the houses of curse magic than the people, though. I’d recommend we start with that, to give us a base to build on.”

“Why?”

“Curse magic bonds to its target. That’s how you get the long-term effect. Regular spells wear out over time, dissolve into the air. But curses sap energy from their targets, just enough to keep them going for months, years, even generations. As long as a curse has energy to draw from, it won’t dispel on its own—and the longer a curse is attached to a host, the tighter the bond becomes. Magic bonds more easily with living things than with objects.”

“So the real problem,” Davis said, “is prying the curse magic from the target.”

“Exactly. You can scrub magic from an object with purification spells. But to remove curse magic from a living host, you have to trick it into transferring to another container. In theory, you can transfer a curse to any object. But some materials work better than others.”

“Like what?”

“Mirrors, especially. And when I say ‘mirrors,’ I mean anything that’s solid and gives a reflection—regular mirrors, gemstones, gold and silver. Even polished stone can work. There’s no guarantee any of those will work on any given curse, but you have a better shot with a material like that than, say, a piece of wood or a random rock.”

“What’s so special about mirrors?”

“With the right preparations, you can use a mirror to reflect the cursed object and trick the curse into jumping from the host to the mirror. It takes some spell work, but it’s possible.”

Davis turned the page in his notebook and jotted something down. “But not every mirror can absorb every kind of curse, right?”

Nasser nodded. “Every curse is different. Sometimes it takes a few tries, a few mirrors, to get the right reflection and make the curse jump.”

“So you use the reflection to transfer the curse into the mirror,” said Davis. “Then what do you do with it?”

“You break it,” Nasser replied simply. “There are certain precautions to take, just to make sure a big ball of curse magic doesn’t shoot into the air and attach to another host, but you’ll always do the same thing in the end. Smash the mirror. It’s the symbolic action that destroys the curse.”

Davis gave a little huff that sounded like a laugh. “I guess they don’t call it curse
breaking
for nothing.”

Nasser smiled. Then he nodded toward the array of items Davis had brought. “Here we’ve got some samples of cursed objects. Blood. Hair. Barnacles cut from one of the victims. It’s all covered in magic.”

“We’re using them to test the curse,” Davis deduced. “Figure what kinds of mirrors can absorb the energy.”

“You got it.” Nasser picked up the first vial of blood and started to unscrew the cap. “Let’s get to work.”

Filo and Henry had been working their way down the packed-earth trails spiraling through the forest for over an hour before Filo noticed the trees beginning to thin, evergreens yielding to tall grass. Occasionally, Filo glimpsed tiny, green-skinned figures peering at them from around the tree trunks. Moss maidens, he thought, and where there were moss maidens, there were usually dryads. Though Filo knew that most dryads weren’t anything like the one that had nearly killed him last year, he couldn’t help but hope he didn’t meet any on this island.

“We’ll be coming up on Point Emerson in a minute,” Henry said, as they started down a tree-dotted hill. “The phouka is usually out there when the weather’s nice.”

Sure enough, when they reached the base of the hill, Point Emerson sprawled before them: a riot of wildflowers and waving, waist-high grass that gradually tapered to a rounded point where the greenery gave way to sand. In the distance, the sea sparkled like a sheet of blue glass, its magic prickling against him. Sea birds called.

Henry plucked a wide blade of grass, then cupped his hands around it and brought it to his mouth. When Henry blew, a terrific squawking noise cut through the air.

A long minute passed before Filo spotted something moving through the grass toward them: a shaggy black pony. When it reached them, tossing its head and snorting, Filo saw that it had eyes the color of blackberries.

For a moment, the pony just watched them. Then it shifted, its form twisting in that strange, misty way that fey forms could, and was suddenly a black dog that snarled at Filo.

“Mella!” Henry chided, as Filo instinctively leaned back. “Stop that!”

In response, the dog snorted. It shuddered, and its body burst into a cloud of smoke that coalesced into a wiry, dark-skinned girl was crouched in the grass before them, feathers caught in her thick black hair. Her ears, still those of a pony, roved endlessly, and she had the pony’s blackberry-colored eyes. A phouka.

“Just playing, Henry.” The phouka cocked her head to one side, tilting it to an angle that would’ve snapped a human neck. “Who’s that?”

“This is Filo. I was wondering if you might help him with something. Help both of us, really.”

“Help?” Mella chirped. “Help with what?”

Kneeling before her, Henry said, “We’re hoping to talk with the new merfolk.”

Mella made a face like she’d just eaten something sour and tilted her head another inch. Filo wondered if she could turn her head all the way upside down.

“What do you want to talk to them for?” she asked.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get them to leave,” Henry said.

At that, Mella snorted and rotated her head back to its normal position. She tossed her hair out of her eyes. “I doubt you’ll manage that. They won’t leave until they’ve gotten what they came for.”

Henry frowned. “What did they come for?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Tell me, Mella,” he pressed.

“I don’t feel like it.” She flopped backward onto the grass and spread her arms, grinning. Typical phouka. “Tell me what you wanted, Henry.”

For a moment, Henry looked like he was going to argue. Then he sighed. “We don’t speak their language. Do you know it?”

Mella looked scandalized. “I’m a phouka,” she sniffed. “Phoukas know every language of man, animal and fey.”

“Will you teach us, then?”

“I could—but it would take you a long time to learn, Henry. You have a clumsy tongue. It would be hard for you.”

“And don’t I know it,” Henry muttered. He beckoned Filo forward. “But my friend here is a quick learner, and he already knows one faerie language.”

The word “friend” made Filo stiffen the same way he had when he first locked eyes with Henry at the Goblin Market. The phouka’s voice snapped him out of it. She asked him, in a modern dialect of Old Faerie,
“You can speak our language?”

“
I’ve studied it since I was very young,”
he answered.

“
Who taught you?”

“
I was raised by two of the Fair Folk. They taught me.”

The phouka’s mouth stretched into a wicked smile. She had unusually large canines.
“Are you a changeling, then?”

“
I—”
Filo paused, but there was nothing else he could say that wouldn’t be a lie.
“Yes, I am. The replaced. Not the replacement.”

“
Why did they take you?”
she asked.
“Because you were a particularly beautiful baby, or because they were owed a debt, or just because they could?”

“
I don’t know,”
Filo said, the words setting a small fire in him. He hated that it was true, that he didn’t know and three strangers with an old file did.

When Mella laughed, the sound was as harsh as the barking of her dog form. Filo felt her laughter like a punch to the chest.

The phouka looked at Henry with glinting eyes. “I have little hope of teaching you anything, Henry,” she said, her words still tinged with laughter. Then she jerked her chin toward Filo. “But this one, I can teach.”

Chapter Eight:

Alice woke with a start when something cold struck her forehead.

She propped herself up on one elbow, casting her gaze around the dark, silent bedroom before tilting her head back. A brownish stain was spreading rapidly across the white ceiling. Cold droplets of water leaked from the stain, sprinkling the bed. Had a pipe burst somewhere?

Alice stared up at the water stain as it spread. Soon half the ceiling was leaking, fat droplets plopping steadily. Several large drops spattered her face; on impulse, she swept her tongue across her lips and frowned. Salt water.

As Alice sat up, the ceiling collapsed.

Water gushed through the hole in the ceiling, crashing like a waterfall, an impossible amount. Chunks of wood and plaster floated in the swirling torrent. In seconds, water lapped the mattress and then washed over it, the blankets drifting in the current.