Silent Doll (18 page)

The book was more interesting than any of the others. It discussed the possibility of attaching a soul to an inanimate object. It was like possession. The theory was complex but in simplest terms it boiled down to this: if you could make something delicately tuned to the slightest fluctuations in energy, a soul could operate with willpower alone.

I’d seen it on a smaller scale when I’d pushed a ghost into establishing a possession over a stuffed toy. It had been able to move about and operate the voice box, but the toy had been too basic for anything else. It had been limited by the vessel. Taking that into consideration, Trinket was a miracle. A sophisticated machine, almost an android or automaton, but created of cogs and a little magic. The magic itself was delving into necromancy. Necromancy could be a deep, slippery slope that could lead to great darkness—if a vampire didn’t kill you for displaying the talent in the first place. I went to my own shelf and pulled out a book I’d bought on the other side about zombies and the reanimation of the dead.

In necromancy, you called a spirit back to its earthly body, holding that body together with blood and magic. Any zombie that you created using your blood you had complete control over, if you were powerful enough. However, there was nothing to say that you had to call a spirit back to its own flesh. What if a person who had died was given a new body? A mechanical body that wouldn’t have to expend as much energy to hold together? You could create someone like Trinket.

It was extremely dangerous; in calling out to the spirit world, there was no guarantee you would get what you wanted. There were many spirits that would want to roost in a virtually immortal body.

I turned to the page on creation and control of a reanimated person. Blood was important here; you called the spirit by blood and then controlled it by that same blood. It had no choice but to do what you wanted. So, if you ordered the spirit not to speak of something, it couldn’t.

I flicked to another part of the book and began reading about loss of control. If a necromancer was weak, then the zombie could break free or rampage, but that was very rare—because if you didn’t have the strength to raise it in the first place you couldn’t have controlled it. The zombie usually fell apart soon after the separation, because it didn’t have the magical energy required to sustain itself. Its battery eventually ran down, its neural pathways deteriorating; first it would become confused and then, usually, violent. Then the flesh started to rot again.

I was sort of glad to know that the cognitive processes went first. It would be horrible if you were still completely aware when your body started to rot. I shuddered and turned the page. A second way to lose control of a spirit was if someone else stepped in and forced the connection to break. This was it, this was what Trinket wanted.

My excitement faded as I read further. If I cut her free, that would be it for her. It was right there in black and white. If I broke the connection between Trinket and her mother, without another source of magic to use as fuel, the essential essence, the spark of life that was Trinket, would be lost. She was a spirit, a pure essence wrenched from wherever the unbound dead go—and she would get sucked right back there. Earthbound spirits had a direct tie to something on the mortal plane, a metaphysical cord between them and a person or place. A spirit that had been pulled from some other place—I didn’t want to call it heaven, as heaven and hell were very solid Christian concepts—had no ties to the mortal plane other than that supplied for it by the sorcerer’s magic.

It was strange for me to say that I didn’t believe in hell, as I’d met a demon. Hell as the name for a realm of demons I could accept. It was the whole Christian concept of hell that I had trouble with. I could believe in a godly being, but not in the whole
he made the world in seven days
way.

I think how the planet came to be was a matter of energy, or magic, or both, colliding to create the earth. The magic spawned its own creatures that evolved separately from man, beings so powerful that when man did evolve it thought them gods. Man had never agreed on a universal principle, so each of these beings were worshipped separately. Maybe they gained power from that worship, from the willingness of their worshipers to share their energy.

Over time some gods became obsolete, lost power, still existing but separate from humans—existing on a place outside normal human perception. Like the Elves once had and the Fae still did. If creatures of benevolence existed like that, I was sure that creatures of malice and evil were just as prevalent. It was only through a concept like Christianity that we’d named them demons; perhaps they’d had their own name once and adopted the new one because it suited them.

It was a complicated mess when I tried to think about it too hard, and I ended up with an unending list of questions. Did angels exist if demons did? If so, what were they and did these other god-like creatures create them? If so, how? How did an angel fall to become a demon? What was it about the demon races that made them unable to exist on the human plane without assistance?

A shiver ran down my spine. I looked out the balcony windows; the sun was setting behind the buildings. Another night, another unanswerable question. If all of it was true, how did my alternating realities work? Maybe my stepfather had been right, and everything had its opposite. Every coin had two sides, after all; maybe it was another ingrained concept.

I shook my head. I was driving myself into a right old melancholy funk. Ever since I’d learned the truth about myself I’d been dwelling on the concepts of life, the universe and everything. I really, really had to get a life.

The crux of the situation was that the only way to help Trinket would be a death sentence. She’d wanted freedom, but I wondered if she truly understood what that meant.

* * * *

The
Circe de Poupee
looked vacant. There were no crowds of people outside, the windows were dark, and when I pushed open the door I saw the velvet rope had been fitted into a corner of the foyer. A sign on the chain hanging across the stairs said
closed
, but I could distinctly hear music rising up from below. I ducked under the sign.

Downstairs, the stage lights were on but the audience and band sections were empty. A boom box sat on the edge of the stage, playing a track from
Madame Butterfly
. I moved through the chairs and froze at the sound of footsteps on the stage. I turned my head, fully expecting a reprimand, but the person on stage was absorbed in a complex routine with a large paper parasol. She was wearing a modified purple kimono, decorated with delicate pink
Sakura
in patterns and a fluffy black skirt. It gave the impression of a mini geisha. Her hair was black, done in two nested buns from which dangled a multicolored spectrum of ribbons.

I watched her twirl and turn the parasol multiple times, both open and closed, until she dropped it. She cursed, dropping down to her knees and banging her fists together in frustration. My phone rang, which made her look up. I scrolled my finger across the ignore feature.

“Miss Cassandra?”

I looked back to the stage to see blue eyes fixed on me. “Trinket?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry, you just look different.”

She examined her hair with her fingers.

“Oh!” She bounced up to her feet. “Wait right there.”

Trinket vanished off into the wings while I made my way up to the stage. She had her blonde curls again when she returned, fiddling under the hairline. She gave me a self-deprecating smile.

“I’m a giant dress up doll. Parts of me are interchangeable.” She sat down on the edge of the stage next to me, swinging her legs back and forth.

“Do you have to practice a lot?”

“Mmm, or I forgot the routines. Momma says practice makes perfect.”

“Where are the rest of your family? Aren’t you open tonight?”

“They went shopping earlier, and then probably to dinner or a movie or something. It’s supposed to be our night off.”

“You didn’t go because?”

“Because bad behavior isn’t rewarded,” she said with a scoffing tone I thought was supposed to be derision. “She ordered me to stay here and practice, so I practiced. How’s your case going?”

She asked the question without looking at me, so she didn’t see my shrug.

“I’m doing what I can. I couldn’t sleep last night, so I got to work on what you asked.”

“You did!” She perked up instantly. “Did you find something?”

“Yes and no.”

Her brow furrowed, actually furrowed: a line formed in the coating that was her skin. She was amazing, and no power in the verse could make me destroy her.

“What is it?”

“It’s not a viable option.”

“Well, shouldn’t I get to decide that?”

“All right.” I took a deep breath. “Do you understand what you are? A mechanical doll with a spirit attached?”

She made a big round O with her mouth. “I guess so. I never really thought about it. I just—as long as I can remember I’ve been like this. Not that I understand how it works, how I work; it puzzles me sometimes. I know this isn’t a human body.” She put her hand on her chest. “It’s a machine. What is a human body but a machine made out of organics instead of mechanics?”

“I understand your point,” I said, smiling. “But a living body and its—spirit, soul, essence, whatever term you’re more comfortable with—are attached to each other with a metaphysical cord.”

I’d met a soul-sucking demoness almost a year ago who had to seal up the souls she stole in special vials because a soul’s natural response was to ping back into its living body, drawn to it by that cord. If the body died, I could only assume the soul was drawn somewhere else.

“So, what’s keeping me all joined up?”

“From what I can gather, magic. Let me try to explain things a little more.” She gave a little gesture with her hand to indicate I should continue. “I would define you as a pure spirit, as you’ve never been a ghost. Then again, ghosts aren’t creatures of magic.”

“Then how do ghosts do it? How do they haunt?”

“When a person dies—and do keep in mind that a lot of this is theory—the tie breaks. An extremely powerful emotion can create a new tie, like an anchor keeping the spirit here. Guilt, vengeance, remorse—it has to be a very strong emotion that tethers them to a person or a place.”

“Unfinished business?”

“Sort of. A lot of murder victims, for instance, become tethered to their death site; they rarely become tethered to their murderer. If they did, that would make catching them so much easier.”

“Mediums and psychics, right. Like those ones on TV, bringing them closure.”

“Yeah, something like that, but I wouldn’t take the word of some TV show as gospel.”

“Okay. So, how is magic different?”

“It creates an artificial bond. Your mom is some kind of practitioner, right?” Trinket nodded. I guessed from her tight mouth that was another thing she was forbidden to talk about. “Her magic holds you here. That’s why she can tell you what to do, why you can’t disobey. It’s a complicated idea if I go into it in detail. The existence of someone like you is only theoretical in most books. There was probably blood involved at some point — her blood.”

Trinket put her hand to her heart again and made an intense study of her fingernails.

“What does that mean?”

“That if I try, I could break the bond between you and your mother. I’m pretty strong and if I kept at it, it would probably give, as it’s not a natural bond.”

“But…”

“You’d cease to exist. Your connection to your body, to this plane of existence, would be gone.”

“I’d be dead.”

“For all intents and purposes, without a bond, without her, you’ll be lost.”

There was silence while she took that in. I made my own intense study of my shoes and, as the silence continued, the floor around it.

“Couldn’t I still haunt my body?” she asked at last.

I shook my head. “I’ve only witnessed a handful of possessions, and without a bond they can’t hold onto it for very long. No offense, but your body is an object, not a person or a place. I don’t know how haunting places works, but a haunting where a ghost is attached to a person means that it is feeding off that person’s energy.”

“Like a leech.”

“Only not sucking blood, sucking energy. If a ghost tries to actually possess the person, it can end up killing them. One energy is not compatible with another. Having two in the same body blows a circuit.”

“It’s no wonder people find dying such a scary thought. Does it scare you?”

I tucked hair behind my ear, stalling, then said, “It used to.”

“But it doesn’t anymore?”

“I’m not going to die anymore. Well, I’m sure there is a way for me to die, because you can kill anything if you try long enough or look hard enough, but that could be…” I stopped. Trinket’s mouth was hanging open.

“You can’t die?” she asked.

I shrugged with a tiny sad smile on my lips. “I keep forgetting that it’s not common knowledge—I’m not human, Trinket, some of the rules don’t apply anymore.”