Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (25 page)

“But she said that there have only been three other Callers in the last hundred years,” I said, eyebrows raised. “Who is her new mentor?”

“Call the devil, and the devil shall appear,” said a silky voice from the doorway. I turned to see Lucida, lounging languidly against the door frame.

“You?” I cried, undisguised animosity in my voice. “No! Why does it have to be you?”

“Now, now, Jess, calm down,” Lucida said, an amused smile toying with the corners of her full lips. “I might start to think you aren’t that fond of me.”

“You know perfectly well I’m not that fond of you,” I shot back.

“Jessica,” Siobhán said sharply. “That is no way to talk to your elders.”

“This elder,” I said, turning to Siobhán in outrage, “Broke into my house in the middle of the night and turned my life upside down.”

“The window was open, dear, it was as good as an invitation,” Lucida said. “And it wasn’t me who turned your life upside down. Your life already was upside down. I just alerted you to the situation.”

I turned away from her and addressed Siobhán. “Why does she have to be Hannah’s mentor? Why can’t they get someone else?”

“As I’ve just explained to you,” Siobhán said curtly, “Hannah needs someone who can help her with her gift, and Lucida is the only person who can do that. She is the only other known Caller alive today.”

My mouth dropped open in shock. Hannah, who had been silent through the entire exchange, spoke for the first time.

“You’re a Caller? Like me?” she asked, wonder in her voice.

“That’s right, love,” Lucida said, smiling at her. “Two of a kind, we are. You could have knocked me flat with a feather when Finvarra told me.”

I just looked back and forth between the two of them, shaking my head.

“Finvarra has asked Lucida to step away from her other duties for the Durupinen and consent to take on the role of Hannah’s mentor, and she has most kindly agreed to do so,” Siobhán went on. “I’m sure that she and Hannah will get along just fine and that Hannah will benefit greatly from Lucida’s guidance.”

Lucida gave Siobhán an elaborate bow of sorts. “Cheers for that vote of confidence, Siobhán,” she said. “I think we’ll be great chums, Hannah and me. Lots to talk about, eh?”

“Oh yeah, I suppose you’ll get all your juicy details now, right, Lucida?” I said.

“What details?” Hannah asked, frowning. “What do you —”

“Does Karen know about this?” I plowed on.

“I believe she has been alerted, yes,” Siobhán said.

“And what did she have to say about it?”

“Nothing that will make the slightest bit of difference to the necessity of the situation,” Siobhán said quellingly. “Now I must insist that you reconsider your attitude toward this arrangement, Jessica, as it will not change in the face of your disapproval. Lucida is by far the most qualified and appropriate mentor your sister could have. I would think you’d be pleased, for your sister’s sake, that she will have the chance to develop and learn about this most rare of gifts.”

I bit my lip. I looked at Hannah, and fancied there was a hint of something accusatory in her eyes. A moment later I was convinced I had imagined it. “Of course I am.”

“Well, then,” Siobhán said. “Let us have no more of these objections. Now I believe you have your own mentor meeting to get to.”

“Off you trot,” Lucida said with a Cheshire cat smile.

There was nothing else I could do. I turned on my heel and walked out of the room as Lucida sauntered into it. My feet carried me all the way to Fiona’s tower automatically, while my mind seethed. Of all the people to subject Hannah to, why did it have to be Lucida? Hannah needed support and encouragement; she needed to be handled with kid gloves so that the tenuous grasp she had on this new world wasn’t shattered before it even had a chance to strengthen. And instead, she was going to be mocked and made to feel a freak by someone who had no regard for her feelings or her mental well-being. I felt so helpless I could have screamed.

Instead I called, “Milo!”

“Yes?” came his voice from so close behind me that I shrieked.

“Don’t do that!” I cried.

“You’re the one who called me!” Milo said, a not-so-innocent smile on his face. “If this is the thanks I get for being a prompt and attentive little spirit guide, I’ll just ignore you next time.” I decided not to play into his banter, as I was already late and Fiona would probably scalp me.

“I need you to go keep an eye on Hannah,” I said.

The words wiped the smile cleanly from Milo’s face. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“They assigned her a new mentor today. Her name is Lucida, and she is an absolute bitch. I’ll explain more about her later, but they’re meeting right now in Siobhán’s room. Can you please just go down there and make sure Hannah’s okay?”

“Of course,” he said and vanished at once. He reappeared a moment later. “Thank you for calling me,” he said quite seriously. I nodded. “You’re her best friend. If I think she’s in trouble, you’ll always be my first call.”

He smiled at me, a genuine smile without a trace of irony or attitude which, I noted, was a first. He started to shimmer out of view when a sudden thought occurred to me. “Milo, one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Have you had any luck figuring out who that little girl ghost is, the one I asked you about?”

Milo sagged a little. “No, and I’ve been trying, I swear. She’s been here longer than all the ghosts I’ve talked to, so none of them know who she was when she was alive. I’ve seen her a few times, but she scampers every time I try to talk to her.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“No problem. I’m off to check on our girl,” he said, and was gone. I relaxed a little bit; enough, at least, to move Hannah to the back of my mind and concentrate all my energy on what was sure to be another strange and mildly terrifying mentor meeting.

I’d had three more classes with Fiona since we’d met. In the first, she’d ignored me for the first half an hour while she stared, muttering, at a partially-formed sculpture. Then she’d handed me a pad of paper and a pencil, pointed at a bowl of fruit set up in the corner, and said, “Have a go at that.” I spent the rest of the class attempting a still life of the fruit while she chain-smoked and carried on her one-sided dialogue with the sculpture. During the second meeting, I handed in the still-life. She took one cursory look at it, snorted, crumpled it up, and tossed it on the floor. Then she stalked over to the bowl of fruit and knocked the whole thing over. The bowl shattered, and fruit rolled in every direction. She bent down, scooped up a single apple, and put it back on the table in front of me.

“Just this,” she said, and started to walk away. Then she turned back, snatched up the apple, took a huge bite out of it, and replaced it. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the class, but alternated between eating bruised fruit off of the floor and chiseling away at her sculpture, which was starting to take the shape of a woman in long, sweeping robes.

During the third class she forced me to sit, eyes closed, pencil and paper in hand, in front of a huge oil painting of a woman. No matter how many times I asked her what I should be doing, she just shushed me and said, “Just listen to what she’s got to say to you.” But with no further illumination on how exactly to do this, I just sat there like an idiot for a full hour, trying to sense someone or something that absolutely refused to be sensed. Finally I gave up, shoved the paper into my bag and stood up.

“This is pointless,” I said bluntly.

“I’m getting nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Fiona looked up from the painting she was restoring, her eyes ridiculously magnified behind a bizarre pair of goggles. “Good. You can go.”

“Good? I just sat there for a whole hour and got nothing. How can that be good? What am I supposed to be sensing? Who is she?”

“She’s nobody,” Fiona said, her nose an inch from the canvas. “There’s no ghost attached to that painting.”

I threw my hands up in exasperation. “So what the hell did you have me do that for?”

“To keep you honest,” she said. “Congratulations. You aren’t full of shit.”

That day it was me who came dangerously close to throwing furniture. At the end of each class, I was sure she would tell me to leave and not come back, but each time, just as the door was about to creak shut behind me, she’d say, “Next week, same time.”

I knocked on the tower door and opened it without waiting, as Fiona rarely bothered to open it herself. At first glance it seemed she wasn’t even there. Then my gaze fell to the floor.

I gasped.

Fiona was sprawled spread-eagled on the bare stone floor. She was twitching from head to foot, and her eyes had rolled back in her head.

“Oh my God! Fiona!” I dashed to her side and fell to my knees. My hands hovered helplessly above her for a moment, as I wracked my brain to decide what to do.

She was obviously breathing, I saw with relief; her chest was rising and falling, and her mouth was moving rapidly in a silent stream of words.

I reached down and shook her shoulders. “Fiona? Can you hear me?”

No response.

I rocked back on my heels and ran a frantic hand through my hair. Should I go get help? What if she swallowed her tongue or something while I was gone?

“Fiona! FIONA!” I shouted, right in her ear.

Her expression changed, her eyebrows contracting. My pulse quickened. She must have heard me. I looked around for something, anything, to rouse her. I ran over to the nearby desk and grabbed a small bowl of water from beside some drying brushes, and splashed it over her face.

With a sputtering, coughing gasp, Fiona sat up. Her eyes flew open, her hands swiping furiously at the water now streaming down her face, pushing her sopping hair out of her eyes. She looked up and saw me.

“What the bloody
hell
do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. I backed away from her in surprise. “I…you…you were having some kind of seizure!”

“And so you thought the appropriate course of action was to drown me?” she yelled.

“I didn’t know what to do!” I said, backing involuntarily away at the livid look on her face. “I thought you needed help! I was trying to wake you up!”

“Well, I’m good and awake now!” she cried. “Dogs!” She jumped to her feet, a little unsteadily, and looked around on the floor, like she had lost something.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking to see if I managed to draw any of it before you blundered in and ruined everything!” she shot at me. She shook her fist combatively at me, and I saw a charcoal pencil clenched in it.

“Draw any of…huh?”

“Look! Use your blasted eyes, will you?” Fiona said, and darted forward. She grabbed my upper arm, yanked me to my feet, and dragged me back to the place I’d found her on the ground. There on the stone, clearly unfinished, was a drawing.

I knelt down and examined it. It was hard to make out. The shapes in the background could have been trees or perhaps buildings, but they were obscured by the dark cloud of smoke rising from what was unmistakably a large and raging fire.

“What is this?” I asked.

“I’m not likely to find out, now,” Fiona grumbled, toweling off her hair with a spare smock.

“You were drawing this during that…seizure, or whatever it was?”

“It wasn’t a seizure, it was psychic trance,” Fiona said slowly and deliberately, as though this should have been obvious. “Spirit communication was being channeled through me.”

“Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that?” I cried. “I walked in the room and you were thrashing around on the floor! I thought you were dying!”

Fiona opened her mouth to retort, but apparently there was a little too much logic in what I had said, so she just let out a frustrated sort of growl and stomped over to her desk. I decided the safest course of action was to stay where I was and make no sudden movements until she calmed down. I watched as she rummaged around in an open trunk behind her desk and pulled out a dry, paint-spattered shirt. Finally she turned to me, and though her face was still a storm cloud, her voice had calmed down.

“It happens that way sometimes,” she said, and without warning pulled her damp shirt over her head. She was wearing nothing under it. I quickly spun around and looked back at the strange partially-finished drawing. “If the vision is really strong, it blocks everything else out, and I collapse. Usually I can feel it coming, and I can get to the ground safely. Sometimes not, in which case I wake up with a bastard of a headache.”

“And when you come to, you’ve drawn something?” I asked.

“Yes,” Fiona said. “I don’t remember a thing, though. The only clues I have to anything a spirit may have said or done or shown me is whatever I’ve managed to create which, in this case,” she added with a frown, “is almost nothing.”

I chanced a look back at her. She was clothed again. “Look, I said I was sorry. But you at least should have warned me that might happen.”

She ignored my apology. “So what did I get, then? Anything discernible?”

“It looks like a fire. A bad one,” I said. “Do you know who the ghost was? Is this how they died?”