Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (40 page)

“You’re…a Durupinen too?”

“No. There are no more Durupinen in my family, not true ones, anyway. I’m the only one of my family living that shows any trace of a spirit connection, and it is simply the genetic vestiges of an inheritance I will never come into. My grandmother can sense them, and even converse with them on occasion. My mother never saw a ghost in her life, and convinced herself that my grandmother was crazy and that her stories were nothing but ancestral folk tales. My abilities are the most pronounced my family has seen in decades, but it still will never mean the reopening of the Gateway, not as long as I am the only one.”

“I can’t believe you knew all of this and you didn’t tell me.”

“Can’t you? Haven’t you had enough experience with the Durupinen now to know why I stayed silent? What if I’d been wrong about you, and told you ancient secrets you had no right to? I pointed you in the direction of your nearest female relative and trusted that she would help you, if she could. It was the only safe thing to do.”

“Do the Durupinen know about you?”

“Oh, yes. They keep a watchful eye on any former Gateways, if only to monitor the possibility that they might be reopened. No one from the Northern Island clans has anything to do with us directly; we have our own Council in Eastern Europe whose job it is to oversee things. But I don’t doubt that they were aware of our interactions.”

“So that’s how you knew where to find me?”

“Fairhaven is not the only school of its kind, you know. It took a little digging, but I was able to find out where it was.”

“So why are you so scared they might have followed me? You’re allowed to know what I am, and you didn’t interfere or tell me anything you shouldn’t have, so what’s the problem?”

Annabelle hesitated. “The situation is…complicated. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, so I want to lay low until I’ve figured them out.”

This mention of questions flipped a switch in my brain. “Are you talking about Pierce? Is that why you’re here?”

She looked momentarily stunned. “How do you know about David?”

“My roommate from St. Matt’s told me. You met her, remember? You read her tarot cards that night at the fair. She told me Pierce has suddenly gone on sabbatical, but I saw him right before I left, and he never said a word about a sabbatical. She got the details about where he’s supposed to be, but we can’t get in touch with him. Annabelle, please tell me you know where he is and that he’s okay.”

Annabelle closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again, they were shining. “I have no idea. Nobody does. He just vanished. We talked a couple of months ago, the same week you went to see him, and we made plans to meet up a few days later to talk about another potential paranormal investigation. He never showed up, and no one’s been able to get in touch with him since.”

“Did you call the police and file a missing persons report?”

“No, we can’t involve the police in this. It’s only going to make matters worse.”

“But he’s missing, Annabelle! Who could be better to help than the police?”

“Don’t be a fool, Jessica,” Annabelle snapped, with a momentary flare of her old spunk. “In the first place, the false trail is too convincing. No one’s going to start a search for a man who has properly filed paperwork explaining exactly where and for how long he would be gone! I went to his office trying to find him, and his department head told me all about this so-called sabbatical. Any paranormal investigator worth his salt knows that the Deer Creek Inn is a hoax. They’ve been planting the stories for years to attract customers, and they don’t let investigators in because they don’t want to be exposed as frauds. It’s true that David might want to get in there, but only to debunk the rumors, and he’d certainly never waste his time writing a book about it. But from an outsider’s perspective it looks like the perfect place to set up a long term project.”

“So you don’t think Pierce is actually there?”

“I know he’s not. I decided to make absolutely sure and drove up there myself. The address he’s supposed to be staying at is an abandoned motel, and his room is empty except for some broken furniture, a family of rats, and an answering machine plugged into an extension cord in the middle of the floor.”

I started to rock, my face in my hands. “Oh, God. Oh my God. Annabelle, what’s going on? Why would he just take off like this?”

“I don’t think he did take off. I don’t think he would have done this of his own free will.”

“So, you think he’s been…what? Kidnapped or something?”

Annabelle didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be struggling with how to say what she wanted to say.

I stared at her in horror. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? It’s because he knows what I am.”

“This isn’t your fault,” she said, almost grudgingly. “But…yes, I think it may be because he knows what you are.”

“But the Durupinen wouldn’t do this! They can’t, not after everything he did for me! He saved my life, Annabelle! They took his evidence, Karen promised that would be enough, that he would be safe! They erased everything that could have been dangerous or given us away! He knows how important this is, and he promised not to ask any more questions!”

“I’d like to think the Durupinen wouldn’t have done this, although I can’t be sure. They certainly have the resources, and they have gone to incredible lengths to keep their secrets over the years. And one of the reasons I admire David is his persistence when it comes to getting the answers he wants. I’d like to think he kept his promise to you, but he might have been too tempted to resist a little more snooping.”

I groaned. Hadn’t I told him how important it was to just leave it all alone? Why couldn’t he have just listened to me?

“There is another possibility, though,” Annabelle said. “I’ve been wondering about it for a while …” She stood up, pacing away from me and leaning on the rails, staring out over the river. “What do you know about the Necromancers?”

“The Necromancers? We talked about them in class. They were the enemies of the Durupinen centuries ago. But they don’t exist anymore, Celeste told us that they were disbanded and destroyed.”

Annabelle smiled wryly. “We all remember history differently, depending on what side we were on. The Durupinen did indeed topple the Necromancers at the height of their power, but that did not mean that the Necromancers ceased to be. They had to start again, and secretly, or risk another battle.”

“So the Necromancers aren’t gone?”

“No, they aren’t gone. You can wipe out the infrastructure of an organization like that. You can eliminate their resources and force them into hiding. But you can’t kill their ideas. The philosophy is too tempting, too alluring. People have been drawn to the idea of raising the dead since the dawn of time. It makes absolute sense — it’s human nature to want to overcome death, so societies like the Necromancers will always find followers and they will always exist.”

“So let me get this straight. You’re saying that not only do the Necromancers still exist, but they might have kidnapped Pierce?”

“Yes.”

“Even if that were true, why would they want Pierce? What possible use could he be to them?”

“If the Necromancers are trying to organize again, they will need as much information about the current state of the Durupinen as they can get. If one of them somehow knew that you and Pierce had contact, they might try to use him to get information.”

I pressed my hands against my temples, as though they could force this new information into a coherent picture in my brain. It wouldn’t work. “I’m sorry Annabelle, but this just seems so unlikely. It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory.”

“I’m sure the idea of the Durupinen sounded crazy when you first heard it. Aren’t you the girl who sat down in my tent and scoffed at the idea of spirits?” Annabelle said.

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it again. One group that helped the dead to cross, another who sought the power to bring them back. Was one really so much more feasible than the other?

“Well, you better hope this particular conspiracy theory is right, because if it isn’t, you’re up to your neck in the organization that kidnapped our friend,” Annabelle said.

We sat in silence for a while, as I let this horrible thought sink in.

“Is that why you came all the way to London? To warn me?” I asked finally.

“Not just to warn you, no,” Annabelle said. “After David vanished, it seemed like the safest thing for me to do would be to disappear, also. So I left some strategically placed candles burning in my shop, bashed in a few windows, and hopped a plane.”

My mouth dropped open. “You did that to your own shop? Aren’t you afraid the police are going to figure it out?”

“Jessica, I’ve told you already, we’ve got bigger problems than the police right now!” Anabelle cried, and several people turned to stare as they walked by. Lowering her voice, she went on. “When it comes right down to it, there are two possibilities. Either the Necromancers are back in operation and hunting down information at any cost, or the Durupinen are dealing pretty harshly with the loose ends you left behind. Either way, we are both in the kind of danger that law enforcement can’t help with. I don’t care what conclusions the police come to about my shop. But I’m hoping that whoever came looking for Pierce won’t know where to find me.”

“Do you think Pierce is dead?” I asked, trying to sound calm, but my voice hitched and broke.

“I don’t know. I really hope not.”

“So what do we do?”

“We keep our eyes and ears open, and our heads down,” Annabelle said. “You will need to be very careful about who you trust over there. Your High Priestess might give the orders, but she is not the only one to be wary of. She is going to be influenced by the people who have her ear, so be careful of her advisors as well.”

“Yeah, I can already think of a few Council members who might fall into that category,” I said darkly.

“Find out what you can about the Necromancers. Use the resources you have there at Fairhaven. I’m sure they have an extensive library and you may even be able to squeeze some better answers out of your teachers, if you just feign some academic curiosity.”

“Okay. And what about you? Are you going to be safe here?”

Annabelle took a deep breath. “I suppose we’ll see, won’t we? In the meantime, I’m going to keep looking for David. You mentioned that your roommate back home was helping you look for him too?”

“Yeah, and our friend Sam. He was Pierce’s work study student,” I said.

“Get in touch with her right away and tell her to stop, okay?” Annabelle said. “We don’t want any more collateral damage than we have already.”

The nervous pit in my stomach grew, if possible, even deeper. “We already agreed they should back off when it looked like something bad had happened to you. They’ve stopped digging.”

“Good. Well, you should get back to school before anyone notices you’re gone,” Annabelle said, and she stood up abruptly. “Do you have a cover story for where you’ve been, if they ask?”

“Yes. If we get caught, we’re going to tell them we snuck out to go to the pubs. Teenage rebellion seems like a plausible cover for a night in the big city, don’t you think?”

Annabelle’s face spasmed with panic. “Who else is here with you? I thought you came alone?”

“No, I came with my friend Savannah. She’s another one of the Apprentices.” Annabelle raked a frantic hand through her hair. “Jessica, I told you to come alone! None of them can know you’ve been meeting with me!”

“I did come alone! Savvy just helped me sneak out and find my way here. I couldn’t have gotten here without her help.”

“But how do you know you can trust her? She could easily tell —”

“Calm down, Annabelle! It’s not like that; Savvy isn’t from an old Durupinen family, she’s a new Gateway. She’s the first one in her family to do this, and she couldn’t care less about their rules and politics.”

Annabelle still looked unconvinced. She chewed at her bottom lip, eyes darting nervously around us. “And you think she’ll cover for you, if they ask her what you were doing?”

“She doesn’t really know what I’ve been doing. I just told her I needed to meet a friend from home. She’s off drinking somewhere in the neighborhood. But even if she did know the details, I’m sure she’d keep it quiet if I asked her to. She’s having a hard time adjusting to the Durupinen training, so her loyalty isn’t exactly with the establishment. She’s from the city, and she sneaks out all the time, that’s why I asked her to help me.”

The wrinkles in Annabelle’s forehead relaxed away. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Don’t tell her more than she needs to know about why you were here, alright? And that goes for anyone else you might want to talk to about this.”

“Of course,” I said. “How do I get back in touch with you?”

“You don’t. I’ll send another ghost to you, if I get any more information. In the meantime, please remember what I’ve told you. Keep your head down and your eyes open. Assume nothing.”

“Okay. Be careful.”

She gave one last, long look. It was almost resentful, but it softened with half a smile when she spoke. “I knew you were trouble. I just knew it.” And she turned, pulling her scarf back over her hair, and walked away.