he’d always wanted to be—a mortal. It’s an illusion.”
“He’s real, Absalom. He has a soul.”
“Have you ever heard of the Tamasgi’po, Finn? No? ‘Spirit in a kiss,’ a lethal poison to our kind because it infects us with memories. And we are old, some of us. What are memories but the cellular structure of a soul?”
“Absalom,” Finn hesitated, “do you have a soul?”
“Oh, we don’t believe in souls.” Absalom began moving down the stone stairs. “Which is why we try so very hard not to die.”
CHAPTER 6
May their backs be towards us, their faces turned away from us, and may God save us from harm.
—OLD IRISH SAYING
Since Finn needed to meet with the HallowHeart professors to ask for their half of the skeleton key into the Ghostlands, she went to the one professor she grudgingly knew better than the others—Jane Emory.
Jane Emory’s cottage was located at the end of a woodsy, residential road, and it was exactly what Finn had expected—a charming oasis of wind chimes, stone sun faces, and clay cherubs. The garden was now veiled beneath snow. Attached to the kitchen was a small greenhouse.
As Finn stepped into the kitchen, Miss Emory opened the fridge and drew out plates of neat little sandwiches and a pasta salad. “Would you like tea or this green juice I blended? I forgot what I put in it . . . kale, garlic—”
“I’ll take the tea, thanks, Miss Emory.” Finn, draping her coat over a chair, noticed the alarming amount of rabbit figurines in the kitchen—not cuddly ones either. Some were primitive totems; others, disturbing hybrids of human and animal.
“Please call me Jane.” As Jane lifted the plastic wrap from the tea sandwiches, she said, “I wanted to talk to you about Halloween night.”
“Why weren’t you there?”
“Sophia Avaline wanted me to look after your father while she and the others went to watch over you and your friends. I think Sophia suspected something terrible was going to happen. I think she put safeties in place.”
Finn sat down and remembered Sophia Avaline’s white face the moment Reiko had announced Finn was to be the sacrifice. “What about Dean Cruithnear?”
Jane hesitated. “I honestly believe he didn’t suspect it would be you. It would have been helpful if he’d told us about the sacrifice in the first place . . . Perhaps he thought it was none of our business because Nathan Clare had agreed to it.”
“Professor Avaline said, that night, the sacrifice is something that must be done, to keep the peace. She didn’t seem surprised.”
“Of course she said that—Reiko needed to believe we were harmless, that we’d accept whatever she threw at us.” Jane looked at her. “They all had knives, you know, and Wyatt had a revolver filled with silver bullets. If any of the Fatas had even suspected that Wyatt and the others were armed . . .”
Finn’s eyes widened as she imagined what would have happened if the professors had gone to war with the Fatas.
Jane sighed. “When I saw you in your kitchen on Halloween night . . . I knew. I just knew something had gone wrong. And then I glimpsed Absalom Askew behind you. He winked at me.”
“Absalom.”
Jane turned to put the kettle on. “From what we’ve noticed, Absalom is an unstable element.”
“You think? And you mean an unstable elemental.” As Finn selected one of the sandwiches, Jane continued, “Before Halloween, Absalom told James Wyatt that Jack would be the death of you.”
Finn frowned at the sandwich. The sunlit kitchen suddenly seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
“Sophia Avaline believed it was a warning.” Jane sat down. “So they all brought iron or silver, sharp things hidden in their clothes, because who would suspect a bunch of college professors to be armed? Before all hell broke loose, Sophia, Hobson, Wyatt, Charlotte Perangelo, and yes, even Edmund Fairchild, were all prepared to battle through that ring of malevolence to free you, armed with nothing more than old-timey kitchen implements and fancy silverware and Wyatt’s Colt.” Jane rose to lift the whistling kettle from the stove. “But you and Jack pretty much allowed us to remain neutral. Halloween . . . well, that was a game changer.”
“Despite what Sophia Avaline said that night, about allowing me to be sacrificed to keep the peace, you don’t intend to ever let the Fatas take another life, do you?”
Jane set two mugs down on the table. “We’ve failed at that, haven’t we? Angyll Weaver was murdered. And