was backing away from her, lips working on some primitive charm or the voiceless mouthings of panic. Her narrow black orbs seemed to exude a mixture of malevolence and terror. The cowl had fallen back from her head and her gray hair, dense with tangles and small insect life, fanned out from her scalp as if animated with static. Fern seized a handful of her filthy robe—Grodda was light, scant flesh on gnarled bone—and thrust her effortlessly back, and back. Then Luc was there, lifting the lid on a chest freezer, and between them they bundled her in, slammed it shut, and placed a stack of ceramic casserole dishes on the top.
“Won’t she die in there?” Luc asked without any particular concern.
“Doubt it,” said Fern. “I don’t know much about hags, but they’re supposed to be incredibly tough. Like cockroaches.”
“Where next?”
“The cellars. Morgus’s storeroom.”
They clattered down another stair in the wake of the flashlight beam. Luc kept a hand on the wall, but Fern seemed to see beyond the meager light. “There should be a cat,” she muttered. “The goblin cat . . .”
“Maybe she took it with her,” Skuldunder suggested hopefully.
“We’ll see.”
The cellar door was locked. Luc had the key, but when he tried to slot it in his fingers cramped and pins and needles ran up his arm. Fern produced a glove from her pocket and put it on: her hand became a lizard’s paw, mottled patterns rippling over it, fading above her wrist. She turned the key without difficulty and they went in. Here, she switched on the main light. The illumination was poor but enough to show the shelves of bottles and jars, hanging bunches of herbs, saucers for burning oils and gums stained with toffeelike residue, white candles skewered on iron candlesticks, scribbled runes marking cupboard and drawer. The contents of some of the jars moved; at the tail of her vision, Fern glimpsed drifting eyeballs that appeared to watch her, following her progress around the room. Using her gloved hand, she opened drawers, finding knives, ladles, pincers, and took down bottles, peering closely at the labels. Some were in Atlantean, some in Latin, Greek, and what might have been Arabic. She didn’t know what they all meant, but several bore the emblem of a tree. She uncorked one or two and sniffed cautiously, catching a familiar smell of dankness and greenness, growth and decay. Behind her, she heard Luc say: “What’s this?” and turning, she saw the small table standing on its own, the empty jar with the crystal stopper, the sigils written in red.
“You don’t want to touch that,” said Skuldunder hastily, but Luc was already reaching out, and the air thickened around the jar, so his hand seemed to be pushing through glue, and shadows slid from the corners of the room toward them. As Fern drew closer she saw the jar no longer looked empty: a glitter of vapor coalesced inside and assumed a shape, too vague to specify, which beat like a trapped butterfly against the glass walls.
“It’s her!” said Luc. “It’s Dana.”
“I think so. Wait—there’s bad magic in here. I need to penetrate the shield.”
She selected a bottle with more optimism than knowledge—one with a colorless liquid inside and red label bearing the Atlantean word for “burn”—and let a single drop fall on each of the sigils. They hissed and smoked, stinging her eyes; scorch marks blackened the table. “Uvalé!” Fern ordered, and the spell barrier, worn thin over the months and never renewed, crumpled at a touch. Fern picked up the jar in her gloved hand and passed it to Luc, who took it gingerly, as if it were very fragile, though the glass was thick and the base solid. “You know what to do,” Fern said. “Imagine her body in the clinic; hold that picture in your mind. When you take out the stopper say the words Ragginbone taught you. Call her by name. Send her home.”
Luc nodded, his dark face at once set and brittle. She saw his throat muscles flex as he swallowed. He seized the stopper, twisted it—for a moment the wax resisted, then it began to crack. A red flake peeled off, and another, and at last the crystal came free. He murmured in Atlantean the spell of unbinding, and a thin vapor streamed out, growing swiftly, spreading into an ill-defined form with trailing wisps of hair and clothing and wide frightened eyes whose whites gleamed as her gaze turned this way and