on the dining-room wall. She had a paintbrush in her hand, and the bristles drew a curling arc of white on the dark-stained wood. Letters with whorls and dots, words in a language Seelie had never seen. Her answer, when she replied, came from Seelie’s right.
“We started ten minutes ago. Place your palms flat on the table. Keep them there.”
“You’re going to mess up your walls,” Seelie said. Her words came out on a puff of gray smoke, burbling between her lips.
“My walls are empty. My house is empty.” The paintbrush drew a long, swooping loop of bone. “Remember this: beyond the incantations and the hocus-pocus, most of witchcraft boils down to bargaining. There are customs to learn, formalities, pacts and traditions that must be upheld.”
“I don’t know any of that stuff.”
“Exactly. More importantly, they’ll know you don’t know any of it. If anyone tries to talk you into a deal, remember that they’re holding all the cards. If someone challenges your right to be there, you can drop my name. Don’t know how much weight it’ll hold, given I’m the coven reject, but I should still have a few friends on the other side.”
Her voice was coming from everywhere now, dancing on the smoky air. The overheads dimmed. The light shivered; then it died. Patty was a shadow in the gloom, moving, whispering sibilant words under her breath. She stood at Seelie’s side, cradling an earthenware pot with an open lid. She dipped her fingers inside and drew out a blob of snowy white ointment.
“This may burn.”
She drew patterns on Seelie’s forehead, then her cheeks. She traced a serpent down the hollow of her throat. The ointment brought a cold fire. Tingling, at first, then the tingle became the trickling chill of an ice cube dragging along naked skin.
“Something you haven’t told me. When I get the answers we need—I mean, if I get the answers—how do I come back?”
Patty stood in the dining-room doorway, a silhouette.
“All I can do is send you there,” Patty said. “You have to find your own way home.”
The wooden doors rattled shut and sealed her in darkness.
49.
Home.
The word reverberated on the smoky air. One syllable, cascading onto itself so many times that it lost all meaning, becoming empty sound. What did home mean? Home was wherever her backpack was.
Except she didn’t have her backpack. She wanted to go and snatch it up, feel its comforting weight, but Patty had told her to keep her hands flat on the table. She couldn’t see her pack against the wall in the inky darkness. Couldn’t see the wall, either. She, and the table, floated in dead space.
A rattling sound split the stillness. Patty had left a tambourine out on the table. An unseen hand struck it, then again, playing a metallic note.
She wasn’t alone.
There were people sitting around the octagonal table, shadows filling every chair. A new odor mingled with the incense: beneath the tang of dark berries and pepper, the rising stench of warm, putrid meat.
A trumpet blew a sharp, off-tune bleat. Now everyone was holding hands, forming a circle, a conduit. There were hands over hers, pressing down. Hands blistered with white pestilence and gray-green decay. Seelie watched, frozen in her chair, as a plump maggot squirmed from its nest between two rotten knuckles and plopped onto the table.
A man’s voice spoke. Too low, off-kilter, like a warped phonograph record on a dying turntable.
“We conjure you, o spirit. Speak to us, the nomads of the middle ways. Speak to us who linger on the roads in-between and reveal unto us the mysteries you possess.”
“This isn’t the entity we called upon,” said another voice.
“Again,” said a third. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence—”
A heavy, warbling sigh. “Pirates. Pirates everywhere. We’ll start over and try again.”
“And this one?”
“Banish it.”
The chair dropped out from under her.
Seelie fell, tumbling, air whistling in her ears as her stomach lurched. She hit terminal velocity. Plunging, flipping end over end, swallowed by a bottomless void.
Then she landed.
She touched down with the faintest tap of gravity, landing in a crouch on a moonless suburban street. Lamps dotted the black pavement with spots of pale light, casting their glow across perfectly manicured lawns. Victorian houses lined the street on both sides. Tall, old and refined, with porch columns and windows like squares of polished onyx.
Seelie rose up, heart still pounding a jackhammer beat.
The sky wasn’t just missing a moon. There was nothing up there, no stars, no clouds, no there, only the black