Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby #3)(56)

Eleanor laughed and caught her breath. The orange lamplight danced in her wide, wet eyes. “Names have power,” she whispered, nodding. “And he kept the one I gave him. My dear, sweet Jackaby.”

The lantern in her hands began to dim. Eleanor’s head shot up, her expression suddenly intense. Her hand reached toward me, fingers shaking with urgency. “Oh no. If he has the sight, then they’re coming for him, just like they came for me. They want it. They need it. Don’t let them take it. It’s important. You have to keep him safe!”

“Who’s coming for him?” I said. The light was flickering now, the cavern blinking into blackness and back with each sputter. Eleanor was beginning to drift away from the boat and back into the shadows.

“I never let them have it.” Her voice was panicked. “I never let them. I couldn’t. It’s too important.”

“Never let who have it? The council? Who is coming?”

“I could feel his eyes on me all the time, red as fire, waiting at the end.”

“Where? The end of what?”

“At the end,” she said, “of the long, dark hallway.” And then the lantern died away and the cavern was pitch-black again. In the darkness I could hear the faintest echo of a whisper. “My poor, sweet Jackaby.”

The sound of Charon’s pole splashing softly in the water and the echoes of drips were all that punctuated the silence for several minutes. My chest felt tight.

“One more, I should think,” Charon said at last.

“One more?”

“Yes,” he said. “Three feels right. I’ve been doing this for some time. You begin to notice the patterns.”

In another moment the boat shuddered beneath us. I still couldn’t see anything, but I could tell that we had stopped. If there was a gate before us, I could not describe it. Everything was inky black.

“Here we are,” Charon said.

A ringing note cut through the darkness, and then all sound ceased. The voice that followed was a man’s this time, clear and deep.

“My constant hunger must be fed, but if I drink, then I’ll be dead.”

Hunger and feeding and death—the notions felt uncomfortably close to home. A vampire? Vampires had to feed, but drinking wasn’t what killed them. I tried to think, but my mind kept flashing back to little Eleanor and Nellie Fuller. What creature ate constantly, but could not drink?

“Fire!” I said at last. The word had barely left my lips when I was pressed back in the ship by a wave of hot air and a blinding light. Twin columns of flame bloomed to either side of us, and the surface of the river flickered with blue heat. We were coasting forward again down a channel of burning black waters, and this time we were approaching a dock.

“We have arrived.” Charon nudged the ship forward until it bumped to a stop against the landing. The flames licked the sides of the old pier, but the ancient wood did not burn. “You did well, Abigail Rook.”





Chapter Twenty-Eight


Charon stepped onto the dock and held out a hand. I accepted it and climbed after him. His fingers were calloused and rough, but his grasp was gentle and his arm steady. With one foot still in the boat and the other just stepping ashore, I felt a sudden chilling pressure wrap itself around my ankle. Without warning, the underworld spun and I began to slip backward.

Something from beneath the surface of the burning waters was pulling me down. My foot slid into a widening gap between the dock and the boat. Too startled even to cry out, I clutched desperately onto Charon’s arm. To my unspeakable relief, his grip held fast. I hung in the air for a sickening moment, suspended between the ferryman above and the something below.

I craned my neck frantically to see shapes in the rippling blue flames beneath me. Tendrils of blue and black swam along the surface of the burning water, shadowy coils of smoke and flame, writhing and twisting and reaching out hungrily. They were eerily beautiful as they spun and beckoned. Their motion was hypnotic. The boat, the dock, the cavern walls around me all faded away as I stared, faded away until there was nothing but the tendrils and the infinite darkness beyond.

Charon pulled firmly, and I found myself suddenly lying facedown on the weathered old dock.

“I would advise against straying from your path,” Charon said as calmly as if I had just stubbed my toe on the mooring. “There are things below that you might not care to encounter.”

I pushed myself up and made for solid ground with alacrity. “What was that?” I asked breathlessly when the dock was behind me.

“I do not know.”

“You don’t—but you’re the boatman!” I said. “You’ve been ferrying souls for hundreds of years.”

“Thousands,” said Charon.

“Then how do you not know?”

“In the same way, I suppose, that you can observe a rainbow without knowing its cause. Some things simply are.”

“Refraction!” I said. “Rainbows are caused by light bending and splitting. It’s called refraction—and we know because usually when people observe a curious phenomenon they want to learn more.”

“Refraction.” Charon tested the word out on his tongue. “Is that how it works?” he said. “I think perhaps someone should tell the Vikings.”

“Thousands of years of traveling across a body of water that occasionally catches fire and tries to eat your passengers, and you never even learned what to call it?”