Summer Sons(109)

Troth’s tense posture loosened. She motioned for him to follow, and he cut narrowed eyes to Sam as she turned away. Sam nodded as they left the room. Andrew thought he might fare better than Riley at slipping through the vast, underoccupied ex-plantation without being noticed. Troth glanced over her shoulder as she opened the doors to the library, and despite the manicured cleanliness of the house, a crawling grime washed over Andrew. He stepped across the threshold.

It was a windowless room. Lamps glowed white and harsh in each corner, illuminating paired plush reading chairs and three walls of built-in bookshelves. In the center of the room, a glass-topped display case stood—ornate, heavy-paneled, antique. Troth padded across the twilight-purple rug. The corner of the display case held an irregular stack of books with a familiar monograph on top, and as he approached, he saw that the glass protected a collection of heirlooms: combs, a worn Bible, folio-bound papers. A disarticulated set of human finger bones. Mourning hair lockets fizzing with malevolence, an old knife with a pitched aura of darkness seeping off of it. The hair rose on the back of his neck; he braced a hand on the lacquered wood. Troth touched his knuckles.

“My family kept their history close. Mark married in, but it’s the Troth name that carries on. I’ve got quite a collection,” she said.

“You found the monograph?” he asked, zeroing in on the book—the one missing from campus, given the library sticker on the spine.

“Yes, and as you suggested, it has much more information on the Fulton curse. Mark must have borrowed Eddie’s copy; neither of them told me about it,” she said.

He picked up the petite hardcover with numb, tingling fingers. His tongue sat heavy in his mouth. The weight of age and haunting in the room pricked at him, plucking sore nerves, and waves crowded the edges of his vision. His phone buzzed in his pocket twice.

He said, voice thick, “You said there were notes, too?”

“Let me just get them for you.” She crossed the room to the far shelving. “I’m surprised to see you’re not still wearing his ring, Andrew.”

“Still?” he asked with a swoop in his stomach that tipped him against the table. Sourceless sound rushed in his ears. He fumbled out his phone. Sam’s text was a garbled smash of letters. Fine shivering in his fingers wobbled the already-fuzzed screen, and the phone clattered onto the glass. His thigh muscles locked, then turned liquid as the carpet rushed up to meet him, fibers soft as silk on his cheek.

“The other one’s passed out in the front room,” a man’s voice said.

“I was worried about the dosage. I didn’t expect another guest,” Troth said.

His phantom flickered in the basement of his skull, hissing with helpless rage, a miserable, useless warning. Euphoria and terror swirled, disconnected, while his fingers twitched. He grasped the table leg and kicked out, dragging one shoe across the carpet. An attempt to speak came out as a slurred moan. He got his knees under him, forehead still on the carpet and head lolling.

“Poor thing,” Troth said.

A gentle shove of her sneaker to his side sent him sprawling. Light dazzled his eyes, fractal patterns that spread and swam. Miasma covered him as her husband crouched alongside and pressed skeletal fingers to the pulse point in his throat. Oncoming death punched through the contact. He blacked out.





29


Static crashed wake up wake up wake up onto his eardrums. Andrew’s head bobbed on his strained neck. His hands and feet were numb; he sagged against the cord looped around his chest and arms. The seat under his ass was solid, hard wood. Drool slicked his chin and lips. He gagged. Flares popped behind his closed eyelids in starbursts. The brush of spectral fingers on his jaw made him flinch against a hard, slatted seatback, skull braced on the wood at an awkward angle. With slitted eyes, he saw his wrists were bound to the chair arms so tight his palms had turned a worrisome shade of maroon. His vision streamed like a ruined watercolor.

“Troth,” he muttered in an anesthetized slur.

Sam had followed him into the house. Sam had drunk the coffee out of polite discomfort, surrounded on all sides by wealth he’d never touch. He’d done it all because of Andrew. Coherency fled as chemical disorientation brought more spit to his swollen, dry tongue. He retched. Bile and coffee burned his esophagus, splattered his shirt.

“Andrew,” she said from a distance. “You’re awake.”

He forced the muscles in his face to squint through the throbbing, shifting room around him, a broad open space with a dirt floor, dimly lit, hay and tarps and chain. The sedate breathing of animals.

“I keep horses,” Jane Troth explained, as calm as if she’d taken him on a tour of the grounds. Her cold hand cupped his chin, lifting his head; her distant expression wavered in and out of focus as he blinked sluggishly. “Thank you for putting the ring on. I needed to be sure of your role, verify you were the vessel he’d chosen—which I hadn’t expected, or I’d have approached the whole situation quite differently from the start.”

Before Andrew mastered his tongue again, she left him with his head lolling under the weight of his skull. A sliding door creaked, rolled, slammed. The specter’s freezing palms petted his exposed, scabbed forearms. His unleashed, starving power hooked him to Eddie’s specter, but he had no grip over their connection. Drugged as he was, the unstable frequency thrummed uselessly. Nightfall loomed hours or minutes from the horizon. He’d come full circle, back to the kid trapped in a cavern with a broken ankle, waiting to die, best friend in his arms.