Bridge of Souls (Cassidy Blake #3)(39)

Muriel’s.

Muriel’s, with its ivy-strewn restaurant, and its large stairs, and the weird, antique-filled room up top.

The séance room.

I glance at Lara and Jacob. “Follow me.”





The downstairs restaurant is packed for lunch. We head straight for the staircase, but a waiter stops us.

“Are you kids lost?” he asks.

Lara bristles visibly at being called a kid, but I just shake my head.

“We have a date with Death,” says Jacob, but thankfully the waiter can’t hear him.

“School project,” I say, holding up my camera.

The waiter eyes us with suspicion, but then someone somewhere drops a tray, and he waves us on and says, “Just don’t touch anything.”

“Of course not,” says Lara, in her best, brightest British.

As we climb the staircase, a couple comes down the other way, arm in arm, drinking and chatting about how spooky it is up there, what wonderful ambience. We pass them, and Lara looks back over her shoulder.

“Is this part open to the public?” she asks me.

I nod, and she looks around, then grabs an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign on a chain and hangs it across the top of the stairs behind us.

“This way,” I say, leading her past the cushioned lounge, into the red light of the séance room, with its eerie darkroom glow.

“Well, this is charming,” says Lara, scanning the old paintings and the grinning masks, the strange combination of statues and animal prints and fancy furniture.

“Ten out of ten for atmosphere,” agrees Jacob.

A quick survey, and I’m satisfied that no one else is up here with us. For right now, at least, we have the séance room to ourselves.

“Ready?” asks Lara, and the question feels so much bigger than it is, but I nod.

“Let’s do this.”

We dump the supplies out of Lara’s red backpack, matches and oil and grave dirt tumbling out onto an ottoman. There’s an ornate silk rug on the floor, and I pull it aside, exposing the bare wood floors beneath, mottled with age.

The last thing we need is to start a fire.

“I thought that was exactly what we’re doing,” says Jacob.

“You know what I mean,” I say. “A bigger fire.”

The kind that gets out of control.

Lara opens the pouch of grave dirt and tips some out into her palm. It looks more like sand than soil, dry and gray, but there’s a faint odor, not like something rotting, exactly, just like something gone. The lifeless smell of old, abandoned places.

She traces out a circle with the small black stones, roughly the size of a séance table, then begins to pour the grave dirt out onto the floor, not in a pile but in a thin line, the way Magnolia told us to when we were in the Veil.

“I have to admit,” Lara says, dusting off her palms, “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

She hands me the bottle of oil, and I tug the stopper out.

“Which part?” I say as the room fills with the scent of sage. “Co-opting a séance room, preparing a ritual ceremony, or banishing an agent of Death?”

“All of it. It’s rather exhilarating,” she says, and then, seeing my face, she quickly adds, “if you don’t think too hard about why we’re doing it.”

Lara draws a groove in the grave dirt, a narrow channel that goes all the way around the circle, and I pour the oil in, careful to save enough that it will reach, from start to end. When it’s lit, the oil will burn through the grave dirt, creating a line of fire and ash, life and death, and when it does, it should cut the line between the Emissary and me.

As long as the Emissary is standing inside the circle.

Now all we have to do is lure it here, and get it to pass within the circle, and light the oil, and burn the space between us clean.

Oh no. This is a terrible idea.

It will never work.

It will never—

“It will,” says Jacob firmly. “It has to.”

He heads out into the lounge to be our lookout, for both humans and Emissaries, and after that, there’s nothing to do but wait.

So we wait.

Lara wanders the room, admiring the strange and morbid decorations. I perch on the edge of a velvet sofa, get up, switch to a chair, get up again, unable to sit still. Silence settles over us like a sheet, and my ears adjust, not only to the Veil, but to the sounds in the living world.

The tinny old-fashioned music that drifts through the room.

The guests outside, murmuring as they reach the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign, saying that they thought it was open before drifting back downstairs.

The faint groan of the floorboards as Jacob rocks back and forth on his heels beyond the door.

“?‘Because I could not stop for Death,’?” says Lara under her breath, “?‘He kindly stopped for me. The Carriage held but just Ourselves, and Immortality.’?”

I stare at her for a long moment.

“Emily Dickinson,” she says, as if that explains everything.

She goes quiet after that, and we wait for what feels like an hour, but, according to a clock on the wall, is only about ten minutes.

Jacob drifts back into the room. “Nothing,” he says, looking nervous. “What now?”

My heart sinks. All of this, for nothing. We can’t get oil back into the bottle. We can’t get the grave dirt back into the bag. We have to go through with this. We have to get the Emissary here. Now.