The Keep (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #4)(82)

With a knowing look, he signaled for the others to try to distract her while he crept around the back of the room. Keeping to the walls, he moved slowly, stepping up onto the four-poster bed and moving forward, so he could try to grab her from behind.

Meanwhile, Jari broke into a dance that looked like a cross between Saturday Night Fever and Riverdance, but even the blond-haired boy’s absurdity couldn’t keep Natalie’s eyes from flitting about the room, her limbs bent at odd angles as she crawled across the floor, rushing toward them like an angry insect. Seeing that Jari’s dancing wasn’t working, Aamir tried reasoning with her instead, speaking to her as if he were bargaining with a small child.

“Natalie, sweetheart, you need to calm down and come back to us. There are no demons, and nobody is dead. It is all in your imagination,” he said.

This seemed to intrigue the changeling version of Natalie. With a sharp hiss that prickled the hairs on the back of Alex’s neck, she scuttled half-crouched, half-upright toward Aamir. Her eyes turned white, a milky sheen sliding across them. Behind her, standing between Alex and his quarry, wispy specters appeared from thin air, conjured by the words her mouth was still muttering and the twist and turn of skillful hands. The whole room went cold, everything suddenly feeling surreal. The gaseous shapes had hollow eyes and gaping mouths, their bodies wispy, blurry bones that bore the dangling strands of ancient cloth. Or so Alex thought—peering closer, he saw the scraps clinging to the translucent bones were not cloth at all, but the final hanging strips of flesh. They stared vacantly from skull faces, their empty mouths yawning in silent screams.

Shivers of fear shot through Alex, and he tried to get closer to her, sliding down over the musty edge of the bed and creeping toward where she had scuttled back to, a short distance from Aamir’s legs. Moving stealthily, he pushed away the horror of the ghosts’ presence, turning sideways to avoid touching them as he slipped through a narrow gap between two of their kind.

He was almost upon her when she whirled around, glowering at him with the milky white of her ghostly eyes. With unexpected agility, she jumped at him, the impact almost knocking him off his feet. Somehow, he managed to hold his ground as she lashed out at him, her teeth coming too close to his skin for comfort. She backed away again, preparing for a second strike.

This time, Alex was ready for her. She leapt toward him, but he ducked just in time, grasping her shoulders tightly as she overshot her mark, pulling her toward him in a rough headlock. She writhed, struggling to get free, but he managed to hold her with enough strength that he was able to steady her, giving him the chance to press his palms to her temples and run his anti-magic into her mind. She froze instantly in his arms.

Flashes of her history surged into his mind—all involving her loving family. The image of her little sister, in particular, served to spur him on, to complete the promise he had made to all of his friends—to get them home. If that slim doorway held what he thought it held, in a room behind it, Alex knew they might be able to meet the tight portal deadline after all.

Alex sent good thoughts to the forefront of Natalie’s mind, smothering the false images the fog had created. Steadily, he worked his way through, dissipating what was left of the red haze, feeling that it had affected her more fiercely than the last time for some reason. Perhaps she had simply absorbed more of it; it was hard to say.

Eventually, he removed the strands of his anti-magic from her mind. He held Natalie tightly, watching as she blinked awake, the milky sheen gone from her eyes, revealing the glimmering dark brown beneath. Unsteadily, her knees buckled, but Alex was there to catch her before setting her gently on the ground. Cautiously, he folded up the small rug around the bottle at its center and moved it to one side, wanting to keep it out of everyone’s way until he could get a better idea of what was so different, and potentially so harmful, about this essence.

The others were watching him curiously, in the wake of what he had done to dispel the demons from Natalie’s mind, but he ignored them, turning back to her.

“How did you find this place?” Alex asked Natalie, his voice gentle.

She glanced up at him, her whole body shaking. “I think it was necromancy that brought me here,” she whispered. “The red fog… it made me hear the voices of people crying, people screaming. Not the prisoners… other people. They were ghosts. They wanted my help… I followed them down here. Everyone was dead…” Her voice caught in her throat as she trailed off.

Alex looked at the bundled-up bottle of essence on the side and knew which ghosts she meant.

“You’re safe now,” he said. “The ghosts are all gone.”

Natalie drew her knees up to her chin, her face a pale picture of fear. There was regret in her eyes too, and Alex had never seen her look so vulnerable. As the others fussed around her, filling her in on what had happened, Alex could detect a wariness still in their demeanor. He didn’t blame them; she had been truly frightening. However, his attention was focused elsewhere.

Leaving the others to Natalie, he went to the narrow entrance, pulling back the velvet curtain, and opened the door with a shiver of trepidation. The sight that emerged from the gloom was an unmistakable one. He had seen it twice before. To Alex’s delight, an antechamber stretched away into a darkened distance, the room much smaller than those he’d seen at Spellshadow and Stillwater, but still full to the brim with smoky black bottles of essence. The dim red light he knew so well, pulsing within the black glass, shone brighter here. It was a different kind of energy altogether—he could feel it, even from the mere threshold of the chamber. He still hoped that, somehow, they’d be able to use it to build the portal home.