A Vial of Life (A Shade of Vampire #21)(45)

“I suspect you’ll find that most of these people here are from around the Pacific,” Lucinda murmured.

I was still trying to wrap my mind around how they could be ghosts—but one thing that was becoming amply clear was that they all appeared to have died in some kind of traumatic, sudden way. Perhaps being ripped from the world unexpectedly caused one to become a ghost? I could only speculate because these ghosts didn’t seem to have a clue as to the meaning behind their existence.

“And why are you all here on this island?”

“I suspect for the same reason that you are here,” the old one-eyed man said as he glanced over me from head to foot. “Did you not hear that heavenly tune? Is that not what beckoned you to this strange, dark island?”

“I was wandering somewhere near the coast of Hawaii,” Lucinda offered, her eyes growing distant with memory. “Not all that far from the plane wreck. Like the rest of us, I heard the melody calling to me across the waves. The most beautiful sound that I’d ever heard. I barely had a choice but to search for it. It was… like an angel calling me. I thought perhaps one had descended to finally end this half-life and coax me to heaven. I followed the tune for days. It disappeared sometimes and left me stranded in the middle of the ocean, but then it would start up again some hours later. Finally, I found this place. It is not heaven, but… it is somewhere I am meant to be. I cannot explain why, but as loud and shrill as the melody became on arrival… I do not want to be parted from it. I can’t bring myself to leave.”

“Where’s the tune coming from?” I demanded. “Who is playing it?”

“The man with the pipe,” one of the children of the air crash, to my right, squeaked.

My eyes shot toward her. “Man? Where?”

She raised a small hand and pointed toward the farmhouse.

The farmhouse. Leaving the crowd, I moved toward its front door. As I arrived outside of it, I caught the scraping of chairs against the floor. And then whispers that I couldn’t quite make out. I drifted through the old wooden door, and, appearing on the other side, the first thing that met my eyes was a long woodwind instrument propped up against the peeling wall near the door. Its body was thick and perhaps three feet in length. It was made of polished black wood, and it reminded me of a bassoon.

My gaze moved deeper into the farmhouse’s dank entrance room. The door to the living area was open, and from it glowed flickering candlelight. When I glided to the door and entered the sitting room, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

Jeramiah and the witch, Amaya, stood around two high wooden chairs.

Amaya wore a trailing maroon dress that covered her legs and arms and formed a turtleneck around her throat. Jeramiah was draped in a heavy black robe. The chairs they were gazing down at looked familiar. I could have sworn that they belonged to my mother and father—chairs they sat on during meetings in the Great Dome.

How did the two of them ever penetrate the boundary?

And what on earth are they doing here?

Chapter 14: Ben

I gaped at the couple as Jeramiah gripped the arm of one of the chairs. He turned it on its side and laid it down over the creaking floorboards.

“We will carve these now,” he said to Amaya in a low voice.

“How much should I carve?” the witch asked.

“Of course, we won’t need all of this wood. We’ll take what we need and then burn the rest. Just be sure to cut shavings from both of them.”

He left Amaya with the chairs and walked halfway across the room, where a round stone slab was propped up against the wall. He gripped its edges and laid it down gently on the floor before kneeling down over it and running his palms over its smooth, sanded surface. He glanced back over his shoulder at Amaya, who had already bent down with a sharp knife and was beginning to carve off shavings from the chairs. She worked quickly and with ease, as though she were slicing cheese rather than solid wood. Clearly she had placed some sort of charm over the knife. Within thirty seconds, she’d created a pile of splinters from both my mother’s and father’s chairs. She gathered them up in her palms and handed them to Jeramiah. He set them down on the floor, next to the round slab of stone.

“Hand me the adhesive,” he muttered. “And also the sealant.”

The witch picked up two cups that had been sitting on the dusty mantelpiece. One was filled with a thick white substance, while pooled in the other was a transparent, runny liquid.

“You’ll also need a brush,” the witch said as she placed the cups down next to the vampire.

She walked to one corner of the room where an old broom leaned against the wall. She turned it upside down, gathering strands of its bristles between her fingers, before yanking hard and detaching them from the wood. Reaching for her knife again, she cut off a long, thick slice of wood from one of the chairs, the tip of which she dipped into the bristles. Magically, the bristles clung to the stick. She approached Jeramiah, holding out her makeshift brush for him to take.

Jeramiah dipped the brush into the thick, white liquid and ran it in strokes around the center of the stone. Then, collecting some of the shavings between his fingers, he began to lay them out on the sticky stone surface, slowly and carefully, in the forms of letters. The white adhesive dried quickly, becoming transparent, and soon I found myself staring down at the words:

In honor and memory of Lucas Dominic Novak.